How Meaning Structures the World
Jonathan Pageau's Symbolism Masterclass - Lecture 1
“…it's mostly because our thinking has been deformed by the Tower of Babel—by an excessive imposition of arbitrary meaning, and then an excessive reductionism—that we're almost incapable of seeing things that are naturally presenting themselves to us.” Jonathan Pageau
I'm very pleased to bring my readers this summary of the first lecture of Jonathan Pageau's Symbolism Masterclass, which started on April 23 and will run for the next 5 weeks. I've made this post a free preview but will reserve the following 5 lectures for my paid subscribers as part of the Study Guide series. Speaking of which: to celebrate The Occidental Tourist's third anniversary, for a limited time I'm offering 20% off paid subscriptions from now until May 22 to celebrate The Occidental Tourist's third anniversary:
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, , and . Now, back to our topic!Introduction to the Symbolic World
If you're not familiar with Jonathan Pageau’s work, here’s a brief introduction: Pageau is an Orthodox artist who initially gained critical acclaim as a liturgical icon carver, but has since become a leading voice in the revival of symbolic and mythological thinking. His work intersects with that of Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, and others who seek to recover meaning in an age of increasing cultural fragmentation.
The Symbolism Masterclass is a culmination of Pageau's work and philosophy: an exploration of symbolic thinking in Scripture, culture, and story. In this course, Pageau will guide modern audiences—habituated to the psychic oppression of materialist and literalist frameworks—toward an integrated apprehension of reality and symbolic cosmology.
Pageau’s course invites participants to "break free from a flat, meaningless, and disjointed worldview and embrace a life of depth and insight" by aligning with the vision of the ancients who regarded reality as richly-layered, participatory, and infused with purpose. The course objectives include:
Learning to recognize symbolic patterns in history, culture, and personal experience.
Developing the skills to interpret stories—biblical, mythological, or modern—with symbolic insight.
Cultivating a purposeful approach to life by aligning with meaningful structures rather than chaos.
Transcending reductionist thinking and adopt a richer, more integrated view of reality.
Summary of Lecture 1: Piercing through the Secular Mind with Symbolism
About 350 students attended the opening 3-hour lecture. Pageau began by situating the loss of symbolic thinking in the historical context of the last 500 years, coinciding with the Cartesian rift between mind and body: "You could say the connection between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ has broken [along with] the relationship between facts and meaning...[and that this] has separated the world into opposites."
In this polarized state, the Tower of Babel becomes the archetypal metaphor for the fragmentation of meaning. As men reach "too high" in their totalitarian mania to "create a name for themselves," the teetering cultural structures topple into anarchy, with language (i.e. meaning) becoming confused. This swing from “high” to “low” brings about a deincarnation, a theological rupture dividing heaven and earth, which exposes the connection between tyranny and chaos. As Pageau observed:
The excess of chaos calls for the excess of tyranny. The excess of tyranny is fragile, and then it brings about [more and more] chaos.
An example of this dynamic, according to Pageau, is the recent trend among New Atheists of moving away from an epistemological foundation based on "science and common sense" toward an accommodation of postmodern meaning structures centered around identity politics. This shift includes the imposition of new naming conventions that uphold transgender ideology, as illustrated in the tweet below by New Atheist Matt Dillahunty. Statements like this reveal the inescapable—but often unacknowledged—hierarchy of competing values and facts underlying one’s worldview.
Medieval Origins of Deincarnation: Nominalism and Univocalism
A weighty but central part of Pageau’s thesis is his assertion that the Scholastic philosophies of nominalism and univocalism contributed to the modern excesses of arbitrary meaning and symbolic reductionism. Largely unfamiliar terms today, nominalism (also known as equivocalism) and univocalism were divergent schools of thought that rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Thomistic realism of the Middle Ages on questions of universal forms and God’s mode of existence.
In Pageau’s synopsis, nominalism’s denial of universal forms led thinkers like William of Ockham to posit only the existence of particulars—a world of concrete individual beings utterly contingent on God’s creative prerogative. Ockham’s ideas fostered a conception of God as totally “other” and remote. In time, this philosophical outlook engendered Deism—the idea that God kick-started and then withdrew from the universe. In the modern era, the “absent God” of Deism has given way to atheism.
On the other hand, univocalism’s conception of God’s existence as essentially the same as his creatures (though infinitely greater, to be sure), led to an understanding of God as merely one being among many. While early univocalists like Duns Scotus were faithful Christians intent on preserving divine sovereignty, their school of thought gradually eroded into a broader supernaturalism and a fascination with the paranormal. As supernaturalism itself gave way to materialism, this philosophical trajectory, too, culminated in atheism, though by a different path than nominalism.
In summary, nominalism denied any real connection between words and reality, causing a radical separation between heaven (meaning) and earth (fact). This is the chaos of Pageau’s Tower of Babel metaphor. Meanwhile, the flattened ontology of univocalism collapsed the heaven/earth hierarchy into a superimposed sameness, the tyranny of the Tower metaphor. Both distortions eroded the symbolic mediation between heaven and earth, spirit and body, signifier and signified.
Thomas Aquinas and the Analogy of Being
It’s important to remember that both nominalism and univocalism were late Scholastic reactions to Platonic realism and “the problem of universals forms.” This realism culminated in the brilliant synthesis of Aristotelian science and Christian revelation achieved by Thomas Aquinas in the late 13th century.1
Aquinas’s theory of the “analogy of being” is essential to understanding how symbolism functions. He teaches that finite beings participate in God’s existence according to the measure and proportion2 of their specific nature or essence. Their existence, therefore, is neither identical to nor wholly separate from God’s, but analogous to it. Similarly, symbolic thinking recognizes the universal patterns embedded in reality as manifestations of a shared relationship—one that interweaves unity and multiplicity, identity and difference.
Occupying a middle stance, analogy avoids the dysfunction of the Tower of Babel syndrome in which humanity reaches either too high or too low to represent meaning. Analogy neither imposes nor reduces meaning, but proposes that every created thing is truly symbolic: it truly reveals a dimension of God’s being, but never exhaustively or equally. And it does so fractally: by demonstrating the unities and multiplicities at all levels of existence, “simultaneously and always.”
Stories and the Hierarchy of Care
Pageau devoted the remainder of the lecture to demonstrating the logical and empirical arguments for symbolism across various intellectual domains, including religion, philosophy, and science. What resonated most with me, however, was his exploration of how symbolic meaning structures reality through the medium of storytelling.
He used the example of fairy tales and myths to illustrate how symbolic patterns are refined over generations. In the selective attention we give to certain stories by perpetuating them over time, a “hierarchy of care” emerges that communicates a deeper meaning about our humanity, not just random information. The stories that continue to be told are those whose patterns mediate important knowledge about our human experience, values, and understanding of the world. In this way, our identities become embedded in stories:
Who we are is not just a collection of facts, but a narrative that gives those facts coherence and purpose. Our identity is shaped by the patterns, hierarchies, and symbolic relationships we participate in.
In recovering the symbolic patterns that shape our stories—and thus our lives—Pageau invites us to step back into a world where meaning is not constructed or imposed, but revealed through love and memory.
This course meets on Wednesdays from 2-5 pm EST. I think you can still sign up here. The remaining lectures are:
Lesson 2: The Architecture of Reality : Meeting of Heaven and Earth - April 30, 2025
Lesson 3: Up and down the Holy Mountain - May 7, 2025
Lesson 4: The Subtle Dance of Opposites - May 14, 2025
Lesson 5: Garments of Skin - the Fall of Man and Civilization - May 21, 2025
Lesson 6: Living Symbolically Today - May 28, 2025
Lecture 1 Reading List
In addition to the course reading list, these are the primary sources Pageau referenced in his lecture per my best conjectures. Starred (*) works indicate those included on Adler’s Ten Year Reading Plan.
Biblical Sources
- Genesis
- Book of RevelationTheological/Philosophical Sources
- Dionysius the Areopagite: Divine Names, Book 1
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica*
- St. Maximus the Confessor: On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ and On the Ecclesiastical MystagogyPhilosophical/Historical Sources
- Plato: The Republic*
- William of Ockham: Summa Logicae, Part II
- Dun Scotus: Ordinatio
- François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel*
- René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy*
- John Locke: Two Treatises of Government*
- Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan*Modern Thinkers/Writers:
- Carl Jung: The Undiscovered Self
- John Vervaeke: "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" lecture series
- J.R.R. Tolkien: "On Fairy-Stories" essay
- Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World
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Paradoxically, it was the intellectual autonomy fostered under St. Thomas that helped advance the critical intelligence which later turned on his ideas. Cf. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1991), 201.
This is the actual meaning of ana-logon, from which we get our word “analogy”. Cf. William Lynch, Christ and Apollo, 1960 and Celestine Bittle, The Domain of Being: Ontology, 1938.