So this is all by way of saying, not only is the metric system
demonic, but cause and effect is made up. In the Middle Ages,
people did not see history and again you could read some of Valaskan's essays about
this, and he's even got a whole section on it in a History of
the Island of People are curious about this. But in the Middle Ages,
people didn't see history as a series of causes and effects. They saw history
as a battle between good and evil, which means that the most important thing
in history has already happened, because that was the crucifixion and the resurrection of
Jesus Christ. Right, But history is this battle between good and evil.
This is what the whole Apocalypse of Saint John is about. Is history seen
as this conflict between good and evil in which good ultimately triumphs. This is
Johnathan Pejo. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello everyone, I am
back with Richard Rowland for another Universal History episode. This week, Richard is
going to give us a presentation that he's prepared in another context, but that
I was very successful. It is about how to read like a medieval how
to look at the ancient world, how to read the text how to engage
with the ancient world in a way that's truthful for us today. And before
we start, I just want to make sure you know about the Bewolf class
that we are putting together. Richard is going to give a Christian reading of
Bewolf that we're going to have on the Symbolic World Community. I will be
part of it. I will be taking the class and also giving some comments
in the discussion. And so look at the description. There'll be a link
in the description below, and we would love to see you come in.
This is a new thing we're doing, and we're really excited about this possibility
of diving in way more than what we do in just these podcasts and helping
you learn how exactly like what we're talking about today, how to read these
old texts, how to make them relevant to you today. So Richard kick
us off, all right, Well, thanks Jonathan. I'm very excited about
both the Beowolf class, which is I mean, I think I've said this
before on this podcast, but if I had to just have one book,
that is the only book I could study and talk about for the rest of
my life, you know, setting aside the Holy Scriptures, it would probably
be Beowolf. So's there's nothing that I'm more excited to talk about and to
get to talk about it with you and with all the people who have signed
up to be a part of the class and a part of the live discussion
everything else. It's going to be great. You guys can go to the
Symbolic World Store. I think there's a link there we can get signed up
for the class. So, but what we're talking about today, this is
a talk that I gave at Father Footy Savant's parish, Sat. Sava's Orthodox
Church here in Allen, Texas. So shout out to Father Photius, who
I know listens to these to the Universal History episodes, and his family.
They were wonderful. They, you know, really great church, really dynamic
parish. If you can ever, if you're ever in the North Texas area
and you can check out and support the work they're doing there, I think
it's just incredible. He has one of the most like I would say medieval
churches in the area in terms of the way that they've built their building and
laid out the interior and the art and the iconography that they're doing now.
It's just fantastic. But So this is a talk that I gave as a
fundraiser for his parish, and a lot of people asked for a recording.
It wasn't really recorded then, but I wanted to do it now in the
context of the universal history discussion because one of the questions that I get the
most often is something like, Okay, but how do we actually read these
stories like and see the things that you guys are seeing when you're talking about
them? Basically, like, well, how do I do this at home?
How do I tell my kids about this stuff? Right? When my
kid asked the question, you know, okay, but did dragons really exist?
Or you know, okay, this thing happens in a Saint story?
But did they really do that? Like? How do I answer that question
for them? So what I wanted to do was to actually kind of pull
back the hurt in a little bit, so it's can be a little bit
of an apocalyptic episode this time, and just talk about some of the underlying
assumptions or the underlying understandings that we use when we read these old stories and
the way that we read them, and maybe that'll help people kind of move
in that direction. So I wanted to start with a quote from C.
S. Lewis, which is where all Orthodox converts, American Orthodox converts have
to begin. Everything is with a C. S. Lewis quote. This
is in his essay de Odendius Poetis. He says, there are two ways
of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country.
One man carries his English re abroad with him and brings it home unchanged.
We could say, like his americanness now, because I think Americans have
displaced the English as like the worst tourists. But anyway, wherever he goes,
he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel, he
means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea
where he might have had excellent coffee. He finds the natives quaint and enjoys
their quot In the same way, there is a man who carries his modernity
with him through all his reading of past literatures, and preserved it, preserves
it intact. The highlights in all ancient and medieval poetry are for him the
bits that resemble or can be so read that they seem to resemble the poetry
of his own age. But there's another sort of traveling and another sort of
reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines. You
can share the foreign life. You can begin to see the foreign country as
it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants. You can
come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before.
So with old literature you can go beyond the first impressions that a poem
makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by
comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period. You
can then re enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives.
And so the premise that sort of like kicks off this our discussion today is
that the situation for us as Christians should be that the world is a foreign
country. Right, Saint Peter says, I urge you, as sojourners and
exiles. I think the King James says, strangers and aliens, to abstain
from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul. The world
should be a foreign place to us, But for most of us, especially
those of us who are moving out of a modern context back towards some more
traditional form of Christianity. Right, it's usually the reverse. We come to
the church finding it as a foreign country. And actually I would even say,
for instance, you don't hear it actually very often anymore. But one
of the sometimes one of the objections that I'll hear when somebody visits an Eastern
Orthodox church for the first time, it's something like, oh, well,
it's just it's too Eastern. It's too difficult for the Western mind to understand,
et cetera. As though there's something like hard coded into the Western brain,
you know, that can't understand people going in and out doors or something.
You know, it's like a little what do you really mean? But
but but what they're really saying though, and people people don't realize this,
But what they're really saying is it's not modern enough, right, It's not
an East West thing. And I've you know, I've said many times and
I will keep saying it until I'm blue in the face, that the real
difference is an East versus West, it's modern versus ancient. Right, So
we come as modern people encountering a pre modern church, a pre modern holy
tradition, and actually listen even if you're a Protestant and you've got no interest
in becoming Eastern Orthodox or traditional Roman Catholic or something like that. The very
fact that you have the Holy Scriptures, right, which is a pre modern
you know, text or a series of pre modern texts, it is something
which is actually not written for you. Now, all scripture is written for
you because it's scripture, just like the liturgy is always for you because it's
the liturgy. But you weren't the original audience, right, and it was
something that was created, you know, through human tools, and those people
that wrote those things were not, for instance, they were not twenty first
century Americans. One time, when I was I was teaching this is my
old church before we became Orthodox. I was teaching a family. We had
a sort of a family integrated Bible study, so like an all age of
Sunday School. Basically it's this is one of the things that I did.
It was a great class, by the way, I love those people love
that class. It was so fun. But one of the you know,
we're going through some of the psalms, and so we come to some of
these, like the Royal Psalms. The psalms have to do with like the
king, right, And I just said, hey, guys, just to
like, you know, just to because I'm an agent of chaos in the
world. I just you know, I was like, I was like,
hey, guys, So you know, as we get into this, we're
going to read the Psalm, and it's about you know, God saved the
king, right, That's what the Psalm is about. And then at the
end, I said, now, having read the Psalm, what would you
guys say the most biblical form of government is? And everyone in the class,
I mean, there's like forty people in this class. We want to
say, oh, obviously it's a representative republic, you know, not even
a democracy. They said, representative republic is a good, good American conservative.
But I mean, this is just it's a little silly of an example,
but it's a classic example of sort of taking our frame and trying to
take it to the way that we read the scriptures. Right, And so
we do this because we're like that first kind of tourist, right, we
fail to realize that that holy tradition, so the scripture, the liturgy,
the Doctor, and the moral law of the Church that we've received was never
intended to satisfy our tastes. So when we encounter things that are sort of
quaint, we're like, oh, isn't that nice? They used to believe
that. And when we encounter things that we don't like, it's because they're
too strange, or they're too regressive, or they're too eastern or what have
you. And so the point of actually this whole project, I would say
the entire project of my adult life, has been to help people be the
good kind of tourist. Right, Several people have said, you know,
in the discussion around the Universal History videos, well, obviously you can't just
turn your mind and you're you can't wind back the clock. You can't just
become a thirteenth century Russian peasant, as much as maybe you would like to
do. And that's that's true, that's true. But you could at least
start by becoming the good kind of tourists. And so the idea is to
is to kind of shift from seeing the Church and the scriptures as a foreign
country to seeing it as our home right. That all of these things,
including the Holy Scriptures, are foreign to us in the sense that they're pre
modern, that they're Eastern. You know, Psalms were not written, you
know, in you know, Kentucky. They're ancient, they're hierarchical. We're
modern, we're postmodern. We're obsessed with up to the minute relevance with being
egalitarian. And so when we try to wrangle with tradition by adjusting it or
rebalancing it for modern day sensibilities instead of encountering it for what it is,
then it it, you know, we end up doing violence to it,
right, Yeah, And it's also like there's also something say that's important,
which is that the modern world has been the world in which society has moved
away from its faith, has moved away from its attachment, you know,
to scripture to faith, and so it's not surprising that in a world that
was set up the thing that brought us away from faith, in that world,
it would be more difficult for us to understand the vehicle by which faith
was brought into the West. And so we have to kind of humble ourselves
and be careful because one of the problems that happens is that in the modern
world you have two reactions. You have a kind of modernism that uses modern
tools like science, like you know, a kind of materialism, a kind
of rationalism to destroy the past, and then you have strange people that still
embrace rationalism and materialism and a kind of that kind of attitude, but then
use the very tools to try to defend text that were never meant to be
that in the first place. Yes, my own childhood is I mean,
I grew up in like a really hard line younger creationists, like literalist reading
of Genesis, right, where basically, like they they'll they'll take certain lines
in Genesis and try to like twist them to conform to sort of here's some
fringe scientific theory. Right, And there's a whole discussion to be had around
this. Let's say, I certainly believe God is the maker of all things
visible and invisible, and really strongly there's something deep in my core that reacts
against the myth of evolutionism. Right. But the problem with this approach is
the way in which it subjects the scriptures to science. Actually, what both
what both like the new atheists and the and the younger you know, answers
to Genesis and those folks, what they both agree on is that science is
the standard. Yeah. I've heard where people say science is the mind of
God like in church. Yeah, science is seeing the mind of God,
and I was like, yeah, I was like seventeen, and I was
already like I don't know about that. That's that's really that's not good.
Yeah, that's not great. Okay. So anyway, we want to help
people be at least begin as being the second kind of visitor, the second
kind of tourist, so that when we come to the church, the liturgy,
and to the scriptures, we encounter them not as some kind of a
foreign country that needs to change and good form to the culture that we came
from, but actually as our true home, right, as the soul's true
home. So one way to kind of frame this would be to say is
to think in terms of mirrors, mirrors and windows. Right, that ancient
literature and ancient liturgy could either be a mirror that reflects our own faces back
to us, where we sort of see the things we're looking for, or
it could be a window through which we gaze upon paradise, upon the stars,
upon the heavenly city, upon the love that moves the sun and the
other stars, as Dante would say. Right, And so that's kind of
the goal here, is to cultivate this. I'll explain this at the end,
but this mystogogical vision of the cosmos. So this being said, there
are four things that I would put forward as these are shifts you must make
if you're going to read ancient, any ancient literature, let's say ancient let's
say pre modern literature, because it's it's really ancient and medieval. Right,
So if you're going to read any pre modern literature and really read it charitably,
there are kind of four shifts that you kind of have to adopt.
So the first is a shift in the way that we think about authorship and
originality. And this is where this is where a lot of the damage was
done before people realized what was happening, starting in the nineteenth century. So
we have this, we have this discipline called signed call textual criticism, and
on its own, it's just a set of tools for figuring out when something
was written and who wrote it. And so in that sense, you know,
like like many tools, it could be used in a good way.
I have, you know, in in my own academic career, I have
engaged in textual criticism, specifically in and around Old Norse poetry. And actually
some version of this has existed since the ancient world. Right famously, origin
you know, one of the most important, you know, his most important
contributions to the tradition was essentially word of textual criticism, looking, you know,
comparing the Septuagint to the Hebrew Old Testament. People have always known that
there were difficulties resented by manuscripts, and that manuscripts contradicted each other. Like
people weren't stupid. It's true that literacy rates were generally lower, although not
as low as people sometimes think they were. But people who were literate read
a lot more than we do today. Like we live in a post literate
society where we think we can read because we can read like a tweet or
an x I don't even know what we call them anymore. But like we
think we're literate because we can read like a status update or you know,
a headline or something like that. But actually most of us just read two
sentences and we skip to the next paragraph. We those first two sentences and
so on. Right, we're actually sort of postliterate. But people who could
read in pre modern times read deeply. They read deeply, so they noticed
these differences. They noticed way more differences. Actually, sometimes I'll be reading
along like in the you know, something like the Ambiguo, which is all
about these difficulties, and you know, written by Saint Maximus or something like
that, some text Like I'll be reading along and he'd be like, ah,
now here, we clearly have what appears to be a difference between this
gospel writer and this gospel right, And I'm looking and I'm like, well,
it doesn't really actually seem like is a difference to me. Right.
They were much more precise in the ways that they look for these things.
So people always knew, and people always understood that that there were things like
translation errors, copyist errors, right, which could render a phrase difficult to
understand. But the pre modern mind saw these difficulties as being providential, actually,
as an indication that there is some deeper meaning the reader was intended by
the Holy Spirit to unearth. It's like it's like the uh say, like
like the corner of a treasure chest poking up out of the ground, and
you walk along, you trip across it, and then you noticed, oh,
there's some very treasure right here. Yeah. But and I want to
defend that very precisely for people, because people might think that it's just a
cope, you know, And I think that you can actually structurally you can
understand it, which is that Imagine a story that you tell and that you
have to remember. And one of the things that makes you help remember a
story is it's just general coherence. It's like if it makes sense, then
you remember it better. Like if it makes sense, then you can attend
to it more easily. But the fact that in stories that are very ancient,
certain quirky details that are so weird are maintained in the story means that
there had to be great effort to remember that, you know. And so
I've mentioned that for example, like a very simple one that has nothing to
do with it's like that with scripture itself. But for example, in translation
about text about Saint Christopher, there was this weird change that happened between the
idea of Canaanite like from Canaan and then canaan Like in terms of dog Canaanites
in terms of dog, and the people interpreting it says, well, it's
all ridiculous because it's just a mistake in transcription. But if if someone had
made a mistake in transcription, and that mistake in transcription made absolutely no sense,
it would have been corrected in the next iteration. But if there's something
about it that is holding, then maybe that that mistake is then continued on
mistake. It's not a mistake, it is something like a providential transformation of
the text. And so I know it's hard for people to understand, right,
if things are remembered and it tended to even though they're weird, it
means there's something hidden underneath it. And so that's what that's how the church
fathers would see it. It's like there's some weird detail that's so strange it
doesn't seem to make sense, like why is it there? If it's maintained
there? And this is actually I mean, the best example for this is
just to understand. This is why we have four Gospels, not one.
I mean it actually sort of is the one Gospel, right, but we
have four gospel accounts. Let me put it that way. Yeah, so,
actually it's not the first book of the New Testament, is not Matthew.
It is the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Right. This is how
it's said liturgically, And even when I speak about it in like teaching class
and things like that, I always try to use that precise language because it's
the one Gospel. And in fact, we collect all four accounts into a
single book in the Orthodox Church, which we call the Gospel Book, which
we parade around and we kiss and we venerate, we read from and everything.
So it's the one Gospel, right. This verbal icon of Christ is
how the fathers speak of it. But we have four accounts, and those
four accounts have these sort of subtle differences, sometimes major differences. But there
were attempts actually, even quite early on, to create a single harmonized gospel
account, you know. Tation's attempt is the most famous, but a lot
of people tried this, and actually the Church rejected it, right, the
Church rejected it. If we wanted just a single synthesized, smooth account,
we could have had it, right, We could have kept it. We
could have just picked one of the four gospels at any given point time where
we could have made our own, you know, our own version that you
know, smoothed out all the differences, included all the parts. If we
wanted that, we could have had it. But it was not God's will,
and it was not you know what the church agreed upon to have that.
We have four gospel accounts, and some of these gospel accounts have subtle
differences. Actually, if you look at I'll tease something which I won't pay
off, and so people will have to go dig themselves for it. As
as as I think you know this is this is this is how Christ teaches,
so there's precedent for it. So the thing that I'll tease and not
pay off is that if you go and look at the account of how the
merd bearing women come to the tomb in the Synoptic Gospels, it's it's a
little bit different in each each version, and the list of who's there and
who's not there, and the time of Mary Magdalene coming and the apostles,
it's all just like there are these little subtle differences. But if you go
and you read, for instance, Saint Gregor of Palomas's homilies on these texts
on the Resurrection, there is actually a really beautiful mystery that Saint Gregory and
actually other church fathers saw as being hidden, as sort of being hidden there
within the gospels concerning concerning the resurrection and the Mother of God. So I
won't explain what that is, but I'll encourage people to go out and kind
of research it for themselves. Okay, so this is like one commonplace example,
but you could basically say, if you wanted to boil down this pre
modern approach to authorship, you could say that they approached it this way.
First of all, they approached reading with credulity. Credulity that is, they
believe that the author loves you, because producing a book is an act of
life. Right, books are extremely expensive in the ancient world. They create
They they represent not just a lot of time and training that would have to
go into some be skilled enough to produce a book, but also like the
lost economic opportunity because most books are written on the on the on the skins
of young animals, right, sheep and cattle specifically, Well, if I
kill a young calf, that's a calf that's now out of my breeding pool.
I can't ever get meat from that calf. I can't ever get milk
from that you know, I can't get any of that stuff. Right,
So it presents a tremendous like lost opportunity. And so this is actually why
for instance, as you if you look at medieval texts, the farther north
you go, in other words, the poor people get and the more scarce
like animals become the more abbreviations are used in the texts, and so by
the time you get to Iceland, it's like they have an abbreviation for almost
every word. It's a total nightmare. Like if you read like, you
know, you know, stuff on the continent and it's in this beautiful Carolinian
minuscule and it's super legible and you can basically just read it off the page,
and then you look at something that's happening like six hundred years later in
Iceland and it's almost completely illegible unless you have a magnifying class. Why because
they're trying to save paper, right, they're trying to save paper. So
creating a book is an active love. The pre modern approach to reading is
first of all this with an assumption that the author loves you, and then
the assumption that the Holy Spirit has guided the process, not only of composition,
which the sort of fundamentalist world that I grew up in are really big
on this. The Holy Spirit has guided the process of the composition of the
scriptures other than the Middle Ages. They would have actually said this is true
for all good books. It's especially true for scripture, but it's true for
all good books. But the Holy Spirit is guided not only the process of
composition, but also that of transmission. Right, So that the Bible that
you have is the Bible that you have, not some easier version of the
Bible, not some version of the Bible that you would have made to satisfy
like modern questions and concerns, because that's what the Holy Spirit has given you.
Right. And so at the end of the day, they would see
the book as a gift received from authority. That's what the book is.
It's a it's a gift. In fact, our word authority right is the
same root as author right. So a book is a gift received from authority
in the modern world. Right. With this, the discipline of textual criticism
is used to look for these differences between texts, no matter how minute they
are right, and use them to propose proposed new theories. Why new theories,
because people have to write dissertations about things. You got to get published,
right. You can't get published saying something somebody's already said. So you've
got to come up with a new theory. And so it's used to propose
new theories about the age, authorship, provenence of text and of course,
saygre text among them. And at its worst, and obviously this is again
it's a useful discipline, it's something that I do and engage in on a
regular base. But at its worst, this modern way of reading sees differences
and difficulties as being something worse than mistakes right at their accidental tells that someone
is being dishonest with you, that somebody is trying to pull the wool over
your eyes. And so there's this idea that on the one hand, the
apostles were these master con men, right, these master con men. They're
fooling everybody into this construct of Jesus of Nazareth, that this new religion they
started. But then on the other hand, they're so bad at their job
that they didn't notice their own you know, you know, they couldn't get
their stories straight. Right, it's just a little obviously, I think it's
a little ludicrous. Right. But the assumptions of this way of reading,
in contrast to the pre modern way of reading, are first of all suspicion,
right, there's an inherent hermeneutic of suspicion. The author has an agenda,
and then usually this idea that historical forces I say, in my most
Marxist accent possible right, that economic, political, social forces guide it,
not the Holy Spirit, but these forces, these forces guided both the composition
and the transmission of the work. And so the book goes from being a
gift received from authority and it becomes a text received from an author, right,
a text received from an author, so as a text received from like
patriarchal you know power, Yes, well that's really that's really that's when postmodernism
comes in, right. And so this, this this modern way of reading
focused on first and foremost on authorship, is the most interesting question because if
we can know when someone lived and what their social splash economic circumstances were,
then we're better able to understand the agenda of the text. But what postmodernism
does is it comes in it deconstructs the modern way of reading further because it
assumes basically liquidity. The author is dead, right, this whole death of
the author thing. The author is dead and therefore any agenda that they might
have had you you don't actually need to know or care about that because this
book, the book is now a fluid reality which can be manipulated to serve
to redistribute social and economic power via various critical lenses. And so this is
when you get into well, let's do a let's do a post colonial reading
of Beayowulf, which is a real thing that somebody has done. Yeah,
you know, well, did anybody writing Beowulf have postcolonialism or even colonialism in
mind? Yeah, but the disease is already there in the modern thinking.
No, it is. It is, yeah, because in the modern way
of thinking, what they would want to do is show how the let's say,
the power structure, whether it's from a Marxist point of view or some
something akin to that, is embedded in the text, and the fact that
it was authoritative means that it participated in maintaining certain social orders that were important
for the people of the day. And so they'll tend to look into the
text and like to see the preservation if you look at at some of the
Old Testament tide to critical writing. They see it as a conflict of different
groups and different political factions that our society inside the text, and that there's
this conflict that you can find inside the text that's showing a political conflict within
Israel at the right. And the big problem that I am currently having with
a lot of let's say broadly conservative reactions to postmodernity, is that they are
trying to get back to modernity. Yeah, and this is just it's not
far enough, right, It's not far enough for us as Christians. That's
not that's not an acceptable solution. So to talk a little bit about the
idea of like authorship, the the authorship in the ancient world was always understood
is as being a composite thing. This is part of why like these these
like modern the modern hyperfixation on oh, well, there's this group in the
text and this group of the text, like you're just saying this is like
sort of missing the point from a pre modern perspective, because well, first
of all, putting the name of an established authority on a work, let's
say, for instance, the Old Testament book the Wisdom of Solomon, this
was often this is a link with the chain of tradition, right, It's
not always an absolute statement about the origin of every syllable in the works.
In the case of the Wisdom of Solomon, nobody thought that Solomon wrote wrote
it. I mean it was everybody too. It had been written much later,
but they named it that why, Because it's in the Solomonic wisdom tradition
that goes back to proverbs. You've got the proverbs of Solomon. Did Solomon
write all of the proverbs of Solomon? According to the Proverbs of Solomon,
he did not. Well, but we still call them the proverb of the
Solomon, in the way that we still call the Psalms the Psalms of David.
Right, David is the author of the Saltier, even though if you
in the actual text, he'll say he's not the author of every single one
of the Psalms. This is again, this is not a problem for anybody
before the nineteenth century, Like, nobody cares like like we understand what we
mean when we say this. Right, So if somebody wants to say,
if somebody wants to say, there's like a uh, you know, there's
like a little bit of you know, oh, this later thing was added
to one of the books of Moses, for instance, right, well,
like the description of his death for example, right right, right, So
simple exact, which is that someone else wrote the description of moses death,
right right whatever? Who cares? Right? Not? Is that is that
a problem for anybody? No? Not really, right, because again,
we the pre modern person trusts that the Holy Spirit is guided not just the
process of composition, but also the process of transmission. And so this is
even when you get into like there are certain perickiepes in the gospel according to
Saint John's specifically the one concerning the woman caught in adultery, right, which
doesn't show up in some ancient manuscripts. Right. And so then you could
sort of ask the question, well, you know, is this originally part
of the gospel or not? And actually for our purposes it doesn't matter.
What matters is uh, is that you know this is this is something at
somewhere in the in the process of transmission, right, which the Holy Spirit
oversaw this This story is one of the stories that's in this gospel. According
to Saint John, it's in this yoanine tradition. And and then you would
just look at, well, how did how how how how does the church?
How do we use this, you know, liturgically? And that sort
of will kind of clear up some of those questions. So, now,
sacred text were copied with a great deal of fidelity. But the farther out
you get from holy scripture, the more likely there are it is for major
changes to be introduced. So a good example of this in in an essay
of his called the Genesis of the Medieval Book, which is a really important
essay that I think everybody who's interested in these things should read. C.
S. Lewis uses the iterations of the Arthurian tales, and so he starts
with Jeffrey of Monmouth as an example, who just includes a little bit of
Arthur in his overall annals. Right, and then you've got Waste and then
Liaman coming along and enlarging and massively improving on what Jeffrey did, Right.
And it was understood that this is sort of like, oh, let's say
far enough out in the narthex as it were, right, you know,
near enough to the base of the mountain, that you have the ability to
kind of improve things, but also bring in things that you've heard that the
previous author maybe hadn't and stuff like that. Right, And so the way
to think about a medieval book or a pre modern book is that it's a
cathedral. Right. Every great cathedral built in the Middle Ages was built over
the course of one two, in one case, six hundred years. Right.
Well, you're going to start building a building that is going to be
finished by your grandchildren and great grandchildren who are going to have totally different architectural
tastes than you do, right, And so these great medieval cathedrals, a
lot of times you'll have well, this bit was done here, and this
bit was done at this time, and this bit was done at this time,
and so everything like sort of doesn't match. But at the same time
it totally goes together, right, because it just sort of grew up in
this organic way. Right. But if you wanted to try to pick through
and pull out and try to pull out the pieces that you could say,
well, this is the original cathedral, then the building just collapses, right.
And this is the kind of the same way that medieval books work.
So Eugene Vonalascan, who you've had on the Channel before, who's a wonderful,
wonderful fiction author. I'll hawk his new book once again, The History
of the Island, which is actually it is a work of medieval universal history
as a novel and it's just fantastic, so people should go read it.
But he said in a really important essay of his called the Middle Ages,
he said that it's important to note that there's a spectrum here that the stability
of a medieval text depended in large part on its closeness to the Holy Scripture,
the primary book in the Middle Ages, the Holy Scripture, the text
of texts standing at the center of spiritual life, had a special fate.
Any new manuscript copy of the Holy Scriptures was produced by drawing not on one,
but on two or more manuscripts. The scribes looked after the integrity of
the Holy Text by comparing manuscripts, correcting possible errors and deviations from the canonical
text. At the other end of the spectrum that ends with maximal distance from
the sacred one can see that the text changed significantly when reproduced, and everybody
was okay with this right. What mattered wasn't so much who said something,
but what was said you could say. And so they don't really have in
the Middle Ages, they don't really have this idea of plagiarism, and in
fact, they don't really have a strong notion of authorship. Most medieval authors
simply did not sign their work unless they were a very important person like one
of the church fathers or you know, an emperor or something like that,
who had like the spiritual or social right to do so. But for most
medieval authors, the idea that you would say by your work would be seen
as kind of like an act of pride. So that's the first thing,
is the shift in the way that we approach that we approach the question of
authorship and transmission. And if we can actually just make that one shift,
then ninety percent of people's problems and like hang ups and things like this,
especially the kind of hang ups that very smart people tend to have, will
go away, and then you can actually start reading the text. Right.
It's the I always crack up whenever, like I buy a new edition of
some patriistic text or medieval poem or something like that. And the actual text
itself is not that long, it's maybe eighty pages. Before the eighty pages,
you have one hundred and fifty pages of critical analysis of here's what the
guy who put this book together, you know, basically this is his PhD
dissertation, Here's what he thinks about the text. Right, And it's sort
of clear by volume which thing is the more important in terms of what's being
published. All right. So the second thing that I would want to kind
of point out as a necessary shift, this is a much shorter point,
is the meanings of words and things. Right. Modernism is a flattening and
a separation of space and time. We'll talk about that a little more in
a moment, But it also tends to flatten out meaning as well. So
as such, modernism is usually capable of understanding something is either being literal,
which by which we mean being understood its most obvious materialistic sense, like a
measurable taxonomical category, usually something like if you had a camera. Yeah right.
But of course, of course this itself is a bad test, right,
because we all know perfectly well from recent events that you can have a
camera on site and half the people watching the video see two totally different things,
right, you know, Yeah, so that during the trucker protest,
very clearly, Yeah, just trucker protests, and I mean lots of other
things, you know, like almost any tragedy that gets fun for political purposes
or whatever, somebody will have a video of what happened, and half the
people who watch it see one thing, and the other half who watch it
see the other thing. But anyway, but modern people will are you capable
of understanding something as either being literal or allegorical, which by which they mean
having a symbolic meeting. And that's that's what the thing we we you know,
we we hit that all the time on the symbolic world because at the
outset, when I started talking about these things, yeah, we just get
backlashes of people saying, oh, you're saying it's all allegorical, it's all
metaphor, you know, and I'm like, I'm not saying any of those
things, but I still remember you're there is such a thing as literal video.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is like purely medieval, like in
the sense that that we're talking about now, which is that there there.
You know, it's like the this idea of like this objective reality that is
completely neutral, of of of importance. It's like even in the modern word,
even though we have that category in the modern world, it it falls
apart very fast. Right, And so this is this is I think one
of the things that this one and the next I would say, the next
three things, like there are four things. These next three things are the
things that your channel has probably done the most open people's eyes on like this
this under standing, like if you can just see that things can mean more
than one thing, right, that words can mean more than one thing.
But also that things that that that things that exist in the world have meaning,
they have significance that you know, you can have a tree, right,
and the tree is you could say in some in some objective secularist reality,
right, that the tree is just it's just an arbitrary organism. But
actually even materialists don't usually think this way because because they'll be, oh,
well, you can't trees are good for the environment, right, you can't
can't down trees. But actually, if we're if we're doing a secularist materialist
devoid of meaning, the tree is just an organism. Its existence is just
as arbitrary as every other organism's, right, unless I give it meaning,
there's no reason I can't cut it down. Yeah, right. So medieval
people believed, I just read that quote from Vadlaskin, because they believe that
everything they wrote and read was, no matter what its style, to some
degree, a continuation or a concreteization of the Holy scriptures. Because they believe
this, they believe that books could have multiple complimentary layers of meaning. Very
simple. We just for Orthodox Christians. Actually old calendar, New calendar,
both would have recently finished the Dormssion fast. So every year doing the dormssion
fast. My family reads the Life of the Virgin by Saint Maximus the Confessor,
which is his sort of hagiography of the life of the Mother of God,
and early on in it, you know, he's talking about Psalm the
forty fourth Psalm, right, you know, the queens did at their right
hand quote, and you know, and this is the this is like one
of the primary you know, Psalms, one of the primary Old Testament passages
that the church sees, and historically all Christians have seen as as talking about
the Mother of God. And he says, but if you find somebody who
says that the queen in this passage actually is the Church, there's no problem
with that, because first of all, she is the Church. And secondly,
and then he says, words authored by the Holy Spirit ought not to
be understood as having only one meaning, very very just very very simple.
Words authored by the Holy Spirit ought not to be understood as having only one
meaning. Right, And so in the Middle Ages this eventually develops into something
that probably most people who have taken some kind of a class on like the
Middle Ages were read like Augustine's confess Saint Augustin's confessions in school or something like
that will be familiar with. And that is the fourfold sense, right,
And there's like there's actually even fun little Latin mnemonic poems to help people remember
this, right, But basically it's the literal. We could say historical might
be a better way of phrasing that. Right, here's what happened in history,
right, although even that is maybe a little fraud, but let's just
say, like, this is what happened in history, this is how it
was recorded, this is the event that was recorded. Rights, that's what
that is. Then there's that typological which would be in what way does this
text, this story, or this symbol or something like that, and what
way does it connect with the life of Christ, with the life of his
mother, with the life of the church, et cetera. So a very
good example is something like, you know the Old Testament, the serpent in
the wilderness, right, the brazen serpent. Well, on the historical level,
God told Moses to make a serpent, right, this is the literal
reading. Okay, God told Moses to make a bronze serpent. He lifts
it up on a pole, and everybody who looks at it or touches it
is healed now on its own. That doesn't actually have a whole lot of
meaning, right, It's just here's God gave you instructions to do an arbitrary
thing. Yeah, and I always did it. I always take the literal
meaning as like the way we talk about literal meaning. It's just like getting
the facts right, right, text, they just getting this is what the
text says like, text says this. Because one of the problems with sometimes
in a negative sense we call allegorical reading, is that people gloss the text,
yes, don't pay attention to it carefully, These kind of gloss over
it and then give this like high meaning. But I think it's really important
even in symbolic interpretation like that you say that you get the text right,
you get you get everything there, right. Yeah. So the in that
case, here's the historical event. God told Moses to do a thing.
Moses did the thing, people were healed. Right. But then there's a
typological significance, which has to do with the lifting up of Christ on the
cross. This one is is easy because Christ himself explained it to us,
right, which we don't always get. We don't always get. And then
the third level is what's sometimes called the moral or the tropolripological level, and
moral as in, this is the moral of the story. In other words,
because this happened, here's how you should behave right, that's the moral
of the story. This is Any one of these levels, by the way,
is like a fine level, but if you treat it like it's the
only one, then you get like an awful version of the story. So,
for instance, there's a lot of like mangling of traditional fairy tales because
people were you know, fairy tales which were not traditionally just stories for children.
Yeah, but in the Victorian period when they tried to make them into
just stories for children, they would always rewrite them with this sense of and
then here's the moral at the end, right, And so it's just like
it just like SAPs the vitality out of the story, which is actually mostly
happening on the typological level, right. And then the finally, the fourth
level that they would see would be was sometimes called the anagogical or the eschatological
level, which is basically connecting the text with last things, the end of
the world or the end of a pattern, the end of a cycle,
or most importantly probably at the end of your life. Right. And it's
important to note that people didn't just use these senses to read the scriptures.
Yeah, they actually use them to read Homer, and they use them to
read everything. And they would actually say, you could read the Odyssey,
and there's a typological sense in which you can apply the Oudis to the life
of Christ. Right, And they one hundred percent sincerely believed that. And
what I'm sort of, you know, obviously trying to imply is that you
can do this too. You can do it with something like the Lord of
the Rings. I've got a whole podcast where that's what we do. So
but in the same way, things can mean not just words, but also
things like like the things that you encounter in the world can mean more than
one thing, right again, rocks trees, basic things like that. My
favorite example, honestly is bread and wine. Right. You know. Part
of the whole symbolic literal argument you know, around the Eucharist in the Christian
you know west over the last five hundred years, six hundred years now,
has has been because people sort of see, well, it can only be
one thing, like it can be bread and the blood and body right at
the same time, Right, Like we have to collapse it to the body
and then take the bread. What do they call it, like just like
detail, like, yeah, accidents or whatever. Yeah, accidental, that's
right. Yeah. So one of my favorite things that Dante wrote is actually
a series of letters. Oh, I gotta plug my computer in is a
series of letters that he wrote actually explaining the divine comedy, which is which
is nice. Again, when the author like gives you an explanation of his
own thing, pay attention. He may be wrong, you know, but
still you should pay attention. So what he says is that we should call
it that is writing polycemus, that is of many senses. First sense derives
from the letters themselves. A second from the things signified by the letters.
We call the first sense literal. So he gives his own explanation for this,
and then he gives an example from the comedy. So it is to
clarify this method of treatment. Consider this verse, when Israel went out from
Egypt the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made to sanctuary
Israel his dominion, which, by the way, that's the psalm that the
souls seeing when they're being brought to the mountain of Purgatory. At the beginning
of Victorio, he says, now, if we examine the letters alone,
the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is
signified. That's the letter. That's the level of the letter we call the
literal meaning. Right in the allegory, it's our redemption is accomplished through Christ.
So that's the typological sense. In the moral sense, the conversion of
the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace.
So this is how I should behave because of this. And then in the
anagogical or the eschatological sense, the exodus of the holy soul from the slavery
of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. They can all be called
And then he says, they can all be called symbolic. Right, of
course, he means something different by that than most of us meet today.
But this is actually how he uses this psalm in the comedy, because if
you pay attention to those early cantos of Purgatory, that's actually what is happening,
is all four of those things. It's you know, remembering this time
God delivered his people. But also in the moral sense, it's the conversion
of Dante's soul from the grief and misery of his own sin, right,
and so on. So that's the That's the second thing that I would want
to help people make the shift on, is that is the meaning of words
and things, right, and their abilities to kind of have that the world
of self is symbolic, the world of self is polysemous, and that these
connections are not arbitrary, which is yeah, but the not arbitrary is very
important because this is something that we run into with postmodernism, which is that
postmodernism argues for polysemi as well, but they argue for free floating polysemy.
So, like, the idea is that is that you have multiple meanings,
but those multiple meanings are disconnected from each other, and there isn't, let's
say, an underlying analogy between the different levels of meanings. And so interestingly
enough is that because of that, when now people like you and I argue
for polysemi, people accuse us of being postmodern because that's where they've heard that,
and they're like, well, how can it have several meanings? It
means that everything's going to blow up and then we don't know what's real and
it's all made up. It's all on your mind and it's all that.
But it's like, no, it's none, it's it's neither of those.
The polysemic aspect of a text is all directed, right, it's all directed
towards the truth. And that's what makes the different levels cohere together. So
when Dante presents his different levels of what he means by that psalm, though
it's not. They're not disconnected. They're just different levels of the same meaning,
the different levels of the same truth. And it's because they had a
you say, the pattern or the interpretive map that they're using, or both
the Book of the Scriptures and also the Book of Creation. Right, is
the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Right, that's the central thing that
you have to take as completely necessary to this entire model. Right that without
it, Without it, almost all Western literature just becomes incoherent. Right,
even fairy tales, even fairy tales, most of the fairy tales written by
the brothers grim and I'm talking like the first edition that had all the gnarly
stuff in it before they kind of you know, made it polite later.
Yeah, but the the the all those fairy tales, right, Those fairy
tales actually have the Gospel story encoded within them, right on the typological level.
And that doesn't mean it had to be a deliberate thing, right that
this is just you know, I am, I mean, you're your thing
that you say, right, This is how the world lays itself out right,
this is this is the way that things are right. And that's really
important because especially and it's weird because a lot of people have done the opposite,
which is to try to make the fairy tales into non Christian things.
And usually what they mean by that is because the fairy tales are immoral.
Often actually they are actually they actually aren't usually about just like getting or whatever.
They're quite a moral, they're quite mythological, and they can be quite
jarring. But the truth is that like read the story of Samson again,
I read the Book of Judges, this is actually part of our tradition.
You know. The idea that everything has to be clean and moral and puritan
is ridiculous. It's just not part of the tradition at all. Like these
gnarly and kind of weird stories. The way that people read Homer there was
there's very weird stuff in Homer, but they could nonetheless, when they could
read Plato, people could read the Symposium and even though it had all this
kind of dark stuff, they could see that there were still glimmers shining through
it, you know, without having to accept thing this as just being an
example a more or lesson about this or that. That's that's beautifully put.
Yeah, this is this is like, this is the big thing that we
got to get people to sort of understand because even then actually something something that's
sort of come up recently. Now I'm off the reservation, I'm off my
notes, but is the way that the way that somebody could read and be
offended by like a Saint story like a work of how geography. Right,
there's like weird, sometimes shocking stuff to modern sensibilities in the saints' lives.
If you don't think that, then you just haven't read enough of them.
Yeah, and so this sort of like we have this kind of idea of
here's what like a like a clean, polite, well behaved, right Christian
person is supposed to look like. And it's basically the product of basically it's
like the nineteen fifties, right, Yeah, you know, like like it's
it's like, at least in this country, we have like nineteen fifties America
in our head, right, you know, that's the that's that's our golden
era. So that's where we go back to, and we're like, you
know, there's the lawn's got to be neatly trimmed and the you know,
you know, all all that stuff, and uh man, it's it's you
know, it's just that the tradition is so much weirder than that. It's
so much more dangerous than that, you know. Uh uh and uh this
is you know again, this is not to say, you know, I
mean, nobody, nobody who knows me think for a moment that I'm you
know, running down like the moral teachings of the Church or anything like that,
and nothing like that. But but to say that that actually, if
you if you go and look at actually what the tradition is, you know,
in literature, in the church, in our hagiography, in the scriptures,
all these things, if you look at what it is, it's it's
not that it's not that just sort of clean. It's not that just sort
of like clean. You know, the lawn is perfectly cut and and you've
got the two kids, one boy and one girl, and like just that
whole like sort of black and white image of here's what perfect life, you
know, is supposed to be. If you're a good person, you go
to church on Sundays. And this is where this is where fairy tales really
fit into things. But they they would have read those stories, and they
would have read but they would have also read Homer, and they would have
also read even like the North Smiths. Right, there's some great work that's
been written. We're going to talk about it some in the Bail of Class
people. There's been some great stuff that's written about how Christians when they you
know, the skin and and Germanic Christians when they converted, they were able
to look at things like Igdrasill right, the Tree of Life right, the
world tree right, and then to sort of see it as the cross right,
and and then and then develop a really beautiful poetic tradition around the cross,
which is actually deeply continent with the Byzantine poetic tradition around the Cross.
So we'll talk about some of those things in the Bail Wolf Class. But
just to move on real quick, because I know we're like way over the
normal time for these kinds of things. The third thing that you need to
understand, and and again this is something that you have been trying to tell
people, and I think effectively telling people for years, is that heaven is
above and hell is beneath. The medieval vision of the cosmos is not geocentric,
right, that is the world at the center. It is rather the
earth at the bottom. Right. And so you get this very clearly in
Dante, where you've got the the the outer heaven, the empire Rian right,
where God dwells, right, the divine rose, the beauty of everything,
sort of like reality bounces back in on itself like a mirror image,
and it's God at the center and everything around him. Right. But then
you have these various tiers, the various different heavens, right, these different
heavens, the heaven of the fixed stars and Saturn and Joe or Jupiter and
Mars and Soul, the Sun and Venus and Mercury and the moon, and
then beneath the moon. And basically in the Middle Ages, the really important
barrier is the barrier of the moon. Right, things beneath the moon can
change. It's the world of time, is the world where repentance is possible,
but it's also the world where things die and decay. Beyond the moon
is things are fixed and things move in kind of perfect order. Right.
And so in Dante's Divine Comedy, when Lucifer, when the devil is cast
out of Heaven, he's cast down to Earth. Why is he cast down
to Earth? In out some other place? Which would actually be a perfectly
good question to ask if you had like a Copernican model of the universe,
right, why not why Earth? Well, it's a very simple answer.
In the bottom is the bottom. It's as far down as you can go.
So Lucifer is cast down to Earth, and when he lands, his
body makes a pit because basically the Earth hates him and is trying to get
out of his way, right, So he lands and everything is like sort
of thrown up, and the dirt is thrown up on the other side of
the planet that becomes the mount of Purgatory. And then Satan eventually lands at
the center of the Earth. Why at the center of the Earth, Because
in this you could say, like geography, this is as far away as
you can get from God. That's the lowest point, the lowest point.
So man did medieval man did not see himself as standing at the center of
the universe. He saw himself as standing at the bottom of a great stairaway,
looking up towards God. And of course the medieval medieval man understood the
entire human life as the soul's longing, a desire to return to God who
had made it right. And so it's really easy to remember this if we
remember two things. One is that in the Middle Ages, nobody believed the
world was flat. It wasn't like people all thought the world was flat until
Christopher Columbus or whoever sailed around it and proved, you know, like,
oh my gosh. The people that think that I still run into it.
People are like, oh, Columbus prove the world was round, and I'm
like, no, he didn't. The Greeks proved the world was round,
and they did it with math, and they did it, you know,
four thousand years ago and anyway, But then also the other thing is the
other thing is and here's my little Enders game reference for Andrews game fans out
there, like we just remember the Enemy's gate is down that is that is,
you know, Hell is down right, the center of the earth right,
And so in the medieval cosmology, there's no such thing as outer space
doesn't exist. Not to say they didn't know that their stars, planets,
comets, supernova, et cetera. But there's no such thing as outer space,
this vast empty blackness where everything is just sort of arbitrary and Neil de
grass tysony just kind of floating out there, right. I actually have a
theory about that is that when we switch to the Copernican model, outer space
becomes the limits of the Earth. It actually flips, it inverts weirdly,
and and everything that used to happen on the edge of the of the world
is now projected into outer space. If you watch that movie Gravity, it's
really actually wonderful, like in terms of that cosmic sense. It represents outer
space as this like place of death and strangeness that is outside the bound world,
and basically like it's it's related to going into the water. That's why
at the end of the movie, and she's in this in this thing,
and she encounters Saint Christopher, and she encounters like this weird place where she
doesn't understand Chinese, and then finally she dives into the bottom of the water
and comes out like resurrection. It's like, that's a real good understanding of
what outer space is. Really. Yeah, the the you know, the
one of the other you know, really strong ancient images, including for like
the Germanic people. So we're going to talk about this in the Babel of
class the way that they they they saw the world as you know, as
as midden yard, right, the middle Earth surrounded by the encircling sea,
right, and where the sea is like, this is the abyss. This
is the thing you can't like, God is over there on the other side
somewhere, right. That's basically what space became for us when that switch happened.
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, yep. So in this conception of the
world, the world moves and is moved by love. Right. Dante again
has this wonderful phrase at the very end of a comedy, referring to God
is the love that moves the Sun and the other stars. So in the
Discarded Image, she Lewis makes a really great point about this. He says
that in the modern world, we conceive of a universe governed by laws.
Right, we have the law of universal gravitation, the law of conservation of
energy, the second law of thermodynamics, Right, and one of the things
that basically postmodernity does is it starts to break down this vision of the universe,
even even at the level like quantum physics, which again this is all
stuff you've talked about, but it breaks down this idea of a world that's
like totally governed and kind of predictable and determinable, governed by laws. And
now we're actually saying perception is part of the you know, actually affects you
know, reality on a quantum level, you know whatever that means, right,
But it's got no compelling alternative with which reality could be unified. And
in the Middle Ages they understood the world as being held together and moved by
love, which you could say is is is held in a world that's tactually
held and moved together by attention, right, and so free Chaucer and is
his poem the House of Fame, which is not one of the Chaucer stories
that you read in high school. I don't know why, you know.
I guess it's because the teenagers. We figure teenagers can handle like the body
humor of of the Canterbury Tales, and maybe that'll be more fun for them.
But in the House of Fame, which which among other things, involves
this this man sort of ascending up through the spheres, right, it's being
you know, he's asking questions about how the medieval universe works the way it
does. And he's told that every I'll just quote from it here, every
kindly thing kindly as in the sense of according to its kind, not as
in the sense of nice nice. So every everything according to his kind,
every kindly thing that is hath a kindly stead, that is a home there,
Hey, he may best in it, can serve it be unto which
place? Everything, through his kindly inclining moveth forward to come to. So
things move in the universe, Things move in the cosmos by by this process
of basically everything trying to get back to where it belongs. So why does
water sit on top of the earth Because water belongs here and the earth belongs
here. If I drop the stone in water, why will it go down?
Newton was not the first person to notice that apples fall from trees or
whatever, right, you know, and be like, gosh, no one's
ever noticed this before, you know. But the explanation that they would have
given was that the apple falls because it's made of earth and it's trying to
get back to where it came from. And of course Lewis I give another
Lewis quote. He says, we could ask the medieval scientists, this is
silly, why you're talking this way? Do you really think that a rock
really loves the earth? Like whatever? And he would we could retort,
or he could retort with a counter question, but do you intend your language
about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly inclining?
In other words, is there like a cosmic traffic court where if you disobey
the law of gravity, like you get a ticket? Like? How does
this work? How does this work? But what Lewis says is that on
the imaginative and emotional level, it makes a great difference whether we with the
medievals we project upon the universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns
our police system and our traffic regulations, Like what do you want to live
in a cosmic police state? Which is even affect of the ways that we
think about Christianity, like the reduction of Christianity to basically just moralism. Yeah,
I mean, I've talked about this elsewhere, but I grew up in
this fundamentalist group or sect that, among other things, believe that the Bible
is a set of laws, of a set of principles. This is what
they call them. And if you live by these things, then your life
will go well, and that they're as immutable and as provable as like the
law of gravity. I mean, they would have said that, right.
And so do we want to live in a world in a cosmos that's governed
by love or in one that's essentially a police state? All right? So
the last thing I want to talk about space and time. So I'm going
to read here a quote from Zigmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity, which is an incredible
book if people haven't read it, it uh by liquid zigment, Boman means
that it is modernity can't hold the shape, it can't hold form. So
he says that modernity starts when space and time are separated from living practice and
from each other, and so become ready to be theorized as distinct and mutually
independent categories of strategy and action. When they cease to be as they used
to be in long pre modern centuries, the intertwined and so barely distinguishable aspects
of the living experience locked in a stable and apparently invulnerable one to one correspondence.
When I read this paragraph, I was just like, Oh, it's
Matthew's book, and it's like everything Jonathan has been saying for years, and
it's like, but somebody else, somebody else is saying it. So modernity
basically is the separation of space and time. It's becoming two sort of separate
things, right, And I think that you can tell me what you think
about this, because I'm still kind of noodling on this idea. But I
think that postmodernity could be understood as a further corruption of this, that once
space and time are measured, separated, categorized, they eventually cease to have
any meaning at all, and then we deconstruct them in order to kind of
show how absurd they are. Right. I think about this a lot when
I'm driving around in my car, because, like, it's the most absurd
sort of separation of space and time. The fact that I can be somewhere,
you know, one hundred miles away, I can be there in an
hour and a half. Yeah, well, for sure that the technology has
made this problem excessively great, in the same way that in your car you
have that experience. We have the experience now like look at what we're doing
right now, right, yes, right, yes, yeah, there's nothing
more like break. Nothing breaks this sense of space? Is this zoom conversation?
You know. Yeah, that's a good point. I think that I
think that deconstruction is at its heart, it's a reaction to the subsurdity,
and it's like a it's like an immune response. I mean, I mean
this is I did not intend today to be the day that I've explained why
the metric system was invented by demons. But the but but but but uh,
as you know, here in America, we stubbornly refuse to use Listen,
I'll I'll measure things in Universal Standard giraffes before I use the metric system,
like like, oh, that's three giraftes long, Like I'll go there
before I before I succumb to the use of the metric system. But I
mean, the but if you think about the metric system, basically, the
idea is, hey, let's measure the earth at a certain point that we've
arbitrarly determined. Let's measure everything, yeah, and then divide it up into
regular sections. And that's going to be our base unit of measurement from now
on. And it used to be like a certain piece of metal that they
had to keep a certain temperature because actually, if you get it out in
the real world, it'll stop being that precise length. And now I think
they use like lasers or something. But anyway, the point it's really important
what you're saying, because this is, you know, the the the traditional
way of measuring, which is clunky and it's difficult, is nonetheless based on
human experience. It's clunky and difficult, but it's also easy and intuitive.
Yeah, right, at a very base level to say, how many feet
is this? Well, I've got a foot, I can check right,
and and most of the time that's going to be good enough for most most
applications. Right an inch, right, well, I've got a right,
a cubit, I've got an arm, you know. But even like measurements
of time, like like so many people have tried to monkey with the way
that we measure time, and it's like like, well, we'll let you
do the metric system with space. But when like when they try to introduce
like the ten day week, just can't do it. You just can't do
it. Like everybody has a seven day week, like it's it's completely you
know. Uh, it's one of the most immutable things about the human experience.
Yeah, and I mean just separating time into four quadrants of sun and
dark, like light and darkness and sun and moon. Even though in in
the the let's say, over the variation it changes, it's like you just
can't change you just can't change that, right, Yes, it's yeah,
so it's this, but this is this is the the kind of ways that
this the sort of idea that if we sort of measure and quantify everything,
right, then we we can control it and then everything is certain, right,
this this basic idea. What it what it does is it separates time
from space, right, because it separates space from any kind of experience of
that space in a way that you know, human beings would would use it.
So what father father Silvio Bunta in his this is from his his commentary
on the Euroticon, which is like for people, it's like the priest book
from the Seminos Petra monastery on Mount Athos. He says that he talks about
how the Orthodox tradition we have two different words for time. We have chronos,
you know, whence chronology right, this is what Father Alexander Schmamann called
death. In other words, it's the it's experience of time and decay,
right, the linear passage of moments. And then we have cairos and cairos
is this uh this this, it's the eternal moment, right. Yeah,
it's qualified. It's qualified time. It's like, yes, qualified time as
a good Yeah. So Charles Taylor in a secular rate, he describes ch
irotic time as how something that happened two thousand years ago can become closer to
you than something that happened yesterday. So like if you go to Orthodox pasca,
right, which even if you're not Orthodox, like it's not even close
to your Easter this year, so like you have no excuse. Go go
go find an Orthodox church area and go experience pasca, Like, go find
out what that's like. When you go to Orthodox pasca, you are experiencing
the resurrection as an event that is closer to you today than the moon landing
or the assassination of JFK Or said, you know, the the you know,
you know, the twenty sixteen election or something like that. I don't
know why I couldn't pick a non controversial historical event. But mind just just
file them up there. My mind wouldn't do it, Okay. So chronological
time is the time of this world, right, but the chirotic time,
the chiros this is this is a time that knows no chronology, ah and
what and but we have the same thing actually with space as well, which
I think is not as well known. In the Orthodox tradition. We have
two words for space. There is korra, which means like normal space,
like any any old space, and then topos, right, which means like
a particular place. Yeah, like it's like it's like that, it's like
this, there's a hierarchy to its existence. So in the liturgy, pronos
becomes cairos and space becomes place right, and all of these things are kind
of caught up into that eternal moment. And to give like an example of
this, So this is all by way of saying, not only is the
metric system demonic, but cause and effect is made up. In the Middle
Ages, people did not see history. And again you could read some of
Vaalalascan's essays about this, and he's even got a whole section on it in
a History of the Island of people are curious about this. But in the
Middle Ages, people didn't see history as a series of cause and effects,
causes and effects. They saw history as a battle between good and evil,
which means that the most important thing in history has already happened, because that
was the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Right. But history is
this battle between good and evil. This is what the whole Apocalypse of Saint
John is about. Is history see as this conflict between good and evil in
which good ultimately triumphs. But because we see history in this way, if
we, uh, you know, I if I slap Jonathan, or let's
say I insult Jonathan, I say something really mean about your mother, right,
and then you slap me. Right, we could say, well,
there's a cause which is I said something insulting and in fact, which is
you slap me. But in the Middle Ages they wouldn't have understood it this
way. They would have understood it as I sinned against the image of God
in you or your mother, and that God through your hand punished me.
Right. That's the that's the sort of difference. There's a we see sort
of history as being this flat, two dimensional thing. But they they would
have seen God as constantly, always intervening in history. And where this becomes
really important is when you understand something like the annunciation. So if you only
have this, this understanding of chronological time in which everything must proceed through a
course a series of ordinary cause it effects, something Lewis really struggled with when
he was writing Miracles, and he actually kind of had to go back can
revise quite a bit of it after a conversation with a Roman Catholic philosopher on
the subject. Okay, but if you see history as just being the series
of sort of normal causes and effects, then Mary is an ordinary Jewish girl,
one whose life must have gone on in the usual way, marriage,
childbirth, family life, old age, death as part of a part of
a normal succession of cause and effect. And so you'll have conversations with somebody
who talking about something like the entrance of the Theotogus in the temple, which
is an event that we celebrate in you know that most traditional all traditional Christians
celebrate, and most Christians around the world celebrate as a as a feast in
the church. But then you'll have a modern person come along and say,
well, that's note they never let women into the temple, so that couldn't
have happened. Well, listen, brother, nobody's saying that this is a
normal thing that happened. If it's not the point, it's a special that
we're talking about it, right, and so, but if you see time
is only in this way, then the nunciation and the incarnation become like a
blip or an interruption into the ordinary passage of things, which is otherwise just
part of the linear progress of humanity. But if you view it as as
happening in chirotic time is happening in Chiros, then all of the righteous actually
from across human history, Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, David right,
sort of narrow into a point so that by the time that the Word
is incarnated in the womb of the Most Holy Virgin, there's basically just the
one righteous family left in Israel. Right. But it's all from a chronos
standpoint, that's terrible, because look, you know, by a number standpoint,
bad guys are winning, right. But actually, from in terms of
Chiros, no it's everything is distilling, everything's condensing down to a single point,
so that all of God's interventions on behalf of his people throughout history are
actually rolled up into and made manifest in that moment. And this is why
the Magnificat, which is one of the oldest Christian hymns, a lot of
historians think that it was already being sung in church before the Old before the
Gospel, according to Saint Luke, was actually written, right, it's one
of the oldest Christian hymns. This is why the Magnificat, if you look
at it, it's really like a bringing together of every song of a victorious
righteous woman from the Old Testament. So you can look at Deborah's song and
Miriam's song of the Sea, and the song of the Righteous Hannah and like
like all of their prayers, right, you know, as the as the
weaker person praying for deliverance. Right, all of that stuff is kind of
rolled up into that single prayer that that she prays. And so this is
where we get to this idea that I think would be like the fifth and
final or the fourth and final maybe just to tell people see what what Richard
is alluding to is. In some ways there's a man in which you can
understand the let's say, the the annunciation of Mary as the cause of all
the other ones that came before in in in a sense of meaning, right,
It's like that's what Richard is trying to allude to, and that's why
when we talk about it's like that which makes all those other things worthy of
interest and important to notice and strings them together and makes them something is actually
something that happens after the event, and that is you know, and that's
why in some ways, like Christians have an eschatological vision of reality, which
is also that that which will happen in the future, like the Esketon that's
coming over the hill that never quite happens, is going to make sense of
everything and will show us and will reveal to us what the cause of everything
was in the first place. And there's a collapse between the end and the
beginning, when some ways the end becomes the beginning, or the beginning and
the end are brought into the person of Christ as this glorious figure that is
both the one that comes at the end but then revealed to be the one
that created is the lamb of God that was sacrificed before the foundation of the
world, although that happened at the crucifixion. That might sound like a weird
a weird way of thinking. But it actually is something that we experience all
all the time, that we experience in our lives all the time, which
is that the fact that we remember things in our past as being important is
usually based on things that are happening to you now, and that things that
are culminating for you now. It's like, oh, the reason why I
liked I like to play this game when I was young is because, oh,
it turns out I'm going to become a doctor or whatever. And we
kind of and it's weird because the postmoderns this something that they understood. Leota
wrote this little book called postmodern Explained to Children, and that was his definition
of postmodernism. Postmodernism was basically reinterpretation of the past based on the present.
But again, what the postmoderns got wrong is that they saw it as an
arbitrary exercise and power ultimately, which is that there's a way in which power
can now reinterpret the past and make it align with with with their present vision.
And they didn't have a sense in which none of this is actually arbitrary,
and ultimately all of this is playing in cosmic patterns that are that are
true, that are just simply true and are playing out in creation. You
could say that postmodernism is sort of a failure of eschatology. Right, you
don't have the capacity for an eschatological vision. You just you sort of like
you're reacting as the separation of space and time. But you still you still
accept the chronos the fact that he thinks they're just going to keep going,
right. Yeah, Well, Jacques Deda had this idea. He called it
open escatology, and it's an interesting idea because he understood in some ways that
the future is coming towards us and interpreting the past. But he didn't want
like he was like, no, it's not about saying come Lord Jesus.
He would just say come like just basically, you know, this this desire
to the future role on us. But you know, it's like that the
world actually does go through path does actually does actually manifest in patterns, and
I'm sorry to tell you, and so so it's not it's not arbitrary at
all, what's coming over the hill? Yes, yes, so this this
kind of brings us to like the final thing that I want to say,
which is that the goal of this kind of reading and the goal of again
my whole goal. I mean, it's really it was like when we sat
down we first started talking about doing the Universal History series, it was kind
of like, how do we get people that take this stuff seriously? Right?
It's this this idea that that uh, through these stories and through sort
of helping people understand these patterns through stories, right, to help them have
a relationship with the cosmos. That is, you could say, like a
mysticgogical vision of the cosmos, right, the mysticgad you being the relationship between
you could say, the earthly temple and the heavenly temple, right, And
and actually in Judaism and in traditional Christianity, those are actually the same thing.
There's no distinction between them. And so this this, uh, this
is a vision of a cosmos in which we see that the relationship between the
scene and the unseen is real. It's not just merely symbolic. It is
symbolic, but it's not merely symbolic in the way that you know, it's
not modern oracle or allegorical way that makes it arbitrary, right, Yeah,
And that's the next thing is just it's not arbitrary. You can't say this
enough, right. The patterns by which the example you've used sometimes, right,
is that the patterns by which the cosmos is laid out aren't just things
that we are making up any more than we see an arbitrary of arrangement of
pigments on a canvas and we discribed, we decide that they're a vang of
painting. Right. But it's also apocalyptic. And this is what I think
sometimes people miss a little bit in some of the conversations that I've seen,
you know, happening in various circles around the internet, talking about some of
the stuff, that it's apocalyptic in the original sense, you know, of
lifting up the veil, the lifting of a veil, right, that the
nature of this relationship is constantly revealing itself in man, who is a microcosm
of the universe. And then also first and foremost in the liturgy. Right,
So, and that's the final thing, is that this, this relationship
between the scene and the unseen is liturgical. That the relationships between these things
aren't static, they move, they dance as in the liturgy. And I
still remember the first time I ever went to a divine liturgy, and you
know, I'd done my homework, I'd read on things ahead of time,
because that's how I am. And then I got there, and despite the
fact that I had read, you know, description after description of what was
going to happen in the Divine Liturgy, I'm there and it's like this big
festa liturgy and there's a bunch of clergy and the coming in at the altar
and the going out of the altar, and they're doing I'm like, I
have no idea what is happening, but I'd had this deep conviction in that
moment that this is the shape of air. Right. And then of course
for us, ultimately the revelation of Jesus Christ, the god Man who is
himself, the total revelation of God, and the total revelation of the human
person. And that's the last thing. The last point is if you're gonna
understand the scripture, is, if you're gonna understand the liturgy, if you're
gonna understand any work of pre modern literature, you have to see man as
a microcosm, that is, as a little cosmos. Right, that this
vision of the world is not anthropostcentric man at the center, but it is
anthropole cosmic. We are not just a collection of cells any more than a
temple is a collection of bricks or the liturgy is just a collection of arbitrary
historical movements that a creed it over time. And this is again, by
the way, like there are certain certain like let's say, circles of conservatism
that are currently trying to wage war against the madness of our of our current
age by reducing things. So I saw this headline a few weeks ago in
a like a conservative website about about some transgendered person, right, and so
of say, but and they said that every DNA of this person's you know,
biology is male, you know. And but listen, folks, if
we are reducing identity down to cellular level, down to DNA, right,
we've actually already seated the ground to materialism. Yeah, right, Because that's
why C. S. Lewis says, it has this wonderful quote, and
uh, I think it. I forget in which book of the no I'm
talking about, in the Space trilogy, he says he says gender is more
primorial than sex. And it's like, and I quoted on Twitter, and
everybody was I saw somebody was enraged at you were like losing the mind and
thinking that I'm like agreeing with gender theory because they want to collapse gender and
sex together, which is actually not a traditional thing at all. Gender and
sex in traditional cultures has always been different. But the problems that they're not
free floating, right, they are coherent, and they are they play different.
They played the pattern of the same thing at different levels, and you
just it's hard for people to think that way, but that's just how it
is. Boats are female, that's right. What are you going to do?
Yeah, boats are feminine. There's nothing you can do about it.
Yeah, another lewis quo. I thought that's where this where we're going to
go. But to paraphrase something he says in the Voids of It on Tredder,
if you're talking about DNA, that's not what a man is. It's
only what he's made of, right. Yeah. So Archbishop Dmitri, who's
our beloved the founder of our diocese here in the OCA, the Diocese of
the South, he said that you know, during the first millennium since Christ,
the church was occupied with the question who is Christ? During the second
with what is the church is? When you have the Sism, the Great
Sism, the Reformation and so on, and that the great question of the
third millennium is going to be what is man right? But Archbishop Dmitri said
that Jesus Christ is the answer right. He says that Jesus Christ is the
truth about God and the truth about Man, since he is both God and
Man. God's real nature is completely revealed in the Son of God, the
incarnate Word, and the whole truth about man. His worth, his value,
and dignity are realized and made manifest to man in the Son of Man,
Jesus of Nazareth. So this is the first thing that we have to
really understand to read and understand ancient medieval literature, liturgy, all of our
scriptures, and we absolutely must understand if we are going to even start to
talk about salvation and what that means is that man is a microcosm. Just
a couple of quotes to finish this up, Saint Macari's have Egypt said,
the heart itself is only a small vessel. Yet dragons are there, lions
are there, There are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. There
are rough and uneven roads, there are precipices, but there too his God
and the angels. Life is there, and the kingdom there to his light,
and there are the apostles, and the heavenly cities and the treasuries of
grace, all things lie within that little space. And this is why,
actually, this is why in the Orthodox spiritual tradition we talk about going down
into your heart, right like turning the eye of a heart inward upon itself.
It's not an act of just like self preoccupation, but it's actually because
the entire world is there. And that's why, that's why you could have
somebody who is a hermit who is actually upholding the whole world, right because
by praying, and this is say Siloon the Athonite once corrected somebody for saying,
you know, Lord Jesus christaid of God, have mercy on me and
on the whole world. He said, don't pray that way, just say
have mercy on me the sinner, because if you do that, then you're
praying for the whole world. Right. That's really that. You can't ask
God for anything more than that. The way that Saint Maximus the Confessor phrases
this is he says that the church building that the temple, but he means
like the building, the physical building is a human being, and every human
being is a church. And then he actually says, and the cosmos is
a human being, and every human being is a cosmos. And the scriptures
are a human being, right, and every human being is a scripture.
Right. And you know, from there there's a lot that we could say
about his mystagogical vision, which I think we're just like way over time,
so I'm not going to do that. But if you sort of like take
these these five things, right, then you can use them to sort of
understand when you come to liturgy or when you come to an ancient text like
Beowulf and we'll talk about this in the class, when you come to even
something like the scriptures and you come across something that's like offensive to your modern
sensibilities, come into the church and you see there's this big wall between you
and the altar, right, why is that there? Like are you trying
to keep me from God? What's going on? Like I thought the curtain
of the temple was torn into you know, and you know to that we
would just say it was. And when do you show that in your liturgy?
Because if you wait here in a minute, you'll see it, you
know. But if you come across these if you come across something that's so
offensive, to modern sensibilities like monasticism, like the relationship between the active and
the contemplative life. You know, why can't you know I'm a visit to
your church. Why won't you let me back in the altar area? You
know, things like that. And these are all real questions, by the
way, that I've tried to answer and had to answer for catech humans and
acquirers in my own parish. Right. But if we can understand, if
we can understand that the world is laid out in this way, we can
understand the human body as first and foremost a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Right. If that's our beginning point, then we can go from there to
address not just be the good kind of tourist, but also, as Christians,
address the passions and the pathologies of our day. So this is kind
of my elevator pitch, my really really long elevator right pitch for if you
can kind of shift the way that you're thinking about these different things, then
okay, you won't. I can't make you into like a native of the
Middle Ages, although maybe it's more possible than some people think, but I
can't. I can't. I can't make you into a native of the Middle
Ages. But what you could do is to become the good kind of tourist
who when you come to these things and when you come to these services,
right, and I'm really big about don't just read about this stuff. You
got to go to church, guys when you come, when you encounter these
things, instead of just being weird or foreign or Eastern, you can start
to see actually what's going on there underneath the surface. So anyway, I'm
gonna stop repeating myself now, all right, Richard, Thanks, This is
great, yah, and people, Yeah, go sign up for for for
Bayo if I really can't wait. It's going to be It's going to be
a lot of fun. And we're also we're going to figure out a way
for people to be able to ask questions, to participate where like a moderated,
moderated interactive discussion and a bunch of really cool stuff. I'm excited about
it because there are things that I can say to the Symbolic World crew about
Beowulf that I probably couldn't say in a more academic setting. You know,
people just wouldn't know how to receive it or accept it. But you guys
have been coming along with Jonathan on this journey for so many years and also
with me, like we've been doing universal history for more than two years now,
Like that's insane. So the groundwork has been you know, been laid,
so we should be able to just kind of get right into it.
So I'm excited about it, and I look forward to seeing everybody in September.
All right, everybody, we'll talk to you soon, alight. If
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