Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, all of those of you engaged in gigantomachy, and also dracomachy. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with us from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick where we have winter, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and we are live! And if you are listening to us live and not via Memorex, you can call us at 855-237-2346. You can talk to us, live! We're going to get to your calls in the second half of the show, and our dear Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls.

Sometimes people use their sense of right and wrong to judge God himself. Is everything that God does good? If something isn't okay for humans, why is it okay for God? So tonight we're going to be talking about ethics. It might seem like a dry tropic and pretty straight-foward: just do what's right, right? Don't do the wrong. But it turns out that how you understand what right and wrong actually are, the truth of what good and evil are, and where these concepts come from, this all makes a big difference in how you understand not only what you ought to do but also who God is, and how you read the Scriptures. So, Father, are we going to start with Genesis this time? Adam and Eve?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Kinda yeah, but before that—

Fr. Andrew: Oh! That's a surprise to me! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Before that, I have to say, while the intro plays and everything, I am alone with my thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: You have time to think over there?

Fr. Stephen: And right before we came on live—so people hearing this recorded won't know—

Fr. Andrew: They won't know, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I heard someone use the word "gumption."

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, you don't hear that too often up here in Yankee-land.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! And this made me think. If there's a functional difference between "gumption" and "moxie."

Fr. Andrew: Ha!

Fr. Stephen: Here's what I mean by functional difference, because there's a different energy.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, absolutely!

Fr. Stephen: "Gumption" has, like, an old prospector energy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and "moxie" is like Broadway kickdancing.

Fr. Stephen: Or 1940s girl reporter.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right! Lois Lane.

Fr. Stephen: But I don't functionally know if there's a difference.

Fr. Andrew: Call in! Let us know!

Fr. Stephen: So even if it's not related to our topic at all tonight, if you want to call in about "gumption" and "moxie," go ahead and do it. We'll host that as a side conversation.

Fr. Andrew: Absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: But in terms of our topic at hand, yeah, why not start in Genesis? Just for tradition's sake. Pretty early on we get the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where these terms are just kind of used.

Fr. Andrew: And not defined!

Fr. Stephen: And not defined. "Good" appeared even before that, because—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God saw that it was good.

Fr. Stephen: God saw that it was good, tov in Hebrew. And then evil shows up with the tree. But they're not sort of defined there, either one of them. And the word tov can mean just good. It could also mean beautiful; it can mean whole, intact, healthy...

Fr. Andrew: The Greek translation, kalos, which is in the Septuagint, the actual Septuagint, it means good and beautiful— I don't know that it means whole. Does kalos mean whole?

Fr. Stephen: Well, if it's used to— So, for example, in Exodus 2 when Moses is born, his mom looks at him and sees that he is—sometimes it's translated that he's beautiful—sees he is beautiful, and so decides not to kill him, and that's—wow. [Laughter] But the idea there is more whole or healthy, like—

Fr. Andrew: He's thriving.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, fully formed. But so, obviously and very clearly once we get to the tree, these terms are being used in an ethical sense, or a moral sense might be better. But even then you can't— It's hard to extricate and maybe we shouldn't extricate good from, say, beauty or truth, as if they're completely separate things. I mean, is there in truth no beauty? [Laughter]

So we're going to— Tonight we're going to be working on understanding these terms. We are coming at it— This is why Fr. Andrew was slightly surprised that I mentioned Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: How dare you go off-script!

Fr. Stephen: When have I ever been on-script?

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. I was talking about "gumption" and "moxie" a minute ago, man! Anyway. [Laughter] But part of how we have to come at this particular topic is a little different, because almost all of us who are going to be listening to this and we who are producing it have been deeply shaped in our concepts of morality and ethics and the terms we use to describe those things by a lot of cultural forces and cultural developments and cultural shifts. And so we kind of have to— To get back to what's going on in Scripture and what's going on in Christian theology, we have to first kind of deconstruct some of that cultural stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, what is it that makes a person get to a point where they say, without batting an eyelash, that pineapple on pizza "is just wrong," right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it clearly isn't, on barbecue pizza. Spicy take.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Did you know that Hawaiian pizza was invented by a Greek in Canada?

Fr. Stephen: I didn't know about Canada. I believe the Greek part, though.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it's a Greek in Canada. It's amazing!

Fr. Stephen: Is that what started the anti-Greek riots in Toronto? [Laughter] Anyway. I'm making jokes about dark chapters in the racial history of Canada.

Fr. Andrew: And we're only eight minutes in!

Fr. Stephen: Send your hatemail to Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com, offended Canadians.

Fr. Andrew: Usually you wait until after 9:30 p.m. to throw out these hot takes so that all the nice people are in bed.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no, right from the jump. My wife asked me, "Are you going to say anything controversial?" [Laughter] And I said, "Yeah…?" And she said, "What are you going to say?" and I said, "I don't know yet, but I'm sure something."

Fr. Andrew: "I'll come up with something. It'll be good, I promise."

Fr. Stephen: "I won't even have to try, trust me." Yeah, but, I mean, on a more serious note than the dubious nature of putting pineapple on pizza, we to this day— There are humans who throw their support behind and who justify all kinds of horrible things in certain situations, that they wouldn't in others. Or who— I think all of us at times act in ways that in our better moments we know are not correct. That's a lot of shaping that's gone on in our life, to cause us to think that black is white and white is black, to confuse what good and evil actually are.

This is especially true, as you mentioned, because we're particularly coming at this tonight— I mean, ultimately this is going to be about what we do, but we have to really start with God. We have to start with God because if we have a definition of "good" that doesn't work with God, that's probably not going to work real well.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also, as I think we said in one of our really early episodes, humans are theomorphic. So if we're made to be the imagers of God, then "What does it mean that God is good?" is a super important moral question.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is something about which there has been a lot of debate over the years. The answers to just that question, "What does it mean that God is good?" are at the root of all kinds of theological systems. Arguably it's at the root of Protestantism if we're talking about the Protestant reformers, for example.

When this topic is addressed out there in the world, if you go and take a class about this, invariably they will start by assigning, because it's short, and talking about Plato's Euthyphro. Plato, his dialogues, for the most part, are named for the person Socrates is talking to in the dialogue, so Euthyphro is the dude whom Socrates is talking to. As usual, he's kind of a foil, like, Socrates' interlocutors do not really come off as the smartest and sharpest people in the world usually. Sort of what occasions this particular discussion that's recorded in the Euthyphro is that this Euthyphro guy is pressing a lawsuit against his own father. This, in Athenian culture in the fourth century BC, was seen as this hideously wicked thing to do, to sue your own father. It was sort of an attack upon your own father, disrespect for your father.

Fr. Andrew: "Who does that?"

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. So this was— And a public shame. This would bring shame on his whole family. Socrates is sort of: "Well, man, what's up with that?" and Euthyphro defends himself. His primary defense is that Cronus castrated Uranus. He refers to the story in Hesiod where Cronus, Zeus' father, castrates his own father, Ouranos or Uranus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so if he can do that, suing him— suing your dad is much less.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, nowhere near that bad! And so he says, "I'm… If anything, I'm imitating the behavior of the gods." So the way this gets discussed— And we're going to deal with the way it gets discussed in a minute, but I do want to point out, the way it gets discussed is not at all what this dialogue is about in its historical context. In the historical context, Socrates' counter-argument is basically: When you hear stories like that about the gods, you need to just disregard them. When you hear stories that are unworthy of the gods, because clearly divinity would not work like that— And this is part of, as we've mentioned before on the show, Plato's overall program of taking Greek deities and sort of divesting them of their human qualities.

Fr. Andrew: He's trying to purify the whole thing so that it's acceptable.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to turn them into the forms. You take Aphrodite, you bleach out all of her vanity and petulance and bed-hopping, and you get love or beauty. [Laughter] Those kind of things. You take those things, you strip away all that human stuff, and you end up with Plato's forms. So that's what he's actually doing; that's what's actually going on in the dialogue in terms of fourth-century BC Greece.

But that's not how the Euthyphro gets used in terms of today. Your atheist philosophy professor is not going to treat it in its societal context. He's going to pose it as: "Oh, well, Plato is posing this dilemma." And you should— Here's one of the tip-offs that this isn't actually what Plato was doing, is that the dilemma they propose assumes monotheism, and Plato was not actually a monotheist.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter] Yeah… Like, you can read the Euthyphro and therefore disprove monotheism: a dialogue written by pagan polytheists who have no concept of monotheism that anybody's really aware of.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and nowhere there say that Cronus and Ouranos don't exist. But they will say, "Here's the dilemma." This is the important thought that they want to press, that they are attributing to the Euthyphro. "Does God command things—? Like, when he gives commandments, does he command you to do something because it's right and not to do something because it's evil, or is something good because God tells you to do it, and something evil because God tells you not to do it? Which way does the cause and effect run?"

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, is there some kind of absolute morality that God is in conformity with, or is morality just whatever God says?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this takes a whole bunch of forms through history, the nominalist-realist debates in the Middle Ages… This takes all kinds— This idea takes all kinds of forms, as I mentioned. So this gives two possible answers—I'm going to say neither of them are good ones, but anyway—two possible answers to what it means for God to be good. One of those is good and evil are these objective categories and God is in the good category.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he fits in the "good" box.

Fr. Stephen: The other one would be: God is good because God decides what is good, and he has called himself good.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, "I am the law." I can't do my full Stallone tonight.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. "Gaze into the fist of dread." And then this is posed as this dilemma. And sometimes your atheist philosophy professor will even try to use this to prove there is no God, because he's going to try to say, "These are the only two answers," and then he's going to say, "They're both bad answers, therefore there's no God."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, setting aside the fact that you might find one of the answers abhorrent, but it could be the truth.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, one of them could be true even though you don't like it, or there could be more possible answers!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why this episode's not going to just be 20 minutes long...

Fr. Stephen: Yes, exactly. [Laughter] But the problems with these two answers start becoming pretty obvious. If we say, "Okay, good and evil are these objective categories, and God is in the "good" category," then right off the bat we have this standard that's over and above God. It already exists and exists at this higher level than God such that God has to submit to it. God has to do the things that are objectively good, and the can't do the things that are objectively bad or evil. Well, so this is a problem, because where did that come from, then? Who or what created that? And who or what, then, would judge God by that standard? And if there is some being that does that, isn't that actually God?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is super common. This is one of the things that happens a lot when people look at the Bible and they see God doing something that they don't like. They'll say, "Well, you know, if that is who God is, then I'm not going to worship him, because he's horrible!" meaning: "I have this other moral standard which is the moral standard which everyone should be subject to, and God does not live up to it."

Fr. Stephen: Right. On a cosmic level, you get this eternal regress of: "Well, okay, then there must be some actual God back there further." We talked about this when we talked about justice, which is a real problem in certain threads of Reformed theology where "justice" is somehow over and above God, and God has to submit to "justice." Like, wait what? Then isn't justice really God? It's the same thing there. And, yes, we have people who then assume this, that there is some access to that standard which stands above God that I can have and then by which I can judge God.

So this creates an obvious problem. Now, there is a very common way to try to get around this problem. Some of you may be typing it already. Go ahead and send the email to Fr. Andrew. He never gets enough emails. [Laughter] But we're going to respond to it right here, beforehand, and that is they will say something like: "Well, God is bound by his nature."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, "he can't violate who he is."

Fr. Stephen: "He can't violate his nature, and his nature is good." And then you can say, "Well, that's just moving the question back, because by what standard is his nature judged to be good?" And they'll say something like… that starts to push toward the other answer, of: "Well, no… just his nature is what good is," or something similar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is again this idea that there's something exterior to God on some level that he has to be obedient to.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the other big problem with this, this idea that God has this set nature and that that restricts what he can and can't do, is that—is not God's nature infinite? How can you be bound by something infinite? How can something that is infinite restrict you? Or, flipping it around, to say that, don't you have to say that God's nature is finite, that God's nature has boundaries that he can't cross? This is a big problem for the Christian God. So the dodge of "well, God's restricted by his nature," that dog don't hunt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it's just kind of using other terms to present the same idea.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's sort of a roundabout. On the other hand, there's the other answer. On the other hand, there are also five more fingers. But the other answer where just whatever God does is good, and whatever he commands us to do is good, and whatever he tells us not to do is evil, and we just have to go with that, that his command is the cause: that's what makes something good or evil.

Fr. Andrew: It's sort of the ultimate arbitrary morality, which sounds bad, but if you decide, well— If you say, "Well, God is the arbiter," then that sounds good!

Fr. Stephen: Abritrio means the will, so it's God's will.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's what he decides.

Fr. Stephen: It's literally arbitrary. It always cracks me up when my Calvinist friends— I say that— I refer to predestination as arbitrary, and they're like: "No! It's according to God's will," and I'm like: "Do you know Latin?" [Laughter] But anyway.

Fr. Andrew: They weren't meant to know Latin.

Fr. Stephen: But so one of the problems with this answer is that, in a way, it doesn't actually tell us what it means to say that God is good, because in this instance, if what makes something good or evil is God's command and his will, then he's not bound by his own command. So he could tell you not to do something, and that makes it evil, but then he can do it, and it's not evil when he does it. Then there is no— It becomes meaningless to say God is good. God is good under this answer just becomes God is God. It just becomes kind of a meaningless statement.

But also, then, what this suggests is that the universe we live in, the universe that God created, is just completely morally neutral, that, you know, giving someone hungry food and murdering them, there is no actual difference between these two acts except that God has told you to do one and not to do the other, but beyond that there's no difference. So if God did tell you to go and start killing people, you should go and start killing people, and now it's good. So that's a problem.

And while it may be very clear to us why that's a problem, a version of this is at the core of how ethics is seen by almost everyone today in the late 20th century and early 21st century, even by the people who identify as conservatives. The way I know this for sure—and I flinch every time someone says it—is that they keep using the word "values." Values! "We value this; we value that." This is all sides of the political spectrum, like I said. Folks who identify as conservatives will talk all the time about family values and traditional values and American values; and people on the other side will talk about how they value diversity and value…

Okay. Here's where that comes from, this whole concept of values. It comes from a fellow named Scheler, one of our 19th-century German friends, who argued that the world we live in is morally neutral; there is nothing that is actually good or evil, right or wrong, in itself, but that different cultures value different things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's just conventional. It's just the social contract. Like, we all got together and this is what we decided.

Fr. Stephen: "In our society, we value hard work, or we value whatever. We value certain freedoms and liberties. We value—whatever." But that can just as easily be: "We value genetic purity. We value dominance and victory in war. We value…" It's this arbitrary thing. And so if you— Let me just say, if you don't believe that's actually true, don't talk that way. Stop talking that way! Stop using the term "values"!

Fr. Andrew: I think for a lot of people "value" has just come to be a stand-in for "standards" or "beliefs" or "teachings" or whatever, but, yeah, it's true. When you say it that way, it's just sort of a war of who values this more, many more people value this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. "I value this. You value that. Okay." The only place you're allowed to talk about values is sales at the supermarket. [Laughter] A circus of value.

Fr. Andrew: "It's the better value!"

Fr. Stephen: But don't use that term ethically, because honestly this is what it entails. And you may say, "Well, that's not how I mean it," but the way we talk about things shapes the way we think about things. It really does. And the term "value, values" relativizes whatever you're talking about. It relativizes what you're talking about. If what you're really talking about is the command of God, talk about the command of God; if you're talking about the commandments of the Torah, talk about the commandments of the Torah; if you're talking about the commandments in the New Testament, talk about the commandments in the New Testament; if you're talking about an ethical principle, if you're talking about a political principle: call it that! Don't refer to things as "things you value."

Fr. Andrew: You might as well just say, "This is what I like," because that's what it—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: "In this society, we like it when you don't murder people." "Oh! Okay, well, I won't do that, then."

Fr. Stephen: "Yeah, and we also prefer you don't litter, and clean up after your dog."

Fr. Andrew: Even if they're heathens.

Fr. Stephen: It planes things out that should not be planed out. "Be kind; rewind."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I was going to say, that's only for us Gen Xers and older.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Any kind of— I imagine there was some elderly person at some point desperately trying to figure out how to rewind a DVD, back in the late '90s.

Fr. Andrew: Remember LaserDiscs? You had to flip them...

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: There's a— I forget which movie it was, but there's a movie where [in] the director's commentary, Kevin Smith yelled, "Forget about DVDs: LaserDisc forever!" [Laughter] I think it's haunted him for a long time.

Fr. Andrew: It was the wave of the future, man!

Fr. Stephen: Just not that far into the future.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Not much, exactly. Not that much.

Fr. Stephen: Just like a couple of years, but it was still the future at the time.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, the '90s. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So obviously from any kind of Christian perspective, this idea that the world is totally morally neutral—even if we're talking about it's morally neutral until God starts commanding things—it doesn't work. It doesn't work. A way to kind of work with this— We talked about the "God being bound by his nature," so a way to try to work with this kind of idea and make it work in a Christian context, to say, "Well, things are this way because God commanded them"— A way to make this work for Christianity is really found in the natural law tradition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this idea that God creates the world and puts a certain order into it, and what is good and evil is written into the order.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it's not that it's… This moves the action of God that makes things good and evil, it moves it from some later point, like when he gives the Torah or when he starts issuing commandments—it moves it back to when he created everything. That's when he sort of made the decisions about what would be good and what would be evil, and he created everything accordingly. He created the order of nature in the universe accordingly.

And now this— There are passages in Scripture, passages in the Fathers that will talk about—and we've talked about some on this show, like in the episode we did about Jewish astrology—that talk about God revealing himself or revealing things about himself or even revealing the knowledge of how humans ought to live, at least to some extent, through nature and through the natural order. So the natural law traditions don't come out of nowhere. They're not just random dodge, like "God is bound by his nature." These have a basis. There is a taking-off point, at least, that is valid.

That this is sort of encoded in nature, that it's encoded in us. That's why people tend to have an innate moral sense about what is good. Even in this case, even with this explanation, we still have the problem of the statement "God is good" becoming basically "God is God," and God not being good per se. But then there's also a couple of deeper issue with this, with natural law and the idea of natural theology as it developed in the West past a certain point. And I'm not going to say what point, because Fr. Andrew would just get a hundred emails arguing about "No, it was 200 years later than that, or 200 years earlier." But past a certain point.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, at some point.

Fr. Stephen: The first one is, then— The first problem is Christ comes and reveals God in a way that is substantively different than the revelation of God that is generally found in nature. So the way we've— I mean, we've gone through this on the show. A few episodes ago, we talked about Christ is the Logos incarnate; the Logos is the pattern, the order, through which all of creation is created; all of creation was created through Christ: there's this connection. But still, the Incarnation is this more full revelation of it. Do we want to say that the incarnation of Christ sort of then has nothing to do with ethics?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, if you're going to say all ethics, all morality, is written into the creation from the moment of "Let there be light" or whatever point you want to say, then that suggests that Jesus is kind of, in some sense, an object.

Fr. Stephen: He's revealing other things maybe.

Fr. Andrew: Other things, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But morality was already squared away through natural revelation somehow.

Fr. Andrew: Which makes you wonder why there is so much of this "If you love me, keep my commandments" stuff going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we also— Importantly, we don't see—we don't see, despite how sometimes the gospels are taught—I wouldn't go so far as to say we never see—Christ giving new moral commandments that weren't already there in the Torah, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, and this raises the question of: Why give commandments at all?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, why even give the Torah?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what do you need that for if it's just in creation?

Fr. Stephen: Right. It should be there. Second big problem, and a related one: if it's all there, why did no one find it there? And I mean this seriously. I mean this seriously. We know too much about the ancient world now. I'm trying to be kind to, say, John Calvin. John Calvin basically argued that all the principles of morality and ethics—he was part of this natural law tradition—that it was all found there, that it was all available through nature. And you know what he used as evidence? How just the Roman Empire's laws were.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! That's because he didn't, you know… [Laughter] I mean, I don't know what he thought the ancient world was really like. Apparently, he thought it was way better than it totally was.

Fr. Stephen: He was living in the 16th century! So, I mean, I'm sure he's getting Roman law through—handed down through later European developments and this kind of thing—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Christian...

Fr. Stephen: —the way people in modern democratic societies talk about Greek democracy like it was anything remotely similar. [Laughter] I have to assume it's something like that.

Fr. Andrew: This is where we just have to give another plug for Tom Holland's Dominion if you want to know what the ancient world was really like and how Christianity changed it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like, ancient Rome is not what needs to be held up as an example. Caesar killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more—yay, Caesar is the greatest guy ever!

Fr. Andrew: It's a vicious, vicious...

Fr. Stephen: Rampant slavery. Gladatorial amusements!

Fr. Andrew: Read the great epics! These are the greatest pieces of literature of this world, and look at what they glorify. They literally— It was interesting. You read the Iliad, for instance—I think I've referenced this a couple episodes ago— but, I mean, there are a lot of descriptions about people putting spears through other guys' throats and how awesome and fantastic and glorious and amazing and manly and powerful and godlike that is.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The really amazing part is when the guy with the spear in his throat gives a speech as he dies.

Fr. Andrew: I love— [Laughter] Well.

Fr. Stephen: That's impressive!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have the whole trope of: "I've stabbed the dragon through the heart, and he has to give a big speech before he dies," so we need that. I want that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: When I was a kid, I thought— Somebody would get shot or something, and it would take them a good ten minutes to die. But there was nothing you could do to stop it. You could just sit there and listen to them give a soliloquy. [Laughter] So, yeah.

The truth is that the Christian conceptions of good and evil did have to be revealed, and they were revealed at a certain point in human history, to humans, because we can kind of see that that had to happen. We can kind of know that they're not, at least in toto, beyond broad strokes, encoded in some way that humans could actually make out on their own.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you could also argue that when God gave commandments he was just sort of reminding them what was in the natural law, but doesn't that sort of suggest that maybe he didn't set up the natural law so great?

Fr. Stephen: Well, or you're just not familiar with humans.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. Yes, you'd think they were actually noble and just.

Fr. Stephen: "Thou shalt not commit adultery"—and no one's going to ask, "Well, is XYZ technically adultery?"

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because you can point at: "Well, humans have always thought murder was wrong." Yeah, and they've all defined "murder" in different ways… So, yeah, the Aztecs thought murder was wrong; they didn't think sacrificing foreigners to their gods was murder. Everybody thinks stealing is wrong, but how do you define "stealing"? So if you go beyond— If you go into any actual depth, these moral principles are not self-evident in the world. They just aren't. How many—? I mean, maybe this just seems so ridiculous to me because I hear confessions, I don't know! [Laughter] But, like… "Well, is XYZ technically stealing?" This is— All humans do this, myself included. We all come up with justifications and loopholes.

Fr. Andrew: "All I did was steal a loaf of bread, and now the gendarmes are following me for the rest of my life."

Fr. Stephen: According to the Torah, that's fine. That isn't stealing, according to the Torah. But, see? The details like that have to be revealed, to protect poor Jean Valjean.

So then another element that has come into this in terms of our popular understanding of ethics… What do we even judge as being good or evil? Meaning, the way we've been talking about it so far tonight, we've been talking about actions. Even when we've been talking about God, we've been talking about God's actions. But there is a move that happens once we get into the modern period, starting in the 16th century, where: well, no, maybe we don't judge what people do, but we judge their motivations. What were they thinking? What is their intent?

Fr. Andrew: Which is why my kids say things like, "I didn't mean to," and feel like that should be the end of the discussion! [Laughter] But you did pummel your brother...

Fr. Stephen: When you look at pre-modern stuff, like when you look at guides to confession in the Orthodox Church for the pre-modern period, for example, it will talk about voluntary and involuntary sins. And an involuntary sin in this instance is not, like, something you did involuntarily. It's not "oh, you had a seizure and you hit someone, and that was evil, that you hit someone while having a seizure that you couldn't control." That's not what it's talking about. "Voluntary" and "involuntary" is talking about: "I threw a rock at a guy" versus "I threw a rock over a fence and hit a guy." But in the pre-modern sense, those are both treated as: You hit a guy with a rock.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's dead or he's bleeding. That's the issue here.

Fr. Stephen: You need to repent of both of those the same way. The one isn't okay because you didn't mean to, or the one isn't assault and the other one is negligence. They're treated the same way.

But this becomes a big thing very early in the modern period. I've chosen a couple of examples totally at random: John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes. I think I am the first person to ever group those two people together.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Absolutely. Although it's giving me ideas, you know, like for a comic strip or something. It's just an idea for later.

Fr. Stephen: Can you even draw?

Fr. Andrew: Um, I can draw conclusions.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Well, that's fair. I can jump to conclusions. I have this mat where you— Anyway. For Calvin, this becomes very important, because this is what allows Calvin to say, "Nothing humans do is ever good," because if we're judging actions, it's hard to argue that humans never do anything good—if we're just looking at actions. Because the Bible says, "Hey, if someone is hungry, feed them," and so if you have someone who is feeding someone hungry, they're doing a good thing, you would think.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although, you know, the total-depravity people would say, "All your righteousness is as filthy rags!"

Fr. Stephen: Right. But this whole idea of motivation— "Well, why is he doing it? Is he doing it for a tax write-off? Is he doing it to impress other people with how good he is? Is he trying to earn his way to heaven?"

Fr. Andrew: "Because it makes him feel good."

Fr. Stephen: "With that works righteousness. Yeah, it makes him feel good to do it, so it's not good any more!" [Laughter] You can see how this has generated billions of neurotic people in the world through history who are constantly over-analyzing and micro-dissecting everything they do because of this, instead of just, I don't know, Christ tells you to do something so you do it. Anyway. [Laughter]

And of course, when it comes to God, if you're John Calvin, then God has this whole plan that is the whole history of the universe, and, in the end, everyone is going to agree that that is good. Since none of us know that, the whole plan, none of us can judge God, so we just have to say that he is good, because it's going to turn out that he was good in the end.

Fr. Andrew: Just trust him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because he is. And Calvin, as we've said before, and in Calvinism, you have this idea of justice, this category sort of pre-existing or external to God, shall we say, which fits with that, too.

So on to Thomas Hobbes! Hobbes obviously deals with this in a very different way than John Calvin, but Hobbes says: Well, all human actions have sort of one of two springboards. Either they're self-centered—either I'm doing it for my own benefit—or they're other-centered—I'm doing it for the benefit of others. And if I'm doing it for the benefit of others, that's good, but if I'm doing it for my own benefit, that's bad, because that's selfish. Now, this is an improvement on Calvin, because at least you can do good things. [Laughter] There is a space here for altruism that isn't just wickedness by another name. And, you know, I don't want to bash on Calvinism too much—people are laughing somewhere—but does anyone really honestly think that there's no substantive moral difference between me buying a meal for a homeless person and telling my friends I did it and me murdering someone? Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, it doesn't fit with human experience to say that all good deeds are actually evil. It just doesn't fit with our actual experience, like you have to create this virtual reality in which everything is always bad all the time. But I was hoping you were going to say, "Sorry, Hobbesians," because we— There's "Sorry, Calvinists" in your corpus all the time.

Fr. Stephen: But how many Hobbesians are there any more? [Laughter] Sorry, Leviathan fans! That would be a whole other thing.

Fr. Andrew: That's true, yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, okay, sorry Hobbesians or Tigers or whatever. Are we really to believe that every action that I take that is for my own benefit, like caring for my health if that was something I did, or—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Brush your teeth—evil.

Fr. Stephen: You brush your teeth.

Fr. Andrew: That's evil! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You try and eat healthy, you exercise—that's bad, because you're just doing it for you. It's selfish!

Fr. Andrew: Although there is a point at which brushing your teeth is altruistic.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. You have to brush your teeth purely for the benefit of those who are going to see you the next day and smell your breath.

Fr. Andrew: That's right.

Fr. Stephen: For no other reason!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: And this way of thinking that you find in Hobbes, and lots of other places in modern thinking, this is what produces the kind of nut-bar reaction you get from, like, Ayn Rand, who just says, "That's ridiculous," and so she decides: "No, no! Selfishness is good, and doing things for other people is bad!" [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: "Rational selfishness."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, just wraps it around: "You go get yours. Don't worry about anybody else." And then goes and lives on the government dole for most of her life. But anyway! [Laughter] It doesn't ultimately work. It doesn't ultimately work.

Remember the parable Christ gave us. There's the two sons. God says to the one son, "Go work in the vineyard"— Or his father says to the one son, "Go work in the vineyard," and he says, "Nah, man. Not today. I'm playing PlayStation." I may have altered this a little to modernize it.

Fr. Andrew: Still better than The Message.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But then later he feels guilty, and so he goes out and he gets to work. And then there's the other brother who is like: "Aw, yeah, Dad! I'm on top of it," and then never goes and does it. And then Christ asked which one pleased his father. So doing the right thing, even if it's for the wrong reasons or tainted reasons or stupid reasons or misguided reasons, is still doing the right thing. And the neurotic self-analysis doesn't help anything.

Well, so then with this we can't get into anyone's head. We can't really get into someone else's head and find out: "Well, what were they thinking? Why did they do it? Why did they say that? What did they mean by that? Were they trying to do this?" That kind of becomes a dead end when it comes to other people. You can neurotically over-analyze yourself, but it's hard to do that with other people when you're trying to assess their behavior.

So then another very common modern proposal of how to deal with this is just: "Well, what are the consequences of what they did?" This seems to try to get back to some of that pre-modern sense of the action, like: "It doesn't matter whether you threw the rock at the person or you just threw it over the fence: a person still got hit with a rock. That was the consequence of your actions, so we'll just deal with that."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but this is very much a live idea, where, particularly… Political correctness, where you could say something that for all of your life has been a harmless thing to say, and not even a little bit mean or whatever, like closet giggling, but really just something that's a harmless thing to say, but someone heard you say it and they were offended, and so therefore you must be held responsible, because the consequence of you saying that was that another person felt something negative.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's: What were the consequences of your speech in that time and place? What were the results? And that also touches on—which we'll only touch on briefly, because it's driving be nuts— But young people—by this I mean people younger than me, by this I mean most of our audience—speaking and acting are not the same thing. I know you've been told all your life that speaking and acting are the same thing. You've been taught this! That saying something and doing something are the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you say the wrong thing, you should lose your job! You should be canceled, you should be whatever. You say the right thing, that means you're standing up for whatever. It's funny, you see this on social media all the time: "I stand with—" and then fill in the blank: whoever, whatever. I'm like, okay, so what—?

Fr. Stephen: You have done nothing to help those people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in what sense are you standing with them? What does that—? "I changed my profile picture; I'm standing with them."

Fr. Stephen: You've done nothing. The Ukrainian flag is not helping anybody in Ukraine. The Russian flag is not helping anyone in Russia.

Fr. Andrew: "Is someone going to stand up for the truth here!?" [Laughter] What does—?

Fr. Stephen: Talking and acting are not the same thing. And on the flip-side, someone saying something mean to you, they are not hurting you. They are not hurting you. If they punch you in the nose, they're hurting you.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Talking and acting are two different things, and talk is cheap. But anyway. Old man yells at clouds. [Laughter] But so yeah, there's this view: we go by the consequence; we go by the results.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it's like what Haddaway said, "What is love? Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me." It's not the talking.

Fr. Stephen: "Don't hurt me no more."

Fr. Andrew: "No more," right? She's been hurting him for a while.

Fr. Stephen: So he's been able to overlook the hurts of the past, but now, going forward, if you love Haddaway, you have to stop hurting him. I'm saying this to everyone: If you love Haddaway, you have to stop hurting him.

Fr. Andrew: So you've stood up for the truth today.

Fr. Stephen: I'm standing up for Haddaway!

Fr. Andrew: You're standing with Haddaway. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Someone might try to justify this kind of approach by saying, "Well, doesn't the Bible say you judge a tree by its fruit?" And say, "Okay, see this results. The results. If what you're doing is good, it should bring good results, and if what you're doing is bad, it should bring bad results." That's what that means, except that's not what that means.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5)—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, self-control—it's not—

Fr. Stephen: You forgot kindness, goodness, patience, gentleness...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not "look at the results"; it's "look at the character of this person."

Fr. Stephen: Right. That is not a list of results. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That's the fruit of the Spirit, is the character.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the other problem with this, with trying to go by consequences, is, right from Genesis in the Bible, we see how over and over again one of the main things God does with reference to the evil in the world is God brings good out of evil in spite of itself. God takes evil actions and brings good out of them despite them. We've talked about this in terms of why he allows demonic activity, paradigmatic example, of course, is in Genesis, is Joseph. His brothers want to kill him; they sell him into slavery. They had no good intentions toward him!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. "You have meant it for evil; God has turned it to good."

Fr. Stephen: Right, but God uses that to save them all from a famine, and all of Egypt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the whole region.

Fr. Stephen: So someone might ask, say, in the book of Romans, "Well, hey. I mean, if God brings good consequences even out of the evil we do, why do we worry about ethics or morality? Why don't we just do whatever? And even if we're doing evil, God will come and bring good out of it."

Fr. Andrew: "Yeah, I mean, we could just sin and grace will abound! Makes total sense."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? And so that kind of consequentialism might work in a universe where there's no God, but if we live in a universe where God will bring good out of the worst of human evil—and we're still working to define what that means, don't forget, but we'll get there—then that means we can't just go by consequences, because there will be a lot of things, a lot of examples we'll find, of horrible, horrible, hideous human evil, but where there are good things that happen in it and during it and relating it and through it and sometimes even because of it, but that doesn't justify the evil. That doesn't make the evil good. That doesn't make the evil okay. This is the problem with going by consequences.

So then we have good old Immanuel Kant. I Kant even. You've got to do at least one Kant joke any time you bring him up.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You know, whenever someone mentions Immanuel Kant, all I hear in my head is the philosophers song by Monty Python. I can't— [Laughter] I didn't intend that pun, but I can't help it.

Fr. Stephen: The basic premise of that is true, by the way, that all philosophers were just drunks.

Fr. Andrew: Basically drunk, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So Kant famously comes up with this categorical imperative: this is how we figure it out. This is how we figure out what's right and wrong in the world. Kant kind of has a god hanging around, but barely, in his universe. So he says, "Well, here's this kind of categorical imperative," and the idea there is that this is an ethical principle that could be applied to everyone in every situation all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if it's right and wrong for me, it has to be right and wrong for everybody else in order for it to be true.

Fr. Stephen: For it to function as a categorical imperative. So, for example, he would say, "Well, I might be in a situation where it seems to me that the right thing to do is lie, for various reasons. But I should then think to myself. 'Self!' I should think, 'What if everyone lied all the time?' Well, that would be very bad. Therefore, I should not lie at this time in this circumstance."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, try to remove all context.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So reference to any situation whatever. I mean, there's a basic problem. Even Kant admits this. You can't admit categorical imperative as the basis for all ethics because he could only come up with a couple of them that actually worked in all possible... [Laughter] But the overarching structure that comes out of that argumentation in Kant, that's called deontological ethics, is an ethics that's based primarily in duty. You have a duty and a responsibility to do certain things regardless of the consequences.

Fr. Andrew: "I cannot tell a lie, therefore…" And, I mean, one of the classic foils to this is: Well, let's say you are in Nazi Germany, and there are—

Fr. Stephen: Ah, Godwin's Law! Now everyone's tuned out. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's true! But, you know, let's say you're in Nazi Germany and—

Fr. Stephen: Can't we be somewhere else? Can't we be in Pol Pot's Cambodia?

Fr. Andrew: Sure, okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Are you hiding dissidents?

Fr. Andrew: And there's somebody that the government wants to kill hiding in your house, and they say, "Where are they?" Should you lie to save their lives, or should you say, "Well, I cannot tell a lie. They are in the parlor"? Knowing full well that they're going to walk in and shoot them or take them off to gas chambers or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this idea that there are just these principles, however you want to attain them, whether you want to attain them as Kant wants to do through logical reasoning, if you want to claim they come from nature, if you want to claim— if you want to take the commandments of the Bible and treat them as absolute in this way, you run into these very, very practical problems. Functionally, you look at the history of Christian ethics, and before that Jewish ethics, and it's very clear, for example, that when it comes to saving a human life, all the other commandments go away.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's a sort of hierarchy.

Fr. Stephen: This was what Christ was always arguing with the Pharisees about with the sabbath. They'd say, "Oh, you're not allowed to do this on the sabbath." He'd say, "Well, if your donkey falls in a ditch on the sabbath, you pull the donkey out of the ditch, don't you? Out of compassion for the donkey. So how much more compassion for the human?" These kind of arguments. But the point here is Christ very clearly doesn't treat "no working on the sabbath" as an absolutely sacrosanct rule, and neither did the Pharisees, for that matter, as he just pointed out in that example: they had exceptions! Everyone has exceptions. You could argue about what should be the exceptions, but, like...

Fr. Andrew: A sabbath's day walk, but if you take one more step then you're working. Ah...

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it gets weird and arbitrary at a certain point, in the modern sense of the word "arbitrary," and so that's why you can argue about it. But they didn't argue that there are no exceptions. No one ever argued that. No one in Jewish and Christian tradition treated—and early Christian traditions, at least—ever treated the commandments of the Bible that way. So that's kind of a problem in terms— for that kind of view of how to determine what's good and evil, to just reduce it to rules or principles that are derived in some way.

So then, the most recent sort of attempt at this that I've seen— This is the approach taken by Sam Harris in his recent book. He did not invent this—there are versions of this going back into the 19th century and even the late 18th century—but he has sort of the most recent version. By the way, anyone listening to this who knows who Sam Harris is and doesn't know who his mother, Susan Harris, is needs to go look up Susan Harris. You didn't think this was going to happen, did you, Fr. Andrew?

Fr. Andrew: No! This was— I was not prepared for this.

Fr. Stephen: Susan Harris, his mother, was one of the first female TV writers. She was incredibly successful. She won an Emmy for writing on Hill Street Blues. She created The Golden Girls. Sam Harris is very much the fail-son of his mother. [Laughter] If you're upset about that, Sam, call in. We'll discuss it. Or I'll come on your show! I don't mind. No, it's behind a paywall; I won't come on your show.

Okay, so this idea— What Sam Harris does with it, his version, is: "Well, look, we can all agree—all of us who are rational can agree—that the worst possible world to live in would be a world where every sentient being—"because he wants to include a lot of animals"—every sentient being was constantly suffering the most horrible possible suffering. That would be the worst possible world." Okay, well, that's not a bad argument.

Fr. Andrew: So the best possible world would be...

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that's hard to argue with, that that wouldn't be the worst possible world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that would be pretty bad.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So the best would be maximal pleasure all the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, for all sentient creatures. That would be the best possible world, so we define morality by: working toward the best possible world. So things are bad if they cause suffering to sentient creatures, and things are good if they bring joy and pleasure and growth to sentient creatures.

Fr. Andrew: When I was in undergrad, back in the before-times, one of my friends and co-workers, this was his ethical theory, and he kind of gave it a nice little Star Treky pall to it. He referred to trying to gather as many "hedons." "Hedons": the pleasure particle. It's like "tachyons," but pleasure particles. And the point was to generate as many hedons for yourself and others as possible. That was his ethical theory. He was a self-avowed atheist, a decent guy, a good guy, but, yeah, that was his— He didn't call it "hedonism," but that's what it was.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, it is— Properly speaking, it's a form of hedonism. That's not what we think of when we think of hedonism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah...

Fr. Stephen: We think of bacchanalia when we think of—

Fr. Andrew: Right, but there's a kind of epicurean, the high, the beautiful, the glorious, the best possible pleasures kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, so earlier forms of this, they would literally have things called, like, a hedonistic calculus, where they would have quasi-mathematical and rational ways to try to, you know, compare the joy that this brings to this many people versus the joy that that other thing brings to that many people, and all this kind of stuff, to try to make this objective and sort of mathematic and scientific and all of this stuff. Of course, the reason we're trying to make it mathematical and objective and scientific and all this stuff is because God's pretty much out of the picture at this point for these folks. So they're trying these things without reference to God.

And here's the functional problem. Once you've got God and the afterlife and judgment and all of that kind of stuff gone, why should I care about the suffering of other people whom I don't know and will never meet?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why be altruistic?

Fr. Stephen: No, I can understand why I should care about, like, my family members, the people close to me. I understand why I should care about the other people in my city, even my nation, because I benefit from all this. But why should I care about starving kids in Africa in this kind of case?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, never met one.

Fr. Stephen: Never will meet most of these people, have no effect on my life. In fact—

Fr. Andrew: I mean, who's going to say, "I'm willing to sacrifice to serve the algorithm of hedonism?" [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, it's not even that. It's not even that, because the algorithm doesn't work this way. In fact, some of those kids who are starving are basically enslaved by Nestlé Corporation—oh, here we go; here's the letters—enslaved by Nestlé Corporation in Africa. They're why I can get cheap chocolate, so their enslavement and deprivation is making my life better.

Fr. Andrew: Everyone's quietly hiding their Nestlé chocolate… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right? Why should I care about that, from this view? Why should I make my life worse to benefit these people I don't know and will never meet?

Fr. Andrew: Especially because, if there is no hereafter, then—

Fr. Stephen: There's not going to be a reckoning.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Like, why should I sacrifice and suffer in my life so that other people's lives can be better, if there's ultimately no— It's just like: "Oh, well, I guess I'm the loser. Or I'm willing to accept little losses," whatever it might be, because there's no greater good that we all get to partake of in this model.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is something that most of our atheist friends haven't reckoned with, that once you get rid of there being a reckoning, once you get rid of there being justice at the end of the day… It's even a problem for some of the universalist folks. Then why shouldn't I be Henry Kissinger? Here's some more letters! Why should a person who lives his person who lives his whole life surrounded by wealthy, powerful people, lives in wealth, more than three million people dead at my orders—more than three million people dead—completely debauched and sexual immoral man, died at what? A hundred? He was close to a hundred.

Fr. Andrew: Isn't he still alive? I don't know.

Fr. Stephen: No, he's dead.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, is he?

Fr. Stephen: He died on my wife's birthday this year. It was a great gift from God.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I'm sorry. I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, and really I know what the Scriptures say.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. He did.

Fr. Stephen: I know that God does not delight in the death of a wicked man. I'm not God; I'm a sinner. I'm glad Henry Kissinger's dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he was just over a hundred years old.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, over a hundred years old. I'm sorry, if you're an atheist, how did he not do it right? If we could summon the ghost of Christopher Hitchens, who hated Henry Kissinger, say, "Hey, Hitch, how did he not do it right? He was wealthy and powerful, sexually decadent his entire life, lived to be a hundred. Blood all over his hands. How is he not living his best life?" As Christians, we know there's a reckoning. But without that, without there being some kind of reckoning, there is no way to construct a reasonable ethical system like this, because most of the wicked people in the world get away with it.

Fr. Andrew: Which is, you know, of course repeated in the psalms over and over again.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. If there is no God, then the wicked just all get away with it. Or if you're a universalist.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, on that bright and cheery note...

Fr. Stephen: There's going to be, like, Kissinger people emailing you, there's going to be Nestlé Crunch fans emailing you...

Fr. Andrew: Okay, I will understand the Nestlé Crunch offended, but if I have people defending Henry Kissinger to me—wow. God bless you! Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that'll be next level. That'll be next level.

Fr. Andrew: I'm sure they're out there. Okay, that said, this is the end of the first half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We're going to be right back after this break.

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody. I haven't— And during the break I did not get any pro-Kissinger emails, so we might be in the clear. I don't know. Of course, you know, a lot of people will be listening to this tomorrow, so...

Fr. Stephen: I'm pretty sure this was on no one's bingo card for 2024, was "Fr. Stephen goes off on Henry Kissinger."

Fr. Andrew: I mean, if someone had said to me, "What is the likelihood that that would happen?" Oh, 100%!

Fr. Stephen: I could see that happening, yeah. It does check out, but not necessarily what people thought was in the works here.

Fr. Andrew: We all thought he was going to go off on Sam Harris, but no!

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, welcome back!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Hey, at least I used someone other than Hitler as an example of the most evil person who's ever lived.

Fr. Andrew: I know! I mean, Godwin's Law doesn't mention Henry Kissinger by name. [Laughter] But, yeah. So we're talking about goodness and evil here on Lord of Spirits podcast. We just talked about a number of attempted models by which people judge God, by which people judge right and wrong for humans. And we mentioned some of the difficulties that some of those models have. We have not yet put forward any solutions. I think this will be a classic Lord of Spirits episode in which we do not get to the answer until some time in the third half, and I think in this one it's toward the end of the third half.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We are on a journey, people.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Board that boat. Theseus, your captain, will take you on this trip. Okay, right. So what exactly is evil?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the first half we were mainly talking about what's good. Now we're going to kind of talk more about the concept of evil and what that means. There may be folks thinking unto themselves that, well, it's just the opposite of good, so whatever we say good is, evil's the opposite of that.

Fr. Andrew: Well, we do have, by the way— We have a caller from Tennessee—

Fr. Stephen: Okay!

Fr. Andrew: —who is calling in, although his telephone says he's from North Carolina, but that's how it goes, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: That's shady!

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, but it's still the South, sort of. Is Tennessee the South, caller?

Fr. Stephen: If that is your real state. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I'm just hearing crackling. Are you there, William? We're having some trouble getting ahold of him.

Fr. Stephen: Seems like he might be a certain creature in the Twin Peaks revival.

Fr. Andrew: I know! Well… Actually, I never—

Fr. Stephen: You haven't seen that.

Fr. Andrew: You know, Twin Peaks is too creepy for me. Yeah, I've never watched it. I can't even do Dr. Who, as I think we've discussed this before. Too creepy for me. Something about Weeping Angels.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which is, like, creepy for eight-year-olds. Yeah, that's creepy for eight-year-olds.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah! I'm very tender-hearted, you know.

Fr. Stephen: I guess. [Laughter] Whereas my conscience has been seared as by a hot iron.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right. Well, God willing, we'll be able to get William back here.

Fr. Stephen: Call us back!

Fr. Andrew: And he won't just have that crackly sound. William, are you there? Well...

Fr. Stephen: Speak to us, William! Who did this to you?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] William, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Oh, just got that lovely crackly sound again. I feel like he's communicating, but it's just— I don't speak that language.

Fr. Stephen: My Morse code isn't that good. Batman would be so disappointed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Blink three times if you're being tortured by Canadians. Blink five times if you're being tortured by New Zealanders. Anyway… I hear him blinking, but it's just not coming through. All right, well, we'll have to roll on, but thank you for calling, William. It's a good try.

Fr. Stephen: I don't know how Canadians would even torture someone. Maybe give them small portions of poutine.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Have really soggy fries with your poutine.

Fr. Stephen: That's right. I'm continuing the horrible, harmful stereotype of Canadians, that they're very polite. Deal with it. So, yeah, we're going to talk about evil, and as I said it may seem obvious—we may be able to give some obvious examples of things that are evil, like Henry Kissinger—but the way in which evil in particular and its relationship to good have been conceived of in the history of humanity, in the recorded history of humanity, at least, has changed drastically. This is— We kind of alluded to this a little bit when we were talking about the fact that no one arrived at Christian ethics through natural law before Christianity, but that is really the pivot point. That is really the pivot point.

Fr. Andrew: By the way, I was going to say, we did get a comment from one of our Canadian listeners, and she's actually called before. This is Catherine of the Great White Zaphon. She says that Canadians torture people with excessive politeness.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, they just ramp up the politeness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they're really sore-y.

Fr. Stephen: Just give me the poutine, and they keep coming to ask about the drink, like, every three seconds.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! Exactly. I mean, that would work on me, because there's only so much that I can handle.

Fr. Stephen: And when I say that Christianity is really the pivot point, that's not because we're not talking about the Old Testament or Second Temple Judaism; it's because ancient Israel, Second Temple Judaism weren't taking the view of good and evil that was revealed to them in the Scriptures and sort of proselytizing the world with it the way Christianity did. So that's why it's Christianity in particular that marks this pivot point in terms of how most of us think about it.

When you read in sources that are talking about this that are before, that are pre-Christian sources, what you find is that the idea of, say, a good or a bad person—this is a good person; this is a bad person—is very similar to the idea of a good or bad chair, or a good or bad apple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not good and evil; it's sort of "better" and "worse."

Fr. Stephen: It's a quality.

Fr. Andrew: Like "This is a good chair." You wouldn't say, "As opposed to an evil chair?" No, as opposed to a crappy chair. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, as opposed to a rickety chair or an uncomfortable chair.

Fr. Andrew: It's about capability, performance...

Fr. Stephen: Performing certain functions, and, yeah, has certain— Some of the qualities that make it a chair are very excellent, like comfort or whatever— Or an apple. A bad apple might be just like a rotten apple, an apple that's not ripe yet, whereas a good apple might be big and ripe and juicy, etc. And so this is how humans were looked at. There wasn't really a concept of good and evil the way we think about it, that were governing particular actions or this or that.

So it was "this is a better person, this is a better human; this is a worse person or a worse human."

Fr. Andrew: Right, if you're strong, if you're good-looking, if you're powerful, if you're wealthy—

Fr. Stephen: Intelligent.

Fr. Andrew: —you are good; you are better. You are better.

Fr. Stephen: You are good. If you're poor, dumb, unattractive according to your society, physically weak, sick, disabled, whatever, then you are bad. And so ethics at this point, when you look at, like, Aristotle's Ethics, ethics is: "Okay, how do you be a good person?" but it's how to be a good person in that sense. It's how to be a good person in the sense of how to be courageous, and particularly how to train a child to be courageous, or how to train a child to be sort of a generous benefactor of the arts, how to— For Aristotle, humility is a vice, because for Aristotle, all virtues are a mean between two extremes. So on one extreme, he has people who are sort of arrogant and take more credit for themselves, think better of themselves than is true; but then on the other side you have humble people. And he says, "No, that's bad, too. That's just as bad! You want to be—"

Fr. Andrew: Because both are lies, effectively.

Fr. Stephen: "You want to be a person who has a completely accurate sense of how great you are." [Laughter] But it's all about— It's cultivating virtues, but it's not really the way we use "virtue." It's cultivating virtue in the way that an exercise program for an athlete is cultivating virtue. It's cultivating excellence at a particular sporting activity.

Fr. Andrew: And within this context, those famous words from—what is it—the American Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Like, that is actually not self-evident. [Laughter] That only works in Christian ethics.

Fr. Stephen: It wasn't before Christianity!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that only works in Christian ethics. Everyone's not created equal. Some people are bigger than others, some people are smarter than others, some people are better-looking than others—

Fr. Stephen: Stronger than others, yeah. Or have different talents.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it's not self-evident. It's revealed, but it's not self-evident.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why, for example, until things become very extreme—until things get to the point of madness— You see, for example, with Roman emperors and with kings and stuff, people tolerating what we consider very evil, horrible behavior, like tyrannical behavior and all these kind of things, because for them it was like being a college athlete: nobody cares what you do as long as you're good on the field. No—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Kinda true...

Fr. Stephen: But it was sort of that thing! "This person is very good at what they're really doing, which is, you know, being a general, being— Whatever it is they were doing, they're really good at it. And so their personal behavior and that kind of thing that we would judge in terms of good or evil didn't enter into the picture in the ancient world. The NFL has showed us all that you can be very good at a particular sporting activity and do impressive feats of human athleticism and be a horrible person from the perspective of good and evil, categories that are going to come later.

In the ancient world, though—again, we're working with these categories of "good" and "bad"—what do you do about bad people? Well, they're not evil people, remember, they're just bad people. So there's no concept of: "Oh, we need to punish them for the evil thing they did," any of that kind of thing. It's the idea that: "Well, okay, this person isn't very bright, but we can extract a certain amount of labor from them, so they were born to be a slave."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, these ideas come up. They're used, frankly, to justify slavery in the United States. This was the scientific view, was that certain people who look certain ways are made by God to be subservient. This is kind of a— This is a pagan, pagan idea that comes back and gets put with Christian clothing on it.

Fr. Stephen: Early 20th century, as Western nations start to secularize: eugenics, here it comes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is just— It's just pagan anthropology coming back.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this is— We mentioned slavery, but, hey, since we're giving different examples tonight, there's a lot more of this in the US than people realize. This isn't just something that went on in Europe and Germany and stuff. Everyone— You all learn in American history class about Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great jurist, the Supreme Court justice. Sometime you should read his majority opinion in the case where they said it was legal for the government to sterilize women by force, in which he says, and I quote, "How many generations of imbeciles are enough?"

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter] And they named a town in North Carolina after him! Wendell! It's just east of Raleigh. All my friends in Wendell are like: "Nooo!"

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, yeah. And that is, as Fr. Andrew said, a revival of this old pagan anthropology, where nature— The idea of nature is that each person has a nature. So Aristotle could talk about: there are people who are by nature slaves; that's all they're good for, that's their position. And of course, Aristotle's going to say women are sort of defective humans, as I've pointed out before. I do want to say, to be fair to Aristotle, even though he does say that and that's obviously horrible, he is the first person in the Greek world to say that women were at least human.

Fr. Andrew: It's a start!

Fr. Stephen: If you read the medical texts in the Hippocratic corpus, they're pretty clear that women are a different species; they're not human.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Wow!

Fr. Stephen: So Aristotle took a half-step in sort of the right direction. He thought women were human at least, just defective ones. But so that's how nature was seen, that each human has a nature, and they need to be plugged into a place in society based on that nature. So if they're one of the wise ones, one of the smart ones, they need to go to the academy and become a philosopher. And if you're Plato who's one of them, you should really be ruling the city, but no one'll listen to you. If they're physically strong, they need to become an athlete or they need to become a soldier. They need to become a general if they have a strategic mind. Everyone gets plugged into society based on their individual nature. And virtue is just being really good at something, being excellent at something. It's not… I mean, it is a moral category in terms of how they saw morality, but it's not a moral category in terms of how we see morality. It's just being excellent at something. That's what arete that we translate "virtue" in Greek actually means; it's like excellence: you're excellent at something; you're really good at it.

And so there is no shared human nature. There's not the idea that human nature is a thing that all humans share, that all humans have the same nature, at all, remotely. The people on top are the best people, people in the middle are enh, people on the bottom are the worst people.

Fr. Andrew: And, you know, within paganism in general, there's even a sense of separate creations, like different people and different city-states and tribes were created separately by various gods. So this is built into the whole system.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with different qualities for different purposes. So when St. Paul goes to these nations and is preaching that there's one human nature—and St. Paul's getting that from the Torah; he's getting that from Genesis—that male and female humans, all of them, are created in the image of God, that there's one human nature, this is a massive bomb dropped on the whole way humanity is thought about in the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the whole notion of human rights is Christian.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The idea that the emperor and the lowest slave woman have the same human nature, are human in the same sense and have the same dignity before God, is an unbelievably revolutionary idea.

Fr. Andrew: That would have been a massive joke.

Fr. Stephen: It was absurd! Yes, it was absurd to the Romans. It was absurd to the Romans, but it's basic to Christianity. And this is another one of these places where this has crept back into our secular society. I gave some grotesque example there with Oliver Wendell Holmes and eugenics and stuff that we now see as grotesque, rightly, but in a more subtle way there is a certain strand of thought in our society, and it's frankly a strand of thought that is politically on the right that I think makes it attractive to some people who are more traditionally religious, shall we say, even though this is not a religious idea. And that is that this kind of anthropology creeps in in a softer way in the sense that people will argue that the current structure of our society is natural. So the people on the top of our society, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they're the smartest and hardest-working people in our whole society, and that's why they're the richest people in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you definitely get that. There's this sort of weird kind of awe for them.

Fr. Stephen: And I wonder what color the sky is in your world, but still. [Laughter] Have you seen Jeff Bezos laugh? And then anyone who is, you know, poor, then the poorer they are, well, that's natural, too; they're that way because they're not as smart: that's natural, that's right. And the fall-out of that idea is: We shouldn't do anything about it, especially at the lower end. We shouldn't do anything to help people who are at the lower end because, I mean, they're there because that's where they're going to be; that's just who they are; that's their nature. So we shouldn't do anything.

If you're someone who has fallen into that kind of ideology through politics or something, I would deeply encourage you to start reading the homilies of St. John Chrysostom, because a lot of the homilies of St. John Chrysostom are fighting the original version of this, because he's got a lot of people he's preaching to, especially in Constantinople—Constantinople more than Antioch—who are barely converted pagans. They've come in the doors and have become Christians for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so good, but they still have this basic pagan worldview. So when he wants to talk to them about the poor, he has to overcome this, this idea that they're somehow supposed to be poor, or they're poor because they're bad, or they're disabled because they're bad. Allow me to suggest that to you, if you've fallen into that way of thinking. I think St. John has some things to say to you that might help cure your soul of that particular delusion.

But so this is the ancient world's view. As we just mentioned with St. Paul especially, as he's going and bringing the faith and a whole new view of the world and of God and of everything to these pagans, there's this massive shift where now a biblical view of this is adopted, and the paradigm is no longer good and bad but becomes good and evil. And, despite all that stuff we talked about in the first half that's influenced us, that different philosophical stuff and ethical reasoning stuff, the Scriptures don't primarily talk about good and evil in terms of ethical decision-making or in terms of abstract principles and arguments, about "what is good" and "what is evil." There's no calculuses, hedonistic or otherwise; there's none of that. Evil is presented from the start, meaning from Genesis, as evil is the power of sin which brings death into the world.

Fr. Andrew: I think it's notable, one of the earliest Christian kind of catechisms, which has a lot of ethical stuff in it, the Didache or "Die-dack," I don't know, D-i-d-a-c-h—

Fr. Stephen: Nobody pronounces it that way. They say "Dee-dah-kay" if they're...

Fr. Andrew: "Dee-dah-kay," okay. [Laughter] Excuse my Greek pronunciation of Greek. That it starts out with: "There are two ways, the way of life and the way of death." It's notable that it doesn't say, "There are two ways: there is the good way and the bad way." It's "the way of life and the way of death."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it's where they lead. And remember, sin— First place sin is talked about, first place the word occurs in the whole Bible: Genesis 4, with Cain, when God says—and we've talked about this on the show before, but it bears repeating—"Sin is crouching at your door. It wants to master you; you must master it." That's not: "Cain, you know, I gave you these commandments, and you're mad at your brother and I think you're about to break one." [Laughter] That's not the way sin is envisioned. Sin is envisioned as this force, this malignant force that, because of the expulsion from paradise, it's loose out there in the world, and it comes for people. And it wants to master them, it wants to take control of them, and it ultimately wants to destroy them, to kill them. That's what sin is, and that's what evil is. That's what evil is.

And death is— Again, death is not just depicted in the Scriptures as, you know: "Well, this is the point where your soul leaves your body. This is the point where your heart stops beating. This is the point—" And that's the way we think about it in modern terms; in terms of ancient pagan terms, it's not part of this circle of life, this cycle that just repeats and repeats and repeats, but death is this devouring, destructive decay that, again, is at work in the world. It is not natural. It is not good. It is evil.

And so evil, biblically—evil in the Scriptures— Evil is whatever enslaves humanity. This is how sin is talked about, mastering you: it enslaves you. And evil is whatever brings death and destruction to humanity and to the rest of the creation. So from that understanding of evil that you get right from the beginning of Genesis and all through the Scriptures, you can sort of come up with a definition of good in contradistinction, over against that. So over against that, you could say, "Okay, well, if evil is this power of sin that's at work, then good is justice or righteousness. It is things being in good order." And you can say, "Well, if evil is death—decay and destruction and death—then good is life. Good is life." These are categories we've talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a lot.

Fr. Stephen: But it's important, again, that we double-down on the Scriptures' understanding of life. The word "life" in the Scriptures is not just talking about biological functioning.

Fr. Andrew: No, it's about the fullness of what God made something to be. Perfection—not perfection as in, like: "What a perfect little child you are," meaning they don't ever do anything wrong, but perfection, like: This has been brought to perfection. This has been refined.

Fr. Stephen: Maturity.

Fr. Andrew: It's brought to its fullness, its growth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it's flourishing. If we're talking about human life, real human life in the Scriptures is human flourishing. Plant life is plants flourishing. Animal life is animals flourishing. This is what life is. This is why you can get the things that we get in the New Testament, where Christ can say, "I have come that you might have life, and that more abundantly." That doesn't mean you'd live a lot of years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it means full living.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it is this flourishing. Or: "This is life, to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent." That is what it means to be alive. That is what it means to flourish as a human, is to know God in Jesus Christ.

And we've talked before about how these are not exclusive things, that order and life are interdependent. That these things being in good order allow life to flourish. Flourishing life is necessary to have good order and for it not to just be tyranny. Like a parking lot is a certain kind of order, but it's not flourishing with life. One of the paradigmatic examples in Scriptures is the beginning of the book of Exodus, where the Israelites are flourishing. They're growing in number. They're flourishing. They're living in the Nile delta. Everything is good. But Pharaoh comes, and Pharaoh is the king. He's this figure of order, of justice for the Egyptians. He's the one who sets the order and enforces the order, but he comes not to use his commands and his ordering capacity in order to help the Israelites or even the Egyptians flourish, but the exact opposite. He comes for population control. He comes to kill and to destroy.

And so here at this point as we're nearing the end of the second half, we've kind of got a working definition of "good" over against "evil," and this is a good starting point. And this is a good— We've arrived somewhere, but we aren't done yet, because that definition of "good" doesn't necessarily work to describe God. When we say God is good, we don't mean that he is in good order and his life is flourishing, at least not quite. So there's a little more we have to say about that.

Part of the reason why this working definition we're at, of good on the one hand and evil on the other, doesn't apply to God, is that we're going to say that God is good and not evil: "God" and "evil" are not equally ultimate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, "evil" is not the opposite of "God."

Fr. Stephen: Right, that it's always existed somehow—not the case. So we have a little more work to do in terms of what it means that God is good, and that's what the third half is for.

Fr. Andrew: All righty. Well, we're going to go ahead and take our second break, and we'll be right back with the third and final half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody. It is the third half.

Fr. Stephen: That commercial for Robin Phillips' book was expected, but the Powerade commercial that only played in certain markets before that was kind of weird, not something I thought I'd hear on Ancient Faith.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well… yes. Anyway. I was trying to come up with a good springboard for the joke, but it just wasn't coming to me. You can tell it's approaching my bedtime.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Sorry to keep you up, Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: I know! I do live in the future as compared to you, so.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. All the way in the year 2000.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that." Right! So we're talking about goodness and evil and who is God with relation to all of that and what are we supposed to do.

Fr. Stephen: We're taking a bold stand, that people should do good stuff and not evil stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. [Laughter] And Henry Kissinger has been referenced, Sam Harris… Always take a few pot-shots and Calvinists and ancient pagans.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Typical episode. So now, as we mentioned at the end right before the Powerade commercial, at the end of the last half, we have a little more work to do in terms of what it means that God is good.

What we have to take into account, we in particular on this show, The Lord of Spirits podcast, is what we've said over and over and over again on this show, repeatedly, ad infinitum if not ad nauseam, that God always acts with absolute freedom. God is absolutely free. We're going back to some of the things we talked about in the first half. There are a lot of things that are ruled out by that, ruled out by that principle. But what do we mean by it when we say that? We've put that in certain terms, like the idea that God has to obey some kind of justice that stands above him, we've said, "Well, that's out." We've said certain things are out because of God's freedom.

But what do we mean when we say God is absolutely free? First of all, we mean there is— God is affected by no necessity. There is nothing necessary for God to do; there is nothing he has to do.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like he must punish sin, for instance, as some theologians have said.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There are no restrictions of any kind on God. There's nothing God can't do. Any argument prefaced with "God can't blank" is going to be problematic. It's going to be problematic, or it's going to be the kind of question asked by a simpleton, like: "Can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Urr?"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, that's just like saying, "This sentence is false." It's just pure contradiction. It has no—

Fr. Stephen: Yes. If you're a teenager and you're an atheist and you think that's a good argument against God, read a book. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Any book, really...

Fr. Stephen: Yes, any book. Harry Potter will get you past that point.

Fr. Andrew: Like The Monster at the End of This Book—

Fr. Stephen: —will get you past that point. Goodnight, Moon even will probably take you past that argument. [Laughter]

So God being absolutely free also means that with God there is not any kind of teleology. There's a five-dollar word. What do we mean by that? Well, for me as a human, I have a telos, an end. There is something that a mature human person— Like Fr. Andrew was talking about perfection in this way: maturity, completeness. I was born as a gigantic baby with teeth, but that was not my final form. [Laughter] I continued to grow even more giant and get more teeth, and hair and things.

Fr. Andrew: Have you reached level 9,000 yet?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. What, 9,000!? Anyway. [Laughter] So I continued to develop. An acorn has as its end an oak tree, that it is growing towards, that is sort of its full form. Obviously God is not in some kind of nascent stage of godhood where he's going to develop into full godhood down the road.

Fr. Andrew: Unlike all the pagan gods.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so there's no way to apply that kind of reasoning to God. We also mean when we say God is absolutely free that there's nothing that can act as a cause on God. There's nothing anyone or anything can do that will cause God to do something outside of his own will.

Fr. Andrew: That's how you know he's not the Force, because, as Obi-Wan once said, "The Force will obey your commands."

Fr. Stephen: Yes, although, midi-chlorians, whatever.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Heresy, heresy!

Fr. Stephen: Right. So I believe it was Archimedes who said, "Give me a place to stand and a long enough lever, and I can move the world." Well, there is no place to stand and there is no long enough lever to move God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why, frankly, satisfaction soteriology implies that God is not free.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, you stepped in it now!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah! [Laughter] It's after 9:00 p.m. Eastern, so I can say this.

Fr. Stephen: There's a whole bunch of people on Twitter who are going to say you're not a Christian now, so basically like every other day.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right!

Fr. Stephen: So there's no— He's free. And this is— This absolute freedom that God has is one of the ways in which he is not like any other thing. He is not like any created thing. I shouldn't say "other" thing, because he's not a created thing. This is one of the ways in which God is not like any created thing, including the other gods, who are created things. He is not like them, because none of them are free in this way. No human is free in this way. No woodchuck is free in this way. There is nothing else that is free in the way that God is radically and absolutely free.

So within this we need to talk about— Here comes some Orthodox theology stuff. We need to talk about the distinction that gets made in Orthodox theology about God's essence and his energies. All those things I just said about how God is absolutely free, I said about his essence; I said about who God is. That's why all of them, you may have noticed, were negative statements.

Fr. Andrew: Unrestricted, not subject to necessity, not heading toward some telos.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's all just ways in which God is not like any created thing. No positive statements about what God in his essence is like, because we can't know God in his essence. We can just know that it's not like any created thing. But what that means is and why that's important for our conversation tonight is that when we say God is good—because again, this is one of the things we want to define tonight— When we say God is good, we're not saying that about his essence, because it's a positive statement and we don't know his essence. We're saying that about his energies. We're saying that about his energies. So good is about what God does. Good is about what God does, not some statement about his essence.

Now we need to explain again—I'm pretty sure we've done this on the show before—what we mean by "energies." Every episode is somebody's first, and some people may not have heard this before. A lot of people may have heard this explained very badly before. But what do we mean when we talk about God's energies as opposed to his essence. "Essence" is pretty clear: God in his essence, God as he truly is, God as he is known to himself as God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in himself, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: But "energies"— Because when we hear the word "energy" in English, we think, like, maybe wom-wom-wom.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or, you know, electricity.

Fr. Stephen: Electricity, fossil fuels, and policies regarding them in the government, in the department of energy.

Fr. Andrew: Literally—and I think this kind of works, maybe not perfectly, but literally, energeia, it means in-working, so it's true to say—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but what's a butterfly?

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, it doesn't work with every single word. [Laughter] But God as he works in creation, as he acts.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of.

Fr. Stephen: So this is a category that we see, energeia— that we see broken down, like a lot of other categories in, for example, Aristotle. Aristotle distinguishes between dynamis, which you may hear yelled in Liturgy at a certain point; sometimes you'll hear it translated in English as "with strength," which is weak-sauce. [Laughter] I think we should just go straight J.J. Walker if you have to translate it and have the priest yell, "Dyna-mite!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What's the deacon—? I know you don't have a deacon, but it's the deacon who gets—

Fr. Stephen: I don't have a deacon.

Fr. Andrew: —who gets to say that.

Fr. Stephen: I am the deacon.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I am the deacon. Yeah, I still can't do Stallone.

Fr. Stephen: I wear many hats.

Fr. Andrew: Photos, please. Pics or it didn't happen.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I can't find them. My head's too big. [Laughter] But what dynamis— Often it gets translated into English as power or ability, but it's not, for example, when Aristotle describes it, just an abstract ability or someone being powerful or something, but it's directly related to the person who has that capability. Examples—and these are actually the examples that Aristotle gives—so you have a person. That person has the ability to sleep; they have the ability to go to sleep. Even if they're not sleeping right now, they have the ability to go to sleep. If they were not able to go to sleep, they would die. So if you have a living human, they have the ability to go to sleep. They have the ability to dance.

Fr. Andrew: You can dance if you want to.

Fr. Stephen: But dynamis is not just the ability to dance; it is the person with the ability to dance.

And then, parallel to that, energeia on the other side: energeia is not sleeping or dancing—it's not just the activity—but energeia is the person sleeping, or the person dancing. It is the person in action, not just the action. So when we talk about the divine energies, we talk about the energies of God, what we're talking about is God himself at work, God himself acting in his creation. This is why you will hear when Orthodox people talk about the essence-energy distinction, they will say, "We know God— We don't know God in his essence, but we do know God in his energies. That is real knowledge of God that comes from— We encounter God in action, in creation. That's where we meet him. That's where we come to know him: in person, is in his working in creation."

So do not let Plato-brain mess this up for you. [Laughter] This is not God "as he really is" and then some kind of impression of God that we derive from things in creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or like an emanation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that's not what this is. This is God as he is in himself, God as he knows himself, which we can't know, versus the God we encounter, the God we meet, who is acting in the creation. So energies are also God himself.

We have to say one more very important thing about God's activities, his energies, these activities in which we encounter him. That is that all of them are eternal. All of them are eternal, meaning when we talk about God's activities—we talk about the energeia, we talk about the works of God—we're not talking about things that God does at an individual time in an individual place. We're not— Like: last Tuesday at 10:05 a.m. local time, God healed this boy in Kenya, and then seven minutes later in Sri Lanka he caused— brought this girl to repentance. That's not what we're talking about when we're talking about God's actions. God's actions are all continual and eternal, because God is not within space and time. But we humans—we humans have our human encounters with God within space and time. So God is pouring out his love on creation. God is present, loving his whole creation, eternally. But I encounter him there at certain points in my life. This is revealed to me at certain points in my life.

Fr. Andrew: And in certain ways. It's not always the same.

Fr. Stephen: Right. These are beyond that. So a good example of this in the Old Testament that we've talked about on the show before is the name Yahweh. The name Yahweh, as we pointed out, means "he who causes to be." And one of the phrases we see again and again in the Hebrew Bible is God saying, "When this happens, then you will know that I am Yahweh." This gets kind of hidden in the English, because it's: "Then you'll know I am the Lord." Well, that reads differently. But what he's saying is: "Then you will know I am the One who causes things to be." So he can say through Ezekiel to the exiles, the Judahites in exile: "When I have raised you up from your graves, then you will know that I am Yahweh." He can say about both the Egyptians and the Israelites, "When I have brought you out of Egypt with a mighty hand, then you will know that I am Yahweh."

He's always Yahweh. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's always creative.

Fr. Stephen: It's not that he's sometimes Yahweh; he's always Yahweh, but individual people and groups of people encounter him there—

Fr. Andrew: "Then you will know..."

Fr. Stephen: —and come to know him there, at a point in time from their perspective. And I use that very deliberately because the Greek translation of Yahweh, o On, St. Gregory Palamas lists as one of the energies of God. So he very much at least interpreted it that way. Oh, wait, sorry. I just quoted a Church Father; I'll stop. [Laughter] I'm not allowed to do that on this show. What was I thinking? [Laughter]

In a sense you can say good means—defining "good" in terms of God—good is what God does, if by that you understand that we're talking about the divine energies, these eternal divine energies, the God whom we encounter in action within the creation. You can also say, sort of looking at all of that collectively, because, again, God isn't doing one thing at one time and another thing at another time— We can talk about there being these different divine energies, these different activities of God, but they're really all united. One of the sort of classical examples of this, of how they're united, is in your house you light a fire in the fireplace. The fire, that one fire sitting there burning, it lights the room and it heats the room. Lighting the room and heating the room are not the same thing; you can distinguish those as two separate things. But the fire isn't really alternating back and forth between doing two different things, and it's not really doing two things at once, like multi-tasking. So this is the example that's given for how God— It's not like God is: "Well, sometimes he's loving and sometimes he's creating and sometimes he's establishing justice and sometimes…" And it's not that he's multi-tasking. [Laughter] But these activities are united; they're all part and parcel of each other.

This is why you get these lists in St. Paul's epistles where he talks about how God is making us holy and making us just and glorifying us and, and, and—because these aren't separate things. These are— God's activity in our life is doing all these things. Looking at it in that unified, collective way, you could say good is the divine nature, because the divine nature is the sort of sum total of all of the powers of God, which are always in action.

If this is what we mean by "good" when we're talking about God, is we're talking about— we're saying "good" is activity, "God is good" is talking about the God whom we encounter in that activity, then what does it mean for humanity to be good, for a human to be good? Not just in contradistinction to evil, not just over against a human being, evil? We mentioned that last half.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think, just to kind of underline that, sometimes people have this sense that being good is just "I didn't do any bad things."

Fr. Stephen: Right, just not being— Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And that's kind of the parenting: "Now, be good." That's what we mean by that, is: "Don't do any bad things."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. "Keep it neutral." [Laughter] But so we defined what it means for a human to be evil, I think, because we've talked about it before. We didn't go into great depth, but we summarized it, I think well, in the second half, that a human being evil means you're under the control of sin, you're enslaved to sin, and that's bringing about destruction and decay for you and for the creation around you. That's what it means for a human to be evil. And we said— Well, we gave kind of a provisional definition of good over against that. But now that we've come to hopefully a little better understanding of what it means for God to be good, now we can come to a better understanding of what it means for a human to be good in some at least similar sense.

And this happens through the fact that our human nature that we all share—the one human nature that we all share with each other and with Christ—is the image of the divine nature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, theomorphic. That's what we are.

Fr. Stephen: You didn't know that was a spoiler when Fr. Andrew said it earlier.

Fr. Andrew: That's true, yeah. Sorry, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: And we talked about how our nature, being in the image of God— Because "nature" itself is kind of a verbal category. We've talked about how "nature" is sort of like the way "body" was used in the ancient world, that it's this nexus of powers and potentialities, that imaging God, being God's image or bearing God's image, is this verbal idea; it's about what we do. And we can see how the human activity—because humans have an energy, too; human nature has an energy, too—the human activity that is imaging God is good in multiple senses.

When a human is imaging God, when a human is working to bring order and life to the world, this brings about human flourishing. So we can say that the human doing that is good in that sense, in that he is flourishing as a human. We can talk about it in terms of, again, throw out the word "teleology"—in terms of this person becoming human: he's coming to maturity; he's becoming what a human was created to be. We can say that it's good because he is becoming like God, who is good, because we've established that God is good, and the God we encounter in his activity is good. When a human is participating in those activities, we can say that the human is good, because it's the same activities. And, of course, the human is, definitionally here, when he's doing good, is participating in God's energies, in God's activities in the world.

And this is— We've talked about, but taking this down again— God is at work, as we said, eternally, loving his creation. So when we love each other, when we show love to another human being, and we truly are showing love, that's not our love; that's God's love. God is loving that other person through us; we are participating in what God is doing in the world. And when God is healing, when God is establishing justice and order, all the things that God does, we participate in them. We don't just mimic. It's not an external mimicking—but it is— We are actively participating in what he is doing such that he's doing it through us and in us, and that is transformative of us.

So then, last kind of question within this context that comes up in this whole discussion of good and evil of course is: Do people have a free will? What does it mean to have a free will?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and most of the time when people think about free will, what they think is, "I can choose to do good; I can choose to do evil. Because I can choose between these things— Or I can choose to have chocolate; I can choose to have vanilla. Because I can choose between these things, that means I have free will."

Fr. Stephen: "I am free. Woo!" [Laughter] And what if there's 31 flavors of ice cream? Is that too much?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No man needs 31 flavors!

Fr. Stephen: Right. But so we have to come to this question from a different perspective now. All of those different views we talked about in the first half would come at this question from different perspectives, from Sam Harris saying, "No, there is no free will," to most natural law advocates saying, "Yes, there's a free will," unless you're talking about Calvin's view of natural law, in which "No, you don't have a free will."

But we have to approach it from everything we've been saying. That's how we have to approach this question. From what we've been saying, human nature has an energy, so we as a human person, we have an activity: we can act in the world. We can act in the world in accordance with our nature. But we've talked about that the question of sin and good is not a question of just choosing to follow a rule or choosing to break a rule, making a good decision, making a bad decision. So we've talked about what sin really is is participating in sin, but participating in sin has a particular character. Remember: "Sin is crouching at your door and wants to master you." Sin enslaves you. Fathers talk about the sinful passions because— They're passions because they make you passive: they act on you rather you than you acting.

So the person who is sinning, the person who is living a life of sin, is a person who is entrapped by sin, enslaved by sin; they are not free. They are not free! They may claim they're very free. As they may say, "I'm free to indulge my desires. I'm free to do this, I'm free to do this." That's not freedom, though. That's not freedom; that's what enslavement looks like, enslavement to those desires.

But we've also said that doing good is not just making good decisions or "choosing to do the right thing," that we've figured out through some philosophical calculus.

Fr. Andrew: "Make good choices."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But that good is when we're participating in the divine energies, when we're participating in God's activity in the world. When we do that, then we become free as God is free, because we begin to flourish, we come alive. And that is real freedom. Real freedom is freedom to flourish as what you are, as a human person. If they do an adaptation of this podcast for dogs, I'll have to change that, but…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] See, that's what I was not expecting!

Fr. Stephen: But for humans… There is television for dogs; I don't know whether or not you know this.

Fr. Andrew: I didn't know that.

Fr. Stephen: It's mostly birds and squirrels and stuff. It's stuff that dogs find mesmerizing to look at. But anyway. Ancient Faith could start a division! A canine division. Try and convert my heathen dogs.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, when you convert your heathen dogs, then they can come work for us.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Right, so real freedom, it's freedom to flourish as a human. It's not just choosing one flavor of ice cream or the other, one kind of breakfast cereal or the other. It's not just choosing to do a thing. Freedom is when we are participating in God's activity in his creation. This is why—I'm going to refer to another Church Father—St. Maximus the Confessor talks about how, in the age to come, we will all be free, because we won't be able to sin. Let that sentence sink in. Because we won't be able to sin, we will finally all be free, completely. So, yeah, freedom to destroy yourself is not freedom. Self-destruction is not freedom; rebellion is not freedom. This is the message you were supposed to get from Fight Club but didn't, because you thought Tyler Durden was cool. [Laughter] He's not cool! He needs to die for you to become a mature adult. Self-destruction: it's not freedom.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. So for my final thoughts, I made reference earlier to the—as you insist on saying it—Didache, and I wanted to actually just quote the beginning of it, because I thought this was a good way to summarize a lot of what we've been saying. It's a short document, everybody, by the way. You can read the whole thing on the internet. There are multiple translations available. It's spelled D-i-d-a-c-h-e; that's how it usually is in English translations. The beginning goes like this:

There are two ways: one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then, is this. First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself, and do not do to another what you would not want done to you. Of these sayings, the teaching is this: bless those who curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you. For what reward is there for loving those who love you? Do not the Gentiles do the same? But love those who hate you, and you shall not have an enemy.

And it goes on. You know, it would be easy to read this document as a kind of list of things you're supposed to do and things you're not supposed to do. Honestly, if you read it that way and you do all the things it says to do and you don't do the things it says not to do, you will be a saint. No matter how you understand it, if you obey what's there, you will be a saint if you do everything it says in this document and abstain from what it says not to do. But sometimes it's easier to obey things if we understand them at a deeper level. I think it's notable that it starts out that way. "There's a way of life and a way of death." And it says, "The way of life, then, is this." Notice, nothing is in with the part that I read that's not in the Scriptures. In fact, most of this document you'll find parallel passages in the Scriptures. If you know the gospels well, you know that I just referenced them as I was reading the beginning of this document.

But notice it says, "First, love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself." This is, again, straight out of Scripture. But also it says, again, straight out of Scripture, "Bless those who curse you, pray for your enemies, fast for those who persecute you." What does all this come to? It's really about doing the works of God. Does God not bless those who curse him? Does he not do good to his enemies? Does he not love them? Did he not die for his enemies? Did he not undergo suffering for the sake of those who had turned their backs on him? This is what God does, so when we do these things, it's not just like: Okay, here's a list of stuff you're not supposed to do; it's doing the things that God does. And this document describes this as the way of life, not the way of, you know, doing what's right. It is that, but it is the way of life, meaning that if you— you have life if you do these things. You will find life in them.

It goes on to say, for instance, give to everyone who asks you, don't ask back. These are words of Christ, really, and on and on. It's about love especially for those who are not loving you back, and indeed sometimes not just not loving you back but hurting you back. Again, these are the works of God. In daily life, how does that work out? Well, number one, this is a very practical document: Do what it says; don't do the things it says not to do. But also, I'll give you an example from my life. I'm a parent. I have four children. My wife is a much better parent than I. Together, we try to train our children to behave in this way, to do these things, and as we're trying to learn them ourselves. What's the point of that? It's so that we can live the commandments of God, because, as it says over and over and over and over again in the Scriptures, if you love God, you will keep his commandments. Christ himself said that. It's in many places in the Bible. Do a little word searching on Bible Gateway or wherever; you'll see "love God," "keep the commandments": these things always go together.

When you do that, it leads to flourishing. It's not just you have a very nice record. "Look at all his achievements." No, it's flourishing. You are being what a human is meant to be. When you're training children or training anyone who's in your care or training yourself, in many ways it is like keeping a garden. You can't make the growth come, but you can put all the conditions in place for the growth to be possible. It is God who gives the growth. We can water and sow and all this kind of stuff, but it is God who gives the growth because what is the growth? It is to become like God.

The reason that we follow the commandments is not so that we will be known as good people; the reason that we follow the commandments is not so that we have some spotless record—the reason that we follow the commandments is because it makes us like God. This is the path of theosis. This is the path of being divinized or deified, of becoming, as Christ says, equal to the angels. That's what this is, because this is what the angels do. This is how the saints live. So if we want to be like them, then this is what we do. There's an actual purpose to following the commandments.

So when we say that God is good—and by that we mean this is what God is doing in the world, this is who God is, this is how he acts—then for us to join ourselves to that, to do those same things, to have him acting through us, is then to become like God, and as Father said, not just an imitative way, not just emulating him, but in a participatory way. God is working through us, and that transforms us to be elevated, to become what humans were destined to be when we were created: sons of God, equal to the angels, co-reigning with Christ forever and ever. That's why all this matters. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So to bring up Aristotle again, as is my wont— Aristotle understood that there is this direct connection between ethics and politics. His somewhat problematic ethics was coordinate with a very problematic politics, from not just our modern perspective but from any Christian perspective. And this is sort of true across the board. This is true across the board in the sense that, at whatever level of community we're talking about, whether we're talking about a local community, a neighborhood, a workplace, a city, a state, a government of any size, a national government, the leadership is—whether they like it or not, they're going to be structuring things in a way that is coordinate with and ultimately promoting and inculcating a certain view of what a human person is, of what human nature is, and of what a good person and a bad person is. That's going to vary all over the place, so North Korea, a good person is a good citizen who loves Dear Leader, and a bad person is one who does not. A good person in another society might be the one who works hard or the one who accumulates wealth, or the one who has power or the one who founds charities or the one who— But this will all be coordinated with some kind of ethical view.

I think I can safely say that none of the folks who are going to listen to this are in a country where their civil government really has structured the society in a way to promote the flourishing of every human person, as that flourishing is understood within Christianity. They may pay lip service to that idea. Lots of governments have paid lip service to that idea, like a lot of free-market American folks in the 1950s would say that; so would a lot of people in the 1950s in Stalin's Russia say that. But what "flourishing" means is not really subjective in the sense that it's not really negotiable, because humans actually do have a nature, and we all share the same one. It's no more subjective when we talk about human flourishing than it is when we talk about an oak tree flourishing. No one would look at an oak tree that's full of rot or that's run up against the foundation of a house or that's pulling up out of the ground and about to tip over and say, "No, no, by my definition, this tree is flourishing." Human flourishing is not any more subjective. It is a real thing.

There have been movements, social movements, throughout modern history, throughout the period of time when such social movements were possible and became a thing—to try to topple governments or reform governments in such a way that at least the people who—sometimes a series of waves of people who take power through violence, each tries to restructure the society in a way that will promote their definition of human flourishing—or something else! Sometimes they don't even pay lip service to that. But to promote something.

It's pretty clear that that's not a way forward, that that's ultimately utopian. That's: we can, through our human efforts and human reasoning, structure utopia, the good place, the perfect place, the perfect order in which everyone flourishes and everyone has everything they want and there's no strife and no trouble and everything will be perfect if we can just do this. And the road toward that is just littered with dead bodies. It's covered in massacres and atrocities, all of which are justified by "the goal."

I'm saying this because I want to make very clear, when we're talking about human flourishing and this kind of thing in this episode, that that's not where we're going. But if humans are going to flourish, they do need to be in communities that are structured around human flourishing, actual human flourishing. There's only one place this can start. That's church communities. That's where it started in the Roman Empire. That's where it started in the Persian Empire. That's where it started everywhere in the world. A Christian community can be and has to be, if it's really going to be a Christian community, structured in such a way, led in such a way, participated in in such a way, that the humans who become a part of it begin to flourish, come alive.

We've said how that happens. It's through encountering God in his work in the world, not just encountering God in liturgy, encountering God in the sacraments. That's included. Not just that, but in his actions in the world within the community, his activities in the world outside the community, where we encounter him. And this is done in very concrete ways.

Humans need certain things in order to flourish. They need certain support. They need certain material things just to survive, let alone flourish. Our church communities are capable—they are capable—every one of them is capable of meeting those needs for all the people in it. They are. If you look at me and say, "Well, our church is too small," or whatever—bull. Bull. You just have a bunch of people who aren't committed to it. You have a bunch of people who aren't committed to it, who don't really want to do that, who have some other agenda. And that church community needs to be transformed, needs to repent, frankly—let's just use that word for it—and transform and restructure itself. Leadership needs to lead it in a different direction until it becomes that kind of place.

See, when it becomes that kind of place, when the people who come in are having all those needs met and are able to flourish and are able to truly live and truly be free, a bunch of things are going to happen. It's going to start attracting a bunch of other people. It's going to start attracting a bunch of other people who are out in the world who are desperate for that, and there's no other place they can find it. And they're going to start coming, and the community is going to grow.

Remember, this is the path that the Church took over against the Roman Empire. If you want the country you live in to be a country that promotes human flourishing, you don't stage a revolution, you don't start shooting at people, you don't storm the Capitol, you don't do any of those things. You work in your church. You build that community. You meet the needs of the other people there. You love them. You show compassion for them. You listen to them. You be with them. You give them all the things they need to flourish. You experience this flourishing yourself. You begin to truly live and truly be free.

And then you remember that it's a long game. Took 300 years for the Roman Empire. You probably won't be alive to see it happen. And that's okay. That's okay. People used to start building cathedrals that their great-great-grandchildren would get to worship in. They really used to do that. We can do that, too. But it starts with us. It starts with you. It starts with the other people in your parish, in your church community, deciding that this is what you want that place to be, and then making it happen. So those are my thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that's the podcast for tonight Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you were not able to get through to us live or didn't leave a comment in our streams, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, you can send us a message at our Facebook page; you can also leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits, and if you have basic questions, introductory questions about Orthodox Christianity, or you need help in finding a parish, head on over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. "For another turning point, fork stuck in the road. Time grabs you by the wrist and directs you where to go."

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