January 17, 2025 • 58 mins
What do these 20 outlaws, revolutionaries, and mystics have in common?
What if timeless wisdom from unlikely figures could speak prophetically into our present day? In this episode, we explore this question with a deep dive into "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" by Robert Larry Inchausti.
Alongside Professor Inchausti, we examine how the radical insights of thinkers like Wendell Berry, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day challenge modern anxieties and oppressive ideologies, offering hopeful visions that remain profoundly relevant.
Join us as we uncover the hidden threads connecting Christian intellectual traditions with broader cultural currents. From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Chesterton and Kierkegaard, these figures disrupt conventional power dynamics while rooting their critiques in enduring faith.
We'll also draw on John Pattison's review in "Besides the Bible" to explore how these thinkers boldly question the status quo, providing a fresh perspective on the intersection of faith and culture.
As we navigate the complex landscape of belief and skepticism, contrasting the approaches of figures like Joe Rogan with the introspective Russian literary tradition, we invite you to explore the quest for meaning in a fragmented world. Reflecting on the transformative power of Russian literature and the moral fortitude of Solzhenitsyn, we consider the challenges of nihilism and the search for purpose amidst chaos. This episode is an invitation to engage with profound narratives and share these insights with those seeking significance in today's disjointed reality.
Reading from book, "Besides the Bible: 100 Books that have, should or will created Christian culture" by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison
Reading from Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander"
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
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 aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(00:27):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in.
Full of anxiety, depression andteenage suicide.
Full of anxiety depression andteenage suicide.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Back in 2006 or 2007, I saw a book on the shelves at
Barnes Noble and it readSubversive Orthodoxy Outlaws,
revolutionaries and OtherChristians in Disguise and I
just had to have this book.
It wasn't the first time.
I had been a pastor for about10 or 15 years and I had over
(01:20):
500 books.
Probably my wife was alwaystrying to get me to get rid of
books and I just kept collectingthem and collecting them.
Over the years I started torealize that this one book I
just kept coming back to Somehowit challenged me and created
some sort of a vastness thatmost of the books I read did not
have.
Most of the books I read weresome type of specific Christian
(01:41):
theology, debating stuff that isdebated in seminaries, stuff
that normal people would havenever heard about.
So when I found this book, itinvolved people like Wendell
Berry and Martin Luther King Jr,dorothy Day and I was like I
have to have this book and Ihave to understand these people,
because this is kind of themind I want to have, where they
(02:04):
can understand culture, they canspeak to it, they can critique
it, they can bless it.
They have an understandingthat's outside of their own
biblical theology.
I read some of it back then andthen I just kept coming back to
it through the years.
It's not super dense in thesense that it's not a huge book.
It's more like a reader to getyou introduced to these 20
(02:26):
different people in the book.
But it is dense and it'swritten in a very poetic prose
and I kept getting inspirationfrom it.
The way it inspired me washearing from people from
different vantage points artists, thinkers, activists,
theologian, one theologian andmany authors.
(02:48):
They had different backgrounds.
You know Russian, orthodox,baptist, american, all sorts of
different other UK and otherplaces.
They're coming from differentfields and different expertise.
The way these authors spoke tomy Christian perspective was so
deeply profound and true and itrang out into humanity in
(03:11):
general.
And that's where I felt theoutward motion of this, where I
just wanted to share it withsomebody In this way.
I believe it to be prophetic andevangelistic, and by
evangelistic I don't mean what Igrew up with a typical
understanding of evangelicalsand the altar call type of a
short message, high pressuresales.
I mean they're sharing andpointing to a macro narrative of
(03:34):
God.
That's good news across spaceand time.
It's a very cosmic good news, agood news that stands up to
Nazis and communist fascists.
It's prophetic in the sensethat it speaks challenge to a
culture because of God-impliedunderpinnings, and evangelistic
in the sense that these authorsare sharing convictions of hope
(03:54):
in a critique of modern andpostmodern notions that
dehumanize us and enslave us.
These are the things I couldfeel when I would read it, but I
didn't know.
How did these people prophesythese things 100 years ago and
50 years ago, and that's whythis book was so profound to me.
When I hear McLuhan or Mertondescribing the culture, it
(04:14):
sounds like they're talkingabout 2025, social media, ai, et
cetera, but these things werenot even invented yet.
They weren't even on theirradar in the slightest.
It's like they were seeing thefuture and could read the times.
Jesus once said when it isevening and you say it will be
fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be
a stormy.
(04:35):
It'll be stormy today becausethe sky is red and threatening.
You know how to interpret theappearance of the sky, but you
cannot interpret the signs ofthe times.
In Matthew 16, two throughthree, he said that I've always
wanted to be able to interpretthe signs of the times, but all
I have to offer is thissubversive orthodoxy stuff
that's been said 50 to 100 yearsago, way in advance, and I
(04:57):
think it actually isinterpreting our time now.
Honestly, I think it's morerelevant now than it was when
these writers wrote them.
Honestly, I think it's morerelevant now than it was when
these writers wrote them.
So I had this book.
I kept coming back to it.
I was revisiting it a fewmonths ago, back in July or
(05:19):
August, and I was reading Ithink I read Solzhenitsyn
chapter and I was just like man,this book is crazy and I
thought I looked back at theback cover.
And I thought I looked back atthe back cover.
Dr Robert Enchosti.
He is teaching at Cal Poly, sanLuis Obispo English.
Huh, I wonder if he's on thewebsite.
I reached out to Dr RobertLarry Enchosti back in August he
(05:41):
goes by Professor or Larry, andI want to tell him how much the
subversive orthodoxy meant tome.
It empowered my worldview andresonated all my inklings about
faith and culture, and itchallenged my intellect in ways
that were both invigorating anddeeply challenging, and I knew I
had to bring this conversationto others in the form of a
podcast.
So, with no further ado, Iactually have Dr Robert Larian
(06:05):
Chostey here today.
The professor, hi Professor.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Hey Tavis.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's great to have you here and I'm so glad you
were willing to have thisconversation and keep the
conversation going from yourbook.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah, well, I'm happy to be here and I'm glad that
you have the questions Well.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
I'm happy to be here and I'm glad that you have the
questions.
So Dr Larry's formal, orProfessor Larry's formal, bio
here is that he is a professorof English at Cal Poly, san Luis
Obispo and author of numerousbooks, including Subversive
Orthodoxy, the Spitwad Sutrasand Thomas Merton's American
Prophecy.
He's an authority on ThomasMerton, who is in the book, and
(06:46):
a lover of literature by writerswho challenge the dominant
narratives of our time, from theBeats to the Mystics.
Larry has spent a lifetimestudying the voices that refuse
to conform, and that's why we'rehere.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
So, doctor, I mean sorry, I keep saying doctor when
I say PhD, I just think doctor,professor, yeah, I always think
of doctors as people thatactually heal people physically,
so I prefer professor, maybeyou're a mind doctor, yeah, so
(07:22):
the title of the book grabbed meimmediately.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
It's such a provocative couple words
together.
And you know, we just found out.
You know well, you shared withme that some authors named
Gibson, green and Patterson hadwritten a book called Besides
the Bible, and this was 100books that have, should or will
(07:48):
create christian culture.
And I wonder if you wouldn'tmind reading that intro to your
book on that, because this is athey gave.
They gave, uh, professor larry,a whole shout out in that book.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
well, I, I I will read it if you want me to.
I have to go downstairs and getit, so we have to oh, no
problem, I have it right here.
Oh, you have it right there.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, I have it and also we could potentially save
it for a little later in theconversation too.
What was your experience withthis book's trajectory since you
wrote it and then hearing fromme, did it feel like, oh, I
don't know if I want to bring upthat old book?
(08:29):
Or did it feel like, yeah, Inever really got to play this
whole book out as much as Iwanted?
Yeah well, it was the latter.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
It was like I wanted to go back and revisit
Subversive Orthodoxy because itseemed like it had set me up for
my books on Merton.
But the backstory to all ofthat is contained in this
(09:01):
Subversive Orthodoxy and inthese figures over the last
hundred years that were indialogue with the modern culture
in the sense of enlightenmentculture from 1500 on, but also
modern culture in the 20thcentury and the postmodern
movement.
And a lot of these figures arepeople that I found that I
(09:26):
didn't even know they wereChristian until years later,
after I'd been reading them.
And then I came across, youknow or if they did know it,
(09:57):
didn't see it in connection withother thinkers and other
prophetic voices of the time.
Thinkers and other propheticvoices of the time,
(10:24):
no-transcript, yeah.
And I knew that this guy wasChristian reading that first
volume because the voice was sofamiliar in terms of the
prophetic voices of other 20thcentury religious thinkers and
mystics that I wrote an articleabout him.
(10:47):
And then I started finding allof these other prophetic voices
and I said well, you know, I gotto put this together because
nobody's really yet sort ofconnected the dots here and
offered people a way into aorthodoxy which is subversive,
(11:14):
of the authoritarian andoppressive aspects of modern and
postmodern world and postmodernworld, but at the same time
(11:35):
connecting to deep roots inWestern religious history.
And so I wanted to make thatconnection and I did, but
apparently not for many people.
Enough people to keep itpublished.
It only was published for aboutthree years and then it went
out of publication, but the goodnews was I got the copyright,
(11:58):
so I still am the author of thisbook.
It's not like one of thoseauthors that, like I think, ray
Bradbury sold the rights ofMartian Chronicles for $300.
And he never got any moneyafter that for all the movies
and things that followed from.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
That's crazy, yeah.
So I think it'd be good now toread the intro from those other
guys, because they obviously sawin your book what I saw and
they wrote about it perfectly.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Since you have it, why don't you read it?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, I'll read it.
It's about two pages.
Okay, just listen to how thisguy describes the subversive
orthodoxy and this actually willtell you exactly where we're
headed with this podcast.
And he actually names most, ifnot all, of the names from the
book of where we're headed.
So this is kind of the table ofcontents as well.
(12:54):
So this is from Besides theBible by Dan Gibson, jordan
Green, john Patterson.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
John Patterson was the one who wrote the review of
my book.
Okay, so this is from JohnPatterson.
John Patterson was the one whowrote the review of my book.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Okay, so this is from John Patterson.
He says he opens with a thingabout orthodoxy by GK Chesterton
.
On on Chesterton's book calledorthodoxy.
So he says GK Chesterton openshis book orthodoxy with a
parable about a sailor wholaunched out to discover
uncharted lands but then got offcourse and bravely rediscovered
(13:25):
his own country.
Chesterton described his voyageto faith.
Chesterton, describing hisvoyage to faith, says he was
that sailor.
I am the man who was the utmostdaring, discovered with the
utmost daring, discovered whathad been discovered before.
As a burgeoning intellectual,he had tried to be original,
tried to stand alone and only torealize that his feet were
(13:47):
firmly planted in Christianity.
He tried to be on the cuttingedge, 10 minutes in advance, of
the truth, only to find out hewas two millennia behind it.
He wrote I did try to found aheresy of my own and when I had
put the last touches to it, Idiscovered that it was orthodoxy
which is hilarious.
Last touches to it, Idiscovered that it was orthodoxy
(14:07):
which is hilarious.
Subversive orthodoxy is Robertand Chastity's book-length essay
about 20 poets, philosophers,novelists, historians, critics,
religious leaders and socialactivists whose work draws from
the deep well of the Christiantradition, chesterton being one
of them.
And Chastity's subjects aresubversive because they are
inherently suspicious of worldlypower.
They're trying to build a newsociety in the shell of the old,
(14:29):
as Peter Morin, the co-founderof the Catholic worker movement,
used to say.
And they are orthodox becausethey test new things against
first things In the beginningwas the word, and scrutinize the
present in light of the end.
This is what Inchasti calls theeschatological perspective on
human existence.
Enchasti follows a thread oforthodoxy through an impressive
(14:50):
roster of artists and thinkers.
Some we know on a last-namebasis, like Blake Goeth,
kierkegaard, chesterton,dostoevsky, kerouac, merton, day
, king.
Others, like Nikolai Berdyev,boris Pasternak, alexander
Solzhenitsyn, walker, percy EFSchumacher, wendell Berry,
(15:12):
marshall McLuhan, northrup Frye,jacques Ellul, ivan Illich and
René Girard, may be lessfamiliar, but they deserve a
wider audience.
Together, they comprise nothingless than a lifetime reading
plan, and that's what I foundtoo Subversive.
Orthodoxy goes far in correctingtwo persistent misconceptions
about Christianity.
(15:32):
The first misconception is thatChristianity is inherently
reactionary, unconsciouslywedded to class, race and gender
prejudices, bound byfoundational metaphysics and
littered with outwornsuperstitions.
The mass media, whoseprevailing bias is for conflict
and sensationalism, depicts onlythe extreme elements of the
faith.
Meanwhile, a small what's theword?
(15:55):
Cadre, cadre, cadre, cadre ofrevolutionary Christian thinkers
has gone about quietly,rigorously, examining all
thought and culture in themessianic light of the last day.
Compare Ntchassi's table ofcontents to our own and you'll
see how thoroughly convinced weare of his argument that the
gospels have served and canstill serve as a pivot around
(16:16):
which most entrenching analysesof modern civilization can turn.
Wow, there's some brainiacsgoing here.
The second misconception is thatorthodoxy is somehow insipid
and boring.
From Blake's defense of theimagination to Nikolai Berdyev's
critique of the mechanizationof the human spirit, from
Dorothy Day's struggle todesacralize war to Ivan Illich's
(16:38):
lament for the demise of thecommon space and the
contemplative culture, from theChristian anarchism of Jacques
Ellul to the radical agrarianismof Wendell Berry, from
Dostoevsky, whose novel theBrothers Karamazov has been
called the Fifth Gospel, to JackKerouac, who once called
himself a strange, solitary,crazy Christian mystic.
Enchastis, outlaws,revolutionaries and other
(17:01):
Christians in disguise confirmwhat Chesterton wrote more than
a century ago.
People have fallen into afoolish habit of speaking of
orthodoxy as something heavy,humdrum and safe.
There never was anything soperilous or so exciting as
orthodoxy, and a damn and a damnabout that Amen my brother.
(17:24):
That is a crazy tribute to yourbook.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
So yeah, so when I talked to you and we thought you
know this has a lot ofrelevance for today on
solstitzen and mccluhan,especially more recently, um, I
just could not.
I couldn't believe the, themoral fortitude of solstitzen
(17:50):
and the, the, the talk of soulthat I feel like our culture has
abandoned along with you know,uh, abandoning like religion in
general.
They kind of lost the conceptof soul and have have moved on
to things like meditation andmindfulness, without without any
(18:11):
concept of soul, more like justmental health.
So hearing Solzhenitsyn saythat you know from the gulags is
pretty incredible and we'll get, we'll get way into that.
But then, when it comes toMcLuhan talking about our
culture and media and everythingand just he's literally
prophesying about social mediais just so insane to me, dang,
(18:32):
that there will be a globalvillage where immediate mass
electronic communications willget everyone to know everything
about everyone's business in anegative way, knowing way too
much about each other.
I just couldn't believe what hewas saying when I you know he's
saying it in 1967.
So these people have a lot tooffer our culture right now.
(18:56):
I feel like we're, I feel likewe're wandering blindly into
this, this technocratic utopiawe're walking in.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Well it's.
It's such a utopia.
Everyone's so happy and joyful,1966.
And it's, as you say, could betalking about 2025.
We're living in the greatestrevolution in history a huge,
(19:35):
spontaneous upheaval of theentire human race.
Not the revolution planned andcarried out by any particular
party, race or nation, but adeep, elemental boiling over of
all the inner contradictionsthat have ever been in man, a
revelation of the chaotic forcesinside everybody.
This is not something we havechosen, nor is it something
(19:59):
we're free to avoid.
The revolution is a profoundspiritual crisis of the whole
world, manifested largely indesperation, cynicism, violence,
conflict, self-contradiction,ambivalence, fear and hope,
doubt and belief, creation anddestructiveness, progress and
regression, obsessiveattachments to images, idols,
(20:24):
slogans, programs anddistractions that only dull the
general anguish for a moment,until it bursts out everywhere
in a still more acute andterrifying form.
We don't know if we arebuilding a fabulously wonderful
world or destroying all that wehave ever had, all that we have
(20:46):
ever achieved.
All the inner force of humanityis boiling and bursting out,
the good together with the evil.
The good poisoned by evil andfighting it, the evil pretending
to be good and revealing itselfin the most dreadful crimes,
justified and rationalized bythe purest and most innocent
(21:11):
intentions.
There you got it, man.
That's Merton nailing the wholething.
Nailing it, but just as acommentary on the present.
One of the things I think madesubversive orthodoxy kind of a
(21:36):
secret or a cult following of 25people or whatever.
However many would contact meabout the book is that people
(22:00):
don't read much anymore in theway that you have to put
everything aside and concentrateto get the deeper meaning of
Solzhenitsyn.
I mean Solzhenitsyn's threevolumes right.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Three large volumes.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Three large volumes, pretty large volumes.
I mean you have to be dedicatedfor a month or two to read that
.
Yeah, and not every paragraphis going to be really exciting
or startling with an aphorism orsomething.
(22:43):
Know, startling with anaphorism or something.
But if you hang in there,you're, you're, you're climbing
a mountain and you get to apoint where there's these vistas
, where you turn around and yousee the last 50 years in depth
in 3d cinema, scope, vision and,and this guy is telling you
(23:06):
about you know how he got thereand it's, it's just it's.
It'll hit you, you know, kindof like all at once and you'll
see it all at once and you don'tforget it.
It alters your view of the world.
You don't have to memorizelines.
Just the name itself evokes inme those two months that I
(23:32):
dedicated to readingSolzhenitsyn and realizing that
I would say every review I hadread of it was read by somebody
who hadn't read the book.
Right, because you can only saythese glib one liners if you
hadn't been with the guy in hisarrest, in his torture, in his
(23:53):
interrogations, in his marchingon the tundra trying to write
without a pencil.
Memorize it.
But the way you write without apencil is.
(24:13):
You memorize, uh your lineswhile you're you're marching on
the tundra and you make everyfive fifth line rhyme.
So if the fifth line doesn'trhyme, you forgot a line.
So now you have to continue uhmarching to find that line that
you dropped and then, once youpick it up again, then you're
allowed to go on to the next.
(24:34):
And he did this for months, andso when he finally gets access
to like a pencil, he has to buryit in a cell because it's
contraband material and he can'tlet anybody see that he has a
pencil.
And then when he finally gets apiece of paper, five months
later, he has to cut it inlittle strips and roll it in
(24:57):
little rolls and bury the rollsin his cell.
And so then when he's when hedecides to write, he doesn't
want to waste the paper, so hedecides he develops a script
that contains no vowels, so hecan just write with consonants
that will bring back to himthese, uh, precious descriptions
(25:23):
and points he wants to preserve, never knowing if he'll ever be
able to dig them up from hiscell and be able to send them in
letters, or however he's goingto get them out.
That's still up to question.
And even if he got them out,they would never be published in
the Soviet Union, because thecensors would never allow any
(25:44):
stories about the gulag, becausethey claim they didn't exist
yeah so when he finally gets out, I know we're getting ahead of
the story, but you.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
You always get ahead on when we talk about sasanitza
when he gets.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
When he gets out, he decides that now he's going to
write, he's going to be able towrite.
And when they arrested him theyasked him what his occupation
was and he had been an officerin the Russian army in World War
(26:21):
II.
He was sent from the front inWorld War II to the Gulag.
So he went from fighting theNazis to being the victim of his
own Soviet government and hewrote that his profession was
(26:43):
atomic scientist and he wasn'tan atomic scientist.
But he thought that they wouldbe less likely to kill an atomic
scientist.
So if they thought he was anatomic scientist they might keep
him around longer than whatthey did with some of the other
guys.
So he finally gets out and theygive him a job teaching physics
(27:06):
at a Siberian high school andjunior and middle school.
So he's teaching middle schoolphysics in Siberia in the day
and then in the night he'swriting the Gulag one page at a
time and burying it in tin cansin his backyard.
And he had five differentnovels going at the same time
(27:26):
and there were five differenttin cans in his backyard.
And he had five differentnovels going at the same time
and there were five differenttin cans.
And then he sent a letter to Ithink it was Tolstoy's great
cousin or aunt, with a map ofhis backyard and said if you
ever hear that I died, backyard,and say if you ever hear that I
(27:50):
died, this is the location ofthe lost literature of the
Russian people and you can comehere and this is where they're
at.
And he had, you know, a littlechart of his backyard and
luckily, you know, he was ableto get out and the rest is
history.
But while he was there workingon his paper there was a Gulag.
(28:13):
On the radio there was aninterview with a contemporary
Soviet bestseller author andthey were asking him how he
writes his Soviet realistmysteries.
And he was saying well, youknow, I try to have three
different color pens and Ilisten to music and stuff.
(28:36):
And he was thinking you knowthis guy, you know he has
everything to help him write butnothing to say.
Thing to help him write butnothing to say.
And I have everything to say butno means of saying it.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
And so I just got to you know, remember that other
writers went through more.
And then I just have to bethankful that I was given a
story to tell and that my storywill someday.
I have given a story to telland that my story will someday.
I have you know, he had to havethe faith will bring down the
Soviet regime, and the lie thatis dialectical materialism won't
be able to coexist with mystory.
(29:21):
And so almost all these writersare similar in that way.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, I wanted to ask you you started, you started
with Solzhenitsyn, that's how,that's how you got the idea
right.
Yeah, and so then tell us howit.
How did it branch out fromthere into the other writers?
Like, obviously, I mean don'ttell your whole.
Merton backstory.
Yet I mean, don't tell yourwhole Merton backstory.
Yet We'll include that anotherday, because I do want to hear
your personal story relates toMerton and that will be like an
(29:52):
intro to Merton, yeah, so howdid you branch out?
Speaker 3 (29:58):
to these other authors.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Well.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Had you already read them or were you kind of like
hunting them down at this point?
Well, I'd read some of thepeople that he referred to down
at this point.
Well, I'd read some of thepeople that he referred to and I
mean, I knew some people thathe referred to in his book his
literary memoir I had alreadyread.
(30:37):
So that was Like Dostoevsky,obviously Like Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy and Chekhov, who Itaught to the present.
There was a long section inthere on Pasternak and his
(31:00):
relationship to Anna Akhmatovaand Marina Tezveteva and
Mayakovsky, who were these greatsort of revolutionary Russian
writers before the RussianRevolution, were dissidents
against the czar and then foundthemselves in opposition to the
(31:22):
Bolsheviks and ultimately andultimately many of them thrown
in jail by Stalin for violatinghis authoritarian so it kind of
(31:54):
branched out into Russian mostlyat first, and then you started
adding others ended up in Franceafter World War I and were part
of the existential movementafter World War II, having
survived a second bout with Naziand war-torn terrorist
countries that a lot of themended up in.
And so there's like twogenerations of just amazing
(32:16):
Russian poetry.
But Pasternak we could talk alittle bit about Pasternak
because he's a great example.
He was a poet, famous Russianpoet, lyricist.
He was considered sort of theantithesis to Mayakovsky.
(32:37):
Mayakovsky was the publicorator of the Russian Revolution
, the Russian Revolution, andPasternak was the interior,
(33:00):
reflective soul of the peoplethat survived the Russian
Revolution, to put it that way.
And so they were kind ofdifferent, and so they were kind
of different politically,although they really admired one
another's courage to stand upagainst the regime before the
(33:20):
revolution and then also to notgive their integrity over to the
Stalinist takeover.
So they were grudgingly sort offrenemies, I guess you would
call them today.
And I knew about Mayakovskybecause he's sort of famous, but
I hadn't known that Pasternakwas a poet, because the only
(33:42):
thing I knew about him was thathe had written.
Dr Zhivago about him.
Was that he had written DrZhivago and Dr Zhivago had just
been made into a big motionpicture in the 50s.
And also, pasternak won theNobel Prize for Literature in
1958.
And then the Soviets refused tolet him receive it because they
(34:04):
said it was a trick by theSwedish committee to honor an
anti-Soviet writer within hisown country and that he really
wasn't that great and that hewanted, and they wanted him to
renounce his own writing andmake apologies for having been
(34:25):
so misunderstood by the West,and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And he was still living in Russia, right, he?
Speaker 3 (34:32):
was still living in Russia and Solzhenitsyn's heart
was broken because he thoughtPasternak was going to go and
get the award and blast theregime and explain what that
novel was all about.
But he died a year later of aheart attack.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Oh, a pasternak did.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah, but who knows why, he died a year later,
exactly right, but a lot of ithad to do with the mental
pressure on him.
He's one of Russia's greatestmodern writers and here he's
being hounded to renounceeverything he ever did.
(35:14):
And the way he made, the way hesurvived the Stalin years, was
he translated all the greatWestern literature into Russian.
So he translated Shakespeareand Goethe and the English poets
all into Russian, and so he waspart of the thought that took
(35:42):
place when Khrushchev took overand after Stalin died.
For a moment there there waskind of a like glasnost, an
opening of Russian culture tothe world.
That lasted for a while and hewould have been, you know, a key
(36:03):
player, especially with DrZhivago being a bestseller in
the West and being made into amovie.
Yeah, but the problem was themovie isn't, the movie is not an
accurate portrayal of the book,because the book is, uh, a
story about a contemplative umwho, uh who, and very written in
(36:28):
very symbolic, poetic languagewith Laura, a kind of symbol of
the natural goodness of theRussian people.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Actually, I'll read the thing you said about it,
that they were afraid of itturning into a movie.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Okay, when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958, the
(37:09):
Soviets saw the award as aspecies of failed socialist
realism, misreading its form,undervaluing its literacism and
totally ignoring its symboliccharacter, while many western
readers misappropriated the workas an anti-communist tract,
oversimplifying its complexmessage and undervaluing an
artistic integrity, its artisticintegrity and missing itsedic
(37:32):
spirituality.
Um, there was a part about theoh yeah, the novel also terribly
misrepresented by david lean'smovie, which captures all its
images and none of its ideas.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yeah, that's so.
That's so true.
The uh, uh you would.
You would go a far uh mile tofind and find many ideas in that
book, become a liberal or ageneral in the Russian army
(38:24):
after Stalin had died andlooking for a representation of
a humanist perspective on theworld.
But he has three lines.
He has three lines and youdon't really know who he is in
the movie and it's soovershadowed by the love story
(38:50):
between Dr Zhabago and Laurathat it just becomes a very good
romantic epic, but not theprophetic, contemplative story
that Pasternak told One of thethings he would say about the
book.
The only positive kind of thinghe said about his own book was
(39:11):
there are people like Zhivago inRussia.
He said about his own book wasthere are people like Zhivago in
Russia, and by that he wastrying to say there are
Christian contemplatives who seethrough the lies of history
like Zhivago, like me.
He couldn't say that, andSolzhenitsyn was so disappointed
(39:34):
in him because he thought youknow, this is going to open the
door to all my books.
You know I have six novelsburied in the backyard that
expose all these things indetail with actual historical
events and it's.
And then when he said well, Iguess I'm gonna have to win the
(39:58):
Nobel Prize so that people willtake me seriously, otherwise
they'll think one more time thatit's just a Soviet.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
This is anti Soviet trick, or something yeah and so
just I want to read uh, give our, give our readers, our
listeners, a little bit of, uh,your intro to Pasternak, um,
something Thomas Merton saidabout him is a quote on
Pasternak.
He said Pasternak'sChristianity is something very
(40:26):
simple, very rudimentary, deeplysincere, utterly personal and
yet, for all its questionableexpressions, obviously
impregnated with the true spiritof the gospels and the liturgy.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Thomas merton, and then um, you could say that
about a lot of the almost allthese characters in this book
and this other paragraph.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Um, I put a bunch of underlines and a wow, so I gotta
read that.
Um boris pasternak oncedescribed himself as an atheist
who had lost his faith inatheism, and I just feel like
that's relevant to our culturein general, because people yeah
people might find themselves asatheists, they might find
themselves as agnostic.
And here's, here's anincredible mind dealing with the
russian revolution, who losthis faith in atheism.
(41:08):
And he was born jewish, so bornjewish.
He was brought up by his nannyin the Russian Orthodox faith,
but as a young man he became askeptic and supported the
October Revolution as Russia'sbest chance to turn the tables
on history and right the wrongsof its tyrannical past.
When the revolution turned sourand its idealism was betrayed,
pasternak lost his faith infaithlessness and became an
(41:31):
internal émigré living in quietprotest.
Internal émigré living in quietprotest Internal émigré.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
He felt like he was a foreigner in his own country.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Okay, yeah, living in quiet protest against the new
totalitarian state, quietlytranslating Hamlet and Faust and
, along with Anna Akhmatova andMarina Tseva Tseva Mandelstam,
(42:00):
launching a radical defense ofthe poetic imagination through
clandestine readings and privatepublications that would
reverberate throughout the worldas one of the greatest defenses
of conscience in all ofliterary history.
In this last line, during thistime of persecution, he tells us
, he quote, came to understandthe bible not so much as a book
with hard, with a hard and fasttext, as the notebook of
humanity and a key to everythingthat is eternal.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Um, so that yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's
pasternak and uh, you, youwouldn't necessarily get that
from Dr Zhivago, as beautiful asthose images were of the film.
You need the ideas to go withit to let you know what you're
(42:47):
seeing.
You're not just seeing avacation in Dramond or something
.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, so I was going to
explore him a little more beforeI read it.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I mean, yeah, and it's, it's not.
It's not the book that the bookis is well, as is always the
case, that the book is betterthan the movie because it's it's
a deep reflection through theeyes of Dr Shibago, who is sort
(43:23):
of a stand in for Pasternakhimself becoming a losing faith
in his atheism.
That's pretty cool, and youknow a story of our atheism.
You know that's pretty cool.
And, uh, you know a story ofour times.
You know, then, the uh.
How how long is it going totake for some for people to
realize, well, how much, howcredulous you have to be to
(43:48):
believe in atheism, as, as adoctor, a dogma?
Carl Rohn used to say a man'sbest friend is his dogma.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And the dogma of atheism.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
it isn't skeptical enough.
If it were only more true toits own skepticism, you know,
then there'd be constantdialogues between you know
different forms of faith andbelief and contemplation, which
is what one would expect thepostmodern culture to be, but it
(44:34):
largely isn't.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, it's not.
I have a little theory.
This is just some fresh, somefresh Travis Mullen thought here
.
But I have my own theory,working working theory that
people believe what they want tobelieve.
That's my theory.
Yeah, the truth, true, I'm sureI've noticed it on um joe
rogan's podcast where he willtalk to you know people that
(44:59):
have some kind of a wacky ideaabout health or about politics
or about aliens.
He's totally into it.
And then he has a christian onthere telling him about jesus
and he's super skeptical he, hehe, he pulls, he has this
incredible, he becomes thisincredible scientist.
At that point, yeah, when it,when it's something he wants to
believe in, it's, uh, incrediblyopen.
(45:23):
So I've noticed that and I, Ilike, I like hearing his thought
process, but I did notice thatthere was one guy in particular
who was like a physicist, um, aChristian who was a Christian,
who was like a biologist, Ithink, I think it was
microbiology is what led him tofaith, and it was just too hard.
Joe Rogan just had, but whatabout?
(45:46):
But what about?
He had 15 layers of buts andwhen it comes to other
subjects's, just no butts, ormaybe one, but you know what I
mean.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of thisresistance, um, and I'm he might
even be open to it, I don'tknow but but his resistance is
evident, like it's veryresistant to certain things, and
it reminded me of your quote,where the atheist isn't applying
(46:08):
his own skepticism to himselfor to his own dogma well that
that.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
That's the other thing that impressed me about
these figures that I uncoveredwas that their self-criticism is
a big part of what they'reabout.
Like Solzhenitsyn since we'retalking about him, he has second
thoughts about how he handledhis arrest.
(46:33):
You know, and he says it rightup front.
You know why.
Why didn't I protest my arrest?
Well, it wouldn't have done anygood, and I think there was a
part of me that knew that.
I was waiting until I reallyunderstood how to take down this
regime before I started poppingoff in public, and that would
(46:56):
require me to become the writerI want to be before I get my own
podcast.
But what happens is, you know,you get podcasts now on
Solzhenitsyn, or you getpodcasts on, you know, my five
favorite novels, or my 20favorite novels, and they're
(47:18):
reduced to five sentences.
And yeah, and you can tell, ifyou've read any of those books,
that either they didn't read thebook or they didn't understand
the book, because most reallygreat literature, books or ideas
the writers understand thelimitations of it and they give
(47:41):
you the limits of their ownthought, and it's so humbling.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
It's like intellectually humble.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Intellectual humility .
Intellectual humility, andthat's what we call gravitas
right.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
Humility, intellectual humility, and
that's what we call gravitas.
Right that they, that they giveyou the truth that they found.
And then they sort of say butyou know, that came from the
life I lived and that came fromthese ideas and that came from
you know here, and now it's yourturn.
You know you, you go there andyou read them and you spend the
(48:15):
time it's not just being gliband having answers One thing
podcasts and radio and socialtalk shows and stuff.
Back in the day when MotherTeresa won the I think Mother
Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize, I think that's true and she
(48:41):
was on a Canadian televisionshow with the biologists that
had won the Nobel Prize inmedicine that year, the Nobel
Prize in medicine that year andthe talk show host was trying to
(49:04):
stir controversy and so he saidwell, you know, this is very
interesting.
We have a doctor here, a doctorhere who's working on cell
research that might somedayresult in eternal life for human
beings, and we have a Catholicsocial worker who believes in
(49:28):
eternal life life, what do theyhave to say to one another?
(49:52):
And so he asks Mother Teresa,you know what she thinks about?
But I do know I believe in loveand compassion and I would
prefer that to eternal physicallife, life.
(50:19):
And the doctor said after theshow that was the closest he
ever came to being converted toChristianity.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
She subverted his question like Jesus does.
Speaker 3 (50:26):
Yeah, it's like well, if you have eternal life and
you don't have love andcompassion, what do you have?
You know you have.
Eternal damnation is what youhave.
Eternity is.
That's not even a Christianconcept of eternity.
Values ahead of yourtechnological miracles, you know
(50:50):
you have to.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
That's a funny concept, given I just this week
was writing a little.
I was trying to write a shortstory about a technological
future scenario where people areresurrected by biotech.
They're kind of kept alive in abunch of chips and wires and
things in their body and theycan't die anymore yeah, and so
(51:15):
they're in.
They're in like this project,resurrection, eternal state and
um, they don't like it.
Like this guy, the maincharacter's wife was resurrected
and he didn't even want her tobe because now she's stuck
working for the state,technocratic, technocratic state
and um, it's kind of like nowthey're.
It's kind of out of thatrevelation and a bob dylan line
that like they want to die andthey can't even die.
(51:37):
Now, yeah, death is a relief tothat, you know yeah which you
know that's.
That is back to these, theserussian characters where they
had to survive the gulags andthe and the jews in the nazi
camps.
It's like how, you know, I meanthis whole concept is is
answering the question like howdid they survive that without
(51:59):
just wanting to die and eitherkill themselves or, or, you know
, death by cop?
Yeah, it could have easily donethat with a guard, you know
yeah um, but the, the fortitudeslash, some type of hope of
living beyond.
that was keeping them going, andthat's an incredible dive into
(52:21):
the human psyche that we'll beexploring more with these
characters.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
Well, yes, definitely , and Dostoevsky is the guy
we're going to go for that, oneof the guys who anticipated a
lot of that 19th century and andhe spent time in prison camp in
siberia.
But his was a 19th centuryprison camp, so you can imagine
it was probably even moreprimitive than that one that's.
(52:47):
I don't know how you could bein a prison camp more primitive
than the one solzhenitsyn was in, but I can imagine Dostoevsky
was pretty close to that.
Speaker 2 (52:59):
Another thing about that is that we didn't get to do
it because we weren'tparticularly going to focus on
Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak today.
But the Russian story to me islike a very unknown story to
most Americans that I've talkedto, like everybody's.
Like gulags I might've heard ofthat, and then Solzhenitsyn oh
(53:20):
yeah, I think I've heard of them, but that's about it.
It's like wow, now that I'veheard this story, I can't
believe it's not front of mindfor many people because Well,
yeah, I can't believe it hasn'tbeen a movie.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
I mean, I know uh, he wrote.
He wrote one short story thatgot pop, that was popular in the
west for a while.
Um, they made a movie out ofthat yeah, they made a movie and
that was just one day in aprison camp.
Uh, you know, and how this guysurvives and it's actually a
good day for the guy, but it's,you know, from any objective
(53:56):
point of view.
You know it was a horrendousday.
But taken out of context of thegulag, of the whole picture
that he presented, or anunderstanding of history, or
understanding of the atrocitiesand the gulags that are around
today, um it, it doesn't.
(54:20):
It doesn't um connect.
For some reason, people don'tconnect it with.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Well, it's the scope.
The scope hasn't been given tothe public.
The public has not seen whatthis was yet.
You know, I don't.
I don't feel like they have,yeah, in a popular culture way.
Yeah, I don't think the gulagshas made it to popular culture
yeah because the holocaust has,because there's so many movies
about it.
But meanwhile there's, you know,while there's 11 million dying
(54:48):
in nazi camps, there's another30 million dying in gulags and
death marches and such and justbeing shot and being arrested
for very minimal things, andit's just a astonishing story.
I mean, it's absolutelyincredible story and it and and
then to hear the pasternak tothe solzhenitsyn handoff and how
(55:08):
, how, yeah, we'll, we'll getinto that more, but but the
whole the listeners you have tolook forward to the handoff
between Pasternak andSolzhenitsyn.
How mad he was.
Professor alluded to it, but hereally, solzhenitsyn, really
wanted him to blow the top offthe regime of the communists and
(55:31):
he didn't do it.
He stayed quiet, kind of, andthen solzhenitsyn did it.
But but then, um, professor isalso going to present a whole
another little anthology of ofdissident poets during that time
too, who had to hide theirpoetry in their minds.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Yeah, that's going to be an incredible tale as well
yeah, so a lot of the russian uhpoets composed and I think this
might be a tribute to thedissidents uh, they didn't.
They didn't do rough drafts.
They composed in their headsand then when the poem was done,
they wrote it down.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
A lot of, a lot of them were like that, so I'm
going to bring this in for alanding for this first episode,
but we're really glad to haveyou guys here with us and I hope
this is intriguing to you andwe find our audience of people
who have philosophy, theology,culture, politics, ethics all in
(56:28):
mind, in history as well.
This kind of touches on allthat and synergizes it.
Something that fascinates meabout these writers and these
people is that, as the culturewas going away from faith, they
were going towards it.
Some of them had radicalconversions during the 1900s,
while the culture was driftinginto a secularism, and a lot of
(56:51):
them moving into a Catholicismand even deeper expressions of
orthodoxy.
You know, there's something herefor all of you, whether you're
a skeptic or a believer orsomewhere in between.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
exploring what this means a lifeof deep meaning in a world that
feels increasingly fragmented,and dealing with nihilism.
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
(57:13):
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy Podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff Without a
parachute, like I'm high oncannabis, and skip through
fields naked, like I wonder if Icould drift, or if I could
drift through it, dancingthrough moonlight under
nighttime skies.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast
with Travis Mullins andProfessor Inchosti.
Speaker 1 (57:40):
Say hi to human beings with a smile, unseen,
grabbing wildflowers as I slidedown hills After a rain, after
some pain, after the same, I'mto blame.
Love in my veins, loosesyringes, untamed Like dosage
doesn't matter inject theseveins.
People got problems and theworld's got more makes you
wonder what the heck I was puton this earth for.
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 aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(00:27):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in.
Full of anxiety, depression andteenage suicide.
Full of anxiety depression andteenage suicide.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Back in 2006 or 2007, I saw a book on the shelves at
Barnes Noble and it readSubversive Orthodoxy Outlaws,
revolutionaries and OtherChristians in Disguise and I
just had to have this book.
It wasn't the first time.
I had been a pastor for about10 or 15 years and I had over
(01:20):
500 books.
Probably my wife was alwaystrying to get me to get rid of
books and I just kept collectingthem and collecting them.
Over the years I started torealize that this one book I
just kept coming back to Somehowit challenged me and created
some sort of a vastness thatmost of the books I read did not
have.
Most of the books I read weresome type of specific Christian
(01:41):
theology, debating stuff that isdebated in seminaries, stuff
that normal people would havenever heard about.
So when I found this book, itinvolved people like Wendell
Berry and Martin Luther King Jr,dorothy Day and I was like I
have to have this book and Ihave to understand these people,
because this is kind of themind I want to have, where they
(02:04):
can understand culture, they canspeak to it, they can critique
it, they can bless it.
They have an understandingthat's outside of their own
biblical theology.
I read some of it back then andthen I just kept coming back to
it through the years.
It's not super dense in thesense that it's not a huge book.
It's more like a reader to getyou introduced to these 20
(02:26):
different people in the book.
But it is dense and it'swritten in a very poetic prose
and I kept getting inspirationfrom it.
The way it inspired me washearing from people from
different vantage points artists, thinkers, activists,
theologian, one theologian andmany authors.
(02:48):
They had different backgrounds.
You know Russian, orthodox,baptist, american, all sorts of
different other UK and otherplaces.
They're coming from differentfields and different expertise.
The way these authors spoke tomy Christian perspective was so
deeply profound and true and itrang out into humanity in
(03:11):
general.
And that's where I felt theoutward motion of this, where I
just wanted to share it withsomebody In this way.
I believe it to be prophetic andevangelistic, and by
evangelistic I don't mean what Igrew up with a typical
understanding of evangelicalsand the altar call type of a
short message, high pressuresales.
I mean they're sharing andpointing to a macro narrative of
(03:34):
God.
That's good news across spaceand time.
It's a very cosmic good news, agood news that stands up to
Nazis and communist fascists.
It's prophetic in the sensethat it speaks challenge to a
culture because of God-impliedunderpinnings, and evangelistic
in the sense that these authorsare sharing convictions of hope
(03:54):
in a critique of modern andpostmodern notions that
dehumanize us and enslave us.
These are the things I couldfeel when I would read it, but I
didn't know.
How did these people prophesythese things 100 years ago and
50 years ago, and that's whythis book was so profound to me.
When I hear McLuhan or Mertondescribing the culture, it
(04:14):
sounds like they're talkingabout 2025, social media, ai, et
cetera, but these things werenot even invented yet.
They weren't even on theirradar in the slightest.
It's like they were seeing thefuture and could read the times.
Jesus once said when it isevening and you say it will be
fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be
a stormy.
(04:35):
It'll be stormy today becausethe sky is red and threatening.
You know how to interpret theappearance of the sky, but you
cannot interpret the signs ofthe times.
In Matthew 16, two throughthree, he said that I've always
wanted to be able to interpretthe signs of the times, but all
I have to offer is thissubversive orthodoxy stuff
that's been said 50 to 100 yearsago, way in advance, and I
(04:57):
think it actually isinterpreting our time now.
Honestly, I think it's morerelevant now than it was when
these writers wrote them.
Honestly, I think it's morerelevant now than it was when
these writers wrote them.
So I had this book.
I kept coming back to it.
I was revisiting it a fewmonths ago, back in July or
(05:19):
August, and I was reading Ithink I read Solzhenitsyn
chapter and I was just like man,this book is crazy and I
thought I looked back at theback cover.
And I thought I looked back atthe back cover.
Dr Robert Enchosti.
He is teaching at Cal Poly, sanLuis Obispo English.
Huh, I wonder if he's on thewebsite.
I reached out to Dr RobertLarry Enchosti back in August he
(05:41):
goes by Professor or Larry, andI want to tell him how much the
subversive orthodoxy meant tome.
It empowered my worldview andresonated all my inklings about
faith and culture, and itchallenged my intellect in ways
that were both invigorating anddeeply challenging, and I knew I
had to bring this conversationto others in the form of a
podcast.
So, with no further ado, Iactually have Dr Robert Larian
(06:05):
Chostey here today.
The professor, hi Professor.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Hey Tavis.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's great to have you here and I'm so glad you
were willing to have thisconversation and keep the
conversation going from yourbook.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah, well, I'm happy to be here and I'm glad that
you have the questions Well.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
I'm happy to be here and I'm glad that you have the
questions.
So Dr Larry's formal, orProfessor Larry's formal, bio
here is that he is a professorof English at Cal Poly, san Luis
Obispo and author of numerousbooks, including Subversive
Orthodoxy, the Spitwad Sutrasand Thomas Merton's American
Prophecy.
He's an authority on ThomasMerton, who is in the book, and
(06:46):
a lover of literature by writerswho challenge the dominant
narratives of our time, from theBeats to the Mystics.
Larry has spent a lifetimestudying the voices that refuse
to conform, and that's why we'rehere.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
So, doctor, I mean sorry, I keep saying doctor when
I say PhD, I just think doctor,professor, yeah, I always think
of doctors as people thatactually heal people physically,
so I prefer professor, maybeyou're a mind doctor, yeah, so
(07:22):
the title of the book grabbed meimmediately.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
It's such a provocative couple words
together.
And you know, we just found out.
You know well, you shared withme that some authors named
Gibson, green and Patterson hadwritten a book called Besides
the Bible, and this was 100books that have, should or will
(07:48):
create christian culture.
And I wonder if you wouldn'tmind reading that intro to your
book on that, because this is athey gave.
They gave, uh, professor larry,a whole shout out in that book.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
well, I, I I will read it if you want me to.
I have to go downstairs and getit, so we have to oh, no
problem, I have it right here.
Oh, you have it right there.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, I have it and also we could potentially save
it for a little later in theconversation too.
What was your experience withthis book's trajectory since you
wrote it and then hearing fromme, did it feel like, oh, I
don't know if I want to bring upthat old book?
(08:29):
Or did it feel like, yeah, Inever really got to play this
whole book out as much as Iwanted?
Yeah well, it was the latter.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
It was like I wanted to go back and revisit
Subversive Orthodoxy because itseemed like it had set me up for
my books on Merton.
But the backstory to all ofthat is contained in this
(09:01):
Subversive Orthodoxy and inthese figures over the last
hundred years that were indialogue with the modern culture
in the sense of enlightenmentculture from 1500 on, but also
modern culture in the 20thcentury and the postmodern
movement.
And a lot of these figures arepeople that I found that I
(09:26):
didn't even know they wereChristian until years later,
after I'd been reading them.
And then I came across, youknow or if they did know it,
(09:57):
didn't see it in connection withother thinkers and other
prophetic voices of the time.
Thinkers and other propheticvoices of the time,
(10:24):
no-transcript, yeah.
And I knew that this guy wasChristian reading that first
volume because the voice was sofamiliar in terms of the
prophetic voices of other 20thcentury religious thinkers and
mystics that I wrote an articleabout him.
(10:47):
And then I started finding allof these other prophetic voices
and I said well, you know, I gotto put this together because
nobody's really yet sort ofconnected the dots here and
offered people a way into aorthodoxy which is subversive,
(11:14):
of the authoritarian andoppressive aspects of modern and
postmodern world and postmodernworld, but at the same time
(11:35):
connecting to deep roots inWestern religious history.
And so I wanted to make thatconnection and I did, but
apparently not for many people.
Enough people to keep itpublished.
It only was published for aboutthree years and then it went
out of publication, but the goodnews was I got the copyright,
(11:58):
so I still am the author of thisbook.
It's not like one of thoseauthors that, like I think, ray
Bradbury sold the rights ofMartian Chronicles for $300.
And he never got any moneyafter that for all the movies
and things that followed from.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
That's crazy, yeah.
So I think it'd be good now toread the intro from those other
guys, because they obviously sawin your book what I saw and
they wrote about it perfectly.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Since you have it, why don't you read it?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, I'll read it.
It's about two pages.
Okay, just listen to how thisguy describes the subversive
orthodoxy and this actually willtell you exactly where we're
headed with this podcast.
And he actually names most, ifnot all, of the names from the
book of where we're headed.
So this is kind of the table ofcontents as well.
(12:54):
So this is from Besides theBible by Dan Gibson, jordan
Green, john Patterson.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
John Patterson was the one who wrote the review of
my book.
Okay, so this is from JohnPatterson.
John Patterson was the one whowrote the review of my book.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Okay, so this is from John Patterson.
He says he opens with a thingabout orthodoxy by GK Chesterton
.
On on Chesterton's book calledorthodoxy.
So he says GK Chesterton openshis book orthodoxy with a
parable about a sailor wholaunched out to discover
uncharted lands but then got offcourse and bravely rediscovered
(13:25):
his own country.
Chesterton described his voyageto faith.
Chesterton, describing hisvoyage to faith, says he was
that sailor.
I am the man who was the utmostdaring, discovered with the
utmost daring, discovered whathad been discovered before.
As a burgeoning intellectual,he had tried to be original,
tried to stand alone and only torealize that his feet were
(13:47):
firmly planted in Christianity.
He tried to be on the cuttingedge, 10 minutes in advance, of
the truth, only to find out hewas two millennia behind it.
He wrote I did try to found aheresy of my own and when I had
put the last touches to it, Idiscovered that it was orthodoxy
which is hilarious.
Last touches to it, Idiscovered that it was orthodoxy
(14:07):
which is hilarious.
Subversive orthodoxy is Robertand Chastity's book-length essay
about 20 poets, philosophers,novelists, historians, critics,
religious leaders and socialactivists whose work draws from
the deep well of the Christiantradition, chesterton being one
of them.
And Chastity's subjects aresubversive because they are
inherently suspicious of worldlypower.
They're trying to build a newsociety in the shell of the old,
(14:29):
as Peter Morin, the co-founderof the Catholic worker movement,
used to say.
And they are orthodox becausethey test new things against
first things In the beginningwas the word, and scrutinize the
present in light of the end.
This is what Inchasti calls theeschatological perspective on
human existence.
Enchasti follows a thread oforthodoxy through an impressive
(14:50):
roster of artists and thinkers.
Some we know on a last-namebasis, like Blake Goeth,
kierkegaard, chesterton,dostoevsky, kerouac, merton, day
, king.
Others, like Nikolai Berdyev,boris Pasternak, alexander
Solzhenitsyn, walker, percy EFSchumacher, wendell Berry,
(15:12):
marshall McLuhan, northrup Frye,jacques Ellul, ivan Illich and
René Girard, may be lessfamiliar, but they deserve a
wider audience.
Together, they comprise nothingless than a lifetime reading
plan, and that's what I foundtoo Subversive.
Orthodoxy goes far in correctingtwo persistent misconceptions
about Christianity.
(15:32):
The first misconception is thatChristianity is inherently
reactionary, unconsciouslywedded to class, race and gender
prejudices, bound byfoundational metaphysics and
littered with outwornsuperstitions.
The mass media, whoseprevailing bias is for conflict
and sensationalism, depicts onlythe extreme elements of the
faith.
Meanwhile, a small what's theword?
(15:55):
Cadre, cadre, cadre, cadre ofrevolutionary Christian thinkers
has gone about quietly,rigorously, examining all
thought and culture in themessianic light of the last day.
Compare Ntchassi's table ofcontents to our own and you'll
see how thoroughly convinced weare of his argument that the
gospels have served and canstill serve as a pivot around
(16:16):
which most entrenching analysesof modern civilization can turn.
Wow, there's some brainiacsgoing here.
The second misconception is thatorthodoxy is somehow insipid
and boring.
From Blake's defense of theimagination to Nikolai Berdyev's
critique of the mechanizationof the human spirit, from
Dorothy Day's struggle todesacralize war to Ivan Illich's
(16:38):
lament for the demise of thecommon space and the
contemplative culture, from theChristian anarchism of Jacques
Ellul to the radical agrarianismof Wendell Berry, from
Dostoevsky, whose novel theBrothers Karamazov has been
called the Fifth Gospel, to JackKerouac, who once called
himself a strange, solitary,crazy Christian mystic.
Enchastis, outlaws,revolutionaries and other
(17:01):
Christians in disguise confirmwhat Chesterton wrote more than
a century ago.
People have fallen into afoolish habit of speaking of
orthodoxy as something heavy,humdrum and safe.
There never was anything soperilous or so exciting as
orthodoxy, and a damn and a damnabout that Amen my brother.
(17:24):
That is a crazy tribute to yourbook.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
So yeah, so when I talked to you and we thought you
know this has a lot ofrelevance for today on
solstitzen and mccluhan,especially more recently, um, I
just could not.
I couldn't believe the, themoral fortitude of solstitzen
(17:50):
and the, the, the talk of soulthat I feel like our culture has
abandoned along with you know,uh, abandoning like religion in
general.
They kind of lost the conceptof soul and have have moved on
to things like meditation andmindfulness, without without any
(18:11):
concept of soul, more like justmental health.
So hearing Solzhenitsyn saythat you know from the gulags is
pretty incredible and we'll get, we'll get way into that.
But then, when it comes toMcLuhan talking about our
culture and media and everythingand just he's literally
prophesying about social mediais just so insane to me, dang,
(18:32):
that there will be a globalvillage where immediate mass
electronic communications willget everyone to know everything
about everyone's business in anegative way, knowing way too
much about each other.
I just couldn't believe what hewas saying when I you know he's
saying it in 1967.
So these people have a lot tooffer our culture right now.
(18:56):
I feel like we're, I feel likewe're wandering blindly into
this, this technocratic utopiawe're walking in.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Well it's.
It's such a utopia.
Everyone's so happy and joyful,1966.
And it's, as you say, could betalking about 2025.
We're living in the greatestrevolution in history a huge,
(19:35):
spontaneous upheaval of theentire human race.
Not the revolution planned andcarried out by any particular
party, race or nation, but adeep, elemental boiling over of
all the inner contradictionsthat have ever been in man, a
revelation of the chaotic forcesinside everybody.
This is not something we havechosen, nor is it something
(19:59):
we're free to avoid.
The revolution is a profoundspiritual crisis of the whole
world, manifested largely indesperation, cynicism, violence,
conflict, self-contradiction,ambivalence, fear and hope,
doubt and belief, creation anddestructiveness, progress and
regression, obsessiveattachments to images, idols,
(20:24):
slogans, programs anddistractions that only dull the
general anguish for a moment,until it bursts out everywhere
in a still more acute andterrifying form.
We don't know if we arebuilding a fabulously wonderful
world or destroying all that wehave ever had, all that we have
(20:46):
ever achieved.
All the inner force of humanityis boiling and bursting out,
the good together with the evil.
The good poisoned by evil andfighting it, the evil pretending
to be good and revealing itselfin the most dreadful crimes,
justified and rationalized bythe purest and most innocent
(21:11):
intentions.
There you got it, man.
That's Merton nailing the wholething.
Nailing it, but just as acommentary on the present.
One of the things I think madesubversive orthodoxy kind of a
(21:36):
secret or a cult following of 25people or whatever.
However many would contact meabout the book is that people
(22:00):
don't read much anymore in theway that you have to put
everything aside and concentrateto get the deeper meaning of
Solzhenitsyn.
I mean Solzhenitsyn's threevolumes right.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Three large volumes.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Three large volumes, pretty large volumes.
I mean you have to be dedicatedfor a month or two to read that
.
Yeah, and not every paragraphis going to be really exciting
or startling with an aphorism orsomething.
(22:43):
Know, startling with anaphorism or something.
But if you hang in there,you're, you're, you're climbing
a mountain and you get to apoint where there's these vistas
, where you turn around and yousee the last 50 years in depth
in 3d cinema, scope, vision and,and this guy is telling you
(23:06):
about you know how he got thereand it's, it's just it's.
It'll hit you, you know, kindof like all at once and you'll
see it all at once and you don'tforget it.
It alters your view of the world.
You don't have to memorizelines.
Just the name itself evokes inme those two months that I
(23:32):
dedicated to readingSolzhenitsyn and realizing that
I would say every review I hadread of it was read by somebody
who hadn't read the book.
Right, because you can only saythese glib one liners if you
hadn't been with the guy in hisarrest, in his torture, in his
(23:53):
interrogations, in his marchingon the tundra trying to write
without a pencil.
Memorize it.
But the way you write without apencil is.
(24:13):
You memorize, uh your lineswhile you're you're marching on
the tundra and you make everyfive fifth line rhyme.
So if the fifth line doesn'trhyme, you forgot a line.
So now you have to continue uhmarching to find that line that
you dropped and then, once youpick it up again, then you're
allowed to go on to the next.
(24:34):
And he did this for months, andso when he finally gets access
to like a pencil, he has to buryit in a cell because it's
contraband material and he can'tlet anybody see that he has a
pencil.
And then when he finally gets apiece of paper, five months
later, he has to cut it inlittle strips and roll it in
(24:57):
little rolls and bury the rollsin his cell.
And so then when he's when hedecides to write, he doesn't
want to waste the paper, so hedecides he develops a script
that contains no vowels, so hecan just write with consonants
that will bring back to himthese, uh, precious descriptions
(25:23):
and points he wants to preserve, never knowing if he'll ever be
able to dig them up from hiscell and be able to send them in
letters, or however he's goingto get them out.
That's still up to question.
And even if he got them out,they would never be published in
the Soviet Union, because thecensors would never allow any
(25:44):
stories about the gulag, becausethey claim they didn't exist
yeah so when he finally gets out, I know we're getting ahead of
the story, but you.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
You always get ahead on when we talk about sasanitza
when he gets.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
When he gets out, he decides that now he's going to
write, he's going to be able towrite.
And when they arrested him theyasked him what his occupation
was and he had been an officerin the Russian army in World War
(26:21):
II.
He was sent from the front inWorld War II to the Gulag.
So he went from fighting theNazis to being the victim of his
own Soviet government and hewrote that his profession was
(26:43):
atomic scientist and he wasn'tan atomic scientist.
But he thought that they wouldbe less likely to kill an atomic
scientist.
So if they thought he was anatomic scientist they might keep
him around longer than whatthey did with some of the other
guys.
So he finally gets out and theygive him a job teaching physics
(27:06):
at a Siberian high school andjunior and middle school.
So he's teaching middle schoolphysics in Siberia in the day
and then in the night he'swriting the Gulag one page at a
time and burying it in tin cansin his backyard.
And he had five differentnovels going at the same time
(27:26):
and there were five differenttin cans in his backyard.
And he had five differentnovels going at the same time
and there were five differenttin cans.
And then he sent a letter to Ithink it was Tolstoy's great
cousin or aunt, with a map ofhis backyard and said if you
ever hear that I died, backyard,and say if you ever hear that I
(27:50):
died, this is the location ofthe lost literature of the
Russian people and you can comehere and this is where they're
at.
And he had, you know, a littlechart of his backyard and
luckily, you know, he was ableto get out and the rest is
history.
But while he was there workingon his paper there was a Gulag.
(28:13):
On the radio there was aninterview with a contemporary
Soviet bestseller author andthey were asking him how he
writes his Soviet realistmysteries.
And he was saying well, youknow, I try to have three
different color pens and Ilisten to music and stuff.
(28:36):
And he was thinking you knowthis guy, you know he has
everything to help him write butnothing to say.
Thing to help him write butnothing to say.
And I have everything to say butno means of saying it.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
And so I just got to you know, remember that other
writers went through more.
And then I just have to bethankful that I was given a
story to tell and that my storywill someday.
I have given a story to telland that my story will someday.
I have you know, he had to havethe faith will bring down the
Soviet regime, and the lie thatis dialectical materialism won't
be able to coexist with mystory.
(29:21):
And so almost all these writersare similar in that way.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, I wanted to ask you you started, you started
with Solzhenitsyn, that's how,that's how you got the idea
right.
Yeah, and so then tell us howit.
How did it branch out fromthere into the other writers?
Like, obviously, I mean don'ttell your whole.
Merton backstory.
Yet I mean, don't tell yourwhole Merton backstory.
Yet We'll include that anotherday, because I do want to hear
your personal story relates toMerton and that will be like an
(29:52):
intro to Merton, yeah, so howdid you branch out?
Speaker 3 (29:58):
to these other authors.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Well.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Had you already read them or were you kind of like
hunting them down at this point?
Well, I'd read some of thepeople that he referred to down
at this point.
Well, I'd read some of thepeople that he referred to and I
mean, I knew some people thathe referred to in his book his
literary memoir I had alreadyread.
(30:37):
So that was Like Dostoevsky,obviously Like Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy and Chekhov, who Itaught to the present.
There was a long section inthere on Pasternak and his
(31:00):
relationship to Anna Akhmatovaand Marina Tezveteva and
Mayakovsky, who were these greatsort of revolutionary Russian
writers before the RussianRevolution, were dissidents
against the czar and then foundthemselves in opposition to the
(31:22):
Bolsheviks and ultimately andultimately many of them thrown
in jail by Stalin for violatinghis authoritarian so it kind of
(31:54):
branched out into Russian mostlyat first, and then you started
adding others ended up in Franceafter World War I and were part
of the existential movementafter World War II, having
survived a second bout with Naziand war-torn terrorist
countries that a lot of themended up in.
And so there's like twogenerations of just amazing
(32:16):
Russian poetry.
But Pasternak we could talk alittle bit about Pasternak
because he's a great example.
He was a poet, famous Russianpoet, lyricist.
He was considered sort of theantithesis to Mayakovsky.
(32:37):
Mayakovsky was the publicorator of the Russian Revolution
, the Russian Revolution, andPasternak was the interior,
(33:00):
reflective soul of the peoplethat survived the Russian
Revolution, to put it that way.
And so they were kind ofdifferent, and so they were kind
of different politically,although they really admired one
another's courage to stand upagainst the regime before the
(33:20):
revolution and then also to notgive their integrity over to the
Stalinist takeover.
So they were grudgingly sort offrenemies, I guess you would
call them today.
And I knew about Mayakovskybecause he's sort of famous, but
I hadn't known that Pasternakwas a poet, because the only
(33:42):
thing I knew about him was thathe had written.
Dr Zhivago about him.
Was that he had written DrZhivago and Dr Zhivago had just
been made into a big motionpicture in the 50s.
And also, pasternak won theNobel Prize for Literature in
1958.
And then the Soviets refused tolet him receive it because they
(34:04):
said it was a trick by theSwedish committee to honor an
anti-Soviet writer within hisown country and that he really
wasn't that great and that hewanted, and they wanted him to
renounce his own writing andmake apologies for having been
(34:25):
so misunderstood by the West,and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And he was still living in Russia, right, he?
Speaker 3 (34:32):
was still living in Russia and Solzhenitsyn's heart
was broken because he thoughtPasternak was going to go and
get the award and blast theregime and explain what that
novel was all about.
But he died a year later of aheart attack.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Oh, a pasternak did.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah, but who knows why, he died a year later,
exactly right, but a lot of ithad to do with the mental
pressure on him.
He's one of Russia's greatestmodern writers and here he's
being hounded to renounceeverything he ever did.
(35:14):
And the way he made, the way hesurvived the Stalin years, was
he translated all the greatWestern literature into Russian.
So he translated Shakespeareand Goethe and the English poets
all into Russian, and so he waspart of the thought that took
(35:42):
place when Khrushchev took overand after Stalin died.
For a moment there there waskind of a like glasnost, an
opening of Russian culture tothe world.
That lasted for a while and hewould have been, you know, a key
(36:03):
player, especially with DrZhivago being a bestseller in
the West and being made into amovie.
Yeah, but the problem was themovie isn't, the movie is not an
accurate portrayal of the book,because the book is, uh, a
story about a contemplative umwho, uh who, and very written in
(36:28):
very symbolic, poetic languagewith Laura, a kind of symbol of
the natural goodness of theRussian people.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Actually, I'll read the thing you said about it,
that they were afraid of itturning into a movie.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Okay, when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958, the
(37:09):
Soviets saw the award as aspecies of failed socialist
realism, misreading its form,undervaluing its literacism and
totally ignoring its symboliccharacter, while many western
readers misappropriated the workas an anti-communist tract,
oversimplifying its complexmessage and undervaluing an
artistic integrity, its artisticintegrity and missing itsedic
(37:32):
spirituality.
Um, there was a part about theoh yeah, the novel also terribly
misrepresented by david lean'smovie, which captures all its
images and none of its ideas.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yeah, that's so.
That's so true.
The uh, uh you would.
You would go a far uh mile tofind and find many ideas in that
book, become a liberal or ageneral in the Russian army
(38:24):
after Stalin had died andlooking for a representation of
a humanist perspective on theworld.
But he has three lines.
He has three lines and youdon't really know who he is in
the movie and it's soovershadowed by the love story
(38:50):
between Dr Zhabago and Laurathat it just becomes a very good
romantic epic, but not theprophetic, contemplative story
that Pasternak told One of thethings he would say about the
book.
The only positive kind of thinghe said about his own book was
(39:11):
there are people like Zhivago inRussia.
He said about his own book wasthere are people like Zhivago in
Russia, and by that he wastrying to say there are
Christian contemplatives who seethrough the lies of history
like Zhivago, like me.
He couldn't say that, andSolzhenitsyn was so disappointed
(39:34):
in him because he thought youknow, this is going to open the
door to all my books.
You know I have six novelsburied in the backyard that
expose all these things indetail with actual historical
events and it's.
And then when he said well, Iguess I'm gonna have to win the
(39:58):
Nobel Prize so that people willtake me seriously, otherwise
they'll think one more time thatit's just a Soviet.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
This is anti Soviet trick, or something yeah and so
just I want to read uh, give our, give our readers, our
listeners, a little bit of, uh,your intro to Pasternak, um,
something Thomas Merton saidabout him is a quote on
Pasternak.
He said Pasternak'sChristianity is something very
(40:26):
simple, very rudimentary, deeplysincere, utterly personal and
yet, for all its questionableexpressions, obviously
impregnated with the true spiritof the gospels and the liturgy.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Thomas merton, and then um, you could say that
about a lot of the almost allthese characters in this book
and this other paragraph.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Um, I put a bunch of underlines and a wow, so I gotta
read that.
Um boris pasternak oncedescribed himself as an atheist
who had lost his faith inatheism, and I just feel like
that's relevant to our culturein general, because people yeah
people might find themselves asatheists, they might find
themselves as agnostic.
And here's, here's anincredible mind dealing with the
russian revolution, who losthis faith in atheism.
(41:08):
And he was born jewish, so bornjewish.
He was brought up by his nannyin the Russian Orthodox faith,
but as a young man he became askeptic and supported the
October Revolution as Russia'sbest chance to turn the tables
on history and right the wrongsof its tyrannical past.
When the revolution turned sourand its idealism was betrayed,
pasternak lost his faith infaithlessness and became an
(41:31):
internal émigré living in quietprotest.
Internal émigré living in quietprotest Internal émigré.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
He felt like he was a foreigner in his own country.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Okay, yeah, living in quiet protest against the new
totalitarian state, quietlytranslating Hamlet and Faust and
, along with Anna Akhmatova andMarina Tseva Tseva Mandelstam,
(42:00):
launching a radical defense ofthe poetic imagination through
clandestine readings and privatepublications that would
reverberate throughout the worldas one of the greatest defenses
of conscience in all ofliterary history.
In this last line, during thistime of persecution, he tells us
, he quote, came to understandthe bible not so much as a book
with hard, with a hard and fasttext, as the notebook of
humanity and a key to everythingthat is eternal.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Um, so that yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's
pasternak and uh, you, youwouldn't necessarily get that
from Dr Zhivago, as beautiful asthose images were of the film.
You need the ideas to go withit to let you know what you're
(42:47):
seeing.
You're not just seeing avacation in Dramond or something
.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, so I was going to
explore him a little more beforeI read it.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I mean, yeah, and it's, it's not.
It's not the book that the bookis is well, as is always the
case, that the book is betterthan the movie because it's it's
a deep reflection through theeyes of Dr Shibago, who is sort
(43:23):
of a stand in for Pasternakhimself becoming a losing faith
in his atheism.
That's pretty cool, and youknow a story of our atheism.
You know that's pretty cool.
And, uh, you know a story ofour times.
You know, then, the uh.
How how long is it going totake for some for people to
realize, well, how much, howcredulous you have to be to
(43:48):
believe in atheism, as, as adoctor, a dogma?
Carl Rohn used to say a man'sbest friend is his dogma.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And the dogma of atheism.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
it isn't skeptical enough.
If it were only more true toits own skepticism, you know,
then there'd be constantdialogues between you know
different forms of faith andbelief and contemplation, which
is what one would expect thepostmodern culture to be, but it
(44:34):
largely isn't.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, it's not.
I have a little theory.
This is just some fresh, somefresh Travis Mullen thought here
.
But I have my own theory,working working theory that
people believe what they want tobelieve.
That's my theory.
Yeah, the truth, true, I'm sureI've noticed it on um joe
rogan's podcast where he willtalk to you know people that
(44:59):
have some kind of a wacky ideaabout health or about politics
or about aliens.
He's totally into it.
And then he has a christian onthere telling him about jesus
and he's super skeptical he, hehe, he pulls, he has this
incredible, he becomes thisincredible scientist.
At that point, yeah, when it,when it's something he wants to
believe in, it's, uh, incrediblyopen.
(45:23):
So I've noticed that and I, Ilike, I like hearing his thought
process, but I did notice thatthere was one guy in particular
who was like a physicist, um, aChristian who was a Christian,
who was like a biologist, Ithink, I think it was
microbiology is what led him tofaith, and it was just too hard.
Joe Rogan just had, but whatabout?
(45:46):
But what about?
He had 15 layers of buts andwhen it comes to other
subjects's, just no butts, ormaybe one, but you know what I
mean.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of thisresistance, um, and I'm he might
even be open to it, I don'tknow but but his resistance is
evident, like it's veryresistant to certain things, and
it reminded me of your quote,where the atheist isn't applying
(46:08):
his own skepticism to himselfor to his own dogma well that
that.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
That's the other thing that impressed me about
these figures that I uncoveredwas that their self-criticism is
a big part of what they'reabout.
Like Solzhenitsyn since we'retalking about him, he has second
thoughts about how he handledhis arrest.
(46:33):
You know, and he says it rightup front.
You know why.
Why didn't I protest my arrest?
Well, it wouldn't have done anygood, and I think there was a
part of me that knew that.
I was waiting until I reallyunderstood how to take down this
regime before I started poppingoff in public, and that would
(46:56):
require me to become the writerI want to be before I get my own
podcast.
But what happens is, you know,you get podcasts now on
Solzhenitsyn, or you getpodcasts on, you know, my five
favorite novels, or my 20favorite novels, and they're
(47:18):
reduced to five sentences.
And yeah, and you can tell, ifyou've read any of those books,
that either they didn't read thebook or they didn't understand
the book, because most reallygreat literature, books or ideas
the writers understand thelimitations of it and they give
(47:41):
you the limits of their ownthought, and it's so humbling.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
It's like intellectually humble.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Intellectual humility .
Intellectual humility, andthat's what we call gravitas
right.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
Humility, intellectual humility, and
that's what we call gravitas.
Right that they, that they giveyou the truth that they found.
And then they sort of say butyou know, that came from the
life I lived and that came fromthese ideas and that came from
you know here, and now it's yourturn.
You know you, you go there andyou read them and you spend the
(48:15):
time it's not just being gliband having answers One thing
podcasts and radio and socialtalk shows and stuff.
Back in the day when MotherTeresa won the I think Mother
Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize, I think that's true and she
(48:41):
was on a Canadian televisionshow with the biologists that
had won the Nobel Prize inmedicine that year, the Nobel
Prize in medicine that year andthe talk show host was trying to
(49:04):
stir controversy and so he saidwell, you know, this is very
interesting.
We have a doctor here, a doctorhere who's working on cell
research that might somedayresult in eternal life for human
beings, and we have a Catholicsocial worker who believes in
(49:28):
eternal life life, what do theyhave to say to one another?
(49:52):
And so he asks Mother Teresa,you know what she thinks about?
But I do know I believe in loveand compassion and I would
prefer that to eternal physicallife, life.
(50:19):
And the doctor said after theshow that was the closest he
ever came to being converted toChristianity.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
She subverted his question like Jesus does.
Speaker 3 (50:26):
Yeah, it's like well, if you have eternal life and
you don't have love andcompassion, what do you have?
You know you have.
Eternal damnation is what youhave.
Eternity is.
That's not even a Christianconcept of eternity.
Values ahead of yourtechnological miracles, you know
(50:50):
you have to.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
That's a funny concept, given I just this week
was writing a little.
I was trying to write a shortstory about a technological
future scenario where people areresurrected by biotech.
They're kind of kept alive in abunch of chips and wires and
things in their body and theycan't die anymore yeah, and so
(51:15):
they're in.
They're in like this project,resurrection, eternal state and
um, they don't like it.
Like this guy, the maincharacter's wife was resurrected
and he didn't even want her tobe because now she's stuck
working for the state,technocratic, technocratic state
and um, it's kind of like nowthey're.
It's kind of out of thatrevelation and a bob dylan line
that like they want to die andthey can't even die.
(51:37):
Now, yeah, death is a relief tothat, you know yeah which you
know that's.
That is back to these, theserussian characters where they
had to survive the gulags andthe and the jews in the nazi
camps.
It's like how, you know, I meanthis whole concept is is
answering the question like howdid they survive that without
(51:59):
just wanting to die and eitherkill themselves or, or, you know
, death by cop?
Yeah, it could have easily donethat with a guard, you know
yeah um, but the, the fortitudeslash, some type of hope of
living beyond.
that was keeping them going, andthat's an incredible dive into
(52:21):
the human psyche that we'll beexploring more with these
characters.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
Well, yes, definitely , and Dostoevsky is the guy
we're going to go for that, oneof the guys who anticipated a
lot of that 19th century and andhe spent time in prison camp in
siberia.
But his was a 19th centuryprison camp, so you can imagine
it was probably even moreprimitive than that one that's.
(52:47):
I don't know how you could bein a prison camp more primitive
than the one solzhenitsyn was in, but I can imagine Dostoevsky
was pretty close to that.
Speaker 2 (52:59):
Another thing about that is that we didn't get to do
it because we weren'tparticularly going to focus on
Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak today.
But the Russian story to me islike a very unknown story to
most Americans that I've talkedto, like everybody's.
Like gulags I might've heard ofthat, and then Solzhenitsyn oh
(53:20):
yeah, I think I've heard of them, but that's about it.
It's like wow, now that I'veheard this story, I can't
believe it's not front of mindfor many people because Well,
yeah, I can't believe it hasn'tbeen a movie.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
I mean, I know uh, he wrote.
He wrote one short story thatgot pop, that was popular in the
west for a while.
Um, they made a movie out ofthat yeah, they made a movie and
that was just one day in aprison camp.
Uh, you know, and how this guysurvives and it's actually a
good day for the guy, but it's,you know, from any objective
(53:56):
point of view.
You know it was a horrendousday.
But taken out of context of thegulag, of the whole picture
that he presented, or anunderstanding of history, or
understanding of the atrocitiesand the gulags that are around
today, um it, it doesn't.
(54:20):
It doesn't um connect.
For some reason, people don'tconnect it with.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Well, it's the scope.
The scope hasn't been given tothe public.
The public has not seen whatthis was yet.
You know, I don't.
I don't feel like they have,yeah, in a popular culture way.
Yeah, I don't think the gulagshas made it to popular culture
yeah because the holocaust has,because there's so many movies
about it.
But meanwhile there's, you know,while there's 11 million dying
(54:48):
in nazi camps, there's another30 million dying in gulags and
death marches and such and justbeing shot and being arrested
for very minimal things, andit's just a astonishing story.
I mean, it's absolutelyincredible story and it and and
then to hear the pasternak tothe solzhenitsyn handoff and how
(55:08):
, how, yeah, we'll, we'll getinto that more, but but the
whole the listeners you have tolook forward to the handoff
between Pasternak andSolzhenitsyn.
How mad he was.
Professor alluded to it, but hereally, solzhenitsyn, really
wanted him to blow the top offthe regime of the communists and
(55:31):
he didn't do it.
He stayed quiet, kind of, andthen solzhenitsyn did it.
But but then, um, professor isalso going to present a whole
another little anthology of ofdissident poets during that time
too, who had to hide theirpoetry in their minds.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Yeah, that's going to be an incredible tale as well
yeah, so a lot of the russian uhpoets composed and I think this
might be a tribute to thedissidents uh, they didn't.
They didn't do rough drafts.
They composed in their headsand then when the poem was done,
they wrote it down.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
A lot of, a lot of them were like that, so I'm
going to bring this in for alanding for this first episode,
but we're really glad to haveyou guys here with us and I hope
this is intriguing to you andwe find our audience of people
who have philosophy, theology,culture, politics, ethics all in
(56:28):
mind, in history as well.
This kind of touches on allthat and synergizes it.
Something that fascinates meabout these writers and these
people is that, as the culturewas going away from faith, they
were going towards it.
Some of them had radicalconversions during the 1900s,
while the culture was driftinginto a secularism, and a lot of
(56:51):
them moving into a Catholicismand even deeper expressions of
orthodoxy.
You know, there's something herefor all of you, whether you're
a skeptic or a believer orsomewhere in between.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
exploring what this means a lifeof deep meaning in a world that
feels increasingly fragmented,and dealing with nihilism.
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
(57:13):
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy Podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff Without a
parachute, like I'm high oncannabis, and skip through
fields naked, like I wonder if Icould drift, or if I could
drift through it, dancingthrough moonlight under
nighttime skies.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast
with Travis Mullins andProfessor Inchosti.
Speaker 1 (57:40):
Say hi to human beings with a smile, unseen,
grabbing wildflowers as I slidedown hills After a rain, after
some pain, after the same, I'mto blame.
Love in my veins, loosesyringes, untamed Like dosage
doesn't matter inject theseveins.
People got problems and theworld's got more makes you
wonder what the heck I was puton this earth for.
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