Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: What is up, all of you giant-killers, you dragon-slayers, you stompers of scorpions and serpents? You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, thousands of miles away, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania—and we are live! So if you’re listening to us live and not via Memorex, you can call us at 855-237-2346, and you can talk to us. We’re going to get to your calls in the second half of the show, and our own beloved Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls.

If you’ve ever had a chat with one of our Calvinist friends about he or she feels about other churches or theologies aside from Calvinism, you may have heard that person use the word “idolatry”—not just for Roman Catholics or us, either. Idolatry is a big category for Calvinists that includes a lot. So what is idolatry, and do the Orthodox, with their love and veneration for iconography, have an idolatry problem. I mean, if you—

Fr. Stephen De Young: No.

Fr. Andrew: —venerate just a little too much, did you do an idolatry?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right! Good night! Yeah, that just makes my rhetorical question pointless! Thank you very much for that one.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay, sorry, sorry. Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Come on! I’m monologing here! You get to monologue for the rest of the show! Anyway, yes, so tonight is the first in a two-part series. Tonight we’re talking idolatry and next time we’re talking iconography, but here’s the burning question that I know even Calvinists sometimes wonder about: Is American Idol real idolatry?

Fr. Stephen: Maybe.

Fr. Andrew: Is that the first “maybe” we’ve gotten!?

Fr. Stephen: I think so. Because Kelly Clarkson’s career is kind of inexplicable otherwise.

Fr. Andrew: Ha! Ha.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, that movie was terrible.

Fr. Andrew: I did not see it, so I was probably saved from… Anyway.

Fr. Stephen: And she had a couple singles, and somehow she gets a talk show? It’s weird. It’s weirder than Ricki Lake. That’s all I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: Man, I haven’t thought about Ricki Lake in a lot of years!

Fr. Stephen: It would be kind of weird if you did. [Laughter] I mean, I think about the Roman Empire every day, but if you thought about Ricki Lake every day—little odd.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t think I’ve even thought about her every year.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t remember every thought I had last year, so who knows? Come and gone. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, we’re doing this two-part thing. In part because lots of people— I mean, we’ve touched on this in various episodes in various ways, but we haven’t done an episode or episodes really devoted to this. And our approach here, because I think this is part of the problem, is, as you implied with your truncated set of rhetorical questions—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How dare you, sir!

Fr. Stephen: —that people tend to see idolatry and iconography somehow as if they’re on a continuum. Of course, this is because there are a lot of people, from Protestant, especially Evangelical Protestant backgrounds, who have been kind of taught that there is no difference, that religious iconography is idolatry, or at least so easily becomes idolatry that it should be avoided.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like: “These simple people, they’re just doing what everybody else is doing, and they’re probably slipping into idolatry.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so there’s just this presupposition that they’re saying. I hear even very intelligent people I know from that background make these kind of comments, like “St. Athanasius here, well, see, he condemns idolatry and he doesn’t mention Christian iconography, so he must have been an iconoclast.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Actual argument being made recently by somebody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, by an intelligent person! By an intelligent person.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, who got very excited about his argumentation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not by a dumb person; by an intelligent person. And that’s sort of like saying, “Well, this Church Father condemned a pagan Roman emperor and didn’t mention bishops, so he must be an anarchist.” [Laughter] Like, those don’t follow! A bishop and a pagan emperor who declares himself to be a god, they’re both authority figures.

Fr. Andrew: And they’re both religious authority figures.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and they’re both religious authorities, because the emperor was the pontifex maximus of the Roman cult; he was the high priest of the Roman cult. So there are some superficial similarities, but there are also much more major difference in how these roles are completely conceived of. And the same is true when you actually get into it about idolatry and iconography, because there’s also pagan iconography, as we’ll talk about next time. So within paganism, idols and iconography were two different things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, idolatry and iconography basically share two different things: images and religion.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But that’s not enough for either one to be what it is.

Fr. Stephen: Like religious authority figures! There’s still a radical difference. Even though some of our Protestant friends would make these arguments with idolatry and iconography, I dare say most of them, unless they’re, like, a Quaker, and say, “Well, hey, look at the pope: we can’t have pastors.” So there are important differences here. And so what we’re going to be doing in these next two episodes—tonight we’re doing idolatry; in a couple of weeks we’ll be doing iconography—we’re going to explain what each of these things are, historically, in their religious use. So hopefully by us, back-to-back, going through each of these phenomena, people will be able to see: “Oh. No, these are two different things.” As you mentioned in your rhetorical question, it’s not like someone’s going to walk into my parish and venerate the icon at the entrance too hard and accidentally do an idolatry. [Laughter] Like: “Oh no!”

Fr. Andrew: “Wait, wait, wait! Back off! That’s too many kisses, pal!”

Fr. Stephen: “Throttle it! Throttle it!” [Laughter] So these are two fundamentally different things, even though they both involve imagery and both… And I will say here, because you mentioned it, this sort of weird colonial idea that: “The world is just full of these simpletons who don’t have the kind of advanced religious sensibility I do—so if they watch a movie with someone playing Jesus in it, they’re just going to start worshiping the movie screen.”

Fr. Andrew: Those ignorant peasants.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that everyone’s just a fool. Or if— I’ve seen it taken to the extent that if you have a cross at the front of your church: “They’re just going to start worshiping the wooden cross, like they’re just too dumb to make the distinction in their mind between a wooden representation of the cross of Christ and God. Just too subtle for them.” And this is preposterous. And by the end of tonight, we’re going to talk about just how idolatrous many of our smartest and savviest folks are, without their knowledge. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But we’re here to help. [Laughter] We’re here to help.

Fr. Stephen: Or at least point a finger and condemn, if not help. [Laughter] I could just go full Pharisee if I need to.

Yeah, so we’re going to start talking about idolatry where it arises, and of course idolatry arises all over the world simultaneously within paganism. This is another one of those things, where someone recently online said, in commenting on one of our old episodes where we had talked about just sort of everyone in the world offered sacrifices and offered incense and therefore that’s sort of the natural way humanity worshiped, they acted like that was ridiculous.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I remember that.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’re moving from a presentist perspective of “Oh, why is that more natural than what they do at a Baptist church or what they do in a Buddhist ashram or…”

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it’s just the reality. This is what you see when you look at the ancient world.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and we try to have reality-based discussions here at Lord of Spirits rather than ideology-based discussions. And this is just true, and this is going back into the— Probably everyone has seen at some point, going back to the Neolithic Era, one of the earliest human-crafted sculptures we have is that earth goddess statue.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: Idolatry just pops up everywhere in the archaeological records. Everybody’s doing it, and this is why, as we’ll get to in the second half, the Israelites have to be told in strictest terms not to do it, because everyone did it. It was what seemed natural to them.

So as we’ve talked about, some of this right here at the beginning we’re going to be reviewing. We’re going to be pulling together some things we said in different episodes in the past. Pagan worship, as we’ve talked about in the past, starts with certain essentially natural places, meaning before people start building temples, before start constructing shrines, naturally occurring features of the world become identified and become the locations for sacrificial worship, the offering of incense, and other religious ritual. As we’ve talked about before, these are generally places where someone has had some kind of contact with a spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s like groves in forests or clearings or on top of a cliff somewhere, stuff like that. It’s some geographic feature that’s recognizable in some way, typically.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and delimitable, where you can say—

Fr. Andrew: “This is a place.”

Fr. Stephen: “This is the place. The other places around it are not this place.” And so that, as this begins to evolve, you start getting low fences, low rock walls, just circles of stones: ways of delimiting that particular space, marking out that particular space. “This is the space where the spirit that they hold to be divine was encountered at some point in the past, so this is the place where we return to interact with, participate in that spiritual reality.” Before you start getting what we would call idols proper, you start out with, again, sort of unworked natural features. So you get a tree, a large tree that’s at the center of one of these spaces. You get a pole. You get some kind of standing stone. Many of these were deliberately the first shaping that happens to them is not carving them into human or animal forms, but generally shaping them into phalluses, if they didn’t already look like them.

Fr. Andrew: Unfortunate reality, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: This is what Asherah poles were, that you read about in the Old Testament; they were large phallic symbols, and the reason for that of course is that they were associated with fertility.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and power, virility, all that stuff, worked in stock and stone.

Fr. Stephen: And both the fertility of the land and crops and the fertility of humans in reproducing and having children, which were the two key things to survival, as the Neolithic revolution happens and people start to do agriculture. So these are people’s two primary concerns. It’s not a wonder that, as they’re interacting with these spirits that they believe are divine, that it takes this form of seeking fertility.

And then, from there, you start having those stones, and those trees or poles or what-have-you, being worked into more complex images and shapes. For the most part, this starts out with animals, with figures of animals.

Fr. Andrew: Theriomorphic. Today’s secret word is “theriomorphic”!

Fr. Stephen: Well, not yet.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Dang it!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Um, actually… No. So in a minute.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay. Just getting excited.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, about theriomorphism. So, no, you start out with just animals. Often, as we’ve talked about on the show before, this is bulls. These are other animals that were taken to embody certain qualities. The bull, obviously, you can see how you can get there from the previous imagery of sort of virility, power—a bull being a male, masculine power. And then also other animals: heifers, obviously, related to that; and other similar sort of imagery.

Then we move into a stage where the spiritual beings who are being interacted with are being depicted, and that’s when you get the theriomorphic human-animal forms.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: The Egyptian gods mostly stuck with that, as did the Hindu gods mostly stuck with that.

Fr. Andrew: And plenty of South American deities as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, are sort of mixed human-animal forms, or mixtures of different animals. And then in some places like Greece, at the end of the Ancient Near Eastern period, you start getting just humanoid, pure humanoid depictions of deities, and those are generally shaped after a king or founder-figure whom they had previously— who while he was alive—or she—and was a sort of king or ruler or founder-figure, was seen— they believed embodied the divine while they were alive. So this king was thought to embody the sky-god; when they make statues of Zeus later, they make him look like that king.

And this isn’t just something we get from modern anthropology. There are a few Church Fathers who talk about this, who say that the popular imagery of the Roman gods, at their time, for example, is based on ancient kings.

Fr. Andrew: Well, yeah, and I mean you even get this later, with Snorri Sturluson introducing the Prose Edda. He basically says that the Norse gods were just heroes from Troy that eventually came to be worshiped.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And it’s probably more complex than that in that there’s a give-and-take of those gods already having been worshiped under some different form, and they do get amalgamated in history.

And so this is sort of what we see on the ground of the beginnings of idolatry. As we said, this is pretty much universal; this is everywhere: in the Ancient Near East, in other ancient cultures like the Indus River Valley. This is all over the place. And it is still kind of true today, as we mentioned with India, in terms of places— If you go to places where Christendom didn’t exist, and you still find this sort of thing in many places. That’s what we find archaeologically and anthropologically. Of course, we talked about previously, when we were talking about the story of the Tower of Babel, that part of the story of the Tower of Babel is them trying to draw God down, them trying to use an idol to contain and interact with Yahweh the God who created the universe. And that of course goes badly for them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s even fun traditions—not mentioned in the Bible, but from Second Temple Jewish stuff—that talk about Nimrod building the tower. Number one—this is my favorite part—“If we build it high enough, then when God floods the place again, we’ll escape this time.” And then also the idea of “And also, while we’re up there, we can make war on heaven and bring him down,” so it’s just another way of using that same kind of imagery of trying to defeat God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so that is sort of from the other side, idolatry coming into being, and a depiction of it. So of course it’s after that, as the true God sort of withdraws from humanity to protect humanity from his own holiness so he won’t destroy the world again as he did with the flood, that angelic beings are assigned to the nations of the world and it’s from there that, as we’ve talked about before, pagan worship and idolatry evolves, as we see in the archaeological and anthropological record.

So how did these idols function? How were they used? Whether we’re talking about in a shrine outdoors in the early phase, or in the Roman Empire in Greece or Rome, where you have a temple with the statue of a god, centrally located.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a vast complex…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: If anybody’s been to Lebanon and you’ve been to Baalbek, there’s a temple to Zeus there, which is just massive! I think it’s the largest extant pagan temple in the world, I’m trying to remember.

Fr. Stephen: I think it mostly got destroyed.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah! I mean, it’s not in good shape, but…

Fr. Stephen: Like, the site got destroyed recently, I think.

Fr. Andrew: Oh really? Oh, like recently?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That’s lame. I hope that that’s not true. I heard that that happened in Palmyra in Syria; I heard that was an issue, but I hadn’t heard that Baalbek had an issue. Anyway.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, as the name implies, originally that was a shrine to Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Baal, yeah, exactly! Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: But Zeus and Baal kind of got assimilated, starting with Alexander.

So how are these idols functioning? How are they being used? The idol, first of all, serves to localize the deity. A spirit wasn’t seen to have— obviously doesn’t have a material body in such a way that it’s like: “Oh, well, yeah, Baal, he’s the next town over. If you go over there, you can have a beer with him at the tavern.” [Laughter] So you have to— He’s a storm-god, too, so he’s hanging out in the sky. You have to bring him down. You have to have a place to meet with him. The idol served to localize, to bring the deity to that place. And this becomes so true that there are particular hypostases—and if me using that word freaks you out, listen to some old episodes; I’m not going to go through it again now—of pagan gods get named after these places.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like Baal Peor or Artemis of the Ephesians.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is why, when you’re reading Homer, it seems like there’s 87 different names for the same Greek god, because a lot of times he’s using local names, like localized place names to refer to Greek gods and goddesses in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

So not only does this localize that deity to that place, but if creates a version. There’s a body of that god now in that place that, unless the temple and idol are destroyed, will remain there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and often they have particular local characteristics, too. It’s not like statues of Stalin which all kind of look the same. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I haven’t studied statues of Stalin, but I’ll take your word for it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They have— In southern Lithuania there is a museum of—not southern culture—of Soviet culture. They collected a whole bunch of statues of Stalin and Lenin and put them all there, so it is kind of funny to see them all as a group. But, yes, they do all kind of look the same. But these different idolatrous statues in different places will have different characteristics.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. So Artemis in Ephesus is a good example. If you look at the depictions of Artemis from Ephesus, from the temple to Artemis there that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and then you look at a depiction of Artemis from, say, the Peloponnese—they don’t look like the same woman. They’re very different. In Ephesus, this is very much a fertility figure; in the Peloponnese, this is very much—she’s a huntress. These are sort of two different conceptions of it. So the localization is really the humans creating a hypostasis of that god, essentially. So, then, the idol functions as the body of the deity in the way that we’ve talked about bodies on the show, as this nexus of powers and potentialities, the idea being: this is the place where you can access that power, those abilities, of this spirit to bring fertility or victory in war or get someone to fall in love with you or whatever it is you’re looking for. But this is seen, then, as the vehicle through which that can happen.

Because this is the place of that access, this is also the place where you’re going to come to try to leverage that spirit to do what you want it to, meaning this is where you’re going to bring sacrifices, this is where you’re going to bring food, this is where you’re going to bring gifts, this is where you’re going to offer hospitality. You’re going to go to the temple to do this, to continue this ingratiating relationship between your people and this spirit that you have chosen to associate with. You’re also going to care for this deity. You’re going to clothe it, you’re going to clean it, do all the things that the servants of a human king… So if you imagine a human king in the Ancient Near East, he has all these servants. They come and they bathe him, they bring him food, they dress him, they do what he tells them, and they ingratiate themselves to him, and then at least hypothetically he provides them with station, rank, wealth, power, and authority. So it’s the same kind of idea, but transferred to what they hold to be a divine spirit.

This is important, what we just said there, about how idolatry worked. It’s important to really understand what’s going on with the traditional Israelite and Jewish critique of idolatry, which is essentially that those things we just listed are self-contradictory. So if Baal has the power to send rains in its season and give you crops and make your wife fertile so you have lots of children—if he can do all that, how come if you tip him over, he can’t stand back up? [Laughter] Why can’t he dress himself? Why can’t he feed himself?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, that’s why so much of the stuff in the Scripture about idolatry is just, like, satirizing it, like it’s a big joke.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the whole idea is that you’re interacting with something powerful, but very clearly humans are more powerful than it. It can’t even make its own idol. You have to go and chop down some wood and go and make an idol, and then you burn the rest for heat. [Laughter] But that’s your effort. So there are much simpler things that they can’t do. This is the core of what you see in the Old Testament when idols are being critiqued. This goes on and on. People have to come there and tell the god what is going on, because it doesn’t know. And they have to come and explain: “Okay, so here we’re at war with these people, and we have to—” Like, it’s self-contradictory; it doesn’t make sense.

But ultimately what an idol is within paganism is a sort of handle or a grip. The image encapsulates the concept of this spirit or deity in a way that limits it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it becomes the god of this spot or this people or this idea. It’s not—

Fr. Stephen: This thing, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: It’s one of the really important things to realize about paganism, is that no pagan religion ever says that their god is all-powerful. They don’t even make that claim. It’s not like: “Well, this one…” like clashing claims with Yahweh. They’re not! They’re not even clashing claims.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s definitionally impossible, because, first of all, you have, as we’ve talked about before, the succession myth. So whoever’s the most high god now wasn’t always, and hypothetically one of his sons could overthrow him tomorrow. And our neighbors’ gods exist, too, so they might come over here and whoop up on us, and that’ll mean their gods are whooping up on our gods, and they could get killed and they can die. But, yes, they become innately limited by having this image, because the image, the idol, is essentially the visual equivalent of a definition. So when you write the definition of a word or a concept, you are limiting it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s this and not that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you are saying that it is just this. Just this is what we mean when we say it. The idol does that visually. The idol does that visually: it says, “This divine spirit is this and has these qualities as opposed to some other potential qualities.”

But this is required if humans are going to have any kind of control or leverage over such a spiritual entity, because if it’s unlimited, then you’re sunk. We read the quote in an early episode when we were talking about primitive monotheism from the anthropologist who talked about how petty gods became much more popular than the idea of a single all-powerful god who created and rules the universe because the single, all-powerful god who created and rules the universe doesn’t need anything from you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s no advantage to— You can’t get anything out of him by giving him something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There’s no way to get him to do what you want! [Laughter] There’s no way to—

Fr. Andrew: That’s not a god that anyone would have invented.

Fr. Stephen: Whereas a little petty god… Little petty gods and spirits— Well, those, those are like humans! They want things, and they like things and hate things.

Fr. Andrew: You can do a deal.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we can do something. So this limiting that happened, that is enacted by making an idol, is the precondition for now—now that this thing is limited, now I can gain leverage over it; now I can manipulate it, because it’s limited like I am as a human. And in fact, as we just mentioned in that critique, that Jewish and Israelite critique, it’s actually kind of more limited than [I am] as a human. It’s kind of more limited than [I am]. Now, we as Christians would say that’s a function of the fact that humans are made in the image of God, and idols aren’t actually made in the image of God. At best, they’re made in the image of a human and you’re one step removed, but usually it’s animals; it’s things that are subhuman.

This now means I can gain, in some sense, power over the divine, over these spirits that at work in the world around me. So there are lots of things in the world that are beyond my human control. If we’re talking about during the Neolithic revolution, the big two that we mentioned: Are the rains going to come and water my crops?

Fr. Andrew: If they don’t, that’s the death of your people.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. That’s: my kids all die, my family all die, maybe my whole tribe and clan dies because we don’t have food. So, are the rains going to come? Are the crops going to grow? Am I going to have a good harvest? Locusts going to come through and eat it? There’s all these variables that I can’t control.

Fr. Andrew: And: Are the women going to have babies?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that being the other one. Am I going to be able to get my wife pregnant? Because they had zero scientific knowledge about how that even works. [Laughter] Yes, I can safely say, for most of human history, humans didn’t understand that male infertility could be a thing. That’s how little they understood it. They thought all men were completely potent and fertile, and it was just a question of the woman. That’s how little they understood of how human reproduction works. So it’s this mysterious thing. I can’t control it. And the infant mortality rate was super high. These are these out-of-control things that my existence, my family’s existence, my community’s existence, my whole people’s existence depend on these.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so you’re going to want divine power to try to give you a hand.

Fr. Stephen: And they did not have the impression that these things were out of control. They did not have the impression that everything was an accident and molecules bouncing off of each other. This was under something’s control: I need to get control of that something. And so this was the way to do it: you take that thing—you take fertility, this big thing that’s out of your control, and you define it and you limit it, and now you can exert leverage on it; you’ve got a handle on it; you can get a grip on it; and you can try to take control of your destiny.

From a certain perspective, we can see how this idea of trying to reduce the divine to the human or the subhuman is sort of the reverse of the Incarnation. Now, this is the Incarnation properly understood. And unfortunately in a lot of Christian circles today, the Incarnation is not properly understood. So the way Christianity has seen the Incarnation, historically, is not that Jesus was God and he somehow limited himself and became just a human for a while. That is not the doctrine of the Incarnation as taught by Christianity. The doctrine of the Incarnation as it is taught by Christianity is that Christ has elevated humanity by taking upon himself our shared human nature. So our human nature that he shares with us has been elevated and united to God in the Person of Jesus Christ. That’s what the Incarnation is about.

And so God becoming man is nothing like ancient idolatry or how they understood their god-kings, that the kingship comes down from heaven in Sumer.

Fr. Andrew: And really, it’s a radical rebuke of all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the opposite. And that’s why the second part of St. Athanasius’s famous dictum, “God became man so that man might become god,” is so important, because if you lose that, then you lose what’s really going on. So the Incarnation is the exact opposite of this, and this is part of why— Well, any feast of Christ that’s concerned with the Incarnation—there’s a few: the Annunciation because of his conception, or obviously his Nativity—you will see these references to Christ who, through his incarnation, through his birth, has caused idolatry to cease. And that’s because of this understanding of what idolatry is, that the Incarnation is fundamentally an inversion, a complete 180 of what idolatry was and how it worked.

Someone might say— Someone might bring up the Greek philosophers, and, yes, to long-time listeners, I’m about to bash on Plato again. [Laughter] The way in which the Greek philosophers have been seen—and Greek philosophy in general, and even Latin philosophy, for that matter—since… really, since the Renaissance, but really since the Enlightenment, is that they’re seen as these people who sort of opted out of the religion of their time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this idea that everybody else is idolaters, but these guys are so smart that they figured out these philosophical ideas…

Fr. Stephen: That the religion of their day was dumb.

Fr. Andrew: Turned their backs on all that idolatry stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is not coincidental. This is the mark of the amateur historian, is that they look into the past and see themselves in a mirror. [Laughter] And so if you think about the Renaissance and then especially in the Enlightenment, you have people who are renegades against the established religion of their own day, who are rejecting Christianity as fables and all this, in favor of these philosophical ideas and universal reason and all this, culminating in massacring a lot of people, but in praise of universal reason and all this. And so, when they look back at Plato and Aristotle, Socrates, et al., they see: “Oh, these were people like me, see, the pre-Christian era. They were the smart ones! They stood up to that goofy Greek religion that was going on at the time in favor of universal reason.” This, of course, is poppycock. Am I allowed to say “poppycock” on AFR airwaves?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Let me check with the censors.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So this is ridiculous. And there are lots of things we could talk about here. We could talk about the fact that Aristotle set up his school inside a temple. There’s a bunch of things. But just to use Plato as an example— Plato did see a problem, if you read the Euthyphro—and the Euthyphro is the Platonic dialogue that’s been the most warped in terms of how modern people read it because of this— What’s really going on in the Euthyphro is that Plato kind of realizes that in the mytho-ritual structures of his day, and in the practice of idolatry, that this limiting and sort of humanization, reducing to the human of these divine spirits and powers and ideas, has happened. But his answer to that is just to— The problem is: “Oh, they’ve been too humanized. And in fact, they’ve been so humanized that they go and do these horrible things.” And so Plato’s forms are just the Greek gods with all the human qualities stripped away.

So Plato’s form of love and Aphrodite: the only difference is Plato’s version of love is not a woman, does not have any kind of romantic or sexual relationships with other principles, does not engage in petty jealousies, does not cheat on a husband. Those elements he throws out, but functionally it’s the same thing because he, through meditative practices, and even through using the temples and the rituals of the day, saw people as coming to participate in love, koinonia. It’s the same word that’s used for sacrificial ritual that he uses for the relationship between the forms and humans. All he’s doing is dehumanizing the gods and calling them the forms. Plato really was a pagan. He just had what he saw as a more enlightened form of paganism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, some of the Church Fathers of course saw “good things” in some of the stuff that he said and saw it as useful for their purposes, but he still was an actual pagan.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. While he was alive on earth, at least, for sure he was never a Christian, never Jewish.

Fr. Andrew: Never got baptized.

Fr. Stephen: And he saw things in a very pagan way. And he saw the idols and those stories and all of that as being, you know, for the common folk, because, you’ve got to remember also, Plato believed in aristocratic rationalism. He believed there were inferior and superior humans, and he said, “Well, we philosophers are the highest tier of humans. Some people are born to be us and some people are born to be slaves, and everything in between.” He said, “And those people beneath us, well, they can’t understand these ideas! They can’t understand what justice is! So we, you know, give them stories, and we give them, you know, rituals and stuff, to try to help them come to participate in and understand justice, whereas we can just kind of look straight into the light and have this sort of pure concept.”

By the way, this kind of view doesn’t stop with Plato. You find this in Averroes, Ibn Rushd, who’s the great Muslim commentator on Aristotle. He literally says this about Islam. He says Islam is philosophy for all the stupid proles out there who don’t— who can’t understand philosophy, so we give them Islam.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And there were a bunch of people in the West, when Averroes— they’re called the Latin Averroists. Thomas Aquinas was not one of them; in many ways he was reacting against them, but people like Siger de Brabant, who took this approach in the medieval approach to Christianity—“Christianity is for all these peasants, because they can’t understand philosophy.” See also the afterword to David Bentley Hart’s book on universalism—but I’ll leave that here! [Laughter]

But so Plato sees part of this problem, but he doesn’t really overcome it; he’s still within this pagan view. He’s just going to say, like he says about everything else, that the actual idol of Athena, sitting there in Athens, is the shadow of an image of wisdom, of sort of pure divine wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t say, “Away with idolatry”—

Fr. Stephen: No! In fact, it’s performing this necessary purpose for all the dummies who can’t understand wisdom per se. [Laughter] He just thinks he’s in this better place, where he can get to the core of it. He can work back up the chain.

But even that view—even that view, if you pause and think about it a minute— Remember what we said about hypostases of different gods and localizations. Plato’s view was not that much different [from] that, that the statue is this shadow of an image, but that he can work back up the chain to get to the spirit, unlocalized is really all he’s saying. He’s still very much thinking and operating within that overall religious worldview. And I think a lot of this stuff gets misunderstood for that reason. Aristotle basically just thinks that a lot of— Well. I’m not going to get into academic stuff I’ve been writing recently, but Aristotle basically argues, for example, that tragedy is basically sacrificial ritual for an upper class of people. [Laughter] This is pretty well common in all their views.

But so, moving on from that, what this means is we have to understand— Whenever anybody thinks about— anybody who is within or who has grown up within or is in a society that holds to one religion tends to view other religions in terms of that religion. And so if you’ve grown up in a Christian culture, in a Christian background, in a Christian family, of whatever type, you’re going to tend to look at other religions from that perspective.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. For instance, I’ve heard lots of people say, “Oh, well, all religions are trying to get salvation in their way.” I’m like: “Actually, not all religions are interested in something called salvation, to start with.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] And what that means can mean very different things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That can mean anything from eternal life to non-existence, depending on if you’re a Buddhist or a Christian, which are kind of opposites. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s very easy for us, when we go back and look at Greek religion—or Roman religion or Babylonian religion or Canaanite religion or Egyptian religion, whatever one we want to choose, whatever slice of paganism we want to take—and be like: “Okay, well, what’s their Bible? Is Hesiod, like, their Bible? Is the Baal cycle like their Bible?” as if they got together on one day a week and had readings from it and somebody preached on it and that kind of thing. [Laughter] Or to look at these in terms of beliefs. So it’s like: “Oh, the Greeks believed there were these twelve really powerful people who lived on this mountain,” as if they had tenets or a creed. Again, no. That’s our thing. They didn’t have councils either. [Laughter]

So even what’s meant by “religion”— This is one of the classical problems, whether you’re coming at religion from philosophy, sociology, anthropology. One of the classical problems is: How do you define religion? Because the whole idea of a religion, as we’ve mentioned before on the show, is like a 16th-, 17th-century idea, where it’s separated out and you have different “religions” and this is a religion. Modern concept. So trying to define it, trying to come up with a definition of “religion” that includes all religions, everything you would think of as a religion, and doesn’t include a bunch of other things that people wouldn’t think are religions, is almost impossible. Almost impossible. And that means that even what “religion” means is different. So as Christians— Well, St. James says true religion, true piety, is care for orphans and widows. That’s not a definition shared by paganism! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s definitely not. Orphans and widows are at the bottom because the gods have decided they should be there.

Fr. Stephen: They were born to be that, yes. But so we might, as Christians, say, “Well, religion or piety means that we participate in certain religious rituals, particularly the Eucharist, directed toward God whom we worship, who created us, that we observe certain standards of behavior in our lives, that when we violate those standards we repent, and that we seek to do works of charity in the world.” Don’t “at” me; I’m just doing this off of my head real quick. Someone might define Christianity that way. None of that applies to paganism. You can’t just sub things out; you can’t just say “Zeus” in there and have it work.

So pagan religion was primarily a form of techne. It was a craft. They actually did engage in priestcraft. It was based in certain knowledge, and that knowledge was practical knowledge, not esoteric knowledge about the origin or nature of the universe or the names of the gods or something, but a very practical kind of knowledge. We mentioned before, I know, that in Exodus the “magicians,” traditionally Jannes and Jambres, who confront Moses, pharaoh’s “magicians,” are actually what are called by historians now “lector-priests,” not related to Hannibal Lecter, but “lector” as in “reader.” And that’s because the caste of priests at that time in Egypt, their primary job was being able to read. Hieratic has a lot of symbols; it’s not an alphabetic language.

So they were able to read the already-ancient documents, the ancient ritual texts, to find out the procedures needed: the procedures for burial, the spells needed to enter into the afterlife. When something would befall Egypt, Pharaoh would call them in and say, “Hey, there was a comet. Hey, there’s a famine. Hey, there’s plagues from this Moses guy. What do we need to do to fix this? What’s the issue? What gods do we need to appease? What do we need to do to make this situation right?” And it was then the job of those Egyptian priests to go consult those ancient texts and say, “Okay, here’s what we need to do,” and tell them.

You can think about other— The haruspex: his whole job—and even though that’s the Latin term they used in Rome, this is a priestly class all through the Ancient Near East—was being able to read the entrails of sacrifices. It was their job to learn how to do that. These are the signs. When we’re butchering the sacrifice, one of the primary ways they saw the sacrifice was being accepted or not was to look for certain signs on different organs: “Oh, there’s a black spot here.” Or, in some weird cases: “This organ is missing!” These were all different omens and signs, and those priests needed to know how to identify those, and then what needed to be done in response.

Rome famously had the Sibylline books, which were hidden under one of the hills under a temple to Jupiter. Caste of priests who was allowed to read from these books, so if something went wrong in Rome, they consulted the books which supposedly recorded the whole history and future of the world, and said, “Okay, this is what we need to do to take care of that comet. This is what we need to do to take care of that ill omen. Failure in war: here’s what we need to do.” That would include with those books: “We need to bury a couple of slaves alive in the market-place. Okay, that’s what we’re doing!” But it was this technique, and having access based on practical knowledge: being able to read, being able to consult, being able to interpret.

Idolatry is one of these techniques. It’s one of these ways of being able to access, interact with, control the spiritual realm, the divine realm. That’s how it was seen. Idolatry is a technique of particular access and manipulation of that realm. And this is why you see in lists, like in the Book of Enoch, when you read the list of all the things the Watchers, the demons before the flood, taught to humanity, one of them is idolatry. And on a surface, literal level, you might say, “Well, what do you mean, ‘taught idolatry’? They taught them how to carve a statue to look like a person? Or to look like a dog-person? What?” That’s not what was being taught. It’s the whole technique that we’ve been talking about and outlining here, of trying to control and manipulate the divine realm that it’s saying was taught by demons.

So again, idolatry is not just making a piece of imagery. Idolatry is everything else we’ve been talking about—the ritual elements, the control, the manipulation—that’s what idolatry is about. When you read in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, other extrabiblical Jewish anti-idolatry texts, they talk about “those who worship them become like them.” Again, as we’ve talked about before, this isn’t saying those gods don’t exist, because the people who worship them don’t cease to exist; but what happens is there’s an inversion of control. They have taken—attempted to— What they’re trying to do is take this divine power, this spiritual power in the world, limit it, and gain control of it, and instead of that happening, they become limited, they become controlled by the spiritual power they were worshiping, they are lowered and become something subhuman. Idolatry backfires is what that’s saying. What you’re attempting to control, what you’re attempting to assert control over is going to end up controlling you. That’s what that “becoming like them” is about.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Just backfires. All right, well, that is the first half for this episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast. We’re going to take a little break, and we will be right back with more.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody, to the second part of the show.

Fr. Stephen: I like the water effects in that part.

Fr. Andrew: I know! That was great, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’re getting… Did you hire a Foley artist over there at Ancient Faith?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Those are expensive, did you know that? You can get those.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Foley artists are still definitely a thing, but they are worth a lot of money. Yeah, no, I’m just sitting here with a couple of buckets right here in the studio, playing that right behind Robin’s voiceover, there.

Fr. Stephen: So you’re an amateur Foley artist is what you’re telling me.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! I need to get a raise. Need to talk to somebody about that, since I’m doing—Foleying? I don’t know where the “Foley” comes from. Anyway, you all can give us a ring: 855-AF-RADIO, just like the voice of Steve just said. Also, I just want to give a little plug. Fr. Stephen is going to be speaking in Miami, at Christ the Saviour Orthodox Cathedral on October 7, and his topic is: “Witchcraft and Idolatry”! Hey, what do you know? You can go to orthodoxmiami.org for more info on that. So all of you south Floridians, this one’s for you. Have you figured out what you’re going to talk about yet, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Of course not! It’s not until next week. I’ve got a whole plane flight.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, that’s right. You can tap it out on the old tablet there.

Fr. Stephen: The thing is, even if I did have a firm plan now of what I was going to say next week, it wouldn’t end up what I say next week.

Fr. Andrew: You change your mind.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I’m a maverick.

Fr. Andrew: “I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Ah, the late, great Paul Reubens.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Is that the first time we’ve quoted him? No, because we did the “This is tonight’s secret word.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But this might be the first time Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was quoted. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Not on the show at all, because I know we’ve quoted things in the past, for sure. Now you’ve just brought the whole room down. You brought the whole room down!

Fr. Andrew: We’ll come back. [Laughter] Our stream died on Facebook, though, by the way. We’re still on YouTube. Of course, if you can’t hear me, you don’t know. I can’t tell you to go to YouTube, but it’s still on YouTube. Of course, the Ancient Faith Radio app is still there, and the website, etc., etc.

Fr. Stephen: Well, if the Facebook stream died, I’m sure there’s a half a dozen confused Boomers trying to figure out how to listen to the show. [Laughter] And they won’t be able to by the time it’s over. They’ll just have to listen to the recording. So if you’re listening to this recording tomorrow, sorry I called you a Boomer.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: To you six folks.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, if you’re triggered by that, then what are you doing listening to this podcast anyway?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, exactly. If you don’t expect me to make fun of Facebook again, is this your first time?

Fr. Andrew: Welcome! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so now, here in the second half, we’re going to talk about Israelite idolatry, because it turns out they did a lot of it.

Fr. Andrew: They did some idolatries.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know if you’ve read the Old Testament, but, yeah, a whole bunch of idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, [Inaudible].

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And we should say— Again, I don’t know why I watch these documentaries; I just do. Setting aside for a second the whole issue of whether monotheism, as a very modern term, is one we need to worry about, it has become stereotypical in any kind of archaeology-based Old Testament Bible documentary, or Hebrew Bible-based Bible documentary, to say two things. First of all, the Old Testament says that ancient Israel was monotheistic, number one, which, as we’ve talked about before: not true, but okay. And then, second, that: “Oh, but all this archaeological evidence and all this other stuff shows that they weren’t, that they were actually polytheistic and worshiping all these pagan gods.”

Now, some of these people who say this have PhDs in Old Testament and/or Hebrew Bible, and this confuses me because it implies to me that they’ve never read it, because, as we’re about to go through, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting idolatry in the Old Testament. In fact, I will go so far as to say you’re hard-pressed to find any period in Israel’s history where, according to the Bible, they were even monolatrous, let alone monotheistic, that they weren’t engaged in idolatry, according to the Bible. So that’s weird to me, but people say it, and people who should know better say it, and folks who watch these documentaries who maybe haven’t read the Old Testament or haven’t read much of it buy it, just believe what they’re saying. But let’s— We’re going to go through.

And Israel’s idolatry can kind of be divided into two categories. That’s how we’re going to approach it here. First category is places where— And we’re only giving examples. We’d be here all night trying to go through every place the Bible talks about Israel being idolatrous. But we’re going to hit lowlights. So the first category is where they’re using idolatry directed toward Yahweh the God of Israel. And then the second category is when the Scriptures talk about Israel engaging in idolatrous worship of other gods alongside Yahweh the God of Israel. So those are sort of the two broad categories. Both of these are bad. [Laughter]

And these are related to the first two commandments. The second commandment is about not making graven images and bowing down to them and serving them: this is talking about idolatry, period. So this is saying: Don’t try to worship Yahweh your God via idolatry. Why? Because what are you doing? You’re trying to do what they did at the Tower of Babel. You’re trying to limit the God who created the universe; you’re trying to limit the God of Israel, trying to draw him down, limit him, get control of him, and get him to do what you want. So the second commandment says you don’t do that. First commandment is: You’ll have no other gods in my presence. So that’s our other category. You’re not to worship these other gods alongside. And that again, it’s for largely the same reason, because if you think about it, if you claim you’re worshiping Yahweh the God of Israel—the God who created everything, the Most High God who created the universe, who created everything else that gets called gods, whether we’re talking about demonic spirits or dead human beings or live human beings: the true God created all of those—if you claim you’re worshiping him, and then you say, “Oh, but I also need to sacrifice to Baal to make sure my crops are good…”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. “Can I have this, too?” Actually, related to that, we do have a call. This person— We have Simon calling from Detroit, Michigan, and apparently Simon is asking: What’s the difference between worship and idolatry, because in Revelation 22, the angel says not to worship him? I don’t know, that seems to be the summary of your question, Simon. Are you there?

Simon: Yeah, I’m here. Good evening, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Good evening! Go ahead and ask your question. Make sure that we understand what you’re trying to get across.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I wish Fr. Andrew hadn’t read that summary, or at least not before I had said, “What does Simon say?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How often do you get that, poor man?

Simon: I’ve never heard it before ever.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, good! That’s great! It’s original.

Simon: Never.

Fr. Stephen: I like to break new ground.

Fr. Andrew: Ever! [Laughter]

Simon: So my question is kind of a two-part question, really. I’ve always been a little bit confused about worship and veneration, especially after you guys talked about it. I’m coming from a Protestant background. I was chrismated last month, actually.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, hey. Congratulations!

Simon: Thank you. And that was one verse I was thinking about, where John gets this vision or things like that from the angel, and he bows down to worship him. It sounds like he’s doing a prostration or something like that, and it uses the word “worship” at least twice in that passage, and then the angel tells him not to worship him, because he’s just a servant of God like St. John is. And so I’m thinking if making a prostration to something is worship, is that what we’re doing when we prostrate for the holy cross and things like that, or is that just veneration, if that makes sense?

Fr. Andrew: Yes. See, I can do monosyllabic responses sometimes.

Fr. Stephen: There you go, stealing my bit. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, it’s a bit. It works. Well, if I recall, I think we’ve talked about this before, but if I recall correctly, the point that the angel is making there is to say to St. John, “I’m not the Angel of the Lord, so you should not be treating me as though I’m God himself.” It’s not that bowing or prostrating is in and of itself bad, because we see that happening between righteous people, for instance, that bow down to the ground to the each other, and the other one doesn’t say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop it, idolater!” As we said, idolatry involves setting up an image, feeding and clothing it, understanding it as controlling elemental forces and spirits. That’s a whole big ball of action and understanding that is not simply bowing or prostrating.

Simon: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. Father, is there anything you wanted to add or correct or subtract?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I think the key thing that’s going on there in context in Revelation is that that angel is differentiating himself from the figure of the glorified Christ, who had been talking to St. John before that, who didn’t say the same thing.

Simon: Okay, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So I think that’s the main intent of that: “Wait, wait, wait. That’s not me. I’m this other kind of thing.” But also, in general—because this covers a lot of questions we get—most people do not use most words as technical terms most of the time. So when we talk about the distinction between worship and veneration, we’re using those as technical terms. We’re saying worship is A, veneration is B. But that doesn’t mean that any time you see a hymn from 15 centuries ago that uses the word “worship” or a writing of a Church Father from 800 years ago that uses the word “veneration,” that every single time anyone in the Orthodox Tradition or in the Scriptures uses one of those two words, it means the technical definition that we give theologically.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Even in English— The word “worship” in English, for most of its history, has meant veneration. It hasn’t meant sacrificing to a god. Now we do use it in that way, but most— You know, because it’s connected to the word “worth,” so it’s just showing the worthiness of the other. So if you said, “Good day, sir,” which is language of respect and honor, that is literally worshiping the other person, according to that older sense of the word “worship.” And it’s why British judges are called “Your Worship.” No one thinks that they’re being sacrificed to as gods; it’s just a form of respect. So, yeah, as Father said, the words are not always used in these tight, technical ways. So the key—this is the important thing—what is the action being done and what is the context of that action? And is it part of a larger set of actions?

You could put food in front of somebody. Let’s say you wait tables at a restaurant. You can put food in front of someone and say, “There you go, sir.” So you’ve not only put food in front of a being, which is a spiritual being, because it’s human, but also said words of respect. Does that make you an idolater? Obviously not, even though putting food in front of an image of a spiritual being and saying words of respect is part of idolatry. There’s a lot more going on in idolatry. Does that make sense?

Simon: Yeah. So just to clarify, that prostration or whatever was happening there with St. John bowing down to the angel, that’s not necessarily worship. I mean, he didn’t offer a sacrifice or anything to the angel; he basically just venerated it, is what it seems like. Is that correct?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the angel was making sure he knew that he was just an angel and not Christ, who had previously been talking to St. John and had appeared to him.

Fr. Andrew: Because, you know, when you’re having a visionary experience, it can be hard to figure out what’s going on! [Laughter]

Simon: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for calling, Simon.

Simon: Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome.

Fr. Stephen: If you get into the original languages, it becomes even more complicated, because the word in Greek that’s usually translated as “veneration” and the word adoremus in Latin, that’s usually translated “adoration” or “worship” both literally mean “to bend the knee.” [Laughter] So that’s what I mean by “technical terms.” Latin-speaking people did not think that every time you bent your knee and bowed to someone you were worshiping them in some idolatrous sense. And Greek-speakers didn’t think if you were bowing before an idol that was okay because you were just venerating it. [Laughter] There’s more nuance to it than just definition of terms.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: All right. So people trying to worship Yahweh with idols. Bad idea, for the record. I’m agin it! [Laughter] So obviously the locus classicus of this is the golden calf. I know we’ve talked about it at least a little on the show before, that if we had a photo of it or if we had the thing, which of course we don’t because it got melted down, it would probably look like an Apis bull from Egypt, seeing has how folks had just come from Egypt, and an odd preponderance of Levites have Egyptian names, so they were probably connected to Egyptian religion in some way before the exodus. It was likely it would have looked like an Apis bull, but it wasn’t purely an Egyptian phenomenon, because of course the Apis bull and everything else, this draws on the whole bull of heaven, Behemot, Behemoth traditions that we’ve talked about on this show several times before, so this is kind of an assimilation of Egyptian and Canaanite idolatry, and even earlier forms of idolatry.

But after Aaron makes the calf, what does he say? He says, “This is Yahweh, the God who brought you out of Egypt.” So this isn’t him introducing some additional foreign god; this is him using idolatry directed toward the true God. And you can see, of course, what is happening. The God who created the universe, we’ve now reduced him to this bull, to being part of this tradition of male fertility, virility, power. But that’s a reduction of the God who created the universe, brought him down to this place. He’s not up on the mountain with Moses; we’ve now brought him down here where we are, and now that he’s here, now we can engage in ritual activity to get him to do what we want rather than he up there on the mountain telling us through Moses what he wants us to do. So this is an attempt to, again, invert in this pagan way the way the true God operates, to limit him and gain control of him.

And it’s interesting. You can see sort of this inversion, this usurpation idea, if you think about the fact that, when they’re going to make this golden calf, the Israelites go and take off all their jewelry and all the gold they have to melt it down. Well, where did they get that? That’s the gold that they pillaged from the Egyptians on the way out of Egypt. So Yahweh their God had defeated the gods of Egypt, as he said himself, on Passover night. He had defeated the gods of Egypt, including Pharaoh; he had destroyed the army of the greatest superpower in the world at the time in the Red Sea; he had done all this, and then he had shared the spoils of that victory with his people, and what do they do with them? [Laughter] They make an idol to try to get control of him, to try to limit him. And so you can see that element of inversion and usurpation happening.

And then what do they do in terms of ritual activity with this statue? Well, the… Most English translations say very politely that they “sat down to eat, and then they rose up to play,” as if it was like: “Hey, we had a nice meal. Let’s play freeze-tag!” Not what it’s saying. This is euphemism, and this is describing what was very common in paganism, which is orgiastic worship. So we have the meal they’re eating is a sacrificial meal: they offer sacrifices to the idol. And then they feast themselves and then enter into this frenzied state. This included sexual immorality, as you would expect from orgiastic, but also went to a general frenzy. It was often accompanied by violence, by a breakdown of social order.

And that was deliberate. This is found all throughout pagan worship, all over the place. This is like The Purge. This is not— Once again, modern reconstructed paganism, where they put on their white gowns and go and have their nice ritual in the woods, or they make something that they think looks like a Greek temple and they go and have this nice things, sing some songs and pray some prayers, that whatever pagan god they’re worshiping will help them with their hurt feelings or something, because someone was mean to them at Target—whatever happened, that’s not what ancient paganism looked like.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay, that’s not remotely what ancient paganism looked like. That’s like a pagan— a very thin, bogus pagan veneer splashed over liberal Christianity; that’s what that is. This went so far— You look at the Dionysian mystery cults. They would enter into a frenzy where omophagy was common. They would eat live animals, like rats and birds.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not like bugs and whatever, people, but mammals.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, like taking a bite out of them while they’re alive, ripping them apart with their hands and their teeth in this frenzied state. We’re talking about mass rapes. We’re talking about The Purge. This is… And this was seen as a state of ecstasy, of divine ecstasy, that is being entered into. That’s what the Israelites do while Moses is up on the mountain. They didn’t venerate a cow statue too hard; this is a total other thing. They’re not remotely similar.

There is not just a coincidental relationship between the transgressive nature of what was being done and the spiritual experience they were having. They believed that the spiritual experience they were having was the product of and intimately related with the fact that they were bursting all of these normal social bonds: transgressing their marriages, transgressing social rules of morality, or doing things that would be abhorrent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this idea of crossing this boundary into this “divine”— well, into a divine world: not divine as in God, but as in the gods.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And you see the same thing, by the way, when the Greeks and the Romans write about war. War in the ancient world was especially brutal. Especially Bronze Age war was worse than Iron Age war, because bronze doesn’t hold an edge very well, so you basically had people clubbing each other to death with massive pointy metal clubs, en masse. Blood, brutality… But the glory of war for the Greeks and the Romans was this frenzied experience, this frenzied, ecstatic experience, that the survivors had gone through. That’s what they exulted in and glorified, because the place of war was another one of these places where all of those rules, all of those structures, the nomos of the people, was stripped away and was gone. And so Homer can have the muses and the gods singing about the glory of the butchery that’s happening in war. This is very foreign territory for us who have been in a Christian society for many centuries, but this is where the pagans were, and this is the territory that Israel entered into with the golden calf. This is why it is so horrific and Moses reacts the way he does. This is like— not just “Oh, they fell back into Egyptian religion.” This is the worst of it. This is like all the worst parts of paganism at the time they went rushing toward.

But this lingering approach to the true God but from a pagan perspective, again, is ongoing throughout the Old Testament. Jephthah is another good example. When people think of Jephthah, they think about the sacrifice of his daughter primarily, but there is a story before that where Jephthah is a leader in war. This is the place where he properly serves as a judge for Israel. When you look at how he negotiates with Moab, if you read what he says, he says, “Well, Yahweh brought us here to our land; Chemosh brought you there to yours, Moabites. Can’t we all just get along?” [Laughter] There’s a massive problem there! Especially since if you read Deuteronomy 2 and it explicitly says Yahweh brought the Moabites there. But he’s perfectly willing to say, “Yeah, you guys got your god; we got ours.” And so, yes, technically Jephthah is worshiping the correct God, but he’s seeing him in very pagan terms. That’s only emphasized by the whole human sacrifice thing, because the way this story is told—at least the way it was told to me as a kid when we got old enough that we actually got the story of Jephthah in Sunday school—was like: “Oh, Jephthah came home and he thought a dog or a cow or a sheep was going to run out to greet him.” [Laughter] What.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: He was going to sacrifice a dog?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, dogs are, especially in the Middle East, Near East—

Fr. Stephen: Unclean?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, are the grossest, nastiest things that you can possibly…

Fr. Stephen: Unclean animals. Or a sheep or a cow was going to run out to greet him? Have any of you ever been around sheep or cows? [Laughter] When he says, “The first one to run out and greet me,” he’s planning on it being a human. He just thinks it’s going to be a slave or something—and instead it’s his daughter. And he sacrifices her. He does a human sacrifice to the God of Israel. And I’m sorry, but if you’re going to come to me and say, “Oh, he didn’t sacrifice her. She just went and became a consecrated virgin at the Temple,” I’m going to say, “This is the book of Judges, bro! There is no Temple!” I’ve heard really smart people say that, so you’ve got to think about context. There is no Temple. A pagan shrine? There weren’t virgins there, I hate to tell you. [Laughter]

So it’s very clear what happens here, and if you read both early Jewish sources and early Christian sources talking about Jephthah, they don’t say a lot of good stuff about Jephthah. They say good things about Jephthah’s daughter. They say Jephthah’s daughter is an image of Christ, because she goes silently to her death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s kind of a martyrdom image.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So they compare her to Isaac in the Jewish cases, and then, through that comparison in Christian sources, to Christ. But, yeah… [Laughter] Jephthah’s a problem, but Jephthah’s another example that there’s still a lot of Israelites who are looking in this way.

At the end of that story, we get— This is again, part of the story if you actually read it. Folks, actually read it. There’s somebody out there right now getting mad at me and saying, “I think Jephthah’s a saint for some reason!” Read the Bible! [Laughter] So at the end of that, you get this new feast that shows up. “Oh, they celebrated this feast thereafter.” That’s not a feast that’s anywhere in the Torah! That’s not one of the feasts God gave the people! They celebrate this feast, and the feast they’re talking about is actually one of the feasts that was celebrated in the northern kingdom of Israel after it split away, that didn’t have the Temple.

And that feast is this feast where they go looking for Jephthah’s daughter. This is an archetypal pagan festal practice, ritual practice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, probably the most familiar one—which I’m pretty sure we’ve mentioned before on this show—is the search for Persephone that Greek pagans would do. What is that, in Athens? Maybe elsewhere, too.

Fr. Stephen: Where were the rites of Demeter? I don’t think it was Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Because she gets spirited away—pun fully intended—by Hades, and so the idea is we have to go looking for her.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but there are examples of this all over the place in ancient paganism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It’s just Persephone is the one most people have heard of.

And so this whole episode with Jephthah causes the northern kingdom of Israel to come up with their own version of the pagan feast! And so that’s a good segue.

Moving to the northern kingdom, when Israel is split, to the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, first king of the northern kingdom is Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. And God sends a prophet to Jeroboam, son of Nebat. He says, “If you keep all of my commandments and are righteous before me as David was, then I will also give you a dynasty that will have no end.” We’ve addressed before on the show—“Wait, what? David kept all the commandments?” But we did that on another show, talking about repentance. Jeroboam does not do likewise, and so his dynasty lasts for two generations, counting him himself: his son becomes king, and then—assassination: it’s over.

But Jeroboam, when he becomes king of the northern tribes, has this issue of David’s son—or David’s grandson, Rehoboam, is the king down there in Judah, and they have the Temple in Jerusalem. And that’s where all the worship is supposed to be going on, and a lot of the feasts of the Torah, say, the Day of Atonement, obviously centered around the Temple sanctuary. So he doesn’t want his people having to travel to this other kingdom to worship, etc., etc., so he famously constructs the golden calves—because the first one went so well— the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, Dan being at the extreme north, Bethel at the south of the northern kingdom of Israel. And that way, no matter where you live in his kingdom, there is one of his golden calf shrines that is closer to you than the Temple in Jerusalem is, so you can go there instead. So we can see there that setting up these calves there has this deliberate goal of localization. He is very much trying to localize the God of Israel to his locality.

Fr. Andrew: And he’s doing a thing that they’re not doing down at the Temple, which— the Temple does not have some statue of God that they are putting sacrifices in front of. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. But what we don’t always think through about this is that the northern kingdom, then, based on these two shrines with the golden calves, Jeroboam constructs an entire new religious system that goes with this. So he has his own priesthood of Levites. There’s a high priest in Jerusalem at the Temple, but he has his own priestly hierarchy of Levites there in the northern kingdom, performing the rituals surrounding the golden calves. He has his own feasts, like the one we were just talking about with Jephthah. It’s a different cycle of feasts. This is a whole different set of ritual observances that are borrowed— that are not sort of like the Samaritans did, where the Samaritans later took the Torah and tweaked things so we can do them at Mount Gerizim. This is not a tweak of the Torah; this is a tweak of the paganism of the surrounding nations. This is patterned after their kind of worship.

That being the official religion of the northern kingdom, that then opens up the possibility, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes here, that Omri will later actualize in the Omride dynasty in the northern kingdom, to then begin to assimilate and syncretize the northern kingdom’s pagan religion directed toward Yahweh and the various pagan religions of neighboring nations.

Fr. Andrew: The “having other gods before me” thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Which brings us to the “having other gods before me” thing! [Laughter] So if the golden calf is sort of the archetypal example from the Torah of trying to use idolatry directed toward the God of Israel, then the locus classicus for this second category of parallel pagan worship, we might say, is in Numbers at Baal Peor, the Baal of Peor, which is a localization of Baal. Baal Peor is a classic example of a high place. So you’ll see throughout the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, references to “high places.” It’ll talk about good kings tearing down the high places and bad kings building back up the high places. And these high places are a type of pagan shrine that is less than a fully constructed temple but a little more than the grove; it’s the in-between category, where you have an area that’s delineated by a fence or a wall, surrounding various natural features, and it’s a place— it’s a sort of a zone, then, there on a hill—hence “high place”—where ritual worship of various gods takes place.

In this example, Baal Peor being one of them, there is this mixture, which hopefully, if not before, people will kind of be ready for now, given what we’ve already talked about in this half, of these foreign pagan women drawing the men of Israel astray and references to the pagan worship of Baal. That’s because these are the same things. This is the same kind of orgiastic worship from the golden calf. It’s just now being done with these “priestesses,” or temple prostitutes as they’re sometimes called, who are there to facilitate that kind of worship, because Baal, storm-god: this is a fertility rite shrine. So this orgiastic worship begins to take place, and this escalates in the story to the point where a man takes one of these women into the camp to continue these activities, walks past Moses and Aaron and the others. So not only are they going out of the Israelite camp, which is to be kept holy—going out of it and performing these acts of idolatry and sexual immorality—but now this escalates with this man now bringing that into the camp, into the presence of God. And that’s why Phineas has to go and make a shish kebab.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I was not expecting that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and put an end to this worship. And so then this is related to— There’s this plague that breaks out, and the plague, when we really understand what’s going on in the story— The plague is not like: “Oh, they’re doing bad stuff. God’s sending a plague to kill them because he’s mad, or to punish them,” because the plague gets stopped, not by just some act of repentance or— and it doesn’t get stopped by the end of them fornicating and participating in idolatrous worship; it’s stopped by a line of priests with incense.

Fr. Andrew: A censer phalanx!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, like standing off and standing between the living and the dead, and sort of blocking the progress of the plague. And so the plague— What the plague is here is the plague is giving a sort of reality, giving a manifestation to the spiritual destruction that Israel has brought upon itself through engaging in this idolatry. It’s giving that a sort of more tangible form so they can see it, so they can understand it. And that’s why the answer to this kind of corrupt pagan worship is the true worship of Yahweh the God of Israel. That’s what stops it, because idolatry is a plague.

So just like in the previous category we can see that this kind of thing continues into the period of the judges. When we get to Gideon, Gideon’s father apparently has a whole ton of idols, because God has to come and tell Gideon to go wreck ‘em. And then Gideon serves his purpose as the judge of Israel. Gideon is a saint in the Orthodox Church. He is on the calendar.

Fr. Andrew: In fact, yesterday was his feast. Yes, he’s on the calendar. Yesterday was his feast day.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he is listed in the synaxarion on that day, even though he’s a little bit of a shifty character, because being a little bit of a shifty character does not stop you from becoming a saint. Looking at you, Jacob. [Laughter] But part of his shiftiness at the end of his life, which is one of my favorite funny scenes in the Bible, is he has all these people coming to him and saying, “You’re trying to make yourself king! You’re trying to set yourself up as the king of Israel!” And he’s like: “What, me? No, never! Why would I do that?” And then it says in the text that his son, Avimelech, was standing there. “Avi-melech” means “my father is king.” So he names his kid that, and then is like: “What? I would never make myself king!” [Laughter] See, a little shifty!

But he has— At the end of this story he has this ephod, and we’re told that after his death this ephod becomes a snare for Israel: it becomes an idol. And this shows us that, among a lot of the Israelites, they were looking at things in a very pagan way. Who is Gideon for them? Gideon, for their tribe, is this founder-figure. And so they kind of divinize him and use his ephod as an idol. So that shows again this kind of idolatrous mindset is still around among a lot of the people. Get excited, folks: I’m about to talk about Samson, but only briefly. As we keep going in Judges—not going to talk extensively about Samson, but notice that when the angel comes to announce the birth of Samson, we’re told that his family lives near Beth Shemesh, Beit Shemesh, which literally means the temple of Shemesh, the sun-god. So apparently Dan is cool with there being a temple to the pagan sun-god Shemesh there, doesn’t have a problem with it. And if you say that probably didn’t include Samson’s family, I would point out that they named him after Shemesh: that’s where the name Samson comes from. So again you see this kind of pagan syncretism going on. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge and worship Yahweh, it’s that they’ve got these other pagan gods, too.

And then in the last part with the Israelite civil war and everything at the end of Judges that we don’t read as much, because it gets really gory and messed up, we read about a Levite who gets hired to come and serve an idol in Dan. So this is the kind of thing that’s happening. Not hidden by the Bible—the Bible is how we know about it! It tells us about it.

Now, lest you think from what we said about Jeroboam, son of Nebat, and the northern kingdom that the southern kingdom was doing it right, we know that, from the story of Solomon, he married—

Fr. Andrew: Also a saint.

Fr. Stephen: Also a saint! Yes, Solomon is a saint.

Fr. Andrew: He’s on the calendar.

Fr. Stephen: He’s on the calendar, in the synaxarion! And Solomon, we even have the book of Ecclesiastes: we have his repentance at the end of this life for the bad stuff he did that the Bible records. But, let me tell you, when the Church says somebody’s a saint, and the Bible says he did bad stuff, that doesn’t mean he didn’t do bad stuff. Doesn’t mean the Bible’s wrong: he did do bad stuff, but people can do bad stuff during their lives and still become saints, which is good news! Or should be.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, that’s kind of how this thing works.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so he takes on a whole lot of wives and concubines—and don’t be mistaken: concubine means sex slave. “Concubine” is a much prettier-sounding word. It’s like saying he had a bunch of girlfriends. No. These are sex slaves. And a lot of them were foreign wives whom he married to make alliances with foreign countries, which he also wasn’t supposed to be doing. And we’re told by the Bible that he built shrines to the gods of those wives in and around Jerusalem. This is part of why the kingdom gets divided, why his son doesn’t inherit all of Israel, why Jeroboam got to do the terrible things he did. More than that, we know from later on, when his descendant, King Josiah, destroys them, that he had set up a chariot of the sun, an idol, with horses, in the Temple courts—Solomon had.

Fr. Andrew: Shemesh shrine! Shemesh shrines: say that five times fast.

Fr. Stephen: Right, with Shemesh having been the pagan god worshiped in Jerusalem before his father, David, took it. Solomon built it, and it was there until the reign of King Josiah. Well, and we also know from what we find out with Josiah that the later kings of Judah put more shrines in the Temple courts to the pagan gods. So keep this in mind. The first Temple, from the time Solomon built it to the time of its destruction by the Babylonians, minus this little window where King Josiah tried to clean things up, was full of idolatrous shrines, according to the Bible. There was no sort of pure golden-age period here with the first Temple. The worst thing about the second Temple is that Herod built most of it. [Laughter] That’s actually a little better, by the way, than the first Temple being full of idols.

And so of course, Josiah tried to clean things up and destroy them, but we hear about his successors rebuilding the high places. This is a big part of how Judah ends up in exile in Babylon. It wasn’t for doing things right and worshiping in purity. That’s not how you end up in exile. And further, we also know, because Josiah briefly puts an end to this as well, that Molech worship was going on, mostly in the Valley of Hinnom—people want to argue about that now, but, hey, if you believe the Bible’s true… I’m sure it was going on other places in the northern and southern kingdoms, too, but Molech worship was what we’re talking about, and this was very popular in certain Phoenician sectors, was the sacrifice of your firstborn infant, and this was as a burnt-offering. This was generally done with bronze statues that were superheated.

Fr. Andrew: This is where you get this phrase in the Bible, “passing your children through the fire.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, to Molech. As God repeatedly points out: “Those aren’t your kids; those are my kids, whom I entrusted to you, and you did this to them.” I won’t go further into this, but there’s a lot of political discourse in the United States right now that revolves around parents saying their children are theirs and they own them, and I have to correct that. Your children are God’s; they belong to him, not you. And you have a responsibility for them. That should make it more dire, not less, than how they’re raised and what happens with them, because you’re going to have to give an account when you stand before the judgment seat of Christ for everything you said and did regarding them. They’re not sort of property for you to dispose of as you see fit. They also don’t belong to the state; I’ll be even-handed. They definitely don’t belong to the state either: they belong to God. Lots of states have gotten destroyed based on what they did to God’s children over the course of human history.

Fr. Andrew: And it can happen again…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Oh, it will happen again. Now, of course, that’s the southern kingdom and the northern kingdom in addition to the sort of paganized religion that Jeroboam, son of Nebat, starts. As I mentioned, when you get to the Omride dynasty started by Omri, his son Ahab: Omri marries his son Ahab to Jezebel—the “-bel” in her name is Baal, if you didn’t know—who was a daughter of the king of Sidon, one of the primary Phoenician cities. And so she came and brought Baal-worship in alongside of it, and seems to have maybe even wanted to displace Jeroboam’s religion with more of her family religion, and Ahab seems to have been especially weak. But this is why— It’s this, this religious imposition, you might say from a modern perspective, and the kind of idolatrous worship that we’ve been discussing that she brings into the northern kingdom, that causes the entire Omride dynasty to get wiped out over the course of the end of 1 Kings, beginning of 2 Kings, because they are the ones sort of deliberately responsible for it.

From the Bible, Ahab seems like a more prominent figure than Omri, so some folks might be wondering why I keep calling it the Omride dynasty. From the perspective of ancient history and the Ancient Near East and all the inscriptions we have from other countries, Omri is the most important king of Israel, period—northern kingdom, southern kingdom, combined. They referred to the northern kingdom of Israel as “the house of Omri” for a long time, until its destruction. We have inscriptions of this. He gets six verses in the Bible that basically just say, “He was wicked. He bought the hill where they built Samaria. He died.” [Laughter] “As for the other stuff he did, read the official annals of the king. Who cares?” And then they move on to the story of Elijah, not even the story of Ahab, his son, but the story of Elijah.

And so just a note here, because this is something obviously that comes up in scholarship. This whole idea— You will see a lot of things in Old Testament scholarship referring to Israelite priests: “Israelite priests “do all kinds of things, pre-exilic, post-exilic. There’s the P source or P sources in the whole JEDP thing with the Torah, with other— the priestly source in other books of the Old Testament. Much is made of the Israelite priests and how they were trying to enforce only the worship of the one God, only from the Temple in Jerusalem all along, and they were the ones really enforcing this. When you look at the actual picture, “Israelite priests” becomes really problematic, because if you follow what we just went through and you follow what the Old Testament Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible says, most of the priests, most of the Levites who were serving priestly functions in Israel—again, especially once it’s divided, but even with Solomon, even during the period of the judges—are pagans, the vast majority of them. Even the ones who are serving at the Temple in Jerusalem, a bunch of them must have been serving at those pagan shrines!

So you really have to, to make that whole priest thing work, you have to extend that priestly source. You have to make it very post-exilic. You have to hypothesize, and then you have to move the writing of pretty much the whole Old Testament into a couple centuries post-exile to try and make that work.

Fr. Andrew: Which some people do! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Which some people try to do. Some people try to do. The Greek Old Testament tradition kind of abuts that, because you start having texts in the third century BC getting translated into Greek. From that we know there were already multiple Hebrew traditions of different forms of these books by the third century BC. The exile ends at the end of the sixth century BC, so I mean we’re not talking about a lot of time for all of this stuff to get written and to have multiple streams of tradition diverge. So the whole thing gets pretty dicey, is all I’m saying. And I don’t think “Oh, they were in Persia and they saw Zoroastrianism, and that made them all monotheists” makes a whole lot of sense?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I read about that on the internet, though, so…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They didn’t become Zoroastrians; they just said, “Hey, we’re going to make up a new kind of religion that has never existed on earth before, based on seeing Zoroastrianism.” Okay!

Fr. Andrew: We just like this one little piece of Zoroastrianism, sort of.

Fr. Stephen: And we’re going to rewrite all these texts, we’re going to rewrite the history of our people, based on this new religion that is somewhat inspired by Zoroastrianism. Like, it’s based on Zoroastrianism the way a Vincent Price movie named after an Edgar Allan Poe story is based on Edgar Allan Poe. [Laughter] Except at least those have the same name.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So with that we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! It’s the third and final—well, probably—yeah, third and final half of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Of this episode, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Of this episode, yes. We did have that one episode that had four halves, so that was—

Fr. Stephen: But unless you have some secret plan that I’m not aware of, for half four tonight…

Fr. Andrew: Nah, I have to get up at 4:45 in the morning to help my kids get the bus, so I’m motivated not to! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They can’t find the bus?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Have to rely on your superior navigational skills.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. The first half we talked about pagan idolatry, second half we talked about Israelite idolatry, and now we’re going to talk about Christian idolatry. What!?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s also bad.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes, we’re not saying that because it’s Christian it’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, just putting “Christian” in front of something doesn’t make it good unless we’re talking about actor Christian Bale, who was excellent.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And the “Bale” part is not “Baal,” everyone.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. So when we talk about—it’s a little tongue-in-cheek to call it Christian idolatry, but what we’re talking about is idolatry from a Christian perspective, which of course is going to be Christian critiques and forbidding of idolatry—idolatry is planet forbidden—and the perspective from which, beyond what we’ve already talked about, idolatry is critiqued within a Christian framework.

So we have to start with sort of prohibitions of literal idolatry, and what I mean by that is obviously Christianity proper—we’re talking about the first century AD, the apostles—there is very literal pagan idolatry going on all around them. Especially when the apostles go out into the Greek and Roman world and beyond it, they are going to communities that are steeped in idolatry. The whole self-identification of those communities, those cities, those people-groups is based around idolatrous worship and festivals and these things. So within the pages of the New Testament and in the early centuries pre-Constantine in the Roman Empire, we find very literal prohibitions of the very idolatry we described in the first half, and really the second half.

In fact, not only was paganism still very much around in the Roman Empire in the first century, but it was sort of ascendant and had been deliberately revitalized. In the wake of philosophical schools in the Greek and in the Roman world, a lot of what anthropologists now would label traditional folk religion, which seems to be the origin of the word “paganism,” for example, had kind of faded off. There were still certain civic festivals, there were still offerings made to the gods, but sort of active participation in these things, the number of sacrifices that were being made, especially government participation from the Senate and these kind of things… The sacrifices and this kind of thing were still being done, but they were done in this rudimentary way, sort of “this is what we do; this is what we have to do.” There was even a certain amount… There are certain quotes you could find from Roman generals and senators and this sort of thing and thinkers that sound pretty jaded as far as the gods go. [Laughter] There of course were no atheists, but these were looked at in a certain way. You find Greeks joking about referring to the sacrifices being offered referred to as the burning of the bones, because, as they pointed out, all the useful parts of the animal people were keeping for themselves and then they were just burning the parts they didn’t want, giving those to the gods. You find this attitude prevailing.

When Augustus becomes Augustus, when Octavian becomes Augustus, and becomes caesar, becomes the emperor, he embarks on a massive project to solidify the empire. You get the Aeneid, the new history of the Roman people; you get Ovid in his Metamorphoses collecting a lot of the folk traditions, religious traditions, of the people throughout the empire; and you get Augustus himself really embracing his role as pontifex maximus. We have at least one very significant intact statue of Augustus in which he is wearing the headcovering of a Roman priest to convey this role as pontifex maximus. He begins to publicly offer sacrifices and lead these festivals again. This is tied to him wanting to re-embrace the Roman tradition.

So there was very much an emphasis on this coming top-down on religious observance, pagan religious observance, from the empire during, for example, St. Paul’s missionary journeys, and that’s part of what exacerbates the tensions that he faces in coming to some of these cities, and is what is going to later, in future bouts of this traditionalism, what’s going to bring about a lot of the persecution of Christians. The persecution of Christians is sporadic through the later history of the empire until St. Constantine, but usually when it erupts it’s during a push to re-embrace traditional religion. Those pushes are often motivated by some calamity or other or problem or other within the empire, that they are returning to their gods to try to solve. And of course the Christians weren’t going to join in with that and so became a problem to be eradicated.

But so when you read especially St. Paul’s letters to the Church at Corinth— Corinth is an ancient Greek city— Now, technically, the one St. Paul writes to isn’t that ancient, because the Romans destroyed it and rebuilt it, but it has this legacy. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Comeback Corinth.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There’s a reason they did that. They did that because Corinth had been the head of the Corinthian League. Corinth had been the city that gathered up the Greek city-states for common defense and this kind of thing. So when the Romans came to take Greece and wanted to make a statement, they made that statement by leveling Corinth and then rebuilding it to say: “Don’t get any ideas.” [Laughter] But it has this legacy and is very much a part of this idolatrous revitalization. A lot of what St. Paul talks about— There’s a reason St. Paul keeps vacillating in those epistles between “don’t participate in idolatry” and “don’t participate in sexual immorality,” sometimes within a few verses, because, as we’ve talked about in the first two halves, these are deeply linked.

And there are these festivals in Corinth where mysteries are celebrated, and we get this kind of orgiastic worship, this breaking of social bounds and boundaries. This is why in the epistles to Corinth St. Paul keeps talking about everything being done decently, in good order within Christian worship, about maintaining traditional hierarchies within Christian worship, because this is over against a paganism that saw the transgressive breaking of these things as the means to spiritual ecstasy, and he’s trying to pull these former pagans, now Corinthian Christians, into being more former pagans, to separating that and delineating what Christian worship is about from what pagan worship was about.

And you see the same thing with St. John. There’s this emphasis on idolatry in especially 1 John; 2 and 3 [John] are pretty short, but it gets touched on a little there. But 1 John, you see this emphasis on idolatry because he’s writing to Christian communities in and around Ephesus: Ephesus, hub of idolatry, place where there is the Temple to Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the main source of the local economy. And so he also is— There has to be this delineation, because what Saints Paul and John and the apostles in general are doing is they’re not only— It’s not only a question of “no, you need Christian worship to be like our Jewish worship which is pure, not like that pagan worship which is evil,” but there’s an introspective nature of it in terms of how St. Paul thinks about the history of Israel, that they’re aware of the failures of Israel as they’re laid out in the Old Testament in this regard.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So don’t keep doing that, guys. This was bad before; it’s going to be bad again.

Fr. Stephen: And so neither coming into the Christian context and trying to worship in this transgressive, sexual way nor trying to come and “okay, well, I’ll come and worship Jesus on this day, and then I’ll go worship Apollo on this other day and Artemis on this third day”—neither of those are acceptable options. Neither the gods alongside the God of Israel, nor the worship [of] the true God in this pagan, idolatrous way: neither of those are acceptable. Neither of those are acceptable. And a bunch of former pagans coming in to join Jewish Christians, it has the potentiality to go in one of those two directions, and especially in a place like Corinth where it seems like it was mainly former pagans and fewer Jewish Christians, as is that dangerous there.

So in the Roman Empire at least, paganism really ends in the fourth century. And it doesn’t end because Constantine and his successors go and murder all the pagans. [Laughter] That’s silly nonsense; it didn’t happen. St. John Chrysostom’s mentor, his teacher of rhetoric, was one of the last generation of pagans, lived a healthy life, remained a pagan. But the pagans of that era were very much no longer practicing the kind of things we’ve just been talking about. Already Christianity had had an effect. To use very modern terms, both paganism and various philosophical schools that were themselves, as we talked about, embedded in paganism still had to “compete with Christianity in the marketplace of ideas.” [Laughter] They had to— And so as they saw the world shifting around them toward Christianity, they had to take the Christian—many of them inherited Jewish critiques of idolatry, of their mode of worship— They had to take that seriously, as these things start to shift.

And so you get the formation of, for example, Neoplatonism in the late second and early third centuries, which is just: “Hey, let’s try to Christianize Platonism.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s an attempt to make it more appealing to, you know— They can see where the wind is blowing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and you get these varying forms of Gnosticism that are basically like: “Hey, let’s Jesus up our paganism a little bit.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, wasn’t it the case where Julian the Apostate— Didn’t he complain? Like he complained that Christians would take care of even non-Christians, and he’s like: “Why can’t our pagans be more like this?” [Laughter] Like, he wants pagans to have Christian ethics.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s why Julian the Apostate’s attempts to kind of re-invigorate paganism ultimately didn’t have a chance of working, because you couldn’t go to even this more philosophically-minded last pagan generation and be like: “No, we’re going to start sacrificing! We’re going to sacrifice 50 bulls to Jupiter.” And they’re like: “Oh. Yeah, well, okay.” “We’re going to go practice the Dionysian rites!” They were like: “Enhh…” Not so much. [Laughter] They didn’t find that as appealing by that point. All of that had really broken down.

And there was also, accompanying this, lest we forget— I mean, everything I just said a materialist could have said, but there’s also this other element of the oracles not working any more, that as Christianity spread and became the legal religion, a lot of these spiritual phenomena upon which paganism was grounded ceased, to the point that we have writers in that late pagan period hypothesizing: “Well, daemon”—where we get the word “demon”—“they must die. They must get old and die, because the ones whom this oracle was channeling, they just stopped.” So the spiritual experience that the pagans were going after, they weren’t getting any more, because these demons, post-Christ, post-spread of Christianity, aren’t able to do it any more in these Christian lands. And so paganism really dies on the vine over the course of the fourth century in the Roman Empire. Honestly, similar things happen wherever Christianity goes and nations convert to Christianity. This happens in the rest of Europe; this happens in Russia, both pieces of it, and paganism just withers, withers and dies.

So for most of us, for most of the people listening to this, there may be some literal idolatry going on near you. There may be a Hindu temple near you or something where there’s literal pagan idolatry going on, probably not— Depending on which country you’re in, probably not the orgiastic worship type thing, though there are still places where that kind of thing goes on. But even if that’s going on, it’s probably not a big temptation to most of our listeners, like: “Hey, I want to get me in on that,” right?

But there’s another way that idolatry has been talked about within Christianity, and that mode of thinking and talking about idolatry and warning against idolatry is just as pertinent as it ever was. And this isn’t just sort of: “Okay, well, all the pagans went away, so all the fifth-century Church Fathers decided to come up with another allegorical thing and call it idolatry so that those commandments still had relevance,” because of course they saw—as we’ll talk about more next time—that they had no relevance to iconography.

This already starts within the Scriptures, within the New Testament: idolatry is used in this way, specifically by St. Paul. St. Paul there— Colossians and Ephesians, a lot of the contents parallel each other. I will not now go into all the weird theories as to why. Journal articles have to be written, dissertations have to be published…

Fr. Andrew: PhD opportunity, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, no. There’s so much writing on all of this. You don’t want to go down that road. You would have to read so much. Colossians 3:5 and Ephesians 5:5 are roughly parallel, and St. Paul uses idolatry in this other way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in the Colossians 3:5 reference, he writes, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” And then in Ephesians 5:5, he says, “For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous, that is, an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so here St. Paul identifies covetousness, basically greed, as idolatry. It might be easy to say, “Oh, well, he’s just analogizing, or this is an allegorical thing, that it’s like idolatry,” but pause for a second, because, notice, in both of these places where he identifies it as idolatry, he connects it, he ties it to sexual immorality, in the way that literal idolatry is tied to sexual immorality throughout the Scriptures, as we’ve seen. So what St. Paul sees here about covetousness and idolatry goes beyond an analogy. He’s seeing something in terms of how it works, how covetousness works and how idolatry worked or works.

And so think about how we were saying in the first half idolatry works, that idolatry gives you this handle or this grip on these spiritual forces at work in the world that are beyond your control: that’s the idea, at least. That’s not what happens, but that’s the idea. And think about how the love of money—how mammon— And “mammon” in Aramaic is more than just money; it’s money, property, your reputation and prestige. A really good translation of it used to be “substance,” back when, in English, you would say that someone wealthy and well-respected was a person of substance, but we don’t say that as much any more, but it sort of entails all of that.

When a person chases after that, what are they doing? Why are they doing it? Well, what St. Paul sees is they’re using that to try to get a handle, to try to get a grip, on the forces that work in the world that they can’t control.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s interesting: I’ve sometimes heard “idolatry” used in this more metaphorical way, glossed as: “Well, an idol is anything that gets between you and God,” and I think that that’s true on a certain level, but I think it’s also more than that. It’s not—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because then you’re just saying all sins are idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, which, I mean, people do that.

Fr. Stephen: No, I mean, that’s not helpful.

Fr. Andrew: Well, what’s the point of having the category of idolatry if it’s just a synonym for sin?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: I think this is really an important point, that if you just spread that word out to mean everything, then what does it actually mean? What’s the point in using it? And we actually have a caller. We have Daniel calling from Virginia who seems to have a related idea on his mind. So, Daniel, are you there?

Daniel: Yes. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is your question?

Daniel: Yeah, this is my first time calling you guys. I’ve found you guys in the process of the bounce from Jordan Peterson to Jonathan Pageau, and then Jonathan Pageau said you were killing it one night with a Twitter link to the giants episode, and I’ve listened to everything since then, poring through it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the Peterson-Pageau pipeline! It continues! [Laughter]

Daniel: Yeah. I’ll make it relevant to my question, too.

Fr. Stephen: Are we the spigot?

Daniel: I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s biblical series. I grew up kind of non-denominational, but I’m trying to sort through everything by listening to you guys and the whole sphere. I kind of glanced over at my computer. I’m a software technology-type person for a profession. I glanced over at my computer while listening to him talk about idolatry and things like that, and also just through listening to the definition that you guys are given, it started to concern me a little bit, because we— there’s a series of bits and switches that turn on and off. It’s a thing that we create, and kind of as Pageau would say, you sacrifice your time and attention as a software developer or even as an electrical engineer to kind of breathe life into the machine to make it do what you want. I don’t think of it that way; I just think of it as a tool, but I’m hoping that the “Father Stephens” could alleviate some of my concerns that we’re just building one big, massive AI-idol.

Fr. Andrew: Did you just pluralize us as as “Father Stephens”? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I think so. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Fr. Andrew: I know! It’s been a long time since anybody did that, but yeah… [Laughter] It’s okay. This is my life. So what I would say is there’s not nothing to that. We’re talking about idolatry as techne, this attempt by human beings to manipulate the world. So if you’ve listened ever since some of our earlier episodes, you know that we’ve said that technology in and of itself is not evil; it’s the, in many cases, getting it too early, but the whole point being using it in a bad way that is the problem. I mean, here we are: Fr. Stephen is in Louisiana, I’m in Pennsylvania, you’re in the holy land of Virginia, where I happen to have been born. [Laughter] And the only reason we’re able to talk to each other live is because of computer technology, so obviously we’re not saying that that is an evil thing in and of itself, but I do think that if people are using it to control and destroy one another and to enrich themselves at the expense of other people especially, and especially beyond what they actually need, then, yes, it is in a way— it does become this handle of mammon, that it becomes this engine of human destruction. I haven’t listened to any of Jordan Peterson’s Exodus stuff, so I have no idea what he said about any of that, but—

Daniel: Oh, it was more of him spurring him, like it was more just the topic spurring thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Got you. But, yeah, I don’t know. I still have thoughts about AI that are not fully-formed. I know Fr. Stephen has some ideas about it as well, but I’m not as alarmed, I think, as some people are, I’ll just put it that way, but that’s not a thought-out theological position; that’s just the way that I am experiencing how the world is actually functioning. I don’t know. Father, do you have something to add or whatever on any of that?

Fr. Stephen: Right. I mean, yeah, I think what you said is true in terms of how it can be used and whether… I don’t know where exactly to nail down what exactly is the idol, like I don’t think the physical computer is the idol or the internet is the idol. It may be that the idol in that kind of situation is sort of the curated version of oneself that one creates online, and I don’t just mean making an avatar in Meta or something; I mean everyone who uses social media is a phony. [Laughter] The carefully curated version of yourself that you put out there to the world, that that might be ultimately the idol, because that’s what you’re using to try to kind of take control of your own destiny and your own fate, because maybe you feel like you can’t control those things about yourself in reality, so you enter into a kind of realm of unreality where you can control those things—what you look like, how you sound like, how you come off to other people.

So, yeah, in terms of the AI-level, I mean, I’ve seen “The Apple” on Star Trek. You can envision— I’ve played Paranoia. You can envision a world where there is an AI that becomes sort of an idol, where people sort of serve it, Mrs. Davis recently. I don’t think we’re there yet in reality. I think we’re much farther from that in reality than people realize. I think ChatGPT, for all its amazingness, is really just Google crossed with an ELIZA program. All the old heads out there in programming know what an ELIZA program is. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man! That brings me back to the ‘80s.

Daniel: To me it feels like MadLibs on steroids sometimes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I think we’re pretty far away from that, but I think there can be a way in which, particularly the way people now interface with the internet primarily through social media can take on an idolatrous aspect. But even that, the vast majority of people in the United States are not on social media, and if you talk about any given platform, it gets super-tiny. But that is still a danger when you get there.

Daniel: So when building software, raid the Egyptians and deliver the goods.

Fr. Andrew: There you go! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Raid the Egyptians, but do not turn what you make into a golden calf.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Daniel: That would be bad. [Laughter] I was hoping you guys would reference The Simpsons. That is one of the most— best golden calf, funniest golden calf moments ever.

Fr. Stephen: I could have brought up Mooby… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right! Well, thank you, that’s a good question, Daniel. Thank you very much for calling in.

Daniel: Thank you so much for taking my question.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. All righty. Mammon as the handle.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it’s worth pointing out, because sometimes it’s not— you don’t connect the dots, but let’s connect the dots. Certain things that always go together. The Scripture says that idolatry and sexual immorality go together, obviously, in terms of this orgiastic worship that you see in pagan ritual. But what do we see in the people who spend most of their time trying to get hold of mammon? There’s not just the wealth—

Fr. Stephen: Money, fame, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. There is a lot of immorality there.

Fr. Stephen: And orgiastic worship. The pursuit of altered states of consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s that same… It’s the same thing; it’s just not cast in specifically religious terms.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Wolf of Wall Street, anybody? Yeah, they go hand-in-hand. They go hand-in-hand, and they always will. St. Paul saw that even when he’s talking about idolatry in terms of greed. But those go hand-in-hand.

To generalize a little more out of that, beyond just mammon, what we’re talking about here is: How can a concept become an idol? What does it mean to worship a concept? What we have to realize is that a concept is basically the same thing. A concept is something that is shaped, that is mentally shaped, and that then delimits something: it limits it, it reduces it, and then allows it to be manipulated. For example, to use the example I used with Plato: justice. When most people talk about justice today, they’re not talking about the divine energy of justice, God’s activity in bringing about justice. They’re not tying that to the God who created the universe, who is infinite; they have a concept of justice. “Here is what justice is. Justice is fairness. Justice is the redress of historical inequity. Justice is the punishment of the guilty.”

But that concept, however it’s defined, that definition is a delimitation. It is a mental shaping and a mental reduction of the justice of God into this image, this delimited image. And then once it’s been reduced to that concept, that concept can now be manipulated. It’s now an idea, and we’ve talked about ideas, how they can be instrumentalized. I can use that concept of justice to make an argument to you, to make a presentation to you, and use it to manipulate you and get you to do what I want, by appealing to these concepts once I’ve defined them and delimited them, and they allow me to get a handle on these forces that are otherwise beyond my control, to bring about agreement, to control other people who aren’t necessarily going to do what I want and who might threaten me and my interests in various ways.

I don’t want to go all Calvin here, who said that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols, but… [Laughter] And I’m talking about the mind. But a concept very easily becomes an idol. A concept very easily becomes an idol when that concept has, in our minds at least, any kind of divine agency attached to it, like justice or love.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! You can always— When people take one thing that is true of God and then make it this overriding thing that eliminates anything else that traditionally is said about God in the Scripture or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: But they even delimit it. It’s: “God is love. Here is what love is.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not all these other things.

Fr. Stephen: “Here’s my definition, and now I can weaponize that definition of love against you.” Any of these concepts to which divine agency can be attached.

And obviously, the “that” that applies to these concepts that are just related to God, applies doubly so to concepts of God, where we in our mind have an idea of God—we have an idea of who he is, what he is like, what he does, what he doesn’t do—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think this is part of why so many of the Church Fathers are so insistent on saying, even alongside the things that are traditionally said about God in our tradition—sorry, that’s a little redundant, but even alongside those things, to say we don’t really know anything. We say these things because this is how God has revealed himself, but you cannot define God. You cannot put a line around him and say, “Well, this is who he is.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, because as soon as we start doing that, we create an idol; we create a conceptual idol. But that’s attractive to us, because then we can use it: “God doesn’t do X; God will do Y.” And we find this all over the place. We find this all over the place. And let me say, as we’ve critiqued many times on this show, both in terms of Calvinism and in terms of universalism, which we said is deeply connected to Calvinism, because both are Platonist, when you impose necessity on God, that’s a good warning flag that you’ve limited him, that you’re dealing with a concept. You’re dealing with your own personal Jesus, not the actual Jesus who exists. Any time you try to limit, define God, you’re doing that, whether you realize it or not, so that you can manipulate the concept. “If I say this prayer, God has to save me. I’m worried; I’m scared. Okay, I said the prayer: now I’m saved; I don’t have to worry.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think it’s really important to emphasize that God is utterly free, and idolatry is about making that not so.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So maybe Calvin was right; he just needed a little more self-examination. [Laughter] So, that said, and because I couldn’t resist the bit, what are some American idols?

Fr. Andrew: Aside from Kelly Clarkson.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: God bless her.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I don’t know what was with that two-tone hair back in the day, though. That was just a weird thing.

Fr. Andrew: I would not have thought you would pay attention to the hair tone of Kelly Clarkson, but here we are.

Fr. Stephen: Well, she’s from Texas, and I was living in East Texas at the time and it was kind of a thing there, and I never got it.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t even remember that it was a thing.

Fr. Stephen: It was kind of a thing. I don’t know if it was a thing beyond Texas, but it was a thing in Texas. At any rate.

What are some things— And again, you and I, Fr. Andrew, live in the United States, so we have to speak from that. I’m sure if you live in Australia or the Netherlands or Greece or England, or wherever you may be—Scotland, Wales: don’t want to leave anybody out.

Fr. Andrew: Guam. [Laughter] Technically the United States, but you Guamanians know that you’re different!

Fr. Stephen: Wherever you might be listening to this, there might be shades of things that might connect, or you might just not like America, so you’ll like what I’m about to say.

What are the things, the conceptual things, other than wrong concepts, limiting concepts of God himself, that have become idols for us? Of course, the big one—and I think this is true in all of the, shall we say, European-descended nations, not just the United States but probably also Canada, also western Europe, at least, Australia, etc., commonwealth countries—and that is the state. You see this unfold in real time in the 19th century in Europe, where as the western European nations were secularizing sort of deliberately, you see the iconography that we’ll talk about more next time and imagery and even popular songs and these kind of things, that used to have religious associations be reassociated with the state, with the leaders of the state, with the founder-figures of the state, in a way that isn’t just overt paganism but is not a different phenomenon either.

So the nation-state itself becomes this idolatrous figure because the nation-state again is going to be this handle. “It is going to give us a good life. It is going to guarantee our safety and peace. It is going to get control of all these things that I’m scared of, all these things that I’m worried about: I don’t have to worry because the state— And all I have to do is my sacred duty to the state, to ensure that that all happens.” This is idolatry. And then politics becomes this sort of techne of how do we use the state to make those things happen.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And you mention all the iconography of nationalism. I’m like: God bless them, you go to our nation’s capitol, and you go to the Lincoln Memorial. That is basically a pagan temple in terms of its architecture, and you’ve got this divinized…

Fr. Stephen: The US Capitol with the— It’s called— The painting is called “The Apotheosis of Washington.”

Fr. Andrew: “The Apotheosis of Washington,” yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Him mounting up into heaven to become a god.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] Yeah, so, I mean, that stuff is there. Now, they meant it in maybe a different way—they’re all being Deists or whatever, I don’t know—but it’s totally there. That’s what that imagery traditionally is about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you get this tradition. But that idea of looking to the state, that idea of nationalism, where the nation-state is our protector, is our savior: it’s what we derive our identity from. Our community is not our church; it’s not the community of faith. We’re not part of the nation of Christians; we are this nation. That’s what gives us our identity and our self-understanding.

Just a side note. I know there are Orthodox folks out there on the internet who say things pro-Christian nationalism. And some of you even evoke St. Constantine to talk about Christian nationalism, as if the Roman Empire was a nation-state, like, huge category mistake: the nation-state is a different concept. But at least in the United States, I think it bears thinking about that if the United States were to go the route of Christian nationalism, where the laws of the country were based on Christianity, the Christians who would be doing that don’t think that I’m a Christian.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, you have people fantasize about these things. They figure that they’ll get to be in charge.

Fr. Stephen: Their group is going to be the one that’s in charge, but that’s not the case if you’re an Orthodox Christian in the United States. We’re a tiny minority! So, you know, huge swaths of our faith may get banned and made illegal as necromancy. They might come and burn all our icons. And if you think I’m being ridiculous, then you don’t know US history; you don’t know about—or Canadian history. You don’t know about the anti-Greek riots in Toronto. You don’t know about all the anti-Catholic violence that Protestants have carried out in the history of this country. You don’t know about the first US governor of Alaska using residential schools to try to force indigenous children to convert from Orthodox Christianity to Lutheranism. So, yeah, that’s what Christian nationalism will get you guys, so leave off with that. You don’t want it.

Anyway, back to our topic. [Laughter] The nation-state becomes this idol, becomes what’s looked to, basically, instead of God, for these things to which we should be looking to God as the One who is actually. But, again, we don’t feel like we can get the true God, who created the universe— we don’t feel like we can get him to do what we want him to do—because we can’t. And we’d prefer something else, like the state, that we see may have the power to do some of those things for us and which we can get a grip on and a handle on, at least a little more readily…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it gets results!

Fr. Stephen: Just like the pagans moved on to the demons, because they couldn’t get the true God to do what they wanted.

Another big one for us in our culture is war—not war in the sense the Romans did, although a lot of horrible things happen in war. If you don’t understand that, go and actually— instead of just talking about how great veterans are, everyone listening to this should go actually meet some and talk to them. A lot of people could use someone to talk to.

Fr. Andrew: Especially if they’ve been in combat.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and find out about their experiences. So it’s not in that sense, where while horrible things happened, it’s not about going and exalting and bloodshed and horror, but there is this idea that somehow war brings out virtue in people. There is this weird idea that, by sort of the state being perpetually at war and by war, in threat of war, dominating the world—again: “Okay, now we don’t have to worry. Now the rest of us who aren’t over there… We’re going to go fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

Fr. Andrew: “Making the world safe for democracy!”

Fr. Stephen: “Okay, now we’re safe because that’s going on.” And then you get really over-the-top stuff, like, I’m sorry, “The Battle-hymn of the Republic”? “As Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the original lyrics, everybody. The “let us live to make men free” is an edited version.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter] I’m sorry: comparing the death of union soldiers to the death of Christ? Like, it’s hard to argue that something idolatrous hasn’t happened here, that something isn’t being put in God’s place that isn’t God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Obviously, in our culture, sexuality.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially in the way that everything is expected— In certain contexts, everything is expected to make way for certain concepts of sexual identity.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s moved from action to identity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That the sense of self—again, not derived from God but being part of a “community”—not that there’s any interaction and community and mutual support most of the time, but just “we all identify the same way; therefore we’re a community”—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’ve talked about this before on the show, as to why it’s becoming more possible, and it’s because of the stuff that Daniel said, that people are pouring their lives into machines, and the 3D world which includes our bodies is less and less on our minds.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, in the United States at least—and I don’t know how much this is a product of US culture and how much this is widespread, so folks outside the US would have to tell me, although I don’t know that I want to know much more detail on this? But in the United States at least, sexualized material—we’re talking about pornography—the entire sex industry in the United States has become over the last couple of decades increasingly violent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it just needs to be more extreme, because that’s how idolatry works; that’s how addiction works.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not about “love” or “sex as an expression between two people”; it’s choking people, spitting on people, demeaning people in other ways. It’s literal violence. It’s more and more transgressive, because remember what we said of this orgiastic worship: the transgression is what produces the experience. The lawlessness is what produces the experience, the quasi-religious experience.

And then of course, we come back to mammon, where we have this fascinating—at least, again, in the United States, we have this fascinating god named “the economy.” [Laughter] “We must all make sacrifices for the economy. We must all do our bit for the economy. The economy is good; the economy is bad. We must appease the economy!” But again: “If I could just get some more money, if I could just get some more fame, then I’ll be in control of my destiny, then I won’t have to worry, then everything— I’ll be safe then. It will all come together.” That’s just idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So flee from idols, as the Apostle says. You know, I’ve been rolling around in my mind the question of what I might say at the end here, and the thing that finally came to me is I think that some people actually— I don’t think this; I know that some people actually use the Church itself as a kind of idol. I know that some people would recoil from that idea. I’ve even heard people say or seen them say on the interwebs things like, “Well, can Christ be separated from his Church?” in other words: “It’s not possible to treat the Church like an idol, because Christ is the Church. The Church is Christ.” And sometimes they’ll say that in the context of apologetics against other Christian groups, essentially saying, “It’s impossible to follow Christ unless you are Orthodox,” effectively. That question aside, which is a whole big interesting discussion, but this issue of treating the Church as an idol…

So if Christ and the Church are simply the exact same thing and completely co-terminus in every possible way, then why do we bother having two words? Why do we talk about Christ and the body of Christ? It’s not because they’re separable, but, even that aside—I’ll just grant that, that there’s no— even if one wants to make a total identification between Christ and the Church, which I don’t think is correct—it is still possible to treat the Church as an idol, because what happens is people have a concept of the Church that they are worshiping, a concept of the Church that they are using, as you said, Father, as a kind of handle on the world.

What does that look like? Well, it looks like a lot of different things. One way it can look is when people have an idea of a particular time and/or place in Church history and make that the end-all, be-all of what it means to be Christian. You can usually note that they’re doing this because they’ll have the word “holy” and then the name of some time, place, empire, kingdom, whatever after that word. “In holy blah-blah-blah, it was this way, and we have to get back to that!” So there’s this kind of toxic nostalgia that sometimes exists.

Sometimes people will idolize elements of Church life; probably the most common is monasticism. And the weird part about it is this is often being done by non-monastics. The very otherness of it, I think, is part of what enables people to turn it into an idol, and so they’ll say, “Well, these monastic fathers say this,” and that’s used as a manipulation over and against, in many cases, the rest of the Tradition of the Church; the rest has to submit to that.

People can idolize the liturgical life of the Church. They can worship worship. And you can note that that’s happening because then the way that it gets used. I have witnessed and been told of stories of clergy serving services who are acting in abusive ways because the people around them are not doing exactly the thing that they’re supposed to do, and I don’t just mean offering proper correction and whatever, but even yelling, and I’ve heard of people throwing things, that kind of thing.

The authority within the Church can be treated in an idolatrous manner. It is the case that right now in some parts of the world if you are an Orthodox clergyman and you preach something that you know is true but is not popular with the government and Church leadership of your time and place, that you can be penalized and even arrested, fined. This is turning Church authority into an idol. I mean, I could go on and on; I could go on and on and on.

But how do you know you’ve turned some element of the Church or your concept of the Church into an idol? It’s when it takes people away from Christ himself. It’s when it takes people away from the life of following the commandments of Christ. It’s when it’s used as a weapon against other people, manipulation against other people, and for one’s personal self-aggrandizement, which could be about money and power and all that stuff, but it could also be about “owning” your opponents. People can turn theology into an idol. It just becomes a bunch of words that ultimately don’t point towards some life in Christ but are about defeating other people and winning arguments and so forth.

There’s a lot of this within the Orthodox Church of our time, on display. It is happening, and it is very sad. I’m not saying it’s predominant necessarily. I don’t know enough about what everybody is doing to be able to say that, but it is definitely out there, and there are people who are being driven away from the Church, whether because they never join it or because they’ve just had enough, because people are treating the Church as an idol and not as the body of Christ.

So how do we guard against that? How do we flee from that idol? Well, number one, we should remember that our concepts of the Church are not the Church. The Church is the living body of Christ; it is we who are in it. It’s not an ideology; it’s an actual community, and it is in the world to do the works of Christ in the world. That’s how we are his body: we are his powers and his nexus of powers. We are potential, in the world. That is who the body of Christ is. And so where you see people being made saints, made to live the way that Christ lived and to be the way that Christ is, then it’s being done right. But when you see it used to destroy other people, in whatever way, then it’s become idolatry; then it’s about control.

So flee from idols, love Christ above all, and remember that following the commandments is the foundation for all of the rest of Orthodox Tradition. And if you’re not living in such a way that you’re following the commandments, then according to the Scriptures you do not love God. And if you don’t love God, then you’re not really a Christian, not really. And all the rest is just an idol, ultimately. So that’s what I would have to say here at the end.

Fr. Stephen: So in past episodes I’ve come out against pasta, the nuclear family, and most recently empathy. So tonight I’m going to come out against delayed gratification. This is something we’ve been taught. Christ tells a parable about delayed gratification. It’s often labeled in our English Bibles as the parable of the rich fool. This man who’s very prosperous, he fills up his barn, he builds more barns, he fills those barns. Finally, he has all of this grain and all of this wealth stored up. He says, “Ah, good! Now I’m set! I can take my leisure; I can relax.” And God comes to him and says, “You fool! You’re going to to die tonight.”

And in a lot of cases we’ve had the opposite ground into us, where all of the actual living of life, all of the good things of this life, are always after a “then,” and there’s always something before the “then.” You have to attain a certain level of success, you have to get a certain level of education, you have to achieve certain things—then you can get married, then you can have kids, then you can relax, then you can enjoy life, then you can have friends and spend time with them, then you can have some kind of leisure time. Well, you have to work so many years, but then someday you’ll retire and then you’ll be able to enjoy your golden years, you’ll be able to relax, you’ll be able to spend time with your hypothetical grandchildren since you didn’t get to spend any with your children because you were working all the time. There’s always this “then.”

And oftentimes what comes before the “then” is an idol. It’s an idol: it’s the thing you’re using to get a grip on your life and get a grip on the world so that then you can relax and do the things you should do or want to do. “But there’s this other thing I’ve got to do first, because otherwise it won’t be safe to do those other things. I can’t relax and do those other things; I’ll have to worry. Got to make sure everything’s squared away first.”

Even more tragically nowadays, for a lot of us, there’s not even a “then”; there’s just what’s before it. There’s just: “I’m going to have to toil away at this until I die.” There’s just: “I’m going to have to tread water. I’m going to have to endure this. I’m going to have to survive this, just for as long as I can.” We’ve realized that those things about retirement or those things about having kids late in life—they don’t actually work; they don’t actually end up happening. And so there’s sort of nothing in front of us except toil and worry and anxiety, and that’ll probably lurch into despair.

But what all those kind of idolatrous calculations have in common is that they leave out God. They leave out his existence. They leave out his activity in the world. They leave out his involvement in the world, the way that he and his very self is active and moving in the world and in us. They leave out the fact that he knows what we need, that he is the One in control of all these things, not us. No matter what handles we find, what levers we pull: it’s always him. That he is the God who created the universe. That he doesn’t do what we want, because often the most disastrous thing God could do to us is to give us what we want or think we want in a given moment.

And we worry and we put ourselves into this despair and toil and stress. We deny ourselves the good gifts of God in this world and the good things of this world, because we ignore him and we forget about him. So because God is real, because the love of God expressed in our Lord Jesus Christ for us is real, we don’t have to be afraid; we don’t have to worry. We can live now. We can love and enjoy community now. We can have families now. We can have friends now. We can enjoy his good gifts now. It’s not even that hard to do. You actually don’t need mammon to do most of these things. You can get together with friends and cook food and eat it. It doesn’t have to be fancy food; it can be ramen! You can spend time with your kids, your wife, your husband, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your pals. You can go and talk to and interact with actual humans, in person, without curating who you are and what you look like and how you come off. You can touch grass. All of these things are available to us all the time, if we stop for a second from all the worrying and all the anxiety and remember that God is real and that Christ is real. And that even when we forget about him, he doesn’t forget about us.

So when the gratification we’re talking about is the blessings of God, is the worship of God, is the love of each other, do not delay that gratification; do not delay it one second. It’s yours now, because if you delay it, you’ll never get to it. That’s what I have to say.

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

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. “God money don’t want everything; he wants it all.”

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