Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers and dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, Cajun country! And I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, exiled among Yankees. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; again, that’s, 855-237-2346. As you just heard the Voice of Steve say, Matushka Trudi is taking your calls tonight, which we are going to get to in the second part of our show.

But first, a word from our sponsors. 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 t-h-e-o-r-i-a-film.org.

Fr. Stephen De Young: You know, I feel like we could do more with our sponsors. They support the show, you read the thing. But there needs to be something here to more actively involve our listeners, like a decoder wheel of some sort, or one of those rings with the whistle in it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Or like maybe they could download and print a coupon for “Flamin’ Hot” Cheetos. [Laughter] Some kind of way—

Fr. Andrew: There should be a giveaway!

Fr. Stephen: —to get them invested in our sponsors a little more. I’m putting that out as a challenge—I don’t know to whom! It’s out there.

Fr. Andrew: I could start dropping encoded references within the course of the ad, and then they’d have to add them up over…

Fr. Stephen: Decipher them.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And then the Cheetos.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because we’re symbologists, right? No, no, that’s a different podcast! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’d probably do it better.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Probably true… Tonight, we continue with our series on the fall of man, and this second part is on the coming of sin into the world and its attack on mankind, beginning with the person of Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve. Last time we talked about death, and this time it’s about sin. But, Fr. Stephen, shouldn’t sin be associated with Adam, though? Isn’t that what the Bible says?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: But also kind of yes.

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t that a meme? Isn’t that the meme with the pirate?

Fr. Stephen: I think it’s the opposite, actually.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, but actually no? No, but actually yes? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I don’t think we made this explicit last time, but maybe we should. Way back in the long-ago time, in the before time, before the grups all died of the plague, we had the five(ish) falls of the angels, and now we’re in the midst of this series on sort of the three falls of man, and when we talk about these three falls of man, most if not all of our listener base, unless, you know, it’s from our material, I imagine—most of them are used to just thinking of “the fall” as one thing. See, the easy thing to do here is to knock St. Augustine, but I’m not going to knock St. Augustine. I have come to praise St. Augustine, not to bury him.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, nice! First Shakespeare reference. We don’t do Shakespeare references very often. That’s good!

Fr. Stephen: These three things that we’re talking about in these episodes… So last—two weeks ago, the last episode, we talked about the expulsion from paradise; now we’re going to be talking about specifically Cain, some things about Cain’s line, leading up to the flood; and then next time we’re going to be talking about events surrounding the Tower of Babel. All three of these you find discussed in Second Temple Jewish sources and in the Church Fathers.

Different Church Fathers—we’ll just talk about Church Fathers for now. Different Church Fathers tend to stress one of the three, or they see one of the three as sort of being the pivotal one, while not denying the others. So St. Irenaeus of Lyons, when we read On the Apostolic Preaching, for him the pivotal moment has to do with Genesis 6:1-4, with stuff we’re going to be talking about tonight and with the giants, this corruption and sin that has to be destroyed by the flood, this is sort of the fall. Obviously, he believes the expulsion from paradise happened; obviously he talks about the Tower of Babel also. But for St. Irenaeus, that—this, from Genesis 4-9, is sort of the main event.

If you read Eusebius of Caesarea’s Demonstration of the Gospel, he sees the Tower of Babel as the main event. He doesn’t deny the expulsion from paradise happened; he doesn’t deny any of the events surrounding the flood, but for him it’s the Tower of Babel, when the nations are divided and the powers and principalities: that for him is sort of the main, central event. Part of how you can tell that it’s the main, central event is when they come around, then, to talking about Christ and the Gospel, they’re mainly talking about Christ in terms of repairing that one. Again, he also takes care of the others, but there’s sort of the one that’s the focus.

And so with St. Augustine—St. Augustine is not different [from] St. Irenaeus or any other Church Father who talks about these events, in that he sees one of them as being the central one, and for him it’s the expulsion from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which then comes to kind of dominate Western Christian theology.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that is “by accident,” meaning it’s not that St. Augustine and his followers went out and killed everyone who disagreed with them or something. [Laughter] This is not like an engineered thing. He was just the foremost and most well-written Church Father in Latin. And St. Augustine himself couldn’t really read Greek, and after him almost no one could read Greek in the West. So they ended up relying on him, and sort of he became the whole show. So all of these things that St. Augustine got wrong—because everybody gets things wrong—St. Augustine was more humble and honest than most humans, in that he actually wrote the big book of retractions at the end of his life; he retracted a lot of what he wrote—

Fr. Andrew: Man, how’d he get a publisher for that? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but De Trinitate that everybody criticizes, his work on the Holy Trinity, he refused to republish it because he thought he got too much wrong in it. He was [more] aware than anybody. He wouldn’t have wanted De Trinitate to become the Western view of the Trinity, and it did. And so anybody who wants to bash St. Augustine himself for that stuff doesn’t understand how history works.

But also, I would add, if you tried to base your whole Christian faith purely on the writings of one Church Father, any Church Father, you’re going to run into trouble, because there is no single Church Father who is inerrant and perfect and never gets anything wrong and never is at odds with the rest of the Tradition and never fails to understand something, never omits something; that doesn’t exist. So pick any example out of a hat—if you base your faith on St. Gregory of Nyssa, you’re going to end up with a distorted view of what Christianity is—not because there’s something wrong with St. Gregory any more than there’s something wrong with St. Augustine. You can do that with St. John Chrysostom; you can do it with any one Church Father, and you would end up with a distorted view of Christianity, because that’s not how Christianity works. You don’t pick your favorite personality and decide that he’s right about everything. Not to mention the fact that you’re going to end up not knowing or saying anything about all the topics that author doesn’t address.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] I was going to say, this idea of kind of emphasizing one or another aspect wasn’t so much a debate, like “No, it’s this—no, no, it’s this!” It was really just like: these are the things that are being emphasized by different Church Fathers.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they were humans and they thought about things and prayed about things, and they had actual ministries to actual other humans in actual places in actual times. And so when they’re preaching and writing, they’re not just— We read Church history like it’s a bunch of talking heads in this really idealist way, and the reality is St. John Chrysostom was dealing with actual situations, sometimes dire political situations, in Antioch and in Constantinople. He’s not just writing in this free way about systematic theology or something. He’s talking to particular problems that particular people are having. He’s preaching to actual people to help them with their actual lives.

Fr. Andrew: Which I think is why especially his work seems so kind of fresh and present, because it’s not ad hoc exactly, but it is to the moment.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but all of it is that way. All of it is that way. When we read it in some kind of detached, systematic theology that could have been written at any time, in any place, by anyone, we’re doing violence to it and interpreting it incorrectly. But all that to say…

Fr. Andrew: All that said, yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Adam is not the figure in Scripture who is primarily identified with the origin of sinfulness, as an archetypal sinner, as someone who’s going to be on the wrong side of the Last Judgment. That is not Adam; that is Cain, whom we’re going to be talking about for the rest of tonight. And the reason most folks in the West don’t know that any more is not St. Augustine’s fault, per se, although his writings were involved. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, and we should just say here at the outset that the thing that Adam did was indeed a sin. By identifying Cain as the sinner, the primary sinner, we’re not saying that what Adam did was not a sin, but the word “sin” was not used for it there in Genesis.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we’ll get into that in more detail, and “sin” versus “sins,” and that kind of thing. That’s our topic tonight on Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So, Cain: where did he come from?

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, when… That was the real problem, in Genesis 4, was Adam. He was repenting for 40 days in the Jordan River, according to The Life of Adam and Eve, and Eve was off raising Cain. [Laughter] Tip your waitresses, everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: We have to— Yeah, we’re going to start by going through the life of Cain as we have it recorded in Scripture, which is not a ton. There’s not chapter after chapter about the life of Cain. In fact, there’s less than one chapter about the life of Cain. But we’re going to go through it because what we do know about Cain right away in Genesis 4 is important. That gets dealt with and treated in certain ways in the New Testament and then also in certain ways in other Second Temple Jewish literature and in certain ways by Church Fathers and other writers. But we have to start with what’s in Genesis 4, and so we start—we begin at the beginning, which is a very good place to start… which is Cain being born.

And while some of you may be fortunate enough to not know why we have to say this, Cain in Genesis 4 is conceived and born in the usual way in which that happens.

Fr. Andrew: But we should mention why some people… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, we will. We will.

Fr. Andrew: Just to say: Why do we have to say…? [Laughter] Yeah. We’ll get to that. So exciting!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I mean, I think I speak for Fr. Andrew also that we are not going to be explaining to you what the usual way is. If you don’t know, ask your parents. If you’re an adult and you still don’t know, ask your priest—I’m going to get angry emails from priests…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Someone came to me and asked…” Yeah, no. Boy, I hope not!

Fr. Stephen: But we have to say this because there are a couple of different ways in which people want to say that Cain may not have been the naturally conceived and born son of Adam and Eve.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this… And it, it kind of runs mostly in Pentecostal-ish circles and Pentecostal-adjacent circles, but not all of them by any means; not the majority.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, you said, “-ish and -adjacent,” so I don’t…

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I know I’ve already got a lot of them mad at me, but we’re not going to accuse them all of believing this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, your average Assembly of God pastor is not going to be teaching this, but there is this idea of something called the serpent’s seed, which is this notion that Cain is born of— Let’s say Adam is off somewhere and Eve has a moment with the serpent, so that Cain is the son of the serpent, and that that’s—

Fr. Stephen: i.e., the devil, in a literal way.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the devil is literally his dad is this idea of the serpent’s seed. And there’s all kinds of just fanciful, crazy—I mean, fun—fun, for sure, although awful spin-offs from there about exactly what that means, and the origins of evil in the world. And I strongly believe that this might be behind some of the ideas of reptilians in high places in government and that kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Well, now, hey. Don’t tar that with the same brush. [Laughter] If you watch some of those videos of the senate, frame by frame, there’s little flickers of things.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true! [Laughter] And if you watch enough videos from The Third Eagle of the Apocalypse on YouTube, eventually, he’ll sing it for you!

Fr. Stephen: So there is another version of this that is differentiated by having, I guess, the veneer of scholarship slathered upon it, and that is… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Mixing those metaphors, Father!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes! So from everything, all the wonderful things we say about the world of Old Testament scholarship on this show, long-time listeners will not be surprised that there’s constantly this effort to find what is “behind the text.” So if there’s a story in the text of especially the Torah, because we’ve chopped it all up in little bitty bits—there’s a story in the Torah, then there’s a real story behind it, and the story that’s in the Torah is trying to “cover up” the story that’s “behind it,” which is the “real story”—not the real story in the sense that it’s true, because of course Old Testament scholars don’t think that any of this stuff’s true, but that’s the original story, but the original story was too ooky or weird or creepy to be allowed to go on, and had to be covered up. So the hypothesis here is that the story of Adam—Adam knowing his wife, Eve, and her having a son, that story—way too suspicious! [Laughter] Why were they hiding?

Fr. Andrew: Why would they do that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, what are they hiding? And the theory is that after Cain is born in Genesis 4, Eve says, “I have received a son from Yahweh.” Now, all of us who are normal, well-adjusted people and who haven’t spent seven or eight years getting PhDs and aren’t 19th-century Germans, hear that and say, “She’s thankful to God, because God gave her the gift of a son.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, I mean, people say this kind of thing all the time: “God gave us children.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but what these folks say is that the story that’s being covered up here—see, this is where—her wording there is where it sneaks out, and the real story is that the original story is that Cain is actually Yahweh’s son with Eve.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… I mean, that just skips chapter four, verse one, where it says, “Now Adam knew his wife…”

Fr. Stephen: That’s part of the cover-up.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, excuse me. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s all part of the cover-up. This is the same strategy. People do this all through…

Fr. Andrew: Man…

Fr. Stephen: And I get questions about this stuff, because they do the same thing— For example, the dedication of the first-born at Passover…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, child sacrifice. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the same scholars say this is covering up child sacrifice that the Israelites were doing; it’s covering it up. So they print these articles like: Oh! Biblical evidence! The evidence is the story that’s in the Bible which is clearly covering up this other one supposedly. “Biblical evidence of child sacrifice in Israel” and then people read that headline and get upset and send me an email. So this is another one of those things. I mean, I don’t have much to say about it other than that is just an unbelievably stupid approach to anything, to reading any text. Just complete hermeneutic of suspicion! Can you imagine if every time someone sent you an email—“Hey, you want to go see a movie this Friday night?”—oh….

Fr. Andrew: “What do you mean by that!?”

Fr. Stephen: “What question does he not want me to ask, and he’s trying to distract me with a movie?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: That’s just not mentally healthy as a way to approach the world. [Laughter] But, you know, you’ve got to write journal articles and dissertations, so.

So very obviously in the text, the actual text that actually exists that you can actually read, he is Adam’s son. And it’s important in the narrative that he’s Adam’s son. He’s in Adam’s image now, Adam post-expulsion from paradise. His story is going to be a continuation of Adam’s story on a bad trajectory. Spoilers.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] In case you haven’t read the rest of Genesis 4.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there may be one person listening somewhere who hasn’t read Genesis 4 in their life or heard this story—sorry about the spoilers; we’ll work through it anyway.

So the main sort of action that we see in the story of Cain starts to unfold when he and his brother, Abel, his younger brother, Abel, go and offer sacrifices to God. We’re told that Abel goes and offers an animal; Cain goes and offers some of his crops.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the fruit of the ground.

Fr. Stephen: And Abel’s offering is accepted, and Cain’s offering is not. Here’s one of the first places where the train pulls into speculation station.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes: “Did he not offer the right stuff? Or did he not bake it correctly? God doesn’t want the vegetables; he wants an animal, because things have to die!”

Fr. Stephen: And this is—I know we’ve talked about it on the show, but this is another good opportunity again to point out, especially in Genesis but throughout the Bible, the way to approach the text is not to come to it with a bunch of your questions that you’re trying to answer to satisfy your curiosity about different things, but to read the text and try to discover what the text is saying, because I think if we read the text closely, we’ll see why one was accepted and the other wasn’t. But if you just sort of stop there, you can go all over with conjecture. So there’s the: “Yeah, were both supposed to be animals?” There are people—some of our Protestant friends out there—who base huge theological things on: “No, it has to be an animal!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it has to die!

Fr. Stephen: It has to die and it can’t be plants. But, like, where in the Torah…? There’s plenty of offerings that are first-fruits and grain offerings.

Fr. Andrew: Right, offerings that God commanded very explicitly. It’s not like he ever said, “Do not bring me grain offerings and drink offerings; I only want stuff that you have to kill before you bring it.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, even some sin offerings were just wheat cakes, if you read Leviticus closely. But beyond that, we’re not even told what kind of offering this was to be able to adjudicate that. It doesn’t say it was a sin offering. It doesn’t say if it’s a thank offering, if it was for first-fruits…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s no point, in the three chapters prior or in this chapter, where it says, “And God commanded them to offer sacrifices and this is how he said you should do it.” I mean, there’s not even a point where it says that God is commanding a sacrifice. You just see them doing it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the text gives us no way to assess. It tells us nothing about the technique; there’s literally nothing about the technique.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just offerings made.

Fr. Stephen: And it doesn’t give us any basis to judge what they should or shouldn’t have been offering. So we can’t do that. But—but—we can look, for example, to where—other places in the Scriptures where this might be talked about. And one of those places that we’re going to be coming back to sort of over and over and over again tonight, because, as I explained to Fr. Andrew yesterday, when you go and get a PhD, you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing, and so your knowledge of things is like this cone that comes down to a tiny point. My tiny point is in 1 John 2, so 1 John 3 that we’re going to keep coming back to tonight is really close to that. So if we keep coming back to 1 John 3:12, I can feel like I know what I’m talking about.

Fr. Andrew: So this is just kind of a general warning for anyone who wants to argue about 1 John with you?

Fr. Stephen: I suppose.

Fr. Andrew: They’ll have a lot of reading to do at the very least.

Fr. Stephen: Or open season on everything else, yeah. [Laughter] This is one of those things that people… People tend to treat scholars sort of the way Marvel Comics treats scientists. If you’re in a Marvel comic and you’re a scientist, like, you can build an inter-dimensional portal…

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s what scientists do!

Fr. Stephen: You can make a chemical potion to shrink people… You can do… Like, there’s no particular science you studied: you just know “science.” And you can invent things, and engineering you know, too, apparently. People treat scholars that way, but the reality is being a scholar means you know an incredible amount about something very, very specific. [Laughter] And so when you’re talking about— The further away you get from that specific thing, the less you actually know as a scholar. So any time a scholar’s talking outside his field, you shouldn’t listen to him at all, because usually they’ll say, if a scholar’s talking outside of his field, it has the same value as a layman. I think it has less value than a layman, because we get pompous from having a PhD, and so we think we know more than we do.

Fr. Andrew: So are you saying that Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be the person to listen to on philosophy and religion?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And/or Richard Dawkins. And/or Sam Harris. And/or… And/or… [Laughter] And I’m not the guy to listen to on theoretical physics, either.

Fr. Andrew: But you have a PhD! Come on!

Fr. Stephen: I know! I’m a scientist! [Laughter] So, anyway, back to—or for our first time, to 1 John 3:12, my comfort zone, my happy place. [Laughter] Or actually, first we’ll read 12 and 13, although it’s 12 primarily that we’re going to keep coming back to.

Fr. Andrew: Right, okay. 1 John 3:12-13:

We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one, and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so these evil deeds of Cain—these evil deeds are not: he tried to sacrifice some herbs to God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not an evil deed.

Fr. Stephen: No, there’s no basis to do that, and it would be at most one deed, and this is deeds plural. So this is talking about who these two people are. Cain was already evil and doing evil deeds, and Abel was righteous and following God and doing good. And so this is why, when Abel then went and offered a sacrifice to God, God accepted it, and when Cain, while still doing evil, went and offered a sacrifice to God, God did not accept it.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, we’ve seen this… Well, yeah, in the Old Testament we get this lots of times, but probably the one that’s most memorable is in Psalm 50 (51) where St. David says you have to be contrite and humble before God and then you can offer bullocks upon his altar. That’s the last verse. It’s the character of your heart; who you are is what’s… what makes a big difference in the sacrifices. It’s not the only thing; it’s not like you can say, “Well, I’m really humble before God, so I don’t need to do all these sacrifices that he commanded.” It’s that it’s a very important prerequisite.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is… This has to be a major theme in the Old Testament, and we see Israel not getting it in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, over and over.

Fr. Stephen: Because this is very different [from] the way things work in the pagan world. In the pagan world, the whole job of various kinds of priests is to know how to do the rituals correctly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re professional ritualists.

Fr. Stephen: You go and you offer the sacrifice and you make all the cuts correctly and you read the entrails correctly. You do all the stuff correctly, and if you do it all correctly, then the god accepts the sacrifice and does what you want.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s about skill.

Fr. Stephen: And if you mess it up somewhere, then it doesn’t work. But that’s not how Yahweh the God of Israel works. And that’s why, over and over again in the Old Testament, it’s that God desires mercy and not sacrifice. At certain points he tells Israel to stop offering the sacrifices because they’re not repenting. They’re living completely wickedly but then following the instructions from Leviticus about killing animals and offering them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t see that in paganism. Like: “Okay, look, you guys. You did the offering correctly, but, you know, your hearts were messed up when you came to the sacrifice.” Thor never shows up and says that. It’s just: “Gimme.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, no, it’s the exact opposite. It’s the exact opposite. You look at when Rome lost the legion to Arminius in Germany, and the people were mad, because they’re like: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” They were like: “We did all the stuff we were supposed to do. We were not supposed to get beaten.” And so they— For years after that, they would throw rocks at the temples in Rome.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the god had swindled them! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The gods had not kept up their end of the bargain. That’s how that worked in the pagan world, but in Israel God’s saying, “Look, I don’t want— I don’t delight in the blood of bulls and goats.”

Fr. Andrew: “I don’t need that stuff.”

Fr. Stephen: “That’s not the point. It’s supposed to be an expression. And so if it’s not going to be an expression of repentance, an expression of love, an expression of praise, an expression of thanksgiving—then just knock it off, man! Save your time.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s hypocrisy, then, which is worse than not doing it at all.

Fr. Stephen: And this carries over even into the New Testament, where Christ says if you’re on your way to the altar and you realize someone has something against you, leave your gift, go find them and be reconciled first. Then come back and make your offering. So this is a basic biblical principle, and that’s what we’re getting laid out here in Genesis 4 already. And if you read Genesis 4:7, for example, very closely—this is part of where God comes and talks to Cain after the sacrifice incident—he pretty much says that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in verse seven… I mean, it starts out with verse six: “The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry and why is your face fallen?’ Then he says to him, ‘If you do well’ ”—this is the ESV—” ‘If you do well, will you not be accepted?’ ”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Hebrew there is literally “do good.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “If you do good.”

Fr. Stephen: “If you do good, will you not be accepted?” So he’s telling Cain what the problem was. “If you repent and you start to do good, if you turn your life around, I will accept your offerings.” He’s not rejecting Cain as a human; he’s rejecting the offering because it’s not being offered to him with a pure heart.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, this goes back to the idea—I mean, we’ve talked about this a bunch of times—but what is sacrifice? It’s about hospitality. If you’re sitting down to do hospitality with someone that you’ve been horrible towards, what kind of meal is that? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And you’re still gossiping about him at the table while he’s sitting there.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yeah, we have to remember that, that you don’t sit down and eat a meal with someone that you’re on terrible terms with. That just doesn’t… I mean, you do it; it does happen sometimes—but wow, awkward! And maybe even offensive.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if part of the purpose of that meal is reconciliation, sitting there insulting him and his wife while you’re doing it is not a good way to go about that. You’re better off probably not inviting them over if that’s what you’re going to do.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, I mean, that’s the logic behind what God says when he rejects sacrifices.

Fr. Stephen: So, as you mentioned there, notice again God doesn’t— And this is the proof that God isn’t rejecting Cain as a human, because after he rejects the offering and Cain is angry and upset, God comes to him and talks to him and tries to help him. He doesn’t write him off. He doesn’t say, “Good. You were never one of the elect anyway.” [Laughter] He comes to him and talks to him and says what we just said.

And then he says something very important that we’re now going to kind of dissect. He says, “Sin is crouching at your door. Its desire—” Well, somebody put a weird translation in the notes. [Laughter] “It desires to master you, but you must master it” is sort of what the Hebrew says.

Fr. Andrew: “If you do not do the good, sin is crouching at the door.” So it’s dependent upon the way he acts, and that it wants to master him, and God says, “You’ve got to get control over this. It’s going to control you, dude.”

Fr. Stephen: And so I’m pretty sure we’ve mentioned it on the show before, but the word that’s translated “crouching” there is—and in Hebrew it’s the word robes—but that is derived from an Akkadian word that refers to a certain type of demons that was believed to crawl up through cracks in the ground and sort of prowl around.

Fr. Andrew: And jump on people, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That’s creepy, every time I think of it. Yikes!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And so the idea is that sin—and notice, “sin” here is singular; it’s not “sins,” it’s not “breaking a bunch of rules is crouching…”; that’s not how sin is being talked about here: it’s “sin,” and it’s being talked about like it’s this sort of demonic beast.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a monster. There’s a monster at your door.

Fr. Stephen: Prowling around. It’s getting ready to jump on you, and it’s going to want to—you must master it. You’re going to have to struggle with it; you’re going to have to fight it. When it comes for you, you’re going to have to fight it. And so it’s portrayed as this sort of demonic power. This isn’t just this one weird place in Genesis 4. This is going to be the primary way that St. Paul, for example, talks about sin. There are a handful of cases where St. Paul uses “sins,” plural, where when he says, “sins,” he’s talking about offenses. He more often uses the word “transgressions” for those things; sometimes, there’s this handful of cases where he uses “sins.” Usually St. Paul uses “sin” in the singular, and he’s thinking of it in the same way, as a power or a force in the world that seeks mastery over us and that we have to master. Of course, a famous passage that has that language in it is when he says, “All things are permissible to me, but not all things are beneficial. All things are permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s that active-versus-passive thing again.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we talked about this last time a little bit. This is that same kind of view of sin sort of as this force. Every time I talk about this in terms of Cain, somebody—not the same somebody; I’m not referring to one person—there’s always somebody—it’s always a different somebody; it’s “a certain man” [Laughter]—will say, “Well, what about Romans 5:12?”

Fr. Andrew: Right. “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and my immediate response: “What about Romans 5:12?” [Laughter] And then I stare at them, intimidatingly.

Fr. Andrew: “Explain yourself!”

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] So, right, this is—obviously the “one man” is talking about Adam, and it’s talking about the relationship of sin and death. But notice, he says “sin,” singular—“Just as sin came into the world through one man.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that man is the door.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so Adam is like the door that let sin into the world. In Genesis 4, sin’s already out there, prowling around in the world, looking for Cain. It’s looking for Cain; Cain doesn’t let it into the world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, his dad did that.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s in the world now, but Cain is the person whom we’re going to see—spoilers again—is the first person whom sin masters, whom sin seizes and whom sin masters and takes control of, not his father, even though his father is how he came into the world. And so, again, St. Paul can say what he wants to say, and since he’s using “sin” in the singular there, he’s sort of deliberately giving that presumption. Because he could have said—he could have used a participle; he could have said, “Therefore, just as sinning began in the world with one man…” If he wanted to talk about breaking rules and Adam as the beginning of sinning, he could have said that, etc., etc. There are lots of ways he could have said it, but this is what he actually said.

And then death comes into the world, also through Adam, and spreads to everyone as all—now notice there St. Paul says “sinned” There he uses the verb. So there he’s talking about a person taking an action; he’s not talking about the force out in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we don’t really have time to go into the complicated relationship between sinning and death and sin, the force, the demonic force. I almost wish he would have capitalized that, although that’s the name of a desert, isn’t it, the desert of Sin? And a Roman Catholic cardinal! I remember when Cardinal Sin was the cardinal of the Philippines. That was—wow. Cardinal Sin.

Fr. Stephen: “Cardinal Sin” sounds like a villain in one of those bad Christian comics.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? I know!

Fr. Stephen: Not the Archie ones, the other ones.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man! That brings me back. But, yeah, the cardinal of the Philippines for a while was Cardinal Sin! I’m sure in whatever his native people’s language was—which I don’t know if it was Tagalog or not—“sin” was not the same thing as it is in English. But, yeah, it is kind of complicated. Maybe we’ll get into that in a future episode: What is the relationship between sinning, death, and Sin (capital-S)? But that’s kind of not what this is about, but in any event we should just know that it doesn’t work in a kind of mechanical way: if you do this, then that will happen, like if you sin this amount, then you’re going to die. That’s not what’s going on here. And also that there are different ways it gets talked about in various parts of the Orthodox tradition, so it’s okay. If it’s a little bit muddy at this point, maybe we’ll cover it in the future.

Fr. Stephen: But for now, before we get to the end of this first half, we’ve got cuneiform to read.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, there’s cuneiform, here in our notes, which—I can’t read it, but it looks pretty cool. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So we’ll move on that. There’s this dialogue where God is almost pleading with Cain not to go down the path that he’s been going down and that he’s now about to go past the point of no return.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s almost like a father saying, “Don’t do drugs. It’s going to kill you, dude. Don’t get addicted.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but a bit more serious.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, way more serious!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, spoilers again, Cain kills his brother; murders his brother. And then, in response to that, he receives a curse, and the language is deliberately—he comes into this state of curse, and the language is deliberately reminiscent of the curse that his father, Adam, came under in the previous chapter, in Genesis 3, at the expulsion from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, if you read these chapters together, you’ll immediately see this kind of language repeated, and it’ll be clear that there’s this parallel.

Fr. Stephen: But there’s also this sort of intensification when you compare Cain’s situation to his dad’s situation. Remember in Genesis 3:17, Adam is told that “cursed is the ground because of you,” that sort of as a result of what Adam had done, now the ground was under a curse, whereas Cain is told, “You are cursed from the ground.” Instead of the ground being cursed, that “from,” there’s this separation now between Cain and the earth. And the result of that—for Adam the result of that in Genesis 3 was that he was going to have to bring forth food from the ground by the sweat of his brow, by hard manual labor; there’s going to be thorns and thistles; there’s going to be difficulty and struggle for him to bring food out of the earth. With Cain in Genesis 4:12, it’s not happening. He’s not going to be able to bring food out of the ground at all. He’s going to be unable to farm, unable to sustain himself from the earth.

So there was— In paradise, remember, they’re told they can eat from the fruit of any tree. So they didn’t even have to kill plants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just pick the fruit, eat it.

Fr. Stephen: The fruit. The rest of the creation offered itself to Adam and Eve for nourishment, offered them fruit for nourishment. They just had to walk by and pluck it off the tree. Adam now has to go and work the ground to bring forth that food. And Cain now is cut off from the rest of creation in a way that the rest of creation will not sustain him.

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t there— I can’t remember, this image of the ground being like bronze or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: That’s in Deuteronomy.

Fr. Andrew: That’s in Deuteronomy, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: In the laying-out of the curse, but it’s the same kind of curse. This is the same kind of thing we’re talking about. So this raises the question within the narrative of Genesis 4: Okay, how is Cain is going to survive? And he’s got two main problems. Problem number one, he killed his brother. Abel is the first human to die. He’s done this horrible thing. Parents, if nobody else, are probably going to want revenge, potentially other children of Adam and Eve could want revenge. So he’s not—so Cain’s not safe anywhere from sort of the cycle of violence that he’s now kicked into motion. And then, secondly, how’s he going to survive in terms of how’s he going to eat?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, is God just kind of cursing him to starve to death here?

Fr. Stephen: So these two aspects of that problem get dealt with in two different ways. The way in which that cycle of vengeance is dealt with is dealt with by what’s traditionally called the mark of Cain. This is the part of the program where we get talk about how stupid racists are.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: And I don’t feel bad about using these words. Racists are idiots! Because, hey, if you want to send an email to Ancient Faith defending racists, send it to Fr. Andrew Damick at Ancient Faith Radio dot com.

Fr. Andrew: That’s an instant delete.

Fr. Stephen: Now, we shouldn’t pick on racists… [Laughter] But so there have been at various points folks trying to justify racism from the Bible, and one of the— I mean, every way they’ve tried to do it is stupid, but this is the stupidest. By saying that the mark of Cain had something to do with the color of Cain’s skin being different.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which—there’s nothing in the text that suggests that at all. It’s just zero.

Fr. Stephen: But more importantly, if you’ve actually—I don’t know, if you can read—so that’s step one of why most racists didn’t see this problem: can’t read—but if you continue reading, you get to Genesis 6-9 in just a few chapters, when everyone except Noah and his sons is wiped out by the flood. That’s everybody descended from Cain.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s not a Cain race around, everybody. Sorry!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there’s no one descended from Cain around. So that’s why… I mean, it’s on-the-face stupid. So hopefully none of you had that in your head; many of you had probably heard about it, and it belies belief that there were people who believed that, but that is a big negatory.

But, as Fr. Andrew said, in the text there’s not even anything that tells us this is some kind of physical mark, that this is like a cowlick in his hair or something. [Laughter] Because first of all, that wouldn’t really make sense either, because if the whole point is—he says, “Anybody who sees me will kill me,” and God says, “Okay, well, I’ll make you really identifiable. That’ll solve the problem.” [Laughter] Again, that doesn’t really work.

So the word here in Hebrew that’s translated “mark” is owt. It is a word that means a pledge or a witness or an oath.

Fr. Andrew: And, yes, we looked it up. This is not an opportunity for Fr. Andrew’s Etymology Corner. “Oath” and owt are not cognate, even though they are…

Fr. Stephen: Even though owt means “oath.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. They are false friends. [Laughter] False friends.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this is like a pledge, and the point is God makes this promise to Cain, this pledge, that anyone who harms him, it will be God who avenges him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s “mark” in the English sense of “mark this well,” which is a sort of archaic way of speaking, but if you read the books that we do, you get this all the time. “Mark this well. Pay attention.”

Fr. Stephen: He will mark Cain in the sense that he’s going to keep an eye on him. [Laughter] He’ll be aware of what happens.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And this is also the beginning of a theme. Notice God says— The way you end the cycle of violence is God says, “I will deal with it.” And this is the beginning of God being the one who silences the avenger and ultimately “Vengeance is mine says the Lord.” God takes care of breaking the cycle of violence. So that takes care of that part of Cain worrying about being hunted.

So then the next part is how is he going to live, and that’s solved by the founding of a city.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you set up a system and you can live off of what other people do.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so now there’s going to be commerce, there’s going to be these other things that are going to allow him to survive without being able to live an agrarian lifestyle. So the city that is mentioned here—

Fr. Andrew: Founded in the land of Nod.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. —is an actual city. SO there’s a little bit of unclarity in the way that the Hebrew is translated sometimes. A better translation of it for various reasons— You will often hear it translated in a way that makes it sound like Cain named the city after his son, Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so shouldn’t the city be called Enoch?

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it’s— Cain actually names the city after Enoch’s son, Irad—is how it’s spelled in most English transliterations. That’s Irad, I-r-a-d. And that is the city of Eridu, which is in southern Sumeria.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you listen to it, the vowels are a little bit different, but it’s still got the same consonants of R and D: Irad, Eridu. You can hear the similarity, I hope, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s Eridu, and— Fr. Andrew, do you want to describe the cuneiform to people?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes! So there’s actual cuneiform in our notes! [Laughter] Thanks!

Fr. Stephen: Fun with fonts, ladies and gentlemen!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. So the first cuneiform character—pictogram, you see four spiky things pointing downwards, with one across it moving from left to right. And then next to all of those there’s a big one going from top to bottom. And then the second character is four of those marks pointing right, and then they’re surrounded by a diamond-shaped box of four other marks, so basically a square, but turned on one of its points. So those are the two images that you get from the cuneiform. That’s about as good as I could do. I’m sure there’s some official way of describing this, but I don’t know it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I was just curious how you’d do it. I’m glad you went along with it.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you go! Spiky things! Hashmarks! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Little wedges, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Wedges, right. We don’t need no stinkin’ wedges!

Fr. Stephen: That Sumerian name is pronounced Nunki-Eriduki, and the Akkadian, which is northern Mesopotamia, Semitic language, called it Iritu. But Eridu was considered in the Ancient Near East, in a lot of places at a lot of times—not everywhere and at all times, but maybe even most places at most times—to have been the first city. We now know it actually isn’t, archaeologically.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but this is the tradition about it.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not even the first Sumerian city, archaeologically, but they believed it was at the time. And so the idea here is that Genesis 4 is, as we’ve seen time and time again, it’s sort of interacting with the traditions of Israel’s neighbors in terms of… So for example the Sumerian King Lists, in many but not all of them, Eridu is the first city, and the founding of Eridu, because it’s the first city, is this incredibly important event in the history of civilization. So the kingship comes down from heaven for the first time in Eridu, and their first king is Alulim who lives like 28,000 years. And he has, as we’ve talked about before when we’ve talked about the apkallu, when we’ve talked about giants, he has a sage, an apkallu, this divine being named Adapa, who advises him and brings civilization to earth in the city.

We have other Sumerian material that talks about Enki, who was the god of the city, founding the city. Enki was believed to have brought up the city, and all life in the world, for that matter, out of what’s now the Persian Gulf; up out of the seas to the south. Enki was believed to live in the far waters. His temple in Eridu was an aquifer.

Fr. Andrew: Which—wow. That’s crazy. But just consider the maintenance on that! It’s always wet! Man. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I live in Louisiana, man, so I don’t know…

Fr. Andrew: Perpetual flooding. That’s what we want! We want it flooded!

Fr. Stephen: But this isn’t just when Eridu is sort of this big, prominent city early on… Much later, in the neo-Babylonian empires—we’re talking about Nebuchadnezzar; we’re talking about thousands of years later—the Babylonians still believed that Eridu was the first city. They just, of course, said it was founded by Marduk, their—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, their guy.

Fr. Stephen: Their guy. So at the time of the Babylonian exile, that would have been the view of the city of Eridu. And so Genesis 4 is saying—is again, this is sort of correcting the record—this was not a great moment in civilization; this is not when the divine came to earth; this was not the… This was Cain murdered his brother—he’s the first murderer; he’s the first great sinner—he had to go on the lam, and he built this great city as kind of a hideout, to try and survive, because he couldn’t farm. So you could see how that inverts the whole view of human civilization, sort of in one fell swoop in a few verses here in Genesis 4.

And for the record, Eridu was founded around 5400 BC, and this was one of those—a lot of times on the show when we give very ancient dates, we know there are certain folks in our listener base who don’t like dates that go beyond a certain point. [Laughter] But the great thing here is: 5400 BC works either way, so regardless of your view of things, 5400 BC, founding of Eridu—it even works for Cain on certain people’s timelines, so.

And so that sort of comparative condemnation of city life versus nomadic and agricultural life is a theme that runs through Genesis and through most of the Old Testament, and we’ve talked about that at various points.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this idea that civilization is not the result of a divine endowment, but is actually the outgrowth of sin, someone running from God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that, moving— You know, when Abram and Lot separate the land, Abram, of course, wants to live nomadically on the plain; Lot’s like: “Ah, let me go hang out there by Sodom and Gomorrah. They seem like fun, happening places!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Dun dun dun!

Fr. Stephen: He wanted to live near the city, kind of regrets leaving Ur in the first place, maybe. So there’s a very different perception here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, that is the end of our first half of tonight’s episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! This is the second half of The Lord of Spirits. We’re talking about Cain walking the earth, sin, all that stuff. This is the second part of the show, and as the Voice of Steve just said, you can call us at 855-AF-RADIO; again, that’s 855-237-2346. I have no commercial for this half, so…

Fr. Stephen: Well, if you wanted to be the new CEO of Ancient Faith—

Fr. Andrew: I don’t.

Fr. Stephen: —I’m afraid time has passed you by.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true! That’s right. Applications are closed, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: You’re going to have to wait a few decades for the next guy to retire.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true, yeah. All right, well, we’ve got Cain having founded the city, and civilization begins.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So, unlike Caine from Kung Fu, he will not be walking the earth any more; he will be in a city.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So this half, our second half, we’re going to sort of start looking at the figure of Cain as he develops in sort of later writings, so in Second Temple Judaism, in some of the Church Fathers, in the New Testament: how is the figure—what is the figure of Cain, sort of his legacy, how does it function? Why is he important? Because, again, as we talked about post-legacy of St. Augustine, for a variety of reasons in the West, Cain doesn’t get talked about that much. There’s not a lot of Cain. But lots of people were talking about Cain in Second Temple Judaism. More people were talking about Cain than were talking about Adam.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s interesting that Cain does show up a lot in other kinds of… I don’t want to call it legendary material, but a lot of stories, for instance—here I’ll throw out the obligatory Beowulf reference—Beowulf references Cain. Grendel, the monster, the big monster at the beginning of the story—and suddenly I’m reminded of that Sesame Street book called The Monster at the End of This Book—but Beowulf does have a monster at the end of the book, and it’s a hidden dragon. See, there you go. But Grendel is said to be a descendant of Cain, and it also says that Cain is the father of orcs and of all kinds of evil, giants and elves—elves are bad creatures in Beowulf, I’m afraid, mostly—

Fr. Stephen: Elves are bad creatures in everything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Yeah, right!

Fr. Stephen: Every fantasy world, elves are responsible for everything bad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true. Even in Tolkien, a lot of the bad stuff gets started because of one particular elf named Fëanor.

Fr. Stephen: The elves have much to answer for.

Fr. Andrew: They do! [Laughter] They really do. But, yeah, Cain—I mean, Cain is a big deal in… like, especially the medieval imagination. He shows up all the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he is this figure. He is this figure, and that disjunction with Adam is important, because as we mentioned on the show before, we see in the icon of the harrowing of hell the raising up of Adam and Eve; we don’t see the salvation of Cain, the repentance of Cain, because that’s not who Cain is.

Fr. Andrew: And in a lot of All Saints icons, you see Adam and Eve, and in many cases they have halos, showing that they are among the divine council, but you don’t see Cain. Cain’s not there.

Fr. Stephen: Yep. So, yeah, we’re going to sort of trace out where that talk about Cain comes from. So Cain is an example of something. He’s not just the first; he’s also the worst! [Laughter] And so one of the places that he’s talked about that is in your New Testament if you are—if your Old Testament if you’re Orthodox or Roman Catholic; in your New Testament if you live in the second century—is in the book of Wisdom 10:3-4.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which goes like this: “But when the unrighteous went away from her—” And we should say that “her” is Wisdom. If you read earlier in the chapter, you get that.

But when the unrighteous went away from her in his anger, he perished also in the fury wherewith he murdered his brother, for whose cause the earth, being drowned with the flood, Wisdom again preserved it and directed the course of the righteous in a piece of wood of small value.

That’s a really great way of referring to the ark.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s cheap.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “A piece of wood of small value.” How much for gopher wood for these days? I don’t know!

Fr. Stephen: So you notice here Cain is just referred to as “the unrighteous; the unrighteous one.” And, interestingly, Wisdom wants to note that Cain also perished “when, in his anger, he murdered his brother.” And that’s talking about a little bit what we talked about last time, that idea of spiritual death, of being cut off from God, from which then sort of further necrosis sets in and someone perishes physically later on. And then also Cain—and this is going to be one of the major themes in terms of how Cain is seen—is that he sort of sets things in motion that will end up causing the flood, the flood of Noah. Because the flood is going to come to purify the creation from humanity. So at the time of the flood whereat everyone’s thought was always evil all the time, which is worse than me, because some of my thoughts are not evil once in a while at least. [Laughter] But this is always evil all the time; everything has snowballed up to that point, but that begins with Cain. That begins with Cain allowing himself to be mastered by evil.

So Josephus is going to— He refers—he uses the word ponerotatos, which is not the same as “po-ta-toes”—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew…

Fr. Stephen: Ponerotatos means most-evil. So he’s not just “the evil one” or “the unrighteous one”; he’s the most-evil one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, you’ve got that word, ponerou, the evil one: ponerotatos is like… the most-evil one.

Fr. Stephen: And not only is he the most-evil one, but he’s also a teacher of evil. Like, he is incredibly evil. And so not only has he been sort of mastered by sin, but now, through him, sin is mastering others as he is teaching and leading people into evil.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’ve got this quote from Josephus’s Antiquities; this is chapter one, verses—

Fr. Stephen: Translated by a very Victorian gentleman…

Fr. Andrew: Yes. —59-60. I know, when I was reading this, I was like: I really feel like I need to say, “However, he did not accept of his punishment in order to amendment!” because that’s how it reads. [Laughter] Anyway, I won’t do that, my fake, fake Victorian accent.

Fr. Stephen: It’d get tedious after a sentence and a half.

Fr. Andrew: It does. It kind of does, and then, like, it only gets really interesting if you do a Grand Moff Tarkin thing. Then it becomes compelling and nasty.

Fr. Stephen: “[Evacuate]? In our moment of triumph!?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right! So, okay, here is Josephus.

However, he did not accept of his punishment in order to amendment, but to increase his wickedness, for he only aimed to procure everything that was for his own bodily pleasure, though it obliged him to be injurious to his neighbors. He augmented his household substance with much wealth, by rapine and violence (or “rapeen”; I’m not sure actually how that’s usually used) —by rapine and violence. He excited his acquaintance to procure pleasure and spoils by robbery (Wow!) and became a great leader of men into wicked courses. He also introduced a change in that way of simplicity wherein men lived before, and was the author of measures and weights. And whereas they lived innocently and generously while they knew nothing of such arts, he changed the world into cunning craftiness. He first of all set boundaries about lands.

Which doesn’t mean borders, I guess, but is more like deeds, buying and selling real estate.

Fr. Stephen: Property markers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So that land could be bought and sold.

Fr. Andrew: Because there are not nation-states in 5400 BC or whenever it is. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this is Josephus in the Antiquities, and notice the points he makes about Cain. Cain does not repent. So even Jospehus sees, based on the way the story is, the way that God speaks to Cain, that even the curse that befalls Cain, just like the curse that befalls his father, was there to drive him to repentance, but Cain does not repent. It was not purely punishment; it was to bring him to repentance, which he refused. And rather than going, returning in repentance, he chooses to pursue all of his own pleasures. So he just lets sin take over; whatever desire comes to him, he allows to control him, and then he leads others into it.

But that also you notice he sort of, related to the city— This is where Josephus is getting this; this is related to the founding of the city—that before this, people had lived in this way of simplicity, where they lived together, they shared things; everybody contributed what they could to the family, to the community, and everyone supported each other for help—which is what Cain could have done. If your question is, well, if he can’t farm, how could he support himself? Well, he could have returned to his parents in repentance. He didn’t have to be the one doing the farming; he could have done other things to contribute to the community and then have people provide food for him, but that’s not how he chooses to go about it. He goes about it the opposite way. He chooses to go and use violence and take and steal, and then to put in place these means of commerce and these means of “cunning craftiness” as he says. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s a system very much.

Fr. Stephen: Right, a system where you’re able to exploit others, take advantage of others, do everything except honest work with your hands in order to extract money and receive sort of bodily pleasure. And so this is who Cain is.

And this understanding of communal life is why, at the beginning of the book of Acts, when it talks about the early Christian community in Jerusalem, and it talks about them having everything in common and living together in common, and then you get the folks who, as soon as they’re done reading it, have to explain, “Now, this is not communism!” [Laughter] But this is—right at the beginning of Acts, it’s referring to this idea.

Fr. Andrew: This communal life, with the family, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s referring to this type, that that is the type of life that early Christians returned to. They pulled out of the life of this—even the city of Jerusalem, which had become horribly corrupt, as we know, by the time of Christ, and many times before and after. They had retreated from that to back to this kind of simplicity of life. That’s the reference there in Acts that they’re trying to show us, this way of life that was sort of more God’s intent from the beginning.

So not only does he do all this stuff, but he’s also presented very frequently as the first heretic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is interesting. You wouldn’t think, like: Wait, is Cain kind of violating some kind of Christological dogma, or…? [Laughter] What does that mean exactly?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he’s an anti-Trinitarian. He’s a Pelagian. [Laughter] Just trying to: “Works righteousness, man. Got to stop—” Ah, no. So he’s referred to this way in a bunch of places, in Philo, in two of the Targums that we call Neofiti and Pseudo-Jonathan; Clement of Alexandria uses him in this way; Tertullian uses him in this way. But, more importantly, he’s used twice this way in the Bible, once in Jude, verse 11 (because there’s no chapters in Jude; it’s a paragraph), and once in—here we are again—1 John 3.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Welcome back.

Fr. Stephen: And in both of those places, these false teachers or sort of heretical groups that have come into the Church and are leading people astray and are afflicting the Church are compared to Cain, directly. They’ve become like Cain; they’ve followed Cain. And the way that works is, if you look at, in both cases, what these people are doing, these people are coming into the Christian community and exploiting people in order to gratify their own desires.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but there are people in our time who will try to divide out certain kinds of dogma from morality and ethics, especially sexual morality, even people who, you know, their voices are from within the Orthodox Church—and as you like to say, that dog won’t hunt. This sense of gratifying your desires being associated with false teaching, and, of course, as we see many times in Scripture, with idolatry, means that, yeah, morality is not up for grabs.

Fr. Stephen: Especially sexual morality.

Fr. Andrew: Especially sexual morality!

Fr. Stephen: Idolatry and sexual morality are always intertwined in this way. And this is why it is a general truth worthy of acceptance that all cults eventually become sex cults.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, I’ve spent, because I have a weird little interest in this—I’ve spent a lot of time reading about weird religious movements, especially various kinds of cults and sects—sects—and they do! They head in that direction, almost to a man—and it’s always men. It’s always men running these things, taking advantage, dominating women, dominating whoever comes within their orbit.

Fr. Stephen: They get power, and they want to indulge all of their desires. And the power they get through these heretical communities they then use to do that—and they are like Cain in that regard.

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: So now we’re going to say more nice stuff about St. Augustine, because of course Cain is a major figure in The City of God, because the whole premise… So St. Augustine writes The City of God as the Western Roman Empire is collapsing, and he—one of his major intellectual contributions there is the idea of the saeculum, which is not the same as what we now call “secular.” The word, saeculum, in Latin before that had just referred to a period of time, like an age or an era, and what St. Augustine does is he uses saeculum to refer to—and he’s mingling some Plato in here as is his wont—that there is this realm of becoming; there is this realm of this world that is always shifting and changing; it’s always sort of temporally determined and in flux. And that’s the saeculum; that’s the city of man.

And so for him, Genesis 4 is Cain founding the city of man. You can read about this in City of God 15:17 is where he talks about Cain in particular. So there’s that world of change, and then over against that there is the city of God, the New Jerusalem, which is eternal, which is unchanging. And so St. Augustine writes The City of God, which is epically huge and covers everything in the world, but the thrust is he’s trying to say to people—who, literally, their world is crumbling around them, in ways that fortunately… I mean, who knows, in the United States, at least, the way things are going. But we, thankfully, most of us listening, have not had to experience yet, but I mean we’re talking about one day people on horses come into your town and just start murdering and raping people, house to house. And the authorities are crumbling, and there’s no food in the market, and people are starving. This is the reality of the fall of the Western Empire; this is the world they’re living in. And St. Augustine is writing to them and saying: This is the way of the world. The city of man—and Rome was the city of man—it never stays. But there is another city…

Fr. Andrew: It’s not the eternal city?

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] There is another city to which you belong, and that is unchanging, and that is pure. But so he not only sets up this paradigm with Cain as the founder of sort of this city of man, but he points to, in 15:17—not the year; sorry, Lutherans [Laughter]—The City of God, book 15, section 17—he points to the two genealogies of Seth and Cain, and he takes… He treats these genealogies in a way that’s actually reminiscent of Wisdom literature and the clever thing he does, to be these two ways, these two paths, that a person can pursue. And he points to the seventh generation of each of these genealogies as being sort of—because it’s the seventh, and “seven”: you reach completion—that’s like the end of the road.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the fullness.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the fullness; that’s the end of the road, where this road leads. So if you do that with Seth, the genealogy of Seth, the seventh from Adam is of course Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Who gets assumed…

Fr. Stephen: Who was taken up into heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, assumed up into heaven.

Fr. Stephen: Walks with God forever more: theosis, as we talked about last time. You look at Cain’s genealogy, and the seventh is Lamech, who’s the one who sings the song to his two wives about how great he is and how he’s going to murder anybody who messes with him and doesn’t need God to avenge him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s the super-murderer. Right, exactly. And it’s interesting to me that— I mean, we see this in Revelation, of course, but then there’s— This theme also persists in other places as well, that what’s held in contrast ultimately against the city of man is not the untrammeled wilderness; it’s another city: it’s the city of God. As it says, “We have here no continuing city, but we seek the one that is to come.” And so there’s this idea that civilization is redeemable, but it’s only because God sends it, only because God makes it happen. The Cain-city is not it. There’s no salvation there.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and polishing it won’t help. Having less crime in it won’t help, less obvious crime, less of the crimes we don’t like. Even spray-painting Bible verses on the walls isn’t ultimately going to help.

So then, as those are understood, as those figures are sort of the culmination—Lamech is sort of this anti-Christ figure—Lamech has these sons, then, in the genealogy, and those sons are treated not so much a continuation of the genealogy as they are treated as sort of—based on the contributions they make to civilization, they are sort of treated as the divisions of types of sin and wickedness that come out of Cain’s line, or come upon you and take you over as you go down that road, this road that Cain began and started traveling.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they’re each described as being the father of a certain way of living or skill, really, is what it comes down to. So this is Genesis 4:20-22.

Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.

So you’ve got keeping livestock. Verse 21:

His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.

Music. And then verse 22:

Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. And the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

So you’ve got husbandry, you’ve got music, and you’ve got metallurgy.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Man, that’s too bad about music. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so what’s going on in these? The livestock thing, the livestock is food livestock. So nobody has permission to eat meat yet in Genesis 4, but, more importantly, they’re making a contrast in sort of the movement, where, again, as we said before, in paradise, the trees are offering their fruit to Adam and Eve for nourishment. Then Adam’s having to work the ground. Now they’re going out and killing; they’re going out and finding, killing, killing things to feed their own desires.

And this has to do with sort of the predatory nature of this. We talked about this when we talked about the rules against blood-drinking, but it’s also why, frankly, we fast from meat. There is permission given later for people to eat meat, so I’m not saying you have to become a vegan—if you’re Orthodox, you’re vegan like half the year, but I’m not saying everyone has to become a full-time vegan, but there is something about meat-eating that is not ideal. The Scriptures are very clear about that, and that not-ideal part is that you’re going out and killing, and that represents a fundamentally different relationship to the rest of creation than what there was in paradise. It’s come far from there.

And so playing the lyre and pipe—I played the drums in school, so I guess I’m fine. [Laughter] No, the idea of music is again what it’s used for, and festival, which were festivals for pagan gods; they didn’t have secular festivals…

Fr. Andrew: No Woodstock?

Fr. Stephen: No. Well, Woodstock might be an example… [Laughter] Because this was about giving people the place and space to indulge their sexual desires.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s often this association with music, within a lot of contexts, with seduction and all this kind of stuff, sadly enough.

Fr. Stephen: Right, now that is not saying music is innately evil. More on that here in a minute.

And then you get to Tubal-cain, and he’s making instruments of bronze and iron, and you say, “Well, metallurgy, that seems like a nice thing.” This is—the idea here is that these are weapons for war, for mass murder. Cain could kill somebody with a rock, but now we’ve got swords, implements… We can go to war. We can have mass slaughter. We can take what we want.

And this sort of dovetails with what gets fleshed out even more. If you look at the version of this genealogy that’s in the book of Enoch, in the book of the Watchers. And we’re not going to—I know this is going to be a let-down, but we’re not going to talk a lot about giants tonight, because we kind of already did that, and we do that frequently; we’re focusing more on Cain tonight.

Obviously, the nephilim lay at the end of this, the end of this chain, but all along the genealogy, when you read it in the book of the Watchers, in the book of Enoch, these demonic spirits are giving the people in Cain’s line these secrets and this knowledge of potions, sorcery, metallurgy, all of these things, all of these sort of techne, all of these sort of aspects. And the idea is that all of them are being given to humanity before humanity is ready to use them in a way that is good and is righteous. So it’s not that there’s not any way to use this technology that way…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a question— Whenever we bring this up, we always get a whole bunch of questions like, “Well, which technologies are okay to use and are not from demons?” or “How do we know when we’re ready?” And it’s like: That’s not the point. The point is: What am I using this for? What is the purpose, the telos? What am I accomplishing by using this technology? That’s the question. And there’s—the big example is nuclear energy. That’s a good example.

Fr. Stephen: We always use—we: us humans—

Fr. Andrew: Humanity.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Give us a thumb, we make a knife. That’s an obscure reference. But any technology we find, we immediately use in the most destructive way possible, and then maybe later develop less weapons-based and killing-based uses for them. So nuclear technology you can use for power, you can use for all kinds of things.

Fr. Andrew: Medicines, actually!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, treat cancer with radiation. And the first thing we of course did with it was massacre thousands upon thousands of people. And I know me saying that now, there will be people upset. But I have to tell you a fact that you may not know and that should make you more upset about it if you don’t know it. Before Harry Truman made the decision to vaporize Nagasaki, it was the most Christian city in Japan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Multiple Christian groups including… I’m not sure it was the largest, but there were at least 14,000 Orthodox Christians living in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, more than 50% of the Roman Catholics in Japan lived in Nagasaki. And one day most of the Christians in Japan, in the most Christian city in Japan—men, women, children, going about their lives, had nothing to do with World War II, were not worshiping the emperor—they were Christians—were vaporized by a bomb. So you can “at” me, you can call me unpatriotic, you can be mad at me about that. Fr. Andrew might read the email. But that’s the reality, and we have to deal with reality. A bunch of Christians, your brothers and sisters in Christ, were murdered. That’s it. That’s what happened.

So, moving on from that happy note, and completely non-controversial with whatever listeners we have left, the other big way that Cain gets talked about, sort of going forward, his legacy in some of these writers, has to do with his state as cursed. So he’s sort of taken as the exemplar of a human who is sort of fully under this state of curse that we’ve talked about before, when we talked about blessings and cursings in one episode, and in Deuteronomy 20-30. This gets sort of developed out as this curse is described. He’s sort of taken as Exhibit A.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it spreads in the world. As Adam and Eve were supposed to spread blessing in the world, instead what happens is curse gets spread. Things get messed up.

Fr. Stephen: By Cain and his descendants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s the anti-Adam in a lot of ways.

Fr. Stephen: And the flood needs to sort of wash this all away. But so Philo of Alexandria, whom I know we’ve quoted a bunch before, but just for the record for everybody, is a first-century BC Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, Egypt. [He] wrote a text whose title is roughly “Questions and Answers in Genesis.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s not just “Answers in Genesis”?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Please! Aw.

Fr. Stephen: And you find it named all kinds of things in translations, like “Questions and Interrogations.” It’s called “Questions and Answers,” man. Come on!

Fr. Andrew: Q&A.

Fr. Stephen: Q&A in Genesis. But he has a couple of questions and then answers related to Cain and his curse, where he kind of lays this out.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so this is in the first chapter or section or book, I’m not sure which, part 71.

The earth is the last portion of the world. Therefore, if that utters curses, we must consider that the other elements do likewise pour forth adequate maledictions. For instance, the fountains and rivers and sea and the air and the land and the fire and the light and the sun and moon and stars—in short, the whole heaven. For if inanimate and earthly nature, throwing off the yoke, wars against injury, why may not still rather those natures do so which are of a purer character? But as for him against whom the parts of the world carry on war, what hope of safety he can have for the future I know not.

And the “he” there, of course, is Cain.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is sort of laying out in a more full way this enmity between Cain and the rest of creation. And if you go and read various versions of The Life of Adam and Eve, when you read stories of Adam’s repentance, the sun and moon and stars and these same things Philo lists are all praying with him and offering incense with him in his repentance. So there’s this idea that in his repentance the whole world is cooperating. Cain is in the exact opposite state; his lack of repentance, his continued evil, means that he is at odds with everything in the creation; the whole created order he is now out of whack with because he won’t repent.

And so then he goes on to answer… I mean, he’s posing himself these questions; it’s a rhetorical device! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s almost like catechism, really.

Fr. Stephen: And he goes on to talk about… a little more about what all is included in that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so this is part 74.

In the first place, he might have received injury from the parts of the world which indeed were made for the advantage of the good, and that they might partake of them, but which nevertheless derive from the wicked no slight degree of revenge. In the second place, it may be that he said this because he was apprehensive of injury from beasts and reptiles, for nature has brought forth these animals with the express object of their being instruments of vengeance on the wicked. In the third place, some people may imagine that he is speaking with reference to his parents, on whom he had inflicted an unprecedented sorrow, and the first evil which had happened to them before they knew what death was.

And of course the thing that he’s referencing Cain saying is like: “I’m going to die; I’m going to get killed”—why would Cain say this? That’s essentially the question that he’s asking.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is all the stuff that might have killed him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, why would he say this? Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The first thing is the idea that he’s so cut off from the world that the things of the world that are there to benefit the righteous would actually do him harm. And this is that same idea we see expressed with St. Paul with the Eucharist, that someone going and receiving the Eucharist… Like, if Cain went and received the Eucharist, it could kill him, because he is not prepared to receive it. He’s not receiving it in repentance; he’s receiving it in impurity and wickedness.

Fr. Andrew: And I love this idea that the animals are at odds with him, because that’s sort of the vengeance from God. Mosquitoes! Mosquitoes are a vengeance from the Lord! [Laughter] But I mean, there’s this notion that this is the left hand of God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, certain types of animals were brought forth in the world for this purpose. And you’re like: Wow, that makes God sound mean.

Fr. Andrew: Harsh. Viruses.

Fr. Stephen: But, once again, remember what we’ve said before about the way God is seen to relate to the demons whom he allows in the world throughout the Old Testament and in Second Temple Jewish literature, which is—again, this is all for bringing about repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this idea about the left hand of God.

Fr. Stephen: It’s all about trying to bring about repentance, not just to punish. But also, this is Philo’s answer for the “Wait, did lions eat grass from the expulsion from paradise?” Like: “No, all the beasts didn’t show up until there were sinners who needed repentance. And the reptiles.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like I said, that’s Philo’s answer; I’m not saying that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, right!

Fr. Stephen: Not a teaching in the Church or what Scripture said. I’m just saying that’s Philo’s answer to that question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then the last thing he says, of course, is that he’s afraid of his parents. “What are they going to do to me?”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this state. The word that’s used by Philo and Josephus and other Greek writers to describe this state of curse that Cain is in is agos.

Fr. Andrew: Alpha-gamma-omicron-sigma: agos.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there’s no iota in there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not agios, which is “holy.” This is agos.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, if I was a hymnographer, man, would I make a lot of use of that pun, right! [Laughter] Which they do!

Fr. Stephen: There’s only one iota of difference! Yeah, and that word… There’s lots of words for “cursed”—“anathema” and that kind of thing—in Greek, but this one is about ritual impurity. And it’s a particular type of ritual impurity that comes upon a person from sacrilege and murder, often when mixed together, and that sacrilege usually takes the form of desecration of some sacred space. So both Herodotus and Thucydides use the word to describe people who, for example, massacred people, like massacred priests, inside some god’s temple. So they defile the god’s temple by murdering people, and that means they’re now agos; they’re accursed, under a curse. They have this status of being ritually impure.

Josephus uses it at a couple of points to describe some massacres that took place in the Jerusalem Temple, that everyone involved… one time it was some Levites who took up arms and killed some people not in the Temple, but that they had contracted sort of this state. And the important part of this is that this kind of cursedness, or the ritual impurity part of this, is not removable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s this permanent mark.

Fr. Stephen: It can never be removed. There’s no sacrifice for it. There’s no ritual washing for it. There’s nothing for it. You maintain the ritual impurity. That’s not the same as saying you can’t be forgiven for the sin involved. That doesn’t mean there’s no repentance, there’s no way back. But the state of impurity, of ritual impurity, cannot be removed.

There are other places where we see this sort of ritual impurity aspect attached to Cain, one of which is in 1 John 3:12.

Fr. Andrew: Hey!

Fr. Stephen: Back again. Where, when St. John says that Cain murdered his brother, the word that’s used for “murdered” there is not the normal word. The word that’s used for “murder” there is sphazo, which means literally “slaughter.” It literally means he slaughtered his brother. But in the Greek Old Testament tradition, that word is used entirely for killing a sacrificial victim. So St. John uses this word in describing Cain and Abel to place what Cain did—it’s not just a fratricide, but to place it in this kind of ritual and ritual impurity context.

And so I know there are people who get worried when you say, “A state of impurity is not removable,” and get worried about something unforgivable, did they do it. I’m pretty sure nobody listening has massacred any priests inside of churches, so, I mean, this isn’t one that you’re going to accidentally do, just slip one day, have a bad day and do it.

But this idea we see in Scripture. For example, King David is told he can’t build the Temple because there’s blood on his hands.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it doesn’t matter how many sacrifices he offers.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And that’s not saying the Prophet and King David is not a saint; it’s not saying he wasn’t holy at the end of his life; it’s not saying he wasn’t forgiven for the sins he committed. All those things are true, but at the same time, what he did—killing Uriah, taking Bathsheba… well, actually, committing adultery with Bathsheba, then killing Uriah to cover it up, then marrying Bathsheba—you can’t undo that. You can be forgiven, but you can’t undo it; you can’t fix it.

Fr. Andrew: Like, Abel can’t be un-murdered. And this plays out. There’s canons in the Church, especially canons having to do with clergy, that if they’ve done various things, especially if they’ve killed anyone, in any way whatsoever, even accidentally, they can’t be ordained, and in some cases they have to be removed from the priesthood or the diaconate or the episcopacy or whatever is the order that they’re holding. And it’s not that they can’t be forgiven, but they can’t serve any more.

I’m reminded of a story—and I can’t remember what the source of this is, so write in if you happen to know the source of this one!—about St. Basil the Great, who, as you know, was a bishop, and he’s got priests serving in his diocese. And one did something, and Basil deposed him from the priesthood. I don’t remember what it was that this man did. He deposed him from the priesthood, and then some time later the two of them are both at the same funeral, and this ex-priest walks up to the body and prays over it and the man comes back to life. And so then he goes up to Basil and says, “So you see what just happened now. Can I please be a priest again?” And St. Basil says to him—now this is to the best of my recollection—“You can be a saint, but you can’t be a priest again.” What he did left a mark, and that’s just the way that it is.

You can talk about how it’s wise to do that because it would scandalize people even if the man was really repentant and so forth, but there’s this deeper thing going on here, this ritual impurity that just can’t be washed away. Again, you can be forgiven, you can become a saint—which is the goal of Christianity, by the way; the goal of Christianity is not to be ordained—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not being a priest; being a saint.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in fact, ordination might even be an impediment to salvation in many cases! [Laughter] The goal is to be a saint. There’s nothing standing in the way of you becoming a saint. If you’re willing to repent, you can do it. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s because sin and curse are not the same thing. Curse is the consequence of sin. And forgiveness does not erase consequences. The fact that you’re forgiven does not mean that you do not have to face the consequences. In fact, when someone comes and asks for forgiveness and says they’re sorry and you know that they’re only doing it because they’re trying to get out of the consequences, that’s considered a bogus apology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not repentance.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like: “I’m really sorry I did it, because I got caught.” [Laughter] That’s not how that works. So repentance includes and often begins with accepting the consequences of our actions, whatever they are. And of the consequences of my actions someday, God forbid, mean that I can’t be a priest any more, then part of my repentance from those actions, whatever they were, will be accepting that I can’t be one any more.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yep. Well, all righty. That wraps up the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits, and we’ve got one more half to go. We’re going to take another break, our final break for this episode, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back! It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast, and we are in the second part of a three-part series talking about the fall of man. The first part was about death; this part’s about sin; next time we’re going to talk about being dominated by demons. But today, we’re talking about sin, we’re talking about Cain as the sinner. So here we are; it’s the third half. Where do we go from here? What do we…? [Laughter] Well, how do we understand: It’s a curse! Death! Destruction! The creation hates you, Cain!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, super metal. [Laughter] I’m trying to think of how many Cain-related metal band names there are. I mean, there’s Avenge Sevenfold… Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: I have not made a special study of this topic! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: What would be awesome if there was an easy listening album or a yacht rock album that had something to do with Cain.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Write in! Let us know: Is there a lounge singer out there that you guys love? Some bluegrass, maybe? I don’t know. Actually, bluegrass does know about sin for sure.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no, I can see plenty of bluegrass songs about Cain and Abel.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: They might be pickin’, but they wouldn’t be grinnin’ on that one.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh! Nice.

Fr. Stephen: But so where we’re going in this third half—shock, we’re going to end up in 1 John 3:12.

Fr. Andrew: Whoa!

Fr. Stephen: Spoilers.

Fr. Andrew: What, again? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But before we go there… By way of a little review… So there’s sort of one more thing to talk about with Cain in terms of 1 John 3:12, and in a lot of ways this aspect of Cain sort of sums up the rest. And so if last—in the last episode we kind of ended up talking about theosis, we’re now going to talk about the other end of the other genealogy here in terms of Cain. But so to start with we have to—quick review. We’ve talked about this before, but the idea of fatherhood and how that relates to image-bearing in the Scriptures. And so being the “son” of something means that you are the image of it or the embodiment of it or the sort of incarnation of it. So if we look at the common examples: Barnabas—Bar-nabas—he is the son of encouragement or the son of consolation. And what we’re saying there is that he is a person who images or who embodies these qualities.

Fr. Andrew: James and John, the sons of thunder, is that…?

Fr. Stephen: Same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah? Because they’re thundery guys.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, although there’s also a riff there, because the place where Jesus calls them that was not far from a shrine to Zeus Boanerges, and “Boanerges” is the word that’s used there.

Fr. Andrew: Oooh!

Fr. Stephen: But you know when we’ll talk more about that?

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: One month from today, when we talk about thunder gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re going to do a thunder gods episode, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Teaser.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Or the son of perdition. And that’s literally sort of “son of destruction.”:

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in Greek is uios tes apoleias, son of destruction. And of course the English word, “perdition”—a little bit of etymology; I’m not going to play the jingle, but a little bit of etymology—“perdition” comes from Latin perdere, which means to destroy; it’s destruction.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and for the record, the road to perdition is near Holland, Michigan.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: On the coast. That’s where it was hot.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. So all of those ideas, that “the son of”—the son is the image of the father, so that’s the idea, that they’re embodying these properties, these qualities, these aspects, these things: destruction, in a real way. And this is also true with the “sons of God” language, that we’ve referred to it with angels and humans, and especially with humans, “sons of God” means we’re imaging God, as we’ve talked about. As we’ve talked about last time, that “sons of God” in the same way that “image and likeness” were sort of on both ends of the spectrum, where I confused everyone. [Laughter] It just sort of wraps around, because this is the theosis as a Möbius strip imagery.

Fr. Andrew: It’s always rough when you get to that half-turn in the middle. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but, you know, Adam is called the son of God, because he’s made in the image of God, in St. Luke’s genealogy of Christ. And also, we are made sons of God, as St. Paul says, that likeness aspect. And that, again, is the theosis, because we’re imaging God in the world.

So Cain doesn’t get called the son of God. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No…

Fr. Stephen: 1 John 3:12, back again. We’re told that he is “of the evil one”; he is “the son of the devil.” Remember the first half.

Fr. Andrew: It does not mean literally!

Fr. Stephen: Not literally! He was conceived and born in the usual way, but he became the son of the devil. He became the son of the devil by what he did. And this is important to hammer not just because of the kind of wonky theories we started out talking about, but also because a lot of forms of Gnosticism, for example, divide humanity into sons of light and sons of darkness, or sons of God and sons of the devil, and those are like ontological categories: you are born as one or the other. It’s like two different species of human, that you’re either one or the other; it has nothing to do with who you are and what you do.

So Cain becomes the son of the devil. He’s the first one who sort of becomes the son of the devil, and he does that how? By imaging the devil, by bringing the devil’s works into the world, by embodying him, by doing this wickedness, by committing murder, by doing all these things—and by teaching them. So not only does he have a demon sort of walking him around, so he’s then walking other people around; he’s passing it on to the next generations.

Fr. Andrew: Both a user and a dealer.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Not high on his own supply, though. [Laughter] And Christ uses this same kind of language, of being the son of the devil or the son of the evil one.

Fr. Andrew: Right! So in John 8:39-44, you see this conversation between Christ and some of his critics. They answered him—

Fr. Stephen: “Critics”: that’s being polite.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, well, I was raised to be polite.

Fr. Stephen: The soon-to-be-murderers.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

They answered him, “Abraham is our father.”

Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did.”

They said to him, “We were not born of sexual immorality. We have one father, even God.”

Jesus said to them, “If God were your father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Pretty sharp words there from the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, kind of unChristlike. [Laughter] Wait.

Yeah, and so notice here what is it that makes them of their father the devil? It’s not coincidental that St. John’s also writing this, and that’s why the same kind of wording appears. Because of what they are doing. Christ says so, in verse 41: “You are doing the works your father did.” That’s what makes them… And if they were sons of Abraham, they would be doing the works Abraham did; that’s what makes you a son of Abraham. To be a son of God means you do the things that God does.

And so again this is— This active imaging works both ways. It works both ways. And so it working in this bad way, in this negative way, in this way of sin and wickedness, is what we’ve kind of been calling in a make-shift word—I wish we’d come up with something better, but I don’t know what—as “demonosis.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean “demonization,” maybe, but “demonosis” is nicely paralleled to “theosis.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of.

Fr. Stephen: I just don’t think it’s an actual word.

Fr. Andrew: No… [Laughter] It’s not. I mean, it is if we all say it is!

Fr. Stephen: Enh… I won’t go along with your ruse! [Laughter] Anyway. So the demonic powers are in the world promoting sin, this force. And sin, the passions that we talked about last time, they make people passive and they take over and they take control, but then they also—that’s also transformative in the same way that theosis is transformative, that following Christ is transformative, love is transformative—hate is transformative. The same way that kindness is transformative, cruelty is transformative, in an opposite direction.

So these aren’t just “Oh, I chose to do this; I could have chosen to do something otherwise,” we assess whether it’s morally bad or good, we have an ethical argument, on and on and on and on. This is much more deeply related to our being and our humanity and who we are. And it has nothing to do with whether you get caught, it has nothing to do with whether anyone knows, it has nothing to do with… because this is in you. If you steal, you can steal your whole life and never get caught, and you’re still a thief. You can kill and get away with it, and you’re still a murderer; you still have blood on your hands. And there’s no changing that; there’s no changing what happened to you because of it, outside of repentance and transformation in the other direction. But it will change you.

And I know we’ve used this example before, but we probably all know people and have known people who have gone down a dark path in life and, by God’s grace, turned it around at some point, and you could physically see when you looked at them the difference.

Fr. Andrew: So are you saying that when you go down the dark path, that doesn’t necessarily forever dominate your destiny?

Fr. Stephen: No, it does not.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And that state of curse, that’s what that is; that’s what that change is; that’s what that negative change is; that’s what that is. That’s not there again as “because God’s going to punish you for your sins because you’ve been bad”; that’s again to drive you to repentance. If we have known those people who have gone down that dark road and have gotten to a point where just physically they’re falling apart, mentally, emotionally, things are crumbling, a lot of times it’s when they hit that, wherever that rock bottom is for them, that’s when they turn around; that’s what finally kicks in the repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I recall one of my professors in seminary saying for a lot of people, the only time they actually will eventually repent is—and this is how he gave it—an event starting with the letter D: death, disease, disaster, divorce, depression. And, I mean, you know, I did pastoral ministry for 13 years, and it’s often true. If people are comfortable, they’re not likely to repent. Just kind of… I mean, it happens, but not super often.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I personally need to be hit over the head with a 2x4, so. To get my attention. [Laughter] And this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the apkallu and the ancient kings in the Kings List. Or we talk about the humans in Cain’s line and the Watchers in the book of Enoch. Or what we saw in Genesis 4 tonight, this sort of symbiotic relationship that develops between humans and these demonic spirits, these demonic powers. It’s not symbiotic in a positive way; it’s more parasitic. Because there’s always promises; there’s always promises of power and knowledge and pleasure and this and that, that never quite pay off, that never quite come to the kind of fruition that…

Fr. Andrew: I mean, you’d think people would read enough fairy tales to know that when a magical being shows up and promises they’re going to make you beautiful, rich, or powerful, always say no! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that’s why they don’t show up any more.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Right! Because there’s enough fairy tales out there to…

Fr. Stephen: It’s not: a being appears to you. It’s a TV commercial or an ad.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. Different modes of enchantment now.

Fr. Stephen: And it tells you: Buy this, go here, do this—and then you will be happy, you will be fulfilled, you will impress the ladies and/or men, whatever it is that it’s promising. And the ultimate result of this, for a human like Cain, being our Exhibit A, who gives themselves over to this, is that they become like demons, and even in that St. John Chrysostom quote, which we are wont to quote, in some cases like with the nephilim, become demons, become demonic spirits.

So this is… We mentioned last time when we were talking about the expulsion from paradise that people have gotten from Milton this idea that the devil decided he was going to somehow God not be God any more and make himself be God, which, as we pointed out last time, makes absolutely no sense.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: But so this is… What we’ve seen with Cain… The devil was only partly successful with Adam; Cain is where we see the devil’s plan sort of go through to fruition. This is what he wants; this is what his plan was. This is how he’s rebelling against God his Creator, and that’s— If God’s plan is theosis, if that’s God’s plan for humanity that made the devil envious, that made him jealous, that made him angry, that filled him with his pride—if that’s God’s plan, then he is going to make at least some of these humans his imagers instead of God’s, his worshipers instead of God’s, his followers instead of God’s. That’s where he’s going to try and usurp God, is in the lives and the minds and the hearts and the souls and the bodies of some of these humans, not because he just loves humans and wants some of his own, but to destroy them, because he knows God loves them, and he hates God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Hey, so, related to that, actually, we just got someone who’s calling from Kentucky. At least that’s where his phone number is from. I’ve learned now that I can’t say they’re in Kentucky or whatever because that just happens to be where your area code is. But anyways, Nathan from Kentucky, are you there?

Nathan: Yes, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, Nathan, welcome to—

Nathan: And and I am in Kentucky.

Fr. Andrew: You are in Kentucky! Great! Well, that’s good to know. [Laughter] Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is—?

Fr. Stephen: Are you in your “old Kentucky home”?

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Nathan: [Laughter] No, I had to move recently. I’m in a new apartment.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, he’s in his new Kentucky home!

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I am suddenly hearing “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” All the old bluegrass songs and stuff are coming to mind now. So, Nathan, what is on your mind about Cain?

Nathan: So ever since I listened to you guys and you talked about the three falls, I noticed that there was like three temptations of Jesus and that a lot of them seem to be like reputations or what you might call discontinuities with those falls. So you have the obvious Tower of Babel with the nations, and then Satan offering Jesus the nations and him refusing to worship, which you know the humanity gave into. And with Adam and Eve and the apple, dealing with God’s intent, and Jesus with the stone and breads, that is also him submitting to what God intended instead of doing his own thing. Which of course leads the temptation on the Temple mount, and Cain’s fall—and those two I can’t… I haven’t figured out. I can’t mesh them, and I keep struggling to figure out what I need to kind of complete this idea.

Fr. Andrew: What do you think, Fr. Stephen? Is there an alignment between Christ’s facing off with the devil in the wilderness and this way of talking about three falls of man?

Fr. Stephen: So I’m not totally sold on the idea, but, if I were to try to make the link you’re wanting to make here, I think this is how I would do it, and I would have to think about this a lot more before I would endorse even what I’m about to say.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Shooting from the hip!

Nathan: Even a direction to research in would be great, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. To me… Because the issue of throwing himself off of the pinnacle of the Temple has to do with trusting in God versus testing God—and I think if I was going to try to connect that with Cain, I would go to after Cain had sinned, and he hears the curse that he’s not going to be able to provide for himself, that the correct thing to do would have been for him to repent and rely on God’s protection. So I don’t know. Like I said, I can’t totally sell it, but that’s the direction I would maybe go.

Fr. Andrew: I think there’s a paper in it, though, Nathan. [Laughter] So if you have to write any papers any time soon…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if there’s any journal articles or dissertations you need to write, you can have that one for free.

Nathan: Well, I was just worried about against PhDs tonight, so I don’t know…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, yeah, well, that’s true.

Fr. Stephen: They could at least get a master’s.

Nathan: Thank you very much, Fathers. I appreciate that much.

Fr. Andrew: All righty. Well, thanks very much for calling in, Nathan. All right, well, we’re actually getting close to the end here, on our way.

Fr. Stephen: This is the end, my only friend. The end.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah—go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, we’re talking about the devil, sort of his main plan. We talked last time about how death gives this—our mortality, our death, the end of our life in this world, and therefore our life in this world, that’s bounded by death, gives us this realm for repentance. And so when we understand that sort of this is what the devil is about, this is what the devil’s plan is, it casts new light on the idea of sort of morality and repentance. So a lot of times Christian morality is approached, especially in the modern West—not just the West in general, but the modern West in particular—as Christian morality is trying to get through life without doing too many bad things. And if you do do those bad things, as you invariably will do at least some, but when you do do them, you repent of them, meaning you ask for forgiveness, and then you go on trying not to do it any more.

And that is sort of a woefully insufficient view of morality, because morality is spiritual warfare. They’re not two separate things. For Cain, he didn’t have a moral choice to make about whether it was right or wrong to murder his brother. Sorry, Immanuel Kant. “What if everyone murdered their brother? This is untenable.” That’s not how this works. He had this power come upon him—anger, rage, resentment—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s how it always works, right?

Fr. Stephen: Shame over his own wickedness that caused his sacrifice to be rejected. All of this came over him, and he had a choice to yield to it, which would result in violence, or to fight it and master it. And Christian “morality” is not about maintaining some kind of code of conduct; it’s about self-mastery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s not like ethical choices, where you can sit back and study out all… I mean, there are moments like that, but generally speaking that’s not how it goes, and even then your reasoning is going to be affected by the kind of person that you are. You can talk yourself into anything.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, yes, and in order to get to the point where you could placidly sit and say, “I am facing this situation. What is the right thing to do?” you have to have achieved self-mastery, because otherwise you’re not going to be able to sit down and make that choice; you’re going to react. You’re going to act, based on whatever’s in the driver’s seat, whether it’s anger, whether it’s lust, whether it’s your laziness, whether it’s resentments, whether it’s irritation, stress, whatever it is. And this is across the board: self-control. St. James talks about taming your tongue. If we can master ourselves, if we can master the forces that are acting upon us, that is what then allows us to follow Christ and to serve God and to do good. But that’s the basis of the ethical or the moral struggle for a Christian. It’s resisting the desires, the passions, all of the forces acting upon us, trying to drive us—being tossed to and fro, like St. Paul says—and being able to do and to act and to follow Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and an important point to make here is that we, as human beings, do not know who is actually engaging in the struggle. Someone might look super sinful to us but actually be really struggling hard; someone might look pious and righteous to us but actually just be yielding to every temptation that comes.

Fr. Stephen: We’re almost always 180° wrong.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Seriously, the people we think are the good and upright and noble people are almost always scumbags, and the people we think are scumbags are almost always holy people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s how we got all those holy fools.

Fr. Stephen: That’s why I’m so popular, because I’m a scumbag!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go! That’ll sell some books!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! I’m going to put that on my tombstone.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. “I’m a scumbag.”

Fr. Stephen: “...That’s why I’m so popular.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, so in wrapping up and summarizing a lot of what we talked about and applying… The thought that came to me especially was… as I’ve mentioned a number of times on this show, I’m the father of four kids. And the other day I actually brought all four of those kids to a candy store, which is not something that we do regularly, but there was a new candy store, and so we’re like: We’ll give their mother a few minutes to herself, take the kids to a candy store. And naturally, of course, especially the younger kids are the more they’re just ready to grab hold of in the candy store. A father’s job is to say, “Here’s the limit, everybody. I brought you to the candy store. I’m not telling you you can’t have any candy, but here’s the limit. You can have this many or this much. And then when we get home, you cannot eat all of it; you may have this much, and then save some for tomorrow.” This is a normal part of parenting; fathers and mothers both do this.

And the thing that occurs to me, especially in light of especially what we were just talking about, about the Christian struggle and morality and so forth, mastering the demonic influence that’s attempting to leap upon us and to take hold of us, is that the way that we do that is through these small choices. With raising children, a lot of what you’re trying to teach your children to do is to restrain themselves, to have self-restraint. Like, yes, I understand you have a desire for candy, and maybe I did a foolish thing by putting this all in front of you, but also we’re trying to enter into this and to have some restraint: you can have one piece, you can have two pieces, you can have three pieces, whatever it might be.

But the same is true for us adults, except, theoretically, by the time we’re out on our own, we’re training ourselves. We now have been given the tools by our parents, and we’re continuing to get counsel from our spiritual fathers and our spiritual brothers and sisters, encouragement to restrain ourselves, to master our selves, to master that desire that comes up within us. Now candy is a desire that seems kind of small and unimportant, sure, but if you feed yourself as much candy as you want and you give it to yourself every single day, then you are not just teaching yourself that that’s okay, you are forming yourself into someone for whom this is the norm. You’re forming yourself into someone who simply has a desire and then fulfills it: “I see something, I want it, I’m going to take it.” And while we don’t imagine ourselves to be doing horrifying things like murder and rape and theft and whatever else, the road there—the road to perdition—is gotten there—we get there by many small steps of training ourselves to be that way. Almost no one wakes up one day and just suddenly snaps into being someone who just grabs for whatever they desire; they have been transformed in that direction. They’ve been transformed in that direction, that, yes, it’s true that the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, but it is a spiritual reality. It is a spiritual reality; you gradually head deeper and deeper into sin.

And holiness works in the opposite way. You train yourself to have that self-restraint. You train yourself to have self-sacrifice, to have humility. You engage—if you engage in the little prayers that is simply daily prayers, morning and evening prayer; if you engage in the little bit of fasting that’s asked for a couple times a week and then longer periods at other times; if you engage in these things, what you do then is you gradually build your ability, frankly, to become like God. You do the works that he does, and we train ourselves in small ways initially, and then it becomes greater and greater. The Lord said this. “You’ve been faithful over a little, and now receive much.”

And so if you say to yourself, “You know, I don’t need to be obedient in this little thing,” then what you’re [doing is you’re] training yourself to be disobedient in great things. That’s how it always goes. That’s how it always, always goes. And so I think one of the big lessons from the story of Cain comes again from that crouching sin that’s at his door, that God says, “Look, it’s going to master you. You’ve got to master it.” This is God behaving as a spiritual father to Cain, encouraging him, like: “You’re going on the wrong path, sir. You need to come back.”

This is what spiritual fathers and mothers and spiritual brothers and sisters do for those that God has brought to them, is to say, “Come back.” And so when someone says to you, “Hey, chill out. Restrain yourself,” or “Hey, take a look! Look at where you’re going!” don’t be like Cain. Don’t be like Cain; you’ve got to turn back and come back to the Lord and do his works, and so we become truly, then, the sons of God. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: See, now there’s certain issues with this audio-only format, because with the title of the episode, I’ve been dangling from wires this whole episode and no one could even tell. [Laughter] I just realized that I—

Fr. Andrew: I heard some whooshing and kind of wondered what that was.

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. So this week, as I was kind of thinking about Cain and how he ended up living his life after what he did and the choices he made, I heard some comments from Christopher Lasch, who was talking about our sort of our contemporary culture of overwhelming narcissism, and he pointed out that the way we look at our lives now has a lot of affinities with how Josephus described Cain living his. It’s obvious—we can all think about some celebrities with reputations or something. We think about people who are just sort of totally debauched and wicked or violent or some kind of arch-criminal or these kind of things as being that type of person.

But there’s a much more nuanced version that is ultimately a version of the same thing that is how a lot of us live our lives, and that’s that—we’re not looking for gratification of sort of crass, sensual desires all the time—we may not be promiscuous or substance-addicted or those kind of things—but we’re looking to satiate certain desires of our ego and of our pride and our desire for even—even a lot of—this’ll be controversial, but oh well—even a lot of the search for meaning stuff now has an undercurrent of this in it, that each of us sort of looks at our individual lives. We say, “Hey, I have this one life to live. That’s what I’ve got, and I need to make the most of it.”

And, again, most of us aren’t crass about it, but we make the most of it because we want to be successful at something; we want to make a name for ourselves; we want to be recognized by others; we want to get our ego stroked; we want sort of money as a measure of that sort of success and that we’re doing well and we’re doing the right things and we’re the right kind of person. And we’re willing to spend a lot of that money to make ourselves appear publicly, whether we’re talking about clothes or whether we’re talking about carefully curating our online profiles to give the right impression to everyone about who we are and that we believe and think the right things, and we’re on board with all the right causes and we support the current thing and all of this. We devote all of our time to this, and then, at some point along the line, we kind of look and go: “Hey, I’ve spent my whole life chasing mammon. What’s the meaning of all this? None of this really means anything.” And it never did. And then we go and look for meaning.

But what Christopher Lasch pointed out is that that way of living life is very recent. That’s not how most people in the history of the world, or even most people in the world today, live their lives. Most people in the history of the world, and in the world today, live their lives, he said, like a thread stretched between their parents and their children. That their life is not this individual thing that belongs to them for them to maximize and curate and invest in such a way that it has an ultimately gratifying shape and result. Their life is a connection between the generation before and the generation after, between the past and the future.

And if we approach life less like Cain and we want to be less like Cain, a good place to start is going to the generation above us, trying to learn from them and what they have to teach us—and that’s a whole lot of things. Every day, people pass away with stories and truths and knowledge and experiences that vanish, because none of us cared enough to talk to them and learn them and be able to pass them on. And every day people younger than [we are] struggle to figure out what to do and how to live and where they belong in their communities and in the world, because we don’t go to them and pass these things along to them and help guide them into where they need to be. Because what our life is really about is being a part of something much bigger than ourselves. This is what St. Augustine was getting at in The City of God.

What our life is about is about contributing our little bit to the history of God’s salvation of his creation, contributing our little bit to the story of the progress of Christ’s Gospel. And we do that through these little, small things that we can all do every day, to play our part, in our shift, in our time on this earth, by being a part of our communities, our families, our church. And when we get plugged in and we’re playing that part, the meaning thing, the idea of what our role is, the idea of what we should be doing—those things all immediately start to clarify. They immediately start to clarify when we stop approaching the world and the universe and life and Christ as individuals, disconnected and alienated from everything else, and we start approaching everything together. So those are my thoughts.

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

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, please, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it. It’s all about the word of mouth.

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 have yourself some only-good Cane’s, the chicken fingers which are better than Chick-fil-A.

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

Fr. Stephen: Stay mad, everybody.