Douglas Murray and Jonathan Pageau ｜ EP 290 (4Modzh94MVw)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4Modzh94MVw

When I read something like a novel by Dostoevsky, I think, well, is this true? And the answer is, well, those precise events never happened. So on that basis, it’s not true. But then there’s something wrong with that description because the characterizations in Dostoevsky are so true that in some sense, they’ve never been surpassed. I do believe that the stories in Scripture happen, but I don’t believe that the people who recorded them had to do it in a way that accounts for our forensic nature, let’s say. I think that they’re doing it in a manner to show this very pattern in the story of what it is that was happening in the world. If you’re going to be a believer, you have to be able to say, in the words of the creed, that you believe in the Virgin Birth, but you believe, most importantly, in the resurrection. Many of us can walk 99 percent of the way there in terms of belief in the truth of the story, or as Betjeman puts it, but is it true? Is it true? And then stumble on the last thing. Hello, everyone watching and listening. I’m very excited today to bring to you two of my favorite people, I would say, Douglas Murray and Jonathan Pagio. I wanted to bring the three of us together to talk about the underlying metaphysical and theological substrate, if any, that constitutes the precondition for classic conservatism, small L liberalism, and maybe enlightenment rationality, as well as, let’s say, classic Western religious belief, which is sort of obviously linked to that underlying metaphysic or maybe the substrate for it. I got interested in talking to Douglas about this because we’ve been talking over a couple of years, and he’s become more convinced, I suppose, or at least curious about the relationship between pure rationality and an ethic that might be associated with pure enlightenment rationality and the relationship between that and an underlying substrate of fiction or narrative or perhaps religious belief. And I couldn’t think of anybody better to talk about that with than Jonathan Pagio. I’ve been speaking with Jonathan many times, particularly with John Vervecky, or at least occasionally with John Vervecky, who’s a cognitive scientist who’s also interested in the same things. And so I thought we’d have a chance today to delve deeply into the bottom of things on the political and conceptual and philosophical front. And so I’ll start with a brief bio, both of Mr. Murray and Mr. Pagio, and then I’ll ask Douglas about his comments and his thinking on this front, because I know, to some degree, his thinking has started to shift and change. So maybe he can outline what he did think and what he now thinks, and then we’ll enter into a follow-up conversation. Douglas Keir Murray is a British author and political commentator. Mr. Murray is associate editor of the conservative-leaning British political and cultural magazine The Spectator, and the author of many books, including, most recently, The Strange Death of Europe, 2017, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity, 2019, and The War on the West, 2022. Jonathan Pagio is a Canadian religious scholar, podcaster, and fine artist, specializing in Christian Orthodox iconography. He was a participant in a recent Exodus seminar that I hosted in Miami, accompanied by a number of other theologians, the first half of which, comprising eight sessions, will be released November 26, 2022. He is also filming a set of introductory commentaries for the forthcoming re-release of my lectures on Genesis. So, well, welcome, gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to be able to introduce the both of you. And Douglas, maybe I’ll get you to open. I remembered, and I was struck by the comments that you made, I believe, when you were talking to Dave Rubin, about the transformation of your thoughts in relationship to religious conceptualization, and your insistence, or your realization, or your speculation that something like a fictional metaphysic is a necessary precondition for the stabilization of more rational worldviews, including conservative, liberal, and perhaps scientific. And so, hopefully, I’m not putting words in your mouth. I hope I derived the right gist and conclusion from your comments. And so, I’d be happy to hear what you have to say about all that. First of all, it’s a great pleasure to be with you both, and particularly to meet Jonathan for the first time. I don’t know if there’s been a shift in the last few years in my thinking, but certainly in the last 15 years or so. No doubt about that. I was brought up a Christian, indeed in adulthood, was a believing Christian, into my late 20s. As is, I think, sometimes quite common, I fell into atheism being, I became a non-believer in my, I suppose, late 20s. And there were lots of reasons for that, we could get into. But I was very much a sort of part of that, a minor part of that new atheism movement in the 2000s. And I suppose I had a period in which I thought that that was enough. And through the years that followed that, I suppose I had some of the zeal of the convert, as it were, that can happen with atheists as much as it can happen with the religious. With the zeal of the convert, once that sort of fell away a bit, I was left with the same questions that I was before, with perhaps a less dogmatic tone. And I suppose one of the things that was on my mind increasingly in the 2010s was that question of what’s often, many people are credited with the thought, but the German jurist, Bochenförde, Ernst Wolfgang, Bochenförde is usually regarded as having done it most epigrammatically, which is to pose the question, can a society continue to survive in its form if it has cut itself off from the things that gave it birth? In other words, if you like Western societies, if you like societies like Britain, America, and elsewhere, there are several directions you can go in. One is to pretend that these societies owe nothing to Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is something that is attempted as a claim by some people. I think it’s obviously risible. Once you accept that the Christian tradition at least gave a very significant amount, at least was an incredibly important strand of our societies, and what we treasure and cherish in our societies today, we would not treasure or cherish if we didn’t have that inheritance. Once you accept that, then there’s this question of, is that society you have able to sustain itself, are the things you love able to sustain themselves and be replenished without reference to the thing that gave them birth? Put it another way, let’s say we’re sitting on a branch, does the branch remain up if the roots of the tree are not nurtured? And putting it that way, of course, makes the answer rather obvious, which is, well, obviously not. If you use the branch of the tree analogy, obviously that doesn’t work. That’s like soaring off the branch you’re sitting on. But then that poses a further question, and I addressed this a bit in the book you referred to there, Jordan, The Strange Death of Europe. There are a number of chapters I use in that book, which is about movement of peoples in the 21st century, the ease of movement, migration, and many other difficult questions. But the part of the book which, at least I think is the most significant, if I say to myself, is the portion on what I describe as a state of Western man’s belief in the 21st century. That history has happened, discoveries have happened, biblical criticism has happened, Darwin has happened, science has happened, discoveries have happened. The way in which we used to explain things we didn’t know by putting God in there has increasingly been narrowed so that increasingly we know through science and discoveries how certain things in our universe happen, how certain things in our bodies happen, and the role of God diminishes and diminishes. But as I explained in The Strange Death of Europe, we are in this, and I myself am in this uncomfortable position because, of course, if you believe and recognize that what you love and want to sustain is a very significant part from this particular route, what do you do? Various theologians, albeit perhaps heretical theologians like Don Cupid and Richard Holloway, have also asked this question, but it’s a difficult and I admit frustrating position to be in, the one that I hold, because in part, and I think Jordan, you yourself have experienced this, in part it’s frustrating because Christians say, well, therefore, why don’t you just believe? And that’s not as straightforward as those Christians seem to think. They seem to think, well, we’ve got you in a corner by you recognizing what you owe to the religion. So therefore, make the final leap. For the last 30 years, we’ve helped Americans diversify into gold, and we can help you too. Did you know you can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account? We can help you transfer an IRA or 401k tied to stocks into an IRA in gold. If you’re skeptical about the trajectory of the economy in the US dollar, then text JORDAN to 989898. The Search Gold Group will send you a free info kit on securing your savings with gold. With thousands of satisfied customers, five-star reviews, and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, we take precious metals seriously. Text JORDAN to 989898 for your free info kit. Yeah, well, the question then becomes what is that leap? So let me offer you a proposition here, and you tell me what you think about this, and then maybe Jonathan can chime in. So, you know, the battle between the atheist, rationalist, materialists, let’s say, and the religious types, if it’s played out on the battleground set by the atheist materialists, is a battle between the claims that the scientific mode of explanation and the religious mode of explanation are alike in kind, but different in conclusion. And so that you have a description of the world where God’s a causal agent, and you have a description of the world where natural processes are causal agents, and the scientists tend to win that battle. But then I think, well, there’s a problem with that, because it isn’t obvious to me at all that the way that God is conceptualized in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and maybe more universally, is as an analogue of a material cause. If I look through the biblical canon and the way that God is characterized as a character, let’s say, in some sense as a fictional character, and I’ll return to that idea, his essence is something more like role model and spirit to emulate. It’s something like a mode of being. It’s an enacted mode of being in the world, rather than a pure causal agent. And the problem with the scientific endeavor is that, as Hume so famously pointed out, there’s a huge gap between is and ought. And what I see offered on the religious front is an answer to the question of ought. And then I’ll add one more thing to that. So this is how you ought to behave. Not only to behave, but how you ought to perceive, how you ought to make a hierarchy of your attentional resources so that you’re looking at the right thing and acting in the right way toward the proper goals all the time. How do you orient yourself to do that? And I don’t think that the, first of all, the atheist types can’t respond to that, because there’s no way that they can produce an ethic on the fly in some sense. And that was Hume’s objection. And it also, thinking about the problem this way, see, it also opens the door to a deeper understanding of the role that fiction and mythology play. Because you can think of fiction, including mythology, as a form of abstraction that characterizes patterns of behavior and action, rather than a form of abstraction that describes the world the way science does. And that way fiction becomes a different kind of truth, which is a pragmatic truth rather than a descriptive or propositional truth. And it’s oriented towards ethics and the direction of attention. And so I’m increasingly thinking about the heavenly hierarchy as a internal, in some sense, psychological structure through which we see the world. And I’ll add one more thing to that and turn it over to Jonathan. The other thing that strikes me as psychologically unassailable is the fact that you need a uniting principle to orient your perceptions and actions toward for two reasons, two fundamental reasons, three fundamental reasons. One is, if you’re aiming towards something valuable, that gives you positive emotion and hope. And so all the motivation that goes along with that fills you with enthusiasm. Second, if you don’t have a uniting ethic that governs your own perceptions and actions, then you’re confused and in disarray. And the cost of that is anxiety and hopelessness and pain and frustration and disappointment and grief, all of the negative emotions. And then third, if you don’t have a uniting ethic, and so that has to be united under something like a monotheistic superordinate entity, if you don’t have that, then you have social disarray because there’s nothing that unites people in their common ethical pursuit. And that’s their behavior and their perceptions. And so I’ll let Jonathan comment on that a bit. No, I think what you’re saying is right on track. That is, one of the problems that happen in the story of Christianity is something like the Enlightenment and modernism, which is that as the world was moving towards this notion of mechanical causation and the interest in mechanical causation, there came to be a misunderstanding of the way that traditional Christians believed the world actually existed. And so there’s a difference between the material causes and something like the vertical cause of something. And the vertical cause of something is exactly this hierarchy that Jordan is talking about. And I would push what Jordan is saying even further. That is, it does actually affect to a certain extent even the is, because we can’t perceive an is without a hierarchy of attention and without a hierarchy of perception, because the world is indefinite in detail and in quantity. And so for even to be able to say this, to point to something, to say that, is already in this hierarchy of something we could call vertical causation. So this glass has millions and millions of aspects to it. But we nonetheless are able to see it as one. And the fact that we see it as one is a total mystery to scientists. They don’t know how to account for it. They use words like emergence. And you could just use the word magic and we’d be the same. It’s like this jump into unity. That is the type of causation that we talk about when we talk about religious causation. Well, that unity that you discuss in relationship to the glass is a pragmatic unity because… It’s a unity of good. It’s a unity of purpose. Well, that’s also a unity of good. Well, then you think, well… It’s an ethical in a general, very general sense. It’s an ethical unity because it’s a source of good. Well, I would say in a specific sense, because if you were a photo realist painter, you could spend a month painting all the reflections on that glass. It’s a very complex thing to perceive. But you perceive it as a unity. And we know this neuropsychologically. We know this scientifically. You perceive it as a unity because you can grip it and because you can raise it to your lips and because you can drink it and because you need to drink water to survive. And you are willing to drink water to survive because you believe emotionally and motivationally and perhaps rationally that survival is a good. And that’s dependent on your belief that human existence in some sense is a good and that it’s striving towards some sort of higher unified order. And you might think, well, you don’t need all that to perceive the glass. And the answer is, yeah, as a matter of fact, you need all of that to perceive the glass. And if you lose some of that because of various forms of cortical damage, let’s say you enter into the realm of all sorts of bizarre blindnesses. And so and so that point you make about the is being dependent on the ought is also extremely interesting because if the world is infinitely complex, which seems to be the case or close enough, the the hierarchy of attention you bring to bear on it and so your intent determines in no small part the array of manifestations that that infinity will produce in your field of apprehension. And that does determine to some degree at least what adds elements of the object you have access to and then manipulate and then bring into being. I’ve been thinking about objects, too, as this. So they have this reality surrounded by a field of possibility. Right. And so the object isn’t just what it is. It’s also a set of things that it could become with varying degrees of difficulty depending on your intent. So it’s a combination of being and becoming could become a weapon. It couldn’t become a car. Right. Right. So it has an identity, but it’s also surrounded by a field of possibilities. That’s a good way to talk. Right. Right. Right. Right. The point is that when we look at the way that the creation of the world is described in Genesis, it’s related exactly to that. God creates something, sees it, and sees that it’s good. And so there’s this notion of apprehension of identities and realizing that those identities have to do with their the fact that they’re bound up in a value judgment, even though it’s not necessarily moral. It’s just a value judgment about how good something is. Because if I see a glass, I am always asking, is it a good glass, even if I don’t do it consciously necessarily, because I have to I know that it’s there to grip and to drink from. And it’s the same even with like even scientists are doing that because they have to focus their attention on something because they can’t study everything at once. They have to decide I’m going to study this and I’m going to decide going to decide the reason why I study that. And therefore I’m going to be able to identify the facts that fit with my theory and prove my theory. So even the scientist is moving is moving in this type of perception of the world, even sometimes without realizing it. I’d like to make a comment on the scientific front, too. And I really started to think about this after talking to Dr Dawkins and I suppose to some degree to Sam Harris, too, on the atheist front. And so I know that as the death of God in the Nietzschean terms has progressed, we’ve lost faith in an increasing range of underlying realities. And the first might be the deistic reality. But then what we’ve seen happening under the onslaught of postmodernist thought is that we’re starting to lose faith in the idea of fact itself. And then I was thinking, well, what’s the precondition for being a scientist? And I thought, well, in some sense, it’s a deistic pre there’s deistic preconditions because one of the things that characterizes scientists, and this includes people like Dawkins, who’s a real scientist, is that the scientist presumes axiomatically that there is a transcendent realm outside the domain of epistemological theory. So if you have a scientific theory and you’re a real scientist, you know that your theory, which is really what you see when you look at the world, you know that your theory is insufficient in comparison to the reality that transcends it. And so then as a scientist, what you try to do is you try to pit your theory up against the transcendent reality so that it fails, so that you find something about what you don’t understand that is able to make itself manifest. Then you adjust the theory to get a better grip on the world, and you assume while you’re doing that, that there’s an underlying logic to the transcendent object, and that analysis of that underlying object is both corrective and redemptive. And as far as I can tell, those are all essentially axiomatic religious claims and that they’re preconditions for any true empirical science. And then so what that implies is that if we lose faith in the transcendent hierarchy, we might lose the entire scientific endeavor. Let me just briefly, if I may, take us away from the glass of water, because I only have Jonathan Page’s word that it is a glass of water, and I don’t want to get into that. Let me address what I think is a sort of necessary thing to begin with, which is the issue of the magisteria. We are talking about them separately, but of course the interrelation of them, whether or not the realms of science and religion are overlapping magisteria or not. And of course some people would claim that they’re absolutely unrelated. We’re getting towards, I think, in this discussion the realization that of course they’re overlapping to some degree. We don’t know exactly how much. Jonathan probably thinks very significantly, I suspect Jordan thinks, to some extent, and I would say to some extent as well. But let me throw out then two issues that I would put as a challenge both for the religious and the non-religious in the discussion that we’re heading towards. The first is the challenge for the non-religious, and that’s to do with something that Jordan’s already talked about, which is the area of ethics and shared values and much more. A great challenge for the non-believers in our age is that issue of where the values come from. And as Jordan’s already suggested, for instance, the Enlightenment, the idea of rationalism, soul rationalism, which not all Enlightenment thinkers were dealing with, but many were. The idea of rationalism being the soul way in which to discern ethics seems to me not to have been embedded very wide or very deep and may suggest that it’s just not possible as a project. So to quote my late friend, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, on this, the idea that ethics are self-evident is self-evidently wrong. So let me throw that out first as a challenge for the non-believer. Then the challenge for the believer comes down to this thing that Jordan’s also already dealt in, which is the issue of, let’s say, myth or story. Because we might agree, for instance, that we need a story to agree upon or a myth to agree upon or a set of ideas to rely upon and to ground ourselves in. And that doesn’t necessarily, of course, by any means lead to the fact that those things are also true. We get into the realm of what Schopenhauer in the Dialogue on Religion, which always made a huge impression on me, deals in, where he says, of course, what he describes as the tragedy of the clergy. The tragedy of the clergy is that they know the necessity of the thing. They know the truthfulness of the story in a certain sense of truthfulness, but could never admit, or their job would be over, that that’s what it is. In other words, they have to continue to deal in it as if this is not simply story or unifying myth or anything like that, but is something which has a truth claim behind it. And then let me just say one other thing on that, which is this. The issue of unifying ethic, because it must be what we’re sort of somehow also among other things, as well as trying to define what the true is and what the real is, must be one of the things that we must sort of try to grapple towards. The issue on this seems to me to be, is the Christian ethic, the Christian tradition, to think of it in Hegelian terms, is it an exhausted force or an unexhausted force? This for our age seems to me to be one of the absolutely crucial issues to address. Is it exhausted or unexhausted? I have a few things to say. First about the idea of the ethic question. Now there’s something which is actually, especially in your project, there’s something which is more than about ethics and about how we should act. It has to do with the glass, sorry, Douglas, but let’s bring it to people now. It has to do with why do we think people are the same? How do we recognize ourselves as being the West or being England or America? These things, that’s first, that’s the question. That is, what is it that we have in common, that we celebrate in common, that we recognize in common as binding us together? And my contention is that one of the things that happened during the Enlightenment is that people thought we can get rid of God, but we can keep our nation or whatever. But then that was a slippery slope. As soon as we got rid of the transcendent, the thing we wanted to have, the king, the queen, the president, this narrative which was at a lower level, started to crumble and to break down. And so it’s not just about how we should act, but it’s even how we recognize each other as belonging to the same category. Yeah, but let me leap in there with something else. I would go a level beneath that, which is something which I think we could agree on, which the Enlightenment thinkers were dealing in, and the religious are dealing with, which is a much more important issue than mere issues of nationhood or belonging, which is, are we beings with value? Yeah, that’s for sure. Very important. That, of course, historically is not the case. Most empires in history, in the ancient world and much more, saw most people as having no value. One of the revelations, obviously, I use the term in a certain degree of quotation marks, but one of the revelations of the Christian tradition is the idea that everybody does have intrinsic value. And we’ve all grown up and everyone during the Enlightenment is dealing in those terms. They’re trying to extend, if anything, the idea of Christian value. And there are some Christian theologians who say the very idea of where we are now is, in a sense, an embodiment of the Christian tradition, which is in the tradition of human rights law and much more. We accept it like fish accept water, that people have value. But that, of course, as we know, we can look around the world today to other places and other parts of the world. And we realize that there are still parts of the world where people do not have any value and their lives are regarded as valueless. And that isn’t even regarded as being a tragedy in the way that we would regard it. So the idea that we’re beings with value is something that has been so deeply built into our sense as a society. They don’t even realize that this is what we’re swimming in now. Obviously, that comes from the Christian tradition. It comes from the idea that we’re created in the image of God. Exactly. The image of God and then the Enlightenment rationalist project, obviously, to some extent, extends or tries to embed and deepen aspects of that, including, of course, the idea of religious toleration. Because, again, one of the reasons why Europe stopped believing was not just what laid out as having happened in the 19th century, but perhaps the worst realization of all, which was the repeated realization that peoples of faith could not exist together. I mean, this is what Europe learns in the 16th century. And it goes awfully deep, that realization, and changes everything. Part of the striving towards monotheism, let’s say, if you think about that psychologically, I would say the striving towards monotheism is a descriptive enterprise to some degree, because it’s an attempt to characterize the nature of the spirit that should be put at the highest place in the hierarchy of perception and action. And then that begs the question, what should be put in the highest place? So let me walk through something, and you guys tell me what you think about this. I used to ask my students, why are you writing this essay? And that’s a variation of the question, why do anything? But let’s make it concrete. Why are you writing this essay? Well, so that I can get a grade for the class. Why are you taking the class? So that I can finish my year at university. Why are you finishing your year at university and motivated to do that? To get my degree. Why do you want the degree? Well, then it gets fuzzier. Well, maybe I want a job, or maybe I want to be an educated person, or some amalgam of those. Why do you think it’s a good reason to be an educated person or to have a productive career? Well, because I want to be a good person. Well, why do you want to be a good person? Well, because that’s part of acting out, and this is where it starts to delve into the mythological. Because being a good person makes society work properly and is the best route to, say, life more abundant. And so what does it mean to be a good person? Then it means something like, well, to orient yourself towards the highest good and to speak the truth. And then that’s a whole hierarchy of value that is definitely governing either in an integrated manner or a disintegrated manner the actions of the person who’s writing the essay. And you might say, well, how hard are you going to try when you write this essay? And the answer to that would be, well, it depends on how well integrated my view of the ethic is all the way up to the highest place. And then we could say, well, the highest place is the divine place. And we could make that a matter of definition. And so then we might say, well, what should be in the divine place? And I would say, well, it has to be something that you can look at the world through and it has to be something you act out. And then we could say, well, that still leaves residual mystery. And then we might ask, well, how do we characterize it? And I would say we characterize that using fiction. Because fiction is the abstraction of hierarchies of attentional prioritization and action. And so we could say that in the highest sense in the biblical corpus, God is the ultimate fictional character. And then we’re trying to characterize his nature as that which should be emulated that unites us psychologically and socially. And so I’ll walk through like five representations. So what should be in the highest place? OK, the spirit that allows you to walk unselfconsciously in the garden. The spirit that calls you to the appropriate dedicated sacrifice. So that’s from the Cain and Abel story. The spirit that calls you to batten down the hatches if you’re wise when the floods are coming. The spirit that warns you against producing totalitarian spirits of towers of Babel. The spirit that calls you to out of your father’s tent. That’s Abraham to the adventure of your life. The spirit that calls you out of the tyranny of Egypt or any tyranny into the desert and then guides you through the desert. And then I’ll skip the rest of the Old Testament for the sake of brevity and jump into the New Testament. Because there’s a characterization of that which is in the highest place that’s revolutionary that emerges out of the Old Testament. But it’s the spirit that makes you voluntarily willing to bear the entire cross of human suffering and malevolence. And then that character that’s at the top of the hierarchy of attention and action, that’s characterized as God. You can say, well, is that a fiction? It’s a fiction, but you have to retool your notion of fiction because fiction then becomes the deepest form of ethical abstraction. And so it’s a meta-truth rather than a falsehood. And then if Jonathan’s right, and I think he is, and I think John Vervecki agrees with this, is that if we have to perceive the world with its multiplicity of possibilities through the lens of an ethic, that ethic becomes the defining tool that we use, in fact, to extract even factual information out of the infinite array of information that presents itself to us. And so not only is science nested inside a fiction in some sense, the fiction is more deeply true than the science. And it’s so deeply true that without the fiction, you don’t even have the precondition for science. Although is it still a fiction? Is it still a fiction, Jordan? For you, this is your stuff in the shop and Harry. Well, Jonathan and I were talking about this last night, you know, about because we just sat and did this long seminar on Exodus. And you might ask, well, did the events in Exodus really happen? And our conclusion was, well, not only did they, they happened in a meta manner, they’re still happening. They happened so, they happened with such reality that they haven’t stopped happening. And so, and what does that mean? Well, everyone still struggles with the spirit of tyranny. And everyone still struggles with the fact that when you escape from a tyranny, you don’t hit the promised land, you hit the desert. And then when you’re in the desert of your imagination or with your lost peers, then you need to struggle with what guides you and what should guide you when you’re lost. And then you have to grapple with the problem of appropriate and reliable forms of governance, because that’s all part of the Exodus story. And so it didn’t happen the way a happening would occur if you just detailed it out as a camera holding empirical observer. It happened in a way deeper way that just doesn’t stop happening. So I think that that’s, for me, like for sure the fiction thing is a difficulty for me, that category. But I can follow the process and understand this idea that they have abstracted, this abstracted story that moves up. But then what I think is that it’s causal, that we’re actually discovering a pattern which is causal to the rest. And so that it’s not just that it’s a fiction, it’s actually that which gives it makes it possible for the world to exist. And so the word fiction at this point becomes ridiculous. It’s not a fiction. It’s actually the source of reality. And so that’s God, right? It’s the source of the possibility for reality to exist. And the manner in which, let’s say, that happens is not just a description of mechanical causes. It has to do with this orientation towards the good, this ethic which comes down and makes it even possible for us to perceive the world. And so I think that for me, for sure, it’s not a fiction. It’s not a fiction. I think that the events in scripture happened, but they don’t have to be described in a way that is equivalent to our scientific understanding, because they’re trying to account for more than our scientific understanding. Just like, well, the reason I would throw a word in here for fiction, I mean, we would have to retool our understanding of what fiction is. And so that’s part of the problem. But when I read something like a novel by Dostoevsky, I think, well, is this true? And the answer is, well, those precise events never happened. So on that basis, it’s not true. But then there’s something wrong with that description, because the characterizations in Dostoevsky are so true that in some sense they’ve never been surpassed. And so, and I do think, to elaborate on Jonathan’s point, is that imagine that human beings, like any other object, have a being and then a realm of possible becoming. And I would say our attempts to characterize the spirit at the top of the attentional hierarchy is an attempt to flesh out and to discover the realm of human possibility. And so it does bring it into being to some degree, even though it’s implicate in the order. And that would be the logos of the world, right? It’s like, what’s the Bible about? Well, it’s about people, clearly. And so everything that’s detailed out in those stories is about the nature of humanity. Now, how that’s related to the nature of the divine is something we’re trying to puzzle out. But it’s clearly about people. And is it true? Well, it has this weird sense of being true that we just described. But there’s also a reality, which is that in a world that understands this or lives in this way, then the manner that they will perceive, remember, and tell stories will be different from the way that you tell a policeman the type of story. And so what we’re asking of scripture is not only not the right questions, we’re not understanding what type of descriptions that they are. And so I do believe that the stories in scripture happen, but I don’t believe that the people who recorded them had to do it in a way that accounts for our forensic nature, let’s say. The way that we think that something happened in the world in terms of a scientist would describe phenomena. I think that they’re doing it in a manner to show this very pattern in the story of what it is that was happening in the world. Yes. I’m wary about some of this because we need to get down to brass tacks, as it were. And Jonathan has done one, but Jordan, you talked about it again as a story and as you say, I mean, dosto yeti. Obviously, if you say it’s dosto yeti true, you need to say in what sense. But then, I mean, the issue with the Bible, the issue with Christianity, the issue with faith is that it’s obviously different. It must be in a different realm. It’s clearly in a different realm because it claims different things for itself. Dostoevsky doesn’t demand that we believe that Raskolnikov lived. The Bible, if you’re going to be a believer, you have to be able to say, in the words of the Creed, that you believe in the virgin birth, that you believe, most importantly, in the resurrection. And as you well know, Jordan, many of us can walk 99% of the way there in terms of belief in the truth of the story or as Betjeman puts it, but is it true? Is it true? And then stumble on the last thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. So one of the things you pointed out in your conversation with Dave Rubin was that the religious substrate risks devolving into something like a puerile social justice without its rooting in something like transcendent mystery. And so let’s just leave that as a proposition for a moment. And then I want to return to the issue of the resurrection. So I’ll push that as far as I’ve been able to push it. And so it definitely appears to me that the story of the Passion is an archetypal and foretold tragic catastrophe. And I’ll explain the foretold part later. So it’s an archetypal catastrophe because it melds all the worst things that could happen to a person in their life. And so it’s death, but it’s knowledge of certain death associated with death. And then it’s youthful death, and then it’s youthful death at the hands of the mob, and it’s youthful death at the hands of the mob despite innocence, despite the mob knowing of innocence. And worse, and in front of the mother. In front of the mother, yes. And as a consequence of the relativistic nihilism of the Romans and the tyranny and the choice of the crowd, and the betrayal of a best friend, all of that. And so it is definitely a journey through all the worst things you could confront in your life. But then that’s not enough, eh? Because there’s the mythological cloud, let’s say, around the narrative, because dying horribly and unjustly isn’t enough. You also have to go to hell and harrow it. And so that would mean that the ultimate extension of the human experience is not only the confrontation with malevolence and unjust death of the innocent, but a genuine journey into hell. Okay, then the question would be, and this is the sticker as far as I’m concerned, is isn’t it the case that in your own life, Douglas, that the more deeply that you’ve peered into the abyss of things, the more likely it is that a light shines through it. And this is sort of the ultimate question of the resurrection, is like, how do you revivify your faith in life? And the answer might be, it might really be, by the radical acceptance of the malevolent tragedy of life, but even more than that, by the radical embracing of even the hellish aspect of life. And that if you did that radically enough, well, who knows what would happen? I mean, we know clinically, look, we know clinically, if you find what people are avoiding and are afraid of and are disgusted by that’s blocking their pathway forward, and you get them to confront that voluntarily, they get courageous and better. It’s clearly the case, and it looks to me like the passion representation and its mythological substrate is exposure therapy on a cosmic level. And you know that the more deeply you grapple with the fundamental issues of life, the wiser and broader you get. And then I guess I would ask, if everyone did that to the utmost, what would it be that we might be able to conquer? And I don’t know the answer to that. Life would radically transform. I mean, I see what happens, because people write me all the time, I see what happens when people adopt a certain amount of responsibility for their life. I mean, they write and they say, man, everything’s way better. It’s like, okay, how much better could it be? And this is also associated with this idea in the New Testament. There’s a section, I believe it’s in the Sermon on the Mount, where Christ says it might not be, but he says that heaven will not emerge and all things will not manifest themselves. So everyone brings everything inside them out, right? Their divine possibility, let’s say, and that part of the reason that the world has fallen the way it is, is because we hold back our best. And we don’t abide by the law and the prophetic spirit, and we don’t bring everything that’s within us out into the world. And the world is lesser as a consequence of that. And I do believe that we don’t bring our best out because we’re afraid and because we’re desperate and because we don’t have the courage to confront the malevolence and suffering and the hellish aspect of life. So I do think so. You look at the death and you say, well, is the death more real and the hell more real or is the resurrection more real? And obviously in some sense I’m speaking symbolically. But it seems to me it’s the same idea, you know, that it’s ancient mythological idea that you could go into the belly of the beast and rescue your father. And you know you’re trying to do that with your book, The War in the West, right? It’s like you see the assault on these values and you’re attempting to resurrect those values. I see that as the same pattern. But I think, so I think Douglas, I understand your question. Like I understand your question. The answer is, is the grave empty? Something like that. Like was the grave empty? And this is, I think, where maybe it’s the most difficult for many materialists to understand. And I know that my ramblings about the glass and about the good and about this might seem like it’s going all over the place. But it’s actually supremely important to understand that if you change your perception about the manner in which the world exists, focused based on the idea of a good, of an ethic, that it’s what underlies even the factuality of the world, then that which will convince me of the truth of the resurrection is not about a bunch of material facts. It’s about the imposition of that story, it being so real that it overwhelms everything else. And it shines a light on everything else. Through the image of the resurrection, we’re able to see everything through it. And so if you ask me like what is the mechanical cause of the resurrection, like how is it that this body could have, I would say that is obfuscated not only in the text, but also in the creed. The reason why in the creed it says he rose again according to the scriptures is because nobody wanted to try to give you a mechanical description. And in the text itself, when the disciples encounter Christ, they don’t even recognize him. What is going on there? They don’t even know who he is. Well, in the beginning at Emmaus, yes. Yeah, so there’s a desire in the text to obfuscate the mechanical causes of the resurrection. And that is not the way, so if you try to get at it that way, you’re never going to get there, obviously. But I don’t get there that way because I don’t, I see through the world, through the resurrection. And it makes so much more sense. And that’s maybe C.S. Lewis’ argument is to say, it’s like give me that one, we need one miracle. Everybody needs one miracle to then lay the world out from that miracle, whether it’s the Big Bang, whether it’s whatever it is, you need that first miracle. So give me the resurrection and I’ll explain the entire key of human experience through that one miracle. So that is what convinces me of the resurrection. I don’t know if that makes sense to you. So I was thinking about this idea, too. I’m sure Jonathan loves some criticisms of this idea, but we’ll see. So there’s this idea in Christianity that the voluntary sacrifice of Christ redeemed the world. And so then you might ask, well, and that that’s already happened in some fundamental sense. But the stories that put that proposition forward play with the idea of time in an extreme way, because you have the notion, for example, of God being the Alpha and the Omega and being outside of time. And so the manner in which time is being used in the stories is very, it’s very mysterious. But then I would say, well, it seems to me that it’s something like this, is that a sufficiently courageous confrontation with the catastrophe of life would redeem it to an indeterminate degree. And that’s already happened because we have the example. But even though it’s already happened, we still have to do it. It’s something like that. And, you know, there’s this emphasis in the biblical writings in particular that each person has a divine part to play and that in some sense, the part that each person plays is equally necessary and equally valuable. And so we have the pattern, which is to confront things in as forthright a manner as we possibly can and to bear the maximal degree of responsibility. And that will redeem things. But we still have a real destiny. Like we each have something real to do that hasn’t been, that’s been granted to us or that hasn’t been taken away from us or lifted away from us. And we could turn the world into hell if we wanted to. But we could maybe do the alternative in some real sense. I don’t disagree with that. What Jonathan says about the resurrection and reality, of course, raises a particular conundrum, which is that if you’re going to use religion as an explanation of reality, you’re also describing the event that subverts reality completely. That the resurrection is the thing that is the least possible thing to do, given the world as we understand it. Least possible than the Big Bang, for example. I don’t know. I see all scientists move towards something which is least possible, let’s say. As a pre-eating. Oh yeah, of course. That’s something that is impossible as a precondition for possibility. What I’m trying to get to is a sort of, not diminish it, but having your cake and eating it thing, which is religion explaining reality, reality explained by religion, and also this thing happens that has never been able to happen. And that if you can make that leap, then you’ve got the faith in religion. I’m not saying that this isn’t possible to do. You obviously do it yourself. But it’s two things that seem to be in some very, very deep way contradictory. And maybe the contradiction is the point. Well, I think you also do it imperfectly. You ask yourself, you’re in some ways on the edges of the cultural battlefront. You ask yourself, how much of the catastrophe of the world can you voluntarily take on? There’s many, many problems that beset us. And there’s a great adventure in trying to rectify them. And it’s an open question how much better you can get at that if you proceed in the spirit of goodwill. I think that’s an indication in the most fundamental sense of your belief. You know, because we don’t want to reduce this to a proposition again. Because I don’t think that’s the right, I think it’s an axiom of faith. It’s something like, okay, do I believe in the resurrection? It’s like, well, it’s not a scientific proposition. At least I’m not going to treat it that way at the moment. It’s a manner of confronting reality. And so then it would be a statement of faith, which is that I believe that if I act oriented towards love and life more abundant, and if I speak the truth, then I can prevail against the gates of hell. And I’m willing to put my life on the line to see if that’s true. And I would say that’s the faith, right? Because who knows? But what’s the alternative? It’s like, are we going to accept the ultimate, what would you say, the ultimate metaphysical reality of the pointlessness of being and the atrociousness of hellish suffering? I mean, it looks to me like we can rectify that. And it also looks like we have to move towards that rectification in something like faith, right? Okay, but let me return to the two questions I posed earlier on about this, were the thing that the religious have a problem with and the thing that the non-religious have a problem with. Putting my cards on the table, I would be relatively happy for Jonathan’s view to be dominant in my society and for me never to be asked whether I literally believe in the resurrection, to dodge the question. I’d be relatively happy for that to be the situation, because there is the place where we get into an awful lot of problems. But that there is virtue and good in what he’s describing. We could leave it as a mystery, unless our age happened to be leaning on this because it needed to know whether the story was literally true, more than Dostoevsky, more than the great poetry, that it was the thing that we relied on more than anything. You would need to know that in that situation. So I think that for sure Christians believe that the resurrection happened, that it’s an event, that it’s something that is not just a fiction in the simplest sense. But they also do insist that you can’t describe it in terms of mechanical causes, that it cannot be reduced to that. And so people always ask me, like, did Jesus sit up in the grave? And I’m like, I don’t, that’s not what the text says. If you read what it says in Scripture, it leaves it very mysterious at what the event is. I think for the reason that it is in some way a meta-event. It’s an event which is, you know, even in Scripture there’s even this description that talks about Christ as being the lamb that was sacrificed before the foundation of the world. That is the notion that the death and the resurrection of Christ is in some ways the foundation of reality. So, and it’s not, I know it’s hard because people are such scientists and such materialists that they struggle. But that’s why I try to help people understand this, the fact that attention precedes phenomena. And that’s why sacrifice comes before phenomena. The importance of sacrificing the externals, of being able to perceive and give up the unity of something, that is actually the foundation of reality. And so it’s ritualized in cultures as actual physical sacrifice, that’s fine. But then it leads up to the mystery of Christ, which is that ultimately the highest version of that is self-sacrifice. If you do that and you participate in that, you are gaining a key to the mystery of how reality actually lays itself out. Let’s look at, I’ve always been struck by Michelangelo’s Pieta. And so, because it’s a sacrificial offering, and so we could say, well, what’s the precondition for the life of an autonomous child? And the precondition is that the mother is willing to offer up the child as a sacrificial entity in the face of life. And the psychoanalysts used to describe the necessary failure of the mother. So that’s the anti-edipal mother. The edipal mother protects and shelters. Right. And then destroys because of that. Whereas the non-edipal mother lets go so the child can be hurt and broken and killed by the world. And so then you might say, well, the willingness to sacrifice the innocent to the realities of existence is a precondition for existence. And I actually think that’s true. And so Jonathan’s notion that the sacrifice of the innocent lamb is a precondition for existence. You could say at least that that’s true phenomenologically. Or maybe for the existence that isn’t hell, because that’s another way of thinking about it. Let me just pick up on this point again, because we might be returning to what I described as these two problems we’ve got to address. The first is whether it’s possible to accept the idea of religion being true in some sense and essentially philosophy for the masses. Which is how many 19th century thinkers were already thinking about it. That you can say it’s true in some sense and it’s the best way to allow the largest number of people to contend with the deepest set of ideas. Because philosophy is only ever going to be an elite sport, and no derogatory term of the meaning elite. But only a small number of people are going to engage in it. Most people are not going to engage in it. Therefore, religion is the best means to engage with meaning in the world. That’s one way of seeing things to begin with. And that’s something we could contend with. But the second thing I wanted to say is just to give Jonathan a breather as it were on some of my demands. Which is what about the non-religious in this? And the non-religious problem in all of this, it comes back to what you described earlier Jordan, as the patterns problem. The patterns we see in the universe, including patterns of truth. What does the non-believer do when they find, for instance, the beauty of a mathematical formula which works and is there and is true? What does it mean? What does it mean when we find extraordinary patterns in nature? What does it mean when we find patterns in our own lives? And what you describe as things like that thing that people can recognize, of needing to see through the void and see the glimpse of light. What do you do about the sense, for instance, that we know that we’re contending with a very, very difficult problem in our lives. We’ve set so many difficult problems in our lives, one of which, perhaps the most, the deepest of which is, does this matter? Does this matter beyond itself? Or one of my favorite quotes from Rilke, Rilke says in one of the Duino elegies, does the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us at all? Does the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us at all now? Our senses, probably one of our deepest hopes is that the answer is yes. That what we do in our lives does not just matter to us or just to the people around us, although that’s not nothing, but matters in some far higher sense. And then we get to that question underneath that, which is, are we simply meaning-seeking beings or is there meaning? And the problem with this question is it leans us towards the second one. Our deepest hope is that the second one is true. Okay, so when I look at that, I start by trying to determine what people react to as if it’s real. And the scientific answer would be, well, there’s nothing more real than matter. And I would say, no, that’s not actually how people act. When push comes to shove, people act like there’s nothing more real than pain. And you can’t argue yourself out of pain or you can do that with great difficulty. And so we can start with the reality of suffering. And then I would say that that’s a phenomenological description or an existential description of reality. But I’m okay with that because I’m not going to make the assumption that reality is fundamentally material and devoid of purpose. It might be, but it might not be because we’re trying to figure out what’s fundamental. Okay, we act as if pain is real. We act as if the pain of infants is particularly real. Okay, then you might say, well, is there anything more real than pain? And I would say, yeah, there is. The meaning that overcomes pain is more real than the pain. And then I would say, well, that’s actually what meaning is. And I could speak psychologically about this. It’s like we know the quality of a meaningful experience. It’s engaging. It’s engrossing. It activates positive emotion and enthusiasm. It makes people more creative. It quells anxiety. And it’s an analgesic, probably mediated by opiate mechanisms. And then the phenomena of meaning seems to emerge on the axis between chaos and order. And so let’s say that we fall into a deeply meaningful conversation like the one we’re having now. And the reason it’s meaningful is because our nervous systems are signaling to us that we’re inhabiting a structure that we comprehend and that’s secure and that we understand what’s going on so we’re not anxious and upset. But we’re moving new information into that structure at an optimized rate. And our nervous system signals to us that that’s deeply meaningful. And that regulates our positive emotion and quells our negative emotion. But I think all of that’s occurring in relationship to this entire hierarchy of attentional priority that we described. And so the more deeply meaningful something is, the more it’s associated with every level in that hierarchy all the way up to the level of divinity itself. And then it’s a matter of faith. It’s like, well, is that a reflection of fundamental reality? And the answer might be, it might be. We also don’t have access to any other reality. It’s actually the other reality that doesn’t participate in this hierarchy of attention, this hierarchy of goods, which is, I would say a delusion, but it’s at least something that you’re positing without much proof that it exists. The idea that the world out there completely exists neutrally without a value hierarchy which sustains it into unities is something which I think is more dubious than the other way around. I think the scientific evidence supports that proposition now. You could take your idea of pain and meaning and you could reduce it to the most simple experience of the world, which is question, answer. What is pain? And that is the meaning. And that happens all the time. You encounter a phenomena that you’ve never seen before. And that phenomena is screaming at you. Like, am I dangerous? What am I? What is this? And then there’s a manner in which we’re able to bring it together and to give it a name and to identify it. And that’s already meaning. The identification of things, especially if we understand that it necessitates a hierarchy of attention, is always meaning. It’s actually harder to live without meaning. You can’t move without meaning. You can’t point your eyes without meaning. You would just lay in bed and wait to die without meaning. Nothing would exist in the… nothing would have light in it. I completely agree. And I think it’s one of perhaps the biggest questions of our age of where you can find that, as it always has been. It’s just that the options in the buffet at the moment are all demanding of something which a lot of people in our society, at the very least, find it hard to accept. What you’ve just described about the nature of sacrifice, for instance, and all these things, we know from Girard and others. These are at such a deep level that they certainly come before religion. They certainly come before any of the religions that we currently have in the world today still operating. What’s the oldest religion we have in the world? Judaism. A religion that’s three and a half thousand years old is young compared to the instincts we’re talking about, such as the need for a scapegoat, the need for sacrifice. We go back thousands of years and we keep finding some kind of organized belief system which believed in sacrifice and totally futile sacrifice in the cases of most of these ideas. But the question of meaning that comes from that is… I come back to this thing that Jordan was just touching on. I agree, Jordan, that if we agree that the thing that’s most real and most to be overcome by us in our lives is suffering, then we have to work out what the thing is that can counter suffering. And then we find that there’s probably only one thing in the world that can counter suffering, which is love. And that’s an instinct that we may have because of the tradition that we’ve come from. It’s possible. Or it’s possible that it is at such a deep level that people had it whether they came from this tradition of ideas and reality or not. Well, I think it was at least latent there before, you know, because that also brings up the question of to what degree something exists, accepted potential, before it’s been dramatized and conceptualized. I mean, I think if you look at the work of people like Franz de Waal with non-human primates, chimps in particular, you see the emergence in chimp social hierarchies of something like long-term reciprocal altruism as the basis for the stable polity and society. It’s not oppression and it’s not power. Now, you might say, well, is that love? And the answer is, well, it’s sort of love the same way that a chimpanzee recognizing himself in a mirror is sort of self-consciousness. But once it’s elaborated up and turned into something communicable and sharpened by dialogue and philosophical inquiry and an aesthetic effort, it becomes more real. Right? It’s a possibility that becomes deeper and more real. Well, look how weak the exhaustive force of even the thing we’re talking there is, perhaps the most real thing, has become in recent generations. Look at the sloganing around love, for instance. I mean, the ease with which it’s turned into a sort of greeting card-like thing. The placards of protesters saying all you need is love, the sort of John Lennon-ism of the society. We know that in some sense even this deepest and most important thing can be cheapened if it’s not, as you say, sharpened unless it’s made actual in some way. If you don’t have something around it that makes it stronger, it’s like I always contend one of the oddities of being in a society that’s essentially post-Christian or at least post-literal Christian, is that people hold on to bits of it like angels or angelic forces without having any idea what they’re talking about other than there’s a nice idea of something they dream about. Don’t you think that the idea of love is deepened by its admixture with the appreciation of hell and suffering? I mean, my family has been through very dire illnesses lately and one of the things that guide us through those illnesses was love. And I don’t think that you have any sense of the depth of love unless it’s experienced as the antidote to cataclysmic tragedy and malevolence. Let me add one thing to that. I agree. Let me add one thing to that. Love may be the thing that can support you through terrible suffering. The love of your loved ones towards you and you towards them. But there’s something more than that which is a bigger ambition, a bigger drive. I don’t know if you know the On an Arondel Tomb of Philip Larkin. His description, I’m sorry to keep reverting to poets, but maybe it’s a good thing to keep reverting to. He describes an Earl and Countess in an English church lying side by side in stone. They’re stone effigies and their hands are intertwined still and they’ve been there for 700 years. The Earl and Countess lie in stone. And the last lines of the poem where Larkin is of course a very wounded non-believer, a mournful non-believer, says at the end of this poem that the sight of this triggers in him, he says, a sense of our almost instinct being almost true. What will survive of us is love. Now that seems to me, people quite often tear that line out and they forget he’s saying almost instinct, almost true. Because you can sense that he’s wishing it to be true. He wills it to be true. But the reason why that line in that poem finds such resonance with people is because it does seem to be something that we all wish for. It’s not just that love in our lives can see us through, but to go back to that quote of Rilke, it’s something that echoes in the universe. It’s something that survives after us. It’s something bigger than us. And there we get to Jonathan’s realm, which is that here we’re in the realm of religion, that religion would explain that. When you love someone, I do believe that what you see in them is something like a glimpse of the eternal embedded in the finite. And so and we don’t really understand the relationship between the finite and the eternal. And we certainly have the apprehension at times in our life that we’re making content, contact with the eternal inside the finite. And we also see that as deeply revivifying. I think you get that in the in the face of beauty. You get that in the face of music. You get that in the face of love. And I I’m loathe to say that that’s not the deepest reality. And because we don’t understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite, we don’t know how our actions echo in the eternal landscape. And I’m unwilling to think that the mean that the instincts that orient us towards our deepest sources of meaning that intimate and immortality and an infinity beyond our apprehension are erroneous because they orient us so well. I mean, the great cathedrals of Europe, they’re they’re oriented towards a time span that’s outside the mere mortal. But there’s something absolutely magnificent about that ambition. And this notion of a love that survives death is like, well, if you love your wife and you have children and you have children in that love and that love propagates itself to an to an unspecified degree out into the world and into the future. And so we don’t we don’t understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite. But I don’t think we can reduce the infinite to the finite and dispense with it. And that seems to demoralize people completely. Unbelievable. It’s the cause of demoralization in our society. The single greatest cause of demoralization in society seems to me not just this the issue of not having a story, not having a structure, but the sense that nothing matters. And the other people don’t think it matters. And what you do doesn’t matter. So why would you bother doing anything? Why would you bother setting sail into the wind and trying to discover new things? Why would you bother with any endeavors? I mean, what’s the point of even prolonging life if it’s just another 10 years sitting on the couch watching Netflix? Like, what’s the point of any of this? And and and and and there’s so little I mean, you’re doing it a lot, of course, and Jonathan’s doing a lot and I’m doing a tiny bit. But there is so little in our society saying to people here is something worth finding your way towards. And I absolutely agree, Jordan, that even if you don’t even need the religion, you don’t even need religion or to think you have the religious urge to do this. But in our lives, we find these moments. It’s what our late friend Roger Scruton described in one of his essays as effingly ineffable. The struggle he said in a volume of his essays that I wrote a new introduction to last year, Confessions of a Heretic. I much urge people to read this essay if they don’t know it is three pages long. It’s easy to get through, but will very, very much influence people. Effingly ineffable, Roger says, is this he knows there is these things in our lives we cannot put our finger upon. And yet we will continue always want to want to do so. We know that there are moments in our lives on the winding staircase of our lives where we see something and we glimpse it and we know we can’t reach it. But then it speaks to us of a thing we cannot reach. And you can put words to it. You can say it’s the divine. You can say this is the justification of religion, or you can say, I don’t know what this is, but whatever it is suggests to me now, and I could run off it for a lot of the rest of my life, that there is something not just me in the universe. Let’s say based on what you’re saying, and I think this also is a point that I wanted to make regarding the question of belief. There’s a lot of talk about belief and I can’t believe this or I believe that and that ethics and belief. But the thing about religion is that it’s practice. It’s not it’s actually not belief, although belief is part of it. But it’s it’s embodiment and it’s practice and it’s and it’s worship. And so this this moment that you talk about this moment where you glimpse something, this love which transcends this momentary where you feel like you’re transported. Well, the answer, the only answer to that that we can have is something like gratitude. It is something like this moment of gratitude and of recognizing it as this gift, which comes from more, let’s say. And I think that the truth is that that is actually that’s the foundation even of the Christian religion, those churches that are there. That’s what they’re for. Right. There are objects of worship there. There are objects that point up to the sky in this celebration and gratitude for those exact moments and those things, those glimpses of light that we are given that guide us through the world. And so I think that sometimes when we talk about, you know, I can believe this thing or this miracle or this, you know, and we get caught up. But if we engage in this act of gratitude, like if you go into church, into a beautiful service where the choir is singing and you are elevating yourself in that moment, that is actually that. Yeah, that is actually the source. And in some ways, some of the more difficult parts of belief will, they will figure themselves out, let’s say. So one of the things I’ve really learned from talking to Jonathan, I think he’s helped me understand the stress on something like communal celebration and worship. And I’ve experimented this with this in my life with Tammy, these religious practices. And, you know, practice makes perfect. And so, well, what’s the opposite of resentment? Well, it’s something like gratitude. OK, so maybe you could practice being grateful. And what’s the opposite of deceit? Well, it’s truth. So maybe you could practice telling the truth and the opposite of hate is love, et cetera. And you can practice these. And then at least you could say that what happens when people are going to church is that they’re attempting to point themselves towards the highest good and to practice. And the belief is that the practice is worthwhile. It’s not a if it’s reduced to the propositional, then we end up in the weeds. But, you know, I’ve been always struck by the beauty of European architecture, especially the classic Christian architecture, which is stunning beyond comprehension in some real sense. And it’s something to be able to open yourself up to that. And you are opening yourself up to the to a glimpse of the infinite. And then you think, well, how do people find themselves revivified? And I would say, well, you can look at communal practices. We go to sports stadiums and we celebrate masterful athletes hitting the goal, which is the opposite of sin, because sin means to miss the target, means to miss the mark. And we go to rock concerts where we can collectively worship the harmonious patterns of being spontaneously played out. And we find respite and nourishment in great literature and in the love of our friends. And there is a way to live that that encourages you to seek that out and to notice the fact that it’s revivifying. And I would say that’s well, that’s the practice of faith. It’s like, well, I could get better at being grateful. I could get better at caring for other people. Obviously, this is one of the one of the key advantages. And I don’t say that with any derogatory spin, but this is one of the key advantages of religion. Organized worship, organized weekly worship, as you say, the moment of being able to feel grateful, which, as you know, I wrote about this in my last book, is the only possible, only possible answer to the culture of resistance. But absent a weekly hour or hour and a half where you have that, you have to recognize your sins and what you’ve done against other people. And you have to signal that you would like to be better going forward and that you would like to, after all, this is what the Eucharist is about, memorialize again the most important thing that happened. Unless you have that, as it were, in the calendar, for most people, all of these things slip by. And it’s always going to be a, you’re never going to find the week in the hour in the week where you even turn off your damn iPhone and look out the window. So, of course, organized religion always has this very distinct advantage. I know it myself. Whenever I sidle into the back of a cathedral, usually for an even song, it has to be said because this seems to me to be the best way to engage without engaging beyond your level of tolerance, should we say. And by the way, I add a side note, which is something I’m sure you’ll both agree with, which is that one of the great tragedies of our era is that the churches have pretty much given up all the most beautiful things they had, including giving up the most beautiful liturgy they had, giving up the most beautiful music they had, often closing the most beautiful buildings they have and replacing what was sort of banal third rate green-piecesm. I mean, that aside, as my friend Tom Holland says, I’d love them to concentrate on the weird stuff. I’d love them to concentrate on the angels and the cherubim and the resurrection and the virgin, but I wish they did that. And it wasn’t just another place where you get another manifestation of the same boring regurgitated path of the time. I wish that the churches would do that more. But that aside, yes, this is one of the great advantages of religion, and it signals that there is something we need to do. We do need to, as human beings, engage actively in these processes we’re talking about. Otherwise, we will always push them off for another day. Well, and collectively. So when I was a kid, there was a corrosive, cynical attitude towards Sunday Christians. It’s, well, these people go to church for an hour and they’re Christians, and then the rest of the time they go back to their old wayward ways. And I kind of bought into that as a teenager and regarded it as a form of hypocrisy. But then when I got older and possibly wiser, I thought, well, at least they were bloody well doing it publicly for an hour. Like, that’s not nothing. It’s 50 hours a year. You know, it’s what, 3000 hours in a lifetime. That’s a third of the way to being an expert. And what are we going to replace that with to get rid of the hypocrisy? Well, we’re not going to ever devote any attention whatsoever to any of that. And look at the movements that have tried to take, I mean, 19th century movements, late 20th century movements that have tried to replicate parts of it. I don’t know if either of you are familiar with the Sea of Faith movement started in the 1980s. I mean, to a great extent, I think certainly Jordan, you and I would have almost 100 percent agreement with this movement that recognized what Nietzsche had done, recognized the existential position that we were in as modern man in the late 20th century. These, they used to be groups. They used to meet on a weekly basis. There are some, I gather, now, but they’ve pretty much dwindled away because they don’t work unless you have that revivifying, central force. And that’s where Jonathan has his great advantage. Well, and you pointed in the last bit of your commentary, you pointed to the fact in your discussion with Holland is that if these collective acts of worship and orientation towards the good aren’t rooted in the kind of transcendent mystery that’s outside the domains of the political, whatever that means, because we don’t know what’s outside the realm of the practical and the political. Well, the realm of the mysterious and eternal. And to the degree, when I go to Orthodox Christian ceremonies, I think I’m probably most at home there, I would say, because all of it’s ancient and all of it’s liturgical and musical and there’s no propaganda. And it’s such a relief. You know, and you and I went to, we went to David Byrne in New York, remember? And that was a pretty good show. And it got transcendent because Byrne’s quite the musician. And then right in the middle of it, there was a piece devoted to woke propaganda. And it just blew the entire atmosphere. And you think, well, you have to be aiming at something transcendent and eternal and that contains the infinite in the finite. And why wouldn’t that be incomprehensibly weird? And isn’t it possible that the emphasis on phenomena like the virgin birth and the death and the resurrection and the word at the beginning of the time and the sacrifice of the lamb aren’t all part of that language that nails down the finite to the infinite in a way that isn’t amenable to the mere disruption of reason. Like music isn’t amenable to the mere disruption of reason. It’s got to be something like that because look what we do in the cathedrals. They’re stunningly beautiful. They take hundreds of years to build. They’re full of music. They’re full of strange practices and gothic symbolism and death. And it’s very uncanny and strange, but it’s not trivial. I don’t think any of us think it’s trivial. By the way, your mention of the Orthodox, because there is always this feeling, particularly in Christianity, that the closer you can get to the beginning, the more true it must be. Which is, I think people sense that in music, certainly in worship. I suspect that the small but significant rise in Tridentine Catholics in our day has something to do with that. When they are rediscovering, for instance, Catholicism in our era, a few of my close friends have done it, they don’t tend to go to the sort of weakest forms of Catholicism. They go to Tridentine Catholic mass, Latin mass Catholicism. And I think that’s totally understandable in the same way that people would go to some of the Orthodox churches for that, because it seems to go back further. And the point with that is always you need to get right back. You tried to get right back to the beginning. And I know, Jordan, you’ll know, I can’t remember if you’ve been to the Holy Land yet, but one of the things that’s so striking about it, of course, is that if you go to, I don’t know, if you go to Nazareth, Nazareth is not a good idea these days, but say the Lake Galilee, and go to the spots where Jesus is believed to have called his disciples, and there’s a church there, and you see the lapping water on the shores, you feel, well, I’m at the place where this whole thing started. And that’s worth thinking about, and that’s worth dwelling upon. Well, that’s an old, that’s a very old idea, too, that that’s what a baptism is. It’s a return to the cosmogonic chaos that preceded existence. And there is this notion that’s very well developed mythologically that in order to revivify ourselves in the face of the continual catastrophe of life, we have to return to the origin and wash away all the stains of life so that we can reemerge and forge forward. And some of that’s dramatized in baptism and the cleansing that’s associated with that. But that’s it’s also the pattern for something like confession and then expiation and atonement. And confession is nothing more than a listing of those things about yourself that you know you should shed and get rid of in the desire to return to something like a more pristine original state. And I think that state is associated with childhood and play, which is there’s an intimation in the New Testament, right? That unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And that is a clearing away of all that traumatic catastrophe that’s associated with maturation and a return to that playful and joyful spirit that so delightfully characterizes children, unconscious though they may be. But I also I think like in terms of the return to the Tridentine and the Orthodox, there’s something more that’s happening. And it has to do with our discussion to a certain extent. And it has to do with something which changed in Christianity during the time of the Enlightenment and the Reformation and the subsequent centuries where Christianity did end up being reduced to something like belief in certain things that happened and was reduced to a kind of materialism and began to compete with science and materialism in ways that ultimately didn’t look right. And so if you look now back at the ancient Christianity and you like, you know, I entered the Orthodox faith because I read the ancient mystics and I read the ancient Christians and I could read as, you know, a seventh century saint and realize that what they’re talking about does not in any way compete with whatever, you know, scientific theory someone discovers or talks about. And that that is reflected in the very way that we worship. We don’t have an hour and a half sermons and we don’t have the same type of moralization that you will find in modern churches. But it is rather this kind of cosmic dance, this kind of cosmic participation in this act of gratitude and of, yeah, it really is something like a cosmic dance. You were trained as a modern artist and you returned to the… Yeah. Okay, so that’s a return to the origin and you were trained as a postmodernist as well when you were an artist. So why did you return to the source and what has that done for you? But it has to do with something like what we’re talking about. Postmodern art is has become a kind of caricature where it is a comment upon a comment and upon a comment. It almost gets reduced to propositions and getting the joke and this type of inner language that is actually not connected to reality anymore. And so looking back in time, I realized that, wait a minute, traditional arts were arts of participation. They were arts of celebration of one’s own world, whether it is your culture, your tribe, but ultimately a celebration of God. And I realized if I want to make something real, something that isn’t just some strange comment upon something else… Something ironic and satirical. Yeah, something ironic and satirical. Then the only way to really get back to that is to engage in liturgical art. So by making things for churches. Yeah, so making things for churches is possibly the realest thing an artist can do because you’re making something that is beautiful, that is proportional, and that is there to enter into a community, participate in that community’s existence, but is also made in the celebration of that which is highest. And so I think that that’s the highest form of art. Let me comment on something Jonathan just said and then something you said, Jordan. First, the issue of modern art. I agree completely. I mean, there is nothing so disturbing as going through a museum like MoMA or Tate Modern. I mean, these are effectively, I think, warehouses of junk or future junk. It is so dispiriting to find a total lack of craft, a total lack of any serious ambition, the kitsch, the irony, the irony without end. And perhaps worst of all, I denigrated Netflix earlier, but let me go back a bit. I don’t know if you’ve seen this recent Warhol documentary on Netflix. It absolutely characterizes the problem that I’m sure you, I think you described as having run into as an artist working in modern art, which is that you see it again and again apart from the limitations of his own imagination. I don’t say that lightly. Warhol’s problem is he roughly knows how to ask questions. I mean, he sort of finds his way towards the basic questions like, what are we doing here? What survives of us? What’s love? And the problem is he gropes his way towards these questions, sometimes quite literally, but he has absolutely no idea of how to answer them. I mean, he becomes famous for raising really quite banal questions and having no answer to them. And that seems to me completely to be the situation you described with modern art, which itself describes something very, very dangerous in the culture, which is that it’s a culture that knows how to raise certain questions, thinks it’s rather brave to raise certain questions, but has no idea of how to answer them. And that brings me to what Jordan said about this undoubted revivifying that comes from the breaking of nature, as it were. There’s a very, and this is about remembering those facts in acts of communal worship, which as I say is a great advantage of organized religion. There’s a very moving description by one of Wittgenstein’s pupils of a tutorial with Wittgenstein in Cambridge in the 1920s. Obviously, I don’t need to explain in short the significance of Wittgenstein to any of our listeners, but one of the things perhaps people don’t realize is the unbelievable magnetism of him as a teacher, the sense that his brain could do almost anything. One of his students once said, I remember, a book I was reading about him, that one day in a tutorial Wittgenstein said to his student, I mean, he said, he said, he said, take this wall, for instance, if I walk through it now. And the student said, I thought Wittgenstein was going to walk through the wall. His mind, everything about it was so extraordinarily powerful, I thought he was going to break nature. And of course, that was enough to fuel that student for the rest of their life, to be one of Wittgenstein’s students and to have been near a brain that seemed capable of breaking nature. And then we get back to that thing, Jonathan, which you’ve raised, which is maybe this idea of a thing so strong that it breaks nature is the thing you need to revive and to run off and the thing will not exhaust. Well, I think, gentlemen, it’s hard for me to imagine a better place to close than that. We should do this again after thinking about it for several months. And I would like that very much. I’d like to thank everybody who is watching and listening and following and hope that you’ll all attend as these ideas continue to develop over the next while, which we certainly hope they will. And so, Jonathan, do you have anything closing? No, that was great. That was pretty good ending. Well, Douglas, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. And the conversation had all the qualities that I was hoping for. And so we’ll keep hashing this out. You know, we’re getting somewhere with this, as far as I can tell. And so hopefully everybody listening and watching will find that as useful and productive as we found it.