Raw Transcript

00:00:00 Jonathan Pau thanks for thanks for coming on the podcast it’s a pleasure I wanted to begin by asking uh hopefully not to embarrass you but when I first invited you on this podcast you expressed a sort of skepticism about doing it and you said something like look I’ve done this sort of religion atheism thing before and a lot of the time it’s a lot of talking past each other and and told me uh that you I think at one point at least you used the word rationalist and said you know you’re probably better off talking to

00:00:30 these people because I I approach this from a different angle and and we might just end up talking past each other what what was it if I might ask that inspired that skepticism in you well I tried to do a few of these with someone called rationality rules and then a few other people and uh what ended up happening was that we would T talk past each other and you could follow it in the comment section which is that usually I would be accused of woo wooing by the people that are watch that are fans of the person

00:01:02 and then the people that are fans of me would would say you don’t understand the argument and so we did I did that a few iterations and then at some point I I felt like this isn’t useful because it’s just not helping it’s just it’s just increasing polarization and it’s it’s not worth it to just get clicks let’s say it that way um you know but I so I got your email and I kind of and I also saw the type of people that you were you were talking about talking to and uh and

00:01:29 I thought okay this is just not that just not my usual apologetics and that type of stuff it’s just not my preview but um but I don’t know why for some reason it kept running in my mind after I got your email and then we met in London just just happen stance and I thought oh okay well this is you know let’s just follow the breadcrumbs and so here we are here we are indeed um I suppose people who uh have have have seen you before we know that you you offer a lot of commentaries on on

00:01:59 religious issues and religious stories but you’re an artist by trade if I’m not mistaken uh yes I’m a painter uh I studied painting but my I kind of did my own you could say I I became disillusioned with the academy that after my uh bachelor’s degree especially because in art a lot of the madness that we see now was already there in the art world so I saw you know the the beginning of that of that stuff uh and so I left the academy but I continued to study on my own reading philosophy being

00:02:31 interested in all kinds of things and developing symbolic thinking as I was also developing my art practice I I just spent a few days in Rome visiting the Vatican and uh the Vatican Museums as well and seeing some of the most beautiful paintings that I’ve ever seen in my life uh some of the greatest artwork some of the most impressive architecture although St Peters I think uh actually leaves something to be desired when looked at from the outside as far as I understand it was a sort of designed by committee

00:03:01 three different Architects all arguing about what they wanted it to look like and so you end up with this beautiful Dome of Michelangelo completely obscured by this rectangular Frontier and you can’t really see it from the front a little bit um controversial that one perhaps but that aside some of the greatest art that I’ve ever seen in my life and a thing that keeps running through my head and I wanted to ask you as somebody who makes religious iconography is the fact that we seem to have a scriptural prohibition in uh the

00:03:31 Ten Commandments in the judeo-christian tradition against making images uh of of holy uh beings and of bowing down in front of them and if I go to a to a Catholic mass I’m doing so in a building that’s just completely adorned with such imagery not just of of saints but also of God himself in his tripartite nature what’s going on here I mean people who who have a crude reading of the Old Testament will say surely this is just a breach of this commandment and and one of the first Commandments given

00:04:05 and so perhaps if there is such a thing as in order of importance one of the more uh pressing ones yeah well Christians came to the conclusion that not only did the Incarnation make the representation uh possible but that it also made it necessary which is that if we believe that Christ is uh the Incarnation of God therefore his image and the image is restored is the best way to understand it because there’s a weird uh mystery in scripture which is in Genesis it says that man is made in the image of God and

00:04:46 then there’s this prohibition against making images uh of things on earth and in heaven and at the same time there is there are places where God tells people to make images right in the case of Moses with the serpent in the case of the the Ark of the Covenant and the cherubim all of these images that were in the Tabernacle and then in the temple if you went into the Jewish temple you would have seen plenty of images there were Bulls there were Angels you know these cherim represented uh and so

00:05:14 there’s a kind of mysterious Duality to the question you even see people in the in the Old Testament you’ll see people not worshiping the means by which God manifests himself but will venerate honor will make some gesture towards the means by which God is manifesting himself so you on the one end you have this sense of a pure uh like a pure attention to the Transcendent but then also a recognition and and some kind of gesture towards that which is manifesting it in the world so right you

00:05:44 see that still today rabbis kissing the Torah this kind of gestures of veneration towards the things that manifest the transcended to us and what Christians came to realize is that with the Incarnation Christ in some ways is the answer to the second commandment M so it’s not just that there’s a Prohibition it’s that there’s a mystery in that commandment and Christ answers that mystery which is he restores the image and he gives us an image and therefore the image now becomes a means by which

00:06:12 God manifests himself in the world and that’s why we don’t worship images but we do venerate them especially in an orthodox church I’m I’m Orthodox if you come into an Orthodox Church you’ll see people kissing images all day long uh because they see it as a restoration of that primordial image it it just seems strange to me to think that something about Jesus’s Incarnation on Earth suddenly would change not just our relationship to to painting Divine figures you know we we have this figure

00:06:44 of Jesus although we don’t have very much about his very much information about his physical features it’s I’ve just got a friend who who who just finished a PhD in the physical appearance of Jesus and one of the most interesting things is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a description of it uh but we could at least imagine a circumstance in which people say well this is the face of God and so we can we can paint this and and we can use it in our in our worship but what changes about our

00:07:11 ability to represent say God the Father I mean you often see these images of a bearded man in the sky and and that seems equally Troublesome as it would have been back then a very it’s a very controversial subject within Christianity I would say so you do not see images of God the Father until about the 13th century there are a few like random things that happen in the 12th century but you really don’t see any images of God the Father every time you see a manifestation of God in the world

00:07:39 it is always Christ who is shown and so even the creation so if you see an image of the creation of the world it’s actually Christ creating the world uh in medieval imagery because he is the logos he’s the Divine logos um and there’s also a mystery there’s another there’s another mystery about a kind of um mystery about the role of H of of the human in the Divine economy let’s just say it that way uh and so what happens in the late Middle Ages with a lot of other kind of

00:08:10 aberration is this this desire to represent God the father and it happens in the west very you know in the time for me like the image of Michelangelo God creating Adam to me that’s an aberration it’s a theological aberration and it’s a it’s something of a monstrosity actually I don’t particularly like I mean it’s visually beautiful like it’s well painted but in theologically it’s a it’s a it’s a bit of a monstrosity what don’t you like about it well because you have the you

00:08:40 have who is who is this character who’s creating Adam like who is he is is it God the father is that what it’s supposed to be and if it’s God the Father why is he surrounded by naked babies like there’s all these weird things about it like just there’s so many strange things about that image and and what is this like it says in Scripture that God created the world through speech the touching of the of the fingers the record what is the touching of the fingers it seems to be just kind of innovation for Innovation

00:09:12 sake I don’t I’m I don’t I’m gonna alienate all the people who like Michelangelo well but like you said it’s artistically impressive it’s not it’s not a a commentary on his artistic prowess I mean I suppose that this points to the larger observation that I’m trying to make which is you look at an image like this and you think very pretty but surely this is this is theologically bunk I mean you’ve got this old man with a beard and he’s reaching out and all this kind of stuff

00:09:37 but isn’t that the case of all depictions of something that is almost by definition if not by definition ineffable yeah and that’s why we that’s why the seventh ecumenical council and the fathers around the seventh ecumenical council say we do not represent God we don’t we represent Christ in the Incarnation you know and that we represent the person of Christ and there is a mystery there is a mystery there right which is the the manner in which the human the manner in which the human becomes God in the

00:10:09 Incarnation but it’s a it’s it’s a it’s a kind of mystery that we don’t we don’t we don’t go into too much but that like I said so now for example I would never represent God the father and I would say that most Orthodox uh iconographers today would never represent God the father and it did happen even in Orthodoxy like in the late later 16th 17th century it starts to appear uh and to me it’s a it was it’s a sign of theological decline when something like that happens where people don’t

00:10:38 understand what they’re doing anymore they don’t understand the that there are metaphysical questions Behind these decisions that the church uh put forth in and exactly like you said you do not like there are things that cannot be represented by their nature and therefore you do not represent them because it’s a it’s an aberration to do so I suppose I’m interested in in in whether you wouldn’t depict God the father in the sense that you want to have this theological reverence for the

00:11:09 father or if it’s a more practical concern that you know you’re essentially getting it wrong and might thereby be misleading people who look at this imagery and and have the wrong idea of what God is well obviously you would have a wrong idea what God what God is you think that God is a bearded man in the sky like you would definitely get and it fueled a lot of the silly secularist argu about God you know you have to real even the Reformation for example like I’m not a big fan of the

00:11:34 Reformation but if you look at the images they were reacting against in at that time they were reacting against these images of a bearded guy in the sky with the triangle Halo and it was like who is that figure is it God like God the father and now we we’re not at all in trinitarian theology in any way we’re just in a returning to kind of pagan uh it’s Zeus basically and it’s already Zeus already in this in in uh Michelangelo’s uh cine Chapel in my opinion well the interesting thing about

00:12:04 the cinee chapel is that it’s not really a chapel it’s it’s a museum you have to queue up for you know goodness knows how long and then they also now force you to go through the contemporary art section where there’s sort of a I don’t know a sort of metal a bunch of sort of metal sticks or pointing out in different directions and it’s it’s it’s called the Adoration of Christ or something and it’s I’m sure it means something but but I I find it I’ve always find a little bit

00:12:33 difficult to to understand um I thought that part should be optional at the very least and then finally you managed to get into the cine chapel and it’s just security guards sort of shoving you into the middle to get you out of the way of the of the flowing traffic and constantly telling people not to take photos um because it says you know look please please be respectful this is a this is a religious this is a religious site so you know don’t be talking don’t be taking photos you know this kind of

00:13:01 stuff dressed modestly and yet it seems to me that by opening up the gates in this way to allow floods of people to come in and just sort of gwk at the ceiling like what are they admiring there I was I was arguing with a friend last night about this and he said look you know it allows you to to turn your head upwards and to and to really be able to turn your attention to God and and the beauty that you perceive in this you recognize is a reflection of the beauty of God and I’m thinking I was not

00:13:27 impressed by God in that Chapel I was impressed by Michelangelo yeah now as a secularist that that’s fine I I don’t mind I’m an atheist that was a great experience that’s that’s one of the best experiences I can have in a chapel but surely this this is this is a Troublesome thing to do to a chapel to transform it into a gallery in this way yeah I I agree I think I mean I agree first of all with Michelangelo that there’s something about Michelangelo which can be understood you know the

00:13:55 story about the Peta of how you know when he created ated it someone said oh it’s Raphael who carved that and he went at night you know to carve his name in the the belt in the in the virgin’s belt and so it’s the only piece that he ever signed I think it’s the only uh the only sculpture that Michelangelo ever put his name on so this is this is the transformation that happens during the Renaissance which is in some ways you know this kind of idea of the genius of the artist and this moves all then it’ll

00:14:25 move into Romanticism and this you know the idea of the artist that we kind of have today of course my approach to Art is more traditional I would say or a desire My Desire don’t probably succeed all the time but there is a sense of entering into a tradition and entering into a a language maybe is the best way to understand it a language that has been fine-tuned for a thousand years in the church and in the life of the church and that has theological import so the decisions that I make are are are

00:14:56 informed by the theological tradition uh so that’s why that Eastern Orthodox icons in general have that characteristic so it’s you know that it’s difficult because I really do find that problematic what you said in terms of the chapel but it’s a 50-50 thing let’s say in terms of the the situation we’re in now which is that on the one hand when people go to cities they want they don’t want to visit the brutalist buildings they want to visit the churches and the reason why they want to

00:15:28 visit the churches I think is a testimony to the to the bankruptcy of certain secularist Tendencies of the 20th century uh and so I think people are saying well let let’s just let them come into the church and see these beautiful things and maybe there’s a little possibility that it will spark something in them but I had the same experience as you in the 16 Chapel it didn’t see it as particularly a sacred Place rather I just saw it as a as a tourist experience erience you know yeah uh

00:16:02 the this idea of people not wanting to visit brutalist buildings I I tend to agree with you I do have one friend who should be coming on the podcast soon he’s got a Twitter account called the cultural tutor and uh he’s he’s written this this defense of of brutalism and one of the things that he said which I think is kind of true is that a lot of the time we might just be confusing something that’s beautiful with something that’s old in the sense that if you go to Egypt everybody wants to to

00:16:27 visit the pyramids and the pyramids seem to have a lot more in common he said with something like you know the barbacan in London than with some Gothic Cathedral much more sort of geometric solid shapes it’s just got something to do with the the the a of being in the presence of something quite ancient that you know has a has a long history that that might be playing in slightly to that in other words I don’t know if maybe if if the barbec 400 years old people might want to go and visit it I

00:16:52 don’t think I don’t think that’s true I think that you have to a lot of ancient art let’s say there’s a unversal quality to a lot of the Ancient Art and it has to do with uh proportionality you can almost understand it as living systems they’re very similar to to living structures that is they have relationships of of U of height and relationships of form that are just basically attuned to human perception and to human engagement which is why there’s something Universal about

00:17:24 all the traditional Arts like they’re different but they have certain characteristics and comment so for example a skyscraper is a um how can I say this it’s an aberration of human perception you know and and this is something that it’s not just like religious thinkers that have talked about this like many uh modern contemporary thinkers like Paul vilio for example who is a basically I mean I guess a kind of leftist guy and you know he talked about this idea the problem of of scale and being facing these

00:17:58 monumentous like huge glass buildings that there’s something alienating about that experience whereas in Egypt the the pyramids were very specific things nobody lived in the pyramids you don’t live in a pyramid you live in uh and then people didn’t even go Worship in the pyramids the temples the Egyptian temples and the Egyptian houses and the Egyptian palaces were far closer to Roman art or to Greek art or to you know Chinese art in terms of the way which should use proportion to build

00:18:30 it and it’s a it’s a it’s it’s an emerging phenomena that actually is is very um it’s very organic because people use their body parts to measure the the they would use thumbs and hands and and to measure the uh the the different sizes and those proportions these human proportions we have the golden rule in us and just intuitively they ended up using these proportions that are human and that that create uh uh how can I say this they they they feel at home to us because they’re made from

00:19:04 us I wonder if it’s if there’s really Beauty there in the sense that if if the Pyramids of Giza didn’t exist or even in a world in which they do if if somebody bought a big plot of land in central London and decided they just wanted to build this huge Stone pyramid I think that’d be a lot of push back a lot of criticism and a lot of people saying this is the problem with the modern world the problem is that people just want to make these completely functional buildings with boring shapes

00:19:31 out of stone that have no sense of beauty and detail I think that’s what people would say about a building blocked in central London today the irony of course being that this is an example of one of the oldest structures uh that humans have ever built yeah like I said again people nobody lived in the Pyramids by the way these were not places to live they we don’t even actually I don’t think people actually know what their function is exactly it’s a speculation based on a dead culture

00:19:59 you know their tombs or this or that who knows uh and so the the idea that you would so you’re right you said Form and Function and that’s exactly the way to look at it that is there is different functionalities and this is something that you know I don’t know if you know who Christopher Alexander is uh a recent theoretician designer who looked at the relationship of form and functionality and proportion and explained how different spaces have different functions and that you know and it’s

00:20:31 something which is difficult to move against that is your bedroom a bedroom and a hall are not the same they have different functions and therefore they have different forms and their proportions will be related to their form and their and their function so the height of a ceiling for example is related to the number of people that are in a building so you can you can twist that you can push it a little but there’s something about modern architecture uh especially the brutalism and especially know like B house and

00:20:59 postmodern architecture especially that is that sees human nature as being accidental and arbitrary and thinks you can simply impose on it a kind of arbitrary rule or or a rule of being on on humans and that it that it doesn’t matter but it does matter because we do resonate and exist in certain ways in certain spaces and if we’re and if we’re not careful we can create alienation you know there’s a the I know this is people are going to not like this but there you know leier has been shown recently that the

00:21:37 was was autistic um and I think that some of the some of the modern architecture has that tendency there’s a kind of alienation and incapacity to see connection between human perception Human Experience and the forms in which we exist uh you know which is why the Communists did it like the Communist what they believed that human nature could be completely malleable and you know recreated and so they just made these monsters you know if you go to Eastern Europe you can see these monst these monstrosities of neighborhoods that just

00:22:12 Ram right through uh the ancient neighborhoods like no no no sense of space and no sense of of uh no sense of the they have a kind of uh they have a kind of equalizing quality for sure but the world is actually made in hierarchies of experience it’s not equality is a is a is a philosophical you could say uh is an ideological thing it maybe the best way to say it uh I want to ask you about whether you think that there is a necessary connection between this decline in architectural uh fitted as you’re describing it and a

00:22:51 decline in religious belief uh I mean that seems to be a a plausible hypothesis but but there are other explanations as well another thing that this this cultural shien uh has suggested is is to think about the fact that you know there’s a World War there two world wars in in the early and mid 20th century after which the project is we need to build quickly and cheaply we need to get everything back up and running again and so emerges these sort of great utilitarian buildings the idea that these have come to replace Gothic

00:23:26 Cathedrals is perhaps a mistake that what they’ve really come to replace is the rubble caused by two world wars and looked at that way it seems a lot more forgivable to produce these kinds of buildings especially if we imagine that although there are exceptions like you know some brutalist architecture is made because it’s supposed to be a kind of a kind of beautiful building that’s a bit more um tasteful I suppose uh a lot of the time the kind of things that we’re complaining about here weren’t really

00:23:55 intended to be beautiful and if they had have been they they wouldn’t have been able to serve the the function quite as well you know yeah well I would say there’s probably some of that but baj house is a prew World War II phenomena and you know ler is a pre-World War II uh architect that the modern Architects precede the the war and so but there the mentality of utilitarianism of pure utilitarianism in the way that the the the far-left conceived of it right in the way that the communist for example

00:24:29 conceived of it is definitely part of it this kind of equalizing tendency right this desire that to make people into numbers and to make them into these Square things basically to turn people into machines is maybe the best way to think about it which is the relationship between the development of these types of uh modern uh boxes and industrialization and the factory worker all of these things are related and there’s a kind of uh right there there’s a sense in which a human person is is

00:25:01 just a mechanism that we that we just put in a in a box you know and then we put them in the factory and they do certain tasks that we can quantify and calculate uh I think so I do really do I really do believe that there is a relationship between the development of these types of forms and and a and a kind of imposition of SE let’s say a a strength of secularism that is taking over Society it’s interesting because communism in particular grows out of a philosophy whose one of the most important observations or hypotheses

00:25:35 proposed by KL Marx is precisely the kind of alienation that you’re describing now being a cause and result of this architectural Trend which is people not feeling I mean he’s talking about people not feeling connected to their labor but it’s it’s the same problem of not feeling like a human but rather feeling like a a cog in a machine that’s right and so but you’re right that but the the the strange reaction into communism is to on the one hand connect them to their labor but to

00:26:02 continue the type of alienation by disconnecting people from uh family connections from religious connections from you know to kind of deconstruct the social apparatus and replace it with the state uh ends up doing the same right you can see it in communist China it was the most visible where you have these still have these pictures of you know masses of people with uniforms in in uh in public life where they would all we the same and have live in the same space with everybody’s allotted the equal

00:26:31 amount of of of things and the and the same things you know uh yeah it really is a quantification of the of the human yeah in attempting to treat everybody as humans you sort of end up treating nobody as as as humans as humans which is an interesting irony I suppose um the interesting thing about architecture by the way in my view is that as far as I can see it’s the only form form of artistic expression that is something that’s supposed to be beautiful and enjoyed that forcibly imposes itself

00:27:06 upon everybody else if you don’t like a painting you don’t look at it you don’t you go into the other room at the gallery you know what I mean if you don’t like a bit of music you turn it off um although living in a modern city maybe some music is imposed on you uh although to to elevators especially yeah to to a lesser degree but you know what I mean like you you put a building in the in in the center of a city especially if it’s some kind of skyscraper and everybody has to look at

00:27:33 that every single day and perhaps there should be some kind of you know some kind of legislation here that if I understand that if you want to do some sort of fancy trials with art about new ways to see beauty fine but you know consign it to the to the museum and make sure the museum on the outside follows the follows the well accepted psychological uh laws of don’t make these huge in the in the space but your intuition is right and architecture is probably the last residue of what I believe art to before

00:28:07 uh it is it is the most important art because let’s say architecture and City Planning are the most important of the Arts because they create they bound bind the space in which you experience reality and therefore they actually say subtly when more than subtly but they invisibly create you know the way in which you understand inside outside the way which you understand hierarchy the way in which you understand um you know the relationship of functions to to uh to to themselves right it’s like how you

00:28:40 organize space a house a building a public building will have an effect on how you understand the way in which that thing happens and so there’s a it it is it’s very important it’s it’s radically important to let’s say I I think that architecture and City planning are one of the places where people who believe very much that humans have a nature that they should be fighting in that sphere more than social media and all this culture War whatever nonsense but architecture is the place where we are

00:29:14 actually framing Human Experience and so there are movements I don’t know if you know a bit about uh what’s called new urbanism which is uh a movement towards the rehumanization of cities and and to to create things like parks to you know you you live in in the UK and so you don’t have the same experience as we do in North America which is just the suburb the suburb and the malls and the highways where there’s no Center there’s no human scale there’s no place to congregate to walk there’s no public

00:29:47 space there’s no Public Square where you can actually come and meet your neighbors and meet people that you know uh there’s a a quantification of human experience and and a reduction of the human to dot basically on a on a flat on a flat map um and so there’s a this desire to recreate neighborhoods and to create you alleys and and places where you can walk and you can congregate fountains all of this type of thing and many of my you know several of my friends are involved in this and I’ve

00:30:16 collaborated quite a bit with an architect his name is Andrew Gould in the US and he does that type of work in uh in Charleston South Carolina but there’s there’s a the Christopher Alexander that I mentioned recently like um Janet uh was it Janet Jacobs um all these these very contemporary thinkers that are trying to recapture a human level experience at the city why is it that religious buildings are so connected conceptually to beautiful buildings in a way that buildings that I won’t call them atheist buildings it

00:30:55 seems like a strange concept but buildings that don’t have any kind of religious connection seem not to seem not to have that that beauty in the same way at least that’s what people think I don’t know if it’s true so there are a few things to mention one is the way that kind of traditional societies function the best way to understand it for modern person is to understand it as a kind of fractal situation a fractal system of Center and periphery and inside and outside and multiplicity and so the church acts as a

00:31:32 a locus of unity for a village like if you take a let’s say a small town There’s a church in the small town the church is usually in a central space if not in the actual center of the Church of the of the Town it is taller than the other buildings for a reason because it is the vector of unity so we look we’re all there and if we look around the thing that that we see that’s taller than everything else is actually the thing that binds us together as a community and and so we you know we go

00:31:59 there we celebrate the things that bind us together the things that unify us the things that are related to our Origins so we have me weddings and baptisms and uh and deaths and all of these things we celebrate uh at the place that binds us together so there’s a there’s an actual coherence to the way in which it’s a medieval city city would manifest themselves which is with his building at the middle and so you can understand it as kind of like an offering to what binds us together so for the same reason

00:32:31 that you would make yourself uh let’s say well dressed to go to a wedding or that you would decorate the house for a Christmas meal you are offering your excess up to something which binds you together and so it becomes like a shining Beacon of your Unity right and that so it’s like a it’s on the one hand a a a a sense of sacrifice where we’re sacrificing this excess into is something which binds us together and up towards something which transcends US uh but then it also becomes an image of our

00:33:04 Unity that’s why it’s it’s a that’s why it is it has a it’s not also the it’s usually not an individual building especially like the the more medieval churches it’s not it’s something which is happens over time right it happens over a Century Two centuries the church is a organic part of the unity of the Town itself it’s not a it’s not just an artistic state or some or or the way we understand how we make art today and it’s not even just architecture it is

00:33:33 that right it’s a it’s a beacon of unity maybe best way to understand but I suppose and I agree with you and that’s it’s fascinating um and maybe that’s why you know if you look at an Old Town Hall for example which isn’t quite a secular church but perhaps the idea of a town hall is that it’s supposed to be something like the the place where everybody comes together these these buildings also tend to be quite beautiful and and uh well put together and designed almost as if they

00:34:01 they could be transformed into churches but I don’t see why it is the case that when somebody’s building a skyscraper I I understand you know residential blocks and and functionally trying to House people but if you’re building The Shard London’s tallest tallest building I I mean sure there’s a sense in which The Shard is is is quite pretty it’s a it’s a slightly explorative form of form of but I mean some of these skyscrapers the walkie-talkie these seem to be it I don’t understand why it is the

00:34:35 case that they can’t also have a similar Devotion to to to beauty that would have existed in something like an old church like why is it I understand why every now and again you build a skyscraper somebody takes a risk and it goes wrong but it seems like every skyscraper we build is an ex it’s like testing people’s assumptions about the subjectivity of art it’s like you know it’s like God is laughing at us in saying that you know when we decide that beauty is subjective and it’s just your

00:35:04 opinion man he’s like well you know try living here for a couple of years yeah let just see what happens if you see how it goes you know see how you like it but I don’t understand why that’s the case like why why does this happen well it is in the the secularist approach itself it’s bound in that which is that if you you live in a world in which uh questioning your suppositions about things questioning your presuppositions about thing and critical thinking is that which is worshiped you

00:35:40 know like the idea that criticizing is more powerful and it have there’s a kind of w there’s a kind of of of smartness of criticizing and there’s a kind of naive stupidity of believing and having faith in something you know if you believe something if you have faith in something you’re you you’re you should have a uh you should be cynical about it right you should you should be cynical about the things that bind us together and so this is woven through our society in at all kinds of levels right it’s not

00:36:10 just you know it happens on the one hand in the Technologies which provides us with with all kinds of Technologies but it also happens in the in the social space which means that every year there’s a new theory about how humans work and it’s it’s completely new and it’s revolutionary and we never thought of it before and it just happens every single uh you know every cycle our education system for example here in Quebec has had reforms like every five years for the past three decades

00:36:41 constantly reforming the way in which we do things so it’s it’s it’s a it’s an approach to reality which uh which gives the results that it gives which is this it’s also part of what it also gives us fashion and fashion is hilarious because obviously Fashion on your clothes is is easy to you know because you’re going to throw your clothes away and you move out but fashion in buildings is the most the funniest thing ever so you have these Fashions of buildings and house building

00:37:09 that just run through society and then 20 years or 30 years later you look at it like your grandfather’s shag carpeting as something kitchy and horrible to to look at so yeah I I suppose in architecture although there are architectural Fashions I I wonder and I don’t know you know as much about architecture as I I like it’s it’s something I’m I’m I’m trying to learn about and I wonder if people are aware that they are engaging in a fashion I mean if if you’re making

00:37:36 clothing you’ll understand when you’re producing these clothes that that that you are playing into something like a fashion but I imagine that people constructing buildings aren’t thinking in that way it’s only retrospectively that we look at Fashions it’s actually it’s actually there’s a it’s progress is what it is people think they’re engaging in progress but what they’re actually doing is engaging in fashion they think that this is that there’s this they they

00:38:00 people will connect technological progress with moral progress and artistic progress together and they have this sense in which we’re moving forward and we’re progressing it seems to be honest it seems like at this point only the most naive people could still believe that you know but nonetheless it’s so ingrained in our thinking this idea of progress is so bound up in our thinking that it it just happens it’s running it’s a program running through human human thinking and when they

00:38:29 people see something different they see it as good in itself they also there’s also this idea that Innovation is a is an untrammeled good Innovation is a good in itself there’s no question about it so we think that in technology we think that in in all kinds of ways and then we also think that in art you know the idea that because something is new and because it’s something that I haven’t seen before it is therefore a good uh that is of course I think ridiculous it’s a ridiculous idea that is human

00:38:58 goodness and human capacity to participate in goodness is based on how humans are made it’s based on human nature and the idea that just because something is new makes it necessarily good uh I think is a is a uh I think is a problem running through human society in general right now you think there’s a there’s a similar uh a similar bias going on in the opposite direction where people assume that because something is old yeah it is beautiful and because something is old it is is worth preserving I mean we were

00:39:28 talking earlier about the pyramids I think the closest example I can think of to a modern pyramid is have you seen this um this orb the sphere in Las Vegas the sphere in Las Vegas the Las Vegas sphere this this and you know thank goodness they built it in Las Vegas because it makes sense there okay it’s it’s huge for people who don’t know it’s this I don’t know how big it is but it’s absolutely you know gargantuan sphere and on the on both sides the inside and the outside it’s covered in thousands

00:39:59 and thousands of LEDs it’s like the most LEDs all in one place and so you you go inside this huge orb and the entire uh the building the entire sky above you can be made to look like whatever you like and it’s such high definition that you know it it absorbs you into into any world you like and on the outside it’s obviously just this big sphere and there are LEDs on the outside as well and so they you know they put like a smiley face and welcome to Vegas and then of course in absolutely no time advertising

00:40:27 it’s it’s it’s a it’s a gigantic billboard okay fine it it works in Vegas they they were trying to build one in London as well and I think that the mayor said no um thank you and then I think to myself okay obviously a disaster just a disastrous idea to put something like that in in maybe not in Vegas but basically anywhere else thing is 2 3,000 years from now you know future societies are sort of doing EX AV on this ancient city of London and and they’re all looking at this massive orb

00:41:02 and they don’t know what it was built for was it a tomb was it was it a church was it somewhere people lived was it you we don’t know isn’t that a great mystery how the hell did they put this thing together I mean people would travel from across the world to come and see what what we are now so find so offensive to our artistic taste that we that we we the mayor actually said it can’t be built but you understand people would be flying from across let push back let me P back a little let

00:41:29 me push back a little against your your your idea that it’s old so a way to understand the fact that old things are survive is to understand uh to understand it actually through a Darian process to understand it through a kind of uh evolutionary process which is that humans propose things right they propose uh they propose buildings they propose literature they propose poems and there’s a kind of uh variability in The Proposal there’s there there’s some variability and some kind of messiness

00:41:59 in that happening and then what happens is that uh then humans remember certain things and preserve certain things and it doesn’t happen over a th a thousand years it happens over a few decades and over a few decades some things are preserved and some things are not and some things are maintained and some things are not and also some things are cared about and some things aren’t so if you create a building let say a thousand years ago and people care for it they are impressed by it they love it and

00:42:30 they they want to maintain it it will it will preserve itself so there are so many buildings that have been destroyed since for thou for thousands of years but there are some that are preserved and those are not preserved for arbitrary reasons and they’re not preserved over 2,000 years they’re preserved over decade year after year after year and that I think is a is a somewhat of a guarantee it’s not 100% guarantee but it’s somewhat of a guarantee that that mechanism that is manifesting itself is telling you what

00:43:05 human attention is made of just intuitively you don’t even have to rationally understand it you just understand that there’s a it has it’s an expression of something true about how humans engage with the world um and so that’s why that’s why I do believe that it’s not just that something is old but it’s that something has been kept and preserved and maintained you know uh for all this time yes I think that makes sense I’m interested in what you think uh well humans we were talking earlier

00:43:32 about iconography humans seem obsessed with making icons they love making icons and in fact in the old scriptural tradition part of the problem is that you know Moses pops up to the mountain and comes back down and then they’ve made a new icon it’s like they can’t stop making icons all the time that doesn’t go away just because we don’t believe in God anymore uh you know Society is secularizing and all that what do you think are the icons of the the secular age yeah well so there’s a way I think there’s a it’s

00:44:06 especially in Christian theology like what we’ll do is we will separate the difference between icon and Idol and the difference between an icon and Idol is that the icon affords the Transcendent that is it is pointed to it is of it is not something which stops at itself but rather leads up towards higher participation so it’s like if I encounter an image of St John the St John the Baptist well the image of St John the Baptist only exists in my life because he pointed to Christ and that image of Christ only exists in my life

00:44:38 because he pointed to the infinite invisible Transcendent and so that is the way that icons function they’re they’re a kind of ladder of participation the idea with of about Idols is that in some ways they are factitious they try to capture it all in in themselves right they try to kind of capture your attention and keep it within its sphere they don’t the idol doesn’t offer itself up to a higher participation and so I would say that in our world now we are surrounded with Idols constantly that is we we are

00:45:16 constantly asked to give our attention to things in ways which are purely subservient to the to the thing itself right advertising itself s has a form of idolatry to it because the the the sometimes advertising can be pointing to a higher good but most of the time it’s not most of the time it’s just like by this thing it will accomplish all your desires I will give you what you want if you get this thing and so there’s a sense in which if I can just get that then I will get what I want and that’s

00:45:49 the way in which you know Idols are represented in uh in the Old Testament if you look at that story of the the the calf the the golden calf for example right it’s like Moses goes up to get the Revelation people down here were like well we need something here we need something to kind of gather us together they make this golden calf and then they have an orgy basically it’s like the the the the the idol affords you your desires so that’s why it’s related to you know that’s why it can be related to

00:46:19 anything that you give your your attention to Too Much whether it’s you know porn whether it’s alcohol with all the classical things that that can capture you and can can become your God for all intents and purposes uh I mean what be would it be right to say that pornography or alcohol are Idols I mean and and the thing that people do with Idols is they worship them and I suppose another thing that I’m a bit unclear on is what it means to worship something can I can I worship this microphone can

00:46:51 can I worship you could yeah it would be a little ridiculous so that is the worship is the best way to understand worship is you could say that it is the highest point of your attention right it is the it is the point of attention in which there is no there is no hire it doesn’t fit into a higher good so a good examp like it’s this is not woo woo like I I don’t want to be careful people to think like oh here what’s Jonathan talking about right so it’s like you’re making food and

00:47:19 you’re cutting the onions right you give attention to that but that attention is bound in the recipe that you’re making the of that recipe is bound in the fact that you’re going to sit together as a family and eat and that sitting together as a family and eat is bound into the love of the Family itself as a as something which provides you know and then you can keep scaling that up all the way up to the highest good which is the the infinite Transcendent and so there are some things in the world

00:47:48 that are more in danger of capturing our attention fully and you know and it’s just by the nature of who we are it’s obviously a microphone it would be difficult for you to worship a microphone it’ be harder but but alcohol is the good it’s fine but it can become a God and we know people for who it does become a God and it does kind of take over their lives and it’s the same with I wouldn’t say pornography but I would say sex let’s say sexuality is obviously something good and but it has to be

00:48:17 ordered in a certain way for it to not become something that traps you and kind of uh takes over your your attention so that you can’t think of other things and you can’t you can’t uh let’s say put your attention into higher you know and you everybody knows it like especially if you remember when you were I mean I I’m older now but when I was 19 or whatever right it was really difficult to think me you think about sex all the time it was just would take over your your your your your field of experience

00:48:45 you would see the world through through the lens of sex right you would notice things and things the world would kind of organize itself in that in that way and that’s that can be dangerous because that’s not actually how the world works it’s the world isn’t only made of sex it’s made of all kinds of other things that have to fit together towards towards higher Goods I mean there’s of course a sense in which it makes sense as an atheist uh thinking about evolutionary biology why people just

00:49:13 become obsessed with sex in this way I mean it is the mechanism by which things are are created it seems less natural to me in other words to suppress that in order to focus our attention on what the religious will say is really the creative power here this is the this is the real force that we should be focusing on why is it such a in other words if worship is is supposed to be directed towards the Transcendent and and God then why is it such an unnatural experience to so many people why is it

00:49:40 so difficult well it it’ be interesting to even take your your the way that you say sex I think that even using evolutionary structures being obsessed with the Act and the pleasure of sex is actually counterproductive to The evolutionary goal goals uh because the the survival of the species is not bound up only in the orgasm like there’s a there’s a whole buffer around that it has to do with the rearing of children especially in terms of of human the how humans uh deal with children there’s a

00:50:11 whole structure around that has to do with the rearing of children and the the the F relationships which will assure the continuation of of your line whatever however you want to think of it and so the buffer around sexuality is already a constraint on the pleasure of sexuality uh you know one of the problems that we have now you could say is that technology in some ways affords something which was impossible in an ancient world right affords unlimited access to insane amounts of of uh of stimulus of sexual stimulus that in some

00:50:46 ways overpowers can overpower a person in a way that is not conducive to evolutionary questions and the proof of that is that let say pornography leads to decline in population to some extent it leads to to erection problems it leads to all these these these difficulties that that will not bring about the continuation and so the the the religious is is the highest point of understanding that the smallest good that I feel whether it’s the pleasure of eating the pleasure of sex these different plures have to be encased and

00:51:22 have to be constrained into higher goods and to some extent for you to even have those right if you want sexuality to be pleasure and not just a master that that kind of overwhelms you it has to be kind of it has to be bound into these higher goods and the same with food is if food is just if you just eat food for pleasure at some point you will no longer have pleasure eating food if you only have sex for pleasure at some point you will no longer have pleasure in sex in order for the thing to be good it has

00:51:53 to be kind of embedded into these higher participation yeah if it no longer points towards something more or or is done in the in the in the in the with the sort of attention focused towards something else and something more then I suppose like you were saying a moment ago it becomes an idol rather than an icon it it becomes an end rather than a window through which to to look at what really is beautiful and and true um fascinating and I did want to ask since you mentioned it a moment ago I mean when talking in

00:52:30 these terms you say well I got to be careful here because I don’t want to be accused of just you know wooing just speaking woo woo um I I do this all the time you when whenever you approach the the topic of religion and and we haven’t really talked about religion per se existence of God the traditional apologetic stuff but whenever you try to approach that conversation from anything other than I guess an an analytic philos opical tradition this accusation often comes up and and it seems like this is something

00:53:00 that’s been levied at you why do where do you think that criticism comes from do you think there’s I mean the the fact that you recognize while you’re saying words that this may sound to people like I’m just sort of talking nonsense yeah why do you feel the need to to some extent it really is the fault of religious people to some extent is that in the 19th and 20th Century Many Many religious people have become what is something like practically they are materialists and they are rationalists

00:53:32 practically but they continue to maintain you know let’s say let’s take new Earth creationism for example right that’s a good example where it’s like people who think that Genesis one is a scientific text and then they insist on that and then they they and then at some point what happens is that they cease to understand what these terms are about and so they don’t know what it mean what heaven means they don’t know what spirit means they don’t know what any of these things mean and they have no connection

00:53:58 to the ancient way of thinking uh and so then you know they they’ve made the language completely abor to people you know so it’s like when when you hear certain words when people hear certain words like like spirit for examp that’s a good example people hear the word Spirit you they just roll their eyes in the back of their head because they think you’re just not talking about anything you’re talking about ectoplasm or some ridiculous like spirit itu material thing that was invented in the

00:54:28 Modern Age and so in some ways religious people are to blame for what happened and the fact that now people just look at this stuff and say exactly like oh it’s a big guy on the sky you know it’s like and and and and it and I I want to be careful it’s like some of the religious people that have this thing usually they’re misrepresenting a deep intuition that that is real but they’re misrepresenting it in the way that they deal with it like I I had an example with someone that I care for very much

00:54:56 but was kind of like this kind of materialist thing and I asked them I said when Jesus went up into heaven where did he go did he go into the clouds did he go into the the the the moon like where did he go and the person literally said I never thought about that and I thought well then if you’ve never thought about that but you have this weird kind of scientific materialism about you then we’re in trouble my friend because like just with one question I could undo your faith like I could

00:55:29 destroy your entire worldview with one question and so you know we have to we have to be able to look at this in a in a different way let’s just say so where is it that the the the atheist rationalist analytic type critic of you know your your religious worldview most fundamentally goes wrong in terms of their approach oh but but I I think it’s exactly it’s exactly they do the same as the kind of materialist Christian is that they they think that there’s a certain way to describe reality and there’s only

00:56:07 one and it and it tends to equate itself to a kind of let’s say a forensic description of a crime right that’s the best way to understand it’s like they they think that everything is something like a forensic description uh but the reality is that it isn’t that that’s that just not reality Works forensic descriptions have a certain purpose but most of the time you do not use forensic descriptions most of the time you use what people call heuristics which I hate that term by the way uh but that that people use

00:56:38 mechanisms of meaning in order to get to their meaning and so if we don’t understand the types of mechanisms of meaning that religion is involved in then at some point we’re just talking past each other and we don’t we don’t know what’s happening and like I said religious people are are are to blame often for that because they themselves have at least in the Modern Age forgotten the ancient the structure of the ancient cosmologies like they haven’t read Dante they haven’t read the

00:57:07 church fathers they don’t know the the the the the they don’t know anything about scholasticism they don’t know anything about the the metaphysics of Christianity they just have this kind of first level understanding so talking about where people go wrong is one thing um I recently had a conversation with John vvi who uh was talking about one of the problems that we face is that people don’t have anywhere to go for wisdom they have places to go for for knowledge and traditionally we’ve we’ve known where to

00:57:37 look for wisdom and it’s not been the same place as looking for knowledge or indeed history whatever it may be and and it and it got me thinking that you know a lot of podcasts they have the sort of the the one question that they ask every single one of their guests at the end of the episode or whatever and I was thinking I might I might trial that by by ending the podcast asking you where do you go for wisdom where do I go for wisdom and so I do believe that tradition offers wisdom well understood that is not tradition in

00:58:13 the the idea of a of data that is transmitted from one generation to the other but what tradition offers is mostly the mode of being from one generation to another and so I do believe that that tradition offers wisdom and that includes of course scripture the church fathers but then also the lurgical life this type of mod of being that that comes from that has been preserved through all these Generations I think that offers uh wisdom well Jonathan Pou thank you so much for joining me oh it’s pleasure

00:58:47 thanks if you enjoyed that conversation then thanks I’m glad you can watch more full episodes of the within reason podcast by clicking the link that just appeared on your screen the podcast is also on platforms like Spotify and apple podcasts don’t forget to subscribe thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next one