Within Reason - #52 Jonathan Pageau - The Problem With Secular Architecture

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Jonathan Pageau is a French Canadian icon carver, public speaker and YouTuber exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world, how these patterns emerge and come together, manifesting in religion, art and in popular culture. He's also the editor of the Orthodox Arts Journal and host of the Symbolic World blog and podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Peugeot, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. I wanted to begin by asking, hopefully not to embarrass you, but when I first invited you on this podcast, you expressed a sort of skepticism about doing it. And you said something like, look, I've done this sort of religion, atheism thing before. And a lot of the time, it's a lot of talking past each other and told me that I think at one point, at least you used the word rationalist and said, you know, you're probably better off. talking to these people because I approach this from a different angle and we might just end up talking past each other. What was it, if I might ask, that inspired that skepticism in you? Well, I tried to do a few of these with someone called Rationality Rules and then a few other

people. And what ended up happening was that we would talk past each other. And you could follow it in the comment section, which is that usually I would be accused of woo-wooing by the people that are fans of the person and then the people that are fans of me would would say you don't understand the argument and so we did i did that a few iterations and then at some point i i felt like this isn't useful because it's just not helping it's just it's just increasing polarization and it's it's not worth it to just get clicks let's say it that way um you know but i so i got your email and i kind of and i also saw the type of people that you were you were talking about talking to and uh and i thought, okay, this is just not my usual apologetics and that type of stuff is just not my

preview. But I don't know why. For some reason, it kept running in my mind after I got your email. And then we met in London just a happenstance. And I thought, oh, okay, well, this is, you know, let's just follow the breadcrumbs. And so here we are. Here we are indeed. I suppose people who have seen you before, we'll know that you offer a lot of commentaries on religious issues and religious stories, but you're an artist by trade, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, I'm a painter. I studied painting, but I kind of did my own, you could say, I became disillusioned with the academy after my bachelor's degree, especially because in art, a lot of the madness that we see now was already there in the art world. So I saw, you know,

the beginning of that stuff. And so I left the academy, but I continued to study on my own reading, philosophy, being interested in all kinds of things, and developing symbolic thinking as I was also developing my art practice. I just spent a few days in Rome visiting the Vatican and the Vatican museums as well and seeing some of the most beautiful paintings that I've ever seen in my life, some of the greatest artwork, some of the most impressive architecture, although St. Peter's, I think, It actually leaves something to be desired when looked at from the outside.

As far as I understand, it was a sort of designed by committee, three different architects all arguing about what they wanted it to look like. And so you end up with this beautiful dome of Michelangelo completely obscured by this rectangular frontier and you can't really see it from the front a little bit. Controversial that one, perhaps. But that aside, some of the greatest art that I've ever seen in my life. And a thing that keeps running through my head and I wanted to ask you as somebody who makes, religious iconography is the fact that we seem to have a scriptural prohibition in the Ten Commandments in the Judeo-Christian tradition against making images of holy beings and of bowing down in front of them and if I go to a to a Catholic mass I'm doing so in a building that's just completely adorned with such imagery not just of of saints but also of God himself in his tripartite nature.

What's going on here? I mean, people who have a crude reading of the whole Testament will say, surely this is just a breach of this commandment, and one of the first commandments given, and so perhaps, if there is such a thing as an order of importance, one of the more pressing ones. Yeah. Well,

Christians came to the conclusion that not only did the incarnation make the representation possible, but that it also made it necessary, which is that if we believe that Christ is the incarnation of God, therefore his image and the image is restored is the best way to understand it. Because there's a weird mystery in scripture, which is, in Genesis, it says that man is made in the image of God, and then there's this prohibition against making images of things on earth

and in heaven. And at the same time, there is, there are places where God tells people to make images, right, in the case of Moses, with the serpent, in the case of the Ark of the Covenant and the cherubim, all of these images that were in the tabernacle and then in the temple. If you went into the Jewish temple, you would have seen plenty of images. There were bulls, there were angels, you know, these cherubim represented. And so there's a kind of mysterious duality to the question. You even see people in the, in the Old Testament, you'll see people not worshipping the means by which God manifests himself, but will venerate, honor, will make some gesture towards the means by which God is manifesting himself.

So on the one end, you have this sense of a pure, like a pure attention to the transcendent, but then also a recognition and some kind of gesture towards that which is manifesting it in the world. So right, you see that still today. Rabbi is kissing the Torah, this kind of gestures of veneration towards the things that manifest that transcended to us. And what Christians came to realize is that with the incarnation, Christ in some ways is the answer to the Second Commandment. So it's not just that there's a prohibition. It's that there's a mystery in that commandment. And Christ answers that mystery, which is he restores the image and he gives us an image. And therefore, the image now becomes

a means by which God manifests himself in the world. And that's why we don't worship images, but we do venerate them, especially in an Orthodox Church. I'm Orthodox, if you're coming to an Orthodox Church, you'll see people kissing images all day long because they see it as a restoration of that primordial image. It just seems strange to me to think that something about Jesus' incarnation on Earth suddenly would change not just our relationship to painting divine figures. We have this figure of Jesus,

although we don't have very much about his, very much information about his physical features. I've just got a friend who just finished a PhD in the physical appearance of Jesus. And one of the most interesting things is that there doesn't seem to be much of a description of it. But we could at least imagine a circumstance in which people say, well, this is the face of God and so we can paint this and we can use it in our worship. But what changes about our ability to represent, say, God the Father? I mean, you often see these images of a bearded man in the sky. And that seems equally troublesome as it would have been back then. It's a very controversial subject within Christianity, I would say. So you do not see images

of God the Father until about the 13th century. There are a few like random things that happen in the 12th century, but you really don't see any images of God the Father. Every time you see a manifestation of God in the world, it is always Christ who's shown. And so even the creation. So if you see an image of the creation of the world, it's actually Christ creating the world in medieval imagery because he is the logos. He's the divine logos. And there's also a mystery. There's another, there's another mystery about a kind of mystery about the role of the human in the divine economy, let's just say it that way. And so what happens in the late Middle Ages with a lot of other kind of aberrations is this

this desire to represent God the Father. And it happens in the West, very, you know, in the time, for me, like the image of Michelangelo, God creating Adam, to me that's an aberration. It's a theological aberration and it's a, it's something of a monstrosity, actually. I don't

particularly like, I mean, it's visually beautiful. Like, it's well painted. But in theologically, it's a, it's a bit of a monstrosity. What don't you like about it? Well, because you have who is, who is this character who's creating Ada.

Like, who is he? Is it God the Father? Is that what it's supposed to be? And if it's God the Father, why is he surrounded by naked babies? Like, there's all these weird things about it. Like, there's just so many strange things about that image. And what is this?

Like, it says in scripture that God created the world through speech. The touching of the fingers, for the record. Like, what is the touching of the fingers? It seems to be just kind of innovation for innovation. sake. I don't, I'm, I'm going to alienate all the people who like Michelangelo. But like you said, it's artistically impressive. It's not, it's not a commentary on his artistic prowess. I mean, I suppose that this points to the larger observation that I'm trying to make, which is you look at an image like this, and you think, very pretty and all, but surely this is

this is, this isologically bunk. I mean, you've got this old man with a beard and he's sort of reaching out and all this kind of stuff, but isn't that the case of all depictions of something that is almost by definition, if not by definition, ineffable. Yeah, and that's why we, that's why the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and the fathers around the Seventh Ecumenical Councils say, we do not represent God. We don't. We represent Christ in the incarnation, you know, and that we represent the person of Christ. And there is a mystery, there is a mystery there, right, which is the manner in which the human, the manner in which the human becomes God in the incarnation, but it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of mystery that we don't, we don't, we don't go into too much, but that, like I said, so now, for example, I would never represent God the father. And I would say that most orthodox, uh, iconographers today would never represent God the father. And it did happen, even in orthodoxy, like in the late later 16th, 17th century, it starts to appear. Uh, and to me, it's a, it was, it's a sign of theological decline when something like that happens, where people, where people,

don't understand what they're doing anymore. They don't understand that there are metaphysical questions behind these decisions that the church put forth in, and exactly as you said, you do not, like there are things that cannot be represented by their nature, and therefore you do not represent them, because it's an aberration to do so. I suppose I'm interested in whether you wouldn't depict God the Father, in the sense that you want to have this theological reverence for the father, or if it's a more practical concern that you know you're essentially getting it wrong and might thereby be misleading people who look at this imagery and have the wrong idea of what God is.

Well, obviously, if you would have a wrong idea what God is, if you think that God is a bearded man in the sky. Like, you would definitely get, and it fueled a lot of the silly secularist arguments about God, you know, you have to realize, even the Reformation, for example, like I'm not a big fan of the Reformation, but if you look at the images they were reacting against at that time, they were reacting against these images of a bearded guy in the sky with the triangle halo, and it was like, who is that figure? Is it God? Like God the Father? And we're not at all in Trinitarian theology in any way. We're just returning to kind of pagan, it's Zeus, basically. And it's

already Zeus already in this in in uh michael angelo's uh sistine chapel in my opinion well the interesting thing about the sistine chapel is that it's not really a chapel it's it's a museum you have to queue up for you know goodness knows how long and then they also now force you to go through the contemporary art section where there's sort of a i don't know a sort of metal a bunch of sort of metal sticks or pointing out in different directions and it's it's it's it's called the adoration of Christ or something, and it sort of didn't really, I'm sure it means something, but I've always found a little bit difficult to, to understand. I thought that part should be optional at the very least.

And then finally, you managed to get into the Sistine Chapel, and it's just security guards sort of shoving you into the middle to get you out of the way of the flowing traffic and constantly telling people not to take photos. Because it says, you know, look, please, please be respectful. This is a religious, this is a religious site. so, you know, don't be talking, don't be taking photos, you know, this kind of stuff, dress modestly. And yet it seems to me that by opening up the gates in this way to allow floods of people to come in and just sort of gawk at the ceiling, like, what are they admiring there? I was arguing with a friend last night about this and he said, look, you know, it allows you to turn your head upwards and to really be able to turn your attention to God and the beauty that you perceive in this, you recognize as a reflection of the beauty of God.

And I'm thinking, I was not impressed by God in that chapel. I was impressed by Michelangelo. Yeah. Now, as a secularist, that's fine. I don't mind. I'm an atheist. That was one of the best experiences I can have in a chapel. But surely this is a troublesome thing to do to a chapel, to transform it into a gallery in this way.

Yeah, I agree. I think, I mean, I agree, first of all, with Michelangelo that there's something about Michelangelo, which can be understood. You know the story about the pieta of how, you know, when he created it, someone said, oh, it's Raphael who carved that. And he went at night, you know, to carve his name in the belt, in the Virgin's belt. And so this is the only piece that he ever signed, I think. It's the only sculpture that Michelangelo ever put his name on.

So this is the transformation that happens during the Renaissance, which is in some ways, you know, this kind of idea of the genius of the artist. and then it'll move into romanticism and the idea of the artist that we kind of have today. Of course, my approach to art is more traditional, I would say, or my desire, I don't probably succeed all the time, but there is a sense of entering into a tradition and entering into a language. Maybe it's the best way to understand it, a language that has been fine-tuned for a thousand years in the church and in the life of the church, and that has theological import. So the decisions that I make are informed by the theological tradition.

So that's why Eastern Orthodox icons in general have that characteristic. So it's difficult because I really do find that problematic what you said in terms of the chapel. But it's a 50-50 thing, let's say in terms of the situation we're in now, which is that on the one hand, when people go to cities, they want to don't want, want to visit the brutalist buildings. They want to visit the churches. And the reason why they want to visit the church is, I think, is a testimony to the bankruptcy of certain secularist tendencies of the 20th century. And so I think people are saying, well, let's just let them come into the church and see these beautiful things. And maybe there's a little possibility that

it will spark something in them. But I had the same experience as you in the 16th Chapel and didn't see it as particularly a sacred place. Rather, I just saw it as a tourist experience, you know. Yeah, the, this idea of people not wanting to visit brutalist buildings, I tend to agree with you. I do have one friend who should be coming on the podcast soon. He's got a Twitter account called The Cultural Tutor, and he's written this defense

of brutalism. One of the things that he said, which I think is kind of true, is that a lot of the time we might just be confusing something that's beautiful with something that's old, in the sense that if you go to Egypt, everybody wants to visit the pyramids. And the pyramids seem to have a lot more in common, he said, with something like the Barbican in London than with some Gothic cathedral, much more sort of geometric, solid shapes. It's just got something to do with the awe of being in the presence of something quite ancient that you know has a long history that might be playing in slightly to that. In other words, I don't know if maybe if the barbecue is 400 years old, people might want to go and visit it. I don't think that's true. I think that you have to, a lot of ancient art, let's say, there is a universal quality to a lot of the ancient art. And it has to do with proportionality.

You can almost understand it as living systems. They're very similar to living structures. That is, they have relationships of height and relationships of form. that are just basically attuned to human perception and to human engagement, which is why there's something universal about all the traditional arts. Like they're different,

but they have certain characteristics in common. So for example, a skyscraper is a, how can I say this? It's an aberration of human perception, you know? And this is something that it's not just like religious thinkers that have talked about. It's like many modern contemporary thinkers like Paul Virilio, for example, who is basically, I mean, I guess a kind of leftist guy.

And, you know, he talked about this idea, the problem of scale and being facing these monumentous, like huge glass buildings, that there's something alienating about that experience. Whereas in Egypt, the pyramids were very specific things. Nobody lived in the pyramids. You don't live in a pyramid. You live in, and people didn't even go worship in the pyramids. The temples, the Egyptian temples and the Egyptian houses and the Egyptian palaces were far closer to Roman art or to Greek art or to, you know, Chinese art in terms of the way which it used proportion to build it. And it's an emergent phenomenon that actually is very, it's very organic because people use their body parts to measure the, they would use thumbs and hands and to measure the,

the different sizes and those proportions these human proportions we have the golden rule in us and just intuitively they ended up using these proportions that are human and that that create uh how can i say this they they they feel at home to us because they're made from us i just i wonder if it's if there's really beauty there in the sense that if if the pyramids of giza didn't exist or even in a world in which they do. If somebody bought a big plot of land in central London and decided they just wanted to build this huge stone pyramid, I think there'd be a lot of pushback, a lot of criticism, and a lot of people saying, this is the problem with the modern world. The problem is that people just want to make these completely functional buildings with boring shapes out of stone that have no sense

of beauty and detail. I think that's what people would say about a building plops in central London today, the irony, of course, being that this is an example of one of the oldest structures that humans have ever built. Like I said, again, nobody lived in the pyramid, by the way. These were not places to live. We don't even actually, I don't think people actually know what their function is exactly. It's a speculation based on a dead culture. You know, their tombs or this, they're that, who knows?

And so the idea that you would, so you're right. You said form and function. And that's exactly the way to look at it. That is, there is different functionalities. And this is something that, you know, I don't know if you know who Christopher Alexander is, a recent theoretician designer who looked at the relationship of form and functionality and proportion

and explained how different spaces have different functions. And that, you know, and it's something which is difficult to move against. That is your bedroom, a bedroom and a hall are not the same. They have different functions, and therefore they have different forms. And their proportions will be related to their form and their function. So the height of a ceiling, for example, is related to the number of people that are in a building. So you can twist that, you can push it a little, but there's something about modern architecture, especially the brutalism, and especially, like Bauhaus and postmodern architecture, especially,

that sees human nature as being accidental and arbitrary and thinks you can simply, impose on it a kind of arbitrary rule or a rule of being on humans and that it that it doesn't matter but it does matter because we do resonate and exist in certain ways in certain spaces and if we're and if we're not careful we can create alienation you know there's a that i know this is people are going to not like this but there you know le corbusier has been shown recently that Le Colbynier was autistic. And I think that some of the modern architecture has that tendency. There's a kind of alienation and incapacity to see connection between human perception,

human experience, and the forms in which we exist, which is why the communist did it. Like the communists, they believe that human nature could be completely malleable and, you know, recreated. And so they just made these monsters, you know, if you go to Eastern Europe, you can see these monstrosities of neighborhoods that just ram right through the ancient neighborhoods, like no, no, no sense of space and no sense of, of, uh, no sense of, uh, they have a kind of, uh, they have a kind of equalizing quality for sure, but the world is actually made in hierarchies of experience. It's not, equality is a, is a, is a,

is a philosophical, you could say, uh, is an ideological thing, maybe. be the best way to say it. I want to ask you about whether you think that there is a necessary connection between this decline in architectural fittedness, as you're describing it, and a decline in religious belief. I mean, that seems to be a plausible hypothesis, but there are other explanations as well. Another thing that this cultural tutor Sheehan has suggested is to think about the fact that there's a world war, there are two world wars in the early and mid-20th century, after which the project is we need to build quickly and cheaply. We need to get everything back up and running again.

And so emerges these sort of great utilitarian buildings. The idea that these have come to replace Gothic cathedrals is perhaps a mistake in that what they've really come to replace is the rubble caused by two world wars. and looked at that way, it seems a lot more forgivable to produce these kinds of buildings, especially if we imagine that although there are exceptions like some brutalist architecture is made because it's supposed to be a kind of a kind of beautiful building that's a bit more tasteful, I suppose. A lot of the time the kind of things that we're complaining about here weren't really intended to be beautiful. And if they had have been, they wouldn't have been able

to serve the function quite as well, you know? Yeah. Well, I would say there's probably some of that, but Bauhaus is a pre-World War II phenomena, and Le Corbusier is a pre-World War II architect. The modern architects precede the war, but the mentality of utilitarianism, of pure utilitarianism in the way that the far left conceived of it, in the way that the communists, for example, conceived of it, is definitely part of it, this kind of equalizing tendency, right? this desire that to make people into numbers and to make them into these square things,

basically, to turn people into machines is maybe the best way to think about it, which is the relationship between the development of these types of modern boxes and industrialization and the factory worker, all of these things are related. And there's a kind of, right, there's a sense in which a human person is just a mechanism that we just put in a box, you know, and then we put them in the factory and they do certain tasks that we can quantify and calculate. I think, so I do really do, I really do believe that there is a relationship between the development of these types of forms and a kind of imposition let's say a strength of secularism that is taking over society. It's interesting because

communism in particular grows out of a philosophy who's one of the most, important observations or hypotheses proposed by Karl Marx is precisely the kind of alienation that you're describing now being a cause and result of this architectural trend, which is people not feeling, I mean, he's talking about people not feeling connected to their labor, but it's the same problem of not feeling like a human, but rather feeling like a cog in a machine. That's right. But you're right. But the strange reaction to communism is to on the one hand connect them to their labor, but to continue the type of alienation by disconnecting people from family connections, from religious connections, from, you know, to kind of deconstruct the

social apparatus and replace it with the state, uh, ends up doing the same, right? You can see it in communist China, it was the most visible where you have these, still have these pictures of, you know, masses of people with uniforms in, in, uh, in public life where they would all wear the same and have, live in the same space with everybody's allotted the equal amount of things and the same things, you know. Yeah, and he really is a quantification of the human. Yeah, in attempting to treat everybody as humans, you sort of end up treating nobody as humans, which is an interesting irony, I suppose. The interesting thing about architecture, by the way, in my view, is that as far as I can

see, it's the only form of artistic expression. that is something that's supposed to be beautiful and enjoyed that forcibly imposes itself upon everybody else if you don't like a painting you don't look at it you don't you go into the other room at the gallery you know what i mean if you don't like a bit of music you turn it off um although living in a modern city maybe some music is imposed on you uh although to a to a less of a especially yeah to a lesser degree but you know what i mean like you you put a building in the in the in in the center of a city, especially if it's some kind of skyscraper. And everybody has to look at that every single day.

And perhaps there should be some kind of, you know, some kind of legislation here. I understand that if you want to do some sort of fancy trials with art about new ways to see beauty, fine. But, you know, can sign it to the museum and make sure the museum on the outside follows the, follows the well-accepted psychological laws of the way. Yeah, don't make these huge monsters in the, in the space. But your intuition is right. And architecture is probably the last residue of what I believe art to before. It is the most important art because let's say architecture and city planning are the most important of the arts because they create, they bind the space in which you experience reality. And therefore they actually, let's say subtly, more than subtly,

but they invisibly create, you know, the way in which you understand inside, outside, the way to which you understand hierarchy, the way in which you understand, you know, the relationship of functions to themselves, right? It's like how you organize space, a house, a building, a public building will have an effect on how you understand the way in which that thing happens. And so there's that it is, it's very important. It's radically important to, let's say, I think that architecture and city planning are one of the places where people who believe very much that humans have in nature, that they should be fighting in that sphere, more than social media and all this culture war, whatever nonsense. But architecture is the place where we are actually framing human experience.

And so there are movements, I don't know if you know a bit about what's called New Urbanism, which is a movement towards the rehumanization of cities and to create things like parks. You live in the UK, and so you don't have the same experience as we do in North America, which is just the suburb, the suburb and the malls and the highways where there's no center, there's no human scale, there's no place to congregate, to walk. public space. There's no public square where you can actually come and meet your neighbors and meet people that you know. There's a quantification of human experience and a reduction of the human to a dot basically on a flat, on a flat map. And so there's this desire to recreate neighborhoods

and to create alleys and places where you can walk and you can congregate fountains, all of this type of thing. And many of my, you know, several of my friends are involved in this. And I've collaborated, quite a bit with an architect. His name is Andrew Gould in the U.S., and he does that type of work in Charleston, South Carolina. But there's the Christopher Alexander that I mentioned recently, people like Janet, was it Janet Jacobs,

all these very contemporary thinkers that are trying to recapture a human-level experience at the city. Why is it that religious buildings are so connected conceptually to beautiful buildings in a way that buildings that I won't call them atheist buildings that seems like a strange concept but buildings that don't have any kind of religious connection seem not to seem not to have that that beauty in the same way at least that's what people think I don't know if it's true so there are a few things to mention one is the way that kind of traditional societies function, the best way to understand it for a modern person is to understand it as a kind of fractal situation, a fractal system of center and periphery and inside and outside unity and multiplicity. And so the church acts as a locus of unity for a village. Like if you take, let's say, a small town, there's a church in a small town. The church is usually

in a central space, if not in the actual center of the town. It is taller than the other buildings for a reason because it is the vector of unity. So we look, we're all there. And if we look around, the thing that we see that's taller than everything else is actually the thing that binds us together as a community. And so we go there, we celebrate the things that bind us together, the things that unify us, the things that are related to our origins. So we have weddings and baptisms and deaths and all of these things we celebrate at the place

that binds us together. So there's an actual coherence to the way in which it's a medieval city city would manifest themselves, which is with this building at the middle. And so you can understand it as kind of like an offering to what binds us together. So for the same reason that you would make yourself, let's say, well-dressed to go to a wedding, or that you would decorate the house for a Christmas meal, you are offering your excess up to something which binds you together. And so it becomes like a shining beacon of your unity, right?

And that so it's like it's on the one hand a sense of sacrifice, where we're sacrificing this excess into something which binds us together and up towards something which transcends us. But then it also becomes an image of our unity. That's why it's a, that's why it is, it has a, it's not also it's usually not an individual building especially like the more medieval churches

it's not it's something which happens over time right it happens over a century two centuries the church is an organic part of the unity of the town itself it's not it's not just an artistic statement or some or the way we understand how we make art today

and it's not even just architecture it is that it's a beacon of unity maybe best way to understand but I suppose And I agree with you, and that's fascinating. And maybe that's why, you know, if you look at an old town hall, for example, which isn't quite a secular church, but perhaps the idea of a town hall is that it's supposed to be something like the place where everybody comes together. These buildings also tend to be quite beautiful and well put together and designed almost as if they could be transformed into churches. but I don't see why it is the case that when somebody's building a skyscraper

I understand you know residential blocks and functionally trying to house people but if you're building the shard London's tallest tallest building I mean sure there's a sense in which the shard is quite pretty it's a slightly explorative form of form of art but I mean some of these skyscrapers

the walkie-talkie these seem to be I don't understand why it is the case that they can't also have a similar devotion to beauty that would have existed in something like an old church. Like, why is it, I understand why every now and again, you build a skyscraper, somebody takes a risk and it goes wrong. But it seems like every skyscraper we build is an ex-is-it-it's like testing people's assumptions about the subjectivity of art. It's like, you know, it's like God is laughing at us in saying that, you know, when we decide that beauty is subject. and it's just your opinion, man. He's like, well, you know, try living here for a couple of years. Yeah, let's just see what happens if you do live that way.

You know, see how you like it. But I don't understand why that's the case. Like, why does this happen? Well, it is in the secularist approach itself, it's bound in that, which is that if you live in a world in which questioning your suppositions about things, questioning your presuppositions about thing. And critical thinking is that which is worshipped, you know, like the idea that criticizing is more powerful and there's a kind of wit, there's a kind of of smartness of criticizing,

and there's a kind of naive stupidity of believing and having faith in something. You know, if you believe something, if you have faith in something, you're, you should have a, you should be cynical about it, right? You should be cynical about the things that bind us together. And so this is woven through our society at all kinds of levels, right? It's not just, you know, it happens on the one hand in the technologies, which provides us with all kinds of technologies, but it also happens in the social space, which means that every year there's a new theory about how humans work, and it's completely new and it's revolutionary,

and we've never thought of it before, and it just happens every single, you know, you know, every cycle, our education system, for example, here in Quebec, has had reforms like every five years for the past three decades, constantly reforming the way in which we do things. So it's an approach to reality, which gives the results that it gives, which is this, it's also part of what, it also gives us fashion. And fashion is hilarious because obviously fashion on your clothes is easy to, you know, because you're going to throw your, clothes away and you move out. But fashion in buildings is the most, the funniest thing ever. So you have these fashions of buildings and housebuilding that just run through society. And then 20 years or

30 years later, you look at it like your grandfather's shag carpeting as something kitsy and horrible to look at. Yeah. I suppose in architecture, although there are architectural fashions, I wonder, and I don't know, you know, as much about architecture as I'd like. It's something I'm trying to learn about. And I wonder if people are aware that they are engaging in a fashion. I mean, if you're making clothing, you'll understand when you're producing these clothes that you are playing into something like a fashion. But I imagine that people constructing buildings aren't thinking in that way.

It's only retrospectively that we look at fashions. It's actually there's a, it's progress is what it is. People think they're engaging in progress. But what they're actually doing is engaging in fashion. They think that people will connect technological progress with moral progress and artistic progress together, and they have this sense in which we're moving forward and we're progressing. It seems, to be honest, it seems like at this point only the most naive people could still believe that, you know, but nonetheless, it's so ingrained in our thinking, this idea of progress is so bound up in our thinking that it just happens.

It's running, it's a program running through human thinking. And when people see something different, they see it as good in itself. There's also this idea that innovation is an untrammeled good. Innovation is a good in itself. There's no question about it. So we think that in technology. We think that in all kinds of ways. And then we also think that in art, you know, the idea that because something is new

and because it's something that I haven't seen before, it is therefore a good. that is of course I think ridiculous it's a ridiculous idea that is human goodness and human capacity to participate in goodness is based on how humans are made it's based on human nature and the idea that just because something is new makes it necessarily good I think is it is a I think is a problem running through human society in general right now you think there's a there's a similar a similar bias going on in the opposite direction where people assume that because something is old, it is beautiful.

And because something is old, it is worth preserving. I mean, we were talking earlier about the pyramids. I think the closest example I can think of to a modern pyramid is, have you seen this orb, the sphere in Las Vegas? Yeah, the sphere in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas sphere, this. And, you know, thank goodness they built it in Las Vegas, because it makes sense there, okay?

It's this huge for people who don't know. It's this, I don't know how big it is, but it's absolutely, you know, gargantuan sphere. And on both sides, the inside and the outside, it's covered in thousands and thousands of LEDs. It's like the most LEDs all in one place. And so you go inside this huge orb, and the entire building, the entire sky above you

can be made to look like whatever you like. And it's such high definition that, you know, it absorbs you into any world you like. And on the outside, it's obviously just this big sphere and there are LEDs on the outside as well and so they put like a smiley face and welcome to Vegas and then of course

in absolutely no time advertising. It's it's a gigantic billboard. It's a monster. Okay fine it works in Vegas. They were trying to build one in London as well and I think that the mayor said no. Thank you. And then I think to myself

okay obviously a disaster just a disastrous idea to put something like that in maybe not in Vegas, but basically anywhere else. Thing is, two, three thousand years from now, you know, future societies are sort of excavations on this ancient city of London and they're all looking at this massive orb and they don't know what it was built for. Was it a tomb?

Was it a church? Was it somewhere people lived? We don't know. Isn't that a great mystery? How the hell did they put this thing together? I mean, people would travel from across the world. world to come and see what we are now so, find so offensive to our artistic taste that we, that the mayor actually said it can't be built.

But you understand that people would be flying from across the globe to come and see it. Let me push back, let me push back a little against your, your idea that it's old. So a way to understand the fact that old things are survived is to understand, to understand it actually through a Darwinian process, to understand it through a kind of evolutionary process, which is that humans propose things, right? They propose buildings, they propose literature, they propose poems, and there's a kind of variability in the proposal.

There's some variability and some kind of messiness in that happening. And then what happens is that then humans remember certain things and preserve certain things. And it doesn't happen over a thousand years. It happens over a few decades. And over a few decades, some things are preserved. and some things are not and some things are maintained and some things are not. And also some things are cared about and some things aren't.

So if you create a building that's a thousand years ago and people care for it, they are impressed by it, they love it and they want to maintain it, it will preserve itself. So there are so many buildings that have been destroyed since left for thousands of years, but there are some that are preserved and those are not preserved for arbitrary reasons. And they're not preserved over 2,000 years. They're preserved over decade, year after year after year. And that, I think, is a somewhat of a guarantee.

It's not 100% guarantee, but it's somewhat of a guarantee that that mechanism that is manifesting itself is telling you what human attention is made of, just intuitively. You don't even have to rationally understand it. You just understand that there's a, it has, it's an expression of something true about how humans engage with the world. And so that's why I do believe that it's not just that something is old, but it's that something has been kept and preserved and maintained, you know, for all this time. Yes, I think that makes sense. I'm interested in what you think, well, humans, we were talking earlier about iconography. Humans seem obsessed with making icons. They love making icons.

And in fact, in the old scriptural tradition, part of the problem is that, you know, Moses pops up to the mountain and comes back down and they've made a new icon. It's like they can't stop making icons all the time. That doesn't go away just because we don't believe in God anymore. You know, society is secularizing and all that. What do you think are the icons of the secular age? Yeah. Well, so there's a way, I think there's a, it's especially in Christian theology, like what we'll do is we will separate the difference between icon and idol. And the difference between an icon in idol is that the icon affords the transcendent. That is, it is pointed to.

It is not something which stops at itself, but rather leads up towards higher participation. So it's like if I encounter an image of St. John the Baptist, well, the image of St. John the Baptist only exists in my life because he pointed to Christ. And that image of Christ only exists in my life because he pointed to the infinite, invisible, transcendent. And so that is the way that icons function. They're a kind of ladder of participation. The idea about idols is that in some ways they are fictitious.

They try to capture it all in themselves. They try to kind of capture your attention and keep it within its sphere. They don't, the idol doesn't offer itself up to a higher participation. And so I would say that in our world now, we are surrounded with idols constantly. That is, we are constantly asked to give our attention to things in ways which are purely subservient to the thing itself, right? Advertising itself has a form of idolatry to it because the, the, sometimes advertising can be pointing to a higher good, but most of the time it's not.

Most of the time, it's just like, by the, this thing, it will accomplish all your desires. I will give you what you want if you get this thing. And so there's a sense in which if I can just get that, then I will get what I want. And that's the way in which idols are represented in the Old Testament. If you look at that story of the calf, the golden calf, for example, right? It's like Moses goes up to get the revelation. People down here were like, well, we need something here. We need something to kind of gather us together, they make this golden calf, and then they have an orgy, basically. It's like the idol affords you your desires.

So that's why it's related to, you know, that's why it can be related to anything that you give your attention to too much, whether it's, you know, porn, whether it's alcohol, and all the classical things that can capture you and can become your God for all intents and purposes. I mean, would it be, would it be right to say that pornography or alcohol are idols? I mean, and the thing that people do with idols is that they worship them. And I suppose another thing that I'm a bit unclear on is what it means to worship something. And can I, can I worship this microphone?

Can I worship? You could. You know, yeah, it would be a little ridiculous. So that is, the worship is, the best way to understand worship is you could say that it is the highest point of your attention, right? Right. It is the point of attention in which there is no, there is no higher. It doesn't fit into a higher good. So a good example, like it's, this is not woo-woo. Like I do, I don't want to be careful people to think like, oh, here what's Jonathan talking about, right? So it's like, you're making food and you're cutting the onions, right? You give attention to that. But that attention is bound in the recipe that you're making. And the making of that recipe is bound in the fact that you're going to sit together as a family and eat. And that sitting together as a family and eat, is bound into the love of the family itself as a, as something which provides, you know, and then you can keep scaling that up all the way up to the highest good, which is the infinite transcendent. And so there are some things in the world that are more in danger of capturing

our attention fully. And, you know, and it's just by the nature of who we are. It's obviously a microphone, it would be difficult for you to worship a microphone, to be harder. But, but alcohol, is the good, it's fine, but it can become a God, and we know people for who it does become a God, and it does kind of take over their lives. And it's the same with, I wouldn't say pornography, but I would say sex. Let's say sexuality is obviously something good, but it has to be ordered in a certain way for it to not become something that traps you and kind of takes over your attention so that you can't think of other things, and you can't, let's say, put your attention into higher, you know and you everybody knows it like especially if you remember when you were I mean I'm older now but I well and I was 19 or whatever right it was really difficult to think you mean you think about sex all the time it was just would take over your your your your field of experience would see the world through through the lens of sex right you would notice things and things the world would kind of organize itself in that in that way and that's that can be dangerous because that's not actually how the world works it's the world isn't only made of sex it's made of all kinds of other things that have to

to fit together towards higher goods. I mean, there's, of course, a sense in which it makes sense as an atheist thinking about evolutionary biology, why people just become obsessed with sex in this way. I mean, it is the mechanism by which things are created. It seems less natural to me, in other words, to suppress that in order to focus our attention on what the religious will say is really the creative power here. This is the real force that we should be focused. on what why is it such a in other words if worship is is supposed to be directed towards

the transcendent and God then why is it such an unnatural experience to so many people why is it so difficult well it'd be interesting to even take your your the way that you see say sex I think that even using evolutionary structures being obsessed with the act and the pleasure of sex is actually counterproductive to the evolutionary goals because the the survival of the speech is not bound up only in the orgasm. Like there's a whole buffer around that which has to do with the rearing of children,

especially in terms of human, how humans deal with children. There's a whole structure around that that has to do with the rearing of children and the familial relationships which will assure the continuation of your line, whatever you want to think of it. And so the buffer around sexuality

is already a constraint on the pleasure of sexuality. You know, one of the problems that we have, have now, you can say, is that technology in some ways affords something which was impossible in an ancient world, right? Affords unlimited access to insane amounts of, of stimulus, of sexual stimulus, that in some ways overpowers, can overpower a person in a way that is not conducive to evolutionary questions. And the proof of that is that, let's say, pornography leads to decline in population to some extent. It leads to... to erection problems, it leads to all these difficulties that will not bring about the

continuation. And so the religious is the highest point of understanding that the smallest good that I feel, whether it's the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of sex, these different pleasures have to be encased and have to be constrained into higher goods. And to some extent for you to even have those, right? If you want sexuality to be pleasure and not just a master that that kind of overwhelms you, it has to be kind of, it has to be bound into these higher goods. It's the same with food. If food is just, if you just eat food for pleasure, at some point you will no longer have pleasure eating food. If you only have sex for pleasure, at some point you will no longer have pleasure in sex. In order to think to be good, it has to be kind

embedded into these higher participation yeah if it no longer points towards something more or is done in the in the in the in the in the with the sort of attention focused towards something else and something more than I suppose like you were saying a moment ago it becomes an idle rather than an icon it becomes an end rather than a window through which to to look at what really is beautiful and and true fascinating. And I did want to ask, since you mentioned it a moment ago, I mean, when talking in these terms, you say, well, I've got to be careful here because I don't want to be accused

of just, you know, wooing, just speaking woo-woo. I see this all the time. Whenever you approach the topic of religion, and we haven't really talked about religion per se, existence of God, the traditional apologetic stuff, but whenever you try to approach that conversation from anything other than I guess an analytic philosophical tradition, this accusation often comes up and it seems like this is something that's been levied at you. Where do you think that criticism comes from? Do you think there's, I mean, the fact that you recognize while you're saying words that this may sound to people like I'm just sort of talking nonsense.

Yeah. Why do you feel the need to issue that disclaimer at the words? It's some extent. It really is the fault of religious people to some extent. that in the 19th and 20th century, many, many religious people have become what is something like practically, they are materialists and they are rationalists practically, but they continue to maintain, you know, let's take New Earth creationism, for example, right? That's a good example, where it's like people who think that Genesis 1 is a scientific text, and then they

insist on that. And then at some point what happens is that they cease to understand what these terms are about. And so they don't know what it means, what heaven means. They don't know what spirit means. They don't know what any of these things mean. And they have no connection to the ancient way of thinking. And so then, you know, they've made the language completely abhorrent to people. So it's like when you hear certain words, when people hear certain words like spirit, for example, that's a good example. People hear the word spirit. They just roll their eyes in the back of their head because they think you're just not talking about anything. You're talking about ectoplasm or some ridiculous, like, spiritualist material thing that was

invented in the modern age. And so in some ways, religious people are to blame for what happened. And the fact that now people just look at this stuff and say exactly, like, oh, so a big guy on the sky, you know, it's like, and, and I want to be careful. It's like some of the religious people that have this thing, usually they're misrepresenting. a deep intuition that is real, but they're misrepresenting it in the way that they deal with it. I had an example with someone that I care for very much, but it was kind of like this kind of materialist thing. And I asked them, I said, when Jesus went up into heaven, where did he go? Did he go into the clouds? Did he go into the moon? Like, where did he go? And the person literally

said, I never thought about that. And I thought, well, then if you've never thought about that, But you have this weird kind of scientific materialism about you, then we're in trouble, my friend, because like just with one question, I could undo your faith. Like, I could destroy your entire worldview with one question. And so, you know, we have to be able to look at this in a different way, let's just say. So where is it that the atheist, rationalist, analytic type critic? of your religious worldview most fundamentally goes wrong in terms of their approach. No, but I think it's exactly, it's exactly they do the same as the kind of materialist Christian,

is that they think that there's a certain way to describe reality, and there's only one, and it tends to equate itself to a kind of, let's say, a forensic description of a crime, right that's the best way to understand it's like they they think that everything is something like a forensic description uh but the reality that it isn't that that's that just not how reality works forensic descriptions have a certain purpose but most of the time you do not use forensic descriptions most of the time you use what people call heuristics which i hate that term by the way but that that people use mechanisms of meaning in order to get to their meaning and so if we don't understand the types of mechanisms of meaning that religion is involved in, then at some point,

we're just talking past each other and we don't know what's happening. And like I said, religious people are to blame often for that because they themselves have, at least in the modern age, forgotten the structure of the ancient cosmologies. Like they haven't read Dante, they haven't ran the church fathers, they don't know the, the, they don't know anything about scholasticism, they don't know anything about the metaphysics of Christianity, they just have this kind of first level understanding. So talking about where people go wrong is one thing. I recently had a conversation with John Viveki, who was talking about one of the problems

that we face is that people don't have anywhere to go for wisdom. They have places to go for knowledge. And traditionally, we've known where to look for wisdom, and it's not been the same place as looking for knowledge or indeed history. whatever it may be. And it got me thinking that, you know, a lot of podcasts, they have the sort of the one question that they ask every single one of their guests at the end of the episode or whatever. And I was thinking I might trial that by by ending the podcast asking you, where do you go for wisdom?

Where do I go for wisdom? And so I do believe that tradition offers wisdom, well understood. That is not tradition in the idea of data that is transmitted from one generation to the other. But what tradition offers is mostly the mode of being from one generation to another. And so I do believe that tradition offers wisdom. And that includes, of course, scripture, the church fathers, but then also the liturgical life, this type of mode of being that comes from that has been preserved through all these generations. I think that offers wisdom. Well, Jonathan Peugeot.

Thank you, so much for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks.