Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: To The Lord of Spirits podcast: Christ is risen! He truly is risen! On this podcast, we laugh in the face of secular materialism, even though it’s not very funny. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in the bright and beautiful Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young is with me from one of the tastiest places on earth, Lafayette, Louisiana, right in the middle of Cajun country. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight.

And this episode is all questions, all the time! This is our first-ever dedicated Q&A episode, so we want your Qs. You can call right now. While we wait for that call board to fill up…

Fr. Stephen De Young: Before that…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, go ahead, Fr. Stephen, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Let me say, I’m somewhat disappointed that you didn’t do a monologue.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Question: the OED defines a question…

Fr. Andrew: No, I never! I never start anything with “The OED defines…” I don’t start that way!

Fr. Stephen: I know, but you didn’t write anything, so now you get this pedantry from me.

Fr. Andrew: That’s good! Go for it, yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Or you could have done the Kael’thas Sunstrider monologue: “The power, my people crave it!” There’s all kinds of ways you could have gone, but it’s just like: “Hey, questions.”

Fr. Andrew: I could have read something in Old—I could have read Caedmon’s Hymn, which I’m starting to memorize from my Old English class which I am taking with Fr. Anthony Cook. Hey, Fr. Anthony!

Fr. Stephen: Watch this transition. You’re really phoning it in tonight, and you should phone in your questions to Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So you could talk to a couple of phonies…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right. All that being said, while we wait for the call board to fill up, number one: Do you have a copy of Fr. Stephen’s book yet? If you don’t, go to store.ancientfaith.com and get one! But while we wait for the call board to fill up, I wanted to read an email question that we got from our listener, Celia. And I want to put this in because it’s probably the only one that I have a really good chance of being the authority on. So this is what Celia had to say.

How do you talk to your kids? I am cradle Orthodox and have learned more in listening to your podcast than I did in all my Sunday school years. I’m starting to undo the materialistic view of the world and slowly trying to see the spiritual world. It’s easier for me since I am cradle Orthodox to understand that it is there, but my American upbringing and education did some serious damage for the past 40 years. In any case, I am afraid that I have already started the corrupting of my 12-, 9-, and 6-year-olds with materialistic American perspective. I’m just wondering how you talk with your kids daily in order to overcome this. Of course we talk about our guardian angels and pray to family saints daily, but I am wondering if I can do more.

So before I go off into my lengthy rant or, you know, discursus, Father, is there anything you wanted to say first?

Fr. Stephen: You know, as far as you know, I don’t talk to your kids, and it’s probably best to keep it that way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You may not talk to my children.

Fr. Stephen: Probably best we keep it that way, so we’ll just let you go ahead and take this one.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so, right, this is actually a question that we get in our Facebook group every so often, and it’s interesting to me, because I think that a lot of people feel that The Lord of Spirits is “advanced” theology or “advanced” biblical exegesis or something like that. And that is one of the things that we are precisely saying is actually not true, that we’re not talking about weird esoterics; we’re talking about stuff that’s simply, mainly right there in the Bible and that the people who received those texts initially would have understood to be part of their normal context and would have certainly talked to their kids about and participated in these rituals with their kids. So I just want to set aside that idea that this is advanced knowledge that is really only for super-academic people or whatever, because it’s just not true. If it were true, then the Church would not have embedded it so deeply in all the Church services, for one thing, which are meant to be attended by everybody, right?

So, all that being said, the question of course is: How do you talk to your kids at home? And I have experienced that children often are actually much more prepared to understand the spiritual life in the kind of mythic terms that we talk about it on this show than adults often are, actually. As adults, we spend years trying to convince ourselves that these are just metaphors or they can’t possibly be true or I don’t know what to do about that—that kind of thing. Yet, like we often say on this show, it’s not just a metaphor.

All that said, I just wanted to point out that kids have a better time connecting with this stuff, and I do talk with my kids, and the way that I talk about it is in these clear kind of mythic terms. So, is there such a thing as a dragon? Yes, there are dragons. Do they look exactly like you see in picture-books for kids? Probably not. I mean, we don’t know; no one’s taken any photos of them. Are there demonic presences that ancient peoples experienced as being like dragons? Yes, absolutely. There are those experiences.

For instance, in our last episode, we talked about Christ’s invasion of Hades. When I tell my kids, “Okay, there’s this depiction of something called the hell mouth that swallows the dead and Christ comes and he pulls people up out of that,” they can immediately connect with that, especially if you show them a picture—and you know what? There’s a lot of pictures of these things. If you show them a picture, they can connect with that very immediately and have an understanding of it. Yes, I may say to them, especially the older ones, “Look, this picture is the best that people can do in terms of trying to explain what’s happening, but we don’t know exactly what this experience was like, but these are the testimonies that we have.” So we could either discount those testimonies because it’s hard for us to believe that stuff, or we could simply say, “Well, man, people keep having this experience and they keep describing it in basically these terms.”

So, yeah, I mean, my kids—my oldest is 14, and we have three more. We have an 11-year-old and a nine-year-old and a four-year-old. And they… This is the way they experience the spiritual life! When I describe to them about when we go outside for Pascha and bang on the doors, this is what this means, this is what’s happening, this is what we’re connecting with, they’re like, “Yeah! I’m participating in that!”

So really, that’s one of the things that I would say, but also I would say: Don’t neglect to bring your children to church and have them participate in as much as possible, as much as possible. I mean, I know that some people have a barrier to connecting with Church life, and it can be hard, but I would say: Bring them as much as you possibly can, to everything. That’s what I do with my kids. They don’t come to every single service; they can’t. For one thing, their mother is tired! [Laughter] But I try to bring them to as much as possible, especially during Holy Week and all that kind of thing, and certainly to surround them in the home with icons, to pray together as a family—all these things.

The biggest thing, really, is to incorporate it into your own way of being, and they’re going to see that. They’re going to see that. So, Celia, I hope that you’re listening and I hope that that helps. God bless your kids. Pray for them, that they would be able to see and to experience all the glory of God, because they’re just as capable of it—and more than capable, in many cases, of it—as you are, probably. So that’s a good question, and definitely one that’s close to my heart.

Fr. Stephen: And part and parcel of all of these things… Like when you read the Torah, this becomes really clear. There’s a concern all through the Torah. It’s not just: Well, here are some intellectual truths we want to communicate to adults, or even: Here are some things we want to tell you how to do and how to live your life. Over and over it says, “When you teach your children, in future generations,” the most obvious example being Passover, when your son asks you, “How is this night different from all other nights?” you say, “This is the night on which the Lord delivers us from Egypt.”

Fr. Andrew: Tell the story! Tell the story!

Fr. Stephen: Right. So part of the adult reception and experience of these events, built into the ritual of experiencing and re-presenting these things is the traditioning of them, is the handing of them on to the next generation. You can’t… You’re not completing the ritual if you’re not passing it on to the next generation in the process.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. All right, well, I see that we have a full board of calls, so this is good! God willing, this is going to be wall-to-wall calls. So our first caller is James. James, are you there?

James: I am here, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Christ is risen!

James: He is risen indeed!

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. Well, welcome, James. We’re glad to have you. What is your question, comment, weird poltergeist experience that you want to share with us tonight on Lord of Spirits?

James: And I first have to say, I did that completely on instinct. I should have said, “Truly he is risen!”

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t get Fr. Andrew started on that.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t get me started, that’s true! [Laughter] I have a whole canned rant I’m just ready to pull out. “He truly is risen!”

James: I would love to hear that. I would enjoy the perspective on that.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so what’s your deal, James?

James: Okay, so I have this little list of lists of questions for you guys, but I narrowed it down to one set of questions, revolving around ritual and spiritual identity of nationhood, because I’ve been reading through the book by Fr. Stephen and I’ve read through all of Fr. Stephen’s blog posts—fun project—and looked into a lot of his stuff. So I’m clear that there isn’t just a permanent number of 70 nations or 70-plus-one of Israel, etc., because that’s metaphorical in Revelation and all that stuff, so that number changes. And we also see, in Israel, that it splits into two, and God judges those nations separately in a sense, because you didn’t have all of them go into exile at the same time, is judging them separately, in a sense.

So there’s that, and then I also remember Fr. Andrew, you talking about, at the Doxamoot, about how storytelling and language create nations in this sense, about the Kalevala of Finland, and I kind of get back to how Luther and his translation of the German Bible effectively created Germany out of a mess of tribes, creating one national identity out of them via language. And then God of course divided them by languages at the Tower of Babel. So there’s a connection there.

I’m trying to figure out what specifically though ritually identifies a nation. Israel was called out of Egypt, as you’ve discussed, and that genetically included Egyptians and Abraham, Isaac, and so on, and it was made very clear that it’s not genetic; it’s not ethnic: it’s a ritual defining of a nation. But how does that work? What specifically…? Can you just go create a new nation ritual like you create a new family ritually or you create a new church ritually? Can you just go create a new nation in that same sense?

And then I have some follow-up questions from that. I’ll leave you to start with that, though.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Define the universe. Give three examples.” Sorry. Yeah, okay, so I’ll just address the thing that I said—I’m glad to hear that you went to Doxamoot. I’ll address the thing that you said there. So I was echoing something that J.R.R. Tolkien said, which is that he regards peoples as basically being defined mainly by their language, and for him that doesn’t just mean the words that they say; that also means the stories that they tell in those words.

James: That’s what a philologist would say.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, right, exactly, because he’s a philologist. And I’m not a philologist; I’m sort of like a wanna-be philologist. I just like being near those people. But I think that there’s something true about that, and even while language is not itself sort of by itself ritual, there’s something ritualistic to it, and especially when you’re telling stories to each other, that increases character, I would say.

James: Like the saying about the sacramental imagination. It’s like the traditioning of a set of stories. [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly, and then the other thing that I would add, because I want to leave… I know that Fr. Stephen has things to say about nations here, but the other thing that I would add is that one of the things that struck me liturgically over the last almost 25 years of being an Orthodox Christian is how often the phrase “the race of Christians” and then also “a new nation which is called by thy name,” how often that gets used in our liturgical services. So in a sense, then… And this is not to denigrate any cultures or whatever that exist—I have love for lots of cultures; I’m getting to know cultures that I’m descended from but didn’t receive anything from—but that the nation now is the Christian race. That’s the nation that every single person is called into, and clearly it’s ritual participation that makes that what it is. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what language you speak, what your accent is like, what your background is—everyone is called into this, everyone can be part of it, and thus that’s why it’s a new exodus. It’s a new passover; it’s the Christian, the ultimate passover in the sense of being final, not just in the sense of being “the very best,” but final, like the ultimate. It’s always a thing. There’s that game called Final Fantasy, but there [were], like, 16 of them? How does that work? But anyway—we stop for some pop culture.

Fr. Stephen: “Penultimate Fantasy” doesn’t quite have the same ring.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly! It’s not the last. Why are you calling it ultimate? But yeah, so that’s what I would have to say about those. So, Fr. Stephen, what would you add or correct or adjust or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think the term “people” as in “a people,” “people” being used as a collective noun, sort of functions a little better in conveying the idea. You know, we’ve talked on this show before about how there’s four main ways that we interface and interact with and shape our world as humans, and those are language, music, art, and ritual. And so I think you find those four things constituting any given people. And in most cases, that occurs sort of naturally; it’s a shared thing within a people who are living in community, and so that then develops into a people. But—and this usually ends up being very dark—there have been, especially in the post-modern era—I don’t want to get all Guy Debord on everybody—but you can try to do that from the top down. You can create this sort of… Rather than it being people interfacing with the world and reality as it is, you can, from the outside, pipe into people: Here is the world, sort of as a spectacle, so this mix of propaganda and advertising and all of these other things, to create this sort of collective hallucination that you then impose upon people, that uses art and music and twists and shapes the language and even rituals. Then you’ve seen totalitarian governments do this.

So that can happen. You can decide, “I’m going to create or reshape this people through these kind of means.” And when that’s happening—and this is sort of what… even though there weren’t sort of the totalitarian states that we think of today… When you hear in the New Testament, the New Testament authors talking about “the world” in that negative sense, of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” when they talk about “the world,” that is in part what that is. “The world says, the world does.” The world out there: they’re not talking about created reality; they’re talking about this system that is trying to be sort of imposed. So Christian iconography, Christian liturgical music, Christian use of language—even though there are a lot of different languages used in the Church, we still sort of have our own language; there are words we use that don’t mean anything to anybody else or that mean something totally different—and most obviously Christian ritual are all a way of fighting back against that encroachment of that kind of imposition of a people, an identity as a people or an identity as a community that’s trying to be thrust from outside, that’s trying to say, “Humanity is one thing. This is what it means to be human,” and we’re saying, “No. This,” in response.

Fr. Andrew: All right. I know you said you had a whole set of questions, James, but you do have to let the other kids have a chance.

James: Yes. Can I ask one follow-up question?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay, you get one follow-up!

James: Because, yeah, I was thinking about that in terms of having the different patron saints of different nations as maybe like provinces under that maybe. So in Scripture we have the idea of the land being defiled, like specifically the shedding of innocent blood, but of all the different horrible sins that are in Leviticus 17-18, around there, talking about “the land spews out the nations that are before you; don’t do these things or you will also get spewed out.” And so you have this idea of the guilt, the sin, contaminating the land, and that’s tied to a national guilt, in a sense. So I was wondering is it possible—because we can’t cleanse it by the blood of those who shed it, Leviticus says in there—what do the apostles say? “Well, we’re the community inside of this nation, and the land is defiled. We don’t agree with it, but they’re not listening to us.” Can we just go say, “All right, we’re going to go be our own nation over here, because we don’t agree with all that horrible stuff they’re doing,” like a tribe basically that has their own identity, saying, “We don’t want to be part of this. We want to go be a Christian province, effectively, and not that.” Can you escape that? Is the land owned by those peoples no longer being the land of that other nation?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think I get what you’re asking. So I would say this. I mean, in the first century and the second century, this was Christianity. There was not… I mean, if you ever read the Epistle to Diognetus, for instance, one of the things it says is that Christians are not distinguished from other people by the way they dress, the way they talk, what they eat, whatever; they live among everyone else, they’re citizens, but they’re also citizens, they are truly citizens of this other world at the same time. So you don’t see Christian separatist movements in the early Church, even though they had way more reason to do that than we do in the 21st century. I mean, think about—talk about defile the land! Like, come on! It was a vile, awful, pagan, debauched place. It was the worst. So yeah, I don’t know if that responds to what you were saying, but that’s what I would say.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul was conducting his missionary journeys under Caligula, for example, and Nero, obviously.

Fr. Andrew: Wasn’t Caligula the one that deified his horse? I’m trying to remember.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he made his horse a senator.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But in addition, in addition to secession being the wrong way to go, the whole time that Israel was going wrong—which was pretty much the whole time, we know from the Old Testament—there were faithful priests who were going every day and serving the sacrifices and offering the incense for the sins and the ignorances of the people. They were atoning to purify a space within that contaminated land for God to continue to dwell. We talked about this in one of the very early episodes. The role which Christians have in—since that’s where I am, we’ll say—the United States, the role of Christians with respect to the United States is the same as, is directly parallel to, the role that a priest has with respect to his parish.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Well, all right. I hope that’s useful to you and gives you something to chew on, James.

James: Thank you, yeah. Appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks very much for calling. Well, we’re going wall-to-wall calls. Now we have a call from Greg. So, Greg, are you there?

Greg: Yes. Yes, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Greg, to The Lord of Spirits. Excellent. Good to hear your voice.

Greg: Okay, I guess my question’s a little odd…

Fr. Andrew: You’ve come to the right place!

Greg: I’ve talked to Mormons, and they basically tell you that their version of heaven will be a paradise where you’ll get your body back but it’ll be when it was in perfect health and you were young and fit, and you will get—of course, they also promise them multiple wives, too. But when you die you get your own planet.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, when you were young and your heart was an open book. [Laughter]

Greg: Yeah, something like that. You’re perfectly fit, and, I don’t know, probably like 21 or something, smart enough to… I guess my question… I’ve heard a couple Evangelical books on pets, and they try to say there’s a case that you’ll be reunited with your pets in heaven if you really want them, because that would be paradise, and God would give you that. I guess if you had hobbies with pets, like horseback riding and things like that, would you be able to do that, or is it just a spiritual realm?

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, I’m going to let you take that one first, Fr. Stephen, but I have some things to say, but let me ponder that first.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the question isn’t, “Do all dogs go to heaven?”; it’s, “Do some dogs go to heaven?”

Fr. Andrew: “Does my dog go to heaven?”

Fr. Stephen: Mine are all heathens; we’ve established this.

Fr. Andrew: And you can’t baptize them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, yeah, they run like crazy any time I bless the house and throw holy water around.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so case in point.

Fr. Stephen: Try to get away from it. Kind of proves my whole thesis. So here we go. This is going to be the most controversial thing I’ve ever said on this podcast, and that is: maybe.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Everybody loves your yes-or-no answers: …no. …yes.

Fr. Stephen: That’s why this is the most controversial one, because I said maybe. So a couple of things, on why I say maybe. St. Gregory Palamas actually has a work on this, on the souls of animals, because he affirms, as pretty much everyone in the ancient world, that plants and animals, like humans, have souls. It’s just a different type of soul; it’s not the same type of soul. And that’s because “soul” basically means life; that’s what the word means. So when you’re reading in Genesis 1, and God creates the fish and the words, it literally says he created all the souls that swim in the sea and that fly in the air. So “soul” just means it’s alive. The Latin word for “soul” is anima, and that’s where we get “animate” as opposed to “inanimate.” So they do have souls, but not human souls, and so that’s why St. Gregory says, well, you know, animals aren’t… don’t go to heaven or hell or any of that, because it’s a different type of soul; it’s not a human soul.

However, here’s the other piece. The other piece is—and I’ve used this before to illustrate what theosis means, as a common illustration—if you take one my dogs, even one of my heathen dogs, and you compare it—like you take my dog Shelby, named after Commander Shelby, and you compare her—

Fr. Andrew: Really!?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. You didn’t know that?

Fr. Andrew: No, that’s fun! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —and you compare her to a wolf or a dingo or a wild dog in general, you would not think they’re the same species: they don’t behave the same way, they don’t act and interact the same way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we had dogs like that on Guam. They were awful.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re scavengers.

Fr. Andrew: They’re gross.

Fr. Stephen: So she makes facial expressions, not because she experiences human emotions, but she’s learned that we think it’s cute and reward her with treats. And she has come up with these ingenious solutions to problems. She will literally, if someone has food and they’re sitting there eating it, go and run to the front door and start barking like there’s someone there to get you to come look so she can loop around and get at your food. [Laughter] This is what I mean by heathenism.

So what’s the difference? Well, there’s no genetic difference between wild dogs and domesticated dogs, but she’s spent her whole life living with humans and interacting with humans and in a human house, and not with wild dogs. So she has in a certain way been humanized. She has become different because of that relationship with a higher sort of level of being. And I’ve used that, as I’ve said before, as an illustration of part of how theosis works, that when we are spending our time not with sort of “the wild humans” that we start out as and can very easily become, but with God, in the presence of God, we also become more like a higher state of being.

So that, to me, opens up the possibility that potentially some of these somewhat humanized animals—we know there are going to be animals. The world to come is this creation, transfigured. That includes plants and animals and all the things that God created. So that to me opens up the possibility—I’m not going to say yes; I’m not saying this is a fact: I’m saying this is a possibility. It’s like when St. Paul says, “I have not heard from the Lord on this,” this is my speculation, that there is a possibility that perhaps some of these animals who have become somewhat humanized might still be around in the age to come.

Fr. Andrew: So the thing that I would add to that is… I’ve heard people say things about paradise that are like this, except maybe in other categories, like, well, it wouldn’t be paradise unless they have lasagna there, or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Bacon.

Fr. Andrew: Bacon, right—bacon lasagna! Bacon lasagna. [Laughter] But I think that the key thing that people have to understand is that the life of the age to come, if you’re with Christ and it’s paradise and you’re in the kingdom of God, it is not going to be disappointing in any way. Like, there’s nothing about it that you’re going to be like: “Oh man! This is paradise!? They don’t have… Milky Way bars?” or whatever. It’s not going to be like that. So whatever it is that you love about this world—and by that, I’m not talking about addictions or whatever; I mentioned food, but the things that are genuine joy—whatever it is that you love about this world, that same… the joy is going to be there, but multiplied times infinity. It’s not going to be a bummer, no matter what you encounter, whether or not your dog is there with you.

I like the point that you made, Father, about it being a potential being within relationship, because we tend, at least within the West, to think in categories, like, again, “all dogs go to heaven.” Well, I mean, having encountered some feral dogs in my time, I would prefer that they not be present there. [Laughter] But if it is possible, then out of relationship with human beings who are in relationship with Christ makes the most sense to me, but at the same time it would be hard to say, especially to a kid who’s just lost their first pet, “Well, your dog doesn’t have a soul, doesn’t have the kind of soul you have, and Jesus didn’t die to save your dog.” So the way I often approach that is I’ll just say, “Look, whatever it’s like, paradise is going to be awesome! Whatever it’s like.” Because I think that that is true; everything that we know about it is true. I don’t know if that answers your question, Greg.

Greg: I just thought of something.

Fr. Andrew: Go ahead, Greg.

Greg: I thought about… I know some of this stuff, because for a short period of time I lived in Evanston, Wyoming, right on the Utah border, so I got to know a lot of Mormons. They believe that you get married for eternity, and I saw in the Bible where it says… somebody asked Jesus if a woman was married and two of her husbands dies, she gets married to a third guy and he dies, and they both die or whatever, then whose wife will she be in heaven? And Christ said, “Well, there won’t be any marriage in heaven.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he says, “You err, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the power of God,” and that God is the God of the living and not of the dead, because they were trying to disprove the resurrection is what that conversation was particularly about. But I think the point being that a kind of… Paradise is not simply a really great version of this. [Laughter] We don’t know exactly all the ways it’s going to be different, but it’s going to be different for sure. It’s not going to be simply like a permanent resort; that’s for sure. Which to me is—

Greg: So it won’t be like Fantasy Island.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. … Well, yes. I will not do my Ricardo Montalban impression. I promise I will not.

Fr. Stephen: If you do, I will yell, “Khan!” really loud.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? See, that would be required. But I’m not an expert in the LDS approach to paradise, but my sense is that it is much more materialist—and by that I don’t mean that they don’t believe in spiritual reality, but that theirs is a much fleshier kind of paradise is kind of my understanding of it. Fr. Stephen, is there anything you wanted to—

Greg: Yeah, they’ll promise you your own planet and you’ll get to have multiple wives, believe it or not. They never actually changed the doctrine; they just don’t talk about it when they come to your door with the white shirts and ties.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I’ve never gotten one of them to sing for me “If You Could Hie to Kolob” even though that’s really a lovely hymn. Fr. Stephen, what do you want to say on that?

Fr. Stephen: I was just going to say, beyond this particular thing with pets or spouses, it is true that the created order, the material order, is not sort of abandoned: we don’t want to go in the other direction, of having a bodiless or a—

Fr. Andrew: Ethereal.

Fr. Stephen: An ethereal kind of eternity that gets rid of the created order, but it’s that the created order finds its fullness and is transfigured through humanity—through humanity: that’s part of humanity’s role—but it’s through the relationship of humanity to the created order, and then humanity to Christ. So humanity is, again, same as we said with the last question, has this priestly role of taking the material order and, through humanity, bringing it into union with Christ so that the whole creation is transfigured. So it’s not done away with.

And, on the marriage thing in particular… So Christ is countering the idea that there’s sort of sexuality in heaven, because the question is: “Whose wife is she?” meaning “Who has her?” [which] is literally the language. And Christ is saying, “Well, you’re not going to be having each other,” like: that’s not how this works; that’s not how any of this works. [Laughter] That doesn’t mean that you and your spouse are just going to be strangers or something, or that the intimacy of the relationship—

Fr. Andrew: Exchanging glances…

Fr. Stephen: —is just going to vanish, and you’re just going to be like: hey, two people who are good pals, but you’re going to be pals with everybody, because it’s heaven, so we all love each other. That’s not what it’s saying, but it’s saying that that relationship, too, is going to be transfigured and exalted and lifted up and is going to lose all of those elements of possession, jealousy, any other things that might taint that relationship on this earth.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, hopefully that answers your question, Greg.

Greg: Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks for calling. Okay, we’re going to take one more call before we go to our first break, and that call is from our friend, Photini up in the frozen tundra. Photini, welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, it is May. [Laughter]

Photini: Hi, Abounas! Yes! I am from the Twin Cities of Ankh-Morpork, and in the second episode, I was known as “Ashley,” until people wise in the ways of caller ID called me out on it and told me not to make up fake names when I called in.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. Well, now you’ve cleaned your slate by coming out with your true name, so that’s okay.

Photini: [Laughter] That’s true. So people found out I was in queue and sent me their questions. So I’m going to be nice. I’ve got two questions that are related that you can answer together.

Fr. Andrew: Oh thanks. Thank you for that permission. That’s good.

Photini: [Laughter] I’m just saying, they’re related! So they’re both about faith and occult activity. One question is… A friend of mine, their neighbor is apparently engaging in rituals and séances and psychic activity next door, and this makes them very nervous, and they don’t quite know what to do about it or what they should do about it, but it makes them uncomfortable. The second question’s kind of related; this person says—I’m just going to read this—“My dad confronted me recently about D&D. I know by experience that it isn’t inherently demonic, but in his opinion it is ritual participation in magic, which makes it so. He says all Satan needs is an inch to get in and invade your home, and in his opinion I might as well have a oujia board in the house.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Photini: So these people were hoping for some insight from our giggling Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Well, giggling is only laughing that you don’t want.

Fr. Stephen: Tee-hee!

Fr. Andrew: That is the truth, so all of you hate-listeners out there right now, who are complaining about “giggling,” it’s just laughing you don’t want.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Don’t let’s start.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So, see, that was a They Might Be Giants reference I caught. Well, that’s because it’s from Flood, isn’t it? The only album I actually know! Yeah, that’s the only one I know, it’s true.

Right, okay, so the next-door neighbor that’s doing bad stuff over on the other side of the fence, and D&D as the devil’s funnel into your life. Right, I mean, my temptation with the neighbor, honestly, would be to go all Jericho on them. Now, just march around your own house, blowing the trumpets—but no. So, I mean, obviously that’s a real problem, and I would simply say that the key then is to just really increase your prayer life in your own home and pray specifically for those people, because they’re not the enemy; it’s the garbage they’re cavorting with that’s the enemy. They’re not the enemy. They’ve been fooled, they’ve been enslaved—they’re not the enemy. So increase prayer life at home. Find ways to be kind to them, especially without them knowing it. Love them anonymously in some way or another, and I don’t just mean feel a happy feeling in your heart about them, but do kind things for them. That’s what spiritual warfare consists of. The devil can’t deal with humility and love and self-sacrifice, because that’s not his deal. So that’s what I would say to that one.

And with regards to role-playing games, there are bad ways to do role-playing games, that’s for sure, but if you’re talking about what essentially amounts to cooperative storytelling, which is what a role-playing game is at its basis, where one person is kind of managing the story and other people are participating in it in terms of playing roles and that sort of thing, then that makes the theater just as demonic. Now, some people might argue that it was… But I think anyone who would say that role-playing games are inherently demonic, most of them are doing things like watching television, and they might go to plays, other kinds of cooperative storytelling that they themselves are just watching rather than participating in, and there’s nothing inherently evil about that. That does not constitute ritual participation in a demonic world. It definitely does not. So that’s what I would say to those two things. Fr. Stephen, I know you have opinions.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] In general, but also on this!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, on this in particular, right.

Fr. Stephen: Also on this, yeah. So what Fr. Andrew said about the first case is basically right.

Fr. Andrew: Yay! I got one!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] You don’t have to get “Um, actually”-ed on this. But because what they may find is that if they do those things in terms of intensifying their own prayer life and prayer life as a family and those kind of things, is that the stuff they’re trying to do next door will stop working. That we have actually… It’s interesting: we have some writings from the third century where pagans at the time were trying to figure out why the oracles had stopped working in some of the smaller towns.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s sabotage!

Fr. Stephen: As Christianity was spreading, stuff just stopped working the way it used to, and they come up with all these bizarre theories, like one of them was just: maybe daemons just get old and die and we need to find a new one.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe they’re on vacation! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They’re in the bathroom…

Fr. Andrew: I’ve heard this one before! I know this one! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They live longer than us, but maybe not forever—who knows? [Laughter] And so there are reports up to this very day of that kind of thing happening, where it will just stop working. I’ve also had a case where I advised someone to pray for the people and to do those things, and they literally moved. They just up and moved, like something happened where they just decided, “We can’t live here any more,” and moved.

The important thing is that you don’t fall into a mode of “We need to be afraid of what’s going on over there and find some way to protect ourselves.” We’re not, as Christians, on the defensive, spiritually; we’re on the offensive. We’re on the winning team. D-Day’s already happened; we’re on mop-up time. So they don’t have anything to fear from their neighbor; their neighbor actually as something to fear from them, that all of this that they’re doing is going to stop working, and they’re going to have to confront some things.

And that, then, relates to the D&D thing. In this case, I do have to “Um, actually…” Fr. Andrew a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks!

Fr. Stephen: That theater was a bad example to bring up, because Greek tragedy was very much derived from pagan ritual, with the goats and all that—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Greek tragedy, but I’m talking about modern… I’m talking about going to Phantom of the Opera on Broadway.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, well, how many steps are there between Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So just not the best example. But, so yes, obviously, if you’re playing a role-playing game, and you’re playing characters who are evil and you’re doing human sacrifices and other horrible things that you’re fantasizing about doing, that’s bad. But a bunch of nerds like me when I was a teenager getting together and drinking Mountain Dew and doing math is not evil or sinister in any way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t know, even Mountain Dew, though…

Fr. Stephen: We’d get a little wired, we’d get a little teed up, but it was okay. We’d get to sleep eventually.

So the bigger issue that, again, that’s falling into this defensive thing. This is like: “Well, the devil’s going to find some way into our house, and it’s going to be like a Harry Potter book,” or watching The Witcher on Netflix or something. That’s not how the devil gets into your house; it’s not that difficult. He doesn’t have to trick you into buying the wrong novel. He gets in there because you’re proud and you’re angry and you’re envious and you’re lazy and through the pipeline of lust that you have coming in through the internet to your PC—that’s how he gets into your house. But we don’t want to deal with those things. Dealing with those things is very hard and, again, forces us to confront things that we don’t want to confront. It’s much easier to sort of go for these sort of obvious cultural things, like: “Oh, that has magic or a wizard in it, so it’s evil, so I get that out of my house and now we have a nice, pure house.” And you’re whitewashing the tomb. You’re washing the outside of the bowl, to use Christ’s terminology to the Pharisees.

The problem isn’t that you’re cleaning the outside; the problem is you’re not doing anything about the inside. So we shouldn’t be sitting around being afraid that we might watch or read or bring into our house the wrong object; we should be actively—again, proactively—on the offense, inspecting our own life for the places where the devil’s already there and already has a hold of us, and through repentance getting rid of them. Because the saints could get together and play a game of D&D and it wouldn’t be a problem. They have better things to do, but, hypothetically…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, does that answer your question, Photini?

Photini: That absolutely does. Thank you so much, Fathers. You know, time after time, I find myself referencing things that I have learned on this podcast. Sometimes I wish I could turn back time just on Orthodoxy and my youth, but I figure time is on my side, I’ve had the time of my life participating in the Facebook group; I pray the abounas stay forever young because I will still be listening when I’m 64. Fathers, bless! Have a good evening!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you very much. All right, we’re going to go—

Fr. Stephen: You know…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, go ahead, Father.

Fr. Stephen: She said she was 64, but I think she was really 28. I see your references, and I counter!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And with that, we are going to go to our first break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! That was probably my favorite commercial we’ve ever done. It was a really good one.

Fr. Stephen: It was a good commercial, but did they seal that quote from you in a coffee can? What was up with the audio?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t know! I think… I feel like… I didn’t even know they were going to play that commercial, so thank you for that little surprise, Trudi. But, no, I think that was from when I did a little interview after that book came out, and I think that was before… I think I did it over the phone or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, so you were talking into a can on the end of a string, and they were recording it on the other end.

Fr. Andrew: Right, long before I am perched in the Tower of Podcasting where I currently am. Okay, so this is our Q&A show. We’re taking all calls, all the time. We want to hear from you. If you call and you’re not able to get through, just call back. The lines are full; this is really awesome. So our next caller is David. David, are you there?

David: Yes, I am here.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, David, to The Lord of Spirits.

David: Thank you very much, Fathers. My question is about the book of Enoch and whether we should be cautious about incorporating doctrines derived from a book that’s not accepted by the Chalcedonian Church, and sort of… If the doctrines that we are talking about in The Lord of Spirits are not necessarily derived from the book of Enoch but just also happened to be present in that book as well, what should we be cautious about in reading the book of Enoch so that we don’t incorporate anything that isn’t scriptural into our lives?

Fr. Andrew: Great question.

David: My second little follow-up question is for my five-year-old, and he wants to know: Why do the demons try to drag the people off the ladder of divine ascent?

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. So I think we should answer that one first. Yeah: because they hate us. That’s what it is. Misery loves company. They’re in rebellion against God, they’re trying to snatch us away from God: that’s why they’re doing that.

Fr. Stephen: And they’re not powerful enough to do anything to God, but they can attack us, and God loves us.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So as to the first one, you might think this is something that I have nothing to say about and should all be punted to Fr. Stephen, but before he goes into a 20-minute thesis about this, I wanted to say that… So the things that we talk about on this show and then, frankly, the things that are embedded in canonical Scripture and in liturgical tradition are not derived from the book of Enoch in the sense that no one knew about this, and here’s this book and they discover it and they say— Hey, is that the five-year-old?

David: That’s a three-year-old, actually.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, hi, three-year-old! These are sounds at my house, too. So it’s not that they’re uncovered from this book, and we’re like: “Okay, now let’s put this in our church services.” That’s not what’s going on; that’s not the way that this works. Rather, what we’re looking at is multiple witnesses to the same Tradition that is the faith of the people of God. So of course it’s going to appear in lots of different places, and that’s because the Orthodox Church does not look at any text the way that, for instance, Sola Scriptura Protestantism treats the Bible, which is largely that it’s a book and you derive things from it and that’s your religion, that Christianity is derived from interpreting that book and using that book well. I know I’m simplifying a little bit, but that’s generally the way it’s seen. So it’s not like we’re pulling stuff out of there to try to incorporate it into our faith. Our faith is what it is, and that book witnesses to some elements of it.

So then, as to the second part, what, in reading that book, shall we say, “Okay, we’re just going to leave that to the side?” I will definitely punt that one over to Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, well, yeah. So there’s… Agreeing with what Fr. Andrew’s saying, we don’t derive doctrines from Scripture and then construct Christian theology in that way. That is the conservative Protestant approach to doctrine, but that’s not how we approach it. Christ, when he talks about the truth going forward in St. John’s gospel, he talks about there being two witnesses—you establish truth through any two witnesses in the Torah—he says the two witnesses are the apostles and the Holy Spirit.

And so we have, in the first and second centuries, it’s very common for the Fathers to refer to the New Testament as the memoirs of the apostles, that this is the account of their experience. So we’ve got in the New Testament Scriptures—we’ve got the one witness, and we can say in the Scriptures as a whole we have the one witness, and then the other witness is the Holy Spirit, who is alive and active in the Church. So we have the record—inspired record, inspired by the Holy Spirit—of the experiences of people in ages past, and then we have the Holy Spirit who causes the saints in every generation to share in that experience as our two witnesses.

So what we’re trying to do on the show when we talk about things in 1 Enoch or Jubilees or the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, or any of these texts which the Church has preserved in her monastic settlements in most cases, is not to say, “These should really be Scripture.” What is canonical and what isn’t is an objective thing. You literally can’t argue about it, because to be canonical means that the text is read and has authority in your community. So a text either does or it doesn’t. My parish, we don’t read 1 Enoch in the liturgical services; it does not have that authority. So me arguing that it should is sort of non-sensical. It’s not. It’s an objective thing; it’s objectively not part of the canon.

That said, though, when we’re reading, say, 2 Peter or Jude, and Jude quotes Enoch, and we say, “Well, wait, where did Enoch say that? I don’t see that in the Old Testament.” Or in 2 Peter, it refers to the angels who sinned. When these things are referenced, when the lake of fire comes up in St. Matthew’s gospel and in the book of Revelation, and we haven’t heard that terminology before, and we’re trying to understand what is meant by that in the New Testament, well then it helps a lot to know about the religious and spiritual life of the people who wrote the New Testament. And part of that life was reading a whole lot of texts that aren’t part of the Bible, just like, for us in our spiritual life, we read a whole lot of books other than the Bible. I mean, I think most of us should read the Bible more than we do, but we also read the Fathers and we read other spiritual books and we read other spiritual things. By doing that, and even by quoting them sometimes, we’re not saying they’re part of Scripture or they’re the same thing as Scripture, but they’re valuable, and very often they’re the context we use to help us understand the Scriptures.

David: But those things are not claimed by others as Scripture. So why…? I mean, that all makes sense to me. What the difference with the book of Enoch and other apocryphal or pseudepigrapha, those are not claimed by other groups to be Scripture like these are, and so to me most likely it makes sense to me that there would be something in them that we should caution ourselves in reading them, because they were sort of actively chosen not to be Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: I disagree that they were actively chosen not to be Scripture. There was never a vote taken; that’s a myth. The reason why the Ethiopian Church considers 1 Enoch canonical is that Ethiopian Jews considered 1 Enoch to be canonical, and so when the Christian Church began in Ethiopia, they took the canon of the Ethiopian Jews as their Old Testament. They just received it. They didn’t argue about it; they didn’t discuss it; they just received that. That was different [from] the Palestinian Jewish canon and the Alexandrian Greek Jewish canon, and so in the Orthodox Church we have different… So, for example, I can’t go to one of my Russian Orthodox brothers and say, “Hey, look. The Greek-speaking Church rejected 4 Maccabees actively as part of the Old Testament. Why do you have it in there? Or 4 Ezra?” I can’t do… Because that’s not what happened historically. It’s functioning differently in different churches.

So basically what I’m arguing for, in terms of the caution, yeah, just like when I read a spiritual book or even when I read one of the Fathers, I don’t assume that every single word is absolutely true. The Fathers disagree sometimes. I can’t say that both of them are 100% literally accurate: they disagree. So I might try to understand why they disagree and that kind of thing, but I’m not… I don’t elevate them to the level of Scripture, where I think every word that St. John Chrysostom ever spoke is inspired by God the way that St. Paul’s epistles are inspired. The Church has never said that. And so the same thing with 1 Enoch. At least the parts that get quoted and referenced in the New Testament are true; the rest of it, there’s probably some things that are true and some things that aren’t, just like any other book that isn’t part of Scripture. So you have to read it in that same sense: you take what’s helpful and useful and you discard the rest.

And in the East… It’s also important to add that in the East traditionally, when you look at the Eastern Fathers and you look at the canon discussions in the East—and this is a difference with the West. In the West, canon was seen very much as a binary thing, one or zero. It’s either canonical and it’s true and good, or it’s not canonical and set it aside, get rid of it. In the East there were always three categories. There were books to be read in the churches, which is what we call canonical, used in the liturgical worship; books to be read in the home; and books not to be read. So your heretical stuff is the books not to be read: the Gospel of Thomas. But I would compare these Old Testament books that are in some canons and not others, or that were preserved in a monastery… Like, Mount Athos, they copied and recopied for centuries the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs; they never read it in the liturgical services, but they kept it and they copied it. I would put a book like that in the same place that I’d put, like, the Epistle of Barnabas or the Shepherd of Hermas or 1 Clement: the Apostolic Fathers. Not part of the New Testament: we’re all clear, that’s not part of the New Testament. You can find people in the early Church who thought they were part of the New Testament, who argued for them being part of the New Testament. We’re clear they’re not, but we still read them, and they’re still helpful to us and useful to us. We just don’t treat them like they’re the Bible. They’re in that second category.

And so the disagreements between the Greek Church and the Slavic Church and the Ethiopian Church and the Coptic Church over the Old Testament is really a disagreement over whether certain books are in the canonical category, to be read in the church, or if they’re in the category: these are books that shouldn’t be read in the church but are fine to be read in the home. That’s our disagreement, not whether they’re canonical or heretical.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense?

David: That does. Yeah, that really helps a lot. Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for calling. Before we take our next caller, I got a message over Facebook Messenger with a question that I actually thought was a really good question, and I just thought I would bring it out. We’ve kind of addressed this a little bit in the past…

Fr. Stephen: You realize now everyone is going to Facebook Message you their questions.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t do it!

Fr. Stephen: You just opened a can of worms. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I know. Oh man. This is the last one, okay? [Laughter] All right, so this is from John, and John says this:

This program has opened my eyes and my heart to the powerful reality not only of the spiritual realm, which I always knew in some way was there all along, but also to the importance and truth of the Old Testament. I’m loving the ability to read the stories of the Old Testament and understand that they are not just important stories, but that they tell a true story that is the foundation of our faith.

But—and this is a big “but”—I am struggling with some of the assertions made about the mindset of the ancient world. When you say that the ancients weren’t referring to the sun, moon, and stars themselves but to the gods which controlled them, this is difficult to accept consider the fact that, to them, they were simply bright lights in the sky. They didn’t have telescopes; they couldn’t tell they were huge balls of burning gas and nuclear reactions. My point is that there were at least some things in the Old Testament and in the ancient worldview that have been proved utterly wrong by scientific inquiry in the last few centuries.

So the question is: What do we do with that? And I would… The way that I would begin getting into this question, because I think it’s a good question, is… I like to point out to people that ancient people believed both that the world was flat and that underneath it was water and the underworld and the heavens were above and that the world was round at the same time. And they didn’t try to make those two images reconcile with each other. Like, there was a sense that there were different ways of looking at it. And I think the problem comes when we attempt to say, “Okay, so this is the material model that we all need to be using, and let’s try to figure out how we make all these elements come together and reconcile.” I don’t know. That’s where I would begin this. It’s a good question, I think. What would you say to that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, I mean, I think we have to get it out of our head that ancient people were unfrozen caveman-lawyer, where it was like: “Your modern ways frighten and confuse me.” [Laughter] And that’s kind of in there in the question. “Oh, these are just bright lights in the sky. We don’t have a telescope. What is it?”—and now we know better, right? Now we have a telescope and so now we know better what they are.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, and it’s an honest question. Like, I get it, I get it, you know?

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this is part of what we’re trying to attack: that the ancients were less sophisticated than [we], that they were somehow different [from] us in that regard, not a difference in approach, but a difference in cognitive level or something. And this is what leads to… Not that the person who asked the question thinks any of this—I’m not imputing this to them, but this is what leads to stuff like Ancient Aliens, like “There’s no way that ancient people could have built the pyramids! There’s no way! They’re a bunch of primitive screw-heads! They don’t know anything!”

And that’s simply not true. So they understood, for example, the sun and moon to be one of the bodies of gods. So the sun—we’ll talk about Egyptians. The sun is one of the bodies of Re. We may have a more developed view of what that body of Re is made out of, but that has nothing to do with their belief. A modern pagan could say, “Yes, the sun is a mass of incandescent gas,” or “a miasma of incandescent plasma,” if they’re using the new version of the song, “but it’s the body of the god that I worship.” Just like they believed that a quartz statue was one of the bodies of the god they worshiped. They crafted this statue and then they did the ritual of the opening of the mouth, and they said, “This is now one of the bodies, one of the localizations, one of the places to interact with our god.” We can come in now, with our more sophisticated science, with an electron microscope; we can tell you all about the quartz; we can tell you all about the molecular structure. They didn’t know about any of that, but that has nothing to do… They could know all that and still believe the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, well, think about it: don’t we already accept that with regards to the human body? Like we know way more about sort of how the human body works, and yet we still believe it’s our bodies. We still believe it belongs to this person. We don’t say, “Well, we know so much about it now that there’s no way there could be a soul in there.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that I think is the key, is that the myths, the stories, the religion is not a primitive form of science that science has replaced. It is not trying to do the same thing; it is doing a different thing that science doesn’t do.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. It’s a good question. I’m glad we had an opportunity to bring that out. Okay, so we’re going to take a call now from Brett. So, Brett, are you there?

Brett: Yes. Thank you, Fathers, for taking my call. I’ve got a question. It’s actually back from the Christmas episode, so I’ve had some time to mull it over. I guess I’m just kind of… after that episode I’m curious. Obviously, you talked about some of the different constellations, all of that kind of stuff. I guess I’m just kind of left with: What do we do with astrology nowadays? Is there really anything that could be looked at still and like: “Oh, this thing points to Christ”? I don’t know if I’m really making sense now that I’m asking it, but I guess just like: What about modern astrology, if there is anything, that could be good or beneficial that we could glean from? Does that make sense?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I mean, I would say, number one, first we have to realize that there’s Christian astrology, and then there’s what you refer to as modern astrology, which is this kind of New Age store… I don’t know, newspaper whatever, this sort of future-predicting thing. And the big difference—the biggest difference between those two is Christian astrology, biblical astrology, is a way of understanding God’s creation and his salvation and his plan for mankind: all this being one great thing that is evidencing in numerous places and in numerous ways. Whereas people who are trying to read their sign and predict the future and “this is what your day is going to be like” and all this kind of thing, it’s really about—it’s a kind of divination on some level. Now, most people don’t take it very seriously, but there are certainly people that do. I don’t know, Father: do you want to add anything to that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think the key is that we as Christians, especially Orthodox Christians, believe that God is constantly—I mean, the psalm that we spend so much time with in that episode: “Day after day, the heavens pour forth speech…”—God is speaking to us and communicating to us and communicating his grace to us and acting in our lives through the whole created order—not just the sky, but everything. And there is… I think the important element to take from it is to be attentive to what God is saying to us and how God is communicating to us, even if that’s just at the level of going out at night in a place where there’s not a lot of ambient light and beholding the beauty of God’s creation in the heavens.

The problem, as Fr. Andrew was pointing to, is that ancient divination and astrology, whether you were looking at the stars or you were looking at the entrails of a goat, that you’re using techne—you’re using a technique, you’re using an art—to try to divine and foretell the future, in order to be able to control it; or you’re looking for omens because you believe that the omens, the stars, control in a fatalistic way the course of your human life, and you’re trying to be sort of forewarned and forearmed about it—and neither of those is sort of valid. Most of the places where astrology shows up in the Scriptures, it’s either to use the stars and the sun and the moon as symbolic of the reality of angelic beings and therefore of the destiny of humanity, or it’s being used to actively invert pagan and especially Babylonian astrology, to say that actually Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the Lord over the stars of the heavens, not vice-versa.

Brett: Gotcha, yeah. Sorry, I don’t want to ask a ton of questions or anything, but…

Fr. Andrew: You can do a follow-up if you want.

Brett: Okay, thank you!

Fr. Stephen: We’ll allow it.

Brett: Fr. Stephen, appreciate it! [Laughter] You mentioned about the—oh, I’m forgetting exactly how you worded it now, but basically just that whole idea that “the stars determine your future” kind of a deal. A brother of mine had mentioned to me while he was actually visiting for Christmas, so that Christmas episode was fresh on my mind, about how he started looking into star charting and all that kind of stuff, and how that deals with people’s personalities. I mean, I guess I wonder if that is a modern way of trying to be maybe a little fatalistic about “these constellations were around when you were born, so that makes you this kind of person,” right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, our faults are not in our stars; they’re in ourselves.

Fr. Andrew: There we go! Yes!

Fr. Stephen: I came up with that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Did you? Did you!?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I came up with that all on my own. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you very much for calling. It was great to talk to you tonight.

Brett: Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, next we have John calling. So, John, are you there?

John: Am I there?

Fr. Andrew: Yes! We hear you! You made it!

John: Hurrah! All right, so I have a simple question about seraphim and serpents, but it’s probably best if I come at it the long way around, like a serpent, I guess. [Laughter] In one of the first episodes, you talked about the serpent in Eden being related to the seraphim, since the seraphim are sort of the hybrid throne guardians, so like the serpent of [Inaudible], you know, the royal serpent. And then you have the serpent in Eden in sort of a reverse role: instead of guarding the throne, guarding the holy place in the garden, where he is trying to lure Adam and Eve into the center, luring them into the holy place before they’re ready for it. And so you have this fallen serpent, you have this ultimate hybrid monster, the dragon at the bottom of the world. But then at the top of the world you also have those, you have ultimate hybrid cherubim, with their four faces. I know the Church has found so much meaning in that, from the [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: John, if I could interrupt you there for just a second, you’re kind of breaking in and out a lot, so if you could go ahead and just cut to the chase…

John: Yeah, but I’m getting there. So the cherubim are depicted in our iconography often with the four faces and the six wings, and the seraphim are depicted in almost the same way, just with one face and the six wings, sometimes also hands holding signs saying, “Holy, holy, holy!” So here’s the question, because the seraphim in the iconography, they’re all face and wing, which is the opposite of a serpent. So do seraphim have anything to do with serpents, really, and how or why?

Fr. Andrew: Okay, that’s a good question. Fr. Stephen, I’m definitely going to let you jump in on that one.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Yes! I knew we’d get at least one of those! Yes.

Fr. Stephen: No, they do. So there’s an interesting shift—well, interesting to me, at least—that happens here, when this is carried over from the Egyptian context to the Israelite context. And so in the Egyptian context, when they talk about the throne guardians being winged serpents, the wings they’re talking about are not like flying-around wings; they’re wings as in the cobra’s hood, which is what you see if you look at… probably the most famous example would be King Tutankhamun’s burial mask, where not only does he have the cobra on his forehead, but his sort of pharaonic headdress is sort of like the hood of a cobra. That’s what they’re talking about with wings. And the other element, of course; the other interpretation of seraphim would be burning ones, and that burning was not referring to a fire but was referring to the venom of a cobra.

So the direct serpentine imagery is what’s brought to the fore in Egypt, but what’s interesting is, when this gets brought over into the Israelite context, it gets brought together with the old Canaanite word for serpent, which is nakash, and we talked about this I know before on this show, that nakash, those consonants, depending on whether it’s an adjective or a participle or a regular noun can mean different things. It can mean “serpent,” it can mean “shining one,” or it can mean “clever or deceitful one.” And you can see how those ideas are related kind of with serpents, other than maybe the “shining one” part.

And so if you look at the earliest seraphim iconography that we have in ancient Israel, which is actually coins from the northern kingdom in the eighth century, near the collapse of the northern kingdom, they depict… There’s sort of a depiction that everybody thinks is supposed to be Yahweh the God of Israel, and it’s like: “Wait, you’re not supposed to depict him”—we’re talking about the northern kingdom. [Laughter] So we’re likely fortunate that it’s not a calf. But what it is, it just looks like a round disk, which most people assume it’s supposed to be a solar disk, but it’s not totally clear, but it’s like a round disk, and that could relate to Solomon having brought back sun-worship to the Jerusalem Temple is how that could connect. But more importantly for these purposes is that on either side of this depiction of the God of Israel, enthroned, are two serpents, but the serpents now have actual wings. They have sets of actual wings, and so this would have been around the time Isaiah was having his vision.

So there’s a transformation of the iconography of seraphim from the sort of Egyptian pattern, which is what we see referenced in Genesis 3, which is what we would expect if the Torah goes back to people who left Egypt. From that Egyptian pattern, it over time becomes the depiction that we now still have in the Church, but it becomes that depiction we now have in the Church before… probably in the Persian period, so we’re talking about the beginning of the Second Temple period. It’s already taken on sort of the human face with the wings, so you can’t see what the body looks like. And I think this is most likely because the iconography of any kind of serpentine being became associated with the devil, essentially. So you still see that when you see descriptions of Azazel in Second Temple Jewish literature. He’s usually scaly. Sometimes he ends up turning into a kind of raven creature, but you still get the scales; you get some of that applied to him.

So that’s a transformation that happens in order to iconographically distinguish the seraphim who still guard the throne of God… Now remember, seraphim and cherubim are two different forms of the same kind of being in the ancient world. So if you’re going to make a change to your iconography of seraphim to distinguish them from fallen demons, demonic beings, how would you do that? Well, you’d make them look more like cherubim. The ones who didn’t fall would look more like the cherubim who didn’t fall. So that’s sort of how that happens and develops iconographically as best as we can understand it.

Fr. Andrew: Cool! Well, it seems that John’s unfortunate connection got the best of him, but hopefully he was able to hear the response there.

Fr. Stephen: We’ll just assume that I nailed it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go! So thank you very much. All right, before we go to our next call, we’re going to go ahead and take a break. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits here on Ancient Faith Radio, and we’re doing a Q&A episode, and I’ve just seen some comments in our Facebook group, because I’ve been keeping my eye on that, people saying it’s really hard to get through. Yeah, so if you call and you hear something that says, “Please leave a message…”—don’t leave a message! Call back! And, God willing, you’ll get through, but a lot of people are calling, so it’s not super easy to get through right now, but we do have someone who has successfully gotten through, and that is Kavia. Are you there, Kavia?

Kavia: Hi, I am here! Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome. You made it!

Kavia: I made it! I know!

Fr. Andrew: Yay! [Laughter] All right, what’s your question or comment or weird thing bumping in your closet?

Kavia: [Laughter] Nothing weird bumping in my closet, luckily.

Fr. Andrew: That’s good.

Kavia: Before I ask my question, all of the people on Discord who are on the Divine Council Podcast Discord have asked me to give them a shoutout. People are having a lot of fun. People are discussing this episode and it’s a lively group, so: shout-out to the Discord!

Fr. Andrew: I’ve heard of Discord. It’s a thing that the kids do these days. [Laughter]

Kavia: It is what the young kids do.

Fr. Stephen: Fr. Andrew actually is unfrozen caveman-lawyer. [Laughter]

Kavia: Wow.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man. Okay, so what’s on your mind there, Kavia. There’s like a thousand people behind you in line!

Kavia: Oh dear…

Fr. Andrew: No pressure.

Kavia: [Laughter] No pressure, got it. Okay, so the question that I’ve had since the Hell episode, and I’ve been saving it until this episode because the Voice of Steve told me to, is: How do you all understand “keep your mind in hell, but despair not,” the saying that God said to St. Silouan the Athonite? Because I’ve always been confused about this, and I can see how, on the one hand, meditating upon our own sinfulness and keeping our minds in hell, so to speak, I guess, or meditating on the day of judgment all day long, which is also a thing that many Orthodox resources say to do, I could see how on the one hand that could lead to useful, fruitful repentance. On the other hand, I also see how it could be a thing that leads us to become fearful, obsessive about our sins in a way that is not productive or helpful, so I’m kind of wondering how you all interpret “keep your mind in hell, but despair not,” and the place that that does or doesn’t have in our spiritual lives.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a great question. So the first thing that I would say in response to that is something that was said by St. Silouan’s own disciple, St. Sophrony (Sakharov), Elder Sophrony of Essex. Someone came to him and asked him essentially this question: What happens when you’re in the depths of almost despair and you feel like you’re about to be cast down into hell? And he said, “Stand at the brink until you can take it no longer, and then step back and have a cup of tea.”

I love that because it expresses a lot about what Orthodox spirituality is about. It’s not about being hard core. Like, there’s some people—there’s this horrible—I’ve seen this online. I don’t know if this is a real bumper sticker—I hope not—which says, “Orthodoxy: It’s Christianity, Only Tougher!” That is utter nonsense! It’s garbage. That’s not what Orthodox Christianity is. But so St. Silouan, okay, he was practicing a very intense kind of spirituality, and I think that what he says is true—“keep your mind in hell”—and it’s not really about thinking that you’re about to be damned, because he talks a lot about the love of Christ and the mercy of Christ; he’s not saying, “Think that you’re damned.” Rather, it’s genuinely about humility and a kind of intensity of repentance is what it comes down to.

And, frankly, most people, even though that’s good what he said—most people are not ready to live the kind of asceticism that he did. I think that a lot of people would be driven to despair if they attempted to imitate him in the particulars of what he was doing, and that’s why God gives us our own pastors and confessors, to lead us into what’s appropriate for us. And I think it’s really interesting that his own disciple, St. Sophrony, who knew him better than anyone and wrote his biography—he’s the one who wrote St. Silouan the Athonite—he’s the one who gave that, what seems like a contradictory kind of saying, but actually it’s within the same thing. He’s kind of emphasizing the “do not despair” side. Everyone always wants to know about the “keep thy mind in hell” part, but don’t forget he always said, “Do not despair!” So that’s what I would say to that. So, Father, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’m not going to “Um, actually” St. Sophrony, for Pete’s sake, man. Talk about front-loading! [Laughter] Anyway, but yeah, I think in general, one of the issues we have in Anglophone Orthodoxy is that almost everything we have translated into English is monastic literature, and most of it, if you read the parts that we usually skim over to get to the meat, like, say, for example, the introduction to the Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John Climacus basically says, “Yeah, I don’t tell married people to do any of this stuff.” He basically tells—he says there what he tells married people to do, and he says, “Now the rest of this book is for monks,” and we all skim over that and go straight into the stuff for monks and then tie ourselves in knots, like: “Oh my gosh.”

Fr. Andrew: “How do I do this in my own home with my kids!?”

Fr. Stephen: “These monks in the prison, how do I reconcile this with the grace of God” and all this, and we’re reading this stuff that we can’t directly apply to ourselves. So I try to always encourage people to read less monastic literature and more homilies from the Fathers, because St. John Chrysostom preached his homilies to people like you and me who showed up to church. [Laughter] So they’re sort of aimed right at us, including the kind of much more basic stuff we need than the people monastics are writing to need. They’re in the advanced track. They’re playing advanced D&D; we’re on the basic set, where we can only get to level three if we work really hard. [Laughter]

So you have to start somewhere like that, and I think there’s a similar idea to what St. Silouan is expressing that’s expressed to us in a lot of ways, and that’s in the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian; it’s in some of the other sayings of the Fathers. “Consider everyone else to be a saint and yourself to be the worst of sinners”—that idea. That’s the beginning of “keep your mind in hell and despair not.” That’s just: Keep a real view of who you are, and not look at other people. That’s a place to begin. That maybe is a place to begin, and maybe someday when we’re more advanced we can get to the full-on “I’m going to walk into hell” part, but for now let’s just keep in mind that I’m a sinner and stop when we say, during the Liturgy, “Christ came to save sinners, of whom I am chief,” actually thinking in my head, “Well, of whom my cousin is chief, but I’m pretty bad, too,” right? [Laughter] That if we can really come to that, I think that’s a first step toward St. Silouan and St. Sophrony [are] talking about. And we’ll get there at some point, Lord willing.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. All right. Does that help out, Kavia?

Kavia: That very much does. Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for calling. Okay, let’s just keep going. Next we have Jessie calling. Jessie, you called 40 times. You made it.

Jessie: I did! [Laughter] I’m so excited.

Fr. Stephen: That was very biblical, to call 40 times, by the way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, I’m sure she marked it down for each call. [Laughter]

Jessie: I figured that I had to do something like that in order to get in.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, Jessie, what is on your mind this evening.

Jessie: I have a question that is actually from my husband, but we were talking about this, and it’s about blood and ritual purity as it was kind of discussed in the sacrifice episode. You had explained that blood is used to purify things like altars, but why is blood also seen as something that can make something unclean, like a woman who’s menstruating or who has given birth? And this is also connected to: Why is it so significant that when Christ was born, not only was it painless but it was bloodless, when we see blood as being the purifying element?

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. That’s a good question, and I know that anything I might say about it would be much better said in the mouth of Fr. Stephen. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So I’m going to be the one that gets us kicked off the air for what I’m about to talk about.

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: There we go!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, you know, this is my job, by the way, so don’t ruin my job, dude! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Honestly, I just have to honestly answer the questions I’m asked. So there’s two pieces here. One is the safe one that we’re going to talk about first, and then the second one relates to bodily fluids, and that’s where we’re going to get into trouble. So we’ll start with the safe one.

Fr. Andrew: Everybody put your kids to bed!

Fr. Stephen: The safe one… I’ll try to use technical terms. The first one is that something that is holy or sacred in Old Testament ritual that is taken out of its appropriate context becomes something which makes things unclean.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like the Torah scrolls. If you handle those, it makes you unclean.

Fr. Stephen: When you handle the Torah scrolls, your hands become unclean. But also, a very pertinent example: What do you do if the blood from sacrifices— You’re using this blood— It’s one of the interesting things about the Day of Atonement rituals, again, interesting to nerds like me. You’re using the blood to purify all of these material objects in the holy of holies of the Tabernacle, but if, while you’re doing that, that blood gets onto your garment, which is also a material object, but if it gets onto your garment, that’s not where it’s supposed to be, so now your garment has to be burned because your garment is now unclean. The purifying agent makes your garment unclean because it’s outside of its proper place and context.

Jessie: The same as you would have with Communion: if Communion gets on something, you would have to burn it, if it’s not supposed to be…

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And so this also applies. Blood, because something’s blood is its life, is seen to be sacred, especially human blood in the Old Testament. So when it’s out of its context, when it is outside of the human body, it becomes unclean and makes things unclean. So when you’re bleeding, that blood is making things unclean. When your blood is in your body, giving life to your body, it’s not unclean and it doesn’t make your body unclean. So that’s part one; that’s the non-controversial part.

Here comes the fun. So I know it is a big issue currently and for good reason… that concerns and sometimes even rules in the contemporary Orthodox Church relating to menstruation and childbirth and the uncleannesses. So the same rules apply both in the Scriptures and in the canons of the Church to male emissions. For whatever reason, in our modern American culture, we are much more comfortable talking about women’s menstruation than we are about male emissions. I think it’s related to the same reason why you can show female nudity and not male nudity in movies, but I don’t know why that is; I just know that’s a cultural thing we have. [Laughter]

So we don’t want to talk about male emissions; we don’t want to talk about nocturnal emissions. I’m using the most technical terms I can… [Laughter] We don’t want to talk about that at all, and since we don’t talk about that, women especially feel like they’re being singled out with their issues, but those same things apply to men. The same rules about menstruation and receiving the Eucharist also apply to men who have had nocturnal emissions. This is why men are to refrain from marital activities with their wives—priests, for example—before serving the Liturgy. All of those things are related, and so we talk about one; we don’t talk about the others.

And the reason for that, the idea behind that, before presenting yourself in the church, coming into the presence of God, was not that there was something gross or unclean about sex or about femininity or masculinity; it was that when you’ve had one of those emissions or expulsions of bodily fluid—when you give birth and there’s the placenta and everything—then you were seen in the Torah as being depleted. You were not in your fullness; you were not whole. And so when we come before God and come into his presence, we are to present ourselves to him whole and not depleted. So those things applied to both men and women. It’s just, in our modern practice, we talk about one and not the other. Sometimes people try to enforce one—and still don’t talk about the other, so they don’t try to enforce it. But those things are closely linked, both in Scripture and in our Tradition, when you go back into past centuries.

So do you think we’re canceled, or did I dodge the bullet?

Fr. Andrew: I think I still have a job, probably. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay. If we could get John to weigh in…

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

Jessie: Yes! Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent.

Fr. Stephen: Be careful with follow-ups!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay—let’s go to the next caller! [Laughter] Okay, thank you very much! Okay, next we are going to hear from Brett. Brett, welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Stephen: I hope this is a different Brett, because that’s not fair…

Brett: It is, but ironically I also have a question back from my Christmas episode Speakpipe.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I recognize this Brett.

Brett: Hello, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, welcome.

Brett: My question relates to… Going back to the episode about astrology, the Akkadian-Babylonian-Mesopotamian general gods of Shamash and Sin, Shamash being the sun-god and Sin being the god governing astrology and the night. How do we relate that to a modern-day or Christian theological concept of sin, and particularly, I guess, a Jewish developed concept, particularly with Hanukkah, the Shamash candle, Shamash being kind of turned into a helper of sorts, from a Hebrew standpoint?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a good question. Yeah, and you did send this to us earlier, and we kept it, and we actually had it as a back-up for tonight. So, believe it or not—

Fr. Stephen: That was one of the questions we were going to answer if we didn’t get any calls.

Fr. Andrew: Right, if we got no calls, and here you are, asking the question. But I remember, in your recording, you asked that question, like how does that connect with the word “sin.” Well, number one—so this is the part that I can answer—the English word, “sin,” has nothing to do etymologically with the god that you were referring to. It actually comes from a Latin word that refers to guilt, so that’s etymologically where it is. Now, all of you out there who are saying, “See! I knew sin meant guilt! I knew it!” just because something etymologically connects to a former word does not mean that that’s what it means now or what it means theologically.

All right, so the rest of all that complex of ancient Semitic deity I will leave to Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. Well, I mean, Kimosh, of course, is also the main, the primary Moabite deity, the moon-deity, Kimosh; and then Shemesh as the sun in Canaanite religion, but that comes out of Akkadian religion and proto-Semitic. But that’s sort of subsumed within our general understanding of the sun and the moon. And what we see is that, while, on the one hand, we have the worship of the sun and the moon still going on in the pagan context of those gods, we also see in early Christian literature and even Second Temple Jewish literature spirits associated with the sun and moon who are also portrayed as being sort of unfallen or positive spirits. Now, sometimes it’s hard to know for sure, because even if something is a demonic, fallen spirit, it’s still under God’s control, so it may be acting in certain ways by compulsion, not by its own will.

But, for example, since we just got done with Holy Week, all that stuff with the sun and moon hiding their faces and all of that isn’t just poetry and allegory. That is referring to— and when they’re depicted in iconography with faces, like in the iconography of the crucifixion, that’s a very literal thing from the perspective of the Church and our hymnography. And the Bible at no point shies away from that. The Bible at no point demythologizes the sun and moon. So when you get to the fourth day of creation in Genesis 1, it literally says that Yahweh created Shemesh and Kimosh.

Fr. Andrew: There you are.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t say he created their bodies; it doesn’t say… It says he created Shemesh and Kimosh, and appointed one to rule the day and one to rule the night, which rocks and miasmas of plasma can’t do. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right. Does that answer your question, Brett? I know it probably sprouted ten more for most of us…

Brett: Yeah, I think it opened more than it answered, but it did answer my question, yes. Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much, Brett. Good to hear from you.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve got to keep people coming back for future episodes.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. “On a future episode…” [Laughter] So okay, next we have someone with one of the greatest names ever, so, welcome, Andrew, to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Andrew: Hi! I have a question on giants, actually.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: About time.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Andrew: So in Matthew 25, it says, “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones are tyrants over them.” I guess I’ve heard a couple times, and I think it’s in the book, too, about the demons not having hierarchy or bureaucracy but just bringing things to chaos. So it seems kind of a paradox where they use rulership to bring chaos? Am I following this, or…?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, I have some ideas, but, Fr. Stephen, why don’t you go ahead and take a crack at this first.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so, two things. First thing is where interpreting what Christ said, and I think you’re right to do that in this context, we’re talking about the relationship that those spirits would have with the people. So if we’re talking about the gods of Rome and the people of Rome, the gods of Egypt and the people of Egypt, that’s the tyranny and the lording it over them to bring about their destruction. So there’s this interplay we talked about when we were talking about the beginnings of Neolithic religion and how that pans out. We were talking about how there were these two principles that correspond to Behemot or Behemoth and Lotan or Leviathan in the Old Testament, and the Behemot, the bull of heaven, this is sort of the—it becomes the beast from the earth in the book of Revelation—is associated with tyranny; it’s associated with sort of that kind of tyranny and domination, which—what does tyranny and domination produce? Ultimately, it produces destruction and chaos. It’s not order in the sense of God’s divine order; it’s not sort of goodness gone too far. [Laughter] It’s this kind of false order, this false order that’s imposed, that sort of grinds humanity in its gears.

Fr. Andrew: I want to say, I would add to that—sorry to interrupt, but I would add to that that no created thing can be truly, perfectly chaotic, because it’s been put into order by God, even if it’s functioning in a very distorted way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it wouldn’t exist.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so a drunk man in the bar who’s like the Hulk and going around and smashing stuff and hurting people, he is functioning in a certain orderly way. His brain is sending signals through his nerves to his muscles to do things: it’s very orderly on a certain level, but it’s against the order of God. So that’s just what I would add to interrupt there; I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Leviathan would be the principle of sort of abject chaos. But both are evil; both of them are aimed at destruction. So you can… I mean, you look at the Holocaust in Germany. IBM made punch cards; they manufactured punch cards for the death camps, indicating this person is a Jew, this person is a gypsy, this person is a homosexual, this person is a “defective”: why they were there, to schedule the execution. There’s plenty of order there. You’ve got your IBM punch cards, you’ve got your bureaucracy, you’ve got your system, and it’s bringing about destruction. And then you’ve got just abject chaos of war out on the battlefield of men and women and children being killed and cut down and hit by shrapnel, which is producing the same result.

You can produce the same result either way, and in fact the two tend to go together in this kind of dialectic. The beast from the earth and the beast from the sea, Behemoth and Leviathan, they go together, and they have this interplay with each other. Calgacus famously said about the Roman Empire, “They’ve made a wasteland and called it peace.” They go out and destroy and create this wasteland and say, “Oh look how peaceful and perfect and beautiful it is, and orderly.” So those two—there’s an interplay there in evil between sort of order and chaos. It’s not order in the sense of divine order, the order that comes from God, the hierarchy that God establishes in the universe and in terms of being; it’s order in the sense of regimentation and tyranny and bureaucracy in the modern age even.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Andrew?

Andrew: Yes, so it’s kind of like the chaos that Sauron’s order brought.

Fr. Andrew: There you go! [Laughter] No, I wasn’t the one who mentioned—brought Tolkien up, but there you are. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Andrew. That’s a good question. Okay, so next we have Kristin on the line. So, Kristin, are you there?

Kristin: Yes, sir, I’m here!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Kristin, to The Lord of Spirits. What is your deal?

Kristin: Thank you. Well, I’m just going to say thank you for giving a maybe on the “all dogs might go to heaven.” No one has ever given me such a good excuse to adopt abandoned and stray animals in my life.

Fr. Stephen: Let me tell you, my dogs are all heathens, but my mom’s dog is such a holy dog, she once ran away and literally spent 40 days living in the wilderness and then returned.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh wow. To the promised land.

Kristin: I literally spent 35 minutes prying a cat out of my engine this afternoon. It’s now in my house, and I’m like: Okay, why not?

Fr. Andrew: Why not?

Kristin: Anyway, to my actual question…

Fr. Andrew: You can’t eat ‘em; might as well feed ‘em. Sorry. [Laughter]

Kristin: I like that, actually.

Fr. Stephen: He’s not a pet person.

Fr. Andrew: I’m not— No, I’m not a pet eater, either, so I’m not going to eat your— Okay, go ahead, Kristin.

Fr. Stephen: His wife will cook your guinea pig.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That seems likely.

Kristin: Okay then. And… pivot. [Laughter] I had about 15 questions, but I’m going to just pick… So the story of… You’ve mentioned in several episodes where— No, actually, no, that’s not it. All right, so the nephilim being the unclean spirits in the New Testament. You know, I’ve looked… I’ve read your Whole Counsel blog post on it, about how we got some of that from Jubilee, and some of that was kind of inferred. They’re described as “unclean spirits”; they’re not described as demons specifically, but unclean spirits, which means they’re mixed in the Torah. So I’m just curious: Is there other scriptural… in our canon, holy Scriptures, evidence for that, or is this one that you kind of have to go, “This is what the Church has traditionally taught, and it’s consistent with these inferences in the Old Testament”?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a good question. So, Father, you want to expand on all that? I mean, unclean spirits do show up in other parts in the New Testament. I don’t know if that’s what you were asking, at least part of it, but they do.

Fr. Stephen: I think she was [asking] particularly their origin.

Kristin: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: The origin question, yeah.

Kristin: You’re not the only nerds.

Fr. Stephen: To a certain extent, there are a whole bunch of things that when we get to the New Testament, they just kind of pop up, and there’s not really much of it in the Old Testament. All of a sudden there’s Pharisees and Sadducees. There’s a bunch of things that cropped up. But one of those is there seem to be demon-possessed people running around all over the place. When you get into the gospels, Christ is doing these exorcisms all the time, all over the place. And you see some unclean spirits coming upon people in the Old Testament, like Saul in the Old Testament, and there’s the possession in Tobit—if you’re using the longer Old Testament canon, you’ve got Tobit there—but there’s not a ton. And you don’t even get a lot of stuff in the Old Testament… Well, you definitely don’t get a lot of stuff in the Old Testament that talks about “Oh, the Messiah when he shows up, he’s going to exorcise all these demons.”

So we’re not sort of ever directly told in the pages of Scripture, “Well, here’s where they come from, all of a sudden, and here’s why Jesus is so concerned with casting them out.” Interestingly, St. John’s gospel, he doesn’t do any exorcisms, but in the synoptic gospels, major emphasis on Christ doing these exorcisms. So we have to look at, well, if it’s not spelled out here in the pages of Scripture, what explanations are there from the Jewish world in the Second Temple period? Where did they think they came from? And when you do that, that’s where you come to the nephilim explanation, and in fact that’s the only explanation you come to. There weren’t sort of competing stories—at least that we still have—which means that either that was just what everyone believed, or that if there were other competing stories, the one that we still have is the one that everyone accepted and that’s why those texts were passed down and the other ones weren’t.

And it’s not just a question of: Well, this is the only explanation we have, so I guess we should just go with it; but the details of that explanation are referred to in places—I mean, it’s oblique; it’s not spelled out—but are referred to in places in those exorcism stories. So the demons whom Christ casts into the pigs say, “Have you come to torment us before the time?”

Kristin: Yes, which is consistent with the Jubilees.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s sort of like: Well, what’s that referring to? Well, if you’ve read Jubilees, you say that is then consistent with that version of the story; that makes sense. So these are inference-type evidence, not deductive-type evidence. And the fact that they talk about being cast into the abyss is consistent. So we have this one explanation for the ancient world. All the evidence that we do have in the Scriptures is consistent with it. If you want to read more about this, a fellow named Archibald Leach wrote a book called The Origin of Evil Spirits which is, I believe, developed from his doctoral dissertation and put into a slightly—

Kristin: That is a fantastic name!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that is just the most amazing—Archie Leach is like the most amazing British name ever. But, yeah, his book, The Origin of Evil Spirits, which is based I believe on his doctoral dissertation—might be based on a monograph—he’s the guy on that. I mean, he goes all the way into—

Fr. Andrew: Archie Wright.

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, Archie Wright.

Fr. Andrew: W-r-i… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I was thinking of Cary Grant. Anyway. That’ll make sense to, like, five people. Archie Wright, sorry; Archibald Wright. He goes all the way in on this, so he goes into all of the sources, all of the details, exhaustively, just on the origin of the demons in the synoptic gospels. So that’s the place to go if you really want to do a deep dive and go all the way down the rabbit hole on that.

Kristin: Well, of course I do.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, why wouldn’t you? Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! All right. Well, okay, thank you very much for calling, and nice to talk to you.

Kristin: Thank you so much, Fathers. Have a good evening!

Fr. Andrew: You, too. Okay, we’ve got Vince up next. So, Vince, welcome to The Lord of Spirits!

Vince: Thanks, Fathers. My name is Vince, and I’m a recovering Calvinist.

Fr. Andrew: God bless you. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It can be overcome. There is hope. [Laughter]

Vince: Okay. Amen. So, because of going too deep into the Reformed rabbit hole, I’m trying to wrap my mind around different views of atonement. So I haven’t relistened to your episode yet, but my question is about cosmic geography and the atonement after the cross. They’re sort of two related questions, I hope. So is Christ dying for the sins of the world more kind of cosmic geographical language with reclaiming the nations rather than specific individual sins in a kind of works-contract, Lutheran failure kind of atonement, because we become sacred space, so Christ died for the nations, but he also died for us to become sacred space where God’s presence could dwell, like in Eden?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. [Laughter] Okay, next!

Vince: Okay…

Fr. Stephen: No! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it’s great when people have got this stuff figured out for themselves. It’s good! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got it! Yes! [Laughter] Yeah, you’ve got it. No, I mean, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.

Vince: So did—do we say that— And sorry this isn’t the second follow-up question, but you gave me a yes, so…

Fr. Stephen: That’s okay. That was a short answer, so, yeah.

Vince: Okay, so, but Christ—he died for the sins of all of humanity because he took upon death, the wages of sin, not, like, every sin I ever committed as some individual tallying system?

Fr. Stephen: Well, where are you getting “the sins of all humanity”? So this is part of the translating 1 John 2:2 correctly, which is— it says, “He died not only for our sins but for the whole world.” There is no “those of” in there. Your English Bible may tack that in.

Vince: Right, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And this is Fr. Stephen’s doctoral dissertation that he wrote a thousand pages on the last, like, eighth of a verse.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a thousand pages.

Fr. Andrew: I’m slightly exaggerating.

Vince: I tried to find it online. I usually can find people’s dissertations for free online, but I couldn’t sleuth that out.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not there. But, yeah, so it’s translating that correctly… This is understanding the element of salvation that is universal and the element of salvation that isn’t. Part of the problem with atonement in the West is that this isn’t clearly distinguished, and so you end up trying to say that one thing is both universal and not at the same time, and that’s where you get sufficiency and efficiency; that’s where you get redemption accomplished and redemption applied. You know what I’m talking about, right? [Laughter]

Vince: Yeah, and that’s where you destroy your assurance, because how can you ever really know you’re elect, then?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the two elements are two separate elements. So Christ defeats death on behalf of all of humanity. In the resurrection icon, Christ is grabbing Adam and Eve: all of humanity death no longer has a claim on. Every human being is going to rise on the last day to be judged by Christ and no one else, because Christ is now the Lord of the living and the dead. That part is universal. The sin part is not universal; there is no icon of Christ redeeming Cain. There is no icon of Christ redeeming Judas. So that part is not universal. It’s not that the whole thing is somehow universal and then not universally applied; it’s that there are two elements of it.

And then there is actually a third element that’s also universal, and that’s Christ’s defeat of the devil and the hostile powers, which affects everyone. But this is why St. Paul can say Christ is the Savior of all men, but especially those who are faithful, because two out of three affect everybody, but the third one is only the faithful.

Vince: So the second one does not affect everyone.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The sin is about the faithfulness; it’s about the repentance and salvation from sin, purification in Christ’s blood—all of that takes place within Christ’s Church.

Vince: Because those who don’t repent don’t receive atonement.

Fr. Stephen: Right, don’t receive the purification that comes from Christ’s blood.

Vince: The cleansing. Okay. Praise God. If I have time, I have a sort of related fast follow-up question about—

Fr. Andrew: Okay, you’ve got a quick one.

Fr. Stephen: We’ll allow it. [Laughter]

Vince: Okay, so with cosmic geography and the claiming of the nations, when a nation like, for example, Turkey, was Christianized and later Constantinople falls in 1453, there’s sort of a legend—I don’t know whether it’s historically true, but I’ve heard it from Muslim sources—that lightning struck the Hagia Sophia and there were sort of portents in the sky when the city fell. So that area has sort of been almost reconquered by a fallen—one of the fallen gods, one of the other Elohim. And so does that mean that territory has now sort of become unclean in a sense, and we have to go reconquer it for the Great Commission to have covered that territory?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I was hoping you were going to ask about the Marbled King. [Laughter] If you don’t know what that is, Vince, go look it up. If you don’t know what that is, go look it up.

Fr. Stephen: If it were to happen, of course, we would reconsecrate Hagia Sophia. We would go in and consecrate it and repurify it as a Christian church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a kind of tension where the whole world belongs to the Lord and he’s made it clean, but at the same time there is the way that people in particular areas are participating or rebelling against that.

Fr. Stephen: You see that with Israel.

Vince: Is that common, in a way? It’s almost like a power changeover where, if the Church is in the ascendancy or in the majority, we’ve sort of restrained evil and cleansed that space by our presence. But then when we get kind of conquered, does the demonic influence increase and pollute it in a way that we have to reconquer it again?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, but I would emphasize… Sometimes people have these wonderful fantasies—and I’m not saying you’re saying this, but sometimes people have these wonderful fantasies, like: “We need to retake Constantinople.” I’m like: “Great! It’s a great idea. Job number one: learn Turkish. Job number two: come to my missionary training school.”

Vince: Awesome.

Fr. Andrew: Because that’s how you retake Constantinople.

Vince: I know a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: Think about it in terms of the Old Testament. Why did the Assyrians and the Babylonians, these pagans, come in and take back the land from Israel and Judah? God allowed it as a judgment.

Fr. Andrew: Sin. Yep.

Fr. Stephen: God allowed it as a judgment, and if you read the monastics and the spiritual writers writing at the time of the fall of Constantinople, they’re very clear that it fell as a judgment from God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s what people then said. All right, well, thank you very much, Vince, for calling in. We are going to take one more caller before we call it a night, and that’s Jordan. Jordan, you are the fortunate person who made it in at the—right before the wire. Welcome, Jordan.

Jordan: Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: What’s your question or concern or…

Fr. Stephen: ...allegation…

Fr. Andrew: ...odd knocking at the door? [Laughter] Accusations! Insinuations…

Jordan: Well, there may be something knocking at my door with this question. When I was in high school, I was just learning about the more liturgical aspects of Christianity such as Catholicism and then later Orthodoxy. I grew up a Protestant, and in that I found “Christian witchcraft,” and for some reason that really connected with me—dare I say that?—and I started practicing it on a minor scale, although I don’t think any witchcraft is minor, but such as putting a cross within a pentagram and writing spells—I hate to use that term now—directed toward God. And I have a friend on Facebook who identifies as a Christian shaman, using Native and Nordic traditions mixed in with Christianity. So I was wondering just how that would end up within the Christian view of things, and how to explain the difference between liturgical worship and daily prayer versus witchcraft to Protestants who are very adverse to the repeated prayer like the Jesus Prayer or making the sign of the cross and who view that as witchcraft.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s an awesome question! I’m so happy it’s our last one! Right, okay, so not to puff you up… [Laughter] So lots of things going on here. Number one, “what fellowship hath Christ with Belial?” right? You don’t mix these things, so obviously it’s a big no. So then the question is: What about people who can’t tell the difference between liturgical worship and witchcraft and just say that’s dark and evil and pagan and demonic, whatever? I mean, I’ve heard that many times.

So here’s the difference, and this kind of goes to one of the things we’ve talked about a lot, which is that in some sense Christianity and paganism are not two different games; they’re two different teams, playing the same game. Yeah. And so ritual participation in the worship of your god is how you worship your god for the vast majority of the history of the world, no matter where you are. And the difference between the worshipers of the one true God, the God of Israel, and everyone else is largely based in whom they’re aiming their worship towards, whom they are worshiping, whom they are offering their sacrifices to and having that communion with. That’s the biggest difference.

Now, there is also a qualitative difference that comes in as well. I mean, there’s all kinds of qualitative differences. One is morality. I mean, pagan morality is way different from the morality of the God of Israel. But also the other thing about witchcraft in particular is that it is about manipulation. It’s about control. And, I mean, often—I mean, it depends on what exactly you’re talking about. I mean, there’s something called Christopaganism, Christian Wicca. There’s even a book called The Path of a Christian Witch. This is all this kind of stuff you can find. And in some cases it’s about invoking other spiritual beings, so literally—literally it’s syncretism, where you’re worshiping more than one thing at a time. In some ways, it’s a kind of exploitation of Christianity, like: “Oh, the cross is a powerful thing. I’m going to use it in my magical spells.” Boy, I can’t help but just think of the ending of that Indiana Jones—I’m sorry, The Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they want to take the ark of the covenant and use it for their own stuff. What a bad idea that was! [Laughter]

So, yeah, I mean, I think the thing to do is… I mean, I come from an Evangelical Protestant background before I became Orthodox, and ritual often in certain Evangelical circles is looked at as being this dark and terrible thing, kind of in and of itself. And so when I talk with people like that I say, “Look, I get what you’re saying, but the truth is that you engage in rituals all the time. You do things that are sort of gestures and actions that don’t sort of accomplish anything utilitarian in themselves.”

Like, why shake hands? That doesn’t do anything. Why shake hands? It’s an action that ritually indicates a meeting or a friendship or trust or whatever, but you can have those things without the shaking of hands, but why do you it? You do it because that’s the ritual that you do, and you participate in this relationship. Or why, when you’re a cemetery, are you quiet? Why are you respectful? Why do you maybe light a candle? Why do you maybe leave a flower? Why do you do that? Again, it’s not utilitarian in any way. It’s not like the dead are going to be mad at you if you’re running around and yelling in the cemetery. I mean, maybe they would—probably not. You know, that’s not what’s going on. So people act ritually all the time; they just don’t see it.

Or like any time someone gets married, do they just go down to the courthouse and sign a thing and then that’s it? Even the people who are the most sort of atheistic and secular want at least some kind of “I do” before they do that. There’s still a need for some kind of ritual. Or when someone graduates. Or when we inaugurate a president of the United States—boom! Out comes a ritual. So we do rituals. It’s just that we’ve reduced the number that we do and the way that we do it and so forth.

And of course, again, if ritual is bad, what is the deal with all that ritual that God directly commands in the Old Testament? It can’t be inherently bad, or else God would never have commanded it. It’s not like suddenly it became evil. So that’s what I would say. I think about worship a lot and especially, since I said, I have an Evangelical background, and people have been asking me these questions for the last 25 years. So, Fr. Stephen, you get the last word.

Fr. Stephen: Okay! Well… [Barking]

Fr. Andrew: And your dogs, your heathen dogs.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, my heathen… That’s Emmet, in particular, for the record. So, yeah, the problem with witchcraft is the same with the problem with priestcraft, and that’s the “-craft” part. [Laughter] That’s the techne again, the fact that it’s trying to get God or the gods or spiritual forces or nature or what have you to do what you want them to do. You’re trying to change God, and Christians are perfectly capable of doing this, too, without resorting to any of that. If your prayers are mostly you reading your list of demands to God, if that’s how you think about prayer, if that’s how you think about getting people to join you in prayer—“Well, if we get enough people praying for it, God will have to do it”—any of those kind of things where you’re trying to change God or get God to do something and you’re trying to figure out how to do it, then there’s a basic problem, because the reality is ritual doesn’t change God. Whether you’re trying to or not, it doesn’t; it changes you. So when you do ritual, it changes you and your world. When your community does ritual, it changes your community and its world. That’s what it does, whether you’re trying to do something more or less, nothing, it doesn’t matter: that’s what gets changed.

So when we’re engaging in the Divine Liturgy, when we’re praying with our families, when we’re praying alone, that’s to change ourselves and our world in which we are living every day. That’s what’s being transformed through it. God isn’t doing something different or becoming something different toward us or looking at us differently or however else we want to think about it. God’s perfect; he doesn’t need to change, whereas we’re being transformed.

So the problem is, when you’re doing another kind of ritual, other than the rituals God laid out for us that are going to lead us deeper and more fully into our humanity—that’s why he laid those rituals out for us and established them for us, is for our salvation—if you’re doing other rituals that you’ve come up with to try and do other things, those are also changing you and also changing your world, the world you live in every day. They’re changing your community and your community’s world and your community’s life together, and they’re changing it in ways that are drawing you away from the fullness of your humanity, that are making your world less human, less filled with God’s goodness. They’re leading you the wrong direction.

So that’s the key problem with it, is the destructive nature. And this was the big temptation for Israel all through the Old Testament. It wasn’t that they were going to reject Yahweh, the God of Israel. It’s just that they were going to keep him in a corner, keep doing the sacrifices to keep him “happy,” and then also serve these other gods and do these other things and sort of cover all their bases and just sort of mix it all together to try to get what they wanted out of the world and out of life, and that led them in very bad directions. And it wasn’t just a question of “Oh, God was mad at them,” but it actually transformed their world and their communal life. When God comes to them and talks about the results of what they’ve done, he doesn’t just say, “Well, I’m mad at you and you did bad things”; he talks about the corruption within Israel and how that plays out: the oppression of the poor and the weak and the needy, the hatred between brothers, the divisions in families, the division within the state. Every two kings in the northern kingdom, there was an assassination and a new dynasty. There was complete political turmoil. They were losing wars and losing territory; they were being conquered by other people. All these things had these effects because they were changing themselves and their world in this way, by trying to mix and match and do these things.

So that, I think, is just as real today as it was in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. Does that answer your question, Jordan?

Jordan: Yes, Fathers. Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for calling. And thanks to all of our callers tonight. We planned for the possibility that we would only get one or two calls, but you guys really jammed it up. I’m really happy with all of you. So I think probably… I don’t know, Father. We didn’t talk about this, but I think maybe at some point down the road we’ll do this again. What do you think?

Fr. Stephen: Maybe.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe, okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’ll set some kind of goal and use this as a reward.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go, exactly! So, all right, well, since it was just kind of a free-for-all this evening, there’s not really—I don’t have any kind of closing statement to make connected with all of that, but it sure was a lot of fun. I will say this, though, before we go into our credits, and that is, if for some weird reason you haven’t yet bought a copy of Fr. Stephen’s book, The Religion of the Apostles, what’s wrong with you? [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Well, here’s the thing. It’s about to sell out.

Fr. Andrew: Right? That’s what I heard!

Fr. Stephen: And if that happens—so you need to order now, because once they’re gone, you’re going to have to wait and you’re going to have to contact Fr. Andrew directly—

Fr. Andrew: Nope!

Fr. Stephen: —to pre-order the second printing.

Fr. Andrew: Nope! I will not— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So order now before that happens, because you don’t want to have to deal with him on the pre-orders.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, because you’ll get nothing. I’ll take your money, but you’ll get nothing. All right, well, that is our show for tonight! Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during this live broadcast, still want to hear from you. You can send us an email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything—we listen to every message you send—but unfortunately we can’t respond to everything or include everything, but we do try to save some of it for future episodes.

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.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page and join our discussion group, leave reviews, 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.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, God bless you, and Christ is risen!