So a few weeks ago I was invited to the Touchdown conference with Rodreer and Paul kings North and also Deacon Seraphim Roland Richard Roland, who you know from.

The Universal History podcast.

As you might know or not know, Deacon Seraphim and I are working together on the Symbolic World Press.

He is the CEO of our company.

Deacon Seraphim is really not only you could say, helping me create some of the most beautiful things that we can.

He is also becoming a voice of his own and his insight and his wisdom.

Is looked after.

He has a podcast on ancient faith.

He is doing all kinds of things, and so do not be surprised if you see videos with him on his own on my channel, because he has a lot to offer and a lot of wisdom and symbolic thinking.

He also has a level of detail that I do not have, and so he's often capable of offering sources that I don't have access to.

So this is the talk that he gave at Touchstone, a kind of road map as to how to live a newly enlightened or a you could say, an enchanted life in the modern world.

What are the small steps you could do with your kids, with your family, what it is that you need to think of to remember to participate in, and so please enjoy.

This is Jonathan Pegel.

Welcome to the Symbolic World.

Hello everyone, we are finally announcing our Paradiso class.

We have done two already.

We have the Inferno, we have the Purgatory, and now we are moving to Paradise.

That is right.

Dante himself says Inferno that we prefer hell to Paradise, and similar early most of us prefer to read Inferno, but when we come to reading Paridiso, we're very confused.

So we're going to be actually taking you through that poem line by line, like we did with Inferno and Purgatorio, and actually looking at how Dante very carefully reconciles some of the contradictory traditions about the heavens in the Christian apocalyptic tradition and does that through the persons of the saints.

And so this is truly important for us right now, with the re enchantment of the world happening, we have to be able to look at those that that did it in the most powerful way that we're able to reconcile the ancient pagan traditions with Christianity, with his modern understanding, the most modern understanding of the cosmos that he had.

And so this is the work that we need to do.

So we need to learn from Dante.

So the course it starts November fifth to December third, right, is that what I've got five weeks two to five on Wednesdays.

So the cost is going to be one hundred ninety dollars US.

But we do have an early bird sale through the month of October, which bumps it down to one hundred and sixty one.

You can use the code early Paradiso and that is good through the end of October.

And the Inferno and the Purgatorial class are also on sale at the same time, so you have fifty percent off during the month of October Code Dante fifty.

And you know that means you have no excuse if you haven't taken the first classes.

Now is the chance to scoop all that up.

Yeah, and if you don't want to watch live or it doesn't work for your schedule, you'll be able to follow along at your own pace.

Just like with all of our courses.

You'll have access to lecture, recording slides, additional readings, and you can still ask questions and interact with your fellow classmates in our circle forums.

And so join us.

After all of this suffering through Inferno and Purgatorio, the Symbolic World finally goes to heaven.

Yeah, join us.

I went.

Actually I first learned about Johnson Pagot and the speaker you heard, So those are those of you who are here last year, might remember Vesper Stamper, and I met her and our next speaker, Richard Roland and Jonathan all at the World.

It's a Symbolic World summit that was held a year before last down in Florida, And I knew nothing about this group, so probably been hearing a lot about it, and I was just blown away.

And you got an idea of why I was so blown away when I was down there.

I attended this conference, but I kind of did, and I didn't attend it.

When I go to a conference, I'm just kind of auditioning speakers.

And they had two different rooms and there'd be two speakers speaking at the same time, and I'd listened to somebody speak and they'd speak for five minutes, and if they didn't grab me.

I'd run to the other room and I'd listen to that guy for five minutes, and I'd run back the other room.

And so I walked on this guy who I'd never heard of, Richard Roland, and it was about halfway through the conference, and I thought, oh my goodness, I got to get him a touchdoone because I was really quite blown away by what he had to say.

Well, I ain't caught about half your talk, and that was still enough to put the hook in me.

Well, let me tell you.

Richard Rowland is a software developer, a German philologist, and an Orthodox Christian, living in Texas with his wife and children.

He speaks and publishes on Germanic poetry, the Inklings, and the Sacramental imagination.

He regularly contributes to Jonathan Pagot's The Symbolic World YouTube channel, and I've signed up for a number of their series and I recommend you do the same.

It's called the Universal History Series, which has recently launched a six week course studying the epic poem Beowolf.

Richard co hosts the.

Monsault Paul podcast and has published several works of fiction and nonfiction.

So please join me in welcoming Richard Rolan.

It's a little surreal being here, actually, because I've heard many things about Touchstone over the years, mostly through my good friend doctor Gary Jenkins, who's back in the back and is one of your new editors.

But it's just really wonderful to be here.

Now.

What you didn't say is what you told me when you first invited me to come speak here, which is you said you'd have to be like, you'd have to be like a little more strict about your time, because I went like thirty minutes over in Florida.

So I'm going to try to be strict about my time today.

Why is any day better than another when all the daylight in the year is from the sun.

By the Lord's decision, they were distinguished, and he appointed the different seasons and feasts.

Some of them he exalted and hallowed, and some of them he made ordinary days.

This is from Ecclesiasticus, Chapter thirty three, verses seven to nine.

In August of twenty nineteen, just a few months before the COVID lockdowns the George Floyd Riots, there was a series of essays published in a special issue of The New York Times called The sixteen nineteen projects.

Some of you maybe are familiar with this.

The following year, right in the middle of everything, in the middle of our civilization's most chaotic moment since nine to eleven, the collection was expanded into a book length publication called The sixteen nineteen Project.

A New Origin Story Now, as the book's subtitle indicates, it promised a new origin story for American culture and society, a new answer to the question who are we, where did we come from?

And the answer, in short, was the African slave trade.

Sixteen nineteen being the year that African slaves first arrived in North America as opposed to like seventeen seventy six, was just when the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain.

Now, as the sixteen nineteen Project argues, and this is a direct quote, slavery is the foundation on which this country is built, and the essential dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed, between slave owners and slaves is the truest and most important story about what America is and who the people are that live there.

Now.

Whatever you think about what was happening from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty one, it was clearly an inflection point, a moment of crisis.

Were the stories that held us together as Americans.

Were the stories that held us together as Western people had begun to crumble, had begun to unravel.

And you could kind of argue, of course, and you've heard lots of persuasive arguments already this weekend that that unraveling had already been going on for a long time.

But there was definitely thing that was happening there, especially for the young people.

I mean, they're going to be studies, papers, dissertations, conferences done on just what that two year period, the effect that it had on our young people in like fifty or sixty years, when it's too late to do anything about it.

The unique pressures of those years made it very clear that a new story was needed.

And one of the stories that was proposed was to take the shame, to take the guilt of one our of our three greatest civilizational sins.

I will not tell you what the other two are.

You can ask me later, and make it the most essential thing about ourselves.

It was to say that the truest thing about ourselves is actually our division and are inequality.

Now, before I go much further, I want to give you another example of historical myth making, which is actually pretty similar.

It won't seem similar at first, but hang in there with me.

So in one hundred and fifty years following the Norman invasion, this is ten sixty six.

And all that.

Some thank you, some of.

You well read people of people of culture, good, good, good.

The place known as England did not actually exist, not as we know it today.

There were really two societies.

There were two languages, two cultures.

There was a Norman French speaking aristocracy who thought of themselves not really actually as English lords and nobles, but as kings and dukes of France, who also happened to control this small but very wealthy in terms of natural resources island nation on the edge of Europe.

And then an Anglo Saxon or for my Oxfordians, an Old English speaking peasant class who themselves had also had then driven out the Romano Celtic tribes some six seven hundred years before, naming them, by the way, Welsh Welsh, which is an Old English word which means foreigner.

Now, this is one of history's great jokes, is that only the English can make you feel like a foreigner in your own country.

Sorry, Paul, I don't know if Kingsworth's in here or not, but all right, that's just that's my I'm an Anglo Saxonist.

These are my people.

That's just that's my joke, so I have to tell it.

So the island of Britain was a hodgepodge of identities, rights, languages, histories, and about a generation after the Norman conquest on the Welsh borderlands, there was born a man who became a priest, but he's not remembered for any of that.

There was born a man named Jeffrey of Monmouth.

Now Jeffrey was himself a man of his time.

He's a hodgepodg so much so that nobody actually seems to have agreed about exactly who his parents were, exactly what his nationality was.

Was he Welsh?

Was he Norman?

Was he the son of a Breton, that is, as in from Brittany, from the Celtic coast of France.

Was he the son of Bretton nobles who had come over with the conqueror, who'd settled down in the Celtic borderland of.

England, Whatever and whoever he was, Jeffrey.

Was a priest, and he was a historian, and the history that I wrote, which you can get a copy of from our good friends at eight Day back in the back.

The history that he wrote.

Brought together all the disparate threads of what it meant to be British.

And later on future historians would argue about Jeffrey's works.

They would say it's some kind of pseudohistory.

Later still they would say that maybe actually he did indeed carefully weave in the oral history of the Welsh and Britain tribes together with the ancient king list of the Romana British dynasties who ruled over the many little kingdoms of the Isle of Albion in the long years between Constantine and Oswald.

People argue about these things.

Dissertations have to be written.

Don't invite these people to your parties.

Now truth be told.

It just doesn't matter whether you think that the history of kings of Britain is history or pseudohistory, or some blend of the two.

It just doesn't matter, because the story that Jeffrey told held Britain together, It created it, It invented it.

In fact, as he's writing it right around the time of Henry the Third, who is the first king who really styles himself as the.

King of the English.

Now it holds Brittin together for a thousand years.

And I'm not saying it was a nice thousand years.

You know, obviously, lot of civil wars and so on, dynastic struggles, civil wars, religious reforms, more civil wars, the rise and fall of an empire, two World wars, and yet that entire time you could point at a thing and say that's Britain.

His story would be told.

And retold again on both sides of the English Channel for the next several centuries.

But in all cases it begins in the most surprising place imaginable.

And here I'm going to read some poetry.

It's just the warning.

When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, and the fortress fell in flame, to fire, brands and ashes, the trader, who was the contrivance of treason there fashioned was tried for his treachery.

The most true upon earth.

It was Eneus the noble and his renowned kindred, who then laid under them lands and lords, became of well nigh all the wealth in the Western Ailes.

When Royal Romulus to Rome, his road had taken in great pomp and pride.

He peopled at first and named it with his own name, that yet it now bears.

Tyrius went to Tuscany, and towns founded Langebert in Lombardy uplifted holes, and far over the French flood.

It was still called the French Flood, not the English Channel.

Back then.

Felix Brutus on many a broad bank and bray Britain established full Fair, where strange things, strife and sadness at wiles in the land did fare and each other.

Grief and gladness off fast have followed there.

And when Fair Britain was founded by this famous lord, bold men were bred there, who in battle rejoiced, And many a time that betide they troubles aroused.

In this domain.

More marbles have been by men seen than in any other that I know of since that olden time.

But of all that here abode in Britan, as kings ever, was Arthur most honored, as I have.

Heard men tell.

Wherefore a marvel among men I mean to recall, a sight strange to see.

Some men have held it one of.

The wildest adventures of the wonders of Arthur.

If you will listen to this lave but a little while, now, I will tell you at once, as in town I have heard it told, as it is fixed and fettered in story, brave and bold, that's linked and truly lettered, as was loved in this land of old.

Now, if you want to know the rest of that story, you have to read Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight.

This is Tolkien's translation, by the way, of this fourteenth century Middle English poem about Sir Gawayne.

You have a story about King Arthur.

You have a story about Sir Gawaine.

But where does it begin.

It begins at the sack and the ruin and the destruction of Troy.

And if you can understand why they thought that was important, because when the Gawayne author, I just sort of picked him because it's cool, but also because he's kind of he's like several hundreds of years after Jeffrey.

If you can understand why they thought it was important to trace their line back to Troy, then you can actually begin to recover your heritage as Western people.

So I'm not here today to poke holes in the sixteen nineteen project.

I'm not here to complain about the way that the world is.

I'm not here to talk about how bad things are.

Truth be told.

I am, as I was telling somebody this morning, it's kind of a child soldier of the culture Wars, and.

I still have a lot of PTSD over that.

I'm not looking to revisit those particular battlefields, but what I am as a father of six children, and like Aeneas after the ruin of Troy, I've been trying to carry my father and my household gods to a new hearth and to a new homeland where we can all be whole.

That hearth is where I'm focused, and it's to your hearth and to your dining room table that I want to return at the end of this talk.

To get there, though, we'll need to explain the difference between these two attempts and mythology.

One of them has already fizzled out.

Nobody's talking about the sixteen nineteen project anymore.

The other continues to be the driving force behind all of our genre storytelling, most of our cultural myths.

And to understand all of this, we will have to understand the differences and the surprising similarities between the ways that the authors of the sixteen nineteen project see History and the Way that Jeffrey of Monmouth saw it.

So what is history?

Jeffrey's work, The History of the Kings of Britain is of a particular and peculiar ancient medieval genre, sometimes referred to as universal history.

So my friend Jonathan Pagoe and I for.

About four years now have been making videos and podcasts together about this subject.

And one of the most common questions I get is what do you mean by universal history?

Where the emphasis is on the second word, and so here a little etymology will help us out.

As Doug mentioned, I'm a philologist, so I'll try to keep this tight and brief, but I just want you to know, like we could just spend the rest of the day talking about the word history.

So, in its earliest sense, from the Greek history history, historia simply means inquiry.

It means knowledge gain from inquiry.

And we still preserve this sense in kind of archaic names, for like the Natural history Museum, that's not the history of nature, it's here's the museum of the things that we have learned learned from an inquiry into nature.

Aristotle's The History of the Animals is what we would today consider to be like a biology or maybe like a zoology text, whether that's a fair categorganization.

That's a different kind of a conference, I think.

But the word then makes its way into Old English via Latin, and by this time it has picked up the senses of account description, written account of past events, recorded knowledge of past events, story or narrative, and finally, by the twelfth century it has come to mean the story or account of a person's life, a chronicle, an account of events as relevant to a group of people or people in general.

So the story of your people mattered because it was your story, and therefore participation in that story makes you a part of your people, which means that if you forget your story, you actually forget yourself, You forget who you are.

To forget it is to forget yourself.

It's to cut yourself off from reality.

It is to be dissipated and scattered, like the nations on the plane of Shinar.

So, taken in this sense, a universal history is a history of everything and everyone.

Who we are, how we got to be where we are, how the laws, customs, rituals, traditions of our people give us meaning and allow us to continue to go here, so that we can be.

Long in the land.

Herodotus, who is very often considered the father of history, writes his histories as a way of telling the story of the Hellenes and as a way of telling the story of the Hellenes and the Persians.

But he took it as a given that in order to do this he would have to go back to the story of the abduction of Helen and the beginning of the Trojan War.

This, after all, is the first great war between the East in the West.

This is how the identity of the Greeks was formed in opposition to the Barbarians, which to the Greeks meant simply people who do not speak Greek.

Similarly, almost every work of Jewish and Christian history from the Torah until modern times has seen it necessary to begin at Genesis, because the first eleven chapters of Genesis have the answers to these questions who are we, where do we come from?

What does it mean to be us?

But they have the answer to those questions for everyone, for the whole race of Adam.

So, for instance, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which is a work which is mostly concerned with events in the eighth and the ninth centuries.

Begins at the incarnation, but then takes pains to trace the lineage Alfred back to Noah.

But beginning in the nineteenth century, there was a concerted effort to kind of move history.

Closer to the sciences.

So there's a guy named Leopold von Rnk, very often considered to be the father of modern source based historiography.

And what he said is history should be concerned with his quoting him here, what really happened knowable only by genuine and original documents.

And this attitude towards history is not unlike the obsession that you'll get with the original articles in biblical textual criticism.

Those things are related that came out of the same movement, And this is an obsession which, as you will probably know, has driven a lot of people to despair, since, of course we do not have these original articles.

Are these original articles in the room with you right now?

You know what we have is actually a received tradition.

There's like one millennial in the audience who laughed at the meme reference I just made.

What we have is the tradition actually as it was passed down to us.

So in our own age.

An over abundance of sources and changing attitudes towards time and meaning actually taken away the certainty that this modernist approach to history promised.

So it is now possible to find expert historians cherrypicked quotes academia dot edu articles.

I had a wonderful Oxford professor who always pronounced dot adieu like academia dot adieu.

Anyway, I love him so much.

You can find these articles to support virtually any position that you might want to take on any given historical events.

So, for instance, going back to the founding of this country, if you want to find evidence that the people who founded this country held a variety of views and positions that we would now consider to be morally reprehensible.

You can totally find that evidence.

If you want to find evidence that they were racists, that they were slave owners, that they were freemasons, that they were unitarians, that they were extremely dedicated Christians with a strong theocratic vision for America as a city set on a hill, you can go find an expert who will tell you every single one of those stories just dependagon which funding fathers you want to focus on, how essential you want to claim this particular person, date, quote, book, article, declaration, et cetera.

How important all of those things are.

So it's actually worse than this, though, because thanks to modern technology, in particular the camera, phone and mass media, it is actually now possible for us to watch some real time event playing out, and for one half of the country they see one event, and the other half of the country sees the other event, a completely different thing, with a completely different meaning and a completely different outcome, and we're looking at the same.

Piece of data.

You think of lots of examples of this in recent American history.

This is amazing to think about, given the fact that very typically that the typical modern response to any miraculous event, like when we say this miracle happened, the resurrection happen, you know, just pick a miracle.

The thing that people always ask me, especially especially younger people, the thing that they always ask is, well, okay, but if you'd been there with a camera.

Like would it you know, like, what would it have looked like?

And so for instance, Saint Constantine's vision of the Holy Cross, the instructions to buy this sign conquer, Okay, but if you'd been there with a video camera, what would the video camera have seen as though the video camera is actually the perceptive agent.

So this shift in the way that we viewed time and history are really actually part of shifting paradigms through which we have been experiencing time as we moved into the modern world.

So time and history, by the way, not the same thing strictly speaking, but they are closely related to each other.

So there's a great French philosopher, anthropologist, Olivia Clement, who I really like.

He has a wonderful book, Transfiguring Time.

I don't know if eight Day has that or not.

Always try to tell eight Day, get this book and sell it, because I'm going to talk about it.

And I don't get any money for that.

By the way, I just really like them.

But I forgot to mention this one anyway.

It's a great book, Transfiguring Time, and he talks about how the ancient Pagans experienced time as this great cycle, a succession of generations or ages.

So there are idyllic ages of.

Gold and silver and bronze in which men live the life of the gods.

And although each one of these generations perishes more often through their own folly, which echoes some kind of an adenic fall story.

Their lives are longer, better, more peaceful than our own.

Mediating between these ancient ages and our own Age of Iron is the fourth age, the Age of Heroes, and these heroes establish the world which we now inhabit.

They killed monsters, they found cities, They do mighty deeds, and because of their mighty deeds, we're told this is a hesiod.

They are given the rest and repose of the men of the Age of Gold.

But as for us, we men of the Age of Iron, we are locked in the endless cycle of the year, and in the greater thousands of years, cycles of the stars, repeating each sunrise, each summer, each winter, each equinox, each solstice, and the Golden Age is inaccessible to us, or almost inaccessible, because ancient man had one powerful recourse.

They had one.

Powerful tool as old as time itself, and that is the festival.

Through the act of celebration, of feasting and retelling the ancient stories of your heroes, your city, your people, you could for a day, for a moment, access the Golden Age again.

You could access that higher time.

There's the Greek word for this, cairos, which originally just meant the proper or fitting time for something to happen.

It still has that connotation, but words changed.

They pick up meaning over history.

And so the originally means the proper fitting time for which for a ritual to be carried out, or like the proper time to go to war, the proper time to do something.

If you just read the iliit in.

The Odyssey, they're always like before they do something, is like, is this a good day to attack the walls of Troy?

Let me go?

And you know, consult the oracles, ask the gods kill a lamb, how many loaves does the liver have?

Et cetera.

Right, all that stuff.

That's what divination is for, is to figure out what is the proper and fitting time to act.

Now, by extension, it comes to mean the time to which that ritual gives you access, an undying time that fills the chronos of the endless days and years with meaning.

And this is the basis of the ancient agricultural cycle of feasts, which is universal to all cultures, especially those which developed in a temperate climate, where season and solstice, springtime and harvest all have meaning.

Now, inattentive years of the old testament have opined that the Law of Moses replaced the old pagan cyclic view of time with one that was strictly linear, but this is simply not correct.

The feast of the Mosaic Law.

I think of, Passover, Pentecost, and so on have their obvious and universal correspondence in the agricultural cycles of the ancient Eeriest.

But in the Torah these feasts become tied to definitive moments in history, in the story of God's redemptive work on behalf of his people.

So the feast brings time and history together.

So the late spring or early summer feast of the First Ruts becomes the feast of Pentecost, which is the day on which the Most High God gives his law to his people, which is the means by which they can enter into a knowledge of Him.

So, according to an ancient belief of the Hebrew peoples, which is for instance, expressing the apocryphal Book of Jubileese, it was on the day of Pentecost that Noah made his with the God of Israel.

It's on the day of Pentecost that the Tower of Babbel falls.

It's on the day of Pentecost, that Abraham makes his own covenant with God.

And it's on the day of Pentecost that the law is given to Moses.

So you could go so far as to say, actually, from a heavenly perspective, that each one of these moments is just Pentecost.

It's the single day of Pentecost, which is always the day on which God renews his covenant and gives us.

The law by which He should be known.

Now, in the center of the yearly cycle, the axis on which the whole thing turns, you have the feast of Passover.

My tradition, we call it Pasca, which means passover.

That's all that is.

That's what it is.

It's passover.

Like you could just take all of the Orthodox liturgical texts and you know for pasca and we sing, you know, a great and holy Pasca.

But you could sing passover.

It would be correct.

That's what the word means in Greek anyway.

Okay, So, but at the center of the yearly cycle, the axis on which it all turns is pasca, passover, in which God makes a distinction between you and the Egyptians.

That is, he is calling his people out of the nations of the world, and now setting the part constituting them as a people set apart unto himself.

It should thus be no surprise that Christ, our light in our life, was himself sacrificed at passover, becoming the sacrificial lamb, leading us out of bondage to what ancient Christian hymns referred to as the spiritual pharaoh, the serpent, the devil.

And so Saint Paul can say, Christ, our pasca, our passover has been sacrificed for us.

Therefore let us keep the feast now.

Already, in the first few centuries of the Christian faith, a very clear understanding had developed, and this is evident in the ancient poscle hymns and sermons from this early period that the historical events of the Old ten Estiment prefigured the fullness that the feasts which commemorated them found in Jesus Christ.

So from this perspective, the passion, death, resurrection of Christ is actually the original passover.

You get that, so, like think of a line of history cross in the middle, that's actually the origin point.

When Christ is crucified, Saint Maximus the Confessor says, he finished his creating the world.

He's really actually talking about finishing the creation of man, but in any case, different talk.

So that's the first passover.

When he defeats the enemy of death, when he calls us out of the Egypt of this.

World and into the Promised Land, and.

That has ripple effects back to the Exodus, but also forward to us.

Because Christ is new atom, he makes common cause with the entire human race.

And therefore this is not a Jewish story.

It is a human story.

The Gospel is good news for everyone.

Everyone is invited to celebrate.

So if you were to represent this on a diagram, sometimes when I talk about this, I have a little whiteboard that would obviously not work in here.

I did sort of think maybe I could like whip something up in MS paint this morning.

Did not work out, So you're just gonna have to imagine.

But I just imagine Crucifix in the center, which the church fathers say, you know, was both in a mystery the creation of the world, and also the fullness of time.

All of time begins at Pasca, flows from it, gather and is gathered up into it in the Escaton.

Thus the events of Holy Friday, Holy Saturday of Great and Holy Pasca can be through the chairotic time of the liturgy, closer to us than the events the Vietnam War or whatever you were doing last Tuesday.

Now, there's a lot of ways to describe modernity.

I actually I'm a really big fan of Ziemint Bauman's Liquid Modernities, and so I was I really pleased to hear it brought up last night.

There's a lot of ways to describe modernity, but one of the easiest ways to explain it is that it is a movement opposed to Cairos.

So modernity is profoundly concerned with progress, with getting somewhere.

We don't really know where, but we're going to get there.

So the modern project has found it necessary to break down all of the old limits around time and around space.

On a practical level, most of us are not actually worried about predicting the vernal equinox.

In fact, there's a lot of smart people in this room, but I would venture to say most of you couldn't do it from scratch.

Probably not by the way people ask me sometimes like how like in a classical ad setting, how are we supposed to like teach astronomy, how do we teach the stars?

That's how you start like you're not a classically educated person if you cannot like figure out when spring starts by observing the stars and planets anyway, different rant, I'm sorry, they're all bleeding in now.

Okay.

So maybe you have a home garden.

When do you.

Decide to plant, Well, whenever the little demon in your pocket tells you to, can you just pull it out?

Look it up?

Oh, this is a good planting time.

I used to have to like get this stuff from your grandpa.

You know, there were several attempts in the early modern period to get rid of Kiro's entirely.

There was a failed attempt at metric time, for which we can blame the French, and he knows, he knows.

There was a failed attempt at metric time.

There was an attempt to enforce, for instance, a ten day work week, which to just not go well with anybody.

There was the removal of Christian holidays, some fifty or so holidays being removed from the calendar of Western civilization during the early modern period, and then to replace them with some civil holidays or some other things that we'll get to in a moment.

And I'm sorry to say that Christians had a part in this as well.

There is, of course, the very well known Puritan War on Christmas being a good example.

So if every day is neither more nor.

Less holy than the last.

Then keeping a celebration like Christmas or Easter is nothing more than superstition.

If we were to diagram this modern view of time, it would just be a long line with points, and each point would be at a regular, perfectly regular interval, because each day is like the last.

Now, at some point in the last one hundred and twenty years, the modern project started to fall apart.

Measuring the whole world, collecting all the data, explaining all of the miracles did not actually have the intended effect.

It did not remove ambiguity and mystery from the world.

Instead, the sheer number of seemingly contradictory facts threatened to drown us because we couldn't agree on a vision of progress.

What are we working towards?

Is it a capitalist utopia?

Is it a worker's paradise?

There was no greater pattern by which the story of history could be organized, so various governments tried to control this, and one of the ways they tried to control this is with propaganda.

So in modernity, you can only celebrate things inasmuch as they feed into the identity of the nation state.

So there's this replacement of religious holy days with patriotic holidays.

It's part of that shift.

And then postmodernity brought all of that crashing down.

And what's interesting about postmodernity is that it actually brought back in this old language, old.

Way of thinking.

I think Jonathan's still in the room, but this is one of the most important things that I think he's helped us understand, is that postmodernity actually brought back the old language of center and margin, the old language of hierarchies.

And in that sense, it's actually, in certain ways closer to the ancient way of seeing history than modernity was.

But postmodernity is only ever capable of seeing history in a series of struggles center versus margin, privilege versus oppressed bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.

And the problem with seeing the world in this way is that there can never be a common celebration.

There can never be a single moment that all peoples and all times look towards, celebrate and find themselves parts of a larger story.

And if we wanted to diagram.

This post modern experience of time.

It's just a line.

There's no points, there's no magnificance.

It is whatever you want it to be.

It's a flat, undi undifferentiated experience of time in which our lives are now so totally insulated thanks to modern technology, so totally insulated from the cycle of the seasons, from the rising and setting of the sun, that we don't need to know the cairos to do something.

Because it's always a good time to buy blackberries.

You can buy blackberries any time of the year.

Did you know this?

You just walk into I'm serious, this is a problem now, I'm really serious.

Like if I wanted to like sum up everything that's wrong right now, like you know my gripe with a machine, if you want to put in that way, it's the fact that I can buy by blackberries in the middle of winter.

Everybody knows blackberries are harvest one time a year, and you can only store them for a certain amount of time, and if you do not eat them all before Michaelmas, the devil will steal them.

This something was well known and understood by our ancestors.

But now you have a refrigerator, you can buy a BlackBerry anytime you want.

So you guys are still laughing about that, but I'm really mad about the BlackBerry thing.

So if modernity removes cairos so that the only thing which can be celebrated is the nation state, postmodernity just removes that celebration altogether.

So something like a Pride parade, for instance, it's not a celebration.

It's an act of war.

Since there are no longer common points of reference, since identity is constructed, since our stories are understood primarily in these power differentials, inequalities, any celebrations are now punitive.

Whenever you're celebrating.

One thing, you're punishing something else, which is why they don't want us to celebrate, because they'll interpret Christian celebration and I don't have a they in particular mind, just the world.

Okay, they interpret Christian celebration was done in a public way as this is an assault, right, This idea of speech.

Is violence, for instance.

So despite being a culture which prides itself on inclusivity, we are actually the most divided that we've ever been, not just from each other, but also from our ancestors.

Now, ironically, the Middle Ages, which is not generally considered to be the most inclusive period in human history, is actually has a vision of storytelling which was capable of bringing together all these disparate elements in your story and in your society and your history, and bring them together.

At the foot of the cross.

So one of the curious aspects I want to go back to, Jeffrey.

Now, one of the curious aspects of medieval universal histories.

How are we doing?

Ooh boy, Okay, I'm not gonna make it man, all right.

So one of the curious aspects of medieval universal histories is the way that the cross becomes the central point around which conflicting origins can be arranged.

So early on, Christian universal histories take the events of the Trophrojan War the end of the Hellenic Age of Heroes as a matter of fact, while Pagans, when they convert, take careful pains to tie their own culture back to the events of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, and in particular the famous Table of Nations in Genesis eleven.

Cultures who convert very late at a time when converting to Christianity also meant being grafted on to the Greco Roman inheritance of antiquity, they worked very hard to trace themselves back both to Genesis but then also to Troy, so that Pagan Norse, when they finally convert, they you hemerize their gods, their old gods as Trojan survivors, and then also trace their people back to a legendary fourth son of Noah about whom there are many.

Traditions even in ancient Judaism.

Now with this in mind, we're now prepared to understand why the story which Jeffrey of Monmouth tells begins at Troy.

As he tells it, those days when David reigned in judea brute, that is, Brutus Felix Brutus, great grandson of Venias, arrived in the island of Albion and exile after a long and violent search for a homeland, and there they found the island desolate, ruled over by a race of giants, which Brute and his Trojan kinsmen killed or drove out, establishing a kingdom which then runs parallel to the Davidic dynasty, but also to this burgeoning little city state on the Tiber, which will eventually become kind.

Of a big deal.

Brutus is succeeded by his son Leo.

About the same time that David is succeeded by Solomon and Silvius.

Ipputus becomes king of the Latin succeeding his father.

But Brutus's dynasty continues with a mix of good and bad kings, including of course King Lear of leader Fame, until some four books in Jesus Christ is Born, I quote by whose precious blood was mankind redeemed that aforetime had been bound in the chains of the devil.

Now Monmouth's history thus triangulates these three locations Jerusalem, Rome, Britain, and their stories are told in parallel until the time of Pope Eleutherius.

The now Roman faith of Christianity is brought to Britain at the behest of the King of the Britons, and by making this connection, the stage is now set in a few generations for.

The coming of the person of Arthur.

And in the person of Arthur, all.

The things that it means to be British, not merely Anglo Saxon or Norman or Welsh, are united.

The descendants of the invaders from a foreign land, connected to the oldest story in Europe, now very importantly a Christian monarch, a lord of a kingdom with as much claim to antiquity and Christianity as.

Anywhere else in the world.

And now to make up for the fact I'm going to make you slightly late for lunch, I'm almost done, but I'll give you something which I wasn't going to give you.

So this is like to buy a little bit of your time.

And that is the name of King Arthur's Lance.

Does anybody know this?

By the way, does anybody know the name of King Arthur's lands without looking it up on your pocket demon?

Was that?

No?

That's his sword?

Was that?

No?

That's not it?

No?

Wait say it again?

No, no, no, okay, all right, Ron?

Who is that?

Yeah?

It's really fun when you're reading along and Jeffrey, it's like and then you know, here's here's Arthur and his sword caliburn, and his and his shield pre you when and his lance?

Ron it's actually it's actually short for a Welsh word.

But anyway, Yeah, that's that's the name of That's actually why I read all this stuff.

I just want the cool names of weapons.

So much later in the medieval period, this latter angle, this idea of Christianity coming to the island of Britain is further developed with legends about Joseph of Vermathea, the infant Christ and did these feet, et cetera, et cetera.

But Jeffrey's version of Arthur is very early, and that is, of course because he didn't invent the character.

Arthur's a person to him, a historical person to him.

He knows stories about Arthur, and so there's very few of the characters in Jeffrey that you would expect to meet in later Arthury and romances.

There's no Lancelot yet, for instance.

But his most important deeds in the history of the Kings of Britain are generally as a general, as a war leader, and as a Christian king who opposes the invading Anglo Saxons, who are Pagans, the ancestors of much of Jeffrey's audience.

Is the point I'm trying to make there, as well as actually the Roman.

Emperor, and so thus Britain is part of a larger story, but it's also Britain.

It has a unique identity that's nested within this higher order, but it is distinct to being Britain.

It's independent, it's not a vassal state.

It's a kingdom with ancient claims to sovereignty and independence and so on.

Because the mythological roots, of course of Britain go just back as far as the mythological roots of Rome, they go back to Troy.

So this myth, which continues to be developed in its most refined form, for instance, Layman's Brute, it's referenced in that prologue to Sir Gawaine in The Green Knight that I read to you, proved to be potent enough to craft a British identity.

And so in twelve sixteen, as The Brute was being written, King Henry the Third was crowned King of England.

And he's the first monarch since ten sixty six to consider himself a.

King of England, not a Norman, not an Anjovin king, but English.

The story of Britain, which folded Britain into the larger Christian story, proved potent enough to contain a distinct British idea identity actually well after the Reformation.

And I'm not saying that identity was wholly without problems, obviously, but it.

Was cohesive, it was durable.

It gave the people of the island of Britain a mythology in which to situate themselves long after they had ceased to believe in it as primary history, and would just be really clear before I wrap up, I'm not saying Jeffrey invented the story.

He's collecting, he's retelling, There's no doubt about it.

But the story is retelling is one that is very old and has the weight of antiquity and anonymity behind it.

It's very important for a founding myth.

If you can point to the guy in the room who wrote the founding myth, it's not a founding myth.

So for a story like this to work, it's got to have that weight behind it.

And it's very important that we understand this when we try to situate ourselves within the Christian tradition.

We can't manufacture this.

So how do we take this home?

Which is supposed to have been the last fifteen minutes of my talk, I'm going to make it the last two minutes.

Here we go hold on.

I use the story of Brutus and Arthur and Troy and Britain as an example of the way that medieval cultures situated themselves in the larger Christian and Greco Roman story because it's more or less familiar to us in the anglosphere, but also distant enough from us, or at least from some of us.

Obviously, we've got some people from the UK here that we can use it as an example of a useful example of how this sort.

Of thing works.

So when we talk in terms of stories and storytelling, most of you will hear what I am saying in terms of books and cinema, maybe music, things that we've been conditioned to think of a storytelling within our own society.

You might also be thinking that we need a textbook, we need curricula to educate our children in this way, and maybe you're right.

But when it comes to the question of how do I take this home, how do I transmit this to my children?

I like to start with food.

Now, there are various reasons for this.

Is that I am a hobbit in my heart, and I think, actually, in serious all seriousness, a lot of the charm and desirability of reading The Lord of the Rings comes from the fact that there's the sense of this connection of food to place and to time into an identity.

And after all, aren't all the best books such as The Hobbit, The Odyssey, the Bible, they're really just books about cooking.

Seriously, though, read the Odyssey it's like the longest travel, like the longest food blog you've ever read.

So my journey into these deep patterns of universal history is actually really personal and that as for me, this journey began with my wife's rediscovery of an intent to cook her way through the Christian year.

And this is when we were at the time in a tradition where there was no Christian year.

And so my wife said, I would like to rediscover this.

And the thing I have control over is the kitchen, and so this is what we're going to do.

So through feasting and hospitality, we re enchanted our family's experience of time.

And it's my belief that if we could just recover, to begin with, just recover Christian patterns of fasting and feasting in other words, celebration, something like an American Christian culture could begin to emerge or be recovered, one rooted in the ancient rhythms of the Church year, vibrant with the hospitality of the new world.

This isn't about inventing a new myth.

It's about living out the old ones.

Folding our daily.

Lives into the eternal cairos where Christ is at the center.

And so here I will mention to you my second book plug for the day, Evelyn burge Vitch's delightful cookbook A Continual Feast.

And they have just a few copies back there at the book table, which you can get.

My wife and I.

This is the book that my wife and I used to cook our way through the Christian calendar and to rediscover our faith.

Now.

Iviitch reminds us in the book, by the way, that feasting is an incidental it's sacramento.

It's a way to celebrate the joys of family and faith together.

And so it draws from the traditions of the old world, which shows in this book how the major feasts that all Christians hold in common, Nativity, Theophany, Apasca, Pentecost, etc.

Can transform ordinary meals into these portals and these little windows into sacred time.

There's a wonderful anonymity by the way to a recipe or else they you could say, recipes have divine authority if you don't think, okay, but think when I say something like this is my grandmother's banana pudding.

If I say this is my banana pudding, it's a little it's like, okay, man, that's a little pretentious, Like would just say you made a pudding.

But if I.

Say this is my grandmother's banana pudding, there's a divine authority there, like this came to us.

No, I'm serious, Like this came to us from the ancestors.

Right.

So there's an old world, an old world.

Practice of having what the Serbs call a family slava.

But this is just the serves that did this.

Everybody used to do this.

The English used to do this, The Norwegians used to do this.

A family feast or a holy day, which.

Is like a big celebration for your family, and it's when you bring your community together.

So for some people this might be the birthday or the name day of the family patriarch.

For others, this was, for instance, Saint John's Night at Midsummer, when the wealthy of the community feasts the poor, which is one of the things you're supposed to do at a feast, I hope you know.

Usually it was.

A day which was connected in some way with some great feast of the Christian year of our Lord, of one of his servants of one of his saints under whose name the hospitality was being practiced, because that's a way to give to your hospitality that anonymity or that divine authority, which makes it authentic instead of just self serving.

So in our family it sort of accidentally became situated right around Christmas and not on Christmas Day itself, but we usually do it right around the first of January, which is part of the twelve Days of Christmas, as I hope you will know.

And on this day we hold what has come to be known in our community as a Charles Dickens Christmas.

And what we do is we take the recipes from this book that I just showed you, the recipes of old europe plum puddings, very different kind of a thing than a banana pudding, by the way, Roast goose mince meat pies with real mince meat, a roast that's been marinating in a vat of cider for a week.

All these recipes are in this book.

By the way.

The impetus for the celebration for us actually came from this desire just to have a Christmas like the one you read about in an old book, you know, And then like, you know, I'm from the South, so you have what turkey and stuffing?

Like I was like, I want to find out what goose is.

Like, guys, turkey is a sy op to keep you from eating goose.

Like once you have goose, that's it, You're done.

You will never buy another turkey.

So every year the menu is essentially the same.

But what we do is we rotate out the guest list.

And so sometimes we invite our sixteen adult god children.

Sometimes we invite new members of our parish that we would like to get to know.

Sometimes we invite those just who have no one else with whom they can celebrate Christmas.

The meal is not a meal, it's a feast.

It has the kinds of prayers and toasts and the storytelling that make a meal into a feast.

So matter where or when you live, to be a follower of Christ has always meant to be a pilgrim and a stranger to this world.

And this, I think, by the way, is why the Aeneid resonated so deeply with Christians in the Middle Ages, even more so than Homer, Because.

To be in exile in search of a new homeland, to.

Carry your father on your back.

Old anchises with his bad knees to carry him with you.

What is best about what it means to be you, to be where you're from, even as you go in search of this new homeland.

Well that's the story of trying to tell the Christian story.

It's a long road and there's going to be a lot of meals along the way.

Thank you.