Russian Catholicism, Jazz, and AI Music w/ Timothy Flanders

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 02, 2026 | In The Catholic Culture Podcast

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Timothy Flanders rejoins the podcast for a freewheeling conversation in which he and Thomas interview each other. Timothy talks about his upcoming book on Catholicism in Russia, and then Thomas gives his thoughts on the place of jazz in the Western music tradition, improvisation as an analogy to the moral life, and the fundamental problem with AI music: AI has no song in its heart.

Links

The Meaning of Catholic https://meaningofcath.substack.com/

Thomas’s lecture on God’s role in artistic inspiration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH5KBsOIz_Y

Structure and Freedom in Music and in Christ, w/ Mark Christopher Brandt https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-33-structure-and-freedom-in-music-and-in-christ-mark-christopher-brandt/

Christians against AI art, w/ Susannah Black Roberts https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/188-christians-against-ai-art-susannah-black-roberts/

Transcript

THOMAS MIRUS: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Catholic Culture Podcast. I’m Thomas Mirus, and this is a production of CatholicCulture.org. Catholic Culture needs your help to continue producing these podcasts, so please consider supporting us at CatholicCulture.org/donate/audio. We’ll be very grateful, and we pray for our donors daily. Today I’m having on a repeat guest. Tim Flanders has been on this podcast a few times. The last time was quite recent to talk about Pope Leo XIII’s writings on America. But we’ve also talked about the writings of Karol Wojtyła. We’ve talked about salvation history, various other topics. And Tim and I have been friends for a few years. And today we’re going to have more of an open-ended chat and just talk about whatever comes to mind because there are so many topics, mutual interests that we share, and it’s always fun when I get to do this. So welcome back to the show, Tim.

TIMOTHY FLANDERS: Hey, always a pleasure to talk with you, man.

THOMAS: Now, you’re the editor, I should have mentioned, of 1Peter5, and also you have your own apostolate, The Meaning of Catholic. And I highly recommend people go to The Meaning of Catholic and sign up, subscribe on your Substack, because there’s a lot of really great stuff over there. What do you have going on there now, by the way?

TIMOTHY: Well, we’re doing a lot of stuff with my co-author, Maxim Grigoriev, on Russia. We’re working on a book on the Russian elements of Fatima. Wow. So that’s a really exciting project because there’s all these Russian Orthodox elements of the Fatima apparitions that nobody knows about. And there’s the Russian icon of the Theotokos of Fatima, which was written with the collaboration of a Russian Orthodox monk.

And so it’s a really cool thing that we’re working on with Russian elements. The Meaning of Catholic is all about bringing together various voices in Catholicism to restore the various schools of thought within the Latin tradition, but also the East-West tradition, breathing with both lungs, but also other lesser-known schools of thought and tradition, like the Syriac tradition, for example. And this is the meaning of Catholic in the one Eucharistic communion. So our Monday morning show is devoted to, for example, it’s called “This Week in the Church Triumphant.” So every Monday morning, we review the week in the Greek Byzantine Rite, the ancient Roman Rite, and the Rite of Paul VI—the new rite as well. So we kind of try to promote a reconciliation between Catholics of various liturgical traditions.

THOMAS: Traditions in what sense? Like, that you’re looking at the liturgical calendar?

TIMOTHY: Yeah. So we’re looking at the various customs that arise East and West and highlighting all the beauty of that: the saints on both East and West, new and old. So it’s kind of like... you know, there’s a lot of people talking about the church things going on in the Church today, you know. But we’re promoting life in the Church Triumphant. Let’s raise our hearts to the Church Triumphant and kind of start there to begin our week. And that’s what, you know, gets me excited about being a Catholic in the coming week. But then it’s also just: let’s look at the new and old, the beauty ever ancient, ever new, of the liturgical rites and the saints East and West. So that’s basically it.

THOMAS: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Now, I’ve seen posts by Maxim, you know, on Russian Orthodox things or, you know, different aspects of ecclesiology. Tell me a little bit about him. What’s his background? And I know you guys are collaborating on this project, but what is his kind of... where is he coming from?

TIMOTHY: Yeah, so he is a seminarian in St. Petersburg, Russia.

THOMAS: He’s a Russian Catholic, right?

TIMOTHY: Yes. So the Russian Catholic Church is... most of the Catholics in Russia are not Russian. So a lot of them are Polish or Ukrainian or various stripes of foreign extraction who live in Russia for whatever reason. And so a good chunk of Russian Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics. So their liturgy is the, like the Rite of Paul VI, the Novus Ordo Missae in modern Russia.

THOMAS: Most Greek Catholics are also Latin Rite, I discovered when I was there.

TIMOTHY: Oh, is that a fact? That’s interesting. Okay. So then, but then this would also hold true for the Greeks as well then, because then there is also a Russian Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite. And the thing that we’re highlighting in our book is that when Our Lady of Fatima was happening in May of 1917, there was also a historic, epoch-making moment happening in Russia at the same time, in May of that same year, and it was the formal organization of the Russian Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite. This had never been allowed by the Tsar for 500 years because Catholicism was always seen as a foreign religion.

I’s like, “Okay, we can let those Jesuits in because we want to teach our Russian children Latin. That’s fine. But you guys are foreigners. You’re not Russian. We’re Russian Orthodox.” So that’s why a Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite was never allowed. But it coincided with Fatima. And in fact, during the June or July apparition, one of the apparitions, this group actually consecrated Russia to the Theotokos. And so there’s this consecration of Russia happening during the apparition. So all these amazing providential things coming together in Russia. So that’s who Maxim is. He’s a part of one of the parishes of the Byzantine Rite that’s Catholic, and it’s in St. Petersburg, Russia. So he’s a seminarian in that tradition in Russia.

THOMAS: That’s really fascinating. It seems to give him a unique perspective on, again, various ecclesiological things. I, years ago—2017, almost 10 years ago—I was working on a cruise ship, and we stopped for a couple of brief afternoons in St. Petersburg. So my only glimpse of Russia has been like three or four hours in St. Petersburg, just walking around. I didn’t really see that much inside, but I did go to the Kazan Cathedral, and I bought a copy of the famous Kazan icon that they have there.

There’s multiple versions of this. There’s a different version of it that was once in the possession of St. John Paul II. I don’t remember all the details of this story, but I remember reading about it after I got home. So this was a famous icon that was like one of these icons that the Russians would, you know, process about to defend their city in time of siege and stuff, the miraculous icon of the Virgin. And somehow, I believe, if I remember correctly, the Blue Army had it, and they gave it to John Paul II, and it was in his, like, room where he would pray for a long time, but then he gave it back to the Russians as one of these sort of gestures of, you know, goodwill that he was famous for. He and, I guess, Paul VI and probably Benedict XVI did some of those kinds of things too, like returning relics that had been taken to the East and things like that. And I want to say there might even be some further connection between that icon and Fatima. I can’t quite remember, but it’s the Kazan icon.

TIMOTHY: Yeah, so this is 2004 when this was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church.

THOMAS: So, this is a small copy of the one that they had in the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, and there was a line of old ladies venerating it there. So anyway, I don’t know much about Russia or Russian Orthodoxy. The other thing I’ll say is the first—I’ve only been to, I think, two Eastern liturgies in my life. I’d love to go to more. But the first one I ever went to was a Russian Catholic Easter Vigil. I believe it’s called St. Michael’s in Manhattan, a parish where I believe I read that Dorothy Day used to worship sometimes. I think Walter Ciszek maybe. But they used to have their own chapel down near Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Unfortunately, they lost that. And now they’re actually worshiping in the space that my parish provides.

But I went to that super long Russian Catholic Easter Vigil a decade or more ago, probably in like 2015 or 2014 or something like that. And the only other Eastern Rite I’ve ever been to was the last Mass before COVID lockdown. The Byzantine bishop announced their lockdowns a few days after Cardinal Dolan did. And so that was the last Sunday liturgy that I got the chance to attend in March of 2020 was at St. Mary’s here in Manhattan, which was also very nice. So I think that’s pretty much it. I might have been there one other time, but yeah, I’d love to—I mean, I know you have more of a history with Eastern Christianity, but I found it quite beautiful. The prayers before communion in particular jumped out at me.

TIMOTHY: Yeah, there’s so many beautiful traditions in our faith, in the one Catholic Church, East and West. We’ve really... with this book with Maxim, we recently published—it was over at 1Peter5 this year—about the Russian tradition of Our Lady of Sorrows. There’s two different Russian icons of Our Lady of Sorrows. One of them is right actually behind me. You can see this is one of the Russian Orthodox icons of Our Lady of Sorrows. The seven swords, just like in the Latin tradition that we’re familiar with. But in the Russian tradition, this icon is called the Theotokos, “Softener of Evil Hearts.”

THOMAS: Wow.

TIMOTHY: And there’s a whole Akathist prayer, which is basically—there’s really no comparison to an Akathist in the West. It’s like a really long litany. It’s like 10 times the size of our litanies. And so, yeah, so there’s two different such icons of the Theotokos, “Softener of Evil Hearts.” And one of the miraculous icons arose in the 1990s, so it was like after the fall of communism. And then we have this Russian... so, an organic Russian icon from the Russian tradition, but it’s also a Latin tradition. And there’s a lot of things like that in Russia, in Russian history, which are kind of obscured by Orthodox apologists out there who kind of want to make Orthodoxy, the Eastern tradition, as anti-Western as possible. So they basically kind of suppress these various overlaps that happen in the tradition over the years. But then it also ends up falsifying the actual tradition. And we do this in the West, too. You know, we’ve got extreme versions of the Latin tradition which are so intense that they want to falsify different aspects of our own tradition. It reminds me of when we were reading Person and Act by Karol Wojtyła. He had this one phrase that has stuck with me for years.

THOMAS: “Absolutizing an aspect?”

TIMOTHY That’s it. Yeah, the “absolutization of an aspect,” and that sums it up. So treating... looking at the tradition—people are talking about tradition these days—but Meaning of Catholic, what we do at Meaning of Catholic is all about taking in all the tradition, all of it, the whole thing, not reducing any of it, not absolutizing any of it, just taking it all in, and it’s beautiful.

THOMAS: That’s great. Yeah. You know, speaking of people using Russia as a kind of a symbol against the decadent West, there’s something—I haven’t been seeing this as much lately, but there’s something that was fashionable on the right and in some Trad Catholic circles for a while in recent years, which was this kind of like, “Russia is going to save us.” Like, you know, Russia is anti-Western, Russia is not gay, you know, all this stuff. And I don’t see too much of that lately. But I mean, I had a friend who went to live there briefly and he was like, “Dude, I thought Russia was going to be this like very Christian country. It couldn’t be further from the truth.” So I don’t know. I’m curious if you have a take on that kind of tendency to sort of, “Oh, well, we live in the corrupt liberal West and Russia is this bastion of religious tradition or something.” Do you have a sort of take on that fad?

TIMOTHY: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I don’t really know much about Russian culture in Russia. I mean, I know these superficial things that I get from Maxim with this book research that we’re doing. But what I do know is that among the Orthodox Christians who are in the diaspora in the West or in America, there are various ethnic traditions. When I was Eastern Orthodox, I was Antiochian Orthodox, so I was among the Arabs. But then there was also Russian Orthodox, and a lot of the Russians are more intense than some of the other Orthodox.

A very conspicuous example is that the Russian Orthodox churches—all the Russian Orthodox churches I’ve ever been to—had no pews. No pews. Whereas all the other Orthodox churches, they all have pews just like all the other churches. And that used to be... in the Latin West, we used to not have pews too. As I understand it, the pews came in after the Protestants started preaching two-hour long sermons and people wanted to sit down, so this became a thing at that time. But it is interesting in the diaspora. In the West, Russian culture, there is... among Russian Orthodox converts, there’s a strong ethnic identity, a Slavophile attitude of loving all things Slavic culture.

But there is an intensity among certain Russian Orthodox that Christians do desire. I think there’s a truth to that because Russians are intense. They’re just an intense people who’ve dealt with a lot of persecutions from the Tsar or Mohammedan invasions. Then we have the Soviets and all sorts of intense difficulties that they’ve dealt with as a people and melded them together into this people that... it’s like the American pioneer spirit. We’ve got a certain toughness. We love American football—it’s a violent sport here in America—that very much defines the grittiness of American culture. I think there’s certainly a Russian grittiness to the Russians, too.

THOMAS: There’s also the whole geopolitical thing that people get into, too. It’s hard to separate it all out. But were you Catholic when you got married, or had you not become Catholic yet?

TIMOTHY: Yeah, I was Catholic. I had become Catholic in order to primarily become a monk; that was the primary reason at the time. So, but yeah, my wife and I are both converts. And I was... yeah, the rest is history, I guess, if you will. But I haven’t really... I’ve always been very much on the Western side of things, even though I was Orthodox, because I was a part of a very interesting group, the Western Rite Orthodox.

THOMAS: Oh, yeah.

TIMOTHY: You know about them?

THOMAS: Yeah. I’ve had one Western Rite Orthodox on this show, a poet and novelist named Marly Youmans. I didn’t actually know—I think until after I interviewed her—that... for some reason, I just assumed she was Catholic. I might have found out while I was interviewing her or after that she was Western Rite Orthodox, like in upstate New York somewhere. Very good poet, you know. But that was my first exposure to the entire idea of it.

TIMOTHY: Yeah. And I think that that’s really... I mean, that’s a critical factor for the entire Orthodox versus Catholic thing is the ethnicity. I didn’t know you had traveled around the world in a boat, Thomas.

THOMAS: Yeah, but I used to when I was doing music, you know. I played a number of gigs playing piano in jazz groups on cruise ships. I think I did that four times total. The first time was 10 years ago this past spring, and it was for four and a half months. So that was by far the longest one I did, and that was a really long time to be on a ship. But it was bouncing back and forth between West Australia and Indonesia and then some other parts of Southeast Asia. And then that was my first time really being out of the U.S., pretty much. I think we had gone to Banff National Park in Canada for like a day when I was 12 or something; that was the only other departure that I had made. And then the next year, I did one in the Baltic for like 10 or 12 days, where that was where we ended up going to St. Petersburg. And then I did one that was from Boston to Bermuda, and then from Boston up the St. Lawrence over to Montreal and back.

And then the last one I did was, I think, in—this was the last professional music gig that I ever played, actually—was in 2022. It was like a 20-day thing through the Panama Canal from like Florida down around Mexico and South America, through the Panama Canal up to Seattle, or up to British Columbia and Seattle, and flew home. So I haven’t done that for a while, but I’ve done it a few times, and that was sort of a first taste of international travel for me back in 2016.

TIMOTHY: Now, did you finish your—speaking of music—you were going to write something about jazz, right? Did you ever finish that?

THOMAS: I haven’t started it yet. I’ve had a few extracurricular writing projects—by extracurricular, I mean not for Catholic Culture, things that other people have asked me to write this year. And the big one was this talk that I gave in L.A., “The Role of God in Artistic Inspiration.” It was at the first conference of the Thomistic Artists Guild at the FSSP parish out there in L.A. It was a great experience. So that was a major writing project for me. It was like a 40 or 35-minute talk.

TIMOTHY: What was your main thrust of that?

THOMAS: Yeah, it was pretty dense. I mean, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a lot of years. And the video is now out on YouTube. I’ve actually published the audio on the podcast feed as well, so people listening to this will have either already heard it or chosen not to hear it, but it’s been presented to them as an option to hear at any rate.

I’ve read a number of great, really wonderful books by 20th-century Catholic philosophers on art—in particular, Maritain, Gilson, some others. And they have a lot of wonderful insights, but one thing that seemed to be neglected was the topic of the role of God in artistic inspiration. So like, Maritain tends to describe the human process of making art, both in Scholastic terms and kind of in more poetic terms. But I wanted to write something about this kind of intuition that artists have had since seemingly the beginning of time that they’re sort of channeling something from outside themselves, some kind of inspiration, whether they call it the Muses or something else. And I wanted to come up with a philosophical account of this—not to prove it to be the case, but to sort of explain how it could be. How could God, in some direct way, inspire an artist without making art into like a supernatural virtue, still keeping it as kind of a natural virtue and a natural human capacity?

But I found some analogies to this. For instance, St. Thomas says that every act of the human will is moved by God. God is the mover of the will. You know, even in specific acts of the will, not that He’s choosing what we will towards necessarily, but the movement of the will itself as such is moved by God. And I found that our friend Matthew Minerd pointed me to something—a little chart in some book, I don’t know which book, by Garrigou-Lagrange—where he gives a little table of different ways in which the will is directly moved by God in the natural order and in the supernatural order. And one example he gives of the will being moved by God in the natural order is special poetic inspirations. So I was like, “Okay, so someone who knows what he’s talking about has said something like this.”

And another analogy is—well, one supernatural analogy is the inspiration of Scripture, and I use that to point out that even the way Catholics tend to understand scriptural inspiration, even though it’s supernatural whereas what I’m talking about is natural, is that basically we do believe the human author had a role in this. It wasn’t just dictated to him. The Muslim view of inspiration is that the Quran was literally dictated word for word by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad. That’s not how we generally think about how the Bible was written, that it was sort of dictated. It was exactly as God wanted it to be and perfectly willed by God in every last detail—that’s the orthodox Catholic view of scriptural inspiration; that’s completely through and through inspired by the Holy Spirit—but using the language and the style and the cultural matrix of the human author so that it truly is written by a human being as well as completely authored by God. There’s an analogy to the Incarnation in that as well.

I mentioned this to talk about how just because we say God can inspire a work of art doesn’t mean that the human being has no part in it and he’s just transcribing. Even though sometimes it feels like that to an artist—like a composer will talk about that, “It felt like I was just transcribing what I heard”—and that is true, but they’re hearing it within them. It’s something that’s coming from their own influences, and it’s like God is using all the materials in their imagination and giving it the breath of life to form it into a form with its own sort of newness and integrity. That’s the way I theorize about it.

The biggest thing that I do is make the analogy between artistic inspiration and procreation. And this was inspired by a throwaway line in a letter by Tolkien to his publisher, I want to say in the ‘40s or the ‘30s—where he said (and I don’t even know what he meant by this, but I was just taking it in my own direction), “A man has not much more share in his writings than in the child of his body.” So I took that to like: okay, what do the parents contribute to the procreative process? Like these physical materials, but God creates the soul, right? God enables these materials to come together in something that is more than the sum of its parts. And then I compared it not only to reproduction, but also to the gradual process of raising a child and responding to God’s guidance in doing that, so that you’re always... there’s a strong parental role, but you are respecting what the child is as made by God and you’re not trying to impose your own idea on it. So it’s like the artist has to sort of respect what he receives in inspiration and not try to control it, but try to cultivate it. So there’s a lot of analogy there.

And then the topic of the conference was art and virtue. So I ended it with like: “Here’s what the practical and spiritual ramifications are if we accept this view of artistic inspiration. What are the implications for how Catholic artists can be better artists and better Catholics?” Like how accepting this view and giving credit to God for everything good in our art will enable us to be less insecure as artists, to be more diligent, to try to purify it from anything that might come from our vices or our vanity and things like that. So that’s the basic... that’s a lot, but those are a number of the points that I touched on.

TIMOTHY: That is beautiful. And what it makes me think of is what makes jazz unique—that jazz has improvisation.

THOMAS: Yeah.

TIMOTHY: So how would you flesh this out in terms of jazz improvisation?

THOMAS: Yeah. So, yeah, you mentioned this thing I was going to write on jazz, and I still want to, but I just haven’t gotten to it yet. So, t here used to be improvisation in the Western tradition. It was always understood that improvisation was a piece of what it meant to be a complete musician. Somehow—and I really haven’t studied how this disappeared—but it seemed to get lost somewhere in the mid to late 19th century. It basically seems to have been lost around the same time that classical music became a repertory art. Prior to the 19th century and the Romantic era, people who were performing what we would now call classical music were mostly not performing old pieces of music; they were mostly performing recent music, perhaps even by living composers.

And that started to change in the 19th century. It started to become a repertory art. I suppose you could say it started to become self-consciously “classical.” In other words, this music that we call classical—this extremely high cultivation of Western music—has now been around for a few centuries, and we’re now self-conscious enough about it that we feel we have to preserve this legacy. And there’s now this “burden of the past” which wouldn’t have existed in the 1500s and 1600s. There just wasn’t enough. There was chant, and there was folk music and whatever else there might have been, but there wasn’t quite a sense of burden by great masters who had come before. Because if you think about it, we talk about classical sculpture, classical literature... classical music doesn’t come from ancient Greece and Rome.

Classical music is a product of, like, the 1700s, right? Basically, it was one of the few things in high culture that was kind of, almost, invented by the Christian West, as opposed to being based on pagan forbearers. Because, the Greeks did have some kind of musical notation, we don’t really know how to read it—we don’t really know how precise it actually was. I believe that the West, starting in the Middle Ages, is the only society that’s developed a highly precise form of musical notation, which of course happened in a largely monastic context for the purpose of mnemonic devices to help people to learn the chants more quickly. And so this enabled... this is a very roundabout answer about improvisation, by the way, but I’m sort of setting the stage. This development of notation enabled the development of music theory and a high level of large-scale composition and all this other stuff.

But all along, you have improvisation coinciding with this. And all of the great composers you could name—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin—are all famed as great improvisers. Bach was said to be even a better improviser than he was a composer, if you can imagine. Chopin... they said the same thing; it was like his improvisations were even more amazing than his written music. So that was just a big part of the tradition. And this disappears. I don’t know all the causes. It starts to disappear in the 19th century, with the exception of the French organ school, which sort of preserved this living tradition of improvisation that’s continued to this day. So Maurice Duruflé, the great Catholic composer in the mid-20th century, is a product of this tradition, for instance—probably the greatest sacred composer of the past century. Didn’t write a lot of music, but what he did write is like unbelievable.

So anyway, just for context for jazz. I think of jazz as kind of like a revival of a high-level tradition of improvisation in the Western musical context. In other words, it’s based on functional harmony, which is a unique development of the West. And on the other hand, though, it’s not the same tradition of improvisation because it’s like a tradition of improvisation cropping up somewhere else also in the West, but it’s not continuous with the classical tradition because it’s coming out of this tradition that also has roots in Africa. It’s very much Western music, but it’s not European music; it’s American music. It could only have developed in America with this confluence of Western and Latin and Caribbean and African influences. So I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say it’s just like a straightforward revival of the tradition of classical improvisation.

There’s wonderful composers in jazz, but it’s really almost purely focused on improvisation. So it never really developed a long-form composition tradition, and probably it was too young to do that. I mean, because it’s only a little bit over 100 years old, and I would say, you know, already at this point a declining art form just because music in general is declining and jazz is sort of going with it. But so it never really got a chance to develop the compositional side of it as much. But that’s one thing I would say about it is that it’s this part of something that’s fundamental to being a musician. And I don’t say this to put down classical musicians, but what classical music is now—which is you’re playing music written by other people—there’s a certain amount of personal creativity you can put into how you perform it, but you don’t really get to make up the notes at all. You don’t even mostly get to do a lot of improvisation, even of ornamentation. I mean, you can to a certain extent, but it’s not that significant.

So it’s this kind of lost tradition, and that’s why a lot of classical musicians in recent decades have wanted to try to revive this classical improvisation by studying with jazz musicians. So I think one of the really important things for—and I did an interview years ago with my teacher, Mark Christopher Brandt, wonderful Catholic pianist and composer; the title of the episode was “Structure and Freedom in Music and in Christ”—basically the way he thinks about it is jazz is a great analogy for the spiritual life because there’s all these skills that you have to develop and then you kind of have to let go and play and let them come out spontaneously in the moment.

So it’s like kind of the correct understanding of the moral virtues, which is not like a set of rules that you apply the same way in every situation, but the moral virtues are these living things in you that spontaneously generate virtuous actions according to prudence in the moment. But it’s not like these... I mean, there are certain hard and fast principles that always apply, but much of it is just something that is spontaneous according to the circumstances, you know? But it’s according to these virtues, these living principles of right action in the soul, I guess.

So improvisation is a powerful thing to consider as an analogy to the spiritual life, I think, for that reason. There’s a couple other things, though, I think about jazz that are significant in terms of the Western music tradition, which is, I mentioned functional harmony. That’s another thing that was abandoned in the classical tradition in the 20th century. So you start getting atonal music and sort of avant-garde noise and stuff like that. Jazz continues working with functional harmony on a high level and sort of picks up where classical music had become this academic, avant-garde practice, much like happened with poetry and modern painting. And I think that’s kind of interesting because in classical, what you end up having is these two sides. It’s like on the performance side, it’s like this ossified museum piece of just only performing old music. And then on the side of composition, it’s newness for its own sake.

TIMOTHY: Yeah, there’s no form.

THOMAS: So it’s like this bipolar thing. Jazz, if anything—I would say most jazz musicians tend to have, in... today, I mean, it’s basically since the ‘90s, if anything, there’s too much traditionalism in jazz. Like, there tends to be a regurgitation of what was done before a lot of the time. But jazz musicians talk about tradition in various terms, and they still talk about beauty, too. Even today, the word “beauty” is not embarrassing for a jazz musician. And even to talk about it in somewhat spiritual terms—now, it might be in New Age-y terms, or it might be, I don’t know where it comes from, but it comes from some “higher power.” It might not be Catholic; it might not be the Holy Trinity or Christ that they’re talking about, but there’s also just more of a kind of a—maybe it’s because jazz has some roots in gospel music, but there’s also kind of more of a spiritual sense.

I think there’s some interesting things where, like, you can see the classical tradition becoming more and more academic, more and more secularist, and more and more kind of iconoclastic. And then the jazz world kind of picks up some of these things that disappeared in classical music.

TIMOTHY: So, one thing it made me think of—I like what you said about the virtues because there are these principles and these rules, but then all of this is about the mode of communion between persons, to find yourself by giving yourself to others, and that is... the axis of that is the intuition of your heart to apply the principle in this particular given situation to what degree. But I love what you said about how this relates to improvisation.

I thought about... bringing it back to the start of our conversation, I thought of Byzantine chant. And so when I was taught Byzantine chant, it was more improvisation. It was like: you get tone eight for this and then you have to take the text and you basically create a chant out of that based on this tone. And so you kind of have a structure and then you sing it, you chant it in this basic structure. And you see, if you look up like old Latin chant, like the Scholas where there’s like three to five men chanting, it’s all the same, it’s all together, very uniform. Not that that’s a bad thing, but there’s also another form of the same Gregorian chant where there’s a single chanter and then someone else does an ison. So he’s like droning on one note mostly, and then the other chanter does the chant, but then there’s a little bit more flourish to it. And that’s really interesting that there is this improvisation, but it’s a sort of... it’s kind of an expression of the heart within a particular form.

But this is a very funny transition, Thomas, because what I really want to bring up now is AI. And I want to ask you about AI music because this is the thing that’s really struck me is when I have heard AI music and I’ve really, really listened hard, it seems to me that AI music is heartless. The vocals—there’s absolutely no little modulation of the vocal where Whitney Houston is going to belt out her vocal, whatever, and you can kind of feel her heart because she’s just letting it out, right? But the AI is like... it’s just like this perfect pitch and it just goes around and it’s just kind of mathematical. So I was like trying to get it: like, what is it about the AI that just doesn’t feel right? It’s like, something’s not there. Because there’s like... it is music, obviously; there’s like a musical quality to it. So what’s your thought on AI music? And I guess that brings up in general, AI.

THOMAS: Yeah. Well, I haven’t listened to a lot of AI music, but, you know, I will admit, there’s a lot of things that worry me about AI. For some reason, music hasn’t been one of them. And I’ll tell you why. Music is already in such bad shape that it almost doesn’t seem to make a difference to me whether it’s AI or not. I mean, if you think about pop music, it’s already so computerized and the voices, the vocals of whoever is really singing, are already so filtered through electronic modulation and Auto-Tune and everything else. And their rhythms are already so computerized that they don’t breathe. It’s like the computer playing it exactly... because human beings don’t play exactly consistently; a computer does that, and so it doesn’t feel alive in the same way. So those are things that already happened before AI, and in a sense, I don’t see how it could get much worse than the pop music that we already have.

But yeah, part of it is those imperfections—those small imperfections, what we would call imperfections in the performance that are actually just its human quality or its sense of kind of breathing. And then there’s the more intangible spiritual aspect of it—like the AI is not producing anything more than the sum of the influences, whereas I do believe that there is something genuinely new when a true artist is making something. Not that he’s creating ex nihilo, but there’s something almost—there’s like a new form or a new spirit to it. And when I was talking about inspiration, I think that that is ultimately contributed by God. But the AI is just only the influences that it puts together. So there’s not a new form on a deeper level, a new synthesis of those influences. So, I mean, I don’t know what else to say because, again, I haven’t listened to a lot of AI music, but this is what I would sort of say in principle about it.

I think I’ll say this too, about AI art: art is in the details, and art is in the intention—the intelligent, rational intention and love put into every detail. And so somebody might say, “Oh, well, I had the idea, and I just need AI to execute it.” But that’s not really how art works. It is in the details that the execution counts, and it’s the intentionality of the details. You might be acting as an art patron when you suggest the idea and then AI executes it. But the problem is that in real art patronage in the past, there was a patron who was a human being, and then there was an artist who was a human being, putting his own artistic sensibility into it. But there’s something sort of disembodied and dehumanized about just the pure idea and then this machine that has no actual knowledge or understanding or capacity for intention or love executing on it. So that’s a real problem.

And I think, you know, going back to the improvisation thing too, I think part of the reason why composition in the classical context went downhill—I mean, I think a lot of it is probably just atheism, the effects of atheism on our culture and on the arts—but I think another reason probably is the loss of improvisation because improvisation and composition are two sides of the same coin. Composition is basically the same impulse as improvisation, but kind of taken out of real-time and written down, and you have some time to consider it and sort of, you know, maybe tweak things to get exactly what you wanted down on paper. But—and it’s not limited to what you could physically perform in the moment, obviously—but the improvisation is what keeps it rooted in the heart, as you said, and in song. So I think that when you lose improvisation and are just writing down compositional ideas in this very sort of purely calculative or purely deliberative way, something of the heart and soul of it is lost.

I mean, I think all music is rooted in singing ultimately. So like in jazz, when we try to internalize the music that we’re studying or listening to, we’ll sing along with it. So many great jazz solos I’ve listened to and sung along with to memorize it. I didn’t learn to perform it, I didn’t write it down on paper; the thing to get it into your soul most deeply is to learn to sing it and to learn every nuance of that musician’s phrasing and be able to sing along with it exactly. That’s an important study tool for jazz musicians. And the other thing is that sometimes when our muscle memory is getting ahead of our soul a little bit, and we’re sort of playing with our hands instead of with our heart—like we’re using stock phrases that we already know or playing a little bit thoughtlessly or a little bit too busy—one thing that we can do to return ourselves to something deeper is to sing—not necessarily out loud, but there’s many times when I’ve been playing with a band or something and I’m taking a solo and I’m kind of singing under my breath as I play the same notes on the piano, because somehow that singing connects you deeper back to your ears and your heart.

So you’re not just kind of doing something mechanically or something purely cerebral. So there’s something mysterious about that, but there’s something about singing—and I think that relates to the musical side of things, too—because I think keeping it rooted in what we would call your inner ear, like your aural imagination, and somehow keeping it rooted in song, even if it’s an instrumental piece of music, is part of the process to make this truly beautiful and truly have a soul to it. And that’s also something that’s lost with AI because there’s nobody... you might say, “Hey, AI, do a mashup of these two genres or these two artists.” But the AI has no song in its heart. You know what I mean? It’s a bunch of different ways of saying the same thing. But those are kind of my thoughts on it.

TIMOTHY: Yeah, AI is heartless. And I don’t really understand the heart—I mean, this is the mystery of the human heart. But there’s an intuition that we all have when there’s a heartlessness. But what’s interesting to me is trying to figure out... when I first was exposed to AI art, whether it was music or the visual art, I didn’t notice it at first. I didn’t even know it existed. And then I just sort of took it as an ordinary piece of art. But then after I found out it was AI, then I started to see it. This is something you see on the internet a lot—these AI art graphics that people make. And I’ve started to really have a negative visceral reaction to these images. They’re just really gross looking. And I’m trying to figure out: what is it exactly that I’m reacting to? Because I didn’t see it at first. And I mean, the only explanation I can give is like... there’s this heartlessness, there’s this mechanical nature to it. And it just does not feel beautiful. And maybe that’s subjective. I don’t really know how to explain it. But what’s your thought on AI graphic art?

THOMAS: Yeah, I did a whole episode on this with a wonderful Anglican lady, Susannah Black Roberts, who’s really insightful about this whole topic. And it was called “Christians Against AI Art.” And we were specifically talking about the visual arts and especially sacred art. And yeah, I mean, I think the ability to be intentional is really the key. The ability to sort of take in your influences, to synthesize them in the mysterious spiritual way that human beings synthesize what we contemplate.

When you read a few books by different authors and you kind of synthesize their ideas and it comes out something new that would only have happened in your own soul—likewise with the visual arts, there’s this kind of gap people think exists between the idea and the execution that is kind of deceptive. I mean, in one sense, yes, the physical execution is separate from the idea. But what I mean is that the idea of a work of art is ultimately every detail of the work of art. You know, you can write a piece of music and have another human being perform it, but you’re both human beings and there’s human intention put into every detail of the writing and then the performance. But when AI takes a part in that process and you just say, “I have this general idea and maybe I’ll give you some pointers. Here’s some things I want in the image, AI. I want this to be blue. I want this to be yellow. I want Our Lady’s mantle to be blue. I want her to have the heart with the seven swords in it,” still, there’s no intention in the detail of how that is created. And it’s synthesizing because it’s drawing on all these other pre-existing images—God only knows what images it’s drawing from. But it’s drawing on all these other pre-existing images and putting them together. And the way that AI synthesizes these things is algorithmic. It’s not intelligent, it’s not human, and it’s not intuitive. And so there’s no real intention there in the particular way that it executes things. And I think that’s why you detect that lack of soul—the lack of soul is nothing other than a lack of intention.

And there’s something... I just looked at some passages in St. John Henry Newman—and this is one of the early lectures, I forget which one, in The Idea of a University. This is about writing. And I don’t know exactly the context here because AI didn’t exist when he was writing. But he’s talking about people who think that you can separate thought and style. Like somebody who says, “I have the idea for this book, but I’m going to hire a ghostwriter to write it for me,” or whatever. So there’s a few quotes here: “Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one. Style is a thinking out into language.” And then he sort of criticized people who, quote, “speak as if one man could do the thought and another the style, as if language were the hired servant, the mere mistress of the reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house.” How about that? And then he goes on to say, “Since the thoughts and reasoning of an author have a personal character, no wonder that his style is not only the image of his subject, but of his mind.”

So I think to some extent, the impulse behind AI art or AI “creativity” of any kind is a misunderstanding of the relationship between thought or idea and execution or style. Like there’s this—for Newman, there’s this integral relation between thought and speech. If you think about it like, “Oh, I have this idea but I’m going to just get AI to... I can’t express it in words. I’m going to get AI to structure my thoughts and blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, “Okay, but structuring your thoughts into a logical order so that all of your ideas are logically connected—that’s part of the process of thinking and understanding.” So if you can’t structure your thoughts in such a way that the ideas seem logically connected, then you don’t yet understand everything. You haven’t fully internalized and understood these thoughts that you yourself have. So there’s no point at which you can hand that work off to someone else.

If you hand it off to somebody else, you’re not having the thoughts—but at least it’s a person doing it, a person taking the baton. In this case, there’s not even another person on the other side; there’s no human editor intelligently shaping what you’ve written. So I think that applies to the visual arts as much as it does to prose or poetry, which Newman was talking about.

And we’re going to use those quotes—I’ll mention Catholic Culture is putting together this kind of manifesto slash editorial policy on the use of AI in writing, mostly for writing, but also for generating media, podcasts, videos, etc. And we’re going to invite a bunch of organizations and prominent individuals to sign on to this thing. So hopefully that’ll launch soon... before too long, sometime in October, hopefully even at the beginning of October, if possible. But we’re going to use those as part of the document, as well as quotes from Pope Leo’s AI encyclical. So, I don’t know, does that make sense?

TIMOTHY: Yeah, what I hear you saying is intentionality is related to this creative force where something truly new is created—not ex nihilo, but there’s a new form created because the human heart and the free will in a human person is collecting something and they have a natural inspiration from God which is allowing them to be creative in some capacity. And I was just trying to find the one quote that I really loved from Dignitas Humana—no, Magna Humana.

Oh, here it is, number 10. He says, quote, “We must then avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language, even a digital one, can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.” And that’s kind of like... if we have all these sets of rules and formulas and algorithms and whatever, then we can just plug everything in and out comes the outcome that we want. And that’s what AI or computers in general can do. And that’s fine; that’s great for a tool for what it can do. But it cannot create something because that’s a unique output of a human person because there’s this intentionality, which is a movement of the heart and the free will. It’s like AI has a certain amount of intellectual capacity, perhaps—it’s like an encyclopedia—but it does not have free will. It does not have a heart.

THOMAS: Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t have intellect. It’s like a data bank or something. It doesn’t have intelligence, it doesn’t have understanding, it doesn’t even have knowledge properly speaking, but it sort of has a passive reservoir, I guess, of information. Something like that. And what you were just saying, too—it goes back to what we were saying about moral virtue, right? Is that moral virtue is generating actions in the moment.

And how do you know if you’re virtuous? As Aristotle said, it’s like a “second nature,” right? You know you’re virtuous when you are not even following a set of explicit rules, but that’s where you go in the moment. You go to the virtuous action. You didn’t have a plan, you didn’t have time to deliberate, but it’s what came out of you because you habituated yourself to virtue. The wonderful thing about it is it’s not like you performed a specific action over and over again—although you did perform specific actions over and over again to train yourself in virtue—but you didn’t do it just so you could perform those specific actions, like “I’m getting up at this time every morning” or something like that. You did it so that the form of that virtue would be imprinted on all of your actions, even an action that you’ve never once performed before in your life, so that you’d be ready to perform that action in a virtuous way. Because you have that principle of the virtue inside you, and it’s generating fresh actions according to the requirements of the circumstances.

That’s why improvisation is the test of a true, complete musician. Because it’s like, okay, what do we mean when we say, “I know music”? Is music a particular piece of music, or is music music as such? If you know music as such, you can generate music. If you know a specific piece of music, you can generate that piece of music. But what happens when you don’t have all the instruments you need? What happens when the bassoon player is missing? Or what happens when something changes? What happens when you make a mistake? You have to fix it, right? Or you have to just pretend it didn’t happen and keep going on. If you’re improvising, you can turn that mistake into something that works by changing the context of what comes next. You can do it again to make it sound intentional, or you can play something next...

Like, what I mean by mistake is like you intended to go for something in the moment and you missed it, right? Your chops weren’t up to it or whatever. But then the next thing you can play can actually, in context, make that mistake sound better than it would have even if it wasn’t what you initially intended. And that’s sort of how life works, too. It’s like, “Oops, I dropped this vase.” And now I have to be creative about what to do next, instead of just sitting down on the floor and crying. You know what I mean? I have to now move on to the next thing and make the best of the situation that I’m now in. And that’s what virtue enables you to do. Virtue enables you to even make the best out of accidents, mistakes, and even momentary lapses in virtue by yourself or by another person.

You know, there’s a famous story by Herbie Hancock where he was playing in Miles Davis’s band probably sometime in the ‘60s. And if I’m remembering this correctly, he just played this wrong chord. There’s no way... he just messed up, and he played some notes that there’s no way this fits anywhere. And then Miles Davis plays a note on the trumpet that somehow made the chord that Herbie Hancock accidentally played... it made it sound right. In other words, Miles Davis didn’t say, “That’s not right. I’m going to play what I’m going to play regardless of your mistake.” He’s like, “All right.” Miles Davis had the freedom to play the note that would now fit that context and serve the music that actually existed instead of the music that was predetermined. Yeah. I can’t do that.

TIMOTHY: And this... it always brings me back to that quote from Dostoevsky where he’s like... the guy who loves humanity so much but he hates this human being in front of him. And it’s like, we want to create all these idols and these ideas and algorithms and everything that works out, but then we’re just ultimately faced with the mystery of the human person in front of us, which is not always going to follow a set sort of rules. And there’s always going to be this intuitive interaction that you have. And I find that the internet exacerbates this tendency to try to make abstract rules always fit every circumstance.

And it’s this dichotomy, because we’ve got this subjectivism, this relativism that denies truth altogether on one side, and then we have an overreaction to that where there’s an abstract objectivism which says anything subjective is necessarily relativism or something like that—which ends up being heartless as well. So it’s like all heart, no intellect, or all intellect, no heart. But the reality of the human person and the mode of communion between persons is both/and. And this is related to everything we’re saying right now.

TIMOTHY: Yeah. Well, it makes me want to go listen to some jazz music.

THOMAS: Yeah, I’ll say my favorite thing about jazz was always the group... not just the improvisation, but the group improvisation. Like, the idea that one musician plays something in the moment that nobody else in the band expected, and then the other musicians listen to that and it affects what they play next. And they’re feeding off each other spontaneously. That’s always what’s most exciting to me about jazz. So I like the musicians that are the true improvisers and the ones who are really dynamic in a group context. Because there’s something very unique about that that I don’t know of happening in another art form.

I don’t know that classical music ever cultivated group improvisation to the degree that jazz did. I know there was improvisation, and I’m sure there was some level of musicians responding to each other spontaneously, but the stuff that I know about was more like a harpsichordist improvising a cadenza or fantasia or whatever. I haven’t read too much about an entire band improvising something. And it’s just that the forms are different. There are different forms of improvisation. So like, in classical music at a certain period of time, theme and variations would have been a big thing—like, “I play this theme, now I improvise variations on that theme.” In jazz, it tends to be more based on an underlying harmonic structure which is consistent and relatively simple and repetitive, and then you create new things each time that structure comes around. Because you share that predetermined structure, that then enables a group of musicians to improvise on it together within that structure. So it’s not purely free improvisation—there is a predetermined structure most of the time—but it’s sufficiently open to allow for a lot of changes. So yeah, there’s different forms of improvisation, but yeah, I love that group thing.

The Miles Davis Quintet that he had in the ‘60s is a great example of that. That’s fairly—not the most accessible music in the world, but more accessible would be some of Chick Corea’s recordings in the ‘70s or... there’s a band now—well, my teacher, Mark Christopher Brandt, has a wonderful album of just duets between piano and guitar that’s fully improvised, and some solo piano albums that are completely improvised with nothing planned before, which are wonderful. I mean, those are a few things I can recommend to people. But there’s a great band called Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band. I think they’re all Christians. Brian Blade is this incredible drummer, and I really like their compositions as well; there’s something kind of American, it’s almost sort of like a folky form of jazz. But he’s this drummer who’s like very melodic and very interactive and can play really, really quiet and, you know, really surprising, exciting playing because he’s not just playing a set sort of drum beat. He’s really adding touches according to what’s happening in the moment. So, yeah.

TIMOTHY: That sounds sweet. Cool. Thanks for the recommendations.

THOMAS: Well, anything else new you have going on that you want to talk about?

TIMOTHY: We’re planning to launch The Consolation of the Scriptures, is what it’s going to be, based on St. Paul’s verse. So, in my first book on the Bible, I was studying the traditional office of Matins. And in Matins, there’s a bunch of Scripture that is read throughout the year. And it’s a good chunk of the Scripture. And so I took the traditional cycle of the annual lectionary for Matins which goes through the Old Testament. Like, for example, Septuagesima, before Lent, you begin Genesis. And you go through the Torah and then through Paschaltide. And by the time you’re into time after Pentecost, you’re entering into 1 and 2 Samuel. So we have an annual Bible reader that is the traditional liturgical cycles.

So you read the entire Bible every year based on these traditional seasons of reading these texts. And then for the Gospels, we followed the Rite of Paul VI—the new rite—which goes through all four Gospels in the daily readings throughout the year. So that’s a project I’ve been working on for some time, is creating resources for this sort of deeper annual Bible reading. So that’s what I’m going to be working on and launching more with Meaning of Catholic, is just promoting the Bible as spiritual reading in this liturgical tradition. So stay tuned for that at Meaning of Catholic.

THOMAS: Yeah, that sounds awesome. And I’ll link to all this stuff in the show notes for people to check out Meaning of Catholic and some of the other things we’ve talked about. And Tim, great to chat with you. That was really fun.

TIMOTHY: Always a joy, yeah. I’m going to go turn on some Miles Davis.

THOMAS: Great. All right. And I recommend our listeners do the same. Thanks, everybody, for listening. God bless you, and see you next time.

Theme music: “Franciscan Eyes”, written and performed by Thomas Mirus. Download the Catholic Culture Podcast soundtrack.