Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, and we’ll get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So Lord of Spirits is brought to you by our listeners, with help from St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology. St. Athanasius is an online academy for kindergarten through 12th grade, offering live classrooms in core subjects, foreign languages, various electives, and Orthodox studies. To learn more about St. Athanasius Academy, please visit www.saaot.edu.

Fr. Stephen De Young: And let me add—I want to assure everyone—I talked to Dn. Adam over at the St. Athanasius Academy, and he assured me that when you go and you take courses from them, he is not going to use your tuition money to launch himself into space.

Fr. Andrew: Hey! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So you don’t have to worry about that.

Fr. Andrew: That is a big bonus! Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’m looking for in the online education for my children.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t want people just using that money to go to space.

Fr. Andrew: Right! So we know that when we titled this episode “Apocalypse Now and Then,” a lot of people got excited that we were going to talk about the end of the world. We know it. And, you know, it’s great! It starts with an earthquake, birds, snakes, aeroplanes… But that’s not actually what this episode is about. “Apocalypse” isn’t actually just a word that means the end of the world. Turns out to be a biblical genre. But before we get to that—and you know we always take a while to get where we’re going—we want to back up to our previous episode on the nous, because this episode is its sequel. We got a lot of questions about thoughts from our last episode, and the one that kept coming up was this one: Does the idea that all of our thoughts coming from outside mean that every single thing we think is being whispered to us by God, an angel, or a demon? So, Fr. Stephen, is that what we meant?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: “No!” Yes! [Laughter] And I mean “no” no, not “yes” no.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re confusing everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, sorry. “No, comma, celebratory yes!” Okay, there we go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, for the transcript, yeah, clarify. And everyone, hopefully, you’ve marked on your bingo cards, we’re about to back up to something we talked about last time, to clarify it, here at the beginning of this episode. So that’s a free spot for everybody.

Yeah, so the stuff we were talking about last time was a little bit complicated maybe, a little bit in depth. So now we’re going to just throw everyone in the deep end at the beginning of this episode as we sort of clarify where we ended up last time.

Fr. Andrew: You know, when you said “complicated,” I started forming an Avril Lavigne-related joke in my head but just didn’t quite get there. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, like the original Avril Lavigne, or the…

Fr. Andrew: Before she was replaced.

Fr. Stephen: ...fake crisis actor Avril Lavigne, who has taken her place?

Fr. Andrew: We should have a doppelgänger episode. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So to start with—and, believe it or not, this is hopefully going to clarify what we were talking about last time with the nous—we’re going to start by talking about pre-reflective consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] When I woke up this morning, I said to myself, “Today I want to talk about pre-reflective consciousness.”

Fr. Stephen: But then you had already reflected, and so it was all over, self-defeating.

Fr. Andrew: Lost, yeah. [Laughter] So, okay, what does that mean for those of us who are not, you know, reading the latest in psychological… I don’t even know the right noun for this, but, yes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Existential psychology and phenomenology, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Correct, right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is another way of talking about what we were talking about last time with the nous in terms of a point of attention and the nous as a sensory organ, and a point of attention or a point of focus. But the term “pre-reflective consciousness” is talking about… It’s pre-reflective because it’s sort of this level of consciousness before you get to thoughts; that’s the pre-reflective: before you get to the actual thoughts, before you get to the stream of consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: This sort of kind of direct apprehension, where you don’t have to think about something in order to get it. You just sort of receive it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. All of a sudden I was about to use the term “fundamental apperception,” and then I realized that would not help.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: So, but too late, I already directed…

Fr. Andrew: Come on, I’m barely getting this

Fr. Stephen: So this is going back to that stream of consciousness is not you, so when we talk about pre-reflective consciousness, we mean that this point of attention is back before that, which… The important part of that is that means you can focus it on, or your mind can look at or your mind can consider—whatever language you want to use for this—

Fr. Andrew: Contemplate, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: —yourself. You can contemplate yourself. And so that means the nous, this kind of consciousness we’re talking about has to be sort of before your self so that you can look at and think about your self as an object and come to know yourself. So it’s possible to live in an unreflective way and not know yourself, or not know yourself very well. And this is something that’s sort of a constant in both ancient philosophical literature and ancient Christian literature, is the idea of coming to know oneself, that that’s the beginning of knowledge, is to come to know your own soul and your own self. So the nous, again, has to be prior to that. It can’t be… When we say, “I am thinking,” the “I” is our self. So that means we’re starting with our self; we’re not thinking about our self, and then we’re talking about something, then, relating to our self. So when we’re talking about the nous, this is back behind our sense of our self.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so for instance, I’ve had a lot of pastoral conversations in which I might say something like, “Listen to your own thoughts.” So if you’re listening to your thoughts, you’re observing your thoughts or whatever, you aren’t… Your thoughts aren’t thinking your thoughts; you’re thinking your thoughts. There’s a “you” that can observe the thoughts, that can actually kind of… It’s not dissociative exactly, but you realize that they are not you. I think that… that’s my understanding of what we’re talking about now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so then you can also think about you. You can think about yourself. And to use an analogy, if you have a weird feeling in your gut, you can sit there and think about “What is going on in my gut?” and try to ponder what’s happening. This is the same kind of thing, but in your mind or in your soul, that you can say, “What is going on in my mind? What is going on in my soul?” because there’s this pre-reflective consciousness; the nous is separate.

And this is also what’s being talked about… We had a call last time where we got into a little bit whether the spirit and the soul are different things, and we talked about how some of the Fathers, they’re sort of used as being the same thing, just referring to the immaterial part of a person, and then other Fathers, there seems to be a distinction. So when there’s a distinction, the spirit is referring to this, to the nous, to the noetic part of a human person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because sometimes “spirit” and “soul” are used as basically synonyms.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s just all lumped together.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Some of the Fathers talk about body and soul; some of the Fathers talk about body, soul, and spirit, as three separate things. Yeah, and, you know, I think… Well, number one, it’s important to realize that, even though we’re talking about the stuff in this way, obviously we’re not necessarily using strictly biblical terminology, because the Bible doesn’t talk in this way, but it does speak in a way that is evincing the same things we’re discussing. So, for instance, in the psalms where the writer addresses his own soul: “O my soul, my soul!” We have lots of Church hymns like that, the big one from the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, the kontakion, “My soul, my soul, arise!” Or in the psalms, “Bless the Lord, O my soul!” And so much of what we talk about on this show is kind of saying, “Okay, what if what’s in the Scripture is not always a metaphor like we seem to so often take it as being? What if you actually can talk to your soul? What if you can observe your soul? What if it’s not quite the same thing as the you?” And of course that means that Descartes’ famous dictum, Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” is actually wrong, because you’re not your thoughts. You’re not your thoughts, and thinking is not what makes you you.

Fr. Stephen: But, by the way, do you know how he died?

Fr. Andrew: I do not remember how he died!

Fr. Stephen: He was trampled by a horse.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: It is true. And that is the origin of the saying, “Never put Descartes before the horse.”

Fr. Andrew: Augh! Oh man! I felt like I was walking into something.

Fr. Stephen: You were. It was a trap.

Fr. Andrew: But that’s okay. I’m going to look up on Wikipedia to find out how he really did die. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He did; he was really trampled by a horse.

Fr. Andrew: He did? Oh man. [Laughter] Wow, okay, so at least it is a well-founded joke then.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with just a certain irony. But right, and yeah, as you said… And this is something that the Church Fathers said very quickly; they said, in order to, in our Greek language, describe what’s going on in the Scriptures, we sometimes have to use terms that are not themselves in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And that doesn’t mean you’re importing theology or you’re importing philosophy that’s foreign to Christianity just because those terms are used in philosophy per se. This is one of the common misconceptions about the Church Fathers by a lot our friends, mostly our non-Orthodox friends, but even some of our Orthodox friends, that they just brought in all of this Greek philosophy rather than just: They’re using the Greek language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for those who have that, who are receiving that thought, there is a wonderful book called Christianity and Classical Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan, which addresses this very directly, and he shows how the Church Fathers take Greek terminology, but then put different meanings into it; they’re not just simply importing philosophical concepts. They’re just using the Greek language and giving new meanings to the words that they are making use of. So there is… It’s a wonderful book, and of course Pelikan is an unparalleled historian of Christianity. I do recommend it.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it is a good book. The key importance, not just for understanding the hymns that you mentioned, for which this understanding is helpful, but also this is important, that the nous in some sense is before the self, is critically important to our understanding of how humanity has free will. The way Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae, whose name I always mispronounce, describes this is that humanity is in some sense absolute, meaning not determined by his physical and material circumstances, that we’re able to… because we’re able to look at our thoughts from behind our thoughts, look at our self from behind our self, that gives us the freedom to comport ourselves—we can’t change reality with our will. We can’t sort of reach out and bend reality—there’s the brute facticity of reality—but we can choose how we are going to comport ourselves to reality, how we’re going to receive what comes into our life and our mind. We have freedom in that because of this distinction, because of this separation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if you are your thoughts, then that means you are at their mercy. You’re simply at their mercy. And attempting to… There’s been many times I’ve had pastoral conversations with people where it’s like: “I keep having this thought, and I just can’t make it go away, and I feel like something is wrong with me.” If you are your thoughts, then the answer to that is: “Yes, there’s something wrong with you.” Right? What other possible conclusion could you come to. And then people find themselves helpless to just make a thought go away. You can’t just will a thought to go away, unless you… If you realize that you are not your thoughts, then you can begin to develop the discipline to do things to your thoughts. But you’re still going to have thoughts that come unbidden, but that doesn’t mean that there’s something fundamentally flawed. I can’t peer into the mind of Christ, but Christ himself was tempted, but he is not his temptations, obviously, because he did not sin. Hopefully I’m not getting across any Christological lines I should not by saying that, but I think that seems pretty clear from the gospels that that’s what happened.

So, yeah, free will is kind of based—not “kind of”: free will is based in this, that you are not your thoughts, that you can observe your thoughts, you can do things with your thoughts, you can reject the thoughts, you can accept some thoughts. This is a thing, and it’s a very freeing thing. I think we mentioned that last time. Just the experience of freedom comes, I think, from realizing that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if you look at the other side, if your brain is just a chemical machine that generates your thoughts, and those generated thoughts and your stream of consciousness are you, then Sam Harris is right and free will disappears, and the person who has the thought that he should kill someone or rob someone—there’s no free will involved; it’s just purely mechanical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and how can you ultimately blame someone then, who just simply obeys their thoughts? Yeah.

So, yeah, okay we have talked about where thoughts come from, that they come from outside, so let’s unpack that a little bit more. I mean, we talked last time about the various ways of knowing other than the nous. There’s techne which is know-how; there’s episteme which is sort of observational…

Fr. Stephen: Mathematical, scientific, right.

Fr. Andrew: … mathematical, scientific knowledge—yeah, there’s that kind of stuff. And this of course… and the idea of course of the nous as a sensory organ, receiving thoughts or images from outside, that’s contrary to solipsism—we’re not just brains in a vat. There is actual contact with the outside going on in your mind. But I think a lot of our problem is that we tend to reduce knowledge to language, and that this is what we think of as thoughts, as a kind of internal monologue, like the things that are being said in my head.

But actually an interesting thing about that is I occasionally see people posting on social media they’re surprised that people experience an internal monologue because they’ll say things like, “I don’t have an internal monologue; that’s not the way that I think. I don’t think in words like that.” And that’s interesting to me. That seems to be an indication that that person has somehow… just is approaching it from a different angle. I don’t know what that’s like; I do have an internal monologue! There are words that roll through my head all the time; I’m a very word-oriented person. But can we reduce thoughts to just words? Clearly not.

Fr. Stephen: So you’re more like the theatrical kind of Bladerunner rather than the director’s cut of Bladerunner.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: With the monologue coming in in the background.

Fr. Andrew: Right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And we spent most of the episode—of course, because the episode is about the nous, so we spent most of the episode not talking about the nous, just like we’re spending most of this episode not talking about apocalyptic… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We’ll get there, everybody; we will get there.

Fr. Stephen: I think some folks, we got to the nous and settled that, right? The other four ways of knowing that we talked about are also ways that thoughts come into your mind. They’re just not always turned into language. So when you’re… If you’re out wrenching on your car and you know what you’re doing and there’s techne involved, but there’s a knowledge of “oh, here’s the problem; this is what I need to do,” that’s not the angel of car repair.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Aw man!

Fr. Stephen: Or the ghosts of Click and Clack coming to help you, unfortunately.

Fr. Andrew: So you’re saying that as I’m looking at my bookcase right now, there’s not an angel sending pictures of my bookcase into my brain?

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s your eyeball. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s my eyeball.

Fr. Stephen: So these things come in. We don’t always reduce them to language. But what we’re… When we call something a thought, like you were saying, we’re thinking about that internal monologue. But so, to give an example, when you look with your eyes and I look at the tree out the window, the image of the tree is coming into my mind through my eyeballs, but I can also then turn that into language, the word “tree.” But when I do that, the experience of me standing in front of a tree, touching a tree, looking at a tree, smelling a tree is very different [from] having the word “tree” in my brain. This is what we mean when we say reducing it to language: this reduction has happened; it’s been boiled down. And most of the content has been lost in favor of this word.

And so the same thing happens with the nous, that you can have things come in through the nous not at the level of sort of discursive language. That’s feelings, emotions, impressions. You feel sad. You can put that into words: “I am sad.” But the words “I am sad” do not really convey the fullness of what you experience when you are sad.

Fr. Andrew: Right. At best it can function as a kind of short-hand. You can invoke the idea of sadness in someone else by saying it, but even then there’s different kinds. Of course, language tries to deal with the complications. You can see a tree; you can say it’s an oak tree or it’s a maple tree or it’s a Japanese maple or something like that. These are all different-looking trees. But the Japanese maple that’s in my neighbor’s backyard does not look like the one in my front yard, and it is an objectively different experience to see those two trees. The one I have is much younger and smaller, and theirs is big and lovely. So even though language can work on those complications and try to become more precise, it still… I could qualify it: “It’s a small Japanese maple”: oh, it’s a small one. But still, the specific one in my yard, you can’t… You could never describe it with language in such a way that someone would get the exact experience of being there. Just approximate.

Fr. Stephen: Right. At best you can invoke a memory of a similar experience. You can make it present again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: Do you remember when you were there? Even a memory of the same tree, if someone saw the tree before I pruned it, that would not be the same thing as it is today.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that… We consider someone to be a great writer when they are able to evoke those actual experiences in us in the form of memory through the use of language, but we more commonly are doing it the other way. We’re taking the experience and boiling it down. The same is true—I was just talking about a tree, but the same is true when we’re talking about the nous with, for example, the word “God,” or even the name, “Jesus Christ.” It’s a very different thing, the word, and we can use it very discursively, the sort of bad kind of theology which is like putting together Tinker Toys. You just get the pieces and put the pieces together to construct something, as opposed to coming to know Jesus Christ. It is a very different thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you can see… I mean, I see this all the time on the internet. People arguing Christology, and the way that they argue makes me really wonder whether they really know the Person they’re talking about. It’s just… Yeah. Even if what they’re saying is correct, factually, it’s still not the same thing as the One that they’re talking about.

Yeah, so, I mean, it kind of raises the question: If there’s this knowledge that’s beyond language… For instance, an example might be that… a sort of a noetic example is that people… You might go somewhere and you have the feeling like something is just wrong, like it feels sort of spiritually wrong—or spiritually right—that there’s that sense, but it’s not something that’s just pure, that you can get by observation alone. So this would be an example of the nous apprehending spiritual reality, but then that kind of leads you to the question: Do my atheist friends have spiritual experiences? Because they would probably say that they don’t, especially if they are really a materialist, a real materialist. They would say that spiritual experiences, there’s no such thing as that; there’s only the material senses. But if such experiences are just reduced, are reducible to language—“I had a feeling that something was wrong”—well, then you can kind of much more easily explain it away, and the classic example of that is in A Christmas Carol when Ebenezer Scrooge—we’ve all read it, or at least you’ve watched some film version of it, probably everybody—

Fr. Stephen: Or a sitcom episode riffing on it.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yeah, this is one of the most re-used stories of our time. —where he encounters Jacob Marley—I was about to say Bob Marley, but then I remembered it’s not…

Fr. Stephen: That would be a much more interesting story in some ways.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh yes! Yeah, anyway, I’m just pushing aside all the jokes that came… —Jacob Marley, his former partner, and he identifies himself as Jacob Marley, and then Ebenezer Scrooge basically tries to explain him away as being based on whatever he ate last night, so undigested beef, a blot of mustard. Essentially he’s saying that this unmistakably spiritual experience he’s having is just an indigestion problem. But he’s having the experience. And of course, as the story goes, he eventually reconciles himself to that fact and is able to change as a result of that. But, yeah, he’s a disbeliever, and he’s explaining it away, because for him it’s reducible to some kind of physical process. “I just ate the wrong thing last night.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we definitely need to get this “Christmas visit from Bob Marley’s ghost” meme going, because this can be amazing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: Get to work, people. And we’ve talked about, previously, on previous episodes, about the sort of classical four ways of interacting with reality that humans have: language, art, music, and ritual. And we’re going to come back to this later in the episode, but this is important to mention here because we as modern Western people try to reduce all of these to just language. It’s not just our thoughts and our experiences that we reduce to language, but it’s all of these things. So we go and we look at a beautiful icon, and we’re like: “Okay, well, this represents this, and that represents that,” and we try to break it all down into language. But even if you write it up really thoroughly and really well, and you have all your citations from art history and you have this whole thing, reading that is a very different experience [from] standing in front of the icon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and people sometimes do the same thing with liturgy. They’re like: “Well, this part means this or it represents this.” And I’m like, well, while that’s not entirely wrong, it can be problematic when people: “Oh, now I get that this is the thing that that means,” so it becomes a meaning that you received observationally rather than an experience that you participated in through ritual. It becomes a spectator sport, so to speak. Again, there’s a whole history of interpreting the Divine Liturgy and other services with these kinds of ways, but they’re not reducible to that; that’s not the only… It’s not… For instance, when the Great Entrance happens in the Divine Liturgy, you’re not supposed to get a meaning from that; you’re supposed to participate in it. You could get a meaning from that by watching it on a YouTube video.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s also why we shouldn’t have our noses buried in books during liturgical services. I know it’s very comfortable for us as modern Western people to try to, again, process everything as language: “I want to follow along and read what is being sung or read what is being said, and try to just process that mentally in the form of language.” But when you do that, you’re not participating in ritual; you’re participating in a linguistic exercise. And you can sit at home and read the text of the Divine Liturgy, but I think we would all agree that that is a very different experience [from] actually being in and participating in the Divine Liturgy. And even though we may feel comfortable doing that, it’s good to be uncomfortable.

And the same thing’s true with music, obviously. We talked about ritual and iconography or art, but obviously the same is true with music. There’s a big difference between reading a lyric sheet and listening to music. These are not the same thing—unless you’re like everybody in the movie Amadeus and you can just look at sheet music and hear it in your head, in which case, go ahead! But I’m not that person, so.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay, so we have this problem where we kind of divide this stuff out into the physical, the material—the immaterial, the material. It’s… I don’t know. As modern Western people we like to have things categorized, and the problem when we do that is we tend to… When we divide it up into pieces then we just pick the one piece that we prefer and kind of leave the rest aside. I think one of the projects that we’re trying to pursue on this podcast is we’re trying to show that everything really is one. There’s not natural and supernatural. That’s not a… There’s a deliberate reason why we use “the seen and the unseen” when we’re describing what we’re doing on this show, because there is a distinction there. There’s things that you can see and observe with your senses, and there’s things that you cannot see with your senses. But natural and supernatural is a different kind of distinction. There’s the Cartesian notion of the soul, which is basically that you’re this immaterial soul that’s kind of trapped inside a body, or, to use the name of a very famous anime film, ghost in the machine.

Fr. Stephen: Ghost in the Shell, noob. [Sigh]

Fr. Andrew: Ghost in the Shell, oh that’s right! I have seen that. I’m sorry. Man. I’m just ashamed of myself now suddenly. I did like that movie, but it’s been a long time since I saw it.

Fr. Stephen: Now, you liked the anime one, just to be clear, not the super-problematic live action one.

Fr. Andrew: I have not seen that one, no. I have not seen that. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t.

Fr. Andrew: I appreciated the anime film for its aesthetics, largely. Obviously I was not on board with its philosophy. It was interesting to watch them struggle with the philosophical problem of: If a person is enough of a machine, can it still hold their soul? Obviously, it’s based on this Cartesian idea of the soul.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. In the ancient world, there’s just creation; there’s just the world, the cosmos, and that includes both material and spiritual realities. Everyone just accepted that. There are gods, there are spirits, there are etc., etc. They are also in the creation. We don’t see them with our eyes, but there are things we don’t hear with our ears and don’t see with our eyes, so the idea that there are certain things that we only apprehend with our minds rather than the other senses kind of made sense to ancient people, just like there’s things you smell but can’t see or hear but can’t see, or hear but can’t smell. And so these are all just different aspects of the one reality, and then modernity happens, and everything gets lame.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like 19th century German theologians are about to be mentioned.

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to get there! We’re not even there yet, though. We’re still in the 16th, 17th century. So we’re building up to it, and that is where you get, as you mentioned, the Cartesian idea, from Descartes, what’s called Cartesian dualism, the idea that the material realm and the spiritual realm are separate realms, just that realm language. They get to spoken of as if… Now, no one’s saying these are actually separate “places,” but they’re being spoken of in that way, that there is… the human body is the body and we have access to that in a certain way, and then the soul is the ghost in the machine; the soul-geist is there connected to it in some way that’s not entirely clear and we don’t have access to it, really, in the same way. So you get the beginning of this division, and the division between natural and supernatural. Supernatural doesn’t just mean “this is a happening that is outside the things that usually happen.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a miracle.

Fr. Stephen: “This is a very unusual occurrence.” But supernatural as meaning not material.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s all the woo-woo stuff. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: Like, angels are supernatural; God is supernatural—which is not true.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then as that develops—we’re not even into the 19th century yet, but you get the beginnings of German idealism, and you get our friend Immanuel Kant, and you get not only sort of the taxonomy of these two realms, but there’s sort of an iron wall between them now, where… So, for Kant, sort of classically you have the noumenal realm—that’s what he calls it—related to the nous, related to the mind, where you have God, the self (meaning the soul), the thing in itself, the essences of things. These are all things that can only be known through the mind through what he basically calls a kind of intuition. In religious circles, especially Protestant religious circles, that’s how faith ends up kind of getting defined. Faith is that sort of intuitive knowledge of those things, of God and of the soul. And then you have the phenomenal realm, which is all the stuff we know through the senses, which is all the material stuff. And these are these two separate boxes, and most conservative Western theology ends up evolving out of this kind of viewpoint.

So there’s maintained that, yes, God exists, the soul exists, things have essences, things have natures, things are what they are, but that’s something you know by faith or intuition or through the application of mental categories; that’s not something you know through the senses or through science or any of those things. So you have these two realms, so this is how we end up as conservative modern Christians, sort of having this box or this set of brackets where we put all that stuff, all that noumenal stuff, and then the rest of our life, everything outside the brackets, we basically interact with everything else the same way atheists do, because that’s all in this phenomenal material realm.

And so then—now we get to our 19th century German friends—

Fr. Andrew: All right! Are they our friends, though?

Fr. Stephen: Not really.

Fr. Andrew: “Friends”: scare quotes.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not good friends. [Laughter] They’ll, like, totally invite you to go see a movie and flake out and not show up, not text, nothing; that’s the kind of friends they are.

Fr. Andrew: They just ghost you.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. They Geist you, even. And we get to Hegel, and what Hegel does, essentially, is collapse that idea of a noumenal realm, a spiritual realm. He collapses Geist and spirit; he just collapses that into the material world.

Fr. Andrew: So what does that mean? How does that play out?

Fr. Stephen: What that means is that essentially, then, all of these—everything from God to spirituality, to the soul—all of these things get reduced to a kind of spiritual metaphor related to material processes. So you get out of this… And this is what, then, liberal Western theology evolves from. So you get, like, the social Gospel and liberation theology.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all very this-worldly focused, ultimately.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so spiritual liberation—what spiritual liberation really means in this kind of view is the transforming of the material conditions of your life to give you freedom. That’s now spiritual liberation. So sin gets replaced with tyranny and oppression. Everything gets reduced. So you still have a concept… So for Hegel God is sort of in the creation, evolving and working things out along with everybody else, and God is just sort of this animating, positive spirit within the cosmos. You still use this language to talk about it, and you still see this spiritual dimension, but the spiritual dimension is now more about feeling and sentiment and solidarity and kinship than an actual connection to an actually existing Creator-God.

And so, yeah, that’s then… Our conservative Western theology comes from more of sort of the Kantian kind of view, and the liberal theology comes from more of the Hegelian kind of view, and from that comes process theology, all of that, all of our 19th century German friends.

And so then the response for people who then reject Christianity altogether, this is how secularism comes about, because then you just, rather than collapsing the spiritual into the physical and the material, you just sort of peel away that layer; you just rip the spiritual, immaterial layer off the top and leave only the physical and material.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if it’s really just a metaphor, well, why not have some other metaphor? If there’s not actually a God that you can encounter, why not come up with some other way of organizing your values around material flourishing? And what’s interesting about this to me is this seems to be the way that public discourse is just sort of expected to go now. Like there’s this polite thing that we don’t do, or I should say there’s this thing that we politely don’t do, which is you don’t talk about spiritual things in public, because, well, that should either be kept private or it’s kind of sort of a joke, like: Don’t talk about that. When we were putting our notes together, you gave the example of Neil deGrasse Tyson—is he an astronomer? I think that’s what he is, I think so…

Fr. Stephen: I think he’s an astrophysicist, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: An astrophysicist, so I was pretty close. [Laughter] He made some reference—he used the word “Godspeed” on Twitter and then had to apologize for that, because of course he doesn’t believe in God, so you shouldn’t say that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: His fellow atheists came after him, the Twitter dog-pile, for saying, “Godspeed,” to astronauts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like: “How dare you? How dare you; what does that mean? Aren’t they just on rockets?” [Laughter] It’s the thing that you’re sort of not allowed to say. We just politely don’t do that in public. And I was thinking about this in contrast to an experience I have once every week or so. My family, we buy… we get raw milk from a Mennonite family about 30 minutes or so, 35-40 minutes south of us. They have a greenhouse and a dairy farm; they make lots of wonderful things. When you go there, though, they will openly and easily talk to you about God and about the weather, usually one in relation to the other. [Laughter] It just really strikes me as how… And it’s not… They’re not proselytizing or anything like that; it’s just simply their experience of the world, and that’s how they talk, that they just don’t participate in that polite agreement that everybody else has. They have no problem saying, “God was really good and gave us really good weather this week!” It’s just something they sort of openly do. So I think about that when I drink my Mennonite milk. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and even—again, we were talking about the brackets—even most modern Christians, who thoroughly believe in God, wouldn’t talk about it that way comfortably in mixed company. Maybe when they’re at church or with their church friends.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like you’re allowed to do it at church.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but not like at the mall, not, you know, talking to a store clerk. So that’s sort of “ways it all went wrong” in the modern period. Probably the question we’ve gotten most often since starting this show has been some version of: Can we really go back to…? Can we un-modern? [Laughter] Is it possible to de-modern oneself? How do you go back?

Fr. Andrew: “Un-modern” is a good Old English construction, and I affirm that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay! And you can’t unlearn. “There are some things that you can’t unsee.” Like, you can’t sort of reverse things and use the Wayback Machine that way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I can’t just decide not to be modern.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but then, so, what is then sort of the way back into the ground, trying to come back to something more like that? And it’s not to, again, set the clock back, but we have to actively work—and that’s what the rest of this episode’s going to be about—to re-integrate what’s been pulled apart. We can’t just pretend it was never pulled apart, but we can work to bring it back together. The key to that is understanding that for every spiritual reality there’s a concombinant material reality, and vice-versa.

Fr. Andrew: Right, these things always, always go together.

Fr. Stephen: And this is at the level of, like we’ve talked about in past episodes, there being spirits or angelic beings assigned to the elements of the created world—

Fr. Andrew: There’s no neutral ground.

Fr. Stephen: —who are participating in their government, that there are spiritual realities connected to every spiritual reality, and physical realities connected to spiritual realities. And the place where we… This is the relationship between the mind and the brain or the mind and the heart, that we all talk about our heart—“I left my heart in San Francisco,” “Last Christmas I gave you my heart; the very next day, you gave it away”—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man!

Fr. Stephen: And even when we use the heart emoji it doesn’t even look like a biological human heart—unless someone’s doing that on purpose as a joke. You don’t see the vena cava… So we get that, when we’re talking about our heart, we’re actually talking about a spiritual reality, but we’re connecting it in talking about it to this organ, and the same thing with the mind and the brain, that, yes, you’ve got this grey, mushy thing with electricity firing around in it, and that’s not completely unrelated to your mind and your thoughts; it’s not ghost-in-the-machine.

Fr. Andrew: So when someone vents his spleen, then…

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I knew it!

Fr. Stephen: His blood is up, yes. The better one is in Greek, when you have compassion, you “spleen” at someone.

Fr. Andrew: That’s great!

Fr. Stephen: That’s literally what it means. So in the gospels, Christ literally spleens at, like, sick people, is what the Greek literally says.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter] I am standing here beside myself!

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so these aren’t disassociated; these aren’t disassociated. And one of the key places—probably the key place, the key place—now this is setting up what we’re going to be talking about the rest of the episode: the key place—where we do this and we do this ritually is in the idea of sacrament or the mysteries of the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Where you have a material reality and a spiritual reality permeating each other, whether it’s water or a male and a female human or bread and wine. There’s a divine and spiritual reality that comes to permeate those material things.

Fr. Andrew: Right. All right, well, on that note, we’re going to be back in just a moment, and we’re going to start talking about apocalypse as a genre within Scripture, but first we’re going to take your calls, but before that we’re going to take a break! We’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! This is the second half of the show where we start to take your calls. Thank you very much for that, Voice of Steve. So the first caller we have on the line is someone with an excellent name, and that is Andrew from Indiana. Andrew, are you there?

Andrew: Yes, I am, Father. Thank you for having me on.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to The Lord of Spirits. What’s your question or your concern?

Andrew: Well, my question is: What is accomplished in the worship of God by those who are outside of the people of God? And so that’s sort of a broad question, but speaking specifically, I guess, with circumstances, the first being the people that are akin to the Israelites in the Old Testament, like the Edomites and the Midianites. On the show you said that there was a point where they were worshiping God still, but they didn’t have the worship of the Torah; they didn’t have the rituals that were a participation in Christ’s saving work like the rituals of the Torah were. So that is one sort of thing, for those peoples in the Old Testament. I wondered as Americans, because Americans did have the Torah, or at least a version of the Torah, I guess we could say, and they held Passover and the various other feasts and festivals, but obviously they were… they separated off and they worshiped in the wrong locations. I guess what is accomplished in their worship, allowing them to bring it to the present for those who are liturgical Christians outside of the Orthodox Church. What was accomplished for them?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so, okay, I’m just going to restate your question the way that I understand it, and you can tell me if I’ve got it. You’re essentially asking if someone’s not actually what we might think of as canonically part of the people of God, whether that’s Israel in the old covenant or Israel in the new covenant (which is the Church), then what exactly does their worship accomplish, if anything? Is that correct? Am I getting that right?

Andrew: Correct, yes. That’s what I’m asking: What does their worship really accomplish for them?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I have some thoughts on this which I’ll say first, but I know that Fr. Stephen probably has a lot more to say, but I’ll just say this, that whenever someone is being obedient to God, they’re being obedient to God! The idea that outside of the canonical boundaries of the people of God there is nothing but unmitigated darkness is simply not true. It’s simply not true, and we have Orthodox saints, for instance, commenting on, even within the past couple of centuries, commenting especially on the problem of what are often described as “separated brethren,” and one of the problems with that phrase, of course, is that people tend to emphasize one of those two words over the other, like they’ll really want to emphasize the word “separated” and forget about the word “brethren,” or they really want to emphasize “brethren” and forget about “separated.” But, like Fr. Georges Florovsky said, you really need to emphasize both words; they’re both important.

But there are Orthodox saints, like for instance St. Silouan the Athonite and I’m kind of blanking on the name right now, but I think there were some 19th century Russian saints who commented especially on Catholics and Protestants in Russia, and they said when they do something that we agree with and recognize as our own, we should affirm that, and they do well to do those things. They never say, “Well, they’re not Orthodox, so, you know, what are they really doing?” So I’m going to go ahead and punt over to Fr. Stephen for especially if he wants to comment on that, but especially the Old Testament piece which I don’t know… I mean, we talked about this, but I’m sure he has a lot more to say about this. So, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so, what the Midianites and Ishmaelites and Edomites—and it’s Ishmaelites and Edomites who make up the Midianites—what they’re doing when we re-encounter them is they’re continuing the kinds of worship and the patterns of worship that they got from Abraham and Ishmael or Abraham and Isaac and Esau. They’re continuing those forms of worship, and as you mentioned, they hadn’t actually received the Torah which gave the specific commands.

But here’s the thing. Those commandments are commandments given to humans, and that cuts in two ways. First, they’re not restrictions God imposes upon himself. It’s not God saying, “I am telling you to worship me this way as my people; therefore I am now restricting myself to only work here in this place at all and never do anything else.” [Laughter] And then, secondly, liturgy is not “the work of the people.” Ritual isn’t something… isn’t a process that we do that then results in us having certain benefits. Ritual and liturgy is the means given to us by God through which God tells us he will work and do certain things, when we are obedient and do the liturgy in that way.

So the question, whether we’re talking about the Midianites or the Edomites or the Samaritans or Roman Catholics and Protestants or anybody else—the guy living on an island who’s never seen an Abrahamic religion in his life—I mean, the question amounts to: What is God doing there? And the ultimate answer to that is: We don’t know most of the time! [Laughter] This is the St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ famous “We know where the Holy Spirit is”—he’s in the Church—and we know what he’s doing in the Church because God made certain promises to us as to what he would do in the Church—but we know he’s outside the Church, but we don’t know what he’s doing outside the Church always. In fact, most of the time we don’t. Sometimes we find out later: some people group comes to faith in Christ, and you can go back and look, and you can see these sort of seeds, like St. Justin Martyr talks about, in their previous beliefs and culture, that kind of helped lead them to Christ, and you can say, “Oh, well, that was the Holy Spirit’s doing,” but in real time, we can’t always see that.

The Holy Spirit blows where he will, and he’s doing things, and God can choose to honor what he chooses to honor; he can show mercy on whom he will show mercy, and compassion on whom he will show compassion. So the issue is: We’re accountable for the riches and the wealth that we have received. So those of us who are in the Orthodox Church are going to be the ones who are the most responsible on the day of judgment, because we’ve received the whole thing, the whole Tradition, everything, all of Christianity: we have it and we have access to it, and so that makes us more accountable for what we do or don’t do with it, and what we learn and what we don’t learn, and what we practice and what we don’t practice.

God is also— Christ is going to judge everybody. He’s also going to judge those people outside the Church; he’s going to judge non-Christians; he’s going to judge ancient people outside of Israel. We know he’s going to hold them accountable for what they did with what they received, and that in pretty much all cases is less, unless they were aware… Unless they were like an Israelite who’s aware of the Torah and decides to move to Moab and become a Moabite and worship Chemosh. Then he’s going to be super accountable, because he received the whole thing and rejected the truth. But your person who’s in ignorance, who’s sort of doing the best they can, your person who lived his whole life and died in 13th century France and never saw an Orthodox Church—he went to the only Christian church in his village—God’s going to judge that person based on what he did with what he had, not on what he did and didn’t have.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Andrew?

Andrew: Yeah. This phrase is I guess a slight issue, because I’ve heard that with the context of evangelism discussion, where some people have said, you know, if you… I’ve heard it in my Protestant days, where if you go and you teach people about Christ, then when they die, there’s going to be a more severe judgment on them. [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: So on the one hand that is true, but on the other hand, didn’t God send that person to teach them the good news? He’s sending someone to do that for them, and they will be better off, having received more.

Andrew: Correct. Yeah, that makes sense.

Fr. Stephen: And St. Paul points out—St. Paul talks about, in Romans 2, these Gentiles who keep the law, just because of their conscience. They live relatively moral lives, or some of them. Some of them live more moral lives than Israelites. But is it easier to follow Christ when you know who he is, or to just kind of figure it out on your own when you don’t know who he is?

Andrew: Yeah, that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you very much, Andrew, for your call. We are happy to have you on the show. Okay, so we’ve got another call. George is calling from Illinois. So, George, are you there?

George: I am here, and I can reach you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can hear you. So what’s your question, George?

George: Very good. Okay, most of my impression or my knowledge about what the nous is I got from Clark Carlton who used to have a—

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Did we lose George? I think we lost George. All right. Fr. Stephen, are you still there?

Fr. Stephen: I am still here.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, hopefully George can call back, and we’ll talk to him. Okay, well, we do have another caller waiting: Christiana from Ohio. Christiana, are you there? Okay, well, we don’t seem to have her connected either.

Fr. Stephen: Catastrophic phone system collapse! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I don’t know what happened here.

Fr. Stephen: Someone’s cut the phone lines. You hear eerie music in the background, Father.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s coming from inside the studio! All right, well, hopefully we’ll be able to get these folks back. George, are you there yet?

Fr. Stephen: I am here.

George: Okay, we lost touch with you for just a second, and I heard you saying—

Fr. Stephen: And you’re back!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I heard you saying that you had learned about the nous from something from Clark Carlton. Is that right?

George: Yes, his Ancient Faith podcast, Faith and Philosophy, which is discontinued now. Okay, and the way he handled it, he contrasted the nous to I think the word is dianoia, discursive reasoning.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

George: Am I saying that Greek word correctly, dianoia?

Fr. Andrew: Close enough.

George: Close enough, okay. And with that in mind, the nous is not a reasoning… not a discursive issue. Some years ago I heard a science podcast, and they had an episode in which they asked the question: Can a child think before he or she can talk? And they gave a few, they gave I think three stories.

I know number two: an adult man who was taught to talk, and then he lost his ability to communicate with others, like him who couldn’t talk, because he could now use reason and he could use words, and he lost his ability that he had to communicate with some other guys. And there was another: a woman who was called dedicated, and something happened to her brain. She wasn’t able to talk or think, and then she regained it, and she was able to reflect upon the period of time when she could not talk or think—or she couldn’t talk or speak in words—but she had… She started talking about some method of thinking that she had during that time period.

And that made me think: Is maybe this an organic reflection of the nous? Is there…? Like in a child’s brain that can’t talk yet, is there…? Would they, would the nous…? We’re told we have to be like a child. Would that be what might be going on there? Am I making sense?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’re making sense. I think that… I mean, I did not listen to what you listened to from Clark Carlton, so I can’t comment on what he in particular said. I have heard this distinction between the nous and the—I don’t want to say dianetic, because that’s L. Ron Hubbard. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Dianoia.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the dianoia. Yeah, the discursive reasoning faculty. Yeah, that is true; they’re not the same thing, and I think that’s an important place to start. That’s what we were talking about: that you are not your thoughts, and also that the nous is not the only way to receive knowledge. So when you talked about people, for instance, who are either physically immature or that then had an injury or something like that, and yet they still were able to perceive, and then later kind of comment on that, just showed—that’s just an illustration of what we’re talking about, that there’s lots of different ways to know, and there’s lots of different ways that thoughts come into your mind. So, Father, is there anything you wanted to add to that or correct or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Well, just a couple quick things. Yeah, we’ve got to be careful when we use—when we distinguish between Greek words. Not that what he was saying was wrong, but I can give you examples where the word dianoia is used in the Bible, for example, where it basically means the same thing as nous. So Exhibit A would be when Christ quotes Deuteronomy and says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” The word for “mind” there is dianoia, and he doesn’t mean discursive reasoning; he means your mind. But, I mean, it’s helpful as a label, and any label you use, we just have to say: This is a label we’re using to make a distinction; it’s not a technical term.

Because if people start to look at it as a technical term, then, for example, they start thinking different Greek words for “love” mean different things—just to stir that pot again while I’m at it—but, yeah, it is definitely true that there are ways of interacting with the world that do not involve language. If you work with animals at all, you know this. Animals can learn to understand verbal commands and understand certain words and sounds mean certain things, but they also are able to process and strategize and interact with their environment in a way that they’re not… they don’t have thoughts formed into language in their brains when they’re doing it.

So, yeah, there are multiple levels, and putting it into words, as we said earlier, is reducing it in a certain sense. You might… If you’re a craftsman and you’re making a chair, you probably don’t, if you’re a professional craftsman, every time you make a chair, think in your head discursively, like: “Okay, now I need to make this measurement and make the curve like…” You just know how to do it, and you just do it. [Laughter] You don’t have to go to the language level.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, like I have four children, and I interacted with them before they could talk to me. They were responding and not in a linguistic way. They didn’t have words initially, and yet they could still communicate, they could still interact, they knew who was who. A baby that prefers Mom over Dad, which is what usually happened in my house, but we did have one baby that, for a period of time, actually liked me better—only one out of four, though! But it’s definitely a thing. The idea that they can’t think or can’t know doesn’t make any… just because they don’t have language… The evidence doesn’t line up with that. I hope that makes some sense, George.

Fr. Stephen: And watch a baby interact with an icon sometime.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right! It’s fascinating. All right, well, thank you very much for that question, George. It’s a useful distinction, clarification to make. Okay, we’re going to take one more caller before we continue on, start talking about apocalypse, and that’s Christiana from Ohio. So, Christiana, are you there?

Christiana: I’m here! Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We hear you!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Christiana: Yes! I’m back!

Fr. Andrew: You made it.

Christiana: Okay, so I am the woman of many questions.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, you get one, and if it’s good we’ll let you have a follow-up. [Laughter]

Christiana: So I was driving the other day, and there was a mourning dove in the road, and the way that they walk, they sort of bob their heads so they feel like they’re going faster, but they’re really not going any faster, and I nearly hit it, and I felt a sort of horror inside of me, and I was like: “No, I can’t hit a dove! That’s the image of the Holy Spirit!” And I’m like: “Wait. Is it? What does that mean? Can we honor the Holy Spirit by honoring a dove? If we hurt the dove in a bad way are we dishonoring the Holy Spirit?” What sort of connection does the Holy Spirit have with the image of a dove?

Fr. Andrew: So, like, as opposed to, for instance, if you hit—I was going to say a pigeon, but pigeons are doves—if you hit a turkey buzzard with your car, which is a little bit more likely, probably, because they like to hang out on roads—would that be sort of not the same thing? I mean, so, in the Scripture we do get the Holy Spirit alighting on the Lord Jesus at Theophany, as it says in Scripture, in the form or the shape of a dove—

Fr. Stephen: Uhhh…

Fr. Andrew: —but he did not become a bird.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So, yeah. He did not become a bird. [Laughter] Okay, I don’t know if I rescued myself by saying that, because Fr. Stephen was about to “uhhh…” Yeah, no, he did not become a bird, so he is not a dove. The Holy Spirit is not a dove. Certainly iconographically, where you see a dove appear, usually that’s a symbol of the Holy Spirit because of that description that’s given in the gospels. But I would… I don’t know; I’m just shooting from the hip here, but I would not say that the mourning dove that you accidentally hit with your car would be an affront to the Holy Spirit any more than hitting some other bird or animal. Now, if you were, like, gunning for it and were just trying to run this thing down out of a sense of glee of killing things with your car, that’s another problem entirely, but I don’t think it has to do with the particular species that you’re hitting. I don’t know. I guess I’m just shooting from the hip.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you take it home and eat it. Then it’s okay. You’re hunting at that point. Car huntin’. I live in Louisiana. Things happen.

Fr. Andrew: Not the best way to hunt, though.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no. Yeah, so the key is that, in that instance, it’s describing the way in which the Spirit descended. It’s giving an image. This is why technically, in Orthodox iconography, you’re not supposed to depict the Holy Spirit as a dove in any other icon in order to not sort of give that impression, that the Holy Spirit was incarnate as a dove or something.

Christiana: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: This may scandalize some people, but—

Fr. Andrew: You do see it that way in some places.

Fr. Stephen: In most of the Scriptures and in a lot of Ancient Near Eastern literature, the dove is not an image of peace and beauty the way it is today. People and things are usually compared to doves in the Old Testament, and this is not why the Holy Spirit—let me be clear, this is not why the Holy Spirit is compared to that. It’s describing a white descent. But in the Old Testament and in a lot of Ancient Near Eastern literature, doves are actually considered to be stupid birds. Jonah’s name means “dove,” and that’s at play in the book of Jonah, that he doesn’t have his head right in terms of figuring out what God is doing. The reason why the dove returning with the branch at the end of the flood is important is that doves aren’t very bright, so if it was able to go and find a branch and get back, that means: Oh! The water must be mostly gone now. [Laughter] Like “Mikey likes it,” so the dove can even go and find it.

And so what happened in sort of the tradition, it wasn’t actually… The peace thing didn’t come from the Holy Spirit actually; it came from Noah’s dove with the branch in its mouth. The olive branch was originally the symbol of peace or the token of peace. If you look at our Orthodox prayers, our older prayers, they talk about the branch, the olive branch, as the symbol and token of peace, but they would depict the dove with the olive branch in its mouth, and so that whole image became a symbol of peace, and then people sort of forgot about the olive branch and it was just doves, and then people started letting them loose at weddings and they went to the bathroom everywhere and it was a nightmare.

Fr. Andrew: Or funerals.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the worst. Sorry, if anyone out there has released doves at your funeral… Yeah. Because the idea there that some people have is like: “Oh, that’s the soul going up” or whatever. It’s like: Please don’t do that. That’s why we don’t make these things up.

Fr. Stephen: So in essence, if you do hit a dove with your car, it’s because the dove was too dumb to get out of the way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Hopefully that’s not scandalous there for you, Christiana.

Christiana: Oh, no. Do we…? So were you saying that the Holy Spirit came down as the image of a dove just to describe its whiteness and how it was sort of bright and the way it flew?

Fr. Stephen: Right. He descended like a dove.

Fr. Andrew: It’s about the motion.

Fr. Stephen: It’s about the descent of the Holy Spirit. It’s not describing the Holy Spirit; it’s describing the descent of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense?

Christiana: Yes, it does! Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. Nice to hear from you, Christiana. All right, so, rolling on: Apocalypse now. Apocalypse now! [Laughter] Or, actually, apocalypse then.

Fr. Stephen: No, apocalypse then. Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Then and now.

Fr. Stephen: We had to take a few calls, because we were going to get to the topic of the episode far too early in the episode if we didn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Too quickly, that’s right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Now we’re safe to actually start the actual topic.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so apocalypse is not about the end of the world or about… You know, it’s funny we have this genre of stories, “post-apocalyptic,” which doesn’t actually mean the end of the world, although it does mean the end of a world, a civilization—

Fr. Stephen: The end of the world as we know it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, as we know it. Right. Hey, that’s where we started this episode! But, yeah, it’s not about mass destruction or giant comets—or about giants…

Fr. Stephen: Zombies.

Fr. Andrew: Zombies, yeah, zombie apocalypse—although, as an interesting side-note, I just have to share this with the world: There is a Facebook account that I like to follow called Confessions of a Funeral Director, which—the guy who writes it actually went to seminary with our mutual friend, Mike Landsman, so that’s kind of fun, and at one point he posted—this was like a couple years ago—this sort of confession that when he’s—now, some people may not appreciate this humor, so I’m just warning you now—

Fr. Stephen: This is the scandal episode of Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: This is the scandal episode, yeah! He said that when he’s putting bodies in coffins, if they’re wearing shoes, that he ties the shoelaces together because if there ever is a zombie apocalypse, then it would be hilarious. That’s what he said.

Fr. Stephen: It could save lives, that forethought.

Fr. Andrew: It could save lives, that’s true! Slow them down just a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there was some televangelist who said the COVID vaccine was going to start a zombie apocalypse.

Fr. Andrew: Oh nice!

Fr. Stephen: And he was serious. Well, as serious as those folks get.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Still could… I mean, you don’t know… So that’s not what apocalypse is!

Fr. Stephen: One of my favorite genres of films… But, no, this is a genre of ancient literature that is a very different genre. So, yeah, it’s not about mass destruction; it’s not about nuclear war. The word apokalypsis in Greek just means “revelation.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or “unveiling” literally.

Fr. Stephen: Removing a cover. Un-mercy-seat-ing something. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: There we go. Now we’ve been doing episodes long enough that we can have cool call-backs like that to previous episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in-joke inceptions.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re peeling back a layer and revealing something, showing something. But that’s why you will sometimes, in your old-timey Bibles, it will be the Apocalypse of St. John, and in your new-timey Bibles, your lame ones, it’ll be the Revelation of St. John, or just Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Not ever Revelations.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there is no plural.

Fr. Andrew: That’s not the book of revelations.

Fr. Stephen: There is no plural. There was one revelation to St. John and he recorded it.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but those are synonyms, basically: to reveal something, to uncover something, to show something. So what it is uncovering is the spiritual reality that is always, as we said at the end of Act I, that is always connected to and right behind the physical and material reality.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but that we don’t usually see.

Fr. Stephen: That most people don’t see. Most people don’t see, and we’re going to get into this more in Act III, why people’s… their nous isn’t all that active. But so, because our nous isn’t all that active, we don’t see this, but it is revealed to people whose nouses are, like prophets and apostles, and then they are able to fill in those blanks. They are able to then show: Here’s what’s going on behind the material reality that you’re seeing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and far from this being something that’s just relegated to that last book in the Bible, it’s actually everywhere. So whenever a prophet receives revelation from God, it’s an apocalypse. Something’s being pulled away, and now he sees something, that God has given him this vision, which is why they’re often called seers. There’s this notion… Like Moses, for instance, in Orthodox liturgical texts, is referred to as the Prophet Moses, the God-seer. God revealed himself to Moses. God apocalyptis— I don’t know that there’s a… There’s not a verb, is there? I don’t know. [Laughter] But God pulled away the veil—

Fr. Stephen: Apocalypto.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. Oh, man, that’s bad! Is it really?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow. Okay, well, there we go. All right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s first person singular.

Fr. Andrew: Apocalypto. Right, yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: That’s “I am revealing.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so this happens all over the Scriptures. So we do have this book called the Apocalypse of St. John, but it’s happening all the time. It’s happening all the time. Whenever you’ve got a prophet or an apostle receiving something—or anybody—receiving something from God, it’s an apocalypse.

Fr. Stephen: It’s what the whole Bible is.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: To varying degrees of obviousness. So there’s places where it’s more obvious, but it’s what the whole Bible is when we understand the Scriptures correctly. That’s why the Old Testament was written by prophets and the New Testament was written by apostles, and there’s less than a hair’s breadth between what a prophet is and what an apostle is.

Fr. Andrew: As we discussed in a previous episode.

Fr. Stephen: But the earliest… Yeah, you mentioned “seer.” The earliest Hebrew term for prophet is actually “seer.” That goes back earlier than the word navi that gets translated as prophetis in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: What’s the earlier word? What’s the Hebrew for “seer”?

Fr. Stephen: It’s a form of the verb ra’ah, “to see.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Which is also—and I think not coincidentally—part of the root that gets turned into “bishop.”

Fr. Andrew: Hmm, yes, “overseer,” right.

Fr. Stephen: But so that’s the idea. This is even the earlier level, is the person who sees. By the time you have sort of the navi, the prophet idea sort of firmly established, you still have that element because, for example, in the book of Jeremiah the definition of who is a true prophet is the true prophet is the one who has stood in the divine council. So the one who has seen God, the one who has been in the presence of God, stood in the divine council and seen him, and the angelic hosts.

And another good example of this sort of noetic sight is the story of Elisha and his servant, Gehazi. Gehazi: underutilized biblical name, folks! We’ve got like a thousand Georges and Nicks in all of our churches, zero Gehazis, folks!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, but you do need a Nick in an Orthodox church for that church to be canonical. Literally, no matter what tradition or jurisdiction it is, there’s always some guy named Nick. It’s just the way that it is. I don’t know that there’s a—we can’t set up a Gehazi requirement.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] No, but just a token Gehazi or two would be good. So, for those who aren’t super-familiar with this story, the Prophet Elisha had this servant, Gehazi, and there was this point at which the authorities were closing in on Elisha. As many of the prophets in the Old Testament, he was not a popular dude, and so they were persecuted, as Christ would later say in the gospels, “Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?” Elisha was one of them. But so as they’re sort of closing in, his servant Gehazi is sort of terrified that they’re going to die, and Elisha is, on the other hand, totally calm. So then there’s this episode where Gehazi doesn’t understand why Elisha is totally calm, so Elisha prays and Gehazi’s eyes are opened, is the language that’s used. His eyes are opened, and he’s able to see the angelic hosts: the armies of Yahweh, the God of Israel, surrounding them on all sides and protecting them.

And the implication is this is what Elisha sees all the time. Elisha is just living in the full world, spiritual and material, and that’s why he operates the way he does. That’s why he has the contentment and the ability to face the suffering and persecution, and giving that to Gehazi, then, helps Gehazi. So when the writers of Scripture—when we talk about the Holy Spirit inspiring Scripture, this is mostly what we’re talking about, what that inspiration is. Sometimes people think about that inspiration like: “Oh, he went into a trance and then, like, he came to and he had written all this stuff! Oh, what’s this?” Like he’s reading it for the first time himself.

Fr. Andrew: No, right, it’s that God reveals things to them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is what we’re talking about. The Holy Spirit comes and allows them to see.

Fr. Andrew: Which, if you think about it… Okay, so, like, we’re going to talk about some places in Scripture where this happens, so Genesis, obviously, a good place to start, at the very beginning. There’s events that happen at the beginning of Genesis that literally there was no one around to write them down. There was no one there when God… no human being there when God separated the waters in the firmament in the earth. No one was there, and then there’s all kinds of stuff that happens long, long before any of this gets written down, and the only way that someone would know those things or that a prophet would have that knowledge is if God had revealed it to him.

And yet, further than that is what exactly is Scripture doing when these stories are being told through the prophets? And this is really interesting to me, because it’s often said, for instance, and rightly so, that the Bible is not a science textbook, that people who attempt to turn it into one, whether it’s people who are trying to that to debunk it or those who are trying to do it, say, “No, no, it’s the greatest of all science textbooks!”—I’m looking at you, Ark Experience! [Laughter] That’s a joke for my dad. He and I feel the same about that.

Fr. Stephen: You just wait. You just wait until global warming raises the sea levels and see who’s laughing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There we go, right. —that that’s not what its purpose is, and the fact that it’s not doing that and we say that it’s not doing that is not some kind of cop-out. When the creation is described, it’s not described in what we would think of as scientific terms, and it’s not even trying to do that. It’s not talking about chemical processes, it’s not talking about… It’s not talking about any of that stuff! I mean, that’s why for me—I know this is just a personal opinion—the whole kind of creationism versus evolution versus “how old is the earth?” this stuff is just missing the point of what’s going on there. I mean, if someone wants to talk about that stuff and is interested in that, fine, but that’s not what Genesis is about, and Genesis is not even trying to supply that knowledge. It’s not bad science, because it’s not science, and it’s only in a world where we think that science equals knowledge and science is the only kind of knowledge that that’s a problem! [Laughter] “If it’s not science, then how can we possibly trust it?” Well, we just spent a whole episode and a half talking about how that’s not all there is to it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the creation story is revealing to us what God was doing.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And what it means, and things about it that God wants to communicate to us. He’s not telling us how he did it, because we can’t understand how he did it. He’s not telling us on the material level. And it’s well known, I think, by now that I hate this “how old is the earth?” stuff and it bores me to tears. But, yeah, if someone’s arguing some position on that with an agenda, like if somebody… Darwin was put to horrific uses in 19th century colonialism and early 20th century fascism. Yeah, I’m agin that! [Laughter] If they have an agenda for today based on that, then, you know, I might need to get involved in the discussion, but if it’s purely an academic level of exactly how old the earth is, I don’t care.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or like the whole kind of… Like I mentioned the Ark Experience, the whole answers in Genesis approach, which is… The idea is if this doesn’t line up with these scientific categories, then that means the entire Scripture is bunk. That’s like saying that the manual that came with my microwave, if it does not line up to Elizabethan forms of iambic pentameter, then it’s junk and we can’t use it. Like, it’s not meant for that! [Laughter] That’s not what it’s doing, although I think it would be pretty amazing if one of you people out there who writes manuals for appliances considered putting them in blank verse. Just an idea. Or alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse, another idea. Just throwing that out there… But, no, that’s not what it’s for!

Fr. Stephen: And to paraphrase N.T. Wright, there aren’t any 19th century Germans around any more, so we don’t need to kowtow to them. So, yes, they wrote as if their culture, civilization, form of religion, was the denouement of history. We obviously don’t believe that. Things didn’t go so well for Germany in the intervening years; there were some problems.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s been some history since then.

Fr. Stephen: We have just a similar mindset. So, for example, we assume that if God explained the creation in scientific detail, that would be 21st century science. Not only would it have made no sense to Moses, if he actually explained it, it would probably still make no sense to us and probably be 3-4,000 years, if ever, before it made sense to anybody, because we just assume that our science now is the science. Yeah, we look at science a hundred years ago and we think a lot of it was dumb, but we’re not going to think that a hundred years from now because we’re smart and have it all together. [Laughter]

So the whole premise behind the idea—that it would be science—is flawed. But the point is, it isn’t; it’s apocalypse: it’s revealing what God is doing. The same thing’s true when you come to the flood, which—

Fr. Andrew: Right, which every ancient culture acknowledges happened on some level.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there is a material reality there; there are events that happened. The world and everything in it, the cosmos, was created; that means it came into being at some point. So there is a material reality that happened there, but we’re saying the Scriptures are not there to describe that material reality; they’re there to describe the spiritual reality.

Same thing with the flood. The material reality is probably—almost everybody agrees on this—the material reality is the earth changes that happened at the end of the last ice age. But the point of the story of the flood as recorded in Genesis is not to say, “Here is exactly what happened.” Everybody knew what happened. Everybody knew there were these earth changes; everybody knew there was a flood; everybody knew that human civilization was nearly annihilated by it. Everyone knew all of this. It was: What does this mean? Why did it happen? How did it happen? How did God preserve humanity through it?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: What is God doing here?

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s what the Scriptures are telling us. They’re not just trying to tell us about the historical, material event, though there was one. We’re not going to the other extreme and denying that there was one and saying, “This was just a spiritual event or some spiritual truth.” But what’s revealed to us in the Scripture is the spiritual truth that is always there behind and alongside the material event.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, same thing with the Bible story. Linguists and philologists will say, “Yes, we can look back and see that there’s these divisions of languages and civilization kind of splits up,” and all this kind of thing, but that’s not what… The Bible story is—sorry, philologists—it’s not a philological textbook. That’s not its point. It’s about the spiritual reality behind it; it’s about human beings attempting to sort of control God and what the fragmentation that happens as a result of that, and then, worse still, that the various tribes and nations become subject to… Well, initially it’s good. God puts them in the hands of angelic powers, but then it becomes bad when those angelic powers fall by accepting worship from those nations. It’s about the rise of paganism and the rise of idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we quoted in a previous episode from some anthropologists and sociologists talking about this. This is a thing that happened in human history, but what the Scriptures are revealing is what was going on there, the spiritual reality that lay behind those events. Same thing is true about the exodus. We talked about the exodus in the Pascha episode. There were these locks connected to the Red Sea that the Israelites had to cross to get out of Egypt: physical water locks. They also passed through the Sea of Reeds in the underworld. That is the spiritual reality of what was happening there, and so the Scriptures are about revealing to us the spiritual reality, not trying to give us a date for the exodus, which is why that also bores me to tears.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, and it’s the same reason why… Again, that approach, it’s like when I was an undergrad, one of my favorite poets was John Keats, and he’s got this amazing poem called “To Autumn,” which I read every year at autumn. But a physics textbook cannot explain why that’s beautiful. That can only really be understood in spiritual terms; it only makes sense that way. So, yeah, I mean, this problem gets repeated over and over again as people are trying to read Scripture. We have to understand it’s all apocalyptic.

Another example is the conquest of Canaan where you’ve got a material thing happening, this migration of these Hebrew tribes, but there’s also a spiritual side, which is the gigantomachy, the defeat of the giant clans, that is also happening, and that’s what the Scripture is revealing to us. It’s passing on this apocalypse.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then you get into the other historical books, you get into the books of Kingdoms (or 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings), and the parallel in 1 and 2 Chronicles. First of all, it’s sort of like it’s chronicling the kings of Israel and Judah, but then also it just zags for a whole bunch of chapters and it talks about Elijah and Elisha who aren’t kings; they’re prophets. But on top of that, when you compare what’s going on in Scripture to what’s going on in the archaeological record, it’s kind of fascinating, because you have most of 1 and all of 2 Samuel (or 1 and 2 Kingdoms) about David, and there’s barely mention of the existence of David in the archaeological record.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it does exist, but not a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Barely, yeah, and only recently has it been found. Whereas you look at Omri, the founder of the Omride dynasty, which Ahab was part of that dynasty—but Omri, he gets six verses in the Bible that basically just say three times how wicked he was and that he bought the hill where they build Sumeria later. That’s it. But you go outside to the archaeological record, and all of Israel’s neighbors referred to Israel as the house of Omri, bet Omri, long after his dynasty was even gone! He was one of the most powerful and successful kings in the northern kingdom’s history, if not the most, and influential in terms of Israel’s neighbors and the global scale. Bible just sets six verses: He’s wicked. That’s it.

And you see this refrain all the time in those books, where it says, “As for everything else this wicked guy did, is it not recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel?” So, yeah, you can go there and get the material history. It’s there in their official annals, all the battles they fought, the territory they took, the taxes they raised, the building projects. You can read all that there; the Scriptures are here to reveal to you the spiritual reality behind that, and the spiritual reality of Omri is that he was wicked, he contributed to Israel’s downfall and its spiral into destruction by the Assyrians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so then perhaps in a more obvious section of the Old Testament, in the Prophets, that this is apocalyptic as well. So then you start getting prophets like Isaiah, who sees God on his throne and reveals that kind of thing. This is apocalypse in a way that makes… that’s a little bit more obvious to us, I think. So what are some more examples of that from those prophets?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, there’s more obvious examples and there’s more subtle examples. What Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are essentially doing is Isaiah, before the fall of the northern kingdom or at the fall of the northern kingdom; Jeremiah at the fall of Judah to the Babylonians; and Ezekiel in exile is: the people know either “Hey, the Assyrians are coming to kill everybody” or “The Babylonians are coming to kill everybody and enslave the rest” or “We’re in exile”—they know that. The prophet doesn’t have to come and reveal that to them, the dates where they were living. The prophet comes to reveal to them: Here’s why. Here’s why the Assyrians are coming; here’s why the Babylonians are coming; here’s why you’re in exile; and here’s how God is going to bring you out of this. Here’s how we ended up here, here’s what you need to do now in terms of repentance, and then here’s how God is going to deliver us from this, from the consequences of our own sins and wickedness. And then you get the really obvious ones like Daniel and Zechariah, where they’re actually apocalyptic texts, like, they’re directly recording visions that they have.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they’re these massive, world-history-spanning things.

Fr. Stephen: And the book of Revelation is that, too.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And this is where that “end of the world” stuff comes in, because, in these more expansive apocalyptics—and the book of Enoch is this, too; the book of Enoch is actually several of these put together, and other Enochic literature is mostly apocalypses, but it has its vast sweep of history. It covers from the beginning, all the way through the history of God’s people, all the way to the end. As modern people, I guess we’re more fascinated by trying to figure out what’s ahead, what’s in the future for us, which is the end, rather than trying to actually understand our past and our heritage and how we got here, which to me is backwards. [Laughter] But, yeah, it’s the whole sweep, not just: Here’s a bunch of stuff that’s going to happen in the future so that you can figure out when the end is coming exactly.

So when we say this is everywhere in the Bible, probably the place where people would think this exists the least might be the epistles of St. Paul, because modern Western Christians, we’ve been taught that St. Paul’s writing theology, which of course isn’t true either: he’s writing letters to churches and to people. But he’s sitting there, he’s writing theology; this is discursive reasoning; we’re going to go and analyze his grammar and his logical arguments, da-da-da-da-da-da-dah. But if you read St. Paul closely and you look at the actual structure of his epistles, he will make a series of theological points, and these aren’t just any theological points. These aren’t sort of “Premise 1, Premise 2.” These are theological points like the first chapter of Ephesians: We’ve been adopted as sons of God; we’re already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. This is visionary-type stuff. This is revealing spiritual reality type stuff. This is the spiritual reality. And then at some point in the epistle, it’s almost always translated into English as “therefore,” and the corny old chestnut is, when you see that, you ask, “What is it there for?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes! I heard that so many times when I was growing up! “What’s the ‘therefore’ there for?” I’m like, “Oh, he’s saying this again, Pastor whatever-your-name-is.”

Fr. Stephen: But what it is is it’s St. Paul doing this transition now to the very practical and the material level. This is true, this is the spiritual reality, this is what’s going on, therefore this is what you need to do. Therefore you need to love your brother. Therefore you need to put off sexual immorality. Therefore you need to worship in this way and not that way. So even in St. Paul, this apocalyptic element is fundamental to what he’s doing.

And that’s what’s behind… You’ll sometimes here this eschatological tension between the already and the not-yet, but what’s really going on is more this apocalyptic transition. This is the reality, this is the truth, now and back then and in the future. This is the truth, therefore this is what needs to happen now, which isn’t just sit around hoping for stuff that’s going to happen in the future. St. Paul always has stuff he wants you to do. Sorry, some of our non-Orthodox Christian friends.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. Also known as “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” except Paul puts it the other way. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand, therefore repent!”

Fr. Stephen: And proclaim the Gospel, and live in unity with your brothers and sisters in Christ, and come together in worship, and don’t divide into factions and fight over stupid things—all of that.

Fr. Andrew: Because that doesn’t align with the spiritual reality that is actually present.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that is false to the reality of who you are in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. All right, well, we’ve had a nice beefy second half to the show, but it’s The Lord of Spirits podcast, and that means there’s a third half coming, so we’re going to take a break in just a second, and when we come back we will be talking about apocalypse now, so let’s go to break!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve! And you know what else you can buy at store.ancientfaith.com, and that’s Fr. Stephen’s book, The Religion of the Apostles. This is an unpaid advertisement, but I just had to mention that for everybody, because it’s selling very well, thank God. There’s a big new printing in the warehouse, so there’s lots more to go.

Fr. Stephen: For now it’s in the warehouse.

Fr. Andrew: For now, yeah. I mean, you know, we’ve sold out in the past, so… Get your copy while you still can.

All right, well, before we continue, we actually do have another caller. Samuel is calling from Virginia. Samuel, are you there?

Samuel: Be you well, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Be well to you! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. We’re happy to hear from you. What’s on your mind?

Samuel: Does the Liturgy include some sort of apocalyptic unveiling?

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: Yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, so how does that…? Yeah, so you might be thinking, “In what way or how does that work?” and that would be a very rational thing to wonder. I mean, we could do whole episodes on this, and we actually do plan to do some episodes on stuff that’s specifically in the Liturgy. There are a lot of things revealed in the Liturgy, but I would say that among the foremost would be the presence of God to his people, like when we say, “Christ in our midst.” Remember that the Liturgy is fundamentally a sacrificial meal that we share with our God, and he offers himself for us, to us, and so we feed upon him. He is revealed to us; he becomes known to us, just like happens in the breaking of bread at Emmaus: he becomes known to us in the breaking of the bread. So fundamentally the Divine Liturgy reveals Christ. There’s a lot of other things we could say about that revelation of Christ, but that’s the most fundamental part of it. It is an unveiling; it is a pulling-back of the veil, and certainly there’s liturgical bits that kind of indicate that, like, for instance, the opening of the Holy Doors in the iconostasis. That’s an indication of part of what’s happening there. Father, you got anything to add?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, there’s the very literal—the opening and the closing of the doors, the opening and closing of the curtain, the veiling and removal of the veils from the Gifts—but, yeah, this idea of noetic revelation is deeply built into the words of the Liturgy, and I think the Exhibit A of that is actually in the epiklesis of the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. The epiklesis of St. John Chrysostom, it’s “Make this bread to be the body; make that which is in this cup to be the blood of Christ, making the change by the Holy Spirit.” The epiklesis of St. Basil the Great, it is: “Show this bread to be…” and “Show this cup to be…” So the idea of showing, revealing, seeing the spiritual reality of Christ’s body and blood, that permeates the Gifts is sort of right there in the language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it also occurs to me—I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier—after we receive holy Communion, then we sing what? “We have seen the true light. We have received the heavenly Spirit.” We’re basically saying we’ve received this apocalypse. That’s what’s happening right after you commune. So, yeah, it’s everywhere! It is an apocalypse. Does that make sense, Samuel?

Samuel: Yes, it does, Father.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. Well, thank you very much for calling.

Fr. Stephen: I think I’m going to start advertising our Sunday service in the paper as “A Liturgical Apocalypse”—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: —and see if it drums up some more visitors.

Fr. Andrew: Apocalypse, 10 a.m.; 9 a.m., St. Paul’s in Emmaus—I don’t know when you do your service. Yeah, that’s a great idea. That’s a very fine idea. All right, thank you very much for calling, Samuel. We’re happy to talk to you this evening.

All right, well, we’re going to roll on here with the third half of the show, and here is our “therefore.”

Fr. Stephen: Therefore!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Therefore.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so, again, like we said at the beginning of the last act, the question that we get all the time is: How do we…? Or I guess it was the end of Act I. What’s the way back into the ground of the ancient world in terms of their way of seeing the world? So what we were talking about at the end of Act I in terms of language and music and art and ritual, we talked about how we in the modern world, due to what modernity has done to us, tend to try to reduce everything to language. Part of the way back is to sort of follow that path back the other way, moving out of that kind of linguistic rationalism that has so come to categorize and describe Western theology, but to try to move from reducing everything to language to going back to iconography.

And we have the tools to do this in the Orthodox Church. You can make yourself, even if you have to make yourself at first, stand before or sit before an icon. You can make yourself put away the lyric sheet and just listen to the liturgical hymns and be in and listen to the Liturgy. And you can come and participate in the sacraments and the mysteries in the Liturgy. You can actually do this! [Laughter] And fight that desire to try to boil it down to language and try and deal with it in that way. If you’re not in an Orthodox church, this becomes much more difficult.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because of the heritage of four bare walls and a sermon. Iconoclasm leads to this reduction to language, because when you pull those things out, then what do you have left? You just have that. And, now, mind you, we’re not in any way knocking language, but language is one of the ways that human beings interact with the world. I mean, how could I knock language?

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to go full Diogenes the Cynic, and when people come and talk to me I’m just going to waggle my fingers at them in strange ways.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, so the thing about the four bare… So this is something that hits home, okay. Again, I guess this is our scandal episode. But when that’s your heritage, when that’s the core of what church is, even when you then do have, say, music, which is another way that human beings interact with reality, the way that music is ultimately evaluated, within that context, is in terms of the lyrics. And that’s why, for instance, that you can change the genre, it can sound however you like, and there’s no… Within that particular context, there is no argument against death metal in church if the lyrics are good, because all that matters is the language.

Now, almost every Christian would sort of viscerally understand that death metal doesn’t work in church—I’m sure that there’s probably some of you out there that don’t agree with that—and the reason why I would say that they viscerally understand this is because that’s super rare in churches. [Laughter] Most would be like: “No, we would not put that in there.” The problem is that there’s no good argument against it when “four bare walls and a sermon” is the core of what your religion does; there’s no good argument against it. So that’s the difficulty when you make church essentially a kind of lesson. I mean, I’m in favor of lessons and lectures and language and all that kind of stuff, but when that’s all that you’ve got, it’s going to be much harder, much, much harder, to get back to—I mean, if we could put it this way, why not?—this enchanted experience of the world, the noetic apprehension of what’s going on, the full panoply of human knowledge, of who God is and what he’s doing in the world.

And, I mean, not to do too much “fall of civilization” kind of stuff of this, but I would say that a religion that emphasizes language to the exclusion of this other stuff, or at least to the detriment of it, tends to help people become secular, frankly. That’s what I think, anyway. So, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, language is, kind of, frankly, the lowest level of this, which is why we talked about reducing it to language. We all kind of realize that, like if the only way you only communicated with your spouse was talking on the phone, that would greatly reduce your relationship, in way that, if you both lost the power of speech but you were together—that would be less of a reduction.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we all have this concept of “that’s just talk.” We have this sense that there’s something deeper and more authentic than language. Now, language becomes vivified when it’s filled with authentic life, when it has the whole… when it’s within the context of all the rest of this, then it becomes what it should be. So Liturgy itself has a lot of language, but it’s only able to do what it does within the context of the ritual of the Liturgy.

Fr. Stephen: Right. If you sit at home in your armchair and read the words of the Liturgy, you will know it is not remotely the same experience, even close. And people I think realize this. I’ve had a lot of people who, over the course of the lockdown, told me that at first they would watch the Liturgy on a stream, and then they stopped and started just doing Typika or prayer services themselves or with their family, and they found actually doing those prayer services far more fulfilling than just watching the Liturgy on the screen as a spectator.

And so this is—we talked last time about how the nous is the capacity through which we as humans image God, that that imaging takes place, and we talked about how what we choose to focus that point of focus on is going to be transformative for us. But there’s also a liturgical shaping that happens to us, and it happens in, again, through the nous, in the same noetic way, but the ritual of the liturgy shapes us, and that’s why in the Orthodox Church we understand that the liturgy, worship, ritual has to be completely inflexible, because to mold something the mold has to be completely firm: you can’t mold Jell-O with Jell-O. If you try to mold something with Jell-O, the Jell-O will be shaped to the thing; the thing will not be shaped to the mold. So if liturgy and worship and ritual aren’t inflexible, then that is exactly what happens: we shape our worship to ourselves rather than the worship shaping us to it, and the worship given by God shaping us to Christ, to God himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I mean… We can’t state this strongly enough, because there are a lot of kinds of worship out there within particular traditions that have this idea… The tradition has this idea that it needs to be constantly changed to sort of keep up with the times, for instance. But if worship is supposed to shape you, but you’re constantly shaping it, then all you get is worship that’s shaped like you. That’s what you get. It’s not, then, going to do the work of cleansing your nous so you can apprehend the spiritual reality. And worship should not be altered to the times because it doesn’t do the work, and also, frankly, it can’t just be changed by issuing a decree: “Let’s just radically revamp it or cut this off” or whatever it might be. That’s not the way that the worship that actually does this work works, because, again, then it’s being… then it’s subject to a human will.

Now, that’s not to say… I mean, we could get this as a long rabbit-trail potentially, but that’s not to say… For instance, I’m not claiming that the way that we worship in all its exact details on Sunday morning in our church here in Emmaus is the exact way that the apostles worshiped. That’s not what I’m saying. The liturgics have changed over time—but not in any radical or fundamental way. The kinds of changes that have occurred are not the thing that we’re talking about now. The problem is when someone essentially says, “We need to re-envision what worship is.” That’s when you have the problem. Or “We need to basically stop doing the tradition we’ve done for all these centuries and start something else now.” That’s the kind of problem that we’re pointing out.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The zeitgeist is a spirit that exists, but it’s not the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t want to be in the spirit of the times. I remember that another corny old saying from back in the day was “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower,” because it’s constantly changing. Are you going to just keep getting married, over and over again, to new spirits of the age? Doesn’t work.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and beyond this we have in our heads—this is another modern Western Christian thing—we have this idea of the two tablets of the Law. We have this idea that there’s these first four commandments that’s like worship stuff, that’s like God stuff; and then there’s these other ones, and they’re like moral stuff. So there’s faith and morals, and these are these sort of two different things. So, first of all, I’m inclined to point out that there were not actually… It’s not that God could only fit four commandments on the one tablet, so he had to bleed over onto “see attached sheets.”

Fr. Andrew: Wait! Wait. Are you saying Cecil B. DeMille lied?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! Charleton Heston is a collaborator! No… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Even though Yul Brynner is Orthodox…

Fr. Andrew: Wow. It’s true: Yul Brynner was Orthodox; it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s not that—he still is.

Fr. Andrew: Is he still alive? Actually, I haven’t checked in a while.

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: No, he’s buried at a monastery in France.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! That’s right, he is!

Fr. Stephen: But he’s still Orthodox; that’s my point.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s actually two copies.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s why there’s two tablets.

Fr. Stephen: That’s why there’s two tablets, but, aside from that, there’s also not this schism. The way that the Scriptures see what we call “morality” is not detached from; it is the same essentially as the way that they see worship as we were just talking about it, especially in relationship to the nous. This is why you constantly see, over and over again, and especially emphasized in the New Testament—when Christ is asked, “What is the first and greatest commandment?” he gives two that sum up all of them, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” that we referred to earlier, “and the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Those go together, and St. John in 1 John says, “He who says he loves God and hates his neighbor is a liar.” These two go together.

These two always go together. Well, why? Well, we’ve talked about worship: worship is hospitality. And this showing of hospitality to God, especially in the form of food, especially in the form of sacrifice, this showing of hospitality to God, this worship we’re talking about, this is part of what noetically shapes us in the image of God and allows us to image God, and, because we understand that not just me but every human person—every human person who has ever lived—is the imager of God, then, the hospitality that I show to that image is the hospitality that I’m showing to God.

Fr. Andrew: “Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.”

Fr. Stephen: And those are all examples, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, of hospitality, every single one of them. So this is why you see over and over again in the Fathers giving alms, giving money to a poor person to help them, is an act of worship of God. And though it’s too big of a rabbit-hole to do here—we’ll do this in a future episode at some point—the Fathers are all very clear, and they’re getting it from the New Testament: the giving of alms, giving aid to the poor, atones for sin. How about that? There’s a bombshell to drop! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it cleanses that place, that person; it cleanses you. Right, that… And the reason why all of these things are ultimately acts of worship… I know one of the big conversations surrounding our podcast is like: “What exactly counts as worship?” But the reason why all these things are acts of worship, as you said, it’s this hospitality frame, but it’s because everything that you do fundamentally is a ritual in the sense that you’re interacting with reality.

So when you do the works of God, when you behave the way that God behaves, when you do his works in creation, especially towards other people, that cleanses your nous, it allows you to have the apocalyptic experience—seeing God, seeing spiritual reality more clearly. Now, it’s not going to be like an instant thing, like: “Well, I gave alms yesterday. How come I can’t see the heavenly hosts?” Like, that’s not the way that it works! [Laughter] But, because the people who have those kinds of experiences, it tends to be something that is formed in them over a lifetime, or, in some cases, God chooses certain people to work through in a way that we can’t quite understand why or whatever, but that’s what happens.

And doing the opposite of that, not loving your neighbor as yourself, that darkens your nous because you’re not behaving like God; you’re not doing his works. So then your ability to see spiritual reality is going to be more limited. There’s some things that you can only understand after a life of all of these things—worship, almsgiving, prayer, sacrificing your own time, yourself, your preferences—all of these things, that that kind of knowledge only comes through that kind of experience is not something you can get from simply hearing a lesson or reading a book, and that’s why, frankly, when… if someone’s going to be like a teacher of theology, and they don’t have this experience of struggling in the Christian life, then, while the words that they might use might be true, they’re also transmitting a darkness alongside it, because they’re functioning with a darkened nous, because they have not done the work.

And that’s something that everyone… Like, this is a warning to me! I’m a teacher; this is my task. So I need to be always struggling to do that, and I need to make sure I’m constantly being prepared, and I need to make sure that I have that blessing from my bishop. I need to not check out of the spiritual life, not check out of doing good works and provoking other people to do good works, as St. Paul puts it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, make no mistake, the parable of the sheep and the goats is apocalyptic.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Not because it happens at the end, but what is the last judgment? We read it on the Sunday of the Last Judgment. That’s the day when everything is revealed; that’s the day. That’s why you can call that day the apocalypse; that’s when everything is revealed. And what Christ reveals to those people is: When you met that man in the street and you told him he smelled bad and he should get a job and that he was a drunk and that he should get away from you, you were saying that to Christ. And when you met that man and you bought him some food to eat and you tried to help him and you were kind to him, you were being kind to Christ. And you can’t tell Christ to get away from you and call him names and be disgusted by him in the street and then walk into a church and share a meal with him in the Eucharist. It’s not going to happen.

Fr. Andrew: St. John Chrysostom says essentially almost exactly that, I think. Something like: If you can’t find Christ in the beggar at the door of the church, then you won’t find him in the chalice. I’m paraphrasing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the keeping of the commandments, all of them, both our worship and our lives, this is what cleanses the nous and allows us to see and understand spiritual reality. And in the same way, when we fall into sin, our nous is darkened and we become less able to see what is happening and understand the spiritual reality that underlies our life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so to wrap up, one of the things that this conversation has really helped to underline for me is how really everything is ritual. And I don’t just mean that everything is like ritual, that it’s just a metaphor—but it actually is. Everything that you do, you’re interacting with reality, you’re interacting… And because all of the material interaction that you do has a spiritual aspect to it, that means that everything that you do is interacting with spiritual reality. We talk about re-enchantment, and sometimes people think of that just in terms of what you see, and certainly that’s one of the elements, and we’ve been talking about that, because the episode’s about apocalypse, but there’s also this sense of participation, the question of participation in the spiritual world.

It can be tempting to want to have a greater awareness of the spiritual world or interaction with the spiritual world in a quick and easy way. So we’ve talked, for instance, about people who get into the occult or into psychedelic drugs, this kind of thing. And it’s true: that takes you there very quickly, but you’re heading into it without having put on the whole armor of God. You’re leaping off the cliff without a parachute, or without wings, whatever metaphor you want to use. And there’s a reason that the Scripture does not ever provide a quick and easy way to open the eye of the soul, the nous, to apprehend spiritual reality. There’s no quick and easy way, because it requires cleansing. It requires cleansing, so if you go with a darkened nous, you might receive some kind of spiritual reality; you might perceive or whatever, but it’s going to do something very bad to you, and we talked the last time about what that does. The Scripture says, “The eye is the lamp of the soul. If you’re full of light, then you’re going to be light. If you’re full of darkness, then you’re going to be darkness.”

But where this comes down for every person is that this should lead us to understand that the Christian life is a holistic life. It’s not a life that has some “spiritual things” in it. It’s a holistic life, that everything that you do, every single thing that you do is a spiritual act. Everything that you do is a ritualistic act. A lot of our problem is that we don’t understand that that’s true. We think that there are sort of neutral acts or sort of non-religious things that we do, but there is no such thing. And the question is not: “Am I going to do spiritual things today?” The question is: “How am I going to do spiritual things today?”

We’re all going to eat food. Am I going to eat food that is blessed by God because I asked him to, or am I going to eat food that I did not ask for God’s blessing, and so it is a different kind of spiritual act. It’s a spiritual act! But it becomes a different kind of spiritual act. Again, there’s no neutral ground. No neutral ground! So the way that you wake up in the morning, the way that you clean yourself, the way that you talk to your family, the way that you go to work, the way that you do your work, the things that you look at, on and on and on—it’s not just a list of moral things, like you’re moral or immoral, like you have plus or minus points on a moral scale; it’s that you are interacting constantly with spiritual reality, and you can do it in a way that is going to make you more like God, or you can do it in a way that makes you more like the demons. I mean, this is one of our great themes. Everything is about everything.

We emphasized apocalypse particularly, and what I want people to walk away from this episode with is a sense of the apocalypse of the ordinary. What that actually does when we understand that every ordinary moment is an apocalyptic moment is the ordinary then becomes for us extraordinary, and by that I don’t mean supernatural; I mean that we begin to understand and to interact with the whole of what reality is in a way that we can do it much more intentionally, because, like I said, you’re always interacting spiritually. You cannot escape that, because you are a being that has a spiritual element, and the world is creation has a spiritual element, so everything that you do is spiritual. So the question is simply: Am I doing it in a way that’s like God, or am I turning away from him and becoming like the evil one? So that’s my encouragement for everyone, is to seek the apocalypse of the ordinary. Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we gave, earlier in the episode, in Act I, sort of a very brief and over-simplified history of philosophy related to this, and the reason for that wasn’t just to nerd out about it, but it was because we need to understand how we got to where we are. Sometimes I worry that the way I in particular talk about these things, including on this show, may come off, especially in our current climate, political and cultural climate, as trying to identify the bad guys, like 19th century Germans: bad guys. Some people might even—hopefully they don’t, but some people might even think somehow non-Orthodox Christians: bad guys; anybody low church: bad guys; that I’m saying these are bad guys. It’s got nothing to do with that. It’s about the actual history: we’re in a place; how did we get here? It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. We’re all to blame. Plenty of blame to go around. I’m to blame as much as anybody.

But now we’re here, and we’ve lost something. To be honest, we had it taken from us, historically. When the altars were stripped in Britain, that was top-down. The English Reformation was not a move of the common people. It came top-down; it was taken away. And what you see after that, in the whole—and continuing in the whole Anglophone world, what you see is an awareness at some level of what’s been lost; that we’ve been reduced to language, that some element of the noetic side, of the spiritual, has been stripped away, and it comes out in all these weird ways. You have somebody like Sir Isaac Newton getting obsessed with alchemy and finding bizarre symbolism and structures in the book of Revelation.

You have weird folk remedies and cures and what are essentially remnants of paganism and superstition cropping up in Puritan communities in the US who fled to have their totally pure English Calvinist religion, have all of these things going on, and relatively accepted, because they’re just part of life. We are aware, even when we want to deny it, no matter how fiercely we want to deny it; we’re aware that the spiritual is there. We experience it all the time. So it’s going to come out in those unhealthy ways if we don’t come up with a healthy approach.

So Fr. Andrew just talked about the idea that these things have spiritual resonance, all the things we do in our life; I’m going to come at it from the other angle. We tend to try to pursue the spiritual as spiritual; that’s what Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemy is. We want visions, we want experiences, we go out and, because we’ve still got this bifurcation, we realize, “I have all this… I’m a materialist. I have this mindset. I need to get this spiritual back,” and so we start pursuing purely spiritual experience in this sort of purely spiritual way. And there are folks out there who just bounce around from mysticism to mysticism and from meditative practice to meditative practice, trying to chase after that experience. But since the reality is that the spiritual underlies the material, the only way to get to the spiritual is through the material. These always go together.

This is why St. Paul says, “I can have all visions, I can speak in the tongues of men and angels, I can have all gifts and prophesy. I can do all these things, and if I don’t have love, I’m nothing; I’m worthless. I’m garbage; it’s pointless.” Love is the way we approach these things. So if you want to get the spiritual back in your life, and you want to really get it, the real thing, not the counterfeit—you want to get the real deal—then the next time you see—and you won’t have to wait long—the next time you see someone who needs someone to smile at them, smile at them. The next time you see someone who needs someone to talk to them, or, more importantly, listen to them, listen to them. The next time you see someone who needs help, help them. And you’ll be amazed at how, as you start doing those things, the spiritual starts to come alive for you. You start to understand the world more.

You’re not going to go and find the spiritual on its own and add it to the material you already have, but through love you’re going to draw close to God, and your nous will begin to be cleansed. You’ll get your mind right, and you’ll start to see what it is that’s been going on around you this whole time, and you’ll start to understand. And that’s also why St. Paul tells us in Hebrews that faith, which should be translated “faithfulness,” is the substance of things hoped for. When we’re faithful, all of a sudden all of those hopes and dreams, all of these things that we’re just sort of believing by faith or intuition, suddenly have substance, suddenly become real to us.

So that’s my closing thought. There’s a very practical way to try to get back to where ancient people were, and it’s not through estotericism or even mysticism; it’s through loving your neighbor, in very real and very practical ways that every single one of us can start doing right now if we really want to.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d still 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 cannot respond to everything, and 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.

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Fr. Stephen: And if you’re on Facebook, watch for what happens on my sister’s birthday tomorrow!

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

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