An Interview with Jonathan Pageau (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start from the top. Was faith, in particular Eastern Orthodox faith, an important part of early life for you? As well, was the art of it an important part of life for you?
Jonathan Pageau: I grew up Orthodox. I grew up in Quebec. There was in the 70’s, kind of a bit everywhere, let’s say – a mass exodus from the Catholic Church and a group of those people that kind of left the Catholic Church became Protestants, became Evangelical. So, my parents were part of that large group of people. My father was, actually a Baptist minister as I was growing up. And so, it was only when I was in my early twenties that being quite dissatisfied with the level of understanding that I could see in the Evangelical world. My father was actually quite an intellectual person. Later in life, he became a clinical psychologist. So, he kind of developed a type of a desire to understand things a bit in more depth; and so I felt like that. And I ended up feeling that was lacking in the Protestant church or even in the Evangelical world that I was in and trying, and then searching and reading and kind of climbing up the ladder back into history. Looking at the history of the church, I discovered the early Christian fathers; that they have the first 1,000 years of Christianity. Then I started to read it and started to understand things a lot. The more profound manner, and also then going and attending an Orthodox Church and seeing the beauty of the liturgy, and the beauty of the art and the profundity of the art. The patterns of the art is what attracted me because I could see that the patterns which were in scripture in terms of storytelling and in terms of the way the world is laid out, let’s say, in terms of the way that it’s laid out phenomenologically; I could see the same structures in the paintings, in the art, and then also in the architecture, and in the liturgy. So, it’s as if there really was a patterning of reality that had analogies in different spheres, and so there was an integrated view of the world, which included as much the ritual of the liturgy as the visual arts and the storytelling all of those kind of work together to create what I call an interpretive mesh for reality. And so, when I kind of saw that, I realized this is very powerful and also because Eastern Orthodoxy also has a very deep connection to mysticism and the mystical aspect of Christianity is very strong in Orthodoxy. So, there is a type of repetitive prayer and connected with a breathing practice that is very deeply a part of Orthodox spirituality. And so, all of that together just made me realize that modern Protestantism or modern Christianity, maybe, starting at the Reformation, and a bit further, had lost a lot of its depth. So, that’s how I finally ended up in the Orthodox Church, but art was a large part of my life. Before, I was an artist in… I went to college, and studied painting at Concordia University in Montréal, but the program was so… postmodern art had completely taken up the space and post-modernism in general. So, there was really just as flattening of value. There was no way to discern quality, everything was just kind of a big mush of ideas and a mush of chaotic images – just juxtaposed to each other without any form of hierarchy. And so, I mean it just seemed to me like that was really the consequence of – I mean, maybe, because I guess because I’m talking to an atheist I could say that like it was really the consequence of – secularism reaching its peak in culture, where there was no hierarchy of values. There was no hierarchy of discernment in terms of form, and so you end up with like a big inflated Snoopy dog is as much art as Michelangelo’s David. There’s no method of discerning qualitative difference. So, I just couldn’t… I tried and I became very disillusioned with the contemporary art world. Also, because what happens when there’s no qualitative capacity to distinguish, the only thing left is brute power. So, it ends up being about relationships and about who you know and who you’re connected to and how you’re able to be friends with this gallery owner or this other artist, so that they can bring you into the network. So, you really become just a network of power relationships and that really did not interest me at all. And so, I abandoned art completely.
Jacobsen: Wow!
Pageau: I had actually got in the studio. I was working with friends for a while and then through this kind of crisis, like a general spiritual crisis in terms of seeing the lack in the Evangelical world in terms of a deeper understanding of Christianity, and finding that in contemporary art; it was just a big morass of chaos. I was like, “Okay, what do I do?” So, it really was in discovering traditional Christianity that I could see all of this coming together and discovering the language of traditional Christian art and seeing it really as a structure like an ontological structure of beings like how things relate to each other in terms of a hierarchy of meaning, then I was like “I’m sold’”. So, I did go into that language and started to use it to give cohesion to the world. I didn’t actually plan to become a professional icon carver. I started carving and started putting my carvings up and people started to like them, and so finally after a few years it became enough to sustain my family. So, I’ve been doing this professionally for about five years now.
Jacobsen: And one thing that you noted about the disjunct between the worldview, the aesthetics of the art and culture, as well as the ritual, such as the liturgy, of the more contemporary versions of Christianity or sects of Christianity; those didn’t appeal to you because there was a disjunct among those different parts of the faith. Yet, you found that unified within the Eastern Orthodox tradition.
Pageau: One of the difficulties of modern Protestantism is that it doesn’t take into account the glasses it’s wearing. So, what it tries to do is it tries to interpret… let’s say they have completely accepted a 19th century modernism, a kind of 19th century scientism. It’s not so prevalent today, but it’s still very strong in popular culture like this modern 19th century scientism. And so, they’ve accepted that as their basic worldview, and then what they’re doing is they’re going back and they’re trying to fit their religious life into that worldview. So, they go back and they try to interpret the Bible with science, which is just the dumbest thing you could ever do because it is not a scientific text. Because of that, it ends up being extremely shallow instead of trying to find the meaning of the text and instead of seeing the powerful patterns that can sustain a vision of the world. What they end up doing is they just spent all their time defending whether or not something happened, it’s just unbearable. It’s like if you spend all your time trying to prove that Moses existed and that he found some wheel of Egyptian cards in the Red Sea; and it proves it. If that’s really what you spend your time doing, who cares? How is that going to help you be a better person? It doesn’t help anything. So, I became very disillusioned. I mean with creationism as well. It just didn’t seem like it was a worthwhile pursuit. I don’t understand what the point is: That’s not what the text in Genesis is talking about. So, there’s a disjunct and so what happens is they end up having a worldview, which doesn’t align with the real traditional Christian worldview. So, if you don’t see it, it’s like this weird thing. And so, they tend to be hostile towards ritual because they interpret ritual in a 19th century kind of materialist way. Tthey say, “Well, ritual is just superstition”, because they have a scientist’s approach to it. So, they don’t want ritual, but then they do have ritual because the more profound understanding is that in order for something to happen there has to be an order, right? In order for a meeting to occur, there has to be an order in the meeting; there has to be a beginning, there has to be a presentation, there has to be the end, and there has to be a way in which question and answers can be. And that’s a religion. That’s a liturgy. That’s a ritual, right? So, there has to be ritual. There’s no way around it. There has to be order for an event to occur. And so, to not be able to see that is what causes the Evangelical church service to be so bland is because, it’s like they just don’t know consciously what they’re doing. And so, whereas in the liturgical sense every single act in the liturgy, every single orientation, and every single movement, the whole order of the liturgy is focused towards its goal. So, if you have a business meeting, the liturgy of the business meeting is focused towards the goal of the business meeting. It’s like you’re trying to sell something, so here are the normal steps that you would follow. If you don’t follow those steps, you’re not going to attain your goal, so you follow the liturgy of a business meeting. But in the church service, you have to follow the liturgy of what it is you’re there to do, which is to be in communion together; and then to focus your communion towards something, which is beyond the group that’s there, so that there’s this connection between the group and something transcendent. So, if you don’t do that, then Evangelical services end up looking like a concert and a conference. That’s not what it’s supposed to be. And so, the disjunct is very profound like it’s very deep. It’s hard to talk about this because most people struggle to think at that level. They don’t understand that the forms of the world have to do with the meaning that you see in the world. And then coming towards Orthodoxy, what I saw is really a very powerful connection between all the aspects of the faith that really did create an interpretive mass for the world; not just interpretive, but a structure into which you could live, not just to interpret but actually live within a life structure. They say the year is ordered or the week is ordered; and we still have that. I mean we still have an ordered week. Even though, it’s a residue of a law of an older time, where you have six days of work and a seventh day rest or something. I mean that’s based on the Bible, but it’s very universal; something that has a seven-day cycle is a pre-universal cycle. So, the idea is you have to order time and the question is by what means will you order time. To me, the Orthodox and the traditional Christian vision does it in a very cohesive manner, which organizes not just time; but also space and also life and creates that frame into which you can live. I don’t know if you see what I’m talking about. I’m talking a bit on an abstract level.
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