Speaker 1: But I have a feeling that the West itself needs
to die. In fact, I think it may already have died. Actually,
this thing we call the West is a sacrifice and
is being sacrificed so that the plant can die, so
the seeds can grow, exactly as you were talking earlier, Right,
you don't get the growth without the sacrifice. And I
think we've got to such a point where we have
created a culture that is irreligious and babylon like and
top heavy, and it's just fading away. And I don't
mean that there should be a giant catastrophe or we
should destroy it or anything like that. I just think
that it's dying if it's not already gone, and we
have to let that happen, because it's not going to
be stoppable at this point. And instead of doing that,
instead of like fighting to protect X, Y and Z
aspects of the superstructure, we can go back to the
root of the culture and write about that instead and
build that and protect that. So it's not an all
or nothing situation. We don't say, oh, the West is
in trouble, let's let everything burn like the joker, you know.
But at the same time, we don't say well, let's
get out there and fight for our right to know,
form transnaction corporations and.
Speaker 2: Have economic growth forever and ever.
Speaker 1: And mind the asteroids with Ellen Musk, right, that's not
anything to do with what we're talking about. Why don't
we step back from that battle at the moment, which
is going on anyway, and go back to our roots,
which we'll find in those stories. Let's tell the stories
of the saints, Let's tell the fairy tales on you.
Let's go and write about how Christianity manifests in the landscape.
And let's do that, not with a plan in mind
that this is going to build a civilization, but just
because we think it's the thing we need to do,
and then will then things will happen.
Speaker 3: You know, this is Jonathan Peeshow Welcome to the symbolic World.
Speaker 4: Hello everyone, I am here with Paul kings North. Think
everyone who watches these videos knows who Paul is. You know,
we've had been having discussions for a few years now,
and recently Paul did a talk at First Things which
was very poignant.
Speaker 5: It was a lot of people were very.
Speaker 4: Touched by his talk where he he really criticized the
dangers of civilizational Christianity and uh, you know, the dangers
of people who put civilization first and see Christianity in
some ways as a as a tool to get there.
Speaker 5: And I felt called by that.
Speaker 4: You know, because you know, because of my involved with art,
because my discussion with Jordan Peterson and a bunch of
other people, and so I thought'd be a good idea
to talk about it with with Paul and kind of
see yeah, and kind of explore his ideas and see
where we where we touch and where we don't on
these on these questions.
Speaker 5: So Paul, thanks for talking to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thanks to have a touch and so it's
good to be back.
Speaker 4: Yes, And so maybe you could start with just obviously
people can watch the talk. We'll link it in the
in the in the scripture and also the written version
of it. Maybe you can give up basic synthesis of
what it is that you were trying to get a craft,
and then we could start the discussion.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, so I was invited to give the Erasthmus Lecture
of First Things, and I to be honest, when I
was invited, I'd never heard of.
Speaker 2: The Erasmus lectures.
Speaker 1: So I went and looked out what it was, and
I discovered, to my horror that had been delivered by
any number of eminent theologians for decades, including the former
Pope Benedict the sixteenth, and I thought they must have
made a mistake. I almost didn't go, honestly, because it
was I didn't think I was up to it, but
they asked me to do it, so I said, okay, well,
I'm going to try and say say something that I
think is necessary. And really the essence of the talk,
which was designed to be provocative, that was the point,
not for the sake of it, but just because I
think it was something that really needed to be saying,
something that's been itching me for a long time.
Speaker 2: Was very much as you'd said in the introduction.
Speaker 1: I can see at the moment around us in Western
society a movement coalescing of what we might called civilizational Christians.
Speaker 2: And what this is, it's a movement.
Speaker 1: Of people who I think quite correctly can see that
Western culture is fragmenting and is spiritually empty. And you know,
all of the things that you talk about on your channel,
all the things I write about, probably a lot of
your readers would agree with, even if we might have
different understandings of what's going on. And people look at
this and they say, what's wrong with the culture. Why
are things falling apart? Why do they not hold together?
Why do things seem to be collapsing, And they come
to the conclusion, which I think is correct. I agree
with it, that there's a spiritual void at the heart
of the culture. I think a culture is fundamentally a
spiritual creation. It's taking me about fifty years to realize that,
but I think that's how it works. So if we
agree that there's such a thing as Western culture, then
we have to ask ourselves what is it, And realistically,
it's what used to be Christendom, which is the domain
of the Western Church, the Roman Church. And so people
then from that conclusion they leap to From that observation,
they leap to a conclusion which is that if this
used to be a Christian culture, then we need to
revive Christianity to defend or promote or rejuvenate the culture.
Speaker 2: But they start in the wrong place.
Speaker 1: They start with the assumption that Christianity is some sort
of tool, some sort of social or cultural tool, which
we can use to defend the culture. Fight the woke people,
fight the Muslims fight the Russians, the Chinese, whoever, we
want to fight and get our culture back to some
form that it used to be in or should be
in the future. And I think it's dangerous because it's
precisely the wrong way around. I think the Western culture
is certainly it's certainly a manifestation of Christianity. It absolutely
was at the core of the culture. That's not the
only thing that it comes from, but it's the spiritual
core and has been for centuries. But not because people
set out to build a civilization with Christianity, but because
they tried to follow Christ and around them grew a
culture which then became a civilization for better.
Speaker 2: Or for worse. And we can argue about whether it
was good or bad.
Speaker 1: And I think that exactly the wrong thing is going
on here. People are starting in the wrong place saying
I want a certain type of civilization, so we should
use the cross as a sword to build it. And
the second thing I went on to say was if
we actually step back and look at the values of
modern civilization, or indeed all civilization, if we want to
be really controversial, can we actually say that they're Christian
at all? Can we really if we look at and
one thing I did in the talk, because I listed
the seven Deadly sins, and I looked at the fact
that I think that our culture is based today in
Western capitalist modernity, on basically inflaming them all for profit.
And I think that's a good case to be made.
I don't think if Christ came and looked at our
culture today he'd say, oh, well, this is exactly what
I had in mind.
Speaker 2: He would not. And could we really, in fact say
that any.
Speaker 1: Giant, centralized culture based on accumulation and wealth creation and
forced labor and all the rest of it is Christian
at all.
Speaker 2: Regardless of what you think about that.
Speaker 1: The fundamental thing I was trying to say was that
we have to I think, head off at the past
this tempt to use the Christian way as a tool
to defend or promote a certain type of culture, because
I think that it's exceptionally dangerous and it's going to
do damage to Christianity and probably to the culture as well.
Speaker 4: No, I think I think that definitely your critique falls
in the right time. And you know, in the moment
when we do are seeing this shift that's happening, there
are more and more people that are either moving espeliciallyde
towards Christianity or at least are not hostile to it
in the ways that they were before. And some of
these characters are not are not particularly are not Christian themselves.
And so it's fascinating because when I watched the talk,
I thought, I really agree with you for fifty percent.
Speaker 5: I think that's what I wrote in the email. I think,
like fifty percent what you said, I completely completely agree
with you.
Speaker 4: In the sense that and I re read your text again
and I realized that I actually agree.
Speaker 5: With you more than fifty percent.
Speaker 4: Fifty was more like the that the the critique of
of what you said, I definitely agree with you. Maybe
I could even say that I have the sense in
which when Christ Christ talks of Antichrist, this is what
he's talking about, is in some ways something which is
within Christianity, which is out of Christianity, but is using
Christ for means that are different than for the glory
of God or for the transformation of souls, you know.
Speaker 5: And so you have the story of Simon.
Speaker 4: The Magician, for example, right there in Acts, which is
in some ways an example of that which is Simon
the magician wants Christ, so he can, you know, make
miracles and and you know, and us and impress everyone.
Speaker 5: And that is exactly the opposite.
Speaker 4: And it's not that the apostles don't make miracles, it's
that their miracles are rooted in a true faith and
true willingness to sacrifice for the highest thing. And so
I think that I see that even if you look
at the images and revelation, you have, like these two
images of civilization, you have one which is the beast,
the beast and the horror. And I think that's exactly
what you're describing, both in terms of this tendency to
move explicitly towards our passions and anywhere. The way the
beast is described is very much in the way you
describe in your own text the criticism of civilization, saying
it's greed, it's exchanged, it's lust, it's all these things
that are kind of wrapped into one. And everybody is
celebrating this horror because it's giving her, giving them what
they want. And then at the same time, the machine,
which is which is hiding under the whore, which is
basically these crazy systems of control that set themselves up
in the moment when we are basically giving ourselves to
our passions, you know, and to facilitate that as well.
Speaker 5: And so I see that.
Speaker 4: And then I also see this other image, which is
the image of the heavenly Jerusalem as and that maybe
that's why I said FE fifty is because I see
these two images as two possibilities of what is downstream
from Christ. But no matter what, I agree that to
have the heavenly Jerusalem, it's not you don't try to
get the heavenly Jerusalem.
Speaker 5: You tried to see the Son of Man. You tried
to live in the light.
Speaker 4: You know that the Lamb provides, and then downstream from
that you do have some image of civilization. And that's
maybe the question I have for you is that, because
you're right, you do push pretty radically in your talk.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: It's like you say, all civilization is wrong.
Speaker 4: And I'm thinking it seems though, that there's like the
wheat in the chaff in civilization, kind of like what
Christ describes, and that for example, our civilization, for all
it's evil, and I totally agree with that, is probably
the civilization in which the fewest people die of hunger
that has ever existed. In the history of humanity. Right,
we have another type of despair, which is work kind
of spiritual despair.
Speaker 5: But that's a real thing. It's a real thing that.
Speaker 4: We have this virtue of taking care of the poor,
that's part of the system. Anyways, I'm talking a lot,
So maybe I set you up with these two opposites,
and I want to know what you think about that.
Speaker 6: Hello everyone, this is Annie Crawford inviting you to join
me this January for a symbolic world reading of Till
We Have Faces. The book C. S. Lewis calls far
and away the best I've written. Till We Have Faces
is Lewis's modern retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche,
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So, I mean, I
have a long history of complaining about civilization.
Speaker 2: That's the first thing I don't want to.
Speaker 1: You know, I've made a career out of it, and
I don't want to. I don't want to be suggesting that.
Luckily Jesus agrees with me, because that wasn't the point.
I mean, one of the things I did want to
do in the talk with seriousness, and one of the
reasons I wanted to give it is I didn't want
to stand up there and attack people. I'm actually looking
at myself quite a lot of the time, because if
we look at the way Christ tells us to live
in the Gospels, it's not the way I'm living, right,
That's the reality of it. And the more Christian I become,
the more the more Christ is sort of inside me,
bashing away and churning things around, the more that becomes
painfully apparent. And so that's the paradox we're all living
in as Christians. If I look at the things we're
told to do in terms of wealth and power and
resisting evil or not resisting evil, it's not only the
opposite of what our civilization tells us to do, it's
pretty much the opposit of what I do. A lot
of the time. So I did try and say that
a couple of times. So I don't want to. I
always give the impression that I'm sort of preaching as
a holy.
Speaker 2: Man, because I'm really not.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a challenge, right, So we are living
in a top down machine civilization, whatever you want to
call it.
Speaker 2: There we are.
Speaker 1: It's not going away. It's existed for ten thousand years now.
Of course, it gives us good material things, There's no
doubt about that, and that's why we like it and
people do like it. The question is what the costs are,
And that's always the question. What's downstream of all the
good stuff we get? What's literally downstream sometimes in the
rivers and in the destruction of the forests and the
loss of the culture and all the things that we
can see happening.
Speaker 2: Right, So, you never get anything for free.
Speaker 1: You do get your good stuff, but you get a
lot of bad stuff as well, and.
Speaker 2: That's just life.
Speaker 1: So there's not a lot to be gained just from
saying civilizations bad and we should not live in it,
because we do.
Speaker 2: There's no getting away from it. That's where we are.
Speaker 1: The question is what kind of values as Christians we're
actually supposed to be pursuing.
Speaker 2: That's my question.
Speaker 1: As I say, it's a personal question for me and
for us and for the culture we live in.
Speaker 2: I can't escape the fact.
Speaker 1: The more I read of the Church Fathers, the more
I read of the monastic Saints, the more I read
of the Philicalia, the more I read of the Gospels,
and it's very very difficult to try, very hard to
escape the fact that there is a clear division between
what Christ calls the world and what he calls the Kingdom.
And there's no doubt about it. And he says very clearly,
I've called you out of the world. And because I've
called you out of the world, you're going to be
hated by the values of the world. The world being
the passions that build the kind of things that you're
just talking about, the Babylon as the kind of manifestation
of the great corrupt global city.
Speaker 2: And interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, when.
Speaker 1: Babylon is that it's most corrupted, you hear this voice
from the heaven, don't you You hear Christ? And he says,
come out of her, my people. It's a really interesting thought.
What are you're supposed to do with Babylon you're supposed
to leave because Babylon is corrupt and the heavenly Jerusalem
is co instead. So we've got this tension all the time,
and the whole of Christianity seems to me like a
like a tension. I wrote about it recently as feeling
like a kind of Zen and Cohen that you're walking
around all the time just going what is this? That
it's not a logical system here, So of course there
are all these contradictions and tensions in it. But the
question becomes what does a Christian life look like? And
therefore what does a Christian culture look like? And therefore
should we live that? And there might be a lot
of answers to that, and you can only really try
and do it by living it, as many people have
done for two thousand years. But I'm pretty sure it
doesn't look like modern civilization. And so as Christians, obviously
we're living in Babylon, so there we are.
Speaker 2: We have to deal with that.
Speaker 1: But if we start saying that the values of Babylon
are actually really Christian values and we have to defend them,
that's where we're in trouble. So the question for me
seems to be and I am stumbling around here because
this is not a theologian or a saint or a bishop.
I'm somebody trying to work this out as I go along.
The question seems to be not how shall we defend
all the glorious values of modernity and wealth creation and profit?
And interestingly, the people who talk like this seemed to
me often to be defending Enlightenment values. Actually they're defending
liberalism and democracy and civil and capitalism and wealth creation.
Speaker 2: And these may or may not be good things.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying they're bad things, but they're not fundamentally
Christian things.
Speaker 2: And they're not anti Christian either necessarily. But they're very
modern values. So what are we doing?
Speaker 1: Are we trying to live as Christians and in a
in a Christian culture? And what would that look like?
And how different would it look like from the thing
that we are doing here? And I think if we
confuse the values of modern, capitalist, progressive modernity with the Gospel,
I think we're in a real We're in a real state.
Speaker 2: Because they don't seem to bear any resemblance to each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I think I think you, I think you,
I think I agree with you. One of the patterns
that I see in scripture. And you can tell me
what you think about about this is I see exactly
in some ways what you describe. So in the Bible,
civilization is the comes down from Cain, you know, and
so you have the fall, and then Caine found the city,
and then his descendants found pretty much everything that we
consider civilization, the arts, music, and then technology, architecture, you know,
ways of living in the world. And then you have
this intimation that violence increases, right, so when you get
to to to Lamic it basically this sense that you know,
the violence has increased seventyfold. You know that this is
this is extremely violent society, and that it'll bring about
the flood, it will bring about destruction. And so one
of the interesting thing God seems to do in scripture
is that he seems to take the image of the
city and the image of the civilization, technology and all
of that, and then he he puts it in the
plan of the temple and the tabernacle. So he gives
from heaven, he gives the plan of the tabernacle to
a holy ab and Bezelel in order to build this thing.
And the way that he talks about a holy ab
in Bezeleel is in similar way that is talked about Tubalcane,
that is, their artisans in the sense of Kane's descendants.
So the vision that I see in scripture is that
civilization always seems to get out of control and be
exactly what you're saying, and that in fact, some ways
it's the spark, it's a sinful spark, and then God
is redeeming it constantly in the story, and the ultimate
image of that.
Speaker 5: Is of course the heavenly Jerusalem.
Speaker 4: But the idea would be, I think, is that there
should be intimations of that in the story as we
move forward, there should be moments where we have intimations
of that.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: For example, Christians have believed that the conversion of Constantine
was one of those moments where.
Speaker 5: It's not a perfect thing.
Speaker 4: It's not like the heavenly Jerusalem comes down from Heaven,
but that in the conversion of the Roman Empire and
the transformation of some of the values that underlied the
Roman Empire, you know, like in fanticide and chattel slavery
and all the dark aspect of the Roman Empire, we're
being transformed, not completely transformed, not fully, but that there
was this motion and so that is something that I
kind of see happen. And so I'm not closed. I
do agree about everything you said about our civilization now,
but I get the sense that it doesn't mean that
it's all it's all evil, that there has to be
something that God can redeem. And I'm not surect Like
when we talk about AI. You know what I think
about AI, It's like I'm looking at it seeing this
like demon possessed.
Speaker 5: You know, thing coming towards us.
Speaker 4: But I'm thinking is like I'm always asking myself, is
it possible for these things to be redeemed? I'm not
sure how, But I see the heavenly Jerusalem as that image,
because in the Heavenly Jerusalem you have this, you actually
have a top down and bottom up situation where the
heavenly Jerusalem comes down from Heaven. And then it says
that the kings of all the nations bring the glory.
Speaker 5: Into the heavenly Jerusalem.
Speaker 4: And so what it suggests is that the nations have
a glory that is can be offered up to God.
It's not all of it, not all of their behavior
and not everything about them, but that there's something about
the nations that can become a proper offering to God.
And so anyways, I wanted to see what you think
about about that.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting, isn't it.
Speaker 1: So I'm always very very conflicted on the conversion of
the Roman Empire because the question is how much did
the Christians convert the Romans and how much did the
Romans convert the Christians into Romans and imperialists, And actually
a probably a bit of both actually, but anyway, that
was that was a long time ago, so that was
what happened. It's really so there are these two images
in the in Revelation. There's Babylon, the earthly whore, basically
the civilized decadence of the humans. And then, as you say,
there is the heavenly Jerusalem, which is given by God.
Speaker 2: It comes down.
Speaker 1: And so I think there's really something in what you're saying.
And I'm thinking about this a lot. So I think
humans have to build things and make things.
Speaker 2: That's what we do.
Speaker 1: So the way I see this, you can tell me
if you think this is completely offbeam if you look
at the if you look at Genesis, there seems to
be only one picture in the Wold of the Bible
of God creating the divine Kingdom, and it's when he
creates the heaven and earth, and then he creates a
garden and he puts us in this garden, and we're
effectively divine gardeners. And our job is to name the
animals to be gardeners and to contemplate God. So we're
not living in a wilderness. We're living in a garden.
It's not the same thing. It's a created thing. But
we have a task, and we choose instead of fulfilling
the task of contemplating God until presumably we're ready to
eat the fruit of these trees, which hopefully we will be,
so that we can share in God's work, we decide
to listen to the serpent, who says, well, why didn't
you become God's yourself quickly? Because you don't need to
listen to God. You can do it yourself. You can
have the power. And so we do that, and then
we have to leave the garden, and the communion's broken.
We can't contemplate God anymore. We can't even see God.
We're on this earth and it's fallen, but it's not evil.
It's fallen, and we're in it. And we have to
build now because on the earth, if you don't build,
if you don't wear clothes, if you don't defend yourself
against tigers, you're going to get eaten pretty quickly because
you're not in the garden of eating anymore. Right, Because
in the garden, in the state we're actually created to
be in, we're also in communion with all the creatures.
Speaker 2: They don't hate us.
Speaker 1: I mean, as an aside, one of the stories, one
of the projects I'm working on at the moment is
my book of Wild Saints, and I'm really really fascinated
by saints who live in wild places and end up
with a relationship to creatures, which is like the relationship
we had in Eden. So it's possible to get back
there on this earth. Right, So that's what we're supposed
to be like, in harmony with Earth, in harmony with God,
in harmony with creatures.
Speaker 2: And we can't be like that because we're falling. So
we have to build.
Speaker 1: And it seems, as you say that, we keep building
and building and building, and then because we're not building
towards God, we're trying to be God's instead. The technologies
that we use and the cities that we build end
up being corrupted all the time because we're not pointing
them in the right direction. So the question becomes, who
are we actually supposed.
Speaker 2: To be serving. We're supposed to be serving God.
Speaker 1: If you build whilst serving God, if you build reasonably
within limits, whilst serving God, you can create beauty and
holy things. You can create a great cathedral, You can
create you know, any number of You.
Speaker 2: Can create an icon.
Speaker 1: You can build a house that you can live in
that's modest, and then you can pray and eat and
do the things you do in the house. But all
the time we're endlessly being corrupted. The whole story of
the Bible, the whole story of human history is humans
effectively continuing to try and follow the path that the
serpent laid down instead of the path of God. And
when you use technology and civilization and you're building techniques
and our technological brilliance to serve the serpent rather than God.
Speaker 2: You end up with Babylon. So that seems to be
what happens repeatedly. It doesn't.
Speaker 1: But I think you're right. It doesn't follow from that
that everything is even. That we have nothing to offer God,
and therefore we can't build anything. We have to build something.
We're technological animals. We can't live without creating. If we
didn't create, we'd be we'd be dead meat when it's snoked.
So this isn't this is you know, we're not bears,
we don't have savage teeth and fairy coats.
Speaker 2: We have to do this. Our brilliance and.
Speaker 1: Our and our terrible our terrible nature as well is
in technology. So if you build technology to serve the serpent,
which means that effectively we are trying to be as gods,
because that's the offer, then you end up with AI,
like you said, right, and AI is us trying to
create gods and effectively trying to turn ourselves, as the
transhumanists want, into immortal beings who will live on other planets,
colonize the universe, and effectively literally be gods. I mean,
these people in Silicon Valley are quite happy just to
say this openly.
Speaker 2: They're trying to make God. They talk about it all
the time.
Speaker 1: So it seems to me that as you say, you've
got these two points of like you can serve God
and you can try and walk your way back towards God,
which is what Christian life is supposed to be. We're
looking for theosis, we're trying to become saints. I mean,
I can't imagine that happening to me, but you know anything,
the miracles going to happen. This is what we're supposed
to do. This is the story. We're supposed to walk
towards sainthood and use our techniques and our abilities within
limits and reason to do that. Or we can keep
following the offer of the serpent, which is what we
perpetually do. And I think that once you get to
the stage, this would be my critique. I suppose once
you get to the stage of having this giant, top
heavy technological civilization, you're inevitably that the momentum is.
Speaker 2: Towards the serpent. That's what you end up.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that within it we can't serve God
and that we have nothing to offer, and that we
can't build Christian cultures within it, because we can. I
think the monastic movements do that. I think Christian communities
do that is individual Christians and the culture serving the
poor can do that.
Speaker 2: We have to do that, actually, But I think that.
Speaker 1: The machine wants to get to this level, if you like,
seems to be seems to be the serpent's doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that seems that that there's almost like an inevitable
thing that's moving towards that. You know, in the in Revelation,
it ultimately says that the beast kills the whore, you know,
and that to me is that image of in some
ways the machine basically clamping back down. It's like, oh,
you know, fun and strangely, I mean it's funny because
it actually it's something that you can experience personally too.
It's like when you give yourself to your passions and
to your sins and then you think that this is freedom,
all of a sudden you realize no, it's like it's
a monster that's enslaving you and that there's no freedom
there anymore. And so that image of the beast can
and the whole it is such a powerful, such a
powerful image. And in the image of the heavenly Jerusalem,
you know, it's it seems like it's a rightly ordered
in the way that you said, because in the center
of the city is the garden. You know, you have
the tree and the water of life that's in the
middle with the lamb and the Son of Man, which
is the light that is shining on the city. But
then on the edge of the city you do have stones.
And it's important to understand for this biblical symbolism what
that is. Referring to the fact that they are carved
stones that like you know, different different metals and stones.
It's important to understand that it is technification. That's what
it represents. That's why the tower Babbel is made of stones.
That's why you know the idols were made of gold.
Like all of these things are images of human making
in there, in civilizational making. So you have this order
where where because the guardian is in the center, then
the city becomes glorious like a jewel. Right, it's shining
with all this this beauty, and so I think that
gives me hope. You know that it does mean that
it doesn't mean it means that the things we do
can be offered to God. Now I don't know, like
you said, in some ways, some of those are not
my problem. Like there's some things that I struggle to
understand how they can be offered up, like AI for example,
at this moment, it's not easy to see how ultimately
it's going to serve. And also the other thing I
wanted to say is that that also seems to be.
Speaker 5: True in a civilizational way.
Speaker 4: What I see in Christian the best moments of Christian
civilization is that the monk or the martyr who gives himself,
sacrifices himself for Christ, who lives ever he lives in
a way that really reflects what Christ is saying. That
I write that yields civilization like it yields families. When
a lot of people say, well, if everybody lived the
way Jesus says, then there would be no people, right
if we were all like living as monks up on
the mountain, and then all the sthetics or whatever, the
civilation would stop. But that's not what happens. There's a
normal hierarchy that sets itself up where these characters become
like beacons, and in their sacrifice it yields families with
ten kids, and you know, and and this kind of
abundance at the at the bottom. But again, the mistake
is to think that that's the that we can weaponize,
that that we can make it happen.
Speaker 2: I think that's the key. I think that's the key.
Speaker 1: So it seems to me that the root of Christian
culture is Christians, right, actual Christians who are not probably
people like me who say where Christians and technically are,
but people actually living like Christians. And as you say,
there's this paradox again, there's that Christian and Cohen again, right,
this weird paradox where the first will be last and
the last will be first. And God's wisdom is not
the wisdom of the world. And Christ is always saying
these things that make absolutely no sense at all in
worldly terms, and you think, I can't live like that.
What is he even talking about? And so did most
of his followers, right, Obviously they leave him before the end.
He only ends up with twelve people after he's told
them to drink his blood and eats his body. That
most of them say he's crazy, off they go because
it makes no sense in the world's terms. And yet
when these people do these things that make no sense
in the world's terms, they end up building a culture
almost by accident, because but if they'd set out to
do that, it would have been a disaster. If you'd
set out to say, right, let's build a Christian civilization everyone,
and let's make it look like this, and we're going
to have this technology in these tools, and we're going
to live.
Speaker 2: This way Christian civilized. There's a quote I used in
the talk.
Speaker 1: It's from Hillary White, the Liturgical Artists, and she said
Christian civilization is a secondary fruit of Christian mysticism.
Speaker 2: And I thought that was exactly what was going on. It's,
you know, the Desert.
Speaker 1: Father, Saint Anthony creates the entire monastic movement by accident
because he wants to try and live the way Christ
told him to live, and so he gives everything away
and goes off to live in a tomb, which is
certifiable behavior.
Speaker 2: You know, if you did it today, they'd section you.
Speaker 1: But that leads to the Christian monastic movement, but not
because he intended it to, because he intended to try
and follow Christ. So it says if it's that if
you actually make the sacrifice and live with that intense humility,
things happen because God makes them happen.
Speaker 2: That's how it seems to me.
Speaker 1: Whereas if you try with your own will to create
some kind of civilization with a cross painted on it,
you end up with the opposite. Because the devil is
the prince of this world. Which is another thing that
keeps popping up in the Gospels all the time, you know,
the devil says, this world has been given over to me.
So all of the worldly projects, if they're not, if
they don't come from this kind of radical renunciation that
Christ teaches, they end up being the devil's projects.
Speaker 2: That's how it seems. So the weird paradox.
Speaker 1: Is we have to give everything away, give everything up,
and try to live in this mendicant way, and then
God gives us what we need to build a culture.
Speaker 2: That's how it seems.
Speaker 1: And as I say, then I just keep going around
this going around in my head because I'm not living
like that.
Speaker 2: So I don't know what that means, but it's this
is this is the challenge. It seems to be. That
seems to be the way it works.
Speaker 4: I think, I mean, I think you're absolutely right, and
we can find many examples in the Bible, but also
in the tradition. Like there's an interesting, interesting paradox, even
in the case of the Life of san Antony, which
is that we always have to remember that the person
who wrote the Life of sant Anthony is is Saint Athanasius, right,
Saint Athanasius, who, under the protection of Constantine basically, you know,
defended Homousios as the as the orthodox position, and and
and and the council that basically, you know, structured the
way that Christians think today. So I'm not saying that
that it's that it's Constantine that led the council, and
the fathers were really cautious about that because one of
the things we don't realize is that that the very
first council there was a chair. You know, if you
know the story, there was a there was a throne
in absentia for Constantine because.
Speaker 5: He didn't go to the council all the time.
Speaker 4: So there was like this throne in absentia for Constantine,
and that really bothered some of the fathers. And so
during the second Council, they put the Gospel on the
throne and it was a way to say, no, it's
like it's actually Christ that's ruling over this council. So
this tension, right, it was there in the sense, and
maybe that is the best way to understand what it
is the best aspect of what Constantine did, for example,
which is that he didn't we hope that he didn't direct,
he didn't direct the theological thought, but he was able
to create a frame around it, then protect those that
were doing it, you know. So you can imagine that
the good role of one of the roles of the
king would be to protect the monastery, you know, because
the monks don't protect themselves. And so it's like, oh,
you guys, sacrifice yourselves completely, live that way, and I'm
going to be downstream from you, and I'm gonna, you know,
if I can, I'll stop the pirates from coming to
from coming to kill you. And so it's like this
weird There's a story. My brother told me the story
a long time ago. It's actually is related to Zen.
It was this story of these two kung Fu swords,
and I forget the name of the sword, sorry for
people watching, but that there were these two swords, and
like the greatest sword that was in the kung Fu
world was the sword that if you put the sword
in water, all the pieces twigs and pieces of like
of grass would avoid the sword. And so like you
put the sword in water, and then everything the sword
in the water would just go around it and avoid it.
And the second most powerful sword was the sword that
when you put it in the water, all the twigs
would come and break against the sword, and so there's
this idea that in some ways in action yields action,
but it has to be in the right order, right,
It's like, there is room for kings that defend people,
but they have to be rooted, and they have to
be rooted something true, something higher than them. A relative
just becomes or real, it just becomes power and just
becomes you know whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it's very true.
Speaker 1: I mean there's there's this always this tension right the
heart of Christianity and every other faith that I know
of as well.
Speaker 2: It's always the same thing.
Speaker 1: What are you going to do about the world being
full of violence? Because it is full of violence? How
do you actually respond to that? And Christ tells you
not to resist evil? And that's and you know, it's
it's very difficult to understand how to live that. That's
the greatest for me, that's the greatest challenge. And yeah,
you're right about that. I mean, it's what do you
do with the kings? The kings aren't going anywhere, so
do you sacralize the kings or do you let the
kings rampage around? And this is you know, that's that's
always the paradox. But again that still comes from that
mysticism doesn't because the monastics get to the point and
the church gets to the point where the king becomes
interested in them. You know, it's a very interesting question
to me. Why did Constantine want to become a Christian?
Why was he suddenly interested in this religion? What's going
on there? It's off him something through what it's doing
because of the way that it's not because it's giving
him power, or there's something about these people and this
faith that is attracting even the Roman emperor, you know,
so because they've been Christians. And so it's like I
said at the end of the tried to say at
the end of the talk, it's like, if we want
a Christian culture back, because we haven't got one now,
we just have to try and live like humble Christians
and then it will happen in God's time.
Speaker 2: It's not that we you know, some.
Speaker 1: People reacting to the talk have said, well, kings not
thinks we should just do nothing and let the world
burn it. That's a critique I get quite a lot,
and I can understand it, but it's not the point.
It's not there's no option to do nothing. You know,
we're all doing something here. We are doing a thing
right now. The question is what you do. You know,
building a monastery is doing something. Living in a Christian
household is doing something. Writing a book is doing something.
Running the symbolic world is doing something. We're all doing things.
It's a question of what we're doing. And then if
we just try to do them with that attempt to
approach that Christian humility, then I think things happen from there,
things grow out from there. That's how Christian cultures get
built because people are at their best, people are attracted
to Christians. At their worst, people are repelled by Christians, right,
But at their best, people are attracted to Christians. And
we've come out of a period in our culture where
people have become very repelled by Christians, partly because of
things the Church is definitely actually done, and partly because
of the kind of the whole campaign of modernity is
against God and against the Christian Church, which has been
made a villain in any number of things. But for
whatever reason, the Church has been turned into a villain.
And so what do you do about that? Well, you
have to just again, the more corrupt and decadent and
horrible the culture gets, the more actual Christians are going
to be really attractive because they are well, you know,
if you ever meet a holy person, you're really drawn
towards them. You can sense it and you want to
go there and you want to be with that person,
and that's what changes the world. It seems to me
that kind of holiness.
Speaker 5: I agree.
Speaker 4: I Another image that comes to me is the image
of the seed that Christ uses himself, you know, you know,
he makes it clear that in order for any fruit
to grow, the origin of that is death, Like the
seed has to die, if the seed, if the seed
does not die, then it doesn't produce fruit. And I
think that that's some ways the image. It's like you
can't fake that. You can't say, well, I just want
the fruit.
Speaker 5: I don't want to die. Well that's not going to happen.
Speaker 4: So Jesus says die Like that's putting you know, that
skin in the game.
Speaker 5: That's not that's not something that you can do utility
with utility, like just with utilitarian thinking.
Speaker 4: It actually is has to be a real self sacrifice
because you you're aimed at the highest thing, and then
out of that the fruit will be communion and etcetera.
Speaker 5: Etcetera that comes out of it.
Speaker 4: And you know, and I think that, and I think
a lot of the people maybe that listen to the talk,
we're afraid in some way that you were, because we
have you know, radical and Baptist types who who will
take what you say and put it very very far
where they they obviously don't like any type of structure.
Speaker 5: They think all structure is evil.
Speaker 4: That that that church buildings are evil in themselves. You know,
that kind of like radical idea, that that even the
the the building of beautiful of beautiful things is is
horrible just for all those reasons.
Speaker 5: But that's not what I hear from you.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a there's a story of Justinian, a
beautiful story of Justinian where Justinian, when you built hi Yasaphia,
he wanted to make the doors of the I think
it was the doors of either the church or of the.
Speaker 5: Y aak noistasis. He wanted to make them into pure gold.
Speaker 4: And the patriarch of Constantinople said, he said, okay, you
can make them out of pure gold, but if there's
just one beggar left in Constantinople after you've done that,
you'll have to you'll have to have account for that,
like you'll have to account for that. And so because
of that, he didn't make them gold. I think he
made them a lesser like silver or something like a
lesser met up because he there was this tension, like
exactly the tension that you're saying. It's like he's like, yes,
it's okay to make a beautiful thing for God. But
it happened, and Saint John Christist I'm had similar statements
where he's like, give to the poor and then if
there's gold left, make gold chandeliers.
Speaker 1: Well this is it, yeah, John, Because ostoin is a
great example of this. I mean he was so incredibly
radical in his preaching that he ended up being exiled
and effectively condemned because he focused on the rich, including
the empress, which turned out to be a bad idea.
But he was, you know, he was being a Christian
and he was a bishop and he was you know,
I'm an Orthodox Christian like you, So you know, I'm
not in a position to that I want to start
attacking institutions or buildings because if I did, I wouldn't
be Orthodox. And you need to live in that tension.
But the buildings that the buildings have to serve God.
And as you say, it seems to be a pretty
good deal that you're allowed to have a golden door
when you've fed the poor, but not before, right, because
this is this is this is the point of the
whole thing. It's when I was on Mount Athos yielded
to a go I visited Elderpaesios hisself. I don't know
if you've ever been there, but it's a tiny little
house and it has two rooms in it. One room
was his bedroom and the other room was a tiny
little church with a tiny chonostasis, and you can go
into this room now.
Speaker 2: And see it.
Speaker 1: And you know, you can go into glorious Orthodox cathedrals
and they're covered in these enormous icons and they're very stunning.
And Elder Pacios's church is just a tiny, little wooden thing.
And the only two icons he's got the ones that
he drew himself, because he had a vision of Christ
and he met Mary the Theotokos, and he drew what
they both looked like, and they almost looked like child's drawings,
and then he just pinned them up on the wood.
And that was one of the most beautiful churches I've
ever seen. So there's a form of beauty that can
be done very simply. It's not a question of, you know,
we don't have to go to the extreme where either
we're building gold churches everywhere or where all building.
Speaker 2: Is evil and we must do nothing.
Speaker 1: Again, it comes down to that question of to me,
same question we're asking with technology, who does this serve?
And one of my limits and am I doing this
aesthetically in far of God and in love of God
after I've fed the poor? Or am I just effectively
following the path of civilization.
Speaker 2: And it's like there's a.
Speaker 1: Very fine line there, and if you fall over that line,
then suddenly your church isn't very different to the skyscraper,
and there's beggars sitting on the steps, and then you
know Jesus is going to come and point out exactly
well the problem there is, just as he did in
the Temple. So it's always that fine line needs And
like I said, I don't think you can live in
this world without building, and you have to build to
the glory of God. And because I'm Orthodox, and this
is why I became Orthodox, one reason I think we
need the church.
Speaker 2: We need the structures.
Speaker 1: We need the teaching, we need the tradition, otherwise we
get the kind of craziness of ten thousand Protestant sects
a minute popping up in America because no one can
agree on what the Bible means, you know, And so
I believe in that. But it's like I think, you
need always this self correcting mechanism all the time. And
that's what I think that the monastics often are at
their best, you know, the monastics and the hermits and
the poor Christians who are trying to live a simple life,
always the correcting the emperor. The emperor needs them otherwise
otherwise he's just another emperor. And there's always I don't
know whether you can ever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's funny what you said is that's exactly what
I see.
Speaker 5: That's the role that I see that you're playing, too.
Speaker 4: Like when I saw the talk, I thought right away,
I thought, this is this is perfect, Like this is
actually the right call that we need to remind ourselves
why we're doing what we're doing, or whatever it is
we're doing, to remember what it is and to be
careful of the dangers, you know, And and you know
that in some ways I'm far more in the world
of cultural Christians. You know that I found myself in
that world and I and I feel that I feel
the attention too. I'm always asking myself and that's why
I was attracted to what you said. I'm like, I'm
always asking myself, Okay, what is this serving? You know?
And it's hard, by the way, and you probably have
an similar experience.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: You you make these videos, you.
Speaker 4: Get attention, you get likes, you get you know, you
get people supporting what you're doing. And so it's like
the man that the the temptation is right there all
the time constantly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, build build your brow exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so it's like you need but it's like
it's like you need a banner, right, you need a
symbolic WORL banner, and so well as well make it
beautiful and then then what like does it? Yeah, it's
a it's a it's definitely something that that I struggle with.
But it's also I think it's very useful and very
powerful that we're reminded of that constantly, Like just remember, remember,
remember why you're doing what you're doing, you know, and
remember your first love too. That's a good way of
thinking about it is that even though at the outset
the things that sparked some of the things we're doing
might have been pure, doesn't mean that it remains that
way all the time.
Speaker 5: Sometimes we can get kind of twisted and turned away.
Speaker 1: So okay, Well, what's really interesting is how easy is
to make idols of things really easily. And it's really
easy to make an idol of Jesus. It's really easy
to make an idol of the church and to create
a shape for them that happens to suit you, just
like it's really easy to create an idol for the culture.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: There's a quote from Christopher lash I keep using in
my writing, and he says, God, not culture, is the
only appropriate focus of your worship.
Speaker 2: And it's really really easy.
Speaker 1: People are always getting attached to their cultures, which is
completely normal.
Speaker 2: Right of course, we're attached to our cultures.
Speaker 1: We've we come from a place, we like that place,
we don't want it to be destroyed. We have protective
feelings towards it. This is normal human staff. But it's
not Christ and it's not God. And if you start
thinking that your culture is Christ just because it has
some churches in it, the question.
Speaker 2: Is what the churches are doing and what you're doing?
Speaker 1: And as I say, is this is me asking myself
this question because I'm not actually in any legitimate position
to stand up and hold the culture to account, because
because I'm not a holy man, right so, But somebody
said something interesting to me after the talk actually, which
really stuck with me. They said, it's aren't we lucky
that the Gospels were written down just a few decades
after Christ by people who knew him, because if they
hadn't been, you can bet your life that later Christians
would have watered them down because they're so incredibly radical
and challenging that we don't want to hear them.
Speaker 2: And I think there's something to that.
Speaker 1: It's like we've always got the Gospels to go back
to when we need a kind of reality check on
what we're actually supposed to be doing here, and then
we go.
Speaker 2: Back and we say, ah, yeah, I'm off the mark
again for the fiftieth time today.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's that seems to be what's what
we need to do all the time. In Eldopaesios again
I quoted him in the talk. He said he was
a radio operator in the Greek Civil War, and he
used this metaphor. He said, if you want to hear
God and speak to God, you have to tune your
radio dial to humility, because that's the frequency of which
He always operates in. And if we ask ourselves if
we're actually doing that, then certainly, for me, most of
the time, ninety nine percent of the time, the answer
is no. So that's what that's the dial in which
we can kind of hear, the frequency that's telling us
where we're supposed to walk.
Speaker 2: I suppose, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's and what you said, it's the grand
inquisitor to some example, it's some extent, you know, it's
like that problem that Jesus is so bothersome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, every time I read the Gospel.
Speaker 5: It's so annoying. Yeah, what is he doing?
Speaker 2: He's ruining my Christianity exactly.
Speaker 5: And that's that's absolutely true.
Speaker 4: I think that you know, you mentioned this scene in
our discussion now, but they made a movie version of
the Gospel of John recently. I don't know when I
was watching with my family, and you know, there's that
scene where he tells people that if you don't eat
my flesh and drink my blood, then you can't enter
the kingdom. And I never realized when I read the
text that it was in public, that it wasn't like
with his disciples, that it was like in front of everyone.
Speaker 5: And he just says that in front of.
Speaker 4: The Pharisees and in front of all these people, and
then you think, well, of course people ran away, Like
this is the craziest thing in the world, to say,
we have the luck of we have the chance of retrospect,
of seeing him resurrected, to be able to look back
at some of the really wild, crazy things that he said. Uh,
and it's only in that light that we can that
we can say, Okay, well, I can't digest this, but
I have to because I'm convinced by the power of
the of the of.
Speaker 5: The resurrection, you know. But yeah, it's it's it's it's
very difficult.
Speaker 2: This is, like I said, it's a Cohen.
Speaker 1: I think hopefully, hopefully after death we get to understand
what was going on properly.
Speaker 2: You know, this is down here. We're still we're chewing
on it. We're chewing on it all the time and
trying to trying to think.
Speaker 4: Even in the story of Jesus, there is this image
that of the of the seed and the fruit. And
I think that the image of the cross and the
heavenly Jerusalem is a good way of thinking about it.
Or even in the image of the heavenly Jerusalem, you
have the lamb and the son of Man, and so
you have this image of the humility of the seed
that is planted. And then you do have the image
of Christ as a as a king. You know, you
do have this image of Christ as a.
Speaker 5: As a as a as.
Speaker 4: A regal figure that is ruling over the world justly
because of him also being the sacrifice. No, and that's
the reason, the reason why he can be our king
and can rule over us in with all the image,
all the pageantry, all the imagery of civilization is because
that it's rooted in his in his kenosis at the outset.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so who is the king.
Speaker 1: The king is the barefoot carpenter who the authority is killed,
who preached things that at the time seemed to many
people to be completely mad, but were transformed, like you say,
through the sacrifice, through the self sacrifice, into what kingship
actually is supposed to look like. You know, that's exactly
it is that without the sacrifice, which is the same
thing as the humility, I suppose, or least the humility
the sacrifice.
Speaker 2: Without that, you haven't got anything.
Speaker 1: You've just got a you've got a similar acroum of
a thing called power. Christianity, You've got power. You've got power,
and you can paint your cross on on on power,
but it's still power. It's the it's the beast, it's
the serpent, it's the prince of this world. It's not Christ.
And we just have to be really careful to confuse
those two things. And we perpetually do it. And I
do it as well. It's easy to do. But if
we do it, it's like that's the tricks. Like the
adversary is just standing there waiting for us to fall
into that trap again, and we do.
Speaker 2: We keep falling into it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we do it, like you said, we do
it at every single level. We do it as much
in our own personal life as we do it's are
in our parishes or in our in our societies, you know,
And and so what do you see Let's say, you.
Speaker 5: Know, for example, like one of the things.
Speaker 4: I I do love and I care about is like
that is the celebration of our stories. For example, like
this is something that I've I've kind of taken on,
you know, and I think Martin shaw Is also can
take on is to kind of help people remind, you know,
remind people of these stories. And there is in that way,
like I really do feel the sense of care for
my story, like a care for my civilizational place, and
I and I have the sense that there's some importance
in I'm trying to like, I'm trying to say, I
think we can see Christ in these in these stories,
and that's the best way to look at them, you know,
like the fairy tales and all that. But I'm curious
of what you think about that, because you know, let's say,
one of the things that even in like this kind
of remembering of the ancient stories of the wild Christians,
of the of the saints, there is this like we
want to celebrate that which brought us where we are today,
you know, we that's part of how we hold together.
And so how do you see that balanced out? Let's say,
what's your approach to how to balance that with the
danger of pride.
Speaker 5: Let's say you're.
Speaker 1: Talking about like the stories of the culture more broadly
or specific Yeah, Well.
Speaker 4: I mean, for example, are the histories of our nations
or you know, even the stories of the saints, or
like I'm doing, I'm kind of revisiting the fairy tales, uh,
the foundation stories, all of these, all of these aspects.
Like we have this whole aspect of our podcast, which
we call Universal His where we are going back and
trying to show the Christian you know, root of Scandinavian culture,
of English culture, of all these different cultures to say,
you like, there are ways in which this connects together,
and so how do you I'm just curious, Like I
don't have a solution.
Speaker 5: I'm just asking.
Speaker 1: It's a really good question. So I've thinking listening to that.
I've got a couple of thoughts. So I'm probably as
interested as you in that. I mean, I'm a history
nerd and I have been all my life, and that's
why I write weird historical novels.
Speaker 2: And I just I'm fasciy.
Speaker 1: I wander around looking at holy wells and writing about them,
you know, because I just I just love the culture
manifested in the landscape, which we have so much off
in Europe going back so long. It's just it's a
kind of embarrassment of riches and I'm as since, certainly
since I've became a Christian, I'm more and more interested
in the Christian foundation of my country, which is England,
and the country I live in now, which is Ireland,
and how that manifested in the landscape, how that built
the people. So all of this is there, and I
think it's there to be rediscovered, and I think especially
the early Christian state, which really interests me, especially here
in Ireland, because I'm fascinated by the possibility that the
first Christians in Ireland are actually from Egypt. I'm fascinated
by this theory that the desert Fathers effectively sent people
up here, and there's plenty of evidence for this, and
so the foundation of Irish Christianity, which then becomes British Christianity,
actually is the desert Christianity of Egypt rather than the
kind of civilized center. So obviously this appeals to me.
You know, this floats my boat. But this is why
this country is full of caves that hermits used to
live in and the rest of it. So I'm really
fascinated by that, and it's why i keep writing about
the Saints, and it's why I write about the Holy Wells.
And it's not just because I'm just a history of
nerd and I find that interesting. It's because I think
we've got something to learn from this, because I think
that this is my intuition, and maybe it's tron and
people will disagree, but I have a feeling that the
West itself needs to die.
Speaker 2: In fact, I think it may already have died.
Speaker 1: Actually, this thing we call the West is a sacrifice
and is being sacrificed so that the plant can die
so the seeds grow, exactly as you were talking earlier, Right,
you don't get the growth without the sacrifice. And I
think we've got to such a point where we have
created a culture that is irreligious and babylon like and
top heavy, and it's just fading away. And I don't
mean that there should be a giant catastrophe or we
should destroy it or anything like that. I just think
that it's dying, if it's not already gone, and we
have to let that happen because it's not going to
be stoppable at this point. And instead of doing that,
instead of like fighting to protect X, Y and Z
aspects of the superstructure, we can go back to the
root of the culture and write about that instead and
build that and protect that. So it's not an all
or nothing situation. We don't say, oh, the West is
in trouble, let's let everything burn like the joker, you know.
But at the same time, we don't say, well, let's
get out there and fight for our right to form
transnational corporations and.
Speaker 2: Have economic growth forever and ever.
Speaker 1: In mind the asteroids with Ellen Musk, right, that's not
anything to do with what we're talking about. Why don't
we step back from that battle at the moment, which
is going on anyway, and go back to our roots,
which we'll find in those stories. You know, how did
these Let's tell the stories of the saints, let's tell
the fairy tales and you let's go and write about
how Christianity manifests in the landscape.
Speaker 2: And let's do that not with a plan in mind that.
Speaker 1: This is going to build a civilization, but just because
we think it's the thing we need to do and will,
then things will happen.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: Stories, I'm with you, you know, you know what I think
about this. Stories are the way that we navigate reality.
This was the really actually, funnily enough, this is what
I'm saying now is almost a Christian version of what
we did at the Dark Mountain Project about fifteen years ago.
And I was certainly wasn't a Christian at the time,
but that was a project which said, look, this whole
modern machine is creaking and crashing, and instead of fighting
over it, let's go back to the roots and examine
where the stories went wrong and tell some of the
correct stories instead, Because I think the root of a
civilization that's gone wrong is a story that's gone wrong,
and so let's tell the right ones. And you're right,
then that actually becomes to me a really exciting thing
to do. You know, it's not doom, lad, and it's
not it's not a cultural war. It's not about anger
or or giving up or anything. It's like, yeah, let's
go back to the desert in a way, in a
good way, and see what happens if we do that.
Let's tell the stories, and let's dig out these old
stories that no one knows about of what our ancestors did,
not so that we can copy them exactly, but just
so that we can listen to them and be inspired
by them and they'll act on us. So I think
that's the I think that's the way or a way
forward that is exciting for storytellers especially.
Speaker 5: Yeah, man, I think I think I felt this.
Speaker 4: I felt this this problem so many times, you know,
in terms of even in terms of my own engagements.
You know, I worked in Africa for seven years, you know,
and working with artisans and it was wonderful, but there
were definitely moments because I was helping the artisans to
you know, to sell their their things and maybe you know,
to connect the Western markets, and there was always this
ambiguity even in my soul, you know, and you see it,
you see it manifested. For example, like this is going
to be controversial with some people. It's like between North
Korea and South Korea. It's like these two places, and
then it's like North Korea is this horrible, horrible place
you know that is just you know, extremely trannical and
controlling and everything, and it's like, you know, we should
free them.
Speaker 5: And then it's like free.
Speaker 4: Them so that they become like South Korea, so that
they become a place where no one's having children, where
everything is falling apart, where you know, people are are
living in despair and in and in complete you know,
portification of culture.
Speaker 5: It's like, is that is that what we want to
replace them?
Speaker 4: Is that Western culture Like is Western culture Disney important?
Speaker 5: And if that's it? Yes, no, thank you, no, no,
thank you indeed.
Speaker 4: Uh And so it's yeah, it's definitely something that that Yeah,
that grades at me even in my own engagement sometimes
where I'm thinking what you're saying, like, do i want everybody,
do I want to bring what is modern Western culture to,
you know, to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: And I you know, my feeling for a long time
has been that this thing that we called the West
is an idol at this point.
Speaker 2: And it's also not.
Speaker 1: Only does it you know, as you say, it's brought
plenty of material benefits, but it's also hugely culturally damaging
to lots of other parts of the world which had
been crushed by it, but also to the culture, to
the people that we were before this modern thing appeared
called the West and scotted on our cultures and sucked
all of the sacredness out of our cultures and the
locality and the and the distinctiveness. And we've confused this
this kind of modern, hyper consumerist industrial beast that we
call the West with an actual culture, and it's not
a culture, it's like a giant.
Speaker 2: It's the machine, as I call it.
Speaker 1: But the machine is parasitical upon actual culture, whether it's
here or elsewhere. So so we ought to be on
the side of culture that is serving God and serving
Christ rather than this kind of anti culture which serves
the machine, which we sometimes confuse for the real thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that no, I think that that's the that's
the right way to think about it. And so listen, Paul,
I would say, I think this is a good place
to to to stop. Thank you, thanks for taking your
time to do this. You know, I think it was used.
Like I said, I was really touched by the talk,
and it was it was good to work it out
with you and to kind of get a sense of
your of your position.
Speaker 5: I I really appreciate what.
Speaker 4: You're doing, and I think a lot of people do
a lot of people really appreciate what you're doing. And
and uh, you know, I need to keep you humble,
but I'll still flatter you anyways because I want. I
think I think it's important that you you understand that
you have an important place in this big discussion that's happening,
and people that you might not know, that you might
not think are paying attention to I think they are,
so so you keep doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1: That's an intimidating thought. Thank you. I'll now go and
do a lot of prostrations to restore my humanity.
Speaker 5: There you go. That's all I wanted.
Speaker 4: I just wanted actually to just I need to do
later to go to confession like I was.
Speaker 2: I'm going to need lost confession in the next week. Pride, Pride.
Speaker 1: Thank you know, it's really good. I really appreciate rotation
as I've always great to talk.
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