The dark powers want to use symbol in a way that sort of upfew skates
what's really there. Powers are always based when they have a kind of a
bent agenda. They have to have some kind of lie that's inherent to the
way they're working in the symbolic world, because true symbol is integrity between what's
on the inside and what's on the outside. It's kind of the way I
think about glory. True glory is like pure integrity of what's on the inside
and the outside. Like a piece of amber, you know, and you
put it up to the sun and it's just like this beautiful translucent thing that
you look through and it's solid all the way through. Whereas a distorted symbol.
And now we get into things like idols and advertising and words and stereotypes
and things that kind of like have a certain force socially, they're all predicated
on some kind of a lie. They have a duplicitous nature. They function
precisely because they're inside does not have integrity with the outside. The outside has
more of like a grandiosity, which we kind of like almost attribute to things
by virtue of association. But they're hollowed out. They really don't have integrity
of meaning. Yeah, this is Jonathan Pegel. Welcome to the Symbolic World.
So hello everyone. I am very happy to be here with Ted Lewis.
Ted Lewis is a director of the International Jacqueline Society, Christian who you
made have seen on this channel and is a good friend of mine presented us
I myself, have you know, read some jacquelul I've struggled with Jacqueline,
you know, in some ways I feel like his insight on technology is is
very important for us right now to understand the problem civilization, the problem of
technology. But also, of course as an Orthodox Christian and as someone who
makes images, I've struggled with some other aspects subject of Jacqueline, which is
what I see as the two negative vision of the city of civilization, of
the image of you know, of spatiality, and the kind of the possibility
of these things to manifest in the world today. And so I'm really excited
to be able to kind of engage this discussion with Ted and so Ted,
thanks for coming along. Yeah, it's great to join in here. So
I think a lot of people will know Jacculin, but maybe several will not.
So could you give people a sense of who he was, what what's
his importance for us today? Yeah, I'll be glad to. Jacques Louel
is a mid century thinker and many in many ways as a pioneer in the
area of critiquing technology, and his prominent book, The Technological Society came out
first in nineteen fifty four in the French edition, nineteen sixty four in English.
So we're coming up on a seventieth year anniversary. But even before that,
during the Nazi era, Jacques Luell and his friend Bernard Charbonneau and others
in the personalist context in France, we're very concerned about how the force of
technology and a mechanized world would have an effect on society as well as our
very humanity. So one of the threads through all of his writings, I
mean, he wrote a lot forty books, died in nineteen ninety four,
But the thread through all of that is sort of a warning that if Western
people do not really come to terms with how the force of progress and technology
when it's un tethered from ethics, will end up having a deep effect on
even the way we conceive ourselves as human beings. A simple way to think
about it is to think about how environments influence us. So a little kind
of split things into three zones. There's sort of like a time where nature
was our environment, and social villages and cultural things are primarily rooted in how
nature forms and patterns human life. And then the next stage it has to
do with just what he calls the environment of the social the society we might
think of the Greek city state and the Roman world and into the medieval world
and Renaissance, and the social world has more influence from how humanity is starting
to lift itself away from nature and to create new ways of thinking and being
and science and and and whatnot. And then for a Lieuell, technology it's
itself becomes a third kind of environment, an environment which informs who we are
as people. And it almost becomes totalistic for him. And some people think
he's, you know, too too far with that totalistic way about technology as
a force dominates every part of human life. But those are some broad strokes
around his writings. Yeah, what I think the thing that for myself made
me feel close to Alul is that he definitely seems to understand because it's important
people to understand that Elud was also a very serious Christian. You know,
his his insight, much of the way that he thought came from the Bible
came from his own. Uh. He was was he reform, Was he
Protestant? I don't know what his tradition was. Yeah, primarily identified with
with the French Reform and it had quite a bit of influence within France and
in those circles. One of the more more significant things is before he was
really a Christian, he had read Karl Marx. He fully embraced a Marxist
approach, and in many ways that continued to inform his his sociology. And
then he starts to read Kirkerguard. I think he's known for reading just about
everything Kerguard wrote, which is really astounding. And then and then he started
getting introduced to Carl Bart, so Kirkergard and Bart kind of advanced his his
Christianity out of a traditional Calvinist reform zone into what you might call more of
a dialectical perspective of faith matters. And so one of the things that impressed
me was that he does seem to really pick up very much on a clear
strain in the Bible, which is the you could call it the canite image
of civilization, which is that we find in the first chapters of Genesis that
civilization is an issue of the descendants of Cain and is in some ways a
kind of reaction, you know, reaction to the curse and a compensation for
the curse in some ways. To think about that that he seems to see
the city in that that vein and civilization and the technification of society in this
this kind of line that's they cannot line, and you really have to understand
A. Leuill's critique of the city, and he does come on pretty strong.
Has a follow up to Harvey Cox's book, The Secular City, where
Harvey Cox tends to have more of an open mindedness, like now now that
we've come into you know, the fullness of modern society, all the virtues
that that might come with that. What A Lewell saw in that was a
sacrilization of the city. So it's not the city person with all of its
architecture and structures and institutions. For Louell that's most problematic. It's the fact
that it gets lifted up like a tower of babbyl as something that becomes autonomous
with its separate law autonomous from God. So that's really at the heart of
the Loull's critique of the city is it becomes archetypal, just like the Tower
of Babel, of human enterprises that don't know how to be more interactive and
participatory with God in a spiritual realm. Yeah, and in this way,
this is where in some ways it starts to rub with me in terms of
as especially being an orthodox Christian, is that his interpretation of that leads all
the way into his vision, for example, of image making and also of
liturgy, how he saw liturgy as something similar to this, to this process,
you know, where he tends to be suspicious of all of all formalizations.
You know, any type of formalization seems to be suspicious and prone to
becoming idols. And his approach seems to be a kind of desire to desacrileze
or de mythologize, you know, very much like Karl Barth very much in
that in that sense where in some ways he sees Christianity as the ultimate desacralizer,
you could say that that desacralizes everything. Is that? Do you think
my understanding is is right in that I think it's it's fairly good. And
you have to understand that Alua once went to a Nazi rally some sometime in
the in the later thirties. He was he was at one of those rallies,
and he even admitted that he felt the pole, the magnetism, the
group energy getting drawn into that. And so his his reaction to ceremony and
ritual and the you use of arts ultimately has to be understood through the lens
of how it can be used to manipulate society. Of course, he then
writes Empire of the Nonsense, where he kind of feels like most modern art
is itself sort of you know, dominated by a technological flow within the twentieth
century. So he doesn't have a whole lot of positive things to say about
modern art. So what is his view of Let's say, because there is
an eschatological image of the city right in the Book of Revelation, and so
how does it for himself, like, how does he reconcile those images together?
Well, I'm glad you use the word reconcile, because that is a
word he likes to use where image and word come together in a fruitful way.
So probably the most important book for this topic of his perspective on images
and liturgy and all of that is the Humiliation of the Word. It happens
to be one of my favorite books, and I was able to bring it
back into print recently. And at the end of that book he has a
whole chapter called Reconciliation, and by that he's talking about Jesus Word of God
ultimate Image of God as reconciling word and image in a way that restores the
balance of both and then that has implications then for other aspects of Christian life.
So even though he's very very hard on image and he prizes word,
I mean the very title, the humiliation of the Word is sort of like
grieving over the fact that we are an image dominated society, image saturated,
and we prize more what we see rather than what we hear. And he
goes into great depth about how the loss of our capacity to hear well affects
our thinking, our way of relating to to the spiritual realm and to God,
and it kind of roots us much more in the here and now.
So bringing back a restoration or reconciliation of word and image, for him is
the pathway modeled by Jesus to you know, to bring us into a better
zone. And so one of the things that made me fascinated to talk about
this is that recently, you know, Case now give me this, this
wonderful edition of the ILUL Forum that deals in large part with the question of
how Jacquelin talked about principalities and powers. This is, i think, something
which is extremely relevant today as we're noticing. One of the things that social
network like social media has done, and the Internet has done, is that
it has accelerated the question of the relationship between between attention and the way in
which social forces function. And what it has done is that made it possible
for us because it's accelerating it so much, it's helping even secular people see
the types of agencies which take over and you know, act through people.
And it's made it easier at least, well, I've noticed, it made
it easier for me to talk about this notion that there are types of agencies
or principal these powers. You know, Saint Paul uses different words to talk
about these that that kind of that say, have a type of agency over
human behavior. And this in some ways is one of the subjects that Elul
has treated, you know, in a moment where it was in some ways
very unpopular to talk about these types of subjects. So can you give us
a sense of how he perceived these these types of transpersonal agencies. Yeah,
it's a it's a big topic, and I have to be humble to say,
I'm still sort of unpacking his perspective and then what I think about it.
He definitely felt and believed that there were real principalities and powers, simply
because the Bible treats them as real. And marvit Don is someone who did
a fair amount of work with this topic. She did her whole dissertation on
Elul's view of the powers and principalities and then wrote some other things about it,
and she highlights that a Lull kind of hedged a little bit on what
might be called the ontological being of powers when it comes to agency and personification,
which you know, through Christian tradition, when we think of powers as
having volitional dimension. I would say he wasn't like fully there in his descriptions,
as you'll find in other Christian writings, and yet for him they are
they do have independent force beyond what you could just study empirically. As a
social scientist, just a couple examples for him was like the power of mammon,
which is a biblical word related to uh, money and wealth and material
things which have a certain power then over our need to protect are what we
save. It's similar to the way we we kind of think of a power
over someone who is an addictive or a compulsive relation to what enslaves them.
And everyone who's in the recovery world kind of knows that these powers are our
way beyond what they themselves can control. And that's why we use terms like
agency from beyond because it's it's it's it's the metaphoric language that helps us be
honest about the fact that there's something greater that's influencing us. Yeah. In
the text that I was reading, there's a letter in the from Jacculin to
Marva Dawn, and he seems, at least in some of the parts of
the letter to to to be wary, to be cautious. Like you said,
it's as if he's a little he tends to have a bit of a
reductionist approach to it, where he doesn't want to fully talk about agency.
But you know, let me just read a little text from it here,
and so he says, he talks about these powers, and he says,
that is to say, they certainly exist, but not as entities comparable to
human and materializable persons. They exist in as much as they are manifestations and
not as beings. Thus one finds the evil phenomena, the fact of money,
of the city, of the state, and of technique, and these
phenomena reveal the existence of an evil spiritual power, but not as a sort
of powerful angel reigning over the world and using money or the state. And
so Satan is the accusation. Therefore, everywhere there is an accusation, there
is Satan. But it is not a personage who provokes and produces the accusations.
The accusation exists by itself, in that I can see that he's really
struggling. He is really struggling to talk about this, And in some ways
I'm I feel like I kind of understand, especially in the moment where in
the time when he was writing this, you know how he was dealing with
this. But there's a way in which, in some ways what he's saying
about these agencies and powers is something that a reductionist would say about us,
about humans. He would say there is no agency. There's only the fact
there's only the actions, there's only the cells, there's only the electric impulses
you know, in your brain. Because you cannot detect through agency through material
calculation, like you can't, agency always appears above let's say the material facts.
And so I was a little surprised because I really do think that someone
would take his argument and apply it to a person and it would be as
valid as the way that he tries to skirt the problem of transpersonal agency by
attributing only the factors. Now, I understand that it's difficult because because we
are we are materialists, and therefore we're not used to thinking analogically. And
so when we think, when we think of these angels and we see these
beings with wings, we we kind of freak out because because it bothers us
to think to think that way, we we can't think that even those representations
are always analogical to some to some other form of yeah, to an invisible
agency. Let's say, yeah, this is a deep topic. I might
kind of come at this topic from a different angle, And I'd like to
throw out the word symbol symbol, you know, sim Greek for with ball,
Greek for throwing something. You know, we get our word ball from
that part of the Greek words that have the bawl in it, so symbol
to throw with, parable to throw, beyond, diable, or diabolic,
to throw apart. So the reason I kind of want to start with symbol
is that in a way, God's effort to reach humanity and see us Lewis
is kind of big on. This has to go through symbol to reach us,
and that doesn't mean that we can deconstruct it and then there's nothing there.
We come to realize it's the necessary means for one realm that's so incomprehensible
and beyond to reach us has to go through metaphor and symbol for us to
make sense of it. And so I think even when it comes to the
darker powers, all we have is language and symbol in a way to apprehend
it. But like wind, like gravity, like frequencies now that that you
know, make our garage door go up and down, we know that this
stuff is like really happening because we see the effects. And so I think
that's part of being just limited human beings is that we have to learn to
know that we're really not going to get that much more than symbol, and
yet that's still a rich area for us to traffic in. And what I
kind of find interesting is that the dark powers want to use symbol in a
way that's sort of up few skates what's really there. So powers are always
based, and I mean, when they have a kind of a bent agenda,
they have to have some kind of lie that's inherent to the way they're
working in the symbolic world. Because true symbol is integrity between what's on the
inside and what's on the outside. It's kind of the way I think about
glory. True glory is like pure integrity of what's on the inside and the
outside, like kind of like when you get like like a piece of amber,
you know, and you put it up to the sun and it's just
like this beautiful translucent thing that you look through and it's solid all the way
through, Whereas a distorted symbol. And now we get into things like idols
and advertising and words and stereotypes and things that kind of like have a certain
force socially, they're they're all predicated on some kind of a lie. They
have a duplicitous nature yea, and they function precisely because the inside does not
have integrity with the outside. The outside has more of like a grandiosity which
we kind of like almost attribute to things by virtue of association, but they're
hollowed out. They really don't have integrity of meaning. Yeah, would you
say that the very because this I think would fit well with But it says,
which is that the lie in some ways is the autonomous existence of the
thing itself. That is, you know, the state presenting itself as the
summit of authority, for example, that itself is the lie which forces the
disjunction between the outward appearance or the outward symbol and the interiority of the of
what is symbolized. And so it forces, you know, when a state
believes that it is all powerful, like in the authoritarian states that we saw
in the twentieth century, it is forced to use a religious language which is
not appropriate for itself, in order to apply it to itself because it is
in some ways like the tower babble taking up the place of God. We
could say, yeah, and I think what fits with what you're saying is
is the phrase pretentious powers. One of Rul's favorite verses right out of Second
Corinthians ten has this phrase of pretentious powers, you know, that we can
deconstruct and bring captive to the lordship of Christ. And by pretentious it means
it has the appearance of being very powerful. This is this is what I
call the outside manifestation of a power that presents well like a state, like
a nation, you know, like like a new car or whatever, but
on the inside has some contradictions, what you're calling a lie. Uh.
There's always an achilles heel, you know, on the inside of these duplicitous
symbols, because they're there, they have to continually be propped up with with
falsehoods and narratives and and things which you know, again lack the integrity of
meaning of the way things truly are in the world. And so one of
the ways that I so this is I think in terms of Ilul, maybe
I can phrase it this way because I think it relates to what we're saying
now, which is that Ilul seems to want to portray the negative, the
negative in the sense that in some ways, right, the crucifixion of Christ,
the humiliation of Christ, the you know, the capacity to embody weakness
subverts the whole structure right, and so in some ways it it it exposes
the powers, right, and that in the similar to the way that the
Canisierra talks about. And I think that in that sense he is completely right.
And there's something about what he's saying which pierces very truly. Where I
wonder is that in scripture there's also a whole other strain, which is the
tabernacle, the temple, uh, you know, and even Ezekiel's third Temple,
which is a kind of vision of an eschatological temple. Yeah, and
and and the same and this image of the son of Man. And so
for example, in Revelation you have this final image where you have two.
So even in the text I was reading, you know, he was alluding
to the lamb and to the to the idea of the lamb as this this
insane image, right, It's like why the lamb at the summit of the
of the hierarchy? Right, this that's the subvertive image. But in the
in the vision, it's actually two images, right, It's it's the son
of Man and the lamb. So it's the the king, judge, ruler
and the lamb joined together. So there are these two strange in scripture it's
it can seem contradictory, but they're there, right. The vision of the
tabernacle, or the God asking Moses to build a tabernacle is is very much
using tropes related to Caine, you know, the Bezeel, the way that
he's described as an artificer. You know, the only other person called an
artificer in scripture I think is is Tublcane. And so it's like there's this
whole other strain and that's the one that that that I see a little let's
say, ignore which which what I think would leads him to say to be
something like a Christian anarchist. Like it's as if all structure is is dangerous
in itself. I don't know if when you think of that, I'm kind
of poking here, but I want to know what you Well, I'll kind
of talk out loud, speaking more more of my thinking than trying to represent
a little here. Okay, okay, but then I will come back to
him. But if you think about Renesierrard's concept of sacrifice as having cultural rootage
in the Hebrew tradition as well as the ancient Near East, and from his
perspective, it slowly is being or it's evolving into a new perspective which upends
the whole sacrificial system itself. It's it's like a a counter narrative that involves
non violence and forgiveness and relationality and upending. So it's it's possible. I
think that when you look at liturgical and artistic and you know, those physical
traditions that come out of the Old Testament, that those themselves have a type
of evolving understanding. So by the time Jesus is talking to the woman at
the well in Samaria, he says, you know, it's neither that temple
or this temple. People are going to worship in spirit and truth. I
think Alull kind of shares a little bit of that kind of sympathy where the
temple itself has like aspects of legitimate tradition, but ultimately it becomes not just
replaced by something spiritual, but it actually becomes sort of there's a tension with
it, there's a subverted element. And Jesus himself is using language to confront
the temple institution itself by by kind of broadening people's minds into into these paradoxical
ways of thinking that are trans cultural. So I don't know if that's a
window in talking about that, but I think Alull kind of shares some of
that sense of there's a trajectory, just like a trajectory for Gerard about sacrifice,
maybe there is for visual culture too, And I think yeah, and
so I think that that's maybe I have a yes and way of thinking,
you know, not a not a not a this, but this or like
I tend to have a yes and we have of thinking and so and so
even in the story of Christ, you have those images, and then you
also have the fact that he cleansed the temple. He wanted to purify the
space that that that God had established. Then I also think of the eschatological
vision. The image of the heavenly Jerusalem is very powerful because it seems to
solve the problem because the way that it's presented is is that the kings,
the kings of all nations, you know, offer their crown up into the
heavenly city, and all the glory of all the nations are elevated into the
heavenly Jerusalem. And so it's not that the nations are destroyed, it's not
that the kings don't exist, is that there exists in the proper order.
So whatever whatever particular glory in nation has is given up to something higher and
that's its glory actually, right, It's like that is what is glory is
whatever it can offer up and whatever it doesn't hold on to itself and tries
to to you know, like like the kind of the kind of dangerous nationalism
that we can see that that is actually a kind of way in which all
this participates on this. So there isn't a there isn't just the negative parts.
There's also this kind of positive way that we can the civilization that art,
that culture, that that that that authority, that all these things can
participate ultimately in the kingdom. Yeah, I think I would affirm that.
And there's there's an affirming incarnational blessing of of things that that are with integrity
reflect the nature of God and the intended you know, creation that was set
out for us. And at the same time, Jesus is the great disturber
of everything in every culture that does not align with with with all of that.
Yeah, that's kind of the way that I tend to I tend to
see it myself. Yeah, it's so so in terms of in terms of
how do you feel that illule speaks now because you know, we're seeing in
some ways the the radical acceleration of technification. You know, everybody's talking about
AI right now. It's it's wild because it it's as if now these principalities
and powers are almost like appearing in front of us, and so and so
what do you what do you think? Yeah, Well, just as an
aside, I'm I'm a real fan of C. S. Lewis's Ransom trilogy
and the third one, that hideous strength is you know, you can get
away with saying things in fiction that you can I know is convey and nonfiction.
And so I just think that that's a great example for us to think
into some of the trends that we're wrestling with now when you think about how
powers are related to institutions and whatnot. For Aluel, I personally think that
one of his most important books for our current time is The Technological Bluff.
In many ways is the third of a trilogy. If you start with The
Technological Society, you know that he wrote in the fifties, and then in
the seventies he wrote The Technological System, which adds some new perspective on his
original thesis and then thirdly, he wrote the technological bluff, and by bluff,
he's talking about how technique driven methods in our society present well to provide
solutions. He even uses the word salvation at times, you know, because
of this problem, this technology is going to save us from whatnot? And
yet the bluff is we really don't know exactly how the the rollouts are going
to look. We don't know what all the effects are. He uses terms
like consequences are unforseeable, they're unpredictable, sometimes even unmanaged, unmanageable. And
because we have such a high general faith in technology, we think that's the
only way to really solve something. You know, we we have a pandemic
which arguably comes out of a technological malule, but now we have to find
a technological solution to deal with it. Well, now that presents some additional
fallout challenges. And this this is the bluff that he says we need to
call if we're really going to not let ourselves be in these cycles of technological
uh soteriology. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that it seems
to present, which is very powerful, is that in some ways, what
happens in a technological state what happens when the technological takes over the narrative is
that it's only means that matter. That in some ways we don't even know
what the goal is. It's only the implementation of means, which seems to
be the very purpose of society itself. And it's almost like you said,
it's as if and then the side effects of the implementation create new needs and
new problems that have to be sorted out by the implementation of more and more
efficient and technical means. And so it's like it makes you feel like you're
moving, and you're moving towards something, but there is no there is no
endpoint besides what more technical efficient things like you know, what is the purpose
of all this? Where we going? Well, when we get away from
yeah, healthy sustainable systems that have give and take and balance and and whatnot.
Yeah, there's a sense in which we you know, for example,
like the the idea that this the technic, the technique technicity you know,
uh is supposed to make us happy. I guess, I guess maybe that's
like the best thing that you can or like the most positive idea you can
makes it easier. Maybe in order for us, I'm trying to be generous
to the to this kind of run towards technicity, to make us, to
make life easier, to make to make things for us to do the things
that we care about which are not related to life or something like that,
like dileisure and and and and and pleasure like that. But but we can
see through like the increase in depression and the increase and kind of a kind
of madness that people are falling into, you know, especially as as identity
starts to fragment. You know, they they they don't know where to look
for meaning. Yeah, and I think this lines very well with C.
S. Lewis's Abolition of Man, another one of my favorites, because he
in the same way you're talking about means separated from ends. That fits well
with what Lewis calls, you know, agendas of progress being untethered from traditional
ethics, because ethics are ultimately about understanding our best ends and then balancing ourselves
in relation to those they have a claim on society to create good ends.
But once, once you remove traditional ethics from the realm of applied science,
then you can see how the means becomes more dominant. It's the same way
in the artistic and image culture where the form begins to dominate over content and
meaning similar application there. Yeah, you see that. I mean advertising is
the ultimate example of that, you know, and I mean it's it's it's
fascinating that I don't know if ilul I mean for sure. C. S.
Lewis had that intuition very much so, which is that, in some
ways, the the increase in man wanting to free himself from transcendent you know,
attachment, the desire for man to kind of fulfill his own destiny,
to fulfill his own will, and to to kind of fulfill his own desire
for power ultimately leads very surprising. It's not that surprising, but it can
seem surprising to some to an anti human narrative ultimately, where in some ways,
you know, we're seeing it now in the more extreme version of the
environmental narrative, where it's almost as if humans are just parasites in the world
and that they you know, that all they do is consume and and we
better if there were fewer of them in the world. And you see it
now with AI as well, this kind of idea that we that you know,
we need to be transcended ourselves like we were going to give birth to
something that will ultimately he destroys or consumers that there's almost like a suicidal ecstasy.
It's very it's very disturbing to see that that's at the end of this,
this kind of desire for technical power. But I don't know if you
look at insight on that, if if you know that he had kind of
foreseen something like that, well, I see what you're saying as requiring social
compliancy. In other words, you can only go in that direction if you
if you don't allow for dissent and that everyone has what might be called a
shared reality. And uh, since you're in Canada, I'll reference an interesting
video that comes out by Horizons Canada which has a Tower of Babel motif in
it. And what's really interesting about this the narrative because it's all about where
technology and and humanity find a way to work together for a better future.
But it has a Tower of Babel image in it. You know, that's
that's all about, you know, people all coming together for one big project.
And it reverses the narrative because God is now the the antagonist in a
scenario where it's good for people to come together think alike, share one language,
and create a better shared future. It's unfortunate that that project was thwarted
and God scattered people laterally back, you know, back into their creaturehood.
Yeah, and this is something that has been going on for a while.
The you know, the building, one of the main buildings for the European
Union, I think it's one of these globalist association is literally designed based on
Brugal's Tower Babbel. And when the European Unions started to kind of meet,
one of the posters they put out was a huge poster of Brugals Tower Babbel,
and it was like, you know, we're gonna basically we're going to
finish the project. You know, we're going to finally do this right.
And you know, those sixteenth century artists, there's so many Babbel painters.
Many of them show the tower incomplete as a both social and theological statement because
because the fact that it was not completed is itself a commentary on the you
know, the false efforts to try to build something independent of God. Yeah,
and that's the right that's the right way to see it, is that
to imagine that anything is complete is the sin in itself. Right to imagine
that anything can be self contained and complete is the is the air of idolatry.
So here's a nice way to bring our topic back to powers. And
speaking of sixteenth century, did you know where the phrase hideous strength comes from?
No, no, I don't know. It's a Tower of Babbel phrase.
David Lindsay, a poet from fifteen fifty five, wrote about that hideous
strength and the shadow that it cast. It's six miles in length. And
so this is Lewis, as a medieval and Renaissance scholar of literature comes across
this poem, recognizes this phrase hideous strength as about the archetypal force from the
Babbel project, and then uses that all through that hideous strength and of course
the nice which is such a playful gesture like acronym, you know, for
the Institute of the Technocrats, because they're aspiring upward, you know, to
have, you know, to build a utopian society. They poke through the
heavens, so to speak, just like my hands sort of poking above the
box here and without them knowing it, that opens up a portal for other
benign celestial powers to come down to Earth and to support the know, the
team that's fighting against the bad side, so they brought down on their heads
their own demise. This is a beautiful image to say that powers have a
duplicitous nature because on the outside, again they present well with with great force
and and and everything, but on the inside there's an insecurity and a lie
and a contradiction, which which means that they ultimately bear the seeds of their
own destruction. H yeah, And I mean I'm interested in knowing about this
as well, if because one of the things I haven't seen in Ilul also
is a mention of angels. That is, there is a whole vision in
scripture of the divine council. You know, this is something that is becoming,
i think, with good reason, more more popular and talked about today,
the idea that that and the way that it was recuperated in Christian mysticism.
Right for example, in Dionysis's Divine hierarchy, he literally he uses the
words that Saint Paul uses to describe what he's talking about in terms of negative
influences, that that that that oppress us. He uses them to talk to
them about them in terms of their positive you know, as like a as
levels of manifestations from the divine down into humans. So throne, powers,
all these things are used by Dionysus to to describe the way that God kind
of descends into the world. And so has he did has he talked about
that like the reality of angels that say in the New Testament as well?
I I think he kind of hedged on that. You know, you got
to understand that he's he's starts out as a Marxist, and so his his
notion of power and force is like akin to the fetishism of commodities. Yeah,
yeah, and and uh and so ultimately, when when Alul has interest
in powers and principalities biblically, he's interested in their function, not their ontological
being. Yeah, so he's not denying their existence. But I think this
goes back to the symbol thing. He recognizes that everything is symbolic, whether
it's the New Jerusalem or or winged beings or whatever, as a way to
help us grasp that there's something there that's additional to our you know, our
our human cultural realm. Yeah. But even in like even in terms of
functionality, and if you think about Saint John in the in the Book of
Revelation, when he addresses the angels of the cities, right, And so
there's a sense in which in that case, the angel of the city,
right, or the principality of the city, is not seen in a negative
way. It's just seen as you know, that it's a a kind of
a place where the identity of the city comes together in its agency. And
so I address this this angel in a in a positive way, not in
a negative way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, as
I think that that image that you just gave us of the tower babbyl poking
through, you know, and then the surprise that it lets in, you
know, benign principalities or good principalities, I think that that's something that we're
already seeing and it's very interesting. So a good example is that during during
during COVID, especially in places where the the power of the state was felt
very strongly, all of a sudden, it's like it kind of exposed certain
things which were already there, hidden, certain capacities that the state had that
people didn't realize that we're there. And then all of a sudden, this
crisis, you know, exposes and makes real the capacity for the state to
really control us, you know, in ways that we didn't think were possible,
both through narrative, through kind of inner propaganda, like using tools of
propaganda inside are the country, but then also real power of like you know,
when I was in quarantine to p these men showed up in my at
my door, right, It's like these are real these are real power steps.
But another thing that happened is that it in seeing that agency and in
seeing the state act with such force and feeling I was like, nobody's controlling
it, right, exactly like an agency. It's like, why is it
happening all over the world and there's nobody in charge of this? And it's
nobody with like that is like, is there's no like evil genius sitting there
rubbing his hands and making it happen. It's just it's just like it's it's
a form of it is a pattern which is laying itself in the world.
The reaction to that for a lot of people was conversion. You know,
like in the Orthodox Church we have seen a massive wave of converts at the
end of COVID, and I'm talking parishes doubling, tripling, all young people
that through this desire of the state to gain absolute power, they were able
to perceive something about how world works that made them want to to to attach
themselves to something higher, you know, mm hm, And that probably did
not happen as much in the mainline denominations. I don't know, I don't
know. I just know about of course, my own, my own,
my own church. And so why would you I don't know, why would
you think that wouldn't have happened in the mainline domination in denominations, for example,
because most mainline didn't denominations lean a little more progressive and liberal, at
least in the United States, and so they were more compliant to not gather,
and in many cases they were whittled down more and many of them are
struggling more so with not just attendance, but leadership transitions, vision of what
their church, you know, direction is. Where whereas in churches which might
not have struggled as much with with that sense of clancy to official narratives,
there was probably more of a sense of resistance and alternative community and perhaps that
becoming an attractive magnet for other people seeking community. Yeah, and even the
even like the I think because one of the things that happens in these totalizing
patterns is that they there's a sense in which we need to be reduced to
individuals, like we need to be reduced to just dots, you know,
without without competing allegiances, you could say, to the to the massive power
of the state and that and then reducing people to lonely, you know,
to like just a lonely Especially though that didn't have families, lonely guys,
lonely women, you know, sitting there in front of Netflix for a whole
year. I think it also made the problem very acute where people realize,
no, actually I need intermediary communities. I need real connected places where I
physically go and talk to people and have and and do that with something that
is meaningful and not just not just yeah, not just arbitrary. Lowell talks
about that as a key priority in his book Presence in the Modern World really
his first major book, written in the mid forties, and in contrast to
institutional systems that want to have a one way communication to kind of control things,
he talks about needing to be with neighbors, needing to have real conversations,
prizing localism, you know, and later, of course, his famous
phrases you know where dialogue ends propaganda begins. So he had a pretty strong
advocacy for those local, real life relationship dynamics as a way to kind of
maintain a type of resistance in the world. Yeah, maybe that's a good
place to transition, and and let's move into the last question that I have
for you is maybe you can tell people about your work and how you see
what kind of solutions you see for modern people in this increasingly technified world and
also increasing centralized authorities. How do you see people finding real life solutions for
their for their lives, and for their families, for the people around them.
Yeah, it's a compelling question. And my primary work is in the
field of restorative justice and conflict resolution for about twenty five years, and it's
a great calling. And you know, one of the things I've observed as
a facilitator is that there's almost a paralysis of dialogue in our Western cultures.
People just having more caution and reservation about having hard conversations with each other because
they're not maybe they're not sure how the other person is thinking or how they'll
react, or maybe they do know how the other person is thinking, and
they're afraid that it'll cause a rift in the friendship. So whether it's red
blue issues, or pandemic issues, or race issues or cultural correctness issues,
whatever it is, we're experiencing a type of paralysis that's deadening healthy dialogue on
so many levels, whether it's family and interpersonal or friends or coworkers. I
mean, I know university teachers that feel more afraid to just freely say things
or choose things within their curriculum because they feel like there's eyes watching them,
not not just from above, but students who will who will say, you
know, I didn't feel safe when that content was presented without warning. I
have a friend who lost her job because of that very thing, without any
dignifying learning conversation from both sides. So practically and positively, the way I
see dialogue opening is in the word story. Usually when we think of civil
discourse, we think of people, you know, having healthy debate, and
there's a good place for that, but it's not necessarily a starting point.
So when I talk about story, I'm talking about people getting into the experiential
realm of what they're really observing and noticing and living through and maybe some hardships
that they've gone through, and just narrating that across the divides to people that
might have oppositional perspective. And what that does is it gets people out of
what I call their head zone, where they tend to be defensive, they
want to win arguments and persuade people, and into the heart zone, where
we tend to think more about our common humanity with others. The heart zone
is where we listen better, where we apology, where we have some humility,
curiosity, and it brings us into these story realms. So that's a
big part of what I do in my workshops now with different groups is I'll
talk about what are skills and structures that help conversations shift away from head zones
into the heart zones where there's kind of a bonding potential. And that doesn't
mean everything just stays in kind of this feeling story zone. It actually creates
a foundation for people with differing views to then come back into the head zones
and have more capacity and more trust to really have iron sharp and iron at
that point, because I think we still need those hard, logic based conversations,
but we're just not able to start there. So we have to have
foundations of shared understanding, shared bonding, shared appreciation for what other people have
gone through and then find ways to come back to the more debatable issues.
Yeah, and I think I think that what you just said is key because
in some ways what we see it seems like what we see is an excess
of both and a new capacity to bridge. Because what you often see the
clash and I see it, you see it in even in the the said
online world, is is someone coming with a story perspective and then someone answering
with a facts logic perspective. And that can go wrong in many ways in
the sense that maybe the person who's just telling the story just wants to tell
their stories that you understand where they're coming from. Sometimes a person telling their
story confuses the spaces, so they think that their story is an argument for
the head head place, and then and then there's a misalignment. But the
idea of of both exploring both and understanding the difference between the two and saying
like you know, of course we should like we we know each other.
Then that that bound, that that basic uh place for trust is set,
and then we can, like you said, then we can talk about the
difficult issues in terms of more in terms of of of how reasonable things are
and what makes sense in terms of what we're doing. So so that no,
I think that's that seems like a great approach. Well, Ted,
thank you so much for this this conversation. You know that I appreciated you
that you went there with me, because as you saw, like my my,
my relationship with it is like a fifty to fifty relationship. And that's
maybe why in some ways I haven't talked about him so much on my channel,
but I think for people watching it's a good it's a good place to
leap into a little especially as someone who had very deep insight into something into
all the problems we're dealing with now in terms of technification and also in terms
of of of state powers becoming all powerful, uh, and how as Christians
we can deal with that. So thanks a lot for your time. Yeah,
I'm really really thankful to be here. And I just want to tack
on one short piece that kind of brings powers and story together as a theme.
The counter narrative for Alul with respect to the Tower of Babel is Philippians
too, where Jesus empties himself not wanting to take on the importance of being
like a Greek Roman god with lots of status, but becomes a servant and
ends up dying. That's the reversal of the Tower of Babel impulse to be
autonomous. And I think that that incarnational story, and Eluis talks about this
as a juxtaposition numerous times in his writings, validates the whole notion that we
live in a real world, we live in a messy world, we live
in a visual world, and so to be able to engage without the same
power dynamics, it really does have validation in that story because it's it's it's
the ultimate symbol of God reaching us. Yeah, and it's the surprising image
of the one who does that, you know, with the with the headboard,
which says that he's the king simultaneously, that kind of simultaneous clash of
imagery where he both empties himself and is raised up to the highest, you
know, he goes into death but then enters into the holy place like it's
a Yeah, this start of the Cross just kills you every time you think
about it. It's so it's it just smashes everything together. So seeing the
world through the Cross is definitely the way to solve the problem of principalities.
And powers and how you know the highest gives itself to the lowest. That's
the best way to understand true Christian hierarchy and true Christian power. So Ted,
thanks, this has been great. Well, it's a delight to kind
of converse with you and and kind of see where our conversation leads us.
All right, A