Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, scorpion- and serpent-stunners. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Reverend Dr. Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick right next to cow country Pennsylvania, in Emmaus. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and indeed, this episode is all about the calls. So tonight we have the great Bobby Maddex himself taking your calls. So make them good so he doesn’t get bored and wander off like he did last time.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Bobby is Matushka Trudi’s unpaid intern, all right.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, so we have to be really nice to him then.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right.

Fr. Stephen: Because, I mean: “unpaid.” He can just walk off. What are we going to do?

Fr. Andrew: Right. Can’t fire him.

Fr. Stephen: Not give him the community college credits? I guess we could do that. I guess we could fail to fill out the form, and no community college credits for him.

Fr. Andrew: So this is our third anniversary show. Like we did last year, we will be playing some of our favorite show clips to celebrate—and maybe some other stuff, too. That said, though, given that we just finished a series about the end of days, there is a rumor flying around—have you heard this one, Fr. Stephen?—that this is the end of the podcast. End of days, end of podcast! Should it be—

Fr. Stephen: And three years, right? As great pagan philosopher, St. Aristotle, told us, everything that comes in threes is perfect.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. So should we just leave everyone hanging for the next 42 days until The Lord of Spirits Conference? And does Dan Rather know what the frequency is? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: So, answering those in reverse order: No, but Kenneth does. [Laughter] And the other question: Nah, we’ve got a couple of years left.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. There we go. [Laughter] Just ruin it from the beginning! Anyway, yeah, so I can see some calls starting to come in, but before we get to calls, though—and see, Fr. Stephen doesn’t know I’m about to do this—some greetings. Some very special greetings for our third anniversary have been sent. So we’ve got one—

Fr. Stephen:  Is it Lee Majors?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m sorry. I did not get the Six-million-dollar man.

Fr. Stephen: Man!

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: I think he’d work for less than the six million.

Fr. Andrew: Probably, probably.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know how much less, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, we do have the technology. But this one comes from the CEO emeritus of Ancient Faith Ministries, the guy who said yes to this podcast. So this comes from John Maddex himself.

Mr. John Maddex: John Maddex here. It was the strangest thing ever. I guess it was three-and-a-half years ago or so. Fr. Andrew calls me and says, “I’ve got a great idea for a new live show on AFR, starring Fr. Stephen and me. It’s about giants and whatnot.” I remember rolling my eyes and thinking to myself something like: “Here we go again.” His last crazy idea had us dramatizing a rip-off of Star Trek, claiming, “There will definitely be Orthodox themes to explore!” Seeing the less-than-enthusiastic look on my face, he says, “No! I’m serious! Fr. Stephen and I are going to talk for three or four hours every other week on a two-part show that will actually be three parts without the listeners even realizing it!”

So, against my better judgment, I asked with faint interest, “What are you going to call this one?” He gleefully replied, “Lord of the Big Giant Rings!” Well, I put my foot down on that plagiaristic idea, but reluctantly agreed to let them run with the concept. I have no idea what they ended up calling it, but now here we are, celebrating, I guess, the third year of the show that eventually led to my retirement. Somehow they have an audience, so more power to them. All I can say is: Good luck, Melinda!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks a lot for that, John!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I don’t know why he’s throwing shade at your Star Trek idea. The Orville ended up being a great success. I don’t know if people even know you’re connected to that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true! That is deeply, weirdly true, but nonetheless an oddly good show, kind of in spite of itself, I think, in some ways. Anyway. Well, right! We do have calls coming in. We have Catherine calling from—

Fr. Stephen: Well, before this call, I do want to say something—

Fr. Andrew: Hold on, Catherine. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: —to our listeners on this anniversary episode. Today, as the cool among you know, Mortal Kombat I was released. I have walked away from my PlayStation 5 to come here and do this program.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Which shows the deep dedication I have to providing quality content to you, the listeners. So I just want that to be appreciated.

Fr. Andrew: I am so honored. All right. Well, Catherine, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Catherine: Well, the fact of the nostalgia of Mortal Kombat I playing in a place called Flintstones in far northern Alberta, Canada, brings back many memories, so thank you for ripping yourself away from your PS5 for my—

Fr. Andrew: I assume it’s deep winter there already?

Catherine: Yeah! But thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Well, thanks for calling. Good night! [Laughter] Just kidding.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, how’d she know I was going to talk about Mortal Kombat? What an amazing coincidence?

Fr. Andrew: She just pivoted, man! She just pivoted!

Catherine: There’s gifts of prophecy, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Catherine: I do actually have a question, though. This has been rumbling around in my mind, and it’s about King David. He obviously had the choice to pick any son that he had. I’m curious to understand why was it Bathsheba, and why was it her son Solomon? I mean, he’s sort of a symbolic person of repentance. And I’m wondering: did he choose Solomon for that sort of thing, the past of his acts and his sins and repentance? Obviously, he had a child die from that. I am wondering if there’s any sort of patristic tradition in that.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. I don’t know. I’ve always thought—this is just me and my pure speculative brain— My sense has always been this favor for Solomon because he was really into Bathsheba, but I don’t know. Fr. Stephen, what is the deal with all that?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, I don’t think that’s how that works.

Fr. Andrew: No?

Fr. Stephen: Because which wife you’re really into can change when you’ve got a bunch of them.

Fr. Andrew: That is true. That is true.

Fr. Stephen: It’s kind of a thing in flux. Yeah, I think there’s a bunch of things going on. I mean, of course a number of the older sons got kind of excluded. I mean, Absalom, Amnon…

Catherine: Well, he kind of excluded himself.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Or were out of the picture. So this wasn’t going to be a primogeniture situation of the oldest son. I think David sort of signaled his intent to do that when he named Solomon, because remember what David is told when he wants to build the Temple. He’s told, “No, there’s blood on your hands. It’ll be a man of peace.”

Fr. Andrew: Ah!

Fr. Stephen: So he has this son and names him Shalomo.

Fr. Andrew: Peace.

Catherine: Beautiful.

Fr. Stephen: And so I think he was signaling that intent already there, but you also have the situation of the child that died whom you mentioned, so I think there’s an Abel-Seth thing going on there in terms of the pattern, with Absalom being more like Cain. I think that’s sort of the pattern that you see playing out there, at least in terms of the account in the Scriptures. I’m not— I’m approaching this question not from trying to psychologize David, but from the perspective of: What’s going on in the narrative? And how the narrative is reflecting on the Torah and is presenting this transition to us.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Catherine from Alberta?

Catherine: Well, I’m actually Catherine of the Great White Zaphon.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me! Excuse me. [Laughter] You’ve called before!

Fr. Stephen: From the mouth of the snow beast… [Laughter]

Catherine: No, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. It’s been rolling around in my mind for a couple weeks, so thank you.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. All right.

Catherine: ‘Kay, bye!

Fr. Andrew: Bye! Next we have Dylan calling from Michigan, the place of many of your people, Fr. Stephen. Dylan, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Dylan: Hey, happy day.

Fr. Andrew: Happy day, indeed. Blessed feast if you’re on the— Well, either Old or New Calendar, or whatever calendar you might be using. It’s a feast for somebody.

Fr. Stephen: You do pronounce it “dill-on” and not “die-lon,” right?

Dylan: Yeah, it is Dylan, although my Romanian priest often goes “die-lon,” so…

Fr. Stephen: Well, “Die-lon” is the five greatest rappers of all time. That’s an obscure reference…

Dylan: That is correct, yes. [Laughter] I read through Maccabees for the first time in the past month.

Fr. Andrew: All four of them?

Dylan: Ah, no, not the fourth, actually. I’m still on my way. [Laughter] But what’s in the canon. And so that’s the thing. Reading through it, it’s seeing things that itch you the wrong way, like, I don’t know, the pillaging and the cutting off a fellow’s head and putting it on a stake, Judah the Hammer over here. And so we’ve got the Hammer, and this is all in our canon, and it’s interesting the Jews don’t have it in their canon, even though you’d think the Hammer would be the Jewish hero. I’m just wondering, going through all of this and all these strange alliances with Rome and seeing very— talking up the Roman politics and strange stuff in there—and this is Scripture! So I’m just wondering what the— how this is integrated into the Tradition and how the Fathers looked at these figures, because it weirds you out on first glance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! I mean, the most prominent bits of the Maccabees stories is, of course, the story of the Maccabean martyrs.

Dylan: Right, and that’s the beautiful stuff.

Fr. Stephen: In 2 Maccabees, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And 2 Maccabees, which kind of sets up— I mean, I’m totally ripping this off of Fr. Stephen, but since I get to talk first— [Laughter] It sets up the pattern for the way that martyrdom is narrated and presented in the New Testament and on into the Christian era. Yeah, they’re interesting stories. A lot of what’s in there, I think a lot of it is simply historical narration. You wouldn’t necessarily read every single bit and say, “Ah! From this I take this significant theological point.” That’s my impression of what’s in a lot of those theological texts, although you can interpret all of it that way; you can interpret it in a way that’s beneficial to you in a spiritual way, but it’s not like— It’s not like Genesis. It’s a different kind of book than that, where especially in the early chapters almost every verse you can make major theological points out of because it’s the basis for so much that later happens.

It’s interesting. The Maccabees— I don’t know, are there feasts, Father, where we actually read those texts for the feast day? I’m drawing a blank. I don’t think so. It’s not in our current practice, is it?

Fr. Stephen: Not—to my knowledge, not from 1 Maccabees. We have a feast of the Maccabean martyrs.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of course, August 1.

Fr. Stephen: And that gets into 2 Maccabees. But not— We don’t—to my knowledge—have any readings from 1 Maccabees any place. Or 3 or 4, but that gets into a whole ‘nother confusing side. [Laughter] But 1 Maccabees, in addition to giving important history… I mean, I think part of the reason why it got rejected from the Jewish—well, it didn’t really get rejected— why it didn’t end up in the Jewish canon is that it represents a set of traditions that played out very badly across the course of the first century AD. There was a very common— The common image of who the Messiah was going to be, among a lot of common people in Judea at the time of what we’re reading in the gospels, for example, was John Hyrcanus. They saw this in very material terms a welding-together of the king and high priest in very material terms, the overthrow of the Romans. This builds up into the Jewish revolts, which as I’ve said before, are like the Matrix sequels, or the Matrix movies. There are three of them, but everybody only wants to talk about the first one, and they got worse as they went. [Laughter]

Dylan: Debatable.

Fr. Andrew: Matrix 2: Please, Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There was sort of a— Obviously, as the edges of the ketuvim, of the writings, are sort of getting finalized, those borders are getting more strictly drawn in the early second century, in the wake of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, the sort of rejection of that whole tradition of zealotry and of that kind of idea of the Messiah I think meant that 1 Maccabees was not destined to a long and happy life in rabbinic circles.

Now, part of the reason why I think it’s important that we have it in our Old Testament is that there are several points in the New Testament that are clearly reflecting on and in some cases inverting things that are going on in 1 Maccabees that if you haven’t read it you don’t know about. The most obvious one, especially since Fr. Andrew’s here, is the whole episode on the road to Emmaus. Really the whole ending of St. Luke’s gospel is patterned around 1 Maccabees, because of course the other place Emmaus is mentioned, the reason it’s relevant is the Battle of Emmaus in 1 Maccabees, which is sort of the climactic battle. So when you’re talking about these people are on the road to Emmaus, that’s like saying they’re on the road to Gettysburg. Like, there’s all of this resonance to it. And they get to Emmaus, and Christ wants to go farther, but they constrain him.

Right after this sort of celebration of the Eucharist that happens in Emmaus, it says— The way St. Luke’s gospel ends is: The disciples are all in the Temple, praising God. And then you open up Acts, and in the beginning of Acts, they are not in the Temple praising God; they’re still locked away in a room. So why does St. Luke choose to end his gospel in the Temple? Well, because that’s what happens after the victory at Emmaus: they go and rededicate the Temple.

There’s this deliberate contrast, and there’s this association of the Eucharist with Christ’s victory, and the sort of reorientation as Christ opens the Scriptures to them on the road to Emmaus, correcting their view of all this, because they’re downfallen because they say, “Oh, we thought Jesus was going to be the Messiah—but I guess not!” [Laughter] And so he has to reorient them.

Having Maccabees there, you know what the text is here working off of, what it’s inverting and redirecting, that set of Jewish traditions. And so, insofar as our Old Testament is there as the… The Old Testament Scriptures are the Scriptures upon which the New Testament is a commentary. The New Testament is a commentary and an explanation of the Old Testament, and so 1 Maccabees actually fits very well because of the way it’s reflected upon in certain parts of the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Does that answer your question, Dylan?

Dylan: Yeah, that was enlightening. Right on! Thank you very much. A quick bonus for Maccabees: 2 Maccabees when you get all those visions of, experiences of the horseman, manifestation of God, it sounds a lot like the Angel of the Lord, like Christ-Logos, among them, or is that just angelic powers or do we know?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Dylan: Got it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: There we go! Got to get at least one monosyllabic answer per episode! [Laughter] All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Dylan. Glad to hear from you.

Dylan: Right on! Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, continuing our tour through the upper Midwest, we have Elizabeth from Wisconsin. Elizabeth, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Elizabeth: Hi! Can you hear me okay?

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you.

Elizabeth: Okay, super. I’ve been listening for many years, and this question has been on my mind for probably a year now. Our parish actually has a Lord of Spirits discussion group and now we’re talking about “The Lord of Spirits Goes to Hell.”

Fr. Andrew: What!?

Elizabeth: But anyway, I’m sorry, that’s not related to my question. My question is: In— Oh! I should preface this by saying I am shamelessly aiming for a trademark one-word answer from Fr. Stephen, although a knock-off one-word answer from Fr. Andrew would suffice. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow. I’m just quitting now. Good night, everybody! [Laughter]

Elizabeth: So in the sense that a sacrament works mysteriously through our cooperation with God’s grace, is prayer a sacrament?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, the question I would ask is: What exactly is a sacrament? Because I know that this is meditated on a lot in Western Christian theology, such that they’re defined and there’s a number and all this kind of stuff, but I don’t know, Father: I don’t think there is a theology of sacraments in the Orthodox Church, as a category that “this list of things falls into and everything else doesn’t.” I mean, we talk about the holy mysteries, but that almost doubles down on the lack of categorization.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: That was just for her sake.

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Elizabeth: Yay! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that was the short answer. So the long answer is: Ye-e-e-es. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Monosyllabic doesn’t have to be short! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In the Orthodox Church, ultimately my answer is: Is there something that isn’t a sacrament? There is a correct answer to that, though: it’s sin. [Laughter] But even that, through repentance, can become a means through which God works in your life. So the sin itself is not a sacrament, but it becomes the occasion for one. But, yeah, that’s a riff on my old mentor, Ed Clowney. Someone asked him once if a particular psalm was “messianic,” and he said, “Are there non-messianic psalms?” [Laughter]

Yeah, so potentially… So the understanding in the Orthodox Church is at least in potency every aspect of creation and every moment of your life can be a point at which God is working in your life and you’re cooperating with his work in your life and in the world. Now, whether that actually happens—that doesn’t happen for me every moment— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What? You’re fired!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Earlier today, new Mortal Kombat game, I’m trying to get the new finishers down… Not a mystery of God working in my life.

Fr. Andrew: Not a sacramental moment.

Fr. Stephen: For a solid period of time there. [Laughter] But it has the potential to be that. And so obviously prayer, not in some kind of automatic way—ex opere operato, just “you’re praying, therefore…”—but prayer has the potential to be, and that’s why praying is something that you learn to do, and it’s something that you grow at and become better at.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s different kinds of it, too. I recall Elder Aimilianos, who just reposed a couple years ago, he made a distinction; he used the Greek words, prosefchi and efchi. Prosefchi is prayer when you’re asking God for something, and then—and this is how he defines it—efchi is this sort of sense of indwelling wordlessly in God. And that the latter is sort of the higher form, but they’re both prayer. But obviously, for most people, it takes a lot of work to get good at either, and certainly more at the one than the other. He’s just going to act like he has his connection dropped…

Elizabeth: [Laughter] Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you were keeping going. No, that’s fantastic! Thank you. Wonderful answer, even though they were a bit lengthy, but it’s okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I gave you both versions! I gave you the short version. I gave you the long version, then I gave you the longer version.

Fr. Andrew: You know, one of the things I would say that I think is so important about not trying to reduce sacramental life to, again, a list of things that fall into particular categories, because when you do that, there’s this temptation to almost regard them as talismans or magical rituals. I’m sure you don’t have that temptation, Elizabeth, but since we’re talking… And sometimes people have this idea that— and they almost paganize them, like: You have to do everything in this exact way, and if you do it a little different or whatever, then it just doesn’t work, and it’s no longer this any more. But that’s not the way that the Church actually functions. That doesn’t mean that there’s not right ways to do things, but yeah… I don’t know. Everything is kind of a sacrament.

I like what Fr. Alexander Schmemann says in his book, For the Life of the World, where he talks about the whole world being secretly sacramental, and what the Church does is sort of reveal it to be what it really is, what it was meant to be by God.

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah! I have that book. It’s a good one.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a good one. It bears re-reading, I think, once in a while.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you so much!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you for calling, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thanks for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: Before we get to our next caller, I promised that we’d play some clips, some of our favorite clips from previous shows. This is something that was prepared.

Fr. Stephen: Last time we did this… [Harp music] I’ll wait. [Mariachi music begins]

Fr. Stephen: There’s a storm here in Louisiana, as happens all too frequently, and my power went out.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: But we can continue.

Fr. Andrew: Hello?

Cody: Hello? Oh, was that to me?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I guess— Fr. Stephen, are you still there? Oh, I think we lost Fr. Stephen for just a second there.

Cody: Oh, man.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, I don’t know what he was about to say, but— Fr. Stephen, do we have you back yet? All right, well, we’re going to try to get him back.

Fr. Stephen: Well, let’s— Right before we do that—

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: I want to call back, before all of my electrical chicanery took place.

Fr. Andrew: We try to blow everybody’s minds with things that have been staring you in the face. [Laughter] So here we are.

Fr. Stephen: [Breaking up] … Galatians 3…

Fr. Andrew: Oh! We kind of lost you a little bit there, Fr. Stephen. Are you still there?

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, yeah, I think Galatians 3, that verse is a good place to start. They’re going to have this particular strip of land in Palestine and—

Fr. Andrew: Oh! All right, Fr. Stephen, did we lose you? Well, it’s live radio, everybody. [Laughter] He was connected to mine, Bobby. Sorry, we’re having— Oh! There’s Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen: Am I back?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, welcome back. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know where exactly I got cut off, but so—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, hopefully we’ll get Fr. Stephen back here and we can hear the rest of his sentence, but maybe not. Reconnect with Fr. Stephen!

Mr. Bobby Maddex: This is the general rule of this show: Don’t bring Bobby in. And you’re doing it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m sorry!

Mr. Maddex: It’s fine. I’ll take you to break. Hang on.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Bobby! Okay, well, that’s how you know it’s live radio, everybody, because everything can happen.

Fr. Andrew: [Mariachi music finishes; harp music] There you go. That was a tribute to some of our very earliest episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. You know, last time we had an anniversary episode and we played clips, I had thought before that episode that we had some really attentive listeners. I mean, people sponsor transcripts. I thought people… People have told us they’ve listened to every episode more than once. I thought, you know, for sure they’re going to remember all these clips, and I was shocked at the responses.

Fr. Andrew: I know! So many people were like: What episode was that from? They couldn’t remember.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So hopefully between then and now, folks have refamiliarized themselves with our material…

Fr. Andrew: I mean, there’s only 200 hours or so worth of material to go through.

Fr. Stephen: Right! It’s like five weeks of full-time work.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And it pays—in knowledge.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so hopefully folks have caught up. They’ll recognize where all of those classic clips are from. I mean, I don’t know how those aren’t people’s favorite clips in the first place.

Fr. Andrew: They’re playing some of my favs. [Laughter] All right, well, we’ve got some more callers lined up. So now we’ve got Michael, calling from the Old Dominion, my natal state: it’s Virginia! Welcome, Michael, to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Michael: Thank you, Fathers, for having me. I have two questions and a brief comment before that. So in—I think it was the “Four Horsemen” episode…

Fr. Andrew: Is that your turn signal we’re hearing in the background? Are you driving?

Michael: No, I’ve been hearing it while I’ve been on hold for ten minutes, so I don’t know what that’s about.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s a metronome! It’s here to drive you insane.

Fr. Andrew: Ah! [Laughter]

Michael: And now it stopped. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s me. [Laughter] But anyway, I think it was the “Four Horsemen” episode, Fr. Stephen had mentioned the guy from the Trinity Broadcasting Network who had been discussing the horses pawing at the golden streets and the gold dust falling and all that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Michael: I thought you might be interested to know, I did my undergrad at Regent University, which is the TBN and CBN—they’re all on the same campus. And in the woods behind the TBN building, one of the rites of passages of students is to go back into the creepy woods, and they actually have the statues of the four horsemen hidden back in the woods.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. I’ve got to go to Virginia and go check this out.

Fr. Stephen: So what do you do when you go out there and find them? Do you mount one of the four horses, or…?

Michael: I think they would break at this point, because they seem pretty old.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Michael: So I didn’t do that. But, yeah, they were pretty creepy, though.

Fr. Andrew: Man. You’ve got to send us a photo of that if you’re ever back at your alma mater. You’ve got to take us a photo of that and send it in.

Fr. Stephen: Does that make you a member of the Bilderberg Group?

Michael: Yeah, I’ll put it in the Facebook group, because they do have pictures of it up.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Michael: I’ll find one and put it in there.

Fr. Andrew: I love Christian kitsch. It is one of my favorite things.

Michael: Oh, for sure. For sure. But my first question involves Christ’s blood during the crucifixion. I have heard various stories, and I don’t know the veracity of them, so I’m hoping to get comments on that as well as the effectiveness of this. But I’ve heard various stories of when Christ was crucified either one of two things: one, it happened on top of Adam’s grave, so then Christ’s blood went down onto Adam’s body; and the other one I’ve heard is that the ark of the covenant was hidden under there, so Christ’s blood ended up on top of the lid or the mercy-seat or whatever you want to call it. So my question is: Is there any official position on either of those two stories? And what is the significance of either of those things?

Fr. Andrew: Huh. I mean, the ark— I’ve never heard the ark thing before. The Adam’s skull thing is represented in a lot of iconography for sure: often at the bottom of the cross in a crucifixion icon, you see a skull, and that’s supposed to be Adam’s skull. But it doesn’t make sense to me that it would be the ark, if only because the Lord is crucified outside of the city. What would the ark be doing out there? I don’t know. I don’t know!

Michael: Well, the story I heard was that it got hidden under there or something, so that was like the final Day of Atonement thing, where the actual final blood ends up on the covering or something like that.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I get that idea… I don’t know. Fr. Stephen, have you heard that? Have you heard that before, the blood on the ark thing?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so the ark thing, the blood and the Day of Atonement part that you added there at the end, is an Evangelical riff—

Fr. Andrew: Ha!

Fr. Stephen: —on an old Templar legend.

Fr. Andrew: [Gasp] Oh, this gets better and better.

Fr. Stephen: So the Knights Templar claimed they had found the ark there during the Crusades and brought it back to a particular church in Scotland.

Fr. Andrew: As one does.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Where it was supposedly housed for some period of time, and then there’s all kinds of: Well, it’s buried somewhere underneath it, or: well, it got taken somewhere else, or: well, someone took it when the Knights Templar got done in, etc., etc. But that’s where that comes from. Also see the first Assassin’s Creed game. [Laughter]

But the first one, the part about Adam, is actually part of Christian tradition going all the way back into pre-Christian Judaism. So in terms of sacred geography, Jerusalem was considered to be the place where paradise had been. Mount Zion, because it became the mountain of God—it was being the mountain of God—that then is the place where paradise is, so it became the place where paradise always was. That then meant that the hill outside the city—where did Adam die and get buried? Outside. And that’s why it was called the Hill of the Skull. That’s where “Golgotha” came from, was that was the site where Adam was buried. That’s why that’s depicted, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, in the icons of the crucifixion: the skull, that’s Adam’s skull beneath the cross, that Christ’s blood is running down toward. And if you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and you go downstairs—it’s down underneath: you have to wend your way down underneath—there is a Chapel of Adam down there at Adam’s Tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you go.

Michael: Okay, cool! Cool, cool, cool. My second question involves—I guess it’s called Anno Mundi— One of the things Fr. Stephen said, if I remember correctly, was that he doesn’t take an official position on the age of the earth because the Church does not take an official position on that. But then in the past month or so I saw all this stuff on Facebook from different Orthodox groups and entities and other things like that, talking about the liturgical new year, and also involving that Anno Mundi thing; it’s like something 7,000 or 5,000 or something like that, so I was wondering if you could explain what that is, and is that the Church having a position on the current age of the earth, or what is that if it’s not an official position?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the Byzantine year. I mean, it is dated supposedly— So it’s dated from the beginning of the world, based on what people at the time who came up with that thought. There’s no version of adding up all the numbers in the Bible where you get to—what is it? Are we in 7520, no 7532, is that the year, the Byzantine year?

Fr. Stephen: -31, -32, something like that, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Something like that, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s finally for everybody, because today is Old Calendar September 1. I mean, that’s what it is. So it was a calculation that was done— I can’t remember when this was come up with. Was this fourth or fifth century? Sixth century?

Fr. Stephen: It was Constantine.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: So before that the Roman Empire had dated everything from the founding of the Roman Republic, but, post-Constantine, it’s no longer the Roman Empire really any more. It’s Christ’s kingdom and its earthly icon, and therefore the idea was you have to date it from when Christ’s kingdom started, which is when he created the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not— It’s not a theological position from the Church.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not clear, as you said— It’s not clear how that exact number was arrived at, because there is no version of Genesis from which you can get that number by adding up genealogies or anything like that. That’s why modern young earth creationists have a different number.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s about 6,000 or so, not the 7500 or so.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s a 25% difference. That’s not an insignificant difference. But that point of that difference, I know some people don’t understand what I mean when I say that young earth creationism is modernism. [Laughter] But that’s what I’m pointing at, because, yes, the Church Fathers, people in the ancient Church and in the Roman Empire, the Christian Roman Empire, didn’t believe the earth was millions of years old: absolutely true. But they also didn’t attempt to determine that using pseudo-science or a fundamentalist reading of some edition of the Bible. That’s not how they arrived at that. And so that’s what I mean when I say— I’m talking about— The methods that most modern young earth creationists use are modern methods. Also I just don’t find the age of the earth all that interesting. [Laughter] It’s not that important to me!

Fr. Andrew: Why exactly— It only matters within a matrix of “We need to use modern scientific empiricism to prove that the Bible is true and then therefore we can believe all the other things the Bible says is true.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s the modernist part that’s a problem. But if someone tells me, “I believe that that date is absolutely accurate. It is 7531 years—” I’m like: “Great.” [Laughter] If they tell me that’s when they think humans were created, and the earth is way older than that, I’m like: “Great.” [Laughter] Or whatever. If you tell me that death, that human death is not the result of human sin, then we have a problem. That’s where we run into trouble.

Fr. Andrew: Is that helpful, Michael?

Michael: It is, yeah. I guess the confusion for me was it sounded like there was an official position on that, and so that’s where I was wondering. So I guess this is not the official position of the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, here’s the thing—

Fr. Stephen: It was not declared as dogma at an Ecumenical Council or something like that.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot of things that exist within how the Church functions that are not a dogma of the Church. I know people who treat everything like that, but that is just not the way it goes, especially when you see that there’s variation over time on various kinds of things. And there can’t be variation on stuff that’s actually dogmatic, not really. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Michael. We are going to go ahead and go to our first break. We’ll be right back with this all-live Q&A episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back. Thank you very much for that, Voice of Steve.

Fr. Stephen: I think I’m going to have to petition them to change the name to “Faithfulness Tree.” [Laughter] Just saying, is all.

Fr. Andrew: All right. We’ll let them know. They are out in California somewhere, so it’s definitely early enough for them to be listening. So, once again, welcome back, everybody. This is an all-live, all-Q&A episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast, and this is our third anniversary episode.

Earlier we listened to a special greeting that was recorded for us by John Maddex, the CEO emeritus of Ancient Faith Ministries. Now we have another one from one of our very special friends. This one comes all the way from Texas.

Fr. Stephen: Before the clip, “emeritus,” by the way, means “person who rests upon their laurels.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you very much for that etymology!

Fr. Stephen: For those who don’t know Latin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there we go. [Laughter] All right, so this is a greeting from Texas.

Mr. Richard Rohlin: Hello, Fathers. This is Richard Rohlin, down here in Texas, and I just wanted to greet you both and wish you both a very happy third anniversary of this wonderful podcast. So many people have benefitted from it, and I just wanted to say that— [Record scratch]

Now listen up here, Friar Stephen De Young! You may think you’re tough, but you haven’t faced the likes of me yet. I’m Richard—the Spider-monkey—Rohan! And I’m here to tell you that I’m going to climb up that tall California Redwood and squeeze ya till you drop! You may be a man of the cloth, but I’m a man of the ring, and I’ll show you no mercy! So get ready, Friar Stephen De Young, because when we meet in the ring, it’s going to be a battle for the ages! Yeah!!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, Richard from Dallas.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So here’s what Richie Rohlins doesn’t understand. In a normal match, I would have a 50% chance of winning. But I’m going to have you in my corner, which means he’s going to have, at best, a 33% chance of winning, and I’m going to have a 66% chance of winning. But what he’s also forgetting is that I have his number, which means realistically I have like a 75% chance of winning. And if you take his 33% chance of winning and you subtract his 25% chance of winning, he’s got maybe an 8% chance of winning that match. You add my 75% chance of winning and my 66% chance of winning: I have a 141% chance of winning this match.

Fr. Andrew: I was told there would be math.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the match by the numbers. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, next we have Alexander calling all the way from San Diego. Alexander, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What’s on your mind?

Alexander: Blessed feastday, Fathers!

Fr. Andrew: Blessed feast.

Alexander: So I have a question about Numbers 11 regarding— in the wilderness. There’s a lot of little things. When the children, the wandering Hebrews, first get manna, quail is mentioned, that there’s quail that just bursts from the ground, and the children gather the manna. But then all the way into Numbers, they’re complaining that they don’t have any meat. Obviously—and there’s a contrast made there, eventually between the manna and the quail that God gives them. But they still— When they get that manna, and it says that they have it in their teeth and they’re gorging themselves, that a lot of them die, and the place was called— I’m driving right now and I can’t bring up the passage.

Fr. Andrew: Kibroth Hattaavah! [laughter] That’s my bad pronunciation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So—

Fr. Stephen: I’d like to apologize to the Jewish community for what Fr. Andrew just did. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I’m doing my best! I don’t know Hebrew! I assume it’s Hebrew.

Alexander: The symbolic meaning seems pretty obvious, and the Church Fathers and other adjacent ancient Christian commentators talk about the meat that they’re satisfying themselves with, and that’s contrasted also with the manna, like the bread from heaven: they’re not satisfied with that and they need something a little bit more lower, let’s say. But what is the story going on there? It seems like there’s something else. The main part of my question, I guess, is they’re literally livestock herders, and they literally have all the meat and hamburgers that they want with them. What does it mean for them that they’re lusting after meat when they literally have herds of livestock with them? What is going on there?

Fr. Andrew: Well, one thing that occurs to me—and again, I’m spit-balling here, but I’m thinking about my ancient Indo-European ancestors—is having herds of livestock with you doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be slaughtering them to eat them, especially if you’re out in a desert where it’s hard to keep livestock. One of the things that made— Now, these are not Indo-European peoples, but one of the things that made Indo-European people more capable of surviving on the steppes of what is now Ukraine is that there is a little gene-switch that flipped that made them able to metabolize milk in the years past infancy. So they were then able to travel with their livestock a lot further because they could drink their milk and survive off of that. But you wouldn’t necessarily want to slaughter them, because once you kill an animal it’s gone. So, yeah, I mean, they’re probably using some of those animals to work and for various reasons like that. They’re not going to just be killing them and eating them, because they’re not living in a great area; they’re wandering in the desert. That’s my off-the-cuff analysis. Fr. Stephen, give me some “Um, actually"s and corrections and “What are you thinking.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, I as a Dutchman can live entirely off of dairy products for any period of time.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. The apotheosis of the Proto-Indo-European peoples! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So there’s a whole through-line in Genesis that is really setting up as prologue to understanding this in the rest of the Torah. So the first thing has to do with meat-eating in general, which is something we’ve talked about on the show before, how there’s this movement in Genesis from Adam and Eve eating fruit from trees, which doesn’t even kill the plant.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just the plant giving you something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The creation offers itself to Adam and Eve for food. Then, after the expulsion from paradise, Adam has to work the ground by the sweat of his brow to bring forth food. And that ends up: you’re killing the plants, you’re uprooting the plants, you’re harvesting the plants, and having to plant again and reseed and do all that work—but we’re still just dealing with plants. And it’s only after the flood that humanity is given permission to eat meat, but that’s also when the strict prohibition of eating blood comes in, because this isn’t just license for man to become predatory, to become a predator. This is intimately related to the fasting rules of the Orthodox Church, then how that’s understood in the monastic diet and all of that. But that diet now, as Americans especially now, we eat tons of meat all the time, compared to anyone else in the history of the world— So it was, as Fr. Andrew says, fairly rare for people to have meat outside of sort of major feasts. So that’s one piece.

The other piece is running through Genesis, this theme of the corruption of the city, Babylon being sort of the archetype: Babel. But Abram and Lot divide the land, and Lot wants to go live first near the city of Sodom and then next to the city of Sodom and then all of a sudden he’s in the city of Sodom and then he’s sitting at the gates as one of the town leaders of Sodom. And so Egypt in Exodus represents the world empire; it is the Babylon of its day. It is this civilization that was the greatest super-power at the time Exodus begins in the sight of the world, but the site of the greatest evil. So if you read Exodus in the King James Version, you’ll see all these warnings of them “craving the flesh-pots of Egypt,” and this is referring to the sort of lifestyle. This is why this ungodly pagan lifestyle of the cities has some appeal to people. There is this lifestyle difference. They’re eating better. They’re drinking better. They’re enjoying this lifestyle that promises enjoyment in this world.

That theme—and that’s the place. You have the flesh-pots of Egypt. That’s bringing them together. You have the meat that’s eaten, the meat that’s served for food in Egypt, the luxurious food of Egypt. And so when they’re craving meat, when they’re dissatisfied with the bread from heaven and they’re craving this meat, it’s not just that it’s meat in general—it’s not like: “Oh, I need more protein”—this is specifically the flesh-pots of Egypt that they’re craving. It is the lifestyle. It is the relative plenty, the luxury of the city of man, of the world, that they’re craving, rather than being satisfied with what God is giving them from day-to-day. And God, with the quail, for example, will on occasion stoop to our level. [Laughter] And that’s a constant dynamic through the wilderness wanderings with Israel: despite Israel at any number of points sort of meriting their own destruction and God starting over with somebody else, God condescends to them out of love. So you get that dynamic of condescension with the quail, but this sort of demand and craving for it, this demand of God that God give them this kind of lifestyle, is one of the crucial sins there.

And this is not something that’s foreign to our time. In most cases, when things in our life aren’t going right, we’ve been indoctrinated with just enough Calvinism to blame God for it. [Laughter] “God’s the reason I can’t pay all my bills this month. God’s the reason why I can’t… God, why aren’t you giving me these things that I need to be happy?” That’s just a continuation of what’s going on with Israel in the wilderness.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Does that answer your question?

Alexander: Yeah, that’s great. I was just thinking that there might have been some sort of idolatrous subtext there that we were missing, but, no, that really corresponds with all the symbolic readings, too. All right, thank you, Fathers. Blessed be your day.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you for calling. All right, well, we have another caller from the Golden State. Jason, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Jason: Hey, Fathers! Thanks for having me.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Welcome. What’s on your mind?

Jason: So I was reading in a Wikipedia article about the Seventh Ecumenical Council—

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s got to be 100% true. 100% true! [Laughter]

Jason: I’m sorry, what? Oh, yeah, for sure! Obviously, what I read, you can correct me or “Um, actually” me. [Echo of question]

Fr. Stephen: Uh-oh! You’ve got to turn off your radio, caller!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Jason: Oh! I’m sorry.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, so you’re going to hear yourself as we’re hearing you now in a little echo there.

Fr. Stephen: Recursive loop!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. So you’re reading Wikipedia, as one does: Seventh Ecumenical Council.

Jason: Yeah, so it’s giving a prooftext for the veneration of icons. It goes through some of the verses where it talks about carving cherubim on, I think, the ark of the covenant, which I totally understand how that relates specifically from your first Halloween episode. But then it gets to Genesis 31:34, where it talks about Rachel stealing Laban’s idols, and I don’t really understand how that relates to venerating icons.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow! See, that’s not where I would go. Is that in the council, Father? I can’t recall.

Fr. Stephen: Nooo…

Fr. Andrew: No, I don’t— Yeah, I mean—

Fr. Stephen: I can’t account for Wiki-ality. [Laughter]

Jason: Okay, fair enough.

Fr. Andrew: But yeah, talk about— I don’t think we’ve ever talked about Rachel and those—whatever they’re called. [Laughter] It gets translated in various ways.

Fr. Stephen: Household gods.

Fr. Andrew: Household gods, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, I mean… I can’t think of a way it relates to the icon veneration! [Laughter] I’m thinking in the story she hides them under the saddle and says she’s menstruating. Like, that’s what happens in the story! So this is going weird places.

Jason: Yeah, it was a mystery to me. So I just wanted to get some insight. My big take-away is to not trust Wikipedia articles, so thank you very much.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because there’s a number— In the Old Testament, there are a number of places where, for example, they start worshiping the bronze serpent as an idol, start using it as an idol, and so they have to destroy it. There’s the whole thing with Gideon and his father’s idols and then his ephod that ends up becoming a snare. Yeah…

Fr. Andrew: So I looked this up just because I’m curious, so I’m looking at the Wikipedia article, and it says…

Woman: I know. I can hear it through my phone…

Fr. Andrew: Hi, other voice! [Laughter] And it says that in the fourth session of the council there’s this reference—and it has just a whole bunch of listed off Bible verses, so obviously Jason decided to look up what the verse was. But the reference to this is that this is from Edward Gibbon. Edward Gibbon is the source that’s given for this.

Fr. Stephen: Oh.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah…

Fr. Andrew: Now, I don’t know. I don’t have the text of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in front of me, so I don’t know what—

Fr. Stephen: What does the specific verse say that’s listed?

Fr. Andrew: It’s 31:34, where it says, “Now Rachel had taken the household gods and put them in the camel’s saddle and sat on them. Laban felt all about the tent but did not find them.” Which… I don’t know. I mean…

Fr. Stephen: So here’s— I’ll try.

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Fr. Stephen: This is 90% conjecture. The idea of household gods— This is something that continued all the way through pagan Rome. The gods any given person worshiped— And this is a family thing; again, this is a communal thing, not an individual thing. Your family had family gods. There might be some god that’s a patron god of your family. There might be some famous ancestor of yours that’s in the hero category, in the sort of demi-god category, whether they were actually an ancestor or not, by our modern genealogy standards. The gods of the place where the family was originally from. The god or gods of the place to which the family had moved at some point. All of those are kind of conglomerated into the gods that were worshiped by a particular family or household, extended family. Those would be represented materially through idols. That’s what’s being referred to in this case with Laban’s household gods.

Like I said, this continued all the way up to the Roman period. In the Roman household, that would be at a hearth, at the hearth which was the center of the home and the center of family life, that’s where those idols would be; that would be the place where the family would gather for their familial worship offerings, that kind of thing.

When Christianity comes, Christianity obviously displaces that. St. Paul goes to Corinth, and you have pagan Romans—not Jewish people in Corinth, but pagans—who join the Christian community. Number one, no more idolatry, so household gods have to go. But what happens pretty much immediately is that it’s not just like: Okay, so now your family’s not going to gather for prayer or veneration or anything in your house any more. No, but you’re going to gather, instead, to worship God and Christ. And so you have those household gods getting displaced by iconography very quickly.

And it’s not just those family shrines at the hearth in the Roman world. The walls were covered with frescoes of scenes from Greek myth that had religious importance of gods, goddesses, monsters, heroes. The Christians didn’t just whitewash their walls. They replaced these with scenes related to biblical stories. And we know that Jewish homes and synagogues—wealthy Jewish homes, obviously, but Jewish homes and synagogues had the same thing from the Hebrew Bible, from what we call the Old Testament.

My surmise is maybe that that verse came up in the context of this displacement, that sort of the household gods weren’t replaced by nothing, because household worship continued, but it became household worship of the true God, and iconography is a different thing than an idol.

Jason: Right. Okay, that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: While you were talking, Father, I found— I don’t know, I’m not doing real research here. [Laughter] I’m just Googling.

Fr. Stephen: Using the Google!

Fr. Andrew: Right. I found the extant extracts from the Acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, went to the session four that’s referenced by that article, and I’m not seeing anything in there about Rachel or Laban or any of them. I don’t know if Edward Gibbon, who is, like, not exactly pro-Christian, or certainly not pro-Eastern Christianity, whether he was making stuff up or what, I don’t know. I’d have to really read through these texts to know if he’s making stuff up.

Fr. Stephen: But I think that there’s an important principle here, in that we have to always keep in mind— For example, we talked about this in the marriage episode, where there’s this idea out there that Christians post-Constantine just had “Roman civil weddings,” and how that doesn’t make sense, because there was no sacred/secular distinction at the time. They didn’t have secular civil weddings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that wasn’t a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Roman weddings were a pagan religious celebration, and so Christians were not having a pagan religious celebration when they got married post-Constantine. [Laughter] That was transformed by Christianity. So the same is true with this, that there’s this assumption that somehow Christianity came into some— or that there is some neutral state into which Christianity came, and that’s not the case. There was family worship going on. Christianity transformed that; it didn’t do away with that, just like it transformed marriage and weddings, it didn’t get rid of them.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like— This is a point that we’ve made in some of our earliest episodes, that the religion of ancient Israel, the religion of ancient pagans, the religion of Christianity from the very beginning are not fundamentally different in terms of the actions that they’re doing, in most regards—there are some pretty significant elements of paganism that are not present in Christianity or Israel!

Fr. Stephen: Sexual ritual, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Sexual rituals, exactly. But the offering of sacrifices, the veneration of images: this is all— Everyone’s doing this! The question is not “Are you doing it or not?” but “Towards whom, with whom, are you doing it? Are you doing it towards Yahweh the God of Israel, or these other spirits God told you explicitly not to worship?” It’s not that venerating images is right or wrong; it’s venerating images of the holy ones of God is good, but venerating images of pagan demons is bad. That’s the difference.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s not the same thing as idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Idolatry is not venerating an image of a demon. Idolatry is the belief that that image embodies, is a body through which that spirit acts and through which you interact with it.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, pagans would both venerate images of demons and also use images of demons as idols, because it’s not the same action.

Fr. Stephen: “Venerate” just means pay respect to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Just pay respect. All right, does that answer your question, Jason?

Jason: Thank you so much. Absolutely.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Okay, before we take our next caller, we have another greeting. You know, I contacted the Voice of Steve, and I said, “Please say something for our anniversary episode.” So this is what he had to say.

Voice of Steve: Hey, everybody, this is Steve, and this is the second time in the last month that Fr. Andrew has pulled me out of my digital multi-media retirement and asked me to record a little greeting for The Lord of Spirits because this is the three-year anniversary! And I’m not going to do a greeting. I’m actually going to share a frustration that has percolated in my heart for the past three years, because this podcast has dehumanized me. This podcast has reduced me to nothing but a Voice. So I go around and I meet people, and they’re like: “Ha ha ha, look at you, you’re not just a Voice; you’re a person!” Of course I’m a person! I’m a person with feelings and desires and motivations, and I want to walk through the hills and I want to smell the flowers and I want to sing the song that I want to sing, and I’ve just been reduced to a Voice, a disembodied Voice by this podcast. And it’s alienating and it’s dehumanizing and it’s done me dirty for a long time, and I’m finally just fed up about it, and now that I have this platform I just have to vent my frustrations, vent the spleen that has built up for so dang long. But, yeah, happy three-year anniversary, I guess. Jerks.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks for that, Voice of Steve!

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s good to hear from the Spleen of Steve. [Laughter] But also, I am now declaring him the John Cena of the Orthodox world.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! All right.

Fr. Stephen: Those who know will know.

Fr. Andrew: And those who don’t, don’t, because that’s how this podcast works. [Laughter] All right, well, heading down to the southern portion of the United States, we have Douglas from Georgia. Douglas, are you there?

Douglas: I’m there. Good evening, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Douglas. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Welcome to our third anniversary episode.

Douglas: Super excited to talk to y’all, and thank you for taking my call. Congrats on three years, and I’ve been listening since December 2020.

Fr. Andrew: All right, fairly early on!

Douglas: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Back during the disconnection days!

Douglas: Yes, oh my gosh! There’s been a vast improvement.

Fr. Andrew: The pre-fiber optic period.

Douglas: Yes, right on. Right on. So I have my question written down, I want to be clear, because this might be a big one, but I feel like this is a good one for the anniversary episode, so bear with me for a second. My question to you both is this: I really enjoy the many discussions that this show has about the history and context of the Ancient Near East, the religious environment, and how the Scriptures, the prophets, the apostles engage with the world that they live in. I have some theological education, but I feel, and I’m sure there are many other listeners who feel this way, that we feel unequipped to dive deeper into that area, that field. For example, I’ve taken Greek and Hebrew, I’m familiar with some of the extra-biblical texts, I’ve had a couple of courses where we’ve looked at Mesopotamian Ugaritic texts like the Baal cycle and Enuma Elish, etc. Shout out to Fr. Stephen: even the poem of the righteous sufferer, aka Babylonian Job, from a few episodes ago. But I feel like I fall short in going beyond that, and often get stuck in contemporary, mostly modern, textual critical schools that want to re-interpret the ancient world through modern lenses.

So, to put it simply: How can one like myself or who’s interested in understanding the world of the Bible get a better context of the Ancient Near East? How can a layman get a good starting place to do their own study and to be able to kind of engage with the stuff that’s talked about on The Lord of Spirits, but they don’t have the opportunity or the incredible discipline for a formal PhD program, but would love to access whatever’s generally available with a computer or a library? Long story short, how would a layman be able to do the work that y’all do regularly on a regular basis and get some amazing stuff out of it? I hope that makes sense.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re trying to put me out of a job…

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, if you’re Fr. Stephen, you start when you’re 16 years old. [Laughter]

Douglas: True. I’m 29, so I might have a late start.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m afraid you’ve wasted half your life. [Laughter] You know, the thing that I would suggest starting with is to read the Old Testament Apocrypha as one of the best places to go. I mean, that’s a big bunch of texts just right there. If you get the Charlesworth two-volume set, that’s two big books. I mean, that is a good place to start for sure.

I know another recommendation that we often give is, especially if you’re not able or can’t or just don’t want to learn the ancient biblical languages, the NET Bible, full-notes edition, is really great because even though the translation is kind of clunky at points— Actually, let’s just be honest: it’s almost all clunky, that translation—but what is has is really detailed translation notes, explaining why they translated the way they did and giving alternatives as well. And the cool thing about that text is, including the notes, is on the internet for free at netbible.org, I think is what it is. So that’s another good way to take those deeper dives into some of that stuff and at least begin to see the larger world of what’s going on there.

But I mean the biggest thing really is just, I don’t know, frankly, go to Orthodox services a lot and really focus on what’s being sung. I’m not one of those people who says, “Oh, just go and the services will teach you everything,” because, number one, that assumes that you can even understand what’s being said in terms of teaching knowledge that you can think about and talk about and discuss—so, number one, it needs to be in a language that you can understand, but also a lot of parishes don’t have a full full cycle of services, so it’s limited in that regard. But nonetheless, there’s still a huge amount there to give that sense of the way that the Church interprets the Scriptures. So those are the three suggestions that I would give, and Fr. Stephen is now going to tell you where you can learn Ugaritic at home. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, if you’ve studied Hebrew, you actually can pick up Ugaritic at home pretty easily.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a Basics of Ugaritic book that will basically get— because all it is is vocalization differences. Less Semitic languages are pretty similar.

Yeah, in terms of what Fr. Andrew said, I just want to add also the purpose of Orthodox services, especially the Divine Liturgy, is not primarily didactic.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Which has a bunch of important resonances, including to a bunch of dumb arguments going on online right now. [Laughter] So, yeah, I mean, I think to me the biggest thing is to try to familiarize yourself with as much primary source material as you can, and there are big collections, like Fr. Andrew mentioned, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha two-volume set. But you can also get Before the Muses that’s Akkadian literature, big chonky book. There are a lot of— There’s a three-volume series for the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of Egypt, of primary literature. And you can find those at libraries. A lot of that stuff, old translations are in the public domain.

Fr. Andrew: And read Hesiod and Homer. A lot of people’s knowledge of Greek paganism, for instance, comes from Edith Hamilton and stuff like that, which is nice, like, those are nice; those collections are nice, but it doesn’t replace reading the actual texts that ancient pagans were using.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And once— as you become familiar with those primary sources and the biblical text itself, you’ll start noticing connections and interactions between them. You’ll start picking those things up, but you won’t if you’re not familiar with the primary material.

And then the second thing is, when you do read secondary material, which is secondary for a reason—that includes journal articles from smart people as well as just any secondary material—one skill that most people today lack is the ability to read something for information or data, not for conclusions. So people will pick up a book about the Old Testament, and it could be arguing for the documentary hypothesis, it could be arguing for some kind of crazy theory about Yahweh being part of a pantheon with El and Baal, whatever. It could be the most liberal, weird 19th-century German thing in the world. [Laughter] You don’t read secondary literature for the conclusions, the conclusions they come to; you read it for the data they’re using to come to their conclusions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and often they give you references to what to go read, read the stuff that they’re reading. I was looking at a book recently, because I was— I think this has been mentioned several times on this show, the ritual search for Persephone that ancient Greek Athenians would engage in. So I want to know a little bit about that. Well, the only book that I could immediately find talking about that was one that was completely whacked out in terms of its theology and so forth, but it nonetheless kind of described these rituals, and that’s what I was there for.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so between the information you get from the secondary sources and your familiarity with the primary sources, you can then form your own conclusions, which may be radically different from the conclusions that whoever the secondary literature author came to, because he started with different presuppositions that he brought to that information. And so you’re bringing a different set of presuppositions. You can look at the same data. You might come to an opposite conclusion. But that’s the place where you can get the data, and that’s really hard for people nowadays to do because, first of all, a lot of people, if they— as soon as they get the impression that they disagree with the book and the author, they stop reading.

Douglas: Right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? Because they’re like: “Oh, well, this person is a—fill in the blank—they’re an atheist, they’re a liberal, they’re a whatever: they have nothing to offer me,” which is hubris beyond belief, for one thing. [Laughter] But also it leaves you deprived of the information, the data that you need to form and inform a sturdy conclusion, because what happens to, for example, a kid who’s just been taught all the answers but hasn’t been given any of the supporting information, when they go to college and somebody smart starts interrogating those answers? It falls apart.

Douglas: That’s right.

Fr. Stephen: And that can happen to any of us. Getting that information and getting it wherever you find it, no matter who it is that’s saying something that’s true or interesting or informative, latching onto it and then forming your own conclusions, because then, when someone comes along and questions your conclusions, you can walk them through how you got there.

Douglas: Yeah, that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: So there you go. Is that helpful?

Douglas: That’s very helpful and I really appreciate it. I feel like there’s so much more I could dive into, but it definitely— I definitely relate to the aspect of: when you read secondary materials, you tend to kind of jump the gun. You see where the argument’s going and not pay attention to the data. I’m sure that’s probably a discipline I could work on for sure. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s funny because— What Father says is right. There’s so much polarization right now, so the question that people ask of a text first is: “Is this person on my side?” Like, you know, you have the book in your hand… [Laughter] They’re not going to win any arguments just by you reading it. It’s not going to hurt you. And it’s interesting: you know this is true, that this is the way people deal with books, because a lot of Amazon reviews you read, almost immediately the person says whether or not they agree with the book, and almost always that’s what the whole review is about, whether they agree with it or not. I’m like: well, if all you do with the book is ask whether you agree with it, then why are you bothering to read, because you have all the answers already?

All right, well, thank you very much, Douglas, for calling.

Douglas: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. All right, we’re going to take one more caller before we take our second and final break. We have Willis calling from the true Yankee state, Connecticut. Willis, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: You’re not going to ask him what he’s talking about? [Laughter]

Lewis: I kind of wish my name was Willis; it’s Lewis.

Fr. Andrew: It’s Lewis!? Bobby wrote “Willis”! Man, see that’s what happens when you hire some intern.

Fr. Stephen: He’s over there watching reruns of…

Fr. Andrew: Eight is Enough, is that it?

Fr. Stephen: Eight is Enough!? Diff’rent Strokes!

Fr. Andrew: Diff’rent Strokes, okay, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: He’s over there watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes. He’s got it on the brain.

Fr. Andrew: It’s that fuzzy 1980s sitcom brain, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Conrad Bain’s performance is mesmerizing. [Laughter] I mean, I will give you that, Bobby. I understand. But.

Fr. Andrew: Man. Okay, Lewis. [Laughter] See, I’ll give everybody a fancy word. It’s called metathesis. That’s when you flip two consonants. So the name Barkley, you can say Broccoli, so Lewis to Willis.

Fr. Stephen: Charles Broccoli.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s right. Lieutenant Charles Broccoli.

Lewis: I’ve learned that now. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Metathesis, metathesis! [Laughter] All right. Connecticut: that’s the state my dad’s from! Where in Connecticut do you live?

Lewis: North of Waterbury.

Fr. Andrew: North of Waterbury, all right.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t doxx the man! Come on.

Fr. Andrew: I’m just asking general region! [Laughter] And your address and your home phone number…

Lewis: Later, later.

Fr. Andrew: So what is on your mind, Lewis from north of Waterbury?

Lewis: Hello, Fathers. So cool to finally call in. Long-time listener. It’s cool to just call in and ask. I have a question about death by holiness, something that this show has clearly established, how it’s a phenomenon in the Scriptures, really illuminating that this is a by-product of the purifying nature of God. It’s really led me to start thinking about Christ’s appearance on Mount Sinai. Moses can’t look at God the Father, but he could talk to the Angel of the Lord. I really started thinking about the Incarnation: God walks the earth, Jesus dines with sinners. Nobody’s bursting into flames. In fact, sinners are healed. It gets a little muddied and everything with the Holy Spirit. So I guess my question is: This death by holiness phenomenon, is this an exclusive quality of the Father? Are there levels to this purifying quality? I’d appreciate it if you two could riff on that in regards to the Trinity and how to understand it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, God is God. That’s why, for instance, to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ in an unworthy manner is harmful to you, as St. Paul says. I mean, that’s a direct obvious reference right there to death by holiness from the Son of God. Yeah, I don’t know. Father, since this is such a great core concept of this podcast— And really I think once you get the idea you start to notice it everywhere in the Bible. And why do certain kind of things happen? Like Ananias and Sapphira lying to the Holy Spirit: Boom!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s the example with the Holy Spirit, and that’s following the pattern from Leviticus. So in Leviticus, the tabernacle— God comes to dwell in the tabernacle. It’s filled with his presence, and then what happens immediately after? Nadab and Abihu get— They’re on fire for the Lord and they die by holiness. [Laughter] And in the text of Leviticus, the Day of Atonement ritual is put into place because of what happened to Nadab and Abihu, to prevent that from happening again, in a more widespread way in the camp. And then you have this same pattern in the book of Acts, where the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, comes to dwell within the Christian community, and one of the first things that happens: Ananias and Sapphira, death by holiness. The sort of stakes have not been lowered in the new covenant in that regard.

In the case of Christ’s incarnation, this is what’s going on, for example, when his flesh is referred to as “the veil,” talking about the veil of the Temple, that Christ’s humanity mediates his divinity to us in a way that prevents that sort of death by holiness, that allows him to be seen by us and interacted with by us. It’s not that— See, this is one of the reasons why we talk about the humanity of the “pre-incarnate Christ” on the show sometimes, even though that makes everyone’s heads hurt, because it’s not that “Oh, well, you can’t see the Father, but you can see the Logos, because the Logos is, like, less God or something.” [Laughter] That would be Arianism. Christ is not the mediator between God and man in that sense, that he is some being that is in between God and man. Christ is the mediator between God and man in his own Person, because he is a divine Person who takes upon himself human nature, our shared human nature. It is our shared human nature that then allows for that mediation to humanity. So that’s what prevents people from dying when they look at Christ or when they stand in his presence or even are sinful in his presence.

The other thing is that, of course, there is a voluntary nature to all of this. So, yeah, Nadab and Abihu did something egregious and died by holiness, but every other high priest who ever went back there was also a sinner.

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

Fr. Stephen: I mean, by the time you get to the New Testament high priests… I know we talked about this on the show at one point. Part of the problem with— So for people who don’t accept the tradition that when Christ talks about the blood of all the righteous from Abel to Zachariah, the son of Berechiah, Church tradition has always been that that Zachariah is St. John the Forerunner’s father whom he’s talking about, who was murdered recently between the altar and the high place. But so, for people who don’t accept that, the problem with identifying who that Zachariah is is there are multiple priests named Zachariah between or in the “intertestamental period” who were murdered in the Temple, historically.

Fr. Andrew: Kind of makes you not want to send your sons off to be a priest.

Fr. Stephen: When the Roman general Pompey, a pagan, annexed Jerusalem, he marched into the holy of holies. So not everyone who went in there unworthily died. Not everyone who unworthily receives the Eucharist drops dead. St. Paul says, “Some of you have gotten sick and some of you have even died.” It’s not that Christ couldn’t have struck dead all of the Roman soldiers and Jerusalemites who were crucifying him if he wanted to. They could have all died due to their wickedness in his presence, but there’s a voluntary aspect to it as well. Nadab and Abihu, Ananias and Sapphira—I mean, Ananias and Sapphira are not the only two who liked to the Church about giving money.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wait, what!?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I know! Not everyone who does it dies.

Fr. Andrew: Man!

Fr. Stephen: But it happens to them as an object lesson. And that dynamic is important to understand when you’re thinking about the death penalties in the Torah, whether all those people were really expected to be executed, or whether the statement that these people are to be cut off from the other people is doing a different kind of work than just mandating the literal execution of every single person who does this, or if this is a warning.

Fr. Andrew: All righty. Is that helpful to you?

Lewis: Oh, big time. Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. Thank you very much for calling. All right. We’re going to go ahead and take a break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of this third anniversary episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Andrew: You know, is it me, or did the Voice of Steve with that announcement sound just a little resentful? I don’t know, I feel like the timbre of his voice changed a little bit there.

Fr. Stephen: I think you’re reading in. But I do have to say whom I do feel bad for is somewhere out there there’s some 29-year-old single person who’s feeling totally alienated by that commercial.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, I have heard that they’re not going to be actually checking ID at the door.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: So I’m just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: So Ancient Faith is in favor of underaged drinking.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, no, no. [Laughter] Well, that escalated quickly!

Fr. Stephen: Just want people to snip these clips and put them on the internet and get mad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! Well, speaking of clips, yes, this is our third anniversary episode, and we have another super-clip compilation in this third and final half. Here we go.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, there were a few great memories I have that weren’t in the first one, so we’ll see if they made it.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true! So hopefully this will supply some of that for you. Let’s think back. [Harp music]

Fr. Andrew: Let’s dive in! So are you ready, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: …Yes. Yes—but no. Yes.

Fr. Andrew: It was like when you see the doctors shock a dead patient in the operating room, and he jumps up, gasping, and is just like he was before?

Fr. Stephen: ...No. No. No.

Fr. Andrew: So is this just talking about language?

Fr. Stephen: No. Yes. No.

Fr. Andrew: And when we say that human consciousness produces the world, are we saying that the world is just the Matrix, but we’re the computer?

Fr. Stephen: No. No.

Fr. Andrew: But is that the kind of world that Abraham lived in, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: No. NO. No. No. Yes. Last time on Lord of Spirits… Now we insert a shot of a guy turning a car key and then a long shot of a car exploding or something?

Fr. Andrew: That there was this idea that ancient Egyptians worshiped onions. Have you heard of this, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I am aware of this. Yes. No. Well, and as you said, I think some people’s brains after this may go into recovering mode from taking in so many high-level ideas.

Fr. Andrew: Fr. Stephen, was Adam a priest?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, but— No.

Fr. Andrew: This is the one episode where I’m allowed to sneeze on the air. What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but you’re only allowed to sneeze twice in a row. Yes. Yes, I am aware of this. NO. NO.

Fr. Andrew: [Harp music] There you go. That’s the monosyllable super-clip.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, we were told by our Lord to let your yes be yes and let your no be no.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And you have let it be those things so many times!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, like a flower in the forest, I have let it be.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. All right! Well, callers, it’s time to hear from you once again. We’ve got Jessie calling from the Bluegrass State. Jessie from Kentucky, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Jessie: Thank you so much, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you!

Jessie: Awesome. I was calling because you guys have talked a lot in past episodes about understanding how things are made holy by being set apart, or things that are set apart and are used for holy purposes. And that makes a lot of sense, especially when looking at places and objects, but I’m wondering about especially how, practically, do you do that with time, especially looking at keeping the sabbath holy, being able to honor especially on a feast day, being able to keep feast days holy. I mean, without getting super legalistic, of like: “Okay, we have to go to church and there’s no video games, and you can’t do this and you can’t do that.” Like, what’s the actual manner in which we can approach keeping our time holy and set apart in a certain way, especially in big families, because I have six kids, so keeping time holy is a challenge any time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, I’ve got four, so I’m two-thirds of the way where you are. Six is magnificent! Yeah. Right, so, well, let me pass on a little bit of wisdom from my wife. She has a lot of it, actually. She has— Especially since her husband is a priest, when it’s time to be in church in particular, that means she’s managing the kids largely on her own. Thank God sometimes the older ones help with the younger—although not always, as I’m sure you know as a mother of six.

Jessie: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] But she— I hate to speak for her here, but I think this is such a beautiful thing that I’ve heard her say, especially to younger mothers. She refers to dealing with that as “praying with your feet,” and apparently there was for a while—I don’t know if it still exists, but there was an Orthodox mother’s blog out there—I think she was also a priest’s wife—titled “Praying With My Feet” or something like that, and it just refers to the simple fact of having to go in and out of church over and over and over and over again, which I’m sure you’ve experienced.

Jessie: Oh, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes: right. A lot of times when people want to— Okay, you arrive to church on Sunday mornings, this is holy time. It’s set apart; it’s holy. How do you do that? You go in, you focus, you be in church, you listen to the prayers, you sing along, you make the sign of the cross, you receive the sacraments—and then a kid starts screeching. Maybe it’s your child, maybe it’s someone else’s child, but it’s an opportunity for repentance. But it feels like distraction.

The task of parents and of helpful godparents and aunts and uncles and older brothers and sisters is to help train those younger ones to learn how to keep the time holy themselves. That is an ascetical act. You have to sacrifice your own sense of momentary peace in church in order to train someone else how to be there and be ready to receive what we all showed up to receive. It’s not easy by any means. In a lot of ways, the clergy—we do have our challenges, but in that regard it’s pretty easy for us, generally speaking: we’re surrounded by people who are trying to be pretty focused and are doing it fairly well—although, you know, clergy can get distracted, too, for sure.

But, yeah, if you don’t catch everything that’s sung, or you only hear 10% of the sermon—if that— [Laughter] I mean, my wife has missed many of my sermons. And you know—God bless her—she doesn’t need to hear my sermons: she lives with me, so she has to hear me bloviate all the time. So if you never hear those things, you are still doing something that is extremely holy.

To me, the moment that we stand before God, if we can speak about it in this way, there’s two recommendations I would like to receive at the throne of God. One is from my wife; I hope that she can say, “Yeah, you can let him be here.” And the other will be from my children. If they can do that, then by God’s grace I will have been saved. Those of us who live in families, this is our biggest task, is to assist and to participate in the salvation of the people that we live with, because—not only because it helps them, although that would be enough, but also because it helps us.

I remember there was one time—I don’t remember if I’ve said this on this show before, but there was one time I was in confession with my father confessor, and I was describing him my struggles, trying to live a good life, and I said something to the effect of, “But the people around me make it really hard.” [Laughter] Like, “I could be a better Christian if it weren’t for them.” That’s basically what I said to him. I don’t remember the exact words, but that was the message. And he said, “You know, all the things that you’ve described to me, all the struggles that you have, the way that your family acts, the struggles that they have, the failings that they have, the strengths they have—” He says, “You have asked God for salvation, right?” I said, “Yes!” He said, “This is what he’s given you, because he knows that this is what you need for your salvation. And if you wish that it were some other way, then what you’re trying to do is walk another path than the one he actually gave you, because this is what you need to be saved, this life that you have.” He said, “They’re not in the way; they are the way. They are the way.”

Yeah, I know full well that when you’re feeling exasperated at children or at anybody, it feels like it’s impossible to pray, but we have multiple saints who have said things to the effect of one person who offers a single prayer in the midst of the world actually is doing a greater work than monks who live in monasteries and get to pray in peace all day long—which is an amazing thing to say, and most of these sayings come from monks, so they recognize that the struggle, the challenge, and the salvific value of the difficulties that we have, just trying to do the basic acts of prayer and piety and trying to keep some order, that that is a very, very powerful, powerful thing. I know this turned into kind of a monologue now, but I do have some experience with this, and I mostly have experience watching my wife, who is really— really has worked very, very hard at this. And seeing it pay off… I mean, my children range from ages 6 to 16, and I’m not going to say that any of them are always 100% totally ready to be in prayer or whatever, but as I’ve watched them begin to love it and connect and so forth, I can see that this is the work my wife has done and that I’ve tried to contribute to, but especially that she’s done.

That’s what I would say about that, especially about trying to participate in Church life with six children. It’s a glorious thing that you’re doing. It really is. It’s a holy, holy thing that you’re doing. And you don’t know how many lives you’re going to benefit by not just the six small people that you’re dealing with, but also the people who watch you dealing with them, the people who watch you even get frustrated and then come back and keep doing it, because that’s really important, but then also the many lives that those children will affect as well, that they will pass on. So it’s a grand, grand work, and so it’s going to feel like a great quest, because it is. That’s what I would have to say to that.

Okay, so now my long monologue is over. Fr. Stephen, I’m going to hand the ball over to you.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know, man. I spent a chunk of today’s feast digitally disemboweling fictional ninjas. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Finish him!”

Fr. Stephen: I think part of the problem we have with this concept is that we’ve been taught to see the world in a way very differently than ancient people and the Scriptures do in that we have in our mind a distinction between the sacred and the secular: the sacred and then the things of the world. In the worst-case scenario, that turns into Gnosticism, where the world is actually evil. But there are much softer versions, of course, that we normally live in, where the world is just kind of neutral at best, but that neutrality mainly gets threatened by Platonism, because it’s like: Well, right now you’re having fun but you could be praying. So is having fun really okay? [Laughter]

And that’s fundamentally different— That distinction between sacred and secular is fundamentally different [from] the distinction between sacred and profane. Profane was not necessarily a moral category. Using the restroom is a profane act, for clear reasons: you make yourself unclean; you need to wash. And the reason why that is distinguished from the sacred is to prevent mixing: the mixing of the sacred and the profane is the problem. When we take things that are profane and bring them in and mix them with sacred things, that’s when it becomes a problem.

So why does this skew our idea of holiness? Well, because most of the world falls into the secular category, if that’s the categories we’re using, of sacred and secular, but most of the world does not fall into the category of the profane per se. Spending time with your kids playing a board game falls into the secular category but not the profane category.

Jessie: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And so part of making, say, a day holy or a time period holy is that we do that ritually, and those rituals don’t have to be sacred as opposed to secular; they need to be sacred as opposed to profane. So, for example, when I was a kid, I wore different clothes on Sunday than I wore on every other day of the week. On Sundays when I was really little and my grandfather was still alive, we went over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for Sunday dinner every week. We didn’t do that any other day. Later on, when I got older and my grandfather passed away, it was Grandma [who] would come over to our house. But when she came over to our house for Sunday dinner, we all sat at the dining room table, not the kitchen table where we usually ate. It was different.

None of those things are particularly sacred or holy or “religious” in the modern sense of sacred-secular distinction, but all of those things were actions by which Sunday became a different day for me than the other days of the week.

A few years ago, I tried to have a conversation with somebody who was an atheist I knew, and I don’t think I was able to communicate my question, because my question to him was: he’s an atheist, never been religious in his whole life, never been religious at all. And I asked him, “What is Sunday like for you?” And he’s like: “What are you talking about?” [Laughter] I was like: “Well, is Sunday just like another Saturday? Do you just have two Saturdays?” And he’s like: “What are you talking about?” [Laughter] Because for him, there was nothing “Saturday,” “Sunday”— There was no difference for him. And that’s just been ingrained in me since I was a child, so it has this different character. Even periods of my life when I didn’t go to church, sometimes for extended periods of time, Sunday was still different for me, because that had been built into me by ritual when I was young.

So there are real practical ways to do that, but we can’t get too up in our heads about “Is this really a sacred thing or is this a worldly thing?” “We’re having fun: we could be praying, we could be reading the Scriptures together.” Sharing fellowship together, hanging around after church and sharing fellowship and having conversations and getting to know the other people in your community is incredibly sacred and in no way profane—unless you’re telling dirty jokes, which most people don’t do at church. [Laughter]

Those things, those times can be sacred, too, as long as we have this idea that they’re set apart and different from other times.

Fr. Andrew: Does that help, Jessie?

Jessie: Yes! That was enormously helpful. Thank you so much. And I wanted to pass on greetings. We have a Lord of Spirits discussion group at church—

Fr. Andrew: What!? [Laughter]

Jessie: —so I’m sure all of them will be super excited to hear it right now.

Fr. Andrew: Another one!?

Fr. Stephen: They’re going to get to discuss you now. [Laughter]

Jessie: I know! So meta. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I feel like we should pull a Shatner and say, “Get a life! It’s just a radio show!” [Laughter] Anyway. Well, thank you very much for calling, and greetings to your Lord of Spirits discussion group there in Kentucky.

Jessie: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, now we have Sam. Is he Sam Houston? It’s Sam from Texas. I feel like that should be a Sam Houston. Sam from Texas calling. Welcome, Sam, to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Sam: Hello! Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we can hear you. You’re not Sam Houston, are you?

Sam: No, I’m afraid not. I’m in Dallas, also, to add to the disappointment, so I apologize.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: But he is in the Republic of Texas.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, we’re close. So, yeah, of course, long-time, first-time, very thankful for Lord of Spirits. My wife and I have begun attending [an] Orthodox church thanks in large part to your work, and we’re reading Religion of the Apostles. But I’m trying to understand the view of sacrifice and idolatry you’re putting forward, Fr. De Young. There are a few things I’m struggling to put together. You frame sacrificial— Well, he frames sacrificial worship as a form of hospitality towards God when done correctly, or towards other spirits when done wrongly. And if I recall correctly, he refers to the spirits that God put over the 70 nations as falling by accepting this sacrificial worship, but if it’s just hospitality, why is it wrong for the nations to offer this form of service and wrong for the spirits to accept it? And if I can just throw in a follow-up, I noticed the hospitable offering of animals and other sacrifices is often paired with offering incense, like in Kings where it talks about them offering incense to Ba’al. So then why does the Seventh Council say the images of saints and angels can be offered incense? I’m just a little confused how this all fits together. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All righty. Well, this is good! This is core meat-and-potatoes stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t say that on a fasting day. [Laughter] It is for us New Calendar people; if you’re Old Calendar, you know, whatever. Texas barbecue, man. Happy new year!

Sam: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, number one, it’s not just hospitality as a general category, because otherwise that would mean having your best bud over for dinner would be idolatry. So that’s not all that it is. It’s hospitality as to a god, which has a particular ritual form. It’s not just hospitality in general. So what does that ritual form look like? Well, in idolatry, they set up an idol, they put food in front of it, it gets offered ritually to the god, and then either burnt completely for the god or maybe part offered for the god and part eaten yourself. And the whole idea is to kind of control the god and get what you want from it. That’s what’s going on in idolatry.

When you invite that god into your community in that way, then you become like that god. It’s a kind of intimacy, spiritual intimacy, that is only appropriate for Yahweh the God of Israel. If you offer that to an angel, an obedient angel says no. We see that happen in Scripture: they do not accept sacrifices. You offer that to Paul and Silas, they say, “No, we’re not going to take that!” [Laughter] That’s what happens in Lystra. So it’s really about this set of actions in this ritual way is appropriate only to God.

With regards to incense, it is within that context of hospitality and sacrifice, but what’s happening with incense and icons or even other humans—because other people standing in church get censed when the deacon or the priest comes and censes them—it’s not being offered to them. It’s been offered to God. The prayer actually says that. “The incense we offer to thee, O Christ our God.” It’s been offered to God, so the sacrifice is to God, but then it is used to purify and to make sacred the space and the people. It’s an act of purification. So incense— I mean, incense in the ancient world had this notion. It had also this sense of hospitality, not just because it smells nice but because there’s a sense of it cleanses the air and there was this understanding that it wards off evil spirits, so it has this spiritual purification element. I think I remember reading recently someone actually— Not that this matters super much in this regard, but I think it’s interesting to note that apparently incense also even has a kind of purifying effect on the air with regards to things like diseases that are airborne, that it actually helps to ward off that possibility, too, which I’m sure ancient people must have noticed that as an effect.

I don’t know—Father, am I leaving something out or getting something wrong?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, something of an “Um, actually.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay, go for it!

Fr. Stephen: I think you overly differentiated amongst types of hospitality.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And the reason I say that is one of the themes when you get into the general epistles in the New Testament is specifically that there are certain people, designated as false teachers, to whom you are not to offer hospitality.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, right, but not because it’s idolatry!

Fr. Stephen: No, but— But it’s ultimately for the same reason.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: The place to go on this is 1 Corinthians 10 and what St. Paul says about sacrifices, including the Eucharist. What does he say? He says, “What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” And he says, “I do not want you to be—” and the word there is koinonia, which is usually translated as “participation” or “partakers,” but that’s the word we sometimes translate in modern English as “fellowship.” “I do not want you to have this hospitality, this fellowship, this participation with demons.” And he says, “You can’t participate with Christ and with the demons.”

So that is the issue there, that this hospitality is not just like: “Oh, we had the new neighbors over for tuna casserole.” [Laughter] This is creating this relationship of community fellowship that we’re talking about. And doing that with a demon, with an unclean spirit, an evil spirit, obviously is like a horrible idea and is going to lead to destruction, whereas doing that with God is going to lead in a fundamentally different direction.

This isn’t just hospitality in the sense of doing something nice for somebody; this is like community-building. These communal meals and the sacrificial rituals that surrounded them are what created communities. That’s what made an Athenian an Athenian, was participating in that sacrificial ritual life. This is why there’s such a crisis when St. Paul starts going to these Greek cities, and that’s why some people start suggesting: “Hey, why don’t they all just become Jews? That’ll solve the problem.” [Laughter] But St. Paul says, “No, they need to stay Greek, and being Greek needs to mean something different than it used to.” And that’s a long process that takes centuries. But ultimately the Greek identity today, part of it is being an Orthodox Christian!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, it worked. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so that’s fundamentally different [from] what it meant to be an Athenian in the first century, which meant worshiping Athena and participating in certain pagan festivals. So this is fellowship, this is hospitality as community-building, the building of family bonds among people, that you don’t want to do with demons, you want to do with God, because we’re part of the household of God.

In terms of incense, what Fr. Andrew said is right in the sense that we literally at the altar offer the incense to Christ, and then the smoke is distributed. And this is true not just— This isn’t just a biblical principle. This is true in the Torah. This is also true in every other ancient culture, because every other ancient culture offered incense. I know it sounds crazy. We’ve said this on the show before. I know it sounds crazy to your average random modern person to say that the default way of worship among the human species is the offering of incense and sacrifices, but I offer to you the history of the world as proof. [Laughter] Literally every culture on earth.

Fr. Andrew: Everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: But that smoke with incense is the product of the sacrifice, and blood was seen in largely the same way, the blood of an animal sacrifice, that is, or with a drink-offering, the wine. And what does the blood of an animal sacrifice do? It has this purificatory effect, because by virtue of that animal being designated as the sacrificial animal and used as sacrifice, the blood is moved into the realm of the sacred and therefore has this purificatory effect. The same thing is true of the smoke of incense. And so in the same way that, for example, in the Day of Atonement in the Torah the blood of the goat that’s offered to Yahweh as a sin-offering is then distributed in a certain way to purify the accoutrements of the holy of holies and the holy place, the smoke of the incense is distributed to purify all those present, including those represented there by icons, including the humans that are present, who are, after all, the icon of God, the image of God.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, Sam. Does that help you understand? Does that work?

Sam: Yeah. No, yeah, that’s very interesting. Thank you. But isn’t the actual wording of the Seventh Council like “of incense and lights being offered to the images according to ancient pious custom, as the honor paid to the image passes…”? You know the classic argument, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure. So the question is not just “what does the word say” but “what are the actions actually taken.” So when a censer is waved at something, that is not offering incense to that thing. The incense has already been offered; it’s been sacrificed to God. We don’t say— And we don’t even say— We don’t even say those words. We don’t say, “We offer incense unto you, O holy Saint whoever.” We don’t do that; we don’t say that.

Fr. Stephen: Nor a candle. The candle that’s lit in front of an icon is not offered to the saint depicted in the icon.

Fr. Andrew: Not offered to— So when the council uses that language, it should not be understood in that way, because that’s not what the actual actions are.

Sam: Okay. Interesting. Well, yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. There’s a lot to chew on. I’ll have to think more about this. As you know, I am a seeker and just exploring it all. But I really appreciate you taking the time. One more question, if I can squeeze in: Will you do a show on icons? And if not, are you at least going to wrestle Gavin Ortlund?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s welcome to call in.

Fr. Stephen: I will, at any time or point of his choosing, take on Gavin Ortlund in a wrestling match, with any stipulation of his choosing.

Sam: All right!

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Sam: I’ll be sure to put that down in his channel.

Fr. Andrew: Pass that on. [Laughter]

Sam: All right. Thank you so much, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. We’re going to—

Fr. Stephen: Let me just add to that real quick.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: In any pagan context—East Asian, Middle Eastern—when you see idols, there is an altar of incense attached to them, where incense is offered to the idol. Of course, there was an altar of incense in the tabernacle and in the Temple. Now, we in the Orthodox Church offer the incense at the same altar where we offer the Eucharist, but you do not find an altar of incense in front of icons in an Orthodox church.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly so.

Sam: That’s a fair point, because, yeah, that’s what first really alarmed me, because I spent a lot of time in Taiwan, and that’s a standard way to worship: you buy an incense stick and you wave it in front of the idol, and then you put it in the little urn.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so I’d have to look at the original Greek and see what the verb there that’s translated as “offered,” too. It could just be “placed in front of” or—

Fr. Andrew: “Given.”

Fr. Stephen: “Set before.” Yeah, I don’t know exactly what the original word there is, but that’s something I’d have to look up.

Fr. Andrew: “Offer,” even in English I could say, “Can I offer you some dessert?” That doesn’t mean I’m making a sacrifice of cherry cobbler to you. Anyway. [Laughter]

Sam: Fair point.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Thank you very much for calling, Sam. We’re going to take a couple more calls, but before we do that, we have one final greeting, and it is indeed from our engineer for tonight, none other than Bobby Maddex himself.

Mr. Bobby Maddex: Fr. Andrew, Fr. Stephen, I can’t tell you what an honor it is to have a small part in this, your very final show. It was a really good run, guys. Love the bat stuff. You know, I just wanted to quickly apologize again for not reviewing with you our AFR audience standards way back in 2020. Now, that would have saved us both a lot of headaches, am I right? Yes, you were reminded. We have that pesky little AFM-wide cap on the number of nerds with whom we’re associated… which you guys blew right on past by episode two, didn’t you? And it didn’t seem like the geeks were ever going to stop tuning in, I tell you what!

Anyhoo, even though Melinda had to cancel the program, if I can be honest here, she never really liked it anyway—too much giggling, she says—I just wanted you to know, as you put Lord of Spirits to bed for the very last time that it was such a joy to spend six and a half hours with you every other week. You guys truly have your finger on the pulse of the American attention span.

I also wanted to say that I look forward to whatever excessively esoteric shenanigans the two of you come up with next—not on AFR, of course, but for someone. Enjoy the night!

Fr. Andrew: So we’re going rogue! What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: I think it’s amazing that he— Even though he’s here live, in theory, he pre-recorded that so he could just wander off and not pay attention during the actual show.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true. It’s absolutely true.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what I think is amazing.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t even know who’s taking the calls over there right now! I have no idea.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it could be a cat. [Laughter] It could be a cartoon cat, like in a police officer uniform.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, so whoever is answering the calls, we have Taylor calling from Daytona Beach. Taylor, welcome to what apparently is the final episode of the podcast.

Taylor:  Hi, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you. Welcome!

Taylor: Great. Thank you! I just wanted to say, before I asked my question, that I’ve been listening since October 2020, so I’m really excited to finally be speaking with you guys. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve done with this show.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God.

Fr. Stephen: I’m glad you’re a long-time listener, but all these people telling us they started in 2020… Like, what else did you have to do in 2020? [Laughter]

Taylor: I mean, I was actually— That’s the first time I stepped foot in an Orthodox church.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, well that’s good!

Fr. Andrew: Awesome!

Taylor: So my question today is I feel like there’s this idea that [Inaudible] and which is this idea that the original intent—and I know this is summarizing a lot, but the idea of taking the garden of Eden, paradise, this sort of divine order that God originally created the world, but then expanding it outward. And I feel like this brings, at least for some people, this very bucolic image of gardening as something meditative and peaceful. I know from experience that there’s actually a lot of toil and suffering and frustration involved. So I was wondering how this idea of, I guess you could say, divine gardening and divine order contrasts with the consequence of sin after the fall in terms of Adam and Eve being told that they have to toil for their food, and that the ground essentially— they have to work the ground for their food. I know we’re not supposed to be taking that literally, but how do those ideas sort of— What does that heavenly gardening look like? If that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a great way to put it. I mean, ultimately it looks like— If you read all the way through the Scriptures, ultimately it looks like the New Jerusalem. We do tend to think of paradise as being this… like those flower gardens—and you can go to old mansions and they have these big flower gardens and that kind of thing. But it’s depicted— So paradise is a walled garden, so it’s not just this kind of untrammeled wilderness: it’s cultivated. It’s cultivated, and it has human participation, intended and designed for that. So it ultimately is about civilization, but it’s civilization given by and in concert with God, rather than the civilization that Cain creates, which is opposite all of that.

When Adam and Eve, it becomes hard for them, it’s an indication that they’re still supposed to be working on what they were given, but now it’s going to be hard because of their mortality, because of their sin. It’s going to take work; it’s going to take repentance, is what it ultimately means. And the beautiful thing is that even when someone gets to the point where sin has been cleaned out, that doesn’t mean that: “Okay—bam! We have paradise.” It doesn’t mean that. It means actually: “Okay, now we can begin” in some sense. “Now we can return to this task, but it will be actually greater than even what Adam and Eve had, ultimately because Christ has come, and through Christ all of this has a possibility.

I don’t know, Father. More to say about that? Less to say? Corrections.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, well, as your question kind of contained, Adam and Eve had the same mission after they were expelled from paradise; it’s just now very difficult. Now it’s a struggle to do it. This isn’t just the fault of our first parents; this is the fault of us. But in part we’ve got this Puritan Calvinist thing in the back of our heads, at least as Americans, where when people hear what I’m about to say, which is turning the world into a garden is essentially humanizing it, they look at that with horror, because we’re all kind of convinced in the back of our heads that humans are totally depraved and therefore to humanize something would be to pave paradise and put in a parking lot or turn everything into a giant city or corrupt everything or cause mass extinctions, because nature is good and beautiful until humans show up!

That’s a problem with our view of humanity. That’s a problem with our anthropology, because the place where we look to see what a human truly is is not Adam and not me, but Christ. Christ doesn’t just show us who God is; he shows us what a human looks like, an actual human. [Laughter] What we’re trying to aspire to be and grow into. So turning the world into a tended garden is humanizing it, because it’s about reestablishing the relationship between us as humans and the rest of the creation, that was damaged at the expulsion from paradise and shattered by Cain.

We see this—we see the image of this—in the saints, for example, with their relationships with animals, sometimes wild animals, whom they were at peace with and were able to live at peace with. Why? Because of their way of being in the world and because of them becoming human in Christ, the relationship between them and the rest of creation was sort of reestablished. So that’s part of what we’re shooting for, and that’s not something— That’s not a switch we can flip, and it’s not something I can give you: “Here’s the ten steps to turning your world into a garden.” [Laughter] I’d sell more books that way, probably. People like that kind of thing here in America.

So as we work toward being conformed to the likeness of Christ, becoming more like Christ and therefore, thereby becoming more like God, the relationship between us and other people is established, and the relationship between us as people and the rest of the creation is reestablished in a way that gives order to it and gives it renewed life, rather than the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Does that answer your question, Taylor?

Taylor: Yeah, that’s what this show always does. It kind of is lifting my mind out of the material, so I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God. All right, well, we’re going to take one final question for this evening’s live Q&A.

Fr. Stephen: Better be good! Lots of pressure!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! So we’ve got Athanasius himself calling. Athanasius from Nebraska, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Athanasius: Greetings from the land that’s not for everyone!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: Do you feel as if the whole world is against you?

Athanasius: Um, yes, especially on football Saturdays.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Athanasius: It’s been a rough 20 years. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s okay. You’ll get through it. I mean, you may not win, but you’ll get through it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You will survive.

Athanasius: I saw a meme on Facebook the other day that right now Nebraska football is like living through Groundhog Day except in hell. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow. You know, Groundhog Day, that takes place here in Pennsylvania. I’ve been to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Not too far down the road from me.

Fr. Stephen: So aside from suffering from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, what else is going on with you? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What’s up with you, Athanasius?

Athanasius: Well, I have a question about soul bodies or spiritual bodies that have been talked about on the show before. It’s kind of an Ancient Faith Cinematic Universe question?

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Athanasius: Because another Orthodox thinker that’s talked a lot about this is Jonathan Pageau, and—

Fr. Stephen: Here comes the Civil War part of the Cinematic Universe.

Fr. Andrew: I’ve heard of him… [Laughter] I think we should bring the feud back, actually. I think this is a good time to relaunch the feud, since we’re going independent anyway.

Fr. Stephen: I’m pretty sure Pageau is Captain America and you’re Iron Man in this, Fr. Andrew. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I thought I was Stan Lee! You’re messing up the whole thing now.

Fr. Stephen: Just in terms of the Cinematic Universe and the Civil War.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. Okay. Anyway… [Laughter]

Athanasius: Well, so a few episodes ago, Fr. Stephen— I think someone asked about the famous Santa Claus video.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, you’re trying to stir this pot, I see. [Laughter] But go ahead, stir it! It’s fine!

Athanasius: Well, so this question is interesting to me and I ruminate on it a lot, and I just wanted to maybe stir this pot a little more to see what both of you think, specifically because Fr. Stephen said something to the effect of, well, I don’t necessarily think Santa Claus exists; maybe St. Nicholas does. I have— One thing that Pageau has talked about in some of his discussions of this is that there’s sort of these beings that are like headless bodies, and what that associated with in my mind is taking— when St. Gregory of Nyssa talks about having an angel and a demon on your shoulder whispering things to you, taking that and blowing it up to the macrocosmic level.

Basically… How do I explain this? It’s like the way the St. Nicholas traditions have been received by the Germanic people, and that became Father Christmas in England and Santa Claus now as we know Santa in America. If I go to the mall and I see Santa Claus there, yeah, I’m sort of experiencing the being of Santa Claus, but… It’s like there’s this body that is either sort of anagogically pointing back toward the St. Nicholas and through him toward Christ, or this large body that you could say maybe a demon is swooping in and taking control of and pointing people toward greed and consumerism and something like that. It seems like, you know, in our normal phenomenological existence, we do experience Santa Claus as existing, but more so as a body, I think, trying to just understand what the Orthodox Church teaches on this and what has been talked about on this show before. I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, I think I got what you’re talking about. So I mean… Without— I can’t say I completely understand all of the ins and outs of Pageau’s arguments about this, although I’ve watched the Santa Claus video. We’ve talked about this before. So the question might be: Is St. Nicholas, the saint, is he making use of all these cultural elements to do something? Like, is he using them as a body? I think that that would be a hard sell for me, because a mall santa is not necessarily conveying Christ to you, right? Which— St. Nicholas is always concerned about doing that, because he’s a saint. He’s a bishop of the Church. He’s a saint. He loves Christ. He worships Christ. So is there something else that’s making use of all that? And I know one of the big questions is: Does consciousness arise out of a mass of movements of people? Like, is there a spirit that arises out of it? I… That suggests that human beings can get together and create spirits, that we can create beings. I don’t think that’s true. Now, can a spirit influence a whole people all at once? Absolutely, of course. I mean, we’ve said that many, many times. Yeah, I think there’s a difference between a spirit animating a people and— although, I mean, it’s not a huge, huge difference necessarily—and having a body. Yeah. I don’t know. What do you think, Father? We’re kind of getting into some good metaphysical weeds here.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So I don’t claim to totally understand Pageau’s position— In fact, the last time we talked about it, I explicitly said that. I’m not entirely sure. And the last time I saw him address this— In fact, if I remember correctly, someone directly asked him about what I said the last time this came up on the show, about whether Pageau thought we disagreed. And in that context, Pageau kind of said that he didn’t think you should try to nail it down too much, meaning he deliberately is not defining this really tightly. So I’m not going to claim that I can define his view more tightly than he thinks it should be defined, but I can lay out what I’m saying—I can try and lay out.

So what I’m saying is Santa Claus exists as an idea. St. Nicholas exists: he is a person. He is a human person. And those are two distinct things metaphysically. So he as a person has a body in the sense that we talk about bodies on this show: a nexus of powers and potentialities. He has agency; he is able to act. As an idea—Santa Claus is an idea—an idea does not have a body and does not have an ability to act, but an idea is something that can be utilized. It is an instrument. So St. Nicholas can use the Santa Claus idea instrumentally to do things, but other beings and people with agency can also.

Athanasius: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So a good-hearted human can use the idea of Santa Claus to dress up and go and visit a children’s cancer ward, to do good to those kids. Another person can use that idea and dress up as Santa and use it to go rob houses.

Fr. Andrew: Which is totally a thing!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And Coca-Cola can go and instrumentalize those ideas to sell you high-fructose corn syrup and caramel coloring. [Laughter] So an idea can be instrumentalized in all of these different ways, but it does not itself have agency, because it’s not a person, whereas St. Nicholas is a person, and so is a person who can instrumentalize those ideas.

Athanasius: Okay! That makes a lot of sense. Sorry, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and the connection between the two— So, I am a person. I, Fr. Stephen De Young, am a person. And therefore I have agency and that kind of thing. But there is also an idea of Fr. Stephen that, for example, listeners of this show have, or readers of my books have, or parishioners at my parish have. And there’s not a one-to-one correlation between the two.

Fr. Andrew: What!?

Fr. Stephen: They’re not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: You mean the things that people say about you on Twitter are not 100% you?

Fr. Stephen: And the idea of me can’t actually do anything, but I can use the idea of me to do certain things, sometimes. Like, I could use the— If I wanted to, I could use the idea of me to enrich myself. I could go around asking people for money and trying to trade on my e-micro-celebrity to accumulate some small sum of money. [Laughter] But other people can use it, too. So someone could go on Twitter and say, “Well, Fr. Stephen De Young said…” And what are they doing when they do that? They’re using the idea of me to make some point, to win some argument, to get people mad at me and on their side. Whatever they’re trying to use it for, they’re instrumentalizing that idea. So that’s another example of that.

So these ideas exist in the phenomenological realm. They exist, but it’s not the same as a person. People instrumentalize those ideas.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, Athanasius. Does that do it for you?

Athanasius: I think so. I think it seems like that the ideas are kind of almost like a fringe or a margin that aren’t necessarily part of the body proper, to use more Pageauvian terms.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They’re epiphenomenal. They arise out of the reality.

Athanasius: Okay! That makes a lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. I mean, it’s like memes! That’s what memes are, right? Memes are epiphenomenal. They get passed around; people use them for stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Yeah! And, you know, various people who have ended up being memes— the meme has very little connection to the actual human whose picture is in it, sometimes.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, Fr. Stephen and I have been memed, sometimes together! [Laughter] Not that we’re encouraging that kind of thing, but, you know, it does happen. All right, well, thank you very much for calling from Nebraska, which, you know, it’s not for everybody, but we do like it!

Athanasius: [Laughter] Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Have a good night.

Fr. Stephen: Mostly good for corn. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, right! Okay, well, that’s our third anniversary episode. That is our show for tonight. Thank you, everyone, very much for listening. If you didn’t get through to us live this time, we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits; you could shout into the air—we probably won’t hear it that way, though.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. We kind of just gave away the fact that this wasn’t the last episode…

Fr. Andrew: It’s true. That said, if you’re on Facebook, follow our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings in all the appropriate places, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to benefit from it—or, you know, just to irritate them.

Fr. Stephen: But, I mean, get off Facebook! How old are you, even, man? Come on. [Laughter] 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: I’m about to start my own TikTok account, so. Thank you, good night, God bless.

Fr. Stephen: Are you going to dance?

Fr. Andrew: No-o!

Fr. Stephen: Oh.