Iconography, Symbolism, and Meaning (w/ Jonathan Pageau)

well hey everyone what is up welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is austin this is gospel simplicity a place where we're passionate about the beautiful simplicity transformative power of the gospel i am so glad that you're here today hey if you're like the vast majority of people who watch these videos and have not yet subscribed to the channel first of all i want to say you're welcome here i'm so glad you're here but if you're enjoying it i just might recommend that maybe you click that subscribe button and if you're feeling wild and crazy and want to live on the edge today click that notification bell as well that's helpful not only to me but it helps push these videos out to more people so if you think they're helpful and you think more people should see them doing those things will help that happen today i've got an interview for you that i think you're really really going to enjoy it's with jonathan pajot he's an orthodox icon carver but he also talks about meaning symbolism patterns all of these really interesting things he's a brilliant guy it's a far reaching conversation i think you're going to really enjoy it but before we get to it i want to say a quick thank you to my patreon subscribers and march buyers who make these videos and this channel possible especially to my patrons those people who give monthly to this channel thank you so much seriously it means so much to me if you would like to support this channel and get some fun perks like merge and early access to things and exclusive access to academic content and all types of fun stuff be sure to go to patreon.com gospelsimplicity or to gospelssimplicity.com donite donate and check it out i'd also like to say a thank you to our sponsor for today kindred kindred is a ministry that exists to help people reclaim sacred time with god and their daily lives they do this by creating beautiful bibles complete with full page photos beautiful text layouts that will cause you to slow down read a bit differently and really get a lot more out of your bible reading if you've heard me saying this and you haven't checked them out yet please go check them out i think you'll enjoy them kindred apostle.com and use the promo code gospel 10 for 10 off your order with all that being said i hope you all enjoy the video [Music] well hey everyone today i am joined by jonathan pagio jonathan pagio is a french canadian icon carver public speaker and youtuber exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our very experience of the world how these patterns emerge and come together manifesting in religion art and even in popular culture he's also the editor of the orthodox arts journal and host of the symbolic world blog and podcast jonathan thank you so much for being here today it's great to be with you i'm really excited to have you here and i first came across your work through your iconography i'd love to know how did you get into doing that it doesn't seem like a skill that you might pick up just in the daily patterns of your life so how did that come about well i studied art in college and kind of contemporary art and i came up i came from an evangelical background and so there was kind of a struggle i would say in terms of being an evangelical wanting to make visual art but also being a christian and wanting to make contemporary art and it really led me into a spiritual crisis that was it was just a spiritual crisis that was boiling so all of that kind of crisis led me into both discovering kind of the symbolic world in terms of reading the church fathers and discovering that but at the same time discovering the ancient art of the church so kind of this whole medieval synthesis which was developed you know i always say in the year 1000 you would have seen similar images all over the world if you had gone into a church so discovering that language and really falling in love with it falling in love with it became a vehicle for me to practice my art in a way that was participatory and was you know engaged in the life of the church let's say that's really neat and you know i your art is beautiful and i'll be leaving links to it down in the description i feel like i could feel a whole hour just asking you like how on earth does this even happen because you do it with carving which is really unique but i i think this despite myself i'm going to set that conversation aside a bit for today because i really want to get into kind of like the your work with meaning and symbolism and everything but you talked about this crisis of art and evangelical in your evangelical upbringing your love for art but how did those things go together and i'd love to know like what what are icons not just as in their pictures but what are they at a deeper level and what do they communicate about the religious communities that use them well for the first thing you could say about the icon is that it's a tribute it's a tribute to the incarnation in the sense that it's a it's a token of the incarnation there was a big conflict in the church about iconography and the to the conclusion to which it came was that we need to be able to represent christ because to not represent his image is to deny an aspect of his incarnation and so the image it's kind of like the image of of god and man was restored in christ and so we participate in that through imagery that's let's say the theological justification for it but then in terms of how it actually participates in the life of the church it becomes a visual way of representing uh the the analogies the typology all of these structures that are there in scripture then appear in visual forms in in the iconography and the iconography is also not just on its own but it's related to architecture and so the spatial image is also represented in the church so different parts of the church will take on different images and so it what it really becomes is like a cosmic language a visual language of of christianity uh and one of the ways in which the church kind of participates and celebrates god is now through these these images which which show us christ would show us you know the the mother of god the saints worshiping god and so there's this kind of this whole this whole process of in which we're kind of gathered in with all these stories and with all these saints into our worship of god that's really interesting and i like the language you used there and it's very in line with your work of this cosmic imagery and it reminded me of the russian emissaries that were sent to kind of you know find the religion that story of going to hagia sophia not knowing if they were in heaven or on earth and it really does communicate something i knew the first time i went into an orthodox church you feel like you're in a very different space and you mentioned that you know you were an artist but you weren't sure how this was going to meld with your evangelical faith when you were able to put those things together inside orthodoxy what did that do for you as an artist and as a follower of jesus like how how was that synthesis just on a personal level it was very transformative i would say not just as an artist but as a person because one of the problems let's say the the fragmentation that i was feeling or the schism that i was feeling in terms of my faith and art and also the contemporary world was ended up being more of a cosmic question or a question of world views let's say and so what i found in discovering traditional art and this language you could say that's not just in visuals but it's also there in the hymns and in the liturgical year this whole dance you could say this whole liturgical dance um of christianity really helped me enter into a world view you could say it like it feels like moderate a lot of modern christians they have a materialist worldview basically and on top of this materialist worldview they kind of slap on a story of of god who became man and was crucified on the cross but sometimes that doesn't it doesn't jive together very well whereas what i was discovering in the art and in this whole let's say this whole way of living was a way to for christianity to become the lens by which i look at the world rather than you know putting on a story on top of a scientific materialist lens i can't wait to dive into that a bit more as we go on that kind of just veneer of christianity that we paint over our pretty much naturalistic materialistic you know kind of skeptical outlook um i think there's so much there and i really appreciate what you have to say on that before we jump away from icons and just imagery though i'd love to ask what is it so i mean you talk about how you know when you became orthodox and you were able to have this synthesis and the way it really transformed your worldview i guess on the the flip side of that is what are communities losing when they kind of deny imagery or icons in these ways i mean throughout history we've seen iconoclastic movements and i think for some people looking back seeing the amount of just tension that was around these scenarios might seem like there was this much tension over church decor but there's there's more going on here and so what is at stake i think what's at stake at least from the traditional point of view what's at stake is the fullness of the incarnation because usually the way that the reason why people oppose iconography is because of the second commandment which is somewhat understandable because it says don't make images and don't worship them and don't bow down before them and the orthodox we do bow down before images and so the question is what's going on there like why why is this happening and you the way to really understand it is to understand that the incarnation is an answer to the second commandment if once we on once we see that all of scripture is speaking about christ ultimately that the reason for every law for everything in scripture is christ then we understand we can kind of start to perceive that the reason why there was this commandment was actually bringing us towards christ and so then once we have the incarnation once we have the image of god in man restored and the image of god appearing before the apostles then it becomes like a celebration and so that's i think is one of the things you could say is missing is this kind of celebratory aspect of how we're all participating together in this kind of cosmic movement up towards god and that's what ends up happening in in modern type of christianity that tend to want to eliminate all ritual eliminate all uh imagery eliminate anything which is formal because they feel like it becomes an idol uh from the traditional point of view it rather becomes a celebration it's like the entire creation now is is coming together and celebrating this new world that christ has inaugurated and so i think that that's what ends up being missing is that you could say it this way is that you're going to celebrate no matter what and you're going to have patterns in your life no matter what so if those patterns aren't based on your worship of god if you don't follow the liturgical year if you don't have these images that you celebrate you're going to end up with advertisement you're going to end up with you know like uh going shopping on saturday those will be the things that will punctuate your days and punctuate your your time and punctuate space but they won't be related to how we're together in worship so it's like you can't avoid it it's just you can't avoid celebrating it's just depending on what you're gonna it's gonna dictate what you're gonna celebrate let's say yeah that's a that's a good way of putting that and i really enjoyed the way that you described kind of the relationship to the incarnation i imagine this harkens back to your previous comments as well about kind of this materialistic view of when we get rid of images maybe we're kind of denying even our own embodiment in some ways there but i'd love to know so you i mean you gave the the reasoning there and i i find it to be compelling reasoning if i was at school with my normal backdrop there'd be icons behind me but i'd love to know like was that difficult for you or did that come easily was it a wrestling to get to the point where you could say you know what i feel good about imagery in churches was that a process or how did that go um i think for me it wasn't difficult in the sense that it's almost as if it was something that i was yearning for and i didn't know and so once i realized that that i had this yearning then once i discovered it i just was fell in love i mean i was when i before just while i was a catacummin i mean i was just a voracious i would go to the library and just take these stacks of books of medieval imagery and just spent all day you know trying to imbibe this language and trying to kind of make it my own and so no it wasn't difficult at all i think that it i it's funny because i think as a protestant i think that coming from a protestant background the the veneration of the saints and especially the veneration of the mother of god is probably the is a was a bigger obstacle for me at first emotionally you could say uh almost like as a like this emotional reaction um but that didn't last very long it really kind of slowly faded away as i saw how it all fit together in this uh you know when i realized that we venerate each other and that you know it's like we kiss each other and we ask forgiveness of each other and this whole sense we ask others to pray for us and so i realized that it's all this it's just the same kind of things that that uh even i did as an evangelical but now i understand that it's just one cosmic dance like there isn't you know there aren't two churches there aren't two bodies there's just one body and mysteriously kind of eschatologically is all participating in this one this one movement towards god let's say and so once i got that then it was then it i was fine that's that's interesting to hear thank you for that and you talk again about kind of mystery in this cosmic uh view of things which i think you draw out well in your podcast which is called the symbolic world and you do lots of work helping people uh modern and postmodern people understand the ancient world and symbolism what inspired you to start talking about ancient symbolism well i think it was really in my 20s while i was in college there was i really did have a crisis and it and it was a crisis in meaning and it was one that i wasn't alone my brother who's a little younger than i we both kind of had the christ at the same time and we started reading and reading and reading and we i don't know it's hard to explain why we both had a capacity to intuit these patterns and uh but once we started to see or to to intuit these these patterns in the world then it really became like a it became like a language for us and so you know i can't help but see the world that way anymore i i just see the world through meaning and uh i see the world in patterns and so it's it's it's i unders i kind of sympathize i understand because i'm surrounded by modern people who can't who can't see it but it's difficult to explain why that happened there's something i think there's a grace there i don't know how to explain it that all of a sudden i could i could perceive these patterns you talk about patterns a lot in your work and i think most people have some idea of what a pattern is you know if i was wearing a striped shirt they might say that has a striped pattern on it or you do things repeatedly and they say oh he has a pattern of doing things this way but just so everyone's kind of on the same page when you're talking about seeing patterns in the world what is that you're getting at and maybe if there's an example that would kind of illumine this hey we'll be right back to the interview but first i want to tell you about another sponsor for today and that is faithful counseling faithful counseling is a group of christian counselors that exist to help you get the help you need you know one of the first youtube videos i ever made was called you can have jesus and a therapist too and what i wanted to do in that video was draw out the fact that so many people are struggling with mental health and the last thing we want to do is make it more difficult for people to reach out to get the help they need by creating this stigma around it it's something that i'm really passionate about and think we need to end in christian circles and that's why i'm so excited to be partnering with faithful counseling their counselors all will be counseling from a christian perspective and you can connect with them from any country in the world they have counselors that speak many different languages and hey if it's important to you to have a counselor from your specific tradition or background they can do their part to try to pair you up with one of them as well all of their counselors are licensed with over 3 000 hours of experience you can connect with these counselors in a variety of ways for in fact you can do video sessions phone calls live chat or messaging all of the messaging is secure if it's between scheduled testing sessions you will receive a response within 24 to 48 hours if this is interesting to you if you think this would be helpful for you or maybe a loved one i'd encourage you to go to faithfulcounseling.com gospel simplicity if you do that first of all you'll get 10 off your order and you will be matched with the counselor in less than 24 hours again that's faithfulcounseling.com gospel simplicity to be matched with the counselor in less than 24 hours and get 10 off your first month faithful counseling costs 260 dollars per month which gets you unlimited messaging with your counselor in four 30-minute sessions but again if you go to faithfulcounseling.com gospel simplicity you'll get 10 off that first month lastly faithful counseling is not a crisis line if you are currently experiencing suicidal thoughts or ideation please reach out to a crisis line or hotline you can find one of them at www.crisistextline.org please do so you can reach out you do not have to do this alone well thank you all so much and i will let you get back to the video but if you want to check them out again faithfulcounseling.com gospel simplicity the link is in my bio and in the pinned comment well back to the interview so the notion of pattern i understand that use of pattern it's not a completely bogus use of pattern but we need to understand pattern as the kind of invisible structure which underlies something and it makes you able to see that different things are also one thing so if i for me to be able to recognize that a face is a face it means that i'm able to recognize across different faces that i'm looking at the same thing or something which has the same essence so that's what i try to talk about when i talk about a pattern um it's a causal it's it's it's similar to kind of plato's idea of forms it's like a causal essence that then it joins together multiplicity into one but the the basic pattern is something like the pattern of of creation it's the pattern we find in the the first chapters of genesis which are really drawing you a map of how uh reality works and so this idea of the the garden at the top of a mountain and heaven above the earth below and this hierarchy of being which is from the garden down into down all the way to the flood you could say that you find in the first chapters of genesis that is really let's say something which draws the pattern out of being so what happens is once you get the sense of this mountain you know with the highest point where god meets where god meets adam and eve and then when they fall they kind of tumble and get chased away there are these layers they have to put on layers and then there's a cherub that protects the door so you have these layers of being once you get that pattern you realize oh wait a minute oh so the temple is the same thing the temple has the same pattern as that pattern the the when moses goes up the mountain and encounters god it's the same pattern again and so you start to see that this actually keeps repeating itself over and over and you realize that all of scripture is just a kind of laying out of this basic pattern of reality and so scripture becomes like this giant map for for the world so once you get it once you kind of see the world through that basic pattern then you can actually look at anything right you can look at you can watch a marvel movie or you can look at a novel or you can look at political events and you can interpret them as just different aspects of this main pattern of the world which is the one we see in uh in the first chapters of genesis which actually culminate i would say which culminate into christ really christ answers a lot of the puzzles that are there in the first chapters of genesis but it's still all there it's it's already all there in the in the beginning of genesis what i really like about that is well there's many things but i think today so often when we're you know people who are followers of jesus and we're trying to present scripture to people the question at least that i've always grown up hearing by communicators and teachers is how do we make this relevant to people and the you know next step of that is usually some point of application so if we're looking at genesis it's how is genesis relevant to people well what is it teaching you to do and i'm not trying to say that the bible doesn't teach us to do things but i think this is a interesting way of connecting the ancient world with our own world through that means of pattern and i know this is a big part of your work and how have you seen that kind of play out for people as they see these texts which i mean the average person doesn't go around reading you know multiple thousand-year-old texts in their daily like it's not an usual thing and i think we have to recognize that as christians especially in an increasingly post-christian culture but how how does this aspect of pattern help people realize and i hate to use the word relevance but maybe the importance of scripture to their own life well the first can help you do is to understand what what is most important and so the the one of the problems we've had is we've actually kind of inverted importance in in terms of our social narrative where if you read script scripture is based on human experience it's based on the human point of view so you have this experience of the world and i my contention is that that's the first place like that's the first meaning all the other meanings like the scientific meanings all of these layers of atoms and and molecules and or all these quasars or whatever that are up there that i'm not saying they're not real but they're very set they're secondary to the first uh level of meaning which is this experience of the world and so one of the things that he can do to re-read genesis with that sense is that it can reconnect us to our experience because a lot of modern uh christians are are severely alienated not even knowing that they're alienated and so they they want to believe in a kind of material a scientific material description in scripture let's say they want to hold on to that because they think that that's the that's the core like that's real reality um but then nonetheless they'll still read the story like the ascension and they'll read it just straight out as if it's not causing a massive problem in their like world view as if the idea that if you if you're thinking that this is a scientific description then where is it that jesus went like did he go to the moon like is he hanging up there on a cloud or something because because it just does it doesn't jive anymore whereas if you come back into the experience and you talk about the appearance of something above you and better than you in terms of meaning as well you know the like a simple example would be that if i stand up on a chair and i'm in a group of people then all of a sudden i will automatically become the focus of attention just because i'm above everybody i am able to see everybody and everybody's able to see me but the people among themselves aren't able to see each other then you can start to understand what it means to be above why we say god is in heaven what is it what is that it's actually related to this experience of something above rather than a kind of technical description of what's up in the atmosphere or whatever some some nonsense like that which cannot make any sense unless you're i mean unless you end up being like a mormon or something that that's just pushing it and i can't i can't go there because it really does have a going up a mountain has a reality of an experience and it can help you understand what uh like why moses had to go up a mountain to encounter god you know it's a it's a it's a real experience i love that you use the example of the ascension there because i think it's something that people often like you said they just kind of take at face value but they never really think where did jesus go like on your materialistic world view like it's not enough to just like go up and then where like and then jesus disappears because jesus isn't disembodied i feel like that's often where we end up getting we get to some kind of you know undoing the incarnation some disembodied jesus because our materialism just can't really make sense of it but and i think oftentimes we do see people like you mention mormons or even in some more fundamentalist readings of certain passages of scripture really having to go to these strange angles to make this work on the other hand though i can i can guess if i can maybe embody some of my listeners that there might be some of them who have a bit of a fear when we talk about you know starting of reading scripture from human experience and looking at patterns to say is that just one step on the way to so it doesn't really matter if this happened and i think people talk about the symbolic meaning or the literal meaning maybe pitting those against each other in unhelpful ways so what would you say to people that worry that okay i can see this pattern in genesis and that's really cool or i can see this pattern in the ascension let's go with the ascension and um that's okay jesus going above but does that mean it doesn't really matter if jesus ascended do you get that often in your work oh i get that all the time i get it all the time and what it does what it it comes back to the problem of this scientific materialism which is that the modern way of understanding the world is that there is a kind of neutral world out there that doesn't have meaning and it's just kind of there and then on top of that then we kind of add meaning and so there's like this neutral reality and then we have interpretation on top of it and i think that this is this is a this is a basic fundamental mistake about how reality works reality is made with logos reality is built with meaning from the first chapter of genesis from the first chapter of of of saint john's gospel you you understand that meaning is intricate is completely bound up with reality and so for something to exist it has to have meaning or else it's chaos or else it's potential it's it's just like potentiality it doesn't actually exist it has to have meaning and so once you kind of understand that then it's like the way that you describe something if you if you emphasize the meaning rather than a forensic description of something the way that we understand forensic descriptions does not at all mean that it didn't happen like it it to describe something that happens you you already have to have it bound up in meaning and so the everything in scripture are is describing events like there's there's nothing in scripture unless it's a it's like a parable but like that let's say when it describes events in scripture it's describing events that happen it's just not doing it in the same way you would describe a crime to a police officer and it's not doing it in the same way that you would like describe how to build a a table from ikea like they're just different ways of describing reality based on the meanings that you want that description to have and that's completely fine because the world has is first of all based on meaning and not on this neutral factuality which is supposedly down there i don't know if that if that can be helpful to understand like when you describe something you're always describing it for a reason and that will actually form the way you describe an event and that's completely fine and it's inevitable and it's probably good right i mean yes i've read ikea instructions to put things together and i'm not very handy in the first place but if the bible all read like that it wouldn't really speak to what we're ultimately searching for right i mean if this i i don't derive much meaning from ikea instructions but scripture is able to communicate in a different way and i think maybe to just push this in a little further maybe to further uh clarify it for some people can we talk about that word symbol in general because i think maybe the way that it's used by you know person a person b and person c all talking about similar things might be meaning very different things so when you talk about symbol in the ancient word world and how the bible communicates through symbols what what are you talking about there i use the word really in its etymological use or kind of when we talk about for example the symbol of the apostles as the creed that's the way i use it which is the gathering of multiplicity of different different aspects gathering into one for a purpose and so the symbol of the apostle they took all because like say you have scripture and you have all these things that are said and so the the apostles you know the apostles and then the father said we need to to gather the elements that are the most important we're going to put them into one pattern and now we're going to give it to people to help them see the meaning of what is in scripture the let's say the most condensed meaning and so that's what symbolism is it's just the condensation of of facts into a pattern so that you get the the meaning and so that's what a story is that's what an image is uh you know that's what a sentence is a sentence is taking a bunch of words putting them together so that they they actually communicate the meaning so it's the process by which meaning happens you could say is what i mean when i use the word symbolism and i think that's going to be helpful for people because i think especially i host a lot of conversations around you know historical theology and people want to debate say the eucharist this would be a big one where it comes up you know is the eucharist just a symbol and we're using that word i think in a bit of a sloppy way often when we talk about you know people who have a belief in say the real presence of christ in the eucharist want to say oh it's not a symbol and i get where they're coming from but i think in our my i think it says something about our materialism that we think that symbol means not real yeah um and so yeah i've heard i've heard actually one of the first things i've heard in an orthodox church which actually made me cinched it for me that i was going to become orthodox it was then it was a deacon at the parish where i was going and he said it almost kind of jokingly but he was he was serious at the same time he said uh he said catholics believe that the the eucharist is real he said protestants believe that it's symbolic he said orthodox believe it's real because it's symbolic i was like all right you've got me i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm here i'm i'm not leaving yeah that's that's really helpful that's a a great uh little little summary there i i don't want to say that to say that i i know that well i don't say that to say that all protestants are on that side no it was really a caricature but it was just there to drive a point obviously it's not it's not it's not as clear-cut as that yeah but it's a great way to teach uh what proper symbolism is yeah and so one one other thing i want to ask here because you do a lot of work in the ancient world and you know helping people understand it and in addition we've outlined some of the things like seeing it as maybe scientific or kind of putting just materialism on it and we've also talked about people just not really caring about it but what other mistakes maybe do you see when people try to get into the ancient world and make sense of it that is maybe leading people astray as they get interested in these things well the biggest mistake people make is the progressive mistake it's the mistake of believing in a kind of social progress and believing that we're actually smarter than the people that were back there and so you see it all the time in scholars who who feel like they're kind of standing above all of it all the fray and that they're just looking back and that they're they're reading scripture as if they as if they're they've they've kind of reached a point where now they can just look at it objectively and analyze these things and that they can pass judgment on what was given to us and i think that that's the biggest mistake the biggest mistake is really the arrogance of of the modern person who thinks that that they have a right to to simply judge what was given to us rather and i think the right way to do it is rather to receive to receive what has been given to us to receive through the authority of scripture through the authority of of those that were behind us that were be that were before us and to to approach it with a kind of reverence and humility and think that rather approach it in thinking that i have to learn from that and i don't have to i don't have to justify it i don't justify it in the sense that you know make excuses for it or uh try to explain it to in a modern way but rather just kind of receive it first that's i think is the is the best approach to begin with and once you do that then you enter in the orthodox circles we always talk about what they call the mind of the fathers right that you need to get the mind of the fathers and i think that that's the approach that you can come there once you once you kind of get the mind of the fathers or you approach it then all of a sudden things start to come together and you realize that it's mostly about a world view rather than about you know this or that information which is correct and this or that uh law which we'll follow or we're gonna we do this or we don't do that it starts with a way of seeing the world first and that's that's the i think that's what i'm trying to get people to kind of capture once again yeah i that's a great summary of um acquiring the mind of the fathers there and i think for a lot of people they're gonna say you know a lot of people at least watch my videos are going to say yes i want that but they might find their you know secular materialism harder to shake than they think it's yeah it's kind of the water that we're swimming in at times how is it that we begin to unravel that because i can i can picture people saying i want to think like them yeah but i've spent 20 30 40 50 60 years you know just kind of encultured into this way of thinking like how do i undo that yeah well there are interesting ways that are presenting themselves to us right now i would say it's an interesting moment because post-modernism has actually had quite it's been useful i think postmodern has been useful because it's broken down the kind of hegemony of modernistic thinking and this this silly 19th century idea of a like a neutral universe that i talked about this neutral universe that we're just gonna understand we're just gonna master it and then like we'll be done this can't just no one can have that position anymore um and so in in cognitive science right now there's a whole movement which is realizing how let's say even human perception works um and uh john viveki who was a psychologist at the university of toronto that i that i have a lot of discussions with he talks about common combinatorial explosion which is the problem that there are too many facts out there that in fact the world is there's too much everything around you is indefinite in in detail and so despite that we're able to perceive unity where we can see that this is like in front of me i have a microphone in front of me i have a screen but that that one thing is made out of millions and millions of details and so the the id the what even cognitive science right now is realizing that without without meaning without patterns that you cannot perceive the world that it's it's actually flipping back to almost like an ancient worldview which is that you cannot see the world without meaning so from nihilism but this weird nihilism of late modernism we reach to a point where actually meaning is inevitable because without it you can't even see you wouldn't be able to walk through a room because there's so much information coming to you and this and you all everything you do is purpose-oriented like all the actions you pose are purpose-oriented so once you kind of so once you at least get that like you understand that this this idea of just neutral reality is not is not possible you don't have access to it and you wouldn't want to have access to it because you need to live your life and you need to right you need to engage the world in a way that's meaningful or else you're going to die like it's as simple as that uh so if so once you get that then all of a sudden then i if i you can re-engage patterns once again you can understand for example that human interactions are always ritualized that you can't avoid rituals and and you know that because if you try to do the opposite of what the social rituals are you would see what would happen right if you like if you if you if you talk to the back of the head of someone or if you i don't know you you just lie on the ground in front of the person while you're in a conversation like the millions of insane things that you could do to break the ritual of human interaction uh but once you kind of realize that then you can see that ritual is not only it's not only um important but it's inevitable we cannot engage the world without ritual if i encounter someone i have to ritualize my relationship with them so once again now once you see that then you're like okay well that's what stories are stories are like really are like facts brought into ritual you take all these facts and you put them into a pattern and now they become meaningful and so all of a sudden now once again a church ritual doesn't become so strange and weird anymore it's not so arbitrary because you realize that all your interactions are ritualized that everything you do has a pattern to it and so now to stand together and to sing together towards something which transcends us you realize that wait a minute we do that we do that all the time like if i go to a sports if i go watch a sports event i'm doing that if i you know if if my family gathers together to celebrate uh birthday i'm doing that and so the fact of doing that in in a church worshiping god all of a sudden just brings it higher up on the level of what we're doing like it it's a higher and higher purpose like going to see a sports event is fine but you're celebrating something which is that's a little lower on the hierarchy of being participating in the fourth of july or in a national holiday is something which maybe is a little higher than my sports team but then that kind of moves up towards the idea of celebrating the infinite love which spawned the universe like okay that's pretty high like i don't know if you can get any higher than that and that will appear in the way that it does right standing together doing things together singing together being directed in the same direction all of these things now will not only make sense but they'll appear as almost like there's no other way to do it like that's the only way that you can actually do these things yeah so what i'm hearing you say is that ritual in many ways is how we've gotten our world view that we have that it you know the way that we're perceiving meaning is going to shape how we see the world and so ritual is also the way that we would change how we see the world that you know if we're always participating in a certain kind of ritual and a certain way of inhabiting the world that's going to shape how we think and then when we're participating in say the the ritual of the church and the life of the church it's going to be kind of pointing our affections or our heart towards something even greater and begin to shape us by that is that a fair characterization exactly because all your bad habits are rituals like all of them all the things you all the bad habits you engage in are are end up being rituals and they cycle in and out and they come in and they always have the same pattern and so it's like you have to kind of decide like how the only way to break the bad rituals is to engage in in true rituals and rituals that are higher up on the scale of being than you know you know like eating eating the second piece of cake or whatever like that it's like oh that comes over once again and again it's like i got my take my cigarette out and or whatever it is that little bad habits that we have are all are ritualized so once you get that it's like okay well now let's so you can read that's why people can understand even things that are difficult uh for moderates to understand you know like the idea that you go to confession and you you you say you sin you go to confession and the priest tells you okay well you need to do this say so many prayers you know you need to do this go on a pilgrimage do these things and we think it's arbitrary we think it's just like compensating for your sin but it's not just compensating for your sin it's about engaging in a ritual that will replace the bad one that will take up the space and will kind of reform you it's almost like a training you're reforming your habits reforming your mind reforming your being to be directed towards something which is other than these these lamer these like less less worthy rituals that you engage in yeah and what i i really enjoyed that at the beginning of that you mentioned something that might have maybe surprised some people i don't know but i i really appreciate it and you said post-modernism actually has given us some good things and not that it's just like a blanket appreciation for it but i think sometimes we often just like villainize post-modernism but i think what you brought up there there's this interesting point that in modernism we have you know descartes cogito ergosome i think therefore i am and we're beginning to realize that doesn't quite account for enough we're more than just brains we're more than just thinking things and that our rituals shape who we are not that post-modernism doesn't have its own problems with identity and how we're going to define that but i do think it's helpful that we're beginning to see that this is you know the the search for meaning the the human experience is a lot more than just what goes on in our brain if we want to change who we are it's not just changing our minds even though that's often what we tend to think and i want to press in a bit to materialism and meaning because i think it's something that you highlight well and something a lot of people struggle with that people today are starved for meaning we see just skyrocketing statistics on anxiety and depression and there's also this pervasive materialism that i don't i i don't think it's just a coincidence that we're seeing both of those things and you also brought up story i'm not i know i'm trying to pull together a couple threads here but what is what is wrong with the stories that people are telling themselves or the stories that we're embodying that is leading us to have this just crisis of meaning today yeah well one of them let's say in the breakdown of christianity you know they kind of promised us they promised us things that say when when the the intellectuals and the elites were kind of breaking down the christian world but they never delivered like there's no there's no new society there's no there's no project that that is worthy of to replace the one which was there let's say in christian civilization so what ends up happening is that we're actually noticing we're witnessing a fragmentation of the world we're noticing a fragmentation of intermediary beings you could say and so you know all the all the places of communion are breaking down whether it was the church where it was clubs whether it was you know we don't have in our city like the suburbs don't have central places we don't have common places where we meet we don't have a church we don't have all of this is kind of going away so the very fabric of society is manifesting itself in the meaning crisis like the suburbs is a is a visual embodied representation of the meaning crisis we're all laid out on a plane we don't know our second neighbor maybe we know our immediate neighbor that's about it we don't know like the second third neighbor we don't necess we don't have any common projects so this is this is the problem and now the stories so in order to compensate for that one of the things that has happened is that we were given entertainment stories and some of them are quite powerful you know like star wars or whatever all these things people get attached to some of them are quite powerful but they're not participative they're passive and so they give us a kick like a kick of enthusiasm but that kick will will very quickly let's say it'll move it'll go away because it's not our story it's a it's just it's just a passive uh watching a story and what christianity offered us was a participative story that is the story of the gospels the story of christ the story of the saints that's our story you know the story of the creation of the world to the eschaton it's a story that you live in it's not just a story that you interpret or that you watch but it is a story in which you are there to participate and that is that is ultimately the key to the meaning problem which is participation and so you can do it at a lower level and it'll work like you have a family have kids uh you know get involved in your community it'll it'll it'll work to a certain extent to be able to reduce your your nihilism um but it but ultimately that has to scale up for it to really kind of hold the world together has kind of scale up towards worship worship is is the ultimate uh ultimate participation it's the it's the the source of participation is worship because participation is celebration like it's if you if you participate in in a project you're always implicitly celebrating the goal of that project right so it's like if i participate in a basketball team by participating in the basketball team i am celebrating the purpose of basketball i'm celebrating the possibility of winning i'm celebrating the possibilities that the sport offers me and it's the same for a family it's the same for any project a company like if you work in a company if you work towards the goal of that company you're always celebrating the goal of that company but that ultimately should lead to something like worship in the in the proper sense in the sense of recognizing the highest thing you know recognizing love recognizing the infinite god as being that which binds all reality together that's really i like what you said there about participation and worship and how we can get almost a glimpse of this and i think we're seeing this a lot right now in the past year it despite the fact that say you have you know millions of people participating in social justice projects they they don't have necessarily that grounding of the story within a larger story so you're getting some sense of participation and you're getting to be part of something bigger than yourself you're getting to be around other people but ultimately it seems those things end up fizzling out because they're missing that grounding is that on the right track do you think or is there something more yeah it's me you're definitely on the right track but the consequences are are much more severe than we might think and i think i i i think you're right i think that the especially during kobit what we saw during kovalev it was very fascinating because we had a kind of uh asceticism at the beginning where there really was like uh you know we were asked to fast and everybody stayed home and everybody kind of not do anything and everything got closed down um and then we we actually witnessed the sacrifice we watched someone get killed and then everybody had went into a kind of religious ecstasy and just ran into the street and then communed in this in this uh in this ecstatic moment um and so it it did create a sense of kind of participation and the sense of cause and all of this was was happening now the difficulty is that the difficulty is that these these religious these religious uh patterns they're not all great they're not all good because they also invoke they also involve scapegoating and they involved creating very strong interiors and very very demonic exteriors and so this is dangerous when if you do this in a racial way it's a very dangerous dangerous thing if you do it in a in a in in a political way it's a very dangerous thing uh and in a way that it's inevitable that it'll happen but the idea of worshipping the god man who sacrificed himself for us and and worshiping the god of infinite love that is the source of reality is there to moderate the dangerous effects of these patterns of participation um and what we're seeing with the social justice world is that we're seeing a kind of christianity without forgiveness a kind of christianity without absolution and so these cancel these people that get cancelled and that all right now it's just all online no problem right i mean it seems like it's not a big deal but this pattern is we've seen it before we saw it just a little more than 100 years ago we saw what happens in these moments of this kind of this this this insane movement of uh of like you know us versus them and the scapegoating and this canceling but it it usually ends up in violence and so i don't see if if it continues in this direction we're gonna see more people fight in the street there's no way around that and that's not particularly what i want i think something that's really interesting if people are listening to you carefully there is noticing that the the way that you you're practicing what you're talking about seeing the world in pattern you're not just seeing you know these disparate events happening and treating them as i don't know seemingly random things but you're using the the lens that we're given the patterns that we're giving through through scripture and the story of jesus and what god's been doing since creation and you know for all of time and kind of seeing the world through those lenses that we have these uh you know these religious groups with a god man and sacrifice but but no absolution in their scapegoats all of these are kind of biblical terms and it's not arbitrary that's a way that we begin to kind of inhabit that story i'm guessing that's you you mentioned that it comes easily to you but i imagine it's also something that you would recommend to people learning to see the world through those patterns and use that language even because language isn't neutral no i i think so i think that one of the best like let's say let's say a christian that is struggling with materialism or kind of lives in a material world like one of the things that can help you break that is to start by typology i think most christians accept typology as a as a an acceptable way to interpret scripture you know except for the real like the scholar scholar types we don't want them anyways and like we don't want to talk about them anyways let's say like in an embodied a real christian life like reading the bible through typology is a way to to that is acceptable so by doing that you can start which is that if you for example when you read scripture you ask yourself uh let's say you read genesis and you then you always compare it to the story of christ and you say how is christ story mirroring or reflecting the story that you see in genesis and by doing that you start to kind of practice these analogical thinking you could say where you start to see that this pattern is playing out in these different spheres using sometimes slightly different now let's say slightly different examples but once you start to get the language and you start to see that you know okay so christ is on the cross and he's dying and he has a good thief and a bad thief next to him and you're like okay well what's going on here you know does it have to do with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil well yes it does have to do with the knowledge of the tree of good and evil and does it have to do with the promise that god that that god told adam that he would die yes it does have a relationship with that so that's just a little example but once you start to see that then all of a sudden then slowly the patterns start to to meld at least that's what i think and then you can actually then you can start to see the world through the bible rather than stand above and interpret the bible like a scientific data that you're you know that you're analyzing using all your your methods of uh you know like exodus methods or whatever it's a different way of inter of like of entering into the life of scripture and i think we see that even in the new testament writers as they're writing how they can pull together these different quotes and illusions and just subtle like hintings at different passages they've so saturated themselves in the well for them would have been like the the hebrew greek old testament that it's just the language that they speak when they're thinking of this human experience they think of it through the lens of this story and that's how we really begin to internalize the bible and i think it has a flip side to it also not only does it have this kind of positive side of well this is also positive but that you know we see the world through these things and we can kind of see how god's at work but i think it also shows us that maybe some of the things that we do that we think are fairly just benign or neutral like you said most of the world is neutral then maybe we can add meaning or subtract it but we can notice maybe these rituals that we're participating in these ways that you know we go through the world and it just seems i don't know that's just what you do we realize wait maybe maybe this is actually celebrating or participating in something that's not what i want to be celebrating or participating in i mean have is that something you've seen people be able to uh to see in their lives or that's helped you as you look at the world and realize my regular rituals aren't neutral no you're exactly right because there is there is a flip side it's a good that you presented that way there's a danger in starting to think symbolically which is that the things you do actually now appear to you as having meaning and so the idea like let's say like some not some christians have this idea this idea that i can basically do what i want if i don't break the rules right i can kind of do what i want if i don't do the things that god said our sins uh that once you start to realize that everything you do is meaningful then that doesn't hold up anymore you can't you just can't have that way of thinking and so it doesn't become it doesn't become an idea of like rules that i break or that i don't but it becomes the notion that all the acts that i do are embodying patterns and are celebrating things it's like all the things i do are always celebrating the reason why i'm doing them and so that that will definitely transform the way you see yourself and you realize that you actually sin a lot more than you thought uh and just because you're constantly acting in ways that that that although you could you could say even like you could say as an ethical person it's not necessarily unethical but it's definitely not celebrating it's not moving towards this celebration of god let's say and so it can it can actually yes it it's definitely will change the way you live and will make you see yourself differently and it can be scary for for a while that's for sure i think that shift from neutrality to the whole world being saturated with meaning really is it can be disorienting for people realizing that these things that i just thought were neutral again aren't and wow like you said you might realize your life is maybe more sinful than you thought and that i think often a lot of the christian life is a progressive realization of our own need for god and as we grow we realize just how much further we are than from where we thought we were even that it's like i i as i'm getting better i'm realizing how much how much darkness there is and there's even more to work on there and i maybe just for some people because i can imagine some people hearing this and they begin to look at the world through you know it's not neutral these things have meaning and maybe starting to really struggle with just everyday things like okay i've lost neutrality but now i'm kind of paralyzed because there's so many things and are these like is this celebrating the wrong thing how how do we do this in a way that is helpful but not paralyzing does that make sense yeah no you're absolutely right because one of the problems that happens when people start to kind of see patterns in the world is that they can it can actually drive you a little crazy you have to watch out to be careful because you know it can make you uh kind of paranoid or obsessed and it's a that's a definitely a danger the the danger can be solved through i mean to through through love i mean you always have to remember that that god is calling you that god that god is kind of slowly pulling you towards him and you need to see the world in hierarchies like what's one of the things in terms of symbolism that i always tell people about is that the world has hierarchies in it and those hierarchies will kind of present themselves to you and you have so many sins in your life that you can't count them and so you need to you need to just slowly move and and deal with the things that present themselves to you as let's say as possible you know and it's it's definitely good to have someone like a spiritual father or a confessor that can kind of help you along um but obviously you can't solve all your sins because it's not going to happen like that's not happening you're not going to solve all your sins you don't even try like you just need to kind of move move towards uh move towards god you know as things present themselves to you and it's probably better to worship this is the one thing that i'm learning in my life because i've i've always been someone who kind of wants to do it on my own and and you know trying to it's like okay you know it's like as i have bad habits or i have these things that i would these sins that i want to deal with and so i kind of give myself you know okay i'm going to do this i'm going to do that and do that and uh often it doesn't work what i've noticed is that if i pray like if i take the time every day to really you know seriously pray then my bad habits tend to diminish on the almost on their own it's like if i focus on god it's better than just focusing on on my sins you need to kind of have both at the same time or else you're gonna be in serious trouble like if you just focus on your sins you're gonna you're just gonna fall into misery and despair yeah i think that's really good advice and it kind of falls into those classic categories of being proactive and reactive it's always on the defense against sin rather than which is is important we need to watch out for sin but taking that step of prayer and worship as both you know a proactive step and kind of an antidote to some of these things on on like a spiritual level i think that's probably a great place to wrap up on a selfish level i do want to ask one last question before we conclude because i think it's valuable for people who are into these conversations and i know the kind of comments that circulate on these types of things and in kind of a maybe quick manner the where's the line besw between seeing patterns and just going off on a conspiracy theory train yeah because i think sometimes they attract overlapping audiences you're right you're absolutely right uh so the way to do the way to see the difference is first of all the pattern is pointing towards god the pattern is not pointing down and so a lot of people who get really caught up in conspiracy theory they see the patterns as pointing towards events and they're trapped in these events rather than seeing the so you can you rather than seeing understanding that the patterns that what they're actually doing is actually pointing us towards towards god and so that's one thing the second thing is that once you see a pattern in in something you always have to verify it at different levels and so if i think if i'm watching a movie and i think i see a pattern then i have to ask myself okay where else do i see this pattern like is there is it somewhere else is it in scripture is it in other stories is it is it uh you know can i find it at different levels is it true at a social level is it true at a personal level is it true at a cosmic level so you have to be able to verify the pattern you think you were seeing at different levels of reality and so if you're able to do that that'll also help you to not focus on the instantiations of the pattern it'll help you not focus on seeing signs as as pointing towards events rather than seeing signs that's pointing to us to what god is trying to show us about about reality so and i'm saying there aren't any conspiracies obviously the conspiracies exist but i i've seen the same thing where a lot of people they they get obsessed with events in the world and they their their eyes are always focused on what's going on here and that to be honest a lot of that stuff you can't do much about and so if you end up being obsessed with that then it will eat you up it'll devour you and we need to rather see you can see the signs of the times but also understand that this is part of the story christ told us this is part of the story and you need to keep your eyes up and not be obsessed with finding all the intricacies of the of the devil below that doesn't that doesn't lead you into good places that's really helpful thank you for that i hope that will be of value to people who um are in danger of kind of mixing the two or kind of running uh for long into uh maybe an unhelpful direction jonathan thank you so much for being here today i really appreciate your insight and your time today i'd love for you to just close i mean if there's anything you want to say of course but also please let people know where they can find your work your podcast etc so mostly if you go to the symbolicworld.com you can kind of find all the resources but i'm also mostly i'm on youtube my channel jonathan pedro or the symbolic world you can type that in and then i'm i'm on twitter and facebook i tried to be less on social media um but for sure on youtube i'm i still have a continuing presence so find me there awesome well thank you so much and i'll close as i always do by saying thank you to all of your time for all of your time whenever it is in the future that you watch this i don't take that lightly and until next time go be on the lookout for more videos and as always go out and love god and love others because truly above all else that will change the world [Music] you

Channel: Gospel Simplicity

Views: 22,983

Rating: 4.955236 out of 5

Keywords: Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, Christian Worldview, Jonathan pago, jonathan pajo, jonathan pageo, symbolic world, symbolism, christian art, christian symbolism, orhtodox iconography, orthodox convert, orthodox art, orthodox symbolism, ancient worldview, seeing patterns, patterns vs conspiracy theories, gospel simplicity, gosple simplicity

Id: NYVLht1t_N0

Length: 62min 22sec (3742 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021