Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom in the past between primary secondary of worlds. I'm your host, Andrew Snyder, and I am always grateful for your company. I had originally planned to host the interview tonight, but we had to cancel last minute because his family's sake, and honestly I get that. In fact, I previously had
to cancel with him for the same reason. The reality is that this is a fairly regular occurrence when you have young kids, and so instead, I want to talk to you a bit about something that's been on my mind lately, and then at the end I'll provide some recommendations. You may have noticed that I recently dropped my ending line that I used to close to the show for most of us run up to this point. I used to finish out by saying something like, may you have
many meaningful roads ahead. It sounded kind of good, but I started to realize that it feels an awful lot like empty postmodern drivel. I mean, it doesn't sound good, right. We all want to walk on meaningful roads. We want to engage in things that are meaningful. We want to make meaningful choices, we want to have meaningful jobs. We talk a lot these days about doing what is meaningful, but even if we may have some ideas what we mean by that, the language of meaning these days tends
to be terribly vague. I think that if we're honest when we say that people should live meaningful lives, we often mean that people should do the things that make them feel satisfied. But that's a really dangerous path to walk. Do we really just want lives that make us feel satisfied or do we want to be satisfied because those
are not necessarily the same thing. Gerekr talks about this a lot, that a number of people may feel really happy in some kind of external, superficial sense, while there is a deep despair abiding in the center of their soul and that they're out of harmony with who it is that they're meant to be and together. Maybe it propped up by a time for circumstance, But circumstance is going to do what it does, It's going to change, and then where are you? And so don't just ask
the question am I happy right now? But if the earthly thing that I value the most, career, family, whatever, the things that are like near and dear to us the things that we should cherish and that we should celebrate and be grateful for while we have them. If something went terribly wrong in the realm of circumstance, would we still be happy. That's the kind of happiness that
the ancients were seeking. That's the you'nemonia of Aristotle. It's the idea that we want to be so constituted within our human nature that no matter what circumstance turns our way, we are still free. We are still ourselves, we are still human, we are stable even when the world around us is given over to change. That's the kind of
happiness the ancient world sought. That's the kind of happiness that we find in the likes of Boethius, who is asking just that question, when fortune turns against me, who am I? Where am I? Where do I anchor myself? That's the kind of good that we need to be seeking, not just what feels good, but what actually is good.
I think how Aristotle in book two of the Nikomaki and Ethics, when he's dealing with virtue, he makes the point that we don't want to do what some people do and make our focus on study to the point where we know virtue. We don't just want to know what virtue is. We want to be good. That's what Aristotle says, and so too. I think that that is what we need to be pursuing, because like, I can eat a fast food cheeseburger and feel satisfied. But am I really satisfying what is good for me? Am I
engaging in real, genuine human flourishing? Am I being the best andrew that I can be simply because I feel satisfied? I mean, the reality is that a number of things seem good to us. A number of things feel good to us. They sound good to us. That we have a number of things pulling on our hearts that feel
like home the way that we ought to go. But I think it's helpful to consider the Greek idea of muses and the sirens here, and that the muses are that the daughters of zoos who inspire truth and beauty in the poets and the craftsmen and the artisans. Right these this is what it means to muse on something. It's like you're being drawn up in its beauty, and
it's designed the way that things ought to be. And so beauty is not something that exists in the eye of the beholder for the ancient world for the most part. But real beauty is like an objective force in the world that pulls on you, that summons you up toward what is true, what is good, what is beautiful, and
what is life giving. Well, we can contrast that with the apparent beauty of the sirens, the sirens who cast out their apparently beautiful song across the waters to unsuspecting sailors who then hear these songs and it fills them with euphoria and visions of delight to the point where they are drawn in because the music sounds, it feels satisfying, it sounds apparently beautiful, and so then the sailors are drawn into its source, and they don't find what is true,
what is good, what is life giving, but they find what is seductive. They find what is life consuming. And so we get this contrast between beauty and seduction, both of which seem very good at the moment, but have very different results. And so what you need to learn is discernment. You need to learn where beauty is anchored, so that we are able to recognize the domain of beauty when you encounter it, and so too with seduction.
Find very similar theme in the proverbs with the contrast between Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly, same basic idea that they both call out with very similar kinds of calls, but with very different results. So we don't need to just ask what feels meaningful, what feels satisfying, We need to ask what actually is rooted in genuine meaning, what actually satisfies my deepest longings, in harmony with my design and what it is that I am for. I C. S. Lewis said, I didn't go to religion to make me happy.
I always knew that a bottle of port would do that. Or It's like an interaction that I had with a student last semester. I would not one of my students, but I was on campus between classes and a psych student was doing a survey for a class project, and it came up to me, surely not recognizing that I was a philosophy professor. He asked me to rate my happiness on a scale from one to ten. He obviously wanted me to just give him a numbers that way he could jot it down and go about his survey.
But I wasn't going to have that he wasn't going to get away that easily, and so naturally I asked him what he meant by happiness? What is it that I'm quantifying here? And he fumbled around and then said, well, I mean like how positive you feel. And this then leads to the question of what do you mean by positive? And of course this is why they killed Socrates for
asking these kinds of questions. But this is a major problem with pseudo psychology in general, that there's a lot of talk about meaning, There's a lot of talk about happiness, there's a lot of talk about mental health, but no one is asking the question of what it even means to be human? What is our standard for what health
looks like in being human? When we're at the same time we're denying that there is any kind of real essence too humanity, I mean psychology suit que lagos literally means or etymologically, it means something like the articulated reason of the soul? What does it mean to be human?
How can we possibly address something like psychological well being if we cannot answer this fundamental question of what we even are Until we have an answer to this question, the question of human essence or te loss or goal, or what it is that we are meant for, all questions regarding a life of meaning become hyper subjectivized nonsense. We're speaking too a void, and mental health inevitably becomes relegated to a vague sense of feeling good, some arbitrary,
meaningless sense of happiness. And we can see the disastrous consequences of this irrationalism in our obvious mental health crisis that is especially rampant amongst the youth. The thing is that without reckon that there is such a thing as human nature, that that comes along with a way that we ought to be oriented in the world, a way we ought to be put together, that we have a design to fulfill. Well, without that, all we have is empty opinion. All we have is superficial feelings and senses
of satisfaction, senses of meaning, senses happiness. When someone tells us then that we ought to live a meaningful life, but at the same time that meaning can mean something different to everybody, and that all different ideas of meaning are totally subjective and all come down to opinion. Well, that point, the words themselves lose their meaning because we don't have any common ground in which to base our vocabulary.
Our words themselves lose the value of communication, but they sound good because we do genuinely yearn for real meaning. We are part of a real world that is anchored in real meaning that finds its way up to the top. But we've denied ourselves of any means of actually achieving this kind of meaning, of recognizing this kind of meaning, And so in our pursuit of meaning in a meaningless world, we just look for that superficial kind of happiness that
was being asked of me to quantify. And if we think that we find meaning while we are at the same time denying anything like human essence, and we're denying that there is a broader reality in which we are nested. Well at that point that in our very pursuit of meaning, our pursuit of our vision of paradise, we end up in the kind of hell that C. S. Lewis gives us, in the Great Divorce, in which everyone is increasingly isolated from each other, and the very houses in which people
live are nothing more than projections of their own delusions. Hey, everyone, as you know, I have a passion for pursuing wisdom through literature and enjoining as many others as I can in that venture, and so with that in mind, I want to make sure that you know about some of
my studies that are currently available for enrollment. First, there is the Fiction and Philosophy of C. S. Lewis, which is a twelve week study of most of Lewis's works of fiction, including the Ransom series, So Out of the Silent Planet, Perilandra, and That Hideous Strength, as well as the Screwtape Letters Till We Have Faces, the Great Divorce, all of the Chronicles of Narnia, and a little bit on the Dark Tower, which was his first attempt at
a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. Each of these weekly modules include suggested secondary reading, often with PDFs attached when I was able to do that, a shorter video that introduces the text or discusses a related essay or nonfiction text, a longer video that covers the main story we're working with, and a recording of our zoom calls from the live run. There's a lot that's crammed into this course over these twelve weeks, but the good news is that it's no longer live, and so you
can work for the material at your own pace. Also, We've just recently finished an eight week study on life, death, and Meaning with Beowulf and Boethius, which follows the same format of the Lewis course, with recommended reading, main videos on the main text, and shorter videos that cover related myths or philosophy or scholarship. Bawel from Boethius both provide incredible texts that help us to gain stability and courage
in a world that is constantly changing. Lastly, and I'm really excited about this, I have a course coming up in early twenty twenty five called The Wisdom of Middle Earth The Lord of the Rings. I intend for this to be the first of a series on talking stories. As we read The Lord of the Rings together, whether it's your first time or your eleveny first time, as we dig into the wisdom embedded in this incredible story. And if you enroll in multiple courses, there is a
bundled discount to go with that. The prices for all of these courses are currently lower than they have ever been before this point, so sign up now, as they may not always stay exactly where they are at this moment. You can find all these courses at Andrew Snyder dot Potty dot com or click the link in the show
notes and now back to the show. And while that book does have some bearing on eschatology or final things the afterlife, it needs to be principally understood not as a book about what happens when people die, but as first and foremost it is a commentary on the way people are living right now in the modern era, and
Lewis explicitly says as much within the book. His version of Hell is simply the demonstration of the modern era of radical isolation that results from severing ourselves from the reality of the shared reality in which we find ourselves now. Is there a subjective element to our pursuit of the
real meaning that is implicit in a created existence? Yeah, I mean, of course there is, and that we each have a responsibility to pay particular attention to the ray of light, the color that shines down upon us, recognizing that there's an entire spectrum of light that finds its unity in the white light on the other side of the prism. And so we may naturally be drawn to different goods, but we should all be moving toward the good, toward God. Even the pagans of the ancient era of
philosophy recognize us. For example, in Plato's dialogue the Euthiphro, Socrates is going to the court when he encounters his buddy Uthaphro. He asks what Euthyphro is doing there, and Socrates finds out that he's prosecuting his own father for murder, for killing one of their servants. Well, it's a pretty big deal. So Socrates says that Euthyphro is clearly an expert on piety if he has the authority to charge his own father with murder. And of course, whenever Socrates
compliment someone like that, it's obviously a setup. Well, Socrates ask Euthiphro to educate him on the nature of piety, and Euthyphro says that piety is what he's currently doing and prosecuting his father for murder. Well, Socrates says that surely there are other pious actions as well, and together they list off some other good things to do. But it still doesn't really answer the question what Socrates wants to know, and early what Plato wants to know is
what makes good things good? We all know, regardless of the skeptical or radically subjective philosophy. We may espouse. We all know that some manners of life are better than others, that it's better to engage in charity than mass murder. I engage in exercises like this with my college students all the time, most of whom will say that there is no such thing as real truth or real goodness. But if you give them a stark moral scenario, then
suddenly they acquire a taste for justice. Or I'll ask them, you know, how many of them intend to vote in the upcoming election, and most of them raise their hand, and I ask them why they intend to vote, and then they'll tell me something about why one candidate offers a better vision than the other, despite the fact that they just told me that all opinions about everything are equally made up. If you're at all in tune with your basic human experience, then you know that some things
are better than other things. Well, this brings us back to the question of what makes good things good. If we refuse to deal with this, then we become lost to delusion, We lose ourselves to postmodern despair. Well, this is not, by any means the last thing that I had to say on this, And at some point I want to do some more carecguard here and to get
back to where I started with this podcast. But for now, I'm just going to conclude with the final words of Boethius in the Constellation of Philosophy, which very much echoes from what we get in Ecclesiastes. He says, avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue. Lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you if you'll be honest with yourself, A great necessity to be good, since you live in the site of a judge who sees
all things. I want to take a moment to thank all my patrons, because I really couldn't keep this up without you. I have a lot of exciting things in my plate, including a book that I've started drafting, some more public facing courses that I'm starting to put together, and some other currently secret projects. If you'd like to help me to keep going with all of these things, then I would greatly appreciate your assistance through Patreon, and many thanks to all of my current patrons, and by name,
all of my Tier two patrons and higher. That's smart Cliff Aaron Paul William, Aaron Andrew Brandon, Christopher E. And Emmy, Jeremiah, Joscelyn, Joshua Landon, Matthew and Steele, and of course thanks to all of my Tier one patrons as well. If you're interested in joining the Mythic Mind Fellowship, then you should know that there's never been so much content, especially at
the higher levels, than there is right now. Starting at tier three, I've been releasing content from my courses, and I've almost finished uploading everything from the Fiction and Philosophy of CS Lewis course, which covers nearly all of his major works of fiction and beyond. This level of patronage gives you access to the videos as well as the audio delivered through the patron podcast feed, and of course you'll also get all of the other Mythic Mind content
as well at that tier. And so head over to patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind to join the fellowship. Okay, so now a recommendation. With the Advent season coming up in the not two discent future, is time for my
annual reading of Saint Athanasius's classic on the Incarnation. If you aren't familiar with Athenasius, he was active following the Council of Nicea in three twenty five, which provided agreement regarding the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit three persons in one God, and that creed would get expanded a bit more with the Council of Constantinople in three eighty one. Well following the Council of Nicea, things were hardly settled on a political level.
Nicia declared that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, the Greek word there being homousius. The heretic Areas, however, said that the Son is of similar substance to the Father, that is homoi ussius, and so i literally may in iota of difference. As Arias believe that the Sun is the highest creation of the Father. He is as like the Father as a created being
can be, but that he is indeed a created being. Well, following Nicia, the Roman Empire went back and forth on this issue between Arianism and Nicene Orthodoxy, which really just became a mess. That's faithful defenders of Orthodoxy such as Athanacious kept getting banished when politics swung toward the Arians, and then they could come back, and then they could
banish again and not just a mess. And the temporarily Aryan Roman Empire set missionaries amongst the barbarians, and it's these arian barbarians that would later occupy nice Rome, and so it's really just kind of a mess. Well, in any case, Athanasius was an ardent defender of orthodox Trinitarian theology, and one of his iconic texts is on the Incarnation, which makes for a great read as we approach the Advent and Christmas season. And so I recommend that they
pick it up and joined me this year. And I think this is fairly commonplace now with the addition that you'll find by just typing in on Amazon. But make sure that you do pick up an addition that has the introduction by C. S. Lewis. This is a great essay that makes the purchase worthwhile all by itself. Well, that's it for now. Depending on how the schedule shakes out, I should have one or another conversation for the next episode, and also make sure that you check out the Mythic
Mind Fellowship podcast as well. The Mythic Mind patrons and I have been reading through the Poetic Eda. We started publishing some of our conversations over there, so make sure you go and subscribe to the Mythic Mind Fellowship podcast, or you can always become a patron yourself and hop into those conversations. But that's it for now and until next time, god speed, a good