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Dr. E Michael Jones is back, this time to discuss the historical influence of philosophy and science on culture. How modern science has been used to justify modern forms of political oppression. The conversation references Dr. Jones' book Logos Rising, and is relevant to the serial theme I've been running lately on the history of metaphysics.

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The fifth and final part of the "Metaphysics Scandal" series asks what happened after Scholasticism broke. The answer is two roads — empiricism and rationalism — that look like opposites but in the extreme arrive at the same destination: a world scrubbed of God and person, leaving only function.

What drove both roads is older than either. It is the Promethean spirit — the will to possess knowledge by force rather than receive it as gift. Today, an endpoint of that arc is artificial intelligence: the moment when function threatens to become total, when the machine that cannot be a face is offered as a substitute for one. Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical calls it an anthropological crisis, not a technological one. This episode is an attempt to explain how we got here.

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Parts I through III traced mimesis in Ancient Greek philosophy, René Girard's mimetic theory, the Scripture and the Church Fathers. Here in Part IV, we arrive at Medieval Scholasticism. It is said to have baptized Aristotle. With that, it also built a great intellectual edifice that set off the modern Western academia. But Aristotelian demonstratio and scientia is based on natures and teleology, not persons and imitation. The change of focus set a chain reaction that caused the nominalist and pietist reactions, Reformation, scientific and political revolutions, and ultimately, modernity.

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Parts I and II covered the role of imitation in philosophy: essential, but incomplete. In this Part III we compare the account of imitation in René Girard's mimetic theory to the scriptural narrative of the Fall.

We are made to imitate: Scripture says man is created in the image and likeness of God. The trouble in Eden starts not because Adam and Eve decided to imitate God. It's the mode of their imitation. In turning to perceive God as their rival, they take the Serpent as their model. 

From the simple story of the Fall, we can derive the whole mimetic anthropology of rivalry, scapegoating, and sacred violence found in Girard's writings millennia later.

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Part 2 after René Girard and the Philosophers. Girard argued that Plato and the philosophers who followed him sidelined imitation — neglecting the rivalrous, appropriative mimesis that drives human conflict. Plato did quiet over the dangerous side of imitation. But imitation is everywhere in classical metaphysics. It's the engine of Plato's cosmos and Aristotle's telos, and the master principle of the Platonic-Christian tradition that follows. This episode traces how imitation became the hidden axiom of Western thought — and how, two and a half millennia later, Girard's mimetic theory helps us rediscover it. Featuring spoiled philosophers, autistic scientists, narcissistic gods, and the long shadow of Plato's classroom.

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While Plato was teaching his students to contemplate the eternal forms, the theatre portrayed women of Thebes tearing a king apart with their bare hands. I talk about how the founding gesture of philosophy was walking away in silence from archaic scapegoating, blood sacrifice, etc., and that René Girard, twenty-five centuries later, gets us to turn around and take a close, analytical look.

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In Part I we saw Newton's anti-Trinitarianism and his science as a single revolution, opposed to the idea that divine form can enter matter and restructure it from within. This week, the counter-argument. We turn to the man in the opposing corner: Athanasius of Alexandria. We introduce his magnum opus, On the Incarnation. First, the metaphysics — form, matter, ousia, the Image. We then interpret the main thesis, which is that the same Divine Logos who created the world became incarnate to save it. The closing questions consider the social consequences of scientism derived from Newton's vision, with its cosmos of inert matter governed at a distance, in which the Incarnation becomes unthinkable, and in which persons too become bundles of forms and properties tossed and turned by impersonal forces.

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Most people know Isaac Newton as the father of modern science. Fewer know that two thirds of his written output was on alchemy and theology — and that he kept it secret because it would have gotten him hanged. This week I read my essay Newton Contra Athanasius, tracing the strange inner life of the man behind the mechanical universe: the abandoned child who reimagined God as a distant sovereign, the secret Arian who spent decades building a forensic case against one of the greatest theologian of the early Church, and the unwitting architect of a worldview that is only now beginning to crack.

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William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and René Girard walk into a bar... 

And share a secret: the price of literary genius is the torment of mimetic cuckoldry, resolved through a type of repentance. I talk about how Girard found this secret in Shakespeare, and how Joyce had already encoded it in a single chapter of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus, presenting his Shakespeare theory to a roomful of erudite groundlings, ends up outcast as their scapegoat. The mob wins in the short term, but the artist persists.

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My French-Canadian friend Martin joins me to discuss the history of Quebec. Discover how this province, once the stronghold of French Catholic conservatism, underwent a rapid secular revolution in the 1960s. What role did the Catholic Church and later secular nationalism play in preserving Quebec's unique identity against Anglo dominance? We explore the demographic strategy of "La Revanche des Berceaux" – Revenge of the Cradles – and delve into the consequences of the shift from Catholicism to secular nationalism. What can the history of Quebec teach us about the demographic challenges facing the broader Western world today?