00:00:00:00 – 00:00:37:15

Alec Bianco

Very excited to be here and to see all these really happy, smiling, not sleepy faces. Right? I’m sleepy. It’s really, really good to be here. I love coming to Belmont Abbey and I especially love walking through old buildings. That is such a blessing to be able to do that for four years. When I was in college, that was one of my favorite things was old, stinky buildings that you just get to walk around in, and it’s really beautiful.

 

00:00:37:15 – 00:00:57:23

Alec Bianco

So, yeah, I want to talk for a little bit, and then hopefully we can have a little bit of time to kind of ask some questions and think about them. Where I went to college, Saint John’s. After lectures, they would have what are called question periods, not question and answer periods. You don’t always have an answer to those questions.

 

00:00:57:26 – 00:01:21:18

Alec Bianco

Sometimes it’s good to just wrestle with the question. So I like calling them that, question periods. So hopefully we’ll have some time for that. Myth as medicine: fairies are real, so are ogres and goblins. Trolls do live under bridges, and there are old giants who live in the mountains and dark creatures deep in the forest.

 

00:01:21:20 – 00:01:44:01

Alec Bianco

We’ve known about them for a very long time. We’ve written stories about them, told tales around the fire, and painted pictures of them, and composed music. We know how real they are because of the impact that they’ve had on humans as a whole. Man is a truth seeker. He has always sought to find out what everything really is, what it really means.

 

00:01:44:03 – 00:02:06:17

Alec Bianco

Man goes out into the world and wonders at it, tries to understand how things work, where they came from, why they are there, and time and time again, these curious oddities called mythical creatures keep popping up. Why is this? I’ve never seen a unicorn or a dragon with my own eyes. I’ve never seen a fairy light up a forest, nor have I been accosted by a troll on a bridge.

 

00:02:06:23 – 00:02:31:16

Alec Bianco

I know I look like I have, nor has a sphinx given me a riddle. And yet that’s not really the issue. The real question isn’t why do I say these things are real when I’ve never experienced them? The real question is, why do I understand them when I’ve never seen them? In other words, the concept of a dragon or a goblin or a wizard, or any fairy tale creature doesn’t perturb me in the least.

 

00:02:31:18 – 00:02:51:27

Alec Bianco

I have no problem wrapping my mind around them. I can describe what they look like to you. I can tell you what they sound like, how they behave, anything like that. I know for a fact that dragons seek to hoard gold and that fairies are beautiful but mischievous. I know that goblins live in caves and that unicorns are found in the open field.

 

00:02:52:03 – 00:03:11:21

Alec Bianco

One arrives at once. They’ve made the dark and perilous journey through the forest. If these creatures aren’t real, why do I understand them so plainly? In fact, why do they even seem to understand me? If they aren’t real, why are so many of us afraid of the dark, afraid of what lurks in the depths of the forest undergrowth?

 

00:03:11:24 – 00:03:34:26

Alec Bianco

But we’re comforted by a warm fire at night and the companionship of fireflies or lightning bugs in the South. I believe that this strange familiarity we all seem to have with these otherwise completely foreign creatures is a testament to the very reality in which we and they participate. In other words, mythical creatures and fairy tales prove that the world is filled with spirit.

 

00:03:34:29 – 00:04:06:08

Alec Bianco

A long time ago, before we were all convinced that we knew everything, we saw the world for what it truly is, a place that was teeming with life, both physical and spiritual. The two were not disconnected. Today, we tend to think of the world, and especially humans, as dualistic mind and body. This is wrong. Descartes describes this in his work that man is made up of mind and body, the mind being the intellect, and the body being that about which intellect did the world.

 

00:04:06:10 – 00:04:28:05

Alec Bianco

The race extensor, I think, is the Latin was intelligible only insofar it was as it was capable of being intellect it upon by the mind. Yet this is further removed from the truth that our ancient forebears knew. The human is body and soul. The intellect is that which resides in the soul, a part of the source faculty for approaching the true, good and beautiful.

 

00:04:28:07 – 00:04:49:12

Alec Bianco

The ancients saw the soul as the animating force of not just the human person, but of all things. It was the spiritual world that permeated the physical and brought movement in life. Aristotle writes in both the physics and the metaphysics about the idea of a prime mover, a being who brings into motion all things without himself being moved.

 

00:04:49:14 – 00:05:10:03

Alec Bianco

Even here we see the deep connection between the physical world and the spiritual, a kind of movement that brings forth physical life but is divine in character. It’s not just in philosophy that we see this prevalence of the spiritual realm throughout the world. Man has written about and interacted with the spiritual world. The Greek myths of the Cyclopes and the Minotaur.

 

00:05:10:05 – 00:05:30:03

Alec Bianco

I’ve heard stories of the Metamorphoses. There’s a Native American tale about the possum who stole fire from the witch to give to humans, and that’s why their tails are bald, because they caught the fire. All of these stories touch on man’s desire and innate ability to see the connection between the spiritual world and the physical.

 

00:05:30:06 – 00:05:56:21

Alec Bianco

It was second nature in some ways, to perceive reality as having a divine touch. However, something changed. It’s not something that’s beyond the scope of this talk. But throughout history, particularly in the age of the enlightenment, ironically, mankind fundamentally changed the way that we view the world, rather than seeing the spiritual realm as coexisting with the physical realm, or even more accurately, as the foundation of the physical world.

 

00:05:56:23 – 00:06:19:10

Alec Bianco

We see the world as merely physical. And if we admit of the spiritual world, we understand it only analogously to the physical. The operative principle in the modern age is that the world is mechanical, not mythical. For us, the world is something that the mind apprehends almost violently. We do not see the world as something to contemplate, but something to conquer.

 

00:06:19:12 – 00:06:41:08

Alec Bianco

The world is physical with an emphasis on physics. We try to understand the rules, the structures that provide the order in which physical things operate. Thus, thought becomes neurons firing in the brain. The movement and forces of the world operate to cosmic laws. The human brain is understood as a kind of computer. Just thinking about that for a second.

 

00:06:41:08 – 00:07:07:10

Alec Bianco

How ridiculous that is. The thing that invented computers is thought of as a computer. Ones and zeros are the stuff we think about. But the ancients had. This is to sound a little sentimental, but the ancients had a more enchanted view of the world. For them the stars were angels and fallen heroes. Flowers and trees that used to be people who underwent terrible things or beautiful victories.

 

00:07:07:12 – 00:07:30:10

Alec Bianco

Certain places were dangerous because there were monsters there. Now, I don’t intend to suggest that the modern emphasis on physics is totally wrong. No, the ancients were just as interested in how the world worked, perhaps even more than us. The scientific achievements and understanding were admirable and noteworthy. The difference between them and us is that they didn’t stop there.

 

00:07:30:12 – 00:08:00:29

Alec Bianco

They didn’t stop at scientific data. They knew to keep going, that the physical world was connected to the divine. This is why Ptolemy, in the medieval period called theology the queen of the sciences, theology or philosophy, was the foundation upon which all of the sciences rested. And this was the project of Socrates, particularly while some of the thinkers of his day were interested only in explaining the phenomena of the universe or focusing on political power, Socrates dared to ask the question how should I live?

 

00:08:01:01 – 00:08:26:07

Alec Bianco

Virtue, ultimately, is the aim of philosophical pursuit, not just knowledge. For knowledge sake, if you all read Plato right, a little bit good, without returning to a more complete vision of the world as the ancients in medieval saw it, we will be destined to view the world as merely mechanical, to see people as animals, and to see life as a process of birth, decay and death.

 

00:08:26:10 – 00:08:49:03

Alec Bianco

But the world is far more wonderful than this, and fully capable of supporting a vision where life is spiritually more fulfilling. We need to see the world not as mechanical, but as mythical. How do we do this? We live in a mechanical world. How do we return to this more mythical one? This is where fairy tales and myths can help us to re-enchant the world.

 

00:08:49:05 – 00:09:17:12

Alec Bianco

To do this, we must first learn a little bit more about why fairy tales are what they are and why they are important. This is what Tolkien has to say. It’s in his essay on fairy stories, “the definition of a fairy story, what it is or what it should be does not then depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of fairy, the perilous realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.

 

00:09:17:15 – 00:09:36:22

Alec Bianco

I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Fairy cannot be caught in a net of words, for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable. Though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.” He’s such a good writer, isn’t he?

 

00:09:36:24 – 00:10:05:29

Alec Bianco

This touches on what I was saying at the beginning. The idea of fairies is something that intersects with our world, participates in it, but is not entirely the same. It is inextricably linked with ours and thus something to which we must attend. Tolkien goes on to say, “for the moment I will say only this, a fairy story is one which touches on or uses fairy, whatever its main purpose may be satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.

 

00:10:06:01 – 00:10:34:09

Alec Bianco

Fairy itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by magic, but it is a magic of a peculiar mood and power at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious scientific magician. There is one provision. If there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of the magic itself that must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away from this seriousness.

 

00:10:34:09 – 00:10:59:25

Alec Bianco

The medieval Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an admirable example.” And again, what Tolkien beautifully points out is the importance of taking these fairy elements seriously. In other words, we ought not to denigrate the spiritual in favor of the physical. To say something like mythical tales are fun and all, but they aren’t real is a supremely presumptuous statement to make.

 

00:10:59:28 – 00:11:20:20

Alec Bianco

It’s the kind of thinking that leads one to getting tricked by fairies, or torn to pieces by an ogre. But more importantly, the need for these kinds of stories is vital. The art of myths, fairy tales, and fables is lost in our mechanical, modern world. However, there have been some bright lights in the last century reawakening our desire for these kinds of stories.

 

00:11:20:23 – 00:11:53:28

Alec Bianco

Tolkien was a deep lover of these stories. So as George McDonald and C.S. Lewis and a lot of others, you could probably think of, Lewis in particular, wrote many of his stories as fairy tales precisely because of the way they conveyed truth. Lewis writes about the fairy tale form, saying, quote, its brevity, its severe restraint on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections. I wrote fairy tales because the fairy tale seemed the ideal form for the stuff I had to say.

 

00:11:54:01 – 00:12:17:07

Alec Bianco

The beauty of the form of the fairy story allows us to delve deeper into our own reality by exploring the extraordinary, the supernatural, and the other worldly. Although on the surface the magic of the fairy world seems other to us, it is in fact a kind of mirror that allows us to see ourselves more clearly and deeply. We can see this particularly well in the epic poems of Homer.

 

00:12:17:09 – 00:12:55:10

Alec Bianco

Have you guys all read Homer? Good. If you didn’t. Bad. While some of what appears in the Iliad and the Odyssey seems completely outlandish. Achilles fighting the river god Odysseus blinding the Cyclops, Homer always connects the stories of his poems to our world, to the use of his epic similes. In book four of the Iliad, Homer describes the Achaeans moving out to battle just as thundering ocean surf crashes on the sand, wave after wave driven by the west winds power one wave rising, a sea then booming down on the shore, arching and crests and crashing down among the rocks, spewing salt foam.

 

00:12:55:13 – 00:13:22:11

Alec Bianco

So then Daan ranks, row after row, moved out, spirits firmly set on war. Oh, that is good. There’s another one. Oh my gosh, I’m just good at this really quick. He describes the Achaeans soldiers moving out of the tents. They’re coming out like crazy, and he describes them as like a swarm of bees. Like if you hit like a beehive and the bees go crazy and the soldiers come out like that, you know, it’s so good.

 

00:13:22:14 – 00:13:52:13

Alec Bianco

Anyways, this beautiful imagery, constant throughout both the Iliad and the Odyssey, highlights Homer’s deep understanding of the power of story to illuminate and drive truth. By giving us these similes throughout, he reinforces the connection between our world and the world he’s presenting to us. It’s the same world. Even though there’s some elements that are slightly other. The apparent otherworldliness of his stories is not an excuse to dismiss them or make them unapproachable.

 

00:13:52:16 – 00:14:21:29

Alec Bianco

Rather, by connecting certain actions and events within the narrative to our world. By use of these similes, he makes the world of the Battle of Troy and the journey of Odysseus. Even more understandable to us, and chanting our world with the beauty of these myths. It is here, though, that I would like to present a warning. We have to be careful not to confuse the aims of fairy stories and myths with just any kind of fictional literature telling a wondrous story about some fantasy world.

 

00:14:22:04 – 00:14:48:16

Alec Bianco

You might think of examples today of what I’m talking about, but I won’t name them explicitly. Telling a wondrous story about some fantasy world does not necessarily mean that one has written a fairy story of this kind. Instead, there is the very real possibility that the author has actually done the opposite. The purpose of these fairy stories is to give us a mirror, a kind of story that deepens our understanding of our own world.

 

00:14:48:19 – 00:15:14:10

Alec Bianco

However, some fictional stories do not present themselves as mirrors, but actually as windows. They offer an alternative reality, a world that is completely other and different to our own, often more exciting and more wild than ours. These stories are a kind of escapism, making us believe, often unconsciously, that our own world is inferior to those presented in the stories they make us.

 

00:15:14:13 – 00:15:41:20

Alec Bianco

I hate to say this, but they make us want to be eternally children so that we can always pursue fun. But this kind of escapism is dangerous because it leads to arrested development or and or can lead to a corruption of our own understanding of the world. This is why Lewis so aptly connects to the land of Narnia, to our own world, never prioritizing Narnia or suggesting that it is a better place to be.

 

00:15:41:22 – 00:16:17:00

Alec Bianco

In fact, he suggests the opposite. And has the Pevensie returned to England better than before? Narnia The Fairy Land is far enough away from our own world that it gives us the opportunity to question ourselves, but it’s close enough that all we have to do is step through the wardrobe to get back home. This is precisely the wisdom that fairy tales provide us by being other, they allow us to more freely question ourselves, and those around us, so that we may be freed from our own peculiar hangups or contexts that make it difficult to pursue the virtuous life.

 

00:16:17:02 – 00:16:35:13

Alec Bianco

But they are close enough to our world that we don’t give up on everything around us. By loving the fairy stories we can learn to love our world and improve it by enchanting it with the same virtues and truth we learned in the fairy land. Here’s what Lewis has to say about the enduring power of fairy stories.

 

00:16:35:16 – 00:16:57:13

Alec Bianco

“The fantastic or mythical is a mode available at all ages for some readers, for others, at none at all ages. If it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power to generalize while remaining concrete to present in palpable form, not concepts or even experiences, but the whole classes of experience. And to throw off irrelevancies.

 

00:16:57:16 – 00:17:31:17

Alec Bianco

But at its best, it can do more. It can give us experiences we never had. And thus, instead of commenting on life, can add to it.” Fairy stories, then, Lewis rightfully points out, are not just silly little tales that we tell to children. In fact, are there for anyone at any age. These stories enchant our world by giving us a sense of wonder which our world rightfully deserves, but also by giving us a way to contemplate issues of right and wrong, justice and virtue, courage and deception, and much more.

 

00:17:31:19 – 00:17:50:18

Alec Bianco

The truthfulness of fairy stories is exactly why they are such a great form. They deliver to us in a delightful way the truth that resonates deep within the heart of each person. This is why Tolkien believed in them so deeply, and why Christians for centuries have used them to help us understand the truth of God and the cosmos.

 

00:17:50:21 – 00:18:20:18

Alec Bianco

Tolkien writes, “The gospels contain a fairy story or a story of a larger kind, which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. They contain many marvels peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving, mythical in their perfect, self-contained significance, and at the same time powerfully symbolic and allegorical. And among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable catastrophe. The birth of Christ is the catastrophe of man’s history.

 

00:18:20:21 – 00:18:50:25

Alec Bianco

The resurrection is the catastrophe of the story of the incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has preeminently the inner consistency of reality. There is no tale told that men would rather find was true, and none, which so many skeptical men have accepted, is true on its own merits, for the art of it has the supreme convincing tone of primary art that his creation to reject it leads either to sadness or wrath.”

 

00:18:50:27 – 00:19:11:11

Alec Bianco

This point that Tolkien makes the inner consistency of reality is key. Fairy tales, fairy tales and myths are no less real than reading a history book, not because they describe what happened on such and such a day as such and such a time. But because they describe something far more important, what has happened is happening and will happen.

 

00:19:11:14 – 00:19:37:00

Alec Bianco

Fairy stories tear apart the veil between our world and the spiritual world, and allow us to glimpse, even if just for a moment, the real reality that we all desperately seek is the experience of Moses and the burning bush. For the disciples on Mount Tabor, those theophany eyes that make our faces shine because God’s light is uncreated, we are unworthy to behold it, and yet mercy and grace allow us to glimpse it.

 

00:19:37:03 – 00:20:03:20

Alec Bianco

Truth is far, far greater than our fleshy existence. Truth is timeless beyond the created order and ultimately past our own understanding. Saint Maximus the Confessor describes that in order to approach God, we must lay aside even our own intellect. We have to contemplate him. Fairy stories participate in this same idea. They present creatures, places, and people completely other than us.

 

00:20:03:23 – 00:20:34:03

Alec Bianco

Things that cannot be understood with our own rationality, but must be approached carefully with fear and trembling. But they allow us to glimpse reality. They are different than us, difficult or even impossible to explain, but somehow allow us to understand ourselves more fully. So, to conclude, fairies are real. So are ogres and goblins. Trolls do live under bridges and sphinxes do give out riddles.

 

00:20:34:05 – 00:21:03:29

Alec Bianco

There are dragons to be slain, princesses to be saved, stones to push up mountains, and Cyclopes who need to be blinded. Men should go out and fight the river god and women should weave and protect Ithaca from the devious suitors? These stories and myths are full of virtues. We need to be more human. Socrates tells Alcibiades in Alcibiades One that the eye of the soul needs a mirror by which to see itself, so that it can truly know itself.

 

00:21:04:02 – 00:21:28:28

Alec Bianco

Why does the soul need this? So that by seeing itself more clearly, it can rightly perceive its own defects? These defects are what we need to work on in order to pursue virtue, and ultimately to participate in the divine nature. This dialectical process of looking at one soul by means of a mirror, allows us to freely question ourselves and grasp at truth and goodness by means of beauty.

 

00:21:29:01 – 00:21:50:17

Alec Bianco

Therefore, heed the call to adventure. Heed the warnings of the terrible dangers afoot. Read fairy stories often and use them as mirrors by which to see yourself more clearly. Thank you.

 

00:21:51:14 – 00:22:21:17

Student 1

I was wondering if you might make a distinction here between what you called myth as a kind of medicine. How would that be different from really Marx’s categorization of religion? And opium. That is just the kind of drug that we use to soften the harshness of suffering. 

 

Alec Bianco

Yeah, that’s a really good question. And it was something I was sort of wrestling with, in a manner of speaking.

 

00:22:23:10 – 00:22:44:00

Alec Bianco

It just sounds so insane. It’s probably just like. What? But he kind of has a point. I mean, sometimes we use stories as coping mechanisms. It’s a way of trying to understand the world, but they’re not necessarily real. They’re just sort of like things that we come up with in order to make sense of the problems that we see.

 

00:22:44:02 – 00:23:04:07

Alec Bianco

So we see bad people getting away with it, and we think, oh, there’s got to be some kind of demon or whatever that is, allow giving them great power. Or we see bad people getting punished. Should we go see the gods are real. They punish evil people. And there’s this sense in which we think of it that way.

 

00:23:04:09 – 00:23:24:15

Alec Bianco

But I would contend that the fact of the matter is, if we look at if we read the ancients, from Mesopotamia all the way up to the medieval and the Renaissance, what we have is pretty.

 

00:23:24:18 – 00:23:46:14

Alec Bianco

Just the outstanding fact that spirit exists, that the spiritual world is real. It’s just statistically, highly unlikely that every single human on the planet would come up with stories. Is every single story true? No, but it’s not. It’s not the facts. And Tolkien gets at this in the fairy stories I think is really good. And he says it better than me.

 

00:23:46:14 – 00:24:08:02

Alec Bianco

So go read that after this. But he talks about that like the, what these facts are like, what does it mean that these are real? It’s not quite as important as understanding that the real reality is not just what physically is in front of me or happened, but that I can participate in what Plato would call the forms.

 

00:24:08:04 – 00:24:39:29

Alec Bianco

And Aristotle probably too, something bigger than us. So I think Marx and Nietzsche and some of those guys, I think what they’re missing is their own insecurity of wrestling with how do I reckon with the fact that I have not I have not obeyed God. How do I reckon with that?

 

00:24:40:02 – 00:25:00:08

Alec Bianco

Because once you realize and you come to that, this in the Greek would be called metanoia. This moment of turning back and realizing, oh my gosh, what have I done? Like, that is a really hard thing to deal with. Start saying the stories are fake, and just an opium or some kind of drug.

 

00:25:00:13 – 00:25:46:01

Alec Bianco

I don’t want to dismiss them because they’re brilliant thinkers. But I do think that there’s a question there that they need to wrestle with. And people who think like that, which is what if you’re wrong and it seems like you are. I think you have a question. 

 

Student 2

So, you mentioned that all fictional stories aren’t necessarily fairy tales. And obviously fairy tales have some kind of characteristics about them. Would you say there’s a method that you can use to determine whether fiction is a fairy tale or how exactly do you differentiate between fictional stories that are fairy tales versus fictional stories that are not fairy tales and just fiction.

 

Alec Bianco

Yeah. That is a really, really good question.

 

00:25:46:01 – 00:26:04:24

Alec Bianco

Thank you for asking that. Here’s a good two. Sorry I hate when people do that. They’re like oh that was such a great question. You’re like, well you didn’t say that to mine. Really good question. I’m going to pick on you for a second. There isn’t a method, and you should avoid wanting to use a method, because a method implies that there’s just a ten step process to victory.

 

00:26:04:24 – 00:26:27:22

Alec Bianco

Right? Perhaps a mode is a way of looking at it. But I think that’s a really good question. And it comes down to it in my mind. I’m not an expert in this. The way Tolkien and Lewis were so. And if you talk to literature geeks, no offense. They’re like a myth and a fairy tale and a fable and a parable like these are all very, very different things.

 

00:26:27:22 – 00:26:51:29

Alec Bianco

And there’s the specific kind of narrative structures and things out of rules that I had to apply in order for it to be classified as that. And I have no problem with that. I get that it’s just for me when I’m reading stories to my children. It matters less to me the difference between a fairy tale and a myth as much as it is communicating truth, right?

 

00:26:52:00 – 00:27:17:02

Alec Bianco

Capital T is it participating in truth, goodness and beauty? Is it presenting something otherworldly but connected to our world so not completely separate? And so Homer does this by, well, one Troy was a real place where it was exactly. We don’t know. But it was a real place. The Greeks were real people, and the Trojans were real people.

 

00:27:18:01 – 00:27:40:00

Alec Bianco

But he’s also talking about, like Zeus and or Aries coming down and fighting with people. What does that mean? I don’t know. I mean, maybe he did. I don’t know, but I’m guessing Aries didn’t really come down to them then do I just dismiss Homer because he just told me a fictional story?

 

00:27:40:06 – 00:28:05:27

Alec Bianco

No, because he’s using these similes to constantly connect you back in, unconsciously. You’re like, I know how waves work, right? Like I’ve been to the beach. I can see exactly what he’s talking about. And then he says, and that’s what the occasions were like. And I go, oh, yeah, that’s crazy to think about. So it’s got to be otherworldly fairies, goblins, trolls, dragons, wizards, whatever.

 

00:28:06:04 – 00:28:26:08

Alec Bianco

But it needs to be close enough. I don’t know, there are certain stories. I don’t know if you guys have read these books. If you have, I kind of feel sorry for you. Like, what is it called? Game of Thrones. So it’s called those stories. Oh, good. Silence. It’s a really great example. People tell me.

 

00:28:26:14 – 00:28:43:14

Alec Bianco

Oh, my God, you have to read it. It’s so good. Okay. My problem with it. I’ve never read them, and I’m not watch TV shows. I don’t need to, but one of the problems with it is that it presents an alternative world. It’s not connected in any way to our world. It’s just its own thing.

 

00:28:43:17 – 00:29:13:29

Alec Bianco

And it’s also very nihilistic in many ways. Like he’s just presenting, he took what he saw in this world tragedy, suffering, vice evil. And he’s like, that’s what life is like. So I’m going to write this alternative world where there’s dragons and swords and magic, and then leave it at that, and then you can get sucked into it, and then you start putting the costumes on and going to the conventions because you love it, and you just get obsessed with it, hyper obsessive.

 

00:29:13:29 – 00:29:34:07

Alec Bianco

And then you’re a 57 year old man. It’s like, what are you doing? Like live your life right? Figure out how to love those stories and connect them back to your real world. Some authors don’t know how to do that. They write stories that are disconnected from our world. And don’t teach me to be a better person. They teach me to consume more of this product.

 

00:29:34:09 – 00:30:15:25

Alec Bianco

That’s the danger. So the method or mode to view those stories is hard. I mean, but I would, I would trust Tolkien and Lewis and McDonald and I would trust anything written more than 200 years ago. You’re probably safe. I think you were first to go ahead. 

 

Student 3

So I was raised in stories (ones that cannot be read about). You can read about good dragons and bad uniforms. Does that perception that we have now have those kinds of stories would you say it warps the truth and like the mirror image that we get from stories because it reverses the roles of like…

 

00:30:15:28 – 00:30:40:19

Alec Bianco

Okay, let me repeat your question because I am supposed to do that, but then also so I understand it. So you’re saying that in certain stories today we present creatures that were, let’s say, stereotypically bad, like dragons, as good. Is that a problem? Right. Is it warping reality? That’s a great question. The answer is yes and no.

 

00:30:41:07 – 00:30:59:12

Alec Bianco

No, in the sense that. Here’s an old adage that you should always kind of keep in your back pocket. Don’t tear a fence down unless you know why it was built. That’s just good old fashioned southern advice that you should just remember. Don’t tear off heads down if you don’t know why it was built.

 

00:30:59:21 – 00:31:17:26

Alec Bianco

And this is kind of this is, I mean, as Catholics or Orthodox or any kind of high church religion. You understand this, that we have a tradition and we are critically obligated to follow that tradition. Well, what is tradition? It’s the fence, right? We don’t just tear it down. We can’t just change tradition because we want to.

 

00:31:18:03 – 00:31:47:05

Alec Bianco

We don’t even know how many people and years went by to make sure that this thing stayed true to what Christ gave us. So analogously, we humans have been noticing that foxes are mischievous and that crows are intelligent, and that monkeys are liars. If you’ve ever read Aesop’s Fables, monkeys lie all the time. I don’t know why, but they just do.

 

00:31:48:03 – 00:32:14:09

Alec Bianco

And foxes are always trying to mislead you, and wolves are always trying to eat you. This and that. There’s this symbology. This is kind of getting into symbology. And it’s really important, I think, to be faithful to those symbols, because now I can learn to think the same way my ancestors did, and learning to think the way my ancestors did is a great joy and great gift.

 

00:32:14:11 – 00:32:31:21

Alec Bianco

And to say, I don’t want it. I don’t care what my great great granddad thought. It is kind of a shame, especially because most of us don’t even know what his name was and how sad that is. We don’t even know where we came from anymore. And so we’ve basically just said, and we’re never going to try and we just need to not do that.

 

00:32:31:21 – 00:32:56:02

Alec Bianco

And one of those ways is, with our stories, not like learning to do what the old masters did. You see this in art, too, right? Like, I want to know how Michelangelo painted. I don’t want to just pay my own way, because I don’t want to learn the hard discipline of rules. You know, I don’t mean to sound like an old man yelling at kids on the lawn, but I just think these traditions and these rules and this understanding of symbology is very important.

 

00:32:56:19 – 00:33:14:08

Alec Bianco

And we should learn to do that. However, is it corrupting the youth, you know, and should we be put to death? If you write a story where a dragon is a good guy? I don’t think so. I mean, probably what I would just say is that the author hasn’t read enough Aesop’s fables and fairy tales, and they probably need to. I mean, I’m a boy.

 

00:33:14:13 – 00:33:36:21

Alec Bianco

I think dragons are sick and I want to ride one like, I get it. It’s kind of cool.

 

Student 4

Yeah. So you were talking earlier about how the difference between fiction and fairy tales is in the connection to reality. Is that on the author to make that bridge or is it on the reader? Is it on both?

 

00:33:36:24 – 00:33:59:13

Student 4

Can the reader make a bridge where the author didn’t intend there to be one? 

 

Alec Bianco

Nice. That’s cool to think about. Hey, if you guys ever heard of the medieval layers of reading the four layers of reading. So I always get the because it’s like Latin and Greek and I get the names mixed up. But basically there’s like a literal reading of a story.

 

00:33:59:20 – 00:34:20:00

Alec Bianco

There’s an allegorical reading of the story, there is an anti-God reading of the story. And there’s one more they came out of, scripture of reading scripture and how to interpret scripture so you can read it kind of literally, what happened in the narrative. And then there’s the allegory.

 

00:34:20:00 – 00:34:53:24

Alec Bianco

Well, what do these people represent? Right. So the burning bush is also a burning bush, but it also represents the Theotokos, Virgin Mary. Then there’s, sort of a more analogical one, which is, well, what is the story of Moses going up to the Mount and teach me about my salvation, and what heaven is going to be like, you know, and so these different ways of reading, what I mean to say by that is that it is the responsibility of the author to write things well.

 

00:34:53:26 – 00:35:22:13

Alec Bianco

You have a responsibility. Don’t call yourself an author. If you’re going to purposely write bad stuff. And the best writing in the world can be subjected to those four layers of reading with great scrutiny and and shine. So Homer shines, Scripture shines. Shakespeare shines. That’s why we have what are called the great books, because these books just shone throughout time, because they can be subjected to all kinds of reading and interpretation.

 

00:35:22:13 – 00:35:49:02

Alec Bianco

And you could realize that there’s so much to glean there. Did the author intend all of that? I don’t know, I mean, there’s a reason that Homer begins both the Iliad and Odyssey by saying sing or muse. It’s not my words, it’s the goddesses. Right? And then in the Holy Scriptures, we believe the same thing, that their spirit, the Holy Spirit, came down and, and, and inspired these authors to write, some of the greatest living works of all time.

 

00:35:49:04 – 00:36:08:08

Alec Bianco

So there’s a sense in which they could probably make that the reader could make connections that the author didn’t intend, and we’ll never know, because the author is dead and has been for thousands of years. Thank God. Right? That way they can’t mess around with it, you know, like some authors are doing with their works today. Don’t mess around with it.

 

00:36:08:10 – 00:36:30:15

Alec Bianco

You tried to write a good product, and you tried to write something that participated in truth and led and can lead me to truth. Let’s let the Holy Spirit work. 

 

Student 5

You mentioned earlier how some stories of today can lead to escapism, which can make you want to be more of a child. Do you mean childish or child-like?

 

00:36:30:15 – 00:36:48:19

Student 5

And can you elaborate a little bit on how the stories do make you want to be that? 

 

Alec Bianco

That is something I should put in this talk. Thank you so much for the beautiful thing. Childish versus childlike, right? Because Christ has become childlike. Come to me as little children and my wife said, you need to put that in your talk.

 

00:36:48:19 – 00:37:14:23

Alec Bianco

So I forgot. So thank you. Yes. That is a beautiful point. Right? Being childish is the problem. Fairy stories, if they’re done well and done rightly, make us more child like where we wonder at the world. And my son, he’s almost a year old now. He’s just sitting in the backyard and likes to pick up rocks and just look at them and throw them down forever.

 

00:37:14:25 – 00:37:39:05

Alec Bianco

What? What kind of a mind is that? Because I get bored in my house. You know, I can get bored at a museum, but children can be wonderful. They can wander in yards forever. So I’m guessing that Christ meant something like that. Like he wants us to always wonder. The mass never gets boring, right?

 

00:37:39:11 – 00:38:08:14

Alec Bianco

Even though it can be sometimes. But that’s on us. That’s not the problem there. So. Beautiful point. Is exactly right. I think childishness results from a lot of childish authors today writing childish things for wannabe children who are upset that they had to grow up and they don’t want to be grown up. They want to be able to have no responsibility and still play and shoot laser guns and do those things.

 

00:38:08:17 – 00:38:27:24

Alec Bianco

And none of those things are bad for children. But at a certain point, you have to realize that I can’t do these things anymore. I have to now make space for my children to enjoy that. But if I decide to be a child forever, my children will never get to live that life. So I need childlike wonder forever.

 

00:38:27:27 – 00:38:57:29

Alec Bianco

I need childishness for a season. Yes

 

Professor

I’m teaching a class on short fiction. Magic happens to the media. Okay, so let’s switch to this way of thinking. And some of the students in my classroom have read what the little mermaid and I think that talking about it can be illustrated so easily about the holers which cuts out precisely…

 

00:38:58:01 – 00:40:05:14

Professor

…what is good? Which is the real cross real suffering and transcendence of that. So I would say it starts with happiness and ends with happiness. It does not exclude the law, the suffering, the self sacrifice. It does not eliminate the cross. Hollywood does and it leaves lies. Also, it simulates what fairy tales don’t. Fairy tales don’t take you away from life. They get you back on your feet. They help you to grow up and become childlike. As adults, you are mature, caring and loving, functional adults. Hollywood breeds childishness that results in dysfunction, immorality, and just decline of culture and tradition all together. 

 

00:40:05:14 – 00:40:28:04

Professor

So they compare the version of the Little Mermaid that Hollywood propagates and the Little Mermaid which was actually was literally the statue of Little Mermaid was taken to Shanghai to represent the ideal city for the future and they said that any ideal city of the future doesn’t just have to have infrastructure it has to have magic and they literally transported from Little Mermaid to Shanghai to be there at the exhibit because no city that is human can be without magic. That’s what you are talking about.

 

Alec Bianco

That’s really well said. Thank you so much.

 

00:40:28:06 – 00:40:59:20

Alec Bianco

Heed her warning. That’s exactly right. Yes. Suffering crosses and crowns. Right. We need both crosses and crowns. That’s really, really good. Any last questions? One more. I’m going to let him go. 

 

Student 6

Yeah. What translation of the Iliad was that? 

 

Alec Bianco

So? This is actually. I pulled it online. It’s a guy named John Hunston, I believe he was just doing a little expose on Homeric similes, so he just translated them himself.

 

00:40:59:22 – 00:41:30:02

Alec Bianco

But typically I would read the latter more. So, Peter Green, he just died this past year. He’s also a very good author. He’s a newer translation as well. Yeah. He’s a really good author. Thank you.

• The Circe Institute