Paul- I am glad to hear you talked to Russell Brand. He has a huge fan base and will help get your work out to a broader audience. This is very good! I look forward to hearing it.
Congratulations on the book release. This is truly a big week.
This is late so perhaps you already know this but you can subscribe for a free trail period (a week, I think) on luminary, but of course you'd have to cancel when you're done.
Allow a humble reader to very highly recommend Alexandria, especially for those of us here who have been following Paul's musings about The Machine. I think Paul would agree that there is a great deal of overlap. Can't say more without spoilers, and the book is too good to allow that.
I keep looking for the swans in my own world, but I fear I won't live to see them.
As I listen to some of these recent interviews, I am confused by what I understand as your disdain for (of?) gnostic Christianity. For me, a person who has returned to the Christian faith, these texts and the teachers who have invited me in to their deeper meaning (Elaine Pagels and Cynthia Bourgeault as examples) have been foundational, and help me to more deeply appreciate the New Testament as it currently stands. I see many of these gnostic texts as deeply incarnational, rejoicing in our bodies and our earth home. Speaking deeply of purpose.
We humans, caught in our false and shallow stories of what we think matters in life, race toward the dangerous precipice. Any offering of deeper meaning and purpose could become lifelines for many right now as our neighbors finally awaken but with much grief and fear. I think we need to open our hearts to all ancient stories and prophets that speak of connection and love. We don’t have much time as our civilization unravels. I worry that our intellects often stand in the way of surrendering to our collective soul longing, our collective purpose. We need to be there for one another.
I have a few answers, but most would take much longer than a comment section to explain.
Firstly, and most simply: I'm an Orthodox Christian. 'Gnostic' texts, so-called, have nothing to do with the Christian faith.
Secondly, in the context of these conversations I've been having, gnosticism, as a general term (it's not very accurate: more of an umbrella for various traditions) posits a completely different worldview to that of Christianity. More to the point, whether you're Christian or not, gnosticism is essentially the faith of the Machine: it offers an opportunity to escape from matter through knowledge. Very much what I would regard as a 'false and shallow story', and also the religion of Silicon Valley.
All religions are not equal, or the same. Do we have a 'collective purpose'? I've yet to hear anyone agree on what it is.
Here's quite a good essay on this, which lays out the terms:
Paul, sorry to write before reading the link you shared.
I’m surprised by your rigid response.
I was Quaker raised, and I have since young childhood been told by classmates and adults that I was not a true Christian. I knew that they were wrong. I knew that Christ fully accepted me and loved me.
The gnostic sects were a wide and diverse group, and I’m not saying that they all had it right. Their texts widely vary. But I do question why so much of their deep wisdom is still deemed heretical without discussion. I’ve gleaned much help from some of the few that remain, Gospel of Thomas for example.
And I still see some of the accepted Biblical texts often interpreted in such a literal fashion that they themselves support and feed the machine.
Enough said.
If I spoke of my love of nature and the fact that I live much as you do, you might walk kindly with me. But as a fellow Christian, you do not. That’s the machine.
I'm not expressing any judgement of you, Jenny. I don't know you, and I've no idea what you do or feel or believe. It would be entirely inappropriate of me to judge you even if I did know you. I'm just responding to your words, as I understand them.
But the word 'Christian', like any other word, has to mean something. Its meaning has of course been ragingly debated for 2000 years. But the Nicene Creed is the very bare minimum for a useful description of the term. As I say, I am an Orthodox Christian, and I became one for a reason. Too much rigidity can be a bad thing, but too little can be dangerous.
Perhaps I responded strongly to your sentence 'I think we need to open our hearts to all ancient stories and prophets that speak of connection and love.' It implies that Christ was just another 'prophet', which of course no Christian could accept.
I think many of us can walk with each other as human beings, and Christians should be prepared to walk with anyone, really. But that's not the same as compromising what any of us believe to be truth.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and kind response, Paul. I’m grateful to be walking with you.
I don’t believe that Christ was just another prophet, never have, and I don’t think that the gnostic texts I treasure say that, either.
Perhaps the best way to describe where I am is undone with grief. We are all so divided and separate, and civilization is unraveling around us. I long for healing and love to reign as the inevitable levels of fear, anger and unrest grow. For me, the second coming is a universal heart-response: walking in grief and loving service with and for one another. I think this is what Christ meant. We are the second coming when we follow diligently and with reference His teachings of love and forgiveness.
A few years ago when Covid first had us all locked down and afraid, I spontaneously emailed my very favorite living author, Jess Walter, after finishing his books. He wrote back with such kindness. I was in awe, and I never got up the courage to thank him for his beautiful response. I had mentioned the spiritual, and (here I paraphrase greatly) he spoke of just this sort of kindness but without the religious focus. He spoke of doing the right thing anyway, and he suggested I read Camus. This kind author was my lifeline; my second coming.
“We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.”
-- Albert Camus
I pray tor peace and love to prevail. Thank you so much, Paul, for gifting me with these.
Hey Paul, I’d be interested sometime, hopefully in an essay, to hear your thoughts about the bounds of who is a Christian. I know you don’t portend to be a theologian, but still, I think your conversion to Christianity has inspired a lot of people, and it’d be interesting to me as a regular reader to understand how you more deeply make sense of what it means to call oneself a Christian.
For instance, do you accept David Bentley Hart’s claim that other deep traditions have valid, in some ways superior and in some ways inferior, paths towards the same God of Jesus (which is the only God)? Are you a Universalist, believing that all shall be redeemed/saved or do you see Hell as an eternal punishment? What do you make of the criticism that most Christianity focuses too much on creeds, therefore beliefs, and not nearly enough on the substantial calls to social action presented in the synoptics? If you don’t see Jesus as “just another prophet,” do you make room that other figureheads in other traditions may have the same intimacy with God that Jesus had? Do you believe in a pre-incarnate Christ such that Jesus was “sent from heaven,” or do you read the Gospels as Jesus becoming incarnate with God after his baptism when the holy spirit descends as a dove and the Father announces he’s delighted?
Perhaps you are uninterested in exploring questions like these in your writing: I certainly understand how faith can better be held as a more private affair. But if you’re game for it, it’d been interesting to glean your takes. And, interesting to hear the criticisms you yourself hold of Christianity at large, and/or to know how you conceive of your faith—is it imperturbable, or contingent on further review, or something else?
Finally, to lay down my cards, I’m walking back into the faith after a long absence, but as I do, I’m being very careful (though not cynically so). In this carefulness, I’m hungry to hear thinkers I respect articulate some of the thornier matters related to Christianity.
The short answer is: maybe but not yet. I'm new to the faith, and I am immersing myself deeply in it. the temptation for someone like me, who can write and has an audience already, would be to sound off too early. But the essence of the faith as I practice it is the emptying of the self and submission to God's will. That's the opposite of the tendency within our culture (and in all of us) to want to bend the faith to what we want it to be. I am quite allergic to that, and so I am careful on that score.
The supplementary answer is that I am an Orthodox Christian, and that was a particular choice. I believe that if you join a church - join *the* church, as the Orthodox would have it - you need to accede to the teachings of that church. Otherwise, why join it? Orthodoxy is perhaps the most traditional and the deepest version of Christianity around, and I subscribe to its claims. I'm going to walk the path as laid down for me by the church fathers and see where it leads. I might have more to say when I know more. But thanks for asking.
I was raised in and fully committed to forms of Christianity that honestly left traumatic marks, so while I hunger for a codified path, I’m very reluctant to give up my self fully to a tradition and its teachings (knowing how distorted the Gospels can become). And yet, I also don’t want to do the post-modern thing anymore either of stitching together reality from my own individualized frames and what “feels good.”
Since you’re new to the path, I’ve wondered how some of the bounds have landed for you, though I know Orthodoxy is rich enough that those bounds don’t always have definitive markers. In any case, I’ve heard you say in interviews “Either these stories are true or they’re not,” and I get to wondering how you conceive of truth in this regard, for literalism was part of the traumatizing package for me, and I’m finding a much deeper connection to the Gospels when I read them simultaneously as poetry, myth, and documentary. And, I’m highly allergic to the forms of Christianity that exclude other paths as valid walks to God, and have been wondering where you stand on that…but Godspeed in however you make sense of these things and whether you’ll write about them one day.
I got Alexandria from the library recently and found it beautifully written and thought provoking, and the evocation of the strange world of a thousand years in the future absolutely mesmerising; and from there i subscribed to The abbey of Misrule,still playing catch up with the essays in it , and also read his earler novel, The Wake feeling triumphant that in the end i managed to overcome my initial resistance to the form of old English in which it is written, and sink into its evocation of a reality of which I had never thought much about before now. and ended by caling my evil cockerel Buckmaster!
You're giving me courage to try The Wake again, Jane. I loved Alexandria, but couldn't get past the language in the Wake. You say it's worth it, and I still have my copy, so I'll give it another shot.
well I am useless at languages and it took me a while of very slow reading and puzzling but it was worth persevering so go for it...and felt triumphant at getting the 'code' and perhaps too seeing I didnt need to exactly know every word to understand what was going on...such a strange other world it describes and imagines so beautifully and horrifyingly
One thing I noticed when reading Middle English, it helped if I actually read out loud. My eyes would get confused by all the weird letter patterns, but if I just pronounced the word, my ears could often decipher them. I might try that with The Wake.
Salivating over some of the events later this year... I'll be sure to listen to the Brand interview, been meaning to check out his longer shows so this will be a good opportunity.
I've previously listened to and really enjoyed your conversations with Jonathan Pageau and Mary Harrington! They are 2 of my favorites and it's encouraging to see these worlds coming together. I see your link to N.S. Lyons in the comments below, so I'll go there next. He, too, is a fav.
It's a little bit of confirmation that all the rabbit trails I tend to find myself down aren't too terribly misleading. Maybe it really does all come together at some point!
Paul- I am glad to hear you talked to Russell Brand. He has a huge fan base and will help get your work out to a broader audience. This is very good! I look forward to hearing it.
Congratulations on the book release. This is truly a big week.
-Jack
It seems that you do have to pay to listen to Russell's podcast. I'll wait for a clip to appear on YouTube...
Really? I'm sure I signed up for free. Possibly you have to subscribe though.
You can listen to the first ten minutes on itunes.
This is late so perhaps you already know this but you can subscribe for a free trail period (a week, I think) on luminary, but of course you'd have to cancel when you're done.
Allow a humble reader to very highly recommend Alexandria, especially for those of us here who have been following Paul's musings about The Machine. I think Paul would agree that there is a great deal of overlap. Can't say more without spoilers, and the book is too good to allow that.
I keep looking for the swans in my own world, but I fear I won't live to see them.
Congrats! Can’t wait to read it!
As I listen to some of these recent interviews, I am confused by what I understand as your disdain for (of?) gnostic Christianity. For me, a person who has returned to the Christian faith, these texts and the teachers who have invited me in to their deeper meaning (Elaine Pagels and Cynthia Bourgeault as examples) have been foundational, and help me to more deeply appreciate the New Testament as it currently stands. I see many of these gnostic texts as deeply incarnational, rejoicing in our bodies and our earth home. Speaking deeply of purpose.
We humans, caught in our false and shallow stories of what we think matters in life, race toward the dangerous precipice. Any offering of deeper meaning and purpose could become lifelines for many right now as our neighbors finally awaken but with much grief and fear. I think we need to open our hearts to all ancient stories and prophets that speak of connection and love. We don’t have much time as our civilization unravels. I worry that our intellects often stand in the way of surrendering to our collective soul longing, our collective purpose. We need to be there for one another.
I have a few answers, but most would take much longer than a comment section to explain.
Firstly, and most simply: I'm an Orthodox Christian. 'Gnostic' texts, so-called, have nothing to do with the Christian faith.
Secondly, in the context of these conversations I've been having, gnosticism, as a general term (it's not very accurate: more of an umbrella for various traditions) posits a completely different worldview to that of Christianity. More to the point, whether you're Christian or not, gnosticism is essentially the faith of the Machine: it offers an opportunity to escape from matter through knowledge. Very much what I would regard as a 'false and shallow story', and also the religion of Silicon Valley.
All religions are not equal, or the same. Do we have a 'collective purpose'? I've yet to hear anyone agree on what it is.
Here's quite a good essay on this, which lays out the terms:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-reality-war?s=r
Paul, sorry to write before reading the link you shared.
I’m surprised by your rigid response.
I was Quaker raised, and I have since young childhood been told by classmates and adults that I was not a true Christian. I knew that they were wrong. I knew that Christ fully accepted me and loved me.
The gnostic sects were a wide and diverse group, and I’m not saying that they all had it right. Their texts widely vary. But I do question why so much of their deep wisdom is still deemed heretical without discussion. I’ve gleaned much help from some of the few that remain, Gospel of Thomas for example.
And I still see some of the accepted Biblical texts often interpreted in such a literal fashion that they themselves support and feed the machine.
Enough said.
If I spoke of my love of nature and the fact that I live much as you do, you might walk kindly with me. But as a fellow Christian, you do not. That’s the machine.
I'm not expressing any judgement of you, Jenny. I don't know you, and I've no idea what you do or feel or believe. It would be entirely inappropriate of me to judge you even if I did know you. I'm just responding to your words, as I understand them.
But the word 'Christian', like any other word, has to mean something. Its meaning has of course been ragingly debated for 2000 years. But the Nicene Creed is the very bare minimum for a useful description of the term. As I say, I am an Orthodox Christian, and I became one for a reason. Too much rigidity can be a bad thing, but too little can be dangerous.
Perhaps I responded strongly to your sentence 'I think we need to open our hearts to all ancient stories and prophets that speak of connection and love.' It implies that Christ was just another 'prophet', which of course no Christian could accept.
I think many of us can walk with each other as human beings, and Christians should be prepared to walk with anyone, really. But that's not the same as compromising what any of us believe to be truth.
All the best,
Paul
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and kind response, Paul. I’m grateful to be walking with you.
I don’t believe that Christ was just another prophet, never have, and I don’t think that the gnostic texts I treasure say that, either.
Perhaps the best way to describe where I am is undone with grief. We are all so divided and separate, and civilization is unraveling around us. I long for healing and love to reign as the inevitable levels of fear, anger and unrest grow. For me, the second coming is a universal heart-response: walking in grief and loving service with and for one another. I think this is what Christ meant. We are the second coming when we follow diligently and with reference His teachings of love and forgiveness.
A few years ago when Covid first had us all locked down and afraid, I spontaneously emailed my very favorite living author, Jess Walter, after finishing his books. He wrote back with such kindness. I was in awe, and I never got up the courage to thank him for his beautiful response. I had mentioned the spiritual, and (here I paraphrase greatly) he spoke of just this sort of kindness but without the religious focus. He spoke of doing the right thing anyway, and he suggested I read Camus. This kind author was my lifeline; my second coming.
“We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.”
-- Albert Camus
I pray tor peace and love to prevail. Thank you so much, Paul, for gifting me with these.
With gratitude and love,
Jenny
Hey Paul, I’d be interested sometime, hopefully in an essay, to hear your thoughts about the bounds of who is a Christian. I know you don’t portend to be a theologian, but still, I think your conversion to Christianity has inspired a lot of people, and it’d be interesting to me as a regular reader to understand how you more deeply make sense of what it means to call oneself a Christian.
For instance, do you accept David Bentley Hart’s claim that other deep traditions have valid, in some ways superior and in some ways inferior, paths towards the same God of Jesus (which is the only God)? Are you a Universalist, believing that all shall be redeemed/saved or do you see Hell as an eternal punishment? What do you make of the criticism that most Christianity focuses too much on creeds, therefore beliefs, and not nearly enough on the substantial calls to social action presented in the synoptics? If you don’t see Jesus as “just another prophet,” do you make room that other figureheads in other traditions may have the same intimacy with God that Jesus had? Do you believe in a pre-incarnate Christ such that Jesus was “sent from heaven,” or do you read the Gospels as Jesus becoming incarnate with God after his baptism when the holy spirit descends as a dove and the Father announces he’s delighted?
Perhaps you are uninterested in exploring questions like these in your writing: I certainly understand how faith can better be held as a more private affair. But if you’re game for it, it’d been interesting to glean your takes. And, interesting to hear the criticisms you yourself hold of Christianity at large, and/or to know how you conceive of your faith—is it imperturbable, or contingent on further review, or something else?
Finally, to lay down my cards, I’m walking back into the faith after a long absence, but as I do, I’m being very careful (though not cynically so). In this carefulness, I’m hungry to hear thinkers I respect articulate some of the thornier matters related to Christianity.
Ha, there's a challenge.
The short answer is: maybe but not yet. I'm new to the faith, and I am immersing myself deeply in it. the temptation for someone like me, who can write and has an audience already, would be to sound off too early. But the essence of the faith as I practice it is the emptying of the self and submission to God's will. That's the opposite of the tendency within our culture (and in all of us) to want to bend the faith to what we want it to be. I am quite allergic to that, and so I am careful on that score.
The supplementary answer is that I am an Orthodox Christian, and that was a particular choice. I believe that if you join a church - join *the* church, as the Orthodox would have it - you need to accede to the teachings of that church. Otherwise, why join it? Orthodoxy is perhaps the most traditional and the deepest version of Christianity around, and I subscribe to its claims. I'm going to walk the path as laid down for me by the church fathers and see where it leads. I might have more to say when I know more. But thanks for asking.
That makes sense.
I was raised in and fully committed to forms of Christianity that honestly left traumatic marks, so while I hunger for a codified path, I’m very reluctant to give up my self fully to a tradition and its teachings (knowing how distorted the Gospels can become). And yet, I also don’t want to do the post-modern thing anymore either of stitching together reality from my own individualized frames and what “feels good.”
Since you’re new to the path, I’ve wondered how some of the bounds have landed for you, though I know Orthodoxy is rich enough that those bounds don’t always have definitive markers. In any case, I’ve heard you say in interviews “Either these stories are true or they’re not,” and I get to wondering how you conceive of truth in this regard, for literalism was part of the traumatizing package for me, and I’m finding a much deeper connection to the Gospels when I read them simultaneously as poetry, myth, and documentary. And, I’m highly allergic to the forms of Christianity that exclude other paths as valid walks to God, and have been wondering where you stand on that…but Godspeed in however you make sense of these things and whether you’ll write about them one day.
I got Alexandria from the library recently and found it beautifully written and thought provoking, and the evocation of the strange world of a thousand years in the future absolutely mesmerising; and from there i subscribed to The abbey of Misrule,still playing catch up with the essays in it , and also read his earler novel, The Wake feeling triumphant that in the end i managed to overcome my initial resistance to the form of old English in which it is written, and sink into its evocation of a reality of which I had never thought much about before now. and ended by caling my evil cockerel Buckmaster!
You're giving me courage to try The Wake again, Jane. I loved Alexandria, but couldn't get past the language in the Wake. You say it's worth it, and I still have my copy, so I'll give it another shot.
well I am useless at languages and it took me a while of very slow reading and puzzling but it was worth persevering so go for it...and felt triumphant at getting the 'code' and perhaps too seeing I didnt need to exactly know every word to understand what was going on...such a strange other world it describes and imagines so beautifully and horrifyingly
One thing I noticed when reading Middle English, it helped if I actually read out loud. My eyes would get confused by all the weird letter patterns, but if I just pronounced the word, my ears could often decipher them. I might try that with The Wake.
Trying reading it out loud. Many of the roughest patches aspiring to life when spoken.
Salivating over some of the events later this year... I'll be sure to listen to the Brand interview, been meaning to check out his longer shows so this will be a good opportunity.
I've previously listened to and really enjoyed your conversations with Jonathan Pageau and Mary Harrington! They are 2 of my favorites and it's encouraging to see these worlds coming together. I see your link to N.S. Lyons in the comments below, so I'll go there next. He, too, is a fav.
It's a little bit of confirmation that all the rabbit trails I tend to find myself down aren't too terribly misleading. Maybe it really does all come together at some point!
Hey Paul, thanks for the update - really enjoyed your talk with Mary Harrington :)
I tried to buy your new book Alexandria, but the link doesn't work? Hope you can fix that soon.