Speaker 1: So a few weeks ago I was invited to the
Touchdown conference with Rodreer and Paul kings North and also
Deacon Seraphim Roland Richard Roland, who you know from.
Speaker 2: The Universal History podcast.
Speaker 1: As you might know or not know, Deacon Seraphim and
I are working together on the Symbolic World Press. He
is the CEO of our company. Deacon Seraphim is really
not only you could say, helping me create some of
the most beautiful things that we can. He is also
becoming a voice of his own and his insight and
his wisdom.
Speaker 2: Is looked after.
Speaker 1: He has a podcast on ancient faith. He is doing
all kinds of things, and so do not be surprised
if you see videos with him on his own on
my channel, because he has a lot to offer and
a lot of wisdom and symbolic thinking. He also has
a level of detail that I do not have, and
so he's often capable of offering sources that I don't
have access to. So this is the talk that he
gave at Touchstone, a kind of road map as to
how to live a newly enlightened or a you could say,
an enchanted life in the modern world. What are the
small steps you could do with your kids, with your family,
what it is that you need to think of to
remember to participate in, and so please enjoy.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pegel. Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, we are finally announcing our Paradiso class. We
have done two already. We have the Inferno, we have
the Purgatory, and now we are moving to Paradise.
Speaker 2: That is right.
Speaker 3: Dante himself says Inferno that we prefer hell to Paradise,
and similar early most of us prefer to read Inferno,
but when we come to reading Paridiso, we're very confused.
So we're going to be actually taking you through that
poem line by line, like we did with Inferno and Purgatorio,
and actually looking at how Dante very carefully reconciles some
of the contradictory traditions about the heavens in the Christian
apocalyptic tradition and does that through the persons of the saints.
Speaker 1: And so this is truly important for us right now,
with the re enchantment of the world happening, we have
to be able to look at those that that did
it in the most powerful way that we're able to
reconcile the ancient pagan traditions with Christianity, with his modern understanding,
the most modern understanding of the cosmos that he had.
Speaker 2: And so this is the work that we need to do.
So we need to learn from Dante.
Speaker 1: So the course it starts November fifth to December third, right,
is that what I've got five weeks two to five
on Wednesdays.
Speaker 3: So the cost is going to be one hundred ninety
dollars US. But we do have an early bird sale
through the month of October, which bumps it down to
one hundred and sixty one. You can use the code
early Paradiso and that is good through the end of October.
Speaker 1: And the Inferno and the Purgatorial class are also on
sale at the same time, so you have fifty percent
off during the month of October Code Dante fifty. And
you know that means you have no excuse if you
haven't taken the first classes. Now is the chance to
scoop all that up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if you don't want to watch live or
it doesn't work for your schedule, you'll be able to
follow along at your own pace.
Speaker 2: Just like with all of our courses.
Speaker 3: You'll have access to lecture, recording slides, additional readings, and
you can still ask questions and interact with your fellow
classmates in our circle forums.
Speaker 2: And so join us.
Speaker 1: After all of this suffering through Inferno and Purgatorio, the
Symbolic World finally goes to heaven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, join us. I went.
Speaker 4: Actually I first learned about Johnson Pagot and the speaker
you heard, So those are those of you who are
here last year, might remember Vesper Stamper, and I met
her and our next speaker, Richard Roland and Jonathan all
at the World. It's a Symbolic World summit that was
held a year before last down in Florida, And I
knew nothing about this group, so probably been hearing a
lot about it, and I was just blown away. And
you got an idea of why I was so blown
away when I was down there. I attended this conference,
but I kind of did, and I didn't attend it.
When I go to a conference, I'm just kind of
auditioning speakers. And they had two different rooms and there'd
be two speakers speaking at the same time, and I'd
listened to somebody speak and they'd speak for five minutes,
and if they didn't grab me. I'd run to the
other room and I'd listen to that guy for five minutes,
and I'd run back the other room. And so I
walked on this guy who I'd never heard of, Richard Roland,
and it was about halfway through the conference, and I thought,
oh my goodness, I got to get him a touchdoone
because I was really quite blown away by what he
had to say. Well, I ain't caught about half your talk,
and that was still enough to put the hook in me. Well,
let me tell you. Richard Rowland is a software developer,
a German philologist, and an Orthodox Christian, living in Texas
with his wife and children. He speaks and publishes on
Germanic poetry, the Inklings, and the Sacramental imagination. He regularly
contributes to Jonathan Pagot's The Symbolic World YouTube channel, and
I've signed up for a number of their series and
I recommend you do the same. It's called the Universal
History Series, which has recently launched a six week course
studying the epic poem Beowolf.
Speaker 2: Richard co hosts the.
Speaker 4: Monsault Paul podcast and has published several works of fiction
and nonfiction. So please join me in welcoming Richard Rolan.
Speaker 3: It's a little surreal being here, actually, because I've heard
many things about Touchstone over the years, mostly through my
good friend doctor Gary Jenkins, who's back in the back
and is one of your new editors. But it's just
really wonderful to be here.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: What you didn't say is what you told me when
you first invited me to come speak here, which is
you said you'd have to be like, you'd have to
be like a little more strict about your time, because
I went like thirty minutes over in Florida. So I'm
going to try to be strict about my time today.
Why is any day better than another when all the
daylight in the year is from the sun. By the
Lord's decision, they were distinguished, and he appointed the different
seasons and feasts. Some of them he exalted and hallowed,
and some of them he made ordinary days. This is
from Ecclesiasticus, Chapter thirty three, verses seven to nine. In
August of twenty nineteen, just a few months before the
COVID lockdowns the George Floyd Riots, there was a series
of essays published in a special issue of The New
York Times called The sixteen nineteen projects.
Speaker 2: Some of you maybe are familiar with this.
Speaker 3: The following year, right in the middle of everything, in
the middle of our civilization's most chaotic moment since nine
to eleven, the collection was expanded into a book length
publication called The sixteen nineteen Project. A New Origin Story Now,
as the book's subtitle indicates, it promised a new origin
story for American culture and society, a new answer to
the question who are we, where did we come from?
And the answer, in short, was the African slave trade.
Sixteen nineteen being the year that African slaves first arrived
in North America as opposed to like seventeen seventy six,
was just when the American colonies declared their independence from
Great Britain. Now, as the sixteen nineteen Project argues, and
this is a direct quote, slavery is the foundation on
which this country is built, and the essential dichotomy between
oppressor and oppressed, between slave owners and slaves is the
truest and most important story about what America is and
who the people are that live there.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Whatever you think about what was happening from twenty nineteen
to twenty twenty one, it was clearly an inflection point,
a moment of crisis. Were the stories that held us
together as Americans. Were the stories that held us together
as Western people had begun to crumble, had begun to unravel.
And you could kind of argue, of course, and you've
heard lots of persuasive arguments already this weekend that that
unraveling had already been going on for a long time.
But there was definitely thing that was happening there, especially
for the young people. I mean, they're going to be studies, papers, dissertations,
conferences done on just what that two year period, the
effect that it had on our young people in like
fifty or sixty years, when it's too late to do
anything about it. The unique pressures of those years made
it very clear that a new story was needed. And
one of the stories that was proposed was to take
the shame, to take the guilt of one our of
our three greatest civilizational sins. I will not tell you
what the other two are. You can ask me later,
and make it the most essential thing about ourselves. It
was to say that the truest thing about ourselves is
actually our division and are inequality. Now, before I go
much further, I want to give you another example of
historical myth making, which is actually pretty similar. It won't
seem similar at first, but hang in there with me.
So in one hundred and fifty years following the Norman invasion,
this is ten sixty six.
Speaker 2: And all that. Some thank you, some of.
Speaker 3: You well read people of people of culture, good, good, good.
The place known as England did not actually exist, not
as we know it today. There were really two societies.
There were two languages, two cultures. There was a Norman
French speaking aristocracy who thought of themselves not really actually
as English lords and nobles, but as kings and dukes
of France, who also happened to control this small but
very wealthy in terms of natural resources island nation on
the edge of Europe. And then an Anglo Saxon or
for my Oxfordians, an Old English speaking peasant class who
themselves had also had then driven out the Romano Celtic
tribes some six seven hundred years before, naming them, by
the way, Welsh Welsh, which is an Old English word
which means foreigner. Now, this is one of history's great jokes,
is that only the English can make you feel like
a foreigner in your own country. Sorry, Paul, I don't
know if Kingsworth's in here or not, but all right,
that's just that's my I'm an Anglo Saxonist. These are
my people. That's just that's my joke, so I have
to tell it. So the island of Britain was a
hodgepodge of identities, rights, languages, histories, and about a generation
after the Norman conquest on the Welsh borderlands, there was
born a man who became a priest, but he's not
remembered for any of that. There was born a man
named Jeffrey of Monmouth. Now Jeffrey was himself a man
of his time. He's a hodgepodg so much so that
nobody actually seems to have agreed about exactly who his
parents were, exactly what his nationality was.
Speaker 2: Was he Welsh? Was he Norman?
Speaker 3: Was he the son of a Breton, that is, as
in from Brittany, from the Celtic coast of France. Was
he the son of Bretton nobles who had come over
with the conqueror, who'd settled down in the Celtic borderland of.
Speaker 2: England, Whatever and whoever he was, Jeffrey.
Speaker 3: Was a priest, and he was a historian, and the
history that I wrote, which you can get a copy
of from our good friends at eight Day back in
the back.
Speaker 2: The history that he wrote.
Speaker 3: Brought together all the disparate threads of what it meant
to be British. And later on future historians would argue
about Jeffrey's works. They would say it's some kind of pseudohistory.
Later still they would say that maybe actually he did
indeed carefully weave in the oral history of the Welsh
and Britain tribes together with the ancient king list of
the Romana British dynasties who ruled over the many little
kingdoms of the Isle of Albion in the long years
between Constantine and Oswald. People argue about these things. Dissertations
have to be written. Don't invite these people to your parties.
Now truth be told. It just doesn't matter whether you
think that the history of kings of Britain is history
or pseudohistory, or some blend of the two. It just
doesn't matter, because the story that Jeffrey told held Britain together,
It created it, It invented it. In fact, as he's
writing it right around the time of Henry the Third,
who is the first king who really styles himself as the.
Speaker 2: King of the English.
Speaker 3: Now it holds Brittin together for a thousand years. And
I'm not saying it was a nice thousand years. You know, obviously,
lot of civil wars and so on, dynastic struggles, civil wars,
religious reforms, more civil wars, the rise and fall of
an empire, two World wars, and yet that entire time
you could point at a thing and say that's Britain.
Speaker 2: His story would be told.
Speaker 3: And retold again on both sides of the English Channel
for the next several centuries. But in all cases it
begins in the most surprising place imaginable. And here I'm
going to read some poetry. It's just the warning. When
the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, and
the fortress fell in flame, to fire, brands and ashes,
the trader, who was the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery.
Speaker 2: The most true upon earth.
Speaker 3: It was Eneus the noble and his renowned kindred, who
then laid under them lands and lords, became of well
nigh all the wealth in the Western Ailes. When Royal
Romulus to Rome, his road had taken in great pomp
and pride. He peopled at first and named it with
his own name, that yet it now bears. Tyrius went
to Tuscany, and towns founded Langebert in Lombardy uplifted holes,
and far over the French flood. It was still called
the French Flood, not the English Channel.
Speaker 2: Back then.
Speaker 3: Felix Brutus on many a broad bank and bray Britain
established full Fair, where strange things, strife and sadness at
wiles in the land did fare and each other. Grief
and gladness off fast have followed there. And when Fair
Britain was founded by this famous lord, bold men were
bred there, who in battle rejoiced, And many a time
that betide they troubles aroused.
Speaker 2: In this domain.
Speaker 3: More marbles have been by men seen than in any
other that I know of since that olden time. But
of all that here abode in Britan, as kings ever,
was Arthur most honored, as I have.
Speaker 2: Heard men tell.
Speaker 3: Wherefore a marvel among men I mean to recall, a
sight strange to see.
Speaker 2: Some men have held it one of.
Speaker 3: The wildest adventures of the wonders of Arthur. If you
will listen to this lave but a little while, now,
I will tell you at once, as in town I
have heard it told, as it is fixed and fettered
in story, brave and bold, that's linked and truly lettered,
as was loved in this land of old. Now, if
you want to know the rest of that story, you
have to read Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. This
is Tolkien's translation, by the way, of this fourteenth century
Middle English poem about Sir Gawayne. You have a story
about King Arthur. You have a story about Sir Gawaine.
But where does it begin. It begins at the sack
and the ruin and the destruction of Troy. And if
you can understand why they thought that was important, because
when the Gawayne author, I just sort of picked him
because it's cool, but also because he's kind of he's
like several hundreds of years after Jeffrey. If you can
understand why they thought it was important to trace their
line back to Troy, then you can actually begin to
recover your heritage as Western people. So I'm not here
today to poke holes in the sixteen nineteen project. I'm
not here to complain about the way that the world is.
I'm not here to talk about how bad things are.
Speaker 2: Truth be told.
Speaker 3: I am, as I was telling somebody this morning, it's
kind of a child soldier of the culture Wars, and.
Speaker 2: I still have a lot of PTSD over that.
Speaker 3: I'm not looking to revisit those particular battlefields, but what
I am as a father of six children, and like
Aeneas after the ruin of Troy, I've been trying to
carry my father and my household gods to a new
hearth and to a new homeland where we can all
be whole. That hearth is where I'm focused, and it's
to your hearth and to your dining room table that
I want to return at the end of this talk.
To get there, though, we'll need to explain the difference
between these two attempts and mythology. One of them has
already fizzled out. Nobody's talking about the sixteen nineteen project anymore.
The other continues to be the driving force behind all
of our genre storytelling, most of our cultural myths. And
to understand all of this, we will have to understand
the differences and the surprising similarities between the ways that
the authors of the sixteen nineteen project see History and
the Way that Jeffrey of Monmouth saw it.
Speaker 2: So what is history?
Speaker 3: Jeffrey's work, The History of the Kings of Britain is
of a particular and peculiar ancient medieval genre, sometimes referred
to as universal history.
Speaker 2: So my friend Jonathan Pagoe and I for.
Speaker 3: About four years now have been making videos and podcasts
together about this subject. And one of the most common
questions I get is what do you mean by universal history?
Where the emphasis is on the second word, and so
here a little etymology will help us out. As Doug mentioned,
I'm a philologist, so I'll try to keep this tight
and brief, but I just want you to know, like
we could just spend the rest of the day talking
about the word history. So, in its earliest sense, from
the Greek history history, historia simply means inquiry. It means
knowledge gain from inquiry. And we still preserve this sense
in kind of archaic names, for like the Natural history Museum,
that's not the history of nature, it's here's the museum
of the things that we have learned learned from an
inquiry into nature. Aristotle's The History of the Animals is
what we would today consider to be like a biology
or maybe like a zoology text, whether that's a fair categorganization.
That's a different kind of a conference, I think. But
the word then makes its way into Old English via Latin,
and by this time it has picked up the senses
of account description, written account of past events, recorded knowledge
of past events, story or narrative, and finally, by the
twelfth century it has come to mean the story or
account of a person's life, a chronicle, an account of
events as relevant to a group of people or people
in general. So the story of your people mattered because
it was your story, and therefore participation in that story
makes you a part of your people, which means that
if you forget your story, you actually forget yourself, You
forget who you are. To forget it is to forget yourself.
It's to cut yourself off from reality. It is to
be dissipated and scattered, like the nations on the plane
of Shinar. So, taken in this sense, a universal history
is a history of everything and everyone. Who we are,
how we got to be where we are, how the laws, customs, rituals,
traditions of our people give us meaning and allow us
to continue to go here, so that we can be.
Speaker 2: Long in the land.
Speaker 3: Herodotus, who is very often considered the father of history,
writes his histories as a way of telling the story
of the Hellenes and as a way of telling the
story of the Hellenes and the Persians. But he took
it as a given that in order to do this
he would have to go back to the story of
the abduction of Helen and the beginning of the Trojan War. This,
after all, is the first great war between the East
in the West. This is how the identity of the
Greeks was formed in opposition to the Barbarians, which to
the Greeks meant simply people who do not speak Greek. Similarly,
almost every work of Jewish and Christian history from the
Torah until modern times has seen it necessary to begin
at Genesis, because the first eleven chapters of Genesis have
the answers to these questions who are we, where do
we come from?
Speaker 2: What does it mean to be us?
Speaker 3: But they have the answer to those questions for everyone,
for the whole race of Adam. So, for instance, the
Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which is a work which is mostly
concerned with events in the eighth and the ninth centuries.
Begins at the incarnation, but then takes pains to trace
the lineage Alfred back to Noah. But beginning in the
nineteenth century, there was a concerted effort to kind of
move history.
Speaker 2: Closer to the sciences.
Speaker 3: So there's a guy named Leopold von Rnk, very often
considered to be the father of modern source based historiography.
And what he said is history should be concerned with
his quoting him here, what really happened knowable only by
genuine and original documents. And this attitude towards history is
not unlike the obsession that you'll get with the original
articles in biblical textual criticism. Those things are related that
came out of the same movement, And this is an
obsession which, as you will probably know, has driven a
lot of people to despair, since, of course we do
not have these original articles. Are these original articles in
the room with you right now? You know what we
have is actually a received tradition. There's like one millennial
in the audience who laughed at the meme reference I
just made. What we have is the tradition actually as
it was passed down to us.
Speaker 2: So in our own age.
Speaker 3: An over abundance of sources and changing attitudes towards time
and meaning actually taken away the certainty that this modernist
approach to history promised. So it is now possible to
find expert historians cherrypicked quotes academia dot edu articles. I
had a wonderful Oxford professor who always pronounced dot adieu
like academia dot adieu. Anyway, I love him so much.
You can find these articles to support virtually any position
that you might want to take on any given historical events. So,
for instance, going back to the founding of this country,
if you want to find evidence that the people who
founded this country held a variety of views and positions
that we would now consider to be morally reprehensible.
Speaker 2: You can totally find that evidence.
Speaker 3: If you want to find evidence that they were racists,
that they were slave owners, that they were freemasons, that
they were unitarians, that they were extremely dedicated Christians with
a strong theocratic vision for America as a city set
on a hill, you can go find an expert who
will tell you every single one of those stories just
dependagon which funding fathers you want to focus on, how
essential you want to claim this particular person, date, quote, book, article, declaration,
et cetera. How important all of those things are. So
it's actually worse than this, though, because thanks to modern technology,
in particular the camera, phone and mass media, it is
actually now possible for us to watch some real time
event playing out, and for one half of the country
they see one event, and the other half of the
country sees the other event, a completely different thing, with
a completely different meaning and a completely different outcome, and
we're looking at the same.
Speaker 2: Piece of data.
Speaker 3: You think of lots of examples of this in recent
American history. This is amazing to think about, given the
fact that very typically that the typical modern response to
any miraculous event, like when we say this miracle happened,
the resurrection happen, you know, just pick a miracle. The
thing that people always ask me, especially especially younger people,
the thing that they always ask is, well, okay, but
if you'd been there with a camera.
Speaker 2: Like would it you know, like, what would it have
looked like?
Speaker 3: And so for instance, Saint Constantine's vision of the Holy Cross,
the instructions to buy this sign conquer, Okay, but if
you'd been there with a video camera, what would the
video camera have seen as though the video camera is
actually the perceptive agent. So this shift in the way
that we viewed time and history are really actually part
of shifting paradigms through which we have been experiencing time
as we moved into the modern world. So time and history,
by the way, not the same thing strictly speaking, but
they are closely related to each other. So there's a
great French philosopher, anthropologist, Olivia Clement, who I really like.
He has a wonderful book, Transfiguring Time. I don't know
if eight Day has that or not. Always try to
tell eight Day, get this book and sell it, because
I'm going to talk about it.
Speaker 2: And I don't get any money for that.
Speaker 3: By the way, I just really like them. But I
forgot to mention this one anyway. It's a great book,
Transfiguring Time, and he talks about how the ancient Pagans
experienced time as this great cycle, a succession of generations
or ages.
Speaker 2: So there are idyllic ages of.
Speaker 3: Gold and silver and bronze in which men live the
life of the gods. And although each one of these
generations perishes more often through their own folly, which echoes
some kind of an adenic fall story. Their lives are longer, better,
more peaceful than our own. Mediating between these ancient ages
and our own Age of Iron is the fourth age,
the Age of Heroes, and these heroes establish the world
which we now inhabit. They killed monsters, they found cities,
They do mighty deeds, and because of their mighty deeds,
we're told this is a hesiod. They are given the
rest and repose of the men of the Age of Gold.
But as for us, we men of the Age of Iron,
we are locked in the endless cycle of the year,
and in the greater thousands of years, cycles of the stars,
repeating each sunrise, each summer, each winter, each equinox, each solstice,
and the Golden Age is inaccessible to us, or almost inaccessible,
because ancient man had one powerful recourse.
Speaker 2: They had one.
Speaker 3: Powerful tool as old as time itself, and that is
the festival. Through the act of celebration, of feasting and
retelling the ancient stories of your heroes, your city, your people,
you could for a day, for a moment, access the
Golden Age again.
Speaker 2: You could access that higher time.
Speaker 3: There's the Greek word for this, cairos, which originally just
meant the proper or fitting time for something to happen.
Speaker 2: It still has that connotation, but words changed. They pick
up meaning over history.
Speaker 3: And so the originally means the proper fitting time for
which for a ritual to be carried out, or like
the proper time to go to war, the proper time
to do something.
Speaker 2: If you just read the iliit in.
Speaker 3: The Odyssey, they're always like before they do something, is like,
is this a good day to attack the walls of Troy?
Speaker 2: Let me go?
Speaker 3: And you know, consult the oracles, ask the gods kill
a lamb, how many loaves does the liver have? Et cetera. Right,
all that stuff. That's what divination is for, is to
figure out what is the proper and fitting time to act. Now,
by extension, it comes to mean the time to which
that ritual gives you access, an undying time that fills
the chronos of the endless days and years with meaning.
And this is the basis of the ancient agricultural cycle
of feasts, which is universal to all cultures, especially those
which developed in a temperate climate, where season and solstice,
springtime and harvest all have meaning. Now, inattentive years of
the old testament have opined that the Law of Moses
replaced the old pagan cyclic view of time with one
that was strictly linear, but this is simply not correct.
Speaker 2: The feast of the Mosaic Law.
Speaker 3: I think of, Passover, Pentecost, and so on have their
obvious and universal correspondence in the agricultural cycles of the
ancient Eeriest. But in the Torah these feasts become tied
to definitive moments in history, in the story of God's
redemptive work on behalf of his people.
Speaker 2: So the feast brings time and history together.
Speaker 3: So the late spring or early summer feast of the
First Ruts becomes the feast of Pentecost, which is the
day on which the Most High God gives his law
to his people, which is the means by which they
can enter into a knowledge of Him. So, according to
an ancient belief of the Hebrew peoples, which is for instance,
expressing the apocryphal Book of Jubileese, it was on the
day of Pentecost that Noah made his with the God
of Israel. It's on the day of Pentecost that the
Tower of Babbel falls. It's on the day of Pentecost,
that Abraham makes his own covenant with God. And it's
on the day of Pentecost that the law is given
to Moses. So you could go so far as to say, actually,
from a heavenly perspective, that each one of these moments
is just Pentecost. It's the single day of Pentecost, which
is always the day on which God renews his covenant
and gives us.
Speaker 2: The law by which He should be known.
Speaker 3: Now, in the center of the yearly cycle, the axis
on which the whole thing turns, you have the feast
of Passover. My tradition, we call it Pasca, which means passover.
Speaker 2: That's all that is. That's what it is. It's passover.
Speaker 3: Like you could just take all of the Orthodox liturgical
texts and you know for pasca and we sing, you know,
a great and holy Pasca. But you could sing passover.
It would be correct. That's what the word means in
Greek anyway. Okay, So, but at the center of the
yearly cycle, the axis on which it all turns is pasca, passover,
in which God makes a distinction between you and the Egyptians.
That is, he is calling his people out of the
nations of the world, and now setting the part constituting
them as a people set apart unto himself. It should
thus be no surprise that Christ, our light in our life,
was himself sacrificed at passover, becoming the sacrificial lamb, leading
us out of bondage to what ancient Christian hymns referred
to as the spiritual pharaoh, the serpent, the devil. And
so Saint Paul can say, Christ, our pasca, our passover
has been sacrificed for us.
Speaker 2: Therefore let us keep the feast now.
Speaker 3: Already, in the first few centuries of the Christian faith,
a very clear understanding had developed, and this is evident
in the ancient poscle hymns and sermons from this early
period that the historical events of the Old ten Estiment
prefigured the fullness that the feasts which commemorated them found
in Jesus Christ. So from this perspective, the passion, death,
resurrection of Christ is actually the original passover. You get that, so,
like think of a line of history cross in the middle,
that's actually the origin point. When Christ is crucified, Saint
Maximus the Confessor says, he finished his creating the world.
He's really actually talking about finishing the creation of man,
but in any case, different talk.
Speaker 2: So that's the first passover.
Speaker 3: When he defeats the enemy of death, when he calls
us out of the Egypt of this.
Speaker 2: World and into the Promised Land, and.
Speaker 3: That has ripple effects back to the Exodus, but also
forward to us. Because Christ is new atom, he makes
common cause with the entire human race. And therefore this
is not a Jewish story. It is a human story.
The Gospel is good news for everyone. Everyone is invited
to celebrate. So if you were to represent this on
a diagram, sometimes when I talk about this, I have
a little whiteboard that would obviously not work in here.
I did sort of think maybe I could like whip
something up in MS paint this morning. Did not work out,
So you're just gonna have to imagine. But I just
imagine Crucifix in the center, which the church fathers say,
you know, was both in a mystery the creation of
the world, and also the fullness of time. All of
time begins at Pasca, flows from it, gather and is
gathered up into it in the Escaton. Thus the events
of Holy Friday, Holy Saturday of Great and Holy Pasca
can be through the chairotic time of the liturgy, closer
to us than the events the Vietnam War or whatever
you were doing last Tuesday. Now, there's a lot of
ways to describe modernity. I actually I'm a really big
fan of Ziemint Bauman's Liquid Modernities, and so I was
I really pleased to hear it brought up last night.
There's a lot of ways to describe modernity, but one
of the easiest ways to explain it is that it
is a movement opposed to Cairos. So modernity is profoundly
concerned with progress, with getting somewhere. We don't really know where,
but we're going to get there. So the modern project
has found it necessary to break down all of the
old limits around time and around space. On a practical level,
most of us are not actually worried about predicting the
vernal equinox. In fact, there's a lot of smart people
in this room, but I would venture to say most
of you couldn't do it from scratch. Probably not by
the way people ask me sometimes like how like in
a classical ad setting, how are we supposed to like
teach astronomy, how do we teach the stars? That's how
you start like you're not a classically educated person if
you cannot like figure out when spring starts by observing
the stars and planets anyway, different rant, I'm sorry, they're
all bleeding in now.
Speaker 2: Okay. So maybe you have a home garden. When do you.
Speaker 3: Decide to plant, Well, whenever the little demon in your
pocket tells you to, can you just pull it out?
Speaker 2: Look it up?
Speaker 3: Oh, this is a good planting time. I used to
have to like get this stuff from your grandpa. You know,
there were several attempts in the early modern period to
get rid of Kiro's entirely. There was a failed attempt
at metric time, for which we can blame the French,
and he knows, he knows. There was a failed attempt
at metric time. There was an attempt to enforce, for instance,
a ten day work week, which to just not go
well with anybody. There was the removal of Christian holidays,
some fifty or so holidays being removed from the calendar
of Western civilization during the early modern period, and then
to replace them with some civil holidays or some other
things that we'll get to in a moment. And I'm
sorry to say that Christians had a part in this
as well. There is, of course, the very well known
Puritan War on Christmas being a good example. So if
every day is neither more nor.
Speaker 2: Less holy than the last.
Speaker 3: Then keeping a celebration like Christmas or Easter is nothing
more than superstition. If we were to diagram this modern
view of time, it would just be a long line
with points, and each point would be at a regular,
perfectly regular interval, because each day is like the last. Now,
at some point in the last one hundred and twenty years,
the modern project started to fall apart. Measuring the whole world,
collecting all the data, explaining all of the miracles did
not actually have the intended effect. It did not remove
ambiguity and mystery from the world. Instead, the sheer number
of seemingly contradictory facts threatened to drown us because we
couldn't agree on a vision of progress. What are we
working towards? Is it a capitalist utopia? Is it a
worker's paradise? There was no greater pattern by which the
story of history could be organized, so various governments tried
to control this, and one of the ways they tried
to control this is with propaganda. So in modernity, you
can only celebrate things inasmuch as they feed into the
identity of the nation state. So there's this replacement of
religious holy days with patriotic holidays.
Speaker 2: It's part of that shift.
Speaker 3: And then postmodernity brought all of that crashing down. And
what's interesting about postmodernity is that it actually brought back
in this old language, old.
Speaker 2: Way of thinking.
Speaker 3: I think Jonathan's still in the room, but this is
one of the most important things that I think he's
helped us understand, is that postmodernity actually brought back the
old language of center and margin, the old language of hierarchies.
And in that sense, it's actually, in certain ways closer
to the ancient way of seeing history than modernity was.
But postmodernity is only ever capable of seeing history in
a series of struggles center versus margin, privilege versus oppressed
bourgeoisie versus the proletariat. And the problem with seeing the
world in this way is that there can never be
a common celebration. There can never be a single moment
that all peoples and all times look towards, celebrate and
find themselves parts of a larger story. And if we
wanted to diagram. This post modern experience of time. It's
just a line.
Speaker 2: There's no points, there's no magnificance. It is whatever you
want it to be.
Speaker 3: It's a flat, undi undifferentiated experience of time in which
our lives are now so totally insulated thanks to modern technology,
so totally insulated from the cycle of the seasons, from
the rising and setting of the sun, that we don't
need to know the cairos to do something. Because it's
always a good time to buy blackberries. You can buy
blackberries any time of the year.
Speaker 2: Did you know this?
Speaker 3: You just walk into I'm serious, this is a problem now,
I'm really serious. Like if I wanted to like sum
up everything that's wrong right now, like you know my
gripe with a machine, if you want to put in
that way, it's the fact that I can buy by
blackberries in the middle of winter. Everybody knows blackberries are
harvest one time a year, and you can only store
them for a certain amount of time, and if you
do not eat them all before Michaelmas, the devil will
steal them. This something was well known and understood by
our ancestors. But now you have a refrigerator, you can
buy a BlackBerry anytime you want. So you guys are
still laughing about that, but I'm really mad about the
BlackBerry thing. So if modernity removes cairos so that the
only thing which can be celebrated is the nation state,
postmodernity just removes that celebration altogether. So something like a
Pride parade, for instance, it's not a celebration.
Speaker 2: It's an act of war.
Speaker 3: Since there are no longer common points of reference, since
identity is constructed, since our stories are understood primarily in
these power differentials, inequalities, any celebrations are now punitive.
Speaker 2: Whenever you're celebrating.
Speaker 3: One thing, you're punishing something else, which is why they
don't want us to celebrate, because they'll interpret Christian celebration
and I don't have a they in particular mind, just
the world. Okay, they interpret Christian celebration was done in
a public way as this is an assault, right, This
idea of speech.
Speaker 2: Is violence, for instance.
Speaker 3: So despite being a culture which prides itself on inclusivity,
we are actually the most divided that we've ever been,
not just from each other, but also from our ancestors. Now, ironically,
the Middle Ages, which is not generally considered to be
the most inclusive period in human history, is actually has
a vision of storytelling which was capable of bringing together
all these disparate elements in your story and in your
society and your history, and bring them together.
Speaker 2: At the foot of the cross.
Speaker 3: So one of the curious aspects I want to go
back to, Jeffrey. Now, one of the curious aspects of
medieval universal histories.
Speaker 2: How are we doing? Ooh boy, Okay, I'm not gonna
make it man, all right.
Speaker 3: So one of the curious aspects of medieval universal histories
is the way that the cross becomes the central point
around which conflicting origins can be arranged. So early on,
Christian universal histories take the events of the Trophrojan War
the end of the Hellenic Age of Heroes as a
matter of fact, while Pagans, when they convert, take careful
pains to tie their own culture back to the events
of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, and in particular
the famous Table of Nations in Genesis eleven. Cultures who
convert very late at a time when converting to Christianity
also meant being grafted on to the Greco Roman inheritance
of antiquity, they worked very hard to trace themselves back
both to Genesis but then also to Troy, so that
Pagan Norse, when they finally convert, they you hemerize their gods,
their old gods as Trojan survivors, and then also trace
their people back to a legendary fourth son of Noah
about whom there are many.
Speaker 2: Traditions even in ancient Judaism.
Speaker 3: Now with this in mind, we're now prepared to understand
why the story which Jeffrey of Monmouth tells begins at Troy.
As he tells it, those days when David reigned in
judea brute, that is, Brutus Felix Brutus, great grandson of Venias,
arrived in the island of Albion and exile after a
long and violent search for a homeland, and there they
found the island desolate, ruled over by a race of giants,
which Brute and his Trojan kinsmen killed or drove out,
establishing a kingdom which then runs parallel to the Davidic dynasty,
but also to this burgeoning little city state on the Tiber,
which will eventually become kind.
Speaker 2: Of a big deal.
Speaker 3: Brutus is succeeded by his son Leo. About the same
time that David is succeeded by Solomon and Silvius. Ipputus
becomes king of the Latin succeeding his father. But Brutus's
dynasty continues with a mix of good and bad kings,
including of course King Lear of leader Fame, until some
four books in Jesus Christ is Born, I quote by
whose precious blood was mankind redeemed that aforetime had been
bound in the chains of the devil. Now Monmouth's history
thus triangulates these three locations Jerusalem, Rome, Britain, and their
stories are told in parallel until the time of Pope Eleutherius.
The now Roman faith of Christianity is brought to Britain
at the behest of the King of the Britons, and
by making this connection, the stage is now set in
a few generations for.
Speaker 2: The coming of the person of Arthur. And in the
person of Arthur, all.
Speaker 3: The things that it means to be British, not merely
Anglo Saxon or Norman or Welsh, are united. The descendants
of the invaders from a foreign land, connected to the
oldest story in Europe, now very importantly a Christian monarch,
a lord of a kingdom with as much claim to
antiquity and Christianity as.
Speaker 2: Anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 3: And now to make up for the fact I'm going
to make you slightly late for lunch, I'm almost done,
but I'll give you something which I wasn't going to
give you. So this is like to buy a little
bit of your time. And that is the name of
King Arthur's Lance. Does anybody know this? By the way,
does anybody know the name of King Arthur's lands without
looking it up on your pocket demon?
Speaker 2: Was that?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: That's his sword? Was that? No? That's not it? No?
Wait say it again? No, no, no, okay, all right, Ron?
Who is that? Yeah?
Speaker 3: It's really fun when you're reading along and Jeffrey, it's
like and then you know, here's here's Arthur and his
sword caliburn, and his and his shield pre you when
and his lance?
Speaker 2: Ron it's actually it's actually short for a Welsh word.
Speaker 3: But anyway, Yeah, that's that's the name of That's actually
why I read all this stuff. I just want the
cool names of weapons. So much later in the medieval period,
this latter angle, this idea of Christianity coming to the
island of Britain is further developed with legends about Joseph
of Vermathea, the infant Christ and did these feet, et cetera,
et cetera. But Jeffrey's version of Arthur is very early,
and that is, of course because he didn't invent the character.
Arthur's a person to him, a historical person to him.
He knows stories about Arthur, and so there's very few
of the characters in Jeffrey that you would expect to
meet in later Arthury and romances.
Speaker 2: There's no Lancelot yet, for instance.
Speaker 3: But his most important deeds in the history of the
Kings of Britain are generally as a general, as a
war leader, and as a Christian king who opposes the
invading Anglo Saxons, who are Pagans, the ancestors of much
of Jeffrey's audience.
Speaker 2: Is the point I'm trying to make there, as well
as actually the Roman.
Speaker 3: Emperor, and so thus Britain is part of a larger story,
but it's also Britain. It has a unique identity that's
nested within this higher order, but it is distinct to
being Britain. It's independent, it's not a vassal state. It's
a kingdom with ancient claims to sovereignty and independence and
so on. Because the mythological roots, of course of Britain
go just back as far as the mythological roots of Rome,
they go back to Troy. So this myth, which continues
to be developed in its most refined form, for instance,
Layman's Brute, it's referenced in that prologue to Sir Gawaine
in The Green Knight that I read to you, proved
to be potent enough to craft a British identity. And
so in twelve sixteen, as The Brute was being written,
King Henry the Third was crowned King of England. And
he's the first monarch since ten sixty six to consider
himself a.
Speaker 2: King of England, not a Norman, not an Anjovin king,
but English.
Speaker 3: The story of Britain, which folded Britain into the larger
Christian story, proved potent enough to contain a distinct British
idea identity actually well after the Reformation. And I'm not
saying that identity was wholly without problems, obviously, but it.
Speaker 2: Was cohesive, it was durable.
Speaker 3: It gave the people of the island of Britain a
mythology in which to situate themselves long after they had
ceased to believe in it as primary history, and would
just be really clear before I wrap up, I'm not
saying Jeffrey invented the story. He's collecting, he's retelling, There's
no doubt about it. But the story is retelling is
one that is very old and has the weight of
antiquity and anonymity behind it.
Speaker 2: It's very important for a founding myth.
Speaker 3: If you can point to the guy in the room
who wrote the founding myth, it's not a founding myth.
So for a story like this to work, it's got
to have that weight behind it. And it's very important
that we understand this when we try to situate ourselves
within the Christian tradition. We can't manufacture this. So how
do we take this home? Which is supposed to have
been the last fifteen minutes of my talk, I'm going
to make it the last two minutes.
Speaker 2: Here we go hold on.
Speaker 3: I use the story of Brutus and Arthur and Troy
and Britain as an example of the way that medieval
cultures situated themselves in the larger Christian and Greco Roman
story because it's more or less familiar to us in
the anglosphere, but also distant enough from us, or at
least from some of us. Obviously, we've got some people
from the UK here that we can use it as
an example of a useful example of how this sort.
Speaker 2: Of thing works.
Speaker 3: So when we talk in terms of stories and storytelling,
most of you will hear what I am saying in
terms of books and cinema, maybe music, things that we've
been conditioned to think of a storytelling within our own society.
You might also be thinking that we need a textbook,
we need curricula to educate our children in this way,
and maybe you're right. But when it comes to the
question of how do I take this home, how do
I transmit this to my children? I like to start
with food. Now, there are various reasons for this. Is
that I am a hobbit in my heart, and I think, actually,
in serious all seriousness, a lot of the charm and
desirability of reading The Lord of the Rings comes from
the fact that there's the sense of this connection of
food to place and to time into an identity. And
after all, aren't all the best books such as The Hobbit,
The Odyssey, the Bible, they're really just books about cooking. Seriously, though,
read the Odyssey it's like the longest travel, like the
longest food blog you've ever read. So my journey into
these deep patterns of universal history is actually really personal
and that as for me, this journey began with my
wife's rediscovery of an intent to cook her way through
the Christian year. And this is when we were at
the time in a tradition where there was no Christian year.
And so my wife said, I would like to rediscover this.
And the thing I have control over is the kitchen,
and so this is what we're going to do. So
through feasting and hospitality, we re enchanted our family's experience
of time. And it's my belief that if we could
just recover, to begin with, just recover Christian patterns of
fasting and feasting in other words, celebration, something like an
American Christian culture could begin to emerge or be recovered,
one rooted in the ancient rhythms of the Church year,
vibrant with the hospitality of the new world.
Speaker 2: This isn't about inventing a new myth. It's about living
out the old ones. Folding our daily.
Speaker 3: Lives into the eternal cairos where Christ is at the center.
And so here I will mention to you my second
book plug for the day, Evelyn burge Vitch's delightful cookbook
A Continual Feast. And they have just a few copies
back there at the book table, which you can get.
Speaker 2: My wife and I.
Speaker 3: This is the book that my wife and I used
to cook our way through the Christian calendar and to
rediscover our faith.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Iviitch reminds us in the book, by the way, that
feasting is an incidental it's sacramento. It's a way to
celebrate the joys of family and faith together. And so
it draws from the traditions of the old world, which
shows in this book how the major feasts that all
Christians hold in common, Nativity, Theophany, Apasca, Pentecost, etc. Can
transform ordinary meals into these portals and these little windows
into sacred time. There's a wonderful anonymity by the way
to a recipe or else they you could say, recipes
have divine authority if you don't think, okay, but think
when I say something like this is my grandmother's banana pudding.
If I say this is my banana pudding, it's a
little it's like, okay, man, that's a little pretentious, Like
would just say you made a pudding.
Speaker 2: But if I.
Speaker 3: Say this is my grandmother's banana pudding, there's a divine
authority there, like this came to us. No, I'm serious,
Like this came to us from the ancestors.
Speaker 2: Right. So there's an old world, an old world.
Speaker 3: Practice of having what the Serbs call a family slava.
Speaker 2: But this is just the serves that did this. Everybody
used to do this. The English used to do this,
The Norwegians used to do this. A family feast or
a holy day, which.
Speaker 3: Is like a big celebration for your family, and it's
when you bring your community together. So for some people
this might be the birthday or the name day of
the family patriarch. For others, this was, for instance, Saint
John's Night at Midsummer, when the wealthy of the community
feasts the poor, which is one of the things you're
supposed to do at a feast, I hope you know.
Speaker 2: Usually it was.
Speaker 3: A day which was connected in some way with some
great feast of the Christian year of our Lord, of
one of his servants of one of his saints under
whose name the hospitality was being practiced, because that's a
way to give to your hospitality that anonymity or that
divine authority, which makes it authentic instead of just self serving.
So in our family it sort of accidentally became situated
right around Christmas and not on Christmas Day itself, but
we usually do it right around the first of January,
which is part of the twelve Days of Christmas, as
I hope you will know. And on this day we
hold what has come to be known in our community
as a Charles Dickens Christmas. And what we do is
we take the recipes from this book that I just
showed you, the recipes of old europe plum puddings, very
different kind of a thing than a banana pudding, by
the way, Roast goose mince meat pies with real mince meat,
a roast that's been marinating in a vat of cider
for a week.
Speaker 2: All these recipes are in this book. By the way.
Speaker 3: The impetus for the celebration for us actually came from
this desire just to have a Christmas like the one
you read about in an old book, you know, And
then like, you know, I'm from the South, so you
have what turkey and stuffing? Like I was like, I
want to find out what goose is. Like, guys, turkey
is a sy op to keep you from eating goose.
Like once you have goose, that's it, You're done. You
will never buy another turkey. So every year the menu
is essentially the same. But what we do is we
rotate out the guest list. And so sometimes we invite
our sixteen adult god children. Sometimes we invite new members
of our parish that we would like to get to know.
Sometimes we invite those just who have no one else
with whom they can celebrate Christmas.
Speaker 2: The meal is not a meal, it's a feast.
Speaker 3: It has the kinds of prayers and toasts and the
storytelling that make a meal into a feast. So matter
where or when you live, to be a follower of
Christ has always meant to be a pilgrim and a
stranger to this world. And this, I think, by the way,
is why the Aeneid resonated so deeply with Christians in
the Middle Ages, even more so than Homer, Because.
Speaker 2: To be in exile in search of a new homeland, to.
Speaker 3: Carry your father on your back. Old anchises with his
bad knees to carry him with you. What is best
about what it means to be you, to be where
you're from, even as you go in search of this
new homeland. Well that's the story of trying to tell
the Christian story. It's a long road and there's going
to be a lot of meals along the way.
Speaker 2: Thank you.