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

It’s our annual Halloween special! It’s that beautiful night on the podcast when everyone thinks we’re going to weigh in on whether trick-or-treating is okay or whether you should do trunk-or-treat, or harvest festivals in the church parking lot, or whether Halloween is secretly pagan—but instead we talk about mocking and beating up demons, because that’s what Christianity has always done! So whether you utterly reject Halloween as all the work of the dark powers, or celebrate it as their defeat, one of the themes that we see connected with Halloween is the theme of madness, and that’s what our show is about tonight. We’re going to be talking about how insanity is depicted in ancient sources; the transformation of human beings by insanity; and whether there is any discernible difference between mental illness, divine madness, and demonic possession. So my first question for you, Fr. Stephen, because it’s always the big slow pitch at the beginning, is whether it’s actually possible to experience what Freddie Mercury sings in Queen’s 1991 single, “I’m Going Slightly Mad.”

Fr. Stephen De Young: That may be possible. However, when it comes to madness tonight, we’re going to go one step beyond, and not just slightly mad: we’re going whole-hog.

And because it won’t fit in later, and you mentioned weighing in on trick-or-treating, I feel like I need to give to our audience, especially the late teenage, maybe even into college-age members of our audience, my trick-or-treating cheat code.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Here we go.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, so this is the trick-or-treating cheat code. Here’s what you do. So this year it will be easy, because Halloween is on a Monday, which means you can do this Tuesday morning. You need to do this on the first weekday morning after Halloween. You go to a well-to-do suburban area of your town. You go there about 10:00, 10:30 in the morning. Go door-to-door, say, “Trick or treat!” When they look at you weird, you say—you give an excuse; you say, “I had to take my kid brother or sister trick-or-treating yesterday. I didn’t get to go.” Whatever you want to say; whatever your conscience will allow. [Laughter]

But here’s what happens. The housewives who are at home do not want the leftover candy in their house, and therefore you will receive—without having to wear a costume, without having to engage in any effort—whole bags of candy.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like you’ve done this.

Fr. Stephen: I have absolutely done this—not recently, but it works. This is the cheat code for trick-or-treating. So, to all of you high school and college-age listeners, I give this to you free of charge. I ask only that you in turn pass it on to the next generation, next time.

Fr. Andrew: I’ve always wondered, though, what would happen… I mean, because I’m always interested in getting weird looks from people—what would happen if we went—like if Orthodox went trick-or-treating on the eve of our own All Saints’ Day, which would be, what, in June?

Fr. Stephen: Or October 31 on the old calendar.

Fr. Andrew: I really, really… Wait 13 more days: “Hey, everybody!”

Fr. Stephen: See, then the stuff would be gone.

Fr. Andrew: The old calendar Western rite. There you go.

Fr. Stephen: The trick is to go the morning after.

Fr. Andrew: It’s totally a thing!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But the morning after, that’s the trick. [Laughter]

But now, tonight, because last year was our first edition, was the Monster Manual, tonight is our second edition, so it’s the Monstrous Compendium. And this is apropos not only because it’s the second edition, but the old heads out there will know that when the Monstrous Compendium was originally released, it was a three-ring binder—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s right!

Fr. Stephen: —into which loose-leaf supplementary pages were placed—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: —as you bought expansions. And what we’re going to be talking about tonight is actually a collection of loose-leaf pages taken from last year’s episode that were never broadcast!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! Because last year, I mean, we’re not exactly known for going short, although I’m kind of hoping I can get home a little bit earlier tonight, because I have to get up very early… But, yeah, we went over three hours or close to that last year, and yet we had another whole act worth of material. So that’s kind of what we’re doing this time.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is the supplement that we are placing in a new three-ring binder to deliver it to you tonight, in an incredible strain on the metaphor.

Fr. Andrew: Now it’s just PDFs; everybody just has bootleg PDFs.

Fr. Stephen: Aargh, not in my day! [Laughter] Old man yells at clouds.

So, as mentioned, we’re going to be talking about madness and mad men, and mad women, because we’re not sexist, and how that was seen in the ancient world, how that’s been seen historically, examples of those, trends that we see in Scripture—we’re going to focus on one major biblical example—and then what that means in terms of our experience in the Church. In the ancient world—and I say “ancient world” now because this goes beyond the Ancient Near East; this is pretty much everywhere—the depiction of the madman or the wild person is that that person is treated not just as being mad or outside of the regular social order, but as also having some kind of connection to the spiritual or the divine.

We see kind of the polarity of people who are sort of set outside the social order through a relationship with the divine—I say “polarity” because there’s two figures—in the relationship, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh sort of stands outside, and in his case sort of above, the regular social order, even of Uruk, where he is king, by virtue of the fact that we’re told he is two-thirds divine; he is two-thirds apkallu. He’s a giant, for those who get excited about such things. So that places him as a sort of god-king. His peers are not even like the noble people or the upper class of Uruk; his peers are the gods. He’s above the human social order.

Enkidu, the wild man who’s out in the wilderness, also stands outside that social order, but on the other end. He’s hairy all over; he’s like a beast or like an animal, despite being human. That wildness is taken in the text to be just as much evidence of his quasi-divine status as Gilgamesh’s exalted position is of his.

That the element of being disassociated from the social order is very important here. Aristotle, in his Politics says this; he presents human beings as political animals, that we are just constituted—it’s part of human nature that we live in community.

Fr. Andrew: And he doesn’t mean “political” in the sense of government necessarily, just the polis, the city, society.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that could be ordered in various different ways, but that we have these social structures, whether that’s a nomadic clan that’s biologically related or a Greek city-state or whatever, that we live in a community; we live in a society. So we have this kind of social order.

And Aristotle even says in order to live outside of any kind of social structure, one has to be either a beast or a god. That means you’re either superhuman or subhuman, for him. [Laughter] And that’s what allows you to live in that way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this otherness, of a very deep, deep nature.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this kind of thing was seen to be a result, generally, as we mentioned, of some kind of contact with the divine, which took different forms. This could be in the context of an experience, this could be in the context of something ongoing… So for example Socrates has a demon he says that dwells within him, that whispers wisdom to his soul, and that divine spirit, in his mind, that is within him allows him to stand outside the social order of Athens and thereby critique it and question it. He’s not sort of fully part of it; he’s not sort of immersed in it, but he’s able to stand outside of it to ask questions about basic matters of justice and that kind of thing.

That kind of idea, that of course is where we get the word “genius.” We’ve talked about before on the show when sacrifices were offered, whether it was incense or animal sacrifices or cakes or whatever that was sacrificed, it was sacrificed to the emperor in Rome; it was actually being sacrificed to the genius of the emperor, the divine spirit of the emperor. And there are statues of various emperors, starting with Augustus, where they’re holding a sort of spirit that to us looks like an angel because it’s a little winged spirit-thing, in their hand, that is supposed to be their genius; it’s supposed to represent that spirit, that divine spirit, that causes the emperor to stand above and apart.

But it also conveyed what we mean by “genius.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, certain very, very gifted in an almost superhuman way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that allows them to rise above what is common and normal for humans. But, just as we have the idea today of the eccentric genius—Albert Einstein couldn’t manage to comb his hair, had 20 of the same suit because he didn’t want to spend time thinking about what to wear—we have this image. That’s always been included there, too.

Fr. Andrew: That they’re always a little weird.

Fr. Stephen: Part of this giftedness, yeah, and part of this being able to stand apart from society also makes you at least a little off. [Laughter] It’s that being separated from society creates this certain uncanniness and oddness when compared to the social structures. This gives us the idea of there being individuals in these different ancient cultures who were sort of touched by the gods, “touched” being another word for that encounter, for contact.

Fr. Andrew: Or in old Southern American English, “tetched.” [Laughter] “He’s a bit tetched.”

Fr. Stephen: Or “touched in the head,” yeah. But one of the keys here is that that was not seen as a negative thing, even when we’re talking about somebody like Enkidu, who’s this wild man. Enkidu, by virtue of being this sort of wild man who’s been touched by the gods, that’s what makes him worthy to be Gilgamesh’s friend.

Fr. Andrew: Suddenly I have a whole new take on that TV show, Touched by an Angel. [Laughter] Sorry. Was that the Roma Downey one?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was always a weird title to be, because it’s not like Roma Downey went around, like…

Fr. Andrew: Touching people?

Fr. Stephen: Touching people’s faces in public or something. That would have been a very different show. She’d have been arrested, probably. [Laughter]

So this wasn’t considered a negative thing in any of these ancient cultures. In fact, these people would be sought out for their wisdom, for their divine perspective.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, always a little dangerous.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, because they’re off. They don’t fit.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t quite know what you’re going to get.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but if you can find them, you can hire the A-Team—no. [Laughter] You can find these people, and potentially, because they stand at this remove, they can advise you in a way that normal people can’t. We even see this—and we’re going to talk more about this later in the show—we see this in, as we talked about in our episode on prophecy and prophets, we see this in some of the Old Testament prophets, and we see this with holy fools within the Christian tradition, that there is a tradition of those who have had a kind of contact with God, with Yahweh the God of Israel, and that contact with him has removed them from the regular culture and society in a certain way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re kind of not-right in a certain… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But the same dynamic pertains, that they’re seen to have wisdom, though, based on that, and to be able to convey things, but we’ll get into that more a little bit later.  But now I’m going to say something nice about Michel Foucault. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: This might be the one nice thing there is to say on Foucault. [Laughter] There might be a couple of other things.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I was going to say he had a nice set of hair, but he was completely bald, so you can’t even do that. [Laughter] I don’t want to spend too much time talking about Foucault himself, but there’s an early Foucault and a late Foucault, and the transition from early Foucault to late Foucault involved him being in the California desert and taking hallucinogenic drugs. I know we have some listeners who are fans of psychedelics, but actually late Foucault was worse.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, don’t do drugs.

Fr. Stephen: Late Foucault is worse than early Foucault, so psychedelics did not help him. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s not the nice thing we’re saying about him.

Fr. Stephen: But one of the first majorly important things that Foucault wrote—and you can see how this would fit into his post-structuralist project—was called Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, which basically is a history of the concept of insanity or madness in the Western world, especially focusing on Western Europe, because he was French. And what’s interesting about this is he kind of constructs a genealogy of the idea of madness and how the way in which people view madness and insanity and then mental illness—how that has changed over time and how—

Fr. Andrew: There’s a whole social construct element to the whole thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that what it meant to be mad in ancient Greece, what it meant to be mad in medieval France, what it meant to be mad in early modern England, and what it means to be mentally ill today are not the same thing, even though we’re using similar terminology.

He starts by talking about what we were just talking about, how in the ancient world this was seen as this spiritual or metaphysical reality, that people saw someone who was outside the social order as being—having some kind of special contact with the gods, and that it was not a negative thing. But then he shows, as we get into the medieval period in Western Europe, how insanity and madness becomes a sociopolitical category, where someone who is opposed to some element of the current social order or unable to adapt to it or unwilling to adapt to it or even who just is a political dissident against a particular king or noble, that person gets branded as insane; that person is mad, because they won’t conform to the current social structures and they’re put into the early asylums. They’re essentially imprisoned at that point in history.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting to think about. I’m reminded now of… So as you know, from my background in theater, I’m an aficionado of some really obscure bits of theatrical history, and one of them is—I think it was… was it late ‘60s, early ‘70s?— show called “Anyone Can Whistle,” which had the now-late Angela Lansbury in it, so when she died, everyone’s like: Murder, She Wrote, and I’m like: Oh! “Anyone Can Whistle!” Like, it lasted three days on Broadway; it was super unpopular. But anyway, the conceit behind the show is there’s a small town and an insane asylum in town, and somehow the gates are left unlocked, and so all the insane people come out and begin to mix with everybody else, and no one’s actually quite sure who’s insane and who’s not. Before, it was: “Well, those are the people in there, who are imprisoned.” It’s interesting to think about: we lock these people up; it’s basically a prison sentence, and yet, as you said, sometimes they’re just sort of political dissidents or whatever! That there’s not necessarily something essentially different about them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that is, by the way—that’s not just something that happened in the medieval period. There have been various political regimes even up to the present time that have used insanity as an excuse to lock up political dissidents. They haven’t actually committed a crime, so they use insanity as the label to do that.

The one institution that you have in medieval Western Europe that kind of preserves some of the earlier understanding of madness is the king having a fool.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is big in Shakespeare, to bring it back to theater. You have various kinds of fools in Shakespeare’s plays, some who are— They’re all kind of funny, but some are mean, some are happy, some are just deeply weird, but they’re truth-tellers.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is the person who, because they’re a fool, they can kind of say what they want.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and often they’re the truth-teller to the king. He’s the one person in the room who can actually say that kind of stuff, and the king may listen to it—although there are various fools throughout history who, you know, crossed the line.

Fr. Stephen: Went too far. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, but the institution is that it’s this truth-telling figure who can kind of say whatever and not get in trouble.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s sort of a social construction there that preserves that earlier view of the fool, the madman, of madness.

This also became a tool used well into the 20th century, against women. The word “hysteria” comes from the word for “woman, for womanhood. And if you look at— You can go online and find these—the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is a good example. And you look at the people in the 19th and early 20th century who were locked up there, and you’ll find a ton of women. The mental illness for which they were put into this asylum will just be listed as “woman troubles.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, literally “hysteria,” because to be hysterical, it was decided it was having to do with having a uterus, like the word “hysterectomy” is to have it removed.

Fr. Stephen: The idea there was that any woman who wasn’t willing to conform to the particular roles of whatever culture they were in that she was supposed to conform to could end up in an asylum. This was before no-fault divorce. It was actually very difficult for a man to divorce his wife, but it was actually easier for him to have her put in an asylum than to get a divorce.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: By just alleging things like “moodiness.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow! It ain’t right.

Fr. Stephen: But you can see how there madness has become something very different. It’s now become this sociopolitical category that’s used to deal with societal dissidents. “You’re not part of our societal structures, and it’s not that that’s good any more; that’s now bad and you’re now dangerous, and so you need to be confined.”

Then this idea sort of segues; there’s not a clear cut-off point, but it segues into the modern idea of mental illness, where it becomes sort of medicalized—

Fr. Andrew: Right, looking for chemical, material kinds of causes.

Fr. Stephen: And if you look at the early “medical treatments,” they’re very barbaric. In the early 20th century, people start doing lobotomies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, shock treatment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s an attempt to try to at least quasi-medicalize this and make it a mental illness. So you have someone who is a sociopath. They are sick in a way that means that they can’t operate within society, and so they need to be isolated from society. Instead of asylums, we have mental hospitals, and that becomes medicalized.

But so this shows us, looking at this thing that Foucault kind of charts… This shows us that this whole idea of madness, that whole category—madness or insanity or whatever term we want to use—that that’s this fluid category. It doesn’t just refer to one thing throughout history, or one type of person. And a person who would be considered mad in one era might not be in another. Or even in different cultures in different places in the same era, what would be considered mad in one place might not be in another.

We have this sort of fluid concept, but where the fluidity comes in—the constant behind all these definitions is that madness or insanity is always over against the social constructions of that culture at that time. So there’s a set of social constructions—political, economic, religious, etc., etc., etc.—that a person is living within in that culture and that society, and the constant through time is that the people who don’t fit within that, either because they can’t or they aren’t willing to, they’re the ones who get the label “mad” or “insane.”

When you chart, as they’ve been doing in modern times, charting rates of mental illness, we can see that that rate of mental illness fluctuates.

Fr. Andrew: Right, why is it that some periods seem to have more people who are mentally ill than others?

Fr. Stephen: That’s because there are societal shifts with which people are trying to compensate and live.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, on the one hand, it’s, as you said, people trying to compensate, but on the other hand I would also say—and maybe this is just another angle to describe the exact same thing—as society shifts, people who used to have just been sane are now considered to be insane because they’re not like everybody else, even though they didn’t change.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They aren’t able to adapt and conform to the new state of things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they didn’t conform. I’m reminded of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, where you’ve got this character of John “the Savage,” who is the most sort of normal person in the book, and he speaks in Shakespearean English, which is lovely, because that’s where he learned English. And yet he’s considered to be a savage by all these people who are living this very anesthetized pleasure-life. He is the deeply weird one and has to live on some kind of reservation because he’s not like them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s portraying exactly this. This is something that charts across the board. There are parts of the country now where there’s a huge rise in depression and mental illness and people self-medicating that illness with drugs and alcohol and things. When you dig a little deeper, the places where that’s happening are places where there’s been some massive shift in terms of how people are or aren’t able to live, and they’re struggling to adapt. There are people who are just better-adapted to other ways of life. There are not a lot of people who are adapted to thrive spending 40 hours a week in a cubicle farm.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Make me go nuts!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so when they try to live that way, they experience anxiety and all of these other things, whereas you take some of those people and you have them doing farm work, and they’re fine. In that other context, in that other way of life, they’re adapted to it and it suits them. Vice versa, there’s probably somebody who really thrives in a cubicle farm. I don’t know who that person is, but there might be.

But there can be, going even further than that, there can be, and are and have been historically— There have been societies and cultures that have become dysfunctional to a point where they only offer unnatural and inhuman ways of living: unnatural in going against human nature, inhuman in that no human can live that way.

Fr. Andrew: I think probably a lot of people feel—and there are certainly days when I feel—that our society is moving more and more in that direction.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. We’re just black-pilling everybody tonight. Happy Halloween! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, we’re not!

Fr. Stephen: No, we’re not.

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny, sometimes people take us a little to literally! I don’t want to pull the veil back too much here—“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”—but just in case, because we did get a couple of emails from people, from our last Q&A show, where we played a clip where someone was functioning in a deeply “pilled” way, or however you want to define it, and they were like: “Is that the direction your show is going!?” Like… No, it was a joke. Really, just a joke!

Fr. Stephen: But in this case, my unrelenting pessimism is real.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, but— [Laughter] But pessimism for the current concept of our society, not pessimism in terms of the arc of history.

Fr. Stephen: No, no, and I’m being semi-facetious. [Laughter] No, I don’t think there’s any hope “in princes and and sons of men in whom there is no salvation.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how about that? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You can come to that point, where the society is so dysfunctional that it will make everyone in it dysfunctional. And this is not unrelated. It is not unrelated to what we talked about in the last episode, when we talked about there being a spirit that’s behind and motivating these societies. One of the things that identifies, as we talked about, a demonic spirit behind these things is that it’s anti-human.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s destructive; it tears people to pieces.

Fr. Stephen: Demons hate and want to destroy humanity. When we talk about these anti-human constructs, that these societal constructs are built in such a way that it’s inhuman, we’re also— That’s the same— We’re talking about thing as when we talk about there being this demonic spirit that’s motivating and driving that society and that culture.

Just to give an example, war is demonic. No human being can naturally thrive and adjust and find salvation through the desperate quest to not die, to save as many of your friends as you can, and to kill an enemy, another human being. People are thrust into that, into that unhuman situation.

Fr. Andrew: You can try to be heroic. I mean, there are good things that can happen in the midst of that, for sure, but it’s in spite of it. It’s because you acted in a way that’s actually contrary to the spirit of that time and place.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You don’t go— And anyone who’s actually been to war will tell you: You don’t go there on purpose to try to find salvation.

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: God can bring good out of any evil, but that’s not… So you can create these inhuman situations, and there are these spirits behind it. But this points to the limits that exist on disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they can’t solve the big problem. They can just try to help you cope.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is from either side, whether we want to talk about it spiritually like in the last episode… Psychoanalysts can’t do exorcisms. [Laughter] They can’t drive out that kind of spirit and invoke the Holy Spirit. This is the difference between confession and therapy.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Not that we’re saying therapy’s bad—

Fr. Stephen: No! But it’s a different thing.

Fr. Andrew: —but it has limits, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s a different thing, and it can’t get to what confession gets to. It’s a different thing.

Or, from the other side, if we want to look at it from the side we’ve been talking about tonight, there’s this limitation where, if I’m doing counseling, I have a person sitting in front of me whom I’m trying to counsel, but I can’t change all of the social structures that that person is forced to interact with on a daily basis. I can only try to help him adapt. And depending on how inhuman those structures are, it may be impossible for him to fully adapt, or her. It may be impossible. So, yes, therapy, counseling: useful, but limited: they’re useful within a sphere. They can’t replace the sacraments, and they can’t replace some other things that we’re going to talk about deeper into the show, to actually address some of these social structures.

But the key here is that, regardless of how the way humans have structured their lives in these various different ways through human history, that this category of madness is a category that’s used for those who stand outside of that order, however it’s been constructed, however it exists, however it’s functioning or dysfunctioning at the time.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we’re going to take a short break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite figures from the Old Testament—Nebuchadnezzar! We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Man, I don’t know who they got to do the voice-over for that ad, but he’s great. Such inflection!

Fr. Stephen: You would think so.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, he does exactly like I would do it. I’m just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: I was just sitting there thinking: “I don’t remember writing any of that!” But I guess that’s what’s in the book, so must have. Automatic writing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So, yeah, it’s the second half, everybody! We’re talking about madness of various sorts. It’s our Halloween episode, and you’re welcome to give us a ring at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346.

Fr. Stephen: It’s 855-“afraid-io.”

Fr. Andrew: “Afraid-io!” OooOOooo!

Fr. Stephen: Just for Halloween.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true! [Laughter] I look at that every time and I think that, but I’m like: “No, don’t say that, because then people will think that there’s an ‘I’ in there where it shouldn’t go.”

Fr. Stephen: That’s okay. They’ll figure it out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter] Anyway. Okay, so: Nebuchadnezzar, or, as it appears in some sources: Nabou-chodo-nosor.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. It’s actually Nabu-kudurri-usur, if you want to be really technical.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Which just rolls off the tongue.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s why you get the pedants among us saying, “Actually, it should be Nebuchadrezzar, not -nezzar.”

Fr. Andrew: Nice!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so those are people to be watched carefully. You just have to keep an eye on them.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s an Uncle Nezzar in that one episode of VeggieTales. Just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: It’s also the ship in the original Matrix movie.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true! Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So Nabu-kudurri-usur means Nabu, who was one of the main gods in Babylonian life: Nabu, watch over my heir.

Fr. Andrew: Heir, like h-e-i-r?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Like his dad named him this because he wanted him to survive to adulthood and become king.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: He’s actually Nebuchadnezzar the Second, but his dad was not the first, and was essentially the founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which is the Babylonian Empire that we see come and take Judah into exile in the Old Testament. So we’re only talking about the sixth century BC, relatively recent by my standards. But we actually have a lot of stuff, a lot of inscriptions, including the things he built in Babylon. He had his name stamped on every brick.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter] That’s a little narcissistic!

Fr. Stephen: A little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Wow! That just puts a whole other spin on this dude.

Fr. Stephen: And for old-school DC fans, or for people who have watched Black Adam already, Nabu: also a Lord of Order who lives within the helm of Doctor Fate.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. I’m not a big DC fan.

Fr. Stephen: Just got to cover the ground. Cover the ground, do this right. [Laughter] So there are a bunch of places where we see Nebuchadnezzar in the Old Testament. Daniel is one of the chief ones. We’re going to talk about, in this second half, a particular story regarding Nebuchadnezzar that made him the subject of a William Blake painting that was used, I know, as an image for this episode tonight. I think we also actually used it as the image for last year and then didn’t end up getting to this material, so it didn’t make sense.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! So that’s why we recycled the pic.

Fr. Stephen: So that was the cover of the loose-leaf expansion for tonight in the Compendium.

So this particular story about Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel begins when Nebuchadnezzar has a dream.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Isn’t this where he’s telling it to Daniel?

Fr. Stephen: First he has the dream and he calls in his regular court magician guys, and they’re like: “I got nothin’.” So then finally he calls in Daniel to interpret the dream.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So this is from Daniel 4, and depending on if you’re reading the Greek Daniel or the Hebrew Daniel, it might be different verses, but anyway…

Fr. Stephen: Technically, it’s the Aramaic Daniel in chapter four.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me. All right. Here’s how it goes:

I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at ease in my house and prospering in my palace. I saw a dream that made me afraid. As I lay in bed, the fancies and the visions of my head alarmed me. At last, Daniel came in before me—he who is named Belteshazzar after the name of my god and in whom is the spirit of the holy gods—and I told him the dream, saying:

O Belteshazzar, chief of magicians, because I know that the spirit of the holy gods is in you and that no mystery is too difficult for you, tell me the visions of my dream that I saw and their interpretation. The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold: a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the heaven lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it.

I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in bed, and behold: a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven. He proclaimed aloud and said thus:

Chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves, and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches. But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth. Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him. The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s pretty self-explanatory.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Isn’t it, though? We do have some fun Easter eggs in there for long-time listeners: watchers—a couple of references to watchers.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, and there’s this reference right off the bat. He calls Daniel by the Babylonian name he was given, Belteshazzar.

Fr. Andrew: And that “Bel-” at the beginning is “Baal.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the sort of Babylonization in the Neo-Babylonian Empire of “Baal.” That’s why he says, “called Belteshazzar after the name of my god,” so that’s the god whom Nebuchadnezzar is worshiping. This is why you may have noticed… Well, you may not have noticed this yet, unless you’re just super familiar with Daniel. But if you go and look at a lot of English translations, when he says to Daniel, “in whom is the spirit of the holy gods,” is how we translate it, but it’ll say, “in whom is the spirit of the holy God,” and in verse nine also, they’ll have “holy God” instead of “holy gods.” The word is elohim.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the plural.

Fr. Stephen: So that could be elohim being used to refer to “God” as it commonly is in the Old Testament, or it could mean “gods.” The reason why we’re reading it as “gods” is because here in verse eight, Nebuchadnezzar says that he’s named Belteshazzar “after the name of my god,” so Nebuchadnezzar’s god is Bel. He doesn’t consider the God of the Jews his god.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he’s a pagan.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he would—at least at this point, maybe not so much in a little bit here, but at least right now—

Fr. Andrew: He’s going to go through something.

Fr. Stephen: He is. He is seeing Daniel, when he says, “in whom is the spirit of the holy gods,” and when he calls him “the chief of the magicians,” he is seeing him as one of these people who is touched by the gods, who has this special relationship with the gods, and that, potentially at least, for Nebuchadnezzar means that he might be able to interpret these dreams, because, as we’ve talked about before on the show, dreams are sort of the activity of the nous. So these were seen to be sort of spiritual realities. If Daniel has this connection with these spirits, with these spiritual beings, they are more aware of these spiritual realities and can explain them and serve as a guide to them. That’s how Nebuchadnezzar’s thinking about this.

He has this vision, then, of this tree that grows tall and strong and huge and fills the whole earth, which… Well, we’ll just summarize it now; we’ll get to the interpretation in a second—fills the whole earth. And then a watcher, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, for all you book of Enoch fans, the term “Watcher” to refer to a certain class of holy ones, a certain class of angelic beings: here it is in the canonical Scriptures—

Fr. Andrew: We’re not making this up.

Fr. Stephen: —even if you’re not Ethiopian. And it’s one of them who comes and announces that there is this sentence, there’s this decree, that this tree is going to be chopped down, but the stump is not going to be removed. Then there’s kind of a mixing of the metaphor, because the tree is not going to have a man’s mind—apparently it was a tree with a man’s mind—and now it’s going to have a beast’s mind.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it just sort of flips at that point. [Laughter] It’s “tree, it,” and then “let him be wet with the dew of heaven, let his portion be with the beasts, let his mind be changed…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the last thing to note is that at the end, this sentence is—this is the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones—to the end that, so that, in order that the living—all the living on earth, the people on earth—may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men. So this decision is presented as having been taken by the divine council. It’s not just— This angel does not just come and announce, “Here’s what God says,” but he says, “This is the decree of the council,” obviously, over which God presides. The purpose of this decree makes it very clear that the Most High God who presides in that council is above the rest of it. It’s going to show who’s in charge.

So then Daniel is then able to interpret this dream.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so, continuing on. This begins with, well, in some versions, verse 19.

Then Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, was dismayed for a while, and this thoughts alarmed him. The king answered and said, “Belteshazzar, let not the dream or the interpretation alarm you.” Belteshazzar answered and said:

My lord, may the dream be for those who hate you and its interpretation for your enemies! The tree you saw, which grew and become strong, so that its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth, whose leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in which was food for all, under which beasts of the field found shade, and in whose branches the birds of the heavens lived—it is you, O king, who have grown and become strong. You greatness has grown and reaches to heaven, and your dominion to the ends of the earth.

And because the king saw a watcher, a holy one, coming down from heaven […] this is the interpretation, O king: It is a decree of the Most High which has come upon my lord the king, that you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. You shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and you shall be wet with the dew of heaven. And seven periods of time shall pass over you, till you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will. And as it was commanded to leave the stump of the roots of the tree, your kingdom shall be confirmed for you from the time that you know that heaven rules.

Therefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable to you: break off your sins by practicing righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the oppressed, that there may perhaps be a lengthening of your prosperity.

Yeah, so he gets this offer for potential repentance at the end: “Do what you’re supposed to do.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So Daniel at first doesn’t want to tell him! [Laughter] Because, as we mentioned, sometimes the fool goes too far, and he doesn’t know how Nebuchadnezzar is going to react before he goes ahead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he says, “I hope this is actually about your enemies, but… it’s… not.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, “But, it’s kind of about you.” This is him; he’s grown strong, he’s extended his power through the Neo-Babylonian Empire over the whole world—but he needs to learn something. He needs to learn something. He needs to learn that it is the Most High God who rules over the world and who gives authority within it, the person whom he wants to have it. That’s why he needs to learn, as verse 26 says, “Heaven rules,” not him.

In order for him to learn that, he is going to have this experience of being driven from men. Not only is he not going to occupy this position atop the Babylonian Empire, atop the social structures of his time, but he is going to be driven out from them and live like an animal. But, as you mentioned, Daniel concludes by saying, “Hey, this is the sentence, but you know what? If you were to repent now and learn this lesson now, then none of this would have to happen.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But… that’s not the way it went down.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Because you get— This is the next thing, the next verse: “All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar.” Then, skipping ahead a few verses:

Immediately, the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hair grew as long as eagle’s feathers, and his nails were like bird’s claws.

Which, you know, if you look at that William Blake painting of Nebuchadnezzar, that’s exactly what’s depicted. It’s this kind of almost werewolf image, the way we imagine a werewolf, anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we have to remember, this is the Neo-Babylonian Empire. This is our latest and in some ways last, really, instantiation of Mesopotamian culture, self-consciously hearkening back to the original Babylonian Empire, of Hammurabi and the Amuru. This is his self-concept. Eventually, he goes from being able to see himself as Gilgamesh, this god-king, this divine king who in some way stands over and above the social order with the other gods as his peers, to being more like Enkidu, to being this wild man out in the wilderness, through this encounter he has with God, mediated through these angelic beings.

Not only is the Most High God not his peer, but even the watchers who pronounce this judgment are not his peers, even the angelic beings. From his perspective, the way the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires essentially worked, it wasn’t that— They didn’t have a federal government and then local governments in the different city-states, because they didn’t have the communication abilities to do that. So you still had kings in these different city-states. Those kings were just vassals of the emperor, of the high king, so in this case of Nebuchadnezzar. So Nebuchadnezzar, when he made that king a vassal, which would happen in one of two ways—either he’d conquer a city or be about to conquer a city, and the king would cut a deal to become his vassal, or he’d conquer a city, kill the current king, and install a vassal as the new king…

Fr. Andrew: A client-king.

Fr. Stephen: And when he did that, he would issue them a covenant; he would cut them a covenant and say, “I’m the king. You’re now my vassal. Here’s what I will do for you in terms of, if someone attacks you, I will bring my army to defend the city, etc., etc. Here’s what you’re going to do for me, in terms of taxes, in terms of tribute, whatever else, how many soldiers you’re going to field for my army. And then here are the consequences if you break this. Here’s what I’m going to do to you if you don’t obey the agreement I’ve just given you.” So it’s not a contract; it’s not a mutual agreement. It’s given by the suzerain to the vassal.

What God is here showing Nebuchadnezzar is that, even though he’s the king—he’s the emperor, he’s the suzerain, he’s the high king—he is, at best, a vassal of God Most High, and there will be consequences if he does not live up to the responsibilities that he has as God’s vassal.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. And this is the consequence: he becomes beast-man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this does not last forever.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! No, it doesn’t! Starting with verse 34, again, depending on which version you’re looking at.

At the end of the days, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. And none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”

At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my majesty and splendor returned to me. My councilors and my lords sought me, and I was established in my kingdom, and still more greatness was added to me. Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just, and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.

The thing especially about that last line… I mean, it sounds almost like it could be right out of the psalms. That’s the way he talks now; he talks like the psalms.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so who knows in the age to come if we won’t encounter Nebuchadnezzar there.

Fr. Andrew: Huh! Don’t go naming any churches after him just yet.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no! [Laughter] I’m not authorized to tell you to do that anyway. That’s above my pay grade. Just, who knows?

Fr. Andrew: May it be blessed.

Fr. Stephen: Notice some things here, that there has been a profound shift in his thinking.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Why is there all this about the Most High, that he lives forever, that his dominion is an everlasting dominion, his kingdom endures from generation to generation? Well, because Babylonian-Mesopotamian religion, there had been a series of succession myths.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is one of these things that is a mark of the Most High God according to the Bible about how he’s different from all other spiritual beings. “Who among the gods is like unto thou, O Lord?”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the gods he used to worship—Nabu, Marduk, Bel—these are gods who were born and who die.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think it’s worth underlining, once again, that if you— Sometimes when people critique Christianity, they sort of treat it like it’s basically saying the same things about its God that all the other religions say about their gods, but if you actually look at what those religions say about their gods, it’s not on the same level. Just take what they say about their own religion, setting aside the question of whether the claims are true or false. They don’t actually make those kinds of claims about their gods, that they’re from everlasting, that they’re all-powerful. That’s just not a thing, just not even there. No paganism does that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and not only were they born and can they die, but whatever rule, whatever dominion, whatever kingdoms they have come into being at a certain point and can fall to other gods. And so that’s why he goes so far, in verse 35, to say, “He does according to his will, not just among the inhabitants of the earth,” not just among humans, “but among the host of heaven.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he is in charge amongst the gods.

Fr. Stephen: So he’s saying there’s as much difference between the Most High God and the gods as there is between the gods and humans, effectively. So he’s had a profound shift here, and he’s come to understand exactly the lesson he was supposed to understand, that his kingdom and any power he has is delegated, that he’s a vassal.

Fr. Andrew: And temporal. The whole world of his empire is temporary. It’s constructed, and it’s going to fall apart.

Fr. Stephen: Right. What’s happened here in terms of our overarching theme that we’re talking about tonight, because this is—Nebuchadnezzar is driven mad in order to learn this lesson, and that is that he is removed for a time from this entire social construction of the Babylonian Empire, from the whole cultural history of it. The cycle of feasts, the gods—all of that, he’s removed from it. He’s living as not even a human, let alone as a Babylonian.

He’s completely removed from that, and what that allows is for him to be reoriented to reality, to the reality of the cosmos, to the reality of God’s creation, to the reality of his human nature, and to come to really understand his place in the creation and in the cosmic order and in cosmic justice. And then once he understands that, he can re-enter—he, in this case, re-enters those structures, but in a different way, and in a way that—who knows?—maybe if he’d lived longer would have been transformative to those structures, but he didn’t live that long after this, and his son was a ne’er-do-will. He had a failed son, as many great kings do.

But this shows he had to be removed from it in order to be reoriented and be able to approach it from another angle, in a different way, with a new wisdom and a new perspective.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that being said, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve! We’re back now with the third half of The Lord of Spirits. We’re talking about—

Fr. Stephen: You know, I like the ragtime piano in that one.

Fr. Andrew: I know! That was a little… I don’t know, unexpected.

Fr. Stephen: I felt like The Sting was about to happen.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: I never realized it, but I think John Maddex is kind of a Paul Newman-type.

Fr. Andrew: Hah! I’m going to have to think about that one for a while. I think it might be true, though.

Fr. Stephen: Just dwell on that a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Now suddenly I’m seeing him in Cool Hand Luke.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “No man can eat 50 eggs.”

Fr. Andrew: “Some men, you just can’t…” [Laughter] So we’re talking about divine madness—actually, several different kinds of madness—and we just talked about Nebuchadnezzar, or Nabouchadonosor or Nebuchadrezzar or the longer version you said earlier…

Fr. Stephen: Nabu-kudduri-usur.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. That would be hard to put on a license plate.

Fr. Stephen: Most states, at least, yes.

Fr. Andrew: The Neo-Babylonian Empire, that’s available for your license plate.

Fr. Stephen: For the record, we’re not talking about “All I wanted was a Pepsi, / just one Pepsi, / and she wouldn’t give it to me”-type of madness, even though that will result in you being put in an institution.

Fr. Andrew: Whoa. That’s an old, old call-back. [Laughter] So in this half…

Fr. Stephen: There are five people who got that, but those are my people.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Call in, let us know!

Fr. Stephen: We don’t need a bunch of calls that are just: “I got that one!”

Fr. Andrew: “I caught that reference!” Quick, send us Captain America gifs. We’ll know what that is.

Fr. Stephen: That is acceptable.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. Yes, this is our Halloween episode, so we always talk about crazy stuff on Halloween, our Halloween episode. And indeed, this time we’re talking about craziness itself.

What is the difference between madness, divine madness, mental illness, demonic possession? Is there a way to test to see what somebody’s got: do they need to go to the doctor, or the exorcist, insane asylum? I mean, what do you—how do you know?

Fr. Stephen: Right. I mean, these questions come up on all sides. In our culture, as we were talking about earlier, in the first half, we now talk about mental illness, and we see this in sort of medical terms. This raises— And by “medical” we mean at least we’re trying to be scientific in our approach to it, and sometimes we are, sometimes maybe not so much still, but we’re trying. This comes up on the one hand: how do you tell someone who is the contemporary equivalent of a fool-for-Christ in the Christian tradition from someone who is mentally ill?

Fr. Andrew: Right, because I’ve encountered people—

Fr. Stephen: Because I’ve encountered people—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I was going to say!

Fr. Stephen: —who say, “I’ve encountered someone who said they had a vision of me before they met me.” As priests, this happens: you encounter people who say they’ve had visions, say they’ve had experiences.

Fr. Andrew: My favorite maybe—I don’t know if that’s the right word; I mean no disrespect… When I was in seminary—you might have had to do this, too; I don’t remember—part of what we did as part of our seminary study was prison ministry. There was a psych ward as part of the ministry, and there was one guy— I can’t remember his name now, but he used to say to the priest who would come and visit; he would say, “Now look, Father, I’m Jesus Christ, and you are my servant, and so I have some things for you to do.” As far as we knew, this guy truly believed what he was saying. He would not be the first person to claim to be Jesus in the modern period; we may have a hundred of those every week, it seems like.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we accept as Orthodox Christians that there is such a thing as a fool-for-Christ. Also, there are a lot of people who might present themselves in religious terms but who we would say are mentally ill: this is not wisdom coming from God, but this is a person who is mentally ill, who needs certain types of help and assistance. And then on the other side, you have, because in our contemporary society we think about mental illness in this medicalized and scientized way, who will say, for example, that the examples of demonic possession in the Bible are just mental illness, and ancient people were just primitive and dumb and didn’t understand the concept of mental illness, and so…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “He doesn’t need an exorcism; he needs a prescription.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so how do you distinguish between someone who is mentally ill, someone who is demon-possessed or a demonized person? Where is the problem something that’s going to be solved by an exorcism and repentance? Where is it…? I mean, repentance is always good, but where is it—where do we not need an exorcism and we just need sort of repentance and medication or what have you?

Fr. Andrew: Maybe just some therapy; talk it out.

Fr. Stephen: So within this, mental illness is sort of the broader category, because mental illness is essentially the way we now talk about what used to be called insanity, what before that was called madness—so it’s this broader category that includes lots of different phenomena, lots of different things.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is what we started out with: people who, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t function in—or flourish within—society… And with no comment about the origin of that—they can’t or won’t or whatever—

Fr. Stephen: For a variety of reasons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s lots of possible reasons.

Fr. Stephen: They’re unable to flourish. If it’s severe, they can’t even function in society the way it’s currently ordered. So we’re using that as the broad category. When we talk about someone who’s a fool-for-Christ or a holy fool, we’re talking about a person who’s not functioning within society as presently ordered due to an experience of God, due to an experience, an encounter they’ve had with God, which has set them outside of those societal structures so that they can sort of testify to it. We’ll get into that more in a minute.

Fr. Andrew: There’s an example coming into my head. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: When we talk about a person who’s demonically possessed, we’re talking about a person who’s not functioning in society due to being controlled by an inhuman and/or anti-human spiritual force.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’ve been touched by something else that’s not God—

Fr. Stephen: —that is now controlling them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not even just having one experience; it’s an ongoing thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why they’re outside. So there can be any number of causes for someone being outside and being unable to function within the social order. Two of those are what we would call someone being a fool-for-Christ or someone being demonically possessed, and then there are a whole lot of others that would fall under the category of mental illness.

We talked previously, in our episode about prophets and prophecy; we talked a little bit about this idea of the holy fool or the fool-for-Christ, because some of those characteristics we see in various Old Testament prophets. These people have an encounter with God, this prophetic call, and then, based on that, they are removed from sort of society. St. Elias, the Prophet Elijah, out in the wilderness; St. John the Forerunner likewise, taking up his lifestyle; Ezekiel has visions and then wanders around naked, not wearing any clothes.

Fr. Andrew: Or like Hosea, with his marriage. That’s deeply weird. Deeply weird in that society.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they’re sort of transgressing societal norms, they’re not living within these societal structures, but the reason they’re doing it is that this experience with God has set them outside of it so that they could come and then testify to it.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a corrective character that’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: They have to stand outside it to critique it, to question it, to point out where it’s gone wrong.

When it comes to someone who might present themselves as a fool-for-Christ or might have some attributes that might cause you to wonder that, if someone is presenting in that way but the wisdom they’re claiming to have from God, the testimony they’re claiming to give, is not of a sort of consistent character, is not prophetic, is not—

Fr. Andrew: Or it’s not leading people to repentance.

Fr. Stephen: Right, bringing people to repentance, applying the message of God, then that would be a case where we’d say, “Okay, this person is not functioning as a fool-for-Christ. This is a mentally ill person.” St. Cyril of Moscow is another famous holy fool who lived naked in Russia in the streets for several years and didn’t die, so that was a sign of something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it gets very, very cold! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And in one episode went and confronted Ivan the Terrible. Hauled a big slab of meat…

Fr. Andrew: Wasn’t that Basil the Fool-for-Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Ah, that was Basil the Fool-for-Christ, right! You’re right, it was St. Basil who hauled this slab of meat before Ivan the Terrible and said to him, “Take and eat.” He said, “I can’t. It’s Lent.” He said, “Then why do you feast on the blood of men?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So he is fulfilling this prophetic role. He’s the only one who can dare call the Tsar to repentance. So the odd behavior, the “crazy” behavior that he’s engaging in, we can see the purpose behind it, and so we can understand this person as a fool-for-Christ.

To use an archetypal example for a demoniac, archetypal not only because of the length of the story but also for the number of times we read it every year in the Orthodox Church for some reason—

Fr. Andrew: Two or three on Sundays!

Fr. Stephen: —is the story of the Gadarene or Gerasene demoniac.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the one with the pigs, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: With Legion, the deviled ham, that whole story.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. I hope everybody made that joke, or heard that joke, this past Sunday.

Fr. Stephen: That is the traditional dad joke for— And since we’re called “Father” as Orthodox priests, we have to make dad jokes, or you’re falling down on the job.

Fr. Andrew: I agree. It’s canonical.

Fr. Stephen: This demoniac, when we first encounter him, has been removed from society: he’s living in the tombs, naked, running around, living like an animal. But there’s no sort of testimony coming from him to the society at large.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: He’s menacing the local people in various ways. It’s important to note here that people don’t just end up demon-possessed like this by accident one day.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like they’re walking down the road and a demon sneaks up on them and just slithers into their brain, takes control of them. You don’t accidentally get demon-possessed.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or they played with a ouija board once at a slumber party—not that that’s a good thing to do—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, don’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: —but that’s not instantly going to get you possessed by a thousand demons and have you running naked in the tombs.

Fr. Andrew: No, this is— It’s just like—it’s the opposite effect of if you live a holy life and you become a peer of the angels and you function like the angels. If you live an evil life—like really evil—then you become like the demons, and you’re not in the divine council, you’re in whatever the opposite of that is: you’re in the infernal—well, it’s not a council—the infernal mob, the infernal horde.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this is something that happened to him— He ended up in this state over a long period of time, living more and more a demonic way, and that actually makes this a very hopeful story, because it means that if he was not too far gone for Christ to come and heal him, then pretty much nobody else is too far gone either.

But note here that once the demons are cast out and they go into the pigs, and the pigs jump in the sea, Christ doesn’t reintegrate this man into his Gentile Galilean society. We know it’s Gentiles because they’re herding pigs. He doesn’t say, “Well, good. Now you can get a job and become a tax-paying Galilean.” [Laughter] “Go find yourself a wife, have yourself a couple of kids, settle down.”

Fr. Andrew: The Galilean Dream.

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t about Christ reintegrating this person into society. He doesn’t want to integrate into society. He begs Christ, to go with him and to become a disciple, to leave all that behind and go become a disciple. Christ instead turns him into an apostle. He sends him. He says, “You need to stay here, and you need to tell everyone what happened to you.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Tell everybody what God has done for you.” It’s interesting. There’s moments where Christ says, “Now don’t tell anybody,” but this is one where he says, “Now go and tell.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So now he has this apostolic and prophetic mission that begins with what? With his encounter with God in the Person of Jesus Christ. And so now he becomes set apart from society in the opposite way. Now he can go and testify to that Gentile Galilean society about who Christ is, to potentially transform it.

Fr. Andrew: So instead of a demonic fool, he’s a holy fool now.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This connection to experiences can also be true in a lot of cases with other broader types of mental illness, where experiences in life, ongoing experiences in life, trauma, these kinds of things in life can change a person in such a way that they’re no longer able to adapt to the social structures that they might have previously felt at home in.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, a really good example: you brought up warfare earlier. People come home with PTSD. Sometimes they can, you know, the trauma, they can sometimes adapt, and sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they just come back and they’re never the same.

Fr. Stephen: Right. When… A big part of why this understanding is important in terms of the social order and whether or not we can and will and should adapt to it is that there are a number of different ways in which the phrase “the world” is used in Scripture. But one of those ways refers to the world almost as this sort of oppressive entity, like “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” There’s a way of reading that, if you’re, say, a Gnostic or a Puritan, in which that means the things in the world, the material world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s not how it’s intended in the Scripture, and that’s why, for instance, Jesus says that he came not to condemn “the world” but to save it. That’s a different usage of “the world.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this understanding of “the world” is about the social order that humans construct in the world. Never forget, Cain built the first city. First polis is him. It’s about these pathological orders that we construct in the world. By those being the social constructs in the world, there is an innate pressure on every one of us to conform to that. Why? Well, it’s not fun being unable to function and unable to flourish in the world you live in. So for us in contemporary society, most of the people listening to this, we have to find a way to make enough money to buy the goods and services we need to shelter ourselves, clothe ourselves, feed ourselves. We have to find a way to function within the order as it exists now, to survive within it, let alone flourish, let alone try to work toward our salvation and do these other things. So there’s always this pressure to conform, because conformity, at least in theory, makes life within that order easier. It might not make human flourishing easier, but it makes life in that order easier.

The world has always been this force, just like it was for Nebuchadnezzar— Just as it was for the first Christians in the pagan Roman Empire, who faced all this pressure to participate in the festivals, to make the sacrifices so they could be in a trade guild, to be good Romans, and then everything would get easier. This exists for Christians today who live in Islamic countries or who live in countries with some kind of tyrannical social order that’s expressly anti-Christian. “If you just become a good citizen of whatever this is—if you just convert, if you just shift, if you just stop being a Christian so much—”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Just be normal!”

Fr. Stephen: “—everything will go easier for you. Everything will go easy for you.” And that’s what the world is. The world is that set of social structures that are constantly a temptation, a seduction: this force, this enemy of us finding our salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this connects, of course, directly to what we were talking about the last episode, because what animates that sense of the world is demonic spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s what’s animating that order. The spirit of the age is not the Holy Spirit. The spirit of the age to come is the Holy Spirit, but not this present evil age.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. The goal of being Christian, then, is not to be a good citizen—of the world. It’s to be a good citizen of the kingdom of Christ, which doesn’t mean you need to be a menace to society, but that you—

Fr. Stephen: Aw!

Fr. Andrew: Hey. I can make the— Well, actually, that’s not that obscure a reference…

Fr. Stephen: No, I was just saying I want to be a menace.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] No, you may not.

Fr. Stephen: Aw, darn it!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not to be a menace to society, but rather to bring the order of God into it. Be a good citizen of Christ’s kingdom, which can make you look crazy to the world at times.

Well, to wrap up, there was a conversation I was privy to recently. Actually, you were there, too, Fr. Stephen, which is recently our diocesan clergy had our annual what’s called clergy synaxis, and Fr. Stephen was our speaker. One of the features of the gathering is always conversations with our bishop, which is always great. Someone brought up to him and asked him to speak about something that’s a very controversial subject in our time. I won’t get into what it is exactly, because that’s a whole other can of worms, but it’s a moral issue; it’s an anthropology issue. I’ll just put it that way.

It was interesting to watch him. He didn’t have a prepared statement. By no means does the bishop think or say or teach anything that’s out of step with regards to Orthodox tradition with regards to this issue, not at all, but it was interesting to hear him sort of think out loud how he wanted to say what he was going to say. He didn’t have a prepared statement. Actually, I think my bishop almost never has a prepared statement. I know a couple times he’s walked in with one; he said something else entirely, because that’s just what he wanted to say.

But in any event, it was interesting to listen to what he said, because there was one point where his first reaction was almost like: “Well, that’s just kind of a distraction.” And certainly understanding that people who are dealing with this issue and maybe suffering from it, that they need pastoral care, because another thing he said was: “Well, this is just a matter of sin, and we know what to do about sin: we repent. That’s what we do about sin. You teach repentance. You’ve got to teach it with love, apply it in a very beautiful, pastoral way.”

But there was one point where he said—and this is kind of where he ended up—he said, “You know, if you really are committed to the life of the Church, especially to the life of prayer and worship, but the whole matrix of what we do as Orthodox Christians—the prayer, the fasting, the almsgiving, the learning, the active love for our family and for our neighbor, for our fellow parishioners, etc.” He said, “If you really are doing that, and the more that you do that, you’ll actually discover that these questions, these very controversial issues of our time, that not only will they not control you”—and this is what he said: “They actually become invisible.”

Now, by that he didn’t mean you get to ignore what’s going on in the world; that’s not what he meant. But what he meant was that your perspective changes so much because—and this is my interpretation of what he said, my sort of paraphrase of it—you realize the story you’re really in. When you know that the real story of what’s going on in the world is a matter of Christ’s rescue of us from these demonic influences and you realize that the real battle is a spiritual battle, then those are the tools that you begin to apply in every situation.

So it’s not that the knots that people get tied into, or sometimes tie themselves up into, as a result of the big controversies of our day, it’s not that we look and just say, “Ah, well, come on. Shape up. Just stop it!” That’s not what he meant at all, but rather there’s a sense in which you start to see those things in true perspective, and what you then bring to them is the wholeness and the beauty and the glory and the sanity—the sanity of God.

Just like—I know a lot of the people that listen to this show are parents; I’m a parent. Your kids will often act in ways that seem kind of nuts! Sometimes they just completely lose it! And it’s really easy to get caught up in their craziness, to become obsessed with it. But if you keep your perspective and you watch your child melting down in front of you, number one, you don’t stop loving them, and you don’t turn towards them not caring about what’s going on with them. You care, because they’re suffering, clearly, even when they’re losing their minds in a destructive way. They’re suffering, absolutely. But you also have the perspective to know that it’s possible to come out of that, that it’s possible for that to be not the way that you function any more, that it’s possible to become sane.

I thought that was what was so beautiful about what the bishop said. He was really speaking as a father to children, a father to fathers of children also, and that the way of having sanity, the way of really becoming whole, is to conform ourselves to the kingdom of God. The more that we do that, then, we’re able to bring that to other people. He always—one of his big sayings he always says is “A priest should spend— The table that should concern the priest the most is the altar table, not the desk in his office.” It’s true; it’s absolutely true, but that’s not just true for priests; it’s true for all of us.

When we bring ourselves into that ordered way of living, which is the way that God has given us in his body the Church, when we conform ourselves, connecting back to our previous episode, to what the Holy Spirit is leading us to do—by being obedient to the commandments, by doing all these things that we know to do, all the things that your priest asks you to do that maybe you don’t do so much—then we are able— Number one, we will as a result kind of be taken out of society, like we’ve been talking about; we’ll be holy fools on some level. But, more importantly, we will be oriented to the life of the world to come. We’ll be oriented to the kingdom of God that’s not just in the future but is also breaking into this moment. I just wanted to pass on that very beautiful word that he gave us, although I probably said it in a thousand more words than he ever would have! [Laughter] He’s pretty to-the-point in the way that he talks.

Fr. Stephen, what’s your final comments for this evening?

Fr. Stephen: So I’m going the opposite tack.

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: I’m going straight, straight after, as my example, a hot-button social issue, in cancellation attempt number four! [Laughter]

I want to dig a little deeper in terms of where we ended. This is ultimately, hopefully, going to be to get past the whole black-pill pessimism thing to something at least potentially positive for us. That is, we have to recognize the fact that… What’s the right word to use? So the Church, as she stands before Christ, is holy and blameless and pure. Not so, at least in the present time, are individual Christian communities in which we live, or at least which we visit, which is part of the problem I’ll come back to here in a minute.

In many ways, this is especially true, I think, for us who live in countries where there is not a sense of antithesis between what we were just calling “the world”—the culture, the political realities, the economic realities, the social constructions in which we live—when we’re in a country in which there’s not a sense of antithesis between that and Christianity, we’ve become especially prone to our Christian communities being co-opted by those social constructions and used as a means to promote conformity to them, used as a way to make people good citizens, to make people good people. And this has been so thorough-going, for example, in some English-speaking countries, that the word “Christian” now is essentially an adjective that means “proper” or “good” or “put together.” It means the equivalent of “clean-cut.” Your Christian name is your proper name. This is a massive problem for everyone who is attempting to work out their salvation in a Christian community, when the Christian community itself, rather than providing respite in a different direction from conformity to the world, is actually being used as a tool for conformity to the world.

As I mentioned, I’m now going to pick a completely non-controversial example. I’m going to talk about marriage and same-sex marriage as an example. So on one hand, we have what is currently called—and again, I primarily always have to speak for the United States, because that’s where I live; that’s what I’m most familiar with—we have communities where the current version of conservatism has taken reign. I say “current version of conservatism” because today’s conservative is always yesterday’s liberal, and last week’s radical. So the position that’s being conserved at any given point in time is usually a fairly late position that would have been radical not that long before.

For example, we have the current conservative position, where it’s taken hold in Christian communities, which has taken the nuclear family. I’ve talked about this before on this show, but they’ve taken the nuclear family, which is sort of the last surviving, bare, fossilized remnant of what family once was—the extended family, the clan, the people-group—this last remaining little vestige, and has made that now the end-all and be-all. As is the tendency with conservativism, whatever the current social structures are are thought to be, number one, natural—this just conforms to nature—and to be essentially eternal—this is the way it’s always been. You’re hard-pressed to find a lot of nuclear families in the Bible, but I digress.

So it is purely on the nuclear family. Well, what does that do? That makes unmarried people in those Christian communities feel like second-class citizens. That makes them feel more isolated and alone than they might already do, because they don’t have a partner to share their life with. Part of the nuclear family is having children, so that makes couples who are unable to have children to feel ostracized, and they’re looked at with suspicion, sometimes outright called selfish. This dysfunction within the Christian community is not helping any of these people flourish as humans or find salvation, but a foreign cultural view has come in and taken hold. You don’t find anything better on what we still, in the United States, at least, call the other side, where we have the more progressive or liberal or however we want to inadequately use terms.

I think we see this most clearly when we come to the issue of same-sex marriage, because those—and there are even a few of these folks in the Orthodox Church; I won’t name names: most of the people listening probably know whom I’m talking about—who see same-sex marriage as something that should happen within their local Orthodox Christian communities. The way they portray it is they will say, “Well, we need to accept people who identify as homosexual who want to be in monogamous, lifelong relationships with a partner.” But what’s going on here? Because the whole basis for monogamous, lifelong marriage—if we want to go with the Bible, it’s that, as Christ said, God created humanity, male and female, and they become one flesh, and there’s at least the potential there to produce children. So biblically, that’s the basis for monogamous marriage. If we don’t want to go biblically, because some of those same folks aren’t so big on literal interpretations of the Bible, we can just go at this from a biological and zoological perspective: higher mammals mate for life. Biologically, male and female mammals mate for life and raise children. So that’s the whole basis for it.

So why, then, would someone who wants to present themselves as somehow progressive or radical argue that the answer for a person who, because they experience same-sex desires, homosexual desires, is outside of the current social order—why would they think that the answer for that is to parrot this sort of nuclear family structure, this sort of monogamous marriage structure? Because they’re not actually challenging the structure. It’s not radical at all; it’s actually kind of reactionary. They’re trying to just widen the category enough that we can squeeze some more people into it: we can get some more people to conform, without questioning what’s being held as an ideal.

It’s not because these people care about these folks who identify as homosexual. They don’t care about them at all. But they want to preserve the social constructions that they personally are beneficiaries of, and they want to assuage their own personal neurotic guilt at benefiting from them by diversifying them, or making them more inclusive. So they want to pry it open just a little. These same folks—these are the folks who don’t want to talk about the military-industrial complex. They just want to diversify the army, and then everything will be cool.

So that’s not a solution either. Both of these “sides” are just trying to preserve a status quo and conform more people to the world and use Christian communities as a way to do that, as a way to funnel people into it.

So what’s the alternative? This is the good news part. It’s that we do have an alternative as Christians. As Christians, we do not have to conform to any of the social structures of the world. We can live and be in the world in a completely different way in Christ. We can take our Christian communities, our parishes, and we can transform them from a place that’s visited a couple times a week, a venue for worship, for a certain type of activity—we can transform them into actual communities, into communities where we can create a family structure, a new family structure in Christ that is part of the household of God. St. Paul talks about this all the time: that goes beyond the nuclear family that’s a result of the Industrial Revolution or the diversified nuclear family that’s the weird compromise position.

But that is a social unit and a family that has a place for unmarried people, and a role for them in our community; that has a place for couples who for whatever reason don’t have children; that has a place for married couples that do have children; that is a place where we all can be freed from these and all the other ideas and concepts and constructs in our society that are preventing us from drawing closer to Christ, that are trying to get us to conform to them instead of to Christ; where we can be free to flourish and come to know Jesus ever more deeply.

And we’ll know we’re being successful in doing this, we’ll know that we’ll really have this type of community, not just when everybody thinks we’re weird—that’ll be step one; St. Peter says we should be like aliens and strangers in the world, not at home—but we’ll know we’re really doing it when they start hating us. We’ll know we’re really doing it when they don’t just think we’re weird, but they think we’re dangerous, when they think that we’re insane, when our existence threatens the people who love and create these often demonic social orders.

Cain killed Abel because Abel’s existence as a righteous person was a threat to him. The Jewish authorities had to crucify Christ because his very existence was a threat to them. Most of us today, so far, are so conformed to the social order that we’re no threat to anybody—but we can be. Together, working together, we can find salvation in the process.

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

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Tuesday morning, next week, out in the suburbs!

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group. Also, everyone, make sure you check out the new Ancient Faith Radio app on both Android and iPhone, if you have one of those machines. Leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. And don’t worry this weekend: no one likes your kids enough to give them free drugs.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you! Good night! And may God bless and keep you.