But then we also have writers like Virginia Woolf, who also seem to have verged it seems to me verged on this idea that we need to escape ourselves and connect connect with what's out there with the universe with nature with time with being it seems like a mystical experience to me is this uh this process of modernist re-enchantment with the world something that we're in need of again now at the end of post-modernism

a short answer uh wolf yeah i think it's it's um I think about, uh, you know, to the lighthouse by, by Wolf, which is, um, has got experiences of which you could think of as experiences of ecstasy, um, uh, which are also linked to the affirmation of, of life.

It is enough.

Mrs. Ramsey says it is enough.

And, um, Elliot is fascinating because, you know, he had this lifelong fascination with, um, with religion.

Um, but the early poetry like proof rock and the wasteland in a sense is, can be construed as atheistic.

Certainly it's, it's a, it's a poetry of sin and, and despair, uh, which is why people, some people tend to prefer the early poetry because it is lovely.

the, you know, the

So why was drama such a big deal? What functions did it serve?

OK.

I think that...

I think that ancient Athens sits on three pillars, really.

One is democracy, rule of law, and the idea of the people as the legislative body, excluding women and slaves.

That's another story.

But this was a radical idea.

I wonder if you could just share that.

What is so specific about Christian religion or Christian tradition or history that makes it more common in that, for mysticism to be a- to appear in that tradition?

Well, yeah, so mysticism appears in every religious tradition, right? Um, Sufism, uh, different traditions of Jewish mysticism.

Uh, you know, you've got the whole, uh, the whole Hindu tradition, the ancient Hindu traditions, all of which are mystical.

And then you can take that even further back into the earliest known forms of religion that we're aware of, you know, in Neolithic cultures or Bronze Age cultures, and all the way back.

For as long as there have been human beings in groups, and we think of ourselves as social creatures, so we're social creatures in groups.

For as long as there have been human beings in groups, there's been something like religion, um, something that's sacred, and someone who is, has the role of mediating that experience of the sacred.

So, for as long as there have been human beings, there's been something like mysticism, on, on the one hand.

So there seems to be a kind of relationship between tragedy and humor.

Yeah,

it's about taste, right? You need taste.

And that's the indefinable thing.

It's about, you know, I'm deeply... offended by music uh because i can't not hear it you know so you're sitting in a a bar or restaurant And you're going there to talk to people that you're friends or people that you're getting to know, whatever.

And so the purpose is conversation.

And there's something sort of banging techno coming through the speakers.

And no one's listening to it.

they you know they don't have to always stick with using um suno you know to kind of uh tickle this uh

The giving and taking of responsibility seems to be something very distinctive about people.

Yeah, yeah.

Responsibility, the other side of re- this is going back to what Philippa was saying.

Stimulus and response.

If we say stimulus is some kind of something you're doing on instinct or as it were, unwittingly, right? There's that.

Uh, how you respond to that is the, is the issue, whether you take responsibility for that.

So the space between stimulus and response is this space of freedom.

Yes.

Mm-hmm

... at a papal bull.

And so, and so what they, what...

At this point in the history of the Catholic Church, uh, as, as other people have pointed out, like, um- Tom Holland in that book, uh, Dominion, really- Mm-hmm.

I think it's-- yeah, I think it's Dominion, where he talks about the, the rise of the, the medieval, the medieval Catholic Church and its, its ob- its obsession with reform, reformatio, and, um, and trying to be clear about where the line is between what you can say and what you can't say, and then having legal systems, canon law, and then universities, which are meant to teach canon law, to basically adjudicate these, uh, these decisions.

So these...

The, the Catholic Church really gets its, it gets its act in order in the late, the late medieval period, and then they begin to find heretics.

Yeah