It is one of the most copied works of literature for effectively a thousand years.
So it's a book that essentially, it's put it this way, that
anyone who could read for the better part of a thousand years in the West
was reading Boethius. It's unbelievably influential, and that with his other translations make
their way into the Middle Ages. And so the metaphor I like to use,
it's like, you know, the flowers have died. We heard Ian
Herzieli recently say the West is a cut flower. It's like the flowers have
died. But these books are seeds. These books are seeds of the ideas,
and it's as if he cast them forward into the future so that hundreds
of years after his death those seeds would grow again into you might say,
the beautiful guarden of Western medieval culture. This is Jonathan Peshel, Welcome to
the symbolic world. So everyone, it is a pleasure to finally have Stephen
Blackwood on my channel. As you know, Stephen Stephen is the president and
founder of Ralston College. He was also one of my It was my neighbor
at the Exodus Seminar, you know, sitting next to me bringing us back
to this story, you know, expressing his wisdom with so much tact.
You know, he's become a friend and someone that I respect very much,
and so I'm happy to have him on. And we're going to talk about
Boethius. We're going to enter into Boethius's Consolation of philosophy. Stephen wrote a
wonderful book called The Consolation of Boetius as Poetic Liturgy, And I mean I
read this, I was amazed at some of the things he was bringing up.
You know, I'm not someone who's that good at poetry, but I
could just see when I was reading his text that he was so close to
the way I see the world, to the things that I care about,
and so I'm excited for him to be able to expound that for us today.
So Stephen, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Jonathan.
Yeah, so tell miss a start off, like, what it is
that attracted you first of all to Boethius's text? Maybe how people most people
will know Boethius, but maybe you know, give a brief introduction of who
he is, what it is that was going on around him, and why
he wrote his consolation. Well I think that, well, he's been a
big inspiration for me for many years. And you know, just in a
really quick sketch, we're talking about the he's born in the late fifth century
AD, so sort of right around the follow Rome in the four seventy five
or so, and he lives for about fifty years, and he was born
into a wealthy should I actually adopted into a wealthy sort of very patrician family.
And he gets the best education you can get, probably in Athens or
Alexandria. He learns Greek, he does all of the studies, all of
the forms of knowledge that we were important, you know, music and mathematics,
astronomy, you know, rhetoric, logic, all of those, all
of those things, philosophy, and he rises to the very sort of very
highest heights of the of the Roman Empire. This is after the fall of
Rome, now right, so so rather than an emperor, there's a kind
of foreign king theodoric. But it's it's it's it's kind of as if you
had, you know, one of our modern states. Everything was functioning except
a foreign king had come in over the top. And so it's actually much
more coherent than people might might think. So he rises to the very you
know the Senate is still there, and and so on. He becomes the
master of offices, the Mcguistrokiorum. He becomes a consul, and he says,
the happiest day of his his his his life, is that his is
the day his two sons both become consuls. And the reason I share this
is because he's at the very sort of tip top of education, of political
influence, of wealth, of of of sophistication. He's a he's a he's
a poet, he's a mathematician, he's an inventor. He's he's really just
at the very top of his game. And and and what what what wes
uh sees is that Rome, which had for so long relied upon you might
say, Greek intellectual infrastructure. Uh. And this is this is not a
wild claim. I mean, the all of the Romans, the educated Romans,
were themselves speaking Greek for hundreds of years, and being educated in Greece
and actually forging their their their literature according to Greek models and the architecture and
all of that. They unders they understood this themselves, very very self consciously.
But Greek is being lost and and and so Beethius sets himself the task
to translate all of these kind of seminal texts of Greek into Latin Latinized.
This this superstructure of of of of wisdom, and uh he translates works in
mathematics and logic and and and music and so on. And these are effectively
kind of latinizations, you know, making available, you know, pretty much
someone else's work into a form. It's a translation or a making available in
a new form, but largely to translation. And then does absolute disaster strikes.
He is accused of treason and thrown in prison, and a year later,
uh, he is according to contemporary the contemporary accounts we have, he's
halted a prison and uh, brutally tortured and executed. And uh, that's
the end of Boethius. That's the end of this man who had hoped,
let's say, to had the dream in some sense that you can say,
the dream of restoring the intellectual foundations of his of his beloved sort of you
know, city, and of all of Rome. It ends in in the
worst sort of in a sense death you can you can imagine, except,
of course, that's not the end of Boethius. While he is in prison,
he writes a book that is not contradictory with everything he's written, but
at the same time totally different. These texts on you know, the translation
of Nicolemichus and so on. They're very dry. I mean, you know,
you should read them if you're interested, but they're very hard to get
through. They're very dry. They're very logic chopping. They're all about ratios
and the music and so on. That was that was an important text for
almost two thousand years. But you know, they're they're a slog let's put
it that way. And and in prison, while he's in prison, he
writes one of the most astonishing world of literature that I think has ever ever
ever been written. And and and this it's like he puts in a certain
sense, he puts all of his fine tuned learning down and he goes right
to the heart of the question. But of course he's not putting it down.
He's putting it into a new form these years of study. And in
this and in this book, he uh, this is a work of consolation.
This is a book in which very raw, in which a woman who's
a personification of philosophy comes to comfort a man, a prisoner, a man
who's been bereft of it, taken away everything that he had on his his
wealth, his family, his position, his reputation, everything, He's got
nothing left. And there he is in his princess. So it's you know,
Boethius played by himself, you might say, in this, in this
amazing literary drama. And and this, this, this woman named Philosophy comes
to comfort him and to restore him to his inner self, possession, to
his his his his knowledge, and possession of himself. And that's the you
know, we may do prehaps we'll have to talk a bit about the book.
But but in terms of the biography, what's amazing is that, uh,
you know, this book that is in a way so different from his
other works, just the literary power that the gripping character of this I I
I say that, uh, this is this is one of those books that
you can give to someone who's in an enormously difficult situation, whether it's you
know, cancer or or terminal disease, or or loss or or or or
some kind of form or pain or indecipherable thing in their lives. Uh.
And it and it speaks directly to that because that's where it starts. That's
the that's the problem this book is written about, and we don't we actually
don't know really how this book got out into circulation and somehow got out of
the prison. There's there's so far as I know, there's little to no
record of it for like two hundred years. So you here this this,
you know, this long arc. It's so important to remember these things,
you know, the long arc of of of time, of culture, of
civilization, of the soul. Here this man who I think had hoped in
his own lifetime that these works that he was translating would help to restore Rome.
He did not know Rome was really effectively over, you know, a
few decades after his death. It's you know, it's a kind of backwater
goes from a million inhabitants or so at it's at its height to essentially,
you know, thirty thousand. It's like a swampy backwater during the Carol Engine
into the Middle Ages. But what I want to leave, you leave this,
this moment of his biography with is this book somehow gets out and after
a couple of hundred years it really gets out, and it's it's translated in
English by King Alfred. We were talking about that earlier but in Latin it
is. It is one of the most copied works of literature for effectively a
thousand years. So it's a it's a book that essentially, it's put it
this way, that anyone who could read for the better part of a thousand
years in the West was reading Boethius. It's unbelievably influential, and that with
his other translations make their way into the Middle Ages. And so the metaphor
I like to use, it's like, you know, the flowers have died.
We heard Ian Herzieli recently say the West is a cut flower. It's
like the flowers have died. But these books are seeds. These books are
seeds of the ideas, and it's as if he cast them forward into the
future, so that hundreds of years after his death those seeds would grow again
into you might say, the beautiful guarden of Western medieval culture. And so
there's a sense of which Boethius though he thought, I think that well,
he had no doubt, hopes as we all do, that his work would
bear some fruit in his lifetime. He had a terrible death, and yet
in the long span of time, and perhaps you could say providence that which
he had given his life to bears enormous fruit hundreds of years after his death.
And so I've often thought about this that you know, from Boethius.
We see, it's not up to us what becomes of our work. It's
only up to us to do to undertake it as faithfully as we can.
Yeah, and I think you're some of the ideas that you brought about are
important to emphasize, which is that the Boethius's work, you know, became
a model for literature in the Middle Ages, became a model for poetry,
became a model you know, and did ultimately more to synthesize the ancient Greek
thinking and carry it forward. Then, like you said, his other kind
of copying of ancient texts, and so there's a strange innovation in the text
itself, but it is also a kind of gathering together in crisis. So
his personal crisis he is suffering, and the you know, the things that
he had to go through become like a microcosm of what is happening to the
West at that moment, and with all the barbarians coming in and this kind
of moment of uncertainty and chaos, and in this in that strange way,
like you said, the book itself becomes a little arc that carries all this
thinking in a very compressed form, with all its different meters and its different
approach to poetry into the flowering of the of the High Middle Ages, you
could say, and becomes a model for that. It's hard for people to
think because so many people think that the Middle Ages are just a dark period.
You know, they don't understand to what extent poetry and music and you
know, meter was important, especially in what we call the High Middle Ages
in the West, into the weird, weirdly too, into the world that
into the barbarian world that had taken over his Rome. Right, So the
influence of his work will make itself, will make itself known in France and
England, in all of these Barbarian lands that are now kind of reviving the
Roman, the Roman world. So it really is an astounding story of how,
of what of what he was able to do in his suffering. Yeah.
Yeah, And it's a very important to point you make about the way
he's gathering up the wisdom of the past. And you know, today we
sort of, you know, have this idea that you know, he's trying
and say something original, and and and and new. And you know for
boiethous, you know he was. I think you know he thought the highest
thing that you know, in a way, the highest and best would be
to to to to share the greatest uh uh, you might say, the
wisdom of the past in a way that could be heard and heard anew.
And so he he is writing as if he might say it's his work is
synthesizing and bringing together without saying he's doing that. I'm saying he thinks,
oh here, I I've got all the answers right here. You know,
he's he's, he's But what he's actually doing is is take looking back to
Plato, into Aristotle, and to the Stoves and the neo Platonists and all
the poetic tradition to omer uh and uh. And indeed, I would argue
to the to to his experience of Christianity and uh, bringing all of this
up in a form that that he thinks is fundamental so it can speak to
his time. Interestingly, I mentioned Christianity. We know is the christian he
wrote text on on the Trinity and so on. There's no mention of Christianity,
or of Christ or anything like that in the consolation. It's a really
interesting, uh kind of question or challenging history for for many scholars. UH.
And my simply say that my sense of that is that what he's doing
is is sharing the wisdom as he understands it in a universal form. And
we can talk about, you know, what the logos is and what he
might have understood, uh, about the relationship between the let's call it the
Pagan and Christian traditions, of the old Pagan philosophical tradition and the Christian religion
is a very very interesting question. But fundamentally, he's putting things in a
language of universality. And that's one of the reasons I think he's such an
important voice today because amidst our fragments are alienated, sort of dysfunctional disagreements,
often very shallow, he offers, I think, a voice that goes right
to the heart of very fundamental human questions. Yeah, and I think the
way that I also understand his work is something like the maintaining of a secular
space in within Christianity. That is, you know, and you can see
it again play in terms of microcosms, which is that he's expressing the continuation
of the Pagan world, the neo Platonic world, the Greek world, into
this burgeoning Christian world. He's expressing that as a possible you know, image
of what of what is good and what is what is in the future.
And then you could say that not surprisingly that his esthetic or his vision gets
taken up by the secular world in in the urgeon in Christian reality, which
is why the kings, you know, it's supposedly Queen Elizabeth also like loved
her Boethius and King Alfred and these secular figures would look to Boethius because they
were playing in some ways a secular role within the Christian vision. They were
they were not directly related, you know, although they did go to church,
there were Christians, they were somewhat of a remove for that, somewhere
like a narthex of the church. And I think that that's one of the
powerful things about Christianity that people forget in our kind of post Puritan age,
which is that is the way that Christianity laid itself out as being both you
know, having the highest mystery in these theological texts and these mystical hymns,
but then also being able to entertain, you know, the works of Soccer,
the work of Aristotle, the works of Plato and the works of the
Greeks, and a vision of poetry, even preserving the dramatic text, preserving
the works of literature that were produced in the in the ancient world, as
a kind of you could say, narthex to Christianity, a place where we
can explore these ideas without explicitly saying always having a religious Uh. Well,
then there's just two quick points to add to that, And the first is
that you know, people today forget that the the Greeks thought there were entirely
rational you know, make say philosophical arguments. Uh. You know, they
talk about the highest good or God, or about the practices that enable you
to approach or understand or come as close as you can to understanding those things.
Those are those are completely rational, philosophically derived principles. So it's not
as if you know you've got this, I don't know, some sort of
cold philosophy in the one hand, and then in the the other hand,
with these kind of simply irrational or mystical practices. I mean, it's the
most for the Greeks, it's the most rational thing in the world. You
might say to to to try to understand uh uh, that which you do
not understand, that which is beyond you, uh and to be adequate somehow
to that understanding. We can talk about intellectual humility, We could talk about
you know, so this this what I'm suggesting is that is that in in
in in the Consolation, for example, there comes a moment in the right,
in the middle of the book, in the middle of the argument where
philosophy system you know, you know the problem with with our thinking are kind
of rational thinking, that it divides things up, and you know, it
divides up that which is which we most seek, which is one, in
whole and unified, the highest good. It divides it up in such a
way that that that that it can't set, it can't satisfy precisely because it's
dividing it up. And we could talk about the implication with that argument.
But what what she says is is that, so what do we need to
do, like, what's the answer to that problem? That's a big problem,
and it's a problem we all face day by day, right, which
is that you know, the way in which all all of your efforts can
somehow divide up or be inadequate to the to the thing that you seek,
which is kind of a unified self possession and so uh and she says,
well, what do you think we should do? And he says, well,
we should seek the Father of all things. And so what you really
see in this fulcrum of the argument is that they're turning upward, you might
say, to that which is the source of rational understanding, but in a
unified form, and they're seeking they're seeking that source for help to bridge that
divide. And so all I want to say is that we talk about the
the the religious element here. What I what I want to say is there
is a phill, there's a there's such a thing as a philosophical religion in
which you are you are, you are adopting habits and practices that you know
are necessary. Doesn't take some add on, some big leap or anything like
that. It's this is like, this is a fundamental some you can do
on a fundamentally rational basis. And the other point of make it very quickly
is that is that it's not It's also that the the inheritance of these uh
Christian, these these the Platonic and Aristilian, you know, the Neopotitanus and
so on, the Greek. The Greeks. Broadly speaking, it's not just
that they were kind of sort of useful in the background. They're absolutely vital
to the whole history of Christian theology to understand itself. I mean, you
know, the Bible is written in you know, the New Testment's written in
Greek, the Creeds are written in Greek, and there's a reason for that,
and so you might say they're they're they're interpreting and understand. I'm not
saying that it's there's that that Christianity can be reduced to the ancient Greeks.
But what I am saying is that we don't, as a fact, get
our understanding of what Christianity is about in the West outside of the mediation of
of the intellectual structures that enabled that to be understood. And in a sense,
it's not just that this goes so far and then this picks up.
It's there's a sense in which those intellectual structures themselves are transformed by their engagement
with the Christian revelation. So works both ways. Yeah, I think that's
a great point. I was, you know, because obviously you know,
you send me this book that your book, and I was reading it,
and so I thought, well, I have to reread The Consolation. I
had read it in maybe fifteen years or something, and I was so struck
by that part of the book itself. I felt like I was falling right
into the problem of emergence, the question of complexity that we're dealing with today.
And I realized to what extent, you know, how deeply Boethist had
perceived it, and what you know, and you can see that this type
of thinking, you know, the relationship between the many and the one,
and the kind of jump into intuition or this jump into something which transcends multiplicity,
you know, was so deeply understood, and now it's become a mystery
to us because we've had a few centuries of kind of rationalistic scientism that is
running out now and people are realizing that again. But definitely revisiting those chapters
in The Consolation is is worth it for people who are thinking about the problem
of complexity, you know, even in technical terms right now. So maybe
we can just quickly, not quickly, but you know, yeah, go
into the argument of the of the book itself before we fall into the rhythms.
That's the thing that I really want to get into. But maybe we
can help people understand a little bit with the argument of the book. You
know, Boethius is is basically lost all the things that he thinks or that
most people think has are valuable to life, that are what make you make
life valuable. And then Consolation is trying to help them see through that.
And so maybe you can take people through the kind of basic argument of the
book and and what he's trying to help, what philosophy is trying to help
Boethius understand. I'd love I love to and tell me if I'm going too
slow trying to do this as quickly as I can. You know, it's
like sorry, it's like reduce the one of these fulgrims of Western civilization to
a few sentences, please at least you know, no more than so many
words. Well, well, let me let me just first take take the
take it, take the chance if I can. Some of your listeners might
be interested in I suspect and if they haven't already read read The Consolation of
Philosophy, and if they're looking for to read it in English. The one
that I most like is this one, this little little read book. It's
called a low from the Lobe Library l O e. B. It's published
by Harvard, just a little about as big as your hand, and it's
got the Latin and the English both together, and so you can look back
and forth. But it's a nice little volume. Having the shelf. There's
something liturgical, there's something just very beautiful about the material materiality of a book.
I can't read books on a kindle or something myself very successfully, and
so I like to recommend this just because I think it's a beautiful experience to
have this book in your hand. But the basic argument is this is that
it starts very very powerfully with we just with a poem, and it's a
woe is Me poem. Oh you know this, all this has happened,
and you know, I wish I could die, you know, but I
can't, you know, But you know I call for death and he doesn't
come, and it's just it's very woe is Me poem. It's not and
and uh uh. And then the book says, as I was writing,
as these verses were being dictated to me by the muses, and the poetic
muses are there, they're telling him what to write. Uh this, this
blazing figure comes in this philosophy is she's described as like having absolutely blazing eyes,
or she's she's she's able to pierce right through him, and she's got
this this kord of ambiguous stature. Sometimes she looked like she was as big
as a as a human being, and other times she was up to the
to the heavens, very rich symbolism, and then other times her head went
through the heavens. Uh. And she says, basically, who let these
Shaney Cassimarri Triculis, who let these theatrical tarts or poetic horrors or what do
you want to say in here to this man? They have no cure for
his pain. They only make it worse. And and and so she's basically
saying, you know, she's he's he's caught in this. And I think
this is a really interesting moment because we've all been there, right, you
know, this moment where you can't see out of your own depression. You're
you're you're in a bad thought pattern or whatever you want to call it.
You can't get out, you can't get get out and feeling sorry for yourself,
and that makes things and then you feel passive and you're to the victim
and it's also terrible. And so she comes in and and so it's very
interesting. Her first move is this kind of condemnations of these poets who are
just making things worse. It's a kind of feeling uh sorry for myself,
uh, like Netflix show or something. And and she and she she kicks
them out. But it's worse than that. That's in a pattern, and
it's like a loop. It's a loop. And so she she kicks them
out. But very interestingly, she then says, this woman who has just
banished the poets or the muses, she says, leave him to my muses
to heal and make whole. So what she's suggesting is that there's a different
kind of of poetry that isn't just sort of feel sorry for myself, woe
is me? But but but that could be salutary and and and transformative.
And so but then she she has uh she he can't even recognize her.
We will have to skip through the symbolism. It's terrible to think to do
in a Jonathan pa Joe podcast. We can revisit it at some point,
but that her, she is such a richly symbolic figure. He can't this
the first few pages you could spend hours on them, but he can't recognize
her, even though he's studied with her. So he's his vision is blurred
with tears. But that's also metaphorical. He can't access, he can't recognize
his surroundings, he doesn't know himself, he can't recognize her. And there's
this beautiful moment. She's wearing this dress that she says, she's woven herself.
What does that mean. It's like, wisdoms represent what we can see
wisdom by, is the work of wisdom itself something like that. And uh,
but it's torn, it's torn, it's it's marauding, you know,
it's like a bandits. He says, it's eventually, eventually, like all
the many competing philosophical schools have each taken a garment, taken part of it.
They've ripped the the Stoics or the Skeptics or the Epicureans or whatever.
But clearly what Bleekish is after is that unitary you know, what brings all
these together. So what she says is so this beautiful moment, she makes
a foold in her dress, this kind of a sacramental moment, and she
wipes the tears away from his eyes so that he can see her and recognize
her as the teacher of his youth. And so there's this very beautiful moment
in which, you know, it's a moment, it's an act of grace.
Fundamentally, it's an act of the good towards us that gets us out
out, frees us, liberates us from our our our inescapable self kind of
regard and self pity. But then what happens is it is just tough freaking
love. She's like, you know, tell me what's wrong with you,
basically, And he goes on this long diatribe about OI, I lost,
that I was mistreated, I've been accused falsely of treason, and now I'm
here in the prison. And of course he's writing all this, but he's
portraying himself as just an absolute I have been and you know, let's take
his word for it. Let's assume he's justly, his account of his situation
is fair, and he is a victim of these terrible injustices. And she's
and she said, and he says, I've been, I've been, I've
been banished, And she says to him, and this is such a pivot
in the book. She says, banished. You say, a man's true
homeland. If you are banished from your true homeland, well, then I
say you have banished yourself, because only you can remove yourself from you know,
true self possession in the place that you belong. And so his retort
is, well, hold on, I've lost all these things, how could
I be happy? And so the first part of the book, I'm going
to move much more quickly here. Now, first part of the book is
as a kind of negative action, she has to separate him out from his
attachments in the world. Is attachment to money, is attachment to his position
of power and his fame and all of that. And she so she shows
him like that. But you can certainly read your way through these beautiful arguments,
and they're so powerful in which she she says, Okay, you know,
let's take money for example. You know, is it ever really yours?
What if the stock market crashes? You know, what if what if
someone steals it away? It's like in the argument of all these things,
same with frame fame, Well you could have your reputation trashed. And then
what you know, her argument is anything that can be taken away from you
is not really yours. So that's that's the first part of the book,
and he he has to think, Okay, then, well you know what
is mine? And so she'll say, well, well, what are you
really seeking in those things? That's the next thing. So let's say in
wealth, maybe you're seeking security. So she shows that there's a spiritual good
that's really being sought in this thing that that you think is the thing,
but can be taken away from you, So it can't be what you're really
after because you wouldn't want a it wouldn't be a real happiness if someone,
if it were externally dependent, it could just be taken away. So then
she goes to show that what the the you might say, the actual object
is is being sought, whether it's security or power in the sense of ability
to realize myself, my power to realize what I'm really up seeking in the
world. That's say, it's not external or security or beauty or whatever the
case may be. And so she shows through this argument that there's a kind
of unitary all these things are connected, they're not separate. They're actually you
know, the thing that would really be desirable is to make you secure,
is also beautiful, is also self sufficient and so on, and so she
shows how each of these spiritual goods that are behind the material I might say
things, are actually all participating in in a single unified good. And so
then we come to this problem that we were talking about a minute ago,
which is that Okay, well, yeah, that's it, that's the thing.
But then the problem is my seeking of that in time. And you
know, sometimes I'm doing this and sometimes I'm doing that. They're all dividing
this up. And so the very thing that I my, the very thing
I want, my approach to that thing is preventing me from having that thing.
And that's a very that's a very it's a very it's a very uh
deep moment. And I think it's important to take a step back and reckon
a bit with you know, this as the kind of problem of finitude itself,
right, you know, how can any of our efforts ever amount to
anything. Let's say you want to love your your partner, your wife,
your husband, your child. You want to love them like perfectly, you
want to This is like even that it's like you know, nothing but failure.
You know, it's like the efforts to be adequate to even to this
one thing, and so there's this moment of prayer that follows that, in
which they're turning towards the highest good to help them overcome that problem, and
the remainder of the of the book, it gets in a sense, the
problem becomes even more real, even even sharper. So let's say you're starting
out in this world of you know, you know, injustice and being robbed
of everything you had, you know, in a moment of suffering, and
you know, his complaint at the beginning I should have said, is is
that there's no order in the world, because these things would not be possible
if there was order in the world. I would not be in this,
this this position of disenfranchised injustice if there were. And so what she shows
in this first half is that there is order because your actions, this is
an argument that comes from Plato, your actions are their own reward. So
you remember we were saying, how if it's external, like you know,
uh Riches, well that can be taken away from you. But if if
you what she shows is that within our actions, the good or evil they
bring about is internal to them. So if you do something good in virtue,
in an act of love, that can't be taken away from you.
It's it's what you are. Whereas even if you're not caught, if you
do something that degrades your soul, that degradation is internal. You lie,
you betray someone, whatever. That's so. So what she says is that
is that is that actions have their own reward or punishment present in them.
Yeah, the good that you do, that's the reward. And it's a
it's a it's a it's a reward in the also in the sense that you
cannot it cannot be taken away from you can't. You can't be stripped of
that good because and so too in the negative side. And so so what
she shows is that in fact, intrinsic inaction is already this justice. You're
getting the reward of the punishment. Because his claim at the beginning is you
know, good people are you get punished, and you know, bad people
get rewarded. And she's saying, well, that may look at like what
it is externally, but actually internally that's not the case. And it's a
very deep in powerfult because there is ultimately there can be no happiness, he
argues, other than one that is internally possessed. So then the question is
how do you how do you possess that? But the second part of the
book is very interesting because you can see in a sense, and I think
we all face this, Okay, we're living in what seems like a disordered
world, and then the answer can be well over yonder, there's a unity
that we seek, and that you can maybe in a moment of kind of
mysticism or something approach. But then very interesting in the second half of the
book, the prisoner Bewethius rearticulates the initial problem at a higher, you might
say, even more fundamental level. What he wants Ultimately, we might say,
what all human beings in some sense, I would argue want, is
not simply an answer that is over there, because we're living in the world
of the finite and the broken and the particular. He wants an answer that
makes sense here in the midst of this. And so the later part of
the book deals with this question of the relation between let's say time and eternity
of the finite in the infinite, and in a difficult sort of theological section
at the end, ultimately with the relation between free will and providence, or
that you might say, the absolute unity of the first principle itself. And
I think what's so beautiful about the ending of this book, which I'm not
going to spoil for your for your listeners, but so beautiful about the ending
of the book is that it's a bit like the question of a ladder,
Like if you get to the top and you kick away the ladder, or
you get to the top and you learn that the top destroys the ladder because
it's all predetermined or something was like wait a second, what what was my
journey after all? Like? What was was that not real? And so
what I what I think is going on in this beautiful book and the way
in which its wisdom is put in the form of poetry, of images of
a beautiful rhetorical uh turns is it's really a work of you might say pedagogy.
It's a work in which the wisdom is being put in a way that
is adequate to the both the soul of the reader in confusion and alienation on
the one hand, and to the integral wisdom that it is it is,
it is, it is conveying. So the fundamental you might say, argument
is one that moves from alienation and this sense that the whole world is disordered,
but that demands to be able to see an order within that to one
that leads him on a journey such that he can see a deeper you might
say, spiritual logic as governing the world, but more just as importantly,
to come to see himself the mechanisms and principles of his own knowing of his
own activities, as you might say, in the image of or a manifestation
of that underlying wisdom. Yeah, and so in that way, it's a
deeply incarnational approach. It's not a gnostic idea like you propose that the outset,
like the idea that you know, all of this is all illusional,
this is all nothing, And once you get to the mystical unity with the
One, then you know all that other stuff doesn't matter. But rather this
formulation at all the levels of how it's adapted to the particular. And I
think this brings us to you know, the reason why I wanted to talk
to mostly in the first place, which is that in your book, one
of the arguments you make is that the very structure of the poems, the
very use of meter, the very way in which Boethius, you know,
structures the meter of the lines in the text is an incarnation of his journey,
moving from a kind of broken disunity and you know, a kind of
confusion towards this deeper unity, and that in some ways that one of the
reasons why it has such an impact on Western civilization is that it is paralyturgical,
or it is liturgical in the sense that if someone goes on the journey
with Boethius, even reads a loud the poems, that that participation in the
rhythm, as as much as the idea that he's he's he's formulating rationally,
is reordering the soul of the participant towards the good that is aimed at in
the book. So maybe you can break down that argument, because I was
really fascinated by, you know, the proposition. You can talk a bit
about how you came to that and and what that looks like the same things
what I what I discovered, and I hasten to add, like the the
acoustic superstructure this book is astonishing, and I sort of uncovered this, but
it's bit like I don't know, falling into a ditch and finding a gold
treasure or something. It's like I didn't I didn't make the treasure. I
just I just sort of realized it was there. And effectively, what I
what I I argue is that these poems, these meters are organized into a
beautiful sort of symmetrical and interwoven str ructure. So there's a you might say,
uh uh an an ordering of the acoustic character of the book that I
suggest mediates time and eternity. And now let's maybe it sounds like a difficult
thought, uh, but what I would want to maybe start with is is
that this, the need for repetition is absolutely fundamental to our need or to
our ability to know, to know anything. So let's just to give a
good simple example. You know, you can't so much as recognize and memory,
let me say, memory and repetition are absolutely fundamentally uh connected. So
so you couldn't so much as you can't recognize, uh, you couldn't so
much as recognize yourself in the mirror or or your your front door, or
your your mom or whatever without without memory, right, because it's memory that
allows you to recognize in the present this as something that you already you already
know and so so so memory is necessary to see a repetition. But repetition
is necessary because without it there's no there's nothing stable at all. So to
imagine, imagine, imagine, you know, just like being in a fire
hose. You know, life is a fire hose. It's just coming at
you. There's no interpretation of anything. It's just you know, you don't
even know it's water, right, because it's just that's you know that that's
the kind of overwhelming locks of movement and change, your total nothing but change.
Let's put it that that way, and you know life feels that way
sometimes, right, I mean that, so you can look at this.
Let's just start in the most stable way, I mean, in the most
in the in the in the in the simplest way. Let's say, you
know, we've all been around babies, you know, most of us anyway,
when they're you know, early on when they're born, and you know,
they look up at their at their hand, and and they don't even
know that's their hand, right, Like they have no idea, it's it's
they're not yet conscious of that fact. And so the question is how do
you move from that moment as a as a child, as an infant that
can't even recognize its mother or its own like limbs, to one that knows,
oh, this is me and know that's that's my mother. And what
I what uh, What I'm arguing is that it's the it's repetition, it's
seeing this again and again and again that stabilizes you imagine yourself as an infant.
It's just everything moving around and to us like the world is stable.
It's like, no, there's the door to the front house and that's mom,
and you know, there's the fireplace, and you know there's the there's
the the painting on the wall or whatever, and here are the people.
I see them all. But the question on what I'm trying to draw out
here is how do you get there to the point where that you can interpret
that world versus where the baby starts? But I don't want to put ourselves
in the baby's position in a sense of to where we actually are, right,
because the question is you can only interpret the movement of the world around
you by stabilizing it, by by having a frame that locates it such that
you can see this particularity within a pattern, whether it's a person. This
I'm giving examples of physical things, but as you go deeper, you realize
there are deeper patterns that govern those things, and so My argument fundamentally is
that we need recurrence of we need to expose ourselves to recurrence or repetition in
order to be shaped in such a way such that our memories are able to
interpret and understand the world around us. And so we see this, you
know, we see this, you know all the time with you know,
the cycle of day and night. You know, imagine we were just living
in one endless day and there was no sun coming up and down. Imagine
there was no cycle of seasons. Of course, you live at the equator,
that is in fact what you have. But for most of us,
we're living in a movement through time in which they are these cycles and so
and we do this at home. We have rituals in the morning, and
we have rituals in the evening, and we have rituals that you know,
Christmas time or religious holidays and so on. We have civic liturgies. In
Canada, Remembrance Days is historically important moment. In America. In the United
States, Thanksgiving is an important such day. And what those are are rhythms
of a certain kind of practice through which we gather ourselves and our experience in
order to understand it. So you pause on Thanksgiving, and you might say
you gather up all of the last that has happened since you've last done that
in a moment that allows you to understand yourself and relation to say gratitude.
But I would say at a at a more fundamental level, or at a
very fundamental level, this is the case with all of us all the time.
But that's just one more thing, and that is that there's a sense
in which you think about the infant. You can't recognize something that isn't part
of a repetition that you recognize. And so we are in a certain sense
nothing but the memories that we hold that allow us to interpret the world.
And that's why the shaping of our memories is so important, because it's what
enables us to see the world around us. And so in some sense it's
why you might say the study of history or the forming of ourselves in relation
to fundamental patterns. Otherwise you end up being like the infant who doesn't even
know that's your mother. You can't you can't see what's in front of you.
The world is an unset stable flocks until you internalize its patterns such that
you can see them outside of you. Yeah, and I think that before
we get deeper into the Boethist idea, you know, it's important for people
to understand that. That's why Plato, you know, almost joins together the
idea of memory and knowledge. That is, to know something is to remember
it. And you know, we can find different ways of formulating formulating that
metaphysically. You know, obviously Plato had this kind of reincarnation model where where
the sense that you're remembering you know, ancient lives and that is what makes
is making participate in it. And you know, as humans now we can
we don't need a reincarnation model to understand that. Even biologically, we understand
that we are the descendants of patterns that have re embodied themselves over and over
and over and we part and it's when we when we know something means we're
tapping in to that at the low level. We could also formulate it vertically
and understand that when we know something, we are connecting to a cosmic memory.
We're connecting to a cosmic pattern of repetition and of truth that instantiates itself
just the world, and we kind of remember that way. So even whether
you look at it as biological or whether you look at it vertically towards these
idea that there are these kind of transcendent cosmic patterns. We can understand how
knowledge is memory, and it's represented that way in the Bible, by the
way constantly, you know, you could we could call it attention and memory,
right, attention and memory as as kind of two faces of the same
thing. The idea that God remembers man, that man remembers God. We
see that in the story of Noah. We see that in the story of
Jonah. We see it constantly in the you know. And when we you
know, even when we talk about the way in which we participate in the
people that came before us, we formulate that as memory. Why do we
we have memorials? We talk when someone dies in the Orthodox tradition, we
say memory eternal, and that their memory be eternal. But it is.
It's not just a vague sentimentality. It's a mode of participation, right,
It's a mode of I'm connecting to those ancient lives and I'm a continuation,
a re embodiment of the good that they these people did in our lives today.
And so I think that for people just to understand that that that this
isn't just a kind of artistic, artistic fancy to talk about these questions a
pattern and memory, but they really are really the way that in which we
engage with with the way in which we recognize the world to exist, you
know, just full stop. Yeah, And there's a way in which the
like if you imagine, you know, life in the fire hose, and
in some sense you know we're in this time in history. We're all way
too much in the fire hose in a sense, right, And and but
if you if you imagine, you know, by metaphor the infant who can't
recognize anything, uh as a kind of metaphor for how many of us,
certainly myself, you are living far too much of the time. The question
is, well, what is the alternative to that? And what is it
that allows anything to become stable so that you're you're you're you're not simply like
if you imagine, you know, every day living every day different with completely
different paths, completely different people, completely different place, you would know nothing
at all. Right, You're just you're just in this in this constant see
of change. And what I think is is is so interesting, is that
you know what is going on in a moment in which you know, you
step outside of that and you sort of understand, Oh, that moment and
this moment and this moment, those are all those are all in me and
connected and understood, And you know, I think it's often interesting to talk
about. For example, people often in experience of nature have this sense which
you know, they move beyond the particular into something that gathers the particular,
often in music or art, and you're listening to I don't know. Bach
is often very famously brought up in these connections because of the way that his
music has touch an astonishing integration of patterns moving through time that you can track
with. And so what I'm wanting to say most fundamentally is that there is
no self consciousness itself, Like any knowledge of anything is a stabilization that is
taking us outside of the immediate into something that is transhistorical. Right, So
the moment that you you know, let's say, you know, you understand
yourself to be the same person that you were, the same person as you
were when you were a kid. You know that you haven't changed and grown
up and so on, but you see a continuity You're like, oh,
no, you remember that, and now and so in that moment, in
our in ourselves, what we have in our in our memories is a way
of making the past present now. And so memory is by definition, and
of course the present doesn't really exist, right because as soon as you're aware
of it, it's already happened. It's like you know that, it's like
perception. You know the thing. By the time you see it, it's
already in the past. You know, even just a micro second or whatever,
but it's already happened. And so what I'm trying to suggest is that
is that it sounds very high falutint and difficult when you talk about the relation
between time and eternity, but this is really the the nature of life,
right, is that that you you can be you can be lost in flux
and movement, or you can The answer to that is to find some longer
continuity that you by definition, has already taken you outside of time. But
then the question is, well, what does that have to do with my
movement through the world in time? And so in some sense that's precisely what
patterns give us, is that give us ways of stabilizing ourselves in our movement
through time, such that we're able to see in the moment the eternal or
open the moment becomes something that reveals a deeper stability. Yeah, and so
it's interesting. Like one of the arguments that you make very simply in the
book that I found really powerful is that you talk about how the patterning of
the words and the patterning of the you know, the creation of these these
frames there are mnemonic in the sense that they help you remember, right,
And people talk about that sometimes too, when they say that one of the
reasons why monks would chant the psalms or that rabbis would chant the psalms is
so because by doing this kind of pattern language, it's easier to remember the
text. But there's also a deeper sense in which it's mnemonic, right,
is in the sense that it's connecting you to the pattern of reality itself.
It's making you remember that it is through this pattern existence that anything that everything
that we participate in comes to find any cohesion whatsoever. Right. The fact
that you exist is mnemonic. Right, The fact that that because you're able
to connect all these different element elements together towards knowing that, like you said,
the five year old version of Stephen and You in a in a very
mysterious way, is the same being that is continuing on with the same the
same pattern. Yeah. I just thought that was really interesting because maybe it
can go a bit a little bit into that, into you know, because
that this is to me the deeper understanding of musicality and also the deeper understanding
of you know, when we we I remember when I was in school,
but people talked about the idea of the music of the spheres and how it's
kind of this kind of ridiculous mythology, right, the idea that the spheres
make music and that we don't hear it anymore. But that is the deepest
part of that, which is that the music of the spheres, or even
the ancient study of music wasn't just the ancient study of how to make entertainment
music for a party, but really how to live in the patterns, like
really what liturgy is and this is what this is there in Boiti's himself as
well in his text. Yeah, So I mean, let's let's just let's
put this way that that two things. First, this whole kind of the
art of memory we've talked about, the mnem monocle is you know, it's
pretty amazing. First of all, what you what a human mind can remember?
And you know, you know, Plato in the Faders is worried about
our losing our memories when we start writing things down, and you know,
that's exactly what happens. And we see that with the internet is not what
you know is where to find it and all those kind of nonsense. But
it's also true that it happens. That's what happens is you know, when
you don't need to you know, you you lose that. And so it's
actually a very scary thing to think about how much less we have in us
to understand the world, right because we think we can just find it all.
We don't get what to look for, right. And so what I
what I want to say is first of all, that the human mind is
an amazing thing from the point of view of memory. And if you look
into the Medievals and even today their memory competitions, people who think they have
bad memories are then capable of astonishing feats, right. But the deeper point
is is what that is doing in terms of formation. And so it's interesting
that when we have in English, for example, we have in the first
place, we say in the second place. And this is a this is
a holdover from from from the art you might say, the art of memory
in the Middle Ages, when you would if you're trying to remember something,
you would say, okay, well let's say that maybe the houses on my
street or the the rooms in my house, and you say, okay,
I'm going to put this thing that I want to remember in the first room,
and you picture it there, and this thing in the second room,
and and so on, and that this is sort of a short version of
how the art of memory works. But I want to make a much deeper
point, which is that in some sense, you can only understand that which
you have the places to put things. You can only put things in places
you have to put them. That's what I'm trying to say. And so
what does that mean? Well, Aristotle has this this wonderful account of habit,
and you know today we like to think, well, you know,
I did all these bad things, but I'm not. Really that doesn't really
define me. That's not really what I am. Well, Arisola would say,
no, you are. You are what you've what you what you what
you've done. And and habits are very powerful, right because you know they're
they're they're, they're they're like an unconscious memory. You repeat it, and
you did it again and again and again, and then it's just what you
are like, you know. I give the example sometimes that in the home
that that my family lived in for many years, at one point they moved
the cutlery drawer for the silverware from one part of the kitchen to the other.
And it was after I'd gone to college and I'd come back, I
would always be going there, right, because it's but but you can you
can put that, uh, you can take that example and realize that that
that we form ourselves by the things we do. And if you're formed in
i don't know, listening to a lot of negativity and anger and frustration and
rancor on the internet, like, that's what you become in a found sense.
Right, That's where that's the truth of Plato's line, Right, is
that you you the kind of vision we bring is to the world. The
form of perceiving limits what we're able to see in it. And so the
whole question of habit is so important. And for example, if you were
a parent, you know, you think about, well, you could you
know, teach your child to you don't know, to have no self control,
and and and and you know, be completely dominated by his or her
emotions by rewarding certain behavior, and and so and then well, what the
world that that child is able to see is completely constrained by the habits they
have taken on. The person they can become is limited by the fact that
there they they had habits that prevent a deeper form of seeing in the world.
Whereas if you you know, is the wonderful line in the scripture says,
you know, if you set your mind on things above such that you
have habits of recollection, such that you're able to see and perceive deeper pattern
deeper patterns, and you might say, become more and more adequate to those
patterns, whether it's of you know, love or patience or humility or whatever.
Then that's what you're able to find in the world. But it's not
as if you can access in the world that which you don't already have the
way of being able to see. And that's why I give the language of
the image of the infant who is lost to even seeing his or her own
hands in the world. Now, because we have the categories of consciousness,
it's not as if we're a blank slate. The infant is innately able to
recognize these patterns because the human mind is made in such a way as to
be able to perceive them, and if it weren't, then it wouldn't be
able to able to see them. But the point fundamentally is that everything is
at stake in the habits we develop and the patterns we expose ourselves to,
because it is what we will be able to see in the world. Yeah,
and I think that's such a Everybody can find examples in themselves or in
other people where they've noticed that, you know, let's say someone who who
is not trustworthy, or someone who tries to trick people, tries to get
things well, their world will get built that way, and then at some
point they'll find themselves in a situation where they're also surrounded by people that you
can't trust, that you're surrounded by people that they shouldn't trust. But it's
and the opposite is true, is that you know, this is something that
you can see in Christ's word, the idea of saying that if you judge
not right, lest you be judged, that is that if you if you
practice the good, then all of a sudden you will start to see goodness
in the world. That because the world has multiplicity, invariance and that,
and there's even a powerful way in which if you learn to live in the
good and see the good, you can actually call the good out of others,
right, you can actually And you know that because sometimes you realize that
when you were certain people, you're the best version of yourself, and then
when you were with other people, you kind of become the worst version of
yourself in all in all kinds of ways. And that this is what you're
trying to bring about, is that the patterning of existence has a deep effect
on who you are and who you remember yourself to be. Because we do
have the potential of being of change, like of changing. That's that's what
humans are. We can be, you know, all kinds of different things,
and that can happen at any time in our life. But if we
have these deep patterns of virtue, but also deep patterns of habit in the
simple sense, you know, like eating three meals a day, sleeping certain
amount of hours, you know, And I see it in my life because
I have a you know, I have this weird I have a kind of
creative bent to myself, and I can see myself sometimes fall into like not
know, not sleeping, not eating well not and then things start to shake
around me, like in every way, like not just in terms of my
habit, but also in terms of the way I treat others, the way
I see the world, why I interpret the way other people treat me.
And it starts to shake. But you know, maybe you can bring us
through a little bit how it is that Boysies does it in his text,
Like what is it that he brings you through through? Really, even without
going into details about the different meters of the poems, but the basic image
of how he takes the reader, the participant in his text through a kind
of poetic transformation towards towards the highest good. I'd be happy to to try
and say a few things about that I've just been meditating on. I think
what you're saying is very very deep. I mean the way that I mean,
what is the So we tend to think that the way we feel about
the world is how the world is right, but it's actually no, no,
no, no, that's that's exactly. That's where Plato starts is saying,
no, you can you're the way you, you might say, feel
about the world is determining what you're able to see. That's what's going on.
It's nothing, you might say, to do with the world in a
sense. And so the question is, well, how do you have a
vision that's more and more adequate to seeing what's really there? And that's that's,
you might say, the whole question of the spiritual intellectual life, that's
a whole question of parenting or teaching or whatever. How do you how do
you shape yourself or others into a way that you can see what's really there?
And you think about the difference between someone who's you know, you know,
always complaining or woe is me or whatever, or or always busy and
running onto the next things. Sometimes I am often I am, or someone
who is I don't know what What is it like to be with someone that
sees you when you when you're in their presence, you think, gosh,
I just feel better. I feel like I'm I'm seeing I'm I'm I'm closer
to what I'm meant to be? What is going on with someone who I
knew I've known a few people like this who's very presence was able to mediate
a deeper sense of the world, a truer, more beautiful sense of the
world. Now, now, in terms of brief is I'll just give a
couple of examples. The poetry works in different ways. One way it works,
as you know, those of you who read poetry, you know that
you know. The way the rhythm works is part of the way the message
is conveyed, that the messages is encoded in that sense, partly in the
in, the in the in the in the way in which that it sounds.
You know, you get these wonderful rhythms. I give example, you
know, towards the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not
creature was stirring, not even a mouse, and that that and that kind
of rhythm. You have this sort of way of you know, you're,
you're, you're, it's it's lulling you in. It's a beautiful repeated pattern
again and again. Uh. But you can also have you can also have
rhythms that are that are jarring, that that are there surprising or or or
or unexpected. Of course, that's what jazz often often often does. And
so so one level at which the poetry works is it's it's it's simply manifesting
you might say the truth or the idea that is present in the poem.
So uh uh. For example, there's a there's a lovely lyrical meat meter
dumb da da dumb da dumb, the dumb dumb da da dumb da dumb
to dumb that that in this this it's called a glyiconic. But what beautiful
in that is that he uses it in the early on to describe the stability
of the seasons and and and the the consistency of these changes in nature.
And so he's using this wonderful lyric. She is using it, I should
say, lady philosophy. Philosophy is using it as a way of she's trying
to settle him down and speak a kind of stability to him in his instability.
And she does this so I mean so wonderful the way she does this,
both by giving him images that his mind can say, oh, yeah,
I know those patterns in nature I've seen I've seen I've seen seen that,
but also putting it in a way so that it's sonically acoustically stabilizing and
lyrical. It's like, you know, we all know with a with an
infant, you know, what do you do with an infant? That's that's
that's you know, upset and crying and so on. You know, you
tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. That's right, and then you
know, you can music can do the same thing. But at the very
most basic level, the rocking is a pattern that stabilizes the child. So
that's one sense. And then there are other poems where where she's talking about
the instability of fortune, for example, and it'll be like dump dump dump
dump, you know will be it will be, So he'll she'll use an
unstable meter to convey the instability. So that's one level. But then what's
amazing is that is that is that some of these meters they occur later on,
and then the question is, well, what's going on there? Is
it the same? Is it just well, okay, well we figured it
out last time and it was in stang it was lyrical and stable or it
was instable. But actually, what I what I what I think is going
on is the way in which the later uses of the meters are doing something
redemptive relative to uh that that you might say, the problems or issues or
matters that were raised in the in the first time time time around. So
you know, there's there's one in which the instability of a meter that was
used to describe the you know, the contingency or called fortuna, the instability
of the world, you know, all that unknowns. She actually uses to
show how that instability is comprehended by a deeper pattern. So the way I
I think this is so beautiful, Jonathan, because because there's a there's a
deep sense in which healing has to take place at the site of the wound,
right like if if you've had this kind of experience or that and you've
been shaped or damaged or broken, that's where the healing has to be.
And so I think one thing that's going on in in the in the poem
is she's she's she's redeeming these broken moments by through this you might say,
acoustic recollection of an earlier moment to give you might say, the answer to
the problem or the pain that was in the first instance. And so it's
it's a way of you might say, redeeming by show by recollecting UH.
And of course psychologists use this this this UH all the time. But then
there's a third level, and that is that is I think that as you
look at the poem as an acoustic structure, the poems of the book as
an acoustic structure, and then readers who are interested can see UH pattern this
out in color at the back of the book. You've got to get the
paperback though, because the hardcover was printed in black and white and it's much
harder to see. But the paperbag you can see these unbelievably intricate patterns of
the poems. And so what I'm I'm arguing is that is that the whole
acoustic structure of the poetry has an interwoven UH pattern. That means that any
point of it is part of It's like what you say about fractalization, right,
any point of it is integrated within a larger pattern. And so maybe
maybe UH share two things quickly, and one is that you know, I
think we this is how memory works, right, Like I give the example
in the book that where I grew up, I love wild roses, and
I've all these you know these the first instance, you see the rose,
Wow, that's that smells good, and it's kind of a memory on its
own. But then the longer you go through life like that, well,
oh that reminds me of that place that I used to go in the summer
and with that person, and then it it it it's it's a reminder of
childhood, and it's reminded. And so you start seeing that you smell the
rose again and you're like, WHOA that has all these deep forms of pattern
that it brings up to you. Maybe it's a it's it's reminding you of
loss, or of happiness or and so all of these things become collected precisely
because the patterns are moving through different moments in time. And and you know,
I you know, my grandmother died a few years ago, and I
know you know, if someone was wearing her perfume it was very distinctive to
her, that would bring back all of my memories of my my grandmother.
So there's a there's this sense of which one thing we want to do is
to scaffold into life the patterns that enable us to gather up our past as
present in a way that it could be comprehended. And then and then the
other thing I would say is that, as you say, if you look
in the in Dependence of my book, you see all these really complicated patterns.
And I had a moment when I was writing this that I thought,
I mean really like, you're really there, like it seems pretty complicated.
And and I was my brother was living in rural Vermont. My wife was
away, and my brother would come to visit, uh in the hills of
Vermont and a mountain ridge. And I taken him to the bus station and
I was driving back, uh and uh. Uh So this woman hitchhiking at
the side of the road. Uh and uh. Of course where you hitch,
like side of the road. And she's standing on the side of the
road and she's she's she's clearly upset. She's got a garbage bag with all
sort of her possessions. And I I stopped, and you know, before
I could start, it had already been stopped. She was she was already
kind of threw her things in the back and got in, and she was
very upset. She was, you know, woman in very challenging circumstances.
And as I got to know her where she was going, it was about
forty five minutes away, and I was not too too far from where I
was I was going, and we got into a conversation about her and she
had a very sad sort of life story and multi generational dysfunction and drug abuse
and children in prison, and it was it was very, very very sad,
and she had been crying and I don't know what had happened. She
had a sort of immediate crisis where she couldn't stay where she was and had
to go somewhere else, and so her things in the garbage bag and uh
ah. Her name was Constance. I think she may have been. I
don't know if she may maybybe she was an angel. She was as I
as I tell this story, it just seems to be unbelievable. Her name
was Constance, right, But anyway, so she was very upset and I
asked her. I was trying to, you know, as we try to
do for people. It's like what philosophy does for bewek is. I was
trying to calm her. I was trying to help her find, you know,
rediscover herself. And so I asked her, you know, what do
you what do you like to do? And she said, oh, I
said, I love to knit. And I said, really, tell me,
tell me, tell me about it. And she said, well,
you know, when I'm when I'm knitting. He said, what do you
like knitting? She said, well, when I'm knitting, she said,
I lose myself in a pattern and and I said, you know, here
I was working on these patterns and things about the recollection itself was I mean,
she met lose herself in the tense of finding herself. It was connecting
with something, something, something, something more permanent. And and I said,
uh, well, you know you're knitting anything now and she said,
yeah, I am knitting this, this this blanket for my daughter. And
I said, tell you about it and she said, well, it's it's
pretty complicated. And I said, well, I'd love to hear about it.
And she said, okay, Well there's there's twelve sections and each of
the sections has six colors and the patterns the colors change in these patterns in
each section and then they relate. And I was like, ho, these
smokes like this is unbelievable. See this woman is telling me an account.
And she got all this in her head and she said, in the back,
it's in this bag. In the back, you want me to show
it to you. And so here I had this beautiful kind of revelation of
this, you know, woman in very difficult circumstances who was showing me like
in her profound way the truth of what was happening. What I had sort
of discovered in some sense in Boethius, that that you know, you think
it's complicated, you know it is. Life is complicated. Bach is complicated,
but it's complicated, it's very complication. It's it's interwovenness is what enables
it to stabilize and gather things into a pattern. And so I came,
of course to think that these patterns really were not only really worth. They
can be there knitting, they could probably be there in Boethous exactly. So
it's thanks to constance that you might say, in a sense, I came
to see how how much we need, too, how much we need to
expose ourselves to patterns through which we can uncover and discover ourselves. I mean,
it's such a great insight that you have, because if you can imagine
the woman knitting, you know, and you know, I imagine at first
she's counting, right, she's actually counting. She's like one, two,
three, Da da da da da da da da da da. And at
some point she probably also stops counting, where it becomes like when you're dancing
and you're not thinking about it and you're just you're just doing a walls and
you're not thinking about where you're putting your feet and you kind of enter into
that rhythm and to what extent, like you said it, it transports us
into something that is beyond us. You know. That is when we can
kind of understand the power of poetry, its relationship to something like liturgy in
the strict Christian sense, but also liturgy in the broader sense, which is
these patterns, whether it is family meals, whether it is you know,
even the simple patterns of how you organize your day and how you kind of
set things up, that these are that all of this is connected to how
humans find meaning. You know, it's very powerful. Definitely wow, And
so thanks Stephen. I would say everybody, if there's someone here now that
hasn't read The Consolation of Philosophy and you you're not going to read it like
you're a hopeless person at this point, Like it is an astounding text,
one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. And also check out Stephen's book.
It's called The Consolation of Buetheists as Poetic Liturgy. It's very it's a
it's a technical book, but the argument is very powerful and it's worth looking
into especially if you're interested in the question of patterns and how patterns affect us
today. And so Stephen, thanks for everything you do. You know,
everybody who who doesn't know about Ralson College, it is worth looking into Ralson
College. It is a seed of hope in this time. I was able
to participate in a trip with Stephen and some of the people around Rosson College.
Was astounded at what it is it is possible to do today and it
does give us hope in a moment where we feel like everything's breaking down.
Thanks for what you're doing, Steven, It's truly appreciated. Well, thank
you, Jonathan. It's a great privilege to have this conversation, to be
in your podcast, your your friendship has been a great gift to me.
I'll only say in conclusion that to those who haven't read Bellithius, just remember
that if you're ever in a really difficult circumstance that that book is there is
there for you. I once a friend of mine. I was once met
a friend of mine at a meeting. It was a board meeting in Boston,
and she had had cancer and I thought it had gone away, but
it had come back, and it was very sad. Anyway, I didn't
know what to do, and I went into the bookstore, and there was
a bookstore there, and I bought her. I think, I just have
to give this woman a copy of Beliethius. And she wrote to me a
few weeks later saying that your words had never been so meaningful to her.
And so I say that because it might be that this is a book that
can in a time that you really needed you can turn to it. Yeah,
all right, thanks Steven, and we'll talk soon as well. We'll
see each other possibly for the second part of our team of Bible interpreters.
We're hoping to see that happen. For those who are hoping that that will,
it seems like it might, so that'd be wonderful. Thank you,
Jonathan. It's a real pleasure. Bye for now. Thanks. I want
to invite you all to the very first Symbolic World Summit. Over three days,
we will finally meet in real time, in real space, and everyone
from this little corner of the Internet will be there to explore the theme of
reclaiming the cosmic image. Of course I will be speaking, but there will
also be Martin Shaw, who is an amazing mythographer. Father Stephen De Young
of Lord of Spirit Fame. There will be Richard Rowland from the Universal History
series, Vesper Stamper, Nicholas Kotar, and Neil De Gray that you've all
seen on my channel here and there for entertainment, we have everyone's favorite apocalyptic
band, the One and Only Dirt Poor Robbins. This event will be the
chance of a lifetime to capture and embrace our current moment, so join us
from February twenty ninth to March second, twenty twenty four in Tarbinspings, Florida.
Visit the Symbolic World dot com slash summit for more information and I will
see you there. So they much pen going