Rediscovering The Guilds That Built Christendom: An Interview with Dr. George Grant

Born in Vinci , leonardo was apprenticed to the famous Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio at the age of 14 . Leonardo's skill quickly surpassed his teacher's and his ability to combine his art and science became evident during his apprenticeship .

While training , he began experimenting with anatomy , perspective , light and shadow , which laid the foundation for his future masterpieces . Da Vinci relocated to Milan in the late 1480s , securing patronage under the Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza .

During this period , he produced works of renown such as the Last Supper , a fresco celebrated for its perspective in the intricate emotions conveyed by its subjects . Capturing the moment . Christ reveals an impending betrayal .

While in Florence , leonardo created his most acclaimed painting , the Mona Lisa , which would become an iconic Renaissance portrait , distinguished by the subject's enigmatic smile and the innovative sfumato technique which seamlessly blends colors and tones . This approach revolutionized portraiture , emphasizing depth , emotion and subtlety .

The Mona Lisa is shrouded in mystery , making its story as captivating as the artwork itself . This acclaimed painting transcends mere artistry . Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa between 1503 and 1506 , though he is believed to have continued working on it for several years after that , possibly until around 1517 .

The painting depicts a woman with a wry smile sitting against a surreal background of distant mountains and winding rivers . The identity of the woman in the painting has been the subject of speculation for centuries , but the most widely accepted theory is that she was Lisa Ghirardini , the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giacondo .

The name Mona Lisa itself comes from the Italian Mona Lisa , which means Lady Lisa . The work remained in Leonardo's possession until his death in 1519 . It was later acquired by King Francis I of France , who hung it in the Palace of Fontainebleau and later the Louvre Museum in Paris . But the painting became truly legendary after a remarkable event in 1911 , theft .

On August 21 , 1911 , the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre by an Italian named Vincenzo Perugia , who believed the painting should be returned to Italy , thinking it had been taken from his homeland during the Napoleonic Wars . The painting was missing for over two years . Its theft caused an international scandal .

The Mona Lisa was eventually recovered in 1913 when Perugia tried to sell it to an art dealer in Florence . Imagine trying to literally sell the Mona Lisa on the black market Obviously not the brightest guy . The dealer grew suspicious and contacted the authorities . Hey , it seems like somebody's trying to sell the literal Mona Lisa .

The painting was returned to the Louvre , where it was met with a hero's welcome . The incident only fueled the painting's fame . Now one has to wonder today why our age seems to produce so few great artists like da Vinci , or musicians and authors .

What is often missed is that great artists are produced by great civilizations and rich cultures , which was certainly the case for Leonardo . In fact , da Vinci could not have emerged had it not been for the enlivening influence of Christianity upon the European world . While he lived much later , leonardo's world was built by centuries of wine-rich Christendom .

That , and the period many slander today as the Dark Ages , which lasted from the 5th to the 10th centuries . In point of fact , this time after the collapse of the Roman Empire , was robustly and distinctly shaped by Christianity . It was a time of light and energy , as new forms of art , literature and architecture began to take shape .

Later , breathtaking cathedrals would be constructed , the same buildings that inspire so much awe and wonder .

Today , without power tools or computer programming or CAD software , these cathedrals somehow dwarf our strip malls and megachurches today , in style craftsmanship and their enduring ability to move the human soul , as we discuss in today's episode , which features an interview with Dr George Grant .

Style craftsmanship and their enduring ability to move the human soul , as we discuss in today's episode , which features an interview with Dr George Grant , the 5th through the 9th centuries were marked by guilds of learning , which , as Dr Grant says , were the melding of craftsmanship with covenant succession .

A student spent an entire lifetime being shaped by a master who helped them become immersed in whatever trade they had taken up . As a result , artists saw themselves as workmen and spent a lifetime honing their craft . None of this could have been possible without the emergence of a Christian education that shaped every facet of life .

Da Vinci , for example , knew five languages , studied vastly and created works of art and science that would still be wildly acclaimed centuries later . A more modern product of Christendom's genius could be found in someone else we discuss in this episode JRR Tolkien .

So join us today in the King's Hall as we discuss the importance of Christendom guilds and the heights of artistic and cultural development brought about by a distinctly Christian culture and people . The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well win the world .

No , I've got the ladies bar , so it's 35 . And then what I do is I just I try to lift that completely by itself and you know , one set of five . That's pretty tough , that's actually quite the strain brian's speaking of strain .

Michelangelo was a Ninja Turtle . Donatello .

So I think we agreed that the real ones do two things they leave their truck primer gray , so you don't have to worry about it , and you say primer , you don't say primer . You don't say primer .

The problem is when you , when you got a a cold open with like three languages of names and stuff , you just have to decide at the beginning if you're going to be like the pedantic guy at Taco Bell that all of a sudden says I would the beginning .

We've referenced a lot of his work , but one of the things he mentions is this idea with the guild in pairing craftsman level workmanship with covenant succession .

So the idea is sort of that somebody like Da Vinci he would have worked for his whole lifetime to learn a trade , but he's studying under somebody who worked his whole lifetime learning similar trades , and so you can understand how you would actually get masters over many uh centuries .

So my question is , as you think about this kind of view of work , first of all , in your vast experience in the business world , inside corporate America , this probably reminds you a lot of the level of work that's out there today .

He gets back from Vietnam , he starts advertising in gun magazines and like the back if you've ever looked at old magazines or ads in the back almost like classifieds . And he built this business from nothing it was like in his garage into a $300 million plus a year business all from a catalog .

But the thing is , as a family business that was owned by the family , the family other than him did not involve themselves . They were actually quite not capable of running the business .

And so even today you get many examples of boomer-aged men who have started businesses and they're successful and they're now reaching retirement age , they want out and there is a glut of businesses that are for sale because they don't have anyone to pass them on to . And so this has been . I mean , this is a generational failure . This isn't unique to our time .

Even you know this has been happening for a long time .

So there was fundamentally continuity , not just in the thing you did to make a living , but across all of your life . You lived in the town , in the place that your family had been for often centuries , at least generations , unless some big event came , a war or a famine or something that would force you to leave and change . There was continuity .

Now we build discontinuity into our cultural practices because you're thinking about that boomer aged guy that worked hard and started that business doing HVAC or doing windows or software . It could be almost anything . What was the expectation for his children ? Well , he didn't pass on to them the idea and they didn't receive .

You're going to learn the family business , son You're going to . I'm going to equip you , all my kids You're going to work whatever part of the business you seem most apt to work in . Or if not , there was also continuity in that old system where , if maybe you didn't work exactly in your father's business .

Maybe he's a farmer and you're going to be a blacksmith farmer and you're going to be a blacksmith . But it's probably because there's some family or connection where you're going to send your son for some time to become you know what we'd call today an intern . But basically like sweeping the floors and learning the craft from the ground up .

We've now built discontinuity in so that that boomer actually probably thought of success for his kids . Like I don't want you to do something dull and dusty and boring , like run my boring HVAC business . I want you to go to college and get a degree in economics and you're going to and then you could be working in a cubicle . We had the wrong status symbols .

Meanwhile that guy goes out and increasingly as the college , inflation makes the degree less and less valuable . But the cultural ideas and norms take a while to catch up . They're actually catching up now . People don't value college degrees the way they did 20 years ago .

Instead , it's funny , like the business that he , that a lot of these boomers are like ah , we need them to go get college degrees and do this . They're businesses that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that could support many households and families and grow and just like so it's .

There's something that's gone wrong in the foundations of our cultural thinking to deracinate us , to uproot us from our place and from that legacy of continuity to where now all of the systems of our culture actually militate against people . Doing that , they're trying to persuade you not to have continuity .

Do you think liberal secular order is even capable of producing the things that Christendom built ? And while you're thinking about that question , I look at it like this I was in high school .

I remember we actually went to a pretty traditional , more classically conservative-esque high school and so it was more like what we think of , like Christian classical education . They couldn't call themselves Christian because they were a charter school at the time . But you know , we read the great books . We read Homer . But I remember we read Homer .

But I remember getting to the modern period especially and they were like the modern great works and I was like what shall we read ? And they're like beloved by Toni Morrison . And I remember thinking this is trash , the modern age isn't producing . And even the great Gatsby yeah , I hate that book . Not good , it's terrible .

It's like modern Hollywood put to a book , you know , and saying like , wow , look , how cool this is . It's not good . So again back to the question do you think modern secularism can ever produce great works ?

Our society has shaped the general will of the populace to think I can't do great things and if I try , the government is going to be there at every step attempting to frustrate my plans to build great things . I think about someone like Elon Musk when he's trying to launch a rocket . That's a feat of engineering , a feat of human ingenuity .

And the local authorities there are , in California or wherever it is . They're arguing with him for months about whether he's allowed to put water on the launch pad after the launch or at the landing or something to prevent it from burning . And they were requiring months of environmental impact studies for what will happen ?

if we pour water on this concrete pad and a guy like you just look at that , they should pay me to do that study .

By the way , I could do that study , we could this is what I think you could take with the technological advance today in in cad and in three-dimensional manufacturing and you could be creating gothic cathedrals carved in marble by brilliant artists who have a 100 or 1,000-fold productivity edge over the old master who had to do that by hand , and we could talk

about the goodness or not goodness of that , but that's all possible . We could be building columns and Corinthian and composite columns today out of stone and marble and putting them together in ways that , honestly , the medievals would would have only dreamed of .

And they would look around and they would say they would ask us with all of these capabilities you have , you built that . It took us 500 years to build this cathedral . You could do it in five years and you built that . And then they would find the mormons and they'd be like why are the Mormons the only ones doing this kind of like ?

The Mormons are building these elaborate temples everywhere . Not good , don't be Mormon . You know , friends , don't let friends be Mormon .

But it's a matter of will , it's a matter of aesthetic , it's a matter of vision , it's a matter of imagination , and those are the things that have been stripped from us , because those are the things that grow up out of the deep roots of a people in a place over a long period of time , with a shared intergenerational vision for beauty and inheritance and

glorification of a place . Those are the things that have been stolen , not our ability to do them .

We're talking about the hard skills like that our fathers passed on . But like you look at the older generations and are like and my dad can weld , my dad can do breaks , he can do you can do any of those things in his sleep . I'll ask him about a circuit for the electrical in our home and he's like oh , that's real simple , you just gotta .

I'm like how do you know this ? You're not an electrician , Nah , but it's simple . And they grew up in ages before YouTube , so that was all passed on from other generations and there's a wealth there .

But then if you don't have those , like Brian mentioned deracination , it seems like it's just the quality of things , the quality of the work and culture just isn't . It's going to be pygmy compared to that other stuff .

Well then , uh , well then , you're going to need some soap so that you don't smell as bad . Do you see what's happening to you ? Like , how are you even ? Are there fairies ? Do you have fairies that give you this Dude ? What are you talking about ? Have you partnered with the Fae ? No , I'm a stone cold Christian who likes soap Dude , I feel .

Wait , is that calendula ? Oh not so mad about it . Now are you ? They make liquid soap now . Yeah , you didn't know that , Dude , I didn't know that .

I'm telling you , are you kidding me ?

One of the things that I suspect and I haven't studied deeply on this one thing I suspect the reason that we've really had architecture , art and this rise of secular humanism that's really affected every part of our world as far as beauty and aesthetics and knowledge and everything like that .

I suspect a lot of it actually has to do with law and with the government . Think about what we've been discovering recently with USAID and what they've been benefiting and who they've been benefiting . And if you look back in time and the commissioning of cathedrals , where did the money come from ? It wasn't coming from the stonecutters . They were being paid .

Somebody was commissioning of cathedrals . Where did the money come from ? It wasn't coming from the stonecutters . They were being paid . Somebody was commissioning them . It was some royalty . It could have been the church who had wealth and power and things like that .

Oh , is that yeah , I , I don't . Yeah , I don't know the exact cost , but it's astronomical they say the f-35 has a lifetime cost of 1.3 trillion wow , okay there you go operating if you were to look at the buildings that the air force is actually building on base , they are like metal sheds . They don't even have drinkable water . I lived on Hill Air Force .

Really , yeah , yeah , it's bad 3087 B , Concord Way baby .

That's kind of interesting for us as far as the government being self-interested , because as you drive through small towns in in the midwest , uh , in the west , here , and I'm sure it's like this other places you go into some of these small towns that are like unincorporated to like 20 000 people . The most beautiful buildings are government buildings .

Yep , the courthouse , they're the courthouse , yeah , yeah , or something , something city hall . Something like that change though yeah , but something changed to where the government or the you know , the legislatures , the rulers , were no longer interested in actually funding beautiful things to be made for the benefit of the people .

Instead they're , they're advantaging other things , like a massive military or aid for , you know , social welfare or whatever they're spending their money on . You can look at the books with Doge , this has been a big thing recently . You can look at the books and see where the money is going .

Oh , it's going to like Uganda and Ukraine , and it's not going to our own people to actually commission , to build great things . And so if you were a stone cutter or a Mason or or whatever , you were in the trades , it was no longer beneficial to do that .

And with the rise of the education system , like you , you said credentialism , university credentialism as a way to escape the mire of this failing trade world you know you wanted your , your kids , to escape into something that was actually beneficial financial systems , corporate America that's actually what's being benefited by tax codes and by legislation .

And so you would encourage your kids to no longer pursue the trades because there was some opportunity elsewhere , and we all want our kids to have a better life than we had , and so I think there are multiple facets to this , but I think an underestimated one is simply just based on the rulers and the law and where the money goes .

I think that's actually a big thing , and so there was a break in the continuity of generational knowledge to the point now where it comes up in the interview and it might even be mentioned in the cold open uh , about how we've lost knowledge .

There's so much lost knowledge now where , if we desired to build a , you know , a cathedral that was built in the 12th century , like I don't know if we could actually do it we , I don't know if we could do it . Yeah , it would take men a lifetime to figure it out . I think we could do it and do it faster .

But I really do think that , when you and you're right , that the law aspect , the , the didactic quality of law , it teaches you and it shapes culture , it directs , it puts up barriers , is a lot of the time what it does , and a lot of the barriers for us have been in bureaucratic . What's the word regulation ? Like regulatory laws ?

A lot of them aren't even laws . They are the regulatory acts of unelected bureaucrats interpreting basic laws and then imposing them on the people .

I think of something like the chinese painting programs that they have . You guys might be familiar with this , but it's a .

You can literally go on the internet and you can find um chinese businesses that have a warehouse full of sculptors and painters that are replicating great works , so like Rembrandt's and Leonardo da Vinci's works and these great works , luminous , the Hudson River School artists .

You can go find any of these guys , dozens and dozens of Chinese painters that they have taught all the principles of art and composition and how to mix paint , and they're laboring , probably for insanely low wages , like in a sweatshop environment , to create sweatshop oil paintings or sweatshop sculptures and you can go buy like legitimately .

I think you could go buy a fairly decently sized replication and an actual painting of a masterwork for like 500 bucks or something like that and they'll ship it to you from China , I know this and ask me how I know , brian , because ? you've bought one . You've bought one . I've bought one . Yeah , I've looked at them .

That's how actually replicable the skills themselves are . Now it's so funny though you look at a cultural imagination of chinese communism linked with globalist free trade , american demand , and that's what we create . It's not that we can't make the paintings .

One of those chinamen is probably a great , could have , probably has the potential to be a great artist , like an actual great . We could be doing this , but our imagination immediately goes to how can I mass produce this ? Not a patron system .

It's going to produce great works of art and public works that people are going to be able to behold for centuries and shape our imagination . They think how can I turn this into a sweatshop for globalist free trade ?

I think it was even with notre dame the the cathedral yeah stained glass notre dame . Thank you , thank you with the , with the cathedral . I don't know if you guys recall reading this about the stained glass , that the older stained glass was better than the newer stained glass .

And we're talking like you know , whatever it was built 14th century and then in the 17th century they couldn't make stained glass as good as they used to , or yeah , or aspects like uh , there are cathedrals that are built . They don't have any metal in them at all .

Right , because steel doesn't last more than a few hundred years , or 500 years or whatever it's not long enough , so they use all wood uh you know old growth timbers that don't exist anymore .

Yeah , it caught on fire and they had to replace a bunch of timbers .

Or they've done work in the Mormon buildings that are 150 years old and they run into similar things where they will have elaborate structures that are built with whole timber and lashings that are still functioning perfectly and that they can't replicate , a because of code , but also because of materials . So it is .

It's this interplay of cultural imagination , the didactic function of law and also opportunity that things like the Industrial Revolution open up to where people start to think that the grass is truly greener on the other side . If I could just escape this humdrum , never-ending continuity . Oh , oh , I've got to do something new and do something great .

And what's funny is that you actually end up destroying the greatness of a people by doing that yeah and then the greatest works you create are something like the barack obama presidential library . I don't know if you've seen that no , it's under construction .

Still , it's supposed to be done and like , like I hope , trump knocks it down , it's all coloring books . I hope Trump drone strikes it , but it's all coloring books . Oh , that's good . It's hideous , it's brutalist , it's disgusting , it's international style . It's like this , just the worst architectural school . But it's perfect . It represents the man perfectly .

It just shows that our imagination . It's probably a very technically difficult building to create . No shade on the engineers building it , it's just that they're setting out because of their imagination , to fail . They're succeeding in failing .

And that's so much of what I think goes into this conversation of covenant , succession and trades and fathers to sons and guilds , and it's about cultural imagination .

I pray of a recovery of a cultural imagination that says America , it's not that America cannot do these things , it's that we have been dreaming too small and we have been stifled by evil people who have shackled us to drab , gray , meaninglessness , nihilism , and we , we will throw off those shackles and go oh , the sun is still up .

We're the United States of frickin' America . Like we can't . We can do these things right .

So maybe we won't figure out the ins and outs of building the most beautiful cathedrals today , but you can try and you'll probably hit some of the targets of beauty . And then it's worth passing on the knowledge and saying like , hey , this is what we did . Don't do that , but do this instead .

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That's beautiful and people love and they still delight to be inside today . And they say , well , this other thing is $275 a square foot if you want to build it New build , yeah , but this thing you're talking about it's $600 . It's $1,000 a square foot to build if you want to do it right .

And we immediately go , of course , why would we squander the Lord's money to build something two to three times more expensive today ? And here's the answer your per square foot cost per year of actual use , functional use , will be far better if you build the thing that people want to be in in 400 years .

And if you're not thinking that far ahead , of course you're going to be giving , you'll give way and you'll say , yeah , you're right , we should just build the box with the stuff like the most , because it's going to be multi-purpose and we're going to be able to rent it out to .

You know , the , the , the business guy that wants to come and do his Tony Robbins thing , and the yeah , of course we should do that TP roof , whatever you're right . And I'm like , if we build a , building and it doesn't have a fricking bell tower stained glass .

Yeah , you know what it was used for nothing , nothing it was used for no purpose they ended up locking it and it wasn't used and it was part of this huge expansion point is that if you build something beautiful and enduring , it will be enduring well , it's actually kind of crazy .

So they figured out how to make a tree that would grow a base and then grow another tree up from it that they could harvest occasionally , and it would grow another base and then grow another tree up from it that they could harvest occasionally and it would grow another one .

Really yes yeah , and their joinery , their wood joinery is so , so good that in an earthquake you get a lot of earthquakes . In an earthquake it's fine . 1500 year old buildings that have gone through magnitude eight , nine plus earthquakes and they just move . It's the same thing the mormon temple in salt lake city .

They're spending like a billion dollars to go under the foundations and put in these rubber , basically big dampers that will allow the building to move on these rollers because of the earthquake , because of earthquakes , it wouldn't . In Utah we have earthquakes , we have earthquakes . Here we're likely to have big ones . That whole modern system , it works .

Ones , um , that whole modern system , it works , but it's uh , does not have the longevity or the function of japanese wood , all wood joinery .

Third , recovering the American will to greatness , because America has everything we need to be great . The American church does the American people do . The American economy does . American government does the American people do .

The American economy does , american government does , but we don't have the will to do it , or at least we're nascently recovering the will to do it now . This is the thing to focus on , in my view , right now it's the recovery of the will and the imagination to do great things and create beautiful things .

And to do that we're going to have to get rid of this regulatory mindset of safety first and go to that safety third mentality . It's funny because you end up again , you spend more up front and it ends up being cheaper in the long haul . You make regulatory safety number one and turns out every 30 years .

They're like oh , by the way , that building code thing we required it's giving everybody cancer , it's microwaving their brains .

But you can find the parts but they're like I don't know , sometimes up to eight or nine times the price of like the Napa part or the parts store part . But you can go through forums and everybody said , like my original suspension parts lasted 150,000 miles and the new stuff will last 40 max .

So yeah , it goes back to that same thing of like just do it right the first time , even toyota with the new tundras . They've even said , hey , we're getting killed by ford and chevy because our trucks last too long . We need to bring them from 300 000 miles down to 200 to be able to compete .

And then we need to bring them from 300,000 miles down to 200 to be able to compete . And then we need to raise the price of the vehicle to about $90,000 on the premium models so that we can continue to make money . So yeah , and part of that to Brian's point is all about will , I do want to encourage people to check out the conference .

June 12th through 14th , Ogden , Utah . Our very own Dan Burkholder is going to be there . Whatever you bring , he'll sign you .

But also , if you're a CEO type or you want to start a small business , you want to interface with other people who are interested in doing that . This is a great time to meet the other builders and growers and the changers of this great American nation , so I encourage you to be there . Newchristendompresscom slash , I think , 2025 .

So we're trying to put more space in the schedule . Even um , we're trying to put more . We have a pastor's breakfast . We have a vip kind of mixer , we have a business mixer . We we have a VIP kind of mixer . We have a business mixer like a Saturday night fellowship event . There's going to be church on Sunday and then a barbecue in the park on Sunday .

So there's going to be opportunities to just be with everybody , get names , get connections . We'll have a way for everybody from a region to connect as well . So it's really we always want the speaking to be great and on the note for what is required today and this year , and we think a lot about that .

But we also want it to be something where you're meeting the right people and you're getting to be encouraged and built up and make connections that can change , that can actually change your life , like . That's the value of you meet one right person in God's providence in your life and it can be who your kids marry .

It can be what business you're in , it can be . These are trajectory-changing moments if you'll grab onto them and get everything that's possible out of them . So come hang out .

So if you support the show on patreon , you listen into that and you can also get access to the deus vault where we do a lot of stories from christendom and christian history that are short , punchy and helpful to just remind you of the greatness that we come from , so we can recover that will to be great ourselves .

Check out the interview and we hope you guys enjoy .

I think a lot of people talk about it , but we don't always know exactly what the definition was . So that's kind of where I wanted to start off with you . What was Christendom ? It encompasses a wide period of time , but what do you think of when you think of Christendom ?

But there was still this kind of cultural consistency that was passed on from the Roman world but now was rapidly Christianizing . The idea of nations is a very modern idea . It's an idea that emerges out of the Enlightenment partly , and all of the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries .

So there was a need for the now sort of dissipated Roman world to find ways to hold itself together , and the dynamism of the Christian faith , applied to every single detail of life , became the glue for this new emerging civilization . And what we start to see is something entirely unique .

It was built on the ruins of the old Roman world , but it was entirely different . As Tom Holland has pointed out in his brilliant book Dominion , the Roman world and the world that came after the world of Christendom were so different as to be almost unrecognizable from one another , most unrecognizable from one another .

The basis for law , the basis for justice , the ability for people to move from the lowest rungs of society to the highest rungs of society , opportunity , prosperity , the emergence , for the first time of a middle class .

All of this was the result of a Christian ethos , the application of Christian morality , christian ethics , the emergence of a new approach to art , music , literature and ideas , the idea that all children should be discipled , that they're training for life .

Whether they went into the trades or , if they were , you know , of noble families , they had to be equipped and trained . This is the beginning of a distinctively Christian education .

So all of this sort of over the course of time , from the fifth all the way through the end of the ninthth century , lay the foundations for what would be the flowering of this new civilization .

There were a lot of interesting innovations , including the development of feudalism , which was a hierarchical structure , structure that was primarily a grassroots , bottom-up system rather than a top-down system , but it provided a means for inheritance law , tort law , the structure of justice for local communities , protection against invaders .

All of that local communities , protection against invaders , all of that , and you start to see the emergence of guilds of learning , the various guilds of the trades , so that we start to see the development of shared innovations across the whole of the Christian world and you start to see endeavors to push the boundaries of Christendom wider and wider .

You start to see trade and mercantilism re-emerge after a period of dissipation following the collapse of the Roman world . There were still the Roman roads and the Roman bridges and the Roman aqueducts and the world of Christendom sort of built on those things . It's really an extraordinary period . That was anything but the Dark Ages .

These were really the bright lights of the beginnings of a whole new way of looking at life and culture . Anybody who's ever walked into a cathedral , even a small parish church , from the 10th through the 14th centuries will immediately say how did they do this ? How did they think of this ?

How did they , over the course of generations , have the patience to build a thing like this ? How much did it cost ? Well , it was really just the outflow of a new kind of civilization . Our modern world is really built on the foundations of the world of Christendom .

Again , as Tom Holland , who's an atheist , points out , even modern atheists have their categories and their understanding of right and wrong built on Christian foundations . That's what Christendom gave us .

In Prague we saw like the , the just amazing cathedral , and you know , they told us they were like , yeah , it's still under construction , it's in like year 900 of construction and this place is beautiful , and I remember thinking it was one of the first times where I realized if the dark ages were so dark , how did they build that ?

That's really what I want to know . So so what I want to ask you is uh , what's the connection with art , literature , culture ?

Compare that today you know we have Taylor Swift and we have stuff like that going on , but you reverse it and you say they were really bringing about a very impressive culture that comes from a certain kind of person , right , and so I'm curious about the individual and the communities that were producing that .

What was it in the water that created such amazing art ?

You know Taylor Swift was never apprenticed to anyone and the way that , in a sense , covenantal succession is built into the arts , as well as mercantilism and everything else , really laid firmer foundations than anything we had ever seen before or since . So what was in the water ? What was in the water was a kind of diligence .

Artists didn't think of themselves as another thing altogether . They were craftsmen . They learned their trade . They didn't dress in black with little berets and go around , you know hoity later , but you read , you start to realize okay , this guy knew at least five languages , was conversant in the sciences , the arts .

He had studied carefully the inheritance of Rome that had been passed on through the antiquities . He was well-studied and he lived a life of craftsmanship . That's something that is largely missing in our day , even among Christians who are working in the arts .

We tend to drink deeply of the draught of modernity , rather than learning the lessons that gave us this civilization in the first place .

So I guess , just talk about why it was so providentially important that Rome , which eventually becomes , you know , Christianized , but why was it so important ? The interplay between Christianity and the Latin culture , Roman Empire .

But I like to point out the fact that Rome gave the perfect contrast of the Christian faith for the early Christians to repent from . A lot of times we moderns have a hard time separating ourselves from the culture . It was not hard for the Christians to separate themselves from the culture .

They saw themselves as a peculiar people , distinct , building something new , and as a result they were thinking outside of the box . They cared for the children that were unwanted In Rome , they were thrown away . They began the first non-ambulatory medical care facilities , what we today call hospitals , because the poor , the sick , the despised and the rejected mattered .

Every human being was precious . So while Roman roads , the prevailing Pax Romana , provided a kind of evangelicum preparatum , the truth is that the Christians also had much to culturally repent of and from , and that gave them a firm footing for the foundations of something altogether new .

One of the things that's interesting about Ambrose is that he resisted what was then the beginnings of a desire to unite all authority under the Bishop of Rome , and in Milan the bishopric was altogether separate . It was a part of the Valdese Valley movement .

That perhaps we don't know for certain , but there are good indications that the Apostle Paul , on his fourth missionary journey , planted churches up and down in the Valdez Valley , leading to the planting of the church in Milan , and so Ambrose was very much a part of that mindset and that theological standard which then gave us the foundations for Augustine .

Augustine and mentored by Ambrose , sent back to Africa by Ambrose and the beginnings really of an understanding of how to separate the city of man from the city of God , giving Western Christendom its real theological moorings .

In the East you have the Cappadocian fathers , people like Basil of Caesarea , gregory Nazianzus , who are laying the foundations for an engagement with the culture , the first real push in pro-life legislation in Byzantium , the beginnings of hospital care , the approach of Christians during plague times to care for neighbors rather than to flee and to hibernate , as well as

the beginnings of standards for what to do quarantine standards . You don't quarantine the entire culture , you quarantine the sick . So all of that begins , and that's very early on . But the ripple effects of Ambrose , augustine , basil , gregory , that has an incredible impact . From Gregory has an incredible impact .

From Gregory , nazianzus and Basil come people like Methodius and Cyril who go to the city of Prague , and this is where the grandparents of good King Wenceslas are converted and we start to see the burgeoning of a remarkable movement there that then connects with the Valdez Valley Christians , so that you have essentially a new kind of Protestantism more than 300 years

before Martin Luther . So all kinds of things are going on there . Then , of course , simultaneous with Cyril and Methodius , you have Charlemagne uniting the empire of the Franks .

Charlemagne is one of those remarkable figures that , as you and I noted before we came on , not enough is written about him , but we can trace really the beginnings of the university movement , the beginnings of the codification of distinctively Christian classical education , to the initiatives that Charlemagne began in places like Aiken and later in Paris .

So those are foundational and you know , we have glimpses of that world in things like the Song of Roland , where we see the beginnings of the conflict between Islam and Christianity along the southern tier of the Christian world . So those are some of the big moments .

Then , of course , in the 12th and 13th centuries we start to have the cathedrals that begin to change everything . It wasn't just an architectural or an ecclesiastical wonder , it became a kind of civic wonder because cities were built up around them .

Then we have the model for how Christian cities should be built Church at the center , commerce around and outside of that the homes of those craftsmen and merchants who worked in the city . So you start to see the emergence of a whole new vision for how a city is built , very different from the old Roman model .

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The Stones of Venice is also incredibly helpful To study Andres Palladius , who gave us the Palladium style of architecture which then influences everybody , from Christopher Wren and Thomas Nash , you know , all the way up to the present day classical architects like Quinlan Terry .

All of that really comes first from Vitruvius , first from Vitruvius , then through Palladius and then on . So you can read a lot of that from Ruskin . And then I really like the architectural writer Wotold Rabinski . He's a Canadian of Polish extraction , extraction .

His books , particularly on Palladius , are incredibly helpful in tracing this whole notion of architecture as an expression of worldview rather than merely a utilitarian space for particular . You know civic purposes . Yeah , perfect , that's really helpful . One of the things . You know , civic purposes .

Just speak to that and why that was so important in what Christendom would become .

the just war theory and everything else . Christendom was forced to wrestle with the questions of justice for the world , not just justice in a village , and that changes the whole mindset of the Christian world . It also brought unity .

By the time we get to the 12th , 13th century , we've got all kinds of squabbles , but the 11th , 12th , 13th , 14th century crusades bring kings and princes and peoples together in a remarkable new way , and it starts to bring a sharing of Christian values across all of the Western world and even into the still Christianized Eastern world .

There are parts of Lebanon , places in Jordan that you can go to today that are still distinctively marked by the old Christendom , and so there's the whole question of how this shapes Christendom in an adversarial fashion . But the other thing is that it caused Christians to start looking outward , and that's the beginning of an interest in widespread foreign missions .

It's the beginning of real exploration Prince Henry the Navigator who establishes the first navigational school at Sagre in Portugal , and then Christopher Columbus coming along two generations later . They are shaped largely by concerns about Islam .

Prince Henry the Navigator was designing ships to take troops to North Africa it was a part of the Reconquesta and , of course , christopher Columbus was looking for a way to rear flank the Muslim horde by sailing across the Atlantic and arriving , he thought , in Asia , and the purpose was to then build allies with Asians to then rear flank the Muslim horde .

It's just a paradigm shifting notion , but that's what he was doing . He wasn't going to discover new lands , he was going to , and he wasn't going after gold , as the mythology states . He was attempting to find a way for the protection and the expansion of Christendom .

You walk away and you're like man , what a dirtbag , this guy must be horrible . And then you come to find out no , actually , this kind of you know , christian hero we can look up to the guy . So yeah , it was just .

But also he created something called the Book of Prophecies , where he wrestles with Scripture to try and determine it that we in this time , 15th century Europe , what is it that we need to be about in this world now hemmed in by the threatenings of Islam ? And it's quite remarkable .

So he pitched to Ferdinand and Isabella , who weren't the king and queen of Spain . There was no such thing as Spain . Ferdinand was the king of Aragon , isabella was the queen of Castile . They were married , but they had two separate kingdoms with two separate coinage , two separate languages . I didn't even know that .

So when Columbus sailed , he sailed for Aragon and Castile , but they were engaged in the Recolquesta , the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula , which had been conquered by the Muslims in the 8th century . So all of what today is Spain and Portugal were once a part of a caliphate and over the centuries , this is a part of the story of the Song of Roland .

Over the centuries , christians reconquered that territory , established the kingdom of Portugal first , and then Navarre and Aragon , and Castile and Catalonia . And so , in 1492 , the Reconcesta was wrapping up , and that's when , finally , isabella and Ferdinand decided to go ahead and give royal warrant for Columbus to set sail .

Let's take like the Song of Roland . What ?

The first true novel , don Quixote . He does it built around , in a sense , a failed crusader . Don Quixote is a sort of you know he's tilting at windmills at windmills . But Miguel Cervantes had been in one of the last naval crusades and had been wounded in one of the last naval crusades .

And so the story is built on the foundations of the Song of Roland and it's kind of the continuing story . So part of what Song of Roland does for us is it gives us the modern novel . Another part of Song of Roland is it solidifies what was at the time a sort of divergent approach to the Chevleric Code .

The Chevleric Code was formulated initially by Bernard of Clairvaux for the Knights Templar , and there were 12 essential virtues that every knight should live up to . Lord Baden-Powell took Bernard of Clairvaux's 12 virtues and he turned it into the Boy Scout Code . Trust wither loyal free , courteous , kind , obedient , cheerful thrifty , brave , clean and reverent .

That's right . Yeah , so what the Song of Roland does is it kind of solidifies that as the essential virtues of true Christian chivalry , which then of course helped shape the way the West saw appropriate justice and the application of justice . So you've got all kinds of things emerging .

And then of course the antipathy of Christendom , with the threatenings of , the horrors and the terrors of the janissaries and the terrorists that were sent from the world of Islam . That becomes a major leitmotif for Western literature and the Western worldview mindset .

We've been really impressed by how pivotal a role education plays . So it wasn't just that you had to conquer the Danes , it's that you had to teach your people how to read . You know and , and , and .

They clearly understood it and I think there's good application in here for us , because today , you know , my experience with especially public education until we got into classical Christian was that it's very much a dumbing down , right , but these guys saw it vastly differently . So just talk to me about the importance of education , why these guys saw that .

Every day after they finished their work , the men of the town would gather in the center of town and they would go to work .

Their wives and their daughters would come and they would bring them dinner and they would work building something that they knew they would never see completed , that their children would never see completed , that their grandchildren would never see completed . They had this long view .

It was built into Christendom because the idea of covenantal succession , the idea of generations , is an essential aspect of the biblical worldview . So it wasn't just cathedrals , of course . They applied that principle to all of life .

Therefore , education , preparing the next generation to pass on to the succeeding generation all of the truth , all of the craftsmanship , all of the beauty , all of the goodness , all of the traditions , that was vital , that made Christendom , that was vital .

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And so you do see these periods of , you know , rise and fall of education standards and stuff like that . But it is interesting that kind of throughout there's this emphasis on we have to go back and learn , we have to .

And , by the way , you know you , you know way more about this than I do but it's fascinating to me because the rigor of the education also was not like common core math , like these guys .

And those skills were taught , oftentimes at home , many times simply through the process of recopying books . You know , gerhard Grote in the IJssel Valley in the Netherlands today just took orphans off the street and he merely had them copying the great books and , in the process , teaching them to read them .

That began a movement of little houses with a kind of structure and order called the Brethren of Common Life and the Brethren of Common Life schools .

Over the course of the next 150 years planted little house cottage centers of learning in the midst of perhaps the most wicked time imaginable , where many people Petrarch and others believed that Christendom was going to collapse . But here are these little pockets of learning . But here are these little pockets of learning .

And 150 years after Gerhard Grote , young Martin Luther was educated in a Brethren of Common Life school . Martin Luther was educated in a Brethren of Common Life school . Theodore Beza was educated in a Brethren of Common Life school . John Knox was educated in a Brethren of Common Life school . Ulrich Zwingli was educated in a Brethren of Common Life school .

Ulrich Zwingli was educated in a Brethren of Common Life school , and so you know what looked like small beginnings in the midst of a sea of perversity and wickedness and disarray . God uses those small beginnings to do great and glorious things .

I had never heard of you and I thought , wow , that's really interesting . And I started , you know , kind of hearing this and thinking , wow , if these guys are right and Christian education is so pivotal for the formation of souls and people and culture , then we really have to invest in it .

So it has been encouraging to see at least a little bit more of that in Christian circles , the value placed on it . But I want to ask you it seems like you can look at our culture today and say the same things . It seems like we're not the first people to ever say you know , the world has gone to hell in a handbasket . You know culture is degrading .

That seems to be . Does it not just embedded in all these stories from Christendom that they saw that too ? Right ? It not just embedded in all these stories ?

The gospel puts to death our sinful flesh , and so our sinful flesh fights for its life at every turn , and it fights culturally . It fights in art and music , it fights in Hollywood , it fights in the sewer , that is , you know , harvard Yard . And so what we have to do is we have to remind ourselves of that .

We don't have to be the hero that rides in on the white horse . All we have to do , the only thing that God has called us to do , is the next right thing .

Names , you'll never know right who , uh , you know , established the kingdom with him , um , and were just faithful , and that was enough , you know I think that's why tolkien probably one of the most lovable characters is samwise . Uh , for that very reason , I was even thinking when he says Tolkien does .

I think it's a return of the king that he's able to defeat the ring and it's because he realizes I'm a gardener and I just need my garden to take care of . I'm not a king , I'm not a king of nations and I don't need to lust for those things , I just need to take care of my garden .

So a good picture , I think , for what makes Tolkien so great is that it's .

Uh , we were having this debate on the King's Hall and I said I think Tolkien could arguably be one of the greatest writers of our time , you know , last couple hundred years for sure , maybe one of the greatest stories ever told , one of my favorite , for sure . But what's interesting about it is he was so steeped , as was CS Lewis , in medieval literature .

He had clearly done his homework . Uh , as we say today , why do you think that sort of thing ? Even though it's it's old , it seems to play well even today . I think that's partly why they're they're really terrible , but that's partly why people are so into the viking stories on netflix .

And then you know into , uh , you know really , king alfred , even though that was a total butcher job for the last kingdom . But people still seem to be moved by these stories . And it goes back to knowing the literature . I wonder if you just weigh in on Tolkien and kind of his mastery there .

He was telling a story . Largely , he was attempting to work out this mythology and this world , and the result is because of his incredible craftsmanship and obviously his giftedness and language and everything else has set him entirely apart . There is an entire genre of fantasy books .

You can go into a Barnes Noble and see shelves of them and none of them hold a candle to Tolkien , and the reason is that those writers have probably read Tolkien , but they've not read deeply in all of the things that Tolkien read .

This is something that I learned early on , when I was venturing into classical Christian education for the first time 30 , some odd 32 , 33 years ago is . I was fascinated by what the founding fathers thought and as a political science major in college , I'd read a good bit . I'd studied the Constitution and all of that . But it struck me one day .

You know , I need to not just read what the founding fathers wrote . I need to read what the founding fathers read and then I may begin to understand why it was that a tiny little strip of land along the edge of the Atlantic coast , with less than a million people , could produce an entire generation of geniuses that could resist the greatest power on earth .

What's what's foundational for the founding fathers ?

They all , every single one of them , would have read things like Dante's Inferno probably not the entire Divine Comedy , but certainly Inferno . They would have read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English . They would have , you know , read some of the great poetry of the troubadours .

They would have been well-versed in Shakespeare and they would have been real careful students of the scriptures , every single one of them . You know Ben Franklin could quote massive sections of scripture from memory . He wasn't even a believer until he got into a relationship with George Whitefield , and even then it's questionable whether or not he was ever converted .

But he knew the scriptures and he knew that they were important .

But I look at it and I'm like , well , I don't know , it's hard to plot it when you're in the middle of it . So is Christendom fallen ? Where do you put us on that map ?

There was no Welsh revival before the Welsh revival . There was no John Knox before John Knox . All of that to say who's to say what tomorrow will bring . Yes , we're in a mess . You know , the Biden administration may be the worst administration since Millard .

We can speak prophetically to our day and age , but we can't really speak eschatologically to our age other than to give eschatological hope , build our churches , create good work wherever we are , relish the beauty , goodness and truth that the Lord has entrusted to us and be a counter to the world . In other words , all we have to do is the next right thing .

But when you trace a lot of these back , it seems like the answer , at least for a lot of people , comes back to the Enlightenment and then you'll get to French Revolution somewhere in that ballpark . But I'm curious in your mind start with the Enlightenment . What impact ?

And you start to see the revolutions the Marxist revolutions of 1848 , the Franklin Prussian War of 1871 . And then you have the emergence of things like the Frankfurt School in Germany and Antonio Gramsci working in Italy trying to flesh out what Marxism could actually be if it weren't a failed economic system .

What if Marxism could achieve that revolutionary goal by cultural means ?

So it's really not until then that we start to see an effect downstream in culture , because what Gramsci taught and what the Frankfurt School internalized and then disseminated was the notion that what we need to do is capture the robes of a culture , the robes of academia , the robes of science , the robes of the judiciary , and then over the course of a few

generations we can filter that down through the universities , through the structures of entertainment etc , the Heilbronners and Freud and others , for it to begin to actually affect the culture at large .

So the Enlightenment sowed those ideas , but those ideas were shared largely by radicals and no one adhered to the radicals , until the radicals realized that barricades in the streets were not going to get them what they desired , and so they began to create new structures for culture .

They they began to work way upstream rather than trying to work downstream why do you ?

And so you've got music , you've got Hollywood , you've got now the beginnings of corporate heads , all having been schooled in this radical cultural Marxism and , whether they realize what they're doing or not , it's now embedded in their worldview .

And as irrational as some of this worldview even seems for us , when we look at it analytically and we say don't they realize they're way out on a limb and they're sawing off their own limb , Don't they realize that ? Well , no , they don't , because they're shaped by this worldview .

But what do pastors , especially in this moment , have to get right ?

We need to be evangelistic . We have become so timid , we have been so cowardly in the face of this cultural onslaught . It's time for us to raise up prophetic voices . That doesn't mean that we have to be mean-spirited , or , you know , we don't all have to be Doug .

We can be us and we can speak clearly , but we have to do what Doug is doing , and that is speaking clearly to our culture . We need to be on mission . Secondly , we need to be on message . Our message is the gospel of Jesus Christ . The gospel of Jesus Christ applied to every single area of life . Single area of life , as Cornelius Van Til says .

The Bible speaks of everything , and so we need to apply the Bible to everything . And that means that we need to be systematically teaching our people the Bible . We have a drought , a famine of biblical illiteracy in our best churches , so we need to be teaching the Word of God , we need to be equipping the saints to teach the Word of God to others .

And then , finally , we need to be in ministry , meaning that we need to be caring for the despised , the rejected , the marginalized , those who are the least and the last , as well as the first and the foremost . For a long , long time , the church has been in a quarterbacks and cheerleaders mode of ministry , and it's time for us to reach the world .

So , on a mission , on message and in ministry , that's what every pastor needs to be .

You know , you've been in ministry for a long time , but what is this moment calling for ? Obviously , what you've just said . I think courage is going to be a big part of it . Calling for , obviously , what you've just said . I think courage is going to be a big part of it . But any further thoughts on that .

Just what is this moment requiring specifically of us ?

The culture is hanging by a thread are at stake . The culture is hanging by a thread . This is one of you know those Jonathan Edwards moments where everything is dangling and we have the opportunity to speak truth . And so what I would say to every pastor is care for the flock , but care for the flock with zeal and boldness and courage and grace .

Any other projects work that you're underway with on the literature side ?

They have a series on Reformation Charity .

I just came out with a wonderful book that I've been wanting to do for years and years called the Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts , the great father of hymnody and successor to John Owen at Mark Lane Chapel in London , and this is in a sense a blueprint or a practical vision for a lifetime of learning , and so that came out this fall .

Love that book , it's just really wonderful .