Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome to the Orthodox Engagement podcast. My guest today is Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox Christian and French-Canadian icon-carver. He is also a YouTuber with over 90,000 subscribers, a podcaster, and a writer, much of which goes under the title The Symbolic World. He teaches iconography and is a sought-after speaker both inside and outside the Orthodox community, discussing iconography and the revival and significance of liturgical arts in the modern world. And especially in that vein, he is also the editor and a contributor to the Orthodox Arts Journal.

Jonathan and I have collaborated three times before, if I’m counting it right, with his appearance on the Amon Sûl podcast discussing dragons in the work of J.R.R. Tolkein, where he insisted that dragons are definitely more real than dinosaurs; and he has had me on The Symbolic World on two occasions, one of which with my Lord of Spirits podcast co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young. Jonathan, welcome to Orthodox Engagement.

Mr. Jonathan Pageau: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. I feel like our paths are crossing more and more, and I think that’s wonderful.

Fr. Andrew: Makes me happy for sure. So to start us off, I actually wanted to mention the talk that you gave when our paths first crossed in person. In April of 2018, almost three years ago now, you gave a talk at St. Philip Orthodox Church in Souderton, Pennsylvania, which you described as “a full frontal assault on the Copernican revolution.” Now, up to that point I had read a couple articles by you, but not really watched any of your videos that I can remember. But I also knew that you had carved the resurrection cross headstone for my friend, the late Fr. Matthew Baker.

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I came to the talk, which was titled, “The Incarnation as the Principle and Center of the Enchanted World,” but I was riveted that you insisted that we didn’t have to see the solar system and the universe the way that is now commonly assumed, and indeed it actually makes more sense not to think in those terms, and I know that you have a related article titled, “Most of the Time, the Earth is Flat.” My sense is that this is one of the keys to understanding your perspective, that the world itself is actually symbolic. Would you begin by explaining what you meant by this “assault” on the Copernican revolution? I mean, a lot of people probably don’t even know what the Copernican revolution is exactly. Isn’t science right about how it describes the earth and the sun and moon and stars?

Mr. Pageau: [Laughter] Well, I think, first of all, that it’s important to understand that there are many ways to describe the same phenomena, and my assault on the Copernican revolution is mostly that it’s usually presented to us that before people used to think that the earth was at the center of the cosmos and that everything turned around the earth. And then Copernicus and then Galileo help us to understand that, no, indeed, the sun is at the center of our system and that the earth turns around the sun, as well as the other planets. It’s usually represented as a kind of technical shift, as a shift, like a scientific shift where we used to scientifically think that the world worked this way, and now we scientifically think that the world works in another way.

But my contention—and I think it’s well-based in a lot of scholarship and in a lot of the ways that people are understanding the different shifts that happened in history—is that that’s not what happened. What really happened was a change from center, the center of the world being meaning, that is, meaning, logos, different ways that the ancients would describe it as being that out of which the world came out, to a more technical kind of mechanical description of physical causalities. So when the ancients would say something like, “The earth is at the middle of the cosmos,” or “Man is at the center of the cosmos,” what they were implying is that man is made through logos and has logos and is able to, through his capacity for mind, is able to participate in how the world exists, and therefore acts as kind of a microcosm for the cosmos. You see that in St. Maximus; you see that in other thinkers as well, even in non-Christian thinkers.

So that’s mostly what I was trying to help people understand, is that it’s actually… The shift that happens in the Copernican revolution is a major shift, and it’s one which is running… It’s running towards the end of its energy, you would say, where now that science has come to the end of what it’s capable of doing through its perspective, it’s now realizing that one of the things it’s not able to account for is quality, not able to account for meaning. It’s able, once you give a category, once you kind of frame the world, then it’s able to explain phenomena, predict phenomena in an amazing way. It’s able to describe mechanical causality in ways that are wonderful, but it’s not able to account for the meaning that precedes that description.

So now, even today, there are many scientists who are realizing the need for meaning in their system, and as they kind of turn their scientific eye back on the structures of meaning, the notion of consciousness, all of these things which usually describe our first-person experience in the world, everything is becoming loopy for them. They can’t account for it. They struggle. They find funny words like “emergence” to describe how phenomena appear to us. They struggle to account for the effect that, as traditional Christians we would say, logos does to the world, how it forms reality out of potential, out of chaos, and calls out things out of the void. This is really how the world works.

So I tried to help people see that, even if you think that the earth turns around the sun mechanically, in terms of meaning, you still live as if the sun goes up in the morning, and you can’t get away from that. You live on a flat earth with a sun that goes up in the morning, which goes around, and you have a certain horizon of experience. There’s up, there’s down, and that accounts for all the meaning in your life, the way you describe even social hierarchies: you use a language of up and down. All of this is actually the frame out of which, then, you are able to abstract yourself and to describe a world in which the earth turns around the sun, mechanically. But your first experience is primal, and it’s actually the most real experience that you’re going to get.

The scientific, Copernican description is totally fine for what it does, but it actually comes second. It comes second to this first-person experience of the world and a patterned existence with the sun coming up and the seasons. So that’s why I wrote this article called “Most of the Time, the Earth is Flat,” which is that once in a while the Copernican description is useful, if you want to fly spaceships and you want to do all the technical things we want to do, but most of the time you don’t live in that world. You live in the same world your ancestors lived in, which is basically a kind of horizon of experience with a dome above you which is the heavens, and that’s really the world you still live in. It’s best to deal with that, or else you’re going to live a schizophrenic experience, a schizophrenic life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That last thing you said about living a schizophrenic life, I think… I don’t know. I think this is one of the keys to trying to understand one of the problems with the world as we know live in it and conceive of it. If we sort of accept this Copernican idea as “this is the only way to understand the universe and the cosmos,” then that means that my daily existence is essentially a kind of life.

Mr. Pageau: That’s what people say all the time. People dare to say that the sun coming up in the morning is an illusion. I mean, people… And that’s a really dangerous psychological game to play, with yourself and with your kids. Because that’s not an illusion; it’s the realest thing, one of the realest things that you can experience.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, okay, I just wanted to put that out there, just as kind of a teaser for everybody to what we’re going to be talking about. But before we get into all that—before we get too deep into all that—I kind of want to cover a few biographical questions. So you live in Montreal now. Is that where you’re from, where you grew up?

Mr. Pageau: Well, I grew up about two hours from Montreal. It’s in a place called the Eastern Townships, close to the U.S. border. That’s where I was born, but I moved around a lot. My father was a Baptist pastor who kind of shifted towards psychology, so when I was a young teenager, we moved to Wheaton, Illinois, and he studied at Wheaton. So I lived there for part of my teenage years, then moved back to Quebec but somewhere else. I also lived in Africa for seven years with my wife who is from Slovakia. So I feel like I’m a very… It’s hard to know what my home is, you know? My history is very… I was more of a traveler, I guess you could say.

Fr. Andrew: Hm. Do you identify yourself with a particular people?

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, I have a fraught relationship with my own origins, that’s for sure! [Laughter] So I’m French-Canadian. French is my first language. Both of my parents are French. My life, my home life, is all in French. If I speak to my kids, it’s all… I spend most of my time in French, but all of my professional life is in English, I guess.

I have a kind of fraught relationship with the French-Canadians because the French-Canadians were probably one of the most Catholic people in the world until the ‘60s, and then there was a major radical shift. Like, it happened everywhere else, but here, because they were so traditional that the shift was extreme. They moved from a kind of very religious culture to an extremely secular culture, kind of modeling themselves on France. So the French-Canadians basically threw out Christianity, so I have like… And I always feel like there’s nothing to do about that, like it’s a horrible… This is more like a confession. I always feel like there’s nothing to do about that, in that there’s nothing… You can’t help the situation. But obviously I’m wrong. There’s something about this moment right now in my life, I would say, where I’m beginning to realize I need to be more involved locally and to do things in French and to kind of reach out to the people I consider my people, I would say.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You mentioned that your father had been a Baptist pastor. That’s kind of unusual by itself for French-Canadians, because, as you said, most have this Catholic background. If that’s your starting point, how did you come to be an Orthodox Christian?

Mr. Pageau: [Laughter] Yeah. It’s one of those “journey to Orthodoxy"s that are super complicated and convoluted, but, I mean… My parents converted from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity, and for them it was really a real, let’s say, discovery for them, because I would say that one of the reasons why the Catholicism here went away so fast is that although it was extremely involved in all aspects of society, it seemed like it was quite superficial in terms of its understanding, like, there really wasn’t a deep intellectual theological tradition in Quebec, so a lot of it came off as, let’s say, superstitious and a little thin.

For my parents, discovering the Bible and discovering the people who love Scripture and who love God and had this energy to follow Christ was something that really brought them along. When I was young, it was all these people who had not long ago converted to Evangelical Christianity. The entire church had converted in the late ‘70s, so it was this huge movement of newly converted people. So I grew up in that, that kind of frenetic, and I would say energetic Evangelical Christianity of churches growing and churches becoming bigger. I remember when I was young there was only one service, and after five years or whatever there were two services in the church, and that kind of stuff. But that didn’t last very long; even in my late teenage years it was already waning.

But I think that I… My father was a very intellectual person. He studied at Wheaton, psychology. We had a lot of intellectual discussions in my house, and my brother and I were both quite tilted in that direction. So in our teenage years, because we had grown up in such a, let’s say an intellectually fruitful place— And my mother as well. Both my father and mother really encouraged us to think and to discuss and to not shy away from questions. So we both started reading. He, my brother, started to study Hebrew on his own, to read the Bible in the Hebrew, and started reading rabbinical commentary. Then I started reading contemporary philosophy, post-modernism especially.

And then in college as well, through the whole question of art. It was really a struggle for me, because I was always artistically minded, and I kind of knew from a very young age that I would be an artist, but to be a Baptist artist… I wanted to be honest about that and the problems… Because there was something about being a Baptist and making visual art which is that people would say that it’s fine, like there’s nothing wrong with making paintings, but there was a tacit hostility, let’s say, towards the visual. So I wanted to deal with that.

So in college I ended up making art which was about that problem. How can I be a Protestant and make art? I was dealing with figures like Luther and Calvin, and I had using images like the bronze serpent in Scripture. The bronze serpent is lifted up, but then it’s cast down. So what’s the difference between the image that’s lifted up and cast down? So it was kind of this intellectual game that I was trying to play, in my paintings, trying to figure this stuff out. Tower of Babel, this whole idea of a structure that you build up that isn’t stable, all this imagery.

But ultimately it ended up being a kind of alienation, because the thing about contemporary art is that it’s always indirect; it’s always a comment on something. So you’re always making art about art, and that’s what it ended up being. I was right in there for the contemporary world. I was basically making images about the problem of making images. So it ended up being art making art about art, but it was quite alienating, and I could feel it as a spiritual crisis, I would say. The whole thing, that’s how it was playing out. And at the same time, I was reading these philosophers; that’s also when I started reading, let’s say, mystical texts from other traditions or from kind of contemporary, more suspect sources. Just looking for something more, feeling like there was something missing in my own tradition.

All of that ultimately led me toward the Church Fathers, also The Way of the Pilgrim, which is something a lot of people fall upon. When I read St. Gregory of Nyssa, the life of Moses, those type of texts just really got me. I remember reading texts by Vladimir Lossky called “Tradition and Traditions” which was at the beginning of his book on iconography with Ouspensky, and I had tears. Now when I read it, it’s so funny, because it’s such a technical text, but I was streaming tears reading this text about how this ontological structure of reality and how it lays itself out and how it flows through this hierarchy of manifestation. I was like: This is it! Why haven’t I ever seen this before?

I basically realized that what I had been looking for was already there in Christianity. It’s just I didn’t have access to it before. So iconography was a big part of it, too, because discovering medieval art at first and then realizing that this language, this beautiful, powerful language of visual signs, and this almost sacred algebra of images was still alive and still functioning in the Orthodox Church. So by the time I actually walked into a church, I was pretty much convinced. I walked into a Presanctified service during Lent, and it was exactly what I needed for where I was: this dark church with all the prostrations and this whole sense of mystery. Yeah, that was it. I knew right away that this was where I needed to be.

Fr. Andrew: So how did you get into iconography? And specifically—you mentioned painting—how did you get into carving icons? I mean, I think about that… If you paint something wrong, you can kind of paint over that. [Laughter] But if you chisel something wrong… I don’t know what you do. Maybe there’s some trick you can tell us about.

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, there are ways. It usually takes a lot of time. You have to bring the whole carving down to kind of fix it. But it’s a really an interesting… It’s a strange situation, because when, like most artists, I would say, who become Orthodox, they become extremely eager to paint icons, so that’s how I was. I was still a catechumen, and I just really wanted to paint icons. But that was in the early 2000s, and there still weren’t a lot of options for people who wanted to learn to paint icons. It feels like it’s really gotten better now, but at that time I really struggled. There were no teachers, there was no one… There were no resources for me to find a place to learn, and so I took some theory classes. A priest here, Fr. Stéphane Bigham, who is kind of an expert on iconology, so I took some classes with him at the little Orthodox Institute we have here. So that just made me more eager to paint, but I didn’t… I felt like if I did it on my own, I would not get it right, because it’s so technical in terms of the egg yolk and all the layering. It’s extremely difficult.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe before you go on, explain to everybody the difference between iconology and iconography.

Mr. Pageau: Oh, so iconology is the theory in terms of the meaning of icons. Understanding everything you see in icons, also understanding the theology of icons and its role in the liturgical life of the Church—that’s what iconology is, whereas iconography is the practice of painting icons. A lot of iconographers will also have an iconological understanding. You need to, because especially if you’re going to paint, let’s say, an entire church, you need to understand which images you want to put where and what’s the significance of the relationship between the architecture and the different images that are used. So this is the kind of thing that iconology would be dealing with.

So I had the theoretical understanding, but I didn’t have the practical capacity or the practical… the way to get the practical skill. Until one day—this is while I was still a catechumen—my parents cut down a linden tree in their yard, and they said, “Hey, Jonathan, we hear this linden tree is good for carving. Would you like to have a few pieces and kind of try it out?” Right away, I was like: I’m going to make a blessing cross. But I had no tools. I basically had X-Acto knives.

So they gave me this piece of wood, and I carve the whole thing. Even the shape of the cross I ended up carving out with X-Acto knives, which was really horrible. It took me forever, and it ended up looking pretty bad. I still have it. I keep it around as a reminder of the humble beginnings. So I finished this cross, and I brought it to church, because I was a catechumen. So I brought it to church and showed it to some people I was with, and they said, “Show it to the priest! Show it to the priest!” and I was like: “Nah, I don’t want to show it to the priest.” So someone took it and showed it to the priest, and the priest looked at it, and he said, “Hey, not bad. You should keep going.” So that encouraged me.

Finally, I said I’m going to take it seriously. Then my parents bought me for my birthday a little carving kit, like these little kits that have all these little knives on them, that you can switch blades on a handle. And I got myself a board, like a wooden board that you can buy in those stores where you make carvings. Then I decided to make a full-on triptych of Christ in glory with cherubim around him and the four Evangelists and the Mother of God and St. John the Forerunner! So I went from making this little rinky-dinky cross to making this super-elaborate carving, which took me months to make, but I learned so much making that. When I finished it, I brought it again to church, and then I showed it to the priest, and then he really said, “Okay, you need to keep going with this. You can’t stop.”

So that’s how it started. And then there was a big pause in my icon-carving, because I actually moved to Africa for seven years. And I thought I was going to carve there, but it ended up being very difficult to do so. Then it’s only when I got back that I met with my bishop and I showed him some of my carvings, and my bishop, Bishop Irénée, said, “Would you be willing to make a Panagia for me?” And I said, “Yes, sure. I will definitely do that.” So I made this Panagia, and I contacted some icon carvings online. There’s a Serbian carver named George Bilak whom I contacted and I said, “Would you be willing that I send you images of me carving during the different steps?” I’m making this Panagia so he could criticize me. So I send him images. He was ruthless! So Serbian. He was so ruthless with me. [Laughter] He would say things like, “She looks like she’s a cat.” Then he said she looks like she’s on drugs.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. Man!

Mr. Pageau: He was really ruthless, but really helpful, and generous with his time! I mean, my goodness. Can you imagine? So he guided me through this little carving, so I had this little stone carving of the Panagia, and I brought it to church on a Sunday that I knew the bishop was going to be there, and I gave him the little wrapping that I put it in. Then I was all excited, because I was thinking about the carving—Did I do it right? Was it okay?—just in terms of technical skills.

And he opens it up and he looks at it, and he crosses himself and he kind of bows a little bit. And that just knocked me over. It just knocked me down. Because I just realized what I had done. I realized that I had made this object which I disappear out of. He was not looking at my carving any more. When he looked at the carving, he wasn’t looking at my carving; he was looking at the Mother of God, and he could see an image of her in this thing that I made. I was just floored. I realized: Okay, I just made something that’s going to participate in his life, in his ecclesiastical role, in his prayer life… I couldn’t believe it. It was such a rush. It was a rush like I’d never had before. And I thought: Okay. This is it.

And I had this realization that as a contemporary artist—let’s say Picasso or a famous artist—they’ll sell their paintings for millions of dollars. I don’t have access to that; that’s never going to happen to me. But no one kisses his paintings! [Laughter] And I have access to that— just if I give up the name. If I give up the fame and the desire to be my own artist and to have my own style and to… then I have access to something as amazing as that. For me, that was it. I can’t imagine… I couldn’t imagine doing any other art besides that, after that. That’s what I really wanted to do. I had the blessing of my bishop, and I started to slowly make carvings. And, yeah, after that I guess I became a professional icon-carver.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Yeah, and as I mentioned earlier, I think the first work by you that I recall, that I remember seeing—it might not have been the first I ever saw—but the first work by you that I remember seeing—it was just a photograph; I’ve not seen it in person—is the headstone that you made for Fr. Matthew Baker, which… I know that one of the interesting elements of that… So it’s an icon of the resurrection, and it’s Christ pulling up Adam and Eve out of the grave as you often see on resurrection icons. I know that the face of Adam is made specifically to resemble the face of Fr. Matthew. Would you be willing to say a little something about that particular work, when you were contacted or whatever? I don’t know, it’s just a very personal thing for me, because he and I were close friends.

Mr. Pageau: Well, I feel very touched that I had this chance. A lot of my success, I would say, has come through Andrew Gould. Andrew Gould, for those who don’t know, he’s a building designer and liturgical art designer who lives in South Carolina. When my bishop kind of gave me the blessing to paint, to carve, I made a little website, put my stuff up, whatever. And Andrew Gould quickly fell upon my carvings, and he right away got behind me and kind of put me next to him and encouraged me, encouraged the people to order from me, so he really kind of put me out there. We also founded the Orthodox Arts Journal together, so that also kind of slowly put my work out there. It was really through my relationship with Andrew that this commission came about.

Matushka—I don’t even remember whom she contacted first, whether it was me or Andrew, but I knew that I would not have done it without Andrew. So Andrew managed the whole logistics of the headstone, and I actually went down to South Carolina to carve it. I was very touched, because I know that Fr. Matthew had had such an impact on so many people, and I also remember when he passed and the tragedy of that accident, how it kind of affected everybody. I was really happy. It was funny, because when Matushka asked me to make the image of Adam to look like Fr. Matthew, I really didn’t want to do it. I almost… I really feel b— I don’t feel this is right, like I didn’t really want to do it that way. And then I just carved the carving, and it ended up looking like him! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Mr. Pageau: I mean, it doesn’t look like him like a portrait.

Fr. Andrew: No, no, it didn’t.

Mr. Pageau: But there’s something of him in the image.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Mr. Pageau: I really didn’t do that on purpose. And that’s happened to me before, too. I’ve made an icon of St. Irenaeus of Lyons for my bishop again, as a gift that I made for him. And then when I finished it, someone said, “That looks like Bishop Irénée!” And I’m like: I swear I didn’t do that on purpose! [Laughter] I really didn’t!

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter]

Mr. Pageau: It’s strange. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was really an honor to have that. I wish I could see it in person. It’s a little far, I think.

Fr. Andrew: It’s in Rhode Island. Like I said, I’ve not seen it in person myself. I was at his funeral, but I haven’t seen it in person. At some point, though, I have to.

So this is your main gig, so to speak. If someone were to commission you to make something—and I know the answer to this, but I kind of just want to get it on tape—when would they see it? [Laughter]

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, right now my waiting list is about two years, at least two years, but I’m really working hard to bring that down, for all of you who are listening to this who have commissions with me! It’s also because the last few years of my life have been such a whirlwind and such a craziness that it’s also what made it worse. Now I’ve just moved back into… For those of you who don’t know, my house was flooded in 2019, and my family and I have been pretty much camping since then, moving different houses. So we just moved back into our house last week, just three days before Christmas. So I’m hoping that being back here with my workshop right next door, that I’ll be able to be more stable and kind of accelerate the process of carving here.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s not a lot of icon-carvers, especially not here in North America.

Mr. Pageau: Well, no, no, but I’ve got a few students that are coming up behind me now. I’m feeling the pressure. It’s good, it’s good. I’m happy to see that.

Fr. Andrew: That’s good. Your work as an icon-carver is how I first learned about you, but you also talk about iconography and the numerous kinds of theology and philosophy and so forth that inform and also kind of branch off of Orthodox iconography. And that’s how you’re probably best known online. How did you come to be both an artisan and a speaker and writer? I mean, why do both? Why not just focus on one thing or the other?

Mr. Pageau: When I was… like that time that I described to people, that I described before, during college and also at the beginning of my marriage when I was discovering Orthodoxy, both my brother and I were really discovering, I would say, the ancient language of symbolic thinking. He was really doing it more from a strangely kind of a Jewish perspective, because he was reading a rabbinical commentary, and I was reading the Church Fathers, reading St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus, so we had intense, intense, intense discussions about symbolism, and just kind of developed a kind of understanding of the patterns that are in Scripture and the patterns how they manifest themselves in different aspects of the world.

When I started writing for the Orthodox Arts Journal, I was basically applying this thinking and this way of seeing the world to icons. But for me this was just one aspect of what I—how I understood the world. Iconography is just a very powerful exemplary of how the patterns—the same patterns we find in Scripture, find visual form in icons, but it’s there all over the place. The world is made this way. It’s basically the structure of reality. I’ve always had this. I always knew that I thought that way.

Then, I would say, in 2016, I had some strange opportunities. Jordan Peterson, I met Jordan Peterson and he really liked what I was doing, so he kind of put me out there, and then he became uber-famous, and the fact that I had been associated with him and that I did some events with him kind of put some strange attention on me all of a sudden, which I felt I had to answer to, because all of a sudden I was getting all these emails from atheists who were telling me that the way that I talked about reality and the way that I talked about Scripture and about icons and how this was not just arbitrary but that it was basically a pattern that found itself in every aspect of your experience—that this was something that was bringing people back to faith. So for a while I was getting emails every day. I was just getting emails every day, of people who were in this process. This was in 2016, 2017.

So I felt like I had to answer, and I couldn’t answer all these emails, so I decided to make YouTube videos, because that was already the kind of Jordan Peterson moment, and they just kind of took off from there. And then I had a few people who kind of believed in me right away at the beginning, like Fr. John Cox, Fr. Barnabas Powell, who kind of reached out to me right away. Fr. John Cox asked for me to be the speaker at the Diocesan Council of the South, I think it was in 2017. So that was the first time I talked to just a bunch of priests and bishops! [Laughter] But it just kind of happened. I took it very seriously, because I could see how people were reaching out to me and telling me about how it was helping them. So it just… I never planned on this; it just kind of happened, and I just move one day at a time doing this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. As I said at the beginning, we’re probably getting a bit ahead of ourselves with that first question about the Copernican revolution. [Laughter] But I thought it was a good one to begin with, to understand your perspective, that the world is best understood as symbolic. I mean, most people would understand that word, “symbolic,” as meaning words or images that kind of point to some other actually real thing, like this is a symbol for this. So what do you mean by “symbolic” exactly?

Mr. Pageau: I really use the etymological definition of symbolism, which I’m not kind of making up. I’ve heard several Orthodox speakers and Orthodox thinkers try to talk about symbolism in that way. Symbolism means two things that are thrown together. The word “symbol” is used to describe different things in Greek as, for example, the place where two rivers will meet and to become one river, will be like the symbol. We use the notion of the symbol of the apostles, the idea of a creed as a symbol. The idea is rather… The way to understand it is the manner in which we gather disparate things so that they become one. That’s probably the best way to understand the way that I talk about symbolism. You could use different terms to talk about that. There have been different ways of trying to explain it. But it’s mostly the problem of noticing—or not the problem, but the reality of noticing that reality is actually so multi-faceted—there’s so much information it’s actually overwhelming. There’s too much. There’s too much stuff. There’s too much detail. There’s too much everything. And it ends up being a sea of potential, out of which the world actually comes out of.

There’s a pattern by which reality manifests itself. So every event in the world, every experience we have, is patterned. It’s not arbitrary. And that pattern is the same pattern that’s described in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The story of creation is still happening now. The way that creation is described is something which still goes on today. When I talk about symbolism, this is what I’m talking about. It’s actually how the world is patterned, and how it has to be patterned, because there’s too much stuff. In order for us to even experience the world, it has to come to us in a pattern. Those patterns look like inside, outside, center, periphery, above, below, and then there’s the notion of beginning, end. All through that, you have stories, you have images, you have categories, and all the categories will appear to us as pattern. That’s mostly what I talk about when I talk about symbolism.

Fr. Andrew: You know, you’ve mentioned a number of times in your work that pre-modern people mainly understood the world in these symbolic terms. Why should we try to recover that symbolic perspective? Isn’t that just sort of a return to ignorance and superstition, that kind of thing?

Mr. Pageau: Well, I think that right now is actually… We have a wonderful moment right now, let’s say this kind of historical moment. Let’s say 50 years ago or 60 years ago, the stuff that I’m talking about would probably have been completely gibberish, would have sounded like absolute gibberish to most people, because we didn’t understand this problem of emergence or the question of multiplicity. We didn’t… As we notice multiple narratives break apart from each other, as we now watch the news and you watch, let’s say, CNN, and you watch Fox News, and you realize that they’re both representing two completely different visions of the same facts, as we notice that, the pattern is more important, or the frame is more important than just the facts. The frame tells you where to look.

This is something which is appearing in all fields, whether it’s in science, in psychology, in organizational culture, systems thinking; all of these types of fields that are very popular right now are all dealing with this problem. It’s a great moment, because we as Christians, who have St. Maximus and St. Gregory and St. Ephraim—we have all of these amazing thinkers—we can speak into this and say, “Hey, hello? Don’t forget that this is what they were talking about the whole time!” It’s okay, even Aristotle, this is what he was talking about when he talks about the body of something as the potential out of which the actuality of the thing uses this potential to have a body in which to manifest itself.

This is all stuff that everybody’s interested in today. It’s just that we had a strange loop in history, from the late Middle Ages until very recently where people were just incapable of seeing it. It was like a blindness, like a strange blindness. So I think that we need to be confident and really be confident in understanding that what we have to offer the world today is what the world needs and what it’s looking for. It’s not just that it needs it and we have to convince it that it needs it.

There are people who are hungry for meaning, who are hungry to understand. They realize that science doesn’t offer them meaning, that science doesn’t offer them the pattern by which they need to live, and they don’t know where to look. We have everything in both the theory, in terms of thinkers like St. Maximus or even St. Dionysios the Areopagite, and we also have the practice, which is this integration of life in the liturgical calendar, this relationship of sacred space, to time. All of this is something that is really the key to the problems that are happening, even in the scientific fields right now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. One of the conclusions I’ve come to is there seems to be this kind of gentlemen’s agreement that nihilism is true, if that makes any sense. I remember, if I can put it this way, one of my college professors, he said— We were studying Renaissance literature, and he was talking about exactly what you were just now saying. And he said, “And here’s the thing. If none of this is true, then that means that life is just”—and he put it this way—“one damned thing after another.”

Mr. Pageau: Man!

Fr. Andrew: Right? I remember hearing that, and I was 19 at the time, and I heard that. And I thought, “I cannot abide for that to be true.”

Mr. Pageau: Yeah! And the great thing is that it can’t be true, and this is what’s happening right now. This is really, like I said, an exciting moment, that it technically can’t be true, because even the thing has to be framed in a pattern, because what thing are you talking about? There are millions of things simultaneously happening. There’s as much complexity in the one drop of water that is sliding down my window as there is in your life. What thing? What are you talking about? There are so many things happening that you can’t even say it. It just becomes a whole jumble of chaos. So even the name, even the thing that you recognize as being a thing and having enough value for you to even recognize it, makes it part of a meaning pattern. So it is inevitable. Everything you notice to have enough value for you to care enough about it to even notice it means that you can’t avoid these hierarchies of meaning.

So I think that college professor that you had, he’s on the outs. He’s waning in the culture, because all the current edge thinking is rediscovering these patterns. They’re not… A lot of people aren’t yet willing to talk about angels and demons yet, but we’re almost there, right? We’re seriously almost there. We’re getting there, and that’s one of the things that I’ve been trying to nudge people along, slowly, towards understanding that these hierarchies of angels? These things are real, and they’re not arbitrary. This is actually how the world has to function. You can’t avoid it, and it’s not just describing Christianity. You have these hierarchies of beings described in every single tradition of every single culture in the world. It’s like this is just how reality works, folks! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s fascinating to me that here we are in what’s often called the information age and which should theoretically be the sort of final death-knell to hierarchies of meaning. And yet, here we are in the information age, blasted—blasted!—with data. Right? There’s more data in a human life now than any other point in history. And it’s at this point, because we’re so immersed in this that we are now seeing: Wait a minute. Hierarchies of meaning are inescapable.

Mr. Pageau: And we see it even with Google and Facebook and the problems that have been coming up in the past few years. It’s all about hierarchies of meaning. Everything. The problem with the search engine and the problems of social media, like your feed, your social media feed, is all about hierarchies of meaning. I think that someone like Zuckerberg didn’t realize that that’s what it was about when he started, but now he cannot avoid it, and they don’t know how to deal with it.

And our hierarchies of meaning have been taken over by certain ideological people, and we can see it; you can just see it. And it has a strangeness to it. It has a kind of off-color, because it’s not the true hierarchy. It’s a kind of false hierarchy; it’s a kind of upside-down hierarchy. But because of that, we can see it, and it’s causing chaos. We’re dealing with these hierarchies of meaning, but we don’t know… we don’t have the proper way and the proper stance to deal with the true hierarchy, then it’s actually causing a lot of damage. But there’s opportunities, like I said, because a lot of people notice it. So there are opportunities to speak into that and to point people towards the real mountain of God.

Fr. Andrew: I’m suddenly reminded of that phrase from Solzhenitsyn, where he simply says, “Live not by lies.”

Mr. Pageau: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: And I think that that at least is a beginning. He was talking about the Soviet hierarchy of meaning, which—why did it collapse ultimately? It’s because everyone saw that it was a lie. It’s because they saw it was a lie, not because there was some armed revolution. It just fell apart one day.

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, and it’s difficult, because right now a lot of people—and I would say maybe most people—accept things that they know not to be true because of convenience and because of social or political reasons or for reasons of not being ostracized, and it’s going to have… The fruits are going to play out. None of this is just going to go away. If this is how we live, then it’s going to play out in our lives as well.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, I’ve played around for a while with the idea of asking every single one of my guests on this show the question: So what is wrong with the world these days? [Laughter] Which of course is a… For those of you who are sort of interested in the English intellectual tradition, is a reference to G.K. Chesterton, where someone sent him a letter—I think it was some newspaper editor—and said, “Mr. Chesterton, what is wrong with the world?” And he wrote back, “Dear sirs, I am.”

Mr. Pageau: Me.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s me. But I mean, I love his glibness, but I think that this is kind of touching on this issue of… And even to be able to ask that question, “What is wrong with the world?” that implies that there is a right way the world should be, which means there has to be meaning. There just has to be. I mean, okay, so we reach towards that and we talk about that, and we try to make things that are authentically reflecting that idea of hierarchy of meaning. But is this a fool’s errand? Do you think it’s possible for modern human beings, living in this post-Enlightenment world, actually to re-enchant the world? It’s not like I can just sort of flip a switch and believe that fairies and Santa Claus are real.

Mr. Pageau: [Laughter] I think there’s work to be done, that’s for sure, and I think that it’s not going to happen fast. I think the best way to do things is to plant seeds and then watch them grow. To me, I feel like that’s what I’ve been trying to do, is to really try to help… It doesn’t… You don’t need that many people. Like a few thousand people, in the world even, that all of a sudden can see the patterns and that can see the inevitability of this, of how the world works. Then I think it’s going to work out. It’s going to work out because this is… These patterns, these descriptions of hierarchies of beings and of angels and of the mountain, of paradise, of temples—all of these descriptions that have been with us since the beginning of known history, that’s really how reality works.

Right now is actually an aberration. The modern world is an aberration on that pattern. You could call it the end of that pattern or moving out into the wild of that pattern, but the real pattern is going to come back. It has to, because that’s actually how reality works. So in a way there’s a despair, because we see that everything is falling apart and everything, that society is fragmenting and people are at each other’s throats, not literally yet, thank God, but it seems like that, at some point, will be the case again. So I think there’s a kind of sadness to see that happen, but there’s also hope to know that when it’s really dark and you light a candle, then you will see the candle. I think that that’s also part of it, that the meaning will shine brighter for a lot of people because of the darkness around. And many will ignore it, but some people will… Those that see it will see it.

It may be even more than in a world where these patterns are completely traditional and just a forgotten part of how reality works and it just kind of functions like a clock almost. Whereas now people who want to recover an enchanted world have to fight for it. They have to fight in their own lives. They have to fight in their communities to kind of get things going, to get a sense of community, to get a sense of meaning going. But since it is the real pattern, it’s going to shine.

Fr. Andrew: That wraps up the first part of my interview with Jonathan Pageau. Be sure to tune in next time to hear the conclusion.