Episode 111: Jason Baxter: C.S. Lewis, the Medieval Mind, Christian Mystics, and Classical Education

[Music] [Music] praa him in the morning praise him in Thea [Applause] [Music] hi welcome to war Christ I'm Marcus today I'm joined by Jason M bter Jason is an author a speaker and a college professor he currently teaches in English and theology at the University of Notre DM in the states he the author of Five Books including the medieval mind of CS Lewis and beginner's guide to Dante's comedy so I suppose first of all Jason how did you come to your love for the humanity broadly this medieval period and the the nuanced way that you describe it and some of the things that you've devoted so much time to with your studies yeah what a great question yeah I I jokingly call myself a recovering cartisian um by which I mean you know like everyone in the modern world I make this kind of you know great subject object divide and which is Lis says that uh we as moderns well and Charles Taylor says this as well in a secular Age We tend to think of that the true source of meaning is my agency is my interiority is my sort of emotional life and all that stuff out there is just sort of dead matter colliding in fields of of of of energy as the 18th century Enlightenment uh uh Newtonian philosopher Le Blas put it if we could know the the trajectory and velocity of every atom in the universe we could tell the whole world in advance and backwards that such was his boast right it's just a bunch of billiard balls out there dead space dead matter whereas what's real is within me I think um in my whole kind of Journey in uh in in Christianity and ultimately to become a Catholic the the idea of a lurgical and sacramental imagination has been has been enchanting to me I guess what I've increasingly called a participatory or an iconic imagination in which um it's kind of anti deist in a way right not full on pantheism but it's kind of anti- deist in that it's it's that it's it's the Lord and the supernatural trying to make it into our world to the extent that it can but it's limited by this uh is limited by our time and uh our space and our historical reality and yet the Lord is you know exerts to speak anthropomorphically exerts great energy in order to try to make himself manifest and this is what excites me so much I think about the medieval is because it's trying to take these these things that we as modern separate the spiritual realm and the Physical Realm and trying to find really intelligent really subtle really interesting ways to talk about our our life our experience our Cosmos um as an iconic or participatory reality and so I suppose um one of my editors wants me to write something properly philosophical and properly theological whereas most of the stuff I've done has been descriptive and historical maybe that will come one day uh for for David Augustine uh um at word on fire but at the moment what I I've just wanted to describe for myself with uh with just to answer this question why did our medieval ancestors find this compelling what was Beauty for them why was it not a peripheral phenomenon for them but rather at the core of their being what does Beauty have to do with the love of God what is Holiness anyway those are the types of questions which I think our we can put it this way our medieval ancestors were to those types of questions what we are to uh technical questions in terms of the Sciences they had a kind of um can we call it um experiential expertise in the interior life whereas as uh Lewis's buddy Owen Barfield said our expertise is now the technical the exterior um and the sort of like graphing the properties of material bodies in mathematical space that's excellent thank you so much Jason and um I want to get into that in more depth particularly pertaining to your book on Lewis but I'd love to before we get there ask a bit a bit about your influences and if there are any figures who've been especially inspirational or influential for you that You' like to tell us about whether that's leis himself um or whether that's Dante some of these figures academic family or other ways yeah I mean I think definitely my uh my teachers especially this year that I spent in Ottawa Canada had a little tiny college called Augustin College uh for 13 years I I love that place with all my heart and I think that's when I went from from being a Suburban kid uh in the Southern United States who used to go to uh to Barnes & Noble and at the Barnes & Noble I suppose this is the same in in uh across the Atlantic there's this kind of like cheesy mural um this fake mural which is in every single Barnes Noble in the in the Starbucks area and it has the writers you know has like James Joyce and Virginia wolf and and I don't know who El George Elliott is very it's pretty inclusive Tableau of writers right and I just I remember as the Suburban kid in Arkansas who didn't know who those people were and hadn't read their books Longing To Belong in their conversation almost in sort of like Lis like way being magically transported you know into that two-dimensional surface and and listening to them but I mean so for me I mean Augustin college going up to this little place in in Ottawa and meeting meeting these learned professors meeting people like David Jeffrey who who wrote On The Franciscan The Franciscan spirituality and it and its influence on early English poetry and meeting people like John Patrick and Graham Hunter philosophers and theologians and scientists that was absolutely eye openening for me that changed everything for me and so I I I suppose beginning with that those are my those are my personal bonds um but I grew up I grew up Protestant and uh love Jonathan Edwards as is that a contrarian thing to do um at least in this country right Jonathan Edwards is only only remembered as the author of the the famous sermon sinners in the hands of an Angry God and I still love that sermon I and I still think it's true um and but he he did all kinds of other things in addition to that so I would say between Jonathan Edwards and and CS Lewis those are my earliest intellectual influences as well as a a Protestant Pastor here in the States called John Piper who wrote a book called Desiring God um and I think that for me that that was my kind of moral Awakening my Spiritual Awakening and then at Augustine College I realized as as one of my as one of my professors said he was Protestant so I suppose he had credentials to say this he used to say to us Protestants Catholic have have answered have asked and answered questions which Protestants haven't even thought of yet I was very offended by that um but I suppose that what he was trying to get at it was there was this huge tradition of thought that that I I was introduced to when I was there and that that was in that was that was eye openening but I think you know the funny thing is for Dante even though I've written about him the most of my life I didn't enjoy reading the comedy at least the first dare I say this five times that I read it maybe three or four times I didn't see what the point was um and so I think for Dante to become I think at last I can actually call him what he calls Virgil he calls virgila Maestro right the good teacher the good leader um and now I think but it's because I'm doing my translation but now I think of him asro and I think now he's part of my my DNA but yeah between CS Lewis and um and now now Dante and um and probably also uh dovi and brothers karatov um between those things I think it's probably very close to the the core of my of my original intellectual Awakening and what a chord that's wonderful thank you Jason so I'd love to home in a bit more about your on your recent book the medieval mind of CS Lewis how great book she up a great mind and ask first um what motivated that and what you hope the readers will take away and why especially home Wi on that perspective of Lewis that's it's not often emphasized and um I suppose if we might look at his medieval apprenticeship as you refer to it and why this element to his person is so significant even if it is often overlooked yeah I exactly I think the book aims to show that Lewis was successful not despite his day job but because of it and knows maybe it's it's somewhat autobiographical I'm trying to tutor a younger version of myself and that I didn't know that he was um he was an Oxford Dawn and that his his life was devoted primarily with the study of medieval and Renaissance literature until much later right I mean I knew him as an apologist and as a writer of fiction and so for me it was like the the great Revelation was when I was um when I was uh writing my dissertation in this tiny 5 foot by five foot Carol on the on the 12th floor of the library at Notre Dame and you know reading all these very weird books which I wouldn't even inflict on my students right I was reading cedus and his commentary on on on the tus and I was reading macrobius and Martian capella and Bernard sylvestri and Alan of and all these things I just thought were incredibly ret and you know and no no one but me had heard of them and then I go home in the evening and read The Chronicles of Narnia to the kids and I have these sort of these kind of you know Double Take moments so I thought wait a minute is that is leis coding calidius there and when I started to dig into this I discovered well yeah Lewis knew all this stuff and of course he writes about it in discarded image and he gave introductory lectures to how to appreciate Renaissance literature in which he said let me do the heavy lifting so that you can do the enjoying um and he read all these things and he read them you know he read them sometimes before they were even improper additions certainly before they were translated he just went up into Duke Humphrey's reading library in Oxford and just you know allegedly read the whole library in preparation his 20-year preparation for his volume on 16th century literature so he just knew it he just knew it all and he had read it until the point in which it um I guess maybe like you know to compare small things to great things he'd read it to the point where you know for me like what what Dante and Lewis are now to a certain extent to my in my marrow right in my in my bloodstream um these things were for for l and there are all these incredible moments where he opens his mouth seemingly in a very practical way like when he's counseling Sheldon vanaken after the death of his wife and he starts saying you know what you should read um you should read boethus you know in in get that lob Edition with the facing page Latin and English and he says you should oh you're probably gonna have to read Dante Paradiso aren't you and so this stuff is so um this stuff wasn't that's what was kind of the great tip off right is that this stuff wasn't um wasn't a mere academic archival scholarly interest for Lewis but he thought that they really knew something he thought that they had seen something and it was too beautiful to die but they had um they had said it in a language and in a mode of thought which had become foreign to us and so what he had to do was sort of remove the gym you know imagine sort of you know your great grandmother's you know sort of precious jewelry the sort of setting is tarnished but you don't want to throw away the gems if you remove the gems and reset them in a fresh setting then he could save these old ideas and they would seem fresh and relevant to us and so when he writes when he writes out of the Silent Planet as you know everyone will know who's read it go read the epilogue he confesses it's just a plagiar of Bernard Sylvester's cosmographia this weird 12th century Latin Treatise which is fearfully weird fearfully weird um but Lewis takes it and all of a sudden it's but facing medieval space travel you know Lewis adds rockets and and some bad guys and he's got out of the Silent Planet because that because it was too beautiful to die and so he was a he was a rescuer of old things interestingly enough that's that was his greatest compliment for Dante he said that he had a tender care of old metaphors and old words and so you sort of see Lewis kind of autobiographically confessing his desire to have this like like anas carrying his household Gods his penates on his shoulders as well as his father and kisis uh so was Lewis with these uh with these old books that's excellent thank you so much Jason and um I think on top of that there's this element that comes across in your work in Lewis Broadley of going Beyond Nostalgia progressivism presentism seeing the big picture I think you de you demonstrate that in a parf of Manor how he ties together the past the present and the future um I wonder if you might tell us a bit more about that and how we might understand the kind of anagog anagogical spirit of his world especially for me as a fulfillment of the great Classics that he surrounded himself with in part because that was maybe one of my bugaboos before I became a believ in Christian I had a conversation with Tom Holland and he was worried about the fate of Virgil on some of these figures and um this how that links in with this kind of long Middle Ages that you've spoken about and how took up this this project that in a wonderful conversation with Mark Vernon you said he built upon what beus had started and it seems that that's something that he'd be proud of does that make sense yes yeah no I think I think Lewis did think of himself as a modern British pothus and um and what what I mean by that is that he regularly jokingly half jokingly um not jokingly calls uh moderns machine using Tech you know technology obsessed moderns than barbarians and and if they are The Barbarians then Lewis is the boethus who's sort of you know desperately trying to save as much of the past as possible and so rather than using these kind of like razor sharp precisions and writing uh lengthy disquisitions on you know the the difference between I don't know fifth century stoical influences and sixth Century neoplatonic influences on so and so so and so Lewis wanted just to talk about what they all had in common I think he felt a sense of urgency that um like boethus did he beus just didn't have a lot of time while he was sitting in you know in prison waiting for his his execution analogously Lewis yeah but I think in terms of this anagogical Cosmos um I write about this and um you know and compare it to a cathedral um Cathedrals are very exciting for Americans um because we don't have many of them um in fact um Europeans say we have none right we just have as out of says dubious imitations um and so yeah they're they're very they're very moving to us and um you know the medievals felt of the the sort of natural world that it has this kind of mysterious harmonic order and then the walls have become so thin that they're translucent and there's this kind of Light which is coming in and Lewis just loved that idea and I think um I think he thought uh two things about it one it's probably as a recovering cartisian as a recovering modernist Lewis like me um he thought that uh he thought that if we could that we could probably recover more aspects of it than we thought that we know that in modernity we have been laid under this this spell he called it of evil enchantment for several centuries such that we might even be coming into contact with Supernatural realities I mean there's a good chance we're surrounded by them right now that there's a sort of field of invisible Glory which uh you know which obviously we can't see through with with physical invisible eyes but uh but pure hearts that have gone through a process of and have learned to love and thus become like God are better in tune with these things Lewis I think thought that that was probably truer than a bunch of moderns knew but he also had this other interesting answer in which I jokingly call it Nostalgia for the future in which he points out that you know what if you lived in the Middle Ages and if you were in some sense lived in a a porous a spiritually porous World in which uh I think of sort of you know Paul Kings North right you were close to Sacred Wells and Relics and right and um and you could you thought that you were catching glimpses of the of the harmony of the Spheres the Moni Lewis thought well you know what it might actually be spiritually dangerous for you to be in such a spiritually soaked world fascinatingly because you might actually love these kind of like lower level uh manifestations of uh of the Divine rather than God himself and thus I think Lewis thought almost like our American writer flry o Conor that the whole world was going through a Dark Night of the Soul not just a few Saints but the whole world but by entering into this and this is connected to my to my mysticism book this is where the mysticism book begins but by entering into this spiritual desert um in which the consolations of the closeness to the Divine are deprived to us that it it gives us this uh this sacred restlessness in which our longing for the consummation at the end of time is greater and thus maybe we're sort of you know maybe our medieval ancestors and our Renaissance ancestors were more content with their Earthly lives whereas I think it's difficult to be content in the modern world it's easy to be distracted but I think uh but I think this sort of sense of restlessness and this sort of sense of Anguish right you you know from the age of Edvard Mo can this scream until now right um D we say that's our spiritual gift dissatisfaction restlessness a sense of um a sense of incompletion I think so in that case that that makes us nostalgic for a future reality as opposed to merely thinking man if I could have been you know there for the the crowning of Charlamagne in 800 ad right then things would have been good right and I mean I certainly I certainly have that type of conservative Nostalgia But ultimately um and and and token writes about this on Fair stories right he says what they're all after he's something which is older than Antiquity itself such as something which is on the other side of time and it seems old to us not because it's chronologically dated but because it's coming from a different dimension and that's has the sense of antiquity well that's beautiful thank you Jason and the do Tales beautifully with what I've been reading from you probably know this and I'm don't know if I'm pronouncing the name of it Eugene Ren stock hussy or Hy this really ectic fascinating a kind of writer philosopher all sorts it brings together so many different genres but he constantly refers to this kind of eschatological significance of the Christian life and it's it's inform and how we live very much dayt day it's really powerful stuff and real antidote again to that kind if bad kind of nostalgia and I love your your term Nostalgia for I think that's powerful but um I want to get back to leis actually and ask about there's something that I think is most impressive in your work there's a beautiful article to about Bob Dylan versus much modern music that maybe we can get into later but you use musical metaphors to create effect in this work that we're mening this Louis work and elsewhere can you tell us a bit about that and this move from the symphony to the machine as you imag my Paul friend Paul Kings North the Machine age of the day and how that helps us to understand Lewis and his continued significance thing yes oh I I feel like that's the nicest compliment I've ever received that um to know that people like my music metaphors um I think I love my music metaphor so much um because I'm a failed a failed musician and you know uh quit piano as soon as I could to play baseball um drive cars and do you know stupid things um and but I think if I I think if there were such a thing as transmigration of Souls and I as far as I I don't think there is but if there were such a thing and if I live this life well I think I'll come back as a Pianist um a concert pianist um but yeah I think yes I'm very much in love with uh um with these M musical metaphors um and I think um there's this there's this wonderful wonderful book which I can only understand about uh one page in every 10 um called box pattern and Mozart's Arrow which talks about the aesthetic effects that modernity had on music and I think if you if you trace these things out longer and longer it gets more and more obvious um if you listen to something like aam's uh Deo gracias uh a Canon for 36 voices or Thomas talis's um spim and Alum you know a motet for 42 40 different voices and these uh uh these eight choirs of of of five that were meant to sing in the around then you see in some sense right this this music doesn't have a plot the sort of like you know this the goal of of of beauty was to overcome time to spatialize time as uh vasin says in um in lus uh to to create eternity moments in which we finally and I think this is so telling for us for us you know hyperactive moderns which we can just get off the treadmill for a little bit right this sort of like stream of Consciousness r ring on to my next activity we think of ourselves as kind of like machines whose goal is to be as efficient as possible to create as much work units as possible and this is what I call um with my students the the internalization of the mechanized world picture that in some sense that we are uh um an f equals ma culture to uh to quote the the famous uh formula by Newton and thus we think of and Lewis and this is also just Lewis and his uh his Cambridge address in 1954 the descript temporum we think of ourselves in terms of machines leis says that we've now lived with machines for so long that it's it's it's snuck into the DNA of our language our metaphors and thus controls our feelings about ourselves our success in our life right I mean we want to be productive in life we want to maximize our potential we go to human resource departments um and if you know we we revert to default modes and um don't have bandwidth to come things the the level of sort of like mechanized metaphor that's moved into our vocabulary is astonishing when you begin to kind of count these things up um and so our medieval ancestors in some sense were the exact opposite they didn't want to hit the accelerator and accomplish more work within t squared but they wanted to experience what boethus called the simultaneous experience of the fullness of life the simultaneous experience of the fullness of Life eternity in which for a for that's how he defines eternity and I think I think we sort of sense this as moderns right um that we have uh who knows even now perhaps we have these types of moments in which we recognize that um something from something from outside of the simple Dimensions is beginning to move in and I wish I were better at actually resting in it in it Lighting in it uh praising it worshiping in it and moving into this sort of state which I well your whole podcast in which I have more Christ in which I can sort of you know stand in that in in firm steadfast stability um I think that's that's what our medieval ancestors thought that their art was for that's why they built Cathedrals and wrote poems and created what we would badly call Symphonies um because they're not really Symphonies um because they work differently the Music Works differently the music is meant to freeze time um as opposed to hasten through it in light of that if you I mean the obvious thing and I have written about this uh uh if you look at you know Rihanna um this is what you came for I've WR I've written on her and compared her to mendleson people think my my buddy James thinks it's unfair um but even if you even within the sort of domain of the of of classical music right and someone like John Adams right a short ride how's it Go a short ride on a fast machine isn't that what it is um or his fearful symmetries the whole thing is basically just just pounding forward within time when you realize that you realize that our our medieval ancestors had a type of wisdom a type of experience which has become preciously rare to us that's powerful thank you so much Jason so um I'd love to dive in there and ask you give Bob Dylan actually just as a broad question but I don't want to go off the the book so much so I I'll keep it I'll try and re it in so the next question I have pertaining to LS specifically is something I can only really ask very few people and yourself being an expert in all these wonderful classical books I've been blessed to to get to know Spencer claven who's doing wonderful work in this area too and his favorite intellectual of the 20th century is Lewis so I've got to ask him a little bit too but it's a blessing to have you here so as a broad point maybe H and as an an apologist how does Lewis go beyond that kind of mere prepositional Christianity that that became dominant maybe with modernity and uh I think here in terms of Plato's kind of tripartite structure of the soul and how does he speak to these different elements of human beings and what do you find encouraging about that then yes what a an amazing question um well I think it's I think you know one of the terms that maybe we're looking for is this idea of an argument from desire and I think it's Lewis's way of resurrecting a very old and very interesting idea um the American philosopher PL uh plantinga um picking up on Calvin you know talks about it as the sense of the Divine the sensus divinitus um and I mean the more I read the more I real more I think that this is just the premodern world and the idea is something like this is that if um if there is a God then nothing in creation can exist apart from him uh therefore uh that in our best selves our truest selves there's there's still a connection to him because we can't entirely Escape him we we if if God not that this could happen but if God in some sense went out of existence everything would just disappear right um it's not like if God died as n had hoped that we'd continue to live on without him no we would just disappear because he's the ground of our being um if and if that's the case then there's a piece of the Soul which is aware of that even now um and the Ancients called it noose in Greek and uh in the Latin tradition like in boist they seemingly call intellectus or intelligencia um but this is the best part of the Soul it's the secret part of the Soul which is already in communication um with God okay that's the medieval idea so I think that someone like Lewis thinks that most of his job as an apologist is to clear away the rubble um in which I can uh I can just acknowledge the sort of Yearning of a heart for yearning of the heart for the Divine and perhaps uh his that he's presently haunting hting me and that's why I mean a lot of Al Lewis's apologetics is very moral which is kind of interesting right um and that as moderns we think that you know let me do the syllogisms let me run my logical permutations and do my positivistic science and then I'll make a decision right for us sort of fact and value are um are are separated right as soon as I factually determine what is the case I will choose it with my will that will be my value right um for the medievals and I think Le has picked up on something really interesting is that um because truth is the pooma of being is richer and more abundant than I can fit into the mere rasassination of my ordinary language then morality is important for me coming to perceive that richness fullness and abundance of being thus for Lewis I think as the apologist you're talking about sort of um weaving together the parts of the Soul um that is my Pursuit Of God can't merely be um a rational Pursuit it needs to be that but if it's only that it probably will fail I'll always be sort of flipping back and forth as he says from looking at things from below and looking at things from above and he says that in transposition and they're both compelling explanations what I also need to do is to be pure uh and to be generous and to be loving and to be less selfish and um to be less avaricious and and as the ancient said when you become like God you will see him I father zosima zosa says that as well in the brothers katav right when you practice active love you will have the consolation of knowing him who is love so I think I think Lewis thinks of something like that and then the experience of beauty as this incredible this incredible opportunity because we can't explain it right we can't to use him as a musical metaphor right we can't explain why the opening bars of uh gustoff M's First Symphony are so haunting right Plato says that when you encounter Beauty um you know whether in artistic or uh human form that the soul Sprouts wings and begins to flutter Sur that's what we experience we were talking about the the landscape of Wyoming earlier surely that's what we experience in Landscapes like that of Wyoming or um the late string quartets of Beethoven or um or these ancient Cathedrals or when we finally understand it Dante's comedy right that uh these Beauty moments are in a way better indications at the fullness of reality than the system of arguments is and I think and I think Lewis sort of in his uh right brained learner kind of way inted that this was at least one of the apologists task was just clearing away the rubble such that um we stopped for a brief while asking is there a God and reconceived the desire to discover that there is one that's beautiful thank you Jason and um another element of your work I think ties in with I figure I mentioned to you Dr Michael Martin who's doing some really interesting stuff and retrieving the weird in the Christian Life and so on is Tom the history in Tom Holland has mentioned this and others have been encouraged and even coming from that kind of secularist background although he's a lot closer to the Christian faith now if not sensibly Christian and um they've been encouraging Christians to lean into the the we weird of the Christian faith and so on I suppose from your perspective why should that be the case why should we Embrace that and what are some of the ways that you've done so and how has that changed your life then right yeah is that for question ask yeah it's it's a cool question um I think uh Christians need to look different than car driving shopping mall buying Amazon purchasing earbud listening technology saturated um you know protocol following our our colleagues in the world right who think that professionalism is the highest virtue um I don't think that driving cars is wicked I don't think that shopping at s you know super uh supermarkets or uh shopping malls is you know evil but I think I think there it's very much detached from a from a great sense of fullness and I mean one of the joys of being a human being is um well as Lewis might say is that it's transpositional that is these these ordinary um daily acts of sort of exchange between each other can be elevated over the course of time from a mere active communication to to one of communion and we can build these thick and rich communities and I think um I think that Christianity um with its roots in the premodern world knows that and feels that in its bones and it's um and and thus I think for us to yes so I don't know are we weird um I mean well maybe that's the funny thing right we're we're weird by uh secularist standards which believes that we should just get over our fear of replacing all of our body parts with you know you know transhumanist utopian dreams and upload our Consciousness to right uh you know to clouds and stuff like that yeah yeah we yeah if that's what being weird is yeah I want to be weird you know because I want it's going to sound strange um I want I want to be close to I want to be close to my Lord uh every now and then especially when I'm reading a bunch of St Francis I even want to offer up my bodily ailments for him my sicknesses for him uh and Francis you know St Francis can even sometimes make you look forward to death that this sort of like great transitional moment which we can finally consummate the process of becoming uh becoming near him and that's remember toen at the beginning the S marilan says that alvatar says I will give them a gift and it will be death that in some sense part of the moral process and I think Homer is on to this already in the Odyssey 700 BC I think part of the part of the pain of being mortal and part of the the magical gift is that we don't get to live forever we don't get to live in perpetuity um we we have a very finite life and so how we spend our hours how we spend our days how we spend our minutes maybe even some sometimes seconds is a precious gift because we choose this and not something else and thus with our sort of like intention and our time we can we can give the gift of presence and and uh an Incredible Gift of Love and it is a gift if we if we think about how you know if we number our days all right as the psalmist says if we count our days so in what ways am I weird um my teenage girls 16 and 14 don't have cell phones don't even have cell phones they don't have iPhones um now at their little school about 50% of the kids don't have phones which is rather unusual um but that's pretty weird in our in our day um I I I don't have a problem with social media um I think it can become problematic but just for me uh for my own personal mind because I tend to be a high anxiety kind of guy I I'm not on any social media whatsoever um I think if I were I'd be trying to manipulate it and I'd try to be like selling my books and I would find myself me personally this is the the depths of my depravity now confessed on International uh transatlantic uh podcast I I think I would I would be making posts um in order to make myself seem intelligent and interesting and deep so that people would buy my books in other words I would be practicing vain Glory which Dante describes in in in FBO 22 um in order to pursue avaricious desire desires um so I am I myself I'm not on social media I'm glad that other people are um I I don't read the news I can't handle it I get deeply anxious about it and I just I worry about all kinds of things and so um I have a very I have a very slow life in a way in which I I listen to a lot of books as I'm walking or driving around town I spend I probably spend more time with uh with ancient authors than modern authors um and so I think in way I think my life feels very slow and uh my family's life my family life feels very slow in that sense but not in the sense of dull or empty but in the s in a sense of like abundant spaciousness um we eat together we uh we pray together we read together we spend time I have three big kids in three little kids and the the big kids help us take care of the little kids um we spend a lot of time together and I think in in in a way at least by modern standards our life is very medieval in that sense that we spend a lot of time to with each other and enjoy each other's presence I mean obviously not without conflict right um and I spent a lot of time uh comparatively speaking uh attending lurgical Services trying to pray uh trying to learn how to pray uh which I think is uh a difficult art um so that's pretty weird isn't it I guess you say what's weird it's how slow my life is but I suppose now as I'm sort of you know externally processing this I suppose maybe I'm trying to do you know a use an American grading system in a c minus kind of way right sort of you know average-ish kind of way um I'm I'm trying to practice practice spaciousness I'm trying to realize eternity even in the course of my of my fleeting uh fleeting moments and uh and yeah I think when you I think you could almost come up could come up with a formula right does this activity help me bring spacious abundance and fullness of life if so it is good if not it is to be avoided I think I just played J Paul King sorth by the way he says he says something very much like that in one of my favorite articles by him that's powerful thank you so much Jason and I appreciate how inte gred um you're living out the Christian life and that's something I love in Lewis too and what you're doing with your family and so on I think is phenomenal from my perspective I'm curious now in line with what you've said how that scales up that we as Christians live this alternative modernity or there's probably better ways a good phrase it and um find those CH distinctly Christian rhythms and so on that you're hting it and uh I'm particularly interested especially given your expertise in this area how that ties in with classical education and schools because there seems to be a lot of good stuff in America with homeschooling and so on and then seems to be good classical schools seems to be Charlotte Mason enthusiasts I think it's wonderful stuff and that's inspiring to me but there's not much of that in Ireland unfortunately the Catholic schools or Church of England Church of Ireland schools are still much just prepositional Christian but that hasn't informed their whole perspective and I'd be interested in hear some maybe advice from you for those of us across the water here and um what you would like to see in that regard that um say for classical schools for young people over here because from my perspective I would love to be part of setting up uh CS Lewis classical school in Ireland and I've been in touch with a few folks about the possibility of that so God willing down the line we could do that but but I just love to hear some of your thoughts on that and how that pays in with what you're doing with your family and so on does that make sense yeah well that's beautiful I think um and again I I'm just not entirely sure about the the legal structures in Ireland um but it seems uh you know maybe one of the virtues America has loads of vices but maybe but maybe the one of the virtues of this country is that kind of like uh Reckless entrepreneurial activity if it's good I will try it yeah which means a sort of a sort of a contentment with um and maybe this is harder for a European to imagine right that uh an American is willing to you know set up shop in a a strip mall made of you know a Cheesy metal building um that you know we rent for $400 a month and we're willing to start with you know 16 students and a lot of these things bust but then some of them actually make it and I think that sort of you know that kind of uh the love of that which is good uh can be very compelling and very beautiful you don't need the infrastructure to do it you don't need to have uh an old school built of stone right there's so many American schools including uh where my college I used to teach wyom Catholic college that is like a a soul in search of a body um and but you know this what we have is is communion faculty members who love students and students who love the faculty member and people who have conversations and talk we have the the beating heart of of an educational Endeavor so maybe that's at least you know one one um one thought the second thought is that you know these days the school is the modern is a modern Piaza right it's where it's where we come together it's where we you know spend time uh and commune with each other um and so it has this incredible social function um well beyond the education of the children I think any classical school should uh um should double down on its Latin being a Latin teacher um and should should teach Latin not as utilitarian activity to you improve your vocabulary for your test scores and your standardized exams but should do it because is Rich and complicated and beautiful I think uh a classical school should Endeavor to have the children learn as much by heart and my memory as possible to sing as much as possible um that if they could sing you know the 20 two best Latin hymns by memory that's a goal they should have they should have lyrical poetry memorized um such that you can give them any word and they could finish it um I had this incredible experience uh once and which I was reading Brothers karamat of and I just finished this chapter which grushenka tells the story of The Onion right um in which the story goes there once upon a time was a miserly old lady and she was going to go to hell and one day a beggar came by and said can I have some food and she Saidi guess you can have that onion over there and that was the only good deed she did the entirety of her life and then she went to hell and she was burning in the Lake of Fire The Story Goes and yet our lady uh on her behalf pointed out to the judge the great judge himself that she had done one kind deed and so they agreed that they would they would do a test and an angel brings down an onion to the Lake of Fire and says if you hold on to this I will pull you out so she begins to you know be pulled out by this onion um and but the other Souls realize that this is their ticket out so they grab onto her ankles and other Souls grab onto those ankles and like a a paper clip being pulled out of a box is creating this chain of souls then it looks like the whole Lake of Fire is going to be emptied out until the miserly old lady looks down and an Envy says this is my onion get off shakes her leg and the stem of the onion snaps and they all fall back down into hell um I tell this story because I just read it and um one my kids were fighting and uh my my 14-year-old was being rude to to her brother and I I was about to go into like a dad sort of fashion lecture mode then I just stopped for a moment I said can I just tell you a story and I told that story and when I concluded she said all right Dad I'll go up oliz to Johnny and I thought this is great I didn't even draw the moral I mean maybe the moral is rather obvious that's what um but I didn't draw the moral I didn't preach I didn't reduce it to a PowerPoint show with bullet points I just had a story and I thought how many other occasions of life if I had preloaded stories I'd be wise I'd be a man of depth I'd actually be capable of ministering to my children to and to my friends because I'd have have stories for them and this is starting to get really Irish here um but what if we began to think of uh of Education as um equipping equipping our children's minds and our own minds with the furniture of story and with song and with lyric there are other things too of course but I think I think this is I think this is a beautiful thing which will enable if if we can if I can declare this the theme of the of the podcast having having arisen emerged naturally this will this will be the thing which will enable us to uh practice engage in practices of spaciousness um right in which we won't be giving that type of advice that feels that it um you know the sort of advice you sometimes get from your mom and it makes you want to do the exact opposite right you shouldn't do that honey if you do you'll get a disease like well fine run the risk right but in some sense like you know the you know the good of story is that it carries reality in its complexity and his difficulty and his Beauty and the sort of as you said earlier U Marcus and the sort of like uh the the the tripartite soul woven back together I think that could be a guiding Vision uh for uh for classical schools both here and across the Atlantic I man that's a beautiful place to finish for this evening I think Jason thank you so much I have so many more questions but I'm cous of your time and God willing we can get together again um in the future where online or in person as I was hinted that before we started recording so hopefully we can make it happen um just to close then is there I suppose is there anything else that you're working on presently that you'd like to tell my viewers or listeners about and where they can find out more about you and your work yeah sure yeah um I have a website it's uh it don't don't criticize me for my social media diet tribe and then I possess a website it h it helps me with practices of spaciousness that's what I tell myself well it's a modern day business card I have a website it's jasonm baxter.com jasonm backer.com and uh here in the states I sell I don't I can't ship abroad because it's too expensive but here in the states I I sell my books uh to my readers and uh sign them and my readers get all excited because I pack them in whatever lecture notes I've just finished or whatever poem I've just annotated or I don't give them student papers um but I just you know grab my other and sort of pack them that and the readers think that's just brilliant apparently Jeff BOS doesn't do that for his his customers um but Jason M Baxter I have a I have uh some popular articles some some things which have appeared on First Things uh some writing about uh about technology and uh not just the relevance but the urgency of uh of the humanities which you can find uh on my website and currently I'm doing two things um well doing a million things but two of the things I'm doing um I have just uh submitted to my publisher to Angelico press a rough draft of Dante's Inferno new translation with an introduction which uh I don't know if it's good but I think it's the best thing I've ever written uh introduction to Dante and I uh I wrote it from the heart um and that Inferno translation will be out in March through Angelico press um and hopefully I'll have time to make an audible recording of it which will ease the the delivery for uh for transatlantic readers um I'm also working on a book for Word on Fire um tentatively called uh father zima's little way uh doki's icon and it's about the role of uh of Byzantine and Eastern spirituality in brothers karasov and dov's confrontation with modernity wow most look forward to it and I'm really glad to hear that you're involved with word on fire I've got to know a few of the folks there and I think they're doing wonderful stuff speaking about beauty and leading with the beautiful I appreciate that thank you so much I appreciate your time Jason it's been wonderful to speak with you and um God bless you and that your continued work thanks [Music] Marcus [Applause] [Music] going

Channel: More Christ

Views: 1,133

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Id: OkIXtBP6tlw

Length: 52min 43sec (3163 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023