https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KVo5hq64B2M
The topic that we will explore today is in many ways one of trying to figure out some of the deepest implications of what it means to be a human being. When we first formed the OCF Ortho-Architecture Fellowship last year, one of the very first discussions we had at our weekly meeting was one that dealt with how we see ourselves today, how we in our society, and especially as students, have lost something very sacred about ourselves. In many currents of thought, and certainly in our hyper-rationalized, deconstructed, post-modern world, one loses sight of the meaning of not only those things which are external to us, but in the process we fail to understand the very core of our being. Many of you will know that recently Dr. Jordan Peterson has faced an immense set of controversy precisely for questioning the dogmas of our age. And yet, he has also stressed the importance of the divine individual and the Christian concept of the logos, which I will allow our speakers to elaborate upon today. A dear friend had told me once that what fundamentally divides orthodoxy from any other kind of ideology is precisely this, the dignity of the divine individual and what this means for us as spiritual and physical beings. And so I’m immensely excited to hear what our panelists have to say tonight. And so I’d like to introduce each of our panelists, starting with Father Theodore Paraskevopoulos, who is adjunct faculty at the Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College. Last semester he taught a course on the human person in orthodox theology and orthodox tradition. And in many ways this is something that touches upon or introduces the very core of what’s being discussed today. What is the individual? What does it mean to be human? And he is also quite a positive presence at our Orthodox Christian Fellowship and we certainly look forward to hearing his perspectives tonight. Jonathan Pagiot is a very well-known icon carver from Quebec, as well as an editor for the Orthodox Arts Journal. Many of us were familiar with Jonathan and his work prior to this, and so it’s a great pleasure to have him here tonight. And indeed, it is entirely appropriate. Just this past Sunday, the Orthodox Church celebrated in the spirit of unity the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the celebration of our triumph over iconoclasm. The tradition of iconography in the Orthodox tradition is one of deep theology, and I’m very pleased that an expert on the matter is with us here today. And many of you may be interested to hear Jonathan’s online discussion with Dr. Peterson, the most recent one being concerned with one of the most controversial political symbols of his day. The metaphysics of Pepe. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology here at the University of Toronto, and I think it goes without saying that the activism of Dr. Peterson has inspired many in the room today. Many who would have previously perhaps not even considered looking into the type of concepts which are going to be discussed today. Myself and many others have been deeply moved by not only Dr. Peterson’s insight on matters of a political nature, but also in his insight in human nature. The title of this discussion was influenced by Dr. Peterson’s usage of the Christian concept of logos and what that means for us as individuals. I’d like to thank Dr. Peterson for joining us, and we are greatly looking forward to hearing more of your insight on this matter. Last but not least, Father Jeffrey Reddy, who is a co-director of the Orthodox School of Theology, the chaplain of our Orthodox Christian Fellowship, and the parish priest at the Holy Merbera’s Orthodox Mission located at Trinity Chapel. From the very creation of our OCF last year, Father Jeffrey has continuously blown our minds and enhanced our understanding not only of our Orthodox spiritual life, but of ourselves as human beings. Apart from his remarkable pastoral qualities, his wealth of knowledge and perspective has made it only natural that we would offer his perspective on this panel tonight. I’d like to thank Father Jeffrey for his work and greatly look forward to hearing his perspectives tonight. So, the format for the discussion today will be basically that each of our panelists will speak for a time, and this will be followed by a question and answer period. Each of you will have received a cue card, and each row has about two pens. So for the duration of the discussion, you can write down your questions and pass them up at the front, and then we’ll try to get through as many of them as possible by the end of the night. And with that, I’d like to welcome Father Theodore Peroskevopoulos to the podium to begin our discussion. Thank you. Okay, so there’s not going to be any mind blowing. Okay, let’s reserve for Father Jeffrey. Thank you to the OCF and the U of T for asking me to come and to be up here on the stage with people that I kind of feel outclassed. Definitely. But I appreciate the invitation. So, I was told to speak for like 10 to 15 minutes about what it means to be a human person in the Orthodox tradition. So I don’t know how possible that is. But Vlad just mentioned that in the past two days, on Sunday, we celebrated in the Orthodox tradition the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which is the first Sunday in Lent. For those of you who don’t know what that is or don’t know what we celebrate on that day, we celebrate the return of the holy icons into the church. Now a lot of people who have been to Orthodox churches know that the church is full of icons and they wonder, well when was there a return and why was there a return considering to be every not have them. Of course Christians have had images in their churches and in their places of worship from the very beginning, but there was a time that there was an oppression of the idea of using images and it was considered to be idolatry within the church and there was a faction within the church that fought against this. And for almost 100 years icons were burned, destroyed and taken out of churches and it was only with the seventh ecumenical council that they were returned. Of course why do we celebrate this on Sunday of Orthodoxy and why do we call it Sunday of Orthodoxy? It’s because those who were the proponents of icons and of course all modern Orthodox Christians today knew that the attack on the depiction of Christ was an attack on the incarnation itself. The idea that Christ is an actual human being, he actually existed, actually lived and lives. He was an actual historical figure who lived at a certain time and not a figment of our imagination as some people today would say. And this means that when we speak about God and when we speak about the Trinity, when we speak about the second person of the Trinity, the Son, the Logos as we were speaking about tonight, we are speaking about a very specific person. And that is in contrast to many of the discussions that we see today both in the public forum, online, a symposium like this where many people would like to think of God as an abstract. For Orthodox Christians and I would say for historical ancient Christianity, God is not an abstract. Rather God is an actual person. There’s an objective reality there. Christ is an objective person. He thinks a certain way, speaks a certain way, acts a certain way, even looked a certain way. And so we can depict him in icons. Now the reason why I started with this and I kind of begin my thoughts is because there is a little bit of a contrast between many religions and Orthodoxy. This is not, this is generalization, but as generalizations go, in many religions, whether they be Christian or not, the concept of God or the concept of the divine usually centers around the idea of the word of God or the concept of God made text. There are usually writings about this and writings that are usually very ancient, they are passed down and the text is usually what is focused on. Even amongst many Christian denominations, it’s all about the text. However, in the Orthodox tradition, it is not about the word becoming text, but rather about the word becoming flesh, becoming a human being. And so our faith is not based on a text, but rather on a deep mystical experience of the risen Lord throughout time. Now you’re going to say, well we read the Bible too, right? We use the Bible, we venerate the Bible, we have it in very high regard. However, for ancient Christianity, I love that because I like Star Trek too. There you go. When we speak about Christ, when we speak about God, we speak about a living tradition. Christ didn’t found a book, neither did he found a philosophy, but rather he found a very real community, a living community. And the Orthodox Church, for the last 2,000 years, is this living community that has never stopped, it has never ceased to exist, it was never a time where it did not exist. We have no beginning, we have no reformer, we have no founder, we have no school of thought, but rather we exist from the very beginning. So the reason why I say this is because our concept of God and our concept of our relationship to him is a very intimate one and one that has been living for the last 2,000 years. So going back to the idea of incarnational theology and of icons, if we are to say that God is real, if he actually exists, if we don’t believe in that, well then this talk doesn’t really matter. But if we believe that God exists and that God is an actual person, is a mind, is a personality, and that Christ is God in human form, then the reality is that there is an objective reality to who God is, and by that we can say that there is an objective truth that we can speak about, and there is an objective good that we can speak about, and there is an objective understanding of the human being that it is not subjective, but rather objective. And for us as Orthodox Christians, we tend to follow the motto that was coined by St. Athanasius the Great, famous 4th century father of the Church and great theologian who said that God became man so that we may become God, not that we may become real God, but like God. So for us, the goal of the Christian life is to emulate Christ, to become Christ-like. It’s not about what I think of myself, it’s not about what I want to be or what I would like to be, or what I would like to create in my mind of what I would like to be or what I think I am, but rather that there is Christ and Christ is the perfect human being and I try to discover what that is. And I know that is diametrically opposed to the society that we live in today, for the most part, for the most part, that we live in a society that is a society of subjectivity, not objectivity, and we live in a society that when it speaks about religion, it speaks about spirituality, it speaks about theology, it usually refers to the subjective understanding of God, the subjective understanding of the human person as Professor Peterson has been hearing in the last few months. So when we talk about human identity, it is something that is to be discovered, not to be kind of created or self-created. So, you know, there’s a writing at a very early second century writing in the church called the Didahi, which means the teaching. One of the earliest writings of the church, I guess we could say, is one of the earliest manuals of how to be a Christian or the basics of the Christian faith, I guess you could say. And in the Didahi, it says, the first line says, there are two ways, one of life, one of death, and there’s a great difference between the two, the opening lines. And really, when it comes to the understanding of the human person from an Orthodox point of view, we would say the same thing, that there are really two ways to understand. There is either the revelation from God and how we emulate that, or rather there’s the movement towards the self, towards self-revelation, self-understanding, and really, we would say, self-idolization. And so, of course, we as human beings are free to do whatever we want to do, and we have free will, but how we use that and what we do with it and what we choose to become really depends on where we’re looking towards, what we want to do and who we want to be. So I would say that the modern existential crisis of our time can really be remedied by the simple statement that if there is a God, there’s a God, I’m not him. So the understanding that if there’s a God and I’m not him would mean that I need to discover who that God is and what he expects of me and why am I here and what am I supposed to do with my life. And that’s diametrically opposed to the subjective understanding of that God is whatever I want him to be or what I would rather him to be and go from there. So in pre-modern Western civilization, society was predominantly a society of these kind of values, these kind of objective truths. It was kind of like the social glue that provided stability for the family and social institutions and religion and even business ethics, like people believed that there was a good, there was a truth out there that we needed to discover, there was a God that we needed to somehow figure out who that God was. And the humility that was required to accept that we are not gods was what held all that together, the social and psychological fabric of society. So without it, and this is where I think Professor Peterson would also agree and has said many times, without this kind of understanding of an objective reality, there is an endless movement towards the individual, towards subjectivity, towards what is relative, and ultimately towards nihilism because if there is no objective meaning in life and there is no objective truth in life, then everything is whatever I make it and everybody is right and really everybody is wrong, and then really what do you have to live for? There’s no real ultimate meaning in life. And so this is the problem. There’s a movement towards the delusion that everyone is their own God and everyone is free to create themselves in their own image. And this breeds endless fragmentation, as Professor Peterson has said, of both so-called individual truths and also individual identities. So if there is no God, as we said, this conversation doesn’t really matter. However, if there is a God and he is a personal God, as the Christians claim, then we cannot go on ignoring him without suffering a serious identity crisis. I believe that this crisis has arrived and the question is, how do we as Christians continue to see the world, see the Word of God, the divine logos, in those who refuse to see it in themselves? How do we speak to that? How do we speak to a world that doesn’t even acknowledge that there is such a logos, that there is such a different truth in the first place? This is the conundrum that we find ourselves in, the difficulty. How do we witness to a world that is not speaking the same language anymore? And I think that is something that, you know, discussions like this are extremely important. I think that is one of the first steps because here we are attempting, and I applaud the OCF for doing this, attempting to find points of convergence between a Christian tradition, the Orthodox Christian tradition, and also the secular approach, psychology, sociology, history, biology, places where these things converge and they tell us and they preach the same truth. And this is why I was so enthused about coming and speaking today because watching a lot of Professor Peterson’s videos online, I saw that there are a lot of points that he makes that not only are congruent with Orthodox theology and Orthodox anthropology, but speak common sense to the world, in a world that is completely fragmented, a world that is completely disengaged from the idea that there can be a truth outside of ourselves, and that there needs to be some type of seeking, some type of understanding of what that truth may be. The main difference between philosophy and theology, I always tell my students, is that philosophy comes from us. It is us trying to understand the world, trying to understand the metaphysical, trying to understand God, trying to understand anything. You can philosophize about anything. But the source is the human being. We have this wonderful thing called the mind that is so powerful, that can do so many things. But that’s philosophy. Theology deals with revelation, deals with what has been revealed from outside the human being, from someone else. And that’s what the church has to deal with. That’s what Christianity has to deal with, the idea of what God has revealed in himself by becoming a real human being, becoming one of us. And we can’t negate that as much as we try. And to do so would mean to negate an important part of ourselves, because we believe, as the Christians like to say all the time, and as we like to quote Genesis, where God says in the very beginning, Genesis 1-26, that God makes man in his image and his likeness. He gives us this great ability to choose, this great ability to reason and to figure things out for ourselves, and to decide whether we want to be like him or whether we want to be more like something else. And so this is the great dilemma. It’s not just a theological dilemma. It’s not just a spiritual dilemma. But it’s an existential dilemma. And it’s becoming a social dilemma, becoming a political dilemma, a biological dilemma, and a whole lot of other dilemmas. So I will end there. I will let my colleague Jonathan take it from here. But I think this is a general introduction to at least the way we see it as Orthodox Christians, that God becomes man so that man can become God. Also, the words of Apostle Paul, there’s not I who live, but Christ who lives within me. This is our ultimate goal. Thank you very much. Father Ted, thanks. We appreciate it. I appreciate being here. I appreciate being in Toronto. It’s a great town. I’m a good kid. I also love reading vows and doing the deeds of theIE tried. My only change in front of a man is that, at that moment, a woman asks, like, didn’t you pray today that, Sexual Abuse was going to happen? town today. I spent the day going to the museum and visiting, so I’m really enjoying the city. I’m going to start with a story. It’s March 2015 and I’m driving. I’m going to pick up my children at some friend’s house on a Friday night. And it’s about a half an hour drive, so I’m settling in and I’m listening to the CBC like I usually do. That particular evening, the content is not usually what you get on the CBC. So on the air is this University of Toronto professor. And what he’s saying rings a bit off from what I usually hear on that show. At first he’s talking about religion and religious symbolism and he’s doing it in a way, let’s say he’s doing it without the usual smugness that we tend to hear when people talk about religion, especially about Christianity. So here he is talking about Christianity, but I can tell he’s not a priest or he’s not a preacher. He’s a psychologist. He’s a scientist. And so as the talk unfolds, let’s say my attention heightens. And after a few minutes, just a few minutes, I just, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. As this prophet is going through stories of Adam and Eve, pain and able jumping to Shakespeare and Milton and Goethe and then to Darwin and Nietzsche and Jung. And immediately I see what he’s doing. He isn’t just trying to communicate information. He’s dancing across this wide variety of references because what he wants to do is he wants to bring out, he wants to trace this underlying pattern. And by doing so he’s trying to awaken something in his listeners. He’s not just trying to get them to understand, which is what we usually hear when we listen to talks. No, he’s trying to provoke, trying to shake people into experiencing how the world is built with meaning. So he talks about logos, which is true meaning expressed in word, the search for purpose. And logos transform, transforms chaos and potentiality into being. And in opposition to this lies, deceit, resentment, gradually dismantle the world and plunge it into ever growing chaos. I mean of course he’s taking this from the Bible, the book of Genesis from the Gospel of St. John, sprinkled with some phenomenology. But he’s very clearly describing this process at all levels of reality. At the individual, the interpersonal, the social, the political levels. And this interaction between logos and chaos is the main manner, we could say, by which the world is constantly sustained. So by this point I’m literally cheering in the car. I’m hitting my steering wheel. And all I can think is who is this? Who is this person talking? And why have I not heard of him before? Like why is he not famous? Well I guess we don’t ask that question anymore, right? And especially I’m like how does he know this? You see like, so the attempt to help people see, experience patterns of meaning and religious symbolism, how it connects to all levels of reality, that’s what I’ve been trying to do for years. That’s been my goal in life I would say, in my carvings, in my articles, in my talks. And I would say there’s only a handful of people that I know that I can relate to at that level. And it’s not that people don’t talk about religious symbolism, actually a lot of people do, but usually when you hear people talk about religious symbolism at some point you can kind of picture them in like a tinfoil hat. And then, you know, soon extraterrestrials become part of the discussion. But not this guy. He’s just as clear as can be. So when I get home, so I reach out to him and I send him just a little message, you know, just thanking him and expressing my surprise and linking him to a few articles I’d written, a few talks I’d given. You know that was it, I didn’t expect, I didn’t really expect an answer. But then the next morning I get a message, thanking me for my message and pointing me to a few lectures that he had given more specifically on religion. I thought that’s pretty cool, like that’s nice, you know. This random Quebecer sending messages to him. But then about an hour and a half later I get this call. And I can’t do the Kermit voice. So anyways, my memories, my memories of the Kermit voice memories of that moment are kind of vague. But I think I probably acted like a 14 year old meeting Kanye West or something. And now his tone is one of surprise, maybe a bit of confusion. And his basic question, and he’s been asking me this question ever since, is how do you know this? Because he’d listened to my talk and he saw the relationship between what I was saying and what he was saying. And the talk, I had been talking about how Logos organizes potential into experienced being. And so why am I telling you this? I mean, first of all I’m telling you this as an excuse because despite what Father Ted said, here’s this carver who’s standing amongst theologians and professors. So the reason why I’m here is because since then Professor Peterson and I have developed this relationship. Some of you might have seen the interviews that we did together. But mostly I’m telling you this because I know that it nears the story of so many people that are probably here in this room. And a lot of the people that might hear this on YouTube or in the broadcast. I know that it nears, I know because dozens of people have told me of that experience. You know, I have this image, I don’t know if people have seen it, of Joe Rogan hearing Dr. Peterson talk for the first time and his jaw dropping. You know, and all of a sudden he sees religion in a completely different way. And I’ve even received dozens of messages from I would call them in process atheists who say, you know, my questions and my thinking have been tilted slightly in unexpected ways. And that experience I think has been strongest for orthodox Christians like myself. In fact, I stopped counting the number of messages I received from priests asking me, so is Dr. Peterson orthodox or what? And to which I usually answer, no, he just likes Dostoevsky a lot. And there is even one clergyman who answered to that, said, oh yeah, he’s orthodox, he just doesn’t know it yet. But this correlation has been persistent. So what is this connection? What made the connection between a traditional Christian like myself and Dr. Peterson so obvious, so immediate? And all of this I believe is resolved around the notion of logos. The language of logos is the underlying language of Christianity. Of course, we know the first vision of logos in Christianity comes from the Gospel of St. John. In the beginning was the logos. The logos was with God and the logos was God. He was in the beginning with God and through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of all mankind. That light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. And this vision of logos would be continued and developed in the life of the church. And especially in the 7th century there was a saint. His name is St. Maximus the Confessor. And he really brought this image of logos, I would say, to its most detailed or most elaborate vision. And he did so by taking the notion of logos that was in the New Testament and he brought and united it with the best of what the Western tradition had already offered. He was able to prune, let’s say, what had come from philosophy and join it with what the Christian message was so that it would attain some clarity and maybe some detail. And so St. Maximus explains that all things have a logos, which is the image of its reason for existing, its purpose and its origin all at once and even its end. So it’s all those things at once. And on top of that each thing has a multitude of logis. That’s a word you’ve probably never heard before. The logis is the plural of logos. And so the logis, they’re like the different qualities of things. So the blueness of the blue or the slowness of the slow. And all of these logis are brought together. They’re woven together, we could say, to sustain the existence of the world. It’s really a map of meaning, to use Jordan’s words. Now these logis, these essences, let’s say, of things, they don’t exist independently in the same way that scientists believe things exist out there. Rather they exist as they come together, as they are joined together in our encounter with the world in a pattern, we could say. So we could say, for example, that a sunset has a certain amount of logi, maybe even an indefinite amount of characteristics of a sunset. But as they come together to be the experience of the sunset, that’s how we experience reality. That’s how we become into contact with reality. So all these qualities, let’s say, light, color, vertical, horizontal, and the things, the sun, the sky, the earth, all of these things, and I could go on, there’s an indefinite amount of them. What’s important in making that experience real is how all those logis are united. And in a way they’re united within us. And human beings, for say, Maximus, are seen as this laboratory where the whole world finds its cohesion. And he expresses it in the sense that the human being is a microcosm. You could say a condensation of the cosmos, the place where the cosmos comes together to make sense. And a good way to see it is that human beings actually participate, being in the image of God, they participate in creation. And we see that in the book of Genesis. In the book of Genesis, God tells Adam to name the animals. And so by his logos, participating in a limited way, in the same manner that the divine logos was the source of everything. And the human participation in this process is not a relativistic thing. It’s not an individual thing. I mean, though it is flexible, it’s nonetheless the most objective of processes, as Father Ted mentioned. And so we need to be cautious, though, because St. Maximus warns us that it’s not just a philosophy, or it’s not just a technical description of the world. This is important because thinking that religious stories are exactly the same kind of encyclopedic knowledge of modern science is the wrong way to go with this. These logos, these truth about things are categories of our engagement with the world. So maybe today we might call them phenomenological categories. And so the discovery of truth, of logos, it’s a personal journey. It’s simultaneously a refinement of our understanding of the world, but at the same time it becomes a refinement of our person. So to discover the true nature of things is to walk on a path of truth. So food is a wonderful thing, and it’s useful for life, but gluttony leads to our destruction. Wealth is useful to accomplish important things, but avarice rots the soul. So you see, it’s not just a description of the world, it’s a path that we walk as we discover the world. And so sin in this vision of the world, that horrible world, that horrible word that no one wants to hear, sin, isn’t just the breaking of arbitrary rules, but it’s in the misuse of the world. And that misuse of the world ends up being an untruth, ends up being a lie or something that’s false, something that separates things from each other. It’s found when things are not aligned with their purposes. So for example, a person is not only a tool for my own gratification, a person is not just a tool so that I can advance myself in the world, and if I can advance myself in the world, and if I treat a person exclusively like that, then I will inevitably sin against that person. I mean, of course it doesn’t mean that a person cannot act as a tool for my gratification. If I go see the baker and I get bread from him, he’s the method by which I get my bread, but the baker is not just a baker. He is a full person just as myself. So when we steal or we lie or we cheat, it’s because we’re not considering the person facing us to be a full-blown person, to be what they are according to their logos, but we see them only as limited things, only as tools. So this is true of people, of things, and of actions. So I was thinking about, I was trying to think about the best example that I could think of to show this in terms of action, and I thought of giving the example of sex. So we did the metaphysics of Pepe, so I think we can get away with the metaphysics of sex, I hope. But it’s a question that definitely needs to be answered today in our topsy-turvy times, let’s say. So what is the logos of sexuality? Well, it has many logy, many purposes. It’s for the propagation of the species. I hope at least a few of you still think that, despite what many people would want us to believe. It creates families and communities. It brings two people together in a type of communion, in an expression of love, and it brings pleasure. So those would be some of the logy. I’m sure we could find more, but those would be some of the logy that sex exists, and there could be more, but the idea and the vision of logos is that all those things need to be brought together in a pattern of some sort for them to be a path towards logos. So if we think of the different logy and we bring them together, I’m trying to think of the word. What is that word? When all those things are together? I think we have a word. It’s the sacrament of the church. I’ll let you figure it out what it is when all those things come together. And so each of the separate purposes of sex that I mentioned, they’re not wrong, they’re fine, but they become alive when we bring them together. If we don’t, then each separate purpose appears as a kind of falsehood. It appears as a kind of lacking. But that’s not enough. Let’s say for a truly traditional or a truly complete vision of sexuality, it cannot end there. It has to move towards the infinite. It has to move towards God. And so the ultimate logos of sexuality is to be an image of the mystical union with God. I mean, it’s to be an image of our union with what is beyond us. And I mean, in that image of the mystical union of God with the soul of Christ, with his church, the marriage of heaven and earth is a completely traditional image that we find in the Church Fathers or in our tradition. And so that image of the ultimate union, the highest union with the infinite, then it comes back down into the multiple lobe, all those other reasons for sexuality that I mentioned, and it fills them and makes them participate in a transcendent purpose and becomes the very relationship that binds them together. And everything in our life can follow that process, work, food, sleep, beauty. And to engage the world in that frame is to find light everywhere, to see life everywhere. The world is no longer made of the dead lifeless dirt, the dead lifeless material that we use to make things with. And as we become better as people, more truthful, more grateful, more free, as we come closer to one another in love, and by the way, that’s what love is. Love is the manner in which all different things, all different people, all different intentions can join together and exist in communion and can become one while at the same time preserving the multiplicity. And so as we follow this path, the hidden lobe in creation, they shine through the world. And today we might say that they re-enchant the world, and the world appears bright and full and not the gray and dead shadows we lost and live in. So that would be, I hope, a summary, let’s say, of that path of logos. But I haven’t really explained what the source of my excitement was on that Friday night yet. What the source of the excitement was that has caused all this flurry of attention to Jordan. And I can tell you, I’ve been thinking about this now for months now. I mean, some of us, and Jordan has been thinking about this for months now. And I think by now we can say that it’s really not about gender pronouns. It’s not. It’s about something that is a lot bigger than that. And I think I can say confidently by now that it’s about logos. The entire project of postmodernism, the last 30, 40 years of higher culture and higher education has been a systematic assault on logos. To de-center logos, to deconstruct narratives and value hierarchies, so we are left slipping and sliding without purpose and direction. And now we’ve reached the end of what postmodernism has to offer. We can actually say that we’ve come to a point where postmodernism has won basically the cultural debate. And a philosophy which decries the center and certainty has perniciously become the very center and unquestionable authority it despises. So everything is upside down. Everything is inside out. Everything is becoming its opposite. And all these inversions and chaos are not to be taken lightly. It has brought about a sterile age, literally sterile as people are not having enough children to fill the society. I think I keep thinking that maybe they’re missing a bit of foul senses. But it’s also sterile in that it has brought about this narcissistic and fragmented culture. You see they told us that the center cannot hold and how things fall apart. And now everybody is decrying the end of truth all of a sudden. Everybody is saying that we’re entering an age of post-truth, fake news. My goodness, they even used it as an argument against Dr. Peterson in the debate on gender pronouns. It’s the postmodernists that heralded the end of truth 40 years ago. And now they’re surprised to see the effect it has. How chaos does not discriminate. How it’s turning against them just as they turned it against their ideological enemies. They wanted to change the world to sand. Now they’re surprised to find it slipping between their fingers. What is most surprising and what is most shocking to them is to find that now, having reached the end of their pursuit, having thought they had won, they see from within the decomposing residues of western patriarchy, they see that there is a seed that’s sprouting. That in the darkest place there is a flame that is lit. Logos awakens. The darkness has not overcome it. St. John promised us that. And my postmodern friends, if you had just paid attention to the stories, if you had just paid attention to the stories which are woven in the fabric of our consciousness, these very stories you tried to deconstruct, you would have noticed that dawn always comes, that a seed is always planted. Their logos regain the center. Christ rises from the dead. And I think that’s the excitement we’re feeling right now. To find that small spark, that seed of a meaningful pattern surprising us in a collapsing world. And it’s not just a pattern of meaning, but it’s the beginning of a network of people. I mean just in the past two years there’s a whole new strange group of public figures that’s arising from the margins. People who are at least trying to figure it out. Who are at least trying to think clearly and work out ideas. And people who are as different from each other as you can imagine, spanning across gender, race, and cultures. Even religious and atheist alike trying to figure it out. And yet the media and the activists, they scream hysterically. Bigot, racist, sexist, Nazi. All the usual litany of attacks and they’re losing their minds. The sand is slipping out of their hand. And only two years ago we would have probably collapsed before this attack. But now we look around and we find that there is a still silent center in which to stand. There is an eye in the overwhelming hurricane. And we can finally say we will not accept your frame. We will not accept your definitions. They are weak by the very process you use to deconstruct them. To deconstruct the categories. And we will speak for ourselves. And we will speak for ourselves. What a relief. But it is a dangerous time. The time of transition, the time of chaos is a dangerous time. Firstly because the enemies of Logos will ramp up their hysteria and totalitarian tendencies as Logos awakens. But it is also dangerous because as Christ himself told us, the tears grow amongst the weak. The re-centering of Logos is the reawakening of identities. We can’t avoid that. And that’s a frightening thing. Because if identity stops at the relative Logi without aiming, without uniting itself to the highest of high, it can be murderous. And it has been increasingly murderous just in the past century. And it is in fact a very murderous and genocidal tendency of identity which provoked the postmoderns to deconstruct identity in the first place. And there is a part where we can’t blame them for that. I mean in the shadow of Auschwitz, what else can you do? So what will strive from this new sprout will depend on us, will depend on all of us. What will rise from this chaos? We’ve seen exciting but also frightening possibilities of what that might look like. I mean will it be race again so that we inch towards genocide? Will it only be nation so we’re tempted to revisit the world wars? Will it only be gender? Will it only be class? In the scheme drawn out for us by St. Maximus, the ultimate identity, the place where all meaning finds its resolution is the divine Logos, the source of everything. That is our trajectory as we walk the path of Logos, as we are transformed by truth. The finality is to be united with God. And I know that for some people just the word God causes allergic reactions. And I’m sure people listening to this will be developing hives on their skin as they hear this. But maybe we can just think of it this way. For identity to be more than a weapon, it must reach its highest point in something that is beyond duality. And so finding, seeing our highest identity in God is finding unity with everything and the source of everything. And in terms of Christianity in particular, the identity with Christ is different from other identities because it’s the identity with the cross. I mean it’s to identify with suffering. I mean it’s not the identity of a self-serving power but the identity of a self-emptying power, a power bound in love that empties itself out of love. I mean it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t struggle. It doesn’t mean that we should just lay down and give up, that we should let our enemies destroy what we value most. I mean Christ brought a whip into the temple after all. But what it really entails, what’s important about it, and this is something that is echoed profoundly in what Dr. Peterson has been telling us, is that we must first walk on the path of logos ourselves. We must embrace our own suffering in that truth. We must take up our cross. We must do so with the desire to first get rid of the lies which blind us, to straighten our own path. And in doing so, well, that is how we will change the world. Saint Seraphim of Sarov is known to have said, save yourself and thousands around you will be saved. As we walk on that path, as we strip away our own excesses rather than looking at the imbalances of others, as we strip away our bad habits and our narcissism rather than acting like victims, the world will change and we will start to see and to experience logos, to fully live within the patterns of meaning that constitute the world. If you take that journey, I guarantee that the universal patterns of meaning will manifest themselves so strongly in your life that at first you’ll use the word synchronicity, but soon you’ll have no other word to use besides miracle. The postmodern chaos will vanish as wax melts before the fire and logos, the very logos that rises from the grave will fill your world and the world with life and light. Thank you. So I’m going to start with a hypothesis. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about religious symbolism and archetypes, but there’s a problem with that and the problem is that the idea of the concept of the world is not a concept of the world, but a concept of the world. And the problem is, it lacks concretization. To think about the ultimate ideal as only something that’s symbolic, it moves away from the real world and it’s partly for this reason that there’s an insistence in Christianity that the logos is two things at once. It took me a long time to figure this out and I was guided in my attempts to understand it by Carl Jung, who was a truly remarkable person, and probably orthodox in his fundamental convictions, I would say. He talked about the logos as the thing that existed at the beginning of time and this is a very particular way of looking at things and so the idea is essentially that, as Jonathan pointed out, that there’s something about consciousness that calls forth being from chaotic potential. And you all understand what this means because when you look at the future or if you look at yourselves, you know that what you confront is a field of potential and everyone tells you that. They tell you, you’re not living up to your potential. And potential’s a very strange thing because it doesn’t yet exist and so by the canons of, say, modern science, it’s not something that has any reality whatsoever, but everyone knows precisely what it means and everything around you is full of potential because you can interact with it and bring forth new things and you know that and you can be called for your failure to do it and you call out yourself for your failure to do it because you wake up at three in the morning and you torture yourself with your inability to bring forth the potential that’s within you and it haunts your soul and it’s hellish and the reason it’s hellish is because it is hellish and if you don’t call forth the potential that’s within you and outside of you, then the world does transform into hell because that’s its tendency anyways and we’ve had no shortage of evidence of that in the last 100 years. It’s part of the Christian doctrine that at the beginning of time, the logos of Yawa operated on potential and brought forth the habitable world, order, and it was perfect in some strange sense. It was the paradise in which Adam and Eve were placed and the paradise was a walled garden, a well-watered place. The walled garden is a place of order and chaos, culture and nature and that’s because people inhabit a garden of culture and nature. That’s our environment and if those two properties are properly balanced, then inside that garden everyone can flourish. And human beings are in principle made in the image of that logos. And that’s why we can speak things into being and we do. And when you speak truth, then you speak paradise into being and when you speak falsely, you speak hell into being. And that’s the truth. And what that means is that with every decision that you make, you decide for yourself and for everyone else whether you’re going to tilt the world a little bit more towards hell or a little bit more towards heaven. And that’s the burden you bear for your existence and the choices that you make as you pass through life. And it’s the fleeing from that that’s at the bottom of the nihilism of postmodernism and the escape into the totalitarian certainties of idol worship. And none of this is fictional because we’ve seen the consequences. Jonathan said, quoting, I don’t remember the source that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, but that’s wrong. But the poetry has to be about Auschwitz. The lesson from Auschwitz was never again. And fair enough, but you can’t decide not to repeat something terrible unless you understand it. And the way to understand it is that the small sins of each individual culminate in the great sins of the state. And so when you ask why terrible things happen in the world, the answer is quite simple. The answer is it’s because you’re not good enough. And it’s because you don’t tell the truth. And you know it. Jonathan said something I thought was very interesting, something I’d thought about, but I haven’t talked to him about it at all. What happens as you move towards the truth? And the answer is everything comes together. That really is the answer, everything comes together. There’s even a sexual element to that because of course the highest element of sexual ecstasy is to come together. And around someone who’s telling the truth, everything comes together and that’s the potential destiny of the world. It’s something that you can partake in. It’s the call to the greatest adventure that there is. You can bring forth something akin to paradise by speaking the truth and you can start in your own life and you can start in the life of your own families. And these are people in principle that you love. And so why would you do anything but speak the truth to them? To protect them from reality? There’s no protecting anyone from reality. Reality just is. You interact with it on its terms and you do that by facing it forthrightly. And you do that by not shying away from the challenge. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a very strange document. I’m going to tell you what I think it means. It means that you’re not going to be able to do it. It means conceptualize the highest good that you can. And so you might think that would be the highest good for you and it would be the highest good for the family around you that you love and it would be the highest good for that family in the state and it would be the highest good for the state in the world. And that would be the highest possible good. Aim at that even though you don’t know how. Aim at that. Make that what you want. And then tell the truth. And it’s an adventure because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have no idea because if you treat things instrumentally, if you treat people instrumentally, you use them as tools for your own desire. And the problem with that is what do you know about what you desire? Many things that you chase will turn out to be empty. Well, what happens if you just tell the truth? Well, the world will unfold around you in very strange and mysterious ways. And there isn’t anything that’s more exciting than that. And it’s perhaps something exciting enough so that the suffering that’s attendant on being would redeem itself by that adventure. And that’s the call. That’s the Western call to the individual. The suffering of being can redeem itself through truth. And it’s not a rule. It’s not a proposition that you need to adhere to like a good citizen. It’s the proper way of wending your way through the terrible world without making it worse than it already is. But the possibility perhaps of making it better. There’s no more exciting possibility than that and no higher moral demand. And the thing is, is everyone knows it. You know when you lie according to your own conception of the truth that there’s something shameful and demeaning about that and you know that it hurts people. And you think, well, why do you do it? Despite all that, and partly you do it because it’s easy. And partly you do it because there’s a crooked, horrible, hellish part of your soul that’s more than happy if part of what you do is make everything worse to pay for the sin of its existence. And I would say we should stop doing that and see what we can do if we’ve got ourselves together. Because human beings are remarkable creatures. We put together an amazing civilization working at it half time. You know, it’s like 55% of humanity on a good day is working to make things better and 45% is working to make it worse. And you wonder what would happen if we all just decided that we were going to make things better. As simple as that. Start where you are. Make things around you better. Where would we be? What would the world turn into around a civilization of people who were genuinely trying to make things better? I can tell you we better find out soon because if we don’t try collectively to make things better, given the current state of affairs, they are going to get a lot worse. I’ve thought for a long time, I wondered why people find themselves adrift in meaninglessness. And there’s a lot of answers to that. There’s the classical criticisms of traditional faith that have been put forth by brilliant people like Friedrich Nietzsche. There’s the idea that there were fairy tales that people lived by prior to the modern age and we’ve outgrown those and that’s left us in a cosmos that’s bereft of meaning. And so it’s a consequence of the inevitable unfolding of a kind of cutting rationality and some of that’s true but there’s a lot of it that isn’t true. Because I’ve also come to understand that the reason that so many of us proclaim that life is meaningless is because we actually would rather have it be meaningless than to take responsibility for it. Because you can imagine this scenario. Imagine you were offered a choice and this is because you are offered this choice, you could say, well, absolutely nothing you do matters and who the hell is going to know anyways in a million years. And so you can do whatever you want moment to moment, right? That’s the payoff for that perspective is you can do whatever you want moment to moment and you’ll not be held responsible by anyone including yourself for pursuing your petty, impulsive, immoral, foolish, and selfish. Destructive, genocidal tendencies. Or the alternative is that you can assume that everything you do is meaningful and everything you do has an impact on the way the world unfolds. And take responsibility for that and it’s something that you’ll have your meaning all right, that’s for sure, because you have an infinite amount of responsibility for every mistake that you make under those circumstances. And perhaps as a medicament for that, the knowledge that when you’re on the path properly that you’re helping the world unfold in the best direction that it possibly could. Well, there isn’t anything better than that. If you want something to set against the inevitable suffering of life, that’s what you set against it. The endless adventure of trying to make things better in every possible way. And God only knows where we could get if we did that. Around the perfect man everything comes together. And I don’t believe that that’s where the infinite logos that stretches across time and space comes together in a single individual. That’s the Christian story. The reason for that is that every single person is embedded in a specific time and place. That’s you as an individual. But at the same point, you’re also the embodiment of this thing that has acted across forever to call chaos into habitable being. You’re both this divine eternal transcendent essence and the finite shell that you inhabit. It’s like the genie, right? A genie is genius, and the genie is something that can grant three magical wishes but has to inhabit this tiny little space. It’s the same idea. Well, you can act that out in your life, and you can transcend it. And as you do that, things come together around you. And everything becomes musical. That’s the right way to think about it. And everything becomes alive. And you shy away from that because you’re resentful about the fundamental structure of being. And you don’t want the responsibility. And that’s why it’s part of the Christian story that Christ took the sins of the world upon himself. Because that’s what you have to do in order to put yourself together. It’s your fault. Everything that isn’t going right is because you’re not good enough. Well, who wants that? Right? Welcome the postmodernists, because they’ll lighten the burden. The consequence is that nothing has any meaning. But that’s a small price to pay to get rid of that particular burden. Well, maybe not. Maybe the meaning of life is to be found in your voluntary willingness to take on that burden and carry it. Right? And that’s the notion that’s embedded in the idea of the cross, right? To pick up a full conscious knowledge of your own vulnerability, your subjugation to betrayal, your slavery at the hands of the state, your insanity and your mortality. And to say, I’ll bear that voluntarily. It’s okay. I can handle it. It seems to me that we’re at a kind of crossroads. I don’t know exactly why. You always meet the devil at the crossroads, by the way. And the reason for that is because every crossroads is a choice. Right? And it’s always a choice between good and evil. We’re at a crossroads, and I don’t know why. I guess it’s because the terrible 20th century has spent its energy, and now we have something new in the aftermath of that. It’s time for everyone to pick up the chaotic pieces and to carry them voluntarily and to make their way through the world and to try to speak their truth and to see what happens. It will heal yourself. It will heal your body. It will heal your soul. It will heal your family. It will heal the nation. That’s what truth does. And how could it be any other way? Reality is the truth. And how are you going to adapt to it without using the truth? Well, the problem is reality is the terrible truth, but it’s certainly possible that the terrible truth is its own medicine. With regards to my connections to orthodoxy, I have kind of a funny story to tell about that. About 15 years ago, a student of mine, who I’ve maintained a relationship with since I taught at Harvard, I’d helped him through a difficult period. His family had been at the center of a real storm of publicity of this. A front page story for a number of months. Recently he returned the favor with me. But he proposed at one point that I fly down to Los Angeles and act as the officiant at his marriage. And I thought, well, that’s pretty interesting. I never expected that to happen. And so I thought, well, if I’m going to do that, I’d better get ordained, because that’s obviously the logical thing to do. And I thought, well, how do you get ordained on short notice? And obviously the answer to that is you go online. So I went online and I signed up. I could name my church. So I did. I have this church. I’m the only member. It’s called the Church of the Spirit of St. Joachim of Floris, which isn’t necessarily the name that you would expect. I like St. Joachim from what I knew of him, because he had this idea that there were three epochs. There would be three epochs in Western civilization, and one would be the epoch of the Father. And that’s roughly the Old Testament epoch, the Old Testament morality that has to do with following rules. And then there was the epoch of the Son, and that was, of course, the Christian epoch of the last 2,000 years. And he believed that what would come after that would be the epoch of the Holy Ghost. And the Holy Ghost is this weird spirit thing that hypothetically Christ left behind that could inhabit people and guide them on their path. It seems to me that that’s very much in keeping with the Orthodox idea that the proper moral pathway for each individual to take is to attempt to bear the burden of the perfect individual, right? To become Christ, so to speak, in an attempt to transcend mortality and finitude and to unite with God. And I thought, well, that was kind of a cool idea. So I thought, well, I might as well have that as a church. And then I thought, who should I be in this church? And I thought, well, Pope was probably a little bit on the narcissistic side, let’s say. So I thought, I’ll be Metropolitan. Because I thought that was kind of archaic enough and sort of out of the way enough so that it was a good joke. So I’m my own Metropolitan, my own church. It only has one rule, and so you can join it if you want. The rule is that if you’re a member of my church, you can’t follow stupid rules. Yeah, so that’s a good rule because it’s actually, it’s an anti-rule rule, which is really funny as far as I’m concerned. Anyways, I went down to LA and I did marry these two and they’re still married and so that’s good. And yeah, yeah, so I know that’s a bit rambly, but it’s been a long day. I talked to Sam Harris today again, for those of you who, it went great. Yeah, it went great. Anyway, so look, the idea is pretty straightforward, you know, as far as I can tell. There’s this tremendous idea that’s at the bottom of Western culture that’s taken the human race millennia and perhaps an endless amount of time before then, to formulate them. The idea is that our consciousness, and that’s the centre of us, the soul, whatever that happens to be, partakes in the process by which creation comes into being and we do that through the logos, which is our capacity to think and to utter words and to engage in dialogue, but more importantly to do that truthfully. And to the degree that we’re able to do that truthfully, we bring paradise into being rather than hell. And it seems to me that that’s as close to objective reality, although it’s not precisely objective, it’s more than objective reality. It’s a kind of meta-reality. It’s the most profound truth that you’ll ever encounter. And the thing that’s cool about it is you can put it to the test if you want, you know. You start deciding that you’re not going to lie because how the hell are you going to tell the truth? What do you know? You don’t know what the truth is, but you certainly know when you lie and you know how to stop doing that. So I would say, well, just try, stop lying and see what happens. Try it for like a year. You don’t get to lie about anything anymore. And that also means you can’t do things that you would be afraid to talk about because, you know, if you’re going to tell the truth, you have to tell the truth about what you did. And if you do reprehensible things, then you can’t just run around telling everybody about them. So it also means that you have to not act in a way that you wouldn’t speak truthfully about. And try it. You’ll find out, first of all, that you’re so full of lies and deceit that you just bloody well can’t believe it. When I started doing this 30 years ago, it really just about drove me crazy because I divided it into two people in some sense. And one person, one person was talking and the other person was watching the person that was talking. And the talking person was a puppet and the watching person was the right person. And every time the talking person said something, the watching person would go, you don’t believe that. That isn’t true. That isn’t your idea. And I thought, wow, that’s really not good because it looks like 95% of what I’m saying isn’t mine or I’m saying it for show or I’m saying it to be dominant, primate or I’m saying it so that I can be, you know, so that I can use my language instrumentally and get what I want or, you know, I swiped it from a book and I really don’t deserve it but I’m saying it. It was horrible. It was 95%, seriously. So then I learned, at least in part, to only say things that made me feel like I was together and that’s part of that coming together. You can feel that physically. You know, if you say something deceitful, you shrink and you cower from it. It makes you embarrassed and it makes you weak. You can feel the weakness. It’s like, well, stop saying things that make you weak. If you don’t want to be weak, then if you want to be strong, stop saying things that make you feel weak. Try it. Try it. See what happens. You can test this out. In a year, things will be way different for you. In five years, you won’t even be the same person. God only knows what will happen in a decade. So it’s really worth it. Besides, you don’t have anything better to do anyways because here you are, you know, suffering stupidly away. You might as well do something useful with your time while you’re waiting to die. And there isn’t anything more interesting to do than that. It’s so cool because, and I mean it’s part of what I decided to do last September when I made these, you know, crazy videos which really have more of an effect than I certainly thought they would. I thought, well, I’ve got some things to say and why don’t I say them and see what happens? So that’s sort of, that’s an excellent way to live. Why don’t I say the things that I think and see what happens? Well, this is one of the things that’s happened so that’s kind of cool. I mean, how unlikely is this? It’s completely absurd and ridiculous that here I’m with Jonathan, this crazy French Canadian barber, and he’s two guys in dresses here. That’s exactly what you’d expect given what I’ve been talking about recently. This is very unlikely and all of this has been very unlikely. And life is very unlikely. And you know, maybe it could be absolutely magnificent and wonderful. We could make everything into a holy temple in which we could live forever peacefully, only searching for more remarkable and spectacular things to do next. And that’s what people do in paradise. They sit around dreaming about how the paradise they already had could give rise to a paradise that’s yet greater than the one that’s there. And with the collective imagination that we pursue, that could be a never-ending thing. And we could bring it into being and that’s what we should do because the alternative is to let everything degenerate into chaos and hell. And how about we don’t do that? Well, that’s good enough. Thank you. Thank you to Metropolitan Jordan of Toronto. I just want to quickly say that following Father Jeffrey’s talk, we will have a question and answer period. So five minutes from now, we’ll have people walking by the aisles taking your question sheets as well as on the balcony. So after Father Jeffrey’s talk, we’ll have a question and answer period. And if you have more questions after that, we’ll collect those as well, just pass them up. And if you’re on the balcony, just give them to Aidan. Thank you very much. And Father Jeffrey? Good evening. Father Ted and I have had a running debate over the last few weeks as to what would be worse, going first or going last? How do I follow that? The second century church did something rather strange and quite astonishing. Stories about Jesus which had been circulating orally for some generations began to be written down in the second half of the first century. There were numerous versions in circulation which came over time to be associated with the traditions of one or another apostolic witness to the risen Lord Jesus. And at a certain point, a choice had to be made. The church could have come up with a definitive account, the single canonical version. That approach was certainly a temptation. One of the first to do this was a dualistic heretic called Marcellus. He settled on one gospel, the Gospel of Luke as it happens. He liked that one. He redacted, however, to suit his vision. Incidentally, he also rejected the entire Old Testament in the process, teaching that matter was evil and therefore the creator God of the Old Testament was responsible for it. But the point here is that he wanted a single gospel to reflect Jesus, who he saw as offering salvation from this material world. That was a heretic. This idea of a single gospel continued to be a temptation even for those within the canonical church. In the middle of the second century, an otherwise quite orthodox believer, Cacian, apparently scandalized by the plurality of the gospels, created his famous Deatesero. In this, he wove the gospel accounts into one seamless, consistent narrative. And it had some traction. In fact, for some centuries, particularly among the Syriac tradition, this was the main gospel use. But the church rejected both of these attempts. And from the beginning of the process of the canonization of the New Testament, it accepted that there should be different gospels. Leading the charge was the second century bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus, who insisted on what he called the Evangelion Tetramorphum, the four-fold gospel. Already in his days, those were the four gospels we have in our New Testament today. This is important. Fully aware of the significant differences in the accounts, not only different emphases and theological visions, but contradictions. The church chose to canonize diversity. It chose to retain four separate and distinctive literary compositions witnessing to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is interesting for all kinds of reasons. And of course, it points to the experience of Jesus being more profound than any one account could capture. But not least, and for our purposes and theme tonight, it also says something about the meaning of what it is to be human. As New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson writes, the diversity of the gospel accounts signifies the infinite replicability of the story of Jesus in the lives of human beings. The spirit of Jesus is not simply the past, the church declares, but continues as the spirit of Jesus transforms the lives of human beings according to the mind of Christ. But in what sense can the story of Jesus be replicated? Surely not in the specifics of his ministry, which are irretrievably in the past. It’s not about being a celibate, bearded Jewish male growing up in Galilee in the first century Palestine, a techno, someone who works with his hands like his foster father. Such historical elements are not repeatable, neither are they important to repeat. Rather, the plurality of the gospels in their variety of and contradictory historical details points beyond all this to a deeper significance. That is to the meaning of the story of Jesus contained in these narratives. It’s not the facts of Jesus’s life that matter and find new expression in the lives of others, but rather the pattern of his existence. Jesus existence as one of radical obedience towards God and selfless service towards others forms a pattern for all humanity that can be written in the heart by the Holy Spirit. It’s this pattern that Paul designates as the nomos Christi, often translated the law of Christ, but it’s better understood perhaps as the pattern of Christ, the pattern of the Messiah. As an aside, this concept of the pattern of Christ etched into the multi-form narratives that witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was also the reason for the limits that were placed on what could be considered gospel. You see, if diversity was not just allowed but a requirement to express the fullness of truth, there was nevertheless a bridge too far. And the rejection of the so-called Gnostic gospels, with which I’m sure many of you are familiar, was precisely that they were not narratives, but often just collections of sayings. And that makes sense. The Gnostics were not interested in the material world, and to have a story requires materiality. Their sacred texts, as much as they purported to be about Jesus, lacked precisely the narrative element of the pattern of Christ. Now time does not suffice for us to explore together this evening how across all the various writings of the New Testament this underlying pattern of Christ emerges. Permit me to outline the very briefest of sketches. In the four gospels, in the letters of Paul and the other early apostles, behind all the collected facts, there’s a deep consistency in the earliest Christian literature concerning a focus not on wondrous deeds or even wise words, but on the character of Jesus as Messiah, on the meaning of his life and death. They all reveal the same pattern of radical obedience to God and selfless love towards other people. They reveal a journey that plunges to the depths of alienation and solidarity with all, and then rises in glorification, having not merely overcome suffering, sin and death, but emptied of their power. They reveal a pattern of joyful sacrifice, voluntary death, and glorious resurrection. And they also all agree on this, that discipleship is to follow the same Messianic pattern. They don’t emphasize that followers of Jesus perform certain deeds or learn certain doctrines. They insist, rather, on living according to the same pattern of life and death shown by Jesus. To be a Christian, therefore, is not about dogma or even morality, although there are dogmatic and ethical implications. It’s not about all that religious baggage we so often associate with it. It is to live. It is for each of us to enact in our unique human existence the nomos Christi, the pattern of Christ. Now, there are numerous ways we can describe this pattern of Christ. For instance, the Eastern Fathers’ principal mode of exegesis of understanding Scripture is typology. So we can add to pattern, the word pattern, another word, typos or type. A type is a person, an object, or an event that is connected across space-time to others. Without losing its own historical reality and identity, it shares in a greater reality of meaning, that greater reality which it points, a greater reality called the antitype. This is how the Apostles and the Church Fathers read the entire Old Testament, for example. Adam, St. Paul says, is a typos, a type of Christ, the first created man pointing forward to the recreation of the human race in Christ Jesus. The Exodus narrative, as an event, is a type of the true Passover or Pascha, Christ’s deliverance of all people from suffering and death. And anyone who’s familiar with the writings of the Church Fathers or the liturgy of the Orthodox Church will know how abundant types are within them. But this is the key. Typology is not just a way of reading and understanding history or texts, seeing how people and events point towards Christ. Typology is, for Eastern Fathers, the fundamental structure of reality, of a world that is symbolic, of an epiphany or theophany of God, and of our own apprehension of this reality, our own finding of meaning within it. So it’s not just figures from scriptural history that are types. We, too, are called to typify Christ, to be symbols of Christ, participants in his archetypal journey and life, his descent in self-offering, and his ascent in glory. If we are to be truly human, we must follow what distinguished scholar of this university, Northrop Pry, calls the U-shaped story that is the foundation not only of biblical narrative and the Christ story, but of story after story, myth after myth. In Christ, the archetype of archetypes. We have, in the words of C.S. Lewis, myth become fact. As we’ve already heard this evening, in the Gospel of St. John, of course, this pattern is above all called logos. It’s not an abstract pattern, but it’s a direct, and in these latter days in the fullness of time, a direct, incarnate expression of God himself. The logos is the principle of order and creation, as we’ve heard. It’s through the logos that God speaks and all things are made. It is logos, God’s verb, perhaps better than verb, in whose image we are created, whose likeness we are called to attain. And the lesson here is simply this, that a properly ordered human life is one lived in accordance with the logos. The concept of logos has a long and venerable history, and it did even before the Greek translators of the Old Testament and the New Testament writers appropriated it. And one of the first, or the first of the Greek philosophers to speak of logos was the pre-Socratic Periclytus, and he said this, To logu de eendos sinu zo usin i coi, although logos is common to all, all have the logos, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. In other words, logos may govern the universe, the macrocosmos, and our own inner world, the microcosmos, but most people don’t choose a properly ordered life, a life aligned with the compass built into the fabric of the world, built into their own hearts and minds. We’ve heard already we are now in the season of great length, the great forty days, as it’s called. And this has many significances, it’s a season of course of ascetic labor, of renewal of faith, redoubling of our commitment to prayer and the service of others. It’s also the season of preparing catacombs, the baptism. Above all though, it’s the season we’re called to come to our senses, and to awake to the fundamental meaning, shape, and pattern of our lives. We realize our alienation, we repent, metanion, we embark on our journey of return, a journey which involves self-sacrifice, a journey which necessarily passes through our own voluntary death and resurrection. Lent is in essence the totality of our life, but it requires the remembrance of death. There was a famous practice in ancient Rome as a general came back victorious from a battle, and during his triumphant parade, he received compliments and honors from the crowd of citizens. He ran the risk of falling victim to his own pride and delusions of grandeur, and to avoid that, a slave would be placed just behind him, whispering into his ear, saying, Vespice poste ominem te memento, look after you to the time of your death, and remember you’re only a man. And thereafter, he was enshrined and picked up in Christian tradition as memento mori, remember that you will die. But better yet, remember to die. Remember to die. I don’t think we need that remembrance, but eventually all of us will probably feel equal to the task. But remember to die, because remember to find and follow the logos, the pattern of our true life, which passes through death to resurrection. It’s a very frequent theme in patristic tradition. St. Gregory the theologian often repeats the saying of Plato, which suggests that the present life ought to be a meditation upon death. And he advised his friend, Philagrius, to live instead of the present, the future, and make this life a meditation and practice of death. If you go on from the Church Fathers, the focus on death is front and center. Remembrance of our journey that passes from death to life. This is also the connection of Lent with the preparation for baptism. Baptism in its deepest and primary sense signifies death and burial and resurrection with Christ. This is very clear in Romans chapter 6, the epistle which we read on the eve of Easter, Pascha. We have been baptized into Christ’s death. We have been buried with him by baptism into death. We have been united to Christ in a death like his and united to him in a resurrection like his. So baptism means death and resurrection. St. Gregory of Nyssa says the font is both tomb and mother. The orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov writes about this theme. It’s an extended quotation of the book. Baptism he says means sharing mystically in Christ’s death and his burial, but also in what happened between his burial and his resurrection, in his descent into hell. What is the meaning of the incarnation? God becoming truly human in Christ identifies himself with all human anguish, alienation, and despair. In the Garden of Gethsemane he says, my soul is exceedingly sorrow even unto death. He shares in the fullness of human pain. He enters into the fullness not only of human life, but of human death. And we are to understand Christ’s descent into hell as being the full expression of God’s solidarity with our human alienation. Christ descends into the hell of human suffering and of human loneliness and human despair. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows as we read in the book of Isaiah. And we may add that Christ has borne all our griefs, all our sorrows. There is a total identification here, an unreserved solidarity of Christ our God in our human fallenness. He who is sinless yet became sin for us, became one with us in our fallen state as St. Paul says. And that is part of the meaning of this descent into hell. All things are full of God, even hell. Though I go down to hell, thou art there also, we read in Psalm 138. So when we are baptized, as Documot continues, we descend with Christ into hell. We also commit ourselves in solidarity with Christ to the same total unreserved identification with those who suffer. Each of the baptized becomes by virtue of his descent into hell with Christ a man or a woman or others. Each of us is called to bear the griefs of others and to carry their sorrows. To be a Christian, ne, to be a human requires us to journey to hell. It is in Jung’s terms to journey to hell and become hell oneself. That’s how we can make sense of the words of a great elder of the 20th century, Saint Sofroni, who when a young monk asked him, how will we be saved, answered, keep your mind in hell and despair not. Why hell? Why this archetypal descent before ascending? Why the you pattern of Christ that we must follow? As an amateur of physics, if you will indulge me, let me offer a metaphor from physics. And I’m borrowing this from a scholar of Orthodox Christian liturgy, David Bagerberg. Archimedes was a Greek physicist who was fascinated by the mechanics of the lever. And you may remember from your science classes and simple machines that a lever is used to exert a large force over a small distance by exerting a small force over a greater distance at the other end. A child can thus lift with one hand a man standing on the short end of the beam if the child presses down on the long end of the beam. Archimedes was so fascinated by the lever’s potential that one day he famously exclaimed, Give me a lever and a place to stand and I shall move the earth. And he realized he needed three things in order to move the earth. A long enough lever, a correctly placed fulcrum point, and a place to stand. But that, of course, was the problem when it comes to moving the earth. How could he apply leverage to the world when he himself was standing on the world? How could he step off the thing he lives on in order to move it? He has no footing. So in philosophy, the riddle becomes known as searching for the archimedial point. That is, an objective standpoint removed from the object of study. This hypothetical point of perspective is thought to be far enough removed from something in order to afford an outsider’s view of it. But how can we remove ourselves to a point outside ourselves? This is our human condition. Augustine defines sin as, In curvatus in sen, being curved in upon oneself, a light oriented inwardly towards self rather than outwardly towards God and others. Our egocentrism exerts so strong a gravitational pull that it bends the light of glory back on ourselves, that light that should be glorifying God. How can we move ourselves off-center when we are the center? We are the center of our universe. We have no leverage over sin. We have no standpoint outside our vanity and pride. We have no rock on which to stand that is beyond our self-interest. Whoever desires to get outside himself needs some sort of archimedian point beyond himself. Our self-offering and our descent to hell is precisely this archimedian point. We are to lift the world. If we are to transform the world into a true symbol and epiphany of God’s own life, then we must first descend. We cannot lift up the world in sacrificial praise so long as we place our footing on the world alone. It is like trying to lift the carpeting while we stand on it. Archimedes’ problem was applying leverage to a world that he could not step off of in order to move it. But we can. By dying with Christ, we are freed from the world. We leave the world for the sake of the world. We die so that we and the world with us may live. This is not merely our spiritual life, our religious vocation, some crazy notion dreamed up by men in black dresses. It is our true life. It is our proper life. It is our life ordered according to the logos. And it is a journey we must undertake. We undertake not on our own, but only in Christ. For Christ and Christ alone is the one who took that journey so that we could be reconciled to God. In closing, I would like to turn to one of the greatest, in my own estimation, poets of the past century. One who saw deeply into these realities of logos, a journey through death and resurrection. In his poem, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot depicts a bleak and sterile world. It’s a world in which we fail to take up our journey, where we stay put amidst a civilization that’s been reduced to a wasteland that has lost its fertility and its ability to bring forth life. The world is filled, he says, with a heap of broken images. And the dead tree gives no shelter. There is no easy fix. And certainly nothing in that civilization or society could offer. There is no leverage. Does such a world sound familiar to us today? We need to look at Eliot’s final work, the Four Quartets for Hope of Renewal and Spiritual Replenishment. Tellingly, above this series of four poems, the last that he wrote, he’s inscribed those words of Heraclitus that I mentioned before. Although logos is common, the many live as if they had wisdom of their own. Eliot gets it. The solution to our wasteland is not renewed civilization per se on its own terms, but a journey undertaken in the pattern of the logos. He says this. It’s a symbol perfected in death. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, by the purification of the motive in the ground of our beseeching. He goes on to evoke an image, this beautiful image of the fire of the Holy Spirit purifying the world as it descends, as it does. And he ends with this, in a hope-bomb, in which descent to death is the source of life and meaning and transformation. We die with the dying. See, they depart and we go with them. We are born with the dead. See, they return and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration. A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments. So while the light fails on a winter’s afternoon, in this excluded chapel, history is now in need. With the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling, we shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and end in the beginning of the summer, and know the place for the first turn. Through the unknown, remembered gate, when the last of the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning, at the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall, and the children in the apple tree not known, because not looked for, but heard, half heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always, a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, when the tongues of flame are enfolded into the crown, if not a fire, and the fire in robes are well. Thank you. What an amazing ending to our discussions. Can I just get another round of applause for all our panelists? Thank you. So, it’s 8.47 right now, but just letting you guys know, even though the event says that the event ends at 9 p.m., we do have the room till 10, so we have plenty of time for questions. So with that said, if you guys have any more questions that develop along the way, you can just write them down and pass them up, and I will try to get to as many as possible, and I’ll also try to ask questions that kind of answer as many other questions as possible. So, with that said, and this question does not address to any panelists in particular, but whichever of you feels like you would like to answer this question, please do so. The statue in Rome depicts the suffering of the Trojan priest, Ladochan, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, and his sons. Unlike the noble suffering of Christ, Ladochan’s suffering seems neither awarded nor justified. Do these two differing visions of suffering form part of the divide between postmodernists and their opponents? And do the postmodernists justify their nihilism and or believe in other ideologies by pointing to the pointless suffering of Ladochan and others like him? You don’t have harder questions. Well, you’ll be answering this one first. They’re right. Would you like to…anyone? Harder. It’s about sculpture. Well, in that case, just meaningless suffering. Is that the core of the postmodern understanding of the problems in the world? I don’t know if it’s at the core of the postmodernists’ view. I think it’s at the core of the problem that every human being has with manifesting sufficient faith to engage fully in life. We look at our lives and the lives of others and we see that the one certainty is suffering and loss. And we’re, at least in principle, the only creatures that are aware of that. That’s really the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve, right? Because Adam and Eve wake up and become aware of their own nakedness, their finitude, their mortality, and that throws them out of the paradise of being. And that’s precisely right. That’s the situation we all find ourselves in. The fundamental question is all that without ultimate meaning. And it’s a very profound question. The answer seems to be something like it’s without meaning unless you take it on voluntarily. And I certainly don’t understand the full implications of that answer, although I know that insofar as you can test that as a theory in your own life, it seems extraordinarily robust. To the degree that it’s a postmodern issue, I think that the postmodernists feed us very thin gruel because they offer nothing in the face of that suffering except the collapse of everything into the sand that Jonathan spoke of. So that’s the best I can do with that. To Mr. Pageau, how do your icons and icons in general function on their day-to-day search for the logos? I think there’s many ways in which they function. One of the things that I talked about is the idea that the path of logos is a path of coming together. And one of the things that icons provide is that image of coming together. So when you engage with an icon, especially in a church where there are many icons and many saints, then you get that sense of your path being one in which you are in communion with others. And so for Orthodox Christians, for example, when we pray before icons, we pray before them because through those images, we can… how can I say this in a way that everybody can understand? So the image becomes a vehicle for the presence of that person into our prayer lives, and there’s this relationship which is set up. And so that is how we live with icons, and icons become a vehicle for that path towards unity. So I hope that helped. That’s on, let’s say, on an experiential sense. I think on a technical sense in terms of the making of icons for myself, for me that’s what they have done exactly, is that my struggle in life before I became Orthodox was how to fit art that I loved into my life, how to make that fit and how for it to all come together. And in discovering the language of traditional Christian art, I found how here’s this art which is both grounded in absolute practical use in the lives of people. It’s used in people’s devotions. It’s used in the church to teach and to participate in the liturgy. And at the same time, I can participate in that by making them, uniting me with the tradition of all the fathers before me, uniting me with the church. And at the same time, these images, what they’re talking about and what they’re revealing is that ultimate reality, that reality that is beyond all realities. And so being able for myself, I feel a great blessing to have the chance and have the blessing of the church to be able to do that for a living. It’s amazing. Every day I get to participate in that process. And so that’s my other answer to that question. Just quickly to add to that point, icons in the Orthodox Church are not merely seen, but they teach us to see. You will have noted that there is a, they are not just an aesthetically beautiful medium. They have a kind of stylization to them. Even though the many styles of iconography, they share a characteristic. And there is something about them that forces the viewer to reflect and to come to a new way of seeing. So icons are not merely symbols as such, but they teach us to understand all of reality in that symbolic sense that I spoke of earlier, that everything ultimately isn’t referencing itself. That’s the problem that we’re in, that things have become self-referential, that everything in the world is an icon, is a symbol of God, and is referring to something much more than what it is, beyond itself, without losing its identity. So icons teach us that vision, not just depict it, if that makes sense, to teach us a way of seeing. Just to quickly add to that, following up on what Professor Peterson said, the average person wants to take the easy route. So when you take a look at icons in Orthodox Churches, a lot of people have never seen them before. They say, well, those are weird, they’re not realistic, they’re very strange looking. They’re done on purpose, because the icon involves you. It forces engagement with the locals, what we’ve been speaking about tonight. Because from the colors that are used to the subtle code that exists within iconography that, okay, if you haven’t studied it, you wouldn’t know, but for the people who read up on it and begin to engage, it forces you to read the icon and to get deeper and deeper into what it’s trying to tell you. Even the perspective, and Jonathan knows this very well, in most icons, not all, but in most Byzantine icons, the perspective is even reversed. For those of you who have taken basic art, you know, vanishing point is far away, right? Things get farther away when you look into the distance, and things get bigger when they get closer to you. But if you look at the geometry of an icon, a lot of times you’ll see that it’s reversed. Why? Because the vanishing point is actually pointing towards you, towards the viewer. Which means that when you look at it, you become part of it, and the orientation of the icon is actually looking at you. You’re not just looking at the icon, the icon is looking at you, and that forces a type of involvement, and it’s hard work, because you have to learn how to read it. You can’t just look at it, and I don’t want to contrast it with, for example, Renaissance painting, as better or worse. It’s just two different things. But when you look at Renaissance painting, it’s realism. It’s just there to depict what exists as it is, and there’s not a lot of work there. There’s a lot of work from a technical point of view, but to look at it, you know, it is what it is. It stops there. Whereas the icon, as Jonathan was saying, kind of reveals another world, the world that could be, the world that we would want to be. And that is a beautiful thing, because it’s a constant engagement with our hope in the eternal. This question is for Jordan Peterson. Can you comment on the cyclical or non-cyclical pattern of history, and if our society is doomed to decay, or can it be renewed culturally in order of society, state, and laws? Well, I would say it’s cyclical at every moment in some sense. It’s nested patterns of cyclicality. I think you can hear that best, and the best representation I’ve ever seen of that is in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. They’re really worth a listen. The new videos I’m going to release that I’m doing with interviews use Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, which is an absolutely phenomenal piece of music, because it cycles and climbs continually and stays in the same place. I have no idea how he managed it. It’s absolutely overwhelming. And that’s what history is like. The apocalypse is always on us, right? I mean, you all confront an apocalyptic destiny because you’re all going to die, and everything comes to an end, and everything is continually regenerated. And that’s what history is like. And I think that’s a very important point. And so that cyclicality is built into every moment. That’s the U-shaped journey that Northrop Frye talked about too, which is order, the descent into chaos, and the reestablishment of order. And everyone knows what that means in their own life. You’re somewhere stable where you understand everything in thought, and you’re somewhere stable where you’re able to understand everything in thought. And then the rug is pulled out from underneath your feet, and you don’t know where you are. You fall into chaos. Someone close to you dies, or you don’t get the promotion you were looking for, or some dream collapses on you, or you discover a new fault that you were never aware of before. And you fall into this chaotic state. And in that chaotic state, that’s the underworld of mythology. And one of the suburb of the underworld, the most horrific suburb of the underworld, is hell, because when you go into the underworld in chaos, it’s easy to become desperate, and then angry, and then vengeful, and then murderous. And that happens to people with tremendous, tremendous frequency. If you haven’t observed that in your own life, you haven’t watched your own interior, you haven’t watched your own interior, you haven’t watched your own interior, you haven’t watched your own interior, you haven’t watched your own interior, you haven’t watched your own interior. You haven’t watched your own interior landscape with any degree of accuracy. And so that cyclicality is built into everything. And it’s the structure of being. That’s the right way to think about it. And now I think the optimistic part of that is that there is a spiral upward, as far as I can tell, or at least there can be. And you get some sense of that when you participate in your own life in the sense that you’ve found a good direction, and that’s imbuing you with a sense of positive meaning. And I really regard, I don’t regard positive meaning as an epiphenomenal manifestation of a deeper material reality. I don’t believe that’s true at all. I believe that there is nothing more real than that sense of engaged meaning. And I think your nervous system has actually evolved to tell you when you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s something that informs you that’s literally beyond your senses, but it’s absolutely central to proper being. You can tell when you’re engaged with the world properly because all of a sudden the world becomes worthwhile around you. And that’s not an illusion. We’ve been taught for so long that meaning is some sort of illusion or an epiphenomenal. And it’s absolutely central. And certainly no one ever thinks that suffering is an epiphenomenal. Everyone acts as if their own suffering is the most real thing there is. And so, and no wonder. So if you experience something that enables you to transcend that suffering or to justify it in your own life, which is that sense of meaningful engagement, why wouldn’t you regard that as even more real than pain? The only thing more real than pain is that which can transcend it. And you can experience that in your own life. You do that all the time when you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s a real thing. And I also think that’s the place that truth puts you. Well, now how that relates to the cyclicality. Well, that’s the pathway out of it. You know, that life is order, chaos, reestablishment of order. And you could say, well, you’re the order. Or you could say you’re the chaos. And lots of people are the chaos. Or maybe you’re even a denizen of hell inside that chaos. Or you’re the reestablished order. And all of those things are reasonable things to be. But the most reasonable thing to be is the thing that constantly moves along that pathway ever upwards. Like that staircase at the back, which is what that represents. It’s that spiral upwards, you know, that leads us up into the beyond. That’s the stairway to heaven. That’s cyclicality. And it’s a genuine thing. And you know it, but you don’t know you know it. And some of these stories, the icons that Jonathan produces and these stories that we’ve been talking about, are humanity’s attempts to make that pattern articulate. And all we’ve really managed so far is to capture an image and story. We haven’t been able to make it fully articulate. But the time for that, I would say, is approaching because we need to understand these things consciously so that we can participate in them properly. Thank you. This one I suppose would be most appropriate for our Reverend Fathers. What role does Jesus Christ and the Church play in helping us become more like God? Is it possible to become like God without this person and this institution? This one wants to start. This is obviously one of the hotly debated subjects in Church history. It’s also a major subject in the New Testament. I’ve been teaching New Testament this term and reading Paul recently and Paul wrestles with this question. How is it under the law, outside of the law, how do people come to this sort of center of being, this fulfillment of humanity’s potential, human flourishing with or without Christ? Depending on how the question is asked, you will get different answers. But I would just recall one of the main themes from tonight, which is that logos is inherent. This isn’t something that’s been concocted and posited as some sort of philosophical premise. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all agreed with this idea and then moved towards it together? Even if it was that, it would be a good thing. But it’s so much more fundamental than that. Every human being, not just those who adhere to this philosophy, has the image of God within them and is operating to some degree or another according to their logos. In fact, the Eastern tradition would tend to argue that our very existence is good and therefore every human being is good insofar as they exist. If there was no goodness in us, we would not exist. Evil is an eclipsing, not actually tangible force, not a real thing. And so is it possible for someone without Christ to somehow come in to touch deeply with logos within them, therefore with Christ? I think the argument would be ultimately yes. The best means would be to hear the gospel proclaimed, Jesus Christ is Lord, and to respond to that in faith as the New Testament talks about. But even apart from that, everyone already has logos and therefore everyone already has that pattern etched into their very existence. And so that’s how we could possibly see the capacity outside of the sacramental boundaries of the church, people coming to a position of harmony with their being. One of the early church fathers, St. Justin Martyr, refers to, and it picks up actually, this is a pre-Socratic idea, the logos spermaticos, the seeds of the Word, which are all through creation. And so this is the fundamental essence of all of reality, not only in us, but in all of creation. And so he was dealing with the fact that people were pointing out, well, how come there’s dying and rising gods in all sorts of different cultures? How come all of the things that you find in the Christian faith are already present in many myths and cultures and so forth? And he said, that’s brilliant. You know, of course they are. This is true. If it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t be so. And so in that sense, absolutely, what we are trying to do as Orthodox Christians is simply live in complete harmony with who we are as human beings. This isn’t an outside imposition. This is the very core of what we are. This is the fulfillment and trajectory of creation. And so that’s why, coming back to the earlier point about how can we have this dialogue, this engagement with the world, with social sciences, with physical sciences, with pure physics and mathematics, we can do that because it all ties in anyway. We are hoping, as Orthodox Christians, we are in touch with what is fundamentally true of creation and of our own human personhood. So hopefully that will join you. Thank you for that. I suppose Dr. Peterson would be best equipped to handle this. Are, or anyone, are Jungian archetypes in accord with or opposed to Orthodox theology? I don’t know too much about what that means, but maybe you do. Well, the problem with answering that for me is that I’m by no means an expert on Orthodox theology. So, but from what I understand of it, I would say… Jung believed that… Jung was a student of Nietzsche. It’s something that isn’t well known about Jung because most of the history of psychoanalytic thought was written by the Freudians. And they think of Jung as a student of Freud. And of course that’s true. Jung was really introduced to the idea, the profound idea of the unconscious through Freud, and also, at least in part, to the idea that there was an interior world of symbols. But at the same time, Jung was a student of Nietzsche. And you see, Nietzsche announced the death of God in the late 1900s. And what he meant by that, in some sense, was that he meant that the spirit of truth that had been instantiated by Christianity had turned against the dogma of Christianity and destroyed it. And what he meant by that was that the emerging… the emergence of science in the context of Western culture and the elaborate description of physical reality that was developed as a consequence ended up in apparent contradiction with the truths of our religious tradition. And we picked the most developed truth and let the other one go. And Nietzsche was not celebrating that, contrary to what most people think. I mean, when he spoke of the death of God, he said that it was an absolute catastrophe and that we would pay for it with millions of lives. And that was his prognostication for the 20th century, which happened to come true in precisely the manner he indicated for exactly the reasons. Nietzsche believed that we would have to invent our own values because we had become… because the old values that we had lived by had bled themselves out and died. But the problem with that, and this is something you picked up on, the problem with that is that you can’t invent your own values. And you know that because all of you have tried on New Year’s Day to decide that you’re going to eat less and go to the gym. And you’d think if you could create your own values, you know, being this sort of demigod, that as soon as you told yourself that you would eat properly and go to the gym, you’d be up at six in the morning, you know, eating carrots and rutabagas and then going off to lift heavy weights. And of course you’re not. You’re sitting in your chair at night eating Cheetos and watching pornography, you know. So how in the world is something like that supposed to create its own values? You’re not in control of yourself to that degree. And so Jung’s answer to that problem was essentially to look partly within and partly to look in the symbolic domain. And what he realized as a consequence of doing that was that there was a profound answer to the question of the resurrection of value. And for him that was really the embodiment of the pattern of Christ. That was the self as far as Jung was concerned. There’s no difference between the archetypal self and the symbolic Christ. They were the same thing as far as Jung was concerned insofar as Christ is the vision of the perfect man, right? Which is a symbolic vision. So you could say, well, what is Christ? And the answer to that is, well, Christ is whatever you think of as the perfect man. Now you’re going to have diverse representations of that. So you could think about it, Christ as the totality of the visions of the perfect man. It’s something like that. And then that the goal of life was to embody that as deeply as possible. And Jung also believed that the world would transform itself around you to the degree that you did that, to an unspecifiable degree. And that’s where the symbolic reality and the historical reality unite. And we know it’s true. We also know this is true. If you look at people like Gandhi or you look at people like Solzhenitsyn, for example, these are great people who stood up as moral icons, let’s say, in the midst of absolute chaos. And they transformed entire civilizations by doing that, by standing up for what they believed to be true. They transformed the entire world around them. And of course, they’re only partially perfect. Someone like Solzhenitsyn or someone like Gandhi or perhaps someone like Nelson Mandela. They’re only partial incarnations of perfection. But even to the degree that they were flawed, they were perfect enough so that despite their remnant flaws, they were able to reorganize being itself around them. And we don’t know what the ultimate limit of that is. We really don’t. It could be that everything will align itself around people to the degree that they put themselves together. And I actually, I’ve had experiences that make me convinced that that’s the case. I truly believe that that’s the case. So, and that’s also what gives me some belief in these strange Christian ideas about the harrowing of hell and the overcoming of death. It’s like we have no idea what we could do as individual embodiments of the logos, which is clearly what we are because we’re all conscious. We have no idea what obstacles we could overcome and what massive transformations we could undertake if we actually lived our lives properly. God only knows what we could get rid of. We could get rid of malaria. We could get rid of schistosomiasis and the guinea worm. Those are going to be gone soon anyways. Polio. We’re going to get rid of hunger. Maybe we can get rid of death. Maybe we can get rid of hell. Who knows? And I know I’m certainly someone who believes that hell is real because I’ve read enough of the accounts of what happened in the 20th century to know precisely that it’s as real as the most warped imagination can possibly make it. And that’s plenty real enough for me. So, well, so I would say Jung’s vision is very much in keeping, as far as I can understand, with the central traditions of the Orthodox Church because he believed that it was the highest moral duty of the awake soul to participate in manifestation of the self. And that’s this union of things that Jonathan talked about that’s beyond duality. It’s to bring everything in you together into this kind of harmony that then extends beyond you into your family and past that. It’s musical. That’s what music represents. That’s why we find it so intensely meaningful. That’s what music tells us. It’s an artwork based upon the meaning of pattern and it infuses everyone. You know what it’s like to listen to music? Even the darkest punk-rocking anarchist atheist is overwhelmed with the glory of God when he listens to his punk rock music. So, yeah. Just a quick comment on that. Going back to the central part of that question, which is about archetypes and whether they’re the same thing. I would largely agree with that point to the extent to which anyone is in touch with the logos within them. They are going to be in touch with fundamental archetypes and those would be the same that the Church Fathers refer us to and so forth. The one element that, and this kind of relates to the previous question about can you do this without Christ, the thing which is possibly the unique element of Christian faith, it’s not love. Love is what defines Christianity. In fact, love can be found throughout the world. It’s more hope. And what I know about Jung, which isn’t all that much, but absolutely the archetypes are there. We’ll go with that. Does he come with the same level of hope that we would as authors? I don’t know. I mean, sometimes you wonder whether the catavasis, the descent, kind of leads us to a hell where we inhabit without hope and rather with despair. Coming back to that point about Archimandrite Sophrony, put your mind in hell, but don’t despair. In other words, have hope. So is it possible to have that hope without ultimately what we have, which is the cross? And the message of the cross as an archetype is that we stare into the depths of darkness and death and we proclaim light and life. In fact, you know, that’s what Jesus himself says when he refers us back to the Old Testament, to when the people of Israel were dying in the wilderness, having come out with Moses and they’re grumbling because they said, because they said, if only we were back in Egypt where we had it so good, because the reality of Egypt was slavery. But they thought, no, no, we’re just going to grumble. And they’re afflicted by serpents. And God says this most incredible thing, put a serpent on a stick and hold it up. And those people that look at the serpent, look at the source of the suffering and death will be healed. And so Christ says, Jesus says, the Son of Man will be raised up. So we have to look upon death and suffering. We have to descend into hell with light, with light, the light that is never extinguished to come back to the prologue of St. John. I don’t know whether that’s there and I can be corrected on that, but that’s possibly the point where, you know, a purely social science or psychological approach might be lacking. Because I say the Christian virtue par excellence is hope, because it’s almost unique in its capacity to look into everything that is so dark and say there is yet life, there is yet light. So one of the things that really affected Jung, who, by the way, worked for the American government and the CIA during World War II, sending them psychological reports on Hitler, Jung meditated for a very long period of time on what happened in Nazi Germany. And Jung’s, the dictum that he derived from his alchemical studies was insturculines inventur, which I’m probably saying wrong, but it means the thing you want most will be found the place you least want to look. And so for Jung, because one of the questions you might ask yourself is that if enlightenment is possible, let’s say if union with the self is possible or some sort of mystical transcendence, why in the world aren’t we just all that way? What’s the barrier? It’s like, well, we could be way better. Well, why not just do it then? If it’s just right there ahead of us. But the answer to that is something like you cannot conceive of how good a human being might be until you can conceive of how evil a human being can and will be. And that means to encounter in yourself the Nazi, that the prison guard, the Auschwitz guard, to understand fully that there is no difference between you and the people who were killing children in the Nazi death camps. That’s you. And that’s that encounter with hell. That’s literally that encounter with hell. You’re a denizen of hell insofar as you’re capable of that. And you are capable of that. There isn’t anything, I think, that can scare you straight, except that knowledge. You can be and are a vessel that can be used for absolute evil and you would participate in it. You would participate in it. And so for Jung, the pathway to… It’s like Dante. You don’t get to paradise before you go to the lowest levels of hell, right at the bottom, where betrayal lurks. For Dante, that was the worst of all sins. And so it’s a terrifying process. I try to teach my students in my Maps of Meaning class, which is the opposite of a safe space as far as I’m concerned. And I mean that technically. I truly do mean that. I try to convince my students. I try to get them to meditate on the fact that they’re the damn Nazis. Really. Because what is it? It’s… What is it? The Germans? Like, come on, really? No! Obviously not. It’s people. And so the pathway to paradise is through hell. And that’s… It’s no wonder no one goes there. I mean, who wants to go there? No one. Well, if you don’t go there voluntarily, you’ll go there accidentally. So it’s better to go there voluntarily because then you can go with hope. You can say, I can withstand this. Maybe I can find a light at the end of the tunnel. A question for Mr. Pajon. You have spoken in the past about the supposedly contradictory nature of symbols. For example, water represents both healing and dangerous chaos. Can you speak about how we can resolve this apparent contradiction? And to follow up, how does this apply to the relationship between the internal mental world and the external material world? You might have to repeat the second part of that question after I answer the first part. I think… I mean, I’ve been… One of the things, as you said, that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the duality of symbols. Every image, every symbol has a dark and a light side, and you can see it when you read the Bible, when you read the stories, or even when you look at icons or when you look at images. It has to do with this idea of ascent, this idea of moving up, because… What’s important when we’re on the spiritual journey is the direction that we’re facing. It’s not so much where we are. If you can imagine the ascent of the world or of ourselves up to God as a ladder, which is how often it’s represented in Orthodox icons, as this ladder that we ascend towards God, you could be pretty high up the ladder, but if you fall, there’s no point, right? The idea is to ascend, and so all the symbols that we see in the Bible have those two sides, and water is a perfect example. In the Old Testament, all through the Old Testament, water is an image of death, the flood, and then the crossing of the Red Sea, the crossing of the Georgia, the crossing of the Jordan, it is constantly this symbol of death, but the key to resolving the duality of symbolism is Christ. He is always the key to all the stories, I believe. And so when you look at the story of Christ, and you see how he takes, let’s say, the dark side of a symbol, and he flips it over and then makes it into something else. So that’s the mystery, let’s say, of baptism. Why would we have to be baptized? I mean, it’s very strange that this flood, this Red Sea that the Egyptians were drowned in, why would we have to be baptized? Well, it’s because Christ takes this death and changes it into a process of, let’s say, washing or a process of purification. And so the same symbol, which is death, can also be a symbol of washing. So it’s the same with fire. Fire is the perfect example. I mean, we look at icons, you’ll see fire in hell, and you’ll see fire coming from the sky as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So how does that mean? And so it’s the same thing. Let’s say you see fire as division. Well, there’s a negative division, which is the division in which we scatter ourselves and we’re consumed, but there’s another type of division, let’s say the division of Pentecost, which is the division which embodies the multiplicity of how God manifests himself in the world. And so it just depends on which side you take each symbol. So I hope that answers that question. What was the second part again? Something about the deep inside? How does this apply to the relationship between the internal mental world and the external material world? Okay, yeah, I think I understand. I think I understand what that means. I think it is my belief that symbolism is anchored in experience, and I don’t think that most symbols are not just these abstract things that float above us. So for example, a good example would be, for example, the mountain. We see in the Old Testament we have this sense that Moses ascends the mountain and then encounters God, and then we see it repeated over and over in the patterns of the stories where Christ ascends a hill or ascends a mountain and then something happens. There’s a revelation on this mountain. And you think like, well, that’s strange, right? I mean, why would you want—what does a mountain have to do with anything? So I think the key to understanding a lot of symbolism is to kind of see it as an experience. And so if you ask yourself, for example, what happens when I go up a mountain? Just physically what happens? Well, as you go up a mountain, the base of the mountain, which is this huge thing, starts to refine itself. And then it starts to become smaller and smaller and smaller, and that up to you get to the point, and then everything is one. And then if you stand at the top of a mountain and you look around, when you’re at the bottom of the mountain, all you can see is the trees that are right next to you, and you can see a very particular part of the world. But if you ascend to the top of a mountain, then you have this vision of everything. And so the symbolism of the mountain, which is found in the Bible, in the Gospel, in the icons, is akin to the phenomenological reality of that thing. So we often—it’s difficult for us to get that because we’re so caught up in the scientific vision of the world that it’s difficult to understand the symbolism. But if you just put yourself in the position of someone who does something or someone—like water is the same. I mean, water—what do we do with water? We wash ourselves with water. And what is washing? Washing is removing all the external and dead things that we have on our hands so that we’re purified. Well, that’s one of the symbols of baptism. So yeah, I hope that explains that question. This question isn’t addressed to anyone in particular, so anyone willing to answer can do so. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the concept of free will. As many of the modern atheists believe that free will is an illusion according to their belief in materialism, how does one reconcile free will with an ammunitioned God who knows the end from the beginning, who knows your future, and created you such that you were compelled to realize it? So, believe it or not, we get this question all the time. We get this question from teens, believe it or not. It’s the perennial question. If God knows what’s going to happen, because he does, if God is everywhere and fills all things, he is past, present, and future, then how can you have free will? And then of course all those other implications, right? So if I don’t have free will, or if God knows what I’m going to do in the end, then does he create some people to go to hell or to be away from him or to not reach union with him and others? And if so, then how can he be loved and all these other things? So I think the fundamental misunderstanding is, I would say, the concept of time, of creation itself. So the idea that God, we think as human beings in a linear way, right? We have no other way of thinking. So we have a beginning, we have a present, and then we have an end. And this is the way the world works. It moves in one direction. We have no concept of God’s reality, the idea of being outside of time. We have no concept of that. We wouldn’t even know how to begin to think about that if we tried, and people have tried. The easiest analogy, I guess, or example that I could give would be the idea of perspective. And what do I mean by that? Let’s say I’m the camera person here, right? And I’m watching this kind of whole event unfolding after it’s happened. So it’s been videotaped, right? And somebody else can watch this, and they can watch this event, and they can forward, and they can go back, and they can go back to see something that they really liked or something that they forgot, or they can fast forward to the end and see how it all turned out. So the person who is watching that, who is removed from that reality, they can see what’s going on and what’s not going on. They can jump ahead in the past, but they don’t cause it. It’s just their perspective is different. And of course, this is kind of a crude analogy. Of course, it’s much more complex than that, and it’s much more nuanced than that. And of course, we would believe, at least as Orthodox Christians, that God is much more, permeates all things, and is working in people’s lives, but there is a strange paradox between free will, the idea that we have the choice, whether we want to follow God, to believe in him, or to believe rather in ourselves. And I think, as Professor Peterson said, the reality of the hell that many of us live in, and the reality of the hell that has been created by societies and civilizations all over the world, is a proof of the reality of free will. It’s proof. At least for people who believe in God. Now, if you don’t believe in God, it’s a different story. Then you would say, well, that’s not a proof of anything, except that we’re just animals living on this planet and there’s no meaning to anything. But if there’s a God and there are still horrible things happening, well, either that God is an evil being, or rather that we have the free will not to believe in him, not to follow him, not to do his will. And that may seem like a horrible thing for God to give to us, this idea of free will. And yet it is also the greatest thing. The greatest thing. Because it’s not only the idea of us avoiding suffering, or us avoiding sin, or us avoiding the evil that we create within the world, but it is the idea of the you, the idea that through our own sin and through our own difficulties, we somehow find meaning and we come up on the other side. So I don’t know how much better I can try to explain it. It’s a complex thing. So in the mythological world, I would say, there are three continually intertwined causal elements. One is consciousness, you could say that’s the logos. One is the interpretive structure within which that logos exists, and that’s the framework that you use to organize yourself cognitively within the world, your point of view. And then there’s the world itself, the natural world, let’s say. Those three things are always in interplay, and they’re each given causal primacy. You see this echoed in popular culture motifs, and I think Pinocchio is a very good example of that, where Pinocchio has a father, and that’s Geppetto, who’s his creator, and he’s a puppet, so a very deterministic sort of creature, and he has a mother, and that’s the blue fairy that comes down from heaven, who’s really a figure of the vitality of nature. And so Pinocchio is portrayed in the movie as child of nature and culture, which is of course how we’re portrayed scientifically. But there’s a third element in that movie, which is really what drives the plot forward, which is Pinocchio’s capacity to make choices, and that’s his consciousness, and that’s also what elevates him above the status of deterministic puppet. Now, you might say, well, there’s no evidence that we’re not deterministic, and I could say, well, that’s fine, because there’s also no evidence that we are deterministic, so we can leave that as a draw. But we certainly treat each other as if we have free will. We treat ourselves as if we have free will. We, even those of us who regard each other as deterministic believe that, or as determined, believe that in their own actions they’re going to be perfectly irritated at whatever choices you make that happen to infringe upon them, and they’re going to act towards you as if you’re an agent with free will. So they can say they regard people as deterministic, but they don’t act it out, so I don’t believe that they believe it, and I also don’t believe that you can produce a functional society without having something like that at its basis, and I’ve never seen any evidence of a functional society being produced without that as a metaphysical presupposition. So, but there’s something more crucial involved here, too, is that in order to accept the inevitability of determinism in human action, you have to accept the presupposition that consciousness is nothing but an epiphenomena of a deeper material reality, and first of all, we do not know that. We certainly do not know that. What we know about consciousness scientifically, you could put in a thimble and still have enough room for another thimble. We know nothing about it. It’s a mystery. We have not cracked at all. And people have been beadling away pretty hard on it from a scientific perspective for the last 40 years since it’s become in vogue again, and I don’t think we’ve moved forward a little bit. And finally, so it’s a mystery, and I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that it isn’t. I read Dan Dennett’s book on explaining consciousness, and it does nothing of the sort. It explains it away, and that’s that, and many critics have made the same comment. But I also think that phenomenologically speaking, it is the case that we seem to encounter the world as a field of possibility from which we extract out choices. You know, you think, well, when I talk to you about your future, I mean, you know what your future is. It’s a branching set of pathways which you can envision because you can envision the future. It’s one of the very strange things about being human. It’s a branching set of pathways of possibilities, and you can pick from among them. And I do believe that’s what you’re doing is I do believe that the world is a well of possibility and potential, and that you interact with it by choice and transform it within your limited power into what you want it to be. And I don’t think there’s any evidence to the contrary. And besides, determinism is a scientific philosophy that probably lost its vogue in about 1850. So, you know, there’s just no reason to, from a scientific perspective, to describe human beings as deterministic creatures. There’s no evidence for it. So we’re partly determined, obviously, because there’s lots of things we can’t do. But that does not by any stretch of the imagination mean we’re fully determined. Can I just add to that that, first of all, that’s a thoroughly orthodox answer, I have to say. We only can deal with what we have in front of us. I mean, picking up on Jonathan’s point earlier about experience and our own going forward. What the Church Fathers tell us, contrary to this scientific notion of time moving forward at a kind of regular rate or anything that we might have conceived in our minds, that actually each infinitesimally small moment of our existence is pregnant with infinite possibility. And so it’s precisely what has just been said, that we have that within our grasp. If only we have the eyes to see it, if only we have the hearts and minds oriented to that, the logos guiding us, then the Church Fathers talk about the fact that we can actually experience infinity in the tiniest of moments. That’s what theosis is all about. That’s what coming into contact with uncreated energies is all about in the Eastern spiritual tradition. That time and space are elastic. We knew that before Einstein ever even was born. And that’s what we have in front of us. So let’s not get into philosophical arguments about how God works and how he sees. It’s precisely Father Ted’s point. I mean, that’s irrelevant. What we know is that every tiny, tiny moment of every day and every space of this macrocosmos is the possibility of encountering the infinite, and that that’s what we have to reach forward and grasp. And that’s what our whole tradition is about. And so absolutely is our position on that point. So we don’t get into debates about predestination and not. It’s irrelevant to us. We just need to grab hold of God where he is, which is right now, in this moment, in this space, as we are. Thank you very much, Father. And thank you very much to each and every one of our panelists. Could I just get a round of applause for all of you? And with that, I’d like to conclude this night. Thank you to absolutely everyone for coming. I hope we’ve managed to learn a lot. This has been recorded. So just in case this was too much information to take in, which it certainly was for me, it will be available at some point or another. So once again, thank you all for coming out.