Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
Subversive Orthodoxy is a movement of soul and story.
It is a project for those who are done with hollow culture wars and tired ideologies, but still believe the Judeo-Christian story has something wild and vital to say to the modern world.
We explore how the ancient faith, often dismissed as irrelevant or oppressive, might actually hold the key to renewing our public life, our politics, and our imagination.
This is not about nostalgic traditionalism or partisan activism.
It is about recovering a rooted, generous, and mystical orthodoxy that refuses to bow to either empire, enlightenment or progress.
It is about reclaiming the sacred in the public square and reviving moral courage in a distracted age.
It is about reclaiming humility and humanizing our neighbors.
The soul of this work is mythic. The method is contemplative and creative.
The goal is to re-mythologize public life, awaken moral imagination, and see the world again as charged with divine purpose.
These conversations don't build platforms or altars, but bridges.
Join us.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #11: Avoiding Spiritual Nihilism, Deconstructing Systems Without Losing Faith: Nikolai Berdyaev (part two)
Episode #11: Life After Deconstruction, How to Be Free Without Losing Your Soul: Nikolai Berdyaev (part two)
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.
To Berdeyev. Commercial life is anti-contemplative and therefore anti-spiritual, and it is essentially futurist in its subjection of the eternal to the temporal, the spiritual to the material and the present to the future. Nothing is of value in and of itself. Everything is fodder for economic development. I feel that in my life, wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in my life. Wow.
Speaker 1: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. We're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide. It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story packed with drama.
Speaker 2:I think in one of Walker Percy's books. He has a line in there where he says you know that it's possible to lose yourself sitting next to your swimming pool in your $50 million million dollar mansion in Hollywood as easily as it is anywhere else, and it's sort of like your relationship with yourself slips away because it isn't anything that's. It really is of a different order than than rationality.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, and that's why Kierkegaard had to come up with these terms and these words for it that nobody had up to that time made as explicit as he as he did now, this next next quote or reading is from slavery and freedom, and I think this speaks to like our current cultural issue of like kind of collectivism where it's like we all know right and the person, each person, doesn't really matter. It's more like what the, the consensus is, um, which is sort of a mob, mob mentality, which kind of happens on the right and the left. Yeah, yeah, so in slavery and freedom, he said, this is the value of each person, rather than thinking of ourselves in a binary model. He says the person is of ultimate value, not the state, not society, not civilization.
Speaker 1:Every system that treats the human being as a means to an end, whether for profit, production or collective utopia, is an affront to God. Both capitalism and socialism in their modern forms are guilty of this reduction. They suppress the inner life, they sacrifice freedom for order or efficiency, efficiency, and they breed spiritual nihilism. Only the christian personalism that sees each human being as unrepeatable, eternal and called to co-creation can resist the mechanization of man. History itself will be judged by how it treats the person. This guy, this guy's deep I mean I, I mean that made me emotional, like this is like. This guy was like very connected. Oh yeah, I mean, this is coming from a very deep place.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, calling out all of all forms of everything, like to call it spiritual nihilism. It it relates to how I feel about our culture, where um, I've had, I've had, you know, my faith going since 90, 96, you know, solidly it's. All my friends since then have known who I was, what I was about, and I can tell you in how many years is that since 96, 20, 30, 30, 29, maybe in 29 years.
Speaker 1:You know how many people have come to me and been like Travis. I'm spiritually seeking. I want to know some things. Can you tell me, can we have a conversation? I think like zero, and it's not because they haven't told me like travis, you've you know you're this kind of a christian.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you or whatever I've heard some compliments like that, but like just their does, their lack of desire, their hunger is not there. And what? What? This, how? That relates to what what berday have just said. He said the, the left and the right, socialism, capitalism breed spiritual nihilism. So it's spiritual death. It's like spiritual nothingness. Yeah, you do see about, you do see a um resurgence of spirituality now, through mindfulness, yoga. You know, people are realizing they have a spiritual need and they're looking. They're looking for that somewhere, they need it from somewhere. So they've turned to the east, I guess, since the beatles right, yeah, um, and rejecting the whole, the whole narrative of, of christianity, for, for some form that they were turned off by at some point in time. So you know, obviously, what Bordea is saying is like you're disconnecting yourself from the source of it all, like when you disconnect from truth and beauty of God himself, and like Jesus.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, your relationship to yourself as a self. You replace it with your relationship with the world, or to an image or something. In one of Walker Percy's books he talks about NASA having a contest where what would be the question that we would ask the aliens, the first question we would ask the aliens when they land, and they had in this novel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is in your book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so all these questions come up. Oh yeah, this is in your book, yeah, and so all these questions come up. You know, can you explain the time-space continuum? You know in a way that a third grader can understand, or all these things. And the one that won was did it happen to you? And they said, well, did what happen to you?
Speaker 2:He says, well, do you have a self that gives you trouble? Are you, are you divided between yourself and and yourself, or are you just a highly formed insect or a robot machine that has no interior life? If you do have an interior life, is that what sent you to find us? Are you looking for friends or are you looking for food? That's the question. That's cool, and it is kind of the existential question, you know, are you looking for question? Are you looking for friends? Are you looking for food? Am I part of your predatory power grab, or are you part of the love that created the universe? What do you identify with? What is you know? And and and verdanieff, as being part of the french of the russian revolution and then being its enemy, probably made it so clear to him where the lines were drawn.
Speaker 2:And you know, between between an existential thinker and a power seeker, that he just couldn't stop himself from explaining it. You know we just, yeah, he wasn't shy about it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I have one here on on god and atheism.
Speaker 1:He's not okay, yeah, I'm gonna hear this one but uh, what you just said also, like if you reduce it down to food and um, food or friend, yeah, that's kind of like darwinism versus christian thought is like food is survival, yeah, and that's the theme of darwinism survival of fittest and what, what's going to survive. And then, uh, the the root of christianity, christian thought is, is fellowship, community, right of love, right. So if you reduce things down to their hard core, core, it starts to see things a little more clearly. Yeah, what world do you want to live in or what view you want to hold? You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So here's him on an atheist and a God, reading that he did, or a writing about that. He said um, it's a, it's in the larger context of a famous line that he said they rebel against God in the name of God. And it's from the book, the beginning and the end Um, so he says thus it is that atheism in its higher, not in its base form, maybe a dialectical cleansing of the human idea of God? When men have risen in revolt against God on the ground of the evil and wrong of the world, they have, by the very fact of so doing, presupposed the existence of a higher truth that is to say in the last resort of God.
Speaker 1:They rebel against God in the name of god, for the sake of purging men's understanding of god. They revolt against a conception of him which has been besmirched by the mire of this world. But as he treads this path of conflict and anguish, man may pass through an experience which brings him moments not only of absolute god forsakenness but even the death of God. And it's got a they have killed God, said Nietzsche reference.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, well, that, yeah, and that is a pretty powerful reflection, especially coming from him. Yeah, especially coming from him that, and also he wrote a book on Dostoevsky and I haven't read his book on Dostoevsky, which I'm going to read before we talk about Dostoevsky, so I can bring Berdenev into the conversation you don't have much time.
Speaker 1:I hope you're a fast reader it's on interlibrary law Dostoevsky's next.
Speaker 2:But that's one of the themes in the Brothers Karamazov, where the brother with the deepest conscience has the biggest problem with faith.
Speaker 1:Is that Ivan?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's Ivan or ivan.
Speaker 1:yeah, ivan and I started. I started the book on audio.
Speaker 2:I'm like a few chapters in yeah and uh, but the uh, uh, his spiritual crisis, you know is, is there. There are parallels and antithetical versions of it in the other brothers which allow us to see both the strength and weakness of that conception. You know, it's a kind of. It's not just a theological conundrum, it's a personal revelation that emerges, and but we'll deal with that when we get to Dostoevsky.
Speaker 1:We'll deal with that when we get to Dostoevsky and for the two little interludes right here. I found this at the thrift store the other day for $1. Oh, really, they found me a copy of the Everlasting man by GK Chesterton.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, that's a good buy From 1958.
Speaker 1:Wow, so I'm excited about that.
Speaker 2:Is it autographed by him?
Speaker 1:I wish.
Speaker 2:And I picked this up in Westerly Rhode Island. Oh yeah, on the road by Jack Kerouac.
Speaker 1:So my whole library is becoming subversive orthodoxy only books, and I'm going to get rid rid of other ones that were not written like at least 50, 60, 80 years ago well, when we get into kerouac catholicism, we'll be in a whole new space.
Speaker 2:By that time, I'm sure yeah, we get there.
Speaker 1:It's like a few people ahead, yeah, but, um, could you elaborate on his concept of personalism and how it pushed him away from both Marxism and capitalism? We've touched on it a little bit, but I don't know if you could do a little more with that. How did his Christian vision shape his critique? He didn't think the left or the right upheld the dignity of the person, because that would be very relevant to our modern politics right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, both sides want to save the world by crushing the person.
Speaker 1:Can you elaborate on that, because I don't think that's what either one would say about themselves.
Speaker 2:Well, because they think in terms of numbers and in terms of team they want to crush the other team.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's more that they don't give the choices to the people that they're saving from themselves. They think they know better than the party which Lenin wanted to put in service of the revolution, or the old aristocracy that wanted to take over the decision-making. And so he was sort of saying well, you know, you can't have freedom and the dignity of the person unless you give them the capacity to make choices over their own lives and be part of the creation of the laws that govern them. And so neither one of the parties want to share decision making with the people that they want to vote for them.
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem.
Speaker 2:I mean they yeah, they're not actually they're not actually listening to yes, they're not actually listening to people who say you know? Well, I don't know, I don't, I don't want to have people take care of me, I want to have freedom to make my own choices about things. Well, okay, how do we arrange that? You know how do we get different? You know it was with Chesterton.
Speaker 2:You know it's sort of like capitalism is great if it's fairly distributed, but if all the capital is in the hands of one percent, then it's not capitalism, it's, it's authoritarianism of the corporatism or corporatism, and the Democrats you know well, ok, but if it's just the number, the majority, that makes the decision, that's not really listening to all the people either, that makes the decision, that's not really listening to all the people either. To have a democracy that is going to work, you need, you know, more feedback from multiple sources and you know distributive justice and there doesn't seem, you know, there doesn't seem to be a working out of those problems in the way that you would think. You know, this long into history, that we could have worked that out a little better.
Speaker 1:But yeah, a Berdeyev quote totally says what you just, you just nailed him on that. He says both capitalism and socialism fail to respect the spiritual freedom of the person. They seek to organize society but do not understand man. Yes, like they don't. They don't really want to hear from the individuals and solve like very complex problems they want to like coercively. Either party in any society probably wants to create a platform and then just run with it and ram it, ram it into the rest of the people. You know.
Speaker 2:Well, well, actual human beings are a disappointment because they're unpredictable and they're irrational and they do, and they do things that you think are not in their self-interest, which you know better, and anybody that has kids understands this. That you know, to treat your kid with love and respect means you're going to have to listen to his stupid decisions when he's 12 and take him seriously and give him the dignity and the respect that will allow him to give you the dignity and respect, and those are difficult things that you know. The Gospels are trying to explain how you do that. You know how do you deal with the power, differential or the roles of people in a culture and desires that conflict with yourself? Know, interest and things. How how do you overcome all those memetic, uh, aspects of human nature? And there, is.
Speaker 2:Can you review that word, because I remember it from that, that well, I would just gerard, renee, gerard oh yeah, he's in motion of the memetic imagination, where we all learn what desire from our, from our parents, who learn it from their parents and their peer groups. And, and isn't it?
Speaker 1:isn't it a desire that I want someone to tell me like I want to? I want the guru, or I want the mimetic desire?
Speaker 2:Well, it's more it's. It's more subtle than that, it's it's unconscious. We want the things that that the more subtle than that it's unconscious. We want the things that the people we admire want, and so we want what dad and mom want for us, because we admire them when we're little, and then it's only later that we find, well, you know, that probably wasn't a good choice for me, or that I misread what it was that they really wanted for me. They didn't want me to be the greatest baseball player, they wanted me to exercise or something. And I misread the imperative, you know. And so that's. You know. I guess we're still pretty young in terms of civilization to have worked out, you know, the, the debts, we debts and some karma to pay. Uh and uh, I don't even think we're.
Speaker 1:We're trying, you know what's so disingenuous about that is the the notion of a christian nation and a religious right. That that doesn't want to talk about that? Yeah, like slavery and native american genocide, oh yeah yeah and, along with you, know many other things, but those are the two biggest ones in our history that are just completely not by a lot, a lot of people and a lot of general broad strokes of culture do not want to talk about or acknowledge. Or it wasn't me, it wasn't you know, and it wasn't us directly.
Speaker 1:It was ourselves, but it was, um, it was a great injustice in our country and it caused both of those caused major injustice to native americans, and it's still going on, and to african americans, and it's still going on like a lot of a lot of effects are still happening. Some friends had a debate with me on that a few years ago. This was kind of hilarious because I wasn't even saying the idea, but he was just arguing against someone about systemic racism.
Speaker 1:And he goes systemic racism isn't in our country anymore. It's been long gone. That's way out of here. I'm sure there's some racist people, but there's no systemic stuff. And I go dude, I just did my mortgage license class. We had a whole huge section on redlining which was happening in the seventies and the eighties. In my lifetime black people were not allowed to buy in these neighborhoods that were redlined, yeah, and it was not gone in the eighties. It was. It was legally gone in the eighties and it wasn't gone.
Speaker 1:Just like segregation was gone, but it wasn't gone. Exactly so these these things, you know. And then you, you have the argument that, um, slavery was over, but then mass incarceration, and then putting inmates to work yeah, it's like a whole nother modification of slavery. So those arguments are when people, when people just this, deflect those arguments too easily. I'm highly skeptical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know, and it, and part of it, reflects on our inability to dismantle them.
Speaker 2:You know, and I'm sure you know, and I'm sure, that well, dismantle their arguments to sort of free them from that the shackle of their prejudice. Oh yeah, Because we participated too in some way. I'm sure Berdenev, when he was on the philosopher ship, had some interesting conversations with guys about. You know why did we lose the argument with Lenin? You know why did the violent Bolsheviks win the argument in Russia, or did they? You know how do we come back from this? It's going to be hundreds of years before we come back from this. It's like thinking of Cortez as a great evangelist. You know, yeah, yeah, he was a great evangelist.
Speaker 1:All right, you know, uh, that's, that's historical genocide of a level that we haven't even imagined yet yeah, and that and for that to be placed on Christian faith in the sense of what Berdyev is talking about is completely the opposite. Yes, right, that's what's so crazy about that. Critique on Christianity is like well, dude Cortez was acting in 100% the opposite of everything Jesus taught, so how can we even associate it? Well, the church was complicit. So, yeah, I'm going to critique that church at that time, not the whole thing, because it's obviously opposed to Jesus in absolution. Like, every form of that is an absolute contradiction of Jesus. And even today, like the way immigration is of that is an absolute contradiction of Jesus. And even today, like the way the way immigration is being treated is an absolute contradiction to Jesus. Yeah, and that's, that's orthodoxy, right there. Like you can't treat people like that, right, you just can't.
Speaker 2:That's why we're going to, that's why we're going to read Dostoevsky, because, or talk about him, because he started asking those questions. You know, how do you, how do you talk about these things in ways that penetrate people's unconscious defenses? Um, yeah, great question that keep them from, from registering anything that might, uh, cause them to doubt their own understanding of the faith, you know, and their projections onto themselves or other people. You know, how do you, how do you overcome that aspect of human nature? Uh, so that's part of what he was writing about.
Speaker 1:Did he verbalize that or are you saying you picked that up from Brothers Karamazov?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's one of the big themes in Brothers Karamazov.
Speaker 1:It's one of the big themes, I know, but did you hear him actually explicitly say that, or you can just tell that's what he's doing? He explicitly says stuff like that yeah, that he's trying to help people to think through their own beliefs, without causing them like, without making them defensive. Yeah, helping them to analyze internally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's a powerful question. There's one scene in Brothers Karamazov one of my favorite scenes, one of the brothers is a street fighter? Which brother he likes to get in fights in bars? Which brother?
Speaker 1:Dimitri Mishnah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so he beat up this old man outside of a bar in front of the old man's I think it's his grandson or his son, a little boy and it was a humiliation. And Alyosha, the younger brother, wants to do something to make it up to this guy. So he decides that he's going to give him 100 copecks, pay him off and apologize for his brother because he knows his brother's not going to do it. So he goes to the guy and he says you know, normally when our brother beats up people in a bar and he does this all the time, you're not the only one we pay the person 100 copecks, but we don't have 100, because it's been a tough month. So would you take 75? And the old man says you give me 75 copex. He goes yeah, yeah, I know, I wish it were 100, but I can only give you 75. And he says are you going to give me a check for that? He said yeah. So he gives him a check for 75 copex and the old man rips it up and throws it in his face and says if you think I take any money from a Karamazov, you don't understand what kind of man I am. And he walks away.
Speaker 2:So Alyosha goes home and his girlfriend says how did it go? Did he take the 75 copex? And Alyosha says, oh, it went great. He ripped up the check and threw it in my face and said screw you, karamazovs. And she said, well, that doesn't sound very good. And he says, oh no, he got it off his chest. He had to do that and he got a little bit of his pride back. Tomorrow I'm going to go off from 100. He's going to take it. And she said, boy, you're pretty good at this. He goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, my spiritual director, zosima, has told me about the underground in man and the need for pride and the need for dignity and the need to be able to take a hit for the team. And that's what I'm learning, you know, and so. So that's just one of the small things. But then he, you know it starts getting bigger, because then he starts working with groups and kids and he starts dealing with people with psychological crises in their families and stuff, and he's trying to work out how, how to be a christian that acknowledges the psychology of the underground in human beings in a way that brings them out of the underground rather than secures them deeper into it and that's one of the big themes of the novel. And of course the two most underground people in the novel are his brothers and his father. People in the novel are his brothers and his father and so that becomes the big family dynamic that the whole novel is built around. So that's on a family level.
Speaker 2:But is there anybody? I'm sure there are people. I mean, gandhi was trying to work that out in a public domain. Martin Luther Gandhi was trying to work that out in a public domain. Martin Luther King was trying to work that out. We have some really prophetic figures in the 20th century Mandela and Tutu, the Councils on Reconciliation. All those are experiments in bringing Christian love into modern life.
Speaker 1:We've established that his faith wasn't always like super orthodox or he hated institutions, including the church. Right, how do you think his faith in such a way that he kept resisting secularism but also religious authoritarianism, which is a common theme? We heard that in Kierkegaard a lot, Blake also. In what way was his faith subversive even to the church itself?
Speaker 2:church itself. Well, you know, some of these guys like Tolstoy is another example and Simone Weil, people like that kind of get labeled Christian anarchists because they're so critical and suspicious of the way institutional forms distort you know their vision of Christ. For the sake of you, know organizationalatives and uh in Kierkegaard too in Kierkegaard too. He called it Christendom. You know that.
Speaker 1:Kierkegaard resisted the last rites of his church did he really?
Speaker 2:I don't remember that yeah he rejected it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know how much of this for Berdiev, kierkegaard, I mean speak specifically to Berdiev, but how much of this for birdie of kirkegaard? I mean speak specifically to birdie, but how much of this to simone bay, birdie of tolstoy, okay, yeah. So how much of that do you think was their personality or and or their reaction to the church at their time, the church, the church um, the state of the institutional church, of their location and time in history? Because that was very unique to Kierkegaard. He was, he never left, he never left Denmark, so all he knew was the Denmark church, the official church of Denmark. Yeah, so that's what he's reacting against. I don't know what Simone Weil was reacting against. I don't know Berdyev was is Russian Orthodox.
Speaker 2:Well, you know it's probably. You know different percentages of both. And you know it's probably. You know different percentages of both. And you know, I think, part of the key here. You look in the Bible, you know, and you look at the prophets in the Old Testament, you know. And what was? Wasn't it Isaiah who said you know, god says your holocaust are an abomination to me. You know so that that's like you know your, your rituals, your fundamental rituals of reconciliation with your god are an abomination to your god did you mean to say holocaust, or did you?
Speaker 1:were you saying for a different word?
Speaker 2:no, that's his. By holocaust he meant your sacrifices okay are abomination to me I never saw that translation that's pretty hardcore uh prophetic language, um, and that would be, you know, pretty harsh institutional uh critique if you took it that way. Uh.
Speaker 1:So there's Well, professor, absolutely, I mean, that's a great point. That's a great point. Is that in the biblical prophets you have maybe this is in Bergman or in Heschel A function of the prophets is that they do critique the institution at that time. And yes, I think it's worth reading that passage because it's very relevant to the point in Isaiah, because it's extremely aggressive. Yeah, he says, I hate your assemblies, you know? Yes, yes, and that's crazy. I mean, that's like and he's speaking for God. He's saying God, is saying this.
Speaker 2:Yes, I know.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's in Isaiah 1, right at the beginning. This is Isaiah 1. So if you think anyone critical of the institutional religious gathering of the time is heretical, then Isaiah is heretical.
Speaker 2:Yeah right.
Speaker 1:He says hear the word of the Lord, you, rulers of Sodom, listen to the instruction of our God. You, people of Gomorrah. The multitude of your sacrifices, what are they to me, says the Lord, I have more than enough burnt offerings of rams and fattened animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampoline of my courts, stop bringing me meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me, and incense is often equated with prayers, new moons, sabbaths, convocations. I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Wow, your new moon feasts and your appointed festivals. I hate with all my being. Oh my gosh, it's like easy God. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you, and even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood. Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of the fatherless.
Speaker 2:Plead the case of the widow.
Speaker 1:Amen. So yeah, you can't write these people off if they're critical of the institution of their day. Oh, yeah, yeah, which I think a lot of my evangelical academic brothers and sisters might have a tendency to do.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, you know.
Speaker 1:And Catholic scholars as well, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, we all want to have our cake and eat it too, right? We want to be respecters of the prophets, but not quite yet. What was it? I think Was it Augustine that said you know, I'm going?
Speaker 1:to it already sounds good, whatever that is.
Speaker 2:I'm going to give up sexuality, but not yet. Or something I'm going to give up sexuality, but not yet. Or something I'm going to give up my sins, but not yet.
Speaker 1:That's really good, so I think we encourage them to listen. I've told a few friends who have no faith just check it out. It's coming from a general enough angle with a bunch of different thinkers that it's not some one thing trying to convert you or anything. This, this podcast, is like a very general approach to a bunch of different thinkers from a bunch of different angles, and oh yeah I think.
Speaker 1:I think there's so much all of these thinkers have to offer the um to the artist, to spiritual see, and those are disillusioned with modern life, like a lot of this stuff's very disillusioning. I mean I've had multiple friends this last year. They're like I'm just trying to survive this dumpster fire.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know, some of that's just politics, but some of it's beyond politics. It's in tech Like I'm sick of social media, I'm sick of fake news. I'm politics.
Speaker 1:It's in tech like I'm sick of social media, I'm sick of fake news, I'm sick of all of this and it's creating like a, a type of despair yeah so I think that's where this podcast and your book, and, like these, these thinkers, are giving us so much to work with, of hope and of depth and of like anchoring to deeper things that are constants, no matter. No matter what is happening in this day and age, you know constants through their, through our, through stalin, through lenin, through uh, any, any, you know hitler, everything like these are people that live through these times and it's just phenomenal what they're bringing to the table.
Speaker 2:Well, it's almost like they're saying what God don't you believe in, I don't believe in that God either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most of the time.
Speaker 2:Or like when, pasternak, you know, I lost my faith in atheism, yeah. Or Berdynieff, you know, the great socialist revolution turned out to be no revolution at all. A disrespector of persons.
Speaker 1:I want to end on our, uh, last reading of your book, um, the, the second half of that, that section which I feel like it's worth reading because it was so well written. Professor, like, seriously, seriously, those, those friends who have read and are reading along, they've all agreed with me that your writing was very, very good. It's very dense and quick. You get a lot in a short amount. You have to go back and reread it. We've all agreed that. So your writing is very powerful and dense, so that's a compliment. And so back to this bit that Berdyev was saying, and I just want to read this as a conclusive bit to leave you with, to leave everyone with, like what he was saying and a couple of his quotes. So I think that's a good way to end it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this may seem like blasphemy to modern day, modern free thinkers who think of themselves as christians, but for bide of, anything that put material development before the kingdom of god was suspect. It was not enough to pursue material gain six days out of the week and holiness on sundays. The bourgeois was not really hypocritical. They knew what they were doing. It was just that they forgave themselves too easily and justified their avarice as the form, as a form of pragmatic realism, just as blake had predicted they would. The materialism of descartes, lock and newton had replaced the invisible god of transcendence with the god of progress and commerce. It reminds me of merchants in revelation, the merchant class, basically, which is the oligarchy, basically, yeah, bertie of explains, and this is from, actually I don't know, probably the same book as quoted before yeah, History, meaning of history meaning of history.
Speaker 1:So in in that book he also says this civilization, as opposed to culture, which has given up to the contemplation of eternity, tends to be futurist. Machinery and technique are chiefly responsible for the speeding up of life and its exclusive aspiration toward the future. Organic life is slower, less impetuous and more concerned with essentials, while civilized life is superficial and accidental, for it puts the means and the instruments of life before the ends, whose significance is lost. The consciousness of civilized men is concentrated exclusively upon the means and techniques of life, considered as the one reality, as the only reality, while its aims are regarded as illusory. To Berdeyev, commercial life is anti-contemplative and therefore anti-spiritual, and it is essentially futurist in its subjection of the eternal to the temporal, the spiritual to the material and the present to the future. Nothing is of value in and of itself, everything is fodder for economic development. I feel that in my life, wow, social change, technological growth and industrial productivity, even leisure and rest are valued for what they add to one's productivity or how we can make money off of it. Time is money and money is power. This view of time as a commodity, indeed of life, spirit, health and meaning as commodities, creates a new human type focused upon personal achievement.
Speaker 1:Again Berdiav remarks as a reaction against the medieval ascetic ideal, man puts aside both resignation and contemplation and attempts to dominate nature, organize life and increase its productive forces. This, however, does not help to bring him into closer communion with the inner life and soul of nature. On the contrary, by mastering it technically and organizing its forces, man becomes further removed from it. Organization proves to be the death of the organism. Life becomes increasingly a matter of technique. The machine sets its stamp upon the human spirit and all its manifestations. Thus civilization has neither a natural nor a spiritual, but a mechanical foundation. It represents par excellence the triumph of technique over both the spirit and the organism. Sheesh, talk about what modern work has done to us. Yes, in our cubicles, sitting on our laptops.
Speaker 2:All right, my friend, thank you so much, all right, well, tell, tell our next time with with those day epsky, we'll have fun, I'm sure, with that those jfc's death.
Speaker 1:This one's going to be two parts because we've gone about an hour and a half yeah um dulce fc. I expect to be two or more parts because I need the audience to pray for us. Professor taught Brothers Karamazov for 20 years or 25 years, so how is he going to do this? How am I going to harness in the professor's knowledge?
Speaker 2:on.
Speaker 1:Dostoevsky.
Speaker 2:We'll do notes from underground first, and then we'll do a shortened version of the Brothers Karamazov the second time.
Speaker 1:Well, two episodes on Brothers K.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'll probably need you to section that out in your head, professor how you're going to approach that. Yeah, well, because I will not know how to manage you on that if you know that much about it. Okay, so yeah just for audience to know, Professor's specialties are in Dostoevsky and especially Merton. He wrote like three or four or five books on Merton.
Speaker 2:So when we get to Merton, I think three.
Speaker 1:Three, maybe seven, yeah, but on Merton also we have a special surprise which is uh part of the professor's faith story had to do with merton yeah which I love okay until next time.
Speaker 1:Thank you, professor okay, adios adios, thank you for listening to the subversive orthodoxy. If today's conversation stirred something in you, whether you're a skeptic believer or somewhere in the middle of deconstruction, know this this isn't about reclaiming an old religious philosophy. It's about realizing that there are ancient constants that challenge the very things in culture that are dehumanizing us. As we speak, we're going to continue exploring what it means to live a life of deep meaning in this world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic, and this prophetic imagination doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. It's not confined to pulpits or seminaries. The prophetic voice is breaking through in novels, poetry, charity work, art and the unexpected corners of culture. We hope you'll continue to join us in this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening.
Speaker 2:If you found this meaningful.
Speaker 1:Please leave a five-star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation, adios. This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Enchasti Chastity. Thank you.