Paradise and Utopia: Recent Episodes
Fr. John Strickland and Ancient Faith Radio
Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Christendom - A series of forty reflections on the history of Christian civilization, or Christendom. The entire podcast is organized around the theme of "paradise and utopia" - that is, of the civilization's orientation toward the kingdom of heaven when traditional Christianity was influential, and of its "disorientation" toward the fallen world in the wake of traditional Christianity's decline in the west following the Great Schism.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses the once popular philosophical movement known as Existentialism, and the way in which one of its leaders, Albert Camus, broke from others in a search for transcendent Truth.
In this episode, Fr. John describes how ideological world building created not only a hard totalitarianism in the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, but a perceivable "soft" totalitarianism in the liberal democracy of Cold War Western Europe and America.
In this new sequence of episodes, Fr. John tells how traditional Christianity provided certain critics of ideological world-building with a new way of seeing the West.
In this episode, Fr. John describes the anticommunist character of liberalism in America during the Cold War, noting how in its promotion of individual rights it accommodated and even emphasized religious belief, but did so conditionally.
In this new sequence of episodes, Fr. John looks at the origins of the main rival to the world-Building ideologies of Communism and Nazis, American liberalism.
In this final episode on Nazi Germany, Fr. John discusses the unparalleled nihilism of Hitler's "new order" for the West during World War II, a racist utopia grounded in a secular ideology.
In this episode, Fr. John describes how the Nazis, once in power, pursued a culture war against existing German values and beliefs by attacking Christianity, advancing neopaganism, and elaborating a racist utopia.
In this episode, Fr. John launches into the darkest period of the age of nihilism, Nazi Germany. In it, he explores the conditions of Western culture following the First World War and how they subverted both traditional Christianity and secular humanism. He concludes with a review of the ideological mythology contained in Hitler's Mein Kampf.
In this final episode dealing with the Soviet Union under Stalin, Fr. John narrates one of the most chilling episodes in the ideological project to apply the transformation-imperative to a nihilistic, post-Christian Christendom.
Father John continues his account of the Soviet Union's totalitarian project of building socialism by contrasting its nihilistic ideology with the sacramental experience of traditional Christianity.
In this episode, Fr. John begins a discussion of ideological world-building during the twentieth-century age of nihilism. The Communist leadership of the Soviet Union under Stalin drew on the philosophies of both Marx and Nietzsche to advance a terrifying counterfeit of the transformation-imperative in ancient Christian cosmology.
Father John describes the way the First World World shattered confidence in utopia with Western Christendom, and how the growing specter of nihilism caused a small and diverse group of intellectuals to return to traditional Christianity in the years that followed.
In this episode, Fr. John reviews the rise of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, an artistic movement that largely annihilated centuries of tradition in Western painting, music, and literature. He continues by exploring the rise of dehumanizing and demoralizing views of the human condition advanced by atheistic social scientists of the period such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.
In this final episode telling of Dostoevsky's encounter with the "specter of nihilism," Fr. John brings attention to the novelist's characters that most revealed the radiant hope of Christ. The first of these was Prince Lev Myshkin in the novel The Idiot. The second was Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. The episode concludes with an excerpt from Age of Nihilism about Dostoevsky's vision of the heavenly transformation of the world.
In this episode, Fr. John reflects on Dostoevsky's spiritual prescription for Christendom as it began to fall under the specter of nihilism. Repentance was the center of the paradisiacal culture of the first millennium, and in his novels Dostoevsky countered atheistic contemporaries like Nietzsche by showing how neglect for it leads only to the human being's self-destruction.
Returning to a literary career after a decade of exile, Fyodor Dostoevsky confronted one of the great delusions of secular humanism: that man is ultimately a rational being whose happiness depends on the exercise of self-interest. Characters in his novels The Idiot and Demons were designed to demonstrate that nihilistic self-destruction is the only outcome of such convictions. Father John concludes the episode by showing how nihilism played itself out in the fictional moral collapse of Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov and the real-life moral collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche.
In this summary of the second chapter of his book, The Age of Nihilism, Fr. John discusses the early life and faith and incarceration of Russia's great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Unlike his contemporaries--particularly Nietzsche--the novelist found in traditional Christianity the only hope for a Christendom living under the terrible specter of nihilism.
In this final presentation on the nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche, Fr. John considers the philosopher's final work, an autobiography entitled Ecce Homo. The book's strange title is discussed in light of Nietzsche's claim to be the West's alternative to Christ. The episode ends with a spiritual and psychological reflection on why, having completed the work, Nietzsche went totally insane.
In his continued account of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fr. John discusses the megalomaniac philosopher's effort to replace the Gospel with an atheistic "transvaluation of all values."
Friedrich Nietzsche is in many ways the father of modern nihilism. In this episode, Fr. John describes the philosopher's relationship to the atheism of contemporary utopian Christendom, and how the music of Richard Wagner played a role in leading him toward nihilism. As with previous episodes, this one introduces the listener to some music that is both beautiful and historically important.
In this episode, Fr. John begins an account of Friedrich Nietzsche by discussing Richard Wagner, a direct influence on the philosopher whose infidelity with women and famous operatic work, The Ring of the Nibelung, helped inspire the coming age of nihilism.
In this introduction to the final part of Paradise and Utopia, Fr. John reads the prologue to his recently released book, The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars. The episode introduces the nihilistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the role compositions by Richard Wagner played in his formation. Included are musical excerpts of the latter's famous "Wedding March" and "Ride of the Valkyries."
Fr. John Strickland gives an overview of his latest book, The Age of Nihilism, available at Ancient Faith Store: https://store.ancientfaith.com/the-age-of-nihilism-christendom-from-the-great-war-to-the-culture-wars
In this final episode of part three of the podcast, Fr. John Strickland traces the outcome of secular humanism in the case of the Russian Revolution. Though numerous Orthodox Christians warned of the impending disaster facing a post-Christian Christendom, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks took advantage of discontent caused by the First World War to plunge violently into a project of counterfeit transcendence they called "building socialism."
Fr. John Strickland concludes his account of the origins of modern political ideology with the rise of nationalism, a force that not only proved to be a counterfeit to traditional Christianity, but the cause of one of utopian Christendom's greatest tragedies.
Fr. John Strickland continues his account of the rise of secular ideology with a presentation on the Russian intelligentsia and the case of Karl Marx.
In this long-delayed episode (due to work on The Age of Nihilism, available at store.ancientfaith.com/the-age-of-nihilism-christendom-from-the-great-war-to-the-culture-wars), Father John presents the historical origins of liberalism as a modern secular ideology. Atheistic philosophers like Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill provided the philosophical basis for hope in a secular "kingdom of posterity."
Fr. John Strickland announces the release of the third volume of his book series. The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution (store.ancientfaith.com/the-age-of-utopia) is a companion to the podcast, but, as he notes, contains quite a bit of material that is unique. Here he summarizes some of its content.
Fr. John Strickland announces the release of the third volume of his book series. The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution (store.ancientfaith.com/the-age-of-utopia) is a companion to the podcast, but, as he notes, contains quite a bit of material that is unique. Here he summarizes some of its content.
In this second half of his response to a recent review of his books, Fr. John Strickland discusses his use of scholarly sources (The Age of Division required more than three hundred and fifty of them). He also reflects on how criticisms of his sources and his arguments may have been provoked by the unconventional way in which he tells the story of Christendom.
In this special edition of Paradise and Utopia, Fr. John Strickland responds to a recent review of the first two volumes of his book series. In it, he notes the failure to consider the books on their own terms. He uses the opportunity to elaborate what he considers a healthy vision of Christian historiography, one that supports what many consider the need for a "re-enchantment" of modern culture.
Most Americans know Tchaikovsky as the composer of the delightful dances contained within the Nutcracker Ballet. As Fr. John Strickland shows, however, there is much more to be heard in their melodies, and little that was delightful about the emotionally agonized life behind them. Using selections from a variety of works, he explores how the romantic agony came for Tchaikovsky in his boyhood and thereafter never departed. Special attention is given to an analysis of the famous Sixth Symphony, nicknamed Pathetique. First performed just days before the composer's abrupt death, the work brings the generation of the romantics to a heart-rending and emblematic conclusion.
What was the genius of classical music during its nineteenth-century golden age? According to Fr. John Strickland, it was an effort to rescue Christendom's transformational imperative in an age when secularization threatened to sever earth from heaven. No longer influenced by traditional Christianity, great composers like Beethoven exaggerated earthly passions (especially sexual love) to communicate the West's primordial desire for transcendence. But the emotionalism that resulted threatened to take the floor out from underneath them. This episode concludes by analyzing famous works by Schubert and Berlioz which show how transcendence gave way to descent, and how utopian hopes plunged into irreversible spiritual agony.
The early nineteenth-century romantics pioneered a new way of seeking personal transformation. Following a century in which deism desecrated the world, separating heaven and earth, they wanted to re-enchant the West. But by ignoring traditional Christianity and looking instead to the "God substitutes" of philosophical idealism, they only succeeded in creating a counterfeit experience of transcendent communion.
In the nineteenth century, some Christians in America developed radically new visions of God's relationship to man and the cosmos. This "utopian Christianity" produced Unitarianism, Mormonism, and a string of millenarian sects. Father John Strickland concludes the episode with one of the most daring and disturbing examples of American utopianism, the community of Oneida in upstate New York.
In this reflection on an emerging post-Christian Christendom, Fr. John Strickland discusses two ways in which eighteenth-century philosophes—from Voltaire to Thomas Jefferson—worked to subvert the paradisiacal culture of the old Christendom. He explores their use of photic imagery such as "enlightenment" and their introduction of the tripartite utopian model of history consisting of ancient, medieval, and modern periods. He concludes with a brief description of Edward Gibbon's famous and influential work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
In this episode Fr. John Strickland discusses various ways in which Christendom's leadership rejected the reformational Christianity that had provoked the wars of Western religion and replaced it with science, philosophy, pietistic Christianity, and a new religion known as deism.
In this reflection, Fr. John Strickland relates how Christianity ceased to motivate and regulate statecraft in Christendom following the Wars of Western Religion. He discusses the cases of France, England, and New England. He concludes with an account of westernization in Eastern Christendom under Peter the Great of Russia.
In this reflection, Father John Strickland turns from secular humanism to reformational Christianity to see how Christendom's paradisiacal culture was subverted by both the Protestant "Counter-Reformation" and the Roman Catholic "Neo-Reformation." Ironically, Protestant fathers like Luther and Calvin did much to perpetuate the anthropological pessimism and cosmological contempt of their rivals like the earlier Pope Innocent III, opening the door even wider to the wholesale secularization of the West.
This is part 2 to last week's special video episode, on the revolution of art during the Italian Renaissance.
In this special video episode (the first of two parts), Father John discusses the background to the revolution in art during the Italian Renaissance. Though it produced some of the most stunning and innovative works ever, secular humanism represented a radical departure from the heavenly orientation of traditional Christian art.
In this episode, Fr. John Strickland recounts the efforts of three Italian humanists of the quattrocento ("fourteen hundreds") to rescue the dignity of man from the pessimism of Western culture. Departing from traditional Christianity's dignification of man through communion with God, they looked instead to Neoplatonism and there found a model of the fully autonomous human being, Prometheus.
In this episode, Father John relates a case in which the early humanist Petrarch confronted one of the new Christendom's chief architects, Pope Innocent III. Applying his newly developed secular thinking, he rejected the pope's notorious treatise entitled On the Misery of the Human Condition.
Modern historians often bring attention to the effects of secularization on the West. Once traditional Christianity ceased to influence Western culture, the experience of the kingdom of heaven naturally diminished, something the famous German sociologist Max Weber called the "disenchantment of the world." In this episode, Fr. John describes how the concept of the saeculum, a kind of neutral cultural space cut off from the life of the Church, first appeared, and how, with Petrarch, it became a haven for humanists fleeing the pessimism of the fourteenth century.
In this episode the "father of humanism," Francesco Petrarch, broods over his sense of guilt and despair, seeking a new path for Western Christendom known as the saeculum, or "secular."
In this anecdotal introduction to Reflection 21, Father John relates a remarkable but short-lived revolution in fourteenth-century Rome that served as a sign of what the age of utopia would bring. Listeners who enjoy the music of Richard Wagner will recognize the ill-fated revolutionary's name and understand why the turbulent nineteenth-century composer was attracted to him! And speaking of music, if you are wondering about the new closing sequence, it is a chorus from Mozart's utopian opera The Magic Flute and consists of the following (in translation): "When virtue and justice strew with fame the path of the great, then earth is a realm of heaven, and mortals are like the gods."
Father John welcomes listeners back to the podcast with the opening to its third part, the age of utopia. He also summarizes some of the main points of his recently released book The Age of Division, which tells the history of Christendom covered in the second part of the podcast.
Fr. John Strickland talks about the newly released book The Age of Paradise. The book is available at store.ancientfaith.com.
In this final episode of Part 2 of the podcast, Fr. John discusses the catastrophic wars that broke out in western Christendom during the Reformation age. These wars, along with other forces unleashed by developments in the Reformation and earlier, would ultimately result in the loss of Christianity's legitimacy, leading to the rise of a modern, secularized form of Christendom centered upon the experience of utopia.
In this episode Father John explores the way in which the loss of sacramental experience among Calvinists led to the rise of a political ideology that would unintentionally lay the foundation for utopia.
In this episode Fr. John discusses Reformed attitudes toward worship, and the ways in which western Christendom's liturgical and sacramental foundations were eroded when they were put into practice.
In this episode Fr. John discusses ways in which Reformed cosmology represented a shift from the heavenly immanence of paradisiacal Christendom toward the heavenly transcendence of utopian Christendom.
In this episode Father John discusses a few tendencies in Calvinism that would serve to undermine the place of paradise in Reformation Christendom, especially the doctrine of "total depravity" and the spiritual anxiety that accompanied it.
In this episode Fr. John explores the life of Protestant father John Calvin and the reformer's contribution to the Reformation project.
In this episode Father John describes some of the most noteworthy effects of the Protestant Reformation on Western Christendom, emphasizing the decline of a sacramental basis for civilization and the rise of a primarily moral one.
In this anecdotal introduction to the final reflection of Part 2 of the podcast, Father John relates the extraordinary story of a Reformation-era town that declared itself the kingdom of Christ on earth, a "New Jerusalem." Expressing a profound absence of God in the world, however, the story of Reformation Muenster was in fact a sign of the fall of a Christendom centered upon the experience of paradise.
In this episode Father John concludes his reflection on the critical state of western Christendom on the eve of modern times, exploring how the Reformation tried to resolve the issue of anthropological pessimism but ironically served to intensify it.
In this episode, Father John continues his discussion of developments that led to the Protestant Reformation, emphasizing doctrines and practices related to human salvation.
In this latest episode on the impending Protestant Reformation, Fr. John discusses ways in which the long legacy of pessimism about the human condition and the world in general undermined western Christendom at one of her most critical moments.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses ways in which papal supremacy led to the growing sense of crisis that preceded the Protestant Reformation.
Returning after a long absence from the podcast, Fr. John in this episode introduces a new reflection on the crisis of western Christendom prior to the Reformation by discussing the penitential context of Martin Luther's famous Ninety-Five Theses.
In this final episode of his reflection on Muscovite Russia, Fr. John describes the Old Believer Schism as a crisis in the formerly optimistic cosmology of eastern Christendom, leading to its decline on the eve of modern times.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses Muscovite Russia's encounter with the West in the face of Uniatism, military invasion, and theological "captivity," all of which contributed to the decline of eastern Christendom.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses an important and fateful development in the history of Russian Christendom before modern times, the Possessor Controversy.
In this episode Father John describes the rise of the Muscovite state within Russian Christendom, and the way its Orthodox leaders began to see themselves as heirs to the fallen Byzantine Empire.
Having related the fall of Byzantium to the Turks, Fr. John now begins a reflection on the only remaining Orthodox state in eastern Christendom, Muscovite Russia. In this introductory anecdote he tells of an event in the history of this "Third Rome" that signaled the coming decline of ecclesio-political symphony, and with it the experience of paradise.
In this final episode of Reflection 17, Fr. John relates the final catastrophe to befall eastern Christendom during the period, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.
Fr. John gives an account of the atmosphere in Italy in which Orthodox and Roman Catholic delegates met to discuss the possibility of union in the middle of the fifteenth century. Only one of the Orthodox would refuse to sign the resulting Treaty of Union, Saint Mark of Ephesus.
In this, the first episode of the Paradise and Utopia video edition, Father John provides a video lecture from his office in Puget Sound, showing, with the use of powerful, full-color icons such as those of Andrei Rublev, how hesychasm inspired some of the greatest art in the history of eastern Christendom.
In this episode, Fr. John draws upon several scholarly works to show how hesychasm protected eastern Christendom from the forces that had begun to lead the new Christendom of the west away from traditional Christianity.
In this episode, Fr. John describes why Saint Gregory's defense of hesychasm against the westernized Barlaam represented a defense not only of Orthodoxy, but of Christendom itself.
Fr. John introduces the force that kept traditional Christianity on course at a moment of crisis in the east, Hesychasm, and how it maintained Christendom's focus on paradise.
After a transition to his new parish assignment, Father John returns to the podcast with a discussion of the atmosphere of catastrophe that hung over the old Christendom of the east as the Muslim Turks advanced on Byzantium, while a defender of traditional Christianity, Saint Mark of Ephesus, prepared to depart for the unionist Council of Florence in the west.
In his conclusion to this reflection, Fr. John discusses the Roman Catholic theological principle of "doctrinal development," and traces the origins of four new doctrines that arose in the west after the Great Schism.
In the latest episode of his reflection on the new Christendom of the medieval west, Fr. John discusses the new approach to theology fostered by scholasticism, contrasting it with traditional Christian theology.
In this episode, Fr. John describes the revolutionary changes that came to characterize western monasticism after the Great Schism, leading to the rise of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Templars.
In this episode of his reflection on the new Christendom of the middle ages, Fr. John discusses the new ecclesiology of Roman Catholicism, contrasting it to Orthodoxy and concluding with a reference to its most notorious statement, the papal bull Unum Sanctum of Boniface VIII.
In this opening anecdote of a new reflection in the podcast, Fr. John examines a famous account of a medieval English knight's pilgrimage to Ireland and vision of purgatory there, relating how it documents the rise of a new type of piety in western Christendom.
In this final episode of Reflection 15, Fr. John discusses the thirteenth-century popes Innocent III and Gregory IX, showing the close connection between their efforts to advance papal supremacy on the one hand and direct crusades against the Orthodox on the other. He concludes the reflection by noting the recent meeting of Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew and placing it within the context of centuries of cultural division between east and west.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses Pope Urban II's calling of the First Crusade and the impact it and the crusades of the twelfth century had upon relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholics.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses the coming of the crusades and the decisive role played by Pope Gregory VII.
In this episode, Fr. John discusses the immediate aftermath of the mutual excommunications of 1054 and the ways in which papal supremacy emerged as the main point of continued division between the east and the west.
In the anecdotal introduction to a new reflection, Fr. John tells the story of the fall of Constantinople to the western crusaders in 1204, showing how this event, inspired in part by new claims of papal supremacy, resulted in the permanent separation of eastern and western Christendom.
In this conclusion to his account of the Great Schism, Fr. John reviews the leading controversies that aggravated relations between Rome and Constantinople during Pope Leo IX's military confinement, and how they resulted in the latter's posthumous act of excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius in 1054.
Fr. John continues his exploration of the pivotal reign of Pope Leo IX and the way in which its reforms led toward a confrontation with the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1054.
Fr. John discusses the spiritual decline of the Church in the West and the attempt to reform this degradation.
Fr. John discusses the baptism of Saint Vladimir and shares an introductory anecdote about the death and canonization of Saints Boris and Gleb.
Fr. John concludes his account of the influence of the Franks by returning to the question of the filioque and how the papacy's resistance to its insertion in the Creed finally came to an end on the eve of the Great Schism.
Fr. John looks at the development that took place within the Frankish lands themselves, especially those concerning the liturgy.
Fr. John describes the desanctification of the world that began to occur in the time leading up to the Great Schism.
Fr. John looks at a couple of consequences of St. Augustine's anthropology in the West.
Fr. John continues to discuss St. Augustine by looking first at his notorious doctrine of original sin and its impact on the conception of man in the West.
Fr. John addresses the foundations in the West of a growing pessimism about man's condition, paying particular attention to Augustine.
Fr. John contends that to understand the coming of the Renaissance and its humanism, one really needs to understand how in the West the doctrines about man became increasingly pessimistic.
In the first episode of part two of his four-part podcast "Paradise and Utopia," Fr. John Strickland, a professor of history at Saint Katherine Orthodox College, describes how Pope Nicholas I paved the way for the rapid development of the papal theory of empire.
Fr. John looks at some of the actual texts of early Christian hymns and the way in which they gave expression to the vision of early Christendom.
Fr. John explores traditional Christian temple or church architecture and locates the principle of heavenly orientation at work.
Fr. John explores specific examples of icons and the way in which they manifested early Christendom's experience of the kingdom of heaven.
Fr. John introduces the principle of heavenly orientation and then explores actual forms of art, beginning with iconography.
Fr. John discusses the ways in which iconography was defined and produced in Byzantine Christendom.
Fr. John explores the triumph of Orthodoxy in the year 843 and the way in which it enables the art of Christendom to express the deepest conviction about man's relationship with God and the possibility of communion with Him.
Fr. John tells the story of when St. Macarius journeyed from the desert to the city to meet two laywomen who were superior to him in their spirituality.
Fr. John discusses the ways in which the Church tries to create a sanctified topography in Christendom.
Fr. John discusses the design, history, and importance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Fr. John looks at traditional Christianity's eucharistic rites in order to see how they served to reorient the world toward the kingdom of heaven.
Fr. John discusses the importance of worship to Byzantium, the immense degree to which its culture was influenced by liturgy, and the significance of "facing East."
Fr. John discusses the life and activities of St. Pulcheria, as well as how the Trisagion came into Orthodox worship.
Fr. John discusses the case of Caesaropapism and the symphony when it was actually achieved.
Fr. John draws attention to a feature of Byzantine statecraft in which the Emperor persecuted and manipulated the leadership of the Church.
Fr. John addresses the uncertainty in Byzantium following the death of Constantine and then the consolidation of Christianity shortly after that.
Fr. John evaluates the impact that the Christianization of Rome had on the state's conception of sacrifice.
Fr. John delineates the various ways in which Constantine contributed to the Christianization of the Roman state.
Fr. John explains how the Church cultivated a higher level of sexual dignity and explores how Christendom served to elevate women in Roman society.
Fr. John explores how the Church began to address, confront, and challenge the pagan culture of the Roman Empire, particularly during the third century.
Fr. John explores what could be called the catacomb culture of the Church in relation to the Roman Empire.
In part two of his introduction to his new podcast, Fr. John offers a preview to the history of Christendom and describe the Orthodox perspective he plans to bring to it.
In part one of his introduction to his new podcast, Fr. John reflects on the crisis of Christian civilization in modern times. He also defines "Christendom" and explains why it is worthy of study.