Universal History： The Symbolism of Nationalism - with Richard Rohlin (XlG3QVlFpWc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XlG3QVlFpWc

There’s got to be a way, and I know you’ve done videos about this, but I’ll just say there’s got to be a way to both love your ancestors and also be honest about their sins. Yeah. There’s got to be a way to do that. And right now it seems like we can only do one or the other. That’s actually a function of idolatry. It’s an image of idolatry. Because one of the things that happens is that because we don’t have the fractal relationship, because we don’t have this hierarchy that leads all the way up to God, we actually expect of these lower rungs to be perfect. And if they’re not perfect, we hate them because they’re not perfect. And so there’s a sense in which if things were properly laid out and we don’t treat these figures as idols to worship them or to cast them down either way, that we see them as just manifestations that are gray because they’re not God. You know, all these leaders, all these heroes have dark sides. Obviously, there’s no way around that. Right, yeah. And we could celebrate their heroism and also recognize their sins. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello, everyone. I am very excited as usual to be here with Richard Roland for the continuation of our Universal History series. This time, we’re actually going to look at the idea of national epics and the way in which different nations would tell their own story, how in some ways they they try to pop out and to have their own their own particular vision, but then also how that ultimately still fits into the idea of Universal History. So I’m excited to go along with this. Richard, it’s good for you to be here. Thank you. Before we get started, I will say more about this at the end, because it is cleverly related to our topic today. But graceful segues abound in this in today’s episode, but we have a I have a Kickstarter going. It should basically already be live when this video drops. We’re within a day or two. So there’ll be a link down below. It’s to a tabletop role playing game called Amboria role playing in the world under starlight. If you want to know what the world under starlight is and why we’re doing it as a role playing game and not some other medium, I’m going to answer those questions at the end of the video. It’s funny when Jonathan when you posted my we shared the Kickstarter like the landing page, you know, like a couple of people in comments like on YouTube or whatever. You know, Christian shouldn’t be, you know, role playing game playing games and dragons is satanic. I know. Yeah, right. Well, so anyway, I’m going to talk about I’m going to talk about actually very soon I’ll be doing a video with Father Deacon Nicholas Cotar, where we’ll be talking about that question specifically. But but I’ll say more about that project at the end because it’s kind of related to the topic of today’s video. But yeah, so part of the reason I wanted to talk about this is because I have recently met a bunch of like symbolic world folks in the wild, sometimes unexpectedly, you know, usually they just show up at my church. Shout out to Samuel. If you’re listening, Samuel, who came to Vespers on Wednesday night and he’s like, wait, what are you doing here? This is my church. What are you doing here? But, you know, but no, it was it was great. But so I’ve been talking to some people who are kind of new to the symbolic world of the universal history train. And so I thought it would be useful because we’ve been doing these videos for almost two years now. I think crazy. Yeah, maybe actually two years. I’m not even sure anymore. Amazing. We’ve been we’ve been doing them for a while. So I thought it might be useful to revisit a little bit, maybe kind of put in some new terminology what we mean by universal history. Because one of the things that I’ve noticed in my conversations with people online and in person is that sometimes people sort of get a little confused about what we mean by medieval universal history and will mistake it for things that look similar, but maybe have completely different goals. So that’s where we’re going to start. Go for it. Go for it. So the symbolic medieval universal history is, let’s say, sorry, I’m looking down my notes. It’s a combination of the of what let’s call the Christian mythic content. And by mythic, obviously, I think everybody should know by now I do not mean false. Right. But Christian mythic content in the in the sense that it’s a myth that we live into a sacred story, etc. So there’s a Christian mythic content, which is obviously the Bible is also the apocrypha, by which I mean the actual apocrypha, not the directors cut of the Bible. And then it’s and then it’s also it’s also like the lives of the Saints and then all the squiggly folklore traditions weird stuff. You know, dog headed Saints and the head of St. John the Baptist flying around haunting people. We were just talking about for the recording started like stuff like that, like all that stuff that’s kind of out there more on the margins of the tradition. That’s all kind of part of this Christian mythic content. Yeah. So it’s that plus the mythical content of Greece and Rome, and specifically the great classical epics, the Homeric epics and the Aeneid. Like if you want to really drill down to the core of that. Yeah. And there’s a little bit of foray into more local mythic traditions, I’d say like Scandinavian traditions, but the but the Greek and Roman mythological always ends up being connected in some way, even to those Scandinavian. Yeah. So I’ll get to the more local stuff here in just a sec, because that’s the next part of this. Right. So but this is the this stuff together, right, becomes the I was I’ve been thinking about it like in terms of hierarchy, but it’s almost like when you when you hear me say a hierarchy in this instance, it is better to understand it as like a series of like nesting dolls, rather than like something that’s really top heavy and like an upside down pyramid or something like that. Right. Yeah. And it’s a it’s a fractal like it’s the best example of a fractal. It’s like little identities exist in larger identities and connect, you know, vertically right up to into the the biblical narrative, you could say. Right. And so this container of the Christian mythical content plus Greco Roman civilizations, mythical content, the container of those two things together becomes a container, which is like large enough and sort of robust enough to then contain this multi tier hierarchical identity within it. So this is this is so identity in the ancient world, unlike the way most of us think about identity today, talk more about that later is it’s hierarchical. That is, it’s conveyed from the top down or from the outside in right. If you’re thinking about nesting dolls, and it begins with God and it ends with me. So you have the you have God. Right. And then you have the sort of like the the almost parallel streams. And I realize there’s a whole very long running historical debate about who has priority, the Pope or the Emperor or whatever. Or if you’re in the East, you’ve got the patriarch and the Emperor. But in any case, you know, you’ve got God and then you’ve got the the Pope or the Patriarch and the Emperor. And then down from there, you have these various increasingly localized principalities. So if you’re talking about the church, then you’ve got under the patriarch, you’ve got like there’s the holy, you know, the base is your local bishop. And then your local bishop, there’s the priest that he’s basically deputized act on his behalf, like all the way down to you. And then if you’re talking about that on a national level, I mean, it’s not for nothing that the original like diocesan structure of the like a diocese is a is a Roman imperial like what division of geography and people like. So like the original like metropolitan diocesan structure of the church in the early centuries was basically they just used what the Roman Empire kind of already had in place. Right. So that you would have you would have these these increasingly local nested identities that are basically parallel. It’s important because, you know, when a lot of modern historians, when they noticed the gestures, for example, that some local what they would call a warlord makes towards the emperor who is like so far away and they have nothing to do with, they tend to dismiss that as just irrelevant and just and just, you know, just words. But but if you understand the way that people saw identity, then you can see that no, this gesture is very relevant to how they anchor everything together and make everything make sense in their world. Yes. So in the way that that worked for like worldly power structures or ecclesiastical power structures. It also works for stories. So at the top or the outside, you have this. Oh, and the other thing to say about that, that social ecclesiastical hierarchy is that there are holy people. A good example would be like your local patron saint. Right. Holy people sort of exist outside or kind of bridge the hierarchy in unexpected ways. So if you live in a small medieval village in Central Europe or something like this, you know, got the emperor and the patriarch and everything way up. Here way up above you. But then like there’s also your local patron saint, maybe it’s St. Nicholas. Right. So like if things are if things are really getting out of hand, you have a you have a path of like appeal, let’s say. Right. You can you can go to St. Nicholas and he can go around. I mean, you know, he can go around the the pope or the patriarch or the or the emperor or whatever and to kind of like help you out in your situation. So you’ve got holy people. And of course, the problem the problem with the problem with modern people trying to understand this is we all want to be the person who’s outside the hierarchy. Right. And it doesn’t, you know, but it’s but it’s really just the holy people. And when I say holy, really hear that not just in a sense of this is a good person or a nice person, but that in the sense that this person is sanctified or set apart because there are there’s also such a sort of a thing as let’s say like the secular holy person, which I’ll come back to in a minute. Right. So anyway, secular in the holy person, the sense that somebody is like a secular but they’re they’re set apart. And because they’re set apart, they’re also sort of operating outside the normal hierarchy of things. Yeah, it’s in some ways there. There are ways in which the hierarchies. These are kind of said it’s like in terms of a system. It’s like fail safe in the hierarchy. Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s the way to I mean, it’s not it’s not as simple as that. But it’s a good way for people to understand why the hierarchies are never even even when we talk about hierarchy, they’re never just as simple as the hierarchy. They have a kind of variability and ways to shortcut when things go wrong along the along the hierarchy itself. So before we started talking about before we started recording, we were talking about the hierarchy itself. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And I think that’s a good way to kind of get people to understand that. And then he goes back. He goes back to the court when it’s over. So anyway, that’s an example of that kind of thing. So if this is true for like, you could say social ecclesiastical hierarchies, it’s also true for the hierarchy of stories when we’re talking about universal history. So we start with this kind of one grand foundational story, which is sort of the mythic content of Christianity plus Rome, right? That’s the ground foundational story into which you have these increasingly localized identity conferring patterns. The story of, well, now here’s the story of my people when we converted. And then beyond that, you might have, here’s the story of my city or my village. And then beyond that, you have like, here’s my family history, all the way down to this is how my parents raised me. And all of that stuff. And of course, what I’m really describing is the idea of tradition. All of that stuff confers identity at all these different levels, but it has the capability to kind of each of those levels to be nested. And obviously, obviously, there are certainly places that converted. I mean, this is why we actually kind of started the series with Ethiopia, right? Is because there are places that converted that were outside the Roman Empire. So in that case, they’re actually like the best proof case for like how this works, because it’s not like they had any like political, you know. Yeah, they had no political reason to play this game at all. Or there are meanings in the same way. Another great example. They had no reason, because people always say that it’s just Constantine and Rome. We have several case examples where that seems to not be the case. Right, right, right, right. So, so yeah, so any of these identity conferring stories can be aggregates or a pastiche. And actually, this is better. And this is another thing that to kind of point out. This is why for purposes of what we’re doing here, I’m deeply uninterested in questions like authorship. Yeah, doesn’t actually matter. Right. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because certain kinds of things, not everything, but certain kinds of things actually have more authority when either we don’t know who wrote them or made them, or when the person who wrote or made them is it has become a mythic person in some way. Right. So to give some some examples of this, actually, a really good example of this is the divine liturgy and the divine services in the Orthodox Church. Yeah. Right. There was no committee that at any point in time sat down and said, here’s the way we’re going to do things. And there is not there’s not a regulatory body across all the Orthodox churches in the world that says, all right, everybody, we’re making this change the liturgy this year. Right. It’s not how it works. You can dig down into the history and I’ve done this and there are lots of people out there have done this. You can dig down in the history and figure out, oh, this part appeared here. Yeah. Or this prayer we this prayer maybe came from St. John of Damascus or, you know, like the the but even then that’s a saint. That’s a saint. That’s a holy person that somebody has become a mythic person. Right. But it’s actually because it wasn’t just created by committee that it has the kind of the weight and the authority and the sense that you can’t just do whatever you want with it. Right. You have it comes down from heaven. Right. Yeah. It comes down from heaven. Right. That’s the that’s but when we say something like that, that’s what we mean. We don’t mean that like the typical one dropped out of the sky. It landed on someone’s head. It’s like, you know, somebody’s, you know, what a silly, silly image. But yeah, we don’t mean that. But what do you mean is that this is this is really it passed down through the life of the church. Right. As opposed to it appears like it appears in so because it’s the same with some of these icons not made with hands. You know, people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a way in which the idea that the icon not made with hands was never made by anybody. I don’t want to be I want to be careful. Right. It’s like the idea that these icons appear, they kind of appear out of nowhere. They find them in the water. They find them somewhere and they they’re kind of not. They’re just they just happen. And we don’t know who made them. We don’t know where they come from. But there is there always is like material causes if you make spend a lot of time to try to dig into them. And that’s not how we receive them. So that’s why we kind of see them as this pattern kind of descending from above and manifesting itself in the world. That’s a great example of this because, yeah, there are some icons that that we do believe when we say they’re not made with hands. Maybe, you know, what we’re really saying is, you know, there’s something miraculous about the creation of this icon. Right. The the the icon not made with hands. Right. The one that Christ, you know, made of himself. Right. That’s the that’s like the ultimate example. Right. But but the but yeah, when it comes to some of these icons, especially the Mother of God, you know, where this icon appears in the field. Right. The curse root icon, I think, is a good example of this. There’s another icon. I can’t remember the name of it now, but I got to venerate it when I was in Lithuania. It was this tiny little sort of Russian village church and really large icon. Very beautiful. And it’s just sort of they found in a field one day. Yeah. Where did this come from? How did it get here? Right. And so so it’s an icon not made with hands, not because not because anybody there is saying nobody ever painted this or touched this, but it’s just sort of it was just received. Right. It just came from heaven in that sense. Right. So, yeah, typically speaking for these things, like they have to have some kind of a mythic authority. Right. This is why I mean, all the way down on a fractal level. This is why sometimes when your parents tell you something, you won’t listen because you know your parents. Right. But then some other adult who you do not know as well, they tell you the same thing. And suddenly it’s got cache. Yeah. Right. But I mean, this is actually why it’s a Jordan Peterson clean your room. It’s like, why is it? Yeah, right. Right. Everybody thinks it’s genius is a perfect example. Perfect example. But I mean, I mean, for instance, this is why it’s actually, you know, better if you don’t know what shenanigans the pope or whatever, like whatever patriarch so-and-so is up to. Like, it’s better if you don’t know those things actually, because it, you know, because the mythic, let’s say like the mythic distance, that’s actually part of the way the hierarchy is supposed to work. Yeah. And of course, this inverts ultimately at the moment of communion when when everything gets, you know, collapsed into the single point. But but just as like a normal way of operating through your life, it’s better if you don’t know. And I want to say something about this, the hierarchy of stories, too, that’s important for people to understand is that this again is is one of the problems of our thinking is that we tend to confuse quality and quantity in the way that we see things. And so when a lot of modern historians look at these these these original histories, they’ll notice that there’s like I said, there’s a gesture at the outset which says something like, you know, we’re connected to this son of Noah or this related relation to the the Trojan War or whatever. And then they’ll go into their national history and spend a lot of time on it. And so they’ll tend to dismiss the first part and say, well, what’s really important is this. Yes. Yes. Just because it’s one sentence or one page or one paragraph doesn’t mean that for the people who wrote it, it isn’t primordially important to be connected in this way that it wasn’t like the reason why they even wrote their national story is based in this first little part that you dismiss and you don’t you don’t think is important. This is such an important point that you’re making here because I’ve had conversations with like old Norse scholars and stuff, you know, about the what’s sometimes called the younger or the pros at which is we’ll get to it eventually. But it’s basically it was like this is where like most most of the stories from Norse mythology probably come from this text. But the text itself is a is a manual for poets written by a Christian man named Snorri Sturluson right in the 14th century I think 1415 somewhere in there anyway, long time after paganism had already died out. He’s writing these stories down because Norse poetry requires the use of what are called Kennings, which are nested references, and sometimes they go several levels down. And so if you don’t know the story that’s being referenced by the story that’s being referenced by the story then you won’t know how to use this in your scaldic verse. And so poetry as an art form was kind of dying out and so Snorri tries to basically gather all the old stories and I strongly suspect when he didn’t actually know the story he just made something up that sounded good to him. But anyway, nothing against him. It’s just like some of that some of the stuff in there is, I think, a little questionable if if you wanted to really convince me that a seventh century Baltic pagan actually believed like this is what they thought about Thor or something. But anyway, but the point being that so he writes it for that but then he begins it with this very actually quite a long chapter, which connects it to the Christian story and connects it to Rome, where you find out that all the Norse gods they’re actually refugees from the Trojan War, and they were actually famous men at one point and powerful wizards and all this other stuff. Right. And so, but when I when I’ve talked to Norse scholars like scholars of Old Norse literature about this, you know, I’ll mention something like well, the the pros etta you know it’s got it’s it’s got these features to it and it’s you know it’s actually from a Christian perspective, because of this stuff and and they’ll look at me like you’re crazy and like well what about the beginning though, and then they’ll say, Oh, well we don’t count that that doesn’t count. That’s not, you know, like that’s a he just had to do that so that the church wouldn’t, you know, as though, as though as though nobody in Christianity, like had ever, you know told the story before, like, you know, and so it’s just, I have a hard time even articulating how much this sort of thing irritates me. And so those, those little bits there’s like the little proem at the beginning of Sir Gowan and the Green Knight, which connects, which connects the whole establishment of the Kingdom of Britain, which Arthur is now king connects it to Brutus and the fall of Troy, and all of the stuff like that’s actually deeply important to understanding what the Arthurian story was even about. So much so that you know like that particular Brutus gives his name to some of the like early Arthurian poems, the Lyamans brute for example. But without that, without that context, like the story wouldn’t have been the same to them. But of course, no, the stories are actually about, you know, you know, feminism and power struggles and like all this other stuff. And so just, that’s way more convincing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. I’m actually probably just still irritated about the Sir Gowan and the Green Knight film that came out a couple years ago. Still pretty salty about that. But anyway, okay, so the other thing to mention when we’re talking about these, these kind of nested hierarchies of stories in, which is really what I mean by medieval universal history, right, is, is that folklore has the same kind of function as like your local patron saint, as folklore is something that kind of is able to jump outside or like buttress the hierarchy kind of from the outside. And so folklore will often just like bring two things together that don’t really like, you know, these two people could not have lived at the same time or these, you know, this, you know, well, this obviously happened here and not here or something like that, but folklore can collapse those distinctions in a way that supports the symbolic structure of the hierarchy. In the same way that your patron saint can like collapse the distance between you and the emperor or whatever. So yeah, yeah. I mean, you see that even in hagiography, right? What is it, you know, you can do it with saints because they can kind of come back from heaven and do things, you know, what is it? Yeah, yeah. I forget that is it St. Demetrios, who is the, who’s the emperor? Oh, oh, oh, yes. It’s like he’s not during his life, right? It’s like after his death. You know, God forgive me, I can’t remember right now. It’s horrible, but St. Demetrios is shown in an icon killing a king, like killing and it’s not during his life. It’s like, you know, after. I’ll think of, I’ll think of which saint it is probably like before the end of the video, but yes. Yeah, so the ground, grand foundational story of the Christian world is the gospel, you could say especially the story that’s from Genesis to Acts, and then the apocalypse, right. But especially the grand foundational story of the Christian world is the passion and the resurrection of Christ. And this is why in traditional Christianity, there’s so much emphasis placed on Holy Week or Passion Week and on Easter or Pascha. I mean, if you want to, if you want to get like irrationally irritated at English language Christianity, a great book to read is a book by an English historian. I’ve talked about it before on the show, but an English historian named Eamon Duffy, and he wrote this, he wrote a bunch of great books about prayer in the Middle Ages, but he has a fantastic book called The Stripping of the Alters. And one of the, there’s a long chapter in this book on basically how they celebrated Pascha or the Easter Vigil in England before the Reformation and just like your average parish church. And it’s so, it’s so Orthodox, like it’s so, it’s so similar to the way that Orthodox Christians are used to celebrating Pascha or Easter today. And like, and you just sort of realize, oh no, we had this at one point and it was all stripped away from us. It took me a while to get over that, to be honest with you, right. But so then after this, you have a wide range of stories, like we’re talking about with increasing locality that nest the local and the specific within the universalizing and the cosmic. So our Universal History series, we’ve been mainly focused on these kinds of stories. This is what we’ve been mainly looking at, right. How did people groups, as they converted, nest their identity within the Christian and within the Roman story, even when they themselves maybe fell outside of the empire. And just to emphasize again, before we get into the next section, is that these identities, they stack or they nest. And if you don’t understand this, then you will make the mistake, which as I’m going to try to argue is basically the mistake of 19th and 20th century nationalism. Yeah. Which is to create something that’s very top heavy, right. Where it’s it’s more about here’s the narrative that actually has to control and oppress everything beneath it rather than serve as a container for it. Yeah, that’s really that’s really important. And that’s when you can see I mean in general, that’s when you can see how when any identity goes wrong is when it doesn’t respect the normal nesting of identities that are below it right it’s like as a family a father it’s like okay the father is the head of the family. But the father is the head of the family in the way that is there to make his children and his wife be fruitful and and and and succeed and be themselves right and have their own lives, ultimately. And so that’s the way that all identities should function and that’s the way God functions and that’s the way that already all identity should function that’s why people are. And so when they think about nationalism they become very tense because they always think that that all that means is, like you said, you know the way that the Third Reich presented their nationalism as this as this completely identity that takes over, but it’s not just the Third Reich like Napoleon, and all of a lot of modern national identity had that that feature but it was not a feature of ancient thinking. I think a much overlooked vision in scripture is Nebuchadnezzar’s like first dream. Right, the one I think it’s his first one, but the one of the tree. Right, so he has everybody remembers like the vision of like the statue being destroyed by the, you know, stone cut out of the cut out of the mountain, you know, and but the, the, but in his vision of the tree right it’s the idea of the tree and of course the trees the king. Right, the tree is, is this beautiful tree. It gives shade to the plants beneath it and also the birds of the air commonest in its branches, the wild beast kind of gather around it but that’s what that’s what the king is supposed to be. And you could say that that’s what whatever your your story that gives identity, that’s what it is supposed to be right it’s supposed to be this tree that you know the birds of the air these various principalities and the beast of the field which are, you know, the things that are lower down right they can come and still they can find shelter and shade and protection. And of course, in his dream, ultimately he’s because of his pride the tree gets cut down but the point, the point is that this is what this is what the king or you could say like the grand story like whatever it is that’s what it, that’s how it’s supposed to function. Yeah, yeah. And obviously this isn’t always like function. Perfectly. But there is. But it but it functions surprisingly well let’s just say right even when you have, even when you have somebody like the Pope, saying, I think it’s maybe the fifth century saying, okay nobody in the West is allowed to read the book of Enoch anymore, you know, but then there were still places on the, you know, the outer branches of the West, you know, in, in, in Scotland and Ireland and the British Isles particularly where, where people kept all of these things right they sort of kept them they still remembered them and it was still part of, again, not just like a book at a monastery but you know teaching from Enoch teaching from the apocryphal books was actually a major part of parish life in Anglo-Saxon England. Right and so there’s there’s a there’s a, there was space even when you when you had somebody who tried to totalize things in some way there was space for this stuff to kind of fit in. Yeah, and that was one of the reasons why that’s why it’s hard for us to think that way, is that because we live in a technocratic society, we, we confuse authority with power, because we have yet we have the capacity now for authorities to have indefinite power. And so, when when the president or whatever when the the authority say something they can implement it completely. Whereas in an ancient world that wasn’t the case you know the Pope can be in Rome saying whatever he’s saying, and it’s going to have influence but it’s not, he doesn’t have the means to enforce it all through Christendom. And so there’s always this organic variability that that installs itself just naturally by just normal human mechanisms. So, yeah, along comes the Protestant Reformation. Right, and the result of the Reformation and it has to be remembered that the Reformation took place in Germany. Right, it’s primarily at in this beginning is primarily a German religious movement. Right, obviously it gives France and Switzerland and England other places, but originally it’s primarily a German religious movement, except that. The Reformation didn’t take place in Germany, because Germany did not exist. Germany is a made up country. Fake news everybody. No, Germany, Germany’s Germany’s a made up country right there if you look at a medieval map there’s no Germany on that map. Nobody who lived in the place that we call Germany now would have called themselves Germans actually they still don’t call themselves Germans. But, but a really fun game is actually, what’s the name of German in other languages and like every, what do you call it, what do you guys call it in French? Alma. Yeah, right, right. Because like the Alamein region right right so so it’s yet nobody who lived there called themselves Germans right this this German but Germany is a modern construct. Yeah, but the way that it was built. The story sort of begins in the Protestant Reformation. I don’t have like a ton of time to go into this but let’s say that as a result of the Protestant Reformation we got something called the 30 years war in Western Europe which is one of the bloodiest periods in Western Europe actually not not the Middle Ages. Right, but, but this is this is now in the modern period. 30 years were incredibly bloody struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants over basically a very small slice of a very small slice of Western Europe. Yeah, and the result the end result of the 30 years war something called the Treaty of Westphalia. And one of the things that comes about as a result of that treaty is that they decide okay your religion will be determined simply by whatever principality, you live in. So like if you live in this little province. And some of these are quite small basically the size of what in Texas would be a county. I don’t know do you guys, do you guys call them parishes or counties or like what’s your what’s the what’s the unit in Canada beyond the city. Yeah, we do have. We do have something like that I forget what they’re called. Okay, I’ll come to you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but basically these very small principalities and your religion, if you live there would just be whatever the official, whatever the religion of. And so what happened was that instead of, instead of the, instead of the, the identity conferred by the Christian story being kind of the at the very outside level is that it collapsed down actually several levels into the hierarchy. And so it goes from being here’s a universalizing story of passion week and Pascha, right of Rome and Greece of the Trojan War, and, you know, St. John the Baptist right all these things like this is our universalizing story that kind of is the container that holds everything together, and now that collapses actually several rungs down the ladder right to now, it’s actually secondary to your political identity. Now, once you kind of understand when that happened and how that happened. You can then understand how it’s actually a pretty short trip to go from there to now my religious identity or my spiritual identity or whatever is something that I confer upon myself. Now personal personal right. Yeah, but but also like but isn’t that also like political identity also has collapsed down to that level now. Yeah. So you’re, you’re, you can freely associate with whatever political party you want, at least in some parts of the world. But you know talking to the United States, you can freely associate with whatever political party you want. And everything about your identity has collapsed down to the level of the self of the self. So, when all of this is going on, though, and before it kind of gets all the way down to that level. In the primarily in 18th and 19th century Europe, you have the emerging of what is sometimes called the search for the national epic. Yeah. So, why do we need the national epic, because we’re not part of an empire anymore. Holy Roman or otherwise, we’re not part of an empire anymore. And we’re not part of, and we’re not even part of the same religion anymore. Right. It’s I mean, and listen. Nowadays, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, like we can go out together and we can have a beer and we can talk about our differences and all these different things. Nobody stabs anybody and that’s great. I love that. Don’t get me wrong. But if you think for a moment that somebody, you know, in the 30 years war, believed that, oh, the Roman Catholic over there and me, we’re the same religion basically. And we’re just quibbling over a few small differences like they this is not how people thought. Yeah. Yeah, they weren’t killing each other over small differences, let’s say. Anyway, so you don’t you’re not held together by the same religion anymore and you’re not held together by the same. And you’re not even held together by like the sort of like the imperial story. Right. And so now what we need to do is to try to find some other narrative that can collect and hold our identity together. And this is the this is why there’s the search for the national epic. So something a lot of people don’t know. You’re of course aware of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. Yeah. Right. And they’re famous for a bunch of fairy tales, which they did not write. There, the fairy tales that we know is like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. They were edited mainly by Wilhelm. But, but they didn’t write those stories. Yeah. What they did was they went around collecting all the oldest stories like the children’s stories is what they would call them. But they went around just collecting all the old wives stories and all the old children’s stories and things like this from these these tiny little idiosyncratic, you know, valleys in different places and what is now Germany. And they’re collecting they’re collecting these stories because the oldest stories preserve the oldest words. And Jacob Grimm is a philologist. He’s interested in really old words. And so his two great works that he composed were the largest and most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, which has ever been created. And then also the an accompanying volume, sometimes it’s called Teutonic mythology or German mythology or something like that. It’s got its own name in German, which I won’t try to pronounce here since we’re on the Internet. But anyway, you’ve got you’ve got these two massive volumes. And the other is this is German mythology and they’re both fascinating works. His Teutonic mythology is, let’s say, has a lot of problems from the perspective of modern scholarship, because once again, there were a bunch of gaps and he just tried to fill the gaps in by guesswork, essentially. And then but the fairy tales were, you know, basically he was sending his grad students out because grad students are the the mindless minions of the economic world. So he would send his grad students out to basically collect these stories. And then later they edited them together in a volume. And that turned out to be much more popular and let’s say more enduring than the other two works. But what a lot of people don’t know is that following the German Revolution, sometimes it’s called the March, March Revolution, when the when the National Assembly of the National Assembly of the German people is like the first German parliament was what came together. Jakob Grimm had a seat. It was just a seat in the parliament, but it was like a special chair. And he had a vote and everything else. And he got disenchanted with politics. It didn’t really last. But the reason that they gave him this spot in the like the very first German parliament ever was because he was he was the great German philologist. He was the great German, you could say, storyteller in that he was telling by collecting all these old stories and trying to package them and arrange them. And so what he’s actually doing is creating an identity that is German, an identity that’s based in this based in the language that you speak and who your ancestors were more than it is in what your religion is or where you live or those other things. And so one of the great questions of the time was, well, as the German state is being founded and there’s there’s lots of like little revolutions and different governing bodies and all these different things, it’s difficult to track even if you have it all laid out in front of you. But basically, one of the big questions that they’re trying to answer is, what does it actually mean to be German? It’s not a religious question anymore. Right. It’s not a it’s not it’s not you know, you know, so like, what does it mean to be German? And obviously, eventually attempts to answer that question are going to develop in some really kind of unhealthy ways. Yeah. Yeah. In more nationalistic ways, the way we understand them now, whereas the ancient world that like if there had been some kind of German identity, let’s say in France, there was definitely more of a let’s say a basic French identity, even though all the regions still there was still that issue where all the region and like your French identity was basically that you know, you’re somehow related to the King of France. That’s where your French identity comes from, you know, you owe allegiance to the king. But then you probably don’t speak French, you don’t speak the same French that the French does you speak some other local dialect or whatever and and you don’t see that this allegiance to the King of France as this totalizing thing, right as this thing that it’s like I am French in the way even that the French would understand that today. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s the thing about nationalism as opposed to, let’s say the older mode is that your national identity is now much more totalizing to the point that it has the ability to actually obliterate the things beneath it. I mean, obviously, it’s the French is a good example when Napoleon took over, he basically, you know, impose Parisian French on the rest of France right to make it one language he he he basically imposed a education system on to all the different regions. And those that you know, and you can see that all like during the revolution, you can see that happening. It’s wild, you know, the, the local places that resist the revolution, you know, they get, they get slaughtered and people just get slaughtered because they, they, there’s this one thing that’s young right there. That’s where even the idea is is kind of born right this idea citizen of a nation. The way we understand it now. Yeah, and it’s a sort of a weird extension, you could say of like the the old really old classical idea of the city state. Yeah, but now imposed across many cities and over very large geographic area until you get to these places where you have the situation today, where modern nation states are so impossibly large. I mean, this is part of why I keep demurring on like when we’re going to do like, what’s the symbolism of America video right part of it is, is that like which America. Yeah, like, well, don’t you think that one of the reasons for the success of America has been that it had had been at least for a while had been able to kind of recast that multiplicity right a sense in which there were local traditions local places, you know, people, people in different regions just have different ways of living and we have to be able to kind of see that. Yes, there. Yes, there is a. I think that was part of a lot of the early genius of the American project and the two, the two things that really challenged it and maybe broke it. Although we’ll see we’re still I mean we’re brand new country so we’ll see. Yeah, you know the ability, you know, which is very importantly. It’s like it’s like now it’s the artery right the the arterial system that connects the country, but very importantly like it’s, it’s owned and paid for by the state of the country. Right, but then also and also along with that, you know, kind of developing as well as the is the, there’s something in our Constitution called the interstate commerce clause, which basically gives the, the interstate commerce clause. Which basically gives the federal government authority to regulate anything that might possibly touch interstate commerce, and I don’t want to get like too much into like American constitutional stuff and politics, but you could just say that the interstate commerce clause is something that’s kind of like the, the interstate commerce clause. You know, being able to recast that locality, like you just said. And obviously airplanes have made things worse, but anyway. But it’s interesting because here in Canada we get to see the interstate commerce clause, which is something that’s really interesting. And obviously airplanes have made things worse, but anyway. But it’s interesting because here in Canada we can really see where that leads to is that it actually leads to extremes in some ways, you know, here in Canada we’re seeing the other extreme where, as we know as the federal government becomes more powerful, we’re seeing the interstate commerce clause. And obviously airplanes have made things worse, but anyway. But it’s interesting because here in Canada we can really see where that leads to is that it actually leads to extremes in some ways, you know, here in Canada we’re seeing the other extreme where, as we know as the federal government becomes more powerful, it’s creating this sense that, you know, diversity, only diversity, like we don’t have an identity. This is this has been now the, the, the way that the government is framing it is that Canada is a is a nation list nation right it’s a post national nation we don’t, our only value is openness like our only identity is diversity. And so it’s almost this like weird collapse. I like how you guys took took the like the joke about Canadians being hyper apologetic for everything and just like what if we turn that into an identity, like what if we turn that into our own identity. And so, and it’s interesting because in Quebec, we, we have a weird fractal thing about that which is that in Quebec they’re trying to hold on to their identity, but they really think of it in terms of nation, like really in terms of the French project in terms of nation. And so it’s all collapsing because they’re trying to like impose language and impose identity over, over the over Quebec but they also, they don’t feel it it’s not an organic thing. And so as they’re including they’re like you know we have this massive immigration policy including all these people, but they have to learn French and they have to, they have to kind of fit into this weird thing it’s like well it’s not, it’s all not working like it’s so inorganic about about about that. And let’s say in the Roman Empire, you would have had, let’s say groups of barbarians that would come and maybe settle and they would negotiate with the local person and they would let them settle. They would kind of they would keep their identity but they would also pay homage to the Romans but it would be of way more organic natural way but but it’s almost impossible to do now. Yeah. Yeah, so we thought we would get into politics so much. I know, I know. I mean, I, it’s my own fault for picking the subject right. Yeah, it’s like it’s, it is a kind of especially as you get closer and closer to modern times it becomes more and more inherently political. So, you have as as as the old idea of the Empire Holy Roman or otherwise right as the old idea of the Empire recedes as Christianity as a central unifying story is that gets pushed more and more to the back burner let’s say, you know, as a result of the enlightenment project and everything else. Something has to step into that space to fill the void that says like, well, okay, how do I know I’m Finnish. Right. How do I like what does it mean to be finished like Finland has been part of the, you know, talking talking about the 19th century now right so Finland’s been part of the Russian Empire for a long time. Right. But, but, but like, you know, nobody in Finland speaks, you know, like the same language that’s our speaks and everything. So like, what would a Finnish identity. What would that look like. Yeah. Right. And so they’re trying to figure that figure that out and answer that question and because so much of the enlightenment project looked back at a very, how do I say, literally a very monochrome version of the classical period. Right. I say literally monochrome because, you know, that, you know, they go over to Greece or Rome or whatever and they see, here’s all these beautiful old white marble pillars and temples and things like this. And so they assume, oh, everything must have been like this and it’s so clean and it’s so orderly and all this different stuff. And then for decades for many decades like when whenever, whenever evidence would emerge that this statue or that these pillars had been painted. Like, I mean, we go, we’ve gone to church with the Greeks like you can’t tell me those people. They paint those statues, come on, those statues. Come on, come on. Right. But, but, but whenever evidence like this would surface they would destroy it. Yeah, because it destroyed the sort of pristine monochrome hyper ordered vision that they had kind of created out of the classical period and in reality is nothing like that. But, but that’s, that’s the vision that they kind of created for themselves. And I think it was so appealing because it basically offered a, a structured ordered framework that was like, oh, look how pristine things were before it was touched by Christianity and Christianity is what brought in all this awful color and texture and actually Right. Into the classical project. Right. And so anyway, so this is the way that this is the way that that that they were thinking about it at this time. And so looking back at the classical period, they said, well, they had the Aeneid, they had the Iliad and the Odyssey. So if we’re going to create a Finnish national identity, then what we need is a Finnish epic. And so I’m just using this as an example because it’s probably my favorite from this period. This is a guy named Elias Lonerat who went around and basically collected all the old Finnish songs about the, the sort of like the ancient heroes and the creation of the world. And, you know, a lot of the stuff only survived in folklore. Right. So he goes around and he collects the songs from all these people who, you know, can’t read, they can’t write, but they have hours and hours and hours of poetry just memorized off the top of their head. And he collects all that stuff together. And then he synthesizes it into a single epic work called the Kallivalla. Now, there was never any such thing in like medieval Finland. It’s a made up epic. It’s made up of real parts, but it was created, it was synthesized. It’s by the way, extremely dope, very beautiful. It’s been one of the most, I think actually, especially in my young life, but even now, like one of the most influential pieces of poetry that I’ve ever read. So I do recommend it. It’s awesome. And there were parts of it that also had a huge influence on a lot of Tolkien’s development because it was really, I mean, it was just being translated into English when Tolkien was a kid. That was like, it was a big deal. But you’ve got other examples of the search for the national epic. Beowulf is my favorite. The only reason we know about Beowulf, the only reason the manuscript isn’t moldering somewhere in a library, totally forgotten, is because when they found it, a lot of people started saying, oh, well, maybe this is our national epic. And so they would say, oh, well, maybe Beowulf, maybe it started out with the Danes. Oh, it’s the Danish national epic because a bunch of the characters in it are Danes. There’s a Danish king in here, right? And then the Germans said, no, no, no, it’s a German national epic because it’s written in Anglo-Saxon, which is a West Germanic language. And so is German. So this is a German national epic. And not until like almost a century later did the English come along and say, well, actually was written in English. But there are no English characters in the story. So it doesn’t really qualify. It’s complicated. Yeah, it’s just not a national epic. It doesn’t fit the bill. But a lot of people wanted it to be. And so that’s how it kind of rose to prominence. Obviously, you’ve got like, you know, the probably the actual German national epic, right? The Nibelungen lead, which, you know, Wagner’s whole ring cycle is built off of that. The Sagas of the Icelanders, which all together, you know, for the Icelandic people, that’s their Shakespeare. And obviously, you know, the the Sid for, you know, people on the Iberian Peninsula. And I know at one point, the song of Roland Roland was supposed to be the French national epic. Right. But it’s such a it’s such a it’s such a strange story to be a national epic because it’s a sort of defeat. And yeah, and it’s like, well, defeat is OK. Lost causes are actually some of the best, most successful national ethics. But but it’s I don’t know, it just it doesn’t seem to fit the bill for what France is now. I was thinking about this earlier. Obviously, you’re closer to French culture than I am. But if I had to pick something that now is maybe like the great French national epic, it might be something like Les Mis. Yeah, that’s what I exactly what I thought when you were when you were talking. Yeah, because I would sort of guess in the revolutionary in the revolutionary mode, it’s something that seems to function as something like that. And it’s got the right kind of scale, but it’s also like a deeply humane work in a lot of different ways. Yeah. And it’s not as mythological because they are modern, a modern nation. Yeah. And then, of course, when it comes to the Celts, like the the the Scottish Irish, Minx, Welsh, like when it comes to the Celtic people, you have so many national ethics, it would be hard to even pick one. And they’re sort of the people that like legitimately just had all the stuff like right there for them because because basically Celtic history is just an extremely long history of lost causes and heroes like all the way from, you know, ancient times and like the the tane all the way up to like Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that stuff, which has which which has a like his whole story has this kind of mythic flavor to it, despite the fact has happened in a relatively recently, historically speaking. So what all of these things have in common, right, is that there, there are things that for something to be really effective as a national epic, typically speaking, it’s got to belong to a mythic past. So this is part of why it’s very difficult to speak of like what would be the American national epic or assume the Canadian national epic. The thing with about that is that the French Canadians have access to a national epic, but they basically don’t want anything to do with it because it’s so Catholic. You know, like the story of the early settlers who came and died and were kidnapped by natives and tortured and like there’s it’s a it’s a it’s really beautiful and intense and and in some of the early like Samuel de Champlain was a was an astounding character. It’s just that he was so Catholic and so Christian that that people don’t talk, they just can’t hold it in them to tell that story. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I’d be really hard put to like to say like what’s the national epic for America but but but again I think probably America’s just too large like you have to think of it in terms of regional epics and a lot of a lot of our big regional stories, obviously, a lot of the big regional stories of the American And of course, American culture as a whole is extremely anti Catholic. There’s, there is, you know, The thing you know, like, you can you can barely even talk about this on the internet right now but or even in, you know, polite company but something like Gone with the Wind, right, the film, right is is very, very close to like something like a regional epic for the deep south. Yeah, which is not quite the region I live in but it’s pretty close. And obviously, that is, you know, that that that story you know for good or for ill it’s got to be discarded now, you know, and obviously there are problems with it but also, but also, you know, a lot of people found it to be a really beautiful and compelling story. So, but, you know, so but there is something like the Wild West the antebellum south. Yeah, the Wild West is has it has definitely has has its mythology that is a real mythology. Yeah, Wild West is a mythology that’s pretty powerful. Yeah, so there is there is something like mythological time and what I’ll be really interested to see is, you know, who knows what’s going to happen, you know, the next two 300 years but, you know, a few hundred years on like what is what what’s our what’s our mythical past going to be. It’s great that you’re hopeful that America will last. I’m an extremely optimistic person I don’t know what to tell you. Sorry to be so. I mean, crazy things are happening right now. I mean, it’s a it’s a wild wacky time like I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I’m I mean I’m, I am a very optimistic person. So that’s one thing. So let me ask you a question. So how do you see. So let’s say now, you know, we’re kind of thinking about this and this rediscovery of stories rediscovery of legends. Do you think that there are ways for us to, because there are in these national epics are beautiful and powerful but like you said there are some ways in which, for example Wagner is is almost demonized because of the way that the Nazis use Wagner right right, but the elements of the story are powerful and could be very useful today. Do you think there are ways that we can recapture kind of read thread some of these elements together to to to maybe rediscover this more fractal relationship, you know that that used to be the ancient way of thinking. I think, and I not only do I think it can be done, I think it’s got to be done. Yeah, because I mean, there are a lot of like great like there’s a whole genre of novel called like the southern Gothic novel, right, that is, that’s really built around the, the, the, the romance and the trauma of the United States, right. And so, but basically it was just built out of people like trying to work through this stuff by telling stories about it. And I think that I mean Wagner’s ring cycle, for instance, has already been extremely successively retold in the Star Wars franchise. Yeah. You know, like the first three Star Wars films are Wagner, right, it’s like operatic in its scope, it’s got the same like use of light and darkness everything else. The whole idea of, of the sun replacing the father, right, you, the son has to kill the father in order to, in order to ascend right that that whole idea, right, super Wagnerian theme. Yeah. So, I think but I but I think that I think that yes these stories have to be retold, and we can retell them in a way where we’re also kind of honest about, you know, there’s got to be a way. I know you’ve done videos about this but I’ll just say there’s got to be a way to both love your ancestors and also be honest about their sins. Yeah, there’s got to be a way to do that. And right now it seems like we can only do one or the other. That’s actually a function of idolatry it’s an image of idolatry, because one of the things that happens is that because we don’t have the fractal relationship because we don’t have this hierarchy that leads all the way up to God. We actually expect of these lower rungs to be perfect. And if they’re not perfect we hate them because they’re not perfect. And so there’s a sense in which if things were properly laid out, and we don’t treat these figures as idols to worship them or to cast them away, that we see them as just manifestations that are gray because they’re not God, you know, that all these leaders all these heroes have dark sides, obviously there’s no way around that. And we could celebrate their heroism and also recognize their sins. And, and in some ways, you know, I think that the idea to cover their sins to some extent in the sense that, you know, we want to emphasize the positive because we want them to be examples in their good things towards us like, you know, what’s the point of just pointing out all the evils of the people that came before you, what you want are examples, but if you can’t find examples, then how can you get better like how can you even live up to the beautiful aspects of what has been given to you. Yeah. He’s like, I don’t know. I’m trying to solve the world’s problems right now but we need we need to do it first of all by telling good stories like that. Yeah, that’s how that that’s how the starts. So, so just a couple more things about the national epic and then we’ll, we’ll all segue into, into some telling good stories stuff hopefully. Yeah. So, all of these things, let’s say, you know, we go back we talk about you know Beowulf or the Cali Vala or the Ring Cycle 7, all of these things have the capacity to be nested into the Christian story. Right. Right. Not just historically but still now, right, you know, like this, you know, elites don’t want you to know this but storytelling is free, you can just tell stories. Right. But if you don’t do this, I mean this is the problem right this is why things got really murdery in the last century, right is, is that if you don’t nest them, and you try to put on, you know, I think idolatry is exactly the right language for it. If you try to put more weight on them, then they can bear, then they start to develop some problems. First of all, that just, for one thing just insufficiently universalizing. Right. So like what do you, what do you do if you’re trying to tell a story about German people living in this country we made up called Germany. Well now what do I do with all the people who aren’t German. Right. And I think the answers to that question were pretty ugly. Right. One step in. But the other thing is that there is still a step in the, in the downward fragmentation of identity, right. Yeah, stories did not were not enough to hold identity together over the long run. Right. And that’s a, that’s important because it’s like, it’s now we can see patently that is true. Yeah, it’s like, maybe when those stories were cast and when these nation, national identities were cast, you could have prophesied it and people could have believed you or not believed you but now as we noticed, everything turned to mush. And we realized that no those stories, these national identities, even here in Quebec it’s because that’s it’s like a very short concentrated time. You know, it’s like we went from the 1940s 50s as the most Catholic place in the world to the 1970s with this major nationalist movement to basically the 2000s where all of that doesn’t matter anymore and you’re all just global mush. And fast here in the US, especially like growing up, you know, very like conservative fundamentalist right we had the founding fathers right we didn’t have any saints, but we had the founding fathers right George Washington Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson, all those dudes right and there was a lot of work in trying to really build up a kind of a Christian mythology around them even though many of them were Christians, many of them you know universalist atheists deist etc but but there was a lot of work put into trying to basically build up a mythology around that as well if we could just get back to these guys, then America would be what it’s supposed to be. Right. And just as a story. It’s not strong enough. It’s, it doesn’t have the capacity to confer identity. You know, like what do you do with people who don’t fit into don’t fit into the story what I mean, you know, like, you know, even in your own like whatever declaration of independence like who are the not people in all men are created equal women slaves. Yeah, that’s a different thing but Matt Yeah, I mean, and I’m not just here to like rag on my country. Yeah, that’s right. I live in but but but my point is, my point is that that story is itself is actually great. Right. Those, those men actually lived, you know, you have flawed flawed human beings or whatever, but actually lived interesting lives and did courageous things, and it’s not wrong to love them or praise them. But if you try to put on them the weight of the whole American story. It’s, it’s too much. It’s too much they can’t can’t hold it right. So, the other thing is that very often this kind of story. One of the deep flaws that it often has is that very often this kind of story is not participatory. Right, there’s there’s really like, now this this differs I mean a lot of the if you’re really into American history there’s a lot of pretty cool participatory things can go to the East Coast, you know, and do you can go to, you know, Washington’s farm and like they have like a bourbon night there once a year and think like, you know, okay, I mean, there’s, there’s a really cool place called colonial Williams Williamsburg where everybody’s like dressed up in period costume and they try to stay in character and, you know, that’s all fun. So like there are some ways you can participate in the stuff but but but ultimately it’s not very participatory right and then you then like well okay but what if you’re black, how do you participate in So it’s like there’s like different. There’s just is one of the one of the problems with this kind of story is that for a story to really confer identity. It’s got to be something that you can actually participate in you can make it a part of your life. So it’s happening. James Taylor talks about this for Orthodox Christians, this would be really familiar concept but James Taylor in a secular age. He talks about this idea of you know, chaotic time, the idea that that this moment that’s maybe a mythical moment or something that happened 2000 years ago becomes closer than yesterday. Right. That’s what happens at Pascha is that at Pascha the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a historical event a mythical event all these layers to it, but it on Pascha night on Easter night it becomes closer than yesterday. Yeah. Right in terms of, you know, and so most of these stories don’t have the capacity to do that. And when you see people at least not completely they have not got the capacity to do that. Yeah, you can celebrate the Fourth of July or whatever their thing right right. Yeah, fair enough. But like you said they don’t they don’t they they just if they tried to stand on their own as the totalizing identity they they they end up being dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, and then of course I mean, one of the questions we’ve been dancing around for a long time is, and then what if you’re a brand new country, right. Well, what is your mythic time right and, and I think we’ve kind of addressed that. Yeah. So, let me let me let me give just like a couple of like practical applications for people it’s the Baptist preacher and me I can’t totally get away from it. But also, as a couple of practical applications but then also a little bit about the project that I’ve been working on and why it’s tied into all of this. So, if you wanted to. If you wanted to like comment all of this stuff. And you’re trying to figure out like what do I do with it, what do I do with this universal history stuff it’s very, it’s very fun to like how do I, how do I actually participate in this and integrate this in my life. The first thing that I’d say is for like for you as a Christian, the liturgical year is your epic. It’s your sacred story. It’s one that you can totally participate in. We have this prayer. In the evening, or as part of our evening prayers in the Orthodox Church, it comes from the service of complin, and it’s addressed to the Mother of God. And I’m not going to unpack this or defend this for our Protestant friends out there. Please understand we mean something by this that’s maybe not. Well anyway, don’t freak out. I’ll be happy to explain this sometime later. But we have in this prayer we say, you are the salvation of the race of Christians. Now salvation we mean like a lot more things by salvation, then, you know, like a, then dying and going to heaven. Yeah, then dying and going to heaven. So that’s not we’re talking about. But she’s the salvation of the race of Christians in what way because Christ comes from her. Right. And in that sense, every single Christian is descended from and is a child of Mary. Yeah. Right. But the thing to kind of focus in on there is actually that last bit the generation or the race of Christians, that when you pass through the baptismal font, you become something more than just your. You know, this is why St. Paul, you know, this is why the church can simultaneously we can talk about there’s no Jew Greek bond free male female, but then also preserve distinctions between those things in important ways. Yeah, we can do both because of this. Right. And this is why I mean it’s tied back to my, my long running theory right that you’re not really a Christian country until you have like a definitive national icon of the Mother of God. You know, that’s when you become that’s when you become a Christian people. Right. Is because there’s some connection between her and the incarnation, some connection between her between the land between the ocean between. Yes. Yeah. All those body. Right. It’s all these things that are there. Yeah. That which holds right. It’s like that’s what that’s in some of the motherland or however you want to think about it. All these all these ways of describing it. So then and I’ll say this especially to my like fellow Orthodox converts. Right. Is that just sort of understand and accept you’ve received a faith, which is, you know, like, serial Greco Jewish in its origins. Right. Like all the early writers. Right. All the all the early hymns all these different things. They’re not written by people from America. Right. So you’re receiving this. Listen, that’s a dumb thing to say. But also, it’s like, it’s like weirdly freeing to realize that. So just like realize that you’re you’re receiving this faith that’s so much older than you. And that wasn’t made with your taste in mind. And when people get like really like, let’s say agitated about how, you know, well, when are we going to enculturate? When are we going to have like a single American jurisdiction? When are we going to have, you know, like American culture really represented? And what about the music and all that stuff like that? Like just like settle down. Yeah. Settle down and and accept the faith that you’ve been given. But know that by doing so, by just like faithfully saying your prayers, going to the services, participating as fully in the life of your parish as you can, that you’re not just hopefully participating in the salvation of your own soul, but you’re also participating in the salvation of your ancestors and of your culture. And I cannot stress enough how important it is to fully accept and receive this deposit of tradition. If enculturation is ever going to happen in a natural way. Yeah, it’s just like we’re talking about committees can’t do it. It won’t stick. It’s got a naturally right. It’s got to just it’s got to just arise out of things that we won’t be able to describe afterwards. So that in five hundred years when the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Texas has officially replaced hummus with guacamole as the Lenten dip of choice, you know, like, but just like nobody will remember how it happened. But in five hundred years, we’ll have American Orthodoxy for good or for ill. It’ll exist. Right. And but but we’re not going to get there by like just trying to force things. So anyway, so save your family, cultivate just kind of a normal, holy life and wait a few hundred years and see what happens. But so all of that with that graceful segue, just real quick here, I know the video has kind of gone long, but just to talk a little bit about the project. Right. So it’s on Kickstarter right now. There will be a link down below where you can click to it and go. I would love it if you would go and consider backing even just like a couple of bucks to watch the project or whatever. If we get enough people backing, then it kind of like favors the algorithm and then Kickstarter will start promoting itself and have a much larger reach. Yeah. But just to say something about this project, why is this a thing that I’m doing? Why is this really important or significant? What’s it have to do with the symbolic world and symbolism and all this stuff? When I was growing up, I was part of a, you know, came out of just extremely fundamentalist, conservative American Christianity, you know, in the deep south, all that stuff. So growing up in that, but also growing up alongside a Chinese culture, because, you know, because we came from a missionary family and they adopted. And so a lot of like Chinese relatives and things like this. And, you know, like the actually the food that I grew up mainly eating was like Chinese food. So like for me, that’s nostalgia. That’s oh, that’s mom’s cooking, right? Is Chinese. And because she grew up over there and, you know, a lot of her siblings, she has Chinese siblings and everything else. So I kind of grew up like in this one culture, but also right next door to this other culture. And, yeah, I mean, to the point that, you know, Mandarin was my second language as a child. And so I grew up right next door to this other culture that that was was actually really rich and old and had a sense of its own aesthetic, right? A sense of philosophy, sense of aesthetic, sense of storytelling and, you know, a certain way, a certain mode of expressing things. And this is like bright and colorful. And then the thing that is, you know, the lane that I’m in is just like very beige. I mean, literally beige. I mean, aggressively, we chose to like make our churches beige as a color. Why? But anyway, and so trying to wrestle with that as a young person is how I grew up. And so I started reading the book, The Book of Life, while this project was birthed. And it started out as trying to trying to answer the question. Well, what does it take? What does it what do you need to have a culture? And so when I was young, I started reading Beowulf and the Song of Roland first and then like a lot of the other Medieval epics. And I became totally in love with this idea of the epic and the national epic and all this different stuff. And I was reading it for a long time, so I hadn’t really connected the dots on like, you know, you know, where some of the stuff ended up leading. Yeah, if that’s what you were reading at 10, we’ll forgive you, Richard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so I just felt totally in love with this stuff. And so, and you know, later on, as my literary powers grew, I began to basically attempt to compose a national epic, like do what Tolkien did, but Tolkien did it mainly linguistically at first. And I am a linguist, so there is a lot of that in here. But I was mainly focused on the idea of like, what’s the what would be the story that could be then passed on like that people will get their identity from. And then as I grew older, I came to understand more and more that it’s not enough just to have a story, but you actually need a sacred story. And you need like a sort of a sacred participatory narrative. And so I kind of went from there to developing, you know, to doing these kind of what if questions Tolkien and Lewis, Lewis, especially famously used to talk about this, you know, that when he was writing, you know, the Narnia stories, he really just started out with like a what if well, what if I changed this one thing, right. And so for me, my what if question was like, what would a Salter be like in a fantasy world? Like, how would you like if, if, you know, if God is still the god of the fantasy world, but but the Christian religion, the incarnation hasn’t happened, the Christian religion doesn’t exist. But like, you know, like, what would that look like? How would that play out? And so and so like, how do you how do you make a like a fantasy religion that is this still true? It’s not a dollar. It’s not demonic, etc. But also, you’re not just like doing fantasy Christianity, which is, which is, in my opinion, is actually is actually worse. It’s actually worse. So anyway, so I started developing and kind of tinkering with these things. And then, you know, the histories and the poetry and everything else kind of developed into this much larger mythic cycle. And in a, you know, in a nutshell, all the stuff that I’ve shared with you today and all the stuff that we’ve shared over the last two years of our symbolic world, universal history conversations, is stuff that I originally worked out by doing this. You know, I’d go read like an Irish story, or I’d go read the Cali Vala. And then I would try to try to figure out what that story was about, by writing a story like that. So so like working out my ideas, but trying to work them out in this creative way. Because for me, the creative voice has to come before the analytical. And so, as for as for you know, why it’s a tabletop role playing game, like I said, I’m going to do another video soon with Polly Deacon Nicholas Cotar, where we talk about that particular medium. But basically, the short version is I think it’s a powerful and very overlooked storytelling medium. There are a lot of It’s almost the only thing left, it’s almost the only means left that has that of telling a story that’s not totally controlled by, by Hollywood and by you know, the big five publishing companies and the big three or whatever it is now. But but just like there’s there’s a stranglehold on storytelling. And like to to to ever get back to where we could even make a good Christian film. Yeah, we’ve got to first learn how to go all the way back and just like tell stories around the around the campfire. Yeah, it’s a I think that’s a great way to phrase it. It’s almost like a kind of laboratory of storytelling. It’s like, yeah, around and learning what stories are made of. And then people recognizing as they watch people make decisions in the story. Yes, like watching what the results of that are because they have real, real kind of consequences. Right? I think if you phrase it that way, I mean, I don’t see how anybody could object because we don’t know how to tell stories anymore. And, and so and this is the great thing is that as a storytelling medium, it’s participatory. Yeah, right. Which is the whole reason it’s a role playing game is because I’ve been working on this stuff for years. And one day, a good friend of mine was like, Hey, would you just run a game for us? Would you just run a game for us? said and because I’ve been doing the Tolkien game for a long time. Would you just run a game for us said in this world that you’ve been working on, because I would like to know more about it. But you know, it’s kind of poetry is pretty inaccessible to a lot of people, etc. And so we just started doing that. And then it kind of spun out from there. But but what I would so what I would encourage people is if this sounds cool to you, and you’re not freaked out by it, maybe go back to project, check it out. But but also, also to to encourage everyone that we need to be telling these stories, like it’s it’s weird, like lately, I know a lot of people like you, but also other friends who are trying to get films off the ground and things like this, where we’ve been talking for years and years about, okay, as Okay, as Orthodox Christians as traditional Christians, etc. We need to get out there, we need to start telling stories and making movies and things like this. And we’re the people with the most beautiful tradition. So let’s share that with the world, etc. And then as soon as like people start trying to work on these projects and get people to fund them. Like everybody just kind of dries up and they’re like, Oh, I don’t know about this fiction thing. And I’m not sure about this. And what about this little detail and, you know, and like people suddenly get really really nervous. And I want to I would encourage people to boldness and of course, yes, we’re going to make missteps, I’m going to make some you’re going to make some. But we have to do this because, you know, this because at the end of the day, this this deep fragmentation of identity has come down to now where we have multiple identities of warring within ourselves, or who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to be, and what our bodies should look like and everything else. And if we don’t have some, you know, if we can’t return to a narrative framework that at least offers, you know, we don’t have an emperor, we can’t force this on people. But if we don’t return people to a narrative framework that at least offers to heal them and reintegrate them into this kind of nested hierarchy, this nested framework that ultimately comes down to Holy Week. Like if we can’t, if we can’t offer some people an alternative in that way, then we’re we’re letting them down, we’re failing them and we’re not really, we won’t we won’t effectively communicate the gospel right the reason Christianity spreads, the reason it takes off when it goes places. Is because, you know, obviously with some fits and starts and mistakes and everything, but it always finds a way to contain the culture, right, where you can where you can then be a Russian, or, you know, again, Russia also made up country, but you can be a you can be a Muscovy or you can be a key of it or you can be from Novgorod or you can be from Vilnius, or you can be from London or you can be from Paris, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from the United States, you know, you can be from Europe, you know, you can be from Germany, the UK, the UK, the UK, and also a Christian. Yeah. And those things nest in on each other. So that’s actually secretly. That’s what the whole project is about. So I hope people will check it out. Cool. So remind people, tell them the name and until when they’ve got to do this because it’s called M. Boria role playing in the world under Starlight. It’s launching on Kickstarter, hopefully the same day that this recording drops out on YouTube. And so Richard, thanks again. And we’ll be paying attention to the Kickstarter and we’ll talk again very soon. Thanks. Thanks, Jonathan.