Latest / Thinking Class / #035 - Hilary White - The Philosophical Revolution Behind The West's Decline (And It Began Much Earlier Than You Think)

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#035 - Hilary White - The Philosophical Revolution Behind The West's Decline (And It Began Much Earlier Than You Think) · Thinking Class

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello classmates and welcome to Thinking Class.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Hilary White.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Hillary is the creator of the Sacred Images Project, which you can find on Substack and which explores the Christian life, thought, history, and culture through the lens of the first 1,200 years of sacred art.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Hillary and I talk about what classifies a sacred art and why it's so important, how the Renaissance led to its decline when man became the measure of all things, and lots of Florentine bankers' money was thrown around in the 15th century onwards to support it, how Cosmo de' Medici would have embarrassed the Pharaoh and Elon Musk with the size of his wealth, the long-term impact of the Renaissance values to the current day, what Christians are supposed to do with sacred art and its links to theology, how Catholics and Anglicans lost their own sacred art over the centuries and are now inviting Orthodox art into their churches, Hillary's loss of faith in the institution of the Catholic Church and public institutions more broadly, and the ideological reasons behind our shift from 1,900 years of crucifixes and biblical scenes to, well, modern art like unmade beds, toilets and buckets of sand, and much, much more.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Hillary has spent her adult life immersed in art history and sacred art, and she has honed the ability to tell stories about the waxing and waning of popular ideas, values, and ideologies, and the loss of faith on people and societies through the ages and how they contribute to examples of social and moral decay we see today.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: This was a really enjoyable conversation, and Hillary is inspiring in being driven by a sense of loss in the hope that we might regain something that benefits future generations.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching Thinking Class on.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we contract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for having me.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: This is very nice.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, we have exchanged numerous messages on Substack to make this happen.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: And Substack is where I came across you and your Substack.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna see how many times I can use that word in one sentence.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Substack.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: Your Substack, the Sacred Images Project, which by your own admission, you've been very surprised to see how it's become so popular, and it is growing very popular.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: And you can you can certainly explain a bit more about what it's like, but your your project ultimately you're trying to save something from what you see as the wreckage of Western civilization, I suppose, is that you think that by uh sacred art used to hold a very prominent view in public life, and at some point it was lost, and now it's become independent from the Christian faith in particular.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: And you you've taken this stupid approach, this kind of stewardship approach to um trying to hold on to something precious for the future generations, because you think that we're we'd be impoverished if we lost it.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, let's let's dig into that a little bit because I think most people listening, they're gonna see pictures on walls of churches if they if they bother to go in.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: Whereas you you see a much wider, a wider purpose for this sacred art.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: So what does sacred art represent?
3:23
SPEAKER_01: Oh, uh, what does it represent?
3:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, it depends on who you ask.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: The thing is, the whole thesis, uh, if you could say I have a thesis of having a substack about this subject, and I call it the Sacred Images Project for a particular reason.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's to not so much to try to bring it back, uh particular forms.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: You know, you you would have a trouble deciding for the whole Western church or the whole Western world what particular form of sacred art you should decide on.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, that that's the official kind.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: Um but no, what I'm hoping to do is essentially just reintroduce Western Christianity, that is Latin Christianity, not Byzantine, um, to some principles that what sacred art is for is not what we have come to have it to think it's for in about the last 500 years.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: We've we've lost, we've forgotten something.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: And I I have an idea, uh sort of a thesis exactly why we've forgotten it.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: And um, so I'm starting to work on a way of developing the idea.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: How shall we approach this question and what do we want from it?
4:39
SPEAKER_01: Um the condition of contemporary sacred art right now uh is in the West is dismal.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: It's confused and has been influenced by a great many influences that are not Christian in any way, not connected to the spiritual tradition.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the things that you learn when you're learning about sacred art is that it is intimately connected with mystical theology.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: Now that sounds very woo.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh and it sounds a bit ridiculous, mystical theology.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're not, it's not the theology of having visions.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: Um and uh we've kind of lost touch uh since really since the Council of Trent uh in the Catholic Church with mystical theology, what it is, and why everybody needs to sort of start doing it.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: Um it's how to live the Christian life, how to live, how to live as a uh as a praying person, aiming your life towards union with God in this life.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: So it's not just sort of, oh, I'll try to be a good person until I die and then I'll go to heaven, right?
5:48
SPEAKER_01: This is the uh uh this is the kindergarten version.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: What do we as grown-up Christians do with our daily lives to create an intimate union with God?
6:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh transcended first cause, you know, ground of being the ultimate source of all goodness and all existence.
6:14
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's a large, large question.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: And it's the thing that monastics do, if they're real monastics, they orient their entire daily lives towards this pursuit of, well, we call it the pursuit of holiness, the pursuit of sanctification.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: So my question was, well, what does sacred art um have to do with that?
6:36
SPEAKER_01: How does the form of sacred art that you have uh support and assist that great um endeavor?
6:45
SPEAKER_01: So learning what all those things mean.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: What is sacred art?
6:48
SPEAKER_01: What is mystical theology?
6:50
SPEAKER_01: What's the purpose of life?
6:51
SPEAKER_01: What is uh what does it really mean to pursue holiness?
6:55
SPEAKER_01: It's not really just, oh, I'm going to try to be good.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: It's uh it really is a kind of um, well, the monastics know what it is.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: It's uh uh to learn to be in a constant state of continuous uh awareness of the presence of God.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: And of course, now that gives you a hint of what sacred art would be for.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: Like you have stuff like this and this and this in your house all the time, it comes into your mind that the sacred world, the mystical theology, the pursuit of God, is present in your life in a daily way.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: So, how do we best do that?
7:37
SPEAKER_01: That's that was sort of my question when I started.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: You touched on how the Western Church started to lose the sacred the sacred arts from its daily practices around 500 years ago.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned the Council of Trent, which was uh a series of responses by the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: D do you believe, and I suppose for people who might not be that familiar with all of that history, do you believe that the beginning of the Protestant Reformations, I suppose, because they took place in different ways in different places, which was grounded in solar scriptura, scripture alone?
8:17
SPEAKER_00: Sort of we only need we do you think that started to cleave?
8:22
SPEAKER_01: Actually, I think the Protestant Revolution was a was uh another effect of the same problem that caused us to lose sacred art in the first place.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Now we really have lost sacred art, but it didn't start with Protestants.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: The Protestants uh in fact uh the um the Protestants did something that hadn't been done since the 7th and 8th century.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: They launched another iconoclasm because of their ideas.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: I won't get into it, about images, um the use and abuse of images.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh Protestants destroyed sacred art across Europe, uh, anywhere they can get their hands on.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh Britain is particularly impoverished because of this.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: Um but that wasn't a cause, that was uh that was um a result.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: I think where we started losing sacred art, and this is a thesis that I've been working on uh in multiple blog articles for quite some time, is really at there was a there was an abrupt alteration uh in Florence around 1470 to 1500.
9:33
SPEAKER_01: Now that obviously we now call that the Renaissance, but really what it was was a philosophical revolution, um mostly fomented by a particular group of people, these unimaginably wealthy uh elites who really were interested in creating a new kind of world, imposing an entirely new metaphysics on our society.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: I call it our society because it's all in continuity, obviously.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And uh they wanted a more favorable metaphysics to their endeavors, which was to become richer than anybody has ever been before, which they were.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: And uh to do that, to create the kind of wealth that they were after, they really did have to change the world.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: And one of the ways they did that, quite consciously, very deliberately, um uh was to change our ideas about art and about uh to to be conformed with a new type of philosophy.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: Now they call it the Renaissance because it was supposedly a revival of classical philosophy.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: Now, the classical philosophy that they chose was um materialist metaphysics.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: It came from uh Epicurus and uh the idea that there is no existence outside of material existence, no spiritual world.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: So there's no point in spiritual pursuits.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: There can there can only be a reason to have material pursuits, which you just begin to see how Cosmo de' Medici would think this is a good idea.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: You know, he it essentially is a philosophy that gave him permission to do whatever he wanted to become as rich as he possibly could.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: And uh the res, you know, the results will speak for for the morality of it.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: So the richer you are, the more it proves that your philosophy is correct.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: And he became the richest person possibly who ever lived.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Um Yeah, you said that in our conversation before this podcast that uh when you put him toe to toe with uh you know this this 15th century Florentine merchant.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was richer than Pharaoh, he's richer than Elon Musk would be if you put him on the phone.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we'd make Elon Musk look like a pauper.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh the Medici family owned Europe.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: They invented banking, they invented money, they invented money so that they could become more rich.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just we have no we have no categories for how wealthy they were.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: So it worked.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: And when you have that kind of wealth, you have a great deal of cultural power.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: So you can hire people.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, and just exactly what he did.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: Cosimo de' Medici, particularly, and the whole family, obviously, but Cosimo was the head of the family at this transitional point.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that they did was um I I had to uh I get a little frustrated, and then I sort of laughed at myself becoming frustrated with this nice lady who you had on before the art historian, and she said something which just made my head explode.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, she said, Oh, well, not everybody in the Renaissance was so interested in uh the spiritual uh the spiritual gossip art.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, look at what Vasari said.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, look at what Vasari said, really?
13:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, let me tell you about Vasari.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: Vasari was hired by the de' Medici family and given access to their extensive libraries specifically to create a work, a very large work in multiple volumes that would promote this new materialist metaphysics and the new art at that time, the early 16th century, had already been going on for quite a while.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: But Vasari really was the guy who invented the Renaissance with this whole mythological thing.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: And he he kind of created this sort of Whig idea of art history where all roads lead to the Renaissance and all roads from the Renaissance lead from it, that everything before it either went to the Renaissance or was irrelevant.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: So he praised Duccio, um, the Cienese painter, because although he had the Greek, i.e.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: the Byzantine style, he started introducing more naturalistic elements, and that's what made him worthwhile.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: It would never occur to say, well, the Cienese Byzantine, the Cienese Italo-Byzantine, or the Cienese Trecento are a pinnacle of artistic works all by themselves.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: It was only valuable because it led to the Renaissance.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: And that's a very Whig idea that there is a sort of cosmic meaning all heading towards a great flowering of humanist wonderfulness.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: We're going to live in a sort of utopian paradise if we all just get on board with the whole um program.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: And I just I just look at this and I just think from the point of view, it was really studying Byzantine art that made me realize that we are all walked into this sort of artistic interpretation of history.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: And it's just made up.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: It was just invented for the use of people who wanted to become very, very wealthy, which is not really a very elevated, um not very elevated motivation, if you ask me.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, you touched on lots of interesting things there.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: I want to linger on the Renaissance for a while, but uh we could talk about some of the downstream impacts of the of the Renaissance, and uh I've read multiple commentators um critics write about how it is responsible ultimately for um the kind of therapeutic mindset we have today.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: It's probably the wrong word, but I just before I came on this podcast, yeah, I'd been I'd been um yeah, I'd been I'd been reading um Alexander Solzhenitsyn's um various lectures he delivered in the 70s after he'd released the Gulag Gulag Archipelago.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: And there was one right because Solzhenitsyn No, you want to go outside and have a walk after that.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Um he I I haven't had time to put these in a place where my eyes would stay in line with the camera, so I'm gonna read directly from the the book here.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: Um but he was he was talking about the impact of and and one of the taglines of the Renaissance was man being the measure of all things.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: And and so he um he he was trying to explain why he believed the West was weak.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Ah, okay.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, there you go.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: Not measure of all things, just to let you know.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm sure you'll have much to say off the back of this, but he he he believes that that that very that very notion has made the West weak in its ability to stand up for things that really count in this life.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: So here's here's the passage.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: He he talked of the the decadence of the weakness.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: He said, Of course, there is a perfectly simple explanation for this process.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: It is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but a huge purely human one.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Once it was proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things, and that man's needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the supreme imperatives of the universe.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: Consequently, the only good in the world, the only thing that needed to be done, was that which satisfied our feelings.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: And I find it remarkable actually that what was a uh a self-umindulgent, self-congratulatory set of ideals which were being propagated through the world by a vast amount of of wealth and and influence ultimately got to the rest of us proles uh through the through the ages.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: And he lays at the feet of the Renaissance, and perhaps you'd agree with this, this de-spiritualizing of the human spirit and us starting to lose the um the view of what really matters.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: In fact, um just yesterday I finished writing uh the piece that I'd been working on, uh, which is the third part.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: I think it's the third, maybe it's the fourth, the third part in a series um basically describing the differences between the art form that was in continuity with the tradition.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: It was the Gothic, so the international Gothic, Northern Gothic, that, uh, which just ended abruptly in around 1470.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: And the reason it ended abruptly uh was that the very, very wealthy patrons of artists in Florence started promoting this new metaphysics.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: So um it wasn't new, it was uh in fact very old, and it was the same exactly what Soljenissen said there.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: It was the same basic idea that man, the measure of all things, could decide for himself what was right and what was wrong, what was valuable, what life was supposed to be for, what to pursue.
19:05
SPEAKER_01: And uh essentially that that ends up, if you take the logic down the line, that ends up with a kind of Nietzschean um nihilistic idea that might makes right.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: So whatever you whoever wins, whoever wins politically or or in terms of wealth has done so because he's fulfilled the the uh imperatives of this universal uh you know, sort of the universe's cosmic idea about what life is for is really essentially just material.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: So if you become the emperor of the Roman Empire or you become Cosmodomedici, the richest man who ever lived, um then you have proven your thesis correct because the material is the only thing that counts.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: So whatever you do to get there, however many people you betray or murder, or you know, however many economies you destroy, essentially you're you're talking about exactly the same um the same metaphysics that generates uh generates permission to do anything to win materially.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: And you've got exactly the same working principle now, uh well, the modern world.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: That's that's what it is.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: That's what it's based on.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think you just need to look at our cityscapes and well, let's use Gothic as an example, which we talked about how in that era it was dismissed by propagandists and biographers of the rich and famous as being you some somewhat sub-optimal, sub-par, and not really the pinnacle of things.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: But if you look at our cityscapes, where does everyone really flock to go and see and fawn over it's the Gothic cathedrals and the Gothic buildings?
20:53
SPEAKER_01: How much money do you think Venice makes every year getting people to come up in buildings?
20:58
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: And then look at look at the London skyline now.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: It is the worship of Mammon, that idea of whatever it is that raises you up to the pinnacle that all that matters is all that's here.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: And as you talked about, you can you you're work you're worshipping material goods, and you look at the state of the London skyline now, and I think Roger Scruton and I must name drop him so many times on this podcast.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which was you ultimately we've got these kitchen gadgets discarded over the skyline now.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: We've got the there's the walkie-talkie, the skyscraper, the girl uh sorry, the cheese grater, the gherkin, and uh and and they are they they look like we've lost our way.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: The irony of it is that of course we started out by calling it humanism.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: And now it's just become radically anti human.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: We have these gigantic buildings that you know are in no way sustainable.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: by uh by ordinary human means.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: You have to have massive machinery to keep a, basically to keep a building like the Gherkin alive.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, you have to have all manner of, oh here's the cat.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: You have to have all manner of sorry Henry, I know, um, of uh very anti-human machinery.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: Now if you had a uh you compare it to sort of the other extreme end.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: If you're talking about a whitewashed stone cottage in the countryside of the Cotswolds or or Ireland, um you have a a building a dwelling that's oriented towards sustaining human life and being sustained by human work.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: So one man and his son can look after a building like that and keep it in good nick forever.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: Basically forever.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: The Gherkin is an example that well is one of those things that as Scruton said if you don't if you don't continually use the efforts of lots of people and literally engineers to keep these buildings going.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: If you leave them alone for unmaintained for 20 years, they just collapse, they fall down and become useless.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: And they're so ugly that nobody wants to restore them.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: You know it's like that he had the example of that terrible seminary that they built in the 60s in Scotland that is literally a ruin.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: It was built there's the law that is this great wonderful architectural marvel and now it's just it's an ugly Bauhausian concrete pile of rocks with covered in graffiti you know where drug addicts shelter out of the rain.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: It's just that's the that's the future of all of these sort of the ultimate conclusion of this materialist idea.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: And the irony is that it started out being called humanism.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: In fact of course like most propaganda they chose that term um to sell it but of course it's exactly the opposite because it refuses to take into account a thing which is most human of all things the connection of the human to the divine what makes us the image and likeness of God well it's not our physical appearance it's our orientation towards transcendent realities transcendent truths.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: And if you try to to erase transcendent truths from a culture the culture collapses which was exactly what we're seeing right now we've had 500 years of trying to make uh materialism materialist metaphysics work and now we've got a society that is that is almost completely anti-human we're literally we're trying to we're trying to uh promote what what could you call it a sort of anti-biological point of view where you can say well biology doesn't matter really biology doesn't matter well that's humanism that's what happened and thanks Cosmo de Medici good job that took a while but we're there and you know what's happening we're we're extincting ourselves literally the same metaphysical motivation that created naturalistic sacred art and stuck it above our altars to start the whole ball rolling has got us now that same materialist metaphysics which values only the material and only wealth and only this world has got us to the point where entire societies are literally going extinct.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: Italy's birth rate now the total fertility rate is now down to about 1.2 uh in South Korea another western country don't don't kid yourself South Korea is a western country is now down below one yeah 0.7 I think 0.7 I mean that's the result people people are baffled by the the demographic collapse I'm not baffled by it at all we've had 500 years of material success you get material success on that level at that this this incredible you know Jetsons lifestyle that we all have um you have to erase uh any kind of transcendent uh orientation from the culture entirely and it took a long time a very long time because it's a deep deep deep human uh instinct to orient your life towards the transcendent they had to do a really hard number on us for a very very long time all the efforts of these philosophical propagandists in all of our cultural output for a very long time to get us to this point where we're literally willing to extinct ourselves yeah well I mean that's uh that that's a conversation that could go on and on and on uh and but we will take ourselves away from from art and uh staying on renaissance of the moment there's people want to know well why is sacred art important that's why take sacred art away for those reasons and 500 years down the line your species will go extinct.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: Renaissance was there was there anything good about it so let me provide a bit more context to that question.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: So I've got uh a print of course not the original of Caravaggio's The Calling of St.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Matthew which I have close by to my desk and the reason why I have that and to explain what it is to people who don't know it's where once Levi later Matthew when he would became a disciple was sitting with his fellow tax collectors counting money and Christ and Saint Peter walk in and that's when he realizes he's called to go and follow Christ and to redeem himself and so I as someone who has worked around financial services for many years it's something that spoke to me and it sits so it sits near my desk and I make sure it's there because it helps me remind myself not to be tempted into misconduct and to remind myself that there is a a more upright way to walk in this world.
28:26
SPEAKER_01: And so that seems to me like it doesn't really conform to the man is the measure of all things model but it does um okay here's here's where we have uh uh sort of um multi-layers of nuances so that painting is I I know it pretty well um that painting is is quite enigmatic um from an iconographic point of view it has bears no relation at all Caravaggio is a is the kind of the ultimate um result of this breaking away in artistic styles from sacred art to secular art with sacred subjects so that is a painting of a uh a secular work of a of a religious subject obviously um now I say it's a secular work I would never want to see that painting above an altar I would never want to see any Caravaggio above an altar because it is not worthy of veneration now those are very strict terms veneration is a very specific idea but you are using that painting in my opinion exactly correctly um you know what it means you look at the painting and you know what's going on what's going on who all those people are you know exactly everything about that moment and um it's a very drama right Caramaggio and his chiaroscuro which borders occasionally on on outright tenebrism where the the background is very dark uh and if you could see if you could sort of interpret it symbolically that's the world the world is very dark and the light in the in the painting is actually on the table not on Christ and Peter I think it's Christ and Peter are both there um who is off to one side and he's a little bit in the background and what you can see of him is this finger this hand so the light is coming onto the hand which is pointing towards somebody at the table the main light of the painting is on the table and it's a very interesting thing that the um art historians can't quite decide which figure in that painting is St.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: Matthew because there's a couple of candidates um I think the general feeling is that it's the guy at the end in the in the fairly well to do clothes and he's he's mucking about with some coins or something on the table and the finger looks as though it's sort of pointing at him so you can sort of say well that's probably Matthew but the ambiguity of it is one of the things that makes it not sacred art.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: The darkness of it not sacred art.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: Christ off to one side and mostly shrouded in shadow where you can really only see his a little bit of his face and his hand not sacred art.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay sacred art that is worthy of veneration what we what the Byzantines would call canonical art liturgical art Christ is at the center.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: If Christ is in the painting he's at the center um everything that's going on around is uh visually points to him now the light in that painting and and all the visual sort of directional lines all point to the money on the table which is why the figure which figure is Matthew is is left a little bit ambiguous.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: So the the light where the light goes is very important in a painting um sacred art is real sacred art Byzantine sacred art is like that there are no shadows right the figures don't cast a shadow on the floor I'm not finish this painting so you can't really see it and the background is often just gold just gold and if there are um if there are background features like buildings or trees or animals or whatever those are symbolic they're not meant to be a sort of uh a snapshot of something that happened in the past you're not supposed to be imagining that you're looking through a magical window into an event that happened in the past you're looking at a timeless space um which has symbolic representations of transcendental realities and that's not Karavatu.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: Karavaju is a snapshot into a past event through a magical window down a tunnel and he does a few symbolic things like the darkness that is always around and you could say well that certainly he had pretty deep knowledge of the darkness of the world and um probably his life I would say influenced his his dependence on Piaroscuro so um a painting like that um excuse me for a second a painting like that would uh be seen by a Byzantine painter as as not a work of sacred art that's a secular work as as the work itself with a sacred subject now his um his approach is very evocative it's very it it provokes an emotional response right you've you you put it on your desk for that for that purpose and um I think that's fine.
33:39
SPEAKER_01: I have a friend who's a who's a sacred artist whose his favorite style is Italian gothic and he is with me that naturalism which is you know more or less what Carabaggio's style is um is fine for your living room put it on your dining room wall don't put it above an altar it doesn't belong above an altar because it is not a work that a Christian Christian prayer can venerate.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: No you have to understand what that word means so naturalism in art serves a completely different kind of function from sacred symbolism here I am coughing right into your podcast.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: No that's okay I mean you're the one suffering in 40 degree Italian and hoping that the icon's gonna help you out I'm I'm in the northern reaches of of of the of Great Britain we we don't we don't have that yeah we can we can still wear jackets right now uh the I've got the air conditioner going full blast for 24 hours fan here and I'm still anyway never mind yeah you're doing you're doing a sterling a sterling job particularly with those northern european genes of yours um even the fact that you're not just collapsed in a puddle and of sweat somewhere on the floor.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Oh I'm I'm planning on collapsing into a puddle later you you've spoken a bit about Byzantine art and I think when people think of sacred art if they think of it at all in their day-to-day lives as they probably yeah yeah yes particularly on the Latin Western side they think of Leonardo and if but otherwise if they were trying to think of more widespread art I suppose what's really come to the fore now what's quite interesting is you find Catholic and Anglican churches bringing Byzantine iconography into the church and it almost feels like that's a a tacit admission a realization that something's been lost along the way uh what what what are and I know we've spoken a bit about definitions about what what's iconic and iconographic what what what are the iconic bits of sacred art that ultimately um you know is uh represent the the Western church is it Leonardo's Last Supper is it okay Leonardo's Last Supper is interesting because you first of all it's a fresco so it doesn't have the extreme depths of um uh contrasts in in dark and light what we call values in the art world so values really means the um differences between the highlights you can see the highlights on my face here and the shadows on this side and a little reflected light back here that's all values if you were doing a portrait of me right now you would be concerned about where the dark line of the shadow starts here and where it stops here and you know so I'm looking at myself in the camera but um so that's values it's actually more important than color it's almost more important than composition you can't have composition without values so um one of the big differences stylistically between the Renaissance and the and the late Gothic right so there was this continuity in sacred art that started with the late imperial times the the late late antiquity um in the starting around the 5th century you started seeing uh what we now refer to as Byzantine art which is actually based on uh believe it or not Roman realism um and it slowly developed for theological reasons into something very very abstracted and uh very symbolic for specific theological reasons because the um theologians at the time understood sacred artists and theology were like this theology was much more important than technique um so a sacred artist had to understand that what he was trying to do was depict transcend transcendent non-material realities in a material way on with paint on a board or on a fresco on a plastic wall so um it presented a conundrum of very a difficulty which we've been struggling with ever since so uh what the Byzantine world did was develop a very specific visual vocabulary a very specific visual language that um everyone understood everyone spoke it in a sense they they would look at an icon and they would know what they're looking at not just be able to identify the figures or the scene being depicted like the nativity or the you know the trend uh these sort of biblical scenes or persons so we've we know about hagiography so we see a woman in a robe standing next to a broken wheel we know that's the Catherine of Alexandria so we can kind of recognize some of the symbols but a Byzantine person of the 7th or 8th century who was an iconodule person who loved icons who was on the side of goodness righteousness and the angels on in the iconoclastic controversy would be able to look at an icon and understand it to be a kind of conduit right we think of it as an a painting as an imaginary kind of an imaginary window into the past so that's what Leonardo was doing and what all those guys were doing was to try to create a a window into the past where you could sort of look down a tunnel and see something that was going on long time ago to people who are long gone and with whom you have no no no personal connection at all.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: You're just being presented with a figure from the past.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: Now an I an icon because it's abstracted because it has this very specific abstract language of symbols the icon kind of takes away that distance and brings the person represented into the room with you so it it creates a kind of um a kind of meeting point between heaven and divine re transcendent realities and us normal people and there's a bunch of tricks that Benedictine Byzantine art does like the reverse perspective so we think of a painting as having um you know the vanishing point goes this way and you have depths into the room and all the lines kind of point towards a vanishing point and it creates this illusion of depth and it makes you think that you're seeing something in normal earthly perspective.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: Byzantine perspective people say oh the Byzantines they didn't know how to do that they didn't know how to do uh naturalistic faces and uh this is not true this is not true they started with all of that naturalism and developed this iconographic iconographic uh stylized symbolic style instead specifically in order to take away naturalism because naturalism really effectively separates you from the people being depicted now if you had that if you had that iconographic language if you were fluent in that language you would be in a room with this the original of this this sixth century pantocriter you would understand yourself to be in the room with Christ that not just that you are being sort of transported to heaven in your imagination but that heaven is being brought into the room with you through this icon that's been blessed and it's been blessed not just by you know a bishop doing this and some holy water but by people venerating it and that's what veneration means it's acknowledging the presence of the person depicted the Orthodox church services if you go to those you can see the veneration of icons in the church there's a bunch of physical things that you do to venerate an icon but really veneration isn't just bowing and making the side of the cross and kissing the icon and doing all those things it's uh an interior knowledge that uh when you're in a church then and in the old days before we had all these problems churches would be covered from top to bottom from floor to ceiling and all over every surface would be covered in icons fresco paintings and mosaics so you walked into a church and you were in a different kind of place.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: This is no longer just a material place.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: Obviously everybody knows it's a building made of stone covered in paint but it's more than that it it it allows you to walk into uh what we might call now a liminal space a kind of a in the Celtic sense a kind of thin place where the the distance between material reality and transcendent reality is erased you're there they're with you right it's I don't I don't think people get just how colourful these these churches and cathedrals were I certainly didn't it took me a long time to figure it out and when you try and get your head around particularly in Britain you go to the English cathedrals and there's always an an austere feeling because you're it's just it's sandstone all the way up right to come along and just shaved them all off.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh the churches in Britain uh until then were uh actually famous for for their wall paintings they weren't very sophisticated because they were a little bit of an outpost in the middle of nowhere from the centers you know when when Constantine uh took uh took it into his head to to move the capital of the empire to to Byzantium he took all the best artists with him so leaving the West with really uh inferior inferior uh resources and so Britain the the outside of the buildings were uh as painted as well weren't they were um in in many cases yeah it It was uh uh you sometimes see now it's a bit of a fashion for people for uh churches to have a laser show that will sort of project the colors uh onto something like the facade of chart or something, and you can really see.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: The Middle Ages was not a drab period, and that tradition, so we have a continuity between this origins of sacred art with that idea, with the idea of being in the room with the this transcendent transcendent reality, um, that the icons made heaven come to you.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh, so we kept that idea going until you know the end of the Gothic, when all of a sudden we got this new idea.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: We got this materialist idea where art was no longer um no longer served those spiritual functions.
44:54
SPEAKER_01: It became uh you you were no longer a person interacting with heaven through the conduit of this icon.
45:02
SPEAKER_01: You were there to admire the technical skill of this craftsman and by extension the uh discernment of uh discerning taste of the person who commissioned it.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: You were supposed to admire those things.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: So we started losing very quickly what the sort of theological history of it was at the time, I don't really know.
45:26
SPEAKER_01: But the art definitely had the effect of uh altering the Western mind away from the Eastern notion of veneration to just sort of admiring a work and not having any kind of interaction with it.
45:42
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45:48
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45:56
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45:59
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46:12
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46:15
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46:18
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: That's fascinating, that's fascinating.
46:24
SPEAKER_00: I don't know we've spoken a bit about how sacred art was was lost.
46:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh and going uh even more contemporary than that and perhaps wider into the arts history world is let's talk a bit about modern art because I I saw I saw a video a few weeks.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: So it I'm Well, you might you might you might have some you might have some views on it.
46:48
SPEAKER_00: You definitely seem to have a grasp of the ideological currents that have swept things up.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: But I saw a video not that long ago of um a modern artist stacking up buckets of sand in a modern art gallery, and then they all he he allowed it to topple, and then he kind of chopped the sand around a bit with some spatula, and everyone stood and watched him in a crowd, and then they clapped him.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: And then if you go to the Trafalgar Square in London, they've got the fourth plinth, which they generally just put really bizarre things on, which have absolutely no connection to plays people type.
47:23
SPEAKER_01: Famous, ridiculous fourth plinth, yeah.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: So so do do you do you have uh an idea uh that why we had 1900 years of crucifixes and biblical scenes, and then we get the fourth plinth and buckets of sand?
47:37
SPEAKER_01: They're messing with this.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is this isn't art, this is politics.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: Um the people doing um, you know, the Tracy Emmons doing her unmade bed and the you know putting a rock in the tate or a pile of bricks or doing whatever it is that they whatever it is that they do, they know the actual things, the unmade bed, the rock, the pile of bricks, um, or in the case of Jamie Hirsch, the the shark and from outside, you know, the actual things have become irrelevant.
48:09
SPEAKER_02: Right?
48:10
SPEAKER_01: Nobody cares about a pile of rocks.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: The statement it makes is always subversion.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: So really, uh these people who are being paid to put something ridiculous on the fourth plant or a pile of rocks in the date are serving the same kind of function as the just stop oil people are doing when they're spraying orange stuff on Stonehenge, right?
48:37
SPEAKER_01: They're just there to subvert the um the meaning of our culture.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: They're just political agitators culturally undermining the things that we all still believe.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: Because we do still believe them, right?
48:54
SPEAKER_01: There's there's this unshakable, this unshakable human orientation towards, as Scruton would put it, the transcendence, the transcendentals of beauty.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: Right?
49:05
SPEAKER_01: That's just built in.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things the materialists don't believe in is human nature.
49:10
SPEAKER_01: So they are trying to dislodge from the cultural sensibility that that orientation towards the transcendental of beauty.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: And they're they're they're thugs.
49:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, they're just thugs.
49:22
SPEAKER_01: Damian Hirsch is a thug.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: These people are thugs.
49:25
SPEAKER_01: And the only thing that they're there to do is be stormtroopers for this cultural revolution.
49:30
SPEAKER_01: And sorry, guys, the cultural revolution that's been going on for 500 years, if you haven't nailed it down yet, just give it up, right?
49:37
SPEAKER_01: People are not going to give up their orientation towards the transcendentals of beauty, truth, and goodness.
49:42
SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna happen.
49:44
SPEAKER_01: You can you can damage the culture, you can mess people up, you can confuse them and convince them of all kinds of nonsense, but the fundamental orientation towards uh of your soul will always be aimed at.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: You mess people up to that degree, to this sort of metaphysical degree, and you've messed them up pretty badly.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: They have to be very, very damaged people.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't believe in the sincerity of of the people who agree with this.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, the people standing around and clapping with the bucket of sand falling down.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: They are people who have convinced themselves that they're just clever sophisticates because they live in London and make a lot of money.
50:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, and so who cares?
50:27
SPEAKER_01: Honestly.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: I think you might well be white.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: Right.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh the the the transcendental, the the human nature, the yearning for things beyond is built into us.
50:43
SPEAKER_00: You you are right.
50:44
SPEAKER_00: It's built into us, but you are right that there's been, I would say, quite a lot of confusion that's been sown amongst people.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: And so to give an example, well, people will believe a lot of things on on the basis of peer pressure.
50:56
SPEAKER_01: It's cool.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: It's cool to be cool about uh you know, a rock in the Tate.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: It's cool to be cool about Damien Hirsch's chopped-up horse or whatever it is.
51:05
SPEAKER_01: You know, you're you're trying to be seen to be cool, and hey, guess what?
51:08
SPEAKER_01: That's still orienting your your goals to the good, right?
51:14
SPEAKER_01: You're you're still aiming yourself at a transcendental good.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: It's just you're just being deluded about its actual nature.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: I I think it's also can be seen in how people view beauty as well.
51:29
SPEAKER_00: And I know I spoke about it in the same podcast that you snorted with rage at.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: Um with uh no, you're just doing a job.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: I didn't mean to No, no, it's fine.
51:38
SPEAKER_00: It's fine.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: No, I I think I think Lady was saying she's uh obviously an academic has to take an objective, you know, not I mean she has to be a little bit distanced from it, and she has to be, and I don't have to be because I'm a sacred artist, so I'm not an academic, and I don't have to take that point of view, but she does.
51:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so it was legitimate, it's it's okay, sorry.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, although it was the it was the question when we spoke about whether beauty was an objective thing or a subjective thing, and I think we're back to the Renaissance point of it all being about ultimately our feelings in the end, and C.S.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: Lewis, and I've referenced this a few times as well, because I just find the book that 30 pages long or something, The Abolition of Man, to be so instructive as to what we have done in modernity to mess around with how it is that we relate to the world, and he speaks a lot about how educators uh uh within his time had started to dismiss feelings of the sublime.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: You can't say waterfall, this is sublime.
52:43
SPEAKER_01: You have to say I feel sublime feelings about the waterfall.
52:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's a cope, isn't it?
52:48
SPEAKER_01: It's a cope.
52:50
SPEAKER_01: Um we have by by the T.
52:52
SPEAKER_01: S.
52:53
SPEAKER_01: Lewis's time, when was he writing the 1940s?
52:55
SPEAKER_01: The 1950s?
52:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 30s.
52:57
SPEAKER_01: Right, we had had a very, very long time now of our cultural be culture being deformed and being damaged by these movements, by these ideological movements that have been going on for centuries and making it um creating a kind of fear, creating a kind of social terror, especially among the English.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: Okay, just the English are particularly uh uh prone to this.
53:25
SPEAKER_01: You cannot step out of line socially, you cannot have uh an uh an opinion about something that is not in line with uh with the accepted standards, because the English live on an island, and if you disagree with the entire social standards, you will be thrown off your island and you will have to go and live on the continent.
53:45
SPEAKER_01: And no Englishman could conceive fate worse than that.
53:49
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, um we have a true.
53:54
SPEAKER_00: We don't know how to wear berets and we like to eat terrible bread and cheese.
53:58
SPEAKER_01: No.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh and live in climate with regular 40 degree temperatures.
54:05
SPEAKER_01: Um so really it's a cope.
54:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh we've created a civilization that is unlivable.
54:10
SPEAKER_01: We cannot live in this in this situation.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: It destroys us, and it destroys us more and more as as these materialist ideologies get more and more of a grip on our on all of our institutions, as we've seen.
54:24
SPEAKER_01: And you can't live in it.
54:26
SPEAKER_01: Everyone is trying to figure out how to live in this kind of culture that has become now completely unlivable.
54:34
SPEAKER_01: And we know this because we stopped having children.
54:37
SPEAKER_01: There's the first indicator, right?
54:39
SPEAKER_01: No civilization in the past has ever had a suicide rate like we've got.
54:44
SPEAKER_01: Right?
54:45
SPEAKER_01: People are checking out physically, mentally, in every possible way.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: Why is everyone addicted to scrolling, scrolling social media?
54:53
SPEAKER_01: Because we're desperate for a way out of this terrible world we've created.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, the idea that you must conform to whatever whatever set of ideas are being promoted this week about that we all have to agree with, right?
55:10
SPEAKER_01: We all have to agree that men can become women, or we have to all agree that there's no such thing as sublime.
55:16
SPEAKER_01: We can only have sublime feelings.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: Those are all sort of coping standards that we have to make everybody agree with.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: And if one person stands up and says, no, that emperor isn't wearing anything, well, the story doesn't say what happened to the kid afterwards, does it?
55:33
SPEAKER_01: Because you have to exile people like that.
55:37
SPEAKER_01: You can't have them living in your society standing up and saying, no, we're doing it all wrong.
55:45
SPEAKER_01: Everything in our our metaphysics of our that we base our civilization on is wrong.
55:51
SPEAKER_01: We've done it wrong.
55:52
SPEAKER_01: We have to stop.
55:53
SPEAKER_01: And C.S.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: Lewis was one of the ones who said that, said, no, more progress along this road isn't the solution.
56:02
SPEAKER_01: We have to stop, go back to the place where we messed up and go on the right track.
56:07
SPEAKER_01: And nobody knew what to do about that.
56:09
SPEAKER_01: How do you do that when your entire society, everything, all institutions, all laws, all ways of making a living, all you know, ways of feeding and housing, clothing yourself and having social interactions, it's all based on something that doesn't work.
56:24
unknown: It doesn't work.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: The reason we know the metaphysics, the materialist metaphysics is wrong is because we now have very concrete evidence that it just doesn't work as a way of organizing society.
56:39
SPEAKER_01: If it did, we wouldn't have the death spiral birth rates.
56:44
SPEAKER_01: We wouldn't have people producing art that nobody cares about.
56:49
SPEAKER_00: Or national debt to GDP ratios of the city.
56:52
SPEAKER_01: No, you mean you can just pick any any metric at all.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: And it's all shh, you know, we're collapsing, we're a civilization now, God help us, a global civilization that is literally on the way out because of these reasons.
57:06
SPEAKER_01: So once again, thanks, Cosmo de Medici.
57:10
SPEAKER_01: You messed up.
57:11
SPEAKER_00: Was it was it was it was it was it Renee Girards who said that um because we are now a basically all civilizations come to an end, but because we are now a globalized civilization, uh all it will take is a a match, one match and the whole thing comes.
57:27
SPEAKER_00: Well what did we learn?
57:28
SPEAKER_01: What did we learn from the uh COVID shutdowns?
57:31
SPEAKER_01: That we're all dependent on these supply chains.
57:34
SPEAKER_01: If you shut that down, everything falls apart.
57:37
SPEAKER_01: Everything.
57:38
SPEAKER_01: And we had just a little taste of it.
57:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, do we do we want the whole world, every nation in the world, to have the kind of runaway inflation they have in Venezuela and Argentina?
57:49
SPEAKER_01: Like we're really on the we're really on the edge of that kind of collapse.
57:53
SPEAKER_01: It's terrifying.
57:54
SPEAKER_00: What's interesting, what's interesting about the lockdown, thinking back to it, those early days.
58:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I um scarpered back from London where I was living at the time to Northumberland.
58:06
SPEAKER_00: And if you speak to anyone, bar those people who were effectively incarcerated in flats without gardens and noir con and all those things, but for everyone else, people spoke all the time about how wonderful it was that things had slowed down and that they had time to spend time with their partners and they had time to spend time on things they wanted to do.
58:27
SPEAKER_00: Now, I appreciate uh in some respects you need to have some level of productivity and all play your part.
58:32
SPEAKER_00: It probably wasn't healthy that lots of people were just sitting around idle, but there were those first few weeks where people seemed to not be bothered about the fact they couldn't spend their money anywhere, that they just enjoyed being able to sit in the garden and read or spend some time with family.
58:47
SPEAKER_00: And obviously we couldn't travel to places, and that was you know obviously not normal either, but people didn't seem to be purely pining for it, and yet then we got out of it and things started to switch on again.
59:00
SPEAKER_00: Um now it's like people have redoubled, redoubled their efforts.
59:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
59:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm not going to get into a big thing about um the effects of the last four years because a lot of other people are thinking about it.
59:16
SPEAKER_01: Um but yes, it was very strange.
59:20
SPEAKER_01: That whole situation, it was probably the strangest thing I've ever lived through.
59:24
SPEAKER_01: Now, I lived in the country.
59:26
SPEAKER_01: Um it just happened that I was uh I had a flat in a farmhouse in the middle of a bunch of fields outside of Perugia, and uh agricultural life never stops.
59:38
SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't matter if the if you know World War II is happening or Napoleon is coming through or Frederick Barbarossa, none of that makes any difference at all to the farmers because they just get up, yeah.
59:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they just get up and they feed the animals and do the things that they always do.
59:54
SPEAKER_01: So uh things didn't really change that much in material ways for me.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_01: But I um yeah, it that period really did teach me that the situation that we've created for ourselves is very, very artificial.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: Um and we have come to a point where if we're not all agreeing to do it all the time, it's uh you know, over.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_01: We don't have any alternative ways of living anymore.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, an interesting thing happened in Italy, and I'm not really sure what to make of it, so I don't have a sort of a thesis to defend here.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_01: But um a very interesting thing happened in Italy.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_01: Now, Italians have been getting herded out of their little villages and towns and rural areas for 150 years and into cities and into into a sort of more urbanized modern life.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_01: Now that's been done quite deliberately by the successive governments.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_01: And um, but in the Italian mind, you know, you meet a taxi driver in Rome, and it's a good idea to ask him where he's from.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_01: Because he might not have lived there for 20 years, but he's from a little town, a little village in the mountains of Abruzzo, where his grandma still lives.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: Nobody, a tiny fraction of the people who live in these cities are from that city.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_01: Um so a very interesting thing happened when uh the government said, you know, in 48 hours we're gonna lock down the whole country.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: They made a mistake of giving everybody 24 hours notice because everybody dropped everything, got on a train, and went back home.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_01: They all just took off because if you could get out of the city, everybody knew that getting locked in your miserable apartment in you know the non-tourist area, the non-pretty part of Rome, which is uh there's quite a lot of very unappealing parts of the city of Rome, uh, was to be by yourself without your family around you, without your, you know, the kids you grew up with in the neighborhood.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: Like, no, we're not doing that.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_01: They all bought on trains and left.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: Um the irony of it was uh one of the things they said was a bunch of people who had left the south, so Calabria, Puglia, places like that down south where there aren't any jobs, they'd left to go up north to Milan to get jobs, which is what you do in this country.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_01: They gave them 24 hours.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_01: So everybody and all the workers, they they're shutting down all the jobs.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_01: There weren't any there wasn't any work to go to.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_01: You set sit in your apartment in Milan that you can't really afford anyway.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_01: No, they all got on trains, they went down to Puglia and Calabria and Basilicata and Sicily to go sleep at their mom's place.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_01: Why not?
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: So the irony was, of course, they said, well, that's gonna spread COVID.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, good job, guys.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you've got COVID, you're gonna get on a train and take it with you down to Puglia.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_01: That's good what's gonna happen.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_01: So I mean the lockdowns were ridiculous.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_01: I believed them.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_01: I I didn't think they were gonna just outright lie to us about it.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: So that you know, when they said, oh, two weeks to flatten the curve, and they showed us the little graph, I thought, all right, well, because you could sit, you could sit there where I was in the middle of the country, where the uh the the sort of the um ground zero of the of the epidemic was uh just a hundred miles north.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_01: And that was the ground zero for the whole world, right?
1:03:29
SPEAKER_01: It started in Italy.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh I can't remember the name of the town.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_01: Bergamo, no.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, somewhere like that.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it anyway, it was up north, and it was only about a hundred miles away.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_01: And I was looking every day at the news, which was showing us the maps of where the outbreaks were happening, you know, big red dots to scare you.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_01: And it just was just getting closer and closer and closer every day to where I was sitting.
1:03:52
SPEAKER_01: And I just thought, okay, maybe we should lock down.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay, if they're saying this terrible thing, and you can this is like watching something come at you.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh, okay, maybe we should try to stop this.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: And but then in practice, it just turned out to be it just turned out to be ridiculous.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: And and then obviously more and more ridiculous things kept being done and kept happening.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_01: And two years later, we're all being trying to they're trying to force us to get a vaccine.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, hey guys, you know, I looked at the numbers and the actual rates of COVID, even the rates that the government was producing, and who knows if we can trust those.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_01: COVID was over by June 2020.
1:04:33
SPEAKER_01: So what are we all doing wearing masks two years later?
1:04:37
SPEAKER_01: Nobody believes.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things, one of the effects this has had, I think, in people's general opinions about things, is that we simply cannot trust our institutions at all anymore.
1:04:49
SPEAKER_01: Anything the government tells you is now your default position is always going to be you're lying.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_01: What are the reasons you could be, what are the reasons you might be telling me these things?
1:05:01
SPEAKER_01: What what what possible reasons could you have for lying to me about this?
1:05:04
unknown: Hello, Bertie.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a couple of there are a couple of uh historians joining me on the podcast in a couple of weeks who wrote a book called Why Empires Fall and it's about America, Rome, future of the West.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_00: And we've spoken about civilizational decline and the various things that have led to it by the way we see ourselves in the world.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_00: And they would posit all of those things as well, perhaps without getting into the materialist philosophy stuff, but they also spoke about how what you can typically see when empires start to fall or civilizations start to collapse is a loss of faith in the public institutions and government.
1:05:43
SPEAKER_00: Um Hilary, you've got you've got views.
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: You've shown that you have you've you've got well founded opinions and worldviews that have been built up over the years.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_00: And a question that I like to ask my guests to finish off on is what is something that you've changed your mind about recently?
1:06:00
SPEAKER_00: Or throughout the course of your life, and what was it that made you think differently?
1:06:04
SPEAKER_01: That's a very interesting question.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_01: Well, I used to believe in institutions.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_01: I used to believe in the church particularly.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_01: I I thought that even if the world was uh addicted to its materialist ideas, at least the church.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: Now I'm gonna say um that I'm not excluding by the using the term church, I don't mean the Latin Catholic Church based in Rome.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_01: I I mean Christianity as a whole.
1:06:36
SPEAKER_01: And you know that that was an institution that could be trusted at least in its official doctrines, tell you the truth or tell you the closest thing that human beings have been able to come up with for the truth, divinely inspired.
1:06:53
SPEAKER_01: And I have to say, um those certain certainties are not as certain anymore.
1:07:02
SPEAKER_01: The situation that we've been in, at least well, I started becoming aware.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I used to write for a conservative Catholic uh Christian news outlet, and my beat was to be the Rome, the Vatican correspondent and European correspondent on sort of church affairs.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, historically, nobody who comes to Rome to report on Rome comes away with their faith completely intact.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, don't forget what happened to Luther.
1:07:32
SPEAKER_01: But um I wouldn't say that I'm losing my faith over it, but my um unquestioning dependence on the institution, I I am a lot more cautious now.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_00: When you went to Rome, picking up on that point when you said no one goes without coming away with questions and doubts, what what what what what was it that you saw that uh uh seems to avail you of some previously held delusions?
1:08:05
SPEAKER_01: Well, um okay, we're we're talking now about worldly institutions.
1:08:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm not talking about the church, the bride of Christ, terrible Zenarmian Battle Ray, all that you know, mystical body of Christ stuff.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about the Vatican.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay, Dicasteres and um the the kind of people that are in there.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_01: They are people I think when I started, I assumed that the people in Rome more or less had the faith.
1:08:37
SPEAKER_01: And I came away after six years of examining it very, very closely, believing the exact opposite.
1:08:45
SPEAKER_01: That if you are if you're working in a Vatican office, if if you're the head of a Vatican office, or if you're organizing conferences, or you know, some are worse than others, I know, but the idea that you have anything resembling the face of the saints, the faith of Hildegard of Binyan or Francis of Assisi, is just laugh.
1:09:13
SPEAKER_01: It's just nonsense.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_01: I know it's going to be controversial, but I don't think I've held back.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_01: Certainly, if you follow my Twitter feed, you know what I think of Rome.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_01: Um is there any hope for fixing it?
1:09:29
SPEAKER_01: Not in human terms.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: Not in human terms.
1:09:32
SPEAKER_01: The the the greatest hope, I think, that the once again, institution has is for the collapse to be allowed to reach its final conclusion.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_01: We have to be we have to start again.
1:09:45
SPEAKER_01: We have to start again.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_01: I'm not in charge, thank God.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_01: Um the things that are my opinions are just my opinions.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't have any ambitions to start any kind of crusades or campaigns or letter writing campaigns or uh start any petitions.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_01: I think all of that activism stuff is just pointless.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_01: I I can't I can't be involved in activism at all anymore.
1:10:11
SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, Hillary, it's been a fascinating discussion.
1:10:16
SPEAKER_00: We've covered some serious grounds.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_00: You've we've talked about your Substack.
1:10:20
SPEAKER_00: We've just referenced your X slash Twitter page.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_00: Where can people find you and what can we expect from you?
1:10:26
SPEAKER_01: Oh, let me call up my Substack.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna say Substack again.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_01: It's called the Sacred Images Project.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's just Hillary White at substack.substack.com.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_01: Um you can find me on Facebook.
1:10:42
SPEAKER_01: I have a thing on Facebook called the uh not the Sacred Images Project, but Hillary White Sacred Art.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_01: And that's mostly where I just post a lot of pictures on trying to get people's visual uh familiarity increased with uh Romanesque, Byzantine Gothic art so that people who follow me at any rate can start sort of getting a feel for the visual standards at least.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_01: And um, if you want to see me yelling at the boat, uh you can always follow me on Twitter.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_01: I love to yell at the boat, it's my favorite thing.
1:11:13
SPEAKER_01: And it's just a hobby, guys.
1:11:15
SPEAKER_01: It's just a hobby.
1:11:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm not an activist.
1:11:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm just entertaining myself and going, ha ha ha, you guys are crazy.
1:11:22
SPEAKER_00: You'd kiss his hand like the rest of us if you saw him.
1:11:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I wouldn't go anywhere near him.
1:11:26
unknown: I guess.
1:11:27
SPEAKER_01: I I used to get off the train at St.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_01: Peter's station to go to the office, and I would hear uh on Wednesday afternoons, they would have the general audience outside in the piazza, and so they would have the amplified voice of the Pope.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_01: It's just like, oh geez, no.
1:11:41
SPEAKER_01: No, I don't want to listen to you anymore.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to have anything to do with this is the late stage of my my journalistic career when I was really just fed up with everything.
1:11:48
SPEAKER_01: And this anyway, Twitter.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_01: Yes, you can follow me on Twitter.
1:11:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's watch your the next blossoming of your journalistic career on the subjects that you care so deeply about.
1:12:00
SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate you and I've found this to be a wonderful conversation and look forward to continuing it in future.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_01: We can get together again sometime when I when I have more concrete ideas about things.
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm not such a scatter brain.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_00: Take good care of yourself, Hillary.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting the good fight.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
1:12:17
SPEAKER_01: Bye.
1:12:22
SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
1:12:32
SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
1:12:38
SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.