WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Jonathan Pageau

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Orthodox Christian, public speaker, and icon carver Jonathan Pageau joined WRFH's Sophia Mandt for an interview on Christian symbolism, the power of stories, and a defense of Christianity as the one true story that structures all reality. From 04/30/26.

You're listening to Sophia Mant, interview Jonathan Pajot on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Pajot is an artist and Christian who speaks on what he calls the symbolic world, where he analyzes the hidden meanings and patterns behind culture. A simple Wikipedia definition of what it is exactly that you do states that you analyze how the concepts of the symbolic world hold that all of reality should be understood as a series of interlocking patterns which embody meeting. Can you speak more for our audience on how you understand this world? Well, you could say that maybe since the Enlightenment or since Descartes, probably a little bit before that, we have separated what we call maybe something like the objective world, which is outside of us and is completely regular and can be predicted. And the interior world, which we often call the subjective world,

which we now often characterize as a world of opinions, of constructs, and all of this. And so this type of opposite leads us into so many problems. And what I'm trying to do with this symbolic world is to bring back what we could call philosophical realism, but do it in a way that is intuitive, not just theoretical, but trying to show how the way that we encounter meaning in the world is not a projection of your psyche on it. It's not arbitrary. It's based on human care and what humans find important. And those are objective in the broad sense. That is that they're not constructed arbitrarily.

That there are patterns and those patterns can be identified and we can understand them and participate them. And of course, sometimes we make mistakes. We misinterpret or we twist things in a sinful way. we could say if we use sin in a broad sense that is away from their true purpose, but it doesn't mean that the true purpose isn't there and that we can't discover it. So the meanings are there and we can engage with them and discover them. I remember I was watching a video and you mentioned that Christianity depicts the structure of one's being.

In what ways does Christianity depict kind of the human person and their being in the world? Well, I would say in general, obviously, religions would do that. I think Christianity has a particular, let's say, a particular take on that, which is very powerful. So if you look at the way, for example, that the creation of the human person is described in Genesis 2, you see that the dust is gathered together, right, and God blows his spirit inside. And this is a good way of understanding how, first of all, not that. only humans are made, but how everything is made, which is that if you're not, if you're attentive, you can notice that everything is made out of a innumerable amount of details, right? That everything is just a bunch of stuff.

But there's obviously a difference between a bunch of stuff and a bunch of stuff that has spirit inside, that is a bunch of stuff that is moving together in a pattern towards a purpose. You know, if you take a rabbit, a dead rabbit, you put it on a scale. it weighs the same as a live rabbit, but there's definitely a difference. In the dead rabbit, the particles, the aspects of the rabbit aren't moving together towards a united being, whereas in a live rabbit,

all the same details and all the same things are joined together and move towards a purpose. And this, of course, describes a being in general, a living being, but what happens in terms of the human is that because it really shows that the spirit of God is put inside the human, It means that there's something more about us. Of course, a live rabbit has something in common with us, but we have something different.

We have more because not only are we able to participate in that pattern of unity, of moving together toward having our parts move together towards a purpose, but we are able to see the patterns, right? We are kind of intermediaries between the world of pure patterns or the world of forms and the way that they instantiate themselves in the world. And so we have a very special place in that structure, which is that we have something of the divine or something of heaven, and we also have something of earth.

And we kind of like are in the middle of, in between heaven and earth, something like that. Do you think there is an intentional concealing of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God in this current age? or a lot of the times do people maybe not even realize kind of that understanding that they've maybe lost because of our fallenness? Yeah, I think that, well, I think that there are certain strands of Christianity which have over-emphasized the fall in the sense that you have to be cautious because if you describe humans as being completely lost with absolutely nothing good in them and nothing, you know, let's say, say that there's nothing left of the image of God in them, then, you know, you are, how can I say

this? You are reducing the human person. And so I think that at the same time, the secular world, for different reasons, often doesn't want to engage with this notion of the image of God in us because they feel like it's almost a kind of tyranny. They would like us to be free. Usually hiding behind people who don't like the idea of the image of God and the human are people. who want to be free to do what they want. You know, they want to, they don't like the idea that there's a true law that inhabits us, you know, that as St. Paul says, like this law that inhabits our hearts. And so I do think that you're right, that there is a reductive tendency that we see

in the modern world to want to make humans basically into animals. And usually what that, the reason for that is so that people feel like there's no law on them that there's no authority on them, that they can do whatever they want. I had a conversation also with a friend recently where he mentioned that there's a certain blindness amongst the modern elites, the modern priestly classes. Do you also kind of maybe notice this certain blindness to, you know, the truth of Christ? And how do you interpret it? Or is there any symbolic meanings you find behind that?

Well, I think for sure, you know, we're living in an age that is, becoming more and more a kind of antichrist age. And part of it is is the basic story. Like if you look at the basic story of the fall or the basic story of Lucifer, you know, the way that it's told kind of mythologically, the idea of the highest angel that, you know, is serving God, but ultimately wants that power for himself, right? Doesn't like the idea that he is in some way sub-servient to a higher principle. And then, wants to declare himself to be the one God, right? He wants to lift himself up at the highest.

And I think that this is, of course, something that is exemplified in all places where power is found. And, you know, in the kings of the world, in the powerful people of the world, there is definitely that temptation. Now, this temptation was held in check for a very long time by the fact that the elites received some of their authority in submitting themselves, at least in appearance to what Christians believed. And so, you know, although obviously they broke that all the time, but there was at least a need to do that in appearance to say, yes, I am a Christian. I do believe in Christ. I do believe in

these higher principles. And then they would have to maybe hide and lie and do these things. And if they were going to break those rules, they would do it. But now we have this problem, which is that our elites aren't Christian. They don't have to be. No one cares. And they, they don't have those principles. And so they don't feel, how can I say this? Then what's happening is we're seeing brute power and manipulation and lies becoming just normal. We're used to the government lying to us. We're used to our elites lying to us for all kinds of reasons. And this And this shows that we are moving further and further away from Christ in our social structures. Thank you. And then I'm also wondering if the whole situation with the Epstein Files release

and just seeing the kind of evils that they're involved in, do you think there's also maybe some meaning behind that as well as well? It's a very dark world. Bizarrely, the one thing that gives me a bit of hope is a lot of normal people I'm talking to are at least now that that's been revealed kind of acknowledging that there really is that level of darkness, if that makes sense? Of course. I think that the Epstein files, the one thing that definitely are revealing is that there, you know, there are people that are very powerful that are hidden, that they don't have our interest in mind, they have their own interest in mind.

And they are like vampires, right? They kind of, they act on the world without feeling like they have to build it. it or to add anything to it. I think for sure, Epstein is kind of just giving us a glimpse of that world. You know, this world that we're talking about is made possible, of course, by the diminution of Christianity as the main philosophy that holds us together. But it's also made possible because of technology. And so technology has in some ways fragmented our world.

we've become dots, you know, economic dots on a board. And therefore, the elites don't have to care about us. In the ancient world, if you think about, think about, let's say, a Roman city, you know, the elites in the city, they could be abusive. They could do things, of course, that were immoral. But because they lived in the city and because they were, they received their riches from the people around them, they had to give back.

There was no way around it. even if they were horrible people, they always had to give back to the people with which they live because or else they would just, the people at some point would just come and kill them. Like, seriously, that's how, you know, they would just come in and destroy their things. But now because of the way the world is set up, you can have elites that live on islands that are completely disconnected from us and that are like vampires on our reality and have absolutely no need or no responsibility to give back. Thank you.

On a different kind of subject, an orthodox friend of mine said she's obsessed with ascetics and wants to know about the relationship between beauty and mystery and the concept of staying veiled. Yes. Well, I think that this is important in terms of if you want to understand the notion of symbolism

that we talked about at the outset, you know, when I said that it's not like there's a spiritual world out there, let's say, and there's the physical world down here and that these are unrelated, right, and that, you know, God is up there, we're down here, and once in a while God shows up, you know, but then most of the time he's not there. That's really not the symbolic perspective. The symbolic perspective is that, you know, the heavens manifest in the earth that the truth of God and of God's will, they are the very structuring of reality, right? The divine logos is what that would structure the reality. So it means that we can discover God in the way that the

world reveals itself to us. And so beauty is important because beauty is the glory of that which is true and that which is good. Of course it can be twisted. You know, it can be misused, but it doesn't mean that at the basis of everything that it isn't true. And so I think this is really important to be able to understand that because the Orthodox engage and want to manifest as the beauty of God's kingdom, it is really because we believe that God can be present in this world, and that appears to us as beauty. This beauty isn't a simple, it's not a naive beauty. It's not, you know, let's say just ornamentation or the flashiness of our consumer culture.

You know, the idea that the cross itself can be beautiful as a deep paradox. You know, these are the kinds of relationships that, we feel, but nonetheless, we can see the beauty of God's presence in the world. Thank you. You're listening to Sophia Mant, interview Jonathan Pajot on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Pajot is an artist and Christian who speaks on what he calls the symbolic world, where he analyzes the hidden meanings and patterns behind culture. Okay, so now I'm going to kind of set up a lead-up for a story I've read parts of recently that's really I've found interesting requires a little bit of explaining and then I'll ask the question.

So recently, I've been drawn to the works of Elia de, a 20th century Romanian scholar of religion and myth. And in particular, his fable known as the old man and the bureaucrats, which he spoke about in an interview that was published as a book titled Ordeal by Labyrinth. And the story is about an old man who's a retired schoolteacher with an incredible memory. who's arrested by the police, by the bureaucracy dominant in the old man's world. But his stories that he tells these policemen, these bureaucrats are so labyrinthine, so fantastical, that amazingly they listen to his stories, just utterly transfixed by what he has to say. And as Eliotty tells it, he is even told to take his time and write his stories down. And the old man gets to meet increasingly important people, right up to a very close woman friend of the

minister of the Interior. And in the interview, Eliotti mentioned something that I find very relevant to what you do when discussing the inspiration that came for his story. And again, the story is titled The Old Man and the Bureaucrats. He states, I wanted to engineer a confrontation between two mythologies, the mythology of folklore, of the people, which is still alive, still welling up on the old man, and the mythology of the modern world of technocracy. These two mythologies meet head on. The police try to discover the hidden meaning of all these stories. But they are also blinkered.

They can only look for political secrets. They are incapable of imagining that there can be meaning outside the political field. Do you also understand the world is having maybe a sort of confrontation between competing mythologies? Yeah, I do think that's right. I do think that the modern world has mistaken theology, you know, and it's not a story that hasn't existed before. In some ways, it's a Promethean story. It's a revolutionary story. So much of the modern world is revolutionary.

So it has its precedence in exactly stories like Prometheus. If you go to some of the, if you go to Rockefeller Center in New York, you'll see the statue of Prometheus, you know, promoted as an image of what it is that they were trying to do in this kind of burgeoning modern age. But it is definitely a mistaken theology. And you can see it in the Eliades story that you tell because it is a story that understands power, that understands everything as power. And this is what is in the Promethean story and it is what is in the Iliari story. whereas the ancient stories, right, the folk stories, these stories that have kind of persisted over millennia in the people in these more organic ways, they hold a type of truth that is,

I call it like a meeting of heaven and earth, right? That is it's, you could say from a modern perspective that they're emergent stories, that is that they exist through persistence and through memory and through retelling and through attention and through care. But because of that, they catch, you could say, the true pattern of human attention. They contain what humans really care about, even sometimes without knowing that that's what they care about. And so I think you're right that we're dealing with this confrontation constantly in our world. I do feel like things have changed a little bit in the past few years, maybe in the past 10 years,

at the height of like the kind of late modernity or the beginning of post-modernity, there was a kind of frenetic attack on these ancient stories. You know, the kind of new atheist moment, the dogma movie and all of this stuff that happened, I think was it like in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s, that were incapable of noticing the beauty of the patterns that were underneath their, their vision of power and of just materiality. But it seems to me, I don't, maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like there's a breach that has opened up.

Maybe it's because of the internet and some of the things that we encounter there. Maybe it's because of AI. But it feels like I have hope that people will understand and will be able to hear the old man's story again in a way that is deeper than just the, just power. Well, that's interesting because that sort of answer. is my next question, which is if storytelling still has the power to make modern man fall into a spell because of its inherent beauty and truth. And it reminds me also of how, I know Eliade, he had to leave his home country because of the power and the sort of communistic world that became. So he was in exile and couldn't return. But yet he wrote amazing stories, as did Nabokov, the Russian writer, who also was like exiled from his home country. And yet, even though that was, you know, very traumatizing, I think, for both of them.

They were able to write incredible stories almost because they more deeply kind of loved or appreciated what they had lost when they had to leave their place. Yeah. It's a, it's a, I think that it's really an exciting time on that front, which is we're noticing, you know, we're noticing Hollywood just slowly collapsing in real time. we're seeing that people don't know what stories to tell anymore. We have most of the storytelling around us has been in some ways reduced to utilitarianism. It's been reduced to propaganda. You know, so many of the Hollywood movies are now so transparent in their propaganda that it's almost painful. It's actually unpleasant.

There's no pleasure in watching these things anymore. But it also opens up a breach like I was kind of mentioning. there's something going on where I think that there's a hope for new storytelling on the horizon. You know, Malcolm Geite, the British poet, just has started publishing a epic poetic version of the Arthurian cycle, which you'd think, why would anybody do that, you know, in the 2020s? And if you, I don't know if you paid attention, but Martin Shaw, who's also a British person, poet has just published this amazing book called Liturgies of the Wild, which was a bestseller, New York Times bestseller and is kind of running through the elites and running through culture

that is proposing a return to this epic vision, a return to the deeper stories. And so I think there's hope, and I think that people are hungry for truth. And so when the, you know, when the bureaucrats, when the bureaucrats are there for too long and their dry propagandistic storytelling just becomes boring for people, you know, there's a limit to which they can shove it down our throats and hopefully true stories will emerge out of that. Well, that's one thing that I noticed that was interesting is that I spent last summer interning in D.C., which is a very bureaucratic place. But I think sometimes if you just tell people, I mean, just straight up stories or people would ask me, like, was that this weird mixer event

that was kind of like, you know, share your different views, whatever, you know, and people would ask me what I thought about certain things was like a free press party. And surprisingly, people were receptive and listened when I would just explain my understanding of like humanity and their purpose in the world because I told it like a story, I suppose. And so it was almost gave me hope, as did how I have noticed there has been books as well. I had not heard of the one you mentioned, but I know against the machine by, I believe Paul King's, is becoming a popular book as an I'll see it in Barnes & Noble. And then he's referencing these thinkers like Jacques Alul or others that, you know, I've never really heard, you know, shared in the public square or as mainstream before, which does give me a sense of hope as well.

I guess another kind of broad question, I suppose theological I've always had. That's a bit of a different topic is that I've seen that many creation myths mentioned that the world was formed from chaos into order. But is it more accurate or better to think of the world as kind of coming from nothing into order or there are always being a sense of order because there was the word and the word was of God? And it's only because of the fall that things are now so wrong and now so chaotic. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, you know, there are obviously different forms. There are different versions of the creation myth. And when we compare, for example, to the ones that are the most relevant to us, it's at Westerners, if you compare, for example, Hesiod's Theogony, which is a kind of creation myth, and then the biblical creation myth, you can kind of see the difference in which one, you know, we can ask us how which one is superior. So in Hesiod's Theogany, everything does come out of chaos. That is that the original state is basically chaos. And then out of chaos, it first rises these kind of dark aspects, you know, like night, like strife, you know, all of these darker elements that are connected to chaos.

And then out of those ultimately will also emerge the heavens and the principles of order. And now the principles of order to spend their time fighting the chaos and trying to subjugate it. And there's this huge competition between the principle of order and chaos. But that is because chaos is the original state and everything emerges out of chaos. And therefore, the world will always be a conflict between order and chaos, you could say. But what happens in scripture is that the original vision of creation is that you have chaos, but chaos is not negative. Chaos is something like potential, right?

It's a kind of emptiness that is out of which, you know, different multiplicities are brought together towards heaven. And so the terms in the biblical story is that you have God as this infinite source of all things. And then you have heaven, which is the place of order and earth, which is the place of chaos. And then they are meant to engage with each other like lovers, very much like in the the theogony, but not in a hostile way, but in a kind of, in a, as a collaboration. And when we see that not working, we don't see it as the nature of reality. We see it as a way in which reality becomes broken.

So when we see the conflict, we see it as sinful as something that is going away from the true purpose of the world. And so it's actually a very much, a very deep distinction between these two modes of seeing. And if you pay attention to a lot of the ways people talk about cosmology today in terms of the scientists, they really tend towards the Greek vision.

They really tend towards this idea that everything is an emergent property that comes out of randomness. But the problem is that they often don't see that the Greeks had it right. They totally understand why if your cosmology is that, then you will always have strife. You will always have a problem of competition between the principle of order and the principle of meaning and the kind of chaos that that gave birth to it. Wow. Thank you. Over Easter, I had a lovely conversation in the home of a retired professor of English who specialized in Southern or agrarian American literature. He invited me to his house and it was lovely, especially because, you know, I'm away from my family. So it's

kind of like, oh, I can go to these people and, you know, wonderful home-cooked meal and everything. And he's very, very smart, but just kind of has this very friendly southern drawl and this old wisdom he carries about him. And I remember that he told me that he thought one of the problems with our country is the Los Angelesocation of America, meaning that the U.S. and I think broadly the world is becoming more homogenized in some ways. I suppose you're Canadian, but do you notice this general trend? and can you speak on its symbolism or some of the meanings behind that? Yeah, and it's a funny thing. It's really a trick. It's a devilish trick, you could say,

is that the way that this happened is that you emphasize diversity, is that you say what's really important is diversity. And it's fascinating because you could say, well, no, Jonathan, I didn't say that the problem was diversity. I said the problem was homogeneity. right? And but what happens when you emphasize diversity is that you get something like, you get something like confusion and mixture. And when there's confusion and mixture, this is when at some point you read, you end up with a kind of bland homogeneity, you know.

And what's fascinating is that in order for distinction to exist, you have to maintain distinction to some extent. That is, it's actually, rejoicing in diversity would actually be rejoicing in unity. That is, how is it that we are together and one? And then understanding and respecting the fact that diversity happens. Like, you know, unity is a joining of diverse elements together. And so you have all kinds of histories of, you know, ancient empires. You know, let's say you look at the Roman Empire that in the Roman Empire,

there are all these different cultures. and they continued to maintain their own cultural independence, but they also understood that they existed together in this larger hole. Whereas now what we do is we emphasize diversity so much and we do it everywhere. So it's like there has to be diversity everywhere. And therefore what it does is it turns the entire world into a bland sameness. Because if you have diversity everywhere in an equal measure, it means that everything's the same.

there actually is no diversity anymore. You've actually destroyed diversity. And so it's kind of like a devilish trick on us is, you know, because obviously we are, as Christians, we are supposed to have compassion for the other. We're supposed to have compassion for the marginalized compassion for those that are different from us, you know, the entire vision of Christ as loving your neighbor,

even loving your enemy, all of this is important. But this new thing that we're seeing this kind of homoical, of the world is really a trick that's being played on us. Thank you. Beyond being an Orthodox Christian man, you are also a husband and a father. What important roles do you think father and husband plays, especially from like a symbolic and Christian perspective? I think that everything that we see that St. Paul talks about, you know, St. Paul really shows us the kind of the image of the family. I think that, you know, we,

the husband, you know, the man of the family is, of course, seen by St. Paul as being the head of the household, the one that kind of gives the identity, it gives the basic direction, it kind of brings people together. But what's different in the Christian vision is, you know, people say, you'll always get hung up on this text in St. Paul, which says that women should submit to their husbands. And they never read the next verses, which then say what husbands have to do, which is they have to die. Like husbands have to die for their family. They have to sacrifice. They have to love their wife and, and, and, you know, do everything to present them blameless and holy before the seat of Christ. And so, you know, I think that this is the way that we understand the relationship in Christianity,

not just as a man in the simple sense of a man and his family, but authority in general. We have the sense that authority plays a kind of masculine role in our life. life, that we expect Christian authority to exist for the sake and love of those that it yields its authority on in an image of God. And then we also, in response to that, submit to that authority. And so I think that that's really the best way of understanding those relationships. Thank you. And then how do you work to encourage your wife and children towards the faith and love of Christ? You know, I mean, I think that obviously, hopefully being an example, You know, and then at the same time, you know, we tried to maintain in our house.

We tried to maintain basic disciplines of prayer before meals of, you know, a kind of reverence towards God. You know, I bring my children to church every, I mean, now they're older. They have to kind of come on their own. But, you know, all their entire life, you know, you go to church, you bring your children to church. You try to kind of maintain that basic discipline. And obviously, you know, you tell the stories. You read the text. You celebrate the feast.

you celebrate Christmas, you celebrate the resurrection, you can celebrate things that will remind your children and your wife and your family of how important these events are in guiding us. Thank you. And then another friend was wondering, I know you've spoken some on this before, but what symbolic roles do witches play in modern society and how do you deal with them? how do you deal with the witches? Yeah.

You know, it's a kind of interesting, it's an interest, the witches thing is really fascinating, right? Because we have this moment in the late, in the early modern period. People always think that witches appeared in the Middle Ages, but really they appeared in the early modern age up to the Enlightenment. And in some ways, witches appear as an image of that which is anti-Christian, right? And it's hard to know if they are a projection at that time. Because some of the stories are so fantastical. It's kind of hard to know if there were really witches

or if this was a kind of social, I don't know, like a kind of vision. I tend to think that the witches actually were around. And so it's a mix of, if you think about it, what it is, it's like a mix of pre-Christian stuff. That's the way that they present themselves. It's like it's a residue of a world that we don't have. that we're no longer in contact with.

And then it's also a kind of revolutionary trope, right, where the idea, especially of the image of the witch and the female witch, you know, that is kind of angry and resentful and therefore wants to undo the social order. That's how they're presented in the, that's definitely how they're presented in the ancient text. And so it's kind of fascinating. You know, if you think about like, there's this crazy text from the Middle Ages, it's not the Middle Ages, from the early modern period again, that's called the Hammer of Witches. It's a wild text. And it describes what witches want. And it's kind of fascinating. It says that witches want because they're angry, you know, because they can't have the men that they want. That for that reason, what they do is they prevent the normal union of male and female.

and they do it in different ways. One of the ways they do it is they remove the male member, which even in the text, they're like, we don't know how they do this. Maybe it's just an illusion, whatever. But think about it more in terms of symbolism, this idea of the castrating character that removes the male member.

And then they abort children. And then they encourage, through all kinds of weird spiritual ways, they encourage women to have children from other men, like from different men, not their husbands, right? And so you're like, oh, it's kind of interesting. Yeah, that kind of looks like today, right? It kind of looks like a lot of things that are happening now. It does.

And so you think, so sometimes I wonder, like, did the witches ultimately win? You know, like, did they win? And so how do we deal with this? How do we deal with the witches today? And now there are people who explicitly say that they're witches. There are women who say their witches. And not only do they say they're witches, but they say they are the witches from the early modern period. They represent the same thing that was being supposedly persecuted back in those days.

It's very fascinating. And they're putting curses on Donald Trump or on whoever they don't like. And so, I mean, how do we fight this? The way to fight it is to pray. It's to go to church, is to embody, you know, the truth and the beauty of what Christ has given. given us and in some ways to demonstrate by our lives that the the beautiful Christian family with children that are healthy and loving and parents that are healthy and loving is life giving whereas the witches let's say loneliness and her animosity towards the world

and her bitterness and her desire in some ways to destroy the structures of reality those are sterile and they're not life-giving. And obviously they can only be a parasite on the beauty of true. Yeah, the beauty of true. And it's weird because witches are like obsessed with, supposedly witches are like obsessed with fertility imagery and stuff. But, you know, witches don't have children, you know. Or at least if you think about the image of a witch, usually they don't.

And so that's what I would say is to really exemplify. what the beautiful world is. Yes, well, it really is wonderful for me when I always, sometimes I forget to pray, but when I do, I always feel better. And I think, you know, it really does say something dark that sometimes I just forget or something that feels like our world wants to make us forget that, you know, I have struggles, I'll have trials and tribulations, but I can always pray to the God that loves me and that wants me to be in union with him and leads me towards goodness.

I mean, it really is special and wonderful that we have the ability to pray for and have, you know, interact with our God. I suppose another similar question, but with a different symbolic creature is maybe what symbolic role do changelings perhaps play in modern society and how much you deal with them, if that makes sense? Well, yeah, these are interesting questions because obviously, you know, these are, this is another example where, you know, when you read the old text and you hear about changelings and you think, you know, what are they talking about? Like, what are these creatures? Like, what is it? And it's funny because now we have them. Like now they're everywhere. The changelings are everywhere. You know, and not only that, but we have entire technological means to make those changelings real. You know, we have. the internet is making things like furries and people who change from humans to animals quite real. Like it's actually happening around us. We went skiing the other day and we saw a bunch of furries. They came skiing and they were all a bunch of animals that were skiing.

And so you think, oh, man, the medievals were onto something. They kind of understood this. And of course, with the rainbow stuff, you get that as well, right? you get this kind of infinite changing, you know, gender fluidity and queerness is, especially those aspects are definitely the, they definitely embody the kind of changeling mythology, you know, very explicitly. And so, you know, what do we, these images, the changeling, like they are images of fluidity. That's a good way of understanding it. They are images of the place where identity breaks down. There are the images of,

of the edges where you stop being yourself or where you're, you know, it's not clear what is there, right? On the edge of your perception, like if you think about even your perception, that what you see in the focus of your eyes is truly real. But what happens in the edge of your perception is this changeling world. And this is true not only in your perception, but it's also true of a, you know, of a nation. that is that people who live on the edges of nations are also changelings because they're a mixture.

They mix between the different countries. Someone who lives on the border between America and Mexico will have a bigger chance of being in some ways a type of ambiguous figure that is maybe more mixed between different identities. So there's nothing wrong with changelings per se. This is something that just happens on the edge of identity. But the problem is, of course, when this becomes weaponized to destroy identity, right? When the shape-changing character is a type of, is represented or appears as a monster that tries to eat the identity. Because ambiguity, if weaponized, can destroy identity. And because you can see it now.

I mean, you're probably so used to hearing this, which is that people, will point out exceptions and then they'll keep pointing out exceptions until they'll start to question the identity itself. And that is an example of what the changelings do and what the changelings can do in our world. Does that make sense to you? I think it does. Yeah. Thank you. Well, it also makes me think a lot on how I really do notice that marriage and the Christian idea of marriage and how wonderful it is, you know, the idea that the husband even sanctifies the wife and is willing to lay down his life for her and how, you know, it's a mystical union that the wife almost has the image of the church, you know, Christ's bride, and then the husband is

Christ. And I was really struck by how I had a theology class in school with a wonderful professor and how that view of marriage, I don't know if I'd ever heard really clearly communicated before. And, you know, I'd been raised in a Christian home and then have been taught those things. And I thought, you know, it almost seems like there's a lot of the, a lot of the wonderful things about us as human beings are almost missing or lost or obscured. So I'm wondering if you could maybe speak on that and if you also maybe notice that with marriage specifically. Yeah, I think that in some ways, you know, one of the things that's happened in Christianity, of course, in the few hundred years, not everywhere, but in some places, which is this reduction

of Christianity to propositions that you believe, right? That if you believe this and when you die, you go to heaven, something like that. And we've forgotten how in some ways Christianity, offers an image of reality. It offers an ontology, right? It helps us see what the structure of the real is. And this example that you say is one of the most beautiful ones that is in Scripture, which is that we understand that the way that God relates to the world

then reflects itself at every level of society. and the image of God and how God is towards us then is mirrored. So you have these little versions of that that appear all over the world all over how reality functions. And so, you know, this is why, for example, St. Paul says that we have to obey our authorities because their authority is given to them by God. And in a smaller way, they act, they represent God's authority over us at their level. And it's the same, of course, with the father and with the husband.

is that the father and the husband then has that image. And so what's beautiful about that is that it's actually more radical than that, which is that that structure, let's say, of the head and the body, right, of the logos and the tropos, as we say in orthodoxy that is the purpose and the embodiment is everywhere. Everything is made that way. Everything has that structure. Everything in some ways has a head or a purpose or an identity that you can see. and that gathers under it or within it

and dances with a kind of with multiplicity so that it becomes one. And that means that, you know, when we say that God is hidden in creation and that everything that God made, that God's light is hidden in the world, you know, that his image is there, this is absolutely true.

This is not just like a nicety that we say. It's not just like a, who is it that said this word was really a deepity? It's not just like a fake thing that you say. It's this is how reality functions. And this is how God reflects himself in his own creation. And so when St. Paul gives us this beautiful image of marriage, you know, you realize that this is the same image as the church. But it's also actually the same image for the entirety of all creation.

That's why the heavenly Jerusalem in the book of Revelation is an expansion of the church to include all creation in it. And so when we participate in these small things in the way in which we live out our marriage and our family, and when we do it in the right way, we are becoming mirrors for the kingdom of God in the world. Wow. Well, that also reminds me of how I remember learning in a Christian apologetics class that I don't want to make a super broad generalization, but a lot of famous atheists or people who even openly hate. hated Christianity had, didn't have a father in the life or hated their father or something like that, which makes me wonder almost if like, you know, it made them harder to accept or believe

in kind of a heavenly father, you know, our father in heaven. If they didn't have an example like that that they were raised with to be able to as easily maybe appreciate that. Yeah, and that's why Christ is so harsh on authorities. That's why Christ is so harsh on authorities. That's why Christ is so harsh on the Pharisees. That's why Christ says, you know, if you, if you cause one of these little ones to stumble, you know, would be best if we put a millstone around your neck and threw you down into the deep because Christ, you know, understands that because of how the world is made, that are authorities, that the people that, you know, teach us God's word, the people that are an authority over us, they are like little images of how God is in our life.

And therefore, when those people go astray, when those people are hypocrites, when those people are misrepresenting, it is much worse because the consequences are not just on themselves, but on all the people that look to them as an image of what God is in the world. So this is obviously, I mean, my goodness, this means that, you know, every time we're in authority, every time that we, you know, people look for power, right? people want to be powerful and to be on top. But when you're on top, it's actually an insane responsibility because you are, you are asked to in some ways embody God's authority and God's love and God's mercy on the people that you are responsible for. So it's actually a great, it's a great weight that we have to take seriously. And then I guess I have a theological question and I don't know for sure if this is true or not,

but is it, do the Orthodox Christians believe in marriage in a sense being eternal? I mean, I think this is a, I mean, this is theologumenon, right? That is, these are not official positions of the church. I mean, of course, there is the famous verse that Christ, you know, when he says that there won't be, people will not be given husbands and wives in the kingdom of, in the kingdom of God. And there's also this, you know, in the Orthodox Church, we do tolerate divorce more, for example, that in the Catholic Church, that is that we, we do not believe that people should get divorced. We think that, you know, humans should not divide what God is united.

But we also understand that all of this is for our salvation. that is that if someone does get divorced, you know, we usually will grant another marriage, usually up to four is actually like the most. It's a penitential marriage. So what I mean is that, you know, I think that there, I think that you probably would get different opinions that obviously we take Christ's words very seriously, you know, how it is that, how it is that we're not going to be married in the kingdom of heaven. But at the same time,

I think that there is something of whatever good is in this world, like whatever good that we participate in this world, whatever love we participate in this world that is true and beautiful, will carry over, you know, into the kingdom of heaven. And so, I mean, I guess do do with that what you will, you know? I'm not sure, but exactly that. that would that would look like? Yes. Well, thank you. I think my kind of last question is, again, I was having a wonderful conversation with a friend. And he said he noticed or he thought that a lot of

maybe what determines the culture is our imagination or how we even imagine the future and how there's a lot of dark, dystopian books that are recently being published or even becoming popular. And some of which I generally agree with their morals or views, if I think, they're correctly, you know, diagnosing certain societal ills. But then he was saying maybe, you know, if we imagine that it's going to be dark and bad, maybe it really will be in maybe a way to help there be hope is to write again fairy tales, you know, write fairy tales, write stories like Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis or, you know, fantasies by McDonald or things like that. So I'm wondering if you think there is maybe a way of kind of like rescuing. I mean,

not that we can save ourselves, but in a sense, trying to rescue ourselves a bit out of some despair by kind of telling beautiful stories. Yeah, I think that that's right. You know, we are doing that. We're publishing fairy tales right now, we're also publishing a big epic called God's Dog, which is trying to tell better stories. But in terms of the dystopia and the despair, this is the thing about Christianity is that we're not naive. We know things die. You know, things die. You're going to die.

I'm going to die. And it'll probably be painful. There's a good chance that it'll be pretty painful. And so we kind of have, we're not naive about that, but we always represent the long game, right? So a lot of the dystopian novels, they're trying to grapple with things that they see in our world that are leading us in dark places and that can. lead to our destruction in different ways. And Christians shouldn't totally disagree with that, that this is real.

But we also know that there's something on the other side, you know, that there is a, that there's a great turn at the end of the story, right? In which in the end, it's the truth that wins. It's the logos that wins. And so I think that we, so we have to be, you know, as Christians, especially those that can tell stories, this is the way of looking at it, which is we have to be able to see that it's not about trying to pretend like things aren't going to fall apart and die because they will.

It's understanding that the guiding principle behind the unity, right, the divine logos, the uncreated word of God is the master of the world and will gather things together again, you know. Thank you. This has been Sophia Mant, interviewing Jonathan. and Peugeot on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM. Pajot is an artist and Christian who speaks on what he calls the symbolic world, where he analyzes the hidden meanings and patterns behind culture.

This has been Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.