Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers and dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, in Emmaus, PA. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in! This is actually the first episode in a while that we’ve taken calls live. You can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s again, 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is taking your calls tonight, which we will get to beginning in the second part of our show.

But first I just wanted to mention that Lord of Spirits is brought to you by our listeners, with help from the Theoria School of Filmmaking. Theoria School of Filmmaking is the first Orthodox film school. The primary instructor is Jonathan Jackson, a faithful Orthodox Christian speaker, writer, and five-time Emmy Award winner. To learn more about Theoria, please visit theoriafilm.org, and that’s spelled t-h-e-o-r-i-a-film.org.

Fr. Stephen De Young: I’m Commander Shepard, and I endorse this product or service.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There we go! Yes. Yeah, we have sponsors! Isn’t that great? So on this podcast, we’ve talked many, many times about the three elements of the fall of man—death, sin, and domination by demonic powers. But we’ve never actually dedicated whole episodes to this, so today we’re going to be beginning a three-part series on this, and our first episode is of course on death, because that’s where it starts; that’s where mankind’s problems really begin. So naturally we’re headed all the way back to Genesis. So, Fr. Stephen, is this going to be the episode where we finally talk about how the earth is almost exactly 6,000 years old!?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Oh.

Fr. Stephen: Because that’s not a thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s very disappointing.

Fr. Stephen: But. Before we start, we have another proverbial element in the proverbial room.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Here we go.

Fr. Stephen: And, you know, I try to mind my own business, keep to myself…

Fr. Andrew: Do you? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’m not on social media, right? But I hear things, you know. Things get back to me. Lately, I hear some guy—Richard “Rawlins,” I guess?—goes on some YouTuber’s show, starts talking a bunch of mess about how I’m a chicken.

Fr. Andrew: I heard about this.

Fr. Stephen: Listen up, pal! You can hear me now and believe me later. Nobody calls me chicken! [Laughter] I know all about all these stories about Melchizedek. I’ve read Slavonic Enoch. So I know about Melchizedek being born from the dead body of his virgin mother, as the third Enochic priest, and being hidden even during the flood. I know all about this. I may have even written about it in a forthcoming book. [Laughter] So, Richard “Rohan,” if that is your real name, here’s what I want to know. You go around acting like you know all about Ethiopia, but I haven’t heard a word from you about 4 Baruch. [Laughter] I don’t think you even know it exists. So what now?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, we’re officially having an internet feud, everybody, so join in, please! Welcome!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right. The gauntlet has been thrown down. I’m told that Richard doesn’t even listen to this live, so he doesn’t even know what a hundred people now know about him. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I have no doubt he’s going to need a lot of time to even figure out how to respond.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: If he deigns. But so, on to our topic for tonight!

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: With apologies to our listeners that they had to sit through that nonsense, but sometimes you have to respond to some things.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sorry you guys had to hear that, but, you know, they’re saying stuff! So things have to be said in return.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. You can’t just let some of these things slide, no matter how obscure a person it is who says it. [Laughter] And we’re going to begin this evening, as we begin so many evenings, by doing a little recap, because we’re going back to the garden of Eden, we’re talking about the expulsion from paradise; we’re talking tonight about death coming upon the human race. And so, as with several of our episodes recently, these aren’t things that we’ve never talked about before, but we’re kind of coming at it from a different trajectory tonight.

And so, just to remind people—because even if you have recently listened to all of the previous episodes straight through, because you’ve been lost at sea or something… with an iPhone? I don’t know. It’s been probably about 100 hours since the last time we talked about this, minimum. So we need to go over a couple of themes from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, respectively. As we’ve talked about a couple of times in the past, in Genesis 1, part of the structure of the description of the six days of creation, followed by the seventh day, is that this follows the general pattern of temple construction, and we’ll probably end up wrapping around and doing another temple episode and going into this in even more detail again…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’d be a good idea.

Fr. Stephen: …but temple construction narratives—stories of gods’ temples being built, or them building and then coming to inhabit their temples—that’s a major genre of Ancient Near Eastern literature. Genesis 1 sort of has those features, and, as I said, we’ll probably go more into depth in that. There’s also continuities and discontinuities with the other Ancient Near Eastern examples.

But the key element for tonight is that at the end of creation being constructed as the temple of Yahweh, the God of Israel, the sabbath day when he comes to rest, it’s not that he needs a break or he’s tired; it’s that he is seated: he is enthroned.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which we covered a lot in our Ascension episode from last year; we talked about this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that is an important element to kind of have back in your mind for what we’re going to talk about tonight. And the second kind of element—and this is something we’ve mentioned, I know, repeatedly, so this may be a little fresher—is the pattern in Genesis 1 and 2 of—you see this in the creation days: the first three days are things being put in order; the second three are them being filled with life. And then the garden itself: a garden is sort of the perfect combination of the two. Order without life is just sort of barren, and life without order is the bayou next door to where I’m speaking to you from right now.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Can you go fishing there? There must be some kind of something good in there.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, and an alligator might catch you...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well… Hey, no guts, no glory, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… I have a parishioner now who did some alligator farming…

And then that pattern of creation—creation being putting things in order, filling them with life—is then what it handed down to humanity to continue that work by filling the earth and subduing it, filling it with life and subduing it, putting it in order.

And we’ve talked before about how one of those tends to the masculine, the other tends to the feminine, and that men and women participate together to accomplish both. So that’s the quick recap. If we have that kind of thing in the back of our head, that will help as we now go forward.

So this is the beginning of, as you mentioned, sort of a three-part series, and these are going to be patterned somewhat the same way. So in our first half of the three tonight, we’re going to be talking about the way in which angelic or divine beings get involved in this first fall of man, because each of the three—obviously, we already did our Five(ish) Falls of the Angels episode, way back in the long-ago time, now we’re focusing on the human side. But there are—in each of these three, there are angelic beings who get involved. And since this is the first one and this is the one that immediately follows the creation of the world, those stories, we need to start by talking a little bit about the invisible creation, because we understand—and it’s even referenced in the Nicene Creed—that creation has these components, visible and invisible. And the whole premise of the show is about reunited those.

But when we talk about the creation of the world and the way a lot of folks, especially in our modern era, sort of the modernist approach to these things focuses almost entirely on the material element of that, which is why some folks spend their time plumbing the depths of the age of the earth and where dinosaurs fit into Genesis and these sort of things, because they’re primarily concerned with the scientific material elements… But the elements of the invisible creation are important here. The other thing that tends to happen—and I’d probably feel worse about bashing John Milton if he weren’t a Puritan—

Fr. Andrew: Well, he’s dead. I mean, he’s not going to be bugged by this, so… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He’s a dead Puritan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly! [Laughter] He wrote some very nice poetry, though!

Fr. Stephen: Eh…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know. Hey. I spent a lot of time with especially 16th- and 17th-century English poetry as an undergrad, and so I have a very soft spot in my heart for that sort of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: I’m more of a—

Fr. Andrew: Milton’s mighty line, you know, right? Milton’s mighty line, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I prefer the—

But from—I mean, you have to give him credit that his writing was sort of so powerful that everyone now has this sense that there was this sort of primordial—not only creation of angelic beings before the creation of the world, never discussed in the Bible, but that there was this war in heaven before the creation of the world, that that has just become so commonplace as a belief…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he took stuff that is or is implied in Scripture and kind of projects it backwards to before Genesis 1:1. This stuff happens kind of off-camera, and then you get Paradise Lost.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but we need to take seriously that Genesis 1 and 2 are giving us the story of creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and angels are created.

Fr. Stephen: Meaning not of the creation of matter, not of the creation of the visible world, but of creation, the whole thing.

Fr. Andrew: The whole creation.

Fr. Stephen: And that the visible and the invisible creation are not sort of these in two separate compartments. Again, the whole theme of this show is that these things are not in these two separate compartments and don’t interact, like there’s some sort of invisible dimensional wall between us and heaven, and the angels are up there doing stuff and we’re here.

So the question becomes if we accept that—so if we accept: okay, what we have, in Genesis 1 in particular, and the beginning of Genesis 2, is the creation of all of creation, visible and invisible, then where within the narrative of Genesis—where does the invisible creation fit in?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it doesn’t seem to be explicit anywhere in there: “And on the Nth day, God created the angelic beings!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, it’s not that explicit, at least. And so what you tend to get is—and if you read Second Temple Jewish sources, if you read the Church Fathers on this, they will generally peg it to one of the creation days. So they don’t see it as this separate event outside of the narration of Genesis 1.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not Day Zero.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but they also don’t— There’s no gap theory, yeah. [Laughter] Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight is not accurate.

Fr. Andrew: Ha! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I know, that’s where you were getting your theology was from… Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, you know me! [Laughter] That stuff… When I was a kid, I saw that that stuff existed, but it always ooked me out on a very, very deep level.

Fr. Stephen: Did you also ook out at Demon Knight?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I just knew Tales from the Crypt existed; I didn’t know that there was also a demon knight.

Fr. Stephen: That was just the first movie. And you should watch what you say about it, because Jada Pinkett Smith is in it, and anybody hears you saying anything bad about that movie, you could get smacked.

Fr. Andrew: I have nothing to say about the movie! I’ve never seen it! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’m just saying! Don’t even want to mention her name; you could get in trouble.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not like Tolkien fans who have everything to say about shows that haven’t even come out yet. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And it stars Billy Zane before he went bald, but ironically he shaved his head in it. Anyway. But it’s inaccurate; that’s where we’re going here. [Laughter] Not a bad movie, but inaccurate. Much better than the sequel, which starred Dennis Miller. That Dennis Miller.

Fr. Andrew: What? Really!?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Tales from the Crypt II: Bordello of Blood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m still not going to watch it, but, oh, gosh. No, I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Where he—spoilers!—he ends up shooting a bunch of vampires with holy water in Super Soakers.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Well. All right?

Fr. Stephen: As one does.

Fr. Andrew: Moving right along.

Fr. Stephen: So. That is also inaccurate, as you know from our Halloween episode this year about that topic.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, that is not how vampires are or orcs or any of that stuff… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So the Second Temple literature and the Fathers see this somewhere in the framework of the creation days. Usually—not always, but usually, it’s the first day or the third day—or the fourth day, I’m sorry.

Fr. Andrew: So why would they pick those days?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the first day, light is created; the fourth day is the sun, moon, and stars, which as we’ve talked about are connected biblically to the angels.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, you wouldn’t want to create those things and just let them float out there without an angel to take care of them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So usually one of those two days. The minority report is there’s some second day, and I think the second-day folks are looking at the separation of the waters above from the waters below, and they’re looking at that as the creation of heaven or the heavens.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s sort of the minority report.

Fr. Andrew: Thus the heavenly hosts.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So those are the— And this is true even for Fathers, for example, like St. Augustine, who don’t hold to 24-hour days in sequence. So St. Augustine famously believed that time doesn’t apply to God, so this sort of all happened at once, and the days there are just sort of a structure to explain it to us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a literary structure rather than a chronological structure.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there are certain other Fathers who have similar— not St. Augustine’s exact view, but who talk about Genesis 1 as being a structure for explaining it to us rather than being a literal blow-by-blow account.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, doesn’t—if I recall correctly, doesn’t St. Basil…? Isn’t it in the Hexameron, who kind of says, “Look, we don’t know exactly and it’s not super important that we know these kinds of of things”?

Fr. Stephen: Right, that beyond what’s in—what is told to us in the text, we don’t have a capacity to know. That’s left to God, and so we need to be attentive to what he did tell us and what he’s teaching us by it, and he’s using that to sort of cut off speculation; you can run all over the place. Yeah, and that kind of approach generally makes sense, because if we also take seriously the idea that we find in most of the Fathers—I’m not going to give a percentage, but most of the Fathers who talk about it—that the Prophet Moses received this in a vision, and it seems to me if he receives it in a vision and you’re going to be a stickler for literal 24-hour days, then he must’ve been, like, standing there on Mt. Sinai for six or seven straight days, watching the vision happen?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Playing it out. Probably can’t pause it.

Fr. Stephen: It being a visionary experience, there’s going to be symbolism; there’s going to be structures to it to communicate things that aren’t necessarily literally. Now, I would say it’s not literal…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and why would they say Moses received this in a vision? Well, because Adam and Eve were not taking notes, and of course they also weren’t present for most of what’s in the… So this would have to have been revealed by God to Moses, who writes Genesis.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that’s the idea there. And again, we’re not saying it’s not literal; we’re just saying it’s perfectly reasonable to take a symbolic reading of what’s going on there, especially when we’re talking about Genesis 1.

Fr. Andrew: Is it a symbolic world? I don’t know… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know. That sounds vaguely familiar… So there is—the key, though, here, the key thing that we can say that is taught—because we’ve said there are these differences and distinctions and nuances—but the key thing that’s taught here is that the visible and invisible creations are a product of the same creative act of the Holy Trinity.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because the idea that they are two utterly separate creations is simply not a thing in Scripture, and, as you said, it’s mentioned in the Creed, that he created all things visible and invisible. It’s just—creation.

Fr. Stephen: So this—and again, obviously we talked about this, again in the before-time, in our episode about the five(ish) falls of the angels, but that, then, of course raises the question of the falls of angels, and specifically the devil. What you find when you start looking this up is that often there’s either—it’s either spoken of as if no real amount of time passed between the creation of angelic beings and them at least beginning to fall…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if I recall correctly, isn’t it St. Maximus maybe that says that they fell—maybe he’s talking about Adam, but the idea is sort of that they fall as they come into being.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s what I was about to say, is that you’ll find Fathers saying the same thing about humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because there is no—again, within the story within Genesis, there is no time-lapse. Like, we don’t have: “Five years later, Eve was standing next to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…” [Laughter] There’s no…

Fr. Andrew: There’s no indication of how much—of when things happened. I mean, there’s an order, a sequence, but there’s no indication of how long it takes from one thing to the next.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I think we need to understand that, as we’ve talked about so many times, you don’t know what it’s like to be a bat; you don’t know what it’s like to be a vast, cosmic intelligence; you don’t even know what it’s like to be a newly created human in the presence of God in paradise.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I can’t even remember being born, so…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] Right, and so we don’t know… In the same way that we don’t know how we will experience time in the life of the world to come—we tend to think about it as if we’re going to experience time the same way we do now; it’s just going to be like forever; it’s going to be like an endless succession of moments—but there’s no logical reason to believe that, that that’s how we’re going to experience time. And the same thing is true before the expulsion from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so I think one of the things that’s really important to highlight here when we talk about the fall of the devil—and we’re talking about the fall of human beings, too, so this is kind of…

Fr. Stephen: Using the word “fall” in this context.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Often “fall,” within a certain theological framework, is used to mean: flipped the switch from good to evil. At this point he was unfallen—perfect, sinless, whatever—and then the switch gets flipped, and it’s evil, depraved, damned. But that is not really the way that the Scripture and traditional Christian theology use this term. It’s actually a little bit more literal on some level, or maybe I should say more analogical. It’s more about being thrown out, cast down. So, for instance, when Christ says that he sees Satan “fall from heaven,” that’s this analogical sense of being thrown out and falling down, not—it doesn’t mean turning to evil, because presumably there’s already evil present within the serpent before he’s cast out from paradise. And we certainly know that Adam and Eve have already transgressed against the Lord before they’re cast out from paradise. So it’s not the same thing as turning to evil, kind of flipping the switch and no longer being good; it’s really about being thrown out, is this sense of “fall.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there are actions taken. Those actions have consequences. One of those is a falling, a being cast out, an expulsion, a removal. And then that in turn has consequences. So, yeah, we’ve got the heavyweight of St. Augustine in Western culture weighing on us with this, where he kind of condensed the three falls that we’re going to be talking about in these three episodes to just the one we’re talking about in this episode, and where this is humanity becoming evil or depraved. And as we’re going to see tonight, that’s not what this story is about. And as we go through the next couple of episodes, we’ll see how other elements of that come into play in the biblical narrative. But, yeah. And we’re also, especially as modern Western folks, very much in the sort of “good guy, bad guy” mode of interpreting reality. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we should also say that even though we are dividing this into three discrete episodes on death, sin, and demonic domination, there’s kind of a lot of overlap that happens between these things. So we can talk about them as separate events; we can talk about them as separate concepts, but they’re really intimately connected, as I think will become apparent as we move through this progression.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we have this “good guy, bad guy” thing, so Adam and Eve are “good” people; then they become bad people.

Fr. Andrew: Then they’re bad.

Fr. Stephen: And then Cain, whom we’ll talk about more next time, he’s a bad person. And there’s good angels and bad angels. And there’s the cowboy with the white hat and the cowboy with the black hat. And then Johnny Cash shows up, and you get all confused.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Good guys wear black! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And, yeah, there aren’t “good people” and “bad people.” There aren’t “good guys” and “bad guys”; there’s just a bunch of guys.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all just dudes.

Fr. Stephen: And they do good things, and they do bad things. But more on that in our third half.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, indeed.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so, accepting that—so the creation of the angelic beings happens somewhere in Genesis 1; don’t really feel a need to plant a flag, but somewhere in there—and it’s been commented on frequently. We have sort of… Well, if you’re a modern biblical scholar, you say, “We have two conflicting stories of creation in Genesis 1 and 2.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or maybe the people who put these things together thought they went together!

Fr. Stephen: I mean, yeah, maybe it’s circulating in the way it currently is for thousands of years now, and nobody’s had massive problems with it. But anyway, so the usual way in which interpreters who are attentive to such things deal with this is that they talk about how we’re told, at the end of Genesis 1, that humanity is created—God creates the male and female, and that’s sort of it. And then in Genesis 2, it’s like we zoom in. Now, note to our Zoomer listeners—when I say, “zoom in,” I do not mean “connect to Zoom call.”

Fr. Andrew: No, this is like lenses.

Fr. Stephen: Back in the day when we had cameras that were not part of our phones, there was a lens on that camera that you would have to focus and which you could—some of them were zoom lenses that would allow you to make things look larger that were far in the distance. And I’m using “zoom” in that sense.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thanks, Dad.

Fr. Stephen: Antiquated technology. So Genesis 2 is sort of zooming in on the creation of humanity and telling that story in more detail. As we’re about to say, that the fall of the devil—the devil being cast down—happens in Genesis 3, we are not disagreeing with those Fathers who don’t have a separate span of time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, these are just different angles for trying to understand what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re saying that just like Genesis 2 zooms in on the creation of man, Genesis 3 is zooming in on this first fall of humanity and on the fall of the devil, which may very well have happened back during Genesis 1, the same way that the creation of humanity is described in Genesis 1 originally. So we’re not disagreeing there. It’s not that: well, the Fathers say they fell originally, and those priests on Lord of Spirits are saying it happened four days later! [Laughter] That’s not a thing.

But so this is… And that, again… I know we belabored this back in the day, contra-Milton, that the devil falls here, not some time before creation. But as we mentioned at that time— St. Andrew of Caesarea sort of lays this out in his Commentary in Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which talks about the casting out of the devil.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because he gets to Revelation 12—and we’re going to talk about Revelation 12 here in a few minutes, but he gets to Revelation 12 that talks about the dragon and a third of the stars and St. Michael casting him down—and we’re going to talk about the other issue he deals with—but he talks about when the fall of the devil happened. And we’re going to quote from—we talked before; I’ve already pushed it at people who’ve pointed out to me that it’s very expensive, but what can you do?—that Ancient Faith’s own Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, her dissertation was on St. Andrew of Caesarea’s Commentary and on the reception history of the book of Revelation in the Eastern Churches in general, and it’s sort of magisterial on that topic. And in the process, she also made her own translation of St. Andrew’s Commentary on Revelation that’s included in the Fathers of the Church series from I think Catholic University of America publishes that.

Fr. Andrew: That sounds right, one of those blue books.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so just to keep it in the Ancient Faith family…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah! So here’s what St. Andrew of Caesarea says about this:

One must know that, as it has been given to the Fathers, after the creation of the perceptible world, this one had been cast down on account of his pride and envy, he to whom had first been entrusted the aerial authority, just as the Apostle said.

So that’s St. Andrew of Caesarea saying it happens after—

Fr. Stephen: That last bit, about being “entrusted the aerial authority, as the Apostle said,” is talking about St. Paul referring to him as “the prince and power of the air.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And then of course you have—there’s a few other scriptural references to the devil being cast out or falling.

Fr. Stephen: Right, aside from Genesis 3 and… yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So you’ve got, in Isaiah 14, this is—and we’ve referenced this before. This is the biblical account of what’s often called the succession myth in studies of mythology, verses 13-15. This is the prophet or God, I think, speaking to the devil, saying:

You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high. I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like the most high.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.

So, ambition: fall, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and pegging the mount of assembly, the mountain where the divine council meets, as being in the far reaches of the north, is hammering home that this is speaking about Ba’al.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, identifying Ba’al as the devil.

Fr. Stephen: In particular, on Mount Zaphon, which literally means the mountain of the north.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So another one, then, is in Ezekiel 28. This is verses 13-17, and this one speaks about the devil specifically as a throne-guardian in paradise. So starting with verse 13:

You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was your covering: sardius, topaz, and diamond; beryl, onyx, and jasper; sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created, they were prepared. You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of the fountains of fire you walked.

You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you. In the abundance of your trade, you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned, so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you.

So you’ve got God throwing him out, from Eden, from the mountain of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and yeah, so if he’s still walking on high in Eden, this is again pointing us to Genesis 3 as the place where this happens. And so that brings us sort of back to Revelation 12 and St. Andrew of Caesarea’s Commentary on it, because when he’s trying to deal with in Revelation 12, particularly in Revelation 12:7-8, it describes St. Michael throwing the dragon out of heaven with his angels, but it describes that right after it describes the birth of Christ. And so that’s why he says, “Well, we know that he was cast down after the creation of the world in Genesis 3. We’ve received that from the Fathers; they’ve received it from the apostles and from Christ.” So we know that’s true, so what’s going on here? How is this happening after?

Fr. Andrew: After the birth of Christ, right. Yeah, I mean, so you’ve got two options. You’ve either got the devil, who is one being, falling two times—which, again, strongly shows… that position would strongly show that this isn’t about turning to evil; it’s about being thrown out. Or there’s the possibility that these are two different beings entirely. One is cast out in Genesis 3, and then another one is cast out after the birth of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because St. Andrew connects this after the birth of Christ to Luke 10:18, where—

Fr. Andrew: Where Christ says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning.”

Fr. Stephen: “I saw Satan fall like lightning”: that’s during his ministry. He’s describing what’s going on during his ministry. He says that’s the other one. So you can also read—and this is part of why St. Andrew describes these two options—it talks about the dragon—the literal wording in Greek is: “The dragon, who is the devil, and Satan.” Well, there’s two ways to read that “and.” You could say, “The dragon (who is the devil and Satan),” as in, all three of those are names for the same critter. Or you can read that as: “The dragon (who is the devil) and Satan (this other guy).” And so, because Luke 10 specifically mentions Satan, it’s possible to read it as: Okay, the devil falls in Genesis 3, and then Satan is cast out of heaven: the Satan who’s still kind of hanging around in God’s throne-room in the book of Job is cast down during Christ’s ministry. You can read it that way. That’s not how St. Andrew reads it. St. Andrew reads it as they’re the same being, and he falls in two different senses. That’s how St. Andrew understands it, to be clear.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Thrown out.

Fr. Stephen: This is one of those things—we’ve kind of talked about this a little. There are sort of a number of devil figures in Second Temple literature, and who are referenced in the canonical Scriptures, and you can lay… The devil, Satan…

Fr. Andrew: Azazel!

Fr. Stephen: Azazel, Belial…

Fr. Andrew: Mastema!

Fr. Stephen: Mastema… And then there’s other forms of the names, like Satana-El and stuff, Samael. So you have these sort of different figures. But nobody says—none of those sources say that there are six different beings. They always have one or two beings, two at most, and then they position those names around those different beings in different ways. So there are some things that have Azazel being the serpent in the garden of Eden and the being we’re going to talk about next time in terms of the daughter of man, but then maybe have Satan as a different being. There’s all these different…

And as we talked about before, the demonic by nature are beings of sort of chaos and destruction and lies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the fact that it’s not easy to kind of lay it all out should not be surprising in any way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But so now that we’ve talked about those other places, sort of back to Genesis 3. And we’ve talked about this in the “Five(ish) Falls of the Angels” way back when, but the devil comes and he tempts humanity to join him sort of in his rebellion—and we’re going to expand what “rebellion” means in this context here in a minute—and then in response he’s thrown down. Now, a lot of people read this as if it were a Rudyard Kipling “Just-So Story”: here’s how the snake lost his legs, like snakes used to have legs.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I think I’ve seen children’s books, illustrated children’s books… I’m reaching way deep down into the depths of my subconscious, but I really feel like that’s—I feel like that’s true, that I saw children’s books with snakes with legs, and then at the end you see no legs on them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah: this is how brontosauruses turned into snakes. [Laughter] No, that’s not what it’s talking about. We talked before about the cherubim connection in Ezekiel that we just heard, the throne-guardian, seraph being the Egyptian word for “serpent,” seraphim sort of being the same role, but in an Egyptian context as opposed to a Mesopotamian context, and all of that kind of thing. But the word when he’s thrown down to crawl on the ground, the word there, ha’aretz, we’ve talked about before; that word is used relatively frequently, not just in the Old Testament, but in the cognate word in other languages, to refer to the underworld. So this is him being cast down to the underworld.

And we’ve also talked about how… And this is something that always needs to be reiterated: ancient people weren’t stupid!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What!?

Fr. Stephen: We tend to think because we have all our technology and stuff that people in the ancient world were just dumb.

Fr. Andrew: Computers and science and rockets!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So this is not the case. And unless you’re a person who could build their own iPhone from scratch, you don’t have anything to brag about over ancient people in terms of technology. But the point being, in this case, that they didn’t think that snakes ate dirt.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s a symbolic way of describing him. We see that Adam is made out of dust and we see now he’s cursed to return to dust, and if the snake is eating dust…

Fr. Stephen: It’s the same word, verses apart.

Fr. Andrew: Right! It’s now the hell-mouth. Now it’s the underworld that swallows up the dead, which is depicted in a lot of iconography, this massive reptilian mouth that is the place where the dead go. And of course in the resurrection, Christ is pulling us up out of there. But, yeah. And of course then you’ve got Hebrews 2:14, which explicitly says that the devil is the one who holds the power of death.

Fr. Stephen: Or was.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, was.

Fr. Stephen: By that point. [Laughter] But, yes. And so that’s… He’s hurled down, he gets sort of: “You get to dwell among the dead. You’re going to Sheol,” with what we’ve talked about, Sheol not a happy place, not a fun place to be. They don’t have good parties there. And it’s not sort of pleasant… Again, this is—got to get that Milton out of your head! This idea that it’s some kind of kingdom that the devil rules or something, that he’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and da-da-da-da-da-da. If you’re a Puritan, you really don’t like kings and people with the ambition to be kings, but the reality is that the devil is hurled there; the devil is imprisoned there just as much as everybody else.

Which is part of why the devil is depicted the way he is in, for example, the icon of the harrowing of Hades. You notice he doesn’t have a crown or a weapon…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s not sitting on a throne.

Fr. Stephen: He’s not sitting on a throne. It’s not like he had a fight with Christ and lost. He’s like an old, naked man.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just gets sort of flattened. It’s very different from the image you tend to have from pagan literature where there’s the idea that Hades is the god who rules and is in charge of and people… of the underworld. It’s pretty pathetic by comparison.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if you compare him—if you look at an icon of the harrowing of Hades, compare the way he’s depicted in Hades to the way the Old Testament saints are depicted in Hades, and you’ll notice something. Unlike him, they all have nice clothes! Something to think about… But he’s actually worse off than [they are], than the humans in Hades. He’s not “in charge.”

So the last thing, then, that we want to talk about here in the first half is, as I mentioned, sort of what is the nature of the devil’s rebellion, because, again, our friend Milton—we have this idea that… Well, and not that— This I can’t totally blame on Milton, because this of course ultimately comes from the succession myth, from the pro-devil propaganda of the neighboring nations, which uniformly says that, no, this guy, this storm-god—whether it’s Ba’al or Zeus or whoever else—no, he successfully went and killed/defeated/displaced the most-high god and set himself up as the most-high god.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s what all the pagan myths say.

Fr. Stephen: They present him as staging this successful revolution to make himself king of the gods. And so I’ll be fair to Milton, because I’ve been picking on him. I’m thinking this is where he got his understanding of what the devil’s rebellion was. But we don’t need to buy into his propaganda, because the reality is, if you think about it for very long—and I’ve said this to people when talking about it in person; I’ve just looked at a person and said, “Okay, like the devil, you are a creature. You are going to make God not be God any more, and make yourself god and get his, I guess, god-powers or whatever. You’re looking at this: how do you do that? What is step one of your plan?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think that that comes… The reason why the pagan story works as a story is because their most-high god is inherently way less than Yahweh, the God of Israel, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their image of what the most-high god is is that he’s sort of the biggest and baddest of them, rather than the One who is outside of all things and the Creator of all things, the Lord of heaven and earth, which is why you get this polemic throughout the Scriptures about our God being all those things: he’s in heaven and earth, he’s above all gods, no one’s like him at all. But the most-high god in pagan mythology—almost pick one, pick whichever one you like—as big and bad as he is, they don’t even claim that he’s like the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and usually the current most-high god, not only did he overthrow the last guy, but he’s usually at least the third most-high god going back. There’s usually been several successions, and these gods come into being at some point, and then can die and be replaced and succeeded by others. Yes, and so these are not remotely the true God, because we’re talking about actual God, the Holy Trinity. That dog don’t hunt; it’s not possible. It’s not conceivable; there’s not a way to do it.

Fr. Andrew: You can’t kick God off… That’s like saying, “I’m going to knock the sky out.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you can’t be like Doctor Doom on Battleworld and build your harness and suck Galactus’s powers…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Galactus, the eater of worlds!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Who’s the silver serpent—

Fr. Stephen: He still got owned by the Beyonder anyway, so, I mean, it didn’t work.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true! I remember that! I remember… What was that called? Oh, “Secret Wars”!

Fr. Stephen: It was supposed to be a secret, so I’m surprised that you remember it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “Secret Wars.” I think it was back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, maybe, wasn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: Boy! Boy, wow, that’s a long time ago. Deep, old cuts here, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So you can… If your step one when I asked that question was “build a power cosmic siphon,” not going to work for you. [Laughter] So this isn’t a possible thing. And it’s not like: Well, maybe the devil thought it was a possible thing? Like, for how many fractions of a second would he have thought that? Vast cosmic intelligence, remember.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you get this language in Scripture, where it says, you know, “You said in your heart: I will sit on the mount of assembly; I will be above the stars of God; I will set my throne on high.” But, you know…

Fr. Stephen: You notice, that’s not talking about God; that’s talking about the other angels, the other creatures.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I’ll make myself like the Most High. So he doesn’t even really say, “I’m going to knock the Most High off his throne”; it’s just sort of: “I will be like him.”

Fr. Stephen: In this respect.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, you can’t actually do that. We talked about this—I don’t remember; I think it was way, way early on we talked about St. Gregory the Great talking about how it is that the demons de-throne God, and he says that they de-throne him in their minds, essentially meaning that they’re not going to obey him any more; that they’re putting themselves on the throne of their own minds is the idea. It doesn’t remove God from his throne; it’s just sort of a choice about the way you’re going to exist.

Fr. Stephen: And this is why we did part of that recap that we did, where because—remember, Eden is a temple; paradise is a temple in this sense. Adam is a priest in this temple. So what is the devil trying to do when he talks to Eve? He’s trying to get humanity to be faithful to him and to serve him, and essentially to worship him, consisting of food—worship him in the temple of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s trying to set up idolatry and usurp that temple—the world.

Fr. Stephen: In that sense, which you can do, because humans can do the wrong thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And so what he’s trying to do— He can’t destroy God—that’s not a thing you can do—but he can try to destroy God’s other creations. And he chooses humans for a particular reason, because this word keeps coming up. We heard it in St. Andrew, we heard it in some of the Old Testament passages, this word “envy.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that the devil fell out of envy.

Fr. Stephen: That his pride is connected particularly to envy. It’s not just pride in a general sense, but connected particularly to envy. So envy of whom and about what? Well, this is envy of humanity, because humanity already had—and this is what we’re going to be talking about for most of the rest of tonight—already had a destiny for which he was created by God, that it is a destiny that the angelic beings, even the high-ranking ones, did not share. And so the devil, as glorious a creature as he was, was going to end up less glorious than humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so he wants that.

Fr. Stephen: And out of envy and jealousy and pride—because he has no way to do anything to God, and he has no way to change it so that he will have that destiny—he chooses to try to destroy the human creatures who do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that they don’t get there and that they follow him into his misery.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because it loves company. So you should start a company and make misery. [Laughter] Anyway.

And so this—when we talk about this destiny, we’re talking about— So when you read, for example, St. Dionysios the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchies—we’ve talked about this before on the show—the angels don’t sort of have species, when you talk about cherubim and seraphim and such.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they have jobs.

Fr. Stephen: Because they don’t reproduce. So in a certain sense, every angelic being is unique, but in another sense they have these ranks, these orders of angelic beings, and those orders are particular roles they play, particular jobs they do in terms of God’s rule and administration of the cosmos. He doesn’t need them to do it any more than he needs humans, but he created them and us out of love, to share his divine life with and to share his rule with. And so what you find in St. Dionysios is that, depending on that role, where they stand in that hierarchy, what role they have, what order they are in, they participate in the grace of God, in God’s actions in humanity, and that’s what separates sort of the ranks or orders from each other: they participate to a greater or lesser degree in his energies, in his grace, in his power.

And so they participate in God’s grace in a way that’s not totally dissimilar from what we talk about when we talk about theosis in humans. When we talk about humans experiencing salvation, experiencing theosis, we talk about them drawing closer to God, participating in God’s grace, participating in his energies, which are his work in the world, what he is doing in the world; humans participate in it. But there’s a major difference in that the angels, the angelic beings, participate in God’s grace and his power in a static way based on their role and their job.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re made for this. They participate in God for this, and they’re not going to get promoted or move up the— Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t start out as an angel, and then you go and help George Bailey and get your wings. [Laughter] And then you sort of rank up.

Fr. Andrew: “Someday, I want to be a dominion…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “You did a great job as a cherubim, so we’re making you a seraphim.” That’s not how it works. So there’s this… It’s static, and so the same was true of the devil before his fall. This is what prompts this envy and this jealousy. As glorious as he was, there was no kind of upward mobility, whereas with humans—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, yeah, he could see humanity was going to surpass him.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, whereas in humanity—and again, this is what we’re going to be talking about in our next two halves—but humans do progress.

Fr. Andrew: And here’s the big reason why: because the Son of God became man. It’s all aiming at the Incarnation.

Fr. Stephen: The divine second Person of the Holy Trinity took upon himself our human nature. He did not take upon himself any angelic nature. And so, as I’ve now said a few times, that’s where we’re going now with the rest of the episode.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, we’re going to take our first break, and we’ll be right back in a moment!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody! This is the second half of the show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls, so please give us a ring at 855-AF-RADIO; again, that’s 855-237-2346.

But before we get back to death and all that cheerful stuff, you might have heard that Ancient Faith Ministries is in the process of looking for its next CEO, also known as my boss at Ancient Faith. John Maddex is retiring in a year, and AFM is accepting applications through Friday, July 15, for his successor as CEO. Could you be the next CEO of Ancient Faith Ministries? Or do you know someone who could be? No media experience is required; it is an executive leadership role. You can see the job description at ancientfaith.com/ceo-search; again, that’s ancientfaith.com/ceo-search. You can apply by sending your resume, and a cover letter describing your interest and your goals, and three references to apply@ancientfaith.com. The deadline is Friday, July 15, so snap to it! You could be my boss. You could order me around. It could be amazing. [Laughter] It’s true! I wasn’t talking to you, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: I know. Also, you’re married, and no man can serve two masters.

Fr. Andrew: That’s very true! [Laughter] It’s true! All right, well, death! Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Huzzah!

Fr. Andrew: Here we are, second half. I mean, it’s a very cheery episode. I know, how many episodes do we have about demons and death and the underworld and hell and all this kind of stuff?

Fr. Stephen: We’re either morbid or super metal, one of the two. Probably more morbid. We’re probably like an old Tones on Tail cassette tape. That’s probably the level we’re at.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s okay. I’m okay with that. All right, well—death.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! So before we get to death—I mean, death is coming for all of us…

Fr. Andrew: It will take us all.

Fr. Stephen: When the man comes around…

Fr. Andrew: Mm! Second Johnny Cash reference for the night, that’s good!

Fr. Stephen: But for… We’re talking about the expulsion from paradise. Paradise, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, is a place where God is; it’s sort of this walled garden is how it’s depicted; and humanity is in Genesis 3 expelled from it. So we talked about the devil being sort of cast into the underworld. Humanity is expelled out into this present world, as the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great describes it.

And so the first question is: Why? So there’s sort of… I’ll just say nonsense readings of this that are: Well, you know, God made this one rule and they broke the rule, and so he got mad, and so he threw them out of his house. [Laughter] There’s just sort of a punishment, just sort of, you know, you’re going to go have to make it on your own now, kid; not under my roof. And not only is any approach like that sort of anthropomorphizing God in the worst kind of way, but it fails to see how this story becomes sort of paradigmatic as a pattern for the rest of the Old Testament.

And so we’ve talked about before, in terms of talking about the presence of God in the tabernacle and the Temple—and this of course, as we’ve been saying, applies equally to paradise—that God is a consuming fire, and what Hebrews means by that is that God’s holiness, his presence, his holiness, consumes that which is sinful, that which is corrupt, that which is wicked; it burns it away and consumes it and destroys it. And so to come into the presence of God, to be in the presence of God, means that either you will be destroyed or whatever is impure, whatever is wicked, whatever is unworthy in you will get burned away. So obviously the second of those is the better option, but after partaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve of course had already known good; they now come to know evil. So they’ve now entered into a different sort of mode of life, and that mode of life means that if they remain in paradise, they will be destroyed; they will suffer the same fate as the devil in terms of the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’ll have to be thrown out.

Fr. Stephen: They will be like the demons. If they’re immortal and wicked, that’s what a demon is. And so this is the whole dialogue that God has in Genesis 3, where he says, “It is not good that man should remain this way forever. We need to cut him off from the tree of life so that he will not live forever.” That’s why he’s expelled from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which some people take as being: “Okay, well, you’ve had enough, so you can’t have any more now, because you were bad.” But really, it’s about a change in man’s mode of living so that he does not live forever; as you said, he has to be removed from the tree of life so he doesn’t persist in evil forever and be demonic.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in that state. So this is part of the remedy. So rather than death, there is exile. That’s the other option, is that humanity is removed from the presence of God, which has now become dangerous to him. And this—we’re going to see this play out in two weeks when we talk about the flood; we’re going to see this play out two weeks after that when we talk about the Tower of Babel; this plays out in terms of the entire Torah being all of the conditions and all of the means of purification to allow humanity to draw close—at least a tiny part of humanity—to draw close again to the presence of God. This is going to be what goes on with the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel, that exile of the southern kingdom of Judah. This is going to play out through the whole Old Testament before this is one of the problems that is going to be solved by Christ in the New Testament.

But so this is intimately connected. This is not just again a one-off story, and not communicating how people became bad but how they became mortal. Because as we said, without being able to partake of the tree of life, humanity will not live forever, and that’s a good thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so in this case man’s fall—and we’re going to talk about meaning several things—but in this case man’s fall means mortality: he’s cast out from immortality; he’s cast out from the tree of life.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and into this present world, which is characterized by corruption and death. And we’ve mentioned before this distinction that St. John of Damascus makes between physical death and spiritual death.

We want to revisit that here in this second half in a little more detail and show how the parts of what he’s saying relate and why it’s important, because sometimes… Well, not just sometimes—there’s a way of reading John of Damascus, the way Thomas Aquinas read him, basically. And certain elements… Like the first part of St. John of Damascus’s Fount of [Knowledge] is essentially his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories; so there are elements of the way he writes that invite this reading. I don’t think ultimately it’s a correct reading, but you can see why people would read him this way, especially someone like Thomas Aquinas would read him this way.

And that’s to read St. John as essentially making a series of logical distinctions about theological terms. And this is sort of the negative tendency that’s all too prevalent in our age, even among a lot of Orthodox scholars and folks, where there’s this danger of theology getting reduced to this kind of weird symbolic logic, where it’s all about getting the right terms with the right definitions and plugging them in in the right order to construct the correct statements: that’s what makes you Orthodox or correct theology, is that you have the right— And so it’s easy to go into St. John and say, “Okay, well, he distinguishes physical death and spiritual death. This is the definition of physical death; this is the definition of spiritual death,” and not really enter into what he’s getting at and what it means and the actual theological import of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and on the other hand, of course, you also have another modernist tendency, which is to treat physical death as being the “real” death and spiritual death as being a kind of metaphor, a metaphor for becoming bad, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or worse—again, if we want to go really, really modernist, they look at this story and it’s like: “Oh, well, God told them in the day they ate of that fruit they would surely die, and they didn’t, so there’s a problem in the text!” So they’ll say, “Oh, well, you came up with this metaphorical spiritual death to try to solve this glaring problem in the text”—neither of which is true.

So what St. John says—and we’re going to start at the level of the logical distinction he makes, but we’re going to go beyond that—the logical distinction he makes is that physical death is the separation of the soul from the body, and spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s nicely parallel. You can see how those would both be different types of death. You could see how somebody would just treat those as propositions to plug into a syllogism somewhere. But we have to dig a little deeper, because, first of all, we have to talk about what we mean by “separation.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, I mean, where exactly is God that my soul can be separated from him so that it’s now in a place where he’s not? [Laughter] That’s… You know… Right.

Fr. Stephen: And in physical death, as we’ve talked about, when you say to someone, “Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body,” you don’t get a lot of: “Well, what does that mean?” but that’s because there’s these presuppositions, one of which is that the soul is a sort of a thing.

Fr. Andrew: You mean it’s not like on Ghost with Patrick Swayze?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s a sphere.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a floating orb. That this whole thing is like a force ghost or it’s a ball of light or whatever, that sort of comes out of someone’s body and floats up into the sky or wherever it floats or gets eaten by a movie monster to power him up or whatever happens to it, or Shang Tsung grabs it.

Fr. Andrew: Wasn’t that an episode of Next Generation where they’re eating souls? Yeah! Right, the time-traveling Data. There we go. I can’t remember the title of that episode now, but it was a two-parter.

Fr. Stephen: It was actually a two-parter…

Fr. Andrew: It was a season cliff-hanger, and then the beginning of the next.

Fr. Stephen: It was a cliff-hanger where they went back and met Guinan, who was on earth in the 19th century, and Mark Twain.

Fr. Andrew: And Mark Twain, yeah! And the head of Data, the severed head of Data.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and they were… I want to…

Fr. Andrew: There’s the ophidian.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s the ophidian cane that he had.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, someone just said the episode is called “Time’s Arrow.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, part one and two.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Nate!

Fr. Stephen: They discovered triolic waves generated by the creatures and that’s how they tracked them even though they were visible. Anyways…

Fr. Andrew: So anyways, the point being: that’s not how it works!

Fr. Stephen: That’s not how this works.

Fr. Andrew: That’s not how any of this works! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and “Time’s Arrow” both inaccurate: resolved tonight.

Fr. Andrew: Good night, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so, as we’ve talked about, the soul is not a thing. It’s not an object; it’s not a reified thing. It is the life of the body. And so when you see a body that is dead, what has changed is that there is no longer life in it. And as a result of not having life in it, it begins to decompose, etc., pretty much instantly. But so the life is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about a soul, and so it is no less problematic to understand what is life, where did the life go. That’s just as cryptic in terms of what separation means as separating the soul from God is. Neither of those is as clear-cut as we might immediately think.

So we have to go back. We don’t have to go back that far, because we’re just in Genesis 3, but we can go back a few pages and see that where does the soul come from. When man is created, God fashions him from the dust of the earth—his body from the dust of the earth—and then breathes the breath of life—the breath, the spirit, the life—into him. And so the connection between the soul and God is being established there, that the breath of life, the soul—this is portrayed here as the breath of God, so there’s a connection between God and life. God is the living God. And that establishing the connection between that life and the body which it comes to enliven.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I recall— I can’t remember which one now, so forgive me, but I think at least one of the holy Fathers says, in his model for what man is composed of, he says that man is body, soul, and Holy Spirit; that man as he’s made—that God’s action within him is part of what he’s supposed to be. That’s my understanding of it, anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so there’s this connection, where God is the life of the soul, and the soul is the life of the body. One metaphor that I’ve come up with, which is a little grotesque, but deal with it—it’s a metaphor for sin and death, so where are you going to go?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: But is—if you think about, in terms of understanding what the separation would then be—we’ve established that connection—God is the life of the soul; the soul is the life of the body—that’s the connection, so what does the separation mean? If you take one of your fingers or toes—I’m not advising this, by the way.

Fr. Andrew: Do not do this, kids.

Fr. Stephen: Do not conduct this as an experiment, children. You will regret it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Some of us might have done it when we were younger.

Fr. Stephen: And if anyone does do this, their parents should direct their angry cards and letters to Fr. Andrew Damick, courtesy of Ancient Faith Ministries.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. But we told you not to do it, so…

Fr. Stephen: If you tie a tourniquet around one of your fingers or toes and you cut off the blood flow, because just like Leviticus says, the blood is the life of the thing; the blood is bringing the oxygen, it’s bringing the nutrients, it’s bringing the life to that member of your body—if you tie a tourniquet around it, what will happen once it’s cut off from the source of life? It will die. The cells that make it up will start to die. Eventually it will completely die. It will begin to decompose; it will become corrupt. Eventually it will literally fall off and just be gone. In the process, you will probably get a nasty case of gangrene, and that gangrene, that rot, may spread to other healthy tissue.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s gross!

Fr. Stephen: That is gross.

Fr. Andrew: And painful, and really bad for you. You could die!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but this is what makes it a good metaphor.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right!

Fr. Stephen: Because what’s being depicted here in the expulsion from paradise is that immediately—the spiritual death happens immediately. The spiritual death means that the souls of Adam and Eve are cut off from the source of their life, and so they begin to die physically. The physical death is the result. The bodily corruption is the result. And it corrupts not only them, but it corrupts the creation around them, until the creation around them becomes full of death. And then eventually they physically die as a result of the spiritual death; eventually they are cut off.

And so what that means is that—the Hebrew has what’s called an infinitive absolute construction. It’s usually translated in English, “You will surely die,” but if you translated it really literally from the Hebrew, it would be, “Dying, you will die.” “On that day, dying, you will die.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so you’ve got both this progressive and future sense going on at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: So the idea here is that the spiritual death is the real death. Tying that tourniquet between you and God, being cut off from God as the source of life, that’s what begins—that’s the real death, because that begins the dying process, and the physical death is a consequence, an image, of the real death that’s already happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is what begins at this point for Adam and Eve, and this is also referred to… I have a— Someone left us a message that I’m going to play for us in just a second here, but this leads to this notion of the “garments of skin,” but they put on fig leaves for a second, too. So this is what leads to this question from our friend, frequent caller, Kyle from Ireland. So here’s from Kyle; this is what he had to say.

Kyle: Hi, Fathers. I have a question on the “garments of skin” in contrast to the fig leaves. Growing up, I was taught that the fig leaves were Adam and Eve’s way of trying to cover for their sins through works, as though it were some kind of parallel to the whole of the Old Testament and the Law, whereas the garments that God made were some kind of appeasing of his anger, a sense of justice, in that an animal had to be killed and blood had to be shed in order for salvation to truly take effect, if you like. I’ve listened to enough of The Whole Counsel of God to know that this kind of short-hand idea of appeasing God’s wrath is certainly let’s say not giving the full picture. So, in short, what are the fig leaves—what’s going on with the fig leaves versus the garments of skin? Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so the first thing that I would say to that is: If it really is the case that God killing the animals is for appeasing his wrath, then why is it that after that happens Adam and Eve are not just welcomed back into paradise? Because shouldn’t that have taken care of it? But apparently not.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah, and, I mean, someone could say, well, I guess in that understanding he described, “Yeah, because the Old Testament sacrifices were ineffectual, but why would God feel the need to do an ineffectual sacrifice?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, but I mean there’s no indication in the text that God’s wrath is appeased or something by this act; that’s just not said.

Fr. Stephen: No, there’s not even an indication of wrath.

Fr. Andrew: Right! It doesn’t even say, “And God became angry and said unto them…” There’s nothing like that.

Fr. Stephen: No, this is right after, “It is not good that man should stay forever in this state.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a compassionate God.

Fr. Stephen: They’re being expelled for compassionate reasons. And so this is—again, to hone in on this, that what we’ve just said about how physical death works and how spiritual death works—is not compatible with the idea of God administering the death penalty to people by killing them when they die.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: That cannot be repeated enough, because even people who get that about Genesis do not get that in real life. When someone dies whom they care about—whom I care about, whom any of us care about—especially if they die younger or at a time or in a way that we don’t think they should have, it’s “God killed them”—that’s not how it works; that’s not what death is for. That’s not what life in this world, and death, is for. So this is not a death penalty. And so, because there’s no death penalty in view, applying a death penalty to an animal is an odd view; it would be irrelevant.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we’re going to go on about this a little bit, but the idea… The garments of skin is not God killing some animals and making some leather for them to wear, although it gets depicted that way iconographically, because how else would you depict this?

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is literary imagery, so it gets turned into visual imagery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. No, it’s that mankind’s mode of existence now alters to become like the animals. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more, but his mode of existence now becomes mortal; it becomes deathly.

Fr. Stephen: And let me throw in another thing. Iconography—hold onto your chair—

Fr. Andrew: I’m holding on. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Iconography is not meant to be a literal, photographic recording of material reality.

Fr. Andrew: What!? [Laughter] But, but, what about the communion of the apostles icon that has two Jesuses in it? Isn’t that…? No.

Fr. Stephen: Or the Nativity icon. It has, like, 83 different things happening, all at the same time.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, no. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s not how any of this works.

Fr. Andrew: So Kyle asked about the fig leaves in contrast to the garments of skin. What is all that about? I mean, if you had to pick a leaf, though—I have a fig tree in my backyard, actually, so those are nice big leaves. So there is that to be said about it.

Fr. Stephen: Turn over a new leaf.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can.

Fr. Stephen: We’re not ready to leave this topic behind yet. [Laughter] So this is—the importance of the fig leaves is connected to what they’re… the situation they’re attempting to resolve. So again, if you want to tie them to works or works of the Law or something, then you have to somehow say that Adam and Eve went through this thought process of “We did the thing we weren’t supposed to do, and so now we need to now do good stuff to impress God so he won’t be mad at us any more,” and the good stuff they chose to do was cover themselves with fig leaves. Right, see how that doesn’t track? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, it’s not good works.

Fr. Stephen: That doesn’t track at all, so the situation they’re trying to resolve is not guilt. Guilt—well, I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit-trail, but there’s nothing particularly Christian about the concept of guilt; we’ll put it that way. So this isn’t a problem of “they feel guilty”; this isn’t a problem of them thinking now the death penalty is going to come upon them. This is—the problem, according to the text, is that they realize that they’re naked. They were always naked. They didn’t realize they’re naked.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, what does that mean. It’s not like suddenly they looked down for the first time and said, “Wait! We’re not wearing clothes! Hold on, hold on!”

Fr. Stephen: Wait, what are clothes?

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, where would they have seen that before?

Fr. Stephen: Clothes haven’t been invented yet! [Laughter] All these other animals are much furrier than [we are]; this is embarrassing! [Laughter] No, this is an image; this is an image of innocence and innocence lost. So little kids—little babies and little toddlers—will run around naked, half-naked; they don’t care, they don’t think anything of it, most of the time their parents don’t think anything of it. They get to a certain age and that’s no longer appropriate. They reach a certain level of maturity and now there’s embarrassment and shame and other issues because of sin in the world. If there was no sin in the world, everybody could walk around naked. The only reason I’m pointing that out is that today is International Nude Day. You didn’t know that…

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t even know that was a thing!

Fr. Stephen: …but it is.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: I’m not promoting nudism, for the record.

Fr. Andrew: No!

Fr. Stephen: If you think I am, send your angry letters to Fr. Andrew Damick, in care of Ancient Faith Ministries.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: But the point is there’s no sense of shame or inappropriateness or anything—until they have the knowledge of good and evil. Now that they have the knowledge of evil, now that evil has come into them—and in our third half, we’re going to talk more about what that means—now there are issues. And so they go and they cover themselves to deal with the problem of being naked and exposed and the humiliation and the embarrassment that they now experience, the passions that they now experience. And that’s why when God comes and confronts them about it, he says, “Who told you you were naked?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then I love in some translations, “Did you eat of the tree which I told you not to eat?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “It wasn’t me! It was this woman you put here with me!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, fairly predictable.

Fr. Stephen: But so this is another important distinction, and I’m trying not to pick on St. Augustine too much tonight, but it’s another important distinction that gets lost a lot of times in Western theology, where Adam and Eve are viewed as perfect.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what does “perfect” mean exactly?

Fr. Stephen: And so paradise is lost, and then paradise is regained. The idea of salvation is going back to the state Adam and Eve were in, but that’s not what’s portrayed here, and this nakedness idea is key to understanding that. Adam and Eve are children, not physically perhaps—we don’t know what they looked like physically at this point—but they’re children; they’re innocent—until they’re not. And that’s why the phrase “the knowledge of good and evil,” every other place where it’s used in the Old Testament, it’s used to refer to a child coming to maturity. So they jump the gun and receive this knowledge that they’re not ready for, that they’re not mature enough for. This is why all the Fathers say that there would have been a point at which Adam and Eve would have been allowed to eat of that tree.

Fr. Andrew: They just weren’t ready for that yet.

Fr. Stephen: When they had properly matured. This is why the book of Enoch still has that tree in paradise. So that’s the issue here. As we talked about in the first half, man has this destiny. Adam and Eve were at the beginning of their journey toward that destiny. They had not arrived; they had not even gotten started, really, and then this happens. That loss of innocence, that loss of their innocence is what causes the shame and humiliation of nakedness to become a reality, because, again, clothes haven’t been invented yet; clothes get invented because of this. And so they have to go and cover themselves.

The garments of skin, this is, then, talking about something different. So why does God kill an animal? To show them what death is.

Fr. Andrew: Because they haven’t seen that before.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is a corpse. And as we just said, physical death is the image of spiritual death. And so God gives this image to them. When I said, “Dust you are and to dust you will return,” Adam didn’t remember being dust! [Laughter] So to make that meaningful, it has to be shown to him. And then the “garments of skin” here, then, is talking about the change to their bodies. Now again, we’re not necessarily talking about a change in physicality, because we’ve talked about what “body” means; we’ll talk more about this in the third half. It’s a collection of powers; it’s a collection of potentialities. That gets changed and becomes more like an animal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t know what the—if there’s a physiological— From our point of view, a biological, physiological alteration. We don’t know that. We just know that there is this change in the way that humans’ physical bodies, that our whole being works. It’s not like we—

Fr. Stephen: Right, our existence, our way of being in the world, changed.

Fr. Andrew: We should emphasize that before this happens, human beings do have material bodies. We’re created that way. This is not the moment that we went from disembodied souls to being embodied souls. We’ve got bodies, but we’re now more like animals as a result of that.

Fr. Stephen: Just like Christ after the resurrection still has a physical body.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: He still does. Obviously, there are differences. If you ask me to define them on a scientific basis, I’m going to tell you to go away and leave me alone.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, because that’s not what we have from Scripture. It doesn’t say, “And Adam became two inches shorter, and his blood turned from green to red…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so… And by way of sort of segue toward our third half, the animal soul, the animal part of the soul, is what is characterized by epithymia in Greek, by passions, by desires. And so this is now something that’s going to come to the fore. And as for the rest of what has been said about the garments of skin, is this not recorded in the annals of The Symbolic World?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! It’s true! So we’re about to take a break, but before we do, we actually have a live call from another Kyle. So, Kyle, are you there?

Kyle: Ah, yes, I am.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Kyle, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Fr. Stephen: Where are you from, Kyle? We have Kyle from Ireland. You have to be Kyle from somewhere.

Kyle: I am actually from southern California, near Redlands.

Fr. Stephen: Oh!

Fr. Andrew: That’s your place, Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen: The great motherland, yes. Kyle of the Inland Empire!

Kyle of the Inland Empire: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, he’s an actual Imperial. That’s great! [Laughter] So, Kyle, what is on your mind this evening?

Kyle: I’m afraid you guys may have already answered it. It was really about the distinguishing… Adam being made of the earth and that part of human nature, as well as what could have been changed when we had the garments of skin put on, that maybe there was the inc— We were given the incorporeal nature, of human beings being of the earth, and then the garments of skin was—I think you guys were discussing maybe like a symbol of death perhaps, or how death may have entered the world. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, first I would not say that man was incorporeal before death was given to him, although you could make— Because of the way “incorporeal” is used now in English. But you could make that point sort of etymologically, that man didn’t have the capability of being a corpse. But usually “incorporeal” means without material body. So he does have a material body before all of this goes down. He is made of earth, and of course he’s going to return to earth, as God says. But as we said, there’s a different kind of way that man’s body functions. Now he has the ability of mortality, which he didn’t have before. And we’re going to talk about what that does for us in the next half. But, yeah, we are still made of earth, but now that earth kind of functions in another way that it did not before. So, Father, I don’t know; did you want to add anything or correct anything on that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, it’s interesting, Kyle of my hometown, that when Adam is created, the language, if you look at it in specific, it’s that God creates him from the dust of the earth and then places him in the garden, which means it was earth from outside the garden, and since that’s actually recorded, it’s probably significant. And I think it’s—I think, based on that, we should not overestimate the physical quality of the difference, because hypothetically, Adam and Eve were going to go out into this world, bringing Eden with them. And so Adam has this intimate connection to it already; he’s not only going to be transforming himself—we aren’t saved out of the world; the creation is saved through our salvation, and we’re saved through Christ.

I think—and obviously this is where we’re going in the third half—is that we’re going to be talking about the body specifically as this collection of powers and potentialities, and specifically about the passions and being subject to them, and the relationship of to the weakening of our body and our nature and our powers, which are quasi—not quite—synonymous. I think we partially answered it, and I think in the third half we’re going to finish answering it. But, yeah, on the whole, the expulsion from paradise would be like if you had to leave Redlands and move to San Bernardino—or worse, Fontana! [Laughter]

Kyle: Very, very dangerous.

Fr. Stephen: Fontana is the Land of Nod, I guess, in this metaphor.

Fr. Andrew: East of Eden. Wow. Well, Kyle, did that help?

Kyle: Ah, yes, and may I sneak in a quick confirmation of at least my thought process? When we were put on the garments of skin, that changed human nature? Did that happen?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. It reflects a change in human nature, “nature” understood as being the dynamis, the powers of a human being, yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thanks for calling, Kyle, and I hope you’ll stick around for the third half. We’re going to go ahead and take our second break. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast, because, as I’ve said in the past, this is a show and a half. So, right, we’re talking about death, the first of the three elements of the fall of humanity, and we just finished up talking about the garments of skin. So why don’t we recap about what exactly a human body is? It’s been a long time since we did the body episodes. I think that was early last year—am I remembering correctly? I can’t recall now off the top of my head.

Fr. Stephen: I no longer have any concept of time or space.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s good.

Fr. Stephen: I’m somewhere, somewhen; who knows?

Fr. Andrew: That’s probably helpful when it comes to doctor visits. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like I go to a doctor! [Laughter] Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Bodies! Deathly bodies. Dead bodies. Bodies!

Fr. Stephen: Let them hit the floor—no. [Laughter] So, yeah, from one perspective, if you think about it, “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” and “It’s Raining Men” could be the same song, or songs about the same event, depending…

Fr. Andrew: That’s true! And given that time and space aren’t a thing, when Whitney Houston said, “I’m every woman; it’s all in me…”

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Or Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes.” Walt Whitney Houston! [Laughter] “I’m every woman; I contain multitudes. It’s all in me.”

Fr. Stephen: I believe it’s pronounced Walt Whitman. But anyway, we’ve talked about—and I know we say this, and it’s a cool phrase, but I don’t want it to be just like a nebulous, mysterious phrase, when we say that a body is a collection of powers and potentialities. When we went into—I think when we really went into it, we were talking primarily about God’s body in that context, and how most of what’s in Scripture is not anthropomorphism; it’s that man is in the image of God, so man is theomorphic, not the other way around.

So here, for our purposes, we’re talking about primarily human bodies, which is a version of a created body. So we’re talking about this collection of powers— And there’s, as we just mentioned, talking to Kyle of the homeland, that there is this sort of overlap. The Venn diagram is not a circle, but there’s a lot of overlap between the way “body” is understood, say, in the Ancient Near East and even in the Archaic period in Greece, and the way “nature” comes to be understood later, the term physis, the term “nature.”

And another rabbit-trail I’m not going to go down right now is the way in which the word physis or “nature” is used in Scripture, because that’s actually way more complicated than people think, because it gets used in 2 Maccabees and in some places, pre-New Testament places, in a certain way that pretty clearly doesn’t correspond to how it gets used in a lot of the New Testament cases. Anyway, that’s a whole thing. If anybody’s looking for a dissertation topic, there you go.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, we’re full of them.

Fr. Stephen: You can have it for free. They have to be written, so might as well do something helpful with them.

Fr. Andrew: Papers have to be published, right.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s a lot of overlap, because of course nature, especially as the way Aristotle defines it, is it’s a collection of powers—dynamis, power. It’s a collection of powers that you have, and different hypostases, different individual beings, different persons, for humans, actualize different ones of those, and that’s what makes them separate independent beings. And so you could see how that overlaps with the idea of a body as a collection of powers.

But those powers that are internal to a given created nature are aimed at something, because the being of any particular being is sort of aimed at something, and so that’s the other part of “nature,” is that aiming towards something. So to use a non-human example, an acorn has the same nature as an oak tree, and the acorn is sort of aimed at becoming an oak tree. Every acorn doesn’t become an oak tree, but that’s what it’s aimed at; that’s sort of the full maturity of the acorn’s nature, is the tall, sturdy, mature, full-grown oak tree. And so, then, that consists of these various powers that are needed to get it from the acorn you can hold in your hand to the giant oak tree that falls on your house in the hurricane. I live in Louisiana. [Laughter]

So the same is true, then, when we talk about the human body or human nature, is that human—our human constitution, the powers that we are invested with as human, that make us human, are aimed at something, and it’s not just a full-grown, physically adult human that a baby becomes. This is what, as we were talking about in the first half, makes humans different from angels and really all other beings, is that humans have a unique destiny, as we said; humans have a unique aim and a unique telos toward which we are directed. And to put a fine point on it, that is God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God is the purpose of human beings. And it’s interesting: there’s a line from St. Gregory the Theologian’s Funeral Oration for St. Basil, which is just a fancy patrology kind of way of saying this is the eulogy he gave at St. Basil’s funeral, where he talks about an incident where a ruler, a prefect or somebody, came up to St. Basil and enjoined him to engage in pagan worship. And Basil, of course, says, “Are you kidding me?” effectively, but Gregory relates this as a dialogue, and one of the things that Basil says in his dialogue with this prefect is; he says that the prefect says, “Why will you not worship our gods? Everybody else has yielded,” or whatever, and he says, “Because this is not the will of my real Sovereign, nor can I, who am the creature of God, and bidden myself to be god, submit to worship any creature.”

So Basil here puts forward this idea—this is in chapter 48, by the way, if anyone wants to look this up in his Funeral Oration for St. Basil—that Basil is a creature, and he’s “bidden to be god,” and he talks about how God is his telos, his purpose, his aim, his target. And because that’s the case, then he can’t worship any creature. He can only worship God, if he’s being true to who he truly is. It’s cool. It’s kind of a side remark, but it’s very memorable that he says—this is the translation—“bidden myself to be god,” or I think some translations say, “commanded to become god.” So this is St. Gregory quoting St. Basil in this Funeral Oration.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and of course, this has obvious resonances with St. Athanasius’s famous “God became man so that man might become god.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So that sounds really cool, but what does that mean? [Laughter] So what does it mean? What we’re saying is you look at the acorn: the end of that is a full-grown oak tree. You look at a baby that was just born, or a sonogram of a baby that was just conceived—well, fairly recently, or you wouldn’t have much of a sonogram; but anyway, you get my point—you look at that embryo, and that is—if we’re comparing that to the acorn, the “oak tree” for that new human life is not an adult human. The “oak tree” for that human life is God. That’s what we’re saying, just to put a fine point on it.

Now again, that sounds cool; what does that mean? Now we’re going to start using crazy terms and then go back on ourselves, so bear with us.

Fr. Andrew: This is the part where Fr. Stephen confuses even me.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, this is where I put a crowbar inside your brain-pan and start twisting, yeah, no. Okay, so—

Fr. Andrew: I’m here for it!

Fr. Stephen: God is the Being who—and I’m going to qualify all this; I know there’s somebody out there who said, “You just said God is a being! [Growling]” Wait for it, okay? God is the Being whose existence and essence are co-extensive. What does that mean, right?

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: So a simple way of saying that is that God is who he is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he hasn’t arrived there. He’s not on his way there. He is who he is. Yes, “I am who I am,” as it were.

Fr. Stephen: There is no— For God there is no acorn stage, fully-grown stage…

Fr. Andrew: He’s not becoming anything.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s not in process. And when I say—even when I say that his existence and his essence are co-extensive, I’m not saying that when I use the word “existence” to describe God or the word “essence” to describe the divine essence, God’s essence, that we mean the same thing as when we talk about the existence or essence of me or a table or one of my heathen dogs. We don’t mean the same thing. We don’t even mean something analogical—sorry, Thomas Aquinas. It’s not even an analogy. We can make analogies between me and the heathen dog and the table, but those analogies never connect up to God.

So as St. Maximus the Confessor said, “If God exists, I do not. If I exist, God does not.” So we as Orthodox Christians can say that we don’t believe God exists, because what we mean by that is that what we usually mean when we use the phrase “exist,” like has material reality—like if someone says unicorns don’t exist, they don’t mean that the concept of the unicorn doesn’t exist; they don’t mean that unicorns don’t exist in fiction; they mean unicorns don’t have material reality, scientific reality in the present world—well, God doesn’t have material, scientific reality in the present world, that’s measurable and quantifiable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can’t put him in a beaker and weigh him.

Fr. Stephen: So he does not exist in that sense. So what I’m actually doing when I say that God’s existence and essence are co-extensive is actually what we call in the Orthodox Church an apophatic move, or a negative theological move. I’m saying that this is a way in which God is different from us. We don’t know what it means to have your existence and essence co-extensive; I just know that mine aren’t.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: That I am on my way somewhere; I am constantly in flux—not goalless flux, but flux. And God is not. So I’m saying—essentially what I’m saying by that statement, God is not like me or the table or my heathen dog, or any other created thing, including angels and demons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is a point that the Fathers make a lot, that he’s utterly unlike any created thing, that the Uncreated One is not… There’s no… We have language to describe him; we have language from Scripture, and that’s the safest place to go, is to quote Scripture, but it does not encapsulate him or define him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that was in prep to try not to break anyone’s brain with what I’m about to do, but I think it kind of broke Fr. Andrew’s brain earlier, so, no promises.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! [Laughter] I think I might get it now. I’m working on it, I’m working on it—I’m learning! I’m becoming! [Laughter] See, there we go!

Fr. Stephen: Your existence is coming closer to… So “existence” and “essence” here, we’re using “existence” to refer to sort of the present state of our day-to-day flux and growth and change and generation and corruption and all of those fluxes that we’re in; and “essence,” then, has to do with identity, with who and what we are. So a way to talk about this that is obviously very applicable to Genesis 1-3—the language in Genesis 1-3 that’s related to this is about the image of God, and in the way we’ve talked about it on this show before. So on one hand, humanity is created in the image of God, and that’s said as a statement. That’s a statement of essence; that is an essential statement about humanity, what humanity is.

Fr. Andrew: Totally apart from what happens in the garden.

Fr. Stephen: Right, totally apart from the existence of any given human.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is the plan.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s why it’s broadly applied. So after the flood, he who spills man’s blood, his blood shall be spilled by man, for, in the image of God, God made man. So every human, no matter how miserable a cuss they are, no matter how wonderful they are, no matter how ravaged by sin they are, they’re still in the image of God in this sense: they are essentially human still. So there’s image of God in that sense.

Then there is our existence, and we’ve talked about on this show how imaging God has this verbal sense, in which imaging God is something we do, that we are able to do. And this is related to theosis, participation in God’s grace, participation in the divine energies, that we actively do the things that God does. Energies are working in the world, working in creation. God is working in creation; we cooperate and participate in his work in creation, and so we image him within the creation. So that’s like our existence.

And the eventual product of that continued imaging, where that imaging is aimed, its goal, would be what the Fathers call the likeness of God. And people will quickly point out to you, if they’ve studied the Old Testament and they’ve studied Hebrew, they will try to offer this as a critique of the Church Fathers and say, “Oh, they didn’t know Hebrew, because if they knew Hebrew, they’d know that ‘image’ and ‘likeness,’ as they’re used in Genesis here, are synonyms!”—they knew that. It’s part of the point. The image in which we’re created is also the goal.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because we are becoming, because we’re not just being.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’re both God: the image of God and the likeness of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so the human identity, as we were made to be, is something that is always in the future, because we, being finite, will never arrive at being God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, our identity is always in the future. My existence is who I am today. And between who I am today and that identity in the future, there is this lack or this gap or this expanse or this nothingness, if you really like Jean-Paul Sartre…

Fr. Andrew: I don’t. [Laughter] Almost never. It was one of the worst experiences I had in high school was reading…

Fr. Stephen: What, did you read Nausea?

Fr. Andrew: No, we read Huis Clos, No Exit, in French, because it was French class, and I was like: why are we reading this?

Fr. Stephen: Well, look, let me submit to you, if you had to live your whole life in France, you would probably also think hell is other people.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, no, come on! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay—I kid the French!

Fr. Andrew: I would like to visit France someday.

Fr. Stephen: I live among them. They’re all exiles, but I live among them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I’m a little bit French-Canadian, by the way. A little bit: my great-grandmother, her maiden name was Thibaut, so there you go. I might be related to that guy who talks about symbolic stuff. I can’t remember his name, though. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there’s this gap; there’s this lack, between me and it, and that will never collapse, because, as we were just saying, the distance—again, we’re using spatial terms, metaphorically—between who I am and who God is is infinite, and remains infinite. Even as I continue to change and move toward it, it remains infinite, which means even when—here’s another place we have to break our Plato brain—even when we’re in the life of the world to come, we’re not going to be in a static state.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which also implies that if our progress is always this point in the future—future for us—which is the fullness of the stature of Christ, to use St. Paul’s language, then that means that this modern thing that we see now, identitarianism, where people take these labels and apply them to themselves and that becomes the end-all, be-all of how they conceive of themselves, looking for their identity either in something in the past or something at this moment—and I’m not saying we shouldn’t respect the past and understand tradition; that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about history. I’m talking about identitarianism. It’s really an anti-Christian philosophy, and it’s really kind of an unhopeful philosophy, because it means I’ve arrived, I am this thing, and this is what I am and who I am, period. The becoming is not on the plate, on the table. It’s a distortion, really.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and one way, one devastatingly destructive way in which we are faithful to something other than Christ is when we’re faithful to some version of ourselves. We have this idea that we’re not allowed to break character, that whoever I was yesterday I have to be someone consistent with that today, even if who I was yesterday was wretched and miserable.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “This is just who I am!” No, you can be better!

Fr. Stephen: Right, “I can’t make a break…” And this is something I say to people over and over and over again in confession, is that the devil doesn’t spend his time trying to get us to sin; we do that on our own. The devil spends his time, when we fall, telling us not to get up, telling us that this is where we belong, this is who we are, don’t bother trying to do better, to be better, to make any progress. Why? Because the thing he’s hated about humanity since the very beginning is that we’re capable of making that progress. And he hasn’t changed, because he can’t.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] As we have said in the past!

Fr. Stephen: So he continues to come with this same thing, but the fact is we have—the Church gives us countless opportunities to make these breaks—when we’re baptized, when we’re received into the Church, every time we come to confession, we have a chance to make a new start and continue to make this progress that will potentially go on forever, that even the angels have not been blessed with the possibility of. And so this—everything we just said about this progress, about becoming like Christ, because of course Christ is the Person in whom humanity is fully and completely united to God…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s the real Man; he’s the total Man.

Fr. Stephen: So everything we’ve just said was true of Adam and Eve before they ate from the tree, in the same way it’s true of us now. They were at the beginning of this same journey of theosis that we are on. But because of the expulsion from paradise and because of death, because of what happens there, there’s now this second complicating factor, and that stems from what we were discussing at the end of the second half regarding the garments of skin and is going to lead us into the nature of repentance, because what you’ll find, especially when you see the Fathers responding to certain things in St. Augustine, or just the Fathers speaking in general about the expulsion from paradise and how human nature changed—again, “nature” being like “body” this collection of powers—what they’re going to talk about is they’re going to talk about our nature being weakened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can be acted upon; we’re passible—passible: p-a-s-s-i-b-l-e.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that I know there’s a legion of Calvinists out there who’re going to say, “Oh, you don’t believe in sin! Oh, that’s wishy-washy!” We’re going to talk about sin next time. [Laughter] But the key here is that becoming passible makes us subject to the passions.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and there’s what we call blameless and blameworthy passions. And blameless passions are the weaknesses that we suffer from simply by virtue of being human, so getting tired…

Fr. Stephen: By virtue of being humans in mortal bodies.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, excuse me. Correct, right, let’s be very precise here.

Fr. Stephen: By virtue of the type of body, the type of nature we have now, in this present world, outside the garden.

Fr. Andrew: The kind of thing when we say, “I’m only human”—“I’m only human in a mortal body.” Right, so we get tired, we get hungry, we get thirsty, we have desires for things that are not sinful in and of themselves.

Fr. Stephen: We get cold, we get hot, we get dehydrated, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which you probably get all those things being in Louisiana in the summer.

Fr. Stephen: All at once! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s true! How can I be so dehydrated when it’s so humid?

Fr. Stephen: Some are more easily satisfied than others, like there’s plenty of good food around; getting cool is a lot harder.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but then even these blameless passions, if we indulge them, can become blameworthy passions. So getting tired: fatigue, that can turn into laziness, if you choose that as your way of being. Or like hunger can turn into gluttony, like you just can’t have enough. Or the normal, natural desire between husbands and wives can turn into lust. All these kinds of things, and that’s what’s going on, and it of course intensifies. With the blameworthy passions, it intensifies the passivity. It takes you over; you’re acted upon. You’re no longer really in control of yourself. You’re out of control: we use this language.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and those are things like—the blameworthy passions, kind of the obvious things like greed, like pride, like envy, like wrath and anger, desire for revenge. Those aren’t like excesses of good things or excesses of unavoidable things; those are just bad things.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, that tend to multiply from these other— Right, exactly. And we should say— We actually got a couple of questions. There were a couple of people who called—I wasn’t exactly sure what they were calling about, to be honest—but then also some questions we got in one of the chats on YouTube about Christ and his mortal, human body. He voluntarily accepted the blameless passions, but he remained in control of them. So he got hungry, but he was never gluttonous.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s worth noting—we have to be a little careful here. So Christ’s human nature was not a fallen human nature.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, cannot underline that enough.

Fr. Stephen: What does that mean? Well, we’ve just talked about what that means. It was not weakened in that way. So when we talk about that’s why that word, “voluntary,” is so important: Christ voluntarily gets tired; he voluntarily sleeps; he voluntarily eats and drinks.

Fr. Andrew: And can be killed.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, he can’t. He voluntarily dies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. He voluntarily— Someone asked the question: How is this different from suicide? And I said, well, in the Scripture, it says that he lays down his own life, that no one takes it from him, but he lays down his life, which is not the same thing as: I kill myself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he has the power to lay down his life and to take it up again.

Fr. Andrew: And to take it up again!

Fr. Stephen: And he has that because he is not passible, because he is not naturally subject to these things the way we are. He is able to voluntarily submit to them. Yeah, so we’ve got to be careful there, although if you still think I’m a heretic, address your letters to Fr. Andrew Damick.

Fr. Andrew: There you go! Delete, delete, delete… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But this mortality and the mutability that that brings, that passibility, is also what allows for repentance, for the process of healing and change and strengthening of those powers that takes place within this mortal life that we have in this world, to which Adam and Eve are sent. They’re sent into this world to live a mortal life that will end with death. And then from there, after the resurrection of Christ, to enter into the life of the world to come.

So our mortal life, then, part of the problem with sort of at least American and probably Western folk religion, which is sometimes only vaguely Christian, is that human life is presented as if this life on this earth is the whole ball game and then once it’s done if you did the right things, however those are conceived, whether it’s just being a good guy or believing certain principles, or whatever it is depending on whom you’re talking to, then you go to heaven and you’re just happy and have a great time for eternity; and if you do the wrong things or fail to do the right things, then you go to hell and suffer and get tortured for all eternity. And so everything is focused on this life.

But if we understand this the way the Scriptures teach and the way the Fathers teach, then this mortal life and the whole aspect of repentance and dealing with sin is sort of this parenthesis. It’s this speed bump that enters in on the road of theosis, on the road of destiny of human persons. It’s a setback, like Tempest Keep: “It’s only a setback.” It’s a setback—I was digging in the crates on that one—where it pauses on our journey.

But so if we’re living the Christian life the way it’s set out for us by the Church, then we’re essentially progressing on two fronts during this mortal life. We are not only dealing with the parenthesis; we’re not only dealing with it through repentance—the passions to which we’ve become subject and the damage that’s been done—but we’re also, on the other side, experiencing theosis, and we’re drawing closer toward that human destiny, again, within the Christian life. We’re doing both of those at the same time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that repentance is—and we’re going to talk about this a little bit more in just a second, I think, but that repentance is not just “I did something bad and it needs to be fixed,” although that’s an element—if you did something bad, it needs to be made right—but it’s also this pressing towards becoming more like Christ. And progressing in faithfulness, which is not just a matter of “stop doing bad things”; it’s doing more worship, more love. So, yeah, as you said, it’s not just dealing with the setback; it’s also progress. It’s also getting back on the track, heading in the direction of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and both of those are active. Neither of those is a passive thing. Theosis is not, like “I get my theology worked out better. I get the right ideas and I get rid of the bad ideas. I believe the right things.”

Fr. Andrew: I can’t just sit at home and do theosis?

Fr. Stephen: “I tweet the right hashtags…” [Laughter] Nor is— As you were saying, nor is repentance… A lot of times, repentance we don’t even think we have to fix it. A lot of times with repentance it’s…

Fr. Andrew: “I said I was sorry!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “I did something bad and God’s mad at me,” or “I did something bad and these other people are mad at me, and so I need to go apologize and get them to not be mad at me any more.” That’s the problem.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. Having raised and being in the process of raising four children, I have occasionally seen—I’ll just say the younger ones sometimes will, especially when they’re quite young, pummel one another, and then immediately say, “Sorry!” [Laughter] You know, “I said I was sorry!” Yeah, but you hit him! You try not to laugh when they do that, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, if that’s what repentance was, then Adam and Eve could have just done it.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Golden, dudes!

Fr. Stephen: They could’ve just said, “We’re sorry. That was dumb. You’re right.” And you don’t find—even if you go and read the various versions of the life of Adam and Eve and their repentance, their repentance is like: Adam standing in the Jordan River for 40 days. They seem to think there are things they have to do, there’s some process here of—

Fr. Andrew: Wait, are you saying that faithfulness without works is dead? [Laughter] I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before…

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, I’m saying faithfulness includes works, but I’m saying believing things without works is dead, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Super dead, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because there’s no life in it, yes, as we’ve been using death tonight.

So what we have is not God getting mad and applying punishments, and then, because of some internal standard of justice within God, he has to enact an elaborate plan to allow himself to not be mad at people any more so he can let them back into paradise. I know that’s reductionist, but I’m sorry a lot of folks believe that, when you really boil it down. That’s not what we see depicted here. What we see depicted here is a chain reaction of consequences from which from the very beginning God is trying to rescue us, trying to save us from ourselves, trying to save us from the death and destruction that’s brought about by our own actions, so that, once that’s been dealt with and we’ve been restored, we can get back on track with what he created us for in the beginning, which is to share his life with him forever.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And all of that involves action: going out and doing good, going out and doing what God is doing in the world.

Fr. Andrew: The Lord says—how many times does this appear in Scripture?—“If you love me, keep my commandments.” I don’t even remember how many times these two things are brought together. It’s a bunch, both Old and New Testament: “If you love me, keep my commandments.” If you love God, you will keep his commandments.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and what are the things that God is doing in the world? Well, we’ve just said a couple of them. One of them is he’s trying to save us from the death and the destruction that are the consequences of our actions, so one thing we should be doing in the world is to help others to be rescued from the death and destruction that are the consequences of their actions and ours. And this is why the whole Pharisaic angle of judgment doesn’t work.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it doesn’t bring people to that place.

Fr. Stephen: Condemning someone and abandoning them to the consequences of their actions is the opposite of what God does, if you understand it correctly. But you can see how, if the way you understand what happens in the expulsion from paradise is that God punishes humans with death for disobeying one of his commandments, then you could see how someone could become a Pharisee. “This person is miserable and deserves to rot and go to hell because of all the sins they’ve committed.” But as pernicious as that is and as much as we’d like to deride those people—and it’s always other people—it’s worse when we direct it at ourselves, when we turn around and say, “I deserve to rot and go to hell because of all the things I’ve done.”

Fr. Andrew: I can’t remember—didn’t one of the saints say something to the effect of the demons always whisper two lies? One is: “You’re doing great!” And the other is: “There’s no hope for you!” And, I mean, those are the roots of… I don’t know, I’ve heard confessions for well over a decade and a half now; I’m pretty sure those are the roots of basically most sins.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s what the devil’s been saying right from the very beginning.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he’s a big liar. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that’s it, and we have to understand this correctly, and that allows us to act as God acts. And we can act like St. Paul says he did to the Ephesian elders, where he said he never stopped, night and day, with tears, begging them to be reconciled to God. If we approached all of our enemies and all the sinners in the world, including ourselves in that way, the world would be a very different place.

Fr. Andrew: And repentance, then, it’s not… It’s about purification from the passions and all of their effects; it’s not just about “don’t do bad things any more,” but actually being purified. And so sometimes some people ask, “What’s the point of all the prayer and the fasting and stuff?” Well, to purify us, to prepare us for the banquet, to prepare us for that intimacy of receiving holy Communion. So we engage in these actions of purification. And why it’s dangerous, then, to go and receive the sacraments without these acts of purification—it’s not that you need to become worthy, because no one’s ever worthy—how many of our pre-communion prayers say, “I’m unworthy”?—but to become ready, to be adequately prepared to receive. There’s never a point at which you deserve, but you can be purified so that you can enter in. You can do the things that God said to do so that you can enter in and become, then, more like Christ through that experience of communion, especially holy Communion, the Eucharist itself.

Yeah, I’m reminded, of course, where St. Paul says in Philippians; he says, “I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Of course, there’s several different— “The high calling” I think is what the KJV has. What a beautiful sort of summary that is, of where he’s headed and what the point is. There’s no point at which he said, “Look, I’m a saint, I’m an apostle—I’m there, you guys.” [Laughter]

All right, well, let’s have some closing thoughts. You know, I think that the Orthodox Church’s teaching about what death is, as we’ve gone through now, how it’s shown in Scripture, it can be surprising, because our cultural theology is suffused with this idea that death is a punishment from God. “You messed up, so—bam!—you’re going to die now.” But as we said, death is actually a gift. Death is a gift from God. Now, it comes with a lot of problems. We become mutable in all kinds of ways that are not particularly comfortable, like dying—getting sick, dying, aging, all these kinds of things. But if we understand that the mutability that comes with death, that is in a sense what death is, is actually a tool that’s been added to our toolkit, then it’s a profoundly hopeful realization, I think. St. Isaac the Syrian, for instance: “This life has been given to you for repentance. Don’t waste it on—” I can’t remember the rest of the line, but like “frivolous pursuits” or something to that effect.

So what does that mean? This life is given to us for repentance. It’s that we’ve been given this tool of mutability, of mortality, of changeability—and mind you, we don’t know exactly how that works in kind of a mechanistic way, like why is it that mortality makes repentance possible? We don’t know, but this is what the holy Fathers say, and it is what we see demonstrated in Scripture, and it is essentially what God is giving Adam and Eve there at the end of chapter three of Genesis.

Since we have that, then we should use it, and one of the reasons—you made this point earlier, Father—it is a profoundly hopeful thing, because it means that I am not stuck with “this is just who I am.” I’m not stuck with that! I do not have to be tomorrow what I was today. I don’t have to be today what I was yesterday. I can change. Now, I can change for the worse. [Laughter] I’ve done that many times in my life! Or I can also change to be more like Christ. I can change to become more like the angels. I can change to become a saint. This possibility exists for every human person, and the reason why we can change is because of this mortality that we have. Again, we don’t know exactly how that works, but that it is what it is. That is what mortality is; it’s a gift from God.

And so many of us in our lives are driven by all kinds of desires and ambitions and pursuits. We have things we want to build—families, careers, our homes, our social networks, whatever—and many of these things are good. They’re good. Not every ambition or desire is bad. But if we can take the investment that we put in that and reinvest it and place it in the life in Christ, all those other pursuits can be sanctified and can come along on that, but if we aim at those created experiences and achievements rather than putting our goal to be Christ, then we’ll lose all of it. C.S. Lewis—not an Orthodox writer, but nonetheless he said some good things—he made this comment in one of his books; he said, “If you aim at heaven, you will get earth thrown in; if you aim at earth, you will get neither.”

If we place all of that desire that we tend to put in all these things that we spend so much time trying to build—and again, they may be good—if we put that in the goal, that is, Christ; if we put that in our salvation, then the whole world is lit up with this beautiful light as it stands out in relief from the darkness of this world, and all then becomes finally realized in Christ. There is an unconquerable hope that we have.

I mean, the Lord spoke about this. He said, “In this world, you’re going to have trouble, but be ye of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” And if we are aiming at Christ, if Christ is our goal, if we are, as St. Basil said, “bidden to be God,” and we make that who we are, then we will have that good cheer, that joy, Christ’s joy will be given to us, whatever is going on in the world. And this is the gift of God to us in mortality. But we only have it while we’re in this life. Once your soul separates from your body, once the life of your body has gone out, you don’t have it any more, so this is the opportunity now. Today is the day of salvation. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So I think sort of the last distinction we made in the third half is very important in a whole bunch of ways to understanding a whole bunch of things, but one of them at least—and I’m talking here about the distinction between the destiny of man and theosis, the way in which every human person is bidden to become God, that God is the end, the telos of humanity, the sense of what our existence is aimed toward—that on the one hand, and on the other hand our ongoing battle with the passions, our ongoing efforts for sort of self-mastery in the face of them and of repentance and healing.

That distinction, I think, helps us really understand why the various other religions, philosophies of the world, seem sometimes to have some kind of purchase. If we only have the struggle with sin, the struggle with the passions, the goal of repentance and self-mastery—if that’s all we have in view in terms of salvation, then it can be very confusing when we look at these other philosophies and religions in the world because it seems like, well, some of these seem kind of helpful, and some of the people who are advanced in these philosophies and religions seem to be doing better with some of these things, like in terms of patience and self-control and even kindness and gentleness, these things that we say are fruits of the spirit—they seem to be ahead of me, and they’re not Christians.

And it is true, pursuing Stoicism will help you gain a certain degree of self-mastery, will help you resist temptations to anger; it will help you in various ways navigate this world. Sigmund Freud, a complete atheist, can come and tell you there are these drives within humanity—the death drive, driving you toward death and destruction; the sexual drives, these drives that you have to contend with, and help you uncover them and see how they’re working in your life, and psychotherapy can lay these things out for you. All of these philosophies and religions can help you in various ways navigate this life in this world.

But again, that’s a parenthesis. They’re able to do that because, as humans, we can observe this world and life in this world and ourselves and how they work, and come to some level of understanding, but none of those things can move us an inch toward our destiny in Christ. None of those things can take us beyond what we now call human, which is this weakened, prone-to-sin, fallen humanity of this world. None of them can take us beyond that. None of that can align our will and our human powers and abilities with what God is doing in the world. They can’t even reveal what God is doing in the world. They can only reveal what we are doing in and to ourselves.

And so this really points us to the uniqueness of Christ. There is a certain utility to all matters of philosophy and thought and even human religions, even the ones that are worshiping demons. There will be people with valid insights into human behavior within this world and what brings success in this world. But again, none of them show us what it means for our humanity to be perfectly united to God, and none of [them] will give us the means of pursuing it, and none of them will reveal to us the love that God pours forth day to day upon his entire creation. None of them will reveal to us the way to make the peace that is the peace of God, the peace where there’s no such thing as an enemy come to be in the world. None of them will show us what true kindness, what true generosity, what a self-control and self-mastery looks like that is aimed toward becoming something better than what we now call human.

So it’s only in Christ that we can become fully human. It’s only in Christ that the goal for which humanity was created can be seen, let alone achieved. And we need to set our sights beyond just making it through this day without yielding to all the manifold temptations that I’ve fallen to in the past and to actually being faithful to encountering and becoming more like Christ. We’ve set our sights too low for too long, and we’ve put way too much emphasis on what’s in the parenthesis, what’s in the footnote, rather than what’s in the real story that’s being told. So those are my final thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you for listening, everyone. If you didn’t get through to us live, we’d still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

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Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air, and thank you to our periodic guest tonight, Mexican radio station!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night, and God bless you.