Jonathan Pageau and Mary Harrington: Reality in a Disenchanted Age
Socrates in the City
Socrates in the City
4.7 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
Episode three of Socrates Dialogues with Mary Harrington returns, this week with artist Jonathan Pageau, for a conversation that is as delightful as it is wide-ranging. From medieval cosmology to internet memes (we love how Mary describes them as “clusters of meaning”), from Dante to C.S. Lewis, we wonder if there’s a topic that wasn’t covered. The duo discuss how one of the modern world’s troubles lies in forgetting how to see, having traded a symbolic vision of reality for a mechanistic one that leaves the soul rather undernourished.
Along the way, there are conversation detours into the importance of words and language, war, and the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation, and even a surprisingly tender conclusion: that even amidst the thorniest political questions, a shared orientation toward what transcends us may yet allow for unity and love.
The post Jonathan Pageau and Mary Harrington: Reality in a Disenchanted Age first appeared on Socrates in the City.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Because concerted has ignored the narrative problem, they've in some ways been losing nonstop, |
| 0:05.2 | because they are in a story that they don't totally understand. |
| 0:08.6 | And they keep complaining about how they keep losing. |
| 0:11.3 | But the reason is because they don't understand that they're not setting the story. |
| 0:15.4 | They're not the main character. |
| 0:16.6 | They're just a character in someone else's story. |
| 0:18.9 | So why do you think the symbolic world has come so roaringly back to us in this day age? |
| 0:25.4 | Why is this happening? |
| 0:26.6 | You must think a lot about this. |
| 0:28.0 | Some of the things that the globalists want is hell. |
| 0:30.9 | Like it's actually not an image of the Eschaton. |
| 0:32.9 | It's an image of the flood, which leads to Babel. |
| 0:35.0 | It's like, let's break everything down. |
| 0:39.1 | But then necessarily comes a very giant tower afterwards. |
| 0:45.0 | Hello and welcome to Socrates' dialogues. I'm Mary Harrington, and I'm very honored to be |
| 0:51.6 | joined today by Jonathan Pajot, an icon carver, a very noted artist, a remarkable thinker on a great many topics, and host of the symbolic world, blog and podcast. |
| 1:04.3 | Welcome, Jonathan. |
| 1:05.2 | And thank you for coming. |
| 1:06.7 | It's great to see you, Mary. |
| 1:08.5 | So, Jonathan, if I may, can we start with how you came to do what you do? |
| 1:17.2 | I mean, there are, I'm sure there are people out there in the world who would say, icon carver, isn't that something from the Middle Ages? |
| 1:24.3 | How, how can you, how do you come to be doing this now and furthermore, how do you come to be doing this in such a potently digitally mediated way? |
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