https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1wI33KevMck
a So sorry everybody for the delay. I was great. I arrived today at Furman and I saw the campus. I was able to walk around a little bit before we started and it’s very beautiful. I was really happy to discover this place. So I’m an Orthodox icon carver as you heard. You can see these are a few examples of my works up there, but I’m actually not going to talk about my work. I’m not going to talk about icon carving. I’m actually going to talk mostly about monsters. I’m going to talk about what monsters mean and how they, let’s say, fit in the world. And I was given a title. I didn’t choose the title. I don’t even remember what the title is, but it’s like zombies versus icons. What is it? Art and the apocalypse or something. So yeah, so I am going to talk about art. I kind of weave that through. Hopefully everything will come together and make sense. But as an artist and as someone who has been studying Christian art for a long time, I’m very interested in Christian symbolism. And as a student of symbolism and also as an artist, I’m very sensitive to cultural images which appear on our cultural horizon, let’s say. And so one of the things that I’ve noticed and I think most people have noticed is that we live in a time of monsters. It seems that since the beginning of the 20th century, the horizon of our storytelling, let’s say the narrative level of our culture, is filling up with levels that it’s almost difficult to fathom with images of the monsters. And it’s been going on for quite a while and it has accelerated quite a bit in the last few decades. And the monsters, they’ve moved away from the stories of fear, from the horror stories. And they’ve made their way into the most comfortable places, even into our children’s stories. And for those, I’m 42, and for those who are my age and maybe a bit older, a bit younger, we grew up with Sesame Street, which told us that monsters were our friends. And so let’s be honest, the world, our world is obsessed with monsters, with things that are strange, with aliens, with things that are marginal, with glorifications of the exception, things that are in between, things that don’t fit. If we remove the moral interpretation of the monster, let’s say, I’m not here to talk about good or bad. If we look rather at the technical definition of a monster, in fact, a monster is something that doesn’t fit. It’s something that doesn’t fit within the usual categories of a human experience. Monsters are too big, they’re too small, they have too much or too little of something, too many arms, too many heads, just one eye, just one foot. Or else they’re a mixture, a mixture of different categories, a mixture of different animals or a mixture of humans and animals. And ultimately, let’s say the ultimate monster might be the confusion between life and death, the mixture between life and death, the ghost, the vampire, and the zombie. But we’ll get to the zombie pretty soon. So the monster is a breakdown of meaning. It’s a place where categories fall apart. They’re the exceptions and they appear on the edge of meaning. And in the ancient world, monsters were seen as signs. In fact, the word monster means a warning, a portent. In French, it has the same root as the word montrer, which means to show. In English, we still have the word demonstrate, which has the word monster inside of it. But the idea of showing in terms of the monster really needs to be understood in the sense of this warning, this portent. And the question is, what is the monster warning us about? There’s a scene in the Romance of Alexander the Great. And for those who don’t know, these are legends of the life of Alexander the Great. And they’re actually very important in the Western canon, let’s say. And for some reason, I don’t even know why, those stories are important from England to Greece. You find them in the Middle East, in Persia, all the way in Israel, all the way to India. They all have their versions of these legends of Alexander the Great. And they’re really important in terms of understanding world culture, world history. And for some reason, they’re being forgotten in our time. And so this image is a cover of a book, but you can see that it’s actually a Persian miniature of Alexander the Great sitting on his horse, who’s coming to meet the Brahmin in India, who are seen as the naked philosophers. And so in the legends of Alexander the Great, the Brahmin didn’t wear any clothing. They were seen as this kind of pure knowledge. They didn’t have any belongings. And so there is this… In the legend of Alexander the Great, there’s a story of a woman who gives birth to a stillborn monster. This is a Byzantine image of that story. And so the monster, the stillborn monster that is born is a human from the waist up, but is a mixture of different animals from the waist down. And the human part was dead, but the different animal parts are still moving, described as being like the great monster Scylla, which we hear of in Homer’s Odyssey. That is this multi-headed serpent. But this writhing spaghetti has the characteristics of leopards, lions, wolves, wild boars, and dogs. Human above the waist, but a writhing octopus of conflicting beasts below the waist. And I’m sure most of us have experienced that once in a while. So the woman, she runs to Alexander with this monster. And when Alexander sees the child, he knows that it’s a sign, but he doesn’t know what it is a sign of. And so he calls the Chaldean magicians, he called the Chaldean wise men to interpret this sign. And although some actually tried to hide the meaning of the sign to Alexander, there is one of the magicians who tells them the truth. With fear and trembling, he tells them that, quote, Oh bravest of all men, you are the human body, and the wild animal forms are the soldiers who are with you. If the human part of the body were alive and moving, as are the animals beneath it, you would have been destined to rule all men. But it is the very part that is dead, and the beasts are alive. So just as it has left its living state, so have you too departed. For example, the animals that are bound to the human body have no kind of consideration towards man. The same way to those who surround you, not love you. And there will be many upheavals in the world when you depart. And those about you will fall out with one another and will bloodily slaughter one another. So what Alexander encountered was truly a monster. And you could say that it is the archetypal monster. You see, the sign, the portent that the monster is showing is nothing but what it is itself. The monster is the lack of a unifying principle. It is the harbinger of that state, a harbinger of chaos. The beasts which intermingle and fight among themselves because they have lost whatever it was that held their multiplicity into a coherent whole. And so here the conscious agent, the human part was dead, and the beastly, chaotic parts were left to fight amongst themselves. If you think of a person like a hierarchy, if you think of a person like a hierarchy with the head as the chief, let’s say, and the lower parts, the bottom, the edge, the periphery of the body as the edge of the body, we can see how the breakdown in this particular image, this image that Alexander saw, was in fact an omen of something larger. It became a cosmic image of what was going to happen when Alexander died. And we know that is what happened. His empire immediately began to fight amongst each other and to fragment. So we can see this sign, the sign that Alexander saw, we can see it at a social level. We can see it, the type of civil war that erupts when the different factions of apolity can no longer agree on what unifies them. Or we can experience it as the conflict of our own passions, our own desires, which when we’re not able to steer and manage those desires, they fight amongst each other and they rip us apart. They can destroy our lives, they can destroy our families, they can destroy our friendships, and they can even destroy our own human integrity. So we need to pay attention and pay attention very carefully because the obsession of the modern world with the monstrous is no longer just in fiction, it’s no longer just in stories. In fact, the monsters have left the dark spaces under our beds. They’ve left our nightmares and they’ve come out to play. And I think we all feel this loss of unity. We all feel this loss of meaning that is creeping into our societies. At the social level we can feel and we can see all around this growing polarization, the acceleration of what we can only call a strange breakdown, the decomposition of culture, the progressive dissipation of any center which can rally us as societies. And it’s difficult not to come back to the famous poem by Yeats, that poem that we’ve heard a million times but that it’s worth to revisit. I think it’s the poem that is the most cited in modern poetry. It’s a poem that is full of passionate intensity. And this poem is the most famous poem of modern poetry because it rings so true, because we stand here in what feels like this wide I mean, gyre, this acceleration of time on the edge of the world where the wheel is spinning so fast that sometimes it feels like it’s going to come off its axis. And we can see that Yeats is using the same structure that we saw in Alexander’s monster, the falconer as the human agent, as the intelligent agent, losing control of the predatory beast which gets farther and farther and farther from his control and things fall apart. And so here we stand on the edge it sometimes seems and it is here that we find the zombies wandering aimlessly in a world that is losing its center. Now the zombie, unlike the other ancient monsters, the other traditional monsters, is truly a harbinger of contemporary nihilism. The zombie, at least the 20th century version of it, the recent version of it, it has no magic. Its arrival is an accident, some kind of freak event, a disease, a plague. It has no reason. It’s couched in a biological accident. The zombie is just an animated corpse and it inhabits the indeterminate space between life and death, living death. The zombie roams around in packs and it shows us this mindless wandering of a mindless mob with an insatiable hunger for devouring others, for swallowing life itself. So if the vampire would be the monster of aristocracy, let’s say, the zombie is truly the monster of the masses. It is the monster of the accidental. It’s the quantitative leveling. The zombie is the atheist insistent on the absence, the illusion of free will. And it’s this image of nihilism and idiosyncrasy taken all the way to its extreme into decomposition. Now in almost every major city in North America, they have these events. You might have heard about them. They call them zombie walks. So people dress up as zombies and they walk in thousands down the streets dressed up to make them look like corpses. They shift around with dead empty eyes pretending to be the walking dead. And some of these are huge. If we were generous, we could call it a zombie procession maybe. We could say that they’re liturgical zombies if there’s such a thing. If you want to know what a society is, you simply have to look at what it processes around. What makes it come together and process? It will give you an idea. Look at social rituals. So the zombie typifies the mob, yes, but not only. The zombie also typifies the absolute individualism, the absolute isolation of contemporary life. Because the zombies, they only interact with what they desire. They never interact with each other. They’re a mob, but they’re not a whole, they’re not a community. And the trope of cannibalism, obviously that’s a very ancient trope. It’s a trope that’s been there in the ancient stories from the beginning. We have them in so many ancient myths. But this tweak in the zombie stories of eating the brains is quite important. Because the zombie is a creature without meaning, without intelligence. It misses any form of person. And so it has this insatiable desire which mirrors what it lacks. It desires what it lacks, identity, meaning. And this desire appears in that materialist reduction of the person to this clump of cells that we have in the human body. It’s a person to this clump of cells that we have up in our cranium. So the zombie wants to eat your brains because it cannot eat the mind, because it cannot speak the mind. But strangely enough, the desire to eat the living. It’s the extreme perversion of our desire for communion with each other. There’s also a distilled image of all our desires, of all our passions, let’s say. Because when we let our desires get out of control, we always see that we attempt to fill this unquenchable yearning. What we do is we transform other people into commodities. We transform other people into something that can get me what I want. And so the zombie is both an image of the social breakdown, the person as a meaningless statistic, the disappearance of common values, except the overwhelming desire to consume. But it’s also the breakdown of the person itself into a soulless, desiring death machine. And there are a very strict analogy between those different levels of the world. The social breakdown and polarization is to the state with the total abandonment of our desire to consume and to our little idiosyncrasies is to the person. And the zombie inhabits both of those things at the same time. I gave a version of this talk last year in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And since I gave that talk, some of the people who follow me on social media, they pointed me to a book that was written by a University of Toronto scholar. His name is John Vervache. And it was published near the same time that I gave this talk last time. And I was really amazed to see in his book how close our thoughts were, how close the relationship of what I was saying was to what he was saying. Vervache mentions the postmodernist theorists Deleuze and Gattari, those two people who work together. And he quotes them saying that the only modern myth is the myth of the zombies. I think it’s quite accurate. And I think it’s increasingly so because the zombie is precisely a breakdown in meaning. And long ago in my own studies I discovered that Jacques Derrida, the famous, you know, the father of postmodernism, he himself called the living dead agents of deconstruction. Quote, zombies are cinematic inscriptions of the failure of the life-death opposition. They show where classificatory order breaks down. They mark the limit of order. Like all undecidables, zombies infect the oppositions grouped around them. So I hope you’re used to hearing postmodern theory, by the way. The zombie is therefore fascinating and also horrific. It poisons systems of order. Like all undecidables, it ought to be returned to order. But this is difficult to do because the zombie is already dead. It is dead and living at the same time. So how do you solve the zombie story? And it’s not a simple task to do. Derrida comes to the end and says the zombie might be ineradicable. It might be impossible to eradicate it. They might return. Possibly undecidability is always with us. If not figured in the zombie, then something else. Ghosts, golems, or vampires between life and death. And Derrida knew exactly what a monster is. And to be generous with him, he wrote this long before the zombie craze, like long before the permanent impact of George Romero and the contemporary wave of the nihilistic zombie, before the zombie hordes, which brought about cultural phenomena like The Walking Dead. In the modern zombie story, there is no solution to the zombie narrative. Not really. Some have tried to give us some relatively happy endings, but we all know that in a zombie story, you just survive as long as possible as what Derrida calls the undecidables encircle you to devour what is left of, quote, classificatory order, like civilizations, families, friends, and any hierarchy of meaning. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. And finally, you are infected yourself, and the virus infects your own will with the zombie state, and your own center cannot hold. Your own narrative succumbs to the mindless, wandering, and insatiable hunger. Now, the cultural manifestations of our world, they have meaning. They are not arbitrary. They are signs, they are portents of where we stand in the patterns of history. I am a liturgical artist, and I’m trained in contemporary art. And the signs of the monstrous and the zombie apocalypse were there in fine art before everywhere else. They are there within the modern art world itself. I mean, one needs to look no further than Picasso to see a breakdown of the person, a breakdown of the point of view. The breakdown of meaning was already there, becoming clearer and clearer after the stark realization of World War I, after the desperation of World War II, the vision that the hopes and dreams of progress were then laid bare in the millions of corpses slaughtered and lying in mass graves. And we can see it develop, how the fragmentation of early Cubism, which you see as the first image, which almost looks mathematical, as a mathematical game, now becomes more frightening breakdown in Picasso’s later images. And if you doubt that it’s there in Picasso, if you doubt this breakdown, this breakdown makes itself seen in the later waves of artists. What in Picasso might for some seem like just an exercise in visual exploration is unveiled in someone like Francis Bacon as beaten, deformed, and decomposing flesh. Anyone who has seen a zombie movie has seen this face, though Bacon painted these years before the zombies graced our screens. I’m from Montreal, and not too long ago the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, they bought a church. You can see it in this image. It’s the church that’s right next to the museum. They needed more space to expand the collection. So they bought this church, and then they gave a commission to a Canadian sculptor. His name is David Ackmett, and he produced this for them in front of the church. So it’s a broken down angel with a hole for a heart, and with a kind of cancerous blob weighing down its wings, and the flesh is coming off his body to show us that it’s just a construction. And it’s a fallen angel. And we know that it’s a fallen angel because Ackmett has made an entire series on the subject of the fallen angel or the giants in Genesis, the Nephilim, the giant race of monsters in the pre-Diluvian story. These are more of Ackmett’s work. And these giants, these monsters, have a long history in Jewish and Christian lore, and they were seen by some as a result of the fallen angels that mixed with human beings and created these giant monsters. So the professor I talked to about, John Vervaca, at University of Toronto, he has some pretty interesting ideas about the zombie. And he tells us that, quote, While the zombie is a versatile enough symbol to stand for many kinds of human defilement, the symbol ultimately draws its aptness from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection, and that most of its traits and features have emerged from and hearkened back to the matrix of the Christian worldview. We will contend that the zombie has evolved to become a representation of the loss of the sacred canopy traditionally provided by Christianity, and that its features have evolved along the fault lines of this loss, representing a world that no longer explains itself, nor provides us instruction for how to live within it. So when you hear that, all of a sudden, At Med’s angel, At Med’s sculpture, takes up all the sense, because here we have a church that has been basically made hollow and changed into a museum to show modern art. And in front of it is an angel with a hollow heart that is decomposing. So, yeah, symbolism happens. And I agree, I agree in large part with Vrvaka, who he’s not a Christian at all, he’s actually a secular Buddhist, but I totally agree, and so I think maybe we can look then, we can look at just how the Christian worldview, and in many ways the traditional worldview of many cultures, how they made sense of the monster. I think that our stories, they can help us understand the world, our ancient stories. If we can kind of forget the polemics that exist, especially in American Christianity, about historical, literal, or whatever, all that stuff, if we forget that and we look just at the story, we can see in the story some powerful patterns that can help us view the world in a different way. It can help us view the world as, we can see these stories as a kind of map, a map that traces patterns in life, traces patterns in history, and this is especially true of the early stories in the Bible. So in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve fall, God tells them that if they eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he tells them that they will die. Now, for the sake of our discussion, you have to see this warning in relation to the monster I mentioned at the beginning in the story of Alexander the Great, the monster with the dead human and the writhing beasts. That might seem a bit strange to you, but give me the benefit of the doubt. Also keep in mind the poem by Yeats describing this falcon, this predatory animal, who no longer hears the command of his master and who whirls uncontrollably in the widening gyre. You see, God tells Adam and Eve that if they eat the fruit, they will die. But that’s not really what happens in the story, is it? They eat the fruit, but then they don’t die. And what happens is that God chases them away from this central place, from this central tree. He chases them away and they start to move out from this axis of the world, start to move away. And as they move away, they encounter the limit of the garden and they encounter this cherub with a flaming sword which guards the entrance. And as they move away, God gives them these garments of skin. And the garments of skin are these dead covering of animal skins. And so you can see this moving out from the center and then this adding of layers and layers upon layers to each other. So God gives them these garments of skin. And in the Church Fathers, in the Christian tradition, these garments of skin that are given to Adam and Eve, they’re seen as not just the garments of skin, but they’re seen as every single piece of skin. And that’s not just the garments of skin, but they’re seen as everything that we add onto our nature, everything that we add onto our human nature. So that includes technology, it includes society, it includes civilization. And so this idea that God gives them these dead skins that are around them, and it’s very strange because why would God give them this layer of death to protect them as he’s chasing them out of the garden? And pondering that, thinking of this idea of a layer of death which is placed around our nature as we move out further and further away from the center, is going to be the key to understanding the possible meaning of the monster. And if you don’t understand it right away, you can actually think maybe just of what a vaccine is. A vaccine is made from the disease that is trying to cure you, just like an antivenom is made from the venom that is trying to cure you. There is this relationship between death and this possibility of being protected from death. And so in the Bible, from the fall of Adam to the flood, it can be seen as this increasing, this adding on of layers and layers to the descendants of Adam as they multiply, as they spread out. Each furthering layer is provoked by some kind of fall in a manner, a consequence of the fall. So Adam and Eve leave the garden, they fall, they leave the garden, then Cain kills his brother and then begins this cycle of revenge. And it said, whoever kills Cain will be avenged sevenfold. And then Cain founds the first city. Those things are not arbitrary. And as we move further down the genealogy of Cain, we find Lamech who says, if Cain will be avenged seven times, I will be avenged 77 times. And we see this increase in vengeance. But we also see an increase in technology. In the lineage of Cain, in the descendants of Cain, we find those who now live in tents. We find those who develop musical instruments. And finally, they develop weapons of iron to increase their possibility of war. And so as we move further and further, we have to imagine it in the world. Once again, in the words of Yeats, this falcon moving out further and further and layers and layers of protection which prevent humanity from seeing the heart, seeing the garden, which now as Cain is moving further and further away from this garden and this tree, he can’t see it through all these layers and layers of protection and increase. And as we get towards the end of that, then we get this idea of these crazy mixtures, this notion that the sons of God went into the daughters of men, whatever exactly that means. Some people think it means angels had relationships with women. Other people think that it’s the more pure people who kind of mixed with these chaotic, crazy people. It doesn’t matter what exactly it means. What’s important is to understand that there’s confusion. This confusion that comes at the end and these monsters which appear on the edge of history. And so these giants appear as the last of this sequence of falls. And then there’s the flood. And the giants, they were said, if you look at the traditions of the giants, you can get a lot of information about what they mean. It was said about the giants that they created Chimera, that they like to create these hybrid animals that had a beak of this bird and the feet of this animal. And so there is this idea of confusion which comes. And this confusion is the very cause, it is the very line which brings us to the flood, which is a return to chaos. Which is a return to the chaos which was there at the beginning before creation, this chaotic sea and the chaotic waters. So in the same way we can see it in history, you can follow the line in history going from Adam in the garden all the way to the flood, but we can also see it in space. And so this story, it echoes how the ancients viewed the world itself. The ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, and in so many other traditions, they viewed the world as this giant island. This giant island which was surrounded by a vast and serpentine ocean. And on the edge of the world is where the monsters are. On the furthest reaches on the edge of the ocean in a place where we can only imagine is where the monsters lay. And so these are images of the ancient, of the monstrous races that were described, imagined, who knows, by Pliny the Elder in Roman times, who lived on the eastern edge of the world. So I always wonder what Pliny would have said if he, how he would have described our own faraway specimens. Now, we have to be, I have to be careful, we have to be careful. I talked about the analogy between the person and society. And we have to understand everything that I’m saying applies as much to ourselves, as people, as it does to society, as it does to history. And so we find on the edges of ourselves the same thing, the same conflict, the same chaos. If we let ourselves go too far into our own chaotic thoughts, our own chaotic feelings, then we find the same type of monsters that we would find on the edge of the world. I think we all have noticed the zombie growing in our own dark places. And so as a Christian, I always go back to this promise that Christ made. Before Christ left the world in the story, in the beginning, in the Gospels, Christ makes this promise to his disciples. He tells them, I will be with you until the end of the age. And so, following the analogy, we can also imagine going to the end of the age as going also to the ends of the earth. Being able to, his message being able to reach all the way to the edge. And so if you look at this image from Vizsalae in France, it’s actually a mixture of the ascension of Christ when Christ told the disciples to go out into the world and that he would be with him until the end of the age. And Pentecost, when the fire of the Holy Spirit came down on the disciples and made them able to speak in all the different languages of all the people. So if you look at the image, you’ll see around Christ, the whole arc around Christ, it’s all these different types of people. All these different types of people from all over the world. And then around him again, at the top, are all the signs of the zodiac and then also all the seasons. So we have this analogy of moving through to the edge of time and also moving all the way to the edge of the world. And in the Orthodox tradition especially, we have this sense that moving to the edge of the world and this promise that Christ made to move all the way to the edge of the world is also a promise to go to the bottom of the earth. To go to the bottom of death. This is an image of the resurrection which is actually an image of Christ descending into death and going all the way to the bottom of the world in order to find Adam and Eve and pull them out of death. I told you about this notion of the garments of skin and this idea of the vaccine and this notion of death. In the Orthodox tradition as we move towards Pascha, we know at Pascha that we will hear that Christ trampled down death by death. That there is a mystery about the edge of the world. There is a mystery about the very bottom of the world which turns, which flips. And that is really the mystery of how the end is transformed into a beginning of how death can change into a resurrection. Now this cosmic shape that I mentioned at the beginning, these layers upon layers upon layers, they were the structure not only of the stories, not only of the map of the world, but they were the structure of the tabernacle that the Israelites built. They had a holy of holies and then they had these layers of veils and the last layer of the tabernacle was this garment of skin. Just like Adam had this garment of skin protecting him. And then it was the image of the temple and it is still the image of the end of the world. It was the image of the temple and it is still the same structure is still the image of a church. A traditional church, not a rock concert hall, a mega church. But let’s say a traditional church still has that structure, that cosmic structure of a center, which is the sanctuary, the altar where the clergy mostly are and then the nave where the people gather and then the narthex where anybody can come. So in the old, old ancient tradition of the church, there was actually a time during the church service where anybody who wasn’t baptized would actually have to physically leave the nave of the church and stand in the narthex because the narthex was this transition space between inside and outside, this buffer zone between what is inside and outside. And so that might seem like a practice that many people would disapprove of today. And to be honest, most churches don’t do that today. But if you just think about your own house, if you just think about your own family, if you think about your own family, if you think about your own family, if you think about your own family, our own houses are built in the exact same way. We have people, our friends who maybe can hang out with us in the living room, acquaintances, let’s say. Then we have closer friends who maybe will come in and eat with us in our dining room. And then the strangers, maybe they’ll stay in the entrance or maybe they’ll stay on the porch. But even your close friends usually won’t follow you into your bedroom. And so the hierarchy of the church and the church is the same hierarchy that I’ve been describing since the beginning as the very shape of the world. Now, understanding this structure, understanding this basic structure can help us understand the great mystery that so many people still struggle with today is to understand, I hope that once I show you, it’ll become obvious, is to understand why exactly the Western church developed the tradition of having gargoyles on the outside of the church. It’s not just in Western churches. There is also a tradition in Georgia, which is an Eastern church, it’s an Orthodox church. And they have a tradition which is actually being revived today where they have griffins outside of the church acting as these guards of the church. To me, I actually wonder why in the world would you not have gargoyles on the outside of your church? It just seems like the obvious thing to do. Once you start to see this pattern in how the world is made, it just seems like the obvious thing to do to have gargoyles on the outside of the church. And it’s just, that’s just the shape of everything. They had sphinxes in Egypt which were protected their holy spaces. And we have the cherub that guards the holy of holies and the cherub that guards the garden of Eden. And if you read what a cherub is, it is a creature with four wings and a head of a lion and a head of a human and a head of a bird and a head of an ox and the legs of a bull. And so you have this creature which protects the holy of holies which is on the outside and is either protecting or acting as a mount for the divine. So there are images in scripture where God is seen riding a cherub across the sky or else God comes down and appears on the cherubs which were on the Ark of the Covenant as this support, as this seat for the divine. All of these things are the same structure. Now, it’s important to understand this because I’ve used about us being on the edge and being obsessed with the exception, with the monstrous, with the evil, with the evil. I’ve used about us being on the edge and being obsessed with the exception, with the monstrous, with the chimera. But we have to understand that on the edge of the world, there isn’t just a monster. On the edge of the world, there’s also a flaming sword. I mentioned this when I talked about this cherub that stands as the gatekeeper of the Garden of Eden. So on the edge of the world, on the end of the world, there’s a kind of radicalization. There’s an aspect of the edge which is upside down and confusion and desire. And there’s an aspect of the edge which is a final cutoff, a wall, a sword. And the modern world has been a pendulum between those two extremes. I mean, in North America and in Western Europe, we just happen to be on the one side, on the desire side, on the fragmenting side, on the confusion side possibly. But we can feel it, and I think everybody in this room can feel it teetering towards that other extreme, towards the wall. We’ve already seen the awakening of this flaming sword in the 20th century, this desire for absolute purity, a move to eliminate for good all that is extra, all that is marginal, all that does not fit. And if you think one side cannot flip into the other, you are not paying attention to history. Occam’s razor can make some bloody cuts when it is applied to sight. In fact, there is a trope in zombie stories itself, which is that no matter how bad it gets out there, no matter how much the zombies come and are clawing at the door, are coming to eat our brains, no matter how bad it gets, the real danger is inside. The real danger is when the human group cuts themselves off so much, becomes so isolated that they become completely pathological in their isolation. And so we should actually rejoice to see the gargoyles, to see them on the outside of the church, to recognize these ambiguous guardians standing at the limit of the church, showing us the role of the ambiguous, showing us the role of the strange, of those things that don’t fit. And so as for the zombie apocalypse, the problem is not the monster, not the strange, it’s not the thing that doesn’t fit into categories, which is the problem. Monsters have a role to play in the grand scope of things. Just like our passions have a role to play, just like exceptions, just like the unknown, our idiosyncrasies, the idiosyncrasies of the past, all of those have a part to play, that’s not the problem. The zombie apocalypse happens when there are more idiosyncrasies than there is unity, when there are more exceptions to the system than there are of the system. When that happens, that is the very description of decomposition. A rotting corpse comes about when the elements cease to have unity and break down into their idiosyncratic directions. The problem of gargoyles would be if all the saints in the church were replaced with gargoyles. It’s a turning upside down of the world. So let me give you an example. So if modern and postmodern art, for example, was there to break down the systems of representation, to question all the rules, all the presuppositions of art, then the zombie apocalypse is when we have giant state-funded museums filled only with art that is supposed to question the rules of art. Can you see the problem with that? You can’t be a rebel when everybody is a rebel. This is the work. It just falls apart. In order to be a rebel, you need something solid to be standing outside of and criticizing. So I want to present to you one monster. There is one monster in the Western imagination which has taken up a special place. That monster is the Cenocephalus. It is the dog-headed man. So dog-headed men actually appear in cultures all over the world, from England to China. They’re in every culture. But at least in the Christian tradition, the dog-headed man came to us from, guess where? It came from the legends of Alexander the Great. So here is Alexander fighting the dog-headed man from a medieval manuscript. So the dog-headed man became the very image of this fierce and undescribable strangeness, the fierce and undescribable foreigner. They are encountered as the very image of the unknown. And they are hailed as the enemy of Christ and the enemy of civilization itself. They are the ultimate barbarian. We could say that they are an image of chaos. They are an image of the unknown in human form. That’s a dog-headed man gargoyle by the way. So just as the word barbarian, the word itself means someone who barks like a dog, right? Bar, bar, bar. So too the Cenocephalus, you could call it a visual barbarian. And it’s important to give a caveat. We don’t have to imagine, we don’t have to think. Even though some conspiracy theories might like to do so. We don’t have to think that there was actually ever or is ever a race of people that were a genetic mixture of humans and dogs. That’s just absolutely absurd. Just as we don’t have to think that a hippopotamus, which means a river horse, has to have a genetic relationship to horses. Ancient people just used different categories. They didn’t, they were talking about genetics, talking about experience. So this experience of the unknown, the experience of a category of human beings that you can barely recognize because they’re so far away from your capacity to see them. It’s hard for us to imagine that because now we’ve seen everything. But imagine 500 years ago encountering an Australian bushman. Imagine the difficulty of recognizing that person because it’s so far away from your own experience. We can still have that experience today in terms of sound. If I as an English speaker, if I hear a language like German, I can kind of make out a little bit of it. And I can kind of hear some words and pick out some words. If I hear something, let’s say like Russian, can’t hear the words, but I can make out the intonations and I can kind of get a sense of at least where they’re going. But when I hear Cantonese, I hear chaos. I can’t make out any of it. So we can have that experience of auditory chaos. You just have to imagine the experience of visual chaos, let’s say. And so… So the ancient… So for example, the dog-headed men, you have to see them. They’re not an actual group of people. They’re just a type. They’re an image of this encounter with something undescribable. So if Alexander found the dog-headed men on the edges of Asia, Charlemagne found the dog-headed men as these northern barbarian tribes coming down to kill his men. And then Christopher Columbus thought he found the dog-headed men when he arrived in North America. It’s just that experience of the absolute difference. So in a way, the synocephalus became the typical monster of the Middle Ages. But I want to show you something. So in the image I showed you before, this image, I showed you of Christ and then all the peoples of the world and all of time surrounding him and him sending out his disciples out to go to the edges of the world, there’s something you might not have caught in this image. I don’t know if you can catch it, but I’m sure you can. You might not have caught in this image. I don’t know if you can catch it now, maybe, if you take a little moment to look. Can somebody see them? I’ll help you out. And so the dog-headed men are represented as monsters, yes, but as those who you can commune with nonetheless, who are at least part of the potential at the edge of the world, which we can engage and which can hear the message in some mysterious way, which can engage with you in some mysterious way. And so this image is in France. It’s in Vézélée. But there are also images of dog-headed men in Eastern icons of Pentecost. So this is an image from Armenia. So we can see, can you see the dog-headed, everybody can see the dog-headed men? And we also have a dog-headed saint. This is an icon of Saint Christopher. So you might know Saint Christopher as the patron saint of travelers. In the West, he’s represented as a giant. And he’s mostly known for these little medals that people wear when they’re traveling, or else these little statuettes that are on the dashboard of cars. You know, people have these little statues of Saint Christopher. And in the West, he’s represented as this giant. But if you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been saying, it doesn’t matter whether he’s a giant or a dog-headed man. It doesn’t matter to the fact that he’s a monster, just like those giants at the edge of the flood in the story of Nome. And so the fact that he is the patron saint of travelers should probably not surprise us either. As we move away from our own home, as we move away from our own center, no matter what that is, and we move out into the unknown, our guide, our patron, is this holy monster. And the way he was represented in the Middle Ages, they relate to his function as a monster. In the Greek tradition, he was often represented at the above the door of the church as you’re leaving the church. So you would, as you’re leaving the church, the last icon you would encounter would be this icon of Saint Christopher. And in the West, in the Middle Ages, Saint Christopher was represented on bridges so that he could represent that in-between space, that indeterminate space that lies between categories. So I think Saint Christopher is a great example of that. So I want to end my talk by telling you a story, telling you one of the legends of Saint Christopher. So the most famous story of Saint Christopher comes from the Western tradition. And it has Saint Christopher as a giant Canaanite. And the Canaanites were basically these strange residues of the descendants of Cain. And so they were related to these giants that were there before the flood in the Bible. And so he’s seen as part of this group. Who knows how they survived the flood? It doesn’t matter. What’s important is to understand the symbolic relationship between this character and these giants that were there before the flood. And so he was this giant, ferocious Canaanite. And he was a giant Canaanite. And so he was a warrior. You can see that he’s represented as a warrior. And so he said it in his mind that he would serve the most powerful king in the world. And so he set out into the world to find the most powerful king. So he comes to the court of the most powerful king in the world and he starts to serve his king. And so he’s a warrior. And so he’s a warrior. And so he comes to the court of the most powerful king in the world and he starts to serve his king. And then at some point he notices that the king is afraid of the devil. And so Christopher asks the king, he says, who is this devil? And the king doesn’t want to tell him, right? Because the king doesn’t want him to leave. But St. Christopher says, no, if you don’t tell me who the devil is, then I leave. I’m going to leave and not serve you anymore. And so St. Christopher tricks the king because obviously when the king tells him who the devil is, St. Christopher immediately leaves and goes to find the devil. So St. Christopher finds the devil and he starts to serve the devil. And then one day he notices that the devil, as he’s walking down the street, he avoids the cross. So St. Christopher says, oh, something going on there. And he asks the devil, he says, what is this cross? Why are you afraid of the cross? And obviously the devil doesn’t want to tell him because he knows that St. Christopher will leave him. But St. Christopher insists and he says, unless you tell me what to do with this cross, then I’m going to leave you. So St. Christopher tricks the devil. And the devil tells him about Christ. So St. Christopher immediately leaves and tries to find Christ. So as he’s out there trying to find Christ, he comes upon a monk. And the monk tells him, he said, I’ll show you the ways of Christianity. So the monk tells St. Christopher, well, you should fast. St. Christopher says, no, I can’t fast. So the monk tells St. Christopher, then you should pray. And St. Christopher says, no, I can’t pray. I mean, he’s a monster after all. And so the monk tells St. Christopher to stand on the side of the river and to cross whoever asks him to cross. Right now, I need you to remember from the beginning of what I said, this image of the world, right? This image of the world going to the flood, this image of the island going to the ocean. So St. Christopher stands on the edge of the world. He stands on the edge of the flood. And then suddenly one day, this young child comes to see him. This young child, obviously the weakest thing you can think of. The child asks St. Christopher to help him cross the river. So St. Christopher puts him on his shoulder and he starts to cross him over the river. And as he’s crossing, the child becomes heavier and heavier and heavier. And St. Christopher is struggling to hold the child up above the waters. And at some point it feels like the whole world is on his shoulders. But he manages to cross the river and comes to the other side. And then he asks the child, he says, why were you so heavy? And the child answers, because I was carrying the sins of the world. And so Christ tricks St. Christopher into serving him. The smallest thing, the weakest thing, the seed, this… tricks St. Christopher into serving him. So I think that’s really the last image I want to leave you with. Especially as we go towards those of you who are Christian and are in Lent. We’re moving towards the passion of Christ, for the death of Christ and the resurrection. Just one, maybe one little last thing. Do you… One of the things I’m trying to do when I give these talks, try to help people see the patterns. So this story, this child on the back of this monster, what does it answer to? What puzzle does it solve that I presented at the beginning? It solves this puzzle. Here’s the dead child and the writhing beast. But in the story of Christ, that’s the difference between the story, the poem of Yeats. Is that we don’t have this idea of just the falconer standing in the middle and calling out to the falconer. We have this notion of the seed, this image of moving out all the way to the edge. And that’s the story of Easter. Moving out all the way down into the bottom of death. And then living in the hope of the resurrection. And so the story of St. Christopher, what it really is about, is about the possibility of the resurrection. Coming out of death. It’s the solution to the zombie apocalypse. So, thank you. So I don’t know if… I think there’s going to be questions later, but we’re a bit late. I don’t know if there are people who have quick questions. So, would you be suggesting in some way that the so-called zombie-crazy and modern society, even in the past decade, one zombie and the other, is somehow sub-animation of the unconscious representing a human society? And then with that, especially the zombie-crazy president of America today, would you say that’s representative of America somehow going out of power for a design? Yes, I think that’s what it is. I think so. That was well put. I do think that the zombie narrative, especially the fact that it appears on the horizon so powerfully, and especially because it is a new trope, there is no real equivalent for the zombie apocalypse in traditional stories. This unending wave after wave of zombies. Maybe the closest thing to the zombie apocalypse we have is the, let’s say, the horde, the barbarian hordes. That might be the closest thing of something that comes in and levels Baghdad with no desire to preserve anything. They just want to return it to dust. So there maybe is a little bit of that, but I think that this appearance of the zombie is really important. John Vervaca, this scholar, you can look up his book online. It’s free. He published it for free. It’s a really interesting analysis of the zombie and how he’s a psychologist. It is a very powerful analysis of how it is a trope which manifests the loss of meaning and nihilism in the contemporary world. But John Vervaca, I think the one thing that he misses, and he sees it as a fragmentation of the Christian worldview, and I think that he’s right that that’s what it is, but the one thing he misses is he misses that the narrative of Christianity contains within itself its own destruction. And that’s something that he doesn’t address in his book. Christianity contains in its own story its own destruction and its resurrection. And so you see it in the story of Christ, like that he chose his own betrayer and Christ is betrayed, he dies and he resurrects. Then you can see it in the projection in the prophecies about the notion of the spirit of Antichrist which rises out of Christianity. You can’t have Antichrist has to come from Christianity. The Antichrist obviously isn’t Chinese. That doesn’t make any sense. The spirit of Antichrist has to come from within Christianity and then Christianity destroys itself. And then, yeah, I don’t know. We could live in the hope of the resurrection, I would say. How might one know about any kind of seeing and understanding of this? Hmm. Ha ha ha. Wow, that’s not an easy question. That’s a really complicated question. I would say the best way to do it is to pay attention to… You look at the stories and then you look at, especially the stories, look at the stories and you try to figure out what are the connections between the stories. And when I say stories, it’s not just the stories in the Bible, but the same patterns that are there in the Bible are there in fairy tales, they’re there in stories from other cultures, they’re basically the fabric of the world. And so paying attention and looking for the places where they connect. I also, especially if you’re talking coming out of Christianity, you know, let’s say as a Christian, one of the things I tell people is to pay attention to the apocryphal stories. Pay attention to the traditions that came after the text because the reason for those stories is usually to help you see some connections that you hadn’t seen before. Or that are there suggested in the text but that you don’t necessarily realize. So the biggest example that I give is, for example, the idea that in the Nativity of Christ there was an ass and an ox. And that is not in the Bible. But it’s there from the beginning of Christianity. The first images we have of the birth of Christ show this ass and this ox at the crib. And so the idea is what is happening. And so that was added, but it’s there to help you see that no, this connects to these other places in the text. And ultimately it connects, I’m not going to go into the whole string, but it actually connects to the notion of the cherub on the Ark of the Covenant. These two beasts that are on the Ark of the Covenant. And so the manger becomes the box in which the divine glory is set and the two beasts act as the two guardians of the box. And so to add that detail, and there are other things going on at the same time. The union of the Jew and the Gentile is also happening with the pure animal and an impure animal. There are all these things going on. And so if you look at the additional stories, what happens in between the stories that we know, it can help you to see the patterns. That might be one strategy. Yeah. Yeah. What we’ve lost in culture. And it really makes sense when you’re talking about the church, the center and the outside, kind of shadowing it. And with St. Christopher, who was a big trick that could be back, and those of us who are Christian, we have this idea of going to, you’ve seen the world this second. We’re ready. Come home, more Jesus, and we’re ready for this, for the Anastasis. And in comic books, in culture, in movies, what are some ways that the story of St. Christopher, in your opinion, has been recombinant in society? Hmm. You mean in the story of St. Christopher. Well, just looking at the broad, general out. Yeah. And the name construction. Right. How can you be read? Well, what you do, you get, you have stories, you know, the story of Pinocchio is a story of an artificial creature who is not real, who’s a puppet, who’s on the edge, who’s hanging by strings. You want to understand an image of the edge. You can understand the falconer holding the string and then the puppet, you know, on the edge of that string. I’m mixing metaphors. Hopefully, you know, you see why I’m doing it. And so the story of Pinocchio is a story of that transformation from the artificial and the edge to the center. There are other stories. I did a review on my YouTube channel recently of the movie Logan. I think that’s a perfect example of that story of a monster who becomes human and ascends the mountain and then comes to Eden. And so it really is. It uses very powerful Christian symbolism to show this transformation of the monster into a human who finally sacrifices himself and is hung on a tree. You know, I mean, the imagery is so layered thick in that movie in terms of finding the monster kind of coming back and serving the center, let’s say, acting as a guardian as well. Yeah. I have a question about what different cultures around the world, I guess, would define as a monster. Because, for example, like the dragon in the movie, it was designed as ominous and dangerous. I guess in cultures like East Asia, China, or Korea, it’s seen as a symbol of who the will is. I don’t know if that has any…what do you think about how that has to do with maybe cultural perspectives or religious perspectives? Yeah, I don’t…I never totally…I haven’t studied the whole phenomena of the dragon in Asia. I don’t know enough about it to talk about it. But what I would say is that there are positive and negative monsters in the West too, right? I showed you an image of the griffin. For example, the griffin always had a positive association with it. This notion of a joining of heaven and earth, a bird and a lion, an eagle and a lion, these two royal figures, one from above, one from below, joining together into one amalgamous creature. So the griffin has a positive aspect, even though it also acts as a guardian for…can act as a guardian for a holy place. And actually, someone pointed out to me that the word griffin is a cognate of cherubim. That it’s actually the same letters, just a transformation of the same letters. And so they probably have very, very far away, they have a similar route. And so…and the cherubim also has that characteristic. So I think that the dragon definitely is seen in negative terms, and the dragon also in the West has that function. But we can see both sides. I think so. Thank you.