Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, but we’ll get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

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

Fr. Stephen De Young: And I talked to Dn. Adam again.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah?

Fr. Stephen: And I just wanted to address the elephant in the room. Some people may look at the St. Athanasius Academy tuition rates, and they may be concerned, but he assured me that, no matter how many courses you take at those low, low prices, you will not add a penny to the national debt.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, that was my biggest concern, so I’m feeling a lot better.

Fr. Stephen: I could tell. I could tell—you’re a deficit hawk.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, big-time. [Laughter]

So, you know, one of the more difficult practices to become accustomed to for those who look into the Orthodox Christian faith—and even for some life-long members—is the keeping and the veneration of relics. Relics can present a jarring conundrum. On the one hand, you’re being confronted with the body parts of dead people, but on the other there are miracles associated with them. We can think of the bones of the Prophet Elisha bringing a dead man back to life in 2 Kings 13:21, or we can think of relics like the hand of St. Mary Magdalene, which I myself venerated in 2018 at Simonopetra Monastery in Mt. Athos, and can confirm is actually warm, just as the living hand of a human being is warm. Do we as Orthodox Christians just point to the miracles and the history and tell people: Just tough it out and accept it? Or is there actually a biblical, theological reason for this? So, Fr. Stephen, is there?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Good night, everybody! [Laughter] Yeah, so, there it is. To get there, though, we need to kind of loop back and head back to some of our most mind-bending episodes where we talked about what a body is. So let’s do a little re-cap. Last time on Lord of Spirits…

Fr. Stephen: What, fifteenth from last time on Lord of Spirits… We have to just do “Previously…”: Previously, on Lord of Spirits…

Fr. Andrew: Previously!

Fr. Stephen: And then clips. But, yeah, so we have to start all the way back with what a body is, because if we’re going to talk about body parts, we have to start with what the body is of which they were part. And so we had defined a body as being, in the ancient understanding, a nexus of powers and/or potentialities.

Fr. Andrew: Which I understand is now a t-shirt. There’s actually a t-shirt out there you can get that defines a body that way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and you can use it to cover your nexus of powers and potentialities. [Laughter] That will let you go into Circle K, if you’re wearing a shirt.

Fr. Andrew: As you should. No shoes, no shirt…

Fr. Stephen: Shoes also. I learned that the hard way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Fr. Stephen: And we talked about how we tend to think purely, when we hear the word “body,” we think in terms of physical body, in terms of meat, but we talked about how, in the ancient understanding, God has a body in that he has powers, and the angelic beings that do not have material, physical bodies still have bodies because they have powers and abilities. So the potentiality part—and we’re going to delve into that a little more as we go on—comes in when we start talking about material bodies. But we also talked about—and we want to sort of rehearse here and sort of even clarify a little bit, because we got some… I’ll call them questions rather than objections or arguments, but questions as to how—

Fr. Andrew: Concerns! Requests for clarification!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, as to how that “bodies” term relates to the terms that most folks who read some stuff about Orthodox theology would be more familiar with, like “nature” and “will” and “energy” and those things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the stuff that you see from the Ecumenical Councils, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we had previously said that we’re talking about a translation thing, that the “body” language was primarily language that was used in the ancient period, sort of pre-Greek philosophical, even, and that that’s a way of describing that very early, especially the ancient Israelite and their pagan neighbors’ way of viewing this and understanding a body. And then that gets translated into other terms, and we mentioned at the time that there are probably better terms, and that’s part of what we want to talk about now, is how these terms sort of clarify in a way that just saying “body” doesn’t, even though there are times where—you’ll see in the Fathers, for example, where they’ll talk about Christ’s humanity and just refer to it as his human body. And when they do that, they’re not saying that Christ’s humanity was just a physical body, because that same Church Father will expressly deny that in other places, but they’re just using that older language still.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the older language, we see it, number one, in the Bible, referring to… Well, we’re going to talk about this more, but, for instance, the body of Christ. Again, we shouldn’t just assume these things are just metaphors. Also we see it in pagan usage where idols are referred to as the body of the god. They don’t think that the spirits that they’re worshiping… That’s not a metaphor, and it’s also not—it should not be taken in an utterly material sense, in the sense that they think that the spirit is kind of confined to that piece of stone or whatever. So this usage does exist, but, as you said, it’s kind of imprecise. And what happens with the use of Greek philosophical language is that it kind of makes the distinctions a lot clearer, so that a lot of when the word “body” is used in Scripture, in patristic usage, for instance, they would then use the word “nature,” even though they don’t exactly perfectly map, because “nature” can also often have a more universal sense, like “human nature,” like you and I share human nature, whereas “body” can be something that belongs to a particular being, and through which that being is working. So it doesn’t exactly map one-to-one, but it sort of clarifies things in the patristic, the Greek philosophical usage.

Fr. Stephen: Right, those are similar things, and, yeah, those are… What happens is, as the ancient understanding and the Christian understanding of, for example, the Incarnation or the Holy Trinity is challenged, they need this greater precision, because you can take “body” in a lot of different ways. So when Apollinarius shows up and says, “Well, Christ just took a human, material body and was just sort of animating it,” then the Fathers have to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, time out, no,” and they have to use more specific terminology to explain why that’s a misunderstanding and will lead you in the wrong direction.

To kind of run through that quickly, “nature,” as you were saying, is probably the closest, the most overlap: the Venn diagram has the most overlap with the ancient sense of “body.” And so “nature” is sort of a set of powers and potentialities, and that’s over against the way we often think about “nature,” which is as a set of qualities or properties than an object has.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so if you have human nature, then you have all the abilities that a human has. You can do the things… And that’s going to include the material body, but it’s also going to include things like your soul, which is not material.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and “nature” is this dynamic concept, not a static concept. You don’t arrive at the nature of something by just describing it in ever more minute detail. Nature is a function of what it is doing.

And so this understanding is super important when you get to Christology, and we’re going to end up talking a lot about Christology tonight and the Incarnation tonight, because if you understand—well, this is basically where people run into trouble in understanding the Incarnation, because if you understand “nature” as this set of qualities or properties, then you understand Christ’s divine nature as this one set of properties, of God-properties—omniscient, omni-present, and all of these properties—and then you understand human nature as another list of qualities or properties, like finitude, weakness. And then you look at those two subsets and you find qualities or properties that conflict with each other. So now that you have this problem—and this is, when you look at Jewish and Islamic arguments against the Incarnation, that’s how they’re all framed, is just coming up with a list of divine qualities and human qualities and showing that they contradict each other; that’s their whole argument.

But then all kinds of bad Christology comes from trying to resolve this unnecessary problem. Whereas, if you understand “nature” in this dynamic sense, as powers Christ possesses full and complete divine powers, and he takes upon himself, in addition, our human nature, meaning he takes human powers and potentialities as well in the Incarnation, because powers and potentialities cannot conflict with each other—being able to go left and being able to go right does not contradict. Being tall and being short—two qualities or properties—do contradict each other. So that’s “nature.”

And then the idea of the will in the ancient concept, then proceeds out of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so “will” is not the way that we tend to think of it. Like, “What will I have for dinner? I will have the lasagna. I will have ice cream.” [Laughter] Yeah, it’s not… That’s not what “will” is.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a choosing to go left or right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if I’m correct on this, doesn’t St. Maximus the Confessor say that doing that actually is kind of the result of the Fall? That’s not… Yeah, and Christ doesn’t sit around going, “Man, I don’t know what to do. Let me think about this for a while. I’ve got some ideas here…” [Laughter] That’s not the way he functions.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he definitely doesn’t have two different capacities that are both doing that at the same time, a human one and a divine one! [Laughter] So when St. Maximus talks about that, yeah, he calls that the gnomic will, but if you look at his language close up, he describes that as a second movement of the will, in addition to the natural movement of the will. So if we understand “will” as a movement… So if “nature” is then this set of powers and potentialities, then “will” is a movement in a particular direction, specifically towards sort of the perfection of that nature. So if you have an acorn, that acorn already has the nature of the oak tree, and that nature is expressed in the acorn almost entirely as potentiality: it has the potential to become an oak tree—unless it’s dead. And so then, its will—and Aristotle and other early philosophers do not hesitate to use the term “will” for even inanimate objects in this regard—that will, then, is the movement, sort of the internal movement, that causes it to grow toward that perfection, to grow into the oak tree.

And so, when the Church says that Christ has two wills, they’re not saying he had two separate decision-making faculties that were both making choices, even if they always agreed. They were saying that Christ possesses the perfect divine will, which is not a movement towards perfections—that’s why there’s powers and not potentiality when we talk about the divine nature, because he already perfectly possesses it—but also then a human will, which is moving toward human perfection, which of course he also achieved. [Laughter]

When we talk about “free will” with this understanding of the natural will, we don’t mean what Western theology means or Western philosophy means.

Fr. Andrew: Which is: make a decision.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’re able to choose between contrary opposites. You’re able to go left or to go right. You’re able to steal the candy bar or pay for the candy bar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s freedom to be what it is you’re supposed to be.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Your will is not obstructed by anything. So the acorn is free to grow into the oak tree. It is not obstructed by a lack of nutrients in the soil.

Fr. Andrew: Kind of arrested development, or lack of arrested development.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this understanding of freedom is important. So from the perspective of Orthodox Christianity, the reason once we’re in the age to come we will not be able to fall into sin again is that we will have perfect free will. We will be free from sin, and so we will be free to eternally develop and draw closer to God for all eternity, because there will be nothing obstructing us from achieving that purpose of human nature as it was created by God any more.

And so then finally the term “energy,” which, you know, we hear “energy” as modern people who have studied science, and we think [Energy noises]. [Laughter] Or ray guns or gamma rays or something. But this is just working in the world, so this is just the will actualizing itself, meaning producing action in the world, the externalizing of the internal will.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the will expressing itself.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And all of that is, to a greater or lesser extent, contained within that older understanding of “body.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is just kind of breaking it down in very precise terms.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It gets disambiguated because it needs to be to explain the problems with bad theology that starts arising in the early Church, and to really clarify who Christ is and how this all works.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the classic example of this kind of narrative playing out is… Like in Scripture it says, “The Lord your God, the Lord is one.” But then Nicaea says that the Son of God is homoousios, of one essence with the Father, which, at the time, was an innovative word in theological terms, and a lot of people opposed it precisely because it wasn’t in the Bible, and yet the Fathers determined that this was the word that was needed in order to lay out precisely how it is that the Lord God is one—the oneness between the Father and the Son—in order to counter Arianism. So this is just another example of that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. And so as Christianity moves into different languages and faces different kinds of opposition, we sort of re-articulate things. That’s not a change; that’s just a clarification or re-articulate, re-explanation, re-appropriation, because every culture and people needs to appropriate the truths of Christianity for itself. That takes subtly different forms.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and you’ve used the word “translation,” and I think that’s a great word for this, because anyone who’s done any translating knows that translation is not just a matter of finding the word in the one language that matches in the original language. It doesn’t ever quite exactly perfectly fit, so you have to come up with other ways of expressing things that are not simply word-for-word literal translations, because you can never completely achieve that from one language to the next.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You have to move from the source language to an encounter with the object being described with the source language, and then describe that same object in the target language.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: You can’t just go from source language to target language, yeah. I won’t rabbit-trail here, but this is where all kinds of biblical interpretation comes from.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sure! Sure!

Fr. Stephen: Going from Greek to English without… “Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, and even just in this particular topic, the word “body” has not always meant the same thing just in the history of English, to say nothing about the history of Greek. We’re tracking it across the Hebrew and the Greek in the Bible, then on towards the Greek being used by the early Church Fathers. So none of these words ever exactly map with each other.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and then you have Heidegger, for example, saying you can only do philosophy in Greek and German. [Laughter] All other language is unsuitable!

Fr. Andrew: Right, and some might raise the request for clarification—again, we’re not going to call it “objection”—that: Why not just understand this language in the Bible as being a metaphor? But here’s why: because the Bible itself does not treat it as metaphor. It doesn’t say, for instance, when it talks about God’s eyes; it doesn’t say, “as if God had eyes.” It doesn’t put it in metaphorical language; it just simply means: “This is God’s power of sight,” so if we understand it in terms of powers, then we don’t have to treat it like it’s a metaphor, and it actually makes way more sense, it’s way more consistent, and actually then has a real depth and richness of meaning within it, as we’re going to see, for instance, when we talk about the phrase “the body of Christ” a little bit later.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s an analogical sense—there’s a sense in which it’s an analogy, because God doesn’t see things the way I see things, or even the way a mantis shrimp sees things. There’s a qualitative difference in addition to a quantitative difference, but it is also a true statement—and this is the problem with saying it’s just a metaphor, because if it’s just a metaphor, then it’s not a true statement that God sees.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s just something that stands for something else.

Fr. Stephen: It’s… you’re just equivocating. And so we can have, particularly through Christ, actual knowledge of God, and so you don’t want to say, “Well, this is just analogy.” But, yes, when it talks about the eyes of God—“the eyes of God roam the earth, looking for…”—there is a metaphorical element there, in that it’s not talking about God with physical eyes actually looking around trying to find something. So there is a metaphorical element, but there is also a non-metaphorical element, that God does indeed possess the power of sight. There is nothing that God is not aware of, that God does not see in that sense.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Yeah, so, okay, these are kind of recaps and clarifications from some of the things that we talked about in some of our episodes on bodies. So let’s head to “The Mountain of God and Boat of Theseus” episode where we started talking about sacred geography, and we’re going to talk now—again, recap—what does it mean for a thing to be a thing, and what does that have to do with the material world?

Fr. Stephen: And, of course, I was being meta by changing “ship” to “boat,” and changing one element and asking if it was the same. Thought experiment.

Fr. Andrew: And all the homeschool children out there who recognize that reference are all pumping their fists, and their parents are smiling broadly.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! So the whole idea of the ship of Theseus, remember, is this thought experiment that Greek philosophers were always using. Theseus’s boat is on display. Over time, the wood rots, and they replace each board as it rots away. Eventually they’ve replaced everything: is it still Theseus’s boat, or is now no longer? And if you took all—and then secondarily, if you took all the parts, all the rotted wood that had been brought off it, and reassembled it into a boat, would that be the real one? And so all of that was getting at the idea that, as much as it seems common sense to us, and to Parmenides, that matter is not what identity is about… So it seems common sense to us… None of us wakes up in the morning and walks out into our house and thinks, “What if someone broke into my house last night and replaced everything with exact duplicates?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Something’s not right!”

Fr. Stephen: We don’t think that. David Hume said you have no good reason to not think that, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It seems like a lot of work on someone’s part to do that, though! That would be my good reason.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to imagine that that’s a possibility.

Fr. Andrew: The argument from laziness. If they’re going to break into my house, that’s not the thing they’re going to do. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, you know, I’m drinking coffee out of my mug. Even though I took my eyes off of it several times today, I assume it’s the same mug, and if you asked me why it’s the same mug, I’d say, “Well, it’s the same physical object that I was drinking coffee out of earlier, or yesterday, or a week ago.”

But the truth is that we now know scientifically—science has sort of thrown this wrinkle into the ship of Theseus—and that’s that we know, for example, the human body—all of the matter that makes it up changes out about every seven years. So none of the matter that currently composes my body was part of my body 12 years ago, at all. But I’m… everyone would say I’m still the same person. That wouldn’t be a valid defense in court if I got caught for a crime I committed 12 years ago, to say, “I’m not the person I was then—literally!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, or you were the victim of a crime, and there’s not a statute of limitations. The statute of limitations does not run out after all the matter trades out, like: “Well, your honor, the victim doesn’t exist any more.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “I did not hit any of that matter with my car.” And, in fact, it was not the same car!

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it gets even more complex when we… Okay, so seven years ago, I looked, eh, basically the same as I do now…

Fr. Stephen: You’re flattering yourself slightly.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, thank you very much. Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: But just a little. Just a skosh.

Fr. Andrew: I think there’s a little bit more of me now than there was then. But basically the same. Basically the same, but 30 years ago, I looked radically different than I do now, and yet we would still absolutely consider that to be the same person; still the same person. And we even recognize that the people in our families are still the same people. Like, it’s interesting: there’s this kind of metaphysical sensibility baked into the way that we interact with matter. We don’t tend to think, day to day, “Ope, there goes another molecule. There goes another one. Man, oh, this process is going to take seven years… Now I feel totally new!” Like, we don’t function that way! [Laughter] We function as though this is truly me; that’s truly you; this is truly the table I’m sitting in front of. All these things are indeed the things that they are, and it would be madness to function as though that were not true. Like, it just simply… No one could live that way; it’s impossible. And we have good reason not to live that way!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, every three and a half years you’re half the man you used to be. [Laughter] Technically speaking.

Fr. Andrew: I thought it was sudden. I was told this happened suddenly—I’m not half the man I used to be. But no, it’s once every three and a half years.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and so that means we have to look for the identity of a thing in another place, as we talked about. What makes a thing what it is has to be something other than just the matter that composes it. So at any given time, there is a certain quantity of matter that is being a certain thing. So right now, there is—and I don’t really know how kilograms work, so I don’t know how much mass of matter, but it’s a lot that’s making up by body… [Laughter] And as we said, it’s not the same matter that was doing it seven years ago, but that is, right now is being my body, my physical body, my material body.

Fr. Andrew: I prefer to measure myself with stone, because there’s a lot fewer of them by comparison.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s weight, not mass.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: We need to be precise here. We don’t want physicists “Um, actually…”-ing us after.

Fr. Andrew: Do we have a lot of physicists in the audience? Write in, everybody. I want to hear from you.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you’re a physicist, “Um, actually…” us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s true for me, and for my heathen dogs, and for the windowpane and the lamppost and everything else. There’s matter that’s being those things, and it’s not the same matter all the time. It’s shifting around. And so we talked about, in the previous episode—we talked about how is or being is actually an active verb, that it’s doing something; it’s actively being that thing.

Fr. Andrew: You can be being. Right, matter is being a thing. Is being.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so—and here’s… We’re going to have some great t-shirt phrases coming up tonight. Here’s one of them. So some matter is being a body of a noetic being right now, and in this case, me, or you, or any of our listeners, because, as we talked about in the last couple episodes, angels and humans are noetic beings. Angels are noetic beings that do not have material bodies, so noetic beings with material bodies are humans. So some of that matter is being the body of a noetic being.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, we’ve… occasionally people request clarification and say, “Aren’t the angels the bodiless hosts?” But when we call them “bodiless,” what we mean by that is that they don’t have material bodies. We’re not saying that they don’t have powers and potentialities, because they clearly do. And they are circumscribed, meaning there’s a space where they are and there’s a space where they are not, because they’re not omnipresent; only God is omnipresent.

Fr. Stephen: Even though they’re vast cosmic intelligences.

Fr. Andrew: Cosmic—that’s right, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Vast.

Fr. Andrew: They cover a lot of acreage. [Laughter] Parsecs, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: And so what this—kellicams. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: How many kellicams to the Kessel Run? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Wow. Wow. You have transgressed, sir.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I know.

Fr. Stephen: So in the case of the human material body, to sort of boil this down and lead in a little to what we’re going to talk about next—the human material body is basically a material pile, a pile of matter, being used as an instrument of consciousness within time and space.

Fr. Andrew: That’s very sci-fi.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So our nous, our consciousness, that point of attention we were talking about the last two episodes, is making use of this pile of matter that’s currently making up my body as an instrument to interact within time and space within the material creation. And it interacts both ways: incoming through the senses and outgoing through the [body].

Fr. Andrew: I think one of the places people might get tripped up is when you use the word “instrument,” sometimes you might think of those mech suits from Voltron and—what was the…?

Fr. Stephen: Robotech.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Robotech. Robotech! That’s right! We are children of the ‘80s.

Fr. Stephen: Macross Saga, man.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly. People might think about it in those terms: “I’m inside…” Go full Cartesian, right? “I’m inside this. I’m making use of this suit” or whatever. But that’s… So it’s not quite that. Your body is you. It is you; it’s not a suit. [Mexican radio] Oh, I think we’re getting the Mexican radio now!

Fr. Stephen: The Mexican radio! Aww!

Fr. Andrew: Ayy! This is a good sign! I always take this as a blessing.

Fr. Stephen: Nostalgia.

Fr. Andrew: There it is, yes! It’s been a while since we’ve had Mexican radio on. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: [Spanish]

Fr. Andrew: That’s great! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, so what a human is, especially in the ancient Israelite conception, the biblical Old Testament conception, a human is an animated body, an ensouled body.

Fr. Andrew: A body with life in it.

Fr. Stephen: If you don’t have a nous, it’s not a human; if you don’t have a material body, it’s not a human. This is why we say physical death is unnatural.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it splits those things apart.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because it rips those things apart, and that’s why the body, then, crumbles to dust—normally. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Normally.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so that’s an unnatural thing that has to be repaired and restored.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, really important for setting things up—we’re going to go to break in just a second here—is that that body is your body. Like, it truly is yours, even at the point and after the point of physical death. It doesn’t stop being your body; it’s still your body.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t stop being you. “Your body” makes it sound like a possession, a thing you have, that belongs to you. It’s you. It doesn’t stop being you.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not, yeah. It is being you. Right, that’s a key concept for everything we’re about to discuss. Okay, we’re going to come back just after break, and we’re going to start taking your calls. So we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, Voice of Steve! We’re back now for the second half. Before we get to what we’re about to talk about, we do have a caller. Michael is calling. He is right here in Pennsylvania. So, Michael, are you there?

Michael: Yes, I am. How are you doing, Fathers?

Fr. Andrew: Good! How are you, Michael? Welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Michael: Thank you, thank you.

Fr. Andrew: So what is your question for us this evening?

Michael: Okay, so my question is regarding relics, just how we believe that, as Orthodox Christians, that grace can be in our bodies, in us; it’s not just an abstract thing. And we also believe it can be contained in objects. Does this also mean that an evil essence or an evil energy can also be contained in an object? And if that is the case, can that evil be expelled from that object, or should it just be burned?

Fr. Andrew: Mm. It’s a good question. The first thing that occurs to me is to think about a house blessing. When we do a house blessing, the whole point is to clean out the residue of sin. Of course, I’m sure you listened to our Day of Atonement episode, in which there’s atonement made for the altar, the tabernacle, the whole space where the people of God are; that sin actually leaves a mark, so to speak; it leaves a stain that needs to be cleaned out. I mean, I wouldn’t think of it in terms of a talisman, but then I wouldn’t think in terms of… I wouldn’t think of that in terms of relics and crosses and so forth that way either. It’s not like it’s a kind of an RPG magical item. That’s not how I would understand it at all. But, yeah, my answer to that is that, yes, absolutely. The physical, material world, even apart from human bodies, can be affected by sin and can have an evil stain within it. But I want to see what Fr. Stephen has to say about this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I have a chalice-plus-one of smiting. [Laughter] I don’t know if you’re aware of that. No—

Fr. Andrew: Well, my censer has plus-six fire damage, so… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Mostly to carpets, I imagine, if my experience says anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, I would also… Yeah. There’s a tendency to start thinking of grace as “stuff,” and we need to push back against that. It’s… the Latin and English languages try to reify everything; they try to turn everything into a thing. And some things aren’t a thing; they’re not even a thing. So we’re going to talk more about that as we go on, about the understanding of grace as the divine energies in this dynamic capacity. We’re going to get into that later on tonight, but, yeah, as Fr. Andrew was saying, there’s a taint that’s usually referred to in the Old Testament as “curse,” that is on and in and taints sort of material, created reality that’s been used for sinful, wicked purposes. And that curse is removed through blessings, so not just house blessings, but blessing objects. When we bless water, we’re not making it magic vampire-killing water… although I understand it does kill vampires—more on vampires this October!

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: But we’re not making magic vampire-killing water; it’s that we’re purifying the curse and so restoring the water to what water was created to be for, which is healing, replenishing, purifying, cleansing; and the same thing when we bless people, and when we baptize people. So, yeah, there is that kind of ontological taint, and as for the grace part, we’ll be getting into that the rest of tonight’s episode. So stay tuned!

Fr. Andrew: Yes. [Laughter] Does that answer your question, Michael?

Michael: Yes, it does, and I’m looking forward to that episode on vampires.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! You have to wait until October, though.

Fr. Stephen: Also werewolves.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Yep. Monsters.

Fr. Stephen: Totally a thing.

Fr. Andrew: Totally. All right, well, thank you very much, Michael, and we do have another call coming in, and it’s Sarah, who I think is somewhere near Chicago. So, Sarah, are you there?

Sarah: Is that me, Sarah from Michigan?

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, well, your phone number apparently says you’re somewhere near Chicago, but you’re the only Sarah we’ve got on the callboard.

Sarah: Well, I live in the suburbs, yeah. I grew up in the suburbs. So anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Your cell phone is from Chicago! [Laughter]

Sarah: Yes, my cell phone is. I have an unrelated question to tonight’s topic, but something that was brought up a few episodes ago. So we were kind of talking a few weeks ago about women who were menstruating or men who have emissions not being part of holy Communion. I was… That kind of got my brain percolating on why are young girls not allowed to serve as an altar girl? Like, if the Theotokos served in this way, why can’t my Orthodox daughter, who is not menstruating yet? And then, kind of a related field of conversation is why do young boys process around the holy table at their 40-day blessing, but girls are not taken past the iconostasis at the 40-day blessing?

Fr. Stephen: So, non-controversial questions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right?

Sarah: [Laughter] I’m just going for it.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Sarah! Okay, so I want to take the second one, because this is actually something I’ve researched—yeah, shocking! So here’s the thing. There is a variety of practices between different Orthodox traditions on that point.

Sarah: Really?

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, yes, historically, a lot of people are not aware of that, because most of us tend to go to one parish most of the time, and that’s not something… When you do visit another parish, it may not be something you see happening at that other parish. So most of us tend to be exposed to only one way of doing that. But the reality is that there are… I’m aware of at least three different versions of that. So there’s one version of which, at the 40-day prayers, that no one is brought behind, through into the holy place, neither boys nor girls. I’m also aware of the practice which you described, which is that boys only are brought back there and then brought around and then handed back to the mother. But there is also a practice where both boys and girls are brought through the deacon’s door, brought round behind the altar, and then brought out the other deacon’s door and brought back to the mother. I guess that might surprise you that that is the case in some churches. If you were to look at, for instance, the most recent official service book from the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America that covers that, that is the practice that is indicated in that book. And there’s a whole bunch of notes in the back about how that’s not something that the people who put that book together made up; it is in fact a well-attested historical practice, actually, and that it seems like the limitation to only boys seems to be a somewhat later development.

Now, all that being said, I am in no way laying down any kind of judgment or criticism on any particular version of that. Every priest—you should do what your bishop tells you to do. And if they’re not doing what their bishop tells them to do, well, that’s between them and their bishop and not my business.

But the question then is why is…? What’s the point of bringing a person back there at that moment? Because a lot of times people have this sense of “okay, only boys are allowed to go back there,” and some people have this sense “all males are allowed to go back there, and no females may ever.” But, clearly, this historical practice of bringing baby girls and boys back there would seem to violate that kind of general idea.

The point of bringing babies back there is that they are being offered to God. That’s what’s going on there. Some will say only boys can go back there because, well, someday they might be priests. And I understand the idea behind that argument, but the truth is that the vast majority of them will not. The vast majority of them will not. It does not make much sense to me. And maybe someone will disagree with me on that point, but it does not make much sense to me to say, “Well, we’ll bring them all back there in the hopes that one out of 10,000 or whatever will actually get ordained.” And nothing in the prayers that are said, whatever version—because, again, there’s multiple sets of prayers between different traditions—none of them say anything about the possibility of that person being ordained. It’s all about offering this child to God, just as was done with the Lord Jesus on his fortieth day.

So that’s my response to that. I do the practice that my bishop gave me to do and that is in the book that is officially promulgated by him. And that’s what everyone should be doing. But there is some variety in that practice. I do not encourage you to go to your priest and say, “I expect you to do this now because I found out there’s another way.” [Laughter] Please don’t do that! No one listening to this—no, please don’t do that! Don’t do that! You know, I’m in favor of liturgical variety; I think it’s okay. So, that’s… Like I said, I looked this up. I actually wrote an article about it that is on my blog. It’s a really interesting thing, and to me what’s really beautiful about it is, whatever practice is being done, the point is to offer this child to God, however it’s being expressed. Again, it’s an imitation of our Lord’s being offered on his fortieth day.

So if that makes sense to you, then I’m going to kick the more controversial thing over to Fr. Stephen and let him cover that question. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I can grumpy-old-man all over it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So it’s worth noting that the Theotokos went into the holy of holies, but she didn’t go back there on the Day of Atonement and assist the high priest. She wasn’t sort of serving as a liturgical assistant.

Sarah: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But so, yeah… So, first of all the thing we need to break that an insane number of Orthodox people have that is that men are allowed behind the iconostasis and women aren’t, because that’s not true! [Laughter] At all! Like, in any form. There’s no element of that that is true. The actual rule is that no one is allowed behind the iconostasis unless they’re there for a purpose for which they’ve been blessed by the bishop.

Sarah: Okay, wow!

Fr. Stephen: I’m a priest, so, as a priest, I am blessed by the bishop to go back there to celebrate services. I don’t go back there and hang out and, like, watch YouTube videos on my phone in the sanctuary. It’s not like a privilege that I have to go back there. I’m only to go back there when I’m preparing for or celebrating or cleaning up after one of the services that I have been blessed to celebrate. If you go to a convent, most convents, when they have a priest or a bishop come to do services, there are certain nuns, usually elderly, well-established nuns, who are designated who will assist the priest behind the iconostasis.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. The other example I like to give is that, during the Byzantine imperial period, at least at some times I know, the empress would actually—I don’t know if she went through the holy doors in the middle—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, she did.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she went right through the holy doors to go receive Communion.

Fr. Stephen: At the altar.

Fr. Andrew: At the altar, just like the clergy. Well, maybe not just like, but pretty similar. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that’s not the rule. The reason why we have altar boys in regular parish practice, as opposed to—in a convent, there aren’t other men around to assist or to clean or to do those things, so particular women are designated for that task—by the bishop. The reason we have altar boys in parish practice is that, contrary to our— This is where I go grumpy old man. Our current modern practice is: “Doesn’t he look cute in his little sticharion! Let’s get a picture of him! Oh look, he’s carrying the big fan! Oh, he’s so cute!” Right? [Laughter] That’s not why. That’s not why. And it’s not even really that the priest needs help.

It’s because, for most of the history of the Church, they didn’t have seminaries, and they didn’t have diaconal courses by mail and late vocations programs. They didn’t have any of that, so the way people learned to become subdeacons and deacons and priests was by celebrating the services. And so the idea was that you’re training the next generation of deacons and priests and subdeacons to serve at the altar. So I, being a grumpy old man, have been known to tell people that if you’re one of those folks who by no means wants your child to be clergy, do not send them back to serve at altar, because that’s what it’s for.

Sarah: Okay. Ahh, that is really helpful!

Fr. Andrew: Yay! I love it when people make that sound! [Laughter] That’s good.

Sarah: I have lots to think on now. Thank you so much for taking my very off-topic question. I very much appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: Well, when I saw it on the callboard, I thought, “Okay, this is not on-topic, but, you know, it’s something I know something about, so here we go!”

Fr. Stephen: And you’re calling from what my people have long considered the promised land.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: That being the state of Michigan.

Sarah: Hey, it’s a great place. Pure Michigan!

Fr. Stephen: And me being Dutch. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, well thank you.

Sarah: Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for calling in, Sarah. Good to hear from you.

Sarah: Yep, bye!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Okay, well, welcome to Act 2.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this being our relics episode, later on we will be discovering Montgomery Scott trapped in the transport buffer of a Dyson sphere.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! I loved that episode, with the green alcoholic beverage that they weren’t sure what it was.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Deep cuts, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Anyway. That takes me right back. So okay…

Fr. Stephen: Isn’t it sad, just as an aside, that our generation… Previous generations experienced nostalgia for rural life or for good times they had in high school with friends. We experience nostalgia for media content.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! It’s just the way it is.

Fr. Stephen: Whither our generation, and all subsequent.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, well, we built the internet, so. I mean, I feel like that’s a decent accomplishment.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like the Tower of Babel?

Fr. Andrew: Exactly! Just like that! [Laughter] Yeah, right. So, okay, since this is… The first part of this episode has been recap, recap, recap, we’re going to do another little bit of recap where we can talk now about the nous again. You’re all going to see how this all fits together very, very soon. So the nous: it’s the imaging capacity, sort of the retina of the soul—can I say that?

Fr. Stephen: ...I guess?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Maybe?

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know. I’ll have to ponder on that one.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay, all right. I mean, that is a metaphor.

Fr. Stephen: I think you’ve gone too far. You’ve transgressed and now you must atone, I think, wherever you were going with that.

Fr. Andrew: This time we’ve come too far.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] But so we talked about how the nous is not only sort of a sensory organ, but also reflects this imaging capacity, this capacity to image God. So, as we were saying at the end of the last act, humanity is the noetic-material being, both a noetic being and a material being, and therefore humanity bridges and potentially unites the entirety of the created order, both the visible and invisible creation. So we’re both the spiritual and physical creation, and material creations, however you want to look at that or parcel that out.

So angelic beings are noetic, but they’re not material, and animals are material but they’re not noetic beings. And we talked about those other intellectual capacities and other forms of reasoning, that heathen dogs like mine have, for example, but they don’t have a nous; they don’t have that imaging capacity that human beings possess.

Fr. Andrew: They have retinas, but not the retina of the soul, as it were. I’m going to try that idea on a few times to see if it fits. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re just going to keep selling it. No matter how hard you try, I don’t think you’re going to make it a thing. It’s like streets ahead; it’s not going to be a thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s not going to be a thing, right!

Fr. Stephen: But so what this means, what this imaging capacity means is that the human person as a whole can function as a material body for another spiritual being.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, another spiritual being.

Fr. Stephen: Meaning—meaning, or to try to help draw this out a little bit—we were just talking about how our physical, material body is the material body for our nous, that it is the way in which our nous interacts with material reality in time and space. And so the human person as a whole can function in that way for another spiritual being, because of the nous. So, for example, the most obvious example of this that we’ve talked about a lot on the show is theosis, this imaging. When we are imaging God in the creation, in the created order, we are serving as a body—we’re serving as an image in the world for God. We talked about that when we talked about creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if a body is, again, the powers and/or potentialities, then that means that when God’s works are being done, the person, if it’s a human being doing God’s works, they are being the body of God, the body of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They’re serving as an instrument in that way.

Fr. Andrew: When you do the works of another spiritual being, you function as the body of that being.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the same is true on the flip-side, and this is the focus on the epic “Giants” episode, on the other side, what we’ve called “demonosis”—which I know you’ve tried to make a thing.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not a thing either?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not a thing yet. To me, it sounds too much like “halitosis,” but maybe some Listerine could clear it up.

Fr. Andrew: Some holy water.

Fr. Stephen: Or demonization, which, as you pointed out to me, we usually use to refer to what we do to our political opponents, calling them names and acting like they’re Satan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but, you know, there’s this: What’s the opposite of a saint? Well, a giant is the opposite of a saint. But however you want to conceive of that, you can do the works of the devil. I mean, the Scripture says this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we got to the end of that in our “Giants” episode, that what we’re talking about when we’re talking about a nephilim or a giant is we’re talking about a person who has completely gone down that path and become demonic themselves, and that’s why there was this understanding, uniform understanding in the ancient Jewish world that after they died, their spirits were the demons that were going around possessing things.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we’ve said that in the past, and we get occasional requests for clarification about that, and sometimes people are like: “Church Fathers don’t say that!” But we actually have a lovely quote from St. John Chrysostom, and St. John Chrysostom, in one of his discourses on the rich man and Lazarus—so this is Discourse II, because there’s four of them—he comments on a kind of urban legend that some people think that someone who dies a violent death becomes a demon after they die.

Fr. Stephen: Which people still think today. There’s: “Oh, this person was murdered, so they’re a ghost now who haunts the place where they were killed.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, there’s this theory… Yeah, exactly. So this is what he said. So this is the actual, direct quote.

For it is a fact that many of the less instructed think that the souls of those who die a violent death become wandering spirits (that is to say, demons), but this is not so. I repeat, it is not so! For not the souls of those who die a violent death become demons, but rather the souls of those who live in sin, not that their nature is changed, but that in their desires they imitate the evil nature of demons. Showing this very thing to the Jews, Christ said, “Ye are the children of the devil” (John 7:44). He said that they were the children of the devil, not because they were changed into a nature like his, but because they performed actions like his, wherefore also he adds, “For the lusts of your father, ye will do.”

So that’s St. John—no less than St. John Chrysostom explicitly saying: “Look, you don’t become a demon after you die by experiencing a violent death; you become a demon after you die by acting like a demon.” That’s what he says.

Fr. Stephen: And just like theosis, it’s not that, just like in theosis, our human nature is not changed into the divine nature…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t become the Holy Trinity.

Fr. Stephen: You remain human. They don’t become fallen angels. Their human nature is not changed into the angelic nature, but it becomes like it and functions like it.

And so what this means is that, from the perspective of the Scriptures, the works that we do—the erga produced by our energeia, the works produced by our energies, which are related words in Greek, the things we do—are the actualization of spiritual energies. So when we are doing “good works,” we’re doing the works of God; when someone does evil works, they’re not just choosing themselves to do a sinful action or making a mistake, but they are actualizing the sin of the demonic powers. So this is why there is not a separation between the idea of morality and the idea of spiritual warfare.

Fr. Andrew: It’s completely relevant to the way that you live your life. And I think that this is a really important pastoral point—we maybe have made it before, but let’s make it again—that often when people are struggling to live as Christians and they find themselves falling into sin, they may conceive of that as simply being: “Well, I’m just a failure. There’s something wrong with me.” Or they may trivialize it: “Well, you know, does God really care if I do that? How big of a deal is it that, really?” But if we understand correctly that when you do what is good you are functioning as the body of Christ, and when you do what is evil you are functioning as the body of the demonic powers, then that changes the whole game.

It completely changes our understanding of what’s going on, and that’s why you see so many, for instance, in the ascetic Fathers, just trying to purge every kind of even minor sin from themselves. They don’t make excuses for it. If they commit sins, they repent of them, because when you sin, then you’re engaging in demonosis. And certainly greater sins do that more than lesser ones, for sure, but you don’t say, “Well, you know, I’m just going to do all these little things, and that’s not that big of a deal,” because the truth is that it does accumulate, and once you permit yourself a small vice, then you’re likely to permit yourself an even bigger one, because it was easy—it wasn’t that bad the last time, and now it’s going to be a little bit easier to make it worse this time. You’re literally, spiritually speaking, hanging around with the wrong crowd, and you become like them. You become like them. So this is a really, really critical concept. You’re going to see how this connects with relics very soon.

Fr. Stephen: We promise.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, you guys know that this is our deal. Right. Yeah, human beings, human works, is the actualization, as they say, of spiritual energies.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we see this kind of approach all over the place in Scripture, one that we’ve come back to several times and we’ll probably end up doing an episode about. You see this with Adam and Cain, where St. Paul says in Romans 5 that sin enters the world through Adam, but notice that language: sin, not sins, not “Adam sinned,” as a verb as an action, but sin, this noun, enters the world through Adam. And that’s commensurate with the way sin is talked about in Genesis 4, where God comes to Cain and says, “Sin is crouching at your door and wants to master you.” It’s sort of this power in the world that is unleashed, and it ends up mastering Cain, and it gets Cain to do his—to do its works.

This gets brought out other places. This is our 1 Enoch quote for this evening. 1 Enoch 10:8 says:

The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel; to him ascribe all sin.

And this is reflecting that same idea, that it’s the works of Azazel that are being done by these people, and they’re corrupting the created order, and that’s what’s going to now necessitate the flood, that he’s the one motivating it, even though the people are doing it. And this is related to the understanding of atonement that we talked about in that episode, that the goat for Azazel: the sins are sent back to him, because he’s where they came from. So: return to sender.

Fr. Andrew: And this same kind of idea is in Scripture, too. We’re not just “getting this from Enoch.” So 1 John, there’s multiple places. 1 John 5:19:

We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.

There’s that sense of the demonic influence everywhere. 1 John 3:8:

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.

So there you go again: You do the works of the devil and you’re becoming like him: you’re a sinner. 1 John 3:12:

We should not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you see Cain’s deeds are evil is a function of him being of the evil one. And Abel’s were a function of him being of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Adam releases sin into the world. We sometimes get this request for clarification: Did Adam sin? Yes, Adam did sin, but the word “sin” is not used to describe what Adam did; it’s a transgression. The word “sin” is used to talk about Cain being overpowered. What Adam releases into the world then leaps on his son, basically, and overpowers him, because Cain doesn’t master himself: he is mastered by sin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is another thing that sort of cuts to most of the debates in the Western theological world, which want to talk about and argue about and split the Church and kill a third of the population of Europe in the Thirty Years’ War, over whether human works, human deeds, are meritorious. And that whole meritorious concept is kind of irrelevant; that whole merit concept is kind of irrelevant, because if we understand human works to be participating, co-operating with, actualizing these spiritual energies, then anything that can be called a good work that a human does is really them participating in and being the instrument of grace, of the divine energies, of God working in the world. They’re the hammer he uses to drive the nail. The hammer can’t ascribe merit to itself. The carpenter doesn’t reward his hammer for having done a good job. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and some of our Reformed friends would say things like, “A human person cannot add anything to his salvation.” They’ll say that kind of thing, and it’s like: Well, any good thing that a human person does is God doing it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that assumes your salvation is like a pile of stuff which you can add to! [Laughter] And that’s not what salvation is. And so the reason God can look at a work and call it good is because it’s his work.

Fr. Andrew: It’s his work.

Fr. Stephen: Just like at the end of each day of creation in Genesis 1, he looks at it and he says, “It is good,” because he did it.

Fr. Andrew: Because every good comes from God. Every good comes from God. There is no independent good.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the alternative for humans is, rather than participating in the divine energies is to participate in the passions, to bring to fruition the works of the evil one, the works of the demons. So, to quote our friend, Bob Dylan, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.” You’re going to have a master. It’s not just that, as Christ said, “No man can have two masters,” but every man serves at least one. And so you can choose. “You have to choose this day whom you will serve.” You don’t get to be an independent contractor.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And whoever’s works you engage in, you become like that one. So you are, or you are becoming, what you do. The things you do are—make you what you are. You know, I mean, just think from your own experience, people, when you… For instance, when you… In one of the fasts and you go to church more often. You’re praying a lot more often. You become much more engaged in the life of prayer. It alters your sensibility. You see things differently. You function differently. But then, say you pick up a habitual sin. It starts to drag you down, and you have this clear sense that you’re a different kind of person, and repentance is you pull yourself up out of that and go back and do the works of God. It changes who you are. It’s not separate from who you are, but it’s also not isolated. The things that you do, you are participating in God or you are participating in the works of the devil. There’s no—there’s no neutral ground. There’s no neutral ground.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this undercuts the whole pathology of Western Christian culture, which includes people who aren’t Christians who were brought up in the culture. And that is guilt: the entire obsession with the concept of guilt. “Is this a sin or not? Am I guilty of something or not? Who’s to blame? Who’s responsible?” This happens even in our Orthodox churches. There’s a problem, and people will spend hours and hours and hours arguing about whose fault it is—and it’s definitely not mine.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s never mine!

Fr. Stephen: It’s definitely this other person’s. It’s their fault. And arguing about whose fault it is and who’s to blame for what, and spend approximately zero hours on working on fixing it. And so repentance is not deciding who’s guilty of what and how that guilt can be absolved. Repentance is fixing the damage, fixing the problem, healing the wounds, repairing the situation. That’s what repentance is, because if you… It’s not a question… There is no question as to whether something was a sin for you. It either drew you closer to God or it drew you farther away. It either made you more like Christ or less like Christ. And so it doesn’t matter if it’s on some list of sins or if you can find a Bible verse to quote saying it’s bad or it’s okay. None of that matters. And this is what St. Paul is always trying to get at when he talks about the conscience. Something can be a sin for one person and not for another person, based on what it does. And if it does that, if it pulls you away from Christ, even a little, that has to be fixed. You have to return to Christ and draw close to him again and continue to draw close to him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so to connect this with some of our other themes, the idea that another spiritual being can make use of a human person as their body— I’m sure when we said that initially, people are like, “Oh, is that what demon possession is?” And the answer is—yes. That is what demon possession is.

Fr. Stephen: In a very literal sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes. Yeah, exactly, but it’s also what idolatry is. Now, idolatry works with a kind of two-factor authentication, as it were, where the demon is making use of the image, the stone or metal or wood idol, and through that, the interaction of human beings with that thing, then they do the works of that demon. But, nonetheless, it still is functioning as a body for the demon, and then those people become further extensions of that body. The idol becomes a kind of conduit to get people to do the works of that demon. But, yeah, demon possession is a thing, both in the sense of a demon getting control of a human person in a sort of very direct and horrifying way, but also, you know, when people do the works of a demon, they are, in a sense, demon-possessed. At the very least, they’re kind of embodying the demon, with this understanding of what a body is. And the good news is, it works the opposite way, too, that we can be the body of Christ also.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the reason for this again—remember, the goal of the demonic powers is to destroy humanity. And humanity has—we have material bodies, we have materiality, which they lack. And that materiality means that we can be shaped; we can change. We don’t just have powers; we also have potentialities that can come to fruition or fail to come to fruition; that can be stunted or that can blossom. So this is why—one of the most common questions we get: Why can humans repent and angels can’t?—this is why. This is why St. John of Damascus says that it’s our materiality that allows us to repent, because we have this malleability, this ability to bring these things into the created order in a way that the demonic powers do not.

And so even in those rare cases—you can find, here and there, these sort of stories—and, as we’ve said before, you never base theology on sort of one anecdotal story from the Desert Fathers and say, “Okay, therefore we have to rewrite our whole theology, because of this one story!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s these stories of angels somehow repenting. Like, that shows up once in a while. But—but!—it always happens with some kind of human agency.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there is a human person involved, with whom or through whom that angelic repentance takes place. So even in these sort of minority reports, where there is some demon that repents, it is by way of a human. And you see the same thing with, when you hear stories about the departed who are in Hades finding salvation, it’s with some living human with a material body, praying for them and repenting for and with them. That materiality is the vehicle through which that malleability and transformation is possible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s why, when the material element of what you are, of who are, what you are, whatever—is separated from the immaterial at death, you can’t repent after that, because you don’t have that potentiality any more.

Fr. Stephen: And so all this has been at sort of the individual level, of individual imaging. But of course, the other big way this whole construct and idea is used in Scripture is corporately—pun intended, to refer to the body of Christ, as in the Church, as in the community, at the community level, the entire Church community serving as the body of Christ, and this in multiple senses. So that the persons who make up the community, when St. Paul gets into that relationship, he talks about members of the body of Christ, and we think of members either as jackets with weird snap-tabs on the shoulders or we think of, like, being the member of a club, or both—porque no los dos? But this is “members” as in parts, as in body parts, and he further defines that. St. Paul talks about eyes and hands and ears. And so “members” meaning each of us is a part of the body, and they all function together to serve as this instrument.

There are two primary ways that St. Paul uses that argument, and other New Testament writers. One is that, as the body of Christ, we are the way in which Christ comes to the world, the Church is. So salvation comes into the world through the Church. Christ works through the Church. When people experience—when people outside the Church experience Christ’s love, it should be—not that Christ can’t do it directly when we’re messing up, but it should be an actual Christian, loving them. It should be the hands of a Christian giving them things to help them with their needs. And, again, there’s that instrumentality. It’s not you doing a good deed by giving a warm coat to a homeless person; it is Christ clothing this person, through you as instrument, through you as his body in the world. And you’ve got some references related to this.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes, we’ve got some good Bible verses. Okay, so 1 John 4:17:

By this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world.

A similar idea is in Ephesians 1:22-23:

And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

The Church is the fullness of Christ. And then I love this really cool expression from St. Augustine, who describes the Church as: “The whole Christ, head and body,” and that’s from his On the Epistle of John.

Yeah, this close identification of Christ and the Church is made very clear in Scripture and certainly the Church Fathers, and it’s in terms that the Church does the works of Christ, that we are the presence of Christ in this world. Of course, someone might object to that and say, “Okay, well, what about bad clergy or bad Christians?” Again, if you’re doing bad things, you’re not being the body of Christ! You’re being the body of another spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so then the other major sense in which we talk about the Church as the body of Christ is that the Church as a community is animated by Christ’s Spirit, because a human body—a human, and human body in the sense that we’ve been talking about “body,” the fuller sense—is a material body that’s animated by a spirit. And so in the same way, because, again, corporately—I’m going to keep punning it up—we’re animated by the Holy Spirit, by Christ’s Spirit, that makes us the body of Christ.

So, from an Orthodox perspective, when we talk about holy Tradition, we’re not talking about a bunch of secrets whispered via telephone-game from the apostles to their successors of some additional stuff that’s not written down in the Bible, some Gnostic secrets we possess that no one else does; we’re talking about the internal life of the Church, which is the Holy Spirit. Just as we have an internal life, not just an external life, so also the Church as the body of Christ has an internal life, the life of the Holy Spirit within the Church, and that internal life, through time and space—you can look at it diachronically or synchronically; you can look at it through history or you can look at it across the Church at any given point in time—that is what holy Tradition is from an Orthodox perspective, and that’s what we protect and preserve and cherish the same way we protect and preserve and cherish our own inner lives as people.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, to me that’s a profound observation that the notion of the Church as being the body of Christ and the notion of holy Tradition being the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, that these are really, essentially two different ways of saying the same thing, just two different angles of looking at it. It’s always beautiful and astonishing to me when concepts that seem like, “Okay, I have a list of concepts that I need to make sure I understand these things”—when they merge and show that it’s really the same one thing. Just, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.

All right, well, with that said, we’re going to take another break, and we’ll be back in just a minute for the third half of our show.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! It’s the third half of the show. I just want to say I know—we’ve been seeing some reports out there that some people are having difficulty with streaming. There have been some technical issues. If you’re hearing me say this, please, if you missed part of the show at all, make sure you tune in tomorrow morning for the recording. We do have a podcast. This is a podcast. You can listen to it recorded, and it is all being recorded, thank God, and you’ll be able to hear it all tomorrow. So our apologies for any technical difficulties that we’ve been having—

Fr. Stephen: Including the Mexican radio.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I was going to say! I hope everybody caught the Mexican radio. If not, it will be on the recording!

All right. Here it is, the third half of the show, and we’re going to talk about relics now! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It really… It wouldn’t be Lord of Spirits without a few technical difficulties here.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, yeah. I mean, we were concerned earlier. You were talking to me yesterday. Last night your power was out because there were storms going on, because it’s storm season in Louisiana! But, thank God, it seems like nothing’s really super problematic on your end. But, oh well!

Fr. Stephen: Now that you’ve jinxed it.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, yeah—boom! “Suddenly, my lights went…” No, it’s okay; it’s okay.

So, okay, the bodies of saints now. The bodies of saints.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so the bodies of saints, then, remain the bodies of saints.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s their body. It’s not just their body; it is them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It is still them.

Fr. Andrew: It is still them. It is still them, and it is still, therefore, the body of Christ, because the works that the saints do are God’s works. So that body is being the body of Christ, because it’s doing his works.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s even though it is a different pile of matter now than it was when that saint was alive. It’s not identical molecules and atoms. That doesn’t affect that any more than it affects it with us as a living human person here in this world, as the matter changes out.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this also applies to pieces of the true Cross and to holy objects in general, once again, even though it’s different matter. Pieces of wood, the molecules still definitely change out. Certainly they would change out a lot of times over the course of 2,000 years, and that’s part of why it doesn’t even matter if it’s “authentic,” because it is being the Cross when it is being prayed in front of, when it is being used to bless someone, when it is being venerated: it is the Cross.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yeah, and so the idea of trying to scientifically authenticate everything is misguided. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, how could you detect…? Okay, let’s detect whether this is being the true Cross. [Laughter] Let’s detect whether this is the Cross for the Church. Like, well, I can detect it, because, look, I saw someone venerate.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and identity is not a question of the material.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s not for you or me either.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a question of what it’s doing, what it is doing, what it is being at that time. And so this also extends to icons, which are related, not the exact same thing, because an icon of Christ, most likely—it’s not impossible, but most likely—none of the matter in the icon of Christ you have on the wall was part of Christ’s physical body—like I said, it is possible, but most likely not—when he walked this earth. But still, it functions in a similar way, that the icon is being the presence of the person or event depicted. This is why the—oh, we’re going to get hate mail for this—this is why the “windows to heaven” language isn’t quite right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because… And from what I understand—I’m not one of the people who study this, but from what I understand, people who have actually studied this, this “windows to heaven” language is relatively recent, quite recent actually. And the problem with a window is that it’s a space that opens to sort of let you see through, but what an icon actually is being is the presence of the saint or event being presented to you. It’s not a telescope that lets you see back in time or into the other world or whatever. It is being the works of that person or event or of God himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It represents this… a material object that has a certain capacity as a medium, and when you get into St. John of Damascus, who—see, I said we were going to get back to him later—when you get to his Defense of the Holy Icons, when he’s arguing against iconoclasm, he doesn’t focus on the type of stuff you brought up in your introduction. He does talk about it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t just say, “Hey, look at these precedents!” I mean, which, fine, there’s nothing wrong with bringing that up. There’s icons in the Temple and tabernacle. That’s fine, but…

Fr. Stephen: But he doesn’t do twelve proof-texts and then say, “Checkmate, iconoclasts!” [Laughter] And when you look at the core and structure of his argument in all of his treatises on the holy icons, the core and structure of the argument, he’s talking about matter. For him, the core of the argument is the relationship of matter, of the material creation, to God and specifically to the divine energies, to grace, to God’s work in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, so there’s this classic quote which I think if anybody knows any quote from St. John of Damascus, that isn’t one of his hymns, this is the one that they’ve heard of. He says this:

I do not worship matter; I worship the God of matter who became matter for my sake and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works for my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God.

So he’s talking about matter being used by God, being inhabited by God, that the matter works his salvation. It’s—again, it’s not an independent good or an independent agent; it’s God doing it. God is making use of matter as an instrument.

Fr. Stephen: And that inhabiting matter, just to clarify, is not some kind of panentheism, where God is just in all the matter. “He’s in the tree. He’s in the wind.” It’s specifically talking about the Incarnation, as St. John of Damascus clarifies.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, okay, so we’ve got another quote here, again from the same work, from his Defense of the Holy Icons, and he says this:

The nature of God remains the same as before. The flesh created in time is quickened by a logical and reasoning soul. I honor all matter besides, and venerate it. Through it, filled, as it were, with a divine power and grace. My salvation is come to me. Was not the thrice-happy and thrice-blessed wood of the Cross matter? Was not the holy and sacred mountain of Calvary matter? What of the life-giving rock, the holy Sepulcher, the source of our resurrection—was it not matter? Is not the most-holy book of the Gospels matter? Is not the blessed table matter, which gives us the bread of life? Are not the gold and silver matter, out of which crosses and altar-plate and chalices are made? And before all these things, is not the body and blood of our Lord matter?

It’s a powerful argument.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he’s saying everything in regard to our salvation—all of the grace of God that we receive—is mediated to us through the material creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s not this sort of projecting of something from on high that we bathe in or whatever. It’s matter, it’s matter, it’s matter, it’s matter.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not over against the material, because St. John of Damascus… Essentially what he comes to most often with the iconoclasts is basically accusing them of being Manichees, accusing them of treating matter as evil or somehow unworthy of God, and thinking that God and matter have to somehow be kept separate. That to him is the opposite view, which the iconoclast view tends to.

But the knowledge of God that we have is mediated through matter, most especially in the Incarnation, but the people who see God in the Old Testament see him with their material senses and interact with him, and he touches them, physically. [Laughter] They experience him; they are material, noetic beings. And the Gospel, the Gospel being what Christ did, what Christ accomplished—he did that, as St. John points out, materially. He died on a cross made of wood, in a place, in space and time. Materially, he accomplished that.

Fr. Andrew: With a material body of his own.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so all of material reality has this sacramental nature, has this sacramental nature where it is capable of being permeated by the divine energies, by the work of God. God is able to work through all of it, and that’s what the age to come represents for us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, I think sometimes when people talk about the energies of God—which, I mean, this is a classic term from Orthodox patristic theology, and it’s in the Bible, actually—that, living in the modern age as we do, I think sometimes people might think of the energies of God as being like a form of radiation, but it’s really God working; it’s God’s works in this world. And it is, as you said: it’s in matter; it’s through matter. He’s making use of matter. And, frankly, some of that is us. We are the matter—we are some of the matter that he’s using to do his work in the world. And that means that we, therefore—it goes the other direction, that when we respond to him, we do it materially. It’s not just an internal, mental thing, where I think about God or feel really hard about God, but there are material actions of worship, of offering sacrifices, the beautiful icons and everything in the church—all of church buildings, incense, holy water—I mean, it goes on and on. These are all things human beings are using to respond to God and to participate in his works. It goes in both directions.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because the matter that God works through is transfigured; it’s not dissolved, it’s not done away with and replaced with spirit or something else, whatever we want to call it, that’s “better,” but it is transfigured and transformed, and then becomes a suitable vehicle for us then to respond through it. So the medium of our salvation, in both directions, the medium through which we interact with God, is the material creation as a whole. And so that is the medium, and Christ is the one Mediator between God and man, because he is both God and man, both God and a material, noetic being that man is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s why, then, there is a bodily resurrection—of Christ, of humanity. It’s the ultimate transfiguration, transformation of all matter, to be the instrument of God. The whole cosmos.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a resurrection of—the cosmos is resurrected. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So that’s what relics are, everybody! It’s… I wanted to relay a little anecdote, actually, kind of connected to all that. So I mentioned in the beginning about venerating the hand of St. Mary Magdalene. Occasionally people ask me, “Are you sure that it was warm?” or whatever. Well, number one, I was kissing a whole series of relics, and there was a clear temperature difference when we came to kissing her hand. It is, it’s warm, just as the hand of any human woman is warm, and the skin is flexible. I mean, the skin’s still on; it’s an incorrupt relic. I mean, it’s a 2,000-year-old relic, but it’s incorrupt: the skin is flexible; the hand is warm.

So on Mt. Athos, many of the monasteries there have the custom—I don’t know if it’s all of them; I haven’t been to all of them, but I saw it at a bunch of them—many of the monasteries there have the custom that, after dinner—so usually you have vespers and then dinner and then they serve compline or “complin” as someone wrote in to tell me I should be saying instead—

Fr. Stephen: I’m Dutch, so when I hear “compline,” I think that’s where you queue up to get free stuff.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The comp-line, yes, nice. So when that service is being served in the narthex, which is where it’s traditionally served, then often in the nave of the church there at the monastery, they’ll put some tables in the middle of the nave, and then they’ll take the major relics that they have at the monastery and put them out there for the veneration of pilgrims. And they’ll do this almost every night. And on Mt. Athos the relics that they have there, most of them, are not like the relics that we have here in America, where most relics you encounter here in America are like a tiny little speck. They’re really, really small, or they might be something like the size of a pea, at biggest. And in some places there’s bigger ones. For instance, if you were to go to Joy of All Who Sorrow Cathedral in San Francisco, you can see the full relics of St. John the Wonderworker there. The same thing with St. Mardarije there in Libertyville, Illinois. But, generally speaking, most of the relics you encounter here in America are tiny little specks.

Well, on Mt. Athos they have many major relics. Like, whole parts: whole skulls, hands, legs, feet, arms. That’s pretty common there, and so when were at Simonopetra Monastery, which has the hand of St. Mary Magdalene, a hieromonk, Fr. Iakovos, who is an American, actually—so he was there, putting the relics out, and he explained to us, in both English and also in Greek for the Greek-speaking pilgrims, what the relics were, who they belonged to: “This is the hand of St. Mary Magdalene. This is…” I think they have a leg from St. John Chrysostom and some other relics there. I don’t remember them now; it’s been a few years.

And one of our pilgrims was a little weirded out by this experience, because, again, they weren’t little specks. I mean, you look, and these are bones right in front of you, or in one case a hand. And he just… I just kind of heard him say, “I don’t know that I can do this.” Like he felt like he couldn’t bring himself to go and kiss these bones. I think a lot of Americans have this sensibility when seeing relics, that it’s hard, because “I’m not used to encountering dead body parts!” Whereas a lot of our ancestors would have been much, much more used to that kind of thing.

So Fr. Theodore, who was leading our pilgrimage, he said—and to this day I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but he said something to the effect of: A relic is the presence of Christ in the saint to us, and there’s a sense in which this is a foretaste of the resurrection as well. And then the pilgrim with the hesitation, he just immediately stepped forward and venerated the relics, and he, too, experienced the fact that her hand is still warm.

You know, a lot of relics have miracles associated with them. Most don’t; frankly, most do not, but, I mean, there’s some where they’re incorrupt: the skin is still on them; there’s some where they’re warm. I read recently that the body of St. Spyridon is warm, and that is skin is flexible, that his hair and nails grow. I mean, he’s been dead for a long, long time. There are some that stream myrrh; there are some that have a beautiful odor, but, again, most don’t have any of those kinds of miracles associated with them. But if we understand that the body of a saint is being that saint’s body, is being that saint, and is therefore the body of Christ—all of this makes sense. All of it makes sense.

So I hope that this kind of recap—I mean, we did a lot of recapping, but you can see it all kind of flows into that. I have some final thoughts on another, related topic, but I don’t know—Father, did you want to give any kind of concluding remarks about how this specifically relates to relics before we do each our final thoughts?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, just touching on what you mentioned about our ancestors being more familiar with this, in a lot of old countries still today—in Palestine in the first century, though this was only for a brief period in Palestine, admittedly—for example, it was very common when someone’s loved one was deceased, they’d be buried, but they’d only be buried or put in a tomb for a period of a year or two. And then the family would return to the gravesite to remove the remains and wash the bones and put them in an ossuary. And there are other, similar rituals. And if you’re talking about an Orthodox old country, I know they still do this in a lot of parts of Greece. There are prayers associated with that. And this has been throughout human history… People have cared for their departed loved ones, meaning their bodies, long after their departure.

We talked about, back in the neolithic period, back in the first human settlements, people buried their departed loved ones in the floors of their homes. They were still there with them. They kept them there with them. And so, yeah, that… Our modern, especially American, sort of squeamishness and, you know, “get the body away from me as fast as possible and make it look like a wax dummy if I have to see it at all and get it into the ground and I’ll just have my memories of that person”—that’s the weird aberration in terms of humanity, not kissing the body of a loved one who has died. That’s not weird; that’s normal for humans. The other is what’s weird and kind of unnatural. So, yeah, just a more global perspective and historical perspective on that I think helps a lot.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that our psychological feelings, sometimes we can’t just trust that they’re the best thing to go by. I remember the late Fr. Peter Gillquist. Now, he was talking about worship, but he said, “Whatever someone’s used to, that’s what’s normal for them.” [Laughter] And it’s really true. That’s the thing that they’re going to call normal, and what everyone else does is weird. Okay, so that really nicely segues into what I wanted to say for my final comments, then, before you make yours, Father.

We had several people that contacted us and were ask— And there was a conversation within our Facebook group, actually, about the practice of cremation. Now, if you’ve been listening to this whole episode, then your mind is going to start to work on this question about cremation. Traditionally speaking, Christians do not cremate their departed. They don’t. Cremation has been something that was much more associated with paganism, although even then most pagans throughout history did not cremate.

One thing, of course, is that a lot of people don’t really understand what’s involved in most cremation, especially here in the United States. It’s not simply burning the body, because not everything in a human, material body burns up: there’s still bones left over, and the cremation process also includes grinding the bones up, smashing and grinding the bones. It’s really kind of a violent thing. Now, not everywhere does cremation the same, but that’s the way that it’s done here in America. And of course if anyone has any kind of prosthetic implants, like a new hip or a joint or something like that, that’s tossed in a big bin to be recycled afterwards. I mean, go down to your local funeral home and ask them about this; they’ll tell you.

But Christians traditionally do not cremate, and, of course, Orthodox Christians—there are exceptions, but, generally speaking, the rule is that someone who’s cremated cannot receive an Orthodox Christian funeral. If you’ve wondered why, well, listen to this episode: because that body is—if it’s a Christian, it’s part of Christ’s body. Christ was not cremated. That body was still him while it was in the grave. He didn’t go somewhere else and then that body was no longer his; it was still him. It still was him, even when he was in the grave. We don’t talk about him being gone; we say that he was in the grave, because his body was in the grave. Christ was not cremated.

And that body rose from the dead, and the bodies of Christians rise from the dead. Actually, the body of everybody’s going to rise from the dead! But we… Christians with the hope of the resurrection, to then act upon that body in a way that utterly dissolves it, sort of erases it, especially this practice of sprinkling ashes—that’s even more this kind of thing of kind of totally erasing the human body. You can see now how this is not appropriate for Christians. Now again, it’s not about the specific molecules; it’s about the person, and that body is still that person. The same understanding is going to extend outward to all human bodies, living or dead, to all material creation. What do we use it for? What are human bodies for? They are for the works of God. And dissolving them, through cremation or whatever other process someone might use, is an act of counteracting that.

Now, if you… if someone you know has been cremated, I’m not saying that that means that they’re damned or that the people who did that are damned. Most people are cremating out of ignorance, actually, because they just maybe think it’s just the cheapest option. Sidebar: it’s not necessarily the cheapest option. Again, if you use a funeral home, talk to the people who run it. It may not be actually the cheapest option.

There’s a lot of considerations that have to go into that, but if we understand that the bodies of Christians are them and are the body of Christ, then we’re going to lovingly lay it to rest. As Fr. Stephen mentioned, there’s in many cases, after a period of time, the bones are removed and lovingly taken care of, put into an ossuary, especially a monastic ossuary, bones stacked upon bones. And it’s interesting: there’s certain ones you might see might be kind of like a honey-golden color or sometimes a scarlet color. Some will drip myrrh; some will have a beautiful odor—because this is the sanctity of Christ in that person. Cremation acts against that. Cremation destroys that possibility for that person.

So this whole episode was not an argument against cremation, but kind of as a by-product of talking about relics. We understand the term “relics” to largely refer to the bodies of saints, but the truth is that every human—every Christian, their body is relics. Their body is being the body of Christ for us, and we should treat it that way. That’s how we should treat it. So I’m not just talking about cremation here, but about the way that we attend to other human persons, not just after their material death, but even as they are living amongst us, that that body is relics. That body is, for us, the presence of Christ in our midst. He is working in them. They are doing his works, because God works in matter; God uses matter for our salvation, just like St. John of Damascus said. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so—fun fact #327 about me is that my favorite novel is Albert Camus’s The Stranger. At another point, after World War II, Albert Camus gave a talk to a group of Dominican monks in France, and he was asked to speak on the topic of what the world wants or expects from Christians in the wake of everything that had happened in World War II and Albert Camus having been part of the Resistance in France, etc. And in it he gives, albeit in a somewhat hopeful way, what has been for a long time in the modern world, the primary criticism of Christians and Christianity from people outside of it, which is, essentially, that Christians only care about spiritual things and not about this world, and that they do that because of their religion. They’re just worried about going to heaven when they die, and they don’t care about anything else, so they don’t care if the water and the air get polluted, they don’t care if people starve to death—they don’t care about any of this stuff in this world, because they just believe the right things, so they’re going to go to heaven when they die, and they just care about the next world and not about this world.

And Camus kind of lays that at the feet, that idea basically at the feet of the Dominican monks, whom he’s kind of blaming for their silence in the lead-up to World War II and even during World War II, when they had kind of cloistered themselves. But he concludes it by saying, essentially, we may never get to live in a world where children aren’t killed, but we can work together to live in a world where fewer children are killed. And I think it’s easy, when we hear that response, especially when it’s put in a patronizing or not very insightful way, by an atheist on the internet; it’s very easy to rattle off a bunch of responses, like: “Hey, Christians built the first hospitals and the first orphanages and feed people, and all the charity Christians have done historically”—and that’s all true, and it’s not that that’s invalid.

But the people who make that criticism aren’t getting it from nowhere; they’re not just making it up. It wouldn’t sting and we wouldn’t get defensive if they were just making it up out of wholecloth. Even some of our very popular American hymns—I love “I’ll Fly Away”; it’s super catchy, but it’s horrible theology. “One bright morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away.” Good-bye, body; good-bye, world. I’m going to heaven; I’m going somewhere better. And that is foreign to Christianity. That idea isn’t Christianity as it has historically existed. It may be some form of Gnosticism; it may be something else, but that’s not Christianity.

For Christians, this world, this material world—the matter that makes up the world to come is not going to be a whole new set of matter; it’s going to be this matter, rearranged and transfigured and re-ordered and re-created in that sense. And so, for us as Christians, as we, as St. Paul says, work out our salvation with fear and trembling, because God is working within us, to will and to do, according to his pleasure—as we’re doing that, we’re doing that in this arena, through this medium that is material. And so we need to not be inspired by our reaction to accusations from atheists, but in response to the example set for us by our forebears in the faith, who came to new peoples and created written languages and taught people-groups literacy so that they could read the Scriptures and read and understand the prayers of the Church and come to know Christ, and sometimes taught them farming methods while they were at it, because if someone’s starving to death, it makes it very difficult for them to learn about who Christ is and to focus on anything else.

They did these things not in addition to and definitely not instead of preaching the Gospel, but these are part and parcel: these things go together. Christ says not only blessed are those who teach little ones the commandments, but also blessed are those who give to the little ones a cup of cold water in his name. Those go together, and so we need to care deeply about this world, this created, material world and the people in it, and doing good here and finding repentance here and bringing other people to the knowledge of God here, because it’s through this medium of this life and this world, in all of its materiality, that we’re going to find our salvation and our entrance into the next world, which is really just this world, fully transformed and made perfect, reaching its goal for which it was created in the first place.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, everybody, that is our show for tonight. Thank you so much for listening. If you didn’t 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 read everything, but 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 all.