Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show. Now, this is a very content-heavy show—I think they’re all going to be that way, probably—and we want to balance that with your calls. So don’t feel bad if you don’t get through this time: just reconnect, try next time, and, God willing, we’ll get to talk to you.

Last time, we introduced this brand-new program by talking about divine plurality in the Scriptures, that is, the idea that there are multiple kinds of divine beings for whom the Bible uses the word “gods”: angels, demons, and even dead humans. We also were clear that there is no one among these gods who is like Yahweh, the God of gods and Lord of lords, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And then we got talking a bit about angels and demons, but there is so very much more to discuss on this, and of course we’ll probably be talking about angels and demons pretty much as long as this program is around.

So we wanted to continue today our conversation on these divine beings by beginning with the divine council, and that’s an image that is given in Scripture, and of course also depicted in the writings of the Church Fathers, in Orthodox iconography, in Orthodox church architecture, and in the liturgical texts of the Church. So to get us into this, I just want you to picture the icon of All Saints. If you don’t know what that looks like, you can actually go to our Facebook page, The Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page, and you’ll see that today we shared some images of the All Saints icon, also icons of the synaxis (that’s the gathering) of the archangels. If you look at that icon, you’ll see it has Christ in the center, and he’s typically enthroned; sometimes he’s enthroned on angelic beings. And he’s surrounded by his angels and his saints. So that’s the image that I want you to keep in your mind especially as we talk about the divine council.

Fr. Stephen, we’ve got our bibles open… [Laughter] Now, this isn’t your Bible study podcast, The Whole Counsel of God, which I super recommend to everybody, but I do think you probably generally want to bring your bible to listen to this show. I’ve got two bibles next to me, and hopefully that’s not enough. But, Fr. Stephen, why don’t you lead us into this discussion about the divine council? We’re going to begin with the holy Scripture.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Absolutely. What we’re talking about when we talk about the divine council is the fact that God—in this case Yahweh the God of Israel, our God—is God Most High. You may be familiar with that phrase from the early parts of Genesis, but that phrase, the “Most High,” you may have noticed is also what demons call God, for example, in the exorcism stories in the gospels. They refer to Christ as “Son of the Most High.” This is because of a relationship that was understood by pretty much everyone in the ancient world, that there was not sort of… We talked last time about how monotheism wasn’t a category in the ancient world that people used, so no one thought that there was this one god whom they worshiped who stood all by himself in the heavens; that’s not the picture that we’re given by the Scriptures. What we find in the ancient cultures surrounding Israel is they had what we’ve mostly been taught if we’ve studied mythology in the modern world as a “pantheon,” that there’s sort of this group of gods who are in charge of things.

But that’s not really how it worked in the ancient world. The way it worked in the ancient world is that individual cities and places and regions and nations had a god, a spirit, whom they worshiped and whom they saw as sort of their patron in the heavens. Then when you have larger units develop, like Sumeria or Assyria or Achad or Syria, the Phoenicians, etc., all of those gods get put together in sort of a group. Generally, whichever city or region had ascendancy, their god is seen as sort of the king of the gods. It’s not just a question of there being one god who’s sort of on top at any given time, but uniformly, in all of these cultures, there is a divine father who is seen as the most high god, and then a divine son who is actually the primary god who receives worship, who is the one who presides in the council of the gods. So you have El and Baal with the Canaanites; you have Aya and Marduk with the Babylonians; you have Chronos and Zeus with the Greeks.

And the key difference here in the conception, when we get to Israel, is that they see Yahweh as filling sort of both of those roles. There is a Yahweh-the-divine-Father and a Yahweh-the-Son. And this isn’t something that Christians come up with; this is something that’s in the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and they’re both Most High God, which I think it’s really important to emphasize that title for a second, because—not that we want to dive back into what we talked about too much in our previous episode, although I think there’s going to be a lot of overlap between all of our episodes—but you don’t say Most High God if there aren’t other divine beings. And yet that title, the Most High, is used over and over again in the Scripture. So clearly there is this sense that he is God over other divine beings, and like you said, that in the case of ancient Israel, that the Most High God is both the Father and the Son, whereas in other… I mean, in most of those other stories, the son is overthrowing his father, typically, right? Isn’t that right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Or the son is overthrowing a previous most high god, at least. There’s what’s called the succession myth, the succession story, where there’s this transition. When we get to talking about the devil, we’ll talk about how the way he’s presented in Scripture is sort of mirroring those stories, but pointing out that that story actually had a different result.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he fails.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then the propaganda that the Baal-worshipers and the Marduk-worshipers, etc., the Zeus-worshipers would have you believe.

But it’s important also here to recognize, along with the difference—that there is Yahweh-the-Father and Yahweh-the-Son, and that there is no succession, those being two key differences—the rest of that picture, the picture that there is this council, this divine council, over which Yahweh presides, is very much in continuity between Israel and the surrounding nations. So the language that is used particularly by the Canaanites—the Canaanites referred to sort of the council of gods as the sons of El, because El was their most high god—so that sons of El, that sons of god language, is taken over directly into the Old Testament to refer to angelic beings, who are not gods in and of themselves, but are members of this council through whom God’s will is expressed. In the same way that a king on earth has viceroys and regents and advisors and other people around him, through whom he administers his kingdom, Yahweh the God of Israel is depicted as having these angelic beings, through whom he administers his kingdom which is of course all of creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s interesting that they’re called sons of God. That shouldn’t be hard for us to grasp, because you mentioned earthly kingdoms. I mean, your average earthly king tends to put his sons and his brothers, his members of the family, he puts in charge of elements of the government. For human beings, that’s not always necessarily a good idea: just because you’re a member of the royal family doesn’t mean you’re good at it. But we’re not talking about human family here; we’re talking about God and his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and then these ranks of angels that are referred to as sons of God. That title appears in a number of places in the Scripture, doesn’t it, sons of God?

Fr. Stephen: “Sons of God” famously in Genesis 6, which is a whole separate discussion that we’ll have here in coming weeks.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, hold onto your hats for that one, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But all through the psalms, it’s used. This is one of the reasons why, in the New Testament, the Greek word monogenis, I know people are used to translate it “only-begotten”…

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: ...but I have bad news for you.

Fr. Andrew: Uh-oh.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not what it means. [Laughter] The begotten-ness of Christ is reflected in, for example, proverbs. There are biblical texts from which the Fathers derived that idea. It was not just from the word monogenis. Monogenis really just sort of means unique. It says that Christ is the unique Son.

Fr. Andrew: One of a kind.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to distinguish his Sonship. His Sonship is different, because he’s begotten from the Father. His Sonship is different from anyone else who gets the title son of God, including, of course, believers. St. Paul, at the beginning of Romans 8, for example, talks about us becoming sons of God. Sometimes that gets occluded by our modern translations that want to be more gender-neutral, and they say “children of God,” and so you lose the “sons of God” language, so you sort of lose St. Paul’s point, that it’s not just a family metaphor, but it’s referring to this role of sons of God in the divine council arena.

Fr. Andrew: Doesn’t even Christ use that term in Luke, or am I misremembering that, where he talks about becoming sons of the resurrection? Maybe I’m misremembering exactly what that is.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think he’s using the term “sons of God” there, but I may be misremembering, too.

Fr. Andrew: I’m going to look this up while we’re talking here. Yeah, so Luke 20:36. I’m not looking at the Greek, but at least in the New King James, it says, “They are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.” So maybe… Yeah, okay. So that language was actually used by Christ himself. At least, I’m looking at this translation. I can grab my Greek when we get up to a break, just to make sure I’m looking… I don’t want to mislead anybody here. But, yeah, this is a really important phrase that appears a lot of times in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: And this idea is so central that it’s part of how we understand “the place” (because of course the place where God is is not a physical place, as if he’s somewhere and not other places), the place where God dwells, the place where he is, is described in terms of his being surrounded by the angelic beings in the council. This is part of why, as you mentioned, in iconography, you see Christ enthroned upon angelic beings. We talk about God sitting upon the cherubim. We’re going to talk about, probably later on in the show, some angels whose names reflect the fact that they’re parts of God’s throne.

But beyond that, the place where God dwells is referred to as the mountain of assembly. It’s Har Mo’ed in Hebrew. And this is again something that’s held in common with pretty much every other culture in the ancient world, who believed that gods lived in sort of a combination of two places: number one, because there was so much desert in the Ancient Near East, the place where God dwells must be sort of luxurious and verdant, so it must be some kind of garden; and then it must be some place where mortals fear to tread and don’t go, and so it’s on a mountain. So you get mountain of assembly idea.

Fr. Andrew: Of course, and I’m thinking about the mythology that I remember reading when I was a kid, and the one that comes to mind, of course, is Mount Olympus. [Laughter] And I remember seeing those movies from the 1960s. I loved all those Greek mythology movies, where you’ve got the camera [which] pans up the mountain, it goes through some clouds, and there’s Zeus and Hera. They’re usually next to some kind of fountain or something like that, but then they’re surrounded by all these gods, so there’s this common notion that all ancient peoples have [which] is the most high god is up on a mountain somewhere, and he’s surrounded by all of these other divine beings. And that’s in the Bible, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s, as one of our callers last week brought up, for Baal that was Mount Zephon, the mountain of the north. And that then becomes not one but several mountains over the course of the Scriptures. I mean, the famous obvious examples are Mount Sinai and Mount Zion: become the place where God dwells, become the mountain of God. Then of course when you get to the New Testament, Mount Tabor, at the event of the Transfiguration. And what we see in all those cases is not just “Oh, well, this is the place where God is temporarily,” but there are specific mentions in all of those cases of this angelic council surrounding him at those places. The Law comes through angels, according to St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, on Sinai! The Law comes through angels. It’s interesting. I think about… So much of this, to look at these things in Scripture closely is rewriting the images in my mind that I grew up with. I grew up Evangelical Protestant; I grew up reading the Bible. But also, I wonder sometimes how much people’s sense of, for instance, what happens in Exodus, is formed by Charlton Heston? That movie, The Ten Commandments, I think about that scene where Moses receives the Ten Commandments, where he receives the Law, and he’s on this mountain by himself; he’s all alone. And then these letters appear on the side of the mountain; they’re being burned into the side of the mountain as God gives each one of the ten commandments, and then they kind of burn out of the mountain, he’s got these two tablets, and then he takes them down.

And it’s funny: that was the image in my head of Moses receiving the Law from God, but that’s not what the Bible actually depicts. It actually talks about angels being involved, that he’s surrounded by the heavenly hosts, that Moses goes to meet God, and there is the divine council surrounding him.

Fr. Stephen: If we follow all of the data that’s in the whole of the Scriptures, what happens is Moses, after his 40 days of purification; ascends the mountain; comes into the garden of God at the top of the mountain; enters into the tent in which God dwells with the divine council, where he’s surrounded by the angelic beings; there speaks to him face-to-face. He gives the covenant on the tablets written with his own hands, which is then delivered to him. And then he descends, and he creates the tabernacle—this is according to St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews. He creates the tabernacle as a replica of the place he went and what he saw when he was on top of the mountain.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] It’s interesting, when you read the Bible as a whole, then some of these pictures become clearer. Whereas if you just pick out maybe the main narrative, then some of it is sometimes left out, and you only get it from other parts. Like that reference to the Law being received through angels. I don’t think it’s there in Exodus, is it? It doesn’t say that explicitly?

Fr. Stephen: No. No, it’s not explicitly there.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s clear [that] first-century Jews believed this. It’s this tradition that’s included and witnessed to in other parts of Scripture. But it’s hard; sometimes it’s hard to connect the dots. I’m sure I read that line about the line about the Law being received through angels when I was a kid and didn’t think, “Oh, wait: I need to rewrite my picture of what happens on Sinai with Moses; it’s not like with Charlton Heston.” [Laughter] You know, as much as I love that movie. It’s a great movie!

Fr. Stephen: And St. Paul in Galatians, when he’s talk about that fact, goes so far as to make the point that the Person whom Moses was speaking to face-to-face was Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yep.

Fr. Stephen: That that’s the Yahweh whom he saw, God the Son who was incarnate in these latter days. I don’t want to go into that now, but that’s key to the argument St. Paul is making in Galatians, in not repudiating the Torah. He’s ultimately arguing the Torah came from the same Christ who now has fulfilled it.

The picture—part of it is that in the Ancient Near East, as I said, these ideas were so common and so well-known that reading the text of Exodus, for centuries the hearers of the text—because they weren’t actually reading it themselves, but the hearers of the text—understood this whole picture from the text, because they knew where gods live and how that works and all of those things.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they didn’t need all those details written in there.

Well, we’ve got about eight minutes until we’re going to go to break. Let’s try to look at some specific Bible passages that just give a little bit of the evidence of what we’re talking about, so people don’t think, “Oh, they’re just making that stuff up.” [Laughter] Let’s actually dig in a little bit to that before we go to break here in just about eight minutes.

I see you have in the notes Psalm 82, which probably you’re going to be hearing about Psalm 82 a lot in this show. What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: Let me do one text first, and then I’ll get to Psalm 82.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah, sure.

Fr. Stephen: And this one I don’t want to go into too super-deep, because we’ll get into it more again when we talk about the devil in particular. But in Isaiah 14:13, it’s sort of the accusation against the being whom we know as the devil. God says to him, “You said in your heart: I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the remote parts of Zephon.” Again, Mount Zephon: the devil here is being connected to Baal, but there’s that language of his rebellion being attempting to sit on the throne in the assembly, to sort of overthrow God as king and take his place in his rule over creation and the beings whom he has created.

So then Psalm 82 that we talked about last time, that begins with “God has taken his place in the council of the gods; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” So there is this place for God who presides, and then he judges those other gods. In verses 6-7, it’s: “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die and fall like any prince.” You see that language of “sons of the Most High,” you see them being called “gods,” and based on the way Christ quotes this in St. John’s gospel, he is identifying himself as the God of Psalm 82:1. He says that these gods who are condemned here are the ones “to whom the word of God came.” And logos theou in St. John’s gospel does not refer to the Bible. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, that’s him. He’s the word of God.

Fr. Stephen: It’s him. He is the Word made flesh. So he is that One, that divine Son who presides over the council and renders judgment. I think we also talked briefly about Psalm 89:5-7 last time. But just to read that again quickly:

Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Yahweh;
your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones.
For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh?
Who among the sons of God is like Yahweh?
A god greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones,
and awesome above all who are around him.

So you very clearly have that idea of him being surrounded by this council.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think it’s important especially there to see that imperative language, like: “Who is like you?” Because we got a little bit of push-back, just a little bit of push-back on social media from a couple people, kind of suggesting, based on our last episode: “Are you guys polytheists?” Like, “Really, should you be talking about ‘gods’ in the plural?” and so forth. But the thing is that the Scripture not only uses this language of God being the Most High God (which means there are other gods) but also this language of other gods, but also makes this comparative point: “Who is like Yahweh?” Well, answer: No one! No one is like him. So just because we use the word “god” to refer both to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and even to demons or to angels or to departed human beings doesn’t mean that we mean that they’re the same kind of being. The point is that he’s incomparable; nothing compares to the one true God. I just kind of wanted to underline that point again, this notion that there are no other gods who are like the one true God; he’s God in a way that they’re not, but we still use the word “god” to refer to all of them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in the same way that we say Christ is “man,” but we say he’s not “just a man,” because we say that.

Fr. Andrew: Right. [Laughter] Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So we could say that Christ is Man with a capital-M the same way we capitalize the G in God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s the Man, not to be a little too “He’s the man.” [Laughter] But, like Psalm 1: “Blessed is the Man.” Who is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly? Well, he’s the one. Yep.

Fr. Stephen: So I won’t read the text of these, but people can look in Job 1:6-12 and Job 2:1-6, which both describe this probably familiar to people heavenly scene of the council sort of being convened and the Satan—“Satan” is not a name in Job; it’s an office that someone holds. He is the Satan.

Fr. Andrew: The Enemy, the Adversary.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but so he then comes into the council, and the one—I want to read; all this will probably bring us to the end of our first half once we talk about it a little. This is probably the most controversial example, too, in terms of weird Old Testament texts that people don’t like talking about. [Laughter] At least for tonight. And that’s 1 Kings 22:19-23 (which is 3 Kingdoms, if you’re using the Orthodox Study Bible or something else based on the Greek text).

What’s happening here is Ahab has finally kind of reached his limit of wickedness, so now is going to be subject to judgment. Yahweh, the God of Israel, has decided now’s the time; I’m going to put an end to Ahab. So we now have this scene unfold, and Micaiah the Prophet is now describing this scene. Starting in verse 19:

And Micaiah said: Therefore, hear the word of Yahweh. I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left. And Yahweh said, “Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-Gilead?” And one said one thing and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before Yahweh, saying, “I will entice him.” And Yahweh said to him, “By what means?” And he said, “I will go out and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” And he said, “You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.” Now therefore, behold, Yahweh has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets. Yahweh has declared disaster for you.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. So God basically says, “I’m going to take Ahab down. Do I have any volunteers?” [Laughter] Right? I mean…

Fr. Stephen: Suggestions.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the Scripture basically says that these different spirits step forward and say, “I’ve got an idea. I’ve got an idea.” And then one says, “I’ll do this,” and God picks that one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and God sends that spirit to go, and basically to go into all of the prophets whom Ahab listens to—which aren’t the good ones; they would be the prophets of Baal at this point—and tell him that, yeah, if he goes into battle, he’s going to win; it’s going to be a rout; it’s going to be an incredible victory—when in fact he’s going to be defeated and killed.

So this bothers many people, because it sure sounds like God has this evil, lying spirit working for him whom he sends to go trick Ahab. The first thing I would point out is: Notice, though, that after this scene unfolds, God sends his own prophet to Ahab to warn him! That’s what Micaiah is doing! Micaiah basically comes to Ahab and says, “Look, this is what’s happening. Yahweh, the God of Israel, has sent a spirit to all those prophets you’re listening to. They’re lying to you. If you go into battle, you’re going to die.” So Ahab has to choose whom to believe.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you have to look at the whole picture, the whole story all at once. You can’t just pick a moment in it and say, “Well, I don’t like what God is doing right here.” Yeah. I’m sorry; go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to ask if you wanted to read this, from St. Gregory the Dialogist’s comments on this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So I thought this would be a good way to end up this segment, with a quote from one of the holy Fathers, talking specifically about this passage that we just read. This is what St. Gregory the Dialogist, also called Gregory the Great in the Western tradition, this is what he says, and this is from his text called the Moralia on Job, ch. 2.

What is the throne of the Lord, unless we understand it as the angelic powers? He is enthroned on high in their minds, and thus he controls everything below. What is the host of heaven, unless it means the many ministering angels? Then why does it say that the host of heaven stands on his right hand and on his left? Since God exists in everything and is also outside everything, he is not limited by right and left hands. But the right hand of God is the elect part of the angels, and the left hand of God means the fallen part of the angels. Not just the good serve God by the help they give us, but the wicked also serve him by the trials they inflict on us. Not just the ones who lift up anyone who turns back from sin, but also the wicked who push down anyone who refuses to turn back. So the angelic host stands on the right and on the left hand of God. The will of the elect spirits harmonizes with the divine mercy, and the minds of the fallen ones, when they serve their own evil ends, obey the judgment of God’s stern decrees.

So we’re going to talk a little bit more about what he says about evil spirits serving him in the third part of our show today. But why don’t we go ahead and go to a break, and we’ll be back and we’ll start taking your calls in the second part of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second part of our show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls, so you can call us at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. You can also send questions to the chat room, but we would especially love to hear your voices.

Just to kind of wrap up our conversation from the first part of our show, I just wanted to remind you of those images that we talked about at the beginning: the icon of All Saints, the icon of the Synaxis of the Bodiless Powers, of the Archangels. And you can look at our Facebook page, The Lord of Spirits Facebook page, and you can see lots and lots of images of that.

The other thing I wanted to mention is an element from church architecture, and that is something called the synthronon. In most Orthodox churches now, the synthronon is very reduced in its form, but you’ll see behind the altar table in the eastern part of the church in what is the area called the apse, you’ll see a throne there in many churches if there’s a space for it, and that is the bishop’s throne. Then sometimes you’ll see chairs next to it. Well, again, if you look at our Facebook page, we posted pictures from ancient churches of what is called the synthronon, and you’ll see that it almost looks like a miniature Coliseum. So there’s kind of one throne in the middle, and then these rows of bleachers almost, next to it. So what’s going on there? That’s actually the fuller, ancient form of the synthronon, and that is the place where the bishop sits at certain parts of the Divine Liturgy, not the whole thing, and his presbyters sit next to him, again, at certain parts of the Divine Liturgy, in the hierarchical Divine Liturgy of the Church. That image is exactly an image of what we’ve been talking about: the divine council. So the bishop is an icon of Christ, and then he’s surrounded by his presbyters. You can see both just the general sense of the divine council, and also the idea that this is Christ with the apostles next to him, ready to render judgment at the parousia, at his second manifestation.

So those are just some images to have in your mind. But anyways, we want to get to some of your calls, and we promise, by the way, on this show, that no question—no question [Laughter]—is too weird. And I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember the TV show, Frasier from the 1990s, but I’ve always wanted to have a call-in show where I said, “I’m listening.” [Laughter] So we are listening, and we’re going to get to your calls in just a second.

We want to talk now about specific angelic beings, so we’re going to get now into some details of the angelic beings. Father, again, let’s bring us in. We’re going to talk about St. Dionysios the Areopagite: a lot of people think about him when you talk about ranks of angels and the types of angels. But of course the various kinds of angels, the ranks of angels, are all described in Scripture. They’re described in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, right? I think both Chrysostom’s Liturgy and Basil’s, if I’m remembering correctly; I don’t know if I’m misremembering there. You hear about principalities, powers, dominions, thrones, etc., etc. So lots of different kinds of angels. One of the questions we’ve gotten sometimes is: Are these different species? Why do some angels look like wheels with wings and eyes on them, and others look like human beings with wings? So what’s going on there? Why do angels look so different in various icons?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, that species issue is important in terms of myth-busting a little. That tends to be how we look at it. We look at it sort of like fantasy races, like there’s dwarves and elves and gnomes, so we’ve got these different types of angels or angelic species that look different ways. But of course, angels don’t reproduce. These angelic beings—or at least they’re not supposed to: Genesis 6 again—but we’ll get to that at another point! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’ll be another episode!

Fr. Stephen: But they don’t reproduce, so there isn’t like a species that has a certain appearance based on that. So angelic beings are really sort of cosmic intelligences, and the descriptions we generally see of them are more human beings struggling to describe what they’re seeing. So you get wheels with eyes and sometimes sort of crazy-sounding things. But these different ranks of angels that we talk about are exactly that: they’re ranks. These titles are really jobs, and part of the problem with how we talk about them is that because we don’t want to say the word “gods” as we talked about last time, we end up calling them angels or angelic beings so that we don’t trigger anybody, but “angel” is actually one of those jobs. The word “angel” means messenger, so that’s one of the jobs. Not all of these ranks, obviously, have that job. We’ve been calling them angels, [which] is technically inaccurate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it would be like saying the whole army is made up of privates, corporals or whatever, sergeants. Okay, before we get into some specific ranks of them, we want to take one of your calls, and we have Ashley calling from Minnesota, and Ashley is calling… She says she used to be a polytheist who was told to worship Yahweh. So, Ashley, are you there?

Ashley: Yeah! Long-time listener, first-time caller, ha ha ha.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’ve been listening for two weeks, good job!

Fr. Stephen: All two weeks!

Ashley: Well, we heard the first episode, right? But it’s not just me. I’ve heard this a few times, so I’m going to give you the experience of a friend of mine, but I’ve heard this story several times. A friend of mine, very smart, I mean, incredibly intelligent person, quite literally worships Zeus and the Greek gods, and in his devotionals one day was told basically, “You’ve been a good and faithful servant, but now you need to serve the God we serve.” And I’ve heard this story from other ex-pagans, and I’m curious on what you guys think is going on there.

Fr. Andrew: So let me get this straight: You’re basically saying that your friend—so this is a story that was told to you, but from multiple people that worship pagan gods, was told by… someone, in a spiritual experience, that they need to worship the God that those gods serve. Is that what you’re saying?

Ashley: Yes, yes, I had a similar experience, but mine’s not nearly as cool-sounding.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Okay, so what’s going on there? Fr. Stephen, I mean, I have some thoughts, but, Fr. Stephen, I want to hear what you have to say about this first.

Fr. Stephen: Sure. Well, as we read in that quote from St. Gregory, even what we would call the demonic powers serve the true God despite themselves. And this is why, even though it may brush past us, we’re told that ultimately every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, both in heaven and on earth and under the earth, meaning the underworld: Sheol, Hades. And we see, for example, during Christ’s ministry, whenever Christ actually approaches someone who’s demon-possessed, the demon is sort of compelled by his presence to confess his identity, sort of against his will, because they know exactly who Christ is.

We’re going to end up talking about the Tower of Babel again in a future episode, but originally when these powers and principalities were assigned by God to administer places and nations and cities and peoples, they were assigned as angels, and it was to lead those people to God Most High, to Yahweh, the God of Israel. And despite the fact that they’ve been worshiped as an ends in themselves, that many of them would become fallen and would become the powers and principalities that St. Paul says we’re at war with, in Acts 17, when St. Paul is talking to them in Athens about the unknown god, about the Most High God who is now calling them back to him through the Gospel, he tells them that he was never that far off, that it was still possible for them, despite the intervening issues of paganism, to find their way back to God, to reach out and touch him.

In Romans, St. Paul says that the truth of this is written in the stars. He meant that literally, like the Magi coming to Christ’s birth, that this had been there for these pagan still to see. He doesn’t say that it’s impossible. So from my perspective, what you’re talking about is just a modern actual occurrence of what St. Paul was saying was possible in the pagan world.

Fr. Andrew: You know, the thing that I would add also is that, number one, it’s certainly possible that these demonic spirits that people are interacting with can be… will serve the one true God if it’s his will for them to do that, but also that one of the non-rebellious spirits, one of the unfallen gods, so to speak, the angelic powers, breaking through into that person’s experience and saying, “Come on, it’s time to worship the only God now, the only God worthy of worship.” It’s hard to tell. We’re not—Fr. Stephen and I are not demonologists, we’re not exorcists except in our task as priests, we don’t have expertise and specific experience with angels and spirits and so forth—but nevertheless, when you’re talking about demonic spirits, they’re not going to be dealing with someone in a straightforward way. I mean, these are big liars, right? They’re extremely deceitful, so they’re going to present themselves to people in all kinds of different ways. So there are just so many possibilities in a particular instance. Does that make sense to you, Ashley, what we’re saying?

Ashley: Absolutely. It’s very interesting, and again I absolutely love the show. Hope it keeps going for a long time.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for calling, Ashley. Good to hear from you. So let’s talk now—I’m sorry; go ahead, Father.

Fr. Stephen: I was just going to say: the troparion of the Nativity says that “those who worshiped the stars were taught by a star to adore the Sun of righteousness.”

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Yeah. So let’s start talking about some of these very specific ranks: seraphim, thrones, dominions, etc. We’ve got a big list here, and I’d like to actually cover all of them. There’s nine ranks traditionally, right? Nine ranks of angels? And then a number of them are kind of grouped together, like there’s pairs. I’m seeing a couple of pairs here in this list. So let’s start talking about that.

So we’ve got: seraphim and cherubim are up at the top, and those are the ones that are typically depicted in really kind of weird shapes—among others! I mean there’s various that are… But seraphim and cherubim are kinds of angels that maybe people have heard those terms more likely, and they’re depicted often as animals, aren’t they? They look like animals?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, maybe not in our modern art. Cherubs in particular are usually fat babies with little wings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, I know.

Fr. Stephen: In your Renaissance art. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No fat babies with wings on this podcast! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Little harp playing… But, yeah, in fact, cheruv, which is where we get—cheruvim is the plural—literally means a living creature. So when you see “the living creatures” in Revelation, those are cheruvim. But in particular what they look like, if you’ve seen—we could probably post pictures of this after the show online—but if you’ve ever seen, probably the most famous ones are at the gates of Nineveh, which are now in the British Museum, it looks sort of like a Babylonian sphinx. It’s got sort of wings and a lion body and the head of a man with sort of a ringlet beard that we see in Babylonian depictions. Those are cheruvim.

Fr. Andrew: So now I’m thinking what about, like, griffins? Are griffins essentially just another expression of the same… being? Or am I getting ahead of myself here?

Fr. Stephen: In some cases yes. Well, no. In some cases they’re sort of a later evolution of it, because griffins fulfilled some of that same role; they’re generally associated with royalty. And the role of the cheruvim was that they were throne guardians, that they protected the thrones of kings and gods. Of course, in the Ancient Near East, those were kind of the same thing most of the time, in their belief at least.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So we read about, of course, all through the Old Testament, God is described as being enthroned on the cheruvim, seated upon the cheruvim. And of course there were the gigantic cheruvim in the Temple. There were the cheruvim on the ark of the covenant that was in the tabernacle. There was also cheruvim woven into the… as tapestries in the tabernacle. And then there were giant cheruvim in the most holy place in the Temple that were representing there the throne of God.

Fr. Andrew: Would they use them in statues or…?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: ...or relief or icons? Statues. So we’re talking great big statues in the tabernacle.

Fr. Stephen: Giant statues. The ones that were in the Temple in Jerusalem, after Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 AD, or AD 70, sorry, they were taken to Antioch, because after Jerusalem was destroyed, Antioch had the largest Jewish population in the world, and they were put on display in the Jewish quarter of Antioch as sort of a warning against uprisings there.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That must have been demoralizing! That was the idea!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was sort of the Roman display of power there. But so those were representational of the throne of God being there and that the ark of the covenant and the altar were then the footstool of God’s throne. So those were throne guardians. We talk about Christ being seated upon the cheruvim for that reason.

The seraphim, which are often, when these are listed in order of rank, ranked higher, they’re often seen as sort of surrounding the throne of God, but they had a similar role. They were also throne guardians, but rather than the Babylonian tradition that the cheruvim are related to and that imagery, they’re related to Egyptian imagery. The seraph is the Egyptian word for a serpent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m not a linguist, but I’m just going to throw out a guess here and say that seraph and “serpent” are cognates, just looking at the two words. It strongly suggests… Yeah, I’ll have to go look that one up.

But just to pause here for a second, we’re talking about imagery from Egyptian tradition, from the Babylonian tradition: is the Bible—because these are in the Bible—is it being syncretistic? Are they incorporating Egyptian paganism and Babylonian paganism? I mean, my answer to that would obviously be: no, they’re not syncretistic; they’re just… What’s happening is that Israel and these other cultures are looking at the same reality, and the way that it’s being depicted is being borrowed perhaps. Does that make…? Am I right on this?

Fr. Stephen: Well, right. The syncretism assumes it’s not true.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not true, so you’re taking some pagan stuff.

Fr. Stephen: It assumes that you’re taking concepts, that somebody is writing these things down and is just sort of grabbing concepts from the local culture and making something up. If we believe these beings actually exist, then they would be encountered by all kinds of ancient people, and if ancient people are actually encountering them, we should expect the descriptions to be somewhat the same, or similar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, it makes perfect sense if this is true. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so let’s move on. Let’s move on to the next rank here which is thro—

Fr. Stephen: Well, let me say one more thing about seraphim.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, yes, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: Because this serpent connection a lot of people don’t understand, and this has obvious implications for what’s going on when we talk about the devil again and we talk about Genesis 3. But also, you may have noticed if you’re familiar with King Tut’s tomb and sort of the gold burial mask. You’ll see the cobra sort of perched there. That’s the seraph who’s protecting the king, and the pharaoh himself, that sort of “pharaoh headgear” we all have in our heads, from Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments, it’s supposed to look like a cobra’s hood.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what it’s supposed to… It’s supposed to be presenting the pharaoh as one of these divine beings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Okay, all right. Can we talk about thrones now? And wheels.

Fr. Stephen: Now we can move on. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get through these ranks, because it’s just interesting to talk about each one of them. So we’ve got thrones, and sometimes presented as wheels, and that’s an image from Ezekiel in particular, right? You’ve got the sort of chariot throne of God, that sense of the wheel. Is that the wheel in the sky? I always think of that Journey song.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, “the wheel in the sky that keeps on turning”? Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right! And Journey is singing about Ezekiel!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And they’re also called thrones in other places. You say, “Well, what’s the connection between a throne and a wheel?” This is what is made very clear in Ezekiel; Ezekiel is sort of the clearest place where this is described. The throne of God is known as the merkabah in Hebrew, which is based on the word for “chariot.” God’s throne is a chariot, because it’s mobile, and Ezekiel describes this: it moves in all directions. This is important for Ezekiel, because he’s in exile in Babylon, and the Temple has been destroyed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this in icons we sometimes see—correct me if I’m getting this wrong—around the feet of Jesus these circles, these red circles, typically, and they have wings and eyes. Is that what we’re talking about here?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Got it. Yep. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So this is the rank… You’ve got the seraphim who are sort of around God enthroned. You have the cheruvim on whom he is enthroned, and then you have the thrones or the wheels who are sort of beneath the throne and are responsible in some way: mobility is the image that we’re given. That’s why the wheels have eyes. It’s sort of about God’s omnipresence and omniscience, not just of him, not just of God himself, but because it’s a part of the throne, his reign and his kingdom being omniscient and omnipresent.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So the next rank, which we’ve all heard of, I hope, is dominions, which is kind of a curious name. But I guess if you think about dominion, it’s about… There’s a sense of rulership there, but it’s not just that; there’s something a little bit more specific than that. So, yeah, in our notes, which I will—I mean, everyone can probably tell that Fr. Stephen compiled most of these notes for us: thank you!—when he says that dominions are angels in charge of judging and of restraining others’ spiritual powers.

You think about, in human government, we have a justice system, where you’ve got not only, for instance, the police, who are there to restrain evil-doers ideally, but you also have judges who render judgment on those who have done… committed crimes. Is this analogous to that? Obviously, we’re talking about spiritual realities that are not exactly the same as human justice, but there’s got to be a similarity here, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, because we have, as we mentioned, as St. Gregory mentioned, you’ve got those on the left hand and those on the right hand: you have elect angels—St. Paul uses that phrase—and you have angels we would describe as fallen. So the task, the role of some of those elect angels, is to restrain and combat and ultimately to judge those fallen spirits and to sort of supervise and limit their actions within God’s creation, to prevent them from bringing about utter wickedness and utter destruction if they had their druthers.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so why don’t you tell us about the next rank we’re looking at? This one is probably the one that interest me the most in a lot of ways. I mean, they’re all fascinating. This stuff is just… I hope, everybody, I hope your minds are just being blown left and right. You’re going to have to relisten to this on the podcast. But anyway, the next one to me is one of the most interesting.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s usually translated in English as “virtues,” because this is one of those cases where we sort of have Greek words, several Greek words that mean very similar things. The word is very similar to “powers,” but powers is something else that we’re going to talk about in a minute, so “virtues” is usually used for this, even though the word “virtue” in English doesn’t really correspond to what they do. But these are spirits whom God has assigned—remember that the role of this council is: God is the king of his creation, and so he administers his kingdom through these other spirits, and the virtues, spirits that are called “virtues” in English, are those who preside over the different, what we would call material elements of creation: the sun, the moon, the stars, the four winds. And we see these referred to in Scripture, that the angels of the four winds prophetically. This is not just imagery; this is the idea that all of these things are administered and supervised and God’s reign over them is through these angelic spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’re moving around the heavenly bodies. They’re moving around the winds and the waves. That it’s what brings life to what seems like inanimate stuff, right? Yet it nonetheless has this motion to it and it affects us. This association of divine beings with these elements of creation… So here’s the reason why this is interesting to me—there’s two reasons, or several reasons, really, but I’ll give you the main two. One, of course, is that this is part of—and we’re going to talk about this a lot in the next episode—but this is part of paganism, that people begin to worship beings who are associated with these elements of creation.

But also the thing that fascinates me that this is a kind of, to use a Tolkienian term, a sub-creative rank of angels. They’re there to express God’s creativity in this creation and to beautify it and so forth. I mentioned Tolkien, and he depicts this very memorably and very beautifully in The Silmarillion, which is sort of like his fictional Old Testament text with these beings called the Valar, who are angelic beings who help participate in creation and rule over it and are associated with particular elements. There’s one associated with the ocean, another with the skies, and so on and so forth. I’m fascinated by this particular rank of angels. It’s really, really interesting to me.

The next one on the list is powers and principalities, and probably you remember that when St. Paul talks about it: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against—” and usually people remember the line: “powers and principalities.” So who are the powers and principalities, exactly? Another really interesting rank of angels here.

Fr. Stephen: One last brief little note on the virtues, and then I’ll do that. To give you an idea of how fully elaborated that was at the time that the New Testament was written, on Rosh Hashanah, the new year, there was the ceremonial blowing of trumpets, and there was actually a prayer that was said before the trumpets were ceremonially and ritually blown to begin the new year, a prayer that was said “to the angels of the trumpet-blast.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh interesting! So, like, they’re saying that there’s angels specifically associated with the sound coming out of the trumpets.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Not with the physical trumpet, but with the sound of the trumpet, to bear that sound into heaven. So this is how sort of fully elaborated into the whole created order and the whole ritual order, this angelic involvement was at that time.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: But so the powers and principalities that St. Paul groups together, as those with whom we’re at war—we’ll talk about how we ended up at war in the future—the powers and principalities are angelic beings who were assigned to preside over nations and regions and peoples, and when they were assigned, they were assigned to shepherd and guide—that shepherding language becomes very important in terms of literature and the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: So these are the regional gods that you talked about a bit when we were talking to Ashley earlier.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And things happened, but that was their original task. So, again, they’re this interface with the created order, but rather than being assigned to the material creation, they’re assigned to these—what we would call political units, but…

Fr. Andrew: Groups of people.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, tribes and nations and peoples and families. Right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, before we move to the next one, do you have anything else to say about powers and principalities? I don’t want to overlap again! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s okay!

Fr. Andrew: Okay, good. So the next—

Fr. Stephen: I could always add something!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of course, right! So we’ve also got archangels. Now, again, this is a rank that a lot of people are familiar with. And typically there’s seven archangels who are in Christian tradition. Now, if you look at the canonical Scriptures of the Orthodox Church, there’s only three mentioned by name. Am I right? There’s Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Are there any others that are actually named?

Fr. Stephen: Well, three and a half.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Three and a half! Oh, man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It depends on how you count 4 Ezra.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, right. Yeah: is it canonical or not? Right.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re from the Slavic tradition, then you have kind of four, because you have Uriel. And if you’re not, then technically you only have three, although the entire Orthodox tradition embraces Uriel as one of the seven.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Right. So even though they’re not all named in canonical Scripture, whether you’ve got three or four, three and a half, the others are named in the rest of Orthodox tradition and exist in Jewish traditions, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, preceding that.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So the seven archangels are… My sense it means it’s not just that there’s only seven. There’s not only seven.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is one of the areas where this gets a little confusing, because…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s many archangels on the one hand, chiefs of angels, but then there are these specific seven that kind of stand directly at the throne of God. In some of the icons of the synaxis of the archangels, you’ll see only seven, although in other icons you’ll see lots and lots of them, and then sometimes you get a kind of a hybrid of those two images: there’s seven that are right next to the throne and then there’s many more around it.

But we have names for those seven, and they vary a little bit between different Christian traditions. I was just reading about this the other day. So in the Coptic Church the names vary a little bit, from, for instance, the ones that we’re used to in sort of the Byzantine Orthodox tradition.

What else do we want to say about the archangels in particular?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, and to try and help disambiguate this, because I’m sure it’s confusing, because we’ve been sort of working out from the throne of God…

Fr. Andrew: Right, concentric circles, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: We’re working out, and all of a sudden we’re like: there’s these seven archangels who stand before the throne of God. We’ve sort of jumped back from creation, back up to the throne. And that’s because—and I know this is going to sound crazy at first, but: the seven archangels are not from the rank of archangels.

Fr. Andrew: ...All right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So…

Fr. Andrew: Sometimes… Yeah, that’s the problem, that we’ve got terminology that overlaps or that gets reused. I think that this is… There’s a rank…

Fr. Stephen:  There’s a rank of archangels, and there are, as the liturgy says, thousands of them within that rank. The seven archangels—the word “archangel” is like “archpriest.” It means chief or first. So the seven archangels are called “archangels” in light of that. They’re actually higher-ranked.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, those seven.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: So, wait, are there therefore ten ranks of angels? Is that what we’re saying?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, because those seven are not a rank unto themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, gotcha.

Fr. Stephen: Those seven are sort of special. So, for example, St. Michael, who’s one of them, probably he and St. Gabriel are the most well-known ones. But St. Michael, who’s one of them, in terms of his role—because we talked about these ranks or roles, right?—he has several of these roles. He’s the chief of the dominions in the sense of being in charge of judging. He’s the one who cast down the satan. He’s the one in charge of judging the rebellious spiritual powers. He also, however, was the angel assigned as sort of the heavenly patron of the nation of Israel, which is the role of a principality. So the seven archangels are sort of their own thing, and each of them fulfills more than one of these roles, whereas the rank of archangels are the step of the eighth rank, the step up of just angels.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So we’ve got one more rank to talk about, and then we have a recorded message that we received. We’ll talk about that rank and then that recorded message, and then after that we’re going to go to break and go to the “third half” of our show. That’s a joke for all of you Car Talk listeners out there.

The final rank is the one that’s just called angels, and that means…

Fr. Stephen: Just plain angels.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just plain old angels, and that means “messenger,” and that’s the job. Their job is to come and deliver messages and to speak on God’s behalf to his creation, although, again, just to complicate things, we see one of the seven archangels, Gabriel, fulfilling that role. But there’s a number of unnamed angels in Scripture as well who do the same thing. Like, who’s the—I don’t know; maybe you could tell me: is the angel who appears in the holy sepulcher and speaks to the myrrh-bearers…? Is he named? I mean, he’s not named in the gospels, but is there a tradition as to him being named?

Fr. Stephen: No, these are angels from the class of angels, bringing a message.

Fr. Andrew: Gotcha.

Fr. Stephen: And the angel who comes and lets St. Peter out of jail. [Laughter] And these are beings who carry, yeah, messages from the throne to the creation.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we have a recorded message that we received from Caedmon, which is actually related to all the stuff he left. He recorded this message earlier this week, so Bobby is our engineer tonight. Bobby, why don’t you go ahead and play that message for us?

Caedmon: How much does the hierarchy of angels inform us of hierarchies on earth, such as those in our governments and in the clergy of the Church? Are all of these related, and is creation as a whole hierarchical by nature? Where does this stem from?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a great question, and it helps to underline one of the points I think that we want to really make, which is that these various ranks of angels are ranks and not different species of angel, even though, for instance, they appear to us in visual form as different. They’re wildly different shapes, for instance. St. Dionysios the Areopagite, in his texts—there’s one called The Celestial Hierarchies and then one called The Ecclesiastical Hierarchies—he relates it directly to the hierarchy of the Church. He compares these celestial hierarchies to the hierarchy of the Church, which is one of the ways that we know that we’re not talking about different species.

An example that I know you, Fr. Stephen, have used a number of times, for instance, is that the bishop is a different rank than the priest, but he’s not a different species. We’re both human beings, but he is of a higher rank for sure, and he has a different role than the priest. So you’ve got within the Church you have these various ecclesiastical ranks. And also, you mentioned, Caedmon, about the government on earth. For sure, human governments, what we think of as political governments, do have this—it’s not a direct analogy, but it is somewhat analogous to these hierarchies—I think that hierarchy is written into creation itself. Some things are higher; some things are on other levels. That doesn’t mean that we look at the king or the president as being God’s chosen, anointed prophet on earth—although there have been a handful of cases in human history where that was true: King David, for instance, prophet, anointed by God, so on and so forth. But nonetheless, there is still that hierarchy in both civil government and Church government that connects with the angelic hierarchy.

Fr. Stephen, did you want to add anything to that? Or correct? I’m always ready for a correction. “Well, actually…” Or anything else.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] No, I haven’t had to do that. I haven’t had to do that tonight.

Fr. Andrew: Oh great! [Laughter] Because I’ve been sticking to the notes really closely.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] A couple of points. One thing that’s very important in terms of St. Dionysios, quite literally, since we’re talking about the divine council: the Davidic king, with his mother enthroned as queen at his right hand, with the prophet of God on his left hand, and surrounded by his royal court, is, in the Old Testament, the icon of the divine council, of God enthroned in the heavens. That is not just a status, but it’s also a calling. It’s David’s calling then to establish God’s justice on earth, to accurately be an image and icon of the rule of God on earth. And then, of course, Christ, being the Son of David and the Son of God, collapses those two and makes them one. So the heavenly council is now the Davidic King, with his mother enthroned as queen at his right hand, with his prophet on his left hand, and surrounded by his heavenly council. So there is a direct relationship there.

All government, whether it’s civil government or whether it’s ecclesiastical government: the bishop is also the icon of Christ, and that’s both a status and a calling, for him to accurately reflect Christ in his administration of the Church; and for the Byzantine emperor, that was to establish justice. So that continues even up till today, though with our modern democracies it becomes very difficult to see.

Fr. Andrew: It does.

Well, with that we’re going to go ahead and go to break, and we’ll be back with the third half of our show right after that.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back for the “third half” of The Lord of Spirits. Again, we want to hear from you, and we’re going to take a couple more calls, and we’re going to talk now in this part about demons in particular. But Fr. Stephen was noting during our break that he wanted something else that he wanted to drop in here before we dive into the dark, dark world of demons. So, Fr. Stephen, what you got?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I just wanted to add one more note, because we’ve been talking about… I’ve talked about the similarities, we’ve talked about both last week and this week, about the similarities between what we find in Israelite religion and other cultures, and some of the distinctions.

This species issue is actually one of the important distinctions, because of course what you find in all of these other cultures is that the god—their gods—are genetically related to each other. You have male and female spirits who mate and produce children. So the fact that angelic beings in the Israelite tradition do not have gender and do not reproduce is really a key and major difference here. In face, all of the Ancient Near Eastern languages all kind of are offshoots of Akkadian, but in particular Ugaritic, Aramaic, Hebrew all branch off around the eleventh or tenth century BC from old Canaanite. And every single one of those languages has a word for “goddess”—except Hebrew. The Hebrew language literally does not have a word for “goddess.” When they refer to Asherah or Artemis or some other god that’s depicted as female, they just use the masculine form—Elohim, the masculine form of the word—because they don’t have a “goddess” word.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as if to say they’re actually all kind of—I mean, if we have to use a gendered term—neuter. They all… they don’t reproduce, right? They’re not doing that. Yeah, that’s really fascinating to draw that distinction.

All right, we’re going to talk now in the final segment of our show about demons, and we’re not going to get too deep into the particular kinds of demons or names of demons, partly because we’ve kind of gotten to the point where we’re running out of time, but we did want to talk in general about demons. Don’t worry, listeners: we’re going to come back to a lot of this stuff over and over again and deal with it over and over, and hopefully not in a repetitive way, but getting into details and so forth so you can have a better understanding.

So what are demons? Let’s start off with that question. Demons are exactly the same kind of being that we’ve just been talking about. They are angelic beings. They are these same kinds of beings. They are gods, they are divine beings, they are spirits. That’s what they are, but the distinction, the single distinction here, is that they are in rebellion. They are in rebellion: that they have turned against the God of gods, they’ve turned against the Lord of lords, they’ve turned against the Lord of spirits. And they don’t desire to serve him, even though they sometimes do against their will, as it says in Scripture, “Man meant it for evil, but God for good.” The same can be true of demonic beings as well, that they mean something for evil, and God uses it for good.

Let’s talk about that a bit. They’re in rebellion. Did this big demonic rebellion happen sometime before the creation of everything, so that’s why there’s demons on the scene when Adam and Eve are walking around in the garden? What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: The short answer to that is no...

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] Yes, how many times will we blow people’s minds in this episode? The image you probably have in your mind of some big division of angels and demons before the creation of the world is not in the Bible. It’s not in Orthodox tradition.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s not in the Bible, it’s not in the Church Fathers—it comes from a fellow named John Milton.

Fr. Andrew: —whom I studied when I majored in English in college. You know: Paradise Lost.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s a Puritan.

Fr. Andrew: He’s a Puritan; he’s a Protestant. Yeah, Paradise Lost.

Fr. Stephen: So he, very dramatically and compellingly, composed this narrative of this pre-—literally prehistoric—pre-creation of the world sort of battle in heaven, where, not coincidentally, because he’s a Puritan, he thought, “Oh, well, the devil wanted to be a king,” because that’s what all bad people do is want to be kings, if you’re a Puritan, especially an English Puritan. [Laughter]

But that is nowhere. And probably the simplest quote to disprove that is St. Andrew of Caesarea, in talking about Revelation 12, which is where people usually go when they try to push back on me about this, is Revelation 12. In St. Andrew’s commentary on it, he says all of the Fathers have taught—he’s in the sixth century—all of the Fathers have taught, to that point, according to him, as he summarizes, taught that after the creation of the world, the devil fell through envy. So that’s about as straightforward and clear as you can get, that there was not this… For him, for St. Andrew, the problem with Revelation 12 depicts this fall of the dragon after the birth of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the problem he’s trying to resolve. So he’s saying, well, the devil fell in Genesis 3, according to all the Fathers, but Revelation 12 seems to say that he fell during the history of Christ. So that’s the problem he’s trying to resolve there. He doesn’t have an inkling that there’s anyone claiming this happened before creation. In fact, many of the Fathers in their discussion of the creation days, have the angels being created out of one of the creation days, generally either the first or fourth.

Fr. Andrew: Oh interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So that kind of makes that whole thing completely impossible. And what we mean… Sometimes people will say demons are fallen angels, but of course as we said, “angel” is a job description and a rank, not a species, really. What’s more accurate is to say that these are beings who are created to fulfill one of these nine roles we just discussed and who did not fulfill it. They rebelled by refusing to fulfill that role as they were created and called to do it. So they fell in much the same sense that human beings fall: man was created by God to perform a specific function and role, to be a certain thing, and failed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a kind of cosmic shirking. [Laughter] It’s interesting to think about—we’re going to talk about demons and temptation and all that kind of thing, but it’s interesting to think about the kinds of temptations to sin that we tend to have. I can’t tell you how many times in hearing confessions people—and how many times I, in giving a confession—have mentioned failing to pray regularly, for instance, or failing to love my neighbor, failing to love my wife and children. It’s this failure to do the thing that I was made to do, the thing that I was given to do. So that’s a demonic act, frankly, and we participate with them when we engage in that kind of shirking of what it is that we’re supposed to be doing.

So, yeah, just to underline this. Not only is there the lack of a sort of prehistoric fall of the angelic beings, but there’s… It’s not even just one, right? I know we’re going to talk about this in more detail in the future…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: We have a bunch of stuff in our notes that we’re just not going to be able to get to tonight, unfortunately, but that’s okay because we’re going to keep coming back every couple of weeks. You know, demons are real and they’re here and they are these, to use the language—we were interviewed by Jonathan Pageau yesterday and just appeared on his channel today—vast cosmic intelligences. Wasn’t that the phrase that you used for these beings?

Fr. Stephen: I think so.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so: imagine a vast cosmic intelligence not doing the task God gave it to do. What kind of damage is going to be done when it turns away from that? That’s frightening. But, I mean, we can even bring it down to our level. A father, in a family, when he doesn’t do his job, look at the damage that does to the people in his family. It scales. It scales up; it scales down. We’re going to talk about multiple falls a lot in detail in the future, I think, so we’re going to probably have to save that. It’s really interesting; we could go on and on and on about it. But there is this sense of…

Fr. Stephen: There are… I was going to say there are at least five angelic falls.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. Yep. Yep, so that would be a teaser for the future.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So here’s the big question, and we don’t have to get into the whole story here—but maybe we’ve answered this a little bit already—why are demons still around? Why does God permit them? Why doesn’t he just tell them—if I may put it so—to go to hell, send them to the abyss? Why are they still here? I mean, we’ve somewhat answered this already, right? We’re talking about God’s right hand and God’s left hand.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and St. Gregory, what he’s expressing there is what he’s received from the tradition that goes all the way back before the writing of the New Testament. One of the places where you really see this clearly is in the book of Jubilees, which is canonical if you’re Ethiopian, but otherwise not so much. The book of Jubilees is just kind of dramatized, where the demonic spirits—and we won’t get into… Well, when the giants all get killed, their spirits come out and become demons. We’ll just tease that; throw that one out there.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So they sort of plead. They plead with God not to cast them all into the abyss. They don’t actually repent; they just don’t want the punishment. So 90% of them end up getting sent to the abyss in the book of Jubilees, but 10% of them, God kind of makes a deal with them and says, “Okay, I’ll allow you to remain as these sort of bodiless demonic spirits in the world. Allow you to remain until the end of days, until the last day.” And that he will use them to afflict the wicked, not as a punishment but in order to drive them to repentance. This is what St. Gregory is getting at with those evil spirits, that God sort of uses them. Now, they’re malicious; they’re just trying to harm people, but God uses them to bring people to repentance.

We see this idea—even though the book of Jubilees isn’t in our canonical Scriptures, this idea is clearly reflected in the synoptic gospels, when Christ is going to cast out one of these demons, and they say, “Have you come to trouble us before the time?” where they beg not to be cast into the abyss.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the very famous swine gospel which we get three times a year. It used to… I have to admit, so I’m going to make a little confession here. As a priest preaching every Sunday, I was like: “Oh, man, the pigs again.” That’s how I used to feel. And then I realized what was really going on, and I was like: “Oh, man! The pigs again! Let’s talk demons! Let’s talk the abyss!” Boy, it’s just absolutely fascinating.

So demons are around and they are afflicting us and they have their own agenda, but God has his agenda and he’s making use of them for his agenda which is to bring us to repentance.

I wanted to take a call that we’ve got, and this call comes from Martin, who is here in Pennsylvania, and I have a strong suspicion that I know him. So, Martin, are you there?

Martin: Ah, yes, Father, I am here, and, Father, bless.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] God bless you! So, Martin, what’s your question or comment for us this evening?

Martin: Considering the reality of angels, demons, spirits—all these things—can either of you tell me about your take on paranormal experiences? I’ve had some myself growing up as a kid, which is why I went on my— —can think of. And then finally, thank God, found myself at the Orthodox Church. But, yeah, just want to hear any kind of information that you may have on that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, I’ll respond first and say that as human beings we encounter spirits all the time. They’re everywhere, all the time, good ones, evil ones. A lot of what we’re doing in the Church is precisely navigating that. So we’re calling upon God’s willing servants to assist us in our repentance, to assist us on the path to salvation, to protect us from evil. And we’re engaging in prayer and the priesthood especially is engaging in exorcistic acts to drive off those who would harm us. It’s not just, for instance, Fr. Stephen mentioned exorcism like in a house, but also there’s exorcism that’s done at the beginning of a baptism.

But the truth is that all the prayers of the Church are exorcistic acts, even the offering, for instance, of incense is an exorcistic act, because it’s an offering to God and it ascends in his sight and it is prayer. It is sort of a spiritual fumigation. I don’t know. Father, do you want to say more about that? I made mention that you talked about exorcising a house, but I think that may have been on our interview with Jonathan Pageau on The Symbolic World, but we might as well talk about it now. So let’s talk about our actual direct encounter with demons. What do we do? What’s happening?

Fr. Stephen: Well, one of the things I mentioned there is that we’ve had the luxury, those of us who are old-timers, of living most of our life in the tail-end of Christendom, where the rule of Christ was something that, in the West for centuries, was enacted sort of in all of our societal structures. Whether people actually believed it or not, whether people actually followed it morally or not, it was enacted; it was there in the structure. We didn’t see the kind of spiritual phenomena in the West that you would see in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in other places of the world where the kind of things we read about in the Scriptures and in the gospels and in Acts are still going on, on a very active basis. Exorcism is a very live ministry in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia and South America.

We haven’t seen as much of it here, but as Christendom here is crumbling, it’s starting to happen more. People are deliberately opening themselves up to the spiritual world, but they’re doing it in ways that aren’t based in Christ and his kingdom and his rule, and therefore they’re doing it in ways that aren’t under his protection. This is everything from oujia boards to kundalini yoga techniques to psychedelic drugs to dabbling in Hinduism and Buddhism. All of these things are ways that not just claim to but legitimately open you up to the spiritual world, meaning to the world of spirits. But that’s not something you want to do outside of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Because the spirits you’re opening yourself up to are not spirits that have your best interests at heart. There are spirits who are out to destroy you. This is their whole motivation as beings of chaos. There is no demonic hierarchy like the celestial hierarchy that we were just talking about. Hierarchy and order are good things. The demons are beings of chaos and destruction, and that’s what they’re out to do: to destroy God’s creation in general, and human persons in particular. So when you open yourself up to that, you’re opening yourself to that. So, yeah, that’s a very dangerous thing. Yes, people who go and start using ouija boards, strange things are going to start happening in their house, and that’s not weird—that’s normal!

Fr. Andrew: That’s normal. And just to talk about, for instance, how what we might think of as the ordinary Church life… I mean, Church life is not ordinary, but the ordinary Church life and how it’s engaging in this battle… I’ll just give you one example from my own experience.

A number of years ago, I became aware that someone that I knew had tried to take their own life. When someone does that, of course, there’s all kinds of things going on, and it’s just horrifyingly bad. I had found this out literally I think an hour or two before I was going to celebrate the Divine Liturgy for the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross. Like I said, there was all kinds of complications and dark things going on surrounding this person and their life. I found out right before we were going to do Liturgy, and I didn’t serve the Liturgy in any sort of unusual way—I said what I was supposed to say, sang what I was supposed to sing, did what I was supposed to do—but I had this very strong sense the whole time of engaging in a kind of forceful battle. It felt like pushing the whole time that we were celebrating the Liturgy, and then towards the end there was this kind of feeling of relief or release. I mean, I still remember it very, very clearly. It wasn’t like I saw things or heard something weird or whatever, but there was just this strong sense of engaging in a kind of a wrestling match, a struggle.

So this stuff is absolutely part of what it is that we do, and we don’t have to live life in utter anxiety and fear, because we’re in Christ. We can call upon Christ, and we have his angels and his saints to assist us. His divine council are present with us, and we begin… When we engage in prayer, we move; we are present there with them. We become part of that, just temporarily here in this life, but, God willing, as we remain in Christ, permanently in the life of the age to come. I don’t know; does that answer your question, Martin?

Martin: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Father.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome, awesome. Thank you very much for calling.

Well, we have piles and piles more stuff in our notes, but it’s going to have to wait until a future episode. But don’t worry, everybody, we are never going to run out of things to talk about on this podcast. Fr. Stephen, I don’t know, did you have any final thoughts you wanted to give before we wrap up?

Fr. Stephen: I think just one last note in that last call, and that’s that I think that probably a lot of people who are interested in this podcast, this show, and these topics are wanting to open themselves and their lives more to the spiritual world, but obviously in a positive sense, not the negative sense we were just talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: The Orthodox Church gives us safe, constructive ways to do this: through the Jesus Prayer, through spiritual disciplines of prayer and fasting, through the liturgies of the Church. There are ways for us to do this that are healthy, good, that will draw us closer to Christ, that will make us more like Christ, that will allow us to participate more in the grace of God. And I want to make sure that we also always keep focused on that. Even though people are fascinated by the negative side and the dark side and that kind of thing, it’s the positive side that we’re really all about here.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, absolutely. Well, thank you very much, everyone, for listening and for calling in. That is our show for today. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page. We read everything but can’t respond to everything, but we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, and don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page. While you’re at it, leave a recommendation and then invite your friends.

Fr. Andrew: And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever you get your podcasts, then that raises the visibility of this show and gets more people connected.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much and may God bless you always.