In Defense of Jonathan Pageau
By now, many of you would have seen Matt Whiteley’s essay “A Critique of Jonathan Pageau”. Jonathan is probably too modest to respond to something like this, so I’d like to offer some thoughts from a pro-Pageau perspective.
Rather than going through Whiteley’s essay point by point, though, let’s ask the one question that really matters: Is Pageau’s work doing more harm than good? And, to be frank, Whiteley does not do great job of arguing that Pageau’s work does any harm. All he really says is that JP tends to be reductive.
For instance, Whiteley cites a comment that Pageau made about gargoyles during an interview:
They’re an expression of mixture, because mixture is chaos, mixture means I see something, I don’t know what it is, so I try to fit two categories and it’s like a mix between this and this and you’re saying this because you don’t know what it is because it doesn’t have a name. Like a dragon is exactly that, a dragon is chaos. And that’s the way it’s represented in the tradition, so what is a dragon? It’s like a snake with wings and maybe with lions feet and so it’s a mixture of other animals together, it’s a mixture of non-meaning. Where meaning breaks down. Chaos. So it’s not necessarily negative, it’s also potential.
First of all, I don’t think it’s fair to pull 115 words of ad-hoc speech almost at random and then act as though it’s representative of a man’s whole body of work. This one quote obviously doesn’t capture the whole Pageauvian “thing.”
Secondly, I don’t think Whiteley’s assessment of the quote is at all fair:
What can you say to any of this? It can’t be falsified, it’s speculative at best, at worst it is just idiosyncratic nonsense. Is dragon chaos or compound-predator? Is it just a scary beast someone made up? Do mountains represent hierarchical structures of reality or, maybe, I might make up, do we use mountains as symbols of God because the sun shines down from above us so going up somehow seems like going towards light? No one here is offering a way of answering those questions that is not just self-indulgent speculation.
Well, clearly, that’s not true. Part of what makes dragons scary is that they combine the elements of different, predators in an uncanny way. They’re a bunch of different, scary animals combined to make one ultra-scary monster.
And, yes: on a deeper level, they do symbolize chaos. Constant bombardment with TV has reduced our imaginations to a vestigial state. But to our ancestors, a mishmash sort of creature like a dragon would have evoked something that comes from outside the natural order. Such creatures are never wholly benevolent. Mermaids lure sailors to their deaths. Most centaurs are murderous thugs. Fauns are sadistic perverts.
Consider the image I chose to accompany this article: The Little Faun by Charles Sims. It’s a powerfully symbolic painting. Per the title, it seems to show a little faun playing innocently on the table while a family picnics. But what’s that big faun doing in the woods to the left? Who’s that woman with him? And what are they doing there in the shadows?
Any symbolic reading I could give of this painting would seem reductive once I’ve actually said it out loud. But does that mean we shouldn’t talk about the basic elements of art, literature, etc.? Isn’t that how we learn to “read” cultural artefacts?
David Hume thought so. He believed that the practice of criticism helped to refine our tastes. It actually makes us more perceptive. I think that will ring true in most folks’ experience.
I think this is part of the reason why people don’t like Pageau. Much of his work is rather complex but, yes: some of it is more basic. That’s because he’s trying to help introduce these fundamental themes and concepts to folks who didn’t get them from their parents, their schools, and/or their undergrad programs.
Maybe you received a good education. In that case, glory to God! But not everyone was so fortunate. And Pageau isn’t only addressing himself to folks with Ph.Ds in comparative religion. He’s trying to have a conversation that anyone can jump into—reagardless of their education level. He doesn’t speak down to people, but he does make himself inteligble to any reasonably thoughtful person. That, in my book, is a virtue.
This is part of what makes Pageau so popular. He’s like that channel “Dad, how do I?” on YouTube. The DHDI guy has over 5 million subscribers, and all he does is teach men basic life skills, from tying a necktie to jumping a battery.
The Baby Boomers were infamously bad at handing down a basic understanding of… well, anything. “Dad, how do I?” is helping to fill that knowledge gap. And so, in his way, is Jonathan.
Again, Pageau is a critically important intellectual. Check out his recent video with Rod Dreher to see him engaging with ideas at a higher level:
What makes Pageau famous, though, is that he fills one of those knowledge gaps—specifically the ones left when we stopped telling our kids bedtime stories. Those were the moments when we catechized our children into the folk-wisdom of their ancestors.
I’m always struck by the scenes The Andy Griffith Show where Andy tells Opie (or Otis) classic stories like Jack and the Beanstalk. The problem is that Opie’s generation also grew up watching The Andy Griffith Show. By the time they had kids of their own, TV had pretty much monopolized the story-telling aspects of our society.
Yet, as St. Basil the Great pointed out, those old stories prepared the hearts and minds of men to receive the Gospel. They still have a place in our world. We have simply failed to make room for them. Pageau is correcting that error.
Also, as we grew older, fed only on the thin gruel of Deweyite education, our imaginative and spiritual powers atrophy somewhat. We’re worse at reading fairytales than children are, not despite our education but precisely because of it. We were catechzied into naturalism. From childhood, we have been indoctrinated into the cult of nihilistic materialism at a young age. Part of Pageau’s work is to help us “un-learn” that nonsense, and then guide us through the basics.
By publishing these talks explaining the “meaning” of this-or-that story, he’s also performing another important task: he’s pushing back against the whole Deweyite paradigm. He’s showing that these stories aren’t just a bunch of fantastical nonsense. They’re fantastical, but they aren’t nonsense.
This is what Pageau is doing when he tells us the “meaning” of a certain symbol, like a gargoyle. He’s not (as Whiteley suggests) extracting every drop of meaning from that symbol. It’s not to give you “gargoyle-ness” in word form so that you never have to bother looking at a gargoyle ever again. No: he’s ensuring that, if we do ever come across a gargoyle IRL, the experience will be even more vivid, spectacular, and pregnant with meaning.
Note well, the “meaning” is already there. It’s just that our eyes are too dimmed from blue light and Doomscrolling for us to recognize it. That’s the whole point of Re-Enchantment. (Haven’t they made that clear enough yet?)
No doubt Pageau has put out some duds—as have I; as have you. On the whole, though, he’s doing God’s work.
Terry Eagleton said that a Marxist’s ultimate goal is to stop being a Marxist. He seeks to win so bigly, to Marxify the world so thoroughly, that “Marxism” as a concept becomes redundant. I expect Pageau would say the same thing about himself. He’d like to put himself out of business by encouraging parents and other teachers to accept the responsibility of storytelling for themselves. And he’s giving them the tools to do exactly that.
Final thought: If you really thinks there’s something dangerous about Pageau’s stuff, I guess you have no choice but to say something. But is it possible that your beef isn’t really with Pageau at all? Is it possible—just possible—you’re jealous that Jonathan is making a living by talking about fairytales? I know I am!