Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #1: Intro to Subversive Orthodoxy - Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
What do these 20 outlaws, revolutionaries, and mystics have in common?
What if timeless wisdom from unlikely figures could speak prophetically into our present day? In this episode, we explore this question with a deep dive into "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" by Robert Larry Inchausti.
Alongside Professor Inchausti, we examine how the radical insights of thinkers like Wendell Berry, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day challenge modern anxieties and oppressive ideologies, offering hopeful visions that remain profoundly relevant.
Join us as we uncover the hidden threads connecting Christian intellectual traditions with broader cultural currents. From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Chesterton and Kierkegaard, these figures disrupt conventional power dynamics while rooting their critiques in enduring faith.
We'll also draw on John Pattison's review in "Besides the Bible" to explore how these thinkers boldly question the status quo, providing a fresh perspective on the intersection of faith and culture.
As we navigate the complex landscape of belief and skepticism, contrasting the approaches of figures like Joe Rogan with the introspective Russian literary tradition, we invite you to explore the quest for meaning in a fragmented world. Reflecting on the transformative power of Russian literature and the moral fortitude of Solzhenitsyn, we consider the challenges of nihilism and the search for purpose amidst chaos. This episode is an invitation to engage with profound narratives and share these insights with those seeking significance in today's disjointed reality.
Reading from book, "Besides the Bible: 100 Books that have, should or will created Christian culture" by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison
Reading from Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander"
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. I'm your host, travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in. Full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide. Full of anxiety depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 1:It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story packed with drama.
Speaker 2:Back in 2006 or 2007, I saw a book on the shelves at Barnes Noble and it read Subversive Orthodoxy Outlaws, revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise and I just had to have this book. It wasn't the first time. I had been a pastor for about 10 or 15 years and I had over 500 books. Probably my wife was always trying to get me to get rid of books and I just kept collecting them and collecting them. Over the years I started to realize that this one book I just kept coming back to Somehow it challenged me and created some sort of a vastness that most of the books I read did not have. Most of the books I read were some type of specific Christian theology, debating stuff that is debated in seminaries, stuff that normal people would have never heard about. So when I found this book, it involved people like Wendell Berry and Martin Luther King Jr, dorothy Day and I was like I have to have this book and I have to understand these people, because this is kind of the mind I want to have, where they can understand culture, they can speak to it, they can critique it, they can bless it. They have an understanding that's outside of their own biblical theology. I read some of it back then and then I just kept coming back to it through the years. It's not super dense in the sense that it's not a huge book. It's more like a reader to get you introduced to these 20 different people in the book. But it is dense and it's written in a very poetic prose and I kept getting inspiration from it. The way it inspired me was hearing from people from different vantage points artists, thinkers, activists, theologian, one theologian and many authors. They had different backgrounds. You know Russian, orthodox, baptist, american, all sorts of different other UK and other places. They're coming from different fields and different expertise. The way these authors spoke to my Christian perspective was so deeply profound and true and it rang out into humanity in general. And that's where I felt the outward motion of this, where I just wanted to share it with somebody In this way.
Speaker 2:I believe it to be prophetic and evangelistic, and by evangelistic I don't mean what I grew up with a typical understanding of evangelicals and the altar call type of a short message, high pressure sales. I mean they're sharing and pointing to a macro narrative of God. That's good news across space and time. It's a very cosmic good news, a good news that stands up to Nazis and communist fascists. It's prophetic in the sense that it speaks challenge to a culture because of God-implied underpinnings, and evangelistic in the sense that these authors are sharing convictions of hope in a critique of modern and postmodern notions that dehumanize us and enslave us. These are the things I could feel when I would read it, but I didn't know.
Speaker 2:How did these people prophesy these things 100 years ago and 50 years ago, and that's why this book was so profound to me. When I hear McLuhan or Merton describing the culture, it sounds like they're talking about 2025, social media, ai, et cetera, but these things were not even invented yet. They weren't even on their radar in the slightest. It's like they were seeing the future and could read the times. Jesus once said when it is evening and you say it will be fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be a stormy. It'll be stormy today because the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. In Matthew 16, two through three, he said that I've always wanted to be able to interpret the signs of the times, but all I have to offer is this subversive orthodoxy stuff that's been said 50 to 100 years ago, way in advance, and I think it actually is interpreting our time now. Honestly, I think it's more relevant now than it was when these writers wrote them. Honestly, I think it's more relevant now than it was when these writers wrote them.
Speaker 2:So I had this book. I kept coming back to it. I was revisiting it a few months ago, back in July or August, and I was reading I think I read Solzhenitsyn chapter and I was just like man, this book is crazy and I thought I looked back at the back cover. And I thought I looked back at the back cover. Dr Robert Enchosti. He is teaching at Cal Poly, san Luis Obispo English. Huh, I wonder if he's on the website. I reached out to Dr Robert Larry Enchosti back in August he goes by Professor or Larry, and I want to tell him how much the subversive orthodoxy meant to me. It empowered my worldview and resonated all my inklings about faith and culture, and it challenged my intellect in ways that were both invigorating and deeply challenging, and I knew I had to bring this conversation to others in the form of a podcast. So, with no further ado, I actually have Dr Robert Larian Chostey here today. The professor, hi Professor.
Speaker 3:Hey Tavis.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you here and I'm so glad you were willing to have this conversation and keep the conversation going from your book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I'm happy to be here and I'm glad that you have the questions Well.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to be here and I'm glad that you have the questions. So Dr Larry's formal, or Professor Larry's formal, bio here is that he is a professor of English at Cal Poly, san Luis Obispo and author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, the Spitwad Sutras and Thomas Merton's American Prophecy. He's an authority on Thomas Merton, who is in the book, and a lover of literature by writers who challenge the dominant narratives of our time, from the Beats to the Mystics. Larry has spent a lifetime studying the voices that refuse to conform, and that's why we're here.
Speaker 3:So, doctor, I mean sorry, I keep saying doctor when I say PhD, I just think doctor, professor, yeah, I always think of doctors as people that actually heal people physically, so I prefer professor, maybe you're a mind doctor, yeah, so the title of the book grabbed me immediately.
Speaker 2:It's such a provocative couple words together. And you know, we just found out. You know well, you shared with me that some authors named Gibson, green and Patterson had written a book called Besides the Bible, and this was 100 books that have, should or will create christian culture. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind reading that intro to your book on that, because this is a they gave. They gave, uh, professor larry, a whole shout out in that book.
Speaker 3:well, I, I I will read it if you want me to. I have to go downstairs and get it, so we have to oh, no problem, I have it right here. Oh, you have it right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have it and also we could potentially save it for a little later in the conversation too. What was your experience with this book's trajectory since you wrote it and then hearing from me, did it feel like, oh, I don't know if I want to bring up that old book? Or did it feel like, yeah, I never really got to play this whole book out as much as I wanted? Yeah well, it was the latter.
Speaker 3:It was like I wanted to go back and revisit Subversive Orthodoxy because it seemed like it had set me up for my books on Merton. But the backstory to all of that is contained in this Subversive Orthodoxy and in these figures over the last hundred years that were in dialogue with the modern culture in the sense of enlightenment culture from 1500 on, but also modern culture in the 20th century and the postmodern movement. And a lot of these figures are people that I found that I didn't even know they were Christian until years later, after I'd been reading them. And then I came across, you know or if they did know it, didn't see it in connection with other thinkers and other prophetic voices of the time.
Speaker 3:Thinkers and other prophetic voices of the time, no-transcript, yeah. And I knew that this guy was Christian reading that first volume because the voice was so familiar in terms of the prophetic voices of other 20th century religious thinkers and mystics that I wrote an article about him. And then I started finding all of these other prophetic voices and I said well, you know, I got to put this together because nobody's really yet sort of connected the dots here and offered people a way into a orthodoxy which is subversive, of the authoritarian and oppressive aspects of modern and postmodern world and postmodern world, but at the same time connecting to deep roots in Western religious history. And so I wanted to make that connection and I did, but apparently not for many people.
Speaker 3:Enough people to keep it published. It only was published for about three years and then it went out of publication, but the good news was I got the copyright, so I still am the author of this book. It's not like one of those authors that, like I think, ray Bradbury sold the rights of Martian Chronicles for $300. And he never got any money after that for all the movies and things that followed from.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, yeah. So I think it'd be good now to read the intro from those other guys, because they obviously saw in your book what I saw and they wrote about it perfectly.
Speaker 3:Since you have it, why don't you read it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll read it. It's about two pages. Okay, just listen to how this guy describes the subversive orthodoxy and this actually will tell you exactly where we're headed with this podcast. And he actually names most, if not all, of the names from the book of where we're headed. So this is kind of the table of contents as well. So this is from Besides the Bible by Dan Gibson, jordan Green, john Patterson.
Speaker 3:John Patterson was the one who wrote the review of my book. Okay, so this is from John Patterson. John Patterson was the one who wrote the review of my book.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is from John Patterson. He says he opens with a thing about orthodoxy by GK Chesterton. On on Chesterton's book called orthodoxy. So he says GK Chesterton opens his book orthodoxy with a parable about a sailor who launched out to discover uncharted lands but then got off course and bravely rediscovered his own country. Chesterton described his voyage to faith. Chesterton, describing his voyage to faith, says he was that sailor. I am the man who was the utmost daring, discovered with the utmost daring, discovered what had been discovered before. As a burgeoning intellectual, he had tried to be original, tried to stand alone and only to realize that his feet were firmly planted in Christianity. He tried to be on the cutting edge, 10 minutes in advance, of the truth, only to find out he was two millennia behind it. He wrote I did try to found a heresy of my own and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy which is hilarious. Last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy which is hilarious.
Speaker 2:Subversive orthodoxy is Robert and Chastity's book-length essay about 20 poets, philosophers, novelists, historians, critics, religious leaders and social activists whose work draws from the deep well of the Christian tradition, chesterton being one of them. And Chastity's subjects are subversive because they are inherently suspicious of worldly power. They're trying to build a new society in the shell of the old, as Peter Morin, the co-founder of the Catholic worker movement, used to say. And they are orthodox because they test new things against first things In the beginning was the word, and scrutinize the present in light of the end. This is what Inchasti calls the eschatological perspective on human existence. Enchasti follows a thread of orthodoxy through an impressive roster of artists and thinkers. Some we know on a last-name basis, like Blake Goeth, kierkegaard, chesterton, dostoevsky, kerouac, merton, day, king. Others, like Nikolai Berdyev, boris Pasternak, alexander Solzhenitsyn, walker, percy EF Schumacher, wendell Berry, marshall McLuhan, northrup Frye, jacques Ellul, ivan Illich and René Girard, may be less familiar, but they deserve a wider audience. Together, they comprise nothing less than a lifetime reading plan, and that's what I found too Subversive.
Speaker 2:Orthodoxy goes far in correcting two persistent misconceptions about Christianity. The first misconception is that Christianity is inherently reactionary, unconsciously wedded to class, race and gender prejudices, bound by foundational metaphysics and littered with outworn superstitions. The mass media, whose prevailing bias is for conflict and sensationalism, depicts only the extreme elements of the faith. Meanwhile, a small what's the word? Cadre, cadre, cadre, cadre of revolutionary Christian thinkers has gone about quietly, rigorously, examining all thought and culture in the messianic light of the last day. Compare Ntchassi's table of contents to our own and you'll see how thoroughly convinced we are of his argument that the gospels have served and can still serve as a pivot around which most entrenching analyses of modern civilization can turn. Wow, there's some brainiacs going here.
Speaker 2:The second misconception is that orthodoxy is somehow insipid and boring. From Blake's defense of the imagination to Nikolai Berdyev's critique of the mechanization of the human spirit, from Dorothy Day's struggle to desacralize war to Ivan Illich's lament for the demise of the common space and the contemplative culture, from the Christian anarchism of Jacques Ellul to the radical agrarianism of Wendell Berry, from Dostoevsky, whose novel the Brothers Karamazov has been called the Fifth Gospel, to Jack Kerouac, who once called himself a strange, solitary, crazy Christian mystic. Enchastis, outlaws, revolutionaries and other Christians in disguise confirm what Chesterton wrote more than a century ago. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy, and a damn and a damn about that Amen my brother.
Speaker 2:That is a crazy tribute to your book.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so when I talked to you and we thought you know this has a lot of relevance for today on solstitzen and mccluhan, especially more recently, um, I just could not. I couldn't believe the, the moral fortitude of solstitzen and the, the, the talk of soul that I feel like our culture has abandoned along with you know, uh, abandoning like religion in general. They kind of lost the concept of soul and have have moved on to things like meditation and mindfulness, without without any concept of soul, more like just mental health. So hearing Solzhenitsyn say that you know from the gulags is pretty incredible and we'll get, we'll get way into that.
Speaker 2:But then, when it comes to McLuhan talking about our culture and media and everything and just he's literally prophesying about social media is just so insane to me, dang, that there will be a global village where immediate mass electronic communications will get everyone to know everything about everyone's business in a negative way, knowing way too much about each other. I just couldn't believe what he was saying when I you know he's saying it in 1967. So these people have a lot to offer our culture right now. I feel like we're, I feel like we're wandering blindly into this, this technocratic utopia we're walking in.
Speaker 3:Well it's. It's such a utopia. Everyone's so happy and joyful, 1966. And it's, as you say, could be talking about 2025.
Speaker 3:We're living in the greatest revolution in history a huge, spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race.
Speaker 3:Not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race or nation, but a deep, elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we're free to avoid. The revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs and distractions that only dull the general anguish for a moment, until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form. We don't know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have ever achieved. All the inner force of humanity is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil. The good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalized by the purest and most innocent intentions. There you got it, man.
Speaker 3:That's Merton nailing the whole thing. Nailing it, but just as a commentary on the present. One of the things I think made subversive orthodoxy kind of a secret or a cult following of 25 people or whatever. However many would contact me about the book is that people don't read much anymore in the way that you have to put everything aside and concentrate to get the deeper meaning of Solzhenitsyn. I mean Solzhenitsyn's three volumes right.
Speaker 2:Three large volumes.
Speaker 3:Three large volumes, pretty large volumes. I mean you have to be dedicated for a month or two to read that. Yeah, and not every paragraph is going to be really exciting or startling with an aphorism or something. Know, startling with an aphorism or something. But if you hang in there, you're, you're, you're climbing a mountain and you get to a point where there's these vistas, where you turn around and you see the last 50 years in depth in 3d cinema, scope, vision and, and this guy is telling you about you know how he got there and it's, it's just it's. It'll hit you, you know, kind of like all at once and you'll see it all at once and you don't forget it.
Speaker 3:It alters your view of the world. You don't have to memorize lines. Just the name itself evokes in me those two months that I dedicated to reading Solzhenitsyn and realizing that I would say every review I had read of it was read by somebody who hadn't read the book. Right, because you can only say these glib one liners if you hadn't been with the guy in his arrest, in his torture, in his interrogations, in his marching on the tundra trying to write without a pencil. Memorize it. But the way you write without a pencil is. You memorize, uh your lines while you're you're marching on the tundra and you make every five fifth line rhyme. So if the fifth line doesn't rhyme, you forgot a line. So now you have to continue uh marching to find that line that you dropped and then, once you pick it up again, then you're allowed to go on to the next.
Speaker 3:And he did this for months, and so when he finally gets access to like a pencil, he has to bury it in a cell because it's contraband material and he can't let anybody see that he has a pencil.
Speaker 3:And then when he finally gets a piece of paper, five months later, he has to cut it in little strips and roll it in little rolls and bury the rolls in his cell. And so then when he's when he decides to write, he doesn't want to waste the paper, so he decides he develops a script that contains no vowels, so he can just write with consonants that will bring back to him these, uh, precious descriptions and points he wants to preserve, never knowing if he'll ever be able to dig them up from his cell and be able to send them in letters, or however he's going to get them out. That's still up to question. And even if he got them out, they would never be published in the Soviet Union, because the censors would never allow any stories about the gulag, because they claim they didn't exist yeah so when he finally gets out, I know we're getting ahead of the story, but you.
Speaker 2:You always get ahead on when we talk about sasanitza when he gets.
Speaker 3:When he gets out, he decides that now he's going to write, he's going to be able to write. And when they arrested him they asked him what his occupation was and he had been an officer in the Russian army in World War II. He was sent from the front in World War II to the Gulag. So he went from fighting the Nazis to being the victim of his own Soviet government and he wrote that his profession was atomic scientist and he wasn't an atomic scientist. But he thought that they would be less likely to kill an atomic scientist. So if they thought he was an atomic scientist they might keep him around longer than what they did with some of the other guys. So he finally gets out and they give him a job teaching physics at a Siberian high school and junior and middle school.
Speaker 3:So he's teaching middle school physics in Siberia in the day and then in the night he's writing the Gulag one page at a time and burying it in tin cans in his backyard. And he had five different novels going at the same time and there were five different tin cans in his backyard. And he had five different novels going at the same time and there were five different tin cans. And then he sent a letter to I think it was Tolstoy's great cousin or aunt, with a map of his backyard and said if you ever hear that I died, backyard, and say if you ever hear that I died, this is the location of the lost literature of the Russian people and you can come here and this is where they're at. And he had, you know, a little chart of his backyard and luckily, you know, he was able to get out and the rest is history.
Speaker 3:But while he was there working on his paper there was a Gulag. On the radio there was an interview with a contemporary Soviet bestseller author and they were asking him how he writes his Soviet realist mysteries. And he was saying well, you know, I try to have three different color pens and I listen to music and stuff. And he was thinking you know this guy, you know he has everything to help him write but nothing to say. Thing to help him write but nothing to say.
Speaker 3:And I have everything to say but no means of saying it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 3:And so I just got to you know, remember that other writers went through more. And then I just have to be thankful that I was given a story to tell and that my story will someday. I have given a story to tell and that my story will someday. I have you know, he had to have the faith will bring down the Soviet regime, and the lie that is dialectical materialism won't be able to coexist with my story. And so almost all these writers are similar in that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wanted to ask you you started, you started with Solzhenitsyn, that's how, that's how you got the idea right. Yeah, and so then tell us how it. How did it branch out from there into the other writers? Like, obviously, I mean don't tell your whole. Merton backstory. Yet I mean, don't tell your whole Merton backstory. Yet We'll include that another day, because I do want to hear your personal story relates to Merton and that will be like an intro to Merton, yeah, so how did you branch out?
Speaker 3:to these other authors.
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 3:Had you already read them or were you kind of like hunting them down at this point? Well, I'd read some of the people that he referred to down at this point. Well, I'd read some of the people that he referred to and I mean, I knew some people that he referred to in his book his literary memoir I had already read.
Speaker 3:So that was Like Dostoevsky, obviously Like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov, who I taught to the present. There was a long section in there on Pasternak and his relationship to Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tezveteva and Mayakovsky, who were these great sort of revolutionary Russian writers before the Russian Revolution, were dissidents against the czar and then found themselves in opposition to the Bolsheviks and ultimately and ultimately many of them thrown in jail by Stalin for violating his authoritarian so it kind of branched out into Russian mostly at first, and then you started adding others ended up in France after World War I and were part of the existential movement after World War II, having survived a second bout with Nazi and war-torn terrorist countries that a lot of them ended up in.
Speaker 3:And so there's like two generations of just amazing Russian poetry. But Pasternak we could talk a little bit about Pasternak because he's a great example. He was a poet, famous Russian poet, lyricist. He was considered sort of the antithesis to Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky was the public orator of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and Pasternak was the interior, reflective soul of the people that survived the Russian Revolution, to put it that way. And so they were kind of different, and so they were kind of different politically, although they really admired one another's courage to stand up against the regime before the revolution and then also to not give their integrity over to the Stalinist takeover. So they were grudgingly sort of frenemies, I guess you would call them today.
Speaker 3:And I knew about Mayakovsky because he's sort of famous, but I hadn't known that Pasternak was a poet, because the only thing I knew about him was that he had written. Dr Zhivago about him. Was that he had written Dr Zhivago and Dr Zhivago had just been made into a big motion picture in the 50s. And also, pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. And then the Soviets refused to let him receive it because they said it was a trick by the Swedish committee to honor an anti-Soviet writer within his own country and that he really wasn't that great and that he wanted, and they wanted him to renounce his own writing and make apologies for having been so misunderstood by the West, and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:And he was still living in Russia, right, he?
Speaker 3:was still living in Russia and Solzhenitsyn's heart was broken because he thought Pasternak was going to go and get the award and blast the regime and explain what that novel was all about. But he died a year later of a heart attack.
Speaker 2:Oh, a pasternak did.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but who knows why, he died a year later, exactly right, but a lot of it had to do with the mental pressure on him. He's one of Russia's greatest modern writers and here he's being hounded to renounce everything he ever did. And the way he made, the way he survived the Stalin years, was he translated all the great Western literature into Russian. So he translated Shakespeare and Goethe and the English poets all into Russian, and so he was part of the thought that took place when Khrushchev took over and after Stalin died.
Speaker 3:For a moment there there was kind of a like glasnost, an opening of Russian culture to the world. That lasted for a while and he would have been, you know, a key player, especially with Dr Zhivago being a bestseller in the West and being made into a movie. Yeah, but the problem was the movie isn't, the movie is not an accurate portrayal of the book, because the book is, uh, a story about a contemplative um who, uh who, and very written in very symbolic, poetic language with Laura, a kind of symbol of the natural goodness of the Russian people.
Speaker 2:Actually, I'll read the thing you said about it, that they were afraid of it turning into a movie.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958, the Soviets saw the award as a species of failed socialist realism, misreading its form, undervaluing its literacism and totally ignoring its symbolic character, while many western readers misappropriated the work as an anti-communist tract, oversimplifying its complex message and undervaluing an artistic integrity, its artistic integrity and missing itsedic spirituality. Um, there was a part about the oh yeah, the novel also terribly misrepresented by david lean's movie, which captures all its images and none of its ideas.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's so. That's so true. The uh, uh you would. You would go a far uh mile to find and find many ideas in that book, become a liberal or a general in the Russian army after Stalin had died and looking for a representation of a humanist perspective on the world. But he has three lines. He has three lines and you don't really know who he is in the movie and it's so overshadowed by the love story between Dr Zhabago and Laura that it just becomes a very good romantic epic, but not the prophetic, contemplative story that Pasternak told One of the things he would say about the book.
Speaker 3:The only positive kind of thing he said about his own book was there are people like Zhivago in Russia. He said about his own book was there are people like Zhivago in Russia, and by that he was trying to say there are Christian contemplatives who see through the lies of history like Zhivago, like me. He couldn't say that, and Solzhenitsyn was so disappointed in him because he thought you know, this is going to open the door to all my books. You know I have six novels buried in the backyard that expose all these things in detail with actual historical events and it's. And then when he said well, I guess I'm gonna have to win the Nobel Prize so that people will take me seriously, otherwise they'll think one more time that it's just a Soviet.
Speaker 2:This is anti Soviet trick, or something yeah and so just I want to read uh, give our, give our readers, our listeners, a little bit of, uh, your intro to Pasternak, um, something Thomas Merton said about him is a quote on Pasternak. He said Pasternak's Christianity is something very simple, very rudimentary, deeply sincere, utterly personal and yet, for all its questionable expressions, obviously impregnated with the true spirit of the gospels and the liturgy.
Speaker 3:Thomas merton, and then um, you could say that about a lot of the almost all these characters in this book and this other paragraph.
Speaker 2:Um, I put a bunch of underlines and a wow, so I gotta read that. Um boris pasternak once described himself as an atheist who had lost his faith in atheism, and I just feel like that's relevant to our culture in general, because people yeah people might find themselves as atheists, they might find themselves as agnostic. And here's, here's an incredible mind dealing with the russian revolution, who lost his faith in atheism. And he was born jewish, so born jewish. He was brought up by his nanny in the Russian Orthodox faith, but as a young man he became a skeptic and supported the October Revolution as Russia's best chance to turn the tables on history and right the wrongs of its tyrannical past. When the revolution turned sour and its idealism was betrayed, pasternak lost his faith in faithlessness and became an internal émigré living in quiet protest. Internal émigré living in quiet protest Internal émigré.
Speaker 3:He felt like he was a foreigner in his own country.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, living in quiet protest against the new totalitarian state, quietly translating Hamlet and Faust and, along with Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tseva Tseva Mandelstam, launching a radical defense of the poetic imagination through clandestine readings and private publications that would reverberate throughout the world as one of the greatest defenses of conscience in all of literary history. In this last line, during this time of persecution, he tells us, he quote, came to understand the bible not so much as a book with hard, with a hard and fast text, as the notebook of humanity and a key to everything that is eternal.
Speaker 3:Um, so that yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's pasternak and uh, you, you wouldn't necessarily get that from Dr Zhivago, as beautiful as those images were of the film. You need the ideas to go with it to let you know what you're seeing. You're not just seeing a vacation in Dramond or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, so I was going to explore him a little more before I read it.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, and it's, it's not. It's not the book that the book is is well, as is always the case, that the book is better than the movie because it's it's a deep reflection through the eyes of Dr Shibago, who is sort of a stand in for Pasternak himself becoming a losing faith in his atheism. That's pretty cool, and you know a story of our atheism. You know that's pretty cool. And, uh, you know a story of our times. You know, then, the uh. How how long is it going to take for some for people to realize, well, how much, how credulous you have to be to believe in atheism, as, as a doctor, a dogma? Carl Rohn used to say a man's best friend is his dogma.
Speaker 1:And the dogma of atheism.
Speaker 3:it isn't skeptical enough. If it were only more true to its own skepticism, you know, then there'd be constant dialogues between you know different forms of faith and belief and contemplation, which is what one would expect the postmodern culture to be, but it largely isn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not. I have a little theory. This is just some fresh, some fresh Travis Mullen thought here. But I have my own theory, working working theory that people believe what they want to believe. That's my theory. Yeah, the truth, true, I'm sure I've noticed it on um joe rogan's podcast where he will talk to you know people that have some kind of a wacky idea about health or about politics or about aliens. He's totally into it. And then he has a christian on there telling him about jesus and he's super skeptical he, he he, he pulls, he has this incredible, he becomes this incredible scientist.
Speaker 2:At that point, yeah, when it, when it's something he wants to believe in, it's, uh, incredibly open. So I've noticed that and I, I like, I like hearing his thought process, but I did notice that there was one guy in particular who was like a physicist, um, a Christian who was a Christian, who was like a biologist, I think, I think it was microbiology is what led him to faith, and it was just too hard. Joe Rogan just had, but what about? But what about? He had 15 layers of buts and when it comes to other subjects's, just no butts, or maybe one, but you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of this resistance, um, and I'm he might even be open to it, I don't know but but his resistance is evident, like it's very resistant to certain things, and it reminded me of your quote, where the atheist isn't applying his own skepticism to himself or to his own dogma well that that.
Speaker 3:That's the other thing that impressed me about these figures that I uncovered was that their self-criticism is a big part of what they're about. Like Solzhenitsyn since we're talking about him, he has second thoughts about how he handled his arrest. You know, and he says it right up front. You know why. Why didn't I protest my arrest? Well, it wouldn't have done any good, and I think there was a part of me that knew that.
Speaker 3:I was waiting until I really understood how to take down this regime before I started popping off in public, and that would require me to become the writer I want to be before I get my own podcast. But what happens is, you know, you get podcasts now on Solzhenitsyn, or you get podcasts on, you know, my five favorite novels, or my 20 favorite novels, and they're reduced to five sentences. And yeah, and you can tell, if you've read any of those books, that either they didn't read the book or they didn't understand the book, because most really great literature, books or ideas the writers understand the limitations of it and they give you the limits of their own thought, and it's so humbling.
Speaker 2:It's like intellectually humble.
Speaker 3:Intellectual humility. Intellectual humility, and that's what we call gravitas right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Humility, intellectual humility, and that's what we call gravitas. Right that they, that they give you the truth that they found. And then they sort of say but you know, that came from the life I lived and that came from these ideas and that came from you know here, and now it's your turn. You know you, you go there and you read them and you spend the time it's not just being glib and having answers One thing podcasts and radio and social talk shows and stuff.
Speaker 3:Back in the day when Mother Teresa won the I think Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize, I think that's true and she was on a Canadian television show with the biologists that had won the Nobel Prize in medicine that year, the Nobel Prize in medicine that year and the talk show host was trying to stir controversy and so he said well, you know, this is very interesting. We have a doctor here, a doctor here who's working on cell research that might someday result in eternal life for human beings, and we have a Catholic social worker who believes in eternal life life, what do they have to say to one another? And so he asks Mother Teresa, you know what she thinks about? But I do know I believe in love and compassion and I would prefer that to eternal physical life, life. And the doctor said after the show that was the closest he ever came to being converted to Christianity.
Speaker 2:She subverted his question like Jesus does.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like well, if you have eternal life and you don't have love and compassion, what do you have? You know you have. Eternal damnation is what you have. Eternity is. That's not even a Christian concept of eternity. Values ahead of your technological miracles, you know you have to.
Speaker 2:That's a funny concept, given I just this week was writing a little. I was trying to write a short story about a technological future scenario where people are resurrected by biotech. They're kind of kept alive in a bunch of chips and wires and things in their body and they can't die anymore yeah, and so they're in.
Speaker 2:They're in like this project, resurrection, eternal state and um, they don't like it. Like this guy, the main character's wife was resurrected and he didn't even want her to be because now she's stuck working for the state, technocratic, technocratic state and um, it's kind of like now they're. It's kind of out of that revelation and a bob dylan line that like they want to die and they can't even die. Now, yeah, death is a relief to that, you know yeah which you know that's.
Speaker 2:That is back to these, these russian characters where they had to survive the gulags and the and the jews in the nazi camps. It's like how, you know, I mean this whole concept is is answering the question like how did they survive that without just wanting to die and either kill themselves or, or, you know, death by cop? Yeah, it could have easily done that with a guard, you know yeah um, but the, the fortitude slash, some type of hope of living beyond.
Speaker 2:that was keeping them going, and that's an incredible dive into the human psyche that we'll be exploring more with these characters.
Speaker 3:Well, yes, definitely, and Dostoevsky is the guy we're going to go for that, one of the guys who anticipated a lot of that 19th century and and he spent time in prison camp in siberia. But his was a 19th century prison camp, so you can imagine it was probably even more primitive than that one that's. I don't know how you could be in a prison camp more primitive than the one solzhenitsyn was in, but I can imagine Dostoevsky was pretty close to that.
Speaker 2:Another thing about that is that we didn't get to do it because we weren't particularly going to focus on Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak today. But the Russian story to me is like a very unknown story to most Americans that I've talked to, like everybody's. Like gulags I might've heard of that, and then Solzhenitsyn oh yeah, I think I've heard of them, but that's about it. It's like wow, now that I've heard this story, I can't believe it's not front of mind for many people because Well, yeah, I can't believe it hasn't been a movie.
Speaker 3:I mean, I know uh, he wrote. He wrote one short story that got pop, that was popular in the west for a while.
Speaker 3:Um, they made a movie out of that yeah, they made a movie and that was just one day in a prison camp. Uh, you know, and how this guy survives and it's actually a good day for the guy, but it's, you know, from any objective point of view. You know it was a horrendous day. But taken out of context of the gulag, of the whole picture that he presented, or an understanding of history, or understanding of the atrocities and the gulags that are around today, um it, it doesn't. It doesn't um connect. For some reason, people don't connect it with.
Speaker 2:Well, it's the scope. The scope hasn't been given to the public. The public has not seen what this was yet. You know, I don't. I don't feel like they have, yeah, in a popular culture way. Yeah, I don't think the gulags has made it to popular culture yeah because the holocaust has, because there's so many movies about it.
Speaker 2:But meanwhile there's, you know, while there's 11 million dying in nazi camps, there's another 30 million dying in gulags and death marches and such and just being shot and being arrested for very minimal things, and it's just a astonishing story. I mean, it's absolutely incredible story and it and and then to hear the pasternak to the solzhenitsyn handoff and how, how, yeah, we'll, we'll get into that more, but but the whole the listeners you have to look forward to the handoff between Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. How mad he was. Professor alluded to it, but he really, solzhenitsyn, really wanted him to blow the top off the regime of the communists and he didn't do it. He stayed quiet, kind of, and then solzhenitsyn did it. But but then, um, professor is also going to present a whole another little anthology of of dissident poets during that time too, who had to hide their poetry in their minds.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's going to be an incredible tale as well yeah, so a lot of the russian uh poets composed and I think this might be a tribute to the dissidents uh, they didn't. They didn't do rough drafts. They composed in their heads and then when the poem was done, they wrote it down.
Speaker 2:A lot of, a lot of them were like that, so I'm going to bring this in for a landing for this first episode, but we're really glad to have you guys here with us and I hope this is intriguing to you and we find our audience of people who have philosophy, theology, culture, politics, ethics all in mind, in history as well. This kind of touches on all that and synergizes it. Something that fascinates me about these writers and these people is that, as the culture was going away from faith, they were going towards it. Some of them had radical conversions during the 1900s, while the culture was drifting into a secularism, and a lot of them moving into a Catholicism and even deeper expressions of orthodoxy.
Speaker 2:You know, there's something here for all of you, whether you're a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between. With some deconstruction journey, we're going to be exploring what this means a life of deep meaning in a world that feels increasingly fragmented, and dealing with nihilism. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and share this with anyone who might find these conversations meaningful.
Speaker 1:Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff Without a parachute, like I'm high on cannabis, and skip through fields naked, like I wonder if I could drift, or if I could drift through it, dancing through moonlight under nighttime skies.
Speaker 2:This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullins and Professor Inchosti.
Speaker 1:Say hi to human beings with a smile, unseen, grabbing wildflowers as I slide down hills After a rain, after some pain, after the same, I'm to blame. Love in my veins, loose syringes, untamed Like dosage doesn't matter inject these veins. People got problems and the world's got more makes you wonder what the heck I was put on this earth for.