Speaker 1: Hello, everyone.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff going on in the world.
Speaker 1: And I realized that I have been making videos since
twenty sixteen, and a lot of things have changed since then.
We are in this moment when all of a sudden,
the churches are exploding. They don't know what to do.
They have to build new churches. It's happening at least,
and I know in the Orthodox Church all over America
there's a transformation and culture that has effectively happened, and
we can see it through all these signs. I saw
it at the New Arc conference, where people were not
afraid at all to speak about their faith, about the
importance of God as being the very root of our
being and as the root of our civilization. The transformation
is crazy. And I was going back into my videos
and I noticed the very first talk that I gave
with Joran Peterson back in twenty sixteen at the University
of Toronto, and it was the Resurrection of Logos. And
in that talk, I intimated the sea that was being planted,
and I kind of could see that all of this
was taking place back at the time and the hardest
moment when it looked like everything was nearing collapse in
terms of culture, where we were being completely overwhelmed by
the monsters of ideology, and so I gave this talk
trying to kind of help people see and you have
to think, I'm going to put this talk up now,
and you have to remember that people had no idea
about all the things that many of us are already
now taking for granted. Trying to help people understand the
transformation and culture that that we're seeing beginning at the time,
and also warning people of the dangers. And now we
can see that both the opportunities and the dangers have grown,
and we are standing in a position right now where
the danger of you could call it too strong an identity,
or the danger of a kind of weaponized Christianity is
really in front of us. But also there are true,
beautiful opportunities that have opened up, and we need to
be able to kind of engage with them in enjoy
and in gratefulness. But I thought it'd be interesting for
you to go back and see this talk, which you
know didn't get many views at the time, but is
in some ways a like a little moment of what
was happening back in the day, and you can look
at it now from in retrospect and see what has
actually happened. The funniest thing about it was I mentioned
how Christian symbolism usually when they they're kind of weird people,
they do Christian symbolism talk about aliens, and I kind
of mock that. And now here we are in this
world where all of a sudden, talking about aliens has
great symbolic import But nonetheless, please enjoy this conversation.
Speaker 2: I know it was a lot of.
Speaker 1: Fun for me to watch it again, so thanks everyone.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pshel. Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 3: Hello friends, this is Richard Roland, and I am inviting
you to join me for my new Symbolic World course,
Tolkien and Universal History. In this course, we're going to
go over the deep mythological and universal history roots of
Tolkien's Legendarium and see how Tolkien sort of shows us
a blueprint for reclaiming a legendary, mythical Christian framework for storytelling,
and in fact, we're going to even do some storytelling
of our own. This is a five week course. It
starts on March the third. We had to postpone it
a week, which means there's a little more time for
you to sign up and I hope to see you there.
Speaker 2: By the Ted. Thanks, I really appreciate I appreciate being here.
I appreciate being in Toronto. It's a great town. Today
I spent the day going to the museum and visiting,
so I really enjoying the city. I'm gonna start with
a story. It's March twenty fifteen, and I'm driving. We're
gonna pick up my children at some friend's house on
a Friday night, and it's about half an hour drive.
So I'm settling in and I'm listening to the CBC
like I usually do, but that particular evening, the content
is not usually what you get on the CBC. So
on the air, this University of Toronto professor, and what
he's saying rings a bit off from what I usually
hear on that show. And at first he's talking about
religion and religious symbolism, and he's doing it in a way,
let's say, he's doing it without the usual smugness that
we tend to hear when people talk about religion, especially
about Christianity, and so here he is talking about Christianity,
but I can tell he's not a he's not a
priest or. He's not a preacher. He's a psychologist. He's
a scientist. And so as a talk unfolds, my let's say,
my attention heightens, and after a few minutes, just a
few minutes, I just I can't believe what I am hearing.
As this prof is going through stories of Adam and
he's kanat able, jumping through Shakespeare and Milton and Gerty
and then too Darwin and Nietzsche and Jung. And immediately
I see what he's doing. He isn't just trying to
communicate information. He's dancing across this wide variety of references
because what he wants to do is he wants to
bring out he wants to trace this underlying pattern, and
by doing so, he's trying to awaken something in his list.
He's not just trying to get them to understand, which
is what we usually hear when we listen to talks. No,
he's trying to provoke, trying to shake people into experiencing
how the world is built with meaning. So he talks
about logos, which is true meaning expressed in word is
search for purpose, and logos transform transforms chaos and potentiality
into being. And in opposition to this lies deceit, resentment
gradually dismantle the world and plunge it into ever growing chaos.
I mean, of course he's taken this from the Bible,
the Book of Genesis, from the Gospel of Saint John,
sprinkled with some phenomenology, but he's very clearly describing this
process at all levels of reality, at the individual, the interpersonal,
the social, political levels, and this interaction between logos and
chaos is the main manner we could say by which
the world is constantly sustained. So by this point, I'm
literally cheering in the car. I'm like, I'm hitting my
steering ear, and all I can think is who is this?
Who is this person talking? And why have I not
heard of him before? Like why is he not famous? Well,
I guess we don't ask that question anymore, right, And
especially I'm like, how does he know this? You see? Like,
so the attempt to help people see experience patterns or
meaning and religious symbolism, how it connects to all levels
of reality. That's what I've been trying to do for years.
That's been my goal in life. I would say in
my carvings and my articles, in my talks, and I
would say there's only a handful of people that I
know that I can relate to at that level. You know,
it's not that people don't talk about religious symbolism. Actually
a lot of people do. But usually when you hear
people talk about religious symbolism, at some point you can
kind of picture them in like a tin foil hat,
and then you know they soon extra terrestrials become part
of the of the discussion. But not this guy. He's
just as clear as can be. So when I get home,
so I reach out to him, and I send him
just a little message, you know, just thanking him and
expressing my surprise and linking into a few few articles
i'd written, a few talks i'd given. You know, that
was it. I didn't expect. I didn't really expect an answer.
But then the next morning I get I get a
message thanking me for my message and pointing me to
a few lectures that he had given more specifically on religion.
I thought, that's pretty cool, Like, that's that's nice, this
random quebecer is sending messages to him. But then about
about an hour and a half later, I get this
call and I can't do that. I can't do the
kriminal voice. So anyways, my memories, my memories of that
moment are kind of vague, but I think I probably
acted like a fourteen year old meeting Kanye West or something.
And now his tone is one of surprise, maybe a
bit of confusion, and his basic question, and he's been
asking me this question ever since, is how do you
know this? Because he'd listen to my talk and he
saw the relationship between what I was saying and what
he was saying and the talk that's exactly I had
been talking about how logos organizes potential into experience being
it's why am I Why am I telling you that?
I mean, first of all, I'm telling this as an
excuse because despite what father Ted said, here's this carver
who's standing amongst theologians and professors. So the reason why
I'm here is because since then, Professor Peterson and I
have developed this relationship. Some of you might have seen
the interviews that we did together, but mostly I'm telling
you this because I know I know that it nears
the story of so many people that are probably here
in this room, and a lot of the people that
might hear this on YouTube or in the podcast. I
know that it mirrors. I know, because dozens of people
have told me of that experience. You know, I have
this image I don't know if people have seen it
of Joe Rogan hearing doctor Peterson talk for the first
time and his jaw dropping, you know, and all of
a sudden he sees religion in a completely different way.
And I've even received dozens of message from I would
call them in process atheists who say, you know, my
questions and my thinking have been tilted slightly in unexpected ways.
And that experience I think has been strongest for Orthodox
Christians like myself. In fact, I stopped counting the number
of messages I received from priests asking me, so says
doctor Pearson orthodox or what, and to which I usually answer, no,
he just likes dosci Sky a lot. And there's even
one clergyman who answered to that said, oh, yeah, he's Orthodox,
he just doesn't know it yet. But this correlation has
been persistent. So what is this connection? What made the
connection between a traditional Christian like myself and doctor Peterson
so obvious, so immediate? And all of this I believes
resolved around the notion of logos. The language of logos
is the underlying language of Christianity. Of course, we know
the first vision of logos in Christianity comes from the
Gospel of Saint John. In the beginning was the logos.
The logos was with God, and the logos was God.
He was in the beginning with God, and through him
all things were made. Without him, nothing was made. That
has been made. In him was life, and that life
was the light of all mankind. That light shines in
the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And
this vision of logos would be continued and developed in
the life of the Church, and especially in the seventh century.
There was a saint. His name is Saint Maximus the Confessor,
and he really brought this image of logos, I would say,
to its most detailed or most elaborate vision. And he
did so by taking the notion of logos that was
in the New Testament, and he brought and united it
with the best of what the Western tradition had already offered.
He was able to prune, let's say, what had come
from philosophy and join it with what the Christian message was,
so that it would attain some clarity and maybe some detail.
And so sam Maximus explains that all things have a logos,
which are which is its reason for existing, its purpose,
and its origin, all at once and even its end.
So it's all those things at once. And on top
of that, each thing has a multitude of logi. That's
a word you never heard before. The logi is the
plural of logos, and so the logi they're like the
different qualities of things. So the blueness of the blue
or the slowness of the slow, and all of these
logis are brought together. They're woven together, we could say,
to sustain the existence of the world. It's really a
map of meaning, to use Georgia's words. Now, these logi,
these essences that say of things, they don't exist independently
in the same way that scientists believe things exist out there. Rather,
they exist as they come together, as they are joined
together in our encounter with the world in a pattern
we could say. So we could say, for example, like
that a sunset has a certain amount of logi, maybe
even indefinite amount of characteristics of a sunset, But as
they come together to be the experience of this sunset,
that's how we experience reality. That's how we become into
contact with reality. So all these qualities that say, light, color, vertical, horizontal,
and the things the sun, the sky, the earth, all
of these things that I could go on, there's an
indefinite amount of them. What's important in making that experience
real is how all those logis are united, so and
in a way they're united within us. And human beings,
for Saint Maximus, are seen as this laboratory where the
whole world finds its cohesion. And he expresses it in
the sense that the human being is a microcosm. You
could say condensation of the cosmos, the place where the
cosmos comes together to make sense. And a good way
to see it is that human beings actually participate being
in the image of God. They participate in creation, and
we see that in the Book of Genesis. The Book
of Genesis, God tells Adam to name the animals and
so by his logos, participating in a limited way, in
the same manner that the divine logos was the source
of everything. And the human participation in this process is
not a relativistic thing. It's not an individual thing. I mean,
though it is flexible, it's nonetheless the most objective of processes.
As Father Ted mentioned and so we need to be
cautious though, because sat Maximus warns us that it's not
just a philosophy, or it's not just a technical description
of the world. This is important because thinking that religious
stories are exactly the same kind of encyclopedic knowledge of
modern science is the wrong way to go with this.
These logos, these truth about things are our categories of
our engagement with the world. So maybe today we might
call them phenomenological categories. And so the discovery of truth
of logos, it's a personal journey. It's simultaneously a refinement
of our understanding of the world, but at the same
time it becomes a refinement of our person. So to
discover the true nature of things is to walk on
a path of truth. So food is a wonderful thing,
and it's useful for life, but gluttony leads to our destruction.
Wealth is useful to accomplish important things, but avarice the soul.
So you see, it's not just a description of the world,
it's a path that we walk as we discover the world.
And so Sin and this vision of the world, that
horrible world, that horrible world that no one wants to hear.
Sin isn't just the breaking of arbitrary rules, but it's
in the misuse of the world, and that misuse of
the world ends up being an untruth, ends up being
a liar, or something that's false, something that separates things
from each other. It's found when things are not aligned
with their purposes. So, for example, a person is not
only a tool for my own gratification. A person is
not just a tool so that I can advance myself
in the world. And if I treat a person exclusively
like that, then I will inevitably sin against that person.
I mean, of course, it doesn't mean that a person
cannot act as a tool for my gratification. If I
go see the baker and I get bread from him,
he's the method by which I get my bread. But
the baker is not just a baker. He is a
full person, just as myself. So when we steal, or
we lie, or we cheat, it's because we're not considering
the the person facing us to be a full blown person,
to be what they are according to their logos, where
we see them only as limited things, only as tools.
So this is true of people, of things, and of actions.
So I was thinking about I was trying to think
about the best example that I could think of to
show this in terms of action, and I thought of
giving the example of sex. So we did the metaphysics
of Pepe. So I think we can get away with
the metaphysics of sex. I hope. But it's a question
that desperately needs to be answered today in our topsy
turvy times. Let's say, so, what is the logos of sexuality? Well,
it has many logi, many purposes. It's for the propagation
of the species. I hope at least a few of
you still think that, despite what many people would want
us to believe, it creates families and communities. It brings
two people together in a type of communion, in an
expression of love, and it brings pleasure. So those will
be would be some of the logi. I'm sure we
could find more. But some those would be some of
the logi that sex exists, and there could be more.
But the idea and the vision of logos is that
all those things need to be brought together in a
pattern of some sort for them to be a path
towards logos. So if we think of the different logi
and we bring them together trying to think of the word.
What is that word? When we all those things are together.
I think we have a word. It's a sacrament of
the Church. I'll lenth you figure it out, which what
it is when all those things come together. And so
each of the separate purposes of sex that I mentioned,
they're not wrong, they're fine, but they become alive when
we bring them together. If we don't, then each separate
purpose appears as a kind of falsehood. It appears as
a kind of lacking. But that's not enough. Let's say,
for a truly traditional or a truly complete vision of sexuality,
it cannot end there. It has to move towards the infinite.
It has to move towards God. And so the ultimate
logos of sexuality is to be an image of the
mystical union with God. I mean, it's to be an
image of our union with that with what is beyond us.
I mean, in that image of the mystical union of
God with the soul of Christ with his Church, the
marriage of heaven and Earth is a completely traditional image
that we find in the Church Fathers, or in our tradition.
And so that that image of the ultimate union, the
highest union with the infinite. Then it comes back down
into the multiple logo, all those other reasons for sexuality
that I mentioned, and it fills them, It makes them
participate in the transcendent purpose and becomes the very relationship
that binds them together. And everything in our lives can
follow that process. Work, food, sleep, beauty. And to engage
the world in that frame is to find light everywhere,
to see life everywhere. The world is no longer made
of the dead, lifeless dirt, the dead, lifeless material that
we use to make things with. And as we become
better as people, more truthful, more grateful, more free, as
we come closer to one another in love, and by
the way, that's what love is. Love is the manner
in which all different things, all different people, all different
intentions can join together and exist in communion and can
become one while at the same time preserving the multiplicity.
And so as we follow this path, the hidden logi
in creation, they shine through the world, and today we
might say that they re enchant the world, and the
world appears bright and full and not the gray and
dead shadows we often live in. So that would be
I hope a summary let's say of that path of logos.
But I haven't really explained what the source of my
excitement was on that Friday night yet, what the source
of the excitement was that has caused all this flurry
of attention to Jordan. And I can tell you I've
been thinking about this now for months now, I mean
some of us, and Jordan has been thinking about this
for months now. And I think by now we can
say that it's really not about gender pronouns. It's not
It's about something that is a lot bigger than that.
And I think I can say confidently by now that
it's about logo. The entire project of postmodernism, the last
thirty forty years of higher culture and higher education, has
been a systematic assault on logos, to decenter logos, to
deconstruct narratives and value hierarchies. So we are left slipping
and sliding without purpose and direction. And now we've reached
the end of what postmodernism has to offer, we can
actually say that you've come to a point where postmodernism
has won basically the cultural debate, and a philosophy which
decries the center and certain certainty has perniciously become the
very center and unquestionable authority it despises. So everything is
upside down, everything is inside out, everything is becoming its opposite,
and all these inversions and chaos are not to be taken. Lately,
it has brought about a sterile age, literally sterile, as
people are not having enough children to fill the society.
I think, I keep thinking that maybe they're missing a
bit of Folow sentence, but it's also sterile, and that
it has brought about this narcissistic and fragmented culture. You see,
they told us that the center cannot hold, and how
things fall apart, and now everybody is decrying the end
of truth all of a sudden, right everybody is saying
that we're entering an age of post truth, fake news.
I mean, my goodness. They even used it as an
argument against doctor Peterson the debate on gender pronouns. I mean,
it's the postmodernist that Harold did the end of truth
forty years ago. And now they're surprised to see the effect.
Speaker 4: It has, how chaos does not discriminate, how it's turning
against them, just as they turned it against their ideological enemies.
Speaker 2: They wanted to change the world to sand. Now they're
surprised to find it slipping between their fingers. What is
most surprising, and what is most shocking to them is
to find that, now having reached the end of their pursuit,
having thought they had won, they see from within the
decomposing residues of Western patriarchy. They see that there is
a seed that's sprouted, that in the darkest place, there's
a flame that is lit. Logos awakens. The darkness has
not overcome it. Saint John promised us that most modern friends,
if you had just paid attention to the stories, if
you had just paid attention to the stories which are
woven in the fabric of our consciousness, these very stories
you try to deconstruct, you would have noticed that don
always comes, that a seed is always planted, their logos
regains the center. Christ rises from the dead. And I
think that's the excitement we're feeling right now, to find
that small spark, that seed of a meaningful pattern surprising
us in a collapsing world. And it's not just a
pattern of meaning, but it's the beginning of a network
of people. I mean, just in the past two years,
there's a whole new, strange group of public figures that's
arising from the margins, people who are at least trying
to figure it out, who are at least trying to
think clearly and work out ideas, and people who are
as different from each other as you can imagine, and
spanning across gender, race, and cultures, even religious and atheists
alight trying to figure it out. And yet the media
and the activists, they scream hysterically bigot races, sexist, nazi,
all the usual litany of attacks, and they're losing their minds.
The sand is slipping out of their hand. And only
two years ago we would have probably collapsed before this attack.
But now we look around and we find that there
is a still silent center in which to in which
to stand, There is an eye in the overwhelming hurricane,
and we can finally say, we will not accept your frame,
We will not accept your definitions. They are weak by
the very process you use to deconstruct them, to deconstruct
the categories, and we will speak for ourselves. What a relief.
But it is a dangerous time. The time of transition,
the time of chaos is a dangerous time. Firstly because
the enemies of logos will ramp up their hysteria and
totalitarian tendencies as logos awakens. But it is also dangerous because,
as Christ himself told us, the terrors grow amongst the week.
The recentering of logos is the reawakening of identities. We
can't avoid that, and that's a frightening thing, because if
identity stops at the relative logi, without aiming, without uniting
itself to the highest of high, it can be murderous.
And it has been increasing the murderous just in the
past century. And it is in fact the very murderous
and genocidal tendency of identity which provoked the postmoderns to
deconstruct identity in the first place. And there's a part
where we can't blame them for them. I mean, in
the shadow of Auschwitz, what else can you do? So
what will strive from this new sprout will depend on us,
will depend on all of us. What will rise from
this chaos we've seen exciting but also frightening. The possibilities
of what that might look like. I mean, will it
be race again, so that we inch towards genocide? Will
only be nationed, so we're tempted to revisit the world wars?
Will it only be gender? Will it only be class
and the scheme drawn out for us by sam Maximus.
The ultimate identity, the place where all meaning finds its resolution,
is the divine logos, the source of everything. That is
our trajectory as we walk the path of Logos, as
we are transformed by truth. The finality is to be
united with God. And I know that for some people
just the word God causes allergic reactions. And I'm sure
people listening to this will be developing hives on their
skin as they hear this. But maybe we can just
think of it this way. For identity to be more
than a weapon, it must reach its highest point in
something that is beyond duality. And so finding seeing our
highest identity in God is finding unity with everything and
the source of everything. And in terms of Christianity in particular,
the identity with Christ is different from other identities because
it's the identity with the cross. Mean, it's to identify
with suffering. I mean, it's not the identity of a
self serving power, but the identity of a self emptying power,
of power bound in love that empties itself out of love.
I mean, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't struggle. It
doesn't mean that we should just lay down and give up,
that we should let our enemies destroy what we value most.
I mean, Christ bought brought a whip into the temple
after all, But what it really entails, what's important about it?
And this is something that is echoed profoundly in what
doctor Peterson has been telling us. That we must first
walk on the path of logos ourselves. We must embrace
our own suffering in that truth, we must take up
our cross. We must do so with the desire to
first get rid of the lies which blind us, to
straighten our own path, and in doing so well, that
is how we will change the world. Since Saraphim Sorrow
is known to have said, save yourself, and thousands around
you will be saved. As we walk on that path,
As we strip away our own excesses rather than rather
than looking at the imbalances of others, as we strip
away our bad habits and our narcissism, rather than acting
like victims, the world will change, and we will start
to see and to experience logos, to fully live within
the patterns of meaning that constitute the world. If you
take that journey, I guarantee that the universal patterns of
meaning will manifest themselves so strongly in your life that
at first you'll use the word synchronicity, but soon you
will have no other word to use. Sides heracle and
the postmodern chaos will vanish as wax melts before the fire.
And logos, the very logos that rises from the grave,
will fill your world and the world with life and life.
Thank you.
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