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- [00:01]
Jonathan Pageau
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
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- [00:24]
Jonathan Pageau
Kids.
- [00:25]
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- [01:21]
Ben Shapiro
Jonathan Pageau is a French Canadian liturgical artist, writer and public speaker on religious philosophy, symbolism and Orthodox Christianity. Pageau first rose to prominence through his popular YouTube channel the symbolic World, where his interpretations of mythical patterns have attracted.
- [01:35]
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More than 20 million viewers.
- [01:37]
Ben Shapiro
Pageau is also the founder of Symbolic World Press, a publishing company specializing in.
- [01:41]
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High quality books which aim to revive.
- [01:42]
Ben Shapiro
The beauty of ancient storytelling. Here at The Daily Wire, Pageot's spiritual and philosophical insights have been featured in Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's 17 part Exodus seminar, as well as in Jordan's most recent series, Foundations of the West. In today's episode, Jonathan and I discuss the biblical themes that can be found in classical fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, and the important role storytelling plays in establishing our most deeply held cultural norms. Pageau also speaks to the modern uses of symbolism, from the prevalence of conspiracy theories to the real meaning behind the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics. After all, as I'm fond of saying, politics is downstream from culture, and that makes Jonathan Pageau's work toward the revival of traditional beauty an essential part of our politics today. Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special. Jonathan, it's great to see you.
- [02:34]
Jonathan Pageau
It's great to see you, Ben.
- [02:35]
Ben Shapiro
So let's talk about deep and fun Things, you know, I spend most of my time obviously covering the news, covering the election, and it's not particularly deep. And this year it's not particularly fun. It turns out that things are very serious. And it turns out also that the news is transitory. And the thing that you work on day in and day out is the meaning and symbolism of the deepest things in the world. So that means that you're constantly talking about the Bible and symbolism and. And now fairy tales. I want to start with having you talk a little bit about your work with fairy tales, because that's something that I think most people don't spend any time thinking about. It's embedded deeply with the vast majority of us. I mean, the minute that you say you've written a book about Jack and the Beaten Stock, that's Jack and the Fallen Giant. And most of us know the story, obviously. I'd say the vast majority of the population knows the story. But the point that you make is that these stories are embedded in our civilization for a reason. So why don't you explain that a little bit?
- [03:26]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah. Well, one of the things we've seen, you know, fairy tales have been actually pretty popular in the 20th century, and we've had Disney do amazing things with them for a few generations. Like one generation and a half, you could say. But now everybody, the people that were kind of the guardians of our fairy tales have dropped them. It seems. They don't actually want to deal with them. They're icky to them because they have things in them that they can't deal with in terms of their ideology. But they were right in their insight that fairy tales are kind of, you could say, downstream from the Bible. That's the way that I understand them. They use a type of language which is simple, similar to biblical stories, but they're more accessible and they're accessible to kids. They deal with fantastical images. So sometimes some of the things in the Bible that are hard to grasp because it's kind of dry. The stories in the Bible don't have a lot of description. They don't describe interstates. They're very dry, but they're amazing. They're the best type of stories ever told. And fairy tales are downstream from that, where they use the same patterns and they connect to the same ideas, but they have a little more buffer and they're more accessible for the common people. So that's how I see them, and I take that very seriously. So even you mentioned the title, Jack and the Fallen Giants. One of the reasons why we're doing it that way is because there's a connection between the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and the story of the giants in Genesis and also later in the Old Testament. So we're trying to help people see those connections and see how the fairy tales aren't just a bunch of ridiculous things that are accumulated together, you know, that are just funny and ridiculous, but they actually have patterns that describe the cosmos in a deep way.
- [05:03]
Ben Shapiro
I think that the way that most people think of fairy tales and the way we tell them to our kids, magic is a big part of that story. And religion has always had this very fraught relationship with sort of the idea of magic. Obviously, the Bible itself calls out things like using witchcraft. It's actually a death penalty offense in the Old Testament. So how should religious people see magic? Because these are kind of ongoing debates, interestingly, in Jewish circles, in Christian circles, about what's real, what's not, what does it mean when it's talking about this sort of stuff, and what's the role of magic in these fairy tales?
- [05:34]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, well, I think that especially as modern people, one of the things we can understand magic as, and this is, I think, the way that C.S. lewis or Tolkien understood magic as something like the deep connection of the world, right? So there's a deep pattern in the world. There's a type of causality which is higher than the type of causality that, you know, mechanical causation does. Like, there's a type of causality related to meaning. Maybe that's a good way of understanding it. There's a vertical causality. I can say things and they happen. So that's dramatized in stories by something like a spell, you know, like you say something and it happens in the world. But the truth is that you do that all the time. Just ask your child to bring you a glass of water, and you basically cause things to happen with meaning. And so I think that's the deepest level of magic that we can understand in those stories. The problem with magic and the way it's described in the Bible is when we try to use patterns of meaning and we try to kind of gain these mysteries of the universe and use them for our own power to predict the future or to, you know, to enrich ourselves and to do all that. And that's why these types of things are evil and in Scripture. But, you know, divination is there in the Bible, Joseph has a divination cup. You know, the. How do you call it? The umin and thumen. I forget how it's pronounced.
- [06:47]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah. Orim and tummim. Yeah, yeah.
- [06:49]
Jonathan Pageau
Those are divination tools that we don't even know how exactly they function. And so it's not like sometimes when we read that, we read the prohibition against sorcery in the Bible, we think that it means that they're all a bunch of scientists and that anything that was outside of that was unacceptable. It's rather about using the power of meaning to twist reality and to, you know, to use spiritual powers for your own sake. You could say it that way, yeah.
- [07:14]
Ben Shapiro
I mean, I think one way to read that in sort of more rationalistic, Maimonidean way would be to suggest that, you know, when you pray, for example, you could see that as a form of magic, theoretically. Right. You're saying words. You hope that God hears those words. Does that mean that God changes his mind? What exactly is prayer? I've talked about my own personal issues with prayer in the sort of sixth grade sense of it, where it's like, okay, I want a thing, therefore I ask God for the thing, therefore God gives me the thing. And God is gumball machine sort of model. When in reality what Maimonides would say, or probably Aquinas, is that the basic idea is not that, it's that the prayer changes you. You're aligning yourself with God's will. And that means that the thing that God is giving you is now more in alignment with the thing that you want because you've actually changed your own wants, you've changed yourself. And so the idea of you having a sort of force in the universe that is effective, that that is actually reliant, they've never seen that in sort of dark magic or whatever it would be, is that when you are attempting to manipulate God, that is a sort of weird form of dark magic and it's not going to work out well for you. And when you are attempting to align yourself with God, that's a completely different thing. And your life gets better because you've aligned yourself with God in a sort of rationalistic framework.
- [08:19]
Jonathan Pageau
I think that's exactly right. And that's why we don't understand prayer in religion as just asking for a bunch of stuff, although that's part of it. Like, we do ask God for things, but that's always associated with contrition, with confession, you know, with trying to. To work on your sins, to also to worship God. And like you said, what that does is that at some point, you know, asking for a new Corvette just becomes ridiculous to you, you know, as you become closer to God. And so then you'll ask for the good of your friends. You'll ask for people around you to. To. To find God. Like the. Your. Your. The desires of your heart will change. And that's when you know. That's when the prayer starts to become effective. Because you're not asking for anything just because it's your whim.
- [09:02]
Ben Shapiro
We'll get some more on this in a moment.
- [09:03]
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- [09:38]
Ben Shapiro
Or at a coffee shop or at an airport or something.
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- [10:08]
Ben Shapiro
So I think it'd be awesome for you to take me and the listeners through kind of your analysis of one of these fairy tales. So pick one of the fairy tales that you like the best and give us sort of the deep read on it.
- [10:18]
Jonathan Pageau
We could pick Jack. I think Jack is a. Is a good example because also we just published the. We're just publishing the newest version and Jack's fun because the thing about Jack is at the outset it looks ridiculous. Like it's really difficult to see with the connection. Since I was a child, I love that story. But I was always wondering, like, how do we get from these different parts of the story to the others. Right. But it's actually, once you kind of understand it, it's actually quite. It's deeply coherent. And so like a lot of the stories, Jack is of coming of age story at the outset. Right? There is. And this is also the thing that's difficult about a lot of puritan interpretation of fairy tales is they try to get rid of the coming of age and sometimes sexual imagery that's in. That's in the fairy tale. By doing that, they miss a whole part of it. Now the other part, like the, the more progressive types, let's say, in the 20th century, have tried to emphasize just sexuality, but that's also wrong. It's both. Just like in the Bible, there's a bunch of sexual symbolism, but it's not just about sex. It's about how sexuality can show us a deeper meaning and a deeper participation. So you see that in Jack. So basically, Jack doesn't have a father and his mother's poor, right? And so she's the poor woman. She's the widow in the story of Elijah. She's someone who doesn't have. She doesn't have anything coming from heaven to give her an identity, to hold her together. And so Jack has to trade the cow, he has to trade the feminine for seed. And it happens about, at the time that he's at that age where that's going to happen to him, where he's going to kind of leave his mother, his body's going to develop, he's going to discover masculinity. And that's. And so. But it's magic seed, you know, but seeds are magic in themselves. Like, it's. That they don't even have to be magic seeds. They're. They're the difference between a cow that gives you milk and seeds that you can plant in the ground. And then they, they give you a whole bunch of food forever if you're able to do it right? So that's what's going on in that story. He plants the seeds at night and he wakes up with a giant beanstalk. There is a little bit of a sexual illusion there about him discovering masculinity. He climbs the beanstalk and then he encounters a giant. And so in encountering the giant, he basically encounters the problem of masculinity, the problem of hierarchy. The idea of trying to integrate a world of masculinity when you're, when you're coming of age, anybody knows that. You try to, you have to. You have to. When you try to join a team or you have to do Anything you have to prove yourself and the other men are giants to you, right? So then. But he has a problem. His mother's poor. And that's one of the problems that he's trying to deal with. The poor mother. And so he finds a bag of gold. He steals that from the giant, brings it to his mother, you think the problem solved, right? He found a bag of gold, solved the problem, but then the gold runs out. So what's better than gold, right? What's better than gold is the way you make gold. If you can produce gold, then it's much better than gold. So he goes back up and he gets a chicken that lays golden eggs. He's reached a higher level of understanding, like a higher pattern of masculinity, a higher pattern of civilization, just a higher pattern of how the world functions. Brings that down to his, his mother. But again, that's not enough. It seems he has to find something else. And then when he goes back up, the last thing he finds is a harp that. A golden harp that plays music. So you think, what the hell? Like, what is the relationship between the gold and the chicken that lays. Goes down on the heart? But it's. Once you understand that what he's getting from heaven is something like patterns. He's getting patterns of being. So you think of Moses that goes up the mountain, right? What does he get when he get to the top? He gets at the top. He gets a pattern of being. That's what the law is. He gets a pattern of space. That's what the pattern of the tabernacle is. And so this is what he's getting. He's getting patterns of being. And now he gets the highest pattern, for all intents and purposes. He gets what, you know, what we call the music of the spheres. Basically, the pattern of everything is what he's attaining, right? The logos itself, if you want to use another type of language. And so he steals that from his mother and then he comes back down. And then he cuts the. He cuts the beanstalk and the, the beanstalk falls. And so now he's gotten from heaven. But it's a. It's a weird Promethean story. It's actually a little suspicious because he's stealing these things from heaven. So there's something of a Promethean element to what he's doing, which is he's going into up Mount Olympus and he's stealing the fire from the gods and bringing them to Earth. And so this is the, this is, you know, once you kind of understand, you can see that it's totally coherent. It makes sense with a lot of the Bible stories. It makes sense with the ancient myths and that it's a grave story, actually, because Jack is a thief who goes into heaven to steal knowledge from the gods, basically. And so in our version, what we do is we. I play with that, where I use reference, the idea of the fallen angels and the fallen giants and this, this idea that in some ways there's something suspicious about what he's doing. Although we all, we all tend to do that, but there's something suspicious about it.
- [15:15]
Ben Shapiro
I mean, one of the things that's fascinating about what you're doing in re examining these fairy tales, it demonstrates how they can also be emptied of. Of all meaning. So you mentioned that the early Disney fairy tales are replete with tremendous darkness. I mean, if you watch the original Snow White from Disney, it is incredibly dark. I mean, if you show it to your kids, this was rated G. People were scared in the theaters. Kids were crying like it's a real thing. And now, because we basically have said that children should never experience anything that scares them or that upsets them, many parents will never show their kids anything like the old Disney movies. The old Disney movies. Again, if you watch Pinocchio, Pinocchio is scary as hell. Truly, it is frightening. I mean, there are children turning into donkeys and being caged forever. I mean, it's really, really scary. And then you fast forward to kind of the fairy tales as they're retold today. And now it's all kind of the same theme. It's always some young girl who is becoming self empowered and never really has to face a villain. It turns out there really isn't a villain. There's just somebody who's sort of misunderstood. And then eventually everybody, it all comes out right in the end because she has found her inner sense of confidence. And then the world is somehow a better place. And that's the story of pretty much every single one of the Disney fairy tales for the last 10 years. So you can see the transition in American life in how these fairy tales are told.
- [16:33]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, and you're totally right. Not only that, but there is a type of arrogance which is that we're going to transform the fairy tales, we're going to twist them, we're going to change them into something that's ideologically aligned with what we want. But the truth is that the fairy tales are not ideological at all. They offer a full story. And you can see different aspects of humanity in these fairy tales. And they're not political in the base sense. Right. It's about really deep relationships of children to hierarchy, about how to integrate the world and how to be excluded from the world. All of these really powerful and important statements like the, you know, that we can see that Disney is. They don't know what to do with Snow White. They just don't know what to do with it. They're stuck because they don't understand it, first of all. And then they think they understand it because they think it's all about patriarchy and about politics. But they don't understand how it is a coming of age story of a young girl and that young girls in the real world, coming of age also means encountering someone with which they're going to found a family. Without that, the world runs out of people. Like if it's just about empowering yourself and being independent, then you don't. Then the world runs out of people in the end.
- [17:44]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah. I mean, that is one of the amazing things that again, I think that the left wing political ethos has taken over so many of these stories. My favorite example in terms of sort of the Disney arc. And again, I'm an old Disney fan, huge Disney fan. It makes me really sad to the core of my being how Disney has destroyed its own IP and really screwed itself up as a company on behalf of politics. My favorite sort of compare. Contrast here is the difference between the Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio, always let your conscience be your guide. Which is literally a line from the movie. I mean, the entire story of Pinocchio is that the boy who's coming of age refuses to let his conscience be his guide. He has to explore every bad idea. And then finally he learns that responsibility on behalf of protecting his own family and his father is actually the way that you become a real boy. Right. The way that you actually mature in the world. You is to take on responsibility and duty and act with conscience as opposed to going to Pleasure Island. Right. I mean, like the thematic could not be clear in the original Pinocchio. And you take that and then you contrast that with the immorality of the most popular song of the last 20 years from Disney, Let It Go, which is entirely about. There's literally a line in there that says, no right, no wrong, no rules, I'm free. Which is about as pagan an ethos as it's possible to find. You can see the arc of American morality in about 60 years right there.
- [18:58]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, exactly. And I think, I think you're right. And that's why they don't know what to do with the fairy tales because the fairy tales just don't, they don't play that game. There are deep reflections of reality that have been built up over millennia, you know, and we have to take. Treat them with respect and because if not, they're going to turn against us. You know, and even what happens is that when you twist the fairy tales, you end up saying things that you don't even know you're saying because you don't even understand the, the, let's say the, how fraught it is to play with these, with these patterns and to just kind of twist them as you want and it will turn against us. You know, like I said, the idea of. People don't realize that the idea of the self made person, you know, that is not how, that is not how civilization functions. We need, we need each other. And so if you think it's ridiculous that the princess ends with the prince or that a movie ends with a marriage, it's like that's how the world functions, how the world works. If you just want to explore your own personal desires and doing that, you're not going to. You're basically going. It's an anti human stance and it leads into human results.
- [20:02]
Ben Shapiro
I mean, that's exactly right. If you look back to, you know, all, if you look back to Shakespeare, which is sort of a, you know, a toned up version of fairy tales, I mean, all of his comedies are essentially a form of fairy tale. And every single one of them ends with a marriage, right? Every single one of Shakespeare's comedies ends with a wedding at the very end. Because that's why, that's why life is funny. Life is funny because all these bad things happen. And then the generations move on. You get married and you build a thing. And, and with the tragedy, everyone dies at the end, right? Death is a tragedy because they actually you have not fulfilled your function of passing it on to the next generation. And usually in the tragedies, it's not just an old person dying, it's the young person dying. That's the real tragedy. The end of Lear Isn't Lear's death really. The end of Lear is Cordelia's death. And that's true throughout all of the stories of the west. Is this importance on the deepest things. And because we have become a sterile civilization. And I wonder how much of that is connected to the sterility of rationality. I really pride myself on rationality. I love reason. Reason's great, logic is great. But the truth is that the things that people tie themselves to are in fact beyond reason. And that's one of the things that you are really very much focused on, is the fact that the things that people most believe in are not in fact the things they can reason out. It's the stuff that's sort of pre rational.
- [21:17]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, well, one of the things I've been arguing now for a decade is that there is a relationship between the excess of rationality and the excess of desire. That those two things actually kind of happen at the same time. So when you look at the Enlightenment, you have the Enlightenment move right away. And then right in the shadow of that, you have Marquis de Sade and Sasser Mazok, you have sadomasochism and sadism and masochism happening right at the outset of the Enlightenment. And there's this sense in which if you don't have something that unites them together, and if you don't have something that transcends reason and emotion or reason and desires that kind of unites them, then they're going to separate. And at the outset you can start with just reason, but then that collapses into just desire. And that's what we've seen. We see this weird pendulum even happening in our society where on the one hand you see these systems of absolute control being set up by states, and not just states, but something beyond states. And at the same time, this worship of complete idiosyncrasy and like complete personal self made self identification and my identity is actually my desire. It's not even anything that holds me together, it's just whatever whim I have. But those two things actually interestingly go together. You need something to hold identity, reason and emotion, or reason and desire into the transcendent.
- [22:37]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, it's one of the things that again, I think it goes back to much what you're talking about with fairy tales, but I've talked about this theory that it's always pretentious to say that you've coined a theory. So I haven't really coined this theory, but it's what I've termed role theory, which is the idea that all of religion is really and all of culture is built around particular roles that are universal to human beings. And we as a society have decided that roles are bad, roles are impositions from the outside, that what we really are is that free floating, authentic desire. And that any roles, because roles come with rules, isn't imposition on us. And therefore we have to explode those rules and explode those rules in order to live a free and full life. When in reality, the roles are what makes us who we are and what pretty much every fairy tale is about and what every great story is about is a person reconciling and making the most of the role that has been laid out for them. The world preexists you, and you're born into a role the minute that you're born. And I mentioned this with regard to the religious community I know best, the Jewish community. When, when you do a Brit me law, when you, when you, when you enter a child into the covenant at eight days old with an actual mark in their flesh, when you do that thing, you, you, you literally say that the child is entering the community. And you say that the child should, should enter the community by, by going from the, from this to fulfillment of the Commandments to the chupa to getting married. Right? This is like the, this is the path that we're laying out for you at eight days old because you're born into a thing and those roles are pre laid out for you, and you have liberty to live out choices within those roles. But the minute that liberty becomes a universal asset that destroys the roles. The minute that that happens, it's no longer liberty now it's libertinism and everything descends into chaos.
- [24:17]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, and it's the same with just, even basic citizenship. We tend to understand citizenship as a right, but citizenship in the ancient world was understood as a role. That is, you are a member of this group, but it also means that you are responsible for the group and you're asked to participate in the body. Or else what? Exactly. We're just a bunch of the suburbs, right? We're just a bunch of people laid.
- [24:40]
Ben Shapiro
Out.
- [24:42]
Jonathan Pageau
On land that have nothing to do with each other, that have no common goals, no common purposes. And that's the fragmentation that we're seeing in North American society.
- [24:52]
Ben Shapiro
You mentioned citizenship, and it's really fascinating. I was rereading a book by Victor Davis Hanson about culture, and I think it's called Carnage and Culture. And the basic idea is why the West Wins Wars. And he lays out a description of ancient Greek citizenship. And the basic idea that he points out is that what made you a citizen, you had private property. And because you had private property, you were expected to defend the private property. When somebody came knocking, the entire phalanx would go out and just eviscerate everyone. And so the Western way of making war was, here is our state. We're all gonna go out, we're all gonna eviscerate them. We're not gonna take prisoners we're not gonna be nice. We're gonna eviscerate them so we can go back to farming. But it was a duty. The duty was you pick up your spirit and you'll be part of the phalanx. And you can see how that's shifted in Western civilization to now. Arguments over who has a right to serve. I mean, what do you mean, a right to serve? That's such a bizarre statement. A duty to serve is a thing that you have. A right to serve is a very weird thing to claim because usually the service is in. Is in fact in service of the right. Meaning you do your duty so that you have the other side of the coin, which is the right. You have a right to property because you did your duty, not you have a right to serve and no private property. It's such a weird reversal of everything that was traditional.
- [26:07]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, but I think it is in some ways a. It's a difference in the way we understand the human person. And it has to do with. I mean, it's a kind of diabolical insight, which is that I'm owed this. I'm owed whatever. I'm owed. I'm owed. I'm owed the rights. I'm owed this. I'm owed pleasure. I'm owed all of this. And then ultimately it really is. I should be God. Like, that's the ultimate thing that's behind. Is that I don't like God, because really, I should have that too. And so it is right, that it's that move in the garden, right? It's the move of Eve and Adam and Eve that reach up and take the apple for themselves instead of understanding that they are tenders of the garden. And whatever they receive, they receive from God. It's not for them to just take upon themselves. And it has to do with. I mean, it's funny because that's it with Jack, like this Jack story. This is why, you know, in some ways, he's growing up to just take it. He just goes up and takes it for himself. We have. We even have. We really have this idea that that's how the world functions. Like, whatever you need, you have to go and take it for yourself. But that's not. Like you said, it's not the deepest form. Right? Anybody who's a father knows that the deepest thing is to give. Like, the deepest thing is to be responsible for these people and to be able to be a model and to. And to. To give to those around you so that we can come together if we just think of Taking then, yeah, we end up all alone, basically.
- [27:30]
Ben Shapiro
You also have a duty to a history that precedes you and to. And to descendants who are going to be there long after you. I mean, this is Edmund Burke's point, is that basically civilization is a contract between those who have died and those who are not yet born. I mean, the idea that you are a freewheeling, atomistic individual is such a negative. And it's actually a Satanic idea. And I mean that in sort of the Miltonian sense. Right. As a Jew, we're not big on the Satan theology, but the Miltonian Satan, which is the idea that you would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, is the idea that you would rather tear down all the structures of the civilization around you just so you can claim your autonomy. Then you would be in a place of prosperity, knowing that you're not at the top of the hierarchy. And that is a deep human impulse, and it's a destructive human impulse that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel, which is really the story of a figure who is, for a reason he can't discern, rejected by God. He brings a sacrifice, actually his idea to bring sacrifices, and then Abel brings the sacrifice. And Abel's sacrifice is then taken by God. And God specifically designs this as a test of Cain. It's hard to read the text without coming to the conclusion that God is doing this specifically in order to text Cain, because he then has this incredible exchange with Cain. The first time in human history that God is explicitly testing someone in advance of the thing happening, right, where he says that sin crouches at your door because God knows what's gonna happen, but you can master it. Which he's basically saying, like, figure out what Abel did. Right. Instead of trying to destroy Abel, and Cain can't handle it, and he goes and he kills Abel. You know, that is the story of humanity in a nutshell. And it feels like we've built a society of Cains. And so anybody who's considered a builder has to be immediately struck down. By the way, I don't think it's a coincidence that at the end of the story, Cain actually repents. Cain repents, and then he becomes a city builder.
- [29:15]
Jonathan Pageau
Yeah, I think you're. I mean, the story in Genesis are definitely, I think, some of the most powerful stories that have ever been told. And it's difficult for people because they're told in a weird way. You know, they're not told in the modern way that we understand them. And there's not a lot of exposition. They're very short. For example, like the genealogies, people aren't used to seeing stories in genealogies, but just the genealogy of the descendants of Cain and the descendants of Seth is like, there's amazing stories just in that genealogy. And so we need to recapture those stories, obviously, because like you said, the problem of civilization is there in the story of Cain. You know, the, the question of the, the dangerous and opportunity, the danger of civilization, the opportunity of civilization are there in the story of Cain. You know, there's a reason why Cain was seen in relationship to Rome. You know, this idea that also Romulus killed his brother and founded a city. You see, it's, it's a universal story that, that manifests itself in all different ways. And the problem of civilization as inside and outside is one that, you know, is difficult to reconcile. We have to find the right way, the right balance in order to be able to deal with inside and outside. And a lot of the laws in the Old Testament are there to find a way to balance that. Right? So you on the one hand you have the identity of the people of Israel and then you have the strangers. But you do leave a corner, you leave the corners of your field. You have certain ways of dealing with the stranger which is there to prevent, let's say the all out war that led to the flood. Right, the all out war. It's not described in Genesis, but we have other traditions that talk about how, you know, the development of civilization went out of control and then there's all these wars that lead to chaos and so how to. So, you know, the rest of the Bible is always playing out these first stories, right, and trying to like, help us find solutions to the puzzles that they bring. At least that's one of the ways of understanding it.
- [31:21]
Character from a dramatic or fantasy scene
What was it like, Malin, to be alone with God? Is that who you think I was? Alone?
- [31:36]
Jonathan Pageau
Maradin.
- [31:37]
Ben Shapiro
I knew your father.
- [31:38]
Jonathan Pageau
I am yet convinced that he was.
- [31:40]
Ben Shapiro
Not of this world.
- [31:44]
Character from a dramatic or fantasy scene
All men know of the great Taliesin, who are my father, that the gods should war for my soul. Princess Garrus, saviour of our people. I know what the bull God offered you. I was offered the same. And there is a new pirate work in the world. I've seen it. A God who sacrifices what he loves for us.
- [32:10]
We are each given only one life singer.
- [32:12]
No, we're given another. I learned of Yazu the Christ and I have become his follower.
- [32:21]
Jonathan Pageau
He's waiting on a miracle.
- [32:23]
Character from a dramatic or fantasy scene
And I think you can give him one. Trust in Ya'. Zu. He is the only hope for men like us. Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Light.
- [32:32]
Great light. Great darkness. Such things mattered to me then.
- [32:38]
What matters to you now, Mistress of lies?
- [32:41]
You, nephew. The sword of a high king. How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield. So clinging to the promises of a God who has abandoned you.
- [33:01]
I cannot take up that sword again.
- [33:04]
You know what you must do.
- [33:07]
Great life, forgive me. The time has come to be reborn.