The philosophical ferment of [the early Christian] period draws on a lot of sources: Jewish scriptural tradition, Greco-Roman hermeticism, Plato, even the Persian Zoroastrians. Zoroastrianism had two gods, the good god and the bad god, which combined with dualities inherent in neo-Platonism and most likely resulted in our modern conception of God and the Devil.

TESS POLLOK: How did you two meet and get started on the podcast?

NATHANIEL SLOAN: We met on Discord, pretty deep in the pandemic. I’m trying to remember if I was in New York then but time feels meaningless now. Our first actual meeting was at a DNR [Do Not Research] de-virtualization event at H0l0, hosted by Dorian Electra.

DEREK CONNELL: It was great getting to meet all of our internet friends and put faces to the names, you know. I think we were talking for about six months before that.

SLOAN: The podcast grew out of conversations we were having over DM and in person. We were talking about entering a new phase of this whole god-posting thing, joking about how these memetic trends come and go really quickly. Specifically, we were interested in "tradcath" [traditional Catholic] posting aesthetics and these hyper-niche, religiously inflected internet personas that were coming into fashion so quickly.

POLLOK: Did you explore that at all at your show? I saw online that you were recently showing work in Western Massachusetts.

CONNELL: Yeah, that was actually a DNR event, as well, it was an art show and reading. They held a group art show with pieces made by the community and some of my memes, which are featured on the account and featured here, were up on the wall, along with a little manifesto I wrote.

POLLOK: Nice. How did it feel having your memes in an art show?

CONNELL: Kind of weird. I get into it more in the manifesto I wrote to accompany the work – it definitely felt nice to be included but I feel like the full expression of the memes is over Instagram, so it was a little redundant. For the reading, DNR published a book at the New Museum of collected essays and some of ours were included. We were one of a handful of people chosen to read from some of the more absurd and humorous passages.

SLOAN: There was an exercise in future casting that I read from about “baddie accelerationism,” which was basically about turning the power of crypto bros against them by turning them into simps.

POLLOK: It’s funny, whenever I interview DNR-affiliated people they always have such strong opinions on accelerationism. It’s usually a question I start with as a joke: “Are you an accelerationist?” Any time it’s a DNR person they tend to have a really long and developed answer. Other people are more, like, “what is this? A magazine for college students?”

SLOAN: I think it’s very juvenile to subscribe to that as a political affiliation, but you don’t have to be an accelerationist to notice those kinds of trends happening in the world. It’s a great cope, too, because you can basically say you’re an accelerationist just by making garbage and consuming things. And it’s apolitical in a way because anyone can be an accelerationist in any direction.

POLLOK: I feel like there’s shades of tradcath in that sentiment, the idea that you could appropriate Catholic aesthetics, things like that, to approach a more medieval sort of life.

CONNELL: Culturally, I think we return to that sensibility at least once a decade. You can go back to the 80s or 90s and see, “Oh, there’s a big chunk of angel movies being released here.” People just return to that in different ways. In the 80s and 90s it was heavily marred by the Satanic Panic, obviously, but that was what was pushing the whole return to Catholicism thing at the time. And now it’s in a kind of meta-ironic stage, more of a caste system. I just see it upholding divisions and it doesn’t do anything very Christian, I find, outside of the few people who take it very seriously.

POLLOK: It’s not functioning in a very Christian way, but has Christianity ever functioned in a very Christian way?

CONNELL: Maybe not in terms of the religious structure, but the early Christians sects did a pretty good job.

SLOAN: The history of early Christianity is really crazy because before it coalesces as an actual hierarchical system, there are many sects interpreting it in many ways –

POLLOK: You're talking about the Gnostics?

SLOAN: Exactly, yeah.

POLLOK: I’m reading a really great book about them right now, actually, it’s a little dated but I’m loving it. It’s called The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas, have you heard of it? It was published in the late 80s, it’s just a beautiful account of their theology and belief systems. I’m glad you guys brought it up because I wanted to talk with you about Gnosticism, especially your use of pneuma, the divine spark of Sophia, which figures heavily in Gnosticism, correct?

SLOAN: I haven’t read that one yet, but that’s interesting. The philosophical ferment of that period draws on a lot of interesting sources: Jewish scriptural tradition, Greco-Roman hermeticism, Plato, even the Persian Zoroastrians. The concept of pneuma as this animating spirit or breath inside man goes way back in Greek philosophy, it’s actually mentioned in the Platonic dialogues.

CONNELL: Who basically lifted it from the East, from the Sufis, from more esoteric sources.

POLLOK: What religion do you feel was most influential on the development of early Christianity?

SLOAN: That’s a tough question. I’m definitely not an expert – I’m not as familiar with the Jewish scriptures and I know they figure in a lot.

CONNELL: I think the Persian Zoroastrians, definitely. When the Jewish people were wandering around in the 7th century after the fall of the Second Temple, they encountered Persians who were almost Zoroastrian. ****They had two gods, the good god and the bad god, which combined with the dualities inherent in neo-Platonism, and, yeah, that’s most likely resulted in our modern conception of God and the Devil. But that’s where we lose the Gnostic faith, because there were about 200 years or so leading up to Christianity becoming the state religion where neo-Platonism wasn’t a part of it yet. And to me that was the best era of Christianity [pre-neo-Platonism], it was the most open-minded and people were willing to understand it as a cosmology and philosophy and understand that stories were metaphorical.

POLLOK: What Christian writings are left of that era?

SLOAN: I think the Gospel of Thomas relates most closely to the Gnostics and their belief system. I forget which sect of Gnosticism he aligned himself with, but it has a lot of similarities with the Book of John. There are also a lot of interesting similarities between early Gnostic sects and some of the accepted gospels.

POLLOK: What's so unique about the Gospel of Thomas?

SLOAN: The Gospel of Thomas places incredible emphasis on bringing the Kingdom of Heaven with you in everyday life. It’s very opaque in some ways, almost mystical – it’s not mysticism, but you get the sense that there’s no way to interpret it literally. If you tried to interpret it literally it wouldn’t make any sense. And by the time Christianity was adopted as a state religion, church leaders who ended up dominating the church hierarchy opted for a more literal interpretation of the texts as a way of gaining more followers.

POLLOK: Is there an example of something from the Gospel of Thomas that isn’t meant to be taken literally?

SLOAN: “No one is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing buried that will not be raised.” Verse 5. But there’s also a passage that’s basically just the Sermon on the Mount, about how the Kingdom of God or the Second Coming are supposed to be things you can realize in your lifetime, if you want to. You have to let go and be accepting of your ego. That being said, these things get spun out over time into huge and deliberate stories as a form of social control. Really, it’s a form of old world technology used to keep people in line with a certain standard of morals.

POLLOK: Have either of you read The Shape of Biblical Language by John Breck? It’s a great book about the chiastic literary structure of the Bible.

CONNELL: No, not yet, but I have the digital of that saved on my computer, I’ve been meaning to read it.

POLLOK: It’s really fascinating. It talks a little bit about what you guys are talking about right now, about the different ways meaning has been transposed in the Bible over time and how we’re not reading it how it was originally meant to be read, specifically with regards to the literary structure. Also, the Bible was written in low language, it was written in slang, so meaning isn’t well preserved in formal English translations like the King James Bible and so on.

SLOAN: A great example of that is the Greek ecclesia, which becomes the word for church. It originally just meant coming together or gathering place. There’s lots of words like that, words that have a general base meaning which comes into a very specific context over time.

CONNELL: I’ve come into my intuitive awareness more and more over the past few years, especially over the pandemic. I re-read a lot of what I thought I already knew about scripture. Recently, I was re-reading The Pilgrim’s Progress [by John Bunyan] and the whole thing was about teaching you to turn over these paradigms, you have to change yourself or kill yourself – at the end of the story you’re back at the beginning of the story, and what’s changed? You. It’s a beautiful thing. What I love about that is that the Gnostics understood, and the Christian mystics understood, that it’s not about working towards transcendence or meditating for 40 days and 40 nights, it’s about realizing that you can have it right here, right now. That’s really beautiful. And I feel like a lot of the tradcath stuff just massively sidesteps that, it’s more about the aesthetics, because Catholic aesthetics are really cool.

No one is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing buried that will not be raised.

POLLOK: Who can blame them? It's some of the most beautiful art in the world.

CONNELL: Exactly, it is. But that should be bringing us closer to something, not further away from it. If it’s grounding us in material things then maybe it’s not being used for what it was meant for.

SLOAN: It’s tricky. Some of the most intense experiences of pure aesthetic connection that people have had have been in spaces like the Hagia Sophia, where I understand the intention was to create a space that was as close an approximation as possible to the divine realm. I read this really wonderful article on the Hagia Sophia by this art historian, Fabio Barry, where he talks about this ancient belief that marble was a kind of frozen or solidified water. If you split marble down the middle it has these beautiful wave patterns. And there’s all these sermons that were given in the space about the transmutation of material and Christ’s miracle of walking on water. There’s also another scholar at Stanford, Bissera Pentcheva, who was able to model the acoustic environment of the Hagia Sophia and turn it into a reverb that you can apply to anything, and she’s applied it to these recordings of a Byzantine chant.

POLLOK: What does it sound like?

SLOAN: It’s got an incredibly long tail reverb, the sound is kind of transmuted and just dissolves as it goes on. The point is to frame the religious experience, but, you know, at what point do you risk somebody missing the mark with what they’re experiencing?

POLLOK: Do either of you like the current pope?

SLOAN: If you’re grading him on a curve, in comparison to the other popes he’s pretty good.

CONNELL: His identity politics are better than the last one.

POLLOK: I don’t like that about him. I think it makes him a bad pope because it makes him a little bit corrosive to the history of the church.

SLOAN: I think it’s hard to say what aspects of the Vatican church are good.

CONNELL: Yeah, what makes a pope good?

POLLOK: I think the pope should be the most hardcore, authoritarian Catholic there is and it’s all supposed to emanate outwards from him. So when we have a wishy-washy pope like we do now, it weakens the church.

CONNELL: You like a hard pope?

POLLOK: Definitely. I like a fascist pope, like a Pope Hitler would be great.

SLOAN: I mean, the way the Vatican runs Rome – they couldn’t shoot Call Me By Your Name in Rome, where the book is originally set, because of the Vatican. So despite whatever Francis is doing, all the cardinals and the structure of the Vatican continue to push forward, at least in the city of Rome itself. Ultimately, I think Francis is kind of doomed, because he can’t really be the based pope he thinks he is and just be, like, “Oh, we’re all Communists now.”

CONNELL: The Vatican did say that China was the most Christian.

POLLOK: The Vatican called China the most Christian nation?

SLOAN: Kind of. One of the cardinals said China was the best at instituting Christian law.

POLLOK: That’s so interesting that he said that. I don’t know a lot about the Catholic population in China, but I thought they were pretty dispossessed.

SLOAN: I wonder if the government is just trying to play ball with the Vatican to see if they’ll get something out of it.

CONNELL: As the middle class grows, so does the need for a singular religion that controls, right? It makes sense to me to try and push everything into one neoliberal structure as your country’s middle class grows.

POLLOK: What's the main religion in China? Confucianism? I'll look it up.

SLOAN: I thought it was Taoism.

POLLOK: It’s Taoism and Confucianism. “Confucianism has long been considered the dominant religion.”

CONNELL: I read the Tao Te Ching recently and I see so much of the Bible in that. A lot of what was distilled into Jesus is in these documents. Dispensing with everything that gets in between you and the universe –

SLOAN: There are still a lot of questions about that. There have been longstanding trade networks between the Mediterranean and China, going into India, so I think there’s still not really a consensus on where ideas were exchanged and to what extent. It’s difficult, you know, that’s a very Joe Rogan statement to make – “There’s actually just one religion at the root of everything. It’s all the same, man!”

POLLOK: They’re all influencing each other. There’s a lot of cross-pollination going on, I think. Do you guys identify as Catholics?

SLOAN: My parents didn’t baptize me, I grew up Episcopalian, which is pretty much just Catholic light.

POLLOK: Oh, my grandma was Episcopalian. She was originally Catholic but she converted to marry a Jewish guy.

SLOAN: My grandma actually converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism. “For the history,” she said, but it was actually because the Episcopalian church was getting too cool with gays. But my dad was Methodist when I was growing up.

CONNELL: Christianity is the religion I’m closest to, that I understand the most. I wasn’t raised in a religious environment but I was dumped in church when I was in the fourth grade and I got baptized alongside a bunch of babies in a Protestant church. In the town I grew up in they only had two churches, one Protestant and one Catholic, and they were right across from one another. The church I went to was great, though. The pastor was an old civil rights activist and he was great at bringing people into the flock. When I was young I was terrible – I just thought, “Well, if Hell is a place, then I’m going, and everyone I know is going.” And I hung out with kids at church who claimed to worship Satan and all that. But the pastor dismissed it, he was, like, “That’s just another aspect of God,” and he even gave me the Book of Eve, and told me, “Here, read this – they don’t want you to read this.” It created this lifelong urge in me to go deeper and learn more about the history and the socioeconomic context of the Bible.

[There was] an ancient belief that marble was a kind of frozen or solidified water. In the Hagia Sophia...they used marble to give these incredible sermons on the transmutation of material and Christ’s miracle of walking on water.

POLLOK: Wow, you’re one of the only people I’ve talked to who had a positive experience being forced to go to church growing up...I guess my next question is: if you had to recommend people read one philosopher, and it could only be one, who would it be?

CONNELL: Hegel!

POLLOK: Why?

CONNELL: Why not?

POLLOK: I'm the one asking the questions here!

CONNELL: The entire universe is in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The God question is in there. It’s consciousness.

SLOAN: I remember in undergrad philosophy class spending almost half an hour reading a single paragraph of The Phenomenology of Spirit over and over. This is may not be an entirely considered answer but I would say Byung-Chul Han, who is himself a Hegelian. But he has some very different ideas, as well – I think his conception of paucity and lack of ritual engagement and loss of different conceptions of time to be really helpful in understanding the quote unquote spiritual bankruptcy of today. He’s not, like, too New Age-y and out there that you can’t understand him. He is a Hegelian, but he makes his own points.

CONNELL: That’s a great point. He’s a better step in. Because he starts from the modern problem.

POLLOK: What's the name of his book?

SLOAN: The Disappearance of Rituals. It’s not the totalizing text of his, it’s not his magnum opus, but The Disappearance of Rituals is an essay, essentially, and it really spoke to me.

CONNELL: I think many people are trying to re-attribute the occult into ritual, all of these artifacts that we’re trying to resurrect to make things more mystical are actually obfuscating God and creating opacities that put more distance between us and God. Where I’m at in my life I’m trying to minimize that distance.

POLLOK: What are you guys reading right now?

SLOAN: I’m reading another short work by Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time. The Disappearance of Rituals covers some of the change in our relationship to time but The Scent of Time is more specifically about our changing relationship to time. It’s an all-encompassing, holistic understanding of time as opposed to the atomized, infinitesimally compressed moment-to-moment time of, like, the endless scroll. But I’m also getting through a collection of essays by the art critic Ben Davis called Art in the After-Culture. For months now I’ve been in the middle of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and I want to read more of Thomas Pynchon.

CONNELL: I started reading The Travels of Marco Polo. I was inspired to read it because I was reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and I learned that he pulled most of that from The Travels of Marco Polo. It’s absolutely fascinating. A lot of the collective imagination we live in has been shaped by narratives like this. Apparently it’s also very historically accurate.

SLOAN: Also, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. This Puritan theologian wrote a really complex allegory of the spirit’s journey through different levels of self-awareness and conception and relationship to God.

CONNELL: I’ve also been reading The Class Matrix by Vivek Chibber. And I just finished The Disappearance of Eros, also by Byung-Chul Han.

SLOAN: He has a lot of writing on the nature of desire. The Disappearance of Rituals gets a little into it, how the internet has fundamentally changed our relationship to desire in contemporary times. Mostly talking about how desire has become totally unmasked and laid bare in the era of the algorithm.

CONNELL: It’s really like Deleuze, where when you’re hungry instead of reaching for what would ease your hunger you reach for what you desire. We live in a world where desire is king and desire is the true self, I see that message constantly repeated in all forms of media, and when people interrogate these desires they tend to reach for the wrong tools to interpret them, and it all becomes this cloying, solipsistic reiteration of self-care.

SLOAN: There’s an interesting parallel between this and the Gospel of Thomas, which intentionally leaves things vague –

CONNELL: Leaving space for you to subjectively interpret things kind of defeats the march of desire.

SLOAN: Again, in The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han uses pornography as this example of the desire to have everything laid bare, and to have either the human form or whatever truth totally disclosed and available to you. Whereas, he traces previous forms of eros and seduction where the key to it is the mystery and the seduction is in its lack of presenting itself. What is hidden is integral to what is functioning. And coming into knowledge of that is a spiritual truth.