ON THE ROLE OF FRINGE PHENOMENA IN SOCIETY

Regular readers already know both partners in the following video. They will not be surprised about Father Andrew's interest in myths and old stories and traditions that have survived well into Christianity; or about the extraordinary perspective that Jonathan Pageau has been taking on philosophy and Orthodox religion. Not part of the series about The Great Tales, but this video on monsters and cynics might have been. It throws new light on the obsession with unusual and fringe phenomena that is so typical of this period, that to some thinkers like Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, its represents the terminal station of liberalism. In other words, 'wokeism' is the end stage of the individualistic approach to civilization that began with the Enlightenment, principally its final stages in the age of German Idealism. 


Dec, 20, 2024 Father Andrew Stephen Damick: Pageau: The Monsters and the Cynics

Father Andrew writes in his introduction:

"In his 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," J. R. R. Tolkien refuted the prevailing Beowulf scholarship of his day, which disdained the poem for its focus on monsters. He had this to say about the Old English epic:

"I would suggest, then, that the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness".

"Fr. Andrew sits down with ‪@JonathanPageau‬ in his Montreal home to discuss whether and how the monsters make sense of our world today, what they have to do with the Christian story, as well as the place of the hero in facing the monsters". 

Alexander Dugin reduces the morality of the story to one sentence: let the fringe be the fringe, don't turn it into the mainstream. 


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