149. David Bănică: Mircea Eliade and the Burden of History

0:00You are listening to Seeking the Hidden Thing with Cryptos. Welcome everyone to another episode of Seeking the Hidden Thing podcast. It is my delight to have on today David Banaka and he is a young man who has read a fair bit of and has dove deeply into the writings of Marcia Eliade and few these days read him

1:08which is unfortunate because he has a lot to say that is pertinent to properly understanding our age and so I thought I would have him come on and we would talk at least at the core of it. We are going to talk about the book The Myth of the Eternal Return and the importance of why the idea of history matters and probably I don't know if Eliade specifically made the argument but it is one of these things. There is a good reason for rejecting the idea of history in order to get your head straight and especially in this age of nealism but anyways that is I am rambling on here. Welcome David it is a delight to have you on. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So I am my name is David. I am a final year history student so I don't have a PhD, I don't have a master's so take whatever I say with the grain of salt. You don't have to listen to me but I think it is better for you if you do. That

2:12is my humility showing through. One of my first encounters with Mircelliade is I am Romanian and it is essentially necessary for every Romanian this is a very Eastern European Balkan mindset that has done anything of note. You have to know everything they have done. You have to know where they are from. How did they drink their coffee? How did they launder their clothes etc etc and obviously I have grown up in the Romanian diaspora so I live in the United States of America but one of the things that really drew me into Eliad in the first place is he is associated with the University of Chicago. He is associated with especially his writings the myth of the eternal return which we will discuss today but also the sacred and the profane and he was the foremost scholar of religious history of the 20th century. He essentially defines the discipline itself. Unfortunately his name has been used by people who are not worthy of it, chairs and funding labels that are not

3:16worthy of it but a lot of the work that he does stands on its own as a testament to what he does. Like what you said there I think that Eliad is works. I read them at first just because of course you read Eliad that he was an amazing guy. He did great things here in America and Europe and elsewhere but in reading Eliad I found things that I did not think I would find. Just a treasure trove of very very pertinent knowledge but not knowledge that stems from a sort of modernist very trendy philosophic because I hate that sort of thing. I read the dissertation of this person from West Africa and this is how this affects post-colonial isms here and there and everywhere. You want something that's above those things that isn't contingent on historical context. Reading him, reading his critique of being in modernity, reading his comparative religious histories really sealed the deal for me and so ever

4:21since then ever since I think man the 9th grade first year of high school I've disciplined myself to read Eliad. Well let's say we probably encountered Eliad about the same time. My pathway and on ramp to Eliad I have to to to sort of admit this. I had not heard of him. I'd heard of other people who've done sort of history that you know being a theology student and having a master divinity. I had done readings in you know the quote unquote history of religions discipline but somehow never managed to actually read any Eliad myself and then came across him via Jordan Peterson of all people and Peterson cites Eliad and Carl Jung as his two great musists. Now I had read a lot of Jung so I could check that box right and so I didn't need to read Jung

5:23but I thought well this is really interesting I'm always on the hunt for new and interesting people to read and so I thought well at the time you know Peterson was on the rise this was you know like 2016 like well before COVID so it would be 2016 2017 and then I picked up a couple of his books and he's not the easiest read either and I'm this is from somebody who's used to reading you know deep philosophy. Eliad is a bit disorienting like of you and you read the myth of the eternal return he just sort of dumps you into the deep end of sort of known idiosat in idiosyncratic way of you know talking through things but if you persevere like you say there are insights about everything now this is probably something that you may not have considered or thought about but it really opened my eyes in regard to preaching and especially as you deal with

6:28the the older the archetypal secular cyclical view of time that we when we were taught in in seminary hermeneutics we were taught that you know you're not supposed to use biblical stories as examples that these are not like examples like go be like David right but when you read Eliad and you read how stories function for ancient peoples you realize that's exactly how they're used yeah the idea of and Eliad talks about you sort of living into the stories and that's how you in a sense find yourself as a man you find a story that to which you connect and then you live into that story and once you begin to realize that it also opens up to you patterns of that even though and we'll get into this like the biblical notion of time is different from the cyclical the cyclical

7:31overlays the biblical notion of time because there's sort of in a sense two types of time working in the Bible at once one is is what we would call biblical time and well again we'll talk about that but the cyclical is in the background so there is this recapitulation of archetypes that happens throughout the Bible in a sense you know Jesus is a recapitulation of you know Joseph is the first Jesus right and then you'll also see like King Josiah is cast as David right these types of things and so you'll see these these recapitulations throughout the scripture and and then you'll see that in story form and then when you're reading the stories you realize what they're grasping at is is is the revelation of archetypes through story and that the whole point is that you connect with the story and then live into that story right so yeah I jumped the gun a little bit here but maybe you want to maybe you could like maybe we'll introduce it and then just begin talking about as I

8:31think if I remember correctly Eliade talks about three main broad categories of time the first being the cyclical and the archetypal the second being the biblical notion of time and then the third being modern directional history that we know right so I think I think when we read Eliade it's important to understand the different religious trends that occurred in his own personal life so at one point you know he's very interested in Hindu metaphysics this is at a time where you know the west was being opened up to Buddhist and Hindu doctrines where you know things like the Bhagavad Gita become very important to our understanding not only of you know religion metaphysics and time but it's opened up into the realm of philology of Indo-European studies of classical studies and of course you have insane people like you know Madden Blavatsky that takes that and go insane philosophical roots and so he was swept up in this not in a not in a very trendy way so he actually

9:37ends up getting a full scholarship from a certain I'm blanking on the name right now but it was an independent kingdom it was a Raj in continental India and the sub-consonants of India and he gets this full scholarship to go and study over there right and and he becomes he becomes a monk in the Hindu tradition he practices yoga when he moves back to the west he later repudiates that you know he dies in Eastern Orthodox Christian full rights good standing in the church and so he really lived cyclical time as a religious tradition this this archaic traditional time before both modernity and biblical time and I think sort of before we get into how he defines time I want to sketch for your audience because again you know he's not very read which is again very unfortunate I'd like to sketch what he means by the profane and the sacred because this is where all of his thought begins even his notions of time are downstream from the sacred and the profane

10:42so you know Elina that outlines the existence of the sacred and profane time essentially the sacred is anything that is transcendent and thus has a direct relationship to the work of God in the Christian tradition or in the archaic religions of the gods when a man participates in a sacred act say an agricultural fertility right he transcends himself because he participates in the sacred he's imitating a divine action so if we're talking specifically about an agricultural fertility right the farmer goes out into the field and while he's plowing he asks the sky to rain on the earth to make it bloom because the earth is fertile as it is but it needs the rain from the heavens and again this is a very abstracted version of this this world fertility myth um if I could jump in and sense to add it sort of we would think of this today in the western tradition as kind of a very metaphysically pregnant world where the world the the the sacred

11:45and the profane or in a sense what you might call um material and the the supernatural the natural the supernatural intermingle and so the natural world is not thought of as inert and we'll tell we'll get at that later but the the natural world is pregnant with meaning it's pregnant with spiritual meaning it's pregnant with the presence of the supernatural and so all around you the world depressed upon by this supernatural world and it shows itself in everything and these meanings coalesce like the meaning is everywhere all around you the world is just pregnant with meaning and this meaning then coalesces in what we would call archetypes and so you then gather the the meaning you see in the momentary parts of the day it coalesces into big meanings that then transcend my life and that life of my children but then I see these big meanings in this sort of pregnant

12:49reality that's all around me let's go go on them no that that that was a great interposition yeah that's that's exactly what we're dealing with here and then in alia there's uh thinking specifically to to sort of adjust a little bit when we talk about the material realm he's very quick to know that a stone is a stone there there is no meaning that a stone has on its own but it is given meaning when when that archetype when that overarching metaphysical archetype is seen and it's manifested in that stone the stone symbolizes it so all the all the meaning that is in the material world is because the material world is viewed as transcendent because of that divine act that that that the creation so in the Christian tradition you know the nature as this element of divinity has this element of holiness because it comes from God not on its own not because it is a plant but because God created the plant or God formed the word the thought of the plant in him

13:52from the beginning of time and he also warns he does like young a lot and and he worked with the union archetypes but more specifically when it comes to archetypes he warns about over abstraction because a lot of archetypes especially in the west can be used to justify secular profane acts and that kind of that takes us to what he means by profane profane is essentially the state this new state of being that inaugurates modernity the profane existence and modernity are one and the same and says obviously this has implications about modern man and he makes a very good point in the first few and I'm working with the Princeton Princeton classics version of the myth of the eternal turn just for your audience to understand where what I'm citing but in the beginning pages of the myth of the eternal return Elia then makes sure that we know that reading the word being into ancient religion is anachronistic it's futile you're not going to get anywhere worth it you

14:56you can't go back to an Australian aborigini and ask you know in 3000 BC what is your being he's not gonna have an answer for you being is this category that modern man has to invent to understand his place in the world because he doesn't know what his place in the world is anymore it's an abstracted understanding so modernity modernism modern man exists in a world that essentially does not have meaning whatever or mean transcendent meaning meaning is only created by what he does in himself this is why you know hegel infamously said that reading the morning newspaper was like his morning benediction you know very this is a very degenerate very useless way of thinking about the world but it comes up out of this modern crisis and historical time is part of this modern modern crisis so what what modern time is essentially what finite wiggish linear time whatever you

16:00want to call it is this understanding of history as the sum of human acts and all of the sacrality all of the meaning that is given to history is comes up out of us being human and nothing else there's no divine example there's no creation necessary there is no god necessary maybe as like a social construct but again that's part of the modernist experiment so modern man has no sacredness has no sacrality is unable to create sacredness but the only thing that creates meaning for him is his own action so you see it it doesn't work you know it's it's an imposition on on human nature on on archaic religion on traditional man elia that uses you know archaic and traditional interchangeably I think traditional is the more forceful more a useful definition obviously um and then there's biblical time and you can interrupt me at any point please interrupt me um I was I was going to say just maybe for the audience just to kind of graph because

17:03you went over very fast is so we have this ancient world that's pregnant with meaning right yeah and so how you interact like you can see this in like the like the eddas have a very very similar idea um medieval like a medieval world has a very similar idea so there's a sense where there's an order to the world around you not only is it pregnant with meaning but it has an order to it so there's a givenness to the world and part of your becoming a fully rounded adult person a human being is too in a sense live into the order as it presents itself to you so in a sense part of that is also living into the role that you are given so you become fulfilled as a human being by being if your dad was a farmer you're a farmer that role is just given to you you don't really have a choice about you know whether to be a farmer or not or a blacksmith or not

18:05or you know if your dad has too many sons he might farm you off to somebody else as an apprentice but but then that role is also given to you and so you're you become a morally good person by living into the role that was given to you so that's if you're the son of a king you become a good person by living into the role of the king and being a good king not by in a sense rebelling against the money and power of your parents and you know doing the revolution against your parents to show them how correct you know you just accept the fact that you're born into a noble family and you live into by being fully known you know you're the son of a warrior so you become a warrior you're son of a farmer you become a farm and all of this types of things so you then you know if you're a woman you become fully a woman by being a good wife and mother and that's how you then find fulfillment because that's the role that's reality gives to a woman and then somewhere between this ancient world and the modern world there's a transition now some might argue that like if you

19:05were to say read an author like Walter Ong or others you know Marshall McCluen they would argue and you know that that writing and the printing press resulted in this bifurcation between ourselves in the outside world that way where we begin to abstract from ourselves but whatever it is you know in a sense it gets documented in Kant where Kant sort of walls off this this world of the metaphysical and says we can't even have access to it anymore like it's just you know you can talk about God and you can talk about all these things but you can't prove them you can't demonstrate them so we're just going to deal with sensory matter what we can see taste and touch but then the world as a result becomes dead and inert it's no longer pregnant with meaning it no longer has meaning that presents itself and so then what changes is that we as human beings become the meaning makers in a dead world and so you can see then the shift that occurs that now the responsibility or how do events have

20:10meaning well because we give them meaning by our action right right whereas in in prior ages events had meaning because they cohered to certain archetypes that you could see in the in the events of the day certain things from the stories and that gave that reinforced the stories and reinforced your events as a sense and gave the world a coherent order whereas now the world has no order other than what we give it and so it is our actions the things that we do that give the world sense meaning right and so then you can even say there's a shift in morality so now no longer is morality about say fitting into an order a law a divine command that's given to you morality is whatever I feel is right I'm the moral I'm the moral law giver because I'm the one that creates meaning in a dead inert world and this is and these are kind of the two ends and then

21:12in between this there is what we would call christian time and maybe then it just as a jump in go ahead and and give the people sort of an outlay of what christian time is because it's not what I think people people generally think of christian time as linear history but that's right right and before right before I do that I wanted to give some extra credence to what you said about you talk about the poetic eddies and there's this there's this episode from the Icelandic sagas where the first Norsemen are coming to Iceland they land on the shores by us and well there's nowhere in the Baluspas there's nowhere in the Edas there's nowhere in Norse mythology where we can account for Iceland this isn't within our framework this isn't within our universe so the first thing they do is they perform a sacrifice to the Nordic gods and then they write it down they write down what they've done they record it so it becomes a part of this history and what they give to Iceland this piece of land this island called Iceland is a legendary history is a mythological history so it's not just oh we wrote it down you know we assign meaning to Iceland it is a part of our

22:17history now no no the gods gave it meaning the giants gave it meaning it's part of this in mythological inheritance and we live in it because before that you know Iceland is formless it belongs to chaos it belongs to you know the waters of the deep it doesn't actually exist until it's given existence and being by you know owed in the all-fot or by the ace here by the van here so just you know and this meaning would present itself in the encounter you know to use say like a god-a-marie in term right in the encounter with being it would emerge the stories would just naturally emerge it's not like they're making something up right but the the realities about which they're talking are real right and so they're just giving voice to their experience of the being of Iceland in a store and then so the archetypes all of a sudden jump out at them and then they're like you say once they're given voice and story they now have a

23:19reality that they didn't before they were kind of formless and void and then they presented themselves in the encounter and then the stories were written and now they have you know existence in a sense that way and then they're carried forward exactly yeah absolutely and this happens you know this isn't just typical for the Indo-European peoples or the Norse peoples this happens everywhere you know in the Christian context when when a new church or temple is blessed that then becomes this microcosm macrocosm representation of heaven right this becomes literally heaven on earth at least in in most orthodox nice impression on understandings of it so moving into biblical time then a lot of and you know this is where Wiggish history departs biblical time and Wiggish and Wiggish history is essentially biblical time that's been secularized and stripped of Christ that's a good way of understanding it and the way that Eliada encounters this so this

24:20understanding of a linear section of time that can be redeemed through religious effort or through the effort of man given sacred meaning is through you know the early Jewish religion right and we absolutely have to address this and this isn't to say he goes in depth in his history the third volume of his history of religious ideas he goes in there sorry the first volume he goes in depth on how there's this very obvious bifurcation in Jewish religious life there is the people who have essentially I mean they're essentially pagan right the vast majority of Hebrews do not think of Yahweh monotheistically at least and not at every point in early he break religion however there is an elite there there is a religious elite that seems to have this more however you want to call it Yahweh's monotheist emphasis this this religious intelligentsia that manifests itself and you know they have to in that you gave an example King Josiah this would be a manifestation

25:25of him rediscovering the scroll in the in the brick wall you know there are points in early Hebrew history religious history where you know God is seen as reasserting himself over the gods of the Canaanites or the Mesopotamians or or the Egyptians and so in this there is this idea born called sacred history two things that have never but never before in human history been put into the same sentence sacred history as defined by Eliadev is our relationship with God the story of our relationship with God and that's what these Hebrew elites you know let's throw out a name Moses is or Abraham these are the ideas that they're preoccupied with now this isn't to say that they don't understand these archaic cyclical things they very much do you know Genesis is occupied with a cosmogyny that the creation of the cosmos and you know it addresses very clearly this idea of

26:27the primordial waters and and the restructuring of the world the first chapter of first 11 chapters of Genesis have to be understood a property understood in this term of like sort of this ancient Eliade like in a sense here's the presentation of all the of all the key archetypes that will then re-appear throughout history through the events of that will reappear history say in the events of man all of these archetypes will appear and reappear and the reason why we're talking about them is because they go back to the these are the very oldest stories that we have right very beginning and these these archetypes you know how are they kept alive in in Hebrew religion and then transmitted into Christianity it's through essentially the liturgical liturgical calendar the celebration of the feast days the high holy day right the temple ritual I don't know I don't know what you know Christian tradition you belong to but in my tradition the liturgy that we follow it repeats itself every year the church calendar repeats itself every year we celebrate the same

27:30things every year not because it's just you know some sort of dead tradition that we just kind of follow now but they have real spiritual significance and meaning and they are still alive as alive as they were for the ancient Israelites and so you know later later in Hebrew monotheism especially with the destruction of the temple you get away from that and and you you get closer to almost the more secularized secularized and hyper spiritualized version are hyper abstracted version of Judaism that very much departs from Christianity and if you don't mind I'll actually read an excerpt from aliyah just to sort of demonstrate this is on on baptism specifically and this is from aliyah there's both the sacred and the profane and it is the Harper one version of this so this is page 132 the fathers of the church did not fail to exploit certain

28:30pre-Christian and universal values of aquatic symbolism although enriching them with new meanings connected with the historical existence of Christ so the historical existence of Christ is part of that sacred history human action human interaction given sacrality the key the key here is that it's Christ giving this meaning it's not it's not John Millbank it's not the inventor of the cotton gin it's not you know Henry Adams the virgin and the dynamo it's not human products creating this but it is the meaning of the sacred with the material that creates this meaning for all of mankind so it redeems linear history but it redeems linear history precisely because it ends it precisely because it brings it back into the cyclical now the crucifixion occurred historically earth of Christ incarnation occurred historically this these are the things that

29:34give meaning to human history this is sacred history what falls outside of that what falls just to human endeavor itself is only given meaning is of only given sacrality when it meets that higher thing when it meets that that transcendent thing does that make sense well and the way I was going to say to maybe help the especially like maybe a more Protestant audience in this regard is to to look at divine history sacred history in this regard biblical the idea of the biblical motion of time as a superstructure okay like as a static superstructure so in a sense it exists with the being of God it's wrapped up in the being in the existence of God and God is in a sense outside of time right but it all exists there within God so there is this as you say this contact with reality and that happens in creation then there is an event the fall into sin this creates problems and a

30:38break between God and man but then there's a promise and this promise is fulfilled in Christ but then Christ is sort of there's a then appeared as Christ appears there's a period of then sort of drawing in the nations and so forth and then there's the final second coming everything all of this action is God doing things it's God saving work it's God's history and these human beings interacted in a sense and this is why I think a lot of people miss the point of this this like theologically this idea of being in Christ so in a sense in Christ everything is fulfilled right so in his death and resurrection sacred time is fulfilled but it has not been shall we say fully revealed or manifest at the past one of the pastures says it's hidden in Christ it's Colossians right but so our task then spiritually is the revelation of what is now hidden in Christ and we would argue then from

31:44today's point of view such revelation has a positive effect on society in the world around us but it's not actually us saving the world we're just merely revealing what God did in Christ because all of history is is rapture Christ now the argument that I've heard and I you know I've read this at a period of time when I wasn't writing online and didn't think that I would need it but it was and but it makes a lot of sense is that around the year 1000 with the year 1000 there was a kind of psychic break right everyone was expecting Christ to return Christ did not return and then shortly there after you have sort of the birth of the west the Renaissance and so forth this flowering of culture and people began to sort of reinterpret Christian time into this new historical time so you now you have humanism and you're bringing this this this divine sacred time down with the human people are saying well maybe we misunderstood it all in a sense you know that's kind of the big way of putting it they're not really doing that on the ground but what they're trying to do is make

32:46sense of a religious impulse so you have this kind of this this psychic break when Christ doesn't return in the year 1000 and to compensate for that people begin to say oh maybe it's up to us and at the same time you have a rise in European culture there's this rising optimism in European culture and people are optimistic things are happening and so they begin to say oh you know what rather than waiting around for God we need to be intrepid part of this and while this is also happening this the sacred notions begin to get addressed as like superstition you have the rise the new learning and so forth and slowly this this this this this this this this superstitious look at the world begins to get pushed into the side and this new humanist understanding begins to to emerge and you know as I said mentioned you know it comes to fulfillment and Kant right where the old

33:47superstitious world is finally cut off and it's just all about us and men and now you have human history and there it is and then the the new theologians of human history are in a sense like Marx Darwin and Hegel and they basically give this this new this new way of thinking about the world a sense of order and purpose and cosmological significance very poorly executed I'll add to that I don't you know I don't know and and Eliade talks about specifically Marxism and Hegelianism he doesn't he's not so crude as to come out and say you know Hegel was a malformed fetus I didn't have any understanding of the world but he's certainly points and pokes at that idea and and even it's it's interesting it's ironic because human nature cannot be other than religions that's why you have this this this crisis of modernity this crisis of no more religious meaning or feeling or intuition that's not how we operate we're not built to

34:52operate that we want the ancient world that's right right with meaning and just that's the what we're created to live in that's how God made us is to live in that world correct and it this seeps into Hegelianism and Marxism because even when Hegel says this is my morning benediction in in using the word benediction in in acknowledging that there is something outside that is conferring sacred meaning he is acknowledging that he is naturally religious and cannot escape it that's why he has to come up with this the Odyssey that's why he talks about you know the Hegelian God right he has to talk about God he's not ready to take that fully yet and then Marx is Marx is able to take this fully but there is no God but if you look at and this might be a harder to understand if you look at his conception of this eternal revolution this eternal class revolution that eventually I mean eventually it's a metaphysic

35:55it's eschatological it's it's divine mandate is to remove all distinctions in humanity all distinctions in humankind which is a you know this is a religious impulse in and of itself so modernity to order the world comes up with religious themes that that that follow religious patterns now it might not acknowledge it human progress right right right and and you know it's it's this misidentification with technological progress and Peter Teal you know bless his heart talks about this how essentially you know the only and I'm not praising Peter Teal by the way I have a lot of bones to pick with the man but in his article and first things against Edenism he has a very interesting line that I essentially agree with where he talks about there you know there has been no real technological breakthroughs in this century or the last nothing really getting us to that point that you know technology has ever since the Renaissance

36:58has essentially promised us theosis through technology you will transcend the human condition we make technology we give ourselves this meaning Peter Teal says essentially outside of artificial intelligence AI systems information systems we don't have these breakthroughs they don't exist sorry you can go ahead well I was just going to say basically it's a story of Babel right that that the the story of human progress the idea of human progress is basically um you know we we've been cut off from God because we we we feel like we can no longer believe in the you know a world pregnant with mean with divine meaning and so let's build a tower to God and then we can then we can rise to the heavens and you you think to yourself like like did nobody see it actually lots of people have seen it and we're starting to read these authors again now right and it's actually interesting you know when when we think of historically or ethnographically anthropologically what the tower tower Babel would have looked like it I mean it was a religious

38:03structure it was a ziggurat essentially right or something close to that whatever we want to say and then all of the city that that that you know revolves around the ziggurat to make it you know to make it work and the sacrifices work and so forth exactly right and so again in in even the temple of Babel has more religious meaning than whatever we're trying to do and I say we you know I have to I have to say that even while I I want to you know undermine modernity and I want to undermine the the condition of modern man I live as a modern man I live connected to modernity so that that's why it's so difficult to understand these things that's why it's so because when you talk about like Peter teal when you talk about being anti technology or anti artificial intelligence there's always that humanistic appeal that because we are you know fallen creatures that we we are sinful people were like well you know AI saved my dog from dying or something like that very

39:04very self-centered which you know objectively you know a resuscitation machine saving phyto from choking on a fork that's great that's amazing but that's not the technology we're talking about that's not the technology I'm talking about in aliyah this book the forge and the crucible he talks about this technological impulse to to control nature and and there's an archetype associated with I think he coins the term himself I'm not sure so don't quote me on that but he uses this term homo favor or you know human fabrication human fabrication human technology human materiality will overcome and control nature and thus by overcoming and controlling nature we can transcend it this is the transcendent act that again you know it's all towards theosis it's all towards the pothiosis we will transcend ourselves but again the cornerstone of this the cornerstone of what people like you know I don't know if using the word human is accurate to describe Alex

40:06carp and Peter teal but what humans like them do is they try to use technology to transcend these things to to make up new religious significance for themselves and I think it's important to say that Peter teal considers himself a sort of Christian so you know you can't live in a world in the modern western world without having essentially a Christian framework but that Christian framework isn't necessarily orthodox and I think that's part of why a lot of these ideas surrounding artificial intelligence utopianism technology history et cetera et cetera that's why they're so seductive because even Marxism is you know has its roots in a Judeo Christian eschatology in in a hebraic thought process a hegel Kant they're all working with a Christian understanding of the world where they're very they're separated from archaic or as it were alia that has a word for

41:09it's it's cosmic Christianity it's it's the Christianity of the golden age of the church fathers of Maximus of Saint John Chrysostom a world that was so pregnant with meaning right exactly well and this is the thing too when you when you then it also helps you to understand concepts that say somebody like like Heidegger when he talks about in framing and and so you you're trying to reach God by building this technical edifice but all you do is continually you know more and more cut yourself off from any meaningful relationship to to the material world around you whether it's like sort of dead inert matter anything but you're just simply you're removing the possibility that you can have an encounter with the real and with and if you can't encounter the real you can't encounter the sacred in the real right and that's and that's in a sense you know and so this is in a sense why it's so important that AI is able to

42:14spontaneously generate intelligence and this is why these guys are so committed to it because in some sense if you can if AI can give birth to consciousness it both on the one hand justifies the meta narrative of evolution that is possible out of material out of material reality to generate consciousness spontaneously but more so it says that we can generate spiritual i.e. divine realities out of the technological we can give birth to God and that's really in the sense the end the end result of it will know that we've ascended to the great to you know we've reached the end of progress when we can give birth to God right and that's I think really you know um kind of that that's sort of the the end point this way and why it gets problematic now in terms of people living in this world human beings who who are created by God to live in a world where

43:15God is present and the world is pregnant with meaning it was spiritual meaning where it's sacred um is that now you have to in this in this world of dead inert matter it is your responsibility to create meaning you have to figure it all out for yourself you have to assert your own consciousness onto the world around you and alayate calls this the burden of history so this idea that well i've got to figure out you know what my goals in life are i've got to figure out who i am what my life is well it used to be you never had to figure yourself out it was given to you and now you've got to find your passion you've got to or even worse if you feel like you're a man trapped in a woman's body or a woman trapped in a man's body what you need to do is to find the technology to then assert that meaning onto the world because that meaning that you

44:18have that's the real meaning the world has the the material world has no meaning your body has no meaning you know so if you're born a man that body has no meaning other than the meaning that you give it to you give to it right right so all of these concepts that we we just take for granted the idea of human progress and and that that you know human beings are at the center of history and you know the the endpoint of that kind of like transgenderism is the endpoint of or maybe it's not even the endpoint but it's an endpoint of notions of technological progress and human progress and the idea that the the world is just matter is just matter and it's up to us to give it meaning we as human beings are the central actors in creation and why not create in the natural world we as human beings are the central actors and we're the givers of meaning and so most people under the weight of having to create their own morality create their own identity create their own meaning create their own purpose they just buckle under it and if if culture is not if the

45:23society is not in its upswing or you know you're being swept along by this great rise in in society on the upswing of western culture and you're being lifted up in that ground once you hit the peak and you sense in the back of your mind that like Peter Tiel saying like you know maybe the really hasn't been any print you know you could argue that technical progress may be continued to the middle of the 1800s and after that most of the great inventions stopped and maybe at the end like the 1940s was about it and now you've got all this prosperity you you know you've devastated the world through technology was it whatever and now you've got to find new meaning for it on the other side of world war one and world war two right and for the most part the vast majority of people have slowly crumbled under the weight of this and that's really what that's why Eliana calls it the burden of history is that we are crumbling under the burden of history and we're just you know and you can see it in society that we just can't bear the weight of our own concept our

46:25own self conception yeah absolutely and and he also calls it um he well he calls he identifies it as as an anxiety as an anxious disorder where we we were promised all these things as you said by by technology we were promised prosperity we were promised and we have these things now and and nothing happened no no angel descended from the skies and not everyone has been instantly you know what's what's the term um raptured straight into heaven none of this has occurred things objectively have gotten and are getting worse and that's that's what we need to understand is that especially coming from a biblical point of view when it comes to like linear history there is no promise of linear progression there's unfolding there's cycles within within linear there's revealing right right um and then this whole there's also this notion and I think

47:27I think some of the post moderns are getting it right and it would actually be useful I think I don't know what you're how you feel about horror movies but looking at some of Robert Ager's filmography especially the witch and Nosferatu you have this really interesting um what I believe and you know what one of my mentors brought this up originally I can't name him on screen you know of course he's a private man um but I credit him with this is that there's this rise and I think interestingly I think HP Lovecraft embodies this but there's this and I have a book chapter I'm gonna self-plug there I have a book chapter coming out later this year on that self-plug so sorry to do on your podcast now we'll do that at the end so you can plug away but yeah perfect so in in in the HP Lovecraft he kind of embodies this okay essentially this modern promise especially him you know growing up in Puritan New England essentially very secularized we've thrown out even the bare minimum of Protestant Calvinism now we're just kind of going on

48:31unitarian good feelings and general vibes world spirit sort of thing um that's decrepit it doesn't lead to anything but technology has also not given us what it's promised so this world that's been opened up by scientific intrusion into the natural world into the cosmos isn't a world full of of meaning like like you were saying full it's it's infertile and actually it's populated by horrible things it's populated by the demonic by bio hazards by bio horror um so there's a lot more to lovecraft but but continuing on with this idea of progress all that progress is is forward velocity there is no moral goodness that's assigned to progress by itself um what happens with that forward velocity you know entails good or bad morality you know evil intention good intention um but you know all of these promises and I think I think even in um modern politics

49:35we're understanding that it's not good anymore like progress to what what does progress mean does progress mean more money laundering in a very uh in a very materialist sense and so going back to Robert Ager's people are craving the spirituality and even in Marxism and fascism and you know Giovanni Gentile um and you know Antonio Gramsci you see this this relate like how do we deal with with this desire that we all have to be right exactly like the need of some of the age how do we find meaning in this in this right right and I think a lot of what the postmoderns are doing and I think you know Ager is an example of this is they're finding spiritual meaning but that doesn't necessarily mean a Christian spiritual meaning it seems to be that no we're entering postmodernism and post-Christian spiritual thoughts seem to be going hand in hand now obviously there is Christianity very vital Christianity suffuse through postmodernism but not always

50:36but not always and so especially in the movie Nosferatu and I try not to watch horror movies but I did in this one I'm very good Romanian language acting in that film not to not to suit that horn again but they did a very good job anyways so you see you know the power and the action of this group of Eastern Orthodox monks and nuns and they're able to keep you know Vlad Drakula at bay they're able to keep the vampire way but then they're you know the camera goes to the next scene in the next storyline and it's this essentially German Lutheran minister who isn't you know not actually Lutheran in any discernible sense not even really Christian in any discernible sense as Christian as Kant or Hegel were who doesn't believe like there can't be a vampire there can't be demonic forces at work there can't be spiritual evil in this world who is unable to do anything it can't do anything to protect the the the city or the family or or the the main characters from evil demonic forces um and you know but in agres orthodox Christianity also isn't

51:44able to kill Vlad Drakula it's only able to sort of keep him at bay maybe only offer an alternative and so I think there's this growing um spiritual movement in in postmodernism that it that you know leaves behind traditional Christian um moralisms ethics uh it understands the metaphysics but it leaves behind the rest and I think that has a lot to do with this this disorientation with Wigish and linear history that has for better or for worse and I think worse than associated with Western Christianity well and I I agree like I'm a thoroughgoing postmodern I think that modernism needs to be smashed and modernist understandings of of scripture need to be smashed ideas of you know quote-unquote objective truth and all the all these pillars that that you know and and the power and centrality of reason and so forth um and um and also empiricism and blah blah blah um the only way out is through and you know out of

52:50this wreckage you know and this is the thing that I I will say to people again and again you know like oh do you mean you have to go back and become menonites and like no because we we can't get away from like modernity is the technological societies here it's it's it's like the the knowledge of good and evil once you have crossed a certain point there is a sense unless we bomb ourselves back into the stone age there's no going back and so now we have a moral um we we need to reassert a moral relationship with technology because right now technology is its own morality in that regard as part of the you know it has as Nick Land says it's it's reached you know escape velocity along with capital and become its own morality um and so you you you you can't get away from technology you can't get away from like the Heidegger's idea that you've been infrained in technology you can't get away from the fact that you live in a world that is nihilistic and dead um but yet at the same time this is where this kind of enchantment talk comes from at the same time

53:55it is desperate for us and I think this is kind of what emerges from the other side is to reinvigorate the encounter with God both in creation and directly in a sense to you know reach out and do the work to smash through the inframing to encounter God directly to capture even if it only imparts um the the archetypal world of the ancients in that regard but we have to do so now on the other side right we can't we can't we capture the world of the ancients we in a sense have to encounter like it's a new encounter but the encounter with God is always living Christ is still sacrifice Christ is still you know dead risen and you know sits at the right hand of God and you have a new life that is hidden with Christ and so you know the the the passage in in Colossians you know as a since Christ since you have been raised if Christ therefore you know uh lifter had to heaven and and you know all of that still remains true so we have a living

54:58and we can bank on this but we're not trying to do a historical project where humanity's at the center of the historical project where we through our actions are trying to usher in the new heaven and the new earth all we're merely trying to do is to reveal a world that's already there that God has already secured in Christ and we're just simply trying to reveal it and to show it to the world around us and so that to me is a sense this is something that in his own way with his ontologism that Italian philosopher Augusto Dalmochi talked about you know Godamer and Kierkegaard in trying to reestablish intuition as the ground of truth did in their own ways so these are the types of pieces that we're trying to in the wreckage of modernity that we're trying to piece together to find a pathway forward but we have to remember that the archetypal hasn't disappeared yeah a good example is from scripture for those that were this really is important to people to

55:58sort of ground things in scripture take for example Luke 13 the following of the Tower of Salon right and people ask well were these people you know any better or worse than anyone else and Jesus points out to them that basically this tower falling is an archetypal breaking in of the day of judgment and so this could have just as easily happened to you the day of judgment could just as easily happen today tomorrow now so when you see the day of judgment breaking in archetypely well what do you see you don't try to say well why is God doing this well God's doing this to you because all creation exists under the judgment of God and we know that it's coming and it's revealing itself in these moments and so your task is now to repent and believe when you see and so this is in a sense of this archetypal understanding of history allows you to make sense of a biblical passage that in a modern like in a modern context

56:59we have trouble making sense of it because we ask the question well why would God do this to us you know what I mean because he's the distant watchmaker God who's breaking into a an inner world to punish people unduly or whatever you know like why is he signaling out of that well no it's just if you think of the world property you understand it property as an archetypal reality well we're all we've always existed since the fall of Adam and you know in even to sin we've existed under the judgment of God and it's just revealing itself like it's revealed itself again and again and again to give you warning about what will one day come yeah absolutely right and so this is in a sense it's going to require of us in some ways to rethink our understanding of the nature of the world and time if we're going to recover me and this is why I find Eliade so helpful because it allowed me to kind of say to make a sort of decisive break mentally and to then see the world of history and time and you know modern inner time in a

58:02directional time weakest time as you say to sort of say well anytime I encounter that I can largely set that aside and ask myself how should I properly understand that in terms of divine like divine biblical time in terms of the static architecture within which all of the divine realities of salvation are revealed archetypal oh shoot I think you're cutting out David you might have put yourself on mute or no can you hear me there we go okay I definitely put myself on mute sorry microphone so I think that something something is very important to talk about that you know your audience our audience shouldn't take away from this is inaction that is not what I don't think you're saying that I'm certainly not saying that and there's this idea especially in Wigish linear understandings of time we have to do something right right sometimes the best thing that you could

59:06be doing is prayer life and that's you know on on other podcasts where I've been asked like what's a practical application of all this Eliade talk is it like becoming a renaissance wizard and studying musculio and Gino and Giordano Bruno and talking to stones no not at all that's not what I'm advocating for but pray that is one of the most important things that you could do as a post modern person pray and pray earnestly and don't skip on it well and also too like realize that you're you are made new in Christ and your new life in Christ is hidden and you will reveal it in part today but probably the most significant act let's call it an act of rebellion against modernity is to reveal your new self in Christ absolutely and it's not dependent on you know material modernist condition at all it's above it and through it and over it and under it

1:00:06and I think I think also another thing that I did for a while was in in my youth like a lot of young men in the anglophone world word and you know 2015 to 2017 very very interested and very galvanized by politics uh everything was full you know newsmax bright bar Fox new CNN AP et cetera et cetera always looking and looking looking um those ideological processes that that that realm of politics it's not unimportant it's it's it's not unimportant but but don't make it the idle on your altar because there are things that are actually more important than what the president of America is doing in the Caribbean currently not that they're not unimportant but in 15 years will you be talking about this or in 15 years will you be figuring out new ways on you know how to undermine artificial intelligence if it were me I'd be looking at the latter and not the former um and to understand that there are metaphysical things that are actionable in your life that you

1:01:11can do and that you can strive towards in the Christian life that there are metaphysical goals you know for all of his uh nonsense reneguon is basically like look don't don't have inertia about these things you know as a christian even though he was a sufi Muslim he also obviously as a perennialist to acknowledge christian truths you know that in the end christwins you know that the war is one metaphysically but do you give up in the middle of the battle and let everyone be slaughtered and let all in the world around you die off because you know that the war will be one no the victory has to be revealed and that's right exactly it's not your victory it's god's victory correct correct and that's the decisive see the shift in modernity is god's victory became our victory exactly that's got to flip again exactly um and so I think I think what would be really helpful for your audience if they want to understand this more obviously you know by you know purchase

1:02:13look up sacred in the profane that's my favorite but aliada himself started with you know told people to read the myth of the eternal return first so I guess you know do what he says um but really by the specific volume is miss uh mutual aliada is a history of religious ideas it's three volumes from the University of Chicago press and I what I see a lot in western christian circles is this idea that because as christians we understand that we have the deposit of faith or the fullness of truth that we ignore other religions or other faith traditions um or on the other end of it we somehow acknowledge that like we worship the same god as as the Muslims are the Hindus I'm not advocating either because I don't believe either is correct um now obviously I believe that Christianity is the fullness of the truth that I don't believe um that you should ignore these things I think it's detrimental to ignore these things um and you you should especially as as a Christian if you're interested in these things um look at where Christianity agrees with these

1:03:19primordial archaic religions why why is there that agreement is it because something in Christianity is man made or is it because that god is so ineffably true and full of goodness that it's that his revelation still shines through no matter what in any faith system um and I obviously I believe that the latter is correct and that you ignore these things and you ignore what's too good and beautiful in them to your detriment that's not to say that you know you should take a potchimama fertility idol from you know south america and put it but you know that's not throwing shade at anyone um but oh absolutely not yeah but you understand the point that I'm making oh yeah for sure no and then and this is the this is the thing though too is is that I think it is possible to to have a sound biblical understanding of the world to root yourself in scripture um and while and I would argue Augustine to allow scripture to be the sign that reveals the

1:04:24thing in itself which is god you know that you know a good Augustinian understanding of the of what scripture is um but rooted in scripture it is very useful to go out into the world and to not be afraid to develop a sophisticated understanding things right now it can be dangerous because you can get into like with nihilism and nici you can get to a point where you're staring at the void and the void stairs back at you many people have begun these explorations and have lost their faith so it makes all the more important that when you go to new you encounter all of these other faiths and all of these other ideas that it it just doubly underscores the importance that you are anchored in the presence of god and in worshiping community um because these things will test and will challenge your faith and for some you know this is not a road or a task for everybody some you know in it and bless their heart some people just want a simple faith and that's good for them but for those sort of thing you know if you want to have a sophisticated Christian faith

1:05:28you have to do more than just read the bible and christian theology to put it that way absolutely and i also i also would say that when you read aliada because he does not uh especially his major works he is not presenting these things to you as a christian theologian uh he is personally a christian in these books and it does show through at some point especially where he talks about baptism and and in his analysis of hebra religion very much balances a quote unquote secular understanding because he has to write a book you know you know these things work um he was at a point in academia where everything wasn't halish and people knew what you meant um it's important to understand that he's not an orientalist he's not like uh um criticizing western civilization to see it fall or or because he hates the west or because he thinks he's not western or because he thinks that christianity isn't the truth and it somehow needs these things from other religions it's a rather to remind christianity of what it has and to fight against this very abstracted

1:06:35secularized christianity that's the christianity of haggle or cons or mill bank um or or or hume or even john lock if we want to go we want to keep going farther back he probably has issues issues with charlamagne the great uh and his liturgical reforms that you know john pelican writes about in in his book series um is it john pelican though who is this young slob pelican? young slob wow John pelican i don't know where i got that from but yeah young slob pelicans works again you have chicago very good history of of the christian church by the way very good very good highly recommended, but that is to say he wants to remind Christians of who we are. We are not modernist constructs, we are not automatons. We belong as much to this primordial archaic man as anyone else does because of who we are because of how we were created. These primordial truths ring truth, ring true in us because we are human because they ultimately are true.

1:07:35And I've been on an everyday level as a Christian, stop seeing the word superstitious as a bad thing. Stop seeing word spiritual as a bad thing. If somebody calls something superstitious, that isn't obviously like witchcraft, be discerning, use discernment, the Holy Spirit gives you discernment, get rid of that word from your vocabulary. If something seems weird in Christian theology, too spiritual, look at it. Again, use discernment, but I would look more at that than any of the last Bible commentaries of the 20th century or the 19th century. Although some of those are pretty good though too, but yeah. Yeah, I'm not a theologian, but that's my general advice. Well, it's an interesting thing where you talk to people, you'll often see this in political dialogue when you make a comment, because I'm in Canada, when you make a comment about Americans, you say, well, you're not American, you don't understand anyways. And there is a certain truth to that that like collective bodies and people's like the

1:08:39church community, you have a personality. And like any person, there's a part of us internally that we know ourselves best that you can't even really explain to somebody outside, but you just sort of know. And the outside are never really grasps that inner reality. And there is a truth to that that there's a, you know, there's an inner reality, shall we say, to being an American or being a Christian or even an American Christian or a Canadian Christian, that only one of us can can kind of grasp. But there is also a truth as well too that there are things that we do that we are blind to. And we tend to filter out information and sensory data that we that we find uncomfortable and we tend to act on things precognitively. And those things can often be very, very visible to others. And so there's this unique dialogue that you can't really know yourself unless you are in dialogue or others. So in this regard, if you're reading people who come from outside the Christian

1:09:45religion, even those that are critical of Christianity, they may be seeing things about you that you yourself are blind to. And that once you have been awakened to them, you can then grapple with them. And you can, you can wrestle with them. And sometimes these are uncomp- there's a reason why you don't want to see these things about yourself is because you're uncomfortable with them, right? And oftentimes you're subconsciously filtering them out because you just don't want to deal with that aspect of yourself. And so I think in that regard, this is why there's many who kind of shy away from the kind of work that Eliade does in terms of the history of religions because they're worried that it will undermine their faith. And perhaps that is the case for some. But for others, if you're open-minded to learning about yourself, there's often things that the outside or the other can speak back to you and help you understand about yourself that, you know, that makes sense.

1:10:46And in some sense, like various, even like specifically Christian rituals that we have, God didn't pull them out of thin air when He instructed them to do us. They're part of the things that are woven into creation and other cultures pick up similar realities. But then you also realizing that in God's people, He's redeeming something that others have gotten wrong. But they're interacting with the same realities. Now some will say, well, that means the Christianity is just sort of, it's not unique, it's not special. And you realize that, wait a minute, no, there's a specific redemptive act that God's initiating by taking something that pagans do and incorporating into our Christian practice in a way that's uniquely redemptive in ours. And I think that's a good, that probably for me, I think that's probably the best way to look at it. And like you say, it takes discernment and so forth. But I have kept you here now for well over now. This has been a wonderful conversation, David. Thank you. Rare can people find you and is there anything that you want to plug? You mentioned that you're going to be doing a chapter in a book, you said?

1:11:49Yeah. So we haven't fully released it, but it's going to be a Bloomsbury academic group book. I'll be co-writing a chapter among others, but it's essentially HP Lovecraft as an anti-modernist, as a reactionary reacting against modernity. And specifically, we'll be analyzing myself and my co-author, we'll be analyzing HP Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and his personal diaries that he kept, as well as some of his larger books, as evidence to show that he actually was a religious person or at the very least had very intense religious experiences. Because a lot of the quote-unquote objective HP Lovecraft scholarship out there essentially is like, well, Lovecraft was an atheist who wrote scary boogie-man stories and that's all well and good, but don't read anything else into him. And that's simply not true. That's simply not true. He's a very deep thinker. His letters alone are a testament to this. Probably one of the most prolific letter writers

1:12:51in American history in the 20th century, maybe by far, there are books and books and books of his letters and diaries. So that's coming out. And then are you aware of what the Ciceroanian society is? No. So the Ciceroanian society is essentially an academic conference where we have fun, because we're all Christian. And it's going to happen out in Omaha, Nebraska. And I have a the book chapter itself is going to be presented there as a paper. And so that's happening in March. But other than that, I don't do really cool things. You can find me on, you can find me on Twitter. My handle is David Bonico Roe. And yeah, I usually post things there. I have a few articles out in different magazines. And I hope to keep doing that this year. But other than that, I just plan on completing my college life and hopefully getting some more traction. That would be always a nice thing to have. Well, very good. Again, thank you for coming on.

1:13:55Just a note for the listener. We were hoping to have Aaron O'Toole join us for a brief interview at the end of this episode. But unfortunately, we ran out of time. So we'll have to catch up to him later. Bye and have a wonderful day.