Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, wranglers of Krampus! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and we are live! So if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346; that’s 855-AF-RADIO, and you can talk to us! We’ll get to your calls in the second half of the show, and Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls. So The Lord of Spirits—

Fr. Stephen De Young: Now, before we started, we had that disclaimer thing.

Fr. Andrew: The content disclaimer? Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And I do want to say, even though the opinions expressed by me on Ancient Faith’s airwaves do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Ancient Faith as an organization, they do reflect, with 100% accuracy and in every detail, the personal opinions of Bobby Maddex. [Laughter] Which is especially strange, because he and I have interacted, like, a handful of times. It’s uncanny.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just weird. It’s like a mirror.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s uncanny.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. I’m going to read an ad now. Yeah. So, The Lord of Spirits podcast, brought to you by our listeners—that’s you people—and by the Antiochian Men. So the Antiochian Men, which is abbreviated A·MEN, a men’s ministry of the Diocese of Miami and the Southeast within the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, will be hosting the first-ever Antiochian Men conference and retreat, March 7-9, 2024, at the Woodland Christian Camp and Retreat Center in Temple, Georgia, with the theme: “The Audacity of Manhood: Strength through Virtuous Work.” The event will feature guest speakers, outdoor activities, sports, workshops, campfire fellowship, and more. Speakers include His Grace Bishop Nicholas, Fr. Stephen De Young—

Fr. Andrew: That’s me!

Fr. Stephen: That’s you, man! That’s right!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: Fr. Hans Jacobse and Fr. Jacob Andoun. And this event will incorporate the best aspects of camping, conferences, and retreats into a first-of-its-kind experience for Orthodox Christian men. Ages 18 and older are welcome to register. Early bird registration is $149 per person, and that includes lodging for two nights and six meals. To learn more and to register, go to antiochianmen.org, and click on the banner at the top; that’s antiochianmen.org.

Fr. Stephen: And here’s something to consider. I’m only in one place at a time.

Fr. Andrew: Really? Can’t bilocate?

Fr. Stephen: And any point when I’m in a particular place, that must mean that I consider that place cooler than at least the other nearby available options.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So since I am going to be at this retreat and conference, that must mean it’s going to be pretty cool.

Fr. Andrew: Well, I mean, it is Georgia—but in March, so…

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Well, anyway, tonight we’re talking about technology. This is something that a lot of you people have asked us about, and even though it’s been discussed every so often in a number of episodes, we’ve never dedicated a whole episode to it and taken that deep dive that I know a lot of you are ready for.

Now, some of our listeners may not remember this, but surely Fr. Stephen and I remember in 1997 when Skynet became self-aware and launched its war against the human race. It was tough for a few years there, but later LiveJournal and MySpace saved us. So that’s done.

That said, here in 2023, people are perhaps more addicted to technology and also more afraid of it than ever before, or at least in recent memory. Will AI take over? What happens when the robotic police force comes online? Are we living in the Matrix? Have your or someone you know been assimilated into the Borg collective already? Is transporter technology in fact a Class I impossibility? For the answers to all these questions, you will have to listen to some other podcast.

So what are we talking about anyway, Father? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I will say there, that could be how I get around this one-place-at-a-time issue. Get the transporter technology and get a whole Thomas Riker situation going on.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true! Then you’ll have to wear fake, glue-on sideburns, though, so… Just putting that out there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, he will. I’ll be fine.

Fr. Andrew: Thomas De Young!

Fr. Stephen: He will have to.

Fr. Andrew: We’ll call him James De Young, because isn’t that your actual middle name?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, and he’ll be slightly lower ranking and have a different colored uniform.

Fr. Andrew: That was one of my favorite bits. And then he shows again as one of the Maquis, if I recall.

Fr. Stephen: On Deep Space Nine, yes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! Good times.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, we’re not actually going to be talking about Thomas Riker either on this show, as much as that may dash the hopes of many.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man.

Fr. Stephen: So what we are going to be talking about is technology: how you define what technology is, how technology relates to how we come to know and interact with the world, where technology comes from, is it good or bad—spoilers: bad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Come on!

Fr. Stephen: And then, ultimately, somewhere down the line, we’re going to get practical about it. But as usual, we’re going to start in some somewhat rarefied air—not the Neolithic Era. We’ll start getting back there in the second half, but in the first half we’re actually starting kind of with an earlier episode of the podcast, because we need to go back and review a little. As Stan Lee used to insist at Marvel: Every issue is somebody’s first issue.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I really wish that weren’t the case, though. I know. I understand. There’s probably some people for whom this is the first time they’ve listened to the podcast, but it’s like: Can you pause and listen to a couple hundred other hours and then get to this episode? If you don’t mind?

Fr. Stephen: Probably not.

Fr. Andrew: Probably not. I do— I mean, the older I get, the more disappointed I feel.

Fr. Stephen: Now, if you could craft a voice or at least a tonality in which you could do those little corner boxes Stan Lee used to do, like: “See Amazing Spider-Man, Number 53.”

Fr. Andrew: The sidebar voice.

Fr. Stephen: Or “Way back in Avengers 47.” You could do that, but you’d have to memorize all the episode numbers so that you could cross-reference those back. So I think it’s easier to just review. I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. Okay. Fine. Fine!

Fr. Stephen: At least in brief. And, really, this episode, the questions we’ve gotten from folks that led up to us doing this episode started with this episode we’re referring back to. So it is fitting in more ways than one.

In the episode we did way back, about the nous and about the different ways of knowing, we talked about techne as one of the ways of knowing, techne being the Greek word from which “technology,” for example, and “technical” are derived.

Fr. Andrew: And “techno.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, everybody’s… It’s EDM now.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] We don’t call it “techno” any more?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s EDM.

Fr. Andrew: I know. What is the difference between those two genres? Is there any?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sure there is some Gen Xer out there who can give us a discourse on the difference between techno, house, industrial, EDM—but I am not that person.

Fr. Andrew: I was recently informed that there’s some genre called—and I’m not kidding about this—chamber pop. And apparently it’s not, like, a pun on “chamber pot”; it’s chamber pop. And it’s like pop music with strings or whatever. So, figure that out. I’ve never even heard of this.

Fr. Stephen: So I can do a certain amount of genre hair-splitting, but electronic music is not my forte in that regard.

Fr. Andrew: Not the one.

Fr. Stephen: I am not nearly European enough and far too affirmed in my masculinity.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Getting spicy already!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: We just lost our ten techno listeners. Oh, sorry: EDM listeners.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I don’t know who you were, but— [Laughter] And now I’ll never know. But techne is one way of knowing amongst others that we talked about in that episode. The other ones, for the record, were: the nous that we talked about as being a sort of spiritual sense, and using the term “sense” in a very literal way, that it functions sort of like an eye, an ear, a nose, if you will; that the nous receives primarily thoughts, but also potentially images, visions, what have you, from spiritual reality. And we talked about episteme in that episode, which often gets translated as “science” in English, which is a type of knowledge that is dealing with things that can be demonstrated, as in mathematically demonstrated. This is the type of scientific knowledge that scientific materialists say is the only type of knowledge. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the prove-it-to-me kind of knowledge.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, evidence proven to me: make a mathematical proof, show me a repeated experiment, etc. And then the other two are kind of related. Prudence, which is phronesis in Greek, usually translated in English as “prudence,” is sort of moral reasoning, knowing what to do in a given situation. And then wisdom, sophia: and wisdom is the ability to recognize patterns and relationships within creation. So not patterns in the sense that we talk about scientific laws or something, but just in the way that things work: being able to see those patterns and then apply them to day-to-day life. And it’s possible for someone to be very advanced in any one of those ways of knowing and not be very advanced in the others.

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: So with the nous, you have the monastic who has received the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory but couldn’t do a calculus problem to save his life, can’t quote Shakespeare, isn’t educated in that sense. Or you have people who have advanced scientific and mathematical knowledge, but no spiritual sense whatsoever. And you have people who are very wise but do not necessarily have a lot of book-learning. You have people who live very morally good lives in the world but don’t necessarily have a lot of book-learning. You have people with a lot of book-learning who are rather foolish in their personal lives and decision-making, etc.

And so the fifth one of these was techne, which, at the time we defined as sort of literally “know-how.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, know-how.

Fr. Stephen: Knowing how to do things, knowing how to manipulate things in the world and to bring about certain results. Again, someone could be very advanced in this, in a particular area of this or in general. There are plenty of handymen out there, probably handy women also. [Laughter] You can think of an auto mechanic. They may not have a lot of book-learning, but they know how to work with machines, how to make them go. Think of a Pakled.

Fr. Andrew: “Things to make us go.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: One of the things that distinguishes techne from these other ways of knowing is that techne is not knowledge of a thing or of relationships between things, per se.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is kind of questions of how things are.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So you don’t have techne with regard to an object. You don’t have techne with regard to a chair.

Fr. Andrew: The question with techne is not: What is it? That’s not the question.

Fr. Stephen: Now, techne would be knowing how to make a chair, but knowing how to make a chair or how to fix a chair is not the same thing as knowledge of the chair itself.

Fr. Andrew: Or knowing how to use a chair in a wrestling move, which I’ve seen.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is a separate set of techne. Although almost everybody has banned unprotected chair-shots. You’ve got to take shots to the back, not the head. Concussion protocols.

Fr. Andrew: You would know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And it’s not necessarily the knowledge of relationships between things. Like when we’re talking about wisdom—or prudence, prudence being relationships between people in terms of morality and ethics. Techne is not necessarily knowledge of existing relationships between things, but it is a knowledge of the potential relationships between things.

Fr. Andrew: Very philosophical. Don’t worry, people. We’ll reify this a little. Don’t worry.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’ll get there. We’ll come back down to earth. But if you think about: There’s a rock on the ground. And so you have a person who is very advanced in techne, so this is a very skilled person; this is a skilled worker, advanced in knowing how to do things. So he may not be able to tell you exactly what type of rock it is or the mineral base or what elements compose the rock, the way the geologist does; and he may not be able to tell you how that rock got there, whether it’s from erosion of the surrounding area, etc., etc.; but he can look at that rock and come up with uses for that rock. He can look at that rock and say, “Well, I could fit this rock in with these other rocks to make a wall,” or “This is a rock of the right size and shape and smoothness; I could use this to make a grinder to grind grain.” So that’s techne: How can I use this object that I find? What relationships could I put this rock into with other things in order to produce some result?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s about accomplishing purposes.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so ultimately this is knowledge of how something can be used, how it can be manipulated, how it can be put to work. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about techne. It’s an instrumental kind of knowledge, meaning: I know how I can use this thing as an instrument to accomplish something else. I know how I can use this thing.

And this is true also in the sense of— So one of the elements, of course, when we think about this kind of knowledge is: Well, part of being able to take things that exist and put them into new relationships and do things with them is inventing things.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And we tend to think of… Like when we use the word “invention” or “inventing,” most of us think now of some guy with spectacles sitting up in his attic, creating some new machine or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: And then Thomas Edison comes and steals the patent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] Exactly. An inventor. But “invention,” at least in English, has had a longer and broader history than that. It’s often been used in literary contexts, so an author engages in invention. He’s not making some kind of device or machine, but he’s making characters, he’s making situations, he’s making plots. But also it applies to art as well and to philosophy, because all of this is the way that you use—whether it’s language or pigment or whatever—for this purpose. So it’s not just about making a thing; it can also be about making concepts or ideas or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, taking existing ideas or words or whatever that already exist, and arranging them and relating them to each other in a new way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s worth noting, because we’ve talked about how ideas come from outside of our heads— In that episode on the nous, we talked about how thoughts come into our heads, thoughts or sights or sounds. Sights and sounds aren’t generated within our brain, hopefully, barring mental illness, but they—

Fr. Andrew: Or substances.

Fr. Stephen: —but they are received. In the same way, thoughts are received, and ideas are received. And so this is actually included in the word “invent.”

Fr. Andrew: Right! And I don’t even have the jingle ready, but etymologically— See, the thing is, this is one that I didn’t look up; it’s one that you informed me of, but I’m always happy to receive new etymologies. “Invent”: so that “-vent,” I think it’s from Latin via French, probably, looking at it, but it means to come, and then “invent” is to come in, so it’s something that comes in, like, that’s what literally “invent” means is it comes in.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so—

Fr. Andrew: It just came to me.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but it doesn’t— It’s not created ex nihilo.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it comes from somewhere else.

Fr. Stephen: In a sense, it already exists, but it comes in; it is brought into existence, which is not exactly the same thing, as we’ve talked about before when we talk about different aspects of creation.

But so why are we going through all this? Ultimately we’re going through this because we want to talk about technology, and so talking about techne is to try and get us to a definition of technology. And ultimately every product of techne, every product of that way of knowing, of that way of reasoning, can be rightly called technology. So we tend to have a lot of arbitrary lines in our head in terms of what’s technology and what isn’t. We tend to not think of primitive things like technology like the wheel or a saddle or a cart, but these are things that were technological innovations at one point. At some point in the past, this was a thing that humanity did not have, and then it had them, and then it spread. And to me—and I know I’m not going to offend anybody with this, because I know we don’t have any Amish listeners, because this is internet radio! [Laughter] But to me one of the basic problems with—not like Mennonites, etc., not all the Anabaptists, but with the Amish per se, is the line they draw in technology seems to me rather arbitrary.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, they’re using horse-drawn wagons; that’s technology.

Fr. Stephen: That was technology at a certain point.

Fr. Andrew: They’re using hats; that’s technology. They’re clearly using razors to get rid of the mustache.

Fr. Stephen: You go to the barn-raising, that’s technological. They did not have barns constructed in that way for most of human history. And so it’s just— A certain point is chosen: this far and no further, and we won’t go past that. But the reality is as soon as someone looks at a rock—our techne example— As soon as someone looks at a rock and decides to use that rock for something, we’ve entered into the realm of technology. They use it to build a wall, they use it to throw at someone or hit someone with, they use it to grind grain—whatever they use it for, it’s now technology, by the fact that they’ve taken it and put it to use. So, bad news to all the anarcho-primitivists out there: you can’t even use rock and be consistent with your philosophy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s no way to not do technology as a human. You’re using stuff…

Fr. Stephen: Well, I guess you could just walk the earth naked and eat berries you pick directly from a plant with your bare hand.

Fr. Andrew: I guess… Please don’t do that, though, people.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know how long your life would last, but— [Laughter] You couldn’t come into cities, because you’d be using the road or the sidewalks; you’d have to stay out in the wilderness doing this at all times. And so this is an important distinction to make right at the set-up, because as much as I joked at the beginning that “no, technology is bad,” obviously no one can say that all technology is bad. [Laughter] At least not and be consistent. We all wear clothing; when it’s cold, we wear warmer clothing than when it’s hot, etc. Any broad generalization we make about technology…

And if we decide that the cut-off for good technology is like when I was 25—you can do that, as I’m very tempted to do, and be “old man yells at clouds,” fine, knock yourself out—but the reality is: that is an arbitrary line.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I refer to that as one’s Luddite Line. And you can always tell when someone has reached their Luddite Line, because they start referring to a piece of technology as “this thing.” [Laughter] That’s the point at which: Oh! This far and no further.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so we have to acknowledge that we are being arbitrary, but people are allowed to be arbitrary if they want to in terms of how they live their life.

Fr. Andrew: Sure! Of course. We’re not going to stop you.

Fr. Stephen: And so it’s also important—because, as Fr. Andrew brought up, we’re not just talking about technology in terms of material physical implements, whether we mean hammers or iPhones; we’re also talking about ideas. We’re also talking about concepts. We’re also talking about narratives and worldviews and whatever other terminology like that. These are things that are formed. They’re formed out of pre-existing elements. But we also have to be aware— And I know I’ve said this on the show before; this is the infamous place where I might disagree with Jonathan Pageau. And someone asked him fairly directly in a Q&A if he disagreed with me about this, and I listened carefully to Jonathan’s answer twice. I’m still not totally sure if we disagree or not. [Laughter] So we may have to hash this out in person at Pageau Fest or something.

As we said, techne, including when we’re talking about ideas and concepts and worldviews and narratives and these kind of things, all of that, this is instrumental knowledge. This is instrumental knowledge.

Fr. Andrew: How-to. Know-how.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so because it is instrumental—this means ideas and concepts and these things are instruments—they are not things in themselves that exist, and therefore they don’t have agency; they can’t do things. So if we’re talking about an iPhone, an iPhone can’t do things by itself. You may have realized that yours is listening to you and giving you ad recommendations based on stuff you said around it, but it’s still not actually the iPhone doing that. It’s a piece of software installed on your phone by a human who created that piece of software, who is harvesting your data; the phone itself is not the agent of this any more than a hammer can drive a nail by itself, any more than a gun can shoot someone by itself. So the concept of fill-in-the-blank can’t do anything by itself.

This is a “sorry, atheists” thing. [Laughter] Because often you will hear our atheist friends say things like, “Religion is responsible for all the evil in the world,” or “Religion is responsible for all the wars in history.” Now, aside from prima facia kind of being ridiculously broad statements, religion can’t do anything. What the atheist is actually talking about there is not “religion”; they’re talking about God, and since they’ve decided to be an atheist and don’t believe in a god, they can’t say God is responsible for all the wars that ever happened; they can’t say God is responsible for all the evil in the world, because they don’t believe in him, so they say religion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you could say something like, “All the wars in the—” Now, this is not true, but you could say something like, “All the wars in the world include a religious element or are motivated by religion” or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Even “motivated by”! Even “motivated by” doesn’t work!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because—

Fr. Stephen: You could say, “In every war, people have used religion instrumentally.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, religion doesn’t cause things; agents cause things.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So religion doesn’t kill people; people kill people and religion sometimes to justify it, various religions. Religion, an idea, can’t cause anyone to do anything. And this is super important to understanding history, to understanding how the world works, to helping you defeat Plato-brain, Plato being the idealist of all idealists. [Laughter] And you can see this, my completely non-controversial example, of the North American slave trade. The North American slave trade was not caused by racism. The North American slave trade was not caused by there being verses in the New Testament that talk about slavery that don’t outright condemn it. That idea’s ridiculous and ahistorical. If you look at the actual history, what happened was people had a need to harvest crops like sugarcane in the New World. The average lifespan of a worker on a sugar plantation in the 18th and 19th century was two years. That’s how brutal the work was. You can’t hire someone to do that.

Fr. Andrew: No, they’re— Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: They needed slavery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they had to force people to do it.

Fr. Stephen: And after the North Atlantic slave trade began—after it began, what do you see? You see in scientific circles, scientists—these are the objective ones—scientists start crafting bogus race science. They start measuring skulls. [Laughter] They start doing all this nonsense, this bogus racial science to justify what they were already doing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the rise of especially American phenotype racism is crappy 19th-century science, really.

Fr. Stephen: After the fact.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then you start getting theology also trying to justify it as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because you have Protestants in the American South participating in the slave trade. That obviously rubs pretty rough against Christianity. So what do they have to do?

Fr. Andrew: They have to decide they’re less than human.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. What do they have to do? They have to craft new ideas that will make it accessible. Those ideas are instruments that they use to justify themselves. But those ideas are epiphenomenal: they arise after the fact of what people are doing. And then those ideas get used by people to various purposes. And once those ideas are around, racism doesn’t cause anyone to do anything. People appeal to racist ideas in order to do things—in order to motivate people, justify behavior, divide people from each other: whatever they want to do.

Fr. Andrew: We’ve said this in a hundred different ways now, which is that conviction follows conditioning. Beliefs, of whatever kind, are— they flow out of actions. And then they’re used to reinforce them—there’s a feedback loop for sure—but that’s the way that it actually goes.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So, having beaten that possibly near-dead horse enough—which is just a bizarrely cruel turn of phrase, too.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Isn’t it? I don’t know the origins of that one, beating a dead horse. I’m going to look that one up.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like we can’t talk about moving on from a topic without referring to beating horses to death and then continuing to beat them after they’re dead?

Fr. Andrew: Apparently it comes from mid-19th century, so roughly contemporaneous!

Fr. Stephen: There we go! Has anything good come out of the 19th century? [Laughter] I guess St. Seraphim of Sarov—there, we’ll answer our own question—and other saints came out of the 19th century.

In the ancient world— We’ve been talking about techne, we’ve been using a lot of contemporary examples, or roughly contemporary, identifiable examples. But in the ancient world, remember, there isn’t this split between material reality and spiritual reality; there isn’t this sort of schism. So when we talk about technology especially, as modern people, we are very deliberately often talking about material reality and only material reality. In fact, a lot of the approaches to the question we’re talking about tonight in general, the question of technology and the Christian faith, are approached in a way that: well, the Christian faith is one thing, over here, and then technology— and it’s a spiritual thing; and then there’s technology, a material thing, over there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, when you say the word “technology,” people think of computers.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and phones. But there is not this split in the ancient world. So techne was also something that extended into spiritual reality. There was an idea of spiritual technology, essentially, in the ancient world. And there have been several examples of this that we’ve talked about before on the show, and this is part of the questions we get about techne and its relationship to some of these other things. One of them, of course, probably the most obvious, is magic, and in fact the understanding of techne is part of what defines magic per se, over against other elements of pagan religion in the ancient world. And magic is a kind of spiritual technology that brings about a result sort of in and of itself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s about the recipe: get the recipe right, and you will always get this result. That the only agent involved is basically the human, and he’s just manipulating stuff, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in the same way that you have a recipe for baking bread, and if you follow it correctly you end up with the loaf of bread, you have the: here’s the love spell, here’s the way to curse your enemy and give them the evil eye, these various things. They might sometimes involve the invocation of some kind of spiritual being, but it’s not the invocation of a spiritual being to enter into some kind of relationship or two-way conversation; it’s: doing this will compel this spiritual being to do what you want it to do, without it having any say in the matter.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So then we’ve also talked about techne in the spiritual sense in regards to idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is, you know— Since this is everybody’s first episode— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: This is somebody’s first episode; this is not everybody’s first episode! We don’t have 100% turnover from episode to episode, I don’t think!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Although we’re working on it, right? You’re trying to offend as many people as possible.

Fr. Stephen: Sure! Already got rid of all the Amish, and everybody who listens to house music, I think are gone already.

Fr. Andrew: EDM. Yeah, so idolatry, it’s the use of images in a particular way in order to trap and manipulate a god, but there is a strong sense that the god or the spirit has agency. So there’s a kind of relationship involved there. You know, it’s funny, I’ve noticed that sometimes people are hesitant to think of idolatry and sacrifice to gods as being technology, and I think that’s because our modern experience of “religion” is that it’s this special thing you do, maybe one day a week; it’s this special thing you do. But this was underlined for me recently, because I’ve been— Over the last week or so, I’ve been reading the Iliad, which, in between graphic descriptions of people’s heads coming off, because there’s a lot of fighting in the Iliad, I mean a lot, like it’s very cinematic in its detail—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I used to have a set of Homeric Greek flashcards—and by “used to,” I mean, like, 25, 30 years ago [Laughter]—when I was first learning classical Greek, and the Homeric vocabulary cards, you learn like 13 words for spear, 12 words for shield.

Fr. Andrew: Learn some exciting phrases in ancient Greek, like “I have judged you worthy of death!”

Fr. Stephen: “I have skewered your throat with my spear!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly. So here’s the thing about reading the Iliad, which— It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, so I really recommend this to everybody, actually—

Fr. Stephen: That’s bold, recommending Homer. You’re going out on a limb there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I know. I know! Yeah, the Robert Fagles translation is great. But one of the things that’s interesting in this regard about that is almost any time one of the characters, one of these heroes, decides he’s going to go and take on his enemies or he sees them coming at him or whatever it is, almost every time they will offer up a sacrifice. Like, it’s constant! I have lost count of how many sacrifices have been offered in the maybe four or five days that have taken place in the events that I’ve been reading. There’s a lot of them, and some of them it’s the full barbecue. It’s literally talking about how juicy it is and all this kind of stuff. But in many other cases, it’s— They’re filling up their cups with wine, but they always pour out a few drops or sometimes the whole cup to Zeus or whoever. So it’s not special; it’s instrumental. It’s like: “We’re about to do this thing. We need this. We want Zeus to come in—“although Zeus mostly likes to sit on his throne and laugh at everybody killing each other. “We want Athena to show up. We want Poseidon. We want Ares. We want Aphrodite.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Seems like he’s on the other side; we need to get him back on ours.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! It’s super tactical! It’s very tactical and strategic, these constant offering of sacrifices. So if you want to see this sense of instrumentality in terms of sacrifice, read the Iliad, really. Again, I’ve lost count of how many sacrifices have happened, and I’m 60% of the way through.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, for Alexander the Great, there was no difference between the phalanx and offering the correct sacrifices to the correct gods at the correct time in terms of how he viewed those. These are both battle tactics. [Laughter] These are both— It’s both technology in terms of strategy and tactics. Yeah. And so this is an instrumental thing. It is very much instrumental; it is getting someone to do what you want.

The difference, then, between your sort of run-of-the-mill paganism with idolatry and sacrifice and stuff and magic is that, within sacrificial ritual, there is the idea that the god can reject the sacrifice. The god can decide he likes the other sacrifice better, the other guy’s sacrifice better, or what have you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, again, read the Iliad: it’s all there. This is a poem from 2700 years ago. Again, we’re not making this stuff up. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so when you start using techne— Some people may already be ahead of at least where we’re talking here. They may be thinking: Well, you can not only approach a rock or a hammer or a piece of wood or a block of marble that you’re going to sculpt or a book you’re going to write or a concept you’re developing; you may not only approach that in this instrumental sort of way, in this way of techne, but as we were just saying, you can kind of approach spiritual entities that way, and you can also approach people that way. You can approach people in the sense of “how can I use this person to accomplish some goal?” And then you can instrumentalize other things, like ideas, feelings, emotions; you can instrumentalize those things to try to get that person to do the things you want, to accomplish the goal.

When this mode of techne is applied to humans, to spiritual or divine beings, it is innately depersonalizing and dehumanizing. You are treating that person in the way that you would treat an object in the world. You are treating them as an object which you can manipulate and put into place. Once that begins, you’ve taken your first big step toward the idea of sort of a mechanistic cosmos. And I say it’s the first big step because even though they wouldn’t use the word “mechanistic”—because there were in ancient Greece some mechanical things, literally mechanical things—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sure, they had machines.

Fr. Stephen: —they did not primarily think in those terms. So they would talk about— “fatalistic” might be better in the classical Greek sense, but there is a sense in which everything becomes compelled and everything becomes instrumental, and therefore free will starts to depart from the picture.

As we move into the modern period and the spiritual realm gets sort of lopped off, either separated out so it’s irrelevant to the world or denied outright later on, this becomes a kind of materialist determinism. So I know we have some listeners at least who are at least around in contemporary philosophical circles. This is the cause du jour: is “hey, can any philosopher out there come up with a way that anyone can have anything like free will?” because everything has become instrumentalized; everything has become mechanical; everything has become clockwork.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s all just atoms banging against each other.

Fr. Stephen: Such that even my attempts to instrumentalize the people and things around me are just the effect of a cause that’s causing me to do that, and there’s just sort of this endless chain, with no original instrumentalizer now, because we don’t even have Deists any more. There’s no original instrumentalizer whose ultimate purpose is being accomplished by this complex chain of dominoes falling; it’s just dominoes all the way down, with no purpose. At least our Calvinist friends— I’ll say something positive; I usually pick on them. But at least our Calvinist friends have some kind of God who kicked over the first domino and set up all the dominoes in the first place, to accomplish something, so there is still some sense of meaning there, even though things then are essentially mechanistic after that. In the modern world, our atheist friends—there’s not even that.

So you can know more, for the majority—the majority opinion among philosophers now, I think I can safely say, is that there is no free will, and therefore you can no more decide what you’re going to do any given day than a domino can decide which direction it’s going to fall. And that’s it, everything is techne. Everything is techne.

I didn’t say this was going to be a happy episode, with a feel-good ending. I never said that, let the record show.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s got a nice beat; you can dance to it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Now we’re back to EDM!

Fr. Andrew: There you go! I wasn’t expecting that when we started this episode!

Fr. Stephen: And all of that points to the fact that, in the West, insofar as we can— I don’t even like referring to “the West” any more, because I think it’s a false construct, but, I mean, really what I’m meaning here is: in Western European civilization and its heirs in other parts of the world, techne really triumphed as a way of knowing. I think you need look no further than secularism and scientific materialism that has come to predominate to demonstrate that.

But it started a lot earlier than that. An example: atonement theories. Atonement theories in general. The whole idea of an atonement theory in Western European theology is: How does the atonement work?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what’s the mechanism by which this happens?

Fr. Stephen: How does Christ’s death and resurrection work? And a very good scholar like Simon Gathercole, when he goes to write his book defending the idea of penal substitutionary atonement like a good Protestant does, says that the reason why that is the best atonement theory is it’s the only one with a mechanism—his word.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: It’s the only one with a mechanism that explains how it works: that makes it the best one, which is very British, very Western European of him. [Laughter] Because the only critique I’m giving of penal substitutionary atonement here—I’ve got lots of them elsewhere, but the only one I’m giving here is this idea of mechanism, this idea that God himself must instrumentally use some kind of spiritual technology in order to save a human being; he can’t just do it, and the problems that causes. [Laughter]

This is the kind of thing you see in Scholastic theology, and I’m not just picking on our Roman Catholic friends here—Protestant Scholasticism is a real thing, especially in the 17th century. Their whole approach to soteriology is along the lines of this technological approach. And this goes so far in some of the Puritans that some of the Puritans— These are the people who founded this country, at least according to histories written after Abraham Lincoln— The Puritans, some of them go so far as to say that if you have faith and God tries to send you to hell, that you could press a covenant lawsuit against God, requiring him to actually save you, because you have met the condition of faith, and that’s the deal.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just— I’m— I’m dumbstruck by that, but I know it’s real. I mean, that’s an absolutely serious theology.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now, of course they mean this as a hypothetical. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Sure, right, of course.

Fr. Stephen: They don’t think God is going to try to— They wouldn’t say that God is trying to damn anyone who has faith, but within their system—

Fr. Andrew: You could think about it that way, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: —ideas arise from somewhere. What makes that thought thinkable to them is the mechanistic way in which they’re viewing salvation. That is a thought that had never occurred to most of our listeners, I’ll bet, because they have never approached salvation quite that way, from that angle. [Laughter] And of course, as we said, atheistic materialism, even beyond other— There are other forms of materialism. I worry sometimes when we talk about materialism on the show, that a bunch of things are getting slurried together under materialism.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sure. I remember when I was a kid growing up in mostly kind of Baptist and Baptist-adjacent type churches, “materialism” was a word that meant possessiveness, being into stuff, basically like Madonna being a material girl. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we’re not talking about greed or consumerism, per se. I mean, that’s obviously not completely unrelated. And we’re not talking about dialectical materialism. I don’t think anyone would tune into this show for analysis and critique of Marx’s Das Kapital.

Fr. Andrew: I would not! [Laughter] That’s not what I signed up for!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t think we’d get even one episode out of that. [Laughter] Like, halfway through the episode, Ancient Faith would just pull the plug, and be like: Why?

But we’re talking about atheistic materialism or scientific materialism, essentially the belief that only things that are materially composed exist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Again, atoms banging against each other is the only thing that is a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Anything that isn’t materially composed does not exist. But that idea— Obviously, if you have that idea, then you can see how you end up with no free will; you can see how everything is just mechanical and relations with cog-wheels. And you can see this—back to picking on the 19th century again—in the rise of social sciences, the idea of social “sciences,” the idea that there is some “science” in the way in which an individual human works, some kind of mathematical formula, some kind of discoverable pattern and mechanism. And then when you look at things like sociology, larger things, how humans work in groups and groups work. Why are we trying to find the techne of these things? So that we can manipulate them; so that we can change them; so that we can instrumentally get them to do what we want.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— I mean, a lot of people were doing that in a theoretically well-meaning way, although not all of them.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! Historically, definitely not all of them!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, historically usually not.

Fr. Stephen: There may—hence, listen: may—be some do-gooder social engineers now, but historically social engineers and eugenicists are not the good guys. [Laughter] But what— you end up there because—and people have probably heard this—what’s the debate about people’s behavior? Say we’re going to talk about crime. Where does crime come from? Is it from nature or is it from nurture? Let’s pause and think about that a second. Those are the only two options. It’s either nature: it’s their genetics; they’re born that way, and so if you come down on that side, that’s where you get eugenics. We stop having people be born that way; we need to get them to be born another way: we need to get rid of all the people who are born that way and/or not let them reproduce. All the horrors—almost all the horrors of the 20th century, right there. And if you want the rest of the horrors of the 20th century, then on the other side are the people who decide it’s nurture: it’s their environment. Therefore, we must re-engineer society to create the new man. We can socially engineer this and give people these experiences and these structures that will create a different kind of person, and we’ll put an end to this. Here comes tyranny.

Fr. Andrew: For your own good! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Between those two poles. But those are the only two ways for humanity to improve once you embrace this kind of scientific materialism and this instrumental, technological view of the world. Those are the two options you have; those are the poles you have to bounce between. And so in many ways, although the Enlightenment wanted to cast itself as an enlightenment, as “we’re going to throw off the darkness of the Dark Ages; we’re going to get rid of all of this (Christian) nonsense and get to science and knowledge and reason!” all of these good things, it’s not a coincidence that this went hand-in-hand with a return to pagan literature, pagan art, because it is essentially a revival of the same worldview that was held by paganism: deterministic, fatalistic, mechanistic.

Fr. Andrew: And manipulable-ble-ble. I don’t know. [Laughter] Able to be manipulated. In so many ways the Enlightenment is essentially a reframing of paganism, but now, instead of gods named Zeus and Odin or whatever, it’s gods named Progress and whatever else.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the Economy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s not going to get much happier from here, guys. I’m warning you. [Laughter] This is like the end of season two of Battlestar Galactica.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh.

Fr. Stephen: It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

Fr. Andrew: The one with Lorne Greene, or—?

Fr. Stephen: No. That was the happy one.

Fr. Andrew: I know. [Laughter] That was the happy, nice Battlestar Galactica.

Fr. Stephen: Those were the friendly morphins in space.

Fr. Andrew: Where Starbuck was still a guy. [Laughter] All right. Well, that said, we’re going to go ahead and take our first break, and we’ll be right back with the second half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Everybody should buy that book.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re kind of preaching to the choir on this one.

Fr. Andrew: I know, but, I mean, these are the people who’re going to buy it.

Fr. Stephen: Did you know that your new book is based on the podcast that you host with me?

Fr. Andrew: I’ve heard that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I wish I could remember the name…

Fr. Andrew: I know, but, you know— I mean, especially for people for whom this is their first episode since we’ve talked to them about it several times, that book might help you out, everybody. You don’t— I’m not saying don’t listen to all those 200-plus hours of other stuff, but if you’re looking to jump in, that book could probably help you do that. So, you know, that’s one of its purposes.

Fr. Stephen: And as somebody who has, like, 163 hours into Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t know who you are that’s complaining that that’s too much to listen to.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because I don’t know how you find Fr. Andrew, but I am at least as entertaining as that game.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Anyway, welcome back, everybody! It’s the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re talking about technology, and as we just said in the first half, it’s about instrumentalizing in all the ways that that means. Speaking of the ancient world, where did this all come from? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Where will it go? Take us back… [Laughter] Oh, yeah, so now we’re going back to the— not quite the Neolithic era; we’re not going back quite that far, mainly because we don’t have anything written from then, because there wasn’t writing.

Fr. Andrew: No, we have rocks and scratches and some tombs.

Fr. Stephen: So while there was technology, as we already mentioned—there was technology as soon as somebody figured out how to tie a rock onto the end of a stick and make a spear, which are depicted in those early cave paintings: technology—we don’t have the stories from those people in terms of how they understood the origin of technology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t know what they thought about it. I mean, it is a true Dark Ages in the sense of— which, that was the original meaning of that, everybody, by the way, is that it was a period where there wasn’t much literature being produced. That’s all that really meant was there wasn’t a lot published.

Fr. Stephen: So we can’t get back to it in the same way.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so we don’t know that much about that. It wasn’t like all is dark and evil and ignorance rules everyone, which is how we depict it now, at least how the Enlightenment often depicted it. [Laughter] So, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I imagine when they first started making metal-bladed knives, there was some guy with a sharp rock, going: “These kids!” [Laughter] But we don’t know that for sure, because he didn’t write anything.

Fr. Andrew: We actually— By the way, we actually do have someone calling in that has a question about magic. So, Joseph, are you there? Can you hear us?

Joseph: Yes. Hi, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. We’re happy to have you.

Fr. Stephen: Hopefully this is not a deck-building question, because I’m not really proficient… [Laughter]

Joseph: Yeah. Thank you, Fathers, for having me. So my question is tangentially related to both techne and magic, and I hope I phrase this correctly. In a previous episode, it was mentioned, if I understood it correctly, that magic is a way to sort of force the gods to do what you wanted them to do, and it was using a certain formula. So what— I guess my question has two parts. How would you explicitly differentiate magic from techne? And then also connected to the formula aspect, what differentiates, I guess, the eucharistic prayer in Divine Liturgy, since it uses the same phrasing on a weekly basis—how would you differentiate that from magic, since we’re attempting to get God to bless our offering every week?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, okay, so there’s a couple things I’ll say. Number one, magic is a subset of techne. So it’s a particular kind of instrumentalization. And the point is that, if you do it right, then you will always get a certain result. It may involve trying to force gods to do stuff, but it may not; it also may be just about manipulating the elements of the world, that kind of thing. This is a good question you ask about the Eucharist, because I think especially for those of us who, even if we don’t have a Protestant background, we live in a Protestant country in a lot of ways, or at least in a country with what’s left of a Protestant culture, maybe? And at least American Protestantism is not that ritualistic in its worship, so it tends to present itself in a much more kind of informal way. So therefore when you see complex worship, people sometimes look at that and say, “You’re doing magical spells,” because of the complexity of it.

But here’s the really important thing. Just because there’s a complex method to something does not make it magic. Magic is about guaranteed results and about the actions themselves doing the thing. The Eucharist is explicitly a request, a prayer to God to do something. He does not have to do it. Now, he is the One who himself gave it—I mean, we see that in the gospels: he gives the Eucharist to us to do and commands us to do it. So this is not something that we dreamed up to force God to do anything; this is something he gave us to do, something that he is doing that he’s inviting us to participate in and tells us how to do that. So it’s not magic because it doesn’t happen because the priest does the technique right, which is why, for instance, variations between eucharistic liturgies that exist between traditions or sometimes completely represent other rituals, so the eucharistic liturgy of the Byzantine tradition is quite different from the eucharistic liturgy of the Latin tradition; even prior to the Great Schism, they were quite different from each other. And yet they still both were the Eucharist. If it was magic, then the technique would need to essentially be the same, because if you’re going to get the thing to do what you want it to do, you have to follow the recipe. That’s how it works.

So, yeah, it’s about prayer, asking God to act; it’s not about making God do anything—as if we could! That’s not a thing. [Laughter] You can’t force God to do anything. So that’s what I would have to say about that. I don’t know, Father: you got anything to add or adjust or “um, actually”?

Fr. Stephen: Well, in terms of the Eucharist, the Eucharist falls within the realm of sacrifice and sacrificial worship. So now I’m talking in the general sense: sacrificial worship in the general sense, which includes the Eucharist, includes pagan animal offerings, includes sacrifices in the Old Testament. Sacrifice, broadly, has always included within it the idea—this is what differentiates it from magic—that the god can reject the sacrifice. And this was literally instutionalized in the ancient pagan world. This is why you would have a haruspex.

A haruspex is somebody— “Haruspex” is the Latin word, but this kind of activity pre-dates Rome by a lot in the Ancient Near East. But a haruspex is a particular type of priest who practiced extispicy, which is the reading of the entrails of a sacrificed animal. So his whole job—and we have mocked-up kidneys and lungs and things that have inscriptions on them, like, made of stone, with inscriptions on them, that were used to train haruspexes, or haruspices, I guess, in their art form. So after the animal is sacrificed, they would go in and get into the guts of the animal, literally, and look for signs as to whether the god had accepted the sacrifice or not. So if they found black spots on certain organs or— We have records in some places of organs being missing: they go in there and one of the major organs, like a heart in one case, is missing. This was taken as this horrible omen that: “oh no, the gods have rejected this sacrifice.” And then you would have to come up with some other actions to figure out why, and then to try to offer more sacrifices and get them back on your side.

Now, obviously, as Christians we don’t do all that activity, but the existence of that and the prevalence of that shows that, unlike magic, there is this possibility that even if you do everything right, it might not work, which means that the divine still has its agency.

In the Old Testament, we find this. It gets to the point in the prophets where God tells them to stop offering the sacrifices, because he says, “Your hearts are far from me. You’re behaving however you want and then coming and offering sacrifices like that makes it okay, like I have to then forgive you even though you’re not repentant. That’s not how this works.” So God makes clear through his prophets in the Old Testament that he retains his autonomy. Sacrifice does not operate in this mechanistic way.

And even within some of the prayers of the Eucharist— So, for example, in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, I pray a prayer—it’s often done silently, so everyone may not hear it, but I pray a prayer asking God not to withhold the grace of the Holy Spirit from the gifts because of my sins as a priest.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which suggests that that’s a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that suggests that that’s a possibility. That is acknowledging the possibility that God could say to me, or to my congregation, or to some portion of the Church, what he said to ancient Israel: “No. Stop. Repent first.” So that is a live possibility there.

What I am about to say is not me taking a cheap shot at our Roman Catholic friends; it is me trying to avoid taking a cheap shot at our Roman Catholic friends. I think this would be a worthwhile question about the Eucharist to ask to an informed Roman Catholic person, because I know the whole hocus-pocus thing; I know they have a good answer for that. I am not the person equipped to answer that for them and explain the difference from their perspective, because there is very much within the Roman Catholic theology of ordination and how they see that as working and the charisms granted to a priest, a kind of mechanistic view of this, where, if he grabs bread and wine and says the words of institution, they automatically become the body and blood of Christ. You find theological statements that talk about the Roman Catholic priest reaching up into heaven and compelling Christ to come down. So that would be a good question to ask them. I’m sure there are answers from a Roman Catholic perspective; I’m not the one equipped to give them, and so I don’t want to caricature them here. But if you do get the opportunity to ask somebody Roman Catholic, and that’s somewhere, I’d be interested in reading it, their answer.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Does that answer your questions, Joseph?

Joseph: Yes, thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Thanks for calling in. Okey-doke. Well, we’re not going Neolithic, but—Lithic? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No. And definitely not Paleolithic.

Fr. Andrew: Post-lithic. What is our relationship to those rocks.

Fr. Stephen: Bronze Age. We’re going Bronze Age! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Hey, that’s the Iliad again! Everything in that thing is bronze.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but we’re even earlier. We’re well earlier than the Bronze Age. I won’t go down that rabbit-trail now about why everything is bronze, but anyway! [Laughter] Because it was actually written in the Iron Age. So we’re going back to—and this is a story we’ve referred to, really a set of stories, set of Babylonian stories we’ve referred to before, from the original Babylonian Empire. So we’re talking about the middle of the second millennium, BC, not the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian Empire that we meet in the Bible with Nebuchadnezzar and Nabopolassar and those folks, that’s the Neo-Babylonian Empire that takes Judah into exile. This is the original Babylonian Empire, middle of the second century, BC. I was about to try to date it in terms of biblical events, but I would have to weigh in on the date of the exodus, and I refuse, darn it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Don’t jump in!

Fr. Stephen: And we’ll leave it at that. And this is the story of the apkallu or the seven sages, Atapa or Adapa and his buds, who are, as we’ve talked about before, starting with Adapa, who’s a sort of a fish-person, supernatural being, who emerges from the rivers, comes and he’s called a sage because he comes and he imparts wisdom to the rulers. He’s followed by six other sages. When you look at kings’ lists from this period, the kings before the flood have these apkallu, these sages, as their advisors, and that’s sort of why they are able to become king. They have this wisdom from the spiritual realm from these spiritual beings. And then as we’ve talked about before, after the flood the kings are said to be two-thirds apkallu, that there’s this sort of interbreeding represented within the story. But the apkallu proper from before the flood, they end up imprisoned beneath the rivers in the abyss by the gods for having given this knowledge to man.

But the importance of the function of this story in the middle of the second millennium, BC, for the Babylonian Empire— This Babylonian Empire was established by the Amurru, which literally means the Westerners; they came from what’s now Syria, Hammurabi being the most famous one, who was a king during this period. They used this story in large part to justify their own reign in that they claimed to still have this secret wisdom given by the apkallu from before the flood.

Fr. Andrew: Antediluvian knowledge.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. They claimed to still have this. And of course, as we’ve mentioned before on the show, the Amurru are the biblical Amorites, that giant clan, probably the most famous one being Sihon, of Og and Sihon. I say probably the most famous, because he’s the one we sing about at Christmas.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or I think in all of the— Why am I blanking on my liturgical language now?

Fr. Stephen: The polyeleos?

Fr. Andrew: The polyeleos, that’s right!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s not Christmas until Og has been slain.

Fr. Andrew: That’s on one of my Christmas ornaments, actually.

Fr. Stephen: I will stand by this. If you ever find a dead Og Christmas ornament, send it to me.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. I mean—

Fr. Stephen: It will have pride of place.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, now that we live in this age where you can literally just order up any kind of merch with anything on it…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Even if you just have the 3D printer plans, like the file, send that to me, a dead Og Christmas ornament.

Fr. Andrew: You’re going to get a hundred of those, I’m just saying.

Fr. Stephen: Cool! I am in for it.

Fr. Andrew: You could have an entire Og Christmas tree.

Fr. Stephen: My wife has the miniature paints. We’ll mix in some Warhammer 40k; it’ll be all good.

Fr. Andrew: Nice. Take pictures. Post them online.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is sort of this… Now remember— We have to always remember. The earliest written thing we have was very likely not created out of wholecloth. So the apkallu story is not the origin of anything. We can’t say that, because there’s untold amounts of ancient literature that either didn’t survive or is in a cupboard at the British Museum somewhere, untranslated. So we don’t know— We can’t construct and origin, but this is our earliest so-far-known version of this story, and this version of the story, by the way, didn’t become widely known until about 2010. Like, journal articles started being published about the translation of these tablets from which the apkallu stories come around 2010, so 13 years ago. So who knows what’s still out there and what we’ll learn in the future, but this is at least a representation, middle of the second millennium, BC, about the origins of technology, about the origins of this kind of techne kind of knowledge.

And we see just as—and we’ve talked about this a lot—as we see in the Scriptures, we see sort of the God give-and-take on a number of these stories like the flood. We see in Genesis the God give-and-take of this kind of story. And this is in the period leading up to the flood, particularly associated with the line of Cain as it plays out in his genealogy, especially at the end of his genealogy in Genesis 4.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the end being Lamech—not the same guy that’s the father of Noah.

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Just has the same name.

Fr. Stephen: Apparently it was a common name in the last antediluvian generation.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so Genesis 4:19-24.

And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-cain was Na’amah.

Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is seven-fold, then Lamech’s is 77-fold.”

Fr. Stephen: So Lamech is the first person who’s a polygamist in the Bible, for anyone still unclear on what the Bible thinks about polygamy. [Laughter] And sings this song to his wives about how great he is. Remember, Cain’s revenge being seven-fold, that was the revenge God was going to take for Cain. So when Lamech says 77-fold, actually he’s saying he’s greater than God; you should fear him more than God. Nice fella.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not a good look.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So the key part here is these three sons and what they create. So the first one, Jabal, is the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. And you’re like: Well, what’s wrong with living in a tent? That’s not the problematic part; it’s the livestock part.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the hoarding of wealth, because in a hunter-gatherer society, everyone has equal access to the food.

Fr. Stephen: Well, not— See, you missed a piece there, Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not supposed to be eating animals yet.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, well, there’s that as well, I guess. That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Right? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But still!

Fr. Stephen: They haven’t been given permission to eat animals. And so what does this represent? This is an element of God’s creation that they have chosen to instrumentalize.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re just taking it and controlling it.

Fr. Stephen: And using it for food. And it’s a very different relationship with animals than what Adam had when he named them: raising them for slaughter. So there’s a shift, and that’s technology. Learning how to breed, raise, kill, butcher, cook, eat animals.

Jubal is the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. This is saying music is bad—no, it’s not. [Laughter] It’s also not why we don’t use instruments in liturgy, although I have heard at least once someone try to argue that.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So the lyre and the pipe, as they’re translated here: the idea here is that this is a particular type of music; this is the type of music used in pagan festivals and pagan rites. So this is actually a kind of spiritual technology that they’re talking about him devising.

And then Tubal-cain, who as everyone knows from the Noah movie got into an epic fight with Noah on the deck of the ark during the flood.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I still haven’t seen that. Is it worth it?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on what you mean by “worth it.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay.

Fr. Stephen: I feel compelled to watch all these things, and I was much more entertained by that one than most of them.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But I emphasize the word “entertained.”

Fr. Andrew: Entertained, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Not informed! Entertained. [Laughter] It’s a thing, yeah. And Noah does not yell, “Are you not entertained,” just for the record, even though it is—

Fr. Andrew: Russell Crowe, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] During the fist-fight. And, hey, you’ve got Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah, so how could you go wrong? Watch the movie to see how you could go wrong! [Laughter] But Tubal-cain, he’s the forger of instruments of bronze and iron.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, metallurgy.

Fr. Stephen: Once again, bronze and iron are tools, but why is this—? What’s the first thing you do when you learn metallurgy? Weapons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you kill people.

Fr. Stephen: Weapons, for killing people. So we see that Cain’s— We’re not going to read the whole genealogy, as exciting as that would be, but Cain’s line that culminates here, you can see that there’s this descent. There’s a descent from Cain pun here. But it descends downward; it gets worse. And this decline was not seen by, for example, Second Temple Jewish interpreters, as being accidental. Josephus, for example, perceives Cain as the arch-heretic, the one who teaches sin. He teaches sin and wickedness to his children.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s not just like: “Oh, poor Cain, he made a big mistake and now he’s out.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he remained actively evil.

Fr. Andrew: He’s a villain.

Fr. Stephen: And so this continues, and it’s out of this descent that we see this technology emerging. Out of this descent, technology comes. We don’t read about technology coming from Seth’s line, leading up to Noah.

This means that, while the apkallu story is casting as this positive thing, this coming of divine knowledge—this is this great thing that gives the right to rule and brings glory to a civilization—we see quite the opposite here. The technology is actually coming from the worst of the worst and represents a descent into evil.

In the Genesis account, though it’s of course, as we’ve talked about several times on the show, that we won’t go back and do again, as much as it might excite people— The supernatural element of this is at least hinted at or pointed to in Genesis 6:1-4, in terms of the nephilim. In the expanded version of this story that you get, for example, in 1 Enoch or the book of Jubilees, this is made sort of even more clear, that these— It’s both— Both gives further description of what the techne is that is received by the line of Cain and makes it explicitly clear that this is being revealed by demonic powers, by specifically fallen, wicked spiritual powers. Again, very similar to the apkallu story, but, in a way, inverted. It’s not: “These are the good guys, bringing wisdom to man, and God or the gods are the bad guy, punishing them and ruining everybody’s party.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s the pagan version of the story!

Fr. Stephen: Right, but quite the opposite. Quite the opposite: the exact inversion of that. And so in the versions we find in the book of Enoch and the book of Jubilees, amongst the techne that’s taught is sorcery, and this in Greek is pharmakeia, as we’ve said before, which is again an instrumental means to enter into and manipulate the spiritual realm. Seduction and implements of seduction, like eye make-up, literally, in the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Cosmetics are part of this bundle of technology used to destroy people.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the arts of seduction. And again, we have to remember the arts of seduction in this case, there is the element here heavily of pagan ritual. Think about Ba’al Peor and what goes on there as we’ve talked about in the book of Numbers.

Fr. Andrew: Or, you know, Thomas Dolby: “She blinded me with science.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] There’s some bestiality stuff in there. But there’s also that pagan sexual ritual element. It wasn’t just the beguiling of naughtiness; it was just that sexual immorality is bad. Yes, it is, but within this context, this is women receiving this from a demonic being with whom they have an intimate relationship. And so that other element, that spiritual element, is always present.

And of course divination is one of the things that’s listed.

Fr. Andrew: Trying to tell the future by observing things. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But one of the things that we may not think about—and this isn’t just a word play; it’s a deliberate word choice—is that divination is a way of determining the future, in the sense that if I know it—if I know what is going to happen tomorrow—then that means it is determined. So divination was understood not just as a way of “hey, I’m curious what horse is going to win the fifth race tomorrow so I can place a bet,” but this is a way of locking it in, locking it into place. It’s not just satisfying a curiosity.

We need to keep that in mind, like with Saul and the witch of Endor. When he goes before battle, it wasn’t just: “Hey, is this going to go well or is this going to go badly? Because if you say badly then maybe we won’t fight, or we’ll do something else,” because he’s told it’s going to go badly and he fights anyway. It’s an attempt to try to lock into place the result that you want.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s a gazillion ways that this gets done. You mentioned the haruspex earlier examining the innards of slaughtered animals, but another one, again from the Iliad—lots of ornithomancy? Ornithomancy, yeah! Telling the future by observing birds, also known as augury. But there’s ailuromancy, which is cats; there’s myrmomancy: ants. I mean, there’s so many possibilities!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, anything that can form patterns, you could find someone who claimed to be able to read the patterns.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s a specialist; it’s a technologist who’s able to do this theoretically.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And before we move on from the divination thing, did you know that there is both an episode of I Dream of Jeannie and an episode of Bewitched in which they accidentally magic up the next day’s newspaper?

Fr. Andrew: I did not know that…

Fr. Stephen: And hilarity ensues involving betting on horses.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Huh. And isn’t that— Isn’t Barbara Eden in both of those?

Fr. Stephen: No! Cliff Montgomery’s in Bewitched. Come on, man!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. I’m sorry. Sorry. I was distracted thinking about marmotomancy, which is what you see in… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Marmots? Oh.

Fr. Andrew: Punxsutawney Phil, right here in Pennsylvania!

Fr. Stephen: But this whole Bewitched thing, man. Not only have you let me down; I think you’ve let yourself down. You probably don’t even know which one’s Dick York and which one’s Dick Sargent, do you?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ll go sit in the corner and you can just monologue for the rest of the episode.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. We don’t have to go that far.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Okay!

Fr. Stephen: Although one more infraction—no.

Fr. Andrew: It’s been years since I’ve watched either one of those shows. Nick at Nite is no longer a big part of my life.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and Nick at Nite now is showing shows from the ‘90s, so you just get depressed and feel old.

Fr. Andrew: I know. Apparently now the stuff that we listened to in the ‘80s is “oldies.” That’s offensive to me, I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah, man. Everything we listened to in the ‘90s is now classic rock.

Fr. Andrew: Aaaah!

Fr. Stephen: Bones turning to powder?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Let’s talk about Prometheus!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, let’s talk about something older than us. So, yeah, there are obviously other places. We talked about the apkallu story as sort of being a preceding of this story from the biblical narrative. The versions that we have, at least, of certain Greek stories, the versions we still possess, are later than the biblical account, but we see similar parallels even with the pagan versions of these stories. So, for example, Prometheus is, in some places, identified as a Titan, and so his narrative sort of fits into the Titan narrative, the overarching Titan narrative. We’ve talked before on the show about how—

Fr. Andrew: Can I just say, the most ironically named guy ever? I mean, his name means “forethought.”

Fr. Stephen: Exactly.

Fr. Andrew: I’m like: Did you really? [Laughter] Anyway. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve talked before on the show about how the Titan narrative, the Titans being imprisoned in Tartarus, is sort of associated in the Second Temple Jewish period—and even in the Scriptures themselves, in the New Testament Scriptures themselves—with the rebellious angels from before the flood who are imprisoned. St. Peter actually uses the word “Tartarus” for the place where they’re imprisoned. And so he’s sometimes referred to as a Titan—we can see there’s a similar pattern—but of course he brings fire to humanity, the knowledge of fire. This brings about his punishment by the gods.

But what gets often left out—because, again, even bizarrely pagan myths are read in a materialist way—is that the particulars—and you can find this in Hesiod—the particulars of what “fire” is referring to here—because that could refer to a lot of things! He brings fire to man: the ability to kindle a fire?

Fr. Andrew: He gives him a light? [Laughter] The way it’s often depicted is he gives them a light, or “Here’s how you make campfires, you guys!”

Fr. Stephen: “Here’s a torch. Don’t let it go out. Keep other things lit.”

Fr. Andrew: No, no, it’s— I mean, we’ve made reference to this on the show before, the whole burning the bones thing, where mankind gives the garbage parts of the sacrifice to the gods. It’s Prometheus who teaches them how to do this. It’s like: “Okay, put out the bones, and then take out the fat and put that on, so Zeus won’t see that you’re not giving him the steaks, and burn that as a sacrifice to him, and meanwhile you keep the steaks.” Like, that’s an element of what “giving fire to mankind” is really about.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The “fire” here is talking about sacrificial technology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: And this is why the gods get mad.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re not like: “Oh, they can cook their meat now.” No, it’s—

Fr. Stephen: Or “Hey, they’re setting themselves on fire.” They would have thought that was funny.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, because that’s the kind of gods they are!

Fr. Stephen: “The humans are down there setting each other on fire. Ridiculous!” It’s because of this element. This is now— There’s this bothersome thing going on, vis-à-vis the gods themselves that makes them mad. The gods generally care about themselves, they care about their demigod kids, and they don’t care about pretty much anybody else unless Zeus finds you attractive, and then you’re in real trouble.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They don’t love you unless they love you, and that’s not good.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Zeus never understood that no means no. So, while we’re at it, talking about parallels, we’ve talked about Prometheus or at least mentioned Prometheus before in this context on the show. I don’t think we’ve mention Sisyphus in this context before.

Fr. Andrew: No! If people know about him, they know he’s the rolling-the-rock-up-the-hill guy.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which he is, but there’s a lot more to it. Camus fan that I am, Sisyphus, if you actually read the stories about Sisyphus—and there’s a couple different versions, by the way, that have been passed down to us—Sisyphus is the king who founded the city of Corinth.

Fr. Andrew: Good old Corinth!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and is a bad guy.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, Corinth is the city you go to if you really want to have a dark night out.

Fr. Stephen: Debauchery.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: But he founded Corinth. The first part of his story, where he first sort of comes to the gods’ attention, as it were, is he has this brother he wants to kill—his brother, whom he wants to kill—but it was widely understood, even among pagans, that you commit murder within families: that’s how you get Furies showing up and dragging you to Hades. Nobody wants that! So he went to the oracle at Delphi to ask Apollo, through the oracle at Delphi, to give him a technique where he could murder off his brother without incurring wrath.

Fr. Andrew: And I’m getting big Ghost vibes here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, there’s some of that; there’s also some Cain vibes here, right? “Want to kill my brother; don’t want to get killed in response.” And then the second part of his story where he gets in trouble is that he was apparently renowned for visitors, travelers, strangers, who passed through Corinth: he would murder and take their stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Also the other big rule you’re not supposed to violate in ancient paganism.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, hospitality. But here we get some Lamech vibes. “I have killed a young man for wronging me…” But finally, because of those two things, the gods killed him. But here’s how good of a technologist Sisyphus was. So depending on the version of the story, either Thanatos or Hades, one of those two gods, is responsible for chaining him up in the underworld, because of this bad stuff he did. And Sisyphus talked, in this story, either Hades or Thanatos into explaining to him how the chains worked.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I could see this as a scene in a sitcom or something! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “Hey, how do these chains of death work, by the way?” So they explain it to him, and he figures it out. So not only does he get loose, but he chains up Hades or Thanatos, and makes a break for it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which has the effect of making it so that nobody can die.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so nobody dies. And then in the Hades version of the story, this makes Ares very mad, because he’s got wars going on and nobody’s dying. That’s no fun!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, that’s the thing he’s into.

Fr. Stephen: That’s like his whole bit! In the Thanatos version of the story, because of the nature of Thanatos as the god of death—we’ve talked about this before on the show—no one can die, meaning the sick and the wounded and the infirm and the elderly can’t die. So they’re just sort of lingering and suffering. Either way, someone comes, either Ares in the one version or one of the other gods in the other version, and lets the death-god loose again, and Sisyphus ends up in Tartarus, pushing the rock up the hill.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which rolls down as soon as he gets it up there, and he has to—

Fr. Stephen: Rolls down every night, and he has to push it back up.

Fr. Andrew: It’s futility.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, futile labor. Futile labor, not feudal labor. He’s not doing farmwork.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s not a serf. And, I mean, other mythic traditions have gods who function in some of these ways, of giving knowledge to mankind, secret knowledge. There’s different versions of it, but none of them are quite exactly Prometheus. A lot of it is just variations on a theme. But one of the things that’s interesting to me is kind of the second tier of this that you get, especially in Germanic mythology particularly, which, again, reminder, everybody: Germanic mythology comes to us through Christians who wrote it down, often centuries after the last pagan in their area was baptized. The last great pagan tradition: get baptized!

And so it’s mediated through that. What you get, then, is sort of these lesser spiritual beings, not Titans or whatever, these kind of lesser spiritual beings who have knowledge, but it’s often not in terms of giving knowledge to people so that they can rule, but rather providing them with cool stuff. So that’s where you get this whole realm of smith-gods. My favorite is Wayland the Smith, who’s actually sort of divine, and in Germanic paganism he’s often the guy who makes whatever impressive sword or bit of armor that’s around in the story; it’s often said to be from Wayland, that he’s the guy who made that, or Wieland, depending on where you are, or Wiolant, same guy. But then you also get dwarves. Again, they’re making magical stuff, especially magical weapons. But then you also get— Wayland, for instance, becomes a tutor figure. Gods will send their sons to him so they can learn stuff from him. He still functions in that same way.

But this idea, right, of this kind of divine mediator of technology is still a thing, even though now it’s kind of demoted a little bit, within some of these more marginal mythologies, and by “marginal” I don’t mean that they’re not important; “marginal” in the sense of being a long distance away from the Ancient Near East where the Bible arises and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: And this is not the Wayland of Weyland-Yutani Corp., by the way, according to the wiki.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Could be.

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s not! No. [Inaudible] Anyway, nevermind. And, of course, you know, if we want really post-biblical, as in recent, not comparatively, this is an enduring story about technology. Probably— Oh, I don’t know any more. I’m about to go on a grumpy old man rant that I’ll stop myself from. But what ought be the most prominent example would of course be the novel Frankenstein.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which is a good novel.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.”

Fr. Andrew: And probably we have to remind some folks that Frankenstein is not the monster.

Fr. Stephen: Oh! Au contraire! Frankenstein is the monster.

Fr. Andrew: Well, you know, right— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Ahh!

Fr. Andrew: Frankenstein’s not the creation, I’ll just put it that way. [Laughter] Yes, that is true. A monster makes a monster. Frahnkensteen! Frau Blücher!

Fr. Stephen: But what is that about? It’s about this person who seeks and ultimately finds this knowledge of life and death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how to overcome death itself.

Fr. Stephen: And that knowledge unleashes destruction. It’s knowledge that’s not meant for man, that man shouldn’t have. Technically, the entire oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft is about this, that there’s just knowledge and corners of the world that humanity was not meant to poke into, and to just leave alone, although, you know, as a tech-pessimist myself, I connect with that. And of course, if we want very recent, whether we’re talking about Michael Crichton’s novel or the movies, Jurassic Park is just a knock-off of Frankenstein. It’s scientific secrets, “we’re going to make life,” “oops.” [Laughter] And of course, even more recent than that in terms of movies, Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb, as we’ve talked about on the show, which— its first use in the world was to massacre more than half of the Christians in Japan.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: And then I believe, Fr. Andrew, that within this category of examples, you were going to channel all of your Kenergy into explaining why the Barbie movie is a good example of techne.

Fr. Andrew: It is! [Laughter] I mean, number one, I have not seen it, which, I know, probably some people find shocking.

Fr. Stephen: But embrace your inner Slavoj Žižek and just talk about a movie you haven’t seen.

Fr. Andrew: Go! But, yeah, I mean, the whole Barbie thing, I mean, it is about this manipulation, about creating this ultimate image, of— [Sigh] I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t get too deep into this.

Fr. Stephen: “She’s made of plastic; it’s fantastic.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I never played with Barbies, and I’m not trying to—

Fr. Stephen: Probably a good thing on the whole.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, I’m not trying to offend anybody who did, but think about it. It’s interesting to think about this in the sense that the culture—and from what I can tell of the movie, it’s riffing on this—the culture has now become sort of aware of Barbie as this unattainable, unrealistic, artificial image of womanhood. And Ken is a kind of an accessory to that. And from what I gather, the film on some level is making fun of that, so that’s why you get— Because now we live when everything is the multiverse, so you get this multiplicity of Barbies, and [Barbie Land] is the world where everything is perfect—except it’s not. So, yeah, probably a lot of people aren’t thinking of the Barbie movie as a commentary on this technomancy of our time, but from what I can tell it kind of is. It kind of is. Didn’t think we’d go there, did you, listeners!

Fr. Stephen: I’ll just go with it.

Fr. Andrew: Barbenheimer. [Laughter] All right. All right! Well, that’s the end of Part Two. That’s the end of the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re going to take a little break, and we’ll be right back with our third and final half.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back! Is this the part where we talk about the Matrix? No, it’s not! Probably not. But, yes, we’re talking about technology!

Fr. Stephen: The movie or the real one?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, right. This is where we— I don’t know. What color should be the pill that we give everyone? I don’t know. I’m looking at—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we have to invent a new one.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s an orange pill, the DayQuil that I’m looking at…

Fr. Stephen: DayQuil! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The green pill, that’s NyQuil.

Fr. Stephen: See, I think DayQuil is just cowardice.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: NyQuil during the day and just fight through it. Be a man. That’s the way to do it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, all right.

Fr. Stephen: Operate heavy machinery! Forget the warning.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, so now we’re going to take it into the present and ask these questions about: What does this mean for us now and how we live and all this kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Now is where we transition into old-man-yelling-at-clouds.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: So we have to acknowledge that… I admit it about myself.

Fr. Andrew: You may be old; I’m middle-aged. I’m middle-aged.

Fr. Stephen: Why would you want to be middle-aged? Middle-aged is the worst!

Fr. Andrew: I love the Middle Ages!

Fr. Stephen: I have planned my whole life to go immediately from young to elderly.

Fr. Andrew: I love the Middle Ages!

Fr. Stephen: [Growling] The Middle Ages, sure, but being middle-aged… You’re just having mid-life crises every few days?

Fr. Andrew: I’m in my medieval period!

Fr. Stephen: I’m just disgruntled because I don’t get the senior discounts yet. I feel like I’m getting all the bad parts of aging and none of the discounts.

Fr. Andrew: In two years you can join AARP, not that I’m suggesting you do, but you can.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I will the second I can, trust me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Because there are discounts that come with that.

Fr. Stephen: Exactly! That’s why. I can sit there, read Modern Maturity, do the word search. It’ll be great.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Get your garbage coffee at the McDonald’s.

Fr. Stephen: That’s such a great title for a magazine, too: Modern Maturity. They need to just call it “old.” Like, I’m old, but I am not mature.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or modern!

Fr. Stephen: I am unfortunately probably rather modern. But, yeah, so when we— But that colors— We all— Again, there’s no view from nowhere, and our perspective, of course, when we talk about something like technology, is colored by the historical epoch in which we find ourselves, and the sort of explosion of technology at the end of the 20th century. It really is an explosion of technology. For those of you not as old, I went from no-such-thing-as-an-internet to internet-that-you-pay-for-by-the-hour to unlimited internet on a small thing in my hand.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] My favorite in the phone timeline of development is when we go to these things that are attached to the wall to the bag phone.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to the cell phone. Rotary phones attached to the wall.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, rotary phones.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, touch-tone phones— The cordless phone to the… Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But the bag phone was a great moment.

Fr. Stephen: The bag phone, the great Motorola brick that you had to plug into the cigarette lighter, which— Do they even call it a cigarette lighter now? Do they call it a power port or something? Because no one uses it for cigarettes.

Fr. Andrew: I know. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. See, this is the old-men-yell-at-clouds part. But that is the explosion of—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, my Luddite Line used to be firmly on the other side, on this side of cell phones. I used to say, “I’ll never get a cell phone. I don’t want that kind of thing.” And then I finally got a flip phone. I had a Razr back in 2007, finally got one in my early 30s; I finally got a cell phone.

Fr. Stephen: The day I retire as a priest, I will no longer have a cell phone.

Fr. Andrew: That’s why I got one! Because I was working…

Fr. Stephen: I have to. But otherwise… Anyway, yeah. Old man yelling at clouds. But so the point being, there was— there has been— There has been, objectively, a massive leap of technology in the last 40 years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we feel it. Especially those of us who are Gen X have seen our worlds completely changed from when we were kids.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s different. The amount of change between 1943 and 1983 was far less than what happened in these last 40 years, but this isn’t the first time this has happened, though, either, because if you go back another 40 years—if you go to 1903 to 1943—you do have something comparable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you go from, if you’re lucky, riding something that’s pulled by a horse to automobiles…

Fr. Stephen: Walking or a horse and buggy.

Fr. Andrew: Automobiles everywhere, radio, tanks being rolled out, machine guns, all of this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Phones in your home that you can call people on the other side of the country or in Europe.

Fr. Andrew: Flight. I mean, flight: that’s huge!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, airplanes.

Fr. Andrew: And all this stuff happens in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Fr. Stephen: So, while there has been this boom, it is not an unprecedented boom. Sorry, Roswell theorists. [Laughter] There have been other booms; there was a boom at the beginning of the 20th century, too. There have been others.

Fr. Andrew: It’s happened before.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, Gutenberg inventing the printing press, there’s a time— So there have been other periods in history where you have these technological leaps forward, and then periods in between, where things are relatively stagnant or at least slower-moving. And no one should conclude— I made a joke about the Roswell theorists, but no one should conclude based on what we said in the second half that what we mean is that every time there’s one of these leaps demons showed up somewhere and cut a deal with somebody to give them the technology either.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Sometimes there are actually inventions the way we moderns think about inventions: people sitting around, tinkering, figuring.

Fr. Stephen: Well, or it’s more subtle than that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, often it’s built— someone’s building onto something someone else has built, and someone builds off, etc., etc.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I mean, someone did go on the go-ahead to drop the bombs, the atomic bombs. And we’re not going to say that was influenced by anything or anyone, spiritually, especially the target selection when it gets dropped primarily on Christian communities; there’s something going on there, but it’s not as direct as what we’re talking about in the apkallu story or something. There wasn’t one of the apkallu hanging around, like, Clinton’s White House being like: “Here’s how to turn FidoNet into…”

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say: but I remember on the Weekly World News that it said that President Clinton met on a regular basis with space aliens.

Fr. Stephen: I know.

Fr. Andrew: I still have that issue around somewhere.

Fr. Stephen: But only about 80% of what’s published in the Weekly World News is true. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So read the paper. But, yeah, so the question is— Because this is the question we get: Is this kind of knowledge evil? Is it bad?

Fr. Stephen: Is techne itself evil? The knowledge: is it evil, inherently?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s certain things that you must not know.

Fr. Stephen: Things like H.P. Lovecraft: knowledge man was not meant to have! Short answer: no. Long answer: no-o-o-o-o. [Laughter] Anyway. So there is not knowledge in this sense that is forbidden to humanity, period, full stop. There is knowledge that is forbidden to humanity by circumstance, and it’s that circumstance that makes it forbidden.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like— And this shouldn’t be difficult, everybody, especially parents. I have a 16-year-old, I have a 14-year-old, I have an 11-year-old, and I have a six-year-old. There is certain knowledge that the 16-year-old, it is okay for that one to have—but not for the six-year-old! Inappropriate, the circumstances are not right: it is forbidden.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t go to a four-year-old and say, “Everyone you know is going to die someday.” I learned that the hard way…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or: “Now this is how this box of matches works.”

Fr. Stephen: Right?

Fr. Andrew: Like, a four-year-old, you could show them and they could light a match. They could get that! They’re capable of that. Ask me how I know! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is a simple concept, but this goes even to— Go back. We’re going to go back again to Genesis, as is our wont. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You want the first story of a certain type of knowledge being forbidden, that being violated, there being bad consequences for humanity: this is it.

Fr. Andrew: This is the original.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is the ur-example. And this is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As it’s described in Genesis 2-3, the knowledge of good and evil is something God has.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and God is good, purely good.

Fr. Stephen: “He is become like us, knowing good and evil.”

Fr. Andrew: Knowing good and evil, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And the angels have it! So it’s not like this—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, that’s also in Genesis 3, where the serpent says, “If you get this, if you eat this, you become—” and there’s various ways it gets translated: “like God, like gods,” or, as I pointed out before in this show, one of the earliest Old English translations of this, it says “like angels”: you become like angels if you eat this fruit.

Fr. Stephen: And so this knowledge isn’t evil; this tree isn’t an evil tree. God made an evil tree for some reason? And this has always been understood this way. You read, again, since we mentioned it already this episode—and we don’t mention it as often as some people think—the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “It’s just because they talk about the book of Enoch!” Wait, what? We’ve never even done an episode on the book of Enoch.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, other Enochic literature, other apocalyptic Jewish literature and Christian literature, when you have a vision of paradise, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is still there.

Fr. Andrew: It’s still there; it’s not cut down.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not destroyed. There’s nothing evil about it. The way it’s been understood consistently in Judaism and at least in early Christianity is that the issue was that humanity was not mature enough to receive that knowledge yet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not ready yet.

Fr. Stephen: But God created that tree and put fruit on it, so there would have come a day when humanity was ready to have that knowledge that God and the angels already had.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it wasn’t just an ornamental tree.

Fr. Stephen: And it wasn’t just a test; it wasn’t just a random test, but it was something for which humanity wasn’t ready. And this is the understanding of what’s going on with that knowledge in the line of Cain. It’s not that learning how to make things out of metal is itself evil. Blacksmiths are not evil-doers. [Laughter] It’s that humanity wasn’t ready for that knowledge that they were given, that they got from spiritual sources, and so they used that knowledge for destruction. They used it to make war, to kill each other, not to make useful implements to help society. Same thing with the other technology; same thing with the atom bomb that gets used to kill a bunch of Christians. There are lots of good uses for nuclear power, for example.

But all of this begs the question— And we quoted— I believe it was St. Sophrony who said at one point, when asked about technology, asked about this burst of technology in the 20th century, what he thought about it, and he said if we as humans were holier, God would allow us to have more technology, because we would have the spiritual sense and the wisdom to know how to use it rather than destroying ourselves with it.

But what all of this presupposes, that we may not have thought about maybe in the past—even people who are familiar with the way we’re talking now, because we talk that way, St. Basil the Great talks that way when he talks about Genesis, the Fathers talk that way: there’s lots of places where you could have gotten this understanding that it was an issue of maturity with Adam and Eve, that it was an issue of maturity with angels—but this implies that there has to be some kind of— For humanity to be ready requires that there has to be some sense of the collective maturity of humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because technology is not ever a thing that’s just one person; it’s a kind of— It always spreads.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this wasn’t like: “Well, someday, you, Adam, and you, Woman; or you, Man, and you, Woman, you will be mature enough that you can eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but then when your kids are born they won’t be yet.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like that.

Fr. Stephen: “And they’ll have to wait.” This is an issue of humanity. And it wasn’t just that: “Oh, Tubal-cain wasn’t mature enough as a person to learn metallurgy.” This has to be a collective sense. This understanding implies a collective sense of humanity, that humanity has a collective maturation. Once we start thinking about that, there are a bunch of other things in terms of how the Fathers read the Scriptures and within traditional Christian theology that start to make sense, because we’ve been taught to think about things in these purely individual terms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s because that’s how our society works.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and not in these collective terms. So for example, it is a commonplace when talking about why Christ was born when he was, when you’re reading the Church Fathers, for them to talk about—and this is even— This idea is sort of forecast in Second Temple Jewish literature, that the history of Israel has a through-line and a purpose, that the purpose of this history that we read in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, is that this purified, this remnant of Israel—most of Israel stripped away, but this remnant of Israel that’s been purified, that’s been tried by fire and tested, this faithful remnant will emerge at the end. And from that faithful remnant will emerge the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is what it means when it says in the Scripture that in the fullness of time God sent his Son. It doesn’t mean that, oh, the date finally arrived. [Laughter] It’s about the state of humanity.

Fr. Stephen: And it doesn’t mean “well, the Romans had really good roads so the Gospel could go lots of places.” He could have waited until 1995, and it could have gone out on the internet.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s what his purpose was. You’ll see the Fathers then talking about how the history of Israel culminates in the Theotokos, that the holiness of the Theotokos, the purity of the Theotokos, this woman who was there to become the Mother of God, the one who gives birth to God, who gives birth to Jesus Christ, is the end product of that history of Israel, generation after generation, being tested and being tried and finding repentance and purification and restoration to God and faithfulness to God. Like I said, all of that culminates in her so that she can give birth to the Messiah. This is why when it comes to Revelation 12, when someone asks you, “Is that the Theotokos or is that Israel?” the answer is yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: ¿Por qué no los dos? Because this is how the Fathers understand it, that there’s this through-line of history, that history is building to something. It is moving in a direction; something is happening in the flow of history, and that involves, again, a collective identity for humanity. This is what— In St. John’s gospel, when Christ promises that when the Holy Spirit comes he will lead you into all truth, he’s not saying, “Well, I taught you some stuff, but then when the Holy Spirit comes, he’s going to tell you other stuff.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not about information.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Like, new info. He’s not going to tell your pastor what to say on Sunday even though he was planning to say something else—not that anyone would ever say that. [Laughter] But it’s that history, this movement of history, isn’t finished. It isn’t finished. We don’t know what it is, but there’s a reason Christ hasn’t returned yet. There is something happening that is building toward that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not just “to be continued.” We’re not just waiting.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but just like in the Second Temple period, for example, they were looking around, going: “Why hasn’t the Messiah come yet?” because they couldn’t see it from that viewpoint, after he comes, then everyone, looking back on it, goes: “Oh. That was the time.”

Fr. Andrew: Ohhh! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “That’s where things were moving all along.” In the same way, we could look around and say, “Why hasn’t Christ appeared? Things are getting really bad.” But there is a process unfolding, and that is associated, by the Scriptures, with the Holy Spirit. This flow of history is associated directly with the Holy Spirit. And so the Holy Spirit is the One guiding history, particularly in and through the Church, and this is the key to understanding the Orthodox understanding of holy Tradition.

Fr. Andrew: And this, to link back to one of our major themes, but also a particular episode about what a spirit is, a spirit and especially the Holy Spirit who animates the Church, it’s this spirit that animates a people, that animates a group, or sometimes an individual, but in talking about holy Tradition, it is this overall historical unfolding, but it’s not a deterministic unfolding. It’s— God himself is working. He has agency. He’s doing all this. And sometimes—a lot of the time—we cannot see what he’s doing.

I mean, just to think about it on an individual level, not that we’re talking about it on the individual level, but we do experience it on an individual level— For instance, if someone has had a true conversion to Christ—a lot of you listening to this have had a true conversion to Christ—you probably could not have predicted that five, ten years—maybe one year!—before that happened, and it’s only in retrospect that you look back on your life and see how it was leading in that direction, that the narrative is something that’s done, that’s apparent in retrospect but not in the moment. Well, this is fractal, and it’s not like God is like: “Well, I’m working on this guy right now and I’ll take care of the rest…” Like, no. God is God, so he’s working on every level, always, everywhere, all the time, which is astonishing to even begin to think about.

Fr. Stephen: On a personal level, this is part of why I don’t talk about my “conversion story” to Orthodoxy. It’s at least part of it. Because, from my perspective now, my experience of my life is not: “I was heading in one direction and then there was this radical course correction and I headed in another direction.” My experience of my life is: “From very early on, in ways that are frankly kind of ooky, God was working to bring me to exactly where I am right now.” There were hints of it in weird places that only from my vantage point now do I understand. And so, like I said, this is part of the reason, there’s no point in telling that story. I am who I am now; that’s the result of it.

But, yeah, and this is true on this macro level. So Tradition is not: “Christ told the apostles a bunch of other stuff. He said, ‘Hey, don’t write this down. Just when you ordain bishops later, kind of whisper it into their ear, and they’ll pass it onto the next group,’ and so each generation of bishops has sort of passed on this secret knowledge.” That’s called Gnosticism! If you think that’s what Tradition is in the Church, go read some St. Irenaeus, where he contrasts what goes on in the Church and that, makes clear: “No, the Church proclaims everything, publicly.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a proclamation. It’s not an esoteric secret knowledge. “You just don’t get it.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, no. Tradition is often defined in the Orthodox Church as the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, but that’s what this means. That’s what this means: the historical reality of the Church in her journey through the world we believe is inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. And so that is how you discern Orthodox Tradition, is by looking back through the history. What writings have been preserved? What writings have been promoted? What is Scripture? Well, what historically became Scripture? And on and on and on. And so what is the holy Tradition of the Church is actually a very objective thing. It can be concluded very objectively. But this is the Holy Spirit.

And so we have to approach questions regarding technology from this perspective of human collective identity, which is not how we tend to approach them, because, again, we’ve been taught to think as individuals, to think about individualism. And so, when the question comes up— When I go on one of my rants condemning social media, what I get as a response usually are people saying, “Well, I have this or that social media, and here is this good thing I do with it,” which is a very individualistic approach. “So, yes, there’s lots of people doing bad things with it, or it’s having bad effects on lots of people, but I do this good thing with it.”

But the question about technology all along, as I think we’ve shown, is this collective question: What is this doing to humanity? What is this doing to cultures, to societies, to communities? Because it’s not that, when Tubal-cain comes up with metallurgy, no one did anything good with metallurgy; it’s that, on the collective whole, it was primarily used for killing. And so we have to assess what’s going on with technology and the role it’s at least currently playing in terms of: What is the broad effect this is having? What is the primary use to which this is being put?

And if we conclude that that is negative, that that is bad—and as we all know from a certain rule, the internet is at least 50% pornography—at some point, we have to say, “Look, until we develop the spiritual wisdom—we, plural, develop the spiritual wisdom—to employ this correctly, we need to move away from this technology.” Because no matter how many good uses I come up to for the internet, like, say, doing The Lord of Spirits podcast live on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month over the internet—I’m aware of the irony here—the fact that your tweenage son can listen to Lord of Spirits on a computer in his room with an internet connection does not mean you should put a computer in his room with an internet connection, because that’s not most of what’s going to be pumped into his room. We have to look at these broader effects and these broader things.

For humanity as a collective, to develop the kind of spiritual wisdom necessary to do these things has become much harder of late because we all think as individuals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the sense of who we are as a people or even just who we are as a town is getting more and more lost. My sense is that it happened in two stages. Initially we lost attention to the place that we’re in, and all of our attention was on national things, which is still obviously— There’s a big discrepancy there. People know way more about who the president is or what’s going on in congress than they do on what’s going on in their town council.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, even though the town council affects them a lot more on a day-to-day basis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, with meetings that they could literally go and attend and be heard and whatever. But then the next stage was— because all of that became so much, just this info-blast, we retreated into echo-chambers and isolation. It’s no longer like “now we mass-communicate!” Mass communication, it’s funny. I’ve had people ask me, “Can you use your platform to promote this?” And I’m like: “You know, I don’t think you understand how this works!” It’s not like I have a big megaphone that everybody listens to. I don’t! We don’t. You and I could advertise something on this show, but that doesn’t make it be a thing. God willing, we connect to the people listening to us or whatever, but there’s this Balkanization that’s occurred, this fragmentation that’s occurred and is getting more and more intense. Somebody actually asked me earlier today— They were joking a little bit, but because there was a three-week gap between our last episode and this one, they said, “What am I supposed to do about withdrawal symptoms?” I was like: “Go take a walk!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Touch grass. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Go take a walk. Don’t listen more or whatever. Of course I’m happy if people listen to the show or read our books, or whatever, but—

Fr. Stephen: Listen in groups! [Laughter] Get together with a few friends and listen.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Which is a thing!

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that points to a key— One of the main differences— And this is part of why this has gotten more difficult. One of the main differences between the technological explosion at the beginning of the 20th century, and at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st is that the technological explosion at the beginning of the 20th century primarily connected people. Now people could listen to the same radio shows all over the country.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, people would gather around a radio.

Fr. Stephen: In groups. And then early television. Everybody was watching the same shows, because there weren’t that many channels. [Laughter] And that created a shared culture, a shared background, a shared frame of reference. The beginning of air travel: you could go and see your relatives on the other side of the country more often. People were more connected. You get the interstate highway system. All these things are connecting people, creating a broader sense of community. And the more recent technological explosion at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century has done the exact opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, now that there’s a million choices for every person, everybody has their own little thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, their own set of facts, their own news from their own source. That was one of the shifts. It used to be towns had two newspapers: one was Republican and one was Democrat. Sometimes that was in the name, literally. There were multiple— And then when people moved to everybody getting the same news from the same radio broadcast and the same TV broadcast, that was a uniting thing.

Fr. Andrew: It doesn’t mean that what gets broadcast was all true and good.

Fr. Stephen: No! It’s not objective. Nothing’s objective! We’ve said that.

Fr. Andrew: But at least there was this common participation going on.

Fr. Stephen: And you could argue about it. You could say, “I think Kronkite’s right on.” You could say, “I think that Kronkite’s a nut!” Right? [Laughter] But you had a common basis for conversation, which you don’t any more. Literally, people are working from different sets of facts now. And you can isolate yourself through the internet and through these things, just an echo chamber where you never hear an idea that you don’t already agree with.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where now cancel culture— If I hear a thing I disagree with, I can call that a harm: I am being harmed by being exposed to or reading a thing that I disagree with, like it’s a harm.

Fr. Stephen: And not only do you block it for yourself, but you try to get it to not exist any more.

Fr. Andrew: For everybody.

Fr. Stephen: But this is isolating. This is alienating to people. This is separating us. And that creates this kind of feedback loop where we’re not able to collectively come together and decide how to use this technology productively because the current use of the technology is pulling us apart in this destructive way.

And beyond our final comment, there is no magic wand to wave. That’s why I said this episode isn’t going to get super happy, and happy ending. There’s not a magic wand to wave; there’s not an easy way past this.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: There just isn’t. We’ve reached a point in terms of our lives, our work lives, our political lives, our everything else, even our religious lives, sadly, where everything is fractured, broken up, alienated, isolated, and all of the technology we have is just furthering that and driving it and instrumentalizing us into being consumers until we run out of debt that we can take on. That’s the state of affairs. So, final thoughts!

Fr. Andrew: All right! Final thoughts! [Laughter] It’s senseless; it’s depressing… You know, okay, so I have a few things to say about this, about all this. One thing I think that’s important to point out is that human beings are fundamentally permeable, which means that the isolation itself that we’re using our technology for is actually, on a certain level, an illusion. We’re still permeable. We’re spiritually permeable, and I think a lot of the times that the isolation that we’re using our technology for is an attempt to escape that, but it creates this feedback loop. I heard— I was listening to something earlier today, and they were talking about feedback loops in terms of bad behavior, and one of the things said was: “Well, if you want to get depressed, when you’re sad, isolate yourself, and then that’ll take you into depression.”

But the reality is that we’re still permeable, so you can put yourself within a hard bubble, but it’s not really. You’re still permeable to spiritual reality, and so one of the things that happens when you isolate yourself from your fellow humans, especially when you isolate yourself from your fellow Christians, is that you’re going to be permeable to other spirits. So that’s a thing that’s happening, and I think that’s one of the things that’s important for us to know, is that the more we try to craft the perfectly customized life, the more that we are going into very dangerous territory. And I think especially for Americans, that’s a constant, constant, constant temptation. We have to be vigilant, always correcting. Always.

If you don’t believe me, go to any store that sells candy. I remember when there was one kind of KitKat. I don’t know how many there are now! I could not tell you. There’s always some combination or new version or whatever. I’m not saying, “Don’t have your mint chocolate KitKats,” or whatever. I’m just like: Think about what it does when you’re constantly looking for more choices and more variety and whatever.

The other thing is— Another thing is that I definitely agree with the idea that, as a race, we’re doing a lot of bad things with technology. And yet at the same time, as you said, you noted the irony: here we are on the internet. This show is possible because of the internet. You’re in Louisiana, I’m in Pennsylvania, people— We had people, first there was a guy from London who said he was listening, a guy from Uruguay, someone from Kentucky, someone from Oklahoma. There’s people all over the world, and the reason they’re able to listen to it is because of the internet. That’s a reality. And, God willing, they’re getting a benefit out of it.

I don’t think that that makes the way that a lot of this media fundamentally works completely okay, but at the same time, as a preacher, as a priest, as an evangelist, as a Christian, I know that everything that I do is going to be at least partly bad. So I have to decide: Okay, in what way am I going to participate in this world to try to do the most good, knowing full well that I am compromised? Because that’s just a reality. I can’t live in any other way. We’re all compromising on one level or another, so the question is: How can I do the most good? And how can I repent as much as possible? I mean, I do think that— I do believe— I mean, if I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be working the job that I do—that technology can be used for good, and, including internet technology, can be used for good.

I see it, in many ways, as being missionaries in the marketplace. The marketplace has always been a place of a lot of temptations and a lot of bad things going on. There is the possibility of being a missionary in that marketplace, but I think it also requires an asceticism, an asceticism of attention. And this is how we get to begin to develop a maturity with relation to these capabilities.

So then the final thing I’ll say is that all of this that I just said, literally all of it, is why we always make the point on this program—and I always make the point on all the work that I do, really—all the public work that I do is about aiming people back to 3D parish life. And if you’re doing that, if you’re really doing it in a very dedicated way, you don’t need any of the stuff that we’re doing. You don’t need it. The point of this is not to point you back to us. If I say, “Hey, buy my book,” or “Hey, listen to this thing,” or “Hey,” whatever, it’s not because I want you to pay attention to me. It’s not about me; it’s about the things that we’re talking about, which, God willing, will aim you towards a life of real repentance in 3D parish life—or if you’re a monastic, in the monastery, which might sound weird to point that out, but actually I have met monks that listen to Ancient Faith Radio! When I was on Mount Athos, five-and-a-half years ago, I met a monk who listened to Ancient Faith Radio. I was kind of stunned, kind of stunned, but it’s a thing.

But it really is about pointing people back to that, because that’s what the Christian life is. It’s this life of worship and almsgiving and community and repentance and love and family, all of these things that you don’t need any of this stuff to do. But if you’re out here in this marketplace with us, we’re going to be pointing you in that direction. That’s always the point. If— I mean, it’s great if— It’s fine if people want to listen and are like: that’s weird, interesting, cool stuff, but this should not be a hobby. These things that we’re talking about should not be a hobby; this should be life. It should be life.

So that’s how I parse through a lot of this, these very difficult questions, is: yeah, we’re— on some level it’s always going to be imperfect and maybe even leaning very in the imperfect direction, but still we can point people back to Christ. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So part of what comes out of what we were talking about all night tonight is that the opposite of this kind of instrumentalization of human persons, of their dehumanization, their alienation, is freedom. Ultimately what it is is a removal of freedom. Part of the problem is that we’ve been taught to think of freedom in the wrong way, because we’ve been taught to think of freedom as individuality. This is another one of those feedback loops. Freedom is individuality, meaning freedom is: I can go and dye my hair some unnatural color that nobody else’s hair is dyed. I can go and buy—I can go and buy guns, I can go and buy drugs, I can go and do this, I can go and do that. This makes me free! None of that is freedom.

Freedom, in terms of the Scriptures, in terms of the teachings of Christianity—freedom is freedom to serve the living God and thereby freedom to flourish, freedom to be human, freedom to become the person God created you to be—and you can’t do that as an individual. Humans can’t exist alone. Even Aristotle knew that, and he was a pagan. Humans have to exist in community. To be human, you have to be in a community. That’s where you become free, free to flourish.

But again, what we’ve been talking about tonight implies what it is that we need to be free from once again. There are people and powers, sometimes powers behind people, who have instrumentalized ideas in order to instrumentalize us, in order to dehumanize us and enslave us. And I’m super glad that we have a disclaimer in front of the show now, because I can say things like what I’m about to say. I probably would anyway, but, hey. Palestinian people need to be free—not free to be individuals, not free to eat McDonald’s—they need to be free to flourish as humans. The only way they can do that is to cast off the ideas their masters have used to enslave them. Israeli people need to be free. The only way for them to be free is to cast off the ideas—the fear, the racial animosity, the pride—that have been used against them to enslave them. Israeli people and Palestinian people will become free when they become free together, by throwing off their masters who have pitted them against each other to their own destruction. You could say the same thing about Ukrainian people and Russian people. You can say the same thing about Norwegian people, about American people, about Australian people, Chinese people, Brazilian people.

We are currently doing things that we don’t really want to do that are making our lives worse, that are alienating us, that we’ve been tricked into doing, by a prolonged indoctrination in certain ideas. Lying to us about where our happiness lies, lying to us about what we need to be afraid of, lying to us about other people to keep us separated from them and isolated and alone, which makes us better prey for the ideas that the people and the powers that have become our masters want us to do.

I’m going to end up in a similar place to where Fr. Andrew did, because the way out of this, the way to be free: we have to be free in a community; we have to be free with other people. And, frankly, the only place we can do this now is in our parishes. The only place we can do this now is the Church. There’s not another spot to start building a community from, even if we wanted to. There’s not another place where we can come together and look at our culture, look at our political leadership—and I often use “leadership” here loosely—look at what we’re receiving from the media, look at it and collectively together as a community say: You know what? No. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to stop buying things—not particular things, not “I’m going to boycott these people because they did XYZ.” You know what? We don’t need to buy so many things! I’m not defined— My identity is not defined by what I consume. That’s a dumb idea. This person isn’t different from me, fundamentally different from me, and I don’t need to be afraid of them because they’re from a different neighborhood, they immigrated from a different country, they look different, they act different, they smell different—doesn’t matter.

We can come together and collectively say that as a community, and when we do, we will become free. We’ll experience freedom. We’ll experience more of the fullness of our humanity. We’ll be emboldened, we’ll be empowered to get about the work that God created for us to do in this world. Being set free from sin to serve the living God is not just something that happened in Egypt under Moses or in Palestine in 30 AD when Christ died and rose again; it’s something that happens— has to happen for each of us. And as many times as we allow ourselves to become enslaved again, we need to be set free again, because one of the most important powers that Christ has given to us when he gave us the Holy Spirit is the power to break those chains—of ideology, of thoughts—that bind us and try and hold us in that kind of slavery.

So that’s my final thought, is that all of us need to free ourselves, and we do that together, and we do that by rejecting the thoughts, the ideas, the ideologies that are currently keeping us from doing that and keeping us from being human together.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that’s our show for tonight. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you didn’t talk to us live, we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at the Facebook page; you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits, and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or need help finding a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

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. “Plastic tubes and pots and pans, bits and pieces, and the magic from the hand.”

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, which, as you’ve heard, you shouldn’t be, but if you are, you can follow our page and join our discussion group; you can leave ratings and reviews in all the appropriate places. Most importantly, though, please share this show with a friend of yours who is going to benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. “From my heart and from my hand, why don’t people understand my intention?”

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