Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back, everyone, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Thank you, Voice of Steve. I feel funny saying that, because I literally just had dinner with the Voice of Steve, and he’s headed back to New York now. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

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So how do we know what we know? What in us is doing the knowing? Is it the mind? Who is doing the knowing? Do we actually know what we think we know? And do we know it in the way we think we know it? The modern world tends to collapse all these questions into a few basic answers. We know with our minds, our minds think thoughts, and we know things because they can be proven.

But the ancient world in which the Scriptures were written, in that world what it means to know and how things are known, and even what thoughts are form a much more complex picture that applies to human experience in a richer and more vibrant manner. So tonight we mean to sort through these questions, especially focusing on what the Scriptures say about them.

But first let’s start with this modern concept. So, Fr. Stephen, I want to start by asking: Can we even know what we’re knowing without ever knowing the way?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Anyone can see that the roads that they walk on are paved in gold. It’s always summer, and they’ll never grow cold.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite sort of semi-personal apocalyptic songs. People just walk off into… Just leave it all behind.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, when you walk off into the sunset, though, eventually you’re just standing somewhere, in the dark.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. On a beach somewhere.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s that awkward moment of: You’ve made your dramatic exit. Now what? [Laughter]

So, yeah, we’re going to be talking about what it means to know things, which people probably think they know what it means to know things, but maybe you don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: You know?

Fr. Stephen: What it means to know things. And mainly, a big part of what we’re going to be getting at tonight is that it means different things to know different things. And if we kind of boil that all down to one idea, which of course is what the modern world has done for us—boiling all that down to one idea—you’re not going to have a good time, because there are going to be things that you try to know in a certain way that you can’t know that way.

Fr. Andrew: Right, just can’t get at it.

Fr. Stephen: And things that then become completely closed and unknowable to you. And that will make sense as we go on. That’s not just us playing with the word “know.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is not just a bunch of punny double-talk or whatever. The place we’re going to start with is the modern concept of knowing.

Fr. Stephen: It’s sort of the ancient parallel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the ancient parallel. To me, the characteristic phrase of the modern notion of knowing is “Studies have shown…” Whenever you hear that: “Oh, now we know that we know something, because studies have shown—whatever it might be.” We tend to think of science. Science is the way to know things in the modern world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and studies especially, as we’re going to see, are sort of a democritization of knowledge. So we sort of get to all vote. We did this study, X% said this, therefore Y. But we’ll get there.

The word that’s used for this kind of knowledge and that gets translated into English in Greek is episteme, where we get “epistemology, epistemic,” and all those related words. Episteme is sometimes even translated “science,” depending on what you’re reading, translated from Greek. And this is the kind of knowledge we major in.

But in the ancient world it was distinguished. Epistemic knowledge was knowledge of very particular things; specifically, it was things that could be demonstrated, and “demonstrated” had a particular meaning, too. It meant I could show it to you; I could prove it to you. So if I come to you and say, “Two plus two equals four,” and you say, “Nah, man, I don’t buy it. What’s all this about?” I could take two apples and put them on the table and then take two more apples and put them on the table, and I can show it to you; I can prove it to you. And so these are things you can have a certain—I was about to do a wordplay on the word “certain” [Laughter]—you can have a certain type of knowledge, and that knowledge is certain: you can be sure, because if you ever have any doubt, it can just be demonstrated to you again. You can see the proof again.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and this is the basis for the scientific method. And it’s why, for instance, if you ever read stuff that’s about the way that science actually gets practiced, there’s a number of interesting articles floating around out there about what’s called the replication crisis in the sciences, where a lot of studies that are done that no one can replicate them to get the same results as the original study that was done that supposedly… some big policy decision was based on or whatever. Because scientific method requires the ability to replicate that demonstration, and if you can’t get the same results over and over again by doing exactly the same things, then it’s not really science. So it’s not demonstrable; it’s not episteme.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is a very narrow type of knowledge in the ancient world. Most of what we would say we know does not fall into that category. So in the ancient world, history is not in that category, because you can’t—I can’t recreate and prove to you the date Napoleon was born.

Fr. Andrew: Or the political crisis of the 18th century in France. Like, you can’t run an experiment where you recreate the French Revolution.

Fr. Stephen: Or do a mathematical proof or… So all of that was outside of that, and so every other type of knowledge that you couldn’t demonstrate in that way was some form of doxa, and doxa is a noun that comes from the verb dokeo, which means to seem or to appear. And there was an ancient heresy called Docetism which was called Docetism because it was the idea that Christ only seemed to be human.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, these were some of the enemies of our old pal, St. Ignatius of Antioch.

Fr. Stephen: Right. “He looked like a man but was not actually a man” was their idea. So that’s this idea of seeming. And so doxa really conveyed that there was… it was an appearance; it was a viewpoint. It was a perspective. So based on that, anything within that realm was going to be something that you established sort of based on testimony. You would collect the testimony of people with various viewpoints on an event, a happening, an idea, and then you would sort of compile those to get a sense of it, but you could never demonstrate it; you could never prove it.

And this, by the way—to annoy a bunch of people—this is going to be one of those things—see, I’m not on Facebook any more, so I won’t have to read all the people trying to challenge this when they get upset, but Fr. Andrew will.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: The doxa in “orthodoxy” is this doxa.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s the doxa of opinion or of seeming or viewpoint or perspective.

Fr. Stephen: The right viewpoint, the right perspective, the right opinion—that’s what “orthodoxy” means. The word for “glory” is related to this, actually, because glory—you can see how the idea of glory is related to the idea of appearance.

Fr. Andrew: Or of reputation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so you can see how those are connected, but even that kind of glory isn’t connected to worship, so, folks, stop saying that “orthodoxy” means “right worship.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, now, we’re not saying that Orthodoxy, Orthodox Christianity, isn’t right worship, but it’s just not what the word means.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not what the word means, yeah, etymologically. So send your angry cards and letters to Fr. Andrew Damick, Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, I’ll take them. [Laughter] I’ll take all of them. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, doxa, this idea of a kind of knowledge that’s about testimony and about perspective… We’ll talk about why that’s sort of a problem in the modern world, and yet, inescapable. So for instance, at a court case, there’s all kinds of things on which the basis of judgments are made and verdicts handed down that are simply based on someone’s perspective. Now, they usually try to get multiple witnesses to say essentially the same thing, but it can’t be demonstrated. You can’t do a scientific experiment to show someone killing someone else, or something like that. Now, you might have evidence for it, but that’s not the same thing. It can’t be replicated. All you have is these things that indicated that it did happen, but it’s still not a demonstration in the same way.

Fr. Stephen: And this, if you’ve watched a court show, just about any court show, you’ve seen this dynamic play out. Because they’ll call some expert witness who will give the scientific testimony about the car accident, like “we can tell from the skid marks that the car was going this fast, in this direction, and here’s how all the physics works, here’s how all this stuff…” And the defense attorney will get up and say, “Well, is it also possible that this other thing happened? Is it possible that it actually went this other way, or are you just saying that it’s completely mathematically demonstrable that it happened this one way?” And the witness will admit, “Well, no, it could have happened this other way,” and then, oh! there goes the whole case, roll credits on the show: the guy’s innocent.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because even if you’re bringing scientific evidence into something, it still has to be curated by people, who then deliver a doxa about what it is that they saw.

Fr. Stephen: Right: “Here’s how the data seems to me.”

Fr. Andrew: It seems, right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “That I’m looking over. Here’s how I interpret the data.”

And we have a clear idea of this. Like, I don’t think anything we just said about data having to be interpreted would be controversial, but some of our friends 150 years ago approached things a little differently, especially in Germany.

Fr. Andrew: Is this 19th century German scholars again? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is 19th century Germany, and it bled out all over everywhere.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a Bingo sheet somewhere that just got crossed off.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s all about the Wissenschaft. [Laughter]

They wanted—they were very keen—they still had that head-rush from the Enlightenment going, and they were very keen that all of human knowledge could come to be sort of scientifically established. So that means we can make everything a science. You get the idea of political science—not politics, the way Aristotle did it. When Aristotle wrote his Politics, he went and got the constitutions of Athens and a whole bunch of other cities and compared them, evaluated them and interpreted that data. He was not claiming to have some kind of mathematical science. But, no, we’re going to do political science now. And history, as we’ve talked about before, was seen in this positivist sense, as a science.

And just to take another shot at Hodge at old Princeton, you read the preface to his Systematic Theology, and he directly says you go to the Bible and you get the data—you get these logical propositions: you get proposition A, proposition B—you use your logic: A, B, therefore C; C, D, therefore E—you construct these logical trains. So for Hodge, his 19th century Presbyterian, American Calvinism was as firmly established as the laws of physics, and just as demonstrable.

And now we look at that and kind of laugh—or at least I do—but that was the idea. And those ideas still bleed through a lot. There are still a lot of people among us with that Enlightenment head-rush still going on. You get these “I’m an atheist; I only believe in science” folks who want to come and tell you that Jesus never existed, because there’s no evidence, because they’re trying to do history by way of science.

Fr. Andrew: And the problem of course is that it’s a reduction in terms of what human knowledge can be. If you say that something is an opinion or “it seems to me,” in our modern parlance, that’s immediately suspect. “Oh, well, that’s just your opinion.” But the problem is that we have ruled out that as being a valid way of knowing things without actually, ironically, demonstrating that it’s always wrong. There’s some kinds of things that you can’t know through demonstrable, repeatable, mathematical means, and history is the classical example.

If we were going to try to use positivistic methods on history, we’d basically have to chuck out pretty much all history that’s ever been written, because all history that’s ever been written requires interpretation, it requires relying on testimonies—all these things that can’t be shown in those ways. So if we’re going to be truly consistent and say that we only believe in things that are truly demonstrable in this kind of mathematical, scientific-method kind of way, then we have to throw out a whole lot of human knowledge, culture, all kinds of things.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not actually congruent with human experience. Human experience knows that there’s ways of knowing that are not about these sort of scientific processes. We’re not putting down science by any means—it is a valid way of knowing things that you can know by it—but it doesn’t give you knowledge of everything; it can’t. The difference— The shift that occurred is that this idea of the doxa, the things that are based on perspective and testimony, in the ancient world were regarded as just as much knowledge. Now, you treat them in a different way than you do demonstrable knowledge, but it is still a kind of knowledge that can only be gotten in certain ways that can’t be gotten through mathematical or scientific kinds of means.

So, yeah, that’s the problem, that we now have this idea that “that’s not real knowledge,” except in certain limited kinds of frames, like a courtroom is another one, is a great example like we gave before. You can’t very well have a trial without testimony, if it’s about anything really important. So we accept that. But in our daily lives, we accept it. Someone says something to you about something else. Do you say, “Well, you have to show that to me. You have to demonstrate it for me.” But there’s some things that can’t be demonstrated. It just can’t.

Fr. Stephen: No one lives their life that way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s no way.

Fr. Stephen: Like you don’t go and master mechanical engineering before you get in your car and start it because you want to make sure it’s safe, and you have to have it all laid out for you, exactly the safety structures and the tensile strength of the panels of the car… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Or do stress tests of the road that you’re about to drive on, every foot of it. It becomes… And the problem is that we severely limit our ability to know things because we, in certain cases, will cut off that kind of knowing, because it doesn’t adhere to the criteria of the scientific method. That’s the problem.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what you had in the ancient world, to borrow a turn of phrase from Plato, that he used all the time, is, based on testimony, you construct “the likely story.” Based on everything, this is most likely, in history, this is mostly what happened, or this is most likely how this works. You have developed a certain amount of faith in your motor vehicle, so when you go out to start it, you think that it is likely that it is going to start and it is going to successfully get you to where you’re going.

So the idea is that, rather than having an experiment, where you reconstruct, repeat something and demonstrate it again, you talk about explanatory power, meaning: I have this idea, I have this hypothesis, I have this theory about life, I have this belief, and I evaluate it based on how well it explains things, how well it explains the details. So I have a belief that my wife loves me. If she did certain things, like if she went and cheated on me, I would take that data and say, “Well, my belief can’t accommodate that data, or at least it makes it difficult, at least I have to adapt my belief to fit this new data.” That’s how we actually all operate most of the time in real life. [Laughter] We have a belief, and then we adjust it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, with the example of if your wife loves you, if you’re going to take the purely materialist, scientific-method way of asking that question, the only question it could answer is whether or not certain kinds of biochemical processes might be observable under certain circumstances. Does her brain do a certain thing when she thinks about you or sees you in all of your glory when you wake up in the morning? [Laughter] No pun on “glory” there—actually, let’s just go ahead and I’ll accept that pun.

But it’s a question that can’t be answered. And then the trap is to go full materialist and say: It’s not a question that’s worth even asking. Like, there’s no such thing as love.

Fr. Stephen: Or you can never know.

Fr. Andrew: Or you can never know, because it’s not something that we can observe by demonstrable, repeatable processes. And it creates all kinds of problems, like there could be interpersonal issues, like “prove it to me, prove it to me,” or even on a cultural level. It’s interesting, for instance, right now, within the past, especially I would say, at least 20 years—at least this is how I remember it—how much kind of personal testimonies have become really important in politics. A politician will bring up someone with a story and put it in front of everyone, and then that’s designed to elicit certain kinds of responses, emotional responses typically. And then, based on that, to make certain kinds of policy decisions and so forth.

And what’s interesting is to watch the tension over that, because on the one hand, people will say, “Yes, this is what’s really going on,” and so there’s this sense of: “Okay, I accept this idea of testimony.” But on the other hand, then, you will get people who will say, “Well, that’s just one person’s story. That one person doesn’t establish a trend,” in other words, trying to push it back towards that kind of scientific approach. I would say that the solution to this is not to push hard in one direction or the other, but rather to recover a robust sense of, as you said, the likely story, as Aristotle puts is. So it is true that one person’s difficult story is not something on which the basis of governmental policy should be made, because maybe that person’s problem can be solved in some way that doesn’t involve passing a law that changes everybody’s lives. But seeing what a whole mass of people are doing, for instance, or whatever… Yeah, it’s interesting the kinds of pathologies that this puts into a society, where, on the one hand, testimony is the only thing that some people will believe, and on the other hand, it’s never believable because I don’t… it appeals to emotion or whatever, are irrelevant: we shouldn’t think about that.

And then of course, it can all be used very, very cynically, in a very manipulative way as well. For any mode of knowing, there are ways to turn it dark, for sure.

Fr. Stephen: And part of it is that what we call post-modernism, like post-structuralism, emerges as the backlash against those 19th century Germans. So it’s: We thought we can know all these things scientifically, and, lo and behold, duh, you can’t know all these things scientifically. So rather than going back to the pre-modern position, it’s: Well, no, you can’t know those things at all, then. The only things you can know are this small scientific subset, and everything else you can’t know at all; everything else is just opinion, and therefore all opinions are equally valid: all perspectives are equally valid. So the opposite extreme.

So to make clear to people—because I know sometimes people worry that this is where we’re going—this is not where we’re going. The rest of tonight is going to be about the way that we know—and truly know, just as much as you know those scientific things, you can truly know all those other things; you just know them a different way, not in the same way.

Fr. Andrew: Nowadays, we have this notion of objective knowledge versus subjective knowledge, and objective is this demonstrable stuff and subjective means everything else, and that means it can be dismissed: “Well, that’s just subjective.” But in the ancient concepts—and we’re going to get to this after a break we’re going to take in a moment here—there’s actually multiple ways of coming upon objective knowledge, but it’s just received in different ways; it’s known in different ways. It’s just a much more complex and rich picture, which is great! We don’t have to live a world where everything is either fact according to a certain set of narrow requirements, or “Enh, it’s just somebody’s opinion.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, yeah, to go a little deeper into that, the way we use objective and subjective is completely wrong. [Laughter] You have never known anything objectively. No one, no human has, because the subject is you and the object is the thing—and I’m using “thing” here broadly to mean “other person” or “object” or “animal” or “plant” or “the world” or whatever—or “God.” For you to know it objectively would have to mean that there was no subject involved: you cease to exist. You know the object as the object knows itself.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: You know the essence of the other person or of the thing or of God—not going to happen. So there is always a subject. There is always a viewpoint in all knowledge that you will ever have, because you are finite. So you are always there as the subject. You are always approaching the object.

Now, there are different types of objects—and this is a lot of what we’re going to be talking about tonight. So there are different types of objects, and objects present themselves and reveal themselves to you in various ways, so that the things we’re talking about here—so it isn’t strictly objective versus subjective; it’s different types of objects, and the objects we’re talking about here in scientific knowledge are a certain type of object that very much reveals itself to you. This is part of what—I know certain listeners aren’t big fans of phenomenology, but, sorry, here’s some Heidegger—the brute facticity of reality.

These are things that impose themselves on you, like two plus two equals four. You can’t deny that that’s true. I mean, you could verbally do that, but you can’t really make your brain think that two plus two equals five; you can’t do it. It impresses itself upon you. So those are the types of objects—there are certain objects like that that impress themselves upon you, that reveal themselves to you almost of their own volition, even though this is an ancient use of “volition,” but not one we use any more, because we think of that as man making choices, but they impress themselves upon you in that way and reveal themselves in that way. So we know those scientifically. That’s why we can so easily demonstrate them, because they sort of impose themselves upon us.

Other things we come to know differently because they’re different objects and they do not reveal themselves to us in the same way. My wife—to use her again, which I’m sure will make her overjoyed when she hears this eventually [Laughter]—as another human does not reveal herself to me in this scientific way. When I encounter her and interact with her, I am not receiving a bunch of data about her exact height and dimensions and the details of these various scientific things. That’s not how, mathematically… That’s not how she presents herself to me; that’s not how I interact with her as an object in the world. That is how I interact with numbers and shapes, that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that said, we’re going to come right back in a few minutes, and we’re going to talk about the various ways and kinds of things that can be known, and we’ll start to take your calls. So we’re going to go ahead and go to break, and we’ll be right back in a second!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Voice of Steve! I feel like I just saw you. Welcome back, everybody. Before we start talking about the various ways of knowing things, we’re going to take one of your calls. I believe we have James on the line? James, are you there?

James: I am, thank you, Father.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, James, to The Lord of Spirits. What’s on your mind? Are you there, James? Oh, I think we lost him.

Fr. Stephen: Noooo!

Fr. Andrew: Noooo! Wow, he was just there. He was just there!

Fr. Stephen: And you had that “mind” pun, like, perfectly lined up there and everything.

Fr. Andrew: I know! Yeah. James, are you back? James, are you there now? Um, okay, well, he looks like he’s on the caller board, but… I’m going to try one more time. James, can you hear us? All right, well, hopefully James can call back, and we’ll hear from him at another time.

Fr. Stephen: This time we’ll Boomer it up a little bit less on the technology to answer your question.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I know. I thought that “What’s on your mind?” joke was a really good one. All right, okay, I’m just being told to try again. James, are you there yet? Oh man. All right. It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: Live radio, everybody!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it is! Yes, it is. So, okay, there’s lots of different ways of knowing, so let’s just start rolling through our kind of catalogue here. The first one that we have is about moral reasoning. I mean, is that really a way of knowing, or isn’t that just a way of arranging the facts and figuring out the thing to do? So what’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, moral reasoning, or sometimes if you’re using old… The Greek term here would be phronesis, which is sometimes, in your old English translations—not Old English, but older English translations…

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: ...translated as “prudence.” “Dear Prudence…” And this is, in the Old Testament in particular, the kind of knowledge we’re talking about when we talking about, for example, the knowledge of good and evil, knowing good and evil.

Fr. Andrew: So like in Genesis 3, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and other places, notably a little bit of an expanded version shows up in Isaiah 7, which is knowing to choose good and shun evil.

Fr. Andrew: Right, in that prophecy about… Isn’t that the prophecy about the birth of Christ? And other things.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. We won’t go down that particular rabbit-hole. [Laughter] We’ll save that for a future Christmas episode.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, right. And I’ll get to say, “Maher-shalal-hash-baz.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, all right.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, thank you! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I still prefer Cushan-rishathaim from [Aram]-Naharaim, but that’s just me, in terms of biblical Old Testament names.

When you take it in that context of knowing to choose the good and shun the evil, that kind of puts it in perspective, because we tend to think of moral reasoning, as modern folks, as “I’m facing this ethical dilemma. I have these options. Which one is the good option? Can there be more than one good option? Are they all bad options? If they’re all bad options, which one do I choose?” And this is not really the perspective of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about most of the ancient world and in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, and even… I’m a father of four children, and part of parenting—a major part of parenting; most of parenting, maybe?—is teaching right and wrong. As you watch children especially make the wrong choice—but, God willing, sometimes the right choice, hopefully more often than not—it’s never… it’s almost never “oh, I have this problem and I need to figure out the right thing and the wrong thing to do”; it’s instantaneous most of the time. There’s just this movement in a particular direction.

Human beings tend to move in the wrong direction, over and over again, until gradually trained to move in the right direction. Then it becomes like a second nature. It becomes the thing that you want to do, that you don’t have to sit down and: “Okay, is this the right thing? Is that the right thing? Is this better than that?” kind of cost-benefit analysis. I mean, we do make decisions like that sometimes, but the vast majority of the decisions we make are not made that way, and we don’t even have a conscious sense that we’re making a decision. It’s not like if one of my family members says something and I get angry that I thought to myself, “Okay, they just said this thing. What shall I do now? I think I’ll get angry. That seems like the right thing.” That’s not the way that it actually works! There’s a sort of movement in that direction.

So, like you said, it’s about knowing how to choose the good and to shun evil, but it’s not… it’s almost never a deliberative process. It’s much more: What are you trained to do? What is it that you have been formed to do? So, yeah, it does have this connection very much to nature, but often it’s skewed.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you’re moving towards something and away from something else. It’s that kind of choice: you’re moving towards something and away from something else by these choices. Yeah, this is the number-one thing on those rare occasions when I’m asked to talk to teens, which really isn’t a good idea, because I’m like, “Hello, fellow kids!” [Laughter] But the one piece of hopefully good advice I try to give them is that there’s a person who God wants them to be and who they want to be when they’re 40, and if they look at the decisions and things that they’re called to make now, in terms of “Will this help me get there and become that person, or will this make it more difficult for me to get there and become that person?” When you think about it in that context, a lot of those choices become clear, that there are some of them that are not going to help you get to that point, and there are other things that are. So this points out that the kind of reasoning we’re talking about here with moral reasoning is not about ends; it’s about means. There’s an end we’re trying to get to, and we’re trying to figure out the means: what will get us there.

And you see this sort of classically when the devil, the serpent, is talking to Eve, and says, “No, if you eat the fruit, you’ll become like God, knowing good and evil.” So Eve wants to become like God. God has a way for her to become like him; it’s not eating the tree. It’s her then taking this other means, her seizing this other means to try to get to that end.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and likewise, to bring it back to the parenting analogy, or example, really: I want my children, for instance, to be respectful to their mother. That’s the appropriate thing for them to do. They’re being disrespectful: I could yell at them to be respectful to her. I could threaten them. Those are means towards that end. Or I could train them by showing them what it’s like to be respectful to her, by helping them restrain themselves when they’re being disrespectful. The truth is that I want the same thing at the end, but there’s one means that’s actually going to get me—there might actually be more than one. There are means that will help me get there, and there are means that feel right in the moment that are not going to help me get there. What I would be teaching them by threatening them or yelling at them is: You should be afraid of your dad. That’s the end that will come from those means.

Fr. Stephen: And your kids do love their mother. Like, they actually do love her and want her to be happy and want to honor and respect her. They just don’t always know how to do that. They just don’t always know how to get there.

So this is then tied directly into, for us, human nature, the directedness of our being, the purpose for which humans were created, which is to become like God. That’s what humanity is created for, what we call theosis. So when we sin, pretty much all sin—and this is where the Orthodox understanding of sin as the passions comes from—all of these sins are ways that humans try to become like God or become God or set themselves up as gods, apart from actually coming to know God. They are these other attempts, whether it’s pride, just elevating your own ego to that point; whether it’s amassing wealth and power; whether it’s becoming beloved by other people; whether it’s through pleasures of the body of various kinds; whether it’s trying to become immortal in some sense, to stave off death—but trying to do it under our own means, by our own power.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the exact… We’re reaching for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, once again. We’re grabbing for the fruit rather than doing what is needed to be ready for the fruit.

I’ve been having conversations with friends lately, especially with people who do ministry in a way that puts them in the public eye, and one of the observations that I think is really, really apt is that if someone’s sort of success outpaces their character, then they’re probably doomed for some kind of spectacular fall. You know, it’s exactly this kind of thing. If someone’s not ready for, for instance, being well-known, or whatever it might be, then it will destroy them. They’re reaching for, as you said, they’re reaching towards godhood, towards being like God, but they’re actually reaching in the wrong direction, and so they end up becoming demonic instead.

As you mentioned, this is the basis for our ascetical theology about redirecting the passions. The desire, for instance, for immortality, is a good desire! The desire for love is a good desire. I mean, these are good desires, but when we try to short-circuit the way that God has given us to arrive at those things, then it becomes very dark and can be very harmful to other people and definitely harmful to ourselves.

And it’s interesting how much literature is based on this idea, that the quick path, the easy path, the path to instant power or celebrity or whatever is the destructive one. But what’s funny is that, while these are the stories that we’re telling each other, the stories that we’re selling each other—“Get rich quick! Take this pill; it’s going to change everything! Solve this problem with this one weird trick!”—it’s funny: we do both things at the same time, and we wonder why we’re so sort of conflicted and function in this kind of… like a multiple-personality disorder sort of way. We’re very fragmented.

I mean, I think that’s why good stories are so important, because they help to form the taste of the person. Like, to me, one of the most important things—I know I keep coming back to parenting, but I think this is so… when we’re talking about moral reasoning, I think it’s a great place of application. One of the things that’s so important in my family is to give our children really good stories to read so that they have a sense of what it means to choose the good and what it means to shun the evil, and what happens when you do those things. So that when they then encounter a situation that’s analogous in some way, that the narrative that they have in their mind is a good one, and then they live into that narrative, having already been formed by that.

There’s so many ways that this is applicable, and I think the beauty of it is that, by seeing clearly what it is we’re trying to attain to, and knowing that there is a way given to us to attain it, then it becomes—I don’t want to say easier, but at least it becomes clearer how we should live, because so many people: “I tried this, I tried this, I tried this, but I’m still not happy, I’m still not content, I’m still not at peace,” or whatever it might be: “I’m still not satisfied.” Well of course not, because those things can’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they can’t actually make you like God. And that end, that purpose, that telos is built into us. It’s built into every human; you can’t get rid of it. We can deliberate over the means, but the end is just there and just built-in; it’s constituitive to us.

So, yeah, that can go dark places. You can have a guy like Lamech at the end of Cain’s genealogy. And what were human beings built for? How do human beings become like God? Well, continuing God’s act of creation, of putting the world in order and filling it with life. So what does Lamech do? Well, he puts the world in order, all right, by going out and murdering everybody who opposes him and becoming a tyrant and dominating everything. And then he’s fertile, all right—he’s got multiple wives whom he sings a song to about how great he is, by means of seducing them further.

That’s how he’s presented in the Scriptures. So these things can turn bad. And in that boasting, what does he say? “God said he was going to avenge Cain sevenfold; we’ll I avenge myself on my enemies seven times sevenfold.” So, again, setting himself up, again, as not only like God, but better, in that sort of dark and twisted way.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, yes. So the question with moral reasoning—“How do I become like God?”—there are the ways that he gives us to get there, and there’s lots of bad ways to get there that don’t actually get you there.

All right, well, there’s some more ways to know things, but before we move to the next one, God willing, James has gotten back in touch with us. So, James, are you there?

James: I am, Father.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Speak to us, James! Speak to us! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Quickly!

James: Before I lose touch again, yes! So I’ve been thinking about the nous and our spiritual body in similar terms, like with the episode on Hades and the mountain of God being richly present in the liturgy and the tabernacle, etc. So I was thinking of it in context of you talk about the nous or heart being sort of where our physical heart is. When I read some of the stuff on hesychasm, they’ll say you want your awareness to be with your heard, and don’t let it drift lower, because that’s where the passions reside. I was wondering if there was a similar idea, where there’s a ritual intersection with the spiritual location of our passions, lower in our bowels, and then our heart, our nous, higher up, closer above our heart. So I was wondering if I was on the right track with that.

And then, as a coach, I work with personality a lot, and I’ve always wondered: Where does personality fit into all of this?

Fr. Andrew: You know, on that first question, it’s interesting if you read pre-modern literature, there’s various ages where the concept of where the seat of emotion is moves around in terms of the way that it’s conceived in the body. Like in the modern world, we tend to think that emotions are in the hearts; you feel things in your heart. But there’s a lot of medieval text where you feel them in your kidneys; that’s where the feelings are. And of course as you move around to different parts of the anatomy, there’s all kinds of jokes you could make about where the real center of the human person is.

But, yeah, I’m not an expert on this kind of ascetical literature about the mind descending into the heart, but I do think as this episode proceeds and we… You know, this is classic Lord of Spirits: we don’t ever start where we say what we’re going to talk about, the nous, you know. But I think it will become clearer as we go, but we don’t want to leave you totally hanging since you finally did get through, God bless you. [Laughter] I think part of the idea of the mind and the heart is it’s really about focus for what it is you’re taking into yourself. Even though there’s not… I don’t think, and, I don’t know, Father, you can correct me if I’m wrong with this—I don’t think that you can pinpoint parts of the material anatomy of the human person as being sort of specifically linked to these spiritual realities, that they’re more— I don’t know. I would say that they’re more metaphorical for a spiritual reality that is going on. So if someone doesn’t have their kidneys any more…

Fr. Stephen: Um, actually…

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, if someone doesn’t have their kidneys any more, does that mean that they can’t feel? I don’t know. Yeah, save me, Father. But I mean, I get the basic sense from the ascetical literature, but I’m not sure that I would pair it up with particular organs, material organs. So “um, actually…” me, yeah, please!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I’m going to “um, actually…” you a little bit. But I’m also going to be an even worse tease, but we’re really going to get into this in two weeks, on our next episode of Lord of Spirits.

James: Aw man! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Got to keep you coming back for more, James.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there is—there is—materiality and spirituality to everything, because spirit and matter are not actually separate.

James: I kind of get it.

Fr. Andrew: But can we peg these things to specific organs? That’s what I was sort of…

Fr. Stephen: Sort of.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of, okay. Whew.

Fr. Stephen: So those chemicals in your brain when you see someone you love are not unrelated to love. Love is not reducible to that, but they’re not unrelated and separate either. So there are… Yeah, you can’t try and… In Greek the word for “compassion” is built around the word for “spleen.” So, like when you read in the gospels that Christ had compassion for someone, it literally says in the Greek that he spleened at them. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That is amazing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you can’t like… Yeah, you can’t do it that directly, but there is a physiological reality to all of these spiritual things.

James: Life is in the heart, and also like the breath of life, and the heart does literally carry oxygen to our bodies. There’s a physical corollary to that spiritual reality, same kind of thing?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve all seen and known someone, at some point in our life, where we’ve seen someone who has fallen deeply into sin—and they look different.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Like physically, physiologically, they start to look different. And we’ve known people who have repented, who, in the opposite direction, started to look different. And that’s that… Again, there is no separation between spirit and matter; that these things are always connected and permeate each other and go both ways. But we’re going to talk about that a lot more—in two weeks! On the next Lord of Spirits. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay, does that help at least a little bit there, James?

James: Yeah, it does help a lot! Will the personality aspect also be touched on in that episode, or does that fit more with this one? Because I thought that personality as a lens of perception, so that kind of, how we perceive the world through this lens is sort of an identity like a lot of people seem to say. It might fit this episode more as far as how we perceive truth.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re not going to get into that next time, for sure. So the modern concept of personality includes a lot of things. [Laughter] And, yeah, so it includes things like habits and patterns of behavior. It includes learned responses, and it includes all of these kinds of things. But then it also, like you mentioned, includes ideas of identity, and that’s kind of a rabbit-hole. We will get to this in a future episode, but the way we think about identity in the modern… in our world today, as the contemporary world—I shouldn’t say “modern” in this case. In the contemporary world, we think of identity as “identity is what sets me apart from all the other people and makes me different.” And identity in the ancient world was the exact opposite.

Identity was like an onion or an ogre—it had layers. [Laughter] It was these layers of belonging, so it was: your family and your trade guild and the city and place you were from. This is why we know all these people. Everybody refers to Thomas Aquinas as “Aquinas.” That’s not his name! That’s the city he’s from. You’re calling him “of Aquino.” [Laughter] But we read that as if it’s a last name, and many of the saints have the place where they’re from—because that’s part of their identity. The community they’re part of and where they’re from: that’s part of who they are. So identity in the ancient world was composed of all of these things. They were all of the things that connected you to other people and places and realities and things.

So, yeah, there’s… We have kind of an inverted sense of identity, and I think that affects how we view personality, too. We tend to view personality as personality’s what sets this person apart from other similar people, rather than seeing it in that context. Going further into that might be too much rabbit-hole for this episode. [Laughter]

James: Yes, that gives me an appetite for future episodes.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Well, thanks very much for calling, James. We’re glad you finally got through.

Well, we have another caller, and we have a question from Troy. So, Troy, what is on your mind?

Troy: Hello, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yep, we hear you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, sir.

Troy: Oh, great. Thank you for having me on. My question is… So when you were talking earlier, since we are subjects who don’t have access to the objects of knowledge, does that mean that there’s a similar distinction in how we know other people or angels to the essence-energies distinction with how we know God?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes! I recall—and we don’t leave it at that, although it’s always great to get one of those monosyllabic yeses from Fr. Stephen, or the no is very good as well. But I recall when I was in seminary and we were talking about this question of essence and energies, that Dr. Boosalis, who was the patristics professor at St. Tikhon’s at the time—great professor—he… Someone said, “Wait, wait, wait,” because we were talking about anthropology, human beings, and someone said, “Wait, wait, wait, so you’re saying God in his essence is unknowable, but he’s knowable in his energies. Okay, and human beings it’s the same? Essence unknowable, energies knowable?” And he gave just like Fr. Stephen: “Yes.”

But think about that, right? You don’t know… This takes us back in some ways: You don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. You don’t know what it’s like to be another person. You can’t know that person in their essence. You can’t even know their experience of themselves. All you know is your interactions with them. You know the way they look; you know the way that they sound; you know what they have said to you and done to you, done with you; you know what their reputation is—all of these things are a part of that. Now, you wouldn’t say, because you don’t know what it’s like to be that other person, that you don’t know them. You do know them, but it’s the kind of knowing that you have. It’s the knowing that you participate in. You can’t know anything… Because only God knows things in their essences. You can’t even really know your own essence. You know what it’s like to be you, but God knows you on a level that you don’t even know yourself.

So, yeah, it’s true that human beings likewise are participable in their energies, but their essence is off-limits, not accessible. Any “um, actually…“s there, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: No, that is great, yeah. You don’t know what it’s like to be a bat or a tree, or a raven or a writing-desk.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, thank you. Lewis Carroll. [Laughter] All right, does that make sense, Troy?

Troy: Yes, thank you. That’s very helpful. Thank you, Fathers!

Fr. Andrew: Great. Excellent.

Fr. Stephen: You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. [Laughter] So, moving on, we’ve got another kind of knowledge, and this is one that should be very, very familiar to modern people, and that’s what in ancient Greek was called techne, but we could translate it as “know-how.” And it’s the origin of our modern English word, “technique.”

Fr. Stephen: And also technology, though people jump to what we call technology a little too quickly. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: A little too quickly, right. It could be like: I know how to work… I know how to drive my car. It doesn’t mean I’m a computer scientist or an engineer or whatever. Or I know how to brush my teeth. These are the… It’s this. I know how to—whatever it might be. It does connect with technology, but it’s about…

Fr. Stephen: Right, we use “technology” to refer to digital technology, and I’m sorry to any Amish people who might be somehow listening to internet radio—I guess I don’t have to apologize—but everything is technology. The buggy was technology—was high technology at one point.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, human activity. The things that we make.

Fr. Stephen: Buttons on your coat were technology at one point. The coat. Slacks. [Laughter] These were all… At one point, these were all technological innovations.

Fr. Andrew: This has come up a lot for Lord of Spirits listeners, because of course we talk about the dark gift of techne to Cain and other people throughout time that were given this knowledge by demons. So occasionally we get this question, like, okay, which kinds of technology are demon-technology? The idea that we shouldn’t touch that because that came from demons! So it’s very much an ongoing concern. [Laughter] So this will be an opportunity to kind of talk about that a little bit more.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because… And now this kind of techne expands even beyond even those examples I just gave of technology, because we’re also including with this things like handicrafts and sculpting and art—

Fr. Andrew: Poetry, music!

Fr. Stephen: —and poetry and music; and all of this sort of human creative activity: taking the things that exist in the creation and putting them in order and putting them to purpose.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so for all you Tolkien fans out there, his term for this is “subcreation,” because human beings can’t truly create, that is, we can’t make something out of nothing; all we can do is take what God has created and put it into a new order. So God made the things that we can make paints out of, we make paints out of them, and then use those paints to… paint icons. So, yes, icons are man-made, but it is… They are subcreated. They are not truly, truly created.

And the reason that we do that— I mean, this is inherently a good thing; we’re made in the image of a Maker, in whose likeness we are made. So we are made to be makers. We’re made to make stuff. It’s a good impulse that we have to want to do this. Now, the knowledge itself—knowing how to make a chair: is that good or evil? It’s knowing how to make a chair. Well, what do you do with a chair? That might be good or evil. But it’s not inherently good or evil; this is simply knowledge. Now, what you do with it—for instance, when demons give technology to mankind at various points, they do it in such a way that they know that we’ll harm ourselves with it. Like matches are a good thing—they’re a useful item—but I’m not going to give them to my four-year-old. It’s not appropriate for him to have matches. Now, my 14-year-old, if I give her matches and to light a candle, then she has done a good thing with the morally neutral knowledge that I gave her, that she did a good thing by obeying her father by making light.

So that’s what we’re talking about, and this is— In the classical world, in the ancient world, this is a kind of knowing: knowing how to do things. This is knowledge.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as you said it’s morally ambivalent, “ambivalent” meaning ambi-valent: it can go either way. You can take any of these arts or any of these crafts and use them to do good or use them to do evil. You can make a scythe to help you harvest crops; you can turn that into a sword and use it to kill people. You can make the first two Pearl Jam albums; you can make Nickelback albums or record as your alter-ego Chris Gaines and create abominations. [Laughter] Any of these things can be taken in either direction, at any point.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, I just wondered if you were going to work in the Nickelback reference. That’s great.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I was. And people get mad when I take cheap shots at Garth Brooks, so I threw that in, too.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. This is how you remind us who we really are.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I know they won a bunch of Canadian awards, but that’s low-hanging fruit. Come on. Don’t come at me with that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! Don’t at me for what he just said, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] What are the Canadians going to do? They’re going to be friendly about it; they’re going to be kind about it—they’re good people. They’re good people.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. We love you, Canadians. You have many great qualities.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so this can go either way, and that’s why there is that danger of giving it to someone who is not prepared to execute that moral reasoning. And that’s what’s going on with the fallen angelic beings and Cain’s line. They’re giving them metallurgy not so they could make tools to help them produce more crops to feed more people and prosper on the earth; they’re giving it to them so they can make weapons and kill each other.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or likewise music. Music can be used to make something beautiful that lifts the person towards God, but it can be used for seduction. I mean, not so much these days, but in certain times music was used to rile people up to do… to make war! I recall in some of the wars between the English and the Scots, the English actually declared the great Highland war pipes to be weapons, which, as a lover of bagpipes, I’m both sort of delighted by that and also slightly appalled. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I do sometimes feel victimized by bagpipe music, I must say, so there is something to that. [Laughter]

But this is a legitimate type of knowledge.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right.

Fr. Stephen: This is a legitimate type of knowledge. Jonathan Pageau knows things about working with wood—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and stone.

Fr. Stephen: —that I do not know. That craft is something which he possesses, and it’s a kind of knowledge and a relationship with those objects in the world that he has, where those objects in the world reveal themselves to him in a different way than they do to me.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is arts and crafts, also artisans and craftsmen. This is making things. And there are people—I’m sure some of you listeners are really great at making things, and some of you are not so great at making things. I’m on the not-so-great-at-making-things line, at least in terms of what people might normally think of as art. I made podcasts.

Fr. Stephen: I think you could make a lovely kind of macaroni picture, for a Father’s Day thing or a Mother’s Day thing. That seems up your alley to me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That… I’ll have to try that.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. And the main reason I mentioned Pageau there was, again, I’m trying to get back in with the Canadians after my flame war.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. After William Shatner—he is the world’s greatest Canadian, possibly. What do you think?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there we go. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, definitely the greatest Jewish Canadian. Number two, Leonard Cohen, just for the record.

So this brings us to our penultimate way of knowing, which is wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s great that we just mentioned Jonathan Pageau, because this will really appeal to the Pageauvians out there, this section of the podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s almost like I planned a segue.

Fr. Andrew: It might well have been. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and in Greek this is sophia. In Hebrew this is a whole bunch of words for variations on wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which was news to me. I mean, do they have shades of meaning that are different from each other?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but they’re shades. I think this is sort of the indigenous people in Alaska and Canada have, what, seven or nine words for snow kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, although some of that is urban legend.

Fr. Stephen: Early Semitic languages have all these different words for variations of wisdom. One of my favorite, which is khakham… Sometimes I think Hebrew should be Flemish, really, based on… They have six consonants that make roughly the sound khkh, so.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so wisdom is—and here’s where all the Pageauvians will love this—wisdom is the patterns built into the creation.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, wisdom is knowing them, discerning them.

Fr. Andrew: Knowing them, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Perceiving them. That there are… within the created order. And as we talked about, God creates by setting things in order. That’s what the creation story in Genesis 1 is. So since he creates by setting things in order, that ordering is perceptible to us, in varying degrees. But that way of knowing, that way of perceiving it, that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about wisdom. And that order built into creation is also connected to the idea of justice, which is why wisdom and justice are always kind of aligned in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Now, would this be the kind of thing, like, for instance, astronomical observations or ecological? Is it even on that level?

Fr. Stephen: Right, all of that. That’s why in Proverbs you get the: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard!” which famously inspired Henry Pym to become Ant-man. So you look at ants, and you perceive something. Or when Christ says, “Consider the lilies of the field; consider the birds of the air,” it’s pointing to these patterns in the created order, and then revealing them about the way in which… If the whole creation is ordered in this way, then that also applies to humans and human life and the human soul and the order that should be reflected there as well. It goes downwards in that way, and then it also goes upwards back toward God who put the order there.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and understanding it in this way is much deeper than the kind of… this sort of “proof” that’s sometimes given about the fact that God exists. “Oh, look at the creation! Look how beautiful that is! That must have been made by somebody.” Like, that’s true… That’s true; of course it’s true, but there’s something much deeper there that’s related to real attention being paid to what’s going on in creation, a much deeper sense of that than just kind of an aesthetic appreciation for what you see and hear and smell and so forth. So the wisdom, the logic of creation itself is something that’s knowable and worth knowing and does lead you to God. I mean, this is the idea that the stars preach the Gospel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you see this in both Romans 1. In Romans 1, where St. Paul is talking to the Gentiles about how they had knowledge of God before the Gospel came to them, when he talks about the “invisible attributes” (it’s usually translated in English) of God were made plain in the created order, in the creation; that they could have looked with wisdom and discerned those patterns and come to understand who God was. And then also in Romans 10, where he’s talking about, again, how they could have known the Gospel before the Gospel came to them, by saying that, as we talked about back in our Christmas astrology episode, that that was written in the stars of the heavens, that these patterns were there for wisdom to discern.

And in those passages in Proverbs and elsewhere in the Wisdom literature in the Old Testament where Christ is identified as Wisdom, it’s always in tandem with his involvement in creation, so that the second Person of Yahweh the God of Israel is involved in creation and is serving this function of wisdom, and this then gets developed through St. John’s use of “Logos” in the prologue of his gospel into what we see later in patristic theology, St. Maximus the Confessor being Exhibit A of the idea of Christ as Logos, and then the logia of creation: the sort of structures, the patterns, the order in creation that leads back to the Logos.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I’ve read some of those passages from St. Maximus, and I see people talk about them a lot on the internet. A lot of it’s kind of bewildering. I’ve seen a lot of weird things that are said about them. I don’t know, could you give a brief summary of what he’s— I mean, really, just—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Just to lay this out, because it’s one of the things that gets talked about all the time, or at least in the stuff that I read, but could be—I don’t know, can seem very esoteric, like “each thing has a logos in it.” What is that? Is that some kind of mystical diamond that everyone’s carrying around?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not the essence. So you start with Christ. Christ is the Logos Theou: he’s the Logos of God. He’s the Logos of God. So that’s setting up a paradigm of the relationship. So he is how God reveals himself to creation. We don’t come to know God the Father directly. We come to know Christ; we come to know the Logos, and through him we come to know the Father.

So the logoi or the logia in all created things are that capacity in which… It’s coming at… I was using the phenomenological language of the way objects in the world present themselves to us. This is coming at it the other way. This is the element of the objects in the world that is accessible to our knowledge. So it’s coming at the same kind of idea from the other direction.

Fr. Andrew: I see. So this is what we can sort of perceive of them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the order, the structure, what makes them them. So it’s closely related to nature. It’s not the particular essence, because we don’t come to know God in his essence. We don’t come to know Christ in his essence. We come to know his Person as the Logos of God. It’s not the individual essence, but it is the pattern, the form, the structure, and that is what is accessible to us as subject when we perceive and come to know object.

Fr. Andrew: Gotcha. Well, that makes sense. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And that’s how they can lead us back, because if we start to understand these structures and these patterns, and we understand them through wisdom, at a larger and larger level, they lead us back to the Logos Theou, the Logos proper, which then leads us to come to know God.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right, well, having said all of that, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and we’ll be right back. Give us a call!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome back, everybody! Welcome to the third half of the show. We’d love to hear from you.

So we’ve been talking about various modes, ways of knowing, kinds of knowledge that come by means of those ways of knowing. This is the nous episode, so we’re now finally going to talk about the nous. I recall when I was in seminary—I don’t know if this was maybe my first or second semester—we were in a class, and the professor was asking provocative questions—I can’t even remember—and throwing out stuff, and one of my classmates raised his hand and said, “Is it the nous?” And the professor says, “Don’t worry about that! You’re going to hang yourself with it!” [Laughter] So I always start thinking about that when I start contemplating the nous. Obviously, the Greek word nous and the modern English word “noose” are not the same word, although now I have to go look up the etymologies just so I can see what the origin of the English word, “noose,” is.

All right, so what is the nous, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, so this isn’t a “pretty nous”; this isn’t “fake nous.” I get all my nous from Gary Gnu, by the way, for anyone who gets that reference.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man! I got it! Yes! Oh boy, that really does take me back. So the modern English word, “noose,” as in the thing you hang yourself with, comes from the Latin nodus which refers to a knot. So that’s where that comes from.

Fr. Stephen: There you have it.

Fr. Andrew: They are not related.

Fr. Stephen: So now that I’m done digging in the reference crates—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. [Laughter] Thank you for throwing me a few bones. I really do appreciate it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So yeah, this is nous, usually transliterated into English as n-o-u-s, and often translated as “mind,” but a whole bunch of other things we’ve been talking about are also translated as “mind” in a lot of your English Bible translations.

But to get into this, we have to get into then the concept of the mind, and we have to start getting into that by sort of breaking down our common contemporary notion of the mind, which is really the brain.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so before we jump into that, we actually do have a caller. We have Scott. So, Scott, are you there?

Scott: I am, Father. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we can hear you, Scott. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Scott: Thank you. I had a thought as you were describing wisdom in the previous half, that the wise men of the East seem to be… Like, what is their characteristic that calls them wise? They seem to be Gentile or pagan people who understand the patterns of the world? And is this their wisdom that you talked about in the previous half, the understanding the patterns of what goes on?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, they’re described often as having essentially knowledge of the stars, so they’re astronomers at the very least.

Fr. Stephen: If you look at— I mean, the word “philosophy” comes from philosophia, the love of sophia, the love of wisdom. When you look at the first philosophers, when you look at the pre-Socratics, what are they trying to do? They’re trying to understand the structures and the principles that underlie the world around them—everything is water, everything is flux, everything is earth, everything is fire. And then you look at Socrates, and he’s trying to understand: what is justice? Not, you know, what are some examples of justice and injustice, but what is justice? What is the pattern or the structure that exists—and of course, Plato, by extension—that we’re pointing at when we say, “This is just” or “This is unjust”? They’re looking for those patterns and to understand those things. The same thing with Aristotle. That’s really what sophia, wisdom, means in the context of philosophy, at least originally. It’s understanding these patterns.

Fr. Andrew: Does that…?

Scott: It feels like a concrete example of what Paul was talking about in Romans, that there is a wisdom that the Gentiles can see, having not seen Christ directly. These guys were coming to worship him, based on nothing but… based on nature.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if they follow it out, it will lead them to Christ. It’s not a separate other way to get to God, but it will lead them to Christ who is the Logos.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Scott.

Scott: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. We have Aaron on the line. So, Aaron, what is… what are you thinking about?

Aaron: Hey, can you guys hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we hear you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, sir.

Aaron: All right, so what’s the deal with the soul?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What is the deal with the soul! I feel like that’s a question, like that’s a Seinfeld…

Fr. Stephen: Wha-at’s the deal?

Aaron: I spent a long time thinking that the voice in my head was myself and that that was the soul, that I sat in my mind and I judged thoughts, and now I’m starting to form the idea that that’s not the soul; that’s an aspect of my thoughts, and that the soul is kind of this thing that I have to train for right conduct and not so much for, you know, pursuing my passions and ultimately shaping my soul to resemble Christ and to get to know him. But also I’m kind of curious, because the Orthodox Church is always referring to the soul in female pronouns, “her” and “she,” and it’s like the bride of Christ, the Church: we are all members of this body, and Christ is the bridegroom, and we collectively—maybe collectively our souls?—are the bride of Christ? With us being shaped and acting in the world. So my general question is, yeah, what’s the deal? What is the soul?

Fr. Andrew: What is the soul. Well, you know, with regards to thoughts—this is literally the next thing that we’re going to be talking about, so just hang in there. So, yeah, Father, how exactly does that relate to the soul? Your thoughts are not your soul; we’ll at least start with that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and your soul is also not your identity, which is another way we tend to think about it; or your ego, that the I is not your soul. The I would refer to you as a person, which includes your body. So your soul is a few things in terms of what it’s doing. The first thing it’s doing is it’s giving shape and form to the big pile of matter that is you—that is you at any given point in time, because the matter in your body changes out about every seven years. So what makes you you is not the particular matter that makes you up at any given point in time. Something like between 30-40% of the cells in your body are actually cells in organisms other than you, strictly speaking.

Fr. Andrew: Right, lots of bugs.

Fr. Stephen: There’s like… and bacteria colonies living in your digestive tract that communicate chemically with other bacteria colonies out in the world. Now I’ve creeped everyone out completely! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Ew!

Fr. Stephen: So your soul is giving form to all of that matter and all of those sub-organisms all the time and is what’s persisting in your person and making whatever matter composes you at any given time you. It is also what is animating—pardon the pun, because anima is the Latin word for “soul”—is animating that matter as a human person. So when you’re—and this is how nefesh in Hebrew is used throughout the Old Testament, and this is why, in the ancient world, including in the Old Testament and the New Testament, animals and plants also have souls, because they’re alive, but they have a different type of soul: not all souls are the same type of soul, but everything alive has a soul; that’s what makes it alive. And so when something dies, that means that that life—the soul, the life—has left it. Since it has left it, and the life is no longer there, that life no longer gives form to that matter, and the matter decomposes; the matter falls apart and decomposes.

So when St. Paul, for example, talks about what happens when we die, we tend to kind of reify our soul into a thing. We’re kind of closet Origenists and think there’s this sort of sphere that’s our soul that flies up into the sky somewhere and goes to dwell somewhere, or we think of our ghost, sort of an ethereal version of us that’s up in heaven somewhere. But what St. Paul says is our life is hidden in Christ; that that life doesn’t just vanish when it leaves our body, but that that life is hidden in Christ, meaning he’s got it, he’s cherishing it, he holds it, he possesses it, and that that is then returned to our bodies at the resurrection. The question of: Well, what’s that like? The answer is: I don’t know! [Laughter] The one person we could think of whom we could ask is maybe Lazarus, but St. Lazarus hasn’t appeared to me to let me ask him that question, because he’s done it twice.

So we don’t know what that’s going to be like, to experience anything without our body, but that’s really what the soul is, and that’s why sometimes in Scripture—and people get all worked up trying to get this all nailed down in their spreadsheet—but this is why sometimes “soul” and “spirit” are spoken of differently. Sometimes “soul” and “spirit” are spoken of in the Scriptures like they’re the same thing, and sometimes they’re spoken of as if they’re separate things. When they’re spoken of as two separate things, it’s because the “soul” is being used in this strict sense that I was just mentioning, of sort of the life of the body. And then other things related to us as person are ascribed to spirit. And then sometimes those things are put together in one category.

So don’t sit around getting in arguments about whether humanity is bipartite or tripartite; it’s boring and passé.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I mean you can see Church Fathers: some of them will say body and soul; some will say body and soul and spirit. They don’t fundamentally disagree with each other.

Aaron: Okay… so what is the difference between the soul and the spirit?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well…

Aaron: I’m not sure if I can do a follow-up question, but…

Fr. Stephen: It depends. If they’re being separated out, then “soul” is being used to strictly refer to the life of the body, whereas “spirit” would then be what… what they’re talking about would be with Christ. And a spirit is something with an immaterial body. [Laughter] By the definition of “body” we used in our body episode, which is… Like an angel is a spirit. It has a body; it has a nexus of powers and potentialities, but it’s not a material body.

Aaron: So I was kind of understanding the soul as the nexus of potentialities, and that the nous is one of those potentialities that our human soul has but a tree doesn’t have. It’s the place where we meet God.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the nous has both a spiritual and material reality.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which we’re about to talk about that in some detail. Just hold on! [Laughter]

Aaron: Okay, and could I get—I know I’m long—a little comment on why the soul is referred to as female all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s mostly grammatical, because the words have grammatical gender that’s female. In the late modern English that we speak, almost no word has grammatical gender any more, although we have kept it around for a few things like ships. Ships are “she"s. Why are ships “she"s? Because they were in Old English, pretty much. Actually, Richard Rohlin is writing this down. It’s not in Old English. But, yeah, it’s about grammatical gender; that’s really all it is.

Aaron: All right. Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Okey-doke.

Fr. Stephen: Thank you, sir.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Okay, so the modern concept of the mind tends to be this notion that we’re sort of… that it’s equal to the brain which is like a meat computer that comes up with thoughts. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s in your brain: it’s in the box of your skull, and it sort of churns and processes information that comes in through your eyes and ears and nose and mouth and nerve endings. [Laughter] And it churns away.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the mind in the modern concept. And I mean we could blame Descartes or whoever, but that’s the way that we conceive of it now. We don’t— And I hope that everyone will listen to this part especially closely, if you haven’t been listening closely yet, but really listen to this part closely, because you’re going to see how this actually really gets down to the individual spiritual life and pastoral work and all this kind of thing, because the question—and we’ll get to that—the question is: Where do thoughts come from?

And it’s really vital that we correct our way of conceiving this, because if we have this modern idea that thoughts are something that are generated by your head, that you come up with them like a computer, and then let’s say you keep having a bad thought, over and over, and you can’t get rid of it—maybe it’s a horrible, horrible thought!—then it would be potentially reasonable for you to conclude: “I am a bad person and I am flawed and there is something wrong with me and I can’t get rid of this, this is just who I am. I was born this way.” But that is not congruent with the ancient conception of what the mind is, the nous is, and where thoughts actually come from.

Thoughts are not something that you come up with. In the ancient conception, the mind is actually an organ of perception, like your eye or your ears, that it receives thoughts, that thoughts come from the outside. So if you keep having the same thought over and over again, that means you keep receiving it over and over again. Now, it’s your choice as to what you—and we’ll get into this—your choice as to what to do with the thought; it’s your choice to pay attention to that thought, but the thought is not being generated by you.

So I turn my head left and right, and different kinds of light come into my eyes, and then I perceive that light; I see different things in the room that I’m in right now. And I focus on them, and then I see that image. I’m not creating those images. Now, you could talk about the way the mind deals with it, the way the brain deals with that stuff, but fundamentally I’m not inventing the way that, for instance, the room looks. I’m perceiving it; I’m receiving it—and that’s the way thoughts are in this ancient conception. I think, as you listen to what we’re about to talk about, it’s going to become clear, I hope, that this is actually a much more workable way of understanding spiritual life, of living the spiritual life. It’s doable. It becomes doable. If we make it a purely psychological thing, where it’s like: “Wow. I just keep having terrible thoughts. I can’t get rid of them,” then it might be a trap, whereas if we understand thoughts in this way, then there is something you can do about it. There’s something you can do about it.

So, yeah, the nous is a perceptive organ. It sees the spiritual world. It receives thoughts, and ultimately it’s designed to see God. That’s why God gave us the nous. It’s to see him. That’s what he wants us to see, to see him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this corresponds to our experienced reality. I’ve never met anyone who’s actually experienced creating a thought.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Thoughts appear in our heads, and we may wrestle with thoughts, we may struggle to understand and interpret thoughts, but there’s no experience of generating a thought. Like, I can experience writing a sentence. I write a letter and then another letter; I write a word and then another word. And I might be kind of composing and coming up with the sentence as I’m typing or writing on a piece of paper. I have had that experience, but I’ve never had that experience in my mental world of composing a thought. In fact, what I’m doing while I’m trying to write the sentence is thinking thoughts, is dealing with thoughts as to what I should put next, but those thoughts are just appearing before my mind.

So this ancient way of seeing it is based on how we actually experience it. This is how, when you get in any ancient source—we’re going to start with a couple of Greek philosophers—but when you go into any ancient source, this is how they view… the nous is sort of the highest of any of these ways of knowing. The nous is sort of at the top of the heap, and all of the others participate in the nous to one degree or another, like this is the highest way of knowing, and all the other ways of knowing are related to it. But for Plato, the nous is how you discern the eternal forms, like the unchanging eternal reality beyond the world of becoming and change and chaos and transition. You come to see them, for Plato, with the nous; you perceive them.

And Aristotle, when you get into Metaphysics Lambda and he’s talking about the being that later becomes known as the Prime Mover, who is more the Unmoved Mover, he describes it as the noesis noesios, which is something like—people struggle to translate that; it’s based on “nous”; it’s sort of the nous that’s nous-ing. [Laughter] So it’s sometimes translated as something like “thought thinking itself,” sort of pure thought in action with itself. But how did Aristotle come to perceive that? Well, he came to perceive that noetically, through like a meditative process. For him in the Metaphysics, you arrive at this through this meditation by which you ascend above the being of beings to Being, capital-B, to the contemplation which—and contemplation means seeing, looking upon this thought thinking itself, however you want to conceive it.

And I’ve never met anyone who’s read Metaphysics and specifically Metaphysics Lambda in Greek and hasn’t gotten a headache, because of trying to deal with this. [Laughter]

But you also find this—here’s going to be the totally non-controversial part of this episode [Laughter]—you also find this in great detail in Eastern religions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it wouldn’t be Lord of Spirits if we didn’t do one segment about something that’s deeply weird.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so get ready! Buckle up!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this notion of—here we go—the third eye, opening—

Fr. Stephen: Which is usually depicted or painted or indicated at the center of the forehead, associated with the mind.

Fr. Andrew: Up top, yeah. And you’re trying to open it up is the idea, so it can see. There’s the notion of—okay, you’re just going to need to help everybody with this—the pineal gland?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So that is associated with the pineal gland, which is sort of at the center of the brain. The pineal gland is triggered by a bunch of things, both meditative spiritual practices and, ah… psychedelic drugs. We’ll put it that way. So, yeah, that trigger it. And that’s what we were talking about, that we’re going to be talking about more in two weeks, that there are these physical structures associated with these spiritual realities, these material structures.

So then what you find in, for example, ancient Greece, particularly in the mystery cults, you find all this imagery of the cornstalk, and this is “corn” in the ancient, broader sense, so don’t send us your cards and letters; we’re not talking about maize in North and South America.

Fr. Andrew: It’s “corn” as in Commonwealth English, meaning “grain.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so a stalk of grain with a head of grain at the top. Or, it works with the corn cob, if you want to think of it that way; it works with any kind of grain: that kind of imagery, where you have this at the top. And this is related to meditative processes in these mystery cults and in Eastern religion, where some form of energy was seen to travel up the spine to the pineal gland in order to activate this. So in certain forms of yogic practice, this is what’s referred to as the kundalini serpent, which is: you’ve got to think of a cobra that’s standing up, with its head up, and the idea is that this is sort of this energy pattern or being that’s coiled up in your bowel region, which sort of extends itself up your spine and then bites up into your brain, sort of, into your pineal gland and injects it.

Fr. Andrew: And this is supposed to be a good thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, thereby opening your third eye and giving you access to the spiritual world. And then as we mentioned, like, psychedelic drugs, the same kind of idea, whether it’s in some kind of native shamanistic practice like ayahuasca or what-have-you, or more modern: you extract DMT.

So all of these things represent by technique or by chemical means a way of sort of spiritual boot-strapping, like short-cutting using the nous to access the spiritual world.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and I mean this is in some ways basically taking techne and trying to wedge it into this, like: “Yes, yes, I could go through all kinds of purification and asceticism and repentance… Or I could just do drugs,” or whatever, one of these other techniques. The idea is to kind of force it, to make it happen.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but inducing that experience in yourself, inducing access to the spiritual world, does not mean— does not entail that you’re going to have the means by which to interpret, understand, prosper, operate within the spiritual world in a way that is healthy and not harmful to you, because the way this is supposed to happen is through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit purifies the nous; the Holy Spirit purifies the eyes of the heart and opens them. And in the light of the Holy Spirit there’s this participation in the divine light that then allows Christ to be revealed to us, and then the nous finds its proper object, which is seeing Christ. And so any kind of boot-strapping, by nature, does not involve the Holy Spirit; it involves other spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are other spirits who are perfectly happy to help you open that third eye or whatever conception you want to use, to open it up and give you access, but it gives them access to you. It’s a mutuality. Like we said, the nous receives thoughts, so if you’re opening yourself up to other kinds of spirits, you’re going to be receiving something from them.

All right, we’re going to talk a little more about that, and we’re going to head out to one of my favorite places, and that’s out into the woods. One of my favorite musicals is Into the Woods, by the way. Great show. Very related to all of these things, actually. Spirits out in the woods! Almost every pagan culture has this idea, that there’s spirits that live out in the wood.

Fr. Stephen: And non-pagan cultures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s what I was about to say, is that Israel has this idea that, out in the wilderness, there are spirits out there, like this is a thing. Again, so many of the sort of facts on the ground are sort of agreed upon by Israel and pagans. The question is interpretation of them and what exactly you do in relation to those beings.

Yeah, so if you go out into the woods and you feel something deeply that then makes you act in some way that you don’t normally act, it was understood to be that you were under the influence of spirits. If you are overcome with rage, you are filled with a spirit of rage. If you’re overcome with lust, you’re filled with a spirit of lust. I mean, everybody agreed on these ideas. This is this idea that thoughts happen to you. And there’s even—and this was something that I didn’t… I hadn’t thought about, but it should be pretty obvious to me—the Greek word evdaimonia or eudaemonia, if you want to sort of anglicize it, which means kind of blissful happiness in our modern sense of that—right there in the word it means you have a good demon.

Fr. Stephen: Good spirits, yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Good spirits are there. Again, the idea of the human person as being this kind of impermeable, closed-off fortress is just not a thing in ancient conceptions, so it’s not a thing in Christian theology. The human person is very permeable, so a lot of what spiritual life is is about guarding that permeability and using it appropriately.

Fr. Stephen: And thoughts come into the nous from noetic beings, from spiritual beings, who bring them and put them there. And that means your inner monologue is not you. It not you narrating your life, as much as we’ve been conditioned by television shows and the original kind of Bladerunner to think so. It is not you.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t really have the voice of Morgan Freeman in my head, narrating my life? No.

Fr. Stephen: No, though that would be nice! Or just pay someone to follow you around and describe what you’re doing. [Laughter]

So this is one of the big shifts we have to take: that’s not you. So then what do you have, then? What you have is a point of focus or a point of attention. You have the point of focus or point of attention before which those thoughts enter, and through which those thoughts enter. That’s what you have that’s you; that’s what consciousness is. That’s what your human consciousness is, and that’s what’s you.

So, therefore, as you were giving the example with vision and turning your head, we are not required to focus that point of focus on every thought that enters our head. That is not a de facto given. So that’s this whole idea of guarding your thoughts and asking God to guard our thoughts, placing a guard, not letting everything in. And then thoughts are sort of like seeds. Even once they come in, you don’t have to let them take root. And even if they have taken root, you don’t have to let them keep growing; you can rip them up by the root and throw them out. And this is what St. Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 10:5, when he talks about taking every thought captive and making it obedient to Christ, sort of capturing it.

But so doing that is a discipline that has to be developed, and we, because, as modern Western people, we’re the only people in the history of the world who don’t believe in the nous—[Laughter] everyone else has always understood that it’s there—since we don’t think it’s there, since we don’t believe it’s there and that’s not how we understand things, we don’t exercise it at all. We don’t attempt to use it at all, and if we have it’s probably because we’ve dabbled or gotten involved in some kind of New Age practice or Eastern practice or Neopagan practice, and that’s been how we’ve approached it, but we haven’t approached it from this Christian perspective.

So getting from the point where we have this constant… The stream of thoughts is not, again, my internal monologue or narration, it is this stream of thoughts flowing through my head, just like the cascade of images you see when you watch TikTok clips that go past—hello, fellow kids—that go past super fast. [Laughter] You have these thoughts, this constant stream, running through your mind, all the time. And this has been the great boon to the demonic powers of our contemporary era, is that we’re constantly bombarded by all of these thoughts. This is why, when you go and try to pray, there are all of these thoughts, because they show up and start putting them into your head and giving you all of these things to think about. So when you look at the prayer disciplines of the Orthodox Church, they’re aimed at helping you exercise this flabby muscle. They’re aimed at working at this, so you have the prayer of a single thought, the Jesus prayer.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, monologistos efche, which is the Greek phrase for that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you start there by training that point of focus that you have, to try to focus on just that one thought and get rid of all the other ones. Run off all the other ones and train yourself to focus more and more on just that one. And the goal is eventually to get to the point where even that one goes away, and that’s where you have contemplative prayer. This is hesychasm; this is the silence of hesychasm, of those thoughts being gone and being able to purely, with the nous, come to see Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, you know, in terms of one’s experience of the Christian life, I’ve been sometimes asked: Why is it that Orthodox prayers, for instance, are so kind of overflowy and poetic and long with all of these endless periodic sentences? “O God who—” comma, comma, comma, colon, “please now do—” They go on like this. Often people give explanations like, “Well, these come from the ancient world where people were just much more poetic, and that’s the way they talk,” and that kind of thing. I think there’s actually something much deeper going on, which is that in the way that this pattern presents itself, it’s actually designed to be a shepherd for your thoughts. If your prayer functions in a purely utilitarian fashion, if that’s all you’ve got, then there’s a lot more space for your thoughts to get distracted by— for you to receive distracting thoughts.

So if you look— if you just walk into an Orthodox church, the way that the prayer works, the way that the music works, the way that what you see works, the way all of it works together is multi-vectored and designed to bring you all to Christ. It’s designed to give you many good thoughts all at once, and you can kind of follow any of them and get to Christ. It’s why— think about— What is the opposite of an Orthodox church? Well, it’s Times Square. That’s the opposite; it’s being bombarded by advertisements and all kinds of other thoughts that are trying to extract something from you. But the way that Orthodox life actually functions in terms of its prayer and so forth is not designed… You’re going to have a thought when you attempt to pray that says, “Just get this over with.” Well, why would you want to get this over with? It’s so you can move on to other ridiculous, distracting thoughts. That’s why.

The struggle is to focus. The struggle is to bring ourselves back to that single thought, who is Christ, and to receive him. I’ve found, in pastoral experience, especially when talking to people in confession, that explaining this and beginning to teach— I mean, I’m no expert at this; I just pass on the wisdom that I’ve been given. But in explaining this and beginning to teach that this is the way thoughts work and how you can actually be working on them is very liberating for people.

And then there’s a final goal. Well, I shouldn’t say “final,” but there is a goal to this. Why do you want to receive the thoughts that are from God and turn away from evil thoughts? Because it actually does do something. So what is that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the nous is also transformational. So, to quote Aristotle again, as we’ve done a few times this evening, the mind, in some sense, becomes all things. It is shaped and formed by all things. So whatever we direct that point of attention at, that point of focus at, we are going to start to become like it. It is going to shape and transform us. And so you’re going to become what you focus on. So this is intimately connected to the idea of theosis on the positive side that we’ve talked about before, and also on the negative side, demonization that we’ve talked about before on the podcast; that what you’re focusing your gaze on, what you’re seeing, is going to be what you’re going to become in the way in which you’re going to change and shift. You referenced, when we were talking about this before, in Matthew 6, something that Christ says on this count.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Matthew 6:22-23.

The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, then, the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

So you get this idea of shining a light into something and it lights up the whole thing; it begins to glow sort of from within. It transforms that thing, and that’s the way that the nous works. If the light of God shines in you, through the nous, then you’re lit up. You change. You become like him. You shine with his light. But if you receive instead the dark light of the demons, then you become like them. It actually does change you.

There’s sometimes people will say about various kinds of sins, “Well, you can look so long as you don’t touch.” I’m sorry, but looking is touching, because looking is transformational. There are circumstances under which you might say that and not mean quite the same thing, but if you look with lust or if you look with envy or if you look with anger, if your looking is to bring that thought into you and to turn it around within yourself, you are being changed by that look. You’re receiving something by that look, so that’s the lesson, is that you’re receiving something. It’s not just what you touch. Looking is touching, on a certain level. So, yeah, it’s a great… I mean… I remember reading that passage from Matthew 6 and always kind of wondering: What exactly is meant here? And then, as I learned about what the nous is and how it functions and so forth, then it—pun fully intended—lit up. It lit up for me exactly the way that it works.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why, when we talked before about man being in the image of God, we talked about how that’s kind of a verbal idea of imaging God. Some people have asked us questions about what you find in some of the Fathers, that they’ll say that the nous—sometimes translated as “reason” or “the mind”—is the image of God, or they’ll talk about the angels also being in the image of God in a sense. And this is what connects those concepts, because the nous, the mind, is the capacity that we have, that we share with other noetic beings like angels, through which that imaging happens. This transformation we’re talking about is that imaging. So this ability to image God is through the nous, and that’s how those are connected.

But then of course, on the flip side, as we said, you can also use the nous to image the demons—and do you want giants? because that’s how you get giants. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. There is an opposite to theosis, an opposite direction.

Well, this is another mind-bender. Again, pun fully intended. But I think that, even though these are difficult concepts and maybe new concepts for some folks, I think they’re really really important to wrestle with. And I believe that the reason why they’re really important to wrestle with and to gain some mastery of these concepts is so that we can actually exercise who it is that we— what it is that we have in a much better way, much deeper, richer way. We went through the various kinds of knowledge according to the ancient world, and if you understand that all of those kinds of knowledge truly are knowledge and are worth pursuing in the good ways, then it opens up so much and it helps us, actually, to be more compassionate to other people. So, for instance, let’s say someone pursues knowledge that is in that category of doxa, and they’re really pursuing that. We should see that as being a good thing and not just say, “Well, you’re just living in a world of subjective opinion. That’s stuff… you can’t really count on that.” No, it’s true knowledge.

But especially with regards to where we just finished—I already said this before a little bit, but I feel that it genuinely bears repeating, which is if we understand that the thoughts that we have are being received and not internally generated, then that actually puts us not in the position of the tortured prisoner down somewhere in the dungeons of the castle who can’t get away from himself—he’s the worst thing ever—but rather, it puts us on the walls of the castle, and we are there to guard the entrances. And when enemies come to the gates, that we turn them away. If enemies come through for some reason, then we defeat them and send them on their way. And then when the King comes to the door, you open the doors to him. That’s what the spiritual life consists of, in a certain sense.

And so all the things that we do, whether it’s our training in prayer, whether it’s our training in asceticism, our training in corporate prayer especially, participating in the sacrifices of the Church, going on pilgrimages, almsgiving, evangelism—all of these things that are the good things that we are to do as Christians—all of these are designed to purify our nous and to train us to focus on the thoughts being given to us from God and sometimes through his angels and saints, but ultimately from him, and turning away from thoughts that come from the dark sources. And the more that we do that, then the more we become like him.

And we don’t have to feel trapped by our thoughts. We don’t have to feel like there is some kind of fatal flaw that can never be overcome: “I’m just broken. I’m just no-good. I’m just born that way.” We have the ability to refocus ourselves. It takes practice. [Laughter] It takes a lot of practice, doing it over and over again. We get comfortable receiving certain kinds of thoughts; we might like it, but then we get addicted, and then we get destroyed.

So it’s really a beautiful teaching, and a liberating teaching, and shows us the love of God for us that…  One of the most beautiful things I ever heard was that every good thought that you receive is from the Lord. So think about that for a second. Think on that; focus on that for a second. Every thought that you have that is about God’s love for you, every thought that you have that is about doing something caring for another person, every thought that you have about making beauty—that is being sent to you from God. So: Receive that thought. Nurture that thought. Integrate that thought into who you are, and you will become more like him. Father?

Fr. Stephen: We live today, probably anybody who’s going to hear this podcast, at least, in the society of the spectacle, where we are bombarded and surrounded continuously by this spectacle that’s made up of propaganda and advertising and images and thoughts and ideas that are being continually projected at us. And it’s not reality, we know it’s not reality: that’s what often makes it attractive to us, because we, for various reasons at various times, don’t want to deal with reality, so the circus, the spectacle, seems very attractive, and it’s coming to us through TV and streaming services and the internet and social media and podcasts other than the ones that Fr. Andrew and I do, and a thousand other sources continuously.

And the producers of the spectacle know full well that it’s shaping us, that as we take it in, it is shaping us and it is changing us, and they’re deliberate about it. It’s changing us into something that is not as good as being human. It’s changing us into consumers, people who want to not only consume goods and services and commodities and things out in the world, but who want to consume each other for our own gratification of our egos or our desires. It’s making us into something worse.

They don’t understand, the producers of it, that it’s making us into something more like the demons, because they don’t believe in demons, but they think it’s making us into consumers and customers, that it’s making us into something that’s more useful to them. And so if we want to escape that, if we continue to just passively receive and absorb all this stuff as we’ve been trained to do, to just sit and passively let things just stream into us and over us, if we want that not to happen to us, we have to be very deliberate. We have to make a conscious decision about disciplining our minds and about disciplining our thoughts and about spending our time and our energy and our focus on things devoted to Christ and to God and to each other rather than taking in the spectacle, because it’s focusing on those things. It’s our relationship to Christ mediated through prayer, mediated through each other, mediated through our church community, mediated through the holy icons, mediated through the Scriptures, mediated through all of these connections; these are the things that are going to transform us in a different direction and make us human, make us human again.

There’s a lot of things that we talk about on this podcast that we’ve lost from the ancient world, and one of the struggles I know people have because they ask us about it all the time is: How can we go back and look at the world that way? How can we go back and think of the world in that way? And, yes, you can’t flip a switch and just see the world the way an ancient person saw it, but you can, by drawing near to Christ, become human in the sense that they were human again, and become a real person again in the sense that they were real persons, and have real relationships with your fellow human beings the way they did, and draw close to Christ, not only yourself but together with your family and your community and have a real sense of community in that you’re not alone, and a sense of community that’s not just based on you consuming the same things, but based on what you’re becoming, more like Christ together.

But we’ve got to get serious about it, and we’ve got to actually do it and not just talk about it, and that means we’ve got to give up some things that come quick and easy, that make us feel better when we don’t want to deal with some of the rougher stuff and some of the tougher stuff in life. We’ve got to stop taking the easy way out, because it’s not just alcohol and drugs that are easy ways out. It’s the spectacle that surrounds us all the time. So that’s my thought for tonight, that once we understand that what we allow into our mind and what we entertain there changes us, then we should realize the dire danger that we’re in, living in modern Western culture.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you, everyone, for listening, everybody. If you did not get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d 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 do read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

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