Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: This is the second part of my interview with Jonathan Pageau. If you didn’t catch part one, make sure you go back and listen to that first.

So you’ve become known for a number of statements that kind of can seem outlandish to modern people, and I just sort of telegraphed one of them a second ago. Yet you nevertheless insist on this stuff being true, and the reality of Santa Claus is one of them. There’s even a t-shirt you can buy that says, “Obviously Santa Claus Exists.” So, I mean, are you just referring to St. Nicholas, the fourth-century Christian bishop in Asia Minor? Or, I mean, is this about something else? What does that mean, “obviously Santa Claus exists”? [Laughter]

Mr. Jonathan Pageau: Well, it’s mostly… The Santa Claus video I did, which actually became a song, which is hilarious, and people can look that up, too. It’s called “Obviously Santa Claus Exists.” It was mostly to help people understand how being works. It’s not about Santa, really. It’s mostly to help people to understand how being manifests itself and how multiplicity can participate in a unity. The idea was to help people to understand that the being of Santa Claus… The fact that there is something behind it, there has to be something behind it… You could you say that it probably is an extension of St. Nicholas, like of St. Nicholas’ action in the world today, although it’s harder to understand because there are some dark possibilities in Santa Claus. But nonetheless, it seems for sure it’s an extension of St. Nicholas.

But the idea is that these corporate beings, you would call, the way that beings stack up and the way that multiplicity comes into one being—the best way to watch the Santa video is to watch it more towards the end where I talk about a city, and I talk about how a city has being and how you can write to the city, and that the city will answer you, and that if you receive an answer from the city, you’re not receiving an answer from Joe at the counter, writing. That’s not the one writing the letter, even though they’re the one typing it out. When you receive the letter, you’re receiving a letter from the city, so the city has being. You could call it like the angel of the city—there are different ways you could say it—but you can interact with its officials the same way that in your own body you have parts, and those parts interact with your logos and your mind, and that your mind will order your parts. It’s the same way that a city works, and it’s also the same way that Santa works.

It’s interesting, because someone recently made a video trying to debunk me saying that obviously Santa Claus exists, and they were trying to say that Santa is just in the imagination. So his daughter, let’s say, believes in Santa Claus, that Santa only exists in her imagination. Then, even in the video that they were debunking, they showed a video of a Santa somewhere in the U.S. who was refusing to give this child a Nerf gun. Did you see this video? It became quite popular.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, I think I saw an article about it, but I didn’t actually watch the video.

Mr. Pageau: So as he’s telling me that Santa doesn’t exist and that it’s only in the imagination of his daughter, he gets offended at this Santa who doesn’t want to give a Nerf gun to this boy. And I’m like: The reason why you’re offended is because you know who Santa is, and this proxy-Santa is not manifesting Santa in the world. So you’re angry, just like if you have a priest who is being immoral, you’ll get angry because you’ll say he’s supposed to be manifesting Christ in the world. Well, all the Santas that are disguised in the malls, they’re supposed to be manifesting Santa to children, and if they go off-course, then we’re going to get angry and we’re going to chide them for it. So it means that Santa manifests himself in the world. You can see the effects of Santa and you can talk to him, you can write letters to him, he’ll answer you. You can do all these things that you would do to a corporate being like a city or something higher than an individual.

The purpose of the Santa video is mostly to help people understand that there are hierarchies of being, and there are beings above you, and those beings use people and use bodies in a different manner—in the same manner, but just higher up—so the way that your hand functions in you, you function in your city. You’re a part of the city, and if you go off-course, then there is a self-defense mechanism which will… they’ll send the police to you and they’ll put you in prison, just like if a part of your body isn’t doing right, you have healing mechanisms to kind of get rid of the parts that aren’t good. It’s mostly about that, to help people understand how being works and how it stacks up towards higher beings, and hopefully helping people to see that the angels of things, that’s what it’s referring to, that God set upon the world hierarchies of beings that manage aspects of reality, and that we can participate in that. New York has an angel, and that angel has characteristics, and when we’re in New York and we’re a citizen of New York, we participate in the characteristics of New York.

Fr. Andrew: You know, what you just said reminds me a great deal of conversations that I’ve had with Fr. Stephen De Young, who’s my co-host on Lord of Spirits. Our next episode—now, when this airs, that episode will already have aired, so, everybody, if you haven’t heard it, just go back and listen! But our next episode is actually about the body, because a lot of biblical theology… Now, I’m just beginning to understand this stuff myself. Fortunately I have someone like Fr. Stephen kind of explain it to me, and then I can help him explain it to other people. [Laughter] But a lot of biblical theology and the ancient world is kind of predicated on this idea that the body is not what we think of as the body. We tend to think of the body as an object, sort of this atomistic view. Here’s a thing and here’s a thing. Again: “one damned thing after another.” But in the ancient world, a body was actually understood as a kind of collection of powers.

Mr. Pageau: Exactly. That’s the right… That’s a beautiful way to describe a body.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So it’s interesting to me that what you just said, that we’re about to work on some of the same kind of stuff ourselves. He’s already done the work, and I’m doing the work now, trying to understand what he’s done. But he said at one point that he thinks that you and he are speaking the same language but different dialects.

Mr. Pageau: I agree! I totally agree. I’ve been extremely grateful for The Lord of Spirits podcast. It’s been just… For me, it’s really been kind of like the next… I kind of joke around and say if I can prepare people to understand what they’re talking about, then I’ve done my job, because you’re dealing with it more on a mythological level, let’s say. So you’re staying more in the mythological strata, which is something that I’ve been wanting to do. I’ve spent several years of my life trying to get some of the book of Enoch back into the discourse, but I always felt like it’s difficult to do so because people don’t understand what it’s talking about and they’re annoyed with it for certain reasons, especially the angels and women parts. But so much of it is relevant to what’s happening right now that I felt like I’ve been wanting to kind of bring it back. You’ve been getting me amazing tools to talk about it.

The description of talking about the relationship between angels and women, how it caused the nephilim, to talk about in terms of using ritual practice, that it was through ritual practice that this relationship happened, makes so much sense! And I can’t believe that I never thought about it. I had read even… I was reading The Hammer of Witches, which is a strange book. I don’t know if people will know what that is, but The Hammer of Witches was written in the Middle Ages about how witchcraft was kind of growing in the 13th, 14th century. They talk about this, too. They talk about how women have relationships with demons, but they say that it’s always happened through secondary causes, that it’s obviously you can’t have a demon and a woman have a relationship, but you need other causes, which is like these rituals that they perform. It’s like I had already seen it, but I had never connected it with that.

So anyways, you’re giving… I’ll just say that you’ve been giving me amazing resources to kind of continue to do the work that I’m doing.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God.

Another one of your sayings—and I think this one gets on t-shirts, too—is “Watch the Fools.” Watch the fools. This is linked up with the idea that we are now living in what you refer to as Clown World, or Upside-Down World. Can you explain that? And also, since I know it’s related: What is the deal with how often you talk about Kanye West? [Laughter] I mean, is that someone that we should really be taking seriously? No offense to Kanye, but explain this!

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, explain. Well, I mean, no, you shouldn’t take him seriously. You should be attentive. You should watch him. Maybe not take him seriously, because he is that fool character. One of the ideas that… We talked about these hierarchies about how the world lays itself out. If you look at the normal relationship of order to disorder and of identity to, let’s say, irony and chaos, so you can notice that on the edge of societies and on the edge of liturgical calendars, there are inversion things, inversion festivals.

There are carnivals. In the Hebrew tradition they have Purim, which is an inversion festival where people dress up, they spin, they get drunk. We have Mardi Gras, and we have Carnival, the Meatfare, which has often had the imagery in different cultures of dressing up and acting upside-down, electing a fool for a bishop, or a boy or a child for a bishop.

Fr. Andrew: Twelfth Night! Twelfth Night is the same thing, yeah.

Mr. Pageau: So there are all these different carnival, inversion carnivals. And those are really to manifest the end of something. So you can imagine that the world has a certain order and that the order is kind of universal, but as you get towards the end, you start seeing idiosyncrasy, and then you start seeing a kind of weird upside-down version of the order which happens at the end, to kind of, let’s say, to manifest the fullness of something. At the end is the upside-down. And you also kind of need that to evacuate some of the—how can I say this? One of the assets of the Carnival is that we all have some exceptional aspects to us, some idiosyncrasies. The Carnival, what that does is give us a place to manifest that, which is controlled, so it’s like: Okay, you can act the fool for a day, and then get it out of your system, and go back to normal, right? [Laughter]

So the idea is that our whole world is there now. All of reality is a Carnival right now. So you see that in what we celebrate, what we admire, what we venerate—it’s all the upside-down, it’s all the exceptional, it’s all the strange, it’s all the idiosyncrasies, let’s say.

Fr. Andrew: The transgressive.

Mr. Pageau: Exactly. All of that is what we elevate. So it shows us where we are in the pattern. We’re at the end. We’re at the end of the pattern. The funny thing about that is when… So there’s a character—the jester or the fool or the sacred, the holy fool: this kind of characters that are there to point out the limits of the system and are there to actually kind of turn it upside-down, to show us the limits of a system. So that’s what a jester does; the jester is always pointing to… The king is trying to show up; he’s trying to show that he’s all-encompassing, that he has everything under control. Then the jester is there to show the underneath of that, to show that, no, in fact, the king also has idiosyncrasies; so he makes fun of the king.

But when the king is upside-down, when everything is upside-down, what does the fool have to do? The whole world is upside-down, so the fool then ends up telling the truth. He ends up bringing things back to normal, and it has to do with his desire to turn things. It’s like he wants to be exceptional. It’s kind of like there’s a lot of memes going around right now, which is the idea that to be a rebel today you should get married and have three kids; that’s being a rebel.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah!

Mr. Pageau: So it has to do with that. The rebel himself, when the world is upside-down, in order to rebel, has to now become normality, has to kind of show the world what normality is. He can’t help himself. So that’s why I say, “Watch the fools.” Because the world is upside-down, we’re going to start to see foolish, extravagant characters start to now act normal. People are going to think they’re foolish when they act normal. So Kanye West was a… I’ve been watching Kanye West for ten years. I always kind of had this intuition that he was going to “flip”—we say, my brother and I, we talk about “flipping.” When he did, he finally became a Christian and then started talking about abortion and against premarital sex, and started saying that he struggled with pornography but that it was really one of the greatest evils we have in our society.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, right!

Mr. Pageau: I was like: This is more than whatever I could have expected!

Fr. Andrew: And then he ran for president! [Laughter]

Mr. Pageau: Exactly!

Fr. Andrew: When I saw him announce that, I was like: Oh, Pageau is going to go crazy about this one.

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, we really liked that, or really enjoyed it. So that’s what I mean. You need to watch these characters, because they… There’s even people who do it because they… It’s a serious problem. What happens when the structure of your society is upside-down? A good example is art. You make art that’s transgressive: so the whole 20th century you make all this art that’s supposedly transgressive—that is transgressing the rules, transgressing your expectations, transgressing, transgressing, transgressing—until you built giant, multi-million-dollar complexes to house and to put, to give a stage for this transgressive art—and it’s all state-funded—and it’s become the major discourse… So, wait. What happened? Like, how can you have state-funded transgressive art? It doesn’t make sense any more. So what ends up happening is this flip. Inevitably, I, as an icon-carver, become the most transgressive artist that can exist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Mr. Pageau: And shunned by everybody. Like, I would have no room in any artistic community because they see what I’m doing as nothing. So it’s like: here I am, making the most traditional, normal art that ever existed, but I’m a complete freak to the art world. So that’s an example, even myself, I am playing a part of that role, where I’m going back to normality, but I’m looking like a fool for doing so.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and of course probably one of the most familiar kinds of fools to a lot of people, at least in English-speaking culture, if they know Shakespeare—Shakespeare has multiple fools, and there’s various kinds. There’s silly ones, there’s angry ones, there’s bitter ones, but I always think about the fool in King Lear, where everything is falling to pieces and the king himself is very broken, and yet he hangs around with Lear even after Lear is wandering around as a vagabond, but he’s very bitter, very, very bitter. It’s interesting. I honestly would never have given Kanye West a second thought. I mean, he’s not in my life; I don’t know him, you know? It’s not like I’m being cruel to him or whatever, but I just would never have given him a second thought. But it’s interesting to me, like you said, he gets into Christianity. His wife has their children baptized in the Armenian Apostolic Church. I’m like: What?

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, what is happening?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Mr. Pageau: Or he goes on television. He goes on TV, he’ll make a political ad, and in his political ad, he says things like… He says, “My platform for becoming president is that we go back to prayer.” [Laughter] He’s saying the most normal, the most reasonable thing that anybody can say, but you know that everybody’s thinking he’s the madman for saying that if we just pray, if we come together and worship God and pray, then we will heal our nation. And it’s like, yes, he’s totally right, but you can’t say that. Even Christian politicians don’t dare say that. But here he is, with diamonds in his teeth, saying, “We need to get together and pray,” and he’s right!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s broken the gentlemen’s agreement of nihilism.

Mr. Pageau: Right, he totally broke it. Exactly. That’s a good way to say it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so related to everything we’ve just talked about is another one of your sayings, and, again, this one gets onto t-shirts, and I think there’s a coffee mug as well. [Laughter] Not to point to this to sell merch…

Mr. Pageau: [Laughter] To “sell merch,” yes!

Fr. Andrew: But I kind of love… I mean, to me it becomes sort of ironically internally transgressive to talk about buying t-shirts with this on it. [Laughter] But anyway, you’ve got another one: “Symbolism Happens.” Symbolism happens—what do you mean by that?

Mr. Pageau: Well, it’s mostly to counter the problem of meaning that has come about in the modern world, which is that people started thinking that if something has meaning then it’s fictional. Whereas reality works in this nihilistic, mechanistic way that you talked about, but then we add meaning on top of it, and then if we tell a story that has meaning, it’s usually because it’s fictional or that it’s allegorical. My contention from the beginning is that, no, that’s not at all how it works. Symbolism is the actual pattern of how reality shows itself to you, and so symbolism happens. There’s no way around it. It’s actually the pattern of reality, so that the pattern that you find in Scripture, the pattern of the story of Jonah or the story of the exile to Egypt—all of these patterns that encounter, that construct those stories—they also happen in your life and in the life of a country, the life of a city. They are the patterns of reality. They happen. It’s not a…

It’s mostly when I was young I had to deal with a lot of kind of materialist Christians who were almost against finding meaning in Scripture. They would get hostile, because they would feel like if you put too much meaning in Scripture, it meant that it didn’t happen, which is just completely insane. So that’s the kind of thing I’m trying to break, which is that— And you see people use that against Christianity all the time. They’ll say something like: “Oh, the story of Jesus looks like the story of this or that god from this or that mythology,” and I’m like: “And so… Your point being… ” I’m cheering for that, and you seem to find it’s some argument against me! I’m not sure how you do that. And it’s usually because they think that the world has no meaning, and if they find meaning then it means it didn’t happen. It’s like: it’s not… That’s actually the very opposite of that!

Fr. Andrew: Right, that meaning is the lie. Yeah, just wishful thinking.

Mr. Pageau: Exactly, and it’s now… We could say something like: That is technically false. It’s technically false, because meaning isn’t… Without meaning, you can’t even encounter reality. You need meaning. Patterns have to be part of how the world appears to you, or else there’s too much of it. You have to break it down into patterns. It has to happen.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, it occurs to me that if nihilists like Nietzsche, or I heard you talking about the Marquis de Sade with Tom Holland—if they were able to sort of see through what it means to abandon Christianity, especially in moral terms, I think that maybe we’re at a point where, taking it even further, that what those who deny the patterns of reality are failing to come to grips with is that you can’t even exist without patterns and meaning. You can’t even think without patterns. We can’t even have a conversation without patterns and meaning. Nietzsche was ready to embrace the will to power and the Übermensch and that kind of thing because he understood that abandoning Christianity meant the strong dominate the weak, because of course that’s… obviously that’s the way the world should be—it was to ancient pagans. And yet, now we’re at a point where there’s a schizophrenia, to use a term you used earlier, where people kind of want to have patterns of meaning in order to argue against patterns of meaning! [Laughter]

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, and not only that, but they also… Most of the problem happens when you know that the people… They have the pattern; they don’t realize it. It’s kind of like a blind spot for them. They pretend like they don’t, and then they think it’s obvious. And you get… A lot of the New Atheists are like that; they’re hilarious. They say silly things like, “Follow the science.” As if you could follow science! [Laughter] Like, “follow the science”? You need… That just doesn’t work! There’s no way to follow science. Science doesn’t give you reason…

Fr. Andrew: Become a disciple of science…

Mr. Pageau: It doesn’t give you reasons for doing things. If my purpose is to torture as many people as possible, then I can follow science to know how to do that. And if my purpose is to help as many people as possible, then I can follow science to know how to do that. But you can’t follow science. You need to have something above it which, first of all, manifests the pattern that you’re aiming towards, the good that you’re aiming for. Then, after that, you can maybe follow science, but science is just a tool.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like reason. So one example… And when I saw this happening, I thought, “Okay, I know that Jonathan is going to be into this,” and then, sure enough, you did a podcast and a video about it—about the racial protests that happened in the U.S. throughout 2020, especially in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the spring. You described all of them as “looking religious.” I imagine some people when they see that sort of headline they thought, “What does he mean by that? They’re just rioting and tearing up streets—violence—” How is this religious? What is the symbol, what is the pattern that you can see in that?

Mr. Pageau: The first thing that happened during the protests was there was a relationship; there was a direct relationship between the protests and the COVID lockdowns. There’s a direct relationship in terms of experience. We almost have to understand the COVID lockdowns as a form of Lent, a kind of enforced asceticism on people.

And then, when George Floyd died, then what happened is there was a kind of catharsis. First of all, people watched him die, which is something that we don’t realize that we rarely do. We watch it on TV; we watch fictional death, but we almost never watch someone die. So to watch someone die over several minutes was a form of catharsis. And that’s what it ended up being. Especially for the white people who were watching it, for them they were supposed to identify with Floyd in terms of the victim, but they were also asked to identify with the killer; they were also asked to identify as people who are potentially racist, to identify as the killer.

That brought about a kind of ecstasy, a crazy ecstasy, and people rushed into the street and started to act out religious rituals. They started to kneel, to chant in unison. They started to… some people were washing each other’s feet and flogging each other. There were some extreme manifestations of religion. My point mostly is to help people understand that these patterns, these religious patterns—they are what reality is made of. They are not arbitrary, and you cannot avoid them. If you try to suppress them for a long time, they’re going to come back. They’re going to come back, because they’re actually how it works.

They’re going to come back in ways that will be kind of off-key and will be off-kilter, because in terms of racial religion, we have a big problem, which is that racial religion doesn’t offer absolution. It’s in an infinite self-flagellating religion. So if you embark on that direction, there is no absolution in the end, especially if you use the kind of woke theories of racial theory. There’s no way out. Whereas Christianity has offered ways to… It’s interesting. If you look at the difference between the work that it’s doing, for example, by the Brotherhood of St. Moses and the type of crazy protests and rituals that were happening in the Floyd protests, you can see the difference. You can really see the difference in someone like Fr. Moses who tells the truth about the terrible things that were done by his ancestors, but you can see in his eyes that he has been transformed by Christ and that he comes to you with love and with a hand out and says, “We need to find ways to find ourselves in this difficulty.” But what was going on in these weird rituals was just a one-way thing, and that doesn’t lead towards real communion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So you mentioned earlier that your house was flooded last year, last spring. It was interesting: a lot of people undergo these kinds of experiences, just kind of say, “Why, God?”… And when someone says, “Why, God?” to something terrible happening, what I think that means is: “I don’t see that this means anything.” I think that’s what they’re saying, because they don’t… It doesn’t seem to have any purpose; it’s just suffering. But I notice that your response to it was to say: Symbolism happens. You mentioned that you just finally moved in. Can you give us kind of an update, but explain why is that response the appropriate one to personal loss and disaster?

Mr. Pageau: I think—I mean, I can’t speak for everybody—in my case, when the flood happened, it was clear that it was following a pattern that I saw in Scripture, that I could see in the tradition, which is that the pattern of the garments of skin, you could call them, which is the development of technology, and the trying to hold back the waters through technical means, you could say—that means building houses, building cities, all of this—that if you push that too far, what ends up happening is there’s a build-up of chaos that happens when you push it too far. A good example is… Well, a good example is going into outer space. It’s like we go into outer space, we’re able to do it, but you put yourself in a situation that is so dangerous that if anything wrong happens, then it’s a total catastrophe. So I think that that’s what happened here. People just build out, build these dykes out on the water and did it in a way that was also—there was some corruption involved as well, which doesn’t help. So then when the water came, the world wasn’t ready for it, and it just kind of ran into our city.

To me, it was just a… It just made sense that that would happen. It didn’t feel like this was like some unusual thing. It wasn’t pleasant; it was extremely unpleasant, but at the same time, the thing about that is that if you look in Scripture and you see these moments where people get thrown into the water or get thrown into the hands of the foreigner or something like that, there’s also something wonderful which can come out of it if you have the right heart. One of the things that you see in Scripture, when the Hebrews leave Egypt, is the surprising moment where all the Egyptians give them stuff. It’s like: Why are the Egyptians giving them stuff when they leave? Why are the Egyptians giving them stuff when they were slaves in Egypt? There’s something about that. When you find yourself in a difficult position, all of a sudden, you have strangers who help you. It’s crazy! And then all of a sudden you have access to a kind of love or a kind of gift from heaven that you would never have if you didn’t fall in that difficult situation.

After the flood, we were surrounded by love and by people who helped us and by people who reached out to us. It was just like… It was amazing. It was amazing. It ended up being really a gift from God, showing us how much he cares for us in difficult situations. I don’t regret a thing about it. I don’t feel bad about a single thing that happened. It was difficult. I would say I’ve got way more grey hairs now than when I had in 2019, but in the end it’s all been, I think, for the glory of God. I can only say it that way.

Fr. Andrew: You know, I think that one of the things that surprises traditional liturgical Christians—and we’ve talked about surprises that Christians feel about some of the things that we’ve been saying—who often see a lot that is familiar in your body is work—and I don’t mean just about your icons, but they see what you’re doing: “Ah, yes, this is Christian stuff”—what’s surprising is how that kind of resonates with an audience that is not exactly co-terminus with historic Christianity. As we mentioned earlier, you’ve got more than 90,000 subscribers on YouTube. Why do you think that is? Why are non-Christians and even anti-Christians—because I’ve seen anti-Christians showing up in the YouTube comments—why are they connecting with what you’re doing?

Mr. Pageau: I think it’s this moment. I think that there’s an opportunity right now, because I’m hoping, too; I’m hoping that some Christians are going to start to wake up and realize that what we have is not just an arbitrary description of something that you have to believe in with faith the way that it’s been presented in a kind of weird, Protestant way. It’s that this is really talking about how the world works. St. Maximus is not just making it up or… He’s actually talking about how reality exists. Because that’s what it is, as soon as the atheist or the kind of anti-theist realizes that you’re not just talking about morality, you’re not just talking about sentiment or feelings, like “it makes me feel good”; you’re actually talking about structural things through which reality manifests itself, then they’re curious, because they’re like: “I always thought that religion was just a silly thing.” So if you can show religious people that the pattern is systematic—not a system; I don’t like that word—that the pattern is coherent and that the pattern lays itself through Scripture, lays itself through tradition, finds itself in sacred architecture, finds itself in the icons and the liturgy—all of this is like a giant dance in which we engage and which holds our reality together—if they’re able to notice—especially if they’re able to notice that our whole entire world is becoming the suburbs and is becoming this flat distribution of points that have no coherence at all—then they’re like: Okay, how do we get this? Why is it that we’re losing cohesion? We can see it.

I think we need to realize that we’re talking about reality and talk about it that way. There are also ways of getting out of… I always try to find words that… Sometimes people won’t always recognize the words that I’m using because they’ll say, “This is not what we say in church,” but I’m always trying to find words that will connect to the people that are listening to me. So for example, the word “consciousness” is not a word that the Fathers used, obviously, but I’ve found it a useful word to talk about something like intelligence or nous or logos or… different ways of talking about our experience of the world and how meaning works through the humanity, how we are connected to Christ and how it forms this reality that comes about in front of us. I can use that word, okay I can use that word.

Then slowly I point people and say: This is what the Fathers are talking about. They just use different words, and sometimes some Christians have forgotten them, and sometimes some Christians just don’t understand it, but just because some Christians don’t understand it doesn’t mean that’s not what’s there. Because the little old lady who goes to church and sings songs, obviously she’s not studying theology—and she doesn’t have to; it’s totally fine—but it’s still there, and you can access it.

Fr. Andrew: I think a lot of times people have the sense that Christianity is essentially a kind of fideism: “Believe this because I said so. Because this is what we’ve always said.”

Mr. Pageau: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Which kind of suggests that it’s not actually about reality, and yet the Fathers often innovate in their language, because I think they were trying to do the same thing that we’re trying to do: Okay, I have these people in front of me, and I’m going to communicate this to them in whatever way I can communicate it to them. Like you said, that word, “consciousness,” is a good example of that.

So you’ve kind of hinted at this, or said it outright several times over the course of this conversation, that we seem to be at a point in history that is now making it possible for non-Christians to connect with Christian imagery and story in a way that maybe just a few decades ago they weren’t. What has changed? What has sort of opened up that gate for them?

Mr. Pageau: Well, I think there is a breakdown of materialism. There is a breakdown of materialism which is bringing about a lot of dangerous negative things including new interests in spiritism and New Age spirituality, all of that stuff. It’s coming out through the breakdown of materialism, but there’s also in that breakdown the possibility to speak into it in a way that wasn’t there before. I think that that’s what’s happening mostly.

So we’re going to see more and more strange spiritual things happen in the next few years. That’s for sure. We’re going to see things that we didn’t think were possible just ten years ago. That is going to be inevitable. So people need to not get surprised. But I think it is an opportunity for us to speak into it. The story of Christ is the story that’s happening right now, and you just can’t get out of it. It’s almost… You just can’t get out of it, especially in the West. That’s the story. It’s the story of the breakdown of Christianity, and that story—Christ prophesied it. We know that it’s going to happen. We know that Christianity is going to, let’s say, die, or at least appear to die or wane, and we know it. So we also need to not be afraid to a certain extent, because Christ told us this was going to happen, so we shouldn’t be surprised. Well, we can be a little surprised, but not be overwhelmed when we see it happen, and know that there’s a resurrection on the other end, and that resurrection has also been called on. That resurrection has been prophesied as well.

The story we’re seeing happen… The story of the West and the story of, let’s say, this moment in Christianity, is the story of… it is the story of Christ. Christ chose the disciple that was going to betray him, and atheism could only come out of Christianity, and the betrayal of Christianity could only come from the inside and manifest itself in the way that it did. So we just need to see that this is the story of Christ. It’s playing out in a cosmic, higher… in a more cosmic way in his body. And trust God that he’s going to guide us through this difficult moment.

Fr. Andrew: I know that some, especially in your non-Christian audience, refer to you as being part of the intellectual dark web. [Laughter] Which is a very ominous-sounding phrase!

Mr. Pageau: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: What do you think of that? I mean, when I think of that category, that includes some very unsavory things. Do you think that that includes you?

Mr. Pageau: No, I don’t. I really resisted that term from the beginning and I’ve actually publicly said that I don’t think I’ve ever used that term to refer to myself or to my participation in anything. Yeah, I’m not a… Whatever. It was a moment. There was a group of thinkers that had their purpose, I guess, but it’s already gone. I don’t think that even exists any more. So I don’t… I’m not a big… No, I’m not a big… I mean, I’m happy to interact with those people if there’s a reason to or a chance to—I’m very happy to talk to anybody—but I don’t feel part of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I know that sometimes that’s connected to your friendship with Jordan Peterson, whom you mentioned earlier, who—if there’s anybody out there who doesn’t know who he is—is a Jungian psychologist and a professor up in Canada. Would you say something about that? I mean, Peterson is clear that he’s not a Christian. So in addition to your friendship, why do you think he’s someone worth listening to and engaging with? Because I’ve heard you say that: people should listen to what he’s saying. Why?

Mr. Pageau: It’s an interesting, strange thing, because at first I met Jordan before he was famous, so I encountered him—I heard him on the radio and reached out to him. There were some points of contact between the things he was saying and I was saying. I saw what he was saying as an opportunity to be like a bridge between the secular world and a re-discovery of what we’re talking about, a re-discovery of these patterns, of the inevitability of the sacred or the inevitability of religion, the inevitability of ritual religion: all these things. And so I saw that in him, because he was saying it in a way that I thought was extremely easy to understand and also it was attractive to people who were atheists, who were secular. So I kind of started to talk with him and to appear in public with him.

And then he became extremely famous, like world-wide famous, and so then it became more complicated, because I thought at first that he was going to be like a bridge for secular people towards Christianity, but then he became so famous that I started wondering if he would also be a bridge the other way, so from Christians going toward the secular world, which is possible for that to happen. I don’t know. So God protect me if I participated in that, but I think that in the end I feel that he has nonetheless been a door for people to peek into spaces that they haven’t dared or didn’t think were even worth looking into.

And so he’s opened up this space in people’s minds for the value of religion, the value even of God, even though it’s not clear to what extent he has faith. So I kind of see him as a King Cyrus figure—who’s not Jewish, who doesn’t necessarily worship the God of Israel, but says to the Jews: Hey, you know that Temple of yours, maybe that wasn’t so bad; maybe you should go back and investigate that; maybe you should go back and rebuild that temple—even though it’s not his own thing. So that’s probably the best way that I kind of describe him.

Fr. Andrew: One of the things that I’ve seen is that sometimes people will associate him with a kind of cult of masculinity and sometimes alt-right nationalist politics and that kind of thing. I’m not studied in Jordan Peterson. I have read a few articles; I’ve watched a few videos. I don’t know. I think… So here’s my take on that. [Laughter] Here’s my from-the-hip take: that within this crisis of meaning that we’ve been talking about, that’s been kind of the perennial topic of our whole conversation today, there are people that are reaching out to try to find archetypes like they feel they don’t have access to. So, for instance, manhood is a really strong one that kind of connects with all of this. I think sometimes when there’s this cult of masculinity—because there is this thing, right? There is this talk about this toxic masculinity, and there’s this kind of response to that, saying, “No, no, masculinity’s not toxic!” For me, it’s like: I think there’s a continuum here, actually.

But what’s the point of that? I think it’s because people feel lost and kind of un-fathered. What does it mean to be without a father? It’s to be without hierarchy of meaning that tells you this is who you are and this is where you belong. That’s my sense of why people are connecting with what he’s doing and also one of the reasons that people are connecting with what you’re doing. It is because there is this now… an awareness of the fact that we’ve attempted to abandon meaning and hierarchy. Sometimes people identify what we’re missing with an almost Nietzschian approach to things: the strong-man is back. But I think that that’s too… rather than identifying the edge and saying, “Okay, that’s the edge,” they identify the edge and they just jump over it. [Laughter] That’s my sense of it. I don’t know. What do you think of that?

Mr. Pageau: I think that if anybody who looks carefully at what Jordan has been saying… he’s been actually moderating something. Because one of the problems with, let’s say, you say toxic masculinity, and you kind of denigrate men, and you do it systematically in culture, constantly, and in every popular TV show, every popular movie you have this image of the woman beating up the man or the man being a total loser, the kind of Homer Simpson loser dad who’s become so just the normal father… If you represent a father in fiction, he has to be like a loser. So you have this, this problem. So then… At some point people start to notice it, and they will start to want to recapture masculinity, but then they can go too far. Actually I think that a lot of the extreme right rhetoric that has been appearing kind of in the dark corners of the internet has been part of that in terms of extreme identity, extreme desire to remove the strange or to cut off the margin.

And so Jordan has actually been moderating that; he’s actually been giving people who feel that and desire, maybe desire for that extreme form of that masculinity, he’s been giving them a way to have a more reasonable approach, by on the one hand saying this talk of toxic masculinity is absurd, it’s silly; but then also presenting a form of masculinity which is self-mastery, which is a kind of capacity to not give in to your passions and not to give into your chaos. It’s not been a caricatural, strong-man version of masculinity at all. That’s a caricature that people present in the media, or people who are hostile to what he’s doing. He talks about the man who masters himself; basically, it’s what he talks about.

Fr. Andrew: Which is a classical… I mean, that’s classic virtue.

Mr. Pageau: Exactly! It’s not at all things he’s making up.

Fr. Andrew: Aristotle…

Mr. Pageau: Yeah, exactly. It’s just… He’s just presenting normality to people, and people are freaking out because the world is so upside-down. What he’s saying is not strange at all. It’s something that a pastor 20 years ago would have been very comfortable telling his own parish. Even now, I’ve heard sometimes people be surprised and saying, “Hey, I’ve been trying to say what he’s saying to my kids for a very long time; they’re not listening.” He just has a way of saying it which is getting people to listen, but he’s basically saying: Get a haircut; clean up your act; get it together, boy! Master yourself, and then the world will open itself to you and you’ll have more possibility. That’s pretty much what he’s saying which is just like normal advice to give to someone.

Fr. Andrew: I know I’ve asked in several ways variants on the question, “What’s wrong with the world.” I wanted to finish it with this, though, by kind of turning it around. One of our common projects, I think, is attempting to help people re-enchant the world, to begin to see spiritual reality again and to interact with it well. On my side, that’s the point of both my Tolkien podcast actually, Amon Sûl, and also the one that I co-host with Fr. Stephen De Young, The Lord of Spirits. Would you describe what you do in this way being about re-enchantment, and why does the world need it now especially, and are we ready for it? All this talk of symbol and angels and, you know…

Mr. Pageau: I think that that’s exactly what I’m doing. I think if you would describe what I’m doing in a few words, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. It is not only to re-enchant the world but to help people have the experience, I would say. If you watch, a lot of the strategies I use are to create moments of connection in people. So I try, even when I’m speaking, I actually try to surprise people with meaning, where I’ll talk about a pattern in Scripture, and then all of a sudden I’ll bring it down to the most immediate thing you never thought I could connect it to. And I’m trying to actually get a little spark moment. I know that that’s what the enchanted world is made of; it’s made of these sparks. If I can create in someone a spark, all of a sudden they connect things together, and you can see it in people’s eyes, especially in a live talk. You watch people’s eyes and you can see a light go on, and that’s an amazing feeling. That’s when I’m trying to create these sparks to help people notice the meaning points in their existence, but also realize how they’re inevitable. So I think that’s exactly what the world needs right now.

I think that—this is probably the first time that I say this, but I’ve hinted at it before—I think we need to be ready, because it’s going to get rocky. It’s not going to be only good stuff. The world is going to get re-enchanted, no matter what, because this is where we are. There’s going to be a lot of dark stuff coming up, and there’s going to be hopefully enough light to cover it, but the world is going to be re-enchanted, whether we participate in it or not, because that’s where we are. That’s the moment where materialism starts to break down and the spirits start to seep back in. That’s why there’s so much witchcraft and there’s so much people going into the darker stuff, because they’re looking for it, and everybody is kind of looking for it.

I thank God for Lord of Spirits podcast. I thank God for what you’re doing, because I think that we have everything there to help people deal with this and to help people re-engage, as this is happening, to re-engage in a positive way, in a way that leads towards God and doesn’t just stop at all these intermediary beings that are starting to poke their nose back into the world right now. So, thanks for what you’re doing, and, yes, I think it doesn’t matter whether we’re ready for it. It’s happening, so we need to play the role that God gives us in making it all ultimately point to him.

Fr. Andrew: Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the Orthodox Engagement podcast. It’s been an honor, and talking with you is always a fascinating time.

Mr. Pageau: Thank you, Father, and like I said, again, thank you for everything you’re doing.

Fr. Andrew: I have been speaking with Jonathan Pageau, an icon-carver, YouTuber, and podcaster on The Symbolic World. You can find his work on pageaucarvings.com and thesymbolicworld.com as well as on his Jonathan Pageau YouTube channel and Symbolic World podcast. Thank you for listening, and we will connect with you next time.