Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to icon carver Jonathan Pageau 02/11/2022

Elizabeth 

Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the ideas that shape us, and how we can better understand people different from ourselves. Every episode, I speak to someone with some role in shaping our public conversations: from journalists, to poets, to faith leaders, from YouTube stars to playwrights, to visual artists. And I asked them to reflect on what is sacred to them in the broadest sense, their own approach to how they use their platform or their voice, and what they’ve learned about the many ways we can if we’re not careful, divide and even dehumanise each other. Guests come from a huge range of perspectives on politics, religion, and everything else, many of which, of course, are different from my own positions. But rather than challenge them, I’m seeking to understand how they’ve got to where they are. I have a hunch that listening deeply is always a good place to start. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do leave us a review or share an episode. I particularly like hearing from you on email, or one of our many social media channels, so do get in touch. This week, we’ve got a conversation to share with you that I had with Jonathan Pageau. I actually went to check his pronunciation having checked it with him, and the official YouTube, you know, the short clip where they read out a word to tell you how to pronounce it. There’s a comment from him underneath, it’s the only common saying ‘This is a dumb way to pronounce my name.’ So, I think it’s Jonathan Pageau. And I hope that I’ve got that right. Jonathan is one of the only professional icon carvers in North America, which means that he creates religious art in stone or wood, and I’d really encourage you to go check it out. It is beautiful. He’s also a writer and a speaker with a very successful YouTube channel called ‘The Symbolic World’. We spoke about the culture of contemporary art, his conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the ways the Left and the Right, both dehumanise people, and his friendship with Jordan Peterson. I really hope you enjoy listening. As usual, there are some reflections for me at the end. 

Jonathan, we are gonna go right in the deep end with a question that you don’t normally get asked day– to–day at a dinner party or on the bus, which is a very deliberate rejection of small talk, and it’s about what is sacred to you. And I have a feeling that you’re someone for whom this word will be more comfortable than it is for some people. But it’s really, I hope, a generative question that you can take in any direction that you like. I would bracket out your family. And the origins of the question for me, there’s a sociologist called Durkheim who’s written a lot about sacred values and sacred ideas on a kind of collective scale. I came actually at it via an anthropologist called Scott Adtran, who uses it in peace building and reconciliation, and says, when we can acknowledge these non–instrumental values in each other, when we can get beyond the things that drive us around comfort and convenience, and the sort of economic rational actor theory, we get to something true that helps us understand each other better. People have said all manner of things to me about what they hold sacred. But what bubbles up for you with that question? What might be some sacred values or some things that you’ve tried to build your life around that are precious? 

Jonathan Pageau 

So, I would say, my answer might actually be far more boring than what you expect. In the sense that I really have completely embraced a more traditional vision of what is sacred; that is, I really see sacrality as a form of participation in something which is beyond you. And it’s something which is beyond you, but also binds you to that transcendent but also to the people that are acknowledging and participating in the sacred as well. And so, I really do see something, let’s say like the Eucharist in the Christian tradition as being the root of sacred participation. And so, I’m a liturgical artist. I make sacred images for churches and for people. And I’m very much in love with that language, with that tradition, you know, with the sacred space of a church and how it’s set up in a three–tiered structure and how it reflects also our own inner sacred space, that we have to also be attentive to, and, and come into. And so ultimately, I could say that I believe that the sacred is something like the place where the transcendent meets the mundane. It’s the place where God encounters the world. 

Elizabeth   

I’m just gonna pause on that hefty and beautiful sentence: ‘The sacred is the place where something meets the mundane’. I don’t want to forget it. 

Jonathan Pageau   

The transcendent meets the mundane. 

Elizabeth   

We’re gonna get back to art and icon carving and imagery. But first, I just want to get a sense of where you’ve come from, where did your story start? Give me a little picture of little Jonathan running around. And what were the big ideas around… political, philosophical, religious, that were formative for you? 

Jonathan Pageau   

So, I guess I come from a very strange background in the sense my first language is French. I’m from Quebec. And Quebec used to be the most Catholic place in the world, possibly. And in the 1960s, and 70s. like many other places in the world, everything just exploded. And the church within one or two generation was emptied. Many people became secular, just became more cosmopolitan. But then some people also discovered Protestant Evangelical Christianity as a kind of breath of fresh air, as a new authenticity to their faith. And that is what happened to my parents. So, my parents converted from Catholicism into Evangelical Christianity as a kind of new discovery of Scripture, and a new way of seeing God. And so, I grew up with my parents, my father was a Baptist minister. And so, I grew up for many years, very much involved in the Protestant church. And I have amazing stories, wonderful people, I don’t really have many complaints about the type of experiences I had with the church. But then when I reached my 20s, and just like everybody, you know, I went to university and I started to read more widely, to read more philosophical ideas, to read from other traditions. And I started to feel as if the Protestant church that I grew up with was lacking something, and I didn’t quite know how to formulate it at first. This is a process that happened with my brother at the same time. So, we started reading, philosophy, different strange authors, reading also texts from other traditions and other mystical traditions and really falling in love with a more mystical vision of spirituality, but also kind of being annoyed that we knew we were Christian, I knew I was a Christian, but I felt like ‘Why is it that I can read some Sufi mystic and just be astounded by what I see there. But then I’m a Christian, but we don’t have that?’ And that’s when I realised that we do. In fact, it’s just that I didn’t know about all the amazing mystical texts that have been written in the Christian tradition. And so, reading Meister Eckhart at the outset, and reading Jakob Böhme, and then ultimately moving all the way back into St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Ephrem the Syrian and all these powerful, early mystical fathers. I came to be completely reconciled with my own Christianity, and ultimately, that led me to Orthodoxy. 

Elizabeth 

I want to hear more about that. But I’m going to try and keep some chronology because having a dad who’s a Baptist minister, how was it presumably as a very artistic, creative child with this draw to making images as a child? Is that a fair assumption? 

Jonathan Pageau 

Yeah, definitely. I was really an artist from very young identified. I remember in third grade, just thinking ‘That my main identity – it’s being an artist.’ So, no, you’re right. There was an issue with that for me. And it didn’t come from my family. My father and my mother are people who are actually quite intellectually honest and open and always in a mode willing to learn, if there’s something to learn. But so, let’s say, imbibed in the culture and the general culture, there was what we could call a kind of implicit suspicion about images. For sure, you can make images in a secular context, but there really was no theological justification, and there was no way to integrate image–making within the church, which at first, I kind of just accepted but then ultimately, when I was in studying Fine Arts at the university, I really was trying to reconcile that in my own work. So, my work became very odd. It was Contemporary Art, but it was mostly contemporary art trying to deal with two problems. One, which was how to make art as a Protestant, and then also how to make Contemporary Art as a Christian, because Contemporary Art is so cynical. And so, you know, it’s always a comment upon a comment upon a comment and there’s something about kind of aloofness about Contemporary Art. And I realised that that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to make something direct, I wanted to make something real, but it seemed inaccessible to me. So, when I finished my university degree, I did really well. I finished first in my class and, I got a workshop, and I got a studio, just like all the artists get these big studios with friends. And for sure, I thought I was going to be an artist, but at some point, the contradiction became so alarming to me that I couldn’t deal with it anymore. And I actually decided that I was done with art. I threw away all my art and I told my wife, I just got married…and I told my wife, I said, ‘I’m done and never making art again.’ She just laughed, because she knew that was a lie, she knew that it wasn’t true. There’s no way. And then ultimately, part of my spiritual discovery in reading the text was also discovering the images, and discovering this beautiful language of Christian art, this traditional language of art that Christians had developed, organically, you know, until maybe like up to the year 1200. There was this universal language all over the church. If you had gone to a church in England or church in Palestine, or you know, anywhere, you would have been able to recognise what you were seeing. There was an organic whole, and I fell in love with that language. And that’s what I ended up embracing. 

Elizabeth 

I want to just pause a moment on the culture of Contemporary Art. Because you wrote this line that really helped sum up some things for me. You talked about Contemporary Art being “Steeped in irony and cynicism, mixed with elitism and a fetishization of the art object. It seemed impossible to make something that was true: not only true in its vision, but its embodiment, and in its very purpose.” And I have talked to various guests about the difficulty of creativity about our deepest things and our most precious things. And how, you know, I’m more literarily leaning, and I bemoan the difficulty. We have Marilyn Robinson, and we have Graham Greene, and then what like maybe 50 years back, then you get to Dostoevsky. But like, decades pass with no one writing serious art literature that takes the possibility of God seriously. And then when visualise arts wrestle with it, either goes straight to something quite dark, quite aloof, quite ironic; or if anything that you’re trying to do, which feels to straight on feels kitsch, or primary colours, or …. that my experience of my faith is like an old master and the visual representations and the cultural representations of it are not. I would just love to hear you talk about why is that? It’s like the Simone Weil thing about like, imaginary good is boring, really good is powerful. Imaginary evil is attractive, real good is banal. Why? Why is that? Helped me understand. 

Jonathan Pageau   

So, when you read scripture, scripture has everything in it. And the characters…especially in the Old Testament, although the stories are succinct, and they’re short, and they’re light on description, every single character in the Old Testament has a complexity and has a kind of dual aspect to them. They all have light and dark sides. There’s no one in the Old Testament, even in the New Testament, except for Christ, there’s no one that doesn’t have a dark side and have some strangeness to their character. And I think what happens with many Christian artists, especially if we’re talking about literary artists, is that they’re so pressed by the morality question that they think that Christianity is morality. Christianity is not morality. Religion is not morality. It’s not that it’s immoral, but morality is downstream from what Christianity really is, which is this deep revelation about how reality exists in God and not just revelation in just a conceptual way, but a deep participation. And so, I think that if Christian artists want to create something powerful, they have to be able to steep themselves in that. And the other problem is that Christians don’t know we’ve been ruined by a kind of German Protestant thinking where we have eliminated everything strange and idiosyncratic about Christian tradition: we’ve dismissed it all. And so now we’re stuck with what? We’re stuck with boring stories. Our whole tradition is so rich with crazy mediaeval myths that you can’t fathom; that are completely amoral in a good way, and that have all the complexity of human interaction. And so, I think that people really need to dive back into our own stories. We have all these stories that nobody knows. Everybody’s forgotten the stories. Now, we’re doing this series called ‘Universal history’ with a friend of mine, and we’re trying to help people dive back into these legends; these crazy ideas that Alexander the Great is somehow related to King Arthur and these wild stories that we have. They’re wonderful, and I think that people who explore them will find. I think right now, so I don’t know if you know of Vodolazkin who wrote Laurus? This book is Dostoyevsky–style, Dostoyevsky–level writing, and it is a Christian author who is writing about Laurus who is basically a mediaeval monk, who becomes a faith healer, but then has this entire crazy story and the story is even postmodern, he transgresses time. He uses anachronism in the story and so he’s actually pulling in postmodern structures in order to tell the beautiful, powerful story. There’s Paul Kingsnorth right now… and I think there’s an interesting moment where we can dive back into the messiness of the great Christian tradition. 

Elizabeth 

You obviously think a lot about myths and symbols, and a kind of different texture of imagination to what we’re generally fed in a kind of liberal Western world. And you’ve written a little bit about how spending some time in Africa, particularly in Kenya was really formative for that for you. I know, after you’re kind of like ‘I will give up art, I will renounce art’, you moved to Kenya to work with a fair–trade organisation, working with the artisans. What was going on there for you both in terms of your faith, and the call of the artistic practice that you’ve now come to? 

Jonathan Pageau  

I mean, it was a strange and interesting time, because I guess in the spiritual crisis that I was going to going through, one of the problems I had was the purpose of what I was doing. I mean, it was a wonderful job, it was fine. But I was working for a project management company, developing pedagogical material or whatever. And so, it just felt as ‘This is not what I want to do.’ And so, my wife really had wanted to do mission work, you know, humanitarian work. And so, it was really her impetus to do that. And I was just like, ‘I’d rather do that than do to do this office work.’ So, we decided to apply for this position, and we got it. At first it was in Congo, actually. We were four years in Congo, and then three years in Kenya. And it was wonderful for me: it broke down the way that I understand art, because the art world is so fetishized; the idea of the art object is a complete anomaly. It is so strange to think of these objects that have no functionality in the world, but that somehow justify their existence. But what I discovered in Africa and at that time in general was the idea and the beauty of purposeful art. The beauty of a well–made chair or of an object that is integrated into the cultural language, but also has a function: an African headrest or all the manner in which these objects would use the iconography of their people, but then also integrate it into daily life. And that’s what made me fall even more in love with the language of iconography and the possibilities of creating images that were not just made to put up on the wall, but would participate in people’s spiritual life, would participate in the life of the church. And in the Contemporary Art world there’s almost like a disdain for capacity, like a disdain for actual artistic capacity. And then in Africa, that all broke down because sitting with guys under a mango tree, you know, just hacking away at these pieces of wood was a way to re–embody, let’s say, art practice for myself. And so, it was really a good transition. I didn’t make much when I was there, only at the very end. While I was there the whole time, I just didn’t have the energy and mind power to make art. And at the very end, I discovered this beautiful stone in Kenya called ‘kisii’ stone. It was really like a muse that was calling to me, because it was so beautiful and so subtle in its colours, and also its capacity to hold detail and everything. And that’s when I started carving icons more seriously. 

Elizabeth   

And you had parents who had been Catholic and converted to Protestantism and become Baptists… In fact, could you say a little bit? Because some listeners would not at all familiar with what Orthodox means in the context in which you’re talking about it? What is Orthodoxy in your sense? And how did you come to convert to it?  

Jonathan Pageau  

So, in the Great Church, let’s say from the very beginning, there were a few schisms. And you know, there were several schisms in the fourth century which produced the Coptic Church and the Syrian churches, you know, we call it Nestorian churches. They don’t like that name but yeah, so there were some schisms and then there’s what we call the Great Schism in the year 1055. And that schism is what produced what we now call the Orthodox churches. And so, there’s the Church of the West, which was Rome, and all of Western Europe and then there were the four bishops. The four other bishops that were Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople… and I’m forgetting one… but was it was basically all those churches and ultimately Moscow as well, later, and then other countries like Georgia, and Bulgaria, all the countries we know. And so, there was a split in the church but that’s not the reason why I was interested in Orthodoxy. The reason why I became very interested in it is because in my impression, it had maintained much of the mystical fathers and most of the mystical understanding of Christianity. They had shied away from the more transactional idea of salvation: God sends His Son to die, so that He can cover your sins and then if you believe in Him, you go to heaven — like that kind of transactional relationship. There’s just none of that in the Orthodox Church. It is more about a transformational process of the person and the body of Christ into deification. And so, I really fell in love with that vision of Christianity. And I also fell in love with the language of the liturgy… because it’s really if you think about it, like a giant poem, right? It’s a giant poem that happens in the liturgy, but also happens in the images, in the music, in the architecture… and so it is almost like this cosmic dance that you participate in when you’re in the liturgical life. And I really, like I said, fell in love with that, I felt like this 19th century thinking had reduced liturgy to superstition. People had thought that liturgy was just superstition, and so slowly evacuated, all the richness of that dance that we participated in. And so those are all the things that kind of led me to become Orthodox, really. 

Elizabeth   

This is a very personal question. So, feel free to dodge it. But how was that process for your wife and your parents? 

Jonathan Pageau  

It was difficult, it was very difficult. You know, actually, my wife never converted to Orthodoxy. She’s still I would say, generally, Protestant. I guess is the good way to understand it. And like I said, you know, my parents are very open and intellectually curious. And so, my father actually said, ‘Well, alright. I’m going to find out what this thing is.’ And so, he started reading the Church Fathers. He probably read way more Orthodox theology and Church Fathers than I did. And he also fell in love with the mystical language of Orthodoxy. And there’s an entire mystical practice of prayer, called the Jesus Prayer and hesychasm: He just really fell in love with that and also, the early fathers. He’s a psychologist, and so there’s some wonderful books of how to integrate Christian cosmology or Christian practice into psychotherapy that happened within the Orthodox Church, and he really enjoyed that as well. But he’s not a big fan of the liturgy. But it’s not a hostile relationship at all. It’s actually, you know, they came this year to Easter, and they came to baptism with my child. And so, they’re still Protestant, but it’s a rich discussion, I would say. 

Elizabeth  

I’m glad to hear it. And I want to kind of get a sense of the threads that you have been pulling on, because you’ve had the kind of artistic re–awakening, this spiritual shift or re–encounter or however you want to describe it. And then what you’re kind of known for now is speaking about ideas, your YouTube channel called ‘The Symbolic World’, and your set of ideas around myth and symbolism and a kind of challenge to a dominant liberal understanding of who we are, that has been so formed by a kind scientistic, post–Enlightenment thinking. How did they begin to crystallise? What was the impetus for you to be like, ‘Actually, in the intersection of art and faith, there are some ideas that are broadly very relevant?’ 

Jonathan Pageau  

So, this is something that happened with my brother a long time ago, 20 years ago, when we were going through this kind of spiritual questioning. Although I’m framing it really as a personal story and also, as related to art and related to my own personal spiritual life. It was also a philosophical question, a metaphysical question about how the world actually exists. And I think that that is what really led both of us into viewing scripture and viewing these stories as not just a bunch of stories, but as really something like templates for reality. And things that reveal the manner in which the world presents itself to us; actually, not in the banal scientific way we think of, but rather, in the way the world presents itself to more like phenomenology, or more like this idea that consciousness is related to the manner in which reality comes together in our experience. And so, once you get that, once you let say, read the stories in the Bible through the lens of the notion of the conscious experience, and of the conscious viewer, then everything snaps together. You’re not trying to find scientific descriptions there, and you don’t actually have to make excuses for it, it’s just not what it’s about. And that’s not only fine, it’s better, because it precedes the science. The description of the world in Genesis is an actual description of how the world exists, it’s the best description you’ll ever find, but it’s not a scientific description. It’s the description of how the world exists with man at its pinnacle, and man as the eyes that are viewing this order of creation that is laying itself in front of them. And so, once we started to understand that, then we realised that this pattern of being that is in Genesis, in Exodus, that is the structure of the tabernacle, the structure of a church, it’s the structure over your experience… you can enter into that structure and then shine light on anything you want: on movies, on stories, on political phenomena…and so that’s what I’ve been really doing — trying to help people see the world through meaning and understand that meaning is not arbitrary. The world lays itself out in patterns, in a kind of dance. It’s like waves and it’s not arbitrary at all. And so, if you really see it, you’ll understand that the world is actually a very magical place. It’s actually quite full of magic. And the fact that we’ve tried to take the magic out of the world, right? The de–mythologisation that people have tried to do is over right now and it’s finished. Even in scientific terms it’s finished. I’ve been having many discussions with top world level cognitive scientists, and they all are coming back to a structure of representation of the world, which looks like hierarchies of angels, which looks like, you know, these fractal structures that look like an ancient temple or that look like something that would be this mediaeval village: that’s actually the manner in which the world is experienced. And one of the reasons why we’re so alienated is because we’ve tried to eliminate meaning out of the world. We live in these anti–human worlds, we live in these anti–human cities, in these anti–human spaces and that’s part of what brings about the alienation. But in a way, it also creates a darkness out of which the light will appear because everybody is so crushed and so alienated that the re–enchantment of the world is becoming inevitable, and it’s and it’s just happening. So… 

Elizabeth  

I think you’re right. I’m seeing a lot of a sense that the winds are changing. I’ve always been this sort of ‘strange token out Christian in ideasy spaces’ and I wrote about it recently for ‘UnHeard’. And they are almost entirely men — the people sideling up to me and going, ‘Suddenly, this Christianity thing looks more interesting than I thought it was, from the Left and the Right. And the Left is very driven by ecological crisis and fear and a sense that actually, they thought if they threw themselves at the project, with enough love and hard work, they could fix it and the like, disappointment and horror and exhaustion is just bringing them to a place of like, ‘Is there something I can surrender to? There’s something bigger than me and our failures’. And then on the Right, it’s coming from a different thing. And I think much more driven by this sense of a meaning crisis and institutional crisis and isolation and breakdown. And some of it does overlap with the cluster of thinkers that you have found yourself part of.  What I was thinking, as I was prepping this interview, I don’t even know how to describe it. So, you know, you’re doing a seminar on scripture, with Jordan Peterson right now, somewhere in America. You know, there is a cluster of commentators that have been in conversation together very visibly over the last, say, five years. There was this phrase, ‘The Intellectual DarkWeb’ thrown around a few years ago, and how do you describe the conversations that you find yourself part of and what has emerged in the last few years around that? I didn’t want to label it for you. 

Jonathan Pageau 

No, I think you’re absolutely right. I think there has been a radical shift that has happened, and it really is like a ‘kairos’ moment, and there’s no other way to say it. I don’t think anybody’s completely responsible for it. I think it’s also a societal pattern where you reach a breaking point. You know, the New Atheists were the last wave of secularism, but that wave was so stupid. The New Atheist argument is so pathetic, that it’s almost as if you make Christianity and religion so stupid and idiotic and ridiculous, that then any glimmer of pattern that appears will look like a miracle to people. And it’s like, ‘There’s actually a lot more than that, folks.’ So, Jordan Peterson is I think, for sure a large part of that. Jordan Peterson appears on the scene, and then starts to talk about religion through perception in the very similar way…that’s why I’m friends with him: it’s because we were already talking in many very similar ways, through this notion of attention, the inevitability of attention, the inevitability of patterns. And all of a sudden, he really made the New Atheists on the… he put them on the defensive, in ways that we had never seen. And so, it changed the landscape and so now, people are far less aggressive about their anti–religious speaking and it’s very difficult for them to be as aggressive as we kind of see things also fall apart around us. It’s like, ‘Okay, well, we did what you said, we created this secular world. And now what?’ Right? It’s not working guys, it’s not better. So, I think all of that is coming together. But really to me, it’s such an exciting time. It’s such an exciting time, because, you know, I’ll give an example. I had a discussion recently with a wonderful conversation partner, John Vervaeke, who is a professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, and Jordan Hall, who is this high–level businessman and working on all these systems thinking and stuff. And we were talking about angels and demons, and it was absolutely normal. There was no cringe. Nobody was afraid. These are the words that were given to us to describe these realities we’re realising are inevitable. And so why don’t you just use those words? Why are you trying to find new words for things that you’re realising are the same? In the same way, I had a discussion with Don Hoffman, who’s a cognitive scientist at university of California, and the same thing: at some point, I just kept using the language of saints and angels and, and it didn’t bother him a bit, because he’s like, ‘No, you’re right, there needs to be a stacked structure of being.’ The idea that agency stops that human at human agency, even from a materialist point of view is completely ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Why would human beings be the top of agency in even in a materialist system? And so, it’s like, no, there’s agency above humans. How do we formulate that? So, it just wonderful. I just think it’s so exciting, and to realise also the sense of participation, like the need for participation, and even the idea of worship. Now I’m seeing people start to realise that actually, if the world is based on attention, then the thing you attend to the most will causally, let’s say cascade back down onto your world. ‘And so, what do you worship? What’s your god?’ is what it ends up being. And so maybe there’s a reason why Christians have a God of infinite love that’s the source of all things. It’s not arbitrary, right? It’s not just things people made up for fun. It’s like, if you submit yourself to the source of all reality, which is also infinite love, that’s pretty good. You know, it’s pretty good. Our world is going to lay itself out, I think. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. I am intrigued by the gender question, in all this, like seeing sudden spiritual openness, generally, amongst middle–aged men. The conversations that you’re in mainly male commentators and that can you know, that can mean it has slightly sharp edges. Like Jordan Peterson, about half of what he says I’m like, ‘Wow…’ why it’s interesting, about half of what he says I’m like, as a woman, I find that quite hard. Which is fine. What are your reflections on why that is? What do you think’s going on? 

Jonathan Pageau 

So, I think that one of the reason why it’s male driven is that at least for now, it is framed as a meaning problem, which is that I think that because men tend to be focused on goals, tend to need that type of, goal driven action, you could say, then, recently, men of just falling into despondency, right? The cliche of the overweight guy who lives in his parents’ basement. I mean, that’s not just a cliche, right? It’s based on a lot of men in their 20s and 30s, that are just struggling to find purpose. And so, I think that that’s why it’s kind of happening that way. And it’s also let’s be honest, it is, in some ways, a reaction to ‘feminism Gone wild. Like it is also a reaction, which is to re–find the purpose of masculinity. But I think also, at least for myself, if you watch a lot of my videos, you’ll see that I’m actually not as much like Jordan. Jordan really tends to focus on the masculine, but a lot of the things I talk about are about the mystery of the feminine and about the mystery of feminine symbolism. And I think that there also definitely needs to recapture the power of what feminine symbolism is. And I think one of the problems with the meaning crisis and even the reality of feminism is not arbitrary, that, you know, the modern world, post–Enlightenment world was so masculine in its emphasis, right? It’s like value is only in production, value is only in things that are public, value is only in this strength…and we also even in terms of Protestantism, we just totally threw the mother of God out the window. And so, why would you want to be a woman in that context? Why would you not just want to act like men, want to capture what the masculine is? And I think that’s often what feminism is. It’s like women’s desire to capture what masculinity is, but then we discount some of the most powerful things that exists, like that feminine symbolism is so powerful. The only difficulty is that it’s somehow secret, it’s implied, it’s in hiding, it’s suggested, and so it’s difficult. Even when I talk about it’s difficult because if you make the feminine too explicit, you are de–naturing it and so you always have to move around and point and suggest. But I think that that’s part of also of what needs to happen as well. We need to rediscover the very deep well, the power that the feminine is. Without that the world is going to dry up. I know in some ways the world is actually still very, very masculine. Like AI and the Internet and, surveillance, and the disappearance of the private life, you know, all of that is really a hyper–masculine move, let’s say. 

Elizabeth   

I wonder also if there’s something around, actually, women never got quite so disconnected from story from embodiment, right? 

Jonathan Pageau 

No, you’re right. No, I think you’re right. Hopefully… when I think about that, I think you’re probably right, because I think one of the problems is that we look to the public, right? And so, what happens is that you look to the public, and what you see are the women who are extremely public. And so therefore, it’s normal that they will also have more masculine traits, like, it’s just inevitable because in order to function in public space you have to dress a certain way, you have to act a certain way, you have to have a certain kind of blinding focus. But all the real feminine happens,  and still continues to happen everywhere and all the time. And so, I think that that’s probably something that I haven’t thought about, but it’s probably true, also. 

Elizabeth  

And how do you think of your vocation? Because even ten years ago, someone having such a strong public voice via YouTube just wasn’t a thing, right? So, this podcast is about people with some kind of public voice and how they think about how they use that voice, and how we build empathy. Cards on the table, I’m always interested in kind of reconciliation, it’s one of the sort of key theological concepts that’s precious to me. And whether I’m talking to a communist or wherever someone sits, I always want to hear how they are both experiencing and navigating that incredibly deep division that is driving us further and further apart. How we both call out what we think is really problematic in the other team, whoever they may be, but don’t accidentally worsen the de–humanising pattern that we’ve put into, and listeners will know that, you know, some of the voices in the spaces that you’ve been, have sometimes been accused of that and I still don’t know what I think about it. And many of the voices in whatever you want to call the Progressive Left equivalent also do that. Like everyone seems to be continually tempted into a contemptuous de–humanising posture with people that we disagree with. I’d love to just hear you reflect on that really, personally. 

Jonathan Pageau  

I totally agree. I agree completely. And I do have a position, right? I’m clearly a more conservative person. I don’t hide that. But I am also a very artistic person. And I grew up and I went to college with the most ‘lefty type people’. I’m also in some many ways very attuned to the question of let’s say the sensibilities of the Left at the same time. And so, I’ve tried to avoid getting into the cultural war myself. And I know that you said that there are many of those that are kind of in this conversation that are far more active on that front, but I just really just tried to do what I can do. So, a few videos I’ve done about this is to try to show the manner in which we de–humanise on both sides, but really structurally. The reason why people don’t see it is because it’s very different. It’s different structurally. So, the conservative type, let’s say the Right winger will tend to de–humanise in space, in terms of identity, so they tend to de–humanise that the stranger. That is the natural default, right? So, they’ll tend to de–humanise that which is not us, we tend to exclude in that way. And that is really a danger that the Right has to be attentive to and be careful to, and especially as Christians to understand that the stories we have in scripture, stories like the Ethiopian eunuch, you know, stories about the Canaanite woman and the Samaritan woman, all of these…there are so many stories in the story of Christ where Christ is reaching out and showing the proper relationship with that which is ‘strange’, let’s say, and so we need to be attentive to that. Now, the Left wingers, they don’t see it, but they do something like de–humanising time. They tend to de–humanise that which came before them. And so, if the conservative will look at this idea that happened to UK, it was the idea of the Irish Apes, like the idea that those that are on those fringes, they’re animals, they’re less than human, they’re the missing link, that kind of idea. Then the Left–wing person does that in time. They say all those people before us they were dumber. And if you want to insult someone, say they’re regressive, say that they’re closer to the apes, that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying the same thing. They’re saying the people, they’re closer to the Neanderthals, and I’m more advanced and I’m more progressive. And so, it’s still de–humanisation. It’s the exact same form of dehumanisation, it’s just that because it happens differently, it’s easy to see the other ones. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, all the Right wing people they hate Mexicans’, whatever in the US, and it’s like, okay, that is true that that can happen. But you think that anybody who still believes in God is a complete idiot? So, I don’t know what to tell you. Right? So, it’s the same thing. It’s just that one is in time, and one is in space? So, I think that at least understanding that this is something that we have a tendency towards, and also understanding that it’s universal. Like one of the things that I learned living in Africa was just how universal de–humanisation is. It is not a European characteristic, right? It’s not just the white person’s problem. It is everywhere. Everywhere that identity exists, the danger of de–humanisation exists with it. So, any tribe, any group, anything, anywhere in the world. I’ve heard people talk about Pygmies in Congo, the way they talk about Pygmies in ways that are completely abhorrent that you can’t stand to hear. So, I think just understanding how universal it is and that we all run the risk of doing that is probably the best way to deal with it and to say, okay, ‘Where am I doing that? Where do I tend to de–humanise? Which groups do I tend to see as less than myself?’ So, if you do it in yourself, you will have a little more compassion when you see other people doing it even though you don’t have to accept it. you don’t have to think it’s right. But you might understand that you know, you do that too. So, let’s calm down and just try to slowly move towards real relationships. 

Elizabeth  

And on that note, that feels a good place to say Jonathan Pageau, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.  

Jonathan Pageau 

Thank you. Thank you. 

Elizabeth 

It’s really noticeable how people from particularly Catholic Christian tradition, and now I’m realising Orthodox Christians, when you ask them what is sacred, they almost always say something very straight in that sense of the religious sense of the sacred, that actually, the Eucharist, the being in church, the mass. I’m thinking about Frank Cottrell Boyce, and Charles Moore and Sohrab Ahmari for whom that is such a central thing. I really love the way that Jonathan described it as the transcendent meeting the mundane. What an interesting journey Jonathan has had: from a kind of Catholic, cultural and parental heritage to parents who converted to Evangelical Baptist Christianity to his own conversion to being an Orthodox Christian, and which his wife and his family still don’t share. And I was really grateful for him for opening up about how they navigate that really well by the sound of it. And there’s a real thread in him and in lots of the voices that I kind of associate as being part of that conversation, that grouping, that constellation is kind of mysticism, and mystery and strangeness, and a kind of post–Enlightenment approach to knowledge which also shows up in theology. And I’m reminded, again, as I often am, of the Ian McGilchrist stuff on different ways of knowing, that the way of being in the world, the way of knowing, and in the case of Jonathan, the way of connecting with his religious practice, it’s so important that it’s one that doesn’t exclude or preclude mystery and mysticism and strangeness and a kind of idiosyncrasies of scripture: the darkness and the light. Then I was really struck by him saying ‘Christianity is not morality, it’s downstream from morality’. And when we try and tame it, something goes badly wrong, and Tom Holland says similar things. I really recognised some of his struggles with the culture of Contemporary Art. I have a few friends in that world and actually, I think there’s lots that is very interesting and challenging and kind of positive in that world as well. But certainly, until quite recently, that kind of cynical, distant, critical posture is not obviously just in visual art, it was very dominant. And I think that’s earnest and sincere or straightforward. It doesn’t have any cultural capital and I can see why Jonathan felt he needed to move out of it in order to make work that he calls more direct and more real, and also more functional. Not just that, he talks about the fetishisation of the art object, which I’m not sure I fully understand. But yeah, there’s interest in weaving beautiful things more into our lives and in our uses in that very kind of arts and crafts John Ruskin way. I was really fascinated by what he said about Orthodoxy as less transactional than many forms of Protestant Christianity. It’s less kind of Jesus died for your sins by paying off a debt in a ledger, in you know, blood instead of money. And this concept of deification, which David Bentley Hart also writes about, and do you think is there’s a resurgence in interest in in the Western Church. And then I was really glad to talk to him at the end about… I have to just to be clear, I have concerns about the public conversation and the way we talk to each other and about each other across the political spectrum. There are lots of ways in which some people who self–describe as progressive can be a part of the problem in the ways we’re driving our societies apart, and the dripping with contempt, and being the quick to judge and point a finger is deeply problematic, I think. And this kind of constellation of thinkers who are trying to recapture or reconnect with a more traditionalist or conservative or post–liberal set of ideas, which are mainly men, which I genuinely find fascinating. I also think there are edges of that which I find very troubling and very contemptuous and very excluding and exclusive. And it was really nice to just reflect a bit with Jonathan on that and how he sees his own place in that and what he’s trying to do and the way he’s trying to live up to Jesus’ call to connect with the stranger. And I really keep thinking about his thing that the Left tends to de–humanise people through time, and the Right tends to de–humanise people through space. And probably the best thing to do is rather than point fingers at each other is to reflect as rigorously, and as carefully, and as honestly as we can about our own temptations. 

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