Do you ever test yourself morally a bit on that?

I mean, unless faith terrorizes you.

Another detail is I'm actually gay.

And for quite a long part of my life, faith terrorized me because of that.

So it's a complicated business.

But there's actually good evidence that quite a lot of what religious traditions hold is fairly pervasively believed.

The piece I was looking at before this program was about providence.

And that is actually one of the big drivers of the Enlightenment.

Good morning Henry, good morning

Amal.

August angst has begun.

The phrase describes the stress caused by psychotherapists taking their summer break over the month beginning today.

Though breaks are part of the therapeutic work, and that explains why August angst is felt by more people than just those in therapy.

Breaks of any kind can be challenging.

The summer break from work was longed for and then feels unsettling.

Mm.

The London when he's born is at war with France, and nearly always either a cold or a hot war with France or other European countries.

It's at a time of empires growing, and the constant struggle to secure your hegemony.

And the American Revolution, War of Independence, and then the French Revolution happened in his lifetime, too.

And then the Napoleonic Wars, which is something that I realized through writing the book were very terrible time.

The millions of people killed across Europe.

So this is part of his life.

So he likes the buildings, but he's not too fond of the institution, is he? What's his relationship to, say, to the Church of England?

Yeah.

And it's also, it's even sort of more participative than that in a way because Steiner points out that a medieval person never had a problem with the idea that their thoughts weren't really their own thoughts, that they might be given by God or a spirit, a place.

They might be given by a demon or another more malign presence or thought.

And so you get this great preoccupation in the pre-modern world with the rites and the rituals and the process of discernment that enable you to understand your thoughts and particularly the source of your thoughts.

Whereas now, of course, very few people would think of their thoughts like that.

We're very inclined to think of our thoughts all as our own.

And so the question is how we reconnect to this more porous experience of life.

that difference i'm just interested in that right yeah

Could we explore this character a bit for those who know the play, have seen it, Mark?

He reminded me, if I can borrow from another bit of ancient Greek philosophy, of the cynics.

Maybe the cynics are a kind of precursor to the eccentrics.

So they were called cynics because they live like dogs and they would do things which would be genuinely shocking, not just performatively shocking, but genuinely shocking.

Illegal.

Yeah, exactly.

But the strange thing is that they did also have, I think... again, what we would call now a deeply romantic philosophy, which is that it's conventions that take us away from who we really are.

Could we explore this character a bit for those who know the play, have seen it, Mark?

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Good morning.

Good morning.

A friend relates the stresses of getting up in the morning.

Her child has stubbed a toe, but is it broken, poor kid? Simultaneously, the radio on, there is news of bombs again in the Middle East.

And then another worry, the erratic weather and what that might mean for a shifting climate.

On top of that again, a background of disturbed domestic politics.

Where is that leading? A hodgepodge of anxieties mount up.

his outlook than he's understood to be, but also an appreciation, and I think this would be importantly related, an appreciation that he's also working against the stream of Enlightenment rationalism.

So he's born in this century, the 18th century, where really the figure of Isaac Newton's influence can't be overstated.

So at the beginning of the 18th century, 17th century, Newton had derived the laws of gravity, the laws of motion, optics.

This was a massive imaginative feat, actually.

The integration of seemingly very disparate phenomena.

We remember it now as the falling of the apple, The same force causes the moon to orbit the earth.

And, you know, we're taught it at school, so we take it for granted.

Sometimes it sounds a little out there, but really there's a sensibility to what he's talking about.