The Vital Importance of the Work of Jonathan Pagaea and Jordan Peterson

Seeking the Reconciliation of Spirit and Nature, Heaven and Earth. Happy Ascension Day!

In today's video I finish up my commentary on @PageauJonathan and @richardrohlin conversation.

One of the huge benefits of the @jordanbpeterson status-rocket-ride was the revelation of @PageauJonathan . JBP's work fascinated me from the outset, but Jonathan's confused me at first.

Pageau and I had our first conversation in Feb of 2018.

I had the long goat back then. You locate my videos in time from the variation of the facial hair. :)

Our second conversation was August of 2018 and looking back now I can see that transformations in me were beginning. I was just starting to see where some of this was going, but still quite confused.

When I first discovered @jordanbpeterson I was working hard on the split world pew sitters and sermon makers wrestle with. On Sundays they read a text in a world beneath a dome containing the sun, moon and stars. During the week we ride a watery sphere circling a flaming ball of gas.

In late 2017 I had been repeatedly reading CS Lewis' book Miracles where Lewis wrestles with these issues most explicitly. One of Lewis' main illustrations of those issues comes in his treatment of the Ascension. (Happy Ascension Day BTW!) https://paulvanderklay.me/2017/05/25/thoughts-from-cs-lewis-miracles-for-ascension-day/

Here's a terrific quote from his book. What we are unable to reconcile is spirit and nature. In my experience inside the church and outside, the situation is even worse. We don't know what Spirit and Nature ARE much less know how to talk about them or reconcile them.

For we have fallen into an opposite difficulty. Let us confess that probably every Christian now alive finds a difficulty in reconciling the two things he has been told about ‘heaven’—that it is, on the one hand, a life in Christ, a vision of God, a ceaseless adoration, and that it is, on the other hand, a bodily life. When we seem nearest to the vision of God in this life, the body seems almost an irrelevance. And if we try to conceive our eternal life as one in a body (any kind of body) we tend to find that some vague dream of Platonic paradises and gardens of the Hesperides has substituted itself for that mystical approach which we feel (and I think rightly) to be more important. But if that discrepancy were final then it would follow—which is absurd—that God was originally mistaken when He introduced our spirits into the Natural order at all. We must conclude that the discrepancy itself is precisely one of the disorders which the New Creation comes to heal. The fact that the body, and locality and locomotion and time, now feel irrelevant to the highest reaches of the spiritual life is (like the fact that we can think of our bodies as ‘coarse’) a symptom. Spirit and Nature have quarrelled in us; that is our disease. Nothing we can yet do enables us to imagine its complete healing. Some glimpses and faint hints we have: in the Sacraments, in the use made of sensuous imagery by the great poets, in the best instances of sexual love, in our experiences of the earth’s beauty. But the full healing is utterly beyond our present conceptions. Mystics have got as far in contemplation of God as the point at which the senses are banished: the further point, at which they will be put back again, has (to the best of my knowledge) been reached by no one. The destiny of redeemed man is not less but more unimaginable than mysticism would lead us to suppose—because it is full of semi-imaginables which we cannot at present admit without destroying its essential character.

Lewis, C. S. (2001). Miracles: A Preliminary Study (pp. 259–260). New York: HarperOne.

Most of the Protestant wrestling with this crisis was warped by the Modernist/fundamentalist debates begun in the late 19th century and addressed only slightly less productively than the disagreements of the Protestant Reformation. Roman Catholics and Orthodox believers had an advantage because they at least continued to pay attention to Classical and Medieval texts and struggled to make sense of them. Most Protestants (speaking as a Protestant) seemed completely lost.

What we see in this revelatory video are the children of Protestants finding their way back.

One might understandably ask "How can paying attention to 'historically discredited' legend be of any help? Shouldn't all of that simply be ignored and dismissed as foolish superstition?"

This is where the combination of @PageauJonathan and @jordanbpeterson starts get fruitful. JBP's work was to create a psychologically based plausibility structure for legend via a new sort of concordism.

Fundamentalists have for a long time tried to create various concordisms to heal the breach opened up in the 19th century fight with Modernism. "Creation Science" is their latest earnest effort to "save the Bible".

Modernists committed an equal and opposite error in broad-brush dismissals of the Bible as history reducing it to moralisms which after the Cold War would come under assault from New Atheists and eventually the Woke Revolution.

CS Lewis was a pioneer to a better route because of his background love of the Classical and Medieval worlds. I wasn't the only one that began to see the relationship between @jordanbpeterson and CS Lewis. This from @zugzwanged in 2018 https://alastairadversaria.com/2018/03/30/understanding-jordan-peterson/

I call @PageauJonathan the "Apostle of Purpose" because he tries to keep reminding us that reality has a structure and a purpose. "It's not arbitrary" needs to be put on his swag.

He's really continuing the enduring project of the Middle Ages of a unified picture of reality and his canvas is not only iconography but symbolism. The work is larger than any individual or even any century, but this is the quest.

Despite the errors and missteps (they are always with us) of the Renaissance, the Prot. Ref. and the Enlightenment they were inevitable. They too have a place in figuring out the reconciliation of Spirit and Nature (Heaven and Earth).

Yes, it's been thousands of years, but we've only just begun. It's analogous to "when we've been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun. We've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun."