THE WEIRDNESS OF CHRISTIANITY. C.S. Lewis & Owen Barfield, with Jason Baxter & Mark Vernon
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- C.S Lewis is not the apologist and writer you might assume, if Jason Baxter is right. Plato, Boethius and Dante mattered immensely to a man who felt more at home in the medieval world, and longed to inspire the modern world with a half-forgotten theophany.
His friend, Owen Barfield, also anticipated a transfigured today, one in which participation with divine life was known by ourselves and within the inside of the whole world.
Christianity itself would recover its experiential, mystical core, the friends hoped, and be less eclipsed by credal and moral formulations.
In this conversation, Jason Baxter and Mark Vernon explore matters from Christian Platonism and the Incarnation, to the Eschaton and the strangeness of miracles.
What might Lewis and Barfield have talked about in private? How closely are the soulmates' visions entwined? Why does Christianity need to recover its oddness and surprise, drawing on the past and being drawn by a renewed future?
Jason Baxter's book's include The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, full details here - www.ivpress.co....
Mark Vernon's books include A Secret History of Christianity on Owen Barfield, full details - here www.markvernon...
I really cannot see how Christianity will survive unless it turns back to the mystical.
Yes. Thank you!
It won’t.
“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or not at all.”
- Karl Rahner
What a beautiful and fantastic conversation. Thankyou both.
True, we need to integrate the cloud of forgetting so the cloud of unknowing and the unity behind it's surface can be experienced.
Orthodox Christianity never lost the mystical
Re: men with chests and Christianity not being merely a “head religion”.
People sleep on Lewis’s space trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength. Most like and read Perelandra…and yes, it’s wonderful. But Lewis is saying marvelous things in those books. And That Hideous Strength is basically a lock-step novel about our current world situation.
14:13 re: parables
Peter Rollins gets this. Terrence Malick gets this. Again, Suzanna Clarke. Eugene Vodolazkin - Laurus. George MacDonald - Lilith.
It’s about a change in consciousness, not a mere change in ideas.
Good dialogue, excellent insights, thank you!
Wow, I'm feasting on this rich dialog and yearning for a Christianity which lies in humble awe of the majesty of GOD. Have to buy your book. Thank you both
I love you guys.
I remember Lewis writing in one of his essays that if God is real, he is Real - he's not a nebulous, vapid, spiritual breath, he's more solid, more real and WE are the insubstantial ones.
Thank you for this wonderful and fascinating discussion - conversation.
I need to know what essay this is from.
Have you two gentlemen come across or at least read about the life of the great Catholic saints like St Padre Pio? He actually and powerfully lived what you are trying so hard and perhaps so laboriously trying to convey, the numinous weirdness of Christianity? Can you imagine living with five bleeding stigmata for fifty years only for them to disappear at the moment of death? The Inklings conveyed just that, inklings of these mystical depths, but for the real and powerful reality you have to go to the Saints.
Take a look @ the Mahayana Buddhist BODHISATTVA tradition.
It's where, hopefully, things will become clearer.
May the apologists (rationalist/objectivists) decrease,
And the mystics increase. 🙏🏼
Hi Luke.
You Ware all over this Video.
Are you planning to discuss it on BoM ?
Thanks and well done for an excellent discussion. It felt like an Inkling Participation!
22:39 Susana Clarke did this for Barfield with Piranesi.
Haven’t even watched yet, and I agree with this comment.
@@WhiteStoneName lol
Yes!
amen, Barfield is much more abstract and difficult. Lewis is more concrete. And he’s saying all the gold of Barfield in his space trilogy. Imo.
@@Owen_Barfield I definitely agree that our times are moving us closer to understanding. Thanks for the link. Your grandfather has been incredibly helpful to me in understanding the world and myself and *trying* to communicate that to other people. God bless. 🤗
I kept wondering, especially at the beginning of the conversation, if Russel Holban's "Riddley Walker" was going to come up in the conversation. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks.
Love what you said about the James Webb Telescope pictures Mark.
A shame about the adverts... 🤔
3:30 “for this slight, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory which is beyond all comparison.”
- St. Paul
Absolutely loved this conversation and its capacity to further push this evolving awareness and understanding of the numinous as illumination to life's meaning and purpose, and, how much more we have to learn about the embodiment of this concept with our historically sapien praxis of religio. Thank you to you both.
Excellent - Thanks so much for this exceptional discussion, Mark!
20:21 wow - human beings are on the periphery of reality, and invited in.
The answer to all you are talking about:
EASTERN ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY!+!+!+
Thank you so much for the talk! I just recently found your channel. I'm myself estranged for 20 years from Christianity but am only now sort of beginning a process of personal retrieval of what it was that it all meant to me growing up, when it was the compass of my sea. The words exchanged here sparked some uncanny feelings in this old reader of C. S. Lewis. Thanks again
We observe the image of the Grand Canyon on a postcard in our minds while standing before its limitless unimaginable grandeur.
So glad I found your channel, Mark! I've been binging on it. Regarding the Creed, I just want to point out that its "simplicity" hides its radically profound and mystical declaration. If read slowly enough, and with enough harkenig back to all the mysteries the Holy Spirit has divulged to us as Christians, one can--each time the Creed is said--use it (like a prayer) to catapult immediately back to stated of mysticism instantaneously ☦️
wow, i really hope final participation means Christ gets to live within his/her creation... insstead of the human sacrifice of original participation. it's the only fair way, mates.
When people talk about enchantment, faries, medievalism, and symbolism, it is an invitation to all those - usually Protestant "dungeons and dragons" converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. These can often invite a neo-gnostoicism, a reactionary antiplatonism that has nothing to do with the fullness of the faith.
I appreciate the grounded enthusiasm...Thanks:)
This was wonderful, thanks. I have never read Lewis or Barfield. Where to begin?
With Barfield, his talks published in this book are a good intro www.owenbarfield.org/selected-books/speakers-meaning/
Thanks, Mr. Vernon!
As a scifi fan, I started with his trilogy. It has a religious theme. But that took me to his apologetics.
Thanks Mr. Stewart!
are jews not invited to this party? i'm not sure why
What an absolutely awesome conversation.
This absolutely resonates, but only if all can be considered ‘Christian’ by default - sentient beings and earth elements, all .. universal wholeness and resurrection.
Wonderful conversation - thank you both so much.
How do I / we instruct, teach, help the younger people with whom we share our lives? I have two "children" of 30 and 27, they have both been slightly inoculated to Christianity.
Fortunately both are hungry for meaning, In what direction do we point them? What engaging books are available to the less life-experienced ones?
Maybe go on a pilgrimage or daytrips to holy wells - something to show rather than tell.
Carl Jung’s Red Book ✌🏻🧡🔥🌈🏴
Hecks yes! Around 18 - 19 minute mark:
Methodological naturalism becomes ontological naturalism
Thanks for a wonderful conversation. I think what Barfield talked about in theory Lewis, Tolkien, and other Inklings illustrated mythically. There are glimpses of final participation, I think, in Shasta's encounter with Aslan on the misty road, in the description of Lothlorien, in Elvish art and Tom Bombadils stronger songs.
22:30 Does anyone know the name of the book Jason mentions by “Ségur Unsaid”?
Sigrid Unset “Kristin Lavrensdotter”. I might be mis remembering the spelling but it’s close.
@@nightspore4850 THANK YOU 🙏🏽
Mark thank you for your work, thank you both for your commitment to the Christian tradition - I think many of us instinctively know there is something very special that history has gifted us in Christ even though the modern world has made us so impatient with its' inherently illusive nature to our grasping minds. I have been lately to a non denominational Christian group inspired by the likes of John Crowder and Baxter Kruger who have done much to try to rediscover the wildness of the Christian vision. When I am with them I have felt a certain giddiness and a kind of sensation of weight like being happily submerged in the spirit and your comments on Lewis's 'weight of glory ' brought this to mind. Hopefully this is the confirmation that I am on the right track 👍. Please consider reaching out to John and Baxter it may be of benefit to both sides.
Wonderful post!!!!
Great discussion
Wonderful.
Great stuff - thank you!
I'm sorry but I find Jason very difficult to listen to. It's not his ideas it's the vocabulary and delivery of these
What was the novel Jason spoke about, in which a medieval sensibility or original participation is attempted?
not sure if this is what you are referring to around 15:35 - where he says "Thomas Hardy's peasants"
See (for example) Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
sorry - just one more at 23:10 - an unnamed book by Sigrid Undset - but I think the book is "Kristin Lavransdatter".
@@MrHwaynefair Thank you for your trouble, I am very grateful
Rudolf Steiner pointed out the Christianity we have now -- Jesus is the simple rabbi from Nazareth that preached love , and they put him on the level with Buda and Mohamad ---- meanwhile the reality is --- HE IS GOD INCARNATE --Huge difference. What does this mean -- God incarnate. What does John mean by the word. You can go to a Roman Catholic Mass for entire life and you have NO UNDERSTANDING of what the Gospels in reality mean. Steiner called it a world of Empty Phrases. You couldn't describe what we are currently living through any better. The reality we are living is completely different than what we are told we are living. Steiner was Orwell before Orwell --- Orwellian --“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth."
Christianity is hypocritical and boring, not 'weird'.