Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast, as you just heard the Voice of Steve tell you several times. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; again, that’s 855-237-2346. And Matushka Trudi, our engineer extraordinare, will be taking your calls tonight, which we will get to in the second part of our show.

So tonight we are talking about idolatry: the worship of false gods, especially as we see it described in the Bible. Now, we’ve addressed this many times on the podcast and other contexts, but tonight we’re zeroing in on this question: Why? Because, in context, it’s a major part about what the Bible is responding to, and so it’s part of how we can understand the Gospel and what Christ’s mission to us actually is.

So where are we going to start? Well, first we’re going to talk about that pesky question of whether the gods the pagans worship really are a thing. Ask most modern people, including Christians, whether Zeus, Odin, Isis, etc., are real; whether there really is any kind of spiritual being that pagans worship, and most are going to say: no, these are made-up stories to try to explain things like lightning and earthquakes. But how did ancient peoples actually see their gods? And, more importantly to us Christians, how does the Bible understand these? And when will we ever discover the true nature of the blood feud Fr. Stephen has with James Earl Jones? So, Fr. Stephen, is it actually true that all the gods of the nations are demons?

Fr. Stephen De Young: You know, a lot of people, they’ve been saying that our last episode, like, they really liked it. Some of the people were saying it was the best episode we’ve done.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: I think it would be wise, when we start out tonight, to let people know: this one’s not going to be as good. [Laughter] I mean, it will be solid…

Fr. Andrew: Is it because I jinxed it with the James Earl Jones thing?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’ll be right there in the pocket, but, you know, there are peaks and valleys.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter] Some have some low expectations tonight.

Fr. Stephen: We can’t get into this recursive loop of always trying to one-up ourselves. That way lies madness. [Laughter] So do you think we should go ahead and do that?

Fr. Andrew: Well…

Fr. Stephen: When do we go live?

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, we’re live now.

Fr. Stephen: Oh!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right: “Welcome, Lord of the Spirits...

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay, yes, yeah! [Laughter] So all of the gods of the nations hold doctorates of ministry, yes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. That’s what it says in the Bible. That’s a clergy joke. That’s a clergy joke, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Which is a subset of the dad joke.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So we’re going to start there, with where the Bible says that. Not exactly that, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the demons… So Psalm 96, or 95 if you’re looking at the Greek numbering, verse five. It simply says: “All the gods of the nations are demons.” That’s how it says it if you’re looking at a Greek translation from the Greek, but when it says it in the Hebrew, it’s usually something like: “All the gods of the nations are worthless,” although we’re going to talk about some other translations of that. So what’s going on there in the Hebrew and in the Greek?

Fr. Stephen: Well, if you’re reading the Douay-Rheims, you get the awesome: “All the gods of the nations are devils.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: One-upping it a little bit. But, yeah, it’s very clear in the Greek it’s just “demons.” So there’s a word there in Hebrew, and that word is roughly elil, and there’s a bunch of things going on with how that word is used, not just here but in a lot of places in the Old Testament where it’s used in the same way. Strictly speaking, that word means “worthless” or “useless” or “vain.” And it’s used in a couple of different contexts. It’s used as an adjective particularly to describe physicians, shepherds, and oracles.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean… Okay, so physicians and oracles do tend to be within a similar category in the ancient world, but, like, shepherds? I mean, they’re not… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I guess it’s authority figures, maybe? Authorities who are kind of worthless?

Fr. Andrew: But, yeah, it’s kind of like: quacks, frauds, garbage…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so it’s used as a noun, often, to refer to false gods in particular.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so the worthless ones.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the reason why that tends to get applied to gods is that there’s a little bit of a pun going on, with the plural of “gods” is elim, and elil is close. So your elim are elil.

Fr. Andrew: That’s pretty funny in Hebrew?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, it flows better off the tongue than it did for me, if your tongue is more used to Hebrew. And so this would be used… Remember, we’re in a “polytheistic” context, so this would be used to describe the other guy’s gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “Your gods are garbage.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so trash-talk before battle was not limited to “Your army’s no good and your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries.” [Laughter] But also to your gods. And there’s an example of that—probably the best example of that is Sennacherib in the Old Testament, where he shows up and says, “Don’t bother praying to your gods, because all of the other cities we just destroyed, they prayed to their gods, too. And so your gods stink; our gods are awesome, so just surrender.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you see this kind of thing with Pharaoh. When the Hebrews come to him and say, “We want to go worship Yahweh,” and he’s like: “The god of slaves? Hello?” Like, this is totally a thing in the ancient world, making fun of other people’s gods.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, especially if you’re very confident in your own. So the thing is, anybody who’s listening to this and who has gone and looked at their local English Bible that’s not the Orthodox Study Bible probably saw it saying something like: “All the gods of the nations are idols.” And you may be wondering, “Well, how’d they get that?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, because “idols” is not literally a translation of either the Hebrew or the Greek.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the answer is: You can’t get there directly from the text. You have to insert another presupposition. You have to assume that the idea of the gods being worthless means that they don’t exist.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s the idea then that they’re saying, “All the gods of the nations are idols”: it’s basically saying that the center of their religion is really just this physical object in front of them that’s in their temple or their shrine or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but the problem with that assumption is, for example, that kind of makes hash of the rest of the ways the word is used. So, like, you pay a doctor to cure something, and he fails, and you say, “You don’t exist!” [Laughter] “You’re just a rock!” That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Likewise, you hire a shepherd, he loses all your sheep—that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot of ways to be worthless… In fact, most ways to be worthless do not involve actually not existing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, now it is true that a non-existent physician would be pretty worthless, but that does not mean that a worthless physician does not exist, by reversing the syllogism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s fun; it’s interesting to look at how this gets translated. Someone actually wrote in and said that they want more of “Fr. Andrew’s Etymology and Ancient English Corner,” so here it is.

Fr. Stephen: We need theme music. We need a little ditty on the zither or something in the background before this.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know. Actually, it was a parishioner here. It wasn’t somebody that wrote in, now that I remember. It was a parishioner here in Emmaus, actually. So, yeah. Right, so I looked this up just to see, okay, how was this line translated in Old English, just as a witness to how very early English Christians would have understood this particular word. And so there is a psalter called the Paris Psalter, and it includes a whole bunch of—and actually I don’t know off the top of my head why it’s called the Paris Psalter but has a bunch of Old English in it, but it does, probably because that’s where the manuscript was found or something like that, because that’s the way it goes, like another Old English manuscript is called the Vercelli Book, which, again, that’s not an Anglo-Saxon name.

But anyway, so the Paris Psalter has translations of—I think it’s most of the psalms, and the translator arranged them into Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, which is great; it reads very beautifully. But anyway, this particular line goes like this. So, in the English, it’s: “For all the gods of the nations are demons, or worthless.” This is how it says in Old English: Syndon ealle hæþenu godu hildedeoful, which basically means: Since (or because) all—and it uses the word hæþenu, which is the ancestor of our worth “heathen,” so: all the heathen gods—and then it uses this word: hildedeoful. So deoful is the origin of our word “devil,” but it seems to be: “All the gods of the heathen are hill-devils,” so there’s this notion that they’re, like, hillbilly demons or demons that hang around hills or mountains, that kind of thing. So there you go: Fr. Andrew’s Etymology and Ancient English Corner. Play theme music.

Fr. Stephen: Somewhere in Sweden there’s a former listener named Hildedeoful who’s deeply insulted, deeply insulted.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Pretty unhappy, yes. Well…

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, Hilde…

Fr. Andrew: Write in, yeah, let us know your story. Yeah, hill-devils.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s probably the… if we want to talk about a locus classicus of “All the gods of the nations are demons,” that’s it, but there are a couple of other places that say the same thing. This isn’t just one isolated verse in a psalm. So 1 Corinthians 10:20, St. Paul is talking about the pagan sacrifices going on in Corinth and why the Corinthian Christians should stay away from them, and he says, “What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” So he doesn’t say they sacrifice to idols or to nothing or to fictional characters, but to demons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so then there’s another one, Deuteronomy 32:17. This is interesting, especially if you look at the actual Hebrew word which is here, which is different from that word, “worthless,” [elil]. This one says, “They sacrificed to demons, not to God; to gods they did not know, to new gods, new arrivals that your fathers did not fear.” So what’s the word for “demons” in the Hebrew there?

Fr. Stephen: In the Hebrew there—it’s “demons,” of course in the Greek, but the Hebrew has this word shedim, which— We’ve commented before that Deuteronomy 32 is one of the really old and difficult to read parts of the Torah in terms of: there’s been no sort of updating or editing of the language at all. And that particular word is actually a Babylonian loan-word, it looks like, because the word shedu in Babylonian refers to a sort of territorial spirit, a spirit that’s in charge of an area.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the technical term in English is tutelary spirit, tutelary.

Fr. Stephen: Not to be confused with Tootie from Facts of Life. Kim Fields has nothing to do with this.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. I did not see that coming. That was really good. You know, with these references you make, I take the good and the bad.

Fr. Stephen: There you have it.

Fr. Andrew: That was pretty lame, but anyway…

Fr. Stephen: That one was kind of bad, I know.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: And when we’re talking about an area, like a territory, in this case we’re talking about a geographical feature, like a valley, a grove, a cave, a hill, a mountain, not like when we hear the word territory, we tend to think of lines drawn on a map. So it’s not so much that as a place.

Fr. Andrew: A range.

Fr. Stephen: A place naturally considered. So, yeah, those are three sort of… If you want proof-texts for the gods of the nations being demons, there’s three of them. But we want to go a little deeper in this, because where we’re heading tonight is building off of—we talked a little bit about this last time, sort of in passing as we went, but how exactly idolatry works and what it is and what it isn’t. And so we have to start out by kind of defining who the beings are who stand behind the idolatry, who the gods are who are being worshiped with these idols. So we have to set the Wayback Machine and rotate back a little bit to some things we talked about way back in the long-ago time at the beginning of the podcast, a hundred or so hours ago.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I think that’s about true now almost. This is episode 36, and we tend to go… I don’t know. We might not be at a hundred hours now yet, but we’re definitely over 75 or so, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Who knows.

Fr. Andrew: So, yeah, we covered this in one of the very first—I think it might be the very first episode, actually. Back before we got you a really good internet connection.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, exactly. So probably half of this got lost into the ether as I was running through my house, trying to reconnect to the internet frantically.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good times, good times!

Fr. Stephen: Last exercise I got, so really, you know…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay, so: monotheism. That’s the word that usually people throw out: Christianity is monotheist, so that means of course these other gods don’t exist. Why do you keep saying that these other gods exist, apart from the fact that the Bible says that they exist?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so as we said way back in the long-ago time, the whole idea of monotheism is a bit naff. These categories… Well, monotheism in particular, I should say, is a term that comes into being in the 17th century. We have to keep reminding people of that. It didn’t exist before that, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have existed before that, because it’s based on Greek: monos and theos both existed as Greek words. But the Church Fathers, for example, never called themselves monotheists. They do refer to the pagan as polytheists, but they don’t call themselves monotheists ever. This is something that happens.

Fr. Andrew: Oh interesting.

Fr. Stephen: In the 17th century, this term is coined, and this is… We’re revving up to our German friends; this is post-Enlightenment. We like to do taxonomy, we like to group things in categories, and then once we’ve got them grouped into categories, we construct our evolutionary flow chart of which are better and which are worst—and the modern German ones are always the best ones, if you’re asking them. [Laughter]

So monotheism gets created as this category to sort of lump together Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and later on Sikhism and a couple other things get thrown in the side. And then that is over against, then, polytheism, which is the belief that many gods exist.

Fr. Andrew: Exist and should be worshiped.

Fr. Stephen: Usually, yeah. And then within polytheism, there are all of these distinctions that can be made.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like there’s henotheism, which is kind of the idea that there’s lots of gods out there that are worthy of worship, but this is the one we worship here; this is our local guy.

Fr. Stephen: And he’s the boss, yeah. And he’s the boss, but who’s the boss can change.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like if there’s a conquest. And then that’s how you actually get, then, empires that worship fully polytheistically, with lots of temples to lots of gods. It’s essentially a kind of conquest game, where you start to group them together.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, yeah, we have—I think we commented this a little last time, but we have this idea in our head that there was some kind of Greek religion that all the Greeks had, or Roman religion that all the Romans had, where they had this pantheon of gods that was like the Justice League, and they all had these twelve members…

Fr. Andrew: Right, it was a collection, and not even collected the same everywhere. Like if you lived in a place… If you think of it more like: These are my favorite restaurants. Sure, we all have a McDonald’s, but I really love this local burger—this other burger place. I don’t know; it’s maybe not the best analogy, but what I can come up with right now. And you would go to a particular temple because the god there was associated with something that you wanted some kind of success in. And so you would go—I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves here, but you would go, essentially, like: I feel like Italian tonight. Or, hey, I really need to defeat my enemies tonight, so let’s go and worship Ares. Or, hey, I need a love potion, or I want to seduce my neighbor’s wife, so I’m going to the shrine to Aphrodite and offer her a sacrifice there, which there happens to be one in town.

Fr. Stephen: Even that is very late and Roman, though. That’s sort of a function of what happens…

Fr. Andrew: Sort of a topical approach, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Well, because the Roman Empire becomes very cosmopolitan. So, I mean, at the ur-layer, each Greek city-state is worshiping two, three gods originally.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the ones that are local to them.

Fr. Stephen: Their local gods. And then as they make treaties and form alliances, you start getting cross-over and that kind of thing. And then once you get to Rome, Rome, very similar to the United States, liked to sort of take and great-value-ize all the cultures they encountered.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Great-value-ize.”

Fr. Stephen: And just kind of incorporate a watered-down version of whatever. “Ooh, Egyptian religion. This is interesting. Let’s incorporate a watered-down version into Roman religion.” So, yeah, once you get to Rome, yes, it’s very cosmopolitan, as St. Paul notices when he goes into Athens and he sees all of the…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is interesting, because it’s a development even in Athens. I mean, Athens, the name in Greek is Athena, because Athena is their goddess, traditionally.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Athena and Hephaestus are the original for Athens. Everybody else shows up later. So that’s an example. All that we just went through is an example of the fact that these terms like polytheism and henotheism don’t really capture any actual existing religion. It’s the problem with doing these kind of taxonomies in these categories. I mean, even just saying “monotheism” and then lumping together Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, let alone Sikhism… Like, there’s a lot more differences there, in a lot of ways, than you’re giving credit for.

And so those categories are less than useful in the first place. Like, they don’t serve a very good purpose in the first place, but then they get turned around and used as cudgels, like the whole Muslim apologetic against Christianity is: “You guys aren’t really monotheists.” And the best response to that is, I think: Who cares?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Like, yes, you can construct a category “monotheism,” and you can construct it in such a way that it doesn’t apply to me—so what? That doesn’t mean anything in reality. That’s just you constructing a label and then pointing out that your label doesn’t apply to me. I think we’ve even said in the past that probably the closest word for what you actually see in the Scriptures, for example, would be—what’s commanded in the Scriptures, I should say, not what Israel actually practices, but what is commanded in the Scriptures, would be something more like monolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which literally just means worshiping one, but of course, as you said, it’s closest; it doesn’t exactly totally encompass what it is God is telling the people of Israel to do within the context of what they believe about the spiritual world that they live in.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because this isn’t an issue of just… Yahweh is Israel’s God, and so he wants them to just worship him and not the other ones, even though the other ones exist. It’s an issue of: Yahweh the God of Israel is in a completely different category than all the other gods.

Fr. Andrew: Right, thus the, I don’t know, gazillion times in Scripture when it says, “Who among the gods is like unto thou, O Lord?” There’s so many comparisons like that.

Fr. Stephen: “There is none beside me.” “There is none beside me,” meaning there’s nobody on my level. There’s plenty beneath me, but there’s none beside me.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and even in the line where it says—I’m trying to remember where it is, but it says something like, “I am God and before me there is no other and after me there will be no other”—doesn’t mean that none existed and none will exist; it means that he’s the only God who is truly God in the sense of being, as this word means in the ancient world, a ruler, the true ruler. The rest are around, but they don’t actually qualify to be what it is that Yahweh the God of Israel actually is.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not in his category. They’re in another category beneath him because they’re spiritual beings created by him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re created things.

Fr. Stephen: And that “before me” and “after me” is actually—it’s in Isaiah, and it’s attacking this idea of the succession myth. Unlike Marduk—Marduk didn’t claim to have always been the most high god. There’s a story about how he became the most high god, and hypothetically someone could come afterwards and overthrow Marduk and become the most high god.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, same thing with Zeus.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because there’s a succession. So that was the God of Israel pointing to yet another one of those differences between his category and theirs, which is there’s no turnover in his category, because there’s no one to do the turning over.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s just not a thing. He’s God. There’s no contest.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you see reflected both in Scripture and outside of Scripture, within paganism, this idea that the spiritual world is tiered, that not all divine beings or spirits or gods—and Scripture uses all those terms—they’re not all on the same level, even if you’re a pagan. So it’s not that the pagans were like super egalitarian about the spiritual world, and Jews were just super hierarchical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s even—even before you get these worked-out pantheons, with sort of a clearer hierarchy, there’s still—almost everybody has a sense of: Okay, there are sort of big gods and little gods. There’s the god that we worship at the temple in the center of town, and then there’s the god out at the tree that I go to once in a while. And they’re understood to be on different levels. You eventually get the sense that they’re—the way it’s described is as if they’re sort of related. Like, this lesser one is a son of the greater one, or a daughter.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they know the difference between Poseidon and a naiad, and they know: Oh, there’s a spirit of this river, and they’d say it’s related in a way to Poseidon, who’s out there—the ocean, the sea—but they’re not on a plane. And that genealogy element is—what is typically used in all of these pagan stories, in order to connote this idea of tiers and relations, we tend to take it very woodenly literally… And it’s not that those pagan gods weren’t running around, fornicating. I mean, they are in all the stories, at least. But it wasn’t primarily about constructing a family tree; it was about the idea of conveying hierarchy, of conveying this tier-level, because, of course, a son or a daughter is less than, in the ancient world, their father or mother, because they’re derived from them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, that’s just a huge piece of what the culture is like, which is the basis for when Jesus quotes Psalm 110, where he says, “The Lord said to my Lord. How could David call him Lord if he is his son?” because everyone understands that sons are not the lords of their fathers. It always goes the other way. But of course, in Christ’s case, he is the Lord of his father, David, because he’s God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you can see this in the pagan settings: Ares, god of war, has kids like Eris, who is strife; strife is sort of low-level war. And then Phobos, that’s fear. It’s sort of all… And so you can see how this works in that sense, so it’s not so much like: No, no, we’ve researched this lineage of demonic powers, but that it’s this idea of derivation and subsidiarity to the more sort of powerful spirit.

And so that kind of gets, in different cultures, that idea of tiers or categories or types or qualities of these gods and divine beings, sort of plays out in different ways. We’re given one model, basically, by the Scriptures and by the Israelite and Second Temple Jewish tradition, and then—and we’re going to go through that in a second, and once we do, then when you compare that to the pagan schema, we’ll see there’s continuities and discontinuities, but that the core ideas are there, and as we’ve seen over and over again are sort of being corrected by the bibilical model by the prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this feeds into one of the main themes of this podcast, which is that ancient peoples are largely all describing the same experience of the spiritual world, but they have different takes on it. They have different ways of interpreting and understanding and telling the stories about it, and a lot of, what you said, what the Bible is doing is saying, “No, no, this is the truth.” And because we’re Christians, we believe what the Bible says about these spiritual beings, and not the stories that are being told within paganism.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that that’s the correct story, the story that’s the way to understand the spiritual world correctly. So this is, again, a little bit of review, I think, but it’s from some early episodes, so it’s worth doing again. As much as we tell people to go back and listen in order, it’s getting mean at this point.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s worth it! Binge it, people.

Fr. Stephen: Are you getting kickbacks or something from bandwidth charges and internet?

Fr. Andrew: No! Yeah, right, that’s an idea! I don’t know… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In sort of the human models we’ve talked about before, you’ve got these—if we except the devil himself, and various devil figures we’ve talked about before—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, set those aside for a second.

Fr. Stephen: —you’ve got basically three categories of what could be called demons.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so number one is that everybody gets the most excited about: Watchers.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I don’t know. We’re going to get to giants. People get excited when we talk about giants.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true, but they’re related, though; they’re related.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they are, in more ways than one.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed! Yeah, the Watchers… So this is the biblical model: the Watchers are these spirits that get imprisoned in the abyss.

Fr. Stephen: “Watchers” is the term that’s used in 1 Enoch, in the book of Enoch; it’s also used in Daniel. And these are the angelic beings who get involved with Cain’s line, to teach them things like metallurgy, teach them secrets, secret knowledge that they don’t have that they intend for them to use to destroy themselves. And so those rebellious angels, according to St. Jude’s epistle, 2 Peter, very clearly are imprisoned in the abyss or Tartarus, if we’re talking about 2 Peter—Tartarus will show up again in a minute—but the abyss is more the Ancient Near Eastern language, where like the Apkallu in the Babylonian version of this story are imprisoned. So they’re imprisoned; they’re awaiting sort of the day of judgment.

Then you’ve got that relationship that they have with Cain’s line, and then going forward after the flood produces the nephilim, produces the giants.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which are also called unclean spirits.

Fr. Stephen: Well, once they die, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly, after they die, and the reason that they’re called unclean spirits is if you look closely at especially Leviticus, then you’ll see that things that are mixed together that ought not be, which is a whole category, a whole bunch of different stuff, but things that are mixed together or touching together that should not be, kind of unholy hybrids, are regarded as unclean, and the idea with these dead giants, these dead nephilim, is that they are, in some way, a mixing-together of the Watchers and humanity. And, no, we’re not saying it’s a genetic DNA mixing; no, we’re not saying that the Watchers have physical bodies that they can biologically reproduce with. Go back and listen to the giants episode. [Laughter] But nonetheless, they are called unclean spirits because there is in some way this sort of mixing, this hybridization going on between these evil spirits and human beings. And then these are the dead, disembodied souls of these beings. So these are humans, right? The unclean spirits are human spirits?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, dead, demonized humans, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, not just any human spirits.

Fr. Stephen: They’re that unclean mixture, like one of those new Reese’s peanut butter cups with a potato chip in it. [Laughter] Like, why would you do that?

Fr. Andrew: Is that really a thing?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I recently got the white chocolate ones, and I thought they were rather good and not too far off, but…

Fr. Stephen: Potato chip.

Fr. Andrew: That ain’t right.

Fr. Stephen: Potato chip, yeah. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls actually call them spirits of illegitimate birth. I don’t think I can say the other word for that on Ancient Faith.

Fr. Andrew: The potato chip thing! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, henceforth… No.

Fr. Andrew: “You got Watcher in my humanity! You got humanity in my Watcher!” Sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As we said before, the go-to place on that—these are the demons whom we see being cast out in the synoptic gospels, for example, and in the book of Acts. And the go-to place on that, it’s the guy’s doctoral dissertation is The Origin of Evil Spirits by Archie Wright—not Cary Grant, but Archie Wright. And you can read all—he has all the sources, that that’s just what people in the first century BC and the first century AD thought demons were. It’s pretty conclusive on that level. So that’s another category. Now, most of those are also imprisoned in the abyss, but there are some that are still sort of roaming around the world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, which if you read Jubilees you get that story, how 90% get tossed in the abyss, 10% are allowed to roam the world, afflicting the wicked, and God lets them do it basically to bring the wicked to repentance. That includes us.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that idea is what St. Paul’s talking about when he talks about excommunicating someone and handing them over to Satan, for the destruction of their body and the salvation of their soul; he’s alluding to that idea, that concept of why the demons are out there.

And so these unclean spirits are bodiless, and these are the ones who are going, as we just mentioned, around possessing people, both in the context of the demonic possessions we see in Scripture and also in the context of oracles among the nations. And they also are going to, then, go into constructed bodies, because we’re heading toward idolatry here.

And so then the third category in the biblical model are the gods of the nations proper, so the gods of Egypt who get judged at the Passover, or the gods of the Romans, the gods of the Babylonians—pick your nation. These are the angelic beings from the Tower of Babel story who were placed over the nations, the princes whom Daniel talks about—the prince of Persia, the prince of Greece—the powers and principalities that St. Paul talks about, which he talks about being in the heavenly places; the angels who gather on the left in the divine council according to St. Gregory the Great in the sixth century in his Moralia. These are those gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’re angels that God had put over the nations, who fell by accepting worship for themselves.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so you may have noticed right there with those last two groups that, if you have one of the demons in that unclean spirit category in an idol, but that idol is of one of these gods of the nations, that they’re sort of working in tandem, like they’re working together. And you find exactly this in Second Temple Jewish sources.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s this idea that a pagan might be bowing down to a statue of Zeus, and yet it’s some dead nephilim jumping in there and actually engaging with the pagan.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the place where this comes up usually in Second Temple Jewish writings, and even in some early Christian writings, is they’re talking about—I was going to say hero worship, but technically in the Greek and Roman context that’s a different thing, because there literally was hero worship. But someone goes and leaves an offering before a statue of some general who just died in a war, and so the question arose: Well, wait, like is that really idolatry, because we know that’s just some guy who just died and is sort of a nice gesture? Or various forms of things that we would call ancestor worship. And Dad, Grandpa, Great-grandpa wasn’t necessarily a nephilim, hopefully. But what you find in those Second Temple Jewish and early Christian sources is that when those sort of things happen, there’s sort of demon ready, one of the unclean spirits ready to swoop in and get in between and sort of intercept.

Fr. Andrew: Right, we don’t necessarily have to believe the story that the pagan is telling what’s happening, because demons are liars and happy to deceive them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, yeah, any chance they get they’re happy to dart in there and take advantage of it. But those three categories, in broad strokes, just to use the Greek traditions as an example, the pagan Greek traditions, because they’re more familiar to most people: you find those same categories.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is interesting. This is one of these places we keep talking about to say that people in the ancient world are largely all talking about the same things, just kind of in different ways, and often one of the ways that you see this playing out is they are all having experiences of these kind of categories of spirits, roughly. They have different stories about how they got to be what they are and all that kind of stuff and how you should interact with them, but it’s still basically the same kind of categories.

Fr. Stephen: But those stories connect and interact with each other also, because they’re living in the same physical world and the same spiritual world, and so there are these intersections. So, for example, in the Greek stories you have the Titans and Prometheus, who are these sort of ancient class of gods; Prometheus isn’t an especially good example, but there’s a few other Titans who do similar things and face a similar fate: they give knowledge to man that man is not supposed to have, and they are punished by being imprisoned in Tartarus.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is just directly parallel, and pretty much exactly the same story as what the Bible says about the Watchers. Like Prometheus, for those of you—maybe it’s been a long time since you’ve read Greek mythology—Prometheus is the one who gives fire to human beings, and then…

Fr. Stephen: Gets his liver pecked out by a vulture.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, I think every day, because it grows back. Lovely. Because he’s chained to the side of the rock.

Fr. Stephen: Never let it be said that the Greek gods aren’t creative in their punishments. But, yeah, so imprisoned in Tartarus. And this isn’t just Fr. Stephen and Fr. Andrew now saying, “Hey, look at these two ancient stories; aren’t they kind of similar.” As I mentioned before, St. Peter talks about the angels who sinned in the time of Noah and got imprisoned in Tartarus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s literally the word he uses; that’s “Tartarus” in Greek.

Fr. Stephen: So he pulls these two stories together; he connects them. This isn’t some new model thing; this happens in the New Testament.

So they have that category. They have—obviously, they believe in spirits that inhabit idols. They do the ritual for that to happen. They have oracles, the oracle at Delphi being the most famous one, whom they believe is possessed by Apollo. They have phenomena of demon possession. Socrates says he’s possessed of a demon; kings and stuff have a demon or a genius once we get to the Roman period. And so this is a phenomenon that they experienced as well. These spirits are sort of a different category of spirits than the Titans, for example.

And then the third category for them would be manifested mostly by the Olympians, and then later by all the other gods whom they come to worship, who are the powers and principalities, the ones who are ruling over them now.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s Zeus and Hera and Athena and Apollo, and all those guys.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if you go back to those older episodes, we quote from Plato where Plato literally tells the story about them having been allotted certain territories, just like in the Babel story, from which they were going to rule over those areas, and Athens got Hephaestus and Athena; that’s theirs. And Plato talks about how at first they ruled as sort of gentle shepherds and then something happened at some indeterminate point, and the golden age of that ended. But so there’s this same kind of structure.

And then within that structure you get sort of the Greek version of gigantomachy.

Fr. Andrew: Which, again, everybody, that’s a wonderful term that means a war against giants, a war with giants.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and there’s several things here we’re going to talk about a little more that we’ve brushed into here and there. But so the way this happens is that in the Greek story there’s sort of this chthonic Gaia. So Gaia is the earth.

Fr. Andrew: Earth, and chthonic is the underworld/Hades.

Fr. Stephen: And we’ve talked about how in Hebrew, haaretz can mean the earth or the land; it can also mean the underworld. The same is true with Gaia; there’s sort of a chthonic version of her, because it’s not just the earth but all the holes and pits and caves and caverns. So she’s angry because the Titans were her kids.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which the Olympians threw them into Tartarus.

Fr. Stephen: And so to get revenge she first brings forth the giants, so there’s this war against the giants.

Fr. Andrew: And I should point out here, everybody, if you actually look at the Greek mythological sources that talk about these giants, they do not make the consistent or even persistent claim that they are physically tall. The thing that really seems to make, be, how they’re actually described is that they’re really fierce and aggressive and really tough warriors is their deal, not that they’re super big. Just a note.

Fr. Stephen: And, as another note, the high altar of Pergamon, which was a victory altar to Zeus, that in his letter to the Church at Pergamon in Revelation St. John refers to as the throne of Satan, which is now in a Berlin museum—the Brits didn’t get that one in time—has this gigantomachy; that’s what’s depicted on the side of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you can Google it up, people, and see—or use your favorite search engine, AltaVista, maybe—and then you can see pictures of it on the marbles and stuff that are associated with that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, use Publisher Clearinghouse’s search engine, you get free sweepstakes entries every time you search.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Is there anybody out there who still uses Archie and Gopher, please write in. I’d love to you hear from you ancient peoples! [Laughter] Wow. Deep, deep…

Fr. Stephen: So after the gigantomachy sort of doesn’t work, she brings forth Typhon, who’s the great beast who comes up out of the sea…

Fr. Andrew: I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before, but more on that later.

Fr. Stephen: What, beasts out of the sea?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And Typhon is described as being this weird hodge-podge of other creatures. And he’s sort of the ultimate expression of the wrath of the Titans. Anyway, that beast is sort of defeated by the Olympians, which is sort of their ultimate establishment of order. He’s sort of this chaos monster out of the sea.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like in Hesiod, Typhon is the son of Gaia and Tartarus. Like, wow. What an unholy union that is! That’s worst!

Fr. Stephen: The underworld and hell got together and brought you this! [Laughter] But this Typhon imagery, as we alluded to, is what is getting picked up by Daniel and Revelation, and what’s happening there is that they’re taking story and inverting it, because from the perspective of the Greeks and the Romans, the Olympians are the good guys, and the Olympians are basically them. And so, no, we are—they are, in their minds—we Romans, we Greeks, represent the triumph of order of chaos, good order, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, you see the exact same thing in Norse mythology. So Odin, the all-father—but, I mean, he wasn’t always the all-father, once again—he defeats this great primeval giant, Ymir, with his brothers Vili and Ve, and as I think I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, when they stab in the toe, a flood of blood comes out and largely drowns all the giants in the world. So, again, there’s gigantomachy, there’s the destruction of monsters, to set up these gods to set up the ones who are really in charge and are the good guys. I mean, it’s the same; really, it’s the same story over and over again, just with a little bit of different details.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so what Daniel is saying through his vision and its interpretation, what St. John is saying through his vision and its interpretation, is: No, you guys are the monster.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Are we the baddies?”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you guys think you’re the ones establishing order and justice, but you’re the monsters; you’re chaos. You’re destruction. You’re worshiping it, you’re following after it, you represent it in the world. And you’re going to be defeated and you’re going to be judged by the actual God, who created the universe and will bring justice to the universe, unless you do something real quick… [Laughter] And you even see in Revelation—again, this would be multiple episodes at some point to go through any of the stuff in Revelation, but it’s worth comparing the harlot and the beast to Gaia and Typhon.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: And the relationship there.

Fr. Andrew: That’s… Wow, that’s fun. All right, well, after that little cataloguing of demons and such from the ancient world, we’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the second half of the podcast! We’re talking idolatry; we’re talking demons, gods, all that awful stuff. Before we get into the next part of what we’re going to be discussing, we actually have a couple callers that we want to talk to, and the first one is Matt. So, Matt, are you there on the line?

Matt: I am. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: I can hear you. Welcome, Matt, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Matt: Okay, so sacrifice has been discussed quite a bit on this show and the nature of it, and one of the main messages is that sacrifice is, at its core, a meal that you share with your god, and it’s like a hospitality thing to improve relations. And so, with that understanding, is it sinful at this point in history, post-crucifixion, -resurrection, with the presence of the Eucharist, for a Christian to still sacrifice food to Yahweh?

Fr. Andrew: So, you’ve put it just ambiguously enough at the end there that it’s like: Well, it depends what you mean. And we’ll talk about why that’s true. So, I mean, the Eucharist is a sacrifice of food to Yahweh, because it’s bread and wine that we’re sharing with God. And this is commanded by Christ, when he said, “Do this as my remembrance.”

But I think maybe underneath your question is sort of the issue of: Is it okay to sacrifice other foods, like barbecue—which, if you’re where I’m from, that is pulled pork with basically vinegar on it—or whatever else it might be. And there is a good answer to that, and I’m going to… I think I know what he’s going to say, but I’m going to punt it over to Fr. Stephen to hear what he has to say about that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so the key is that the Torah makes clear you’re not allowed to sacrifice whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want.

Matt: Oh, it does? Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s not just a question of hospitality, but it’s… I mean, we’re talking about hospitality as an overarching category in the ancient world. So obviously different cultures had different rules for sacrifice. Like, they could sacrifice people. But the Torah was very strict about that. You read the instructions and it’s, you know, this many of this type of animal, on this day, in this one place, by this officiant, or the Passover: one lamb per household, unless your household is small, then you can share with another small household, etc., etc. But there’s very strict rules. And that’s a general thing about worship, all the way through the Torah. And sacrifice obviously is the central act of worship. Nadab and Abihu decided to innovate with their offering of incense, and it didn’t go so well for them.

So I think the same broad principle would apply today, that when Christ says, as Fr. Andrew said, “Do this as my remembrance,” we have this tradition of worship we’ve received. Trying to sort of riff off of that or innovate from that would be a bad thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. The other thing I would add, by the way, and this was one of the things that I learned which was really fascinating to me—if you listen to our episode that we did about Abraham—I think we titled it “From Ur of the Chaldees” or something like that?—we talk about the incident where Abraham is called by God to offer up Isaac on the mountain. And before he can do that, of course, God stops him, and a ram is given as the sacrifice instead. And one of the things that Fr. Stephen pointed out was that this was interpreted by Second Temple Judaism and by—well, not by Second Temple Judaism so much maybe… Oh, no, no, correct me in this—but certainly by the early Church, as an indication that animal sacrifice was being provided by God until such time as the One who is the sort of true and final Isaac—that is to say, Christ—comes and is sacrificed. So it would be a kind of a Judaizing thing—in other words, acting like the Messiah has not come—if we were to offer up other kinds of things on the altar, other than what he has commanded us in the new covenant. Did I get that right, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: About—yeah. There was an early connection of the Messiah to Isaac, particularly in terms of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah that led to that broader interpretation, that the sacrificial rituals in the old covenant were sort of for that purpose for that time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that Christ is the final fulfillment of all of that, and so therefore—he’s given us himself to offer on his altar. Why would you offer something else.

Matt: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s even canons against things like offering milk and honey, which you know if someone makes a rule against it, that means that someone was doing that. [Laughter] So there are even comments saying: Don’t do this other thing as well. Does that make sense, Matt?

Matt: Yeah. Well, I’m curious. Do you recall where those canons are?

Fr. Andrew: It’s in one of the Ecumenical Councils, but I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Matt: Very good answer. Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for calling, Matt. Okay, we’ve got Bill calling. Bill, are you there?

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

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you, Bill. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Bill: Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s up?

Bill: My question has to do with what modern Pentecostals call glossolalia and if that has any relation to the ancients’ gods of the nations. So, a bit of backstory: I was raised Pentecostal. I was taught that glossolalia was a sign of the Holy Spirit speaking through you, and I was deeply disturbed when I found out that other religions have the same manifestation as well. My understanding is that it’s referenced in Greco-Roman religious literature, modern African and Indian—I’m sorry, Indonesian. Maybe Indian, I don’t actually know. Mormonism, I do know, though. And I don’t know what to make of this phenomenon. So the question: Is there an idea or practice in the ancient world of spiritual babbling or speaking a divine language as a kind of worshiping or secret knowledge or communion with their gods? And, if so, what’s going on there?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Well, I mean, the short answer is: Yes. Ecstatic utterances definitely go with ancient paganism. I actually want to comment. This is a really interesting subject for me. So, not to sell my book too much, but I wrote a book called Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, and there’s a whole chapter on Pentecostalism. And one of the things that I discovered as I was researching it—because I didn’t know this until I started researching it—is that the first Pentecostals, late 19th century, actually their understanding of the gift of tongues was like what you actual see at Pentecost in the book of Acts, which is to say, they were being given the miraculous ability to speak foreign languages. Or, I mean, you can also interpret what happens in Acts as being like the Star Trek universal translator: the apostles speak and everyone simply hears his own language, which is the language that’s actually used there in Acts.

But in any event, early Pentecostals, they said they were speaking Swedish or Chinese. Those are actual examples. And so they—this is related; I’ll get to why! So they sent out missionaries all over the world, ready to—because they believed they were given this gift to do this one final great evangelism before the end of the world was going to come. So they sent out missionaries, but of course it didn’t take long for the missionaries to realize: Hey, wait a minute, I’m not actually speaking Swedish or Chinese, or if I am these people don’t seem to understand me. And they came back, and within the space of a decade, the theology of what speaking in tongues was shifted within Pentecostalism from being that, which generally is called xenoglossia, which is the gift of foreign languages, to glossolalia, this sort of ecstatic utterance.

So the reason why this is relevant to what you asked—because you asked what’s going on there, and people often ask: Is there something demonic in Pentecostal tongue-speaking? Is that one of the questions maybe on your mind?

Bill: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so here’s my take on it, and this is my take; this is not the ruling of an Ecumenical Council or even what I was taught in seminary. I don’t even remember it being addressed when I was in seminary. My take is this: is that there’s a number of possibilities. One is that it’s a purely psychological phenomenon. People can enter into states of altered consciousness and begin to speak ecstatic utterances. Like, this is a thing and you can actually track it scientifically, with empirical instruments, and they can actually see that the brain starts working in a different way. So I think that that’s one possibility.

Another possibility is— And I’m not saying that it’s one of these; it could be any or all of them, depending on who and where and when you’re talking about. Another possibility is utter fraud, just totally fraud: people making it up. Another possibility is that it’s people that are honestly deceived, and maybe they’re deceived by having the psychological experience and maybe they’re deceived by actually interacting with demonic beings. So I think that all of those are possibilities.

One of the things that tells me that it’s not proper for Orthodox Christians, aside from the fact that you simply don’t see it in Orthodox Christianity, although I’ve heard about some possibilities in certain corners of Church history, is that, in many cases within Pentecostal tongue-speaking, you’ve got people teaching other people how to practice it. I don’t know if you had that experience as a Pentecostal yourself. “Just make some sounds, and eventually it will kind of unleash.”

Bill: They tried; it didn’t really happen.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, and sometimes they’ll try to instigate it in other people, like make them start. And then the other thing—this is what’s interesting for me as a kind of amateur linguist, and I emphasize the word “amateur”—is that I’ve noticed that tongue-speakers seem to use, largely speaking, the phonemes—that is to say, the sounds of language, like the vowels and the consonants together—the phonemes that are native to the language that they already speak. So largely tongue-speakers are not making sounds that are foreign to them, which, if you’ve ever tried to learn another language, you know that usually that other language has sounds that you’re not used to making. Like my favorite is the Arabic vowel ayin. There is nothing in English like that vowel, and it’s one that trips up a lot of people, and I’m sure I just said it wrong. But I’ve noticed that tongue-speakers tend to speak in tongues with the phonemes that they already know, which suggests to me that there is at least a strong psychological element to what’s going on there.

I don’t know as much about this in the ancient world. I do know that glossolalia does exist in pagan religions, so I don’t know, Fr. Stephen, if you know about that in a way that I don’t. It’s just that something that existed, and sometimes was associated with oracles and stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’ve got to “Um, actually…” you a little bit—

Fr. Andrew: Okay, go for it.

Fr. Stephen: —because you kind of went full materialist. Do you realize that?

Fr. Andrew: Did I? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like, if they hook you up to a brain meter and detect something, that means there’s nothing spiritual about it?

Fr. Andrew: No, that’s not what I meant at all.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, because that’s kind of what it sounded like!

Fr. Andrew: No, no, no, no. No, I’m saying it is something that can be observed. That there are things to observe when you hook people up.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, okay. I’m just saying, is all.

Fr. Andrew: No. Thank you for that opportunity to clarify. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I don’t have a reputation for being nice. I think most of the time there’s a demonic element to it, but that takes different forms. That doesn’t mean I think people are 99% of the time demonically possessed, like Pentecostals are all demonically possessed, because there’s other ways demons can be involved in temptation and in other things, aside from just straight-up possessing people. And I think the really dangerous part, as you know, the ecstatic experience, the production of the ecstatic experience by techniques is a commonplace in ancient magic and ritual. And ecstatic utterances are one of the earmarks of that. And so anything that puts you into an altered state of consciousness—it doesn’t have to be psychedelics, for example… Oh, what the heck. I can say whatever I want, I guess. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow, here we go!

Fr. Stephen: People who have spent time in Evangelicalism know, for example, that if you keep people on their feet for a certain amount of time and you have them sing repetitive prayer choruses, praise choruses of a certain length, you can produce an ecstatic experience. Everyone will walk out of there swearing that they felt the Holy Spirit. And the people who organize those things know that and engineer it.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, I used to do big concerts and that kind of thing, and that kind of technique is absolutely involved in the kind of experiences that people have, at rock concerts, at plays, at whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you can have them at sporting events. But, again, regardless of how you engineer it, whether it’s with pharmaceuticals or whether it’s with those kind of techniques, you’re putting someone into an altered state of consciousness, which thereby makes them spiritually vulnerable. It makes them vulnerable to spiritual deception; it makes them vulnerable in various ways. There’s also the whole issue—and this is really what we’re going to be talking about for most of the rest of the show—anything spiritual in which you are told to apply a technique, you should run from like fire. That’s where you’re told, “Here’s this technique. Follow this technique, and it will produce these results.” That’s not Christianity. That is another kind of religious experience.

So the reason I said 99% is that there’s always this one percent of weird things. Like, if you’ve read enough of the Bible, you know there’s these weird things, like where Saul goes to the city of prophets and rips off all his clothes and flops around on the ground, prophesying; or Ezekiel running around naked. So there’s these weird cases. So I’m not going to say that there hasn’t been some case in the history of the Church where a Christian received a vision from God and that was accompanied by some kind of ecstatic utterance. That’s why I have to leave that one percent open. But even if we accept that that happened in that one percent, or 0.01% or whatever it is, of cases, that’s the fringe and the extreme, not the norm. We don’t read about that happening to Saul and so we say, “Hey, when I go to church, when I go to liturgy this week, I’m going to strip off all my clothes and roll around on the floor!” Please don’t! We don’t do that, because we accept this is this weird kind of extreme thing.

And that alone, I think, is enough to say to the Pentecostal practice, where they’ve taken that which would be, at best, this kind of extreme or fringe or rare, exceptional spiritual occurrence and tried to make it the norm. Some of them even teach if you haven’t done it, you’re not saved. I mean, that’s as norm as you can get. They’re taking something out at the fringe—hi, Jonathan Pageau—and moving it to the center. [Laughter] And you’re not going to have a good time when you do that. So, yeah, that’s what I have to say about that. It’s dangerous for that reason and is not something to be pursued. There are plenty of things that we have to pursue in our Christian life and work toward, and I don’t see how that can take precedence over the giving of alms, prayer, fasting, worship, prayer with our families. Pursuing a kind of esoteric experience seems to be a waste of time better spent elsewhere, repenting, et al.

Fr. Andrew: At least. Does that make sense to you, Bill?

Bill: It does. If I might ask real quickly, my priest is also a former Pentecostal who did this before and now thinks that it was more of a hypnotic experience, which just seems… It might be true, but it just seems like too much of a materialist explanation, and I’ve been really looking for an Orthodox understanding of this that doesn’t lean too heavily into pure materialism. So are there any good resources—aside from Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, which I now obviously have to check out—that goes over the spiritual understanding of this, both contemporary but also in ancient religions in the ancient world? Priority on the first, but the second is also really interesting.

Fr. Andrew: I’m not aware of any book that does what you’re describing. The only other text that I’m aware of that deals with tongue-speaking and Pentecostalism in general, in any kind of focused way… Now, maybe there’s a scholarly thing I haven’t read; I don’t know. So Fr. Seraphim Rose has a book called Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future which came out in the 1970s, or at least that’s when he wrote it. And he very, very, very much all-out says, “This is a demonic spirit. It’s demonic possession.” So he gives it as a very—I would regard it as a kind of extreme reading. I would agree with Fr. Stephen that I don’t think it’s a matter of being possessed by the devil necessarily. I mean, maybe in some cases that is what is going on, but Fr. Seraphim takes a very strong tack against it. But at the time, also, frankly, the movement was quite different in his period than it is now. It’s really mainstreamed in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. Father, do you know of anything that really deals with this, like Bill is describing?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, not off the top of my head. If I find something good, I’ll pass it along to Fr. Andrew and he can post it somewhere on the interwebs, on his tweet-talks or whatever.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I quit Twitter. I’m a Twitter quitter. All right, well, I hope that that’s helpful to you, Bill. Thank you very much for calling this evening.

All right, well, rolling right along, now we’re going to talk about idolatry and how it actually works. What exactly is going on with idolatry? And to start with that, we’re going to talk about things that are not actually idolatry but get called it. Right, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Idols, how do they work?” Yeah, first we have to do some ground-clearing, because we have a bunch of ideas in our heads. We briefly mentioned this last time, but we have these ideas in our head. A lot of them come from—frankly, as we’re going to see, a lot of them come from other discussions. They come from, for example, intra-Protestant issues, where people are wanting to categorize things as idolatry so that they can then condemn them as idolatry, even if they’re not sort of idolatry proper, so you get kind of some weird definitions, like all of a sudden everybody’s a Pelagian; now all of a sudden everything is an idol. [Laughter] Who could I be talking about?

Fr. Andrew: These idle accusations of idolatry… Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Wow.

Fr. Andrew: I know. It’s getting toward my bedtime.

Fr. Stephen: I’d like to apologize to our more sensitive listeners for that comment. [Laughter] So one of the—and we mentioned this last time, but one of the sort of classic bad definitions is that you worship a picture of a thing instead of the thing. And, really, you only get this argument from even very modern iconoclasm, not iconoclasm proper in the eighth and ninth centuries, but, like, modern Protestant iconoclasm usually, which is the idea that, well, if you have an icon, if you have an image of Jesus, if you have a picture of Jesus, and you venerate that, you kiss it, you reverence it, you bow to it—you’re bowing to the picture instead of to Jesus.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the picture gets between you and him kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which, as I’ve probably—I’m sure I’ve commented on this show at some point before, that’s like seeing a guy pick up the picture of his wife from his desk and kiss it and saying, “He’s having an affair with a coated, two-ply piece of Bristol paper! He loves that picture, not his wife! I saw him making out with it!” [Laughter] You’d think that person was a loon; you’d think that person was an absolute loon. Everybody would instantly know: somebody picks up and kisses a picture of his wife and kids, it’s because he loves his wife and kids, not the picture.

By the way, the original iconoclasts, what they were arguing about was whether icons should be venerated the same way you venerate the cross and the gospel book. So they were talking about what category of holy things icons were in; they were not talking about this kind of silliness, that they thought people were worshiping pictures instead of what they were a picture of.

Fr. Andrew: And I don’t think any religious person, no matter how actually idolatrous they might be—I don’t that any religious person actually says, “Oh, this picture is my god.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, like the pagan gods: if the pagan gods thought you were worshiping the idol instead of them, you’d think they’d be upset.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. “Hey, I’m right over here!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that’s not how this works; that’s not how any of this works. So you then also get— I mean, relatedly, we should say as an addendum to that, you also just get making a picture of God, having a picture of God at all. So any movie where there’s an actor portraying Jesus is automatically idolatry, or just having an image, sometimes even a cross, in a worship space, that’s automatically idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, and these are real positions that people actually have, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but clearly, if you take that into the ancient world, there were images in the tabernacle, but that was not idolatrous worship, like, definitionally, that was opposed to the idolatrous worship of the nations. A more common, and rightfully so since it’s at least a little more sophisticated, is the idea that idolatry is about people worshiping hunks of wood or stone.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this seems to have some basis in stuff that actually is in the Bible, a certain reading of stuff that’s in the Bible.

Well, we have a passage, and this is one of the passages, I think, that gets used for this, and I’m just going to read it real quick. This is from Isaiah 44; this is verses 9-17.

All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his companions shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are only human. Let them assemble; let them stand forth. They shall be terrified; they shall be put to shame together.

The ironsmith takes a cutting tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it with hammers and works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry, and his strength fails; he drinks no water and is faint. The carpenter stretches a line; he marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house.

He cuts down cedars, or he chooses a cypress tree, or an oak, and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar, and then rain nourishes it, and it becomes fuel for a man. He takes a part of it and warms himself. He kindles a fire and breaks bread. Also, he makes a god and worships it. He makes it an idol and falls down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire; over the half he eats meat: he roasts it and is satisfied. Also, he warms himself and says, “Aha, I am warm; I have seen the fire.” And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god.”

So the one reading of this is: this guy made this thing and that’s his god.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s worshiping this piece of wood or metal.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s what the Bible is talking about here. But that’s not actually what this is all about. What is going on in this passage, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Right, not if we read it carefully. And so we start out with talking about these witnesses. So these witnesses show up, and they tell you about this god; they tell you about Baal and all his escapades and about how he went and defeated Yam and he defeated Lotan and totally won, went into the underworld, fought death, totally won again, and then builds his house. Tells you the whole story. Now, the people who tell you these stories weren’t there, didn’t see it happen, don’t actually know anything about it, but they’re repeating the story.

And so this guy says, “Oh great, I’m going to worship Baal now.” So he goes and either he gets metal and he is a craftsman; gets the tools, hammers the metal, works the metal, working over the coals. Or the carpenter goes and he cuts down a mighty tree, cuts the wood, and goes and he makes himself a fire and makes himself some food and he warms himself and takes care of himself while he works on it, and finally he’s got this idol now and says that this god is going to deliver him.

Now, notice how much time Isaiah spends describing this whole process, felling all of these trees and the different kinds of trees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the hero of this passage, so to speak, is the craftsman.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s describing the craftsman’s deeds. So he’s heard about all these great deeds of Baal which, by the way, nobody was there and we don’t have any actual eyewitness testimony, but, be that as it may, then he goes and does all these things, all these very impressive things, and he takes care of himself while he’s doing it and provides for himself. He plants this tree, the rain nourishes it and it grows, and he cuts it down and all of these things. And now he’s got this little statue, and this little statue is going to do what for him? [Laughter]

He is way more powerful than this statue, because the statue couldn’t cut down the tree, the statue couldn’t make the tree grow, the statue couldn’t make bread for him—the statue did nothing for him; he did everything for the statue. But now he thinks somehow the statue is going to save him or help him or…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the point being also that if this god that he’s worshiping is so great, with this statue, then why is it that he has to do all this work in order to make this possible? He’s clearly more powerful than the god, because he can do all these things! The god can’t even—if his statue falls over, he can’t even pick it up.

Fr. Stephen: Right, as Isaiah says in another place—it’s Jeremiah. It’s Jeremiah who says you have to then put fasteners down, because if it tips over, it can’t stand itself back up. But it’s going to give you victory in battle, sure thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Fr. Stephen: So this is about the weakness and the powerlessness of the god is the criticism that’s taking place here. It’s not implying that he’s actually worshiping the piece of wood. He knows it’s a piece of wood: he cut it. He’s using that piece of wood to worship this god, and it’s that god that’s a worthless one, as we talked about at the beginning. So, yeah, there’s… We could sum up a bunch of these, a bunch of these sort of bad definitions under the category of just physical objects being used in religious ways.

Fr. Andrew: I think this, to me, is one of the unspoken doctrines of at least major parts of Protestantism, is holiness does not reside in physical objects. That’s the way I summarize it in my head, and I think that’s what it is. So if someone makes the claim that they do, well, that’s idolatry. And so it could be that you’re using the object in a particular religious way, that you’re making a pilgrimage to the object, that you’re giving honor to the object, or whatever it might be; it’s all kind of grouped together in the sense of: No, don’t do woo-woo stuff with these holy-looking things, because that’s idolatry. So that’s another kind of category of that. But there’s a lot—it’s clear from the Bible that physical objects can have holiness associated with them and religious things are done with them. This happens a bunch of times, both in the Old and New Testaments.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and in some Puritan extremes you get that the sacraments are somehow idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, wow.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’re material things, and if you treat them as anything other than just a kind of analogy or something, if you have any view of any reality to the sacraments or what they do, that is leading into idolatry for some extreme end of that point of view, which again makes no sense in terms of the actually existing idolatry in the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: In the ancient world. We’re going to get to that in just a second.

Fr. Stephen: So the last sort of view is sort of less a definition of idolatry and more a way in which idolatry is talked about, which is a kind of analogical way, or at least sophisticated folks would acknowledge that it’s an analogy to ancient idolatry; they wouldn’t say, “This is what ancient idolatry was,” but they would say, “This is a modern form of idolatry, related by analogy.” And that’s that it’s sort of material goods, the good things of the material world, the good things of the world, are—

Fr. Andrew: Right, so stuff you care about, stuff you focus on…

Fr. Stephen: The stuff you like, yeah, that’s your idol. So, as I said earlier to you today, if you have your Bell Biv DeVoe poster on your wall, Michael Bivins is your idol, and…

Fr. Andrew: You know, for my graduating class at the prom which I did not go to—I sort of attended a party that protested the prom, because that’s the kind of 17-year-old I was—

Fr. Stephen: That checks out.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday” was the theme for our class. So you might be… But, no, I’m not a Bell Biv DeVoe fan!

Fr. Stephen: Oh. Well, I guess that’s better than having the theme be Poison, I guess. Allow me to be the first person in AFR history to say over their airwaves, “You can’t trust a big butt and a smile.” [Laughter]

Anyway, so this is just… Anything you like, any of the goods in this world that you like, that you care about, that are important to you, even if they haven’t been on American Idol, then, you know, that is in some way idolatry. And this is not totally wrong. There is a sense in which this is correct, and we’re going to come back to that at the very end of the third half tonight.

Fr. Andrew: So hang on.

Fr. Stephen: But the casual way it’s bandied about is showing a bunch of people with Plato brain. And that’s not Play-doh brain, like the stuff you ate when you were three even though you weren’t supposed to—

Fr. Andrew: Not me. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —but Plato the philosopher. And there’s this idea from Plato that distinction implies opposition. So if you have more than one thing, they’re automatically to some degree opposed to each other, so if God is the ultimate good, anything you like other than God, anything you care about, anything you invest in other than God, is somehow taking away from your love and care and investment in God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is the basis also for one of the objections about asking the help of saints. Like: “Why do you need to spend time on that? Just ask God! You don’t need to take away from your request to God.” It’s interesting how it plays out in almost exactly the same way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s just Plato brain, man; he was wrong about that. More than one thing can be good; more than one thing can be bad.

Fr. Andrew: Plato-derangement syndrome.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. More than one thing can be good and more than one thing can be bad, but you have to have good things in a proper order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, in the right way. So how does idolatry actually, then, work. What is the technique—because it is a technique, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s a practice. It’s something you do. You idolatry, you do an idolatry—no. [Laughter]

So we’ve talked before—a little bit of review, catch up again, of the idea that an idol is, strictly speaking, a body for a god or a body for a spirit. And that’s true in a couple of senses. So the most sort of, pardon the pun, wooden sense, is that you have this spirit that is inside it, sort of indwelling it as a body. We’ve talked about the ritual for the opening of the nostrils that allows the spirit to go into the idol, so it is dwelling within it.

Fr. Andrew: Like Robotech.

Fr. Stephen: Ghost in the machine. But it’s also, and more importantly, true in the broader sense of body that we’ve talked about on this show, that sees the body as a nexus of powers and potentialities.

Fr. Andrew: So it is like Robotech.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, I was trying to get you to acknowledge this.

Fr. Stephen: Which Macross season are we talking about?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, you’ve lost me now!

Fr. Stephen: I think it’s more like the motorcycles and the planes. Anyway. Although the Zentradi are kind of giants… This may require an episode. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh. Dun-dun-dun-dunn!

Fr. Stephen: So that means that what we’re doing—well, not what we’re doing, hopefully, but what someone is doing when they’re making an idol is they’re creating a hypostasis; they’re creating a localization for the god in question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that the worshiper can interact with the god and the god can interact with the worshiper, through this thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so for… We talked before; we were talking about hypostases and how that works and there is a pagan conception of it, that one of the core disjuncts between the God of Israel and the pagan gods is that the pagan gods can have hypothetically an infinite number of hypostases.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just keep making idols.

Fr. Stephen: Because you can make them, yeah. Whereas the difference is that Yahweh the God of Israel has eternally existed in three hypostases and that’s it and you can’t make them and you can’t… Right. But so you’re making this body, this localization of the god, and that’s why you get not just sort of an identification of, for example, Artemis of the Ephesians, but Artemis of the Ephesians has a particular idol, a particular image, that looks very different [from] the Artemis you’d find in the Peloponnes, very different. So it’s actually a unique and local sort of form of the god, where a particular people—whether that be a family, a clan, a tribe, a city, whatever social unit—can then sort of—it’s an access point for them to that spirit, where they can go and ritually, then, share hospitality, communion: commune with that spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so if you’re thinking now, listener, about the golden calf incident, where Moses is up on Sinai, and “wow, he’s been gone a long time; I guess he’s gone,” and then Aaron leads the people in worshiping—in making and then worshiping the golden calf. This is an attempt to worship Yahweh—their true God—by means of this image, because, notice, when it’s presented in front of everybody, Aaron says, “Here’s the God who brought you up out of Egypt.” He’s not saying, “This golden calf brought you up out of Egypt,” but essentially: “Let’s use this golden calf in an idolatrous way in an attempt to interact with Yahweh, our God.” So it’s trying to worship their God—the only God worthy of worship—by idolatrous means. That’s what’s going on there. That’s why he says, “Here’s the God that brought you up out of Egypt.”

But if you take a close look at all the things that God does tell them to do in terms of worshiping him, there is no point at which any object anywhere—in the tabernacle, in the Temple—not even the ark of the covenant is described as being a body of Yahweh. In other words, there is no idol that God commands them to make and use, although there is a really interesting note about the ark of the covenant, Father, that you brought up when we were briefing about this earlier today. Why don’t you tell everybody about that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is—I mean, this is something that especially stands out. So some people seem to think that the ark of the covenant was, like, God lived inside of it, like it was a box that God lived in, and—no. Not that.

Fr. Andrew: Well, no. I mean, how many times does it say he does not dwell in stuff made by hands?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, let alone a box being carried around on poles. And… Yeah, I won’t go down that rabbit-trail now. Self-discipline.

Fr. Andrew: I do see Indiana Jones in my head right now.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, that’s not where I was going at all.

Fr. Andrew: “It’s beautiful!” Sorry, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I don’t think that was supposed to be God. I don’t know who that was supposed to be, a bunch of demons it looked like came out of there.

Fr. Andrew: I think it was supposed to be the angel of death or something like that in that film. That film scared the snot out of me when I was a little kid. Boy!

Fr. Stephen: Ah, nothing like seeing Nazis’ face melt.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I mean, if Indiana Jones wasn’t punching Nazis, he was melting their faces. [Laughter] Anyway.

So, where we were going with this though was that the ark of the covenant is not sort of this one-off item that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. There were similar kinds of—it’s similar to a kind of barque, a kind of ceremonial boat, a ritual boat that was either carried or sent on an actual boat down the Nile in Egypt. And the key difference, though, is that those—you may remember the ark has the two cherubim with their wings extended over the center—the barques would have two goddesses, usually Isis and Nephthys, who were winged; sometimes they were just depicted in bird form, but sometimes they were sort of humanoid women with wings, extended across the middle. But then the idol of the god or, if this was used on a tomb or that kind of thing, the image of the dead pharaoh, who of course was a god—the image of the god would be between the wings. And in the case of the ark of the covenant, there’s nothin’ there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s a very similar shape: you have the winged spirits on either end, but in the middle—nothing. No idol.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no idol. So the ark of the covenant was a constant pointer that there was not actually an idol there.

Fr. Andrew: And wasn’t it—I can’t remember who it was—was it Antiochus Epiphanes, when he invaded the Temple…?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, you’re thinking of Pompey.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He invades the Temple and shoves his way into the holy of holies, and then there’s no idol there, and he’s like: “What’s going on? What’s this all about?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s nothing there. And he told the Romans, and that started this huge fascination with Judaism among upper-class Romans, because they decided that the Jews must worship their god sola mentis, only with their minds—

Fr. Andrew: With their minds!

Fr. Stephen: —so that made them seem very sophisticated and strange.

Fr. Andrew: So philosophical, that Judaism, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, yeah. And a lot of those people were St. Paul’s first Gentile converts later, so that all worked out okay.

Fr. Andrew: That worked out!

Fr. Stephen: It didn’t work out so well for Pompey, long-term, but anyway, that’s another story. So idols, then, are something that’s used to localize a god, meaning it’s a sort of spiritual technology used for purposes of worship. So what kind of forms, then, to idols take? Well, obviously statuary is really obvious. That’s probably your typical idol. That’s what people think of when people think of idols. But also very common, probably—maybe even more common in the ancient world—were sacred trees and poles, Asherah’s being the most famous pole biblically, probably.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, usually within some kind of grove.

Fr. Stephen: [Inaudible] Family show. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Some kind of grove, or sometimes like a little walled garden or grove.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you would segment off a sacred space around it. And we made a discovery during our pre-show briefing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, yes, this is amazing.

Fr. Stephen: Because I was drinking some of the bold and refreshing Sunny Delight, and we discovered that it is entirely possible that Sunny D may be an idol, because on the side of the bottle as I perused it was the legend of Sunny D, talking about how, in the summer of 1963, two men stood in Florida in an orange grove, perhaps a sacred orange grove, and there they took a vow—

Fr. Andrew: An oath.

Fr. Stephen: —to make the boldest, most refreshing citrus drink that the world had ever seen. And that’s what produced Sunny D. So it is entirely possible that Sunny D is an idol. I don’t know for what god; you figure it out. But just a tidbit. You can verify that—

Fr. Andrew: Blood oath for the blood orange.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you can verify that on the side of any current bottle of Sunny Delight. And since it’s cold and flu season, get your vitamin C, kids. [Laughter]

So in addition to the sacred trees and poles, citrus and otherwise, another very, very common form of idol or image in the ancient world that we don’t often think of is amulets or sort of—it’s an amulet if you’re wearing it around your neck or around your hand, but small insets on the insides or outsides of buildings, sort of medallion insets carved, are incredibly common throughout the ancient world. One of the most common ones in the Greek and Roman worlds was to have a Medusa head, an image of a Medusa head—which may seem weird, to walk around with that around your neck, or if you’re a Jew in Galilee, to put that on the outside of your synagogue, as many of the Galilean synagogues did—they had multiple Medusa heads facing in different directions. But the idea here was—

Fr. Andrew: And that was bad, by the way. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was not a good thing that they did that on those synagogues. Now, note that they had them on the outside, not the inside, but still. It was Galilee of the Gentiles for a reason. But so in the story of Medusa, Medusa is this priestess who is super beautiful and a little bit vain and so gets cursed by the gods, because they do that, and so she becomes the Medusa so no one now can look at her without getting turned to stone and dying. So one of the common things in ritual as a whole—we won’t go too deep into this, but is that you reenact or you depict something in order to ward it off. This is a real rabbit-trail, so I’m not going down it, but this is actually how Aristotle’s Poetics works and makes sense in terms of his understanding of Greek tragedy.

So Medusa is sort of this image of someone who had something really bad happen to her; she got cursed. So the image of Medusa was seen to ward off ill fate and curses that other people might direct at you. So you sort of depict a curse to ward off a curse was sort of the general idea, but there were amulets and that kind of thing depicting all kinds of things for these various reasons that were used in these sort of idolatrous ways as sort of an access point to spiritual powers.

Fr. Andrew: The thing that this reminded me of, like having Medusa heads on the outside of buildings to ward off evil—the thing it reminded me of actually was gargoyles. And so I looked up—I was like: Okay, what is the deal with gargoyles? And it seems that originally gargoyles, even on the outside—and we’re used to them being on Gothic cathedrals, but actually gargoyle heads—particularly heads—were also depicted on the outsides of other buildings, too; it was not just churches. So here’s what I discovered.

Originally, most gargoyles were just the head and the neck of a dragon, and later on you get the kind of bat-like, human-bat, were-bat—there you go—a were-bat-looking thing, but initially it’s just heads and necks of dragons, and this seems to come from a seventh century or so legend about St. Romanus of Rouen in France, that he defeated a dragon that was terrorizing the people by making use of a cross to defeat it. And so they dragged the body back, and they were going to burn the whole thing, which they did, but the head and the neck, because it had been sort of so galvanized by the fire of the dragon did not burn. So St. Romanus hung up the neck and the head on the outside of the church, essentially as a warning to other demons, like: If you come around here, this is what’s going to happen to you.

So it is kind of weirdly parallel, but it’s more like putting the heads of your enemies on spikes outside the gate kind of thing than this sense that this face is going to, itself, ward off evil. But there is a certain kind of curious parallel to that. No, we do not have any gargoyles on the outside of our church here in Emmaus, just FYI.

Fr. Stephen: But if someone wants to donate one…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I’ll submit it to the parish council! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: See what the bishop thinks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so those being sort of the types of idols, then, where do you find said idols? And, of course, there’s some obvious ones. So you’ve got temples; that’s a big yeah. At the center point of a temple, as we’ve talked about before, you have the image of the god. But then you also will find them in shrines, and what separates a shrine from a temple is that shrines are generally at some natural feature—a cave, a grove, a spring, a valley, a cleft in the rock—some kind of a place that’s associated with spiritual activity, where there’s been some kind of spiritual encounter in the past, as we’ve talked about before. And then that will be a place where a shrine is built, because it’s seen as sort of being a natural access point, and that will usually have images brought into it.

And then probably the most important one, but the one we think about the least, is that at the center of every home, for example in the first century AD, you had a hearth. And at that hearth—that hearth, especially in Roman religion, was the most important part of the home.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Right in the middle.

Fr. Stephen: And that would be the place where you had what are sometimes called in the Bible “the household gods.” You would have the small idols or images of the gods of the family, the clan, the ancestors, the place were you lived, the place were you used to live, your trade guild—all sort of collected there, who were sort of your gods.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s important to mention: What is a hearth? I mean, that’s the place where all the food gets prepared. That’s the place you gather around for warmth. It really is a major, major place in your home. And probably there is eating going on right there as well, because the food is hot off the hearth and you eat it right there.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s a reason why Isaiah talked about kindling a fire for warmth, making food, and then there’s also idols.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because this all happens in one spot.

Fr. Stephen: And this is the gathering place for the family. This is where family interactions with each other, prayer, all that kind of thing is going to happen.

So the origin of what we would now call an icon corner or a prayer corner in an Orthodox house is with the purification of this: the removal of the idols from this family gathering place and the replacing of them with the icon of Christ, first and foremost, and then later also of the saints, who are not, as we’ve talked about many times, not just sub-ins for other pagan gods, but are the saints in glory who have actually replaced those fallen pagan gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, defeated them!

Fr. Stephen: And so I’m going to suggest that it’s interesting to note in 2 Corinthians 4:6, St. Paul talks about seeing the face of Jesus Christ. He speaks in a way that suggests that the Christians in Corinth have seen the face of Jesus Christ. And when I say he conveys that they’ve seen it, he’s using a reference to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ as a way of not materializing, but making—the idea that the power of God is made real for them in the face of Jesus Christ. That’s the place where they see it. And so, if they haven’t ever actually seen the face of Jesus Christ in Corinth, his argument doesn’t work so well.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because Jesus never went to Corinth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, anywhere near. So that implies to me that we’ve already got something like iconography, iconographic tradition starting. Now, if you want to say they weren’t replacing those—getting rid of those idols and replacing it with an icon of Christ in their home, that’s fine. If you want to say, hey, they were putting up icons of Christ in their synagogue, I won’t argue with you about that; that’s a fine alternative—I think less likely that the local synagogue would be putting up icons of Christ than that Christians would have them in their homes, but okay. But it is a strong argument that something’s happening there, I think.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we’ve just kind of gone through the hardware and the location, so to speak, of idolatry. And when we get back after our break in just a moment in the third half, we’re going to be talking about: What exactly does idolatry do to you? So we will right back after this break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: So, I like that commercial—it’s got a good beat—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, thank you.

Fr. Stephen: —I don’t know if you can dance to it, but I feel there was a missed opportunity: when you guys all introduced yourselves, that you didn’t say after that, “And by our powers combined… we are OrthodoxIntro.org!” [Laughter] I feel like…

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: That was a strike you should not have let past. You should have swung. You should have swung.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sorry. Well, yeah. Thank you for that note. [Laughter] All right, well, before we get to exactly what idolatry does for you, so to speak, or to you, really, we do have a caller. And Sal is calling in. So, Sal, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Sal: Thank you, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We hear you! What’s on your mind?

Sal: Awesome. I was reading in the Life of St. Macarius the Spirit Bearer and other Desert Fathers that when they go up to the desert, it seems to be that the demons don’t follow them there, but that’s kind of a demons’ hang-out. And they mentioned a lot of times, “Hey, we’ve got to get this Macarius out,” or whoever: “They’re making a paradise out of our desert!” And then you read in the Gospel where God says—or Christ says when you banish a demon they go into dry and deserted places. And you combine that thought with the idea of sending a goat out to the desert to Azazel. And then you combine that idea with the idea of Taos, New Mexico, having these weird spiritual dark vibes to it in the American Southwest, and all that type of stuff.

There seems to be a connection with the demonic and the actual, physical desert. Am I reading too much into that, or is that something that, yeah, that’s kind of where they chill?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that is definitely a thing. You get that in the Bible, and there’s that idea that they’re described as wandering spirits and that’s the place where you encounter them. I mean, if I recall correctly, when Jesus is tempted, he goes into a wilderness place, and he’s confronted by the devil. Father, what do you have to say about this?

Fr. Stephen: Well, to quote Val Kilmer’s greatest film role: “You don’t want to go to the desert.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Anybody who gets that reference, I’ll have to figure out some kind of prize to give them. Immediate family members are disqualified. So, yeah, the wilderness for Israel: we’ve talked about paradise, remember, is this walled garden that God has put in order and filled with life. And so the contrast with that, the opposite of that, is the desert, is the wilderness, which is not put in order and is full of death. There’s decaying animals, dead people, scavengers feeding on carrion. So it is, in a sense, the outside of Eden. That’s why you get, as you pointed out in St. Macarius, this kind of contrast. He, by going there, sort of brings God with him, the way Adam and Eve were supposed to bring God with them out of paradise into the world, and by doing that he’s turning the wilderness into a paradise. He’s setting it in order, filling it with spiritual life, and the demons don’t like that sort of happening in real time.

Now, we shouldn’t take that in a materialist sense, like: Don’t go to Arizona.

Fr. Andrew: I believe he singled out New Mexico earlier, actually.

Sal: I like Arizona.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but, I mean… Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, come on. Good television. Anyway. Yeah, so we shouldn’t take that kind of materialist— But it’s sort of like if a garden, an ordered, tendered garden that’s full of life and beauty, if that’s our idea of where God lives, then you can pretty quickly see how the wilderness, the desert, is going to be the antithesis of that, sort of a wasteland is the opposite of that.

But the response to that is not to just never go there; the response is to try to go there and bring God there, as the Desert Fathers did.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Sal? Hello?

Fr. Stephen: Speak to us, Sal.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I think we lost him.

Fr. Stephen: Who did this to you?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. Well, hopefully that makes some sense. I was looking at my instruments like: Did I just lose everybody? But then I heard your voice, and it was okay. Okay, well…

Fr. Stephen: That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ll take that in the Shakespearean sense of a romance, like The Tempest and that kind of thing. All right, well, hopefully that was helpful to Sal. So we’re going to take one more caller. We have Fr. Elijah calling. So, Fr. Elijah, are you there?

Fr. Elijah: I am here. Christ is in our midst!

Fr. Andrew: He is and ever shall be. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast, Father. What’s on your mind?

Fr. Elijah: I was fascinated. I was just listening with my family—

Fr. Andrew: I think we lost Father.

Fr. Stephen: Finally. Technical difficulties that aren’t mine.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there you go! [Laughter] All right, well, I’m going to try again. Fr. Elijah, are you there? We lost you for a second.

Oh, okay. Well, so if we can get him back, Matushka Trudi, just let us know if he comes back. I’ll just ask one more time. Fr. Elijah, are you there?

Fr. Andrew (echo): ...We lost you for a second.

Fr. Andrew: Are you there, Father?

Frank: Hello, my name is Frank.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, well. We’re going to move on here until we get things worked out over there with the call board.

Fr. Stephen: That could have been the pope!

Fr. Andrew: Really, you think the pope would call and say, “Hi, my name is Frank”?

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know! He’s low-key.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. It didn’t sound Argentinian.

Fr. Stephen: He comes off as humble. I don’t know. I’d have a lot to say to him…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, that’s true. We could just set aside the rest of the episode to have a conversation with the pope.

All right, well, okay: idolatry. We’ve talked about what you need to—what someone, what they used for idolatry and where you locate it and all that kind of thing. So, you know, we talked about setting them up, taking care of them. We talked about a lot of this stuff before, the opening of the nostrils ceremony, and of course putting food in front of it, this kind of stuff.

So what’s the point? Does it actually have some kind of effect on the worshipers? That’s what we’re talking about here in the third half. So what’s going on with that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: The answer is yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I can’t say good night and have that be funny at this point, because it’s already been two hours.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is your brain on idolatry… And this is sort of laid out to us. So the Old Testament isn’t against idolatry just because God decided he didn’t like it and so he put it on the rules, like: None of that in this house. Get out of this house if those are the clothes you’re going to wear; get out of this house if you don’t cut that hair. It’s not like that kind of rule. It’s because idolatry does something to humans when they do it, because all worship has a transformative effect on the worshiper. And that’s kind of telegraphed in Psalm 115 in the Hebrew, [113:11-16] if you’re reading in the Greek, verses three through eight.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what that says, starting with verse three:

Our God is in the heavens.
He does all that he pleases.
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths but do not speak,
eyes but do not see.
They have ears but do not hear,
noses but do not smell.
They have hands but do not feel,
feet but do not walk.
And they do not make a sound in their throat.
Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the contrast here is with that second part of verse three. Our God who is in the heavens, he does all that he pleases. He does whatever he wants; he’s all-powerful. And these gods who are being worshiped by means of idols don’t really do much of anything. They have things done to them. They’re created; they’re cared for. Things happen to them, but they don’t do anything. And then the same thing is going to happen to those who follow them.

So we have to do a little bit of our step back and quick review here. We’ve talked before about how language, art, and music, and ritual are ways that we as humans engage with the world and things that shape our human consciousness, shape the world around us in terms of how we experience it. And so idolatry is a form of ritual, but that includes, obviously, art in crafting the idol, can include music in the worship, language in the worship. And so participating in idolatry, using idolatry as your mode of worship and your mode of interacting with the spiritual world, is going to shape beyond just that act. It’s not just a sign, but it’s going to shape how you view other people, how you view the world around you and objects in it, how you view the divine, your view of God or the gods, and how you relate to and interact with all of these things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how you treat everybody. So apparently we have Fr. Elijah back. So, Fr. Elijah, are you there?

Fr. Elijah: I’m here; are you here?

Fr. Andrew: I’m here! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’m all the way over here.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, we’re all in different places.

Fr. Elijah: Well, where is “there”? No. Yes, I was just very fascinated by the talk about the ancient role that the hearths played in homes, and that would be the kind of gathering of the household idols, and that was also kind of the social and spatial center of the home. And in a lot of modern architecture, our living rooms are kind of the center of the home. Often a living room is now merging with the kitchen, and often in the middle of all of it will be a really wonderful place with outlets to plug in a television. And I’m an Orthodox priest now, but I grew up a Protestant, and I know in the Protestant language of idolatry, we love to materialize our idolatry, and we love to talk about worshiping the television, worshiping technology.

And I was wondering, in Pageauvian—Jonathan Pageau sometimes talks about how worship and attention go together. I’m just wondering, in your thoughts of this interaction of the center of the home historically being a place where idols would be; now we have technology. How do we pull apart attention to things that maybe grab our desire and our attention, and those that are spiritually maleficent and seeking to more classical… Maybe old gods versus new gods: the classic paganism, classic idolatries, versus maybe these new spin on idols and attention. Does any of that make any sense? I’m sorry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think so. In fact, in some ways, I think you’re sort of setting up for the conclusion of this podcast!

Fr. Elijah: Oh, I’m sorry.

Fr. Andrew: No, no, no! It’s good! But, I mean, I can’t speak for the way that Jonathan Pageau would address this—not that you had asked that in particular, but you mentioned him. I mean, I will just say this. One, it’s interesting actually: I think that more and more family gathered around a television set is hardly even a thing, more and more. It’s people gathered, each separately, around his or her own device.

Fr. Elijah: That’s true.

Fr. Andrew: We’ve all got the WiFi password, right? So I think there is some truth to that. The other thing I’ll say, though, is that attention is definitely an element in worship, so it’s a necessary condition, but it’s not sufficient. So just paying attention to something does not mean that you’re worshiping it, or idolizing it. But definitely there is… I think you are onto something, in my opinion, that what you pay your attention to—and I have always loved that expression, that attention in English is something we pay, like you have a finite amount of it; you can’t pay attention to everything all the time—that what you pay your attention to does transform you. One of the classic pieces of pastoral advice to someone who has trouble battling lustful thoughts is: “Control your eyes, dude!” I’m sure you’ve experienced that in the priesthood: “Control your eyes!” What are you looking at? What are you listening to? That kind of thing.

So there is some truth to that, and I think that the way that idolatry works is it really… It’s that par excellence, like you’re really going into communion with the thing that you’re engaging in idolatrous worship of. Like, it’s one thing to contemplate an image of some false god; it’s another thing to put food in front of it and then eat some of that food.

Fr. Elijah: Yeah, that’s very helpful, because in my before—in the before years, when I was a Protestant missionary—

Fr. Andrew: In your before times?

Fr. Elijah: My before times, when I was a Protestant missionary, I lived among a lot of people in Southeast Asia that literally would sacrifice food and chickens to idols. And, growing up Protestant, there was a lot of this talk of attention, and I was like: “You know, it doesn’t seem that when I’m paying too much attention to my phone or TV that I’m doing what they’re doing. There might be an overlap, but there is a distinction.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you saw real idolatry. Like, that’s the real deal, what you saw: putting food in front of images and then eating parts of it, that is pretty much the key movement in idolatrous worship. Fr. Stephen, did you have anything you wanted to add or “Um, actually”?

Fr. Stephen: I’m not going to “Um, actually” you.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, thank God!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it’s idolatry per se, but any opportunity I get to kind of talk badly about our current cultural media landscape, I’ll take.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Amen. As we talk on a podcast…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Guy Debord said, decades ago, that everything that used to be directly experienced is now presented to us in the form of spectacle. And you see that every day when you see people in front of some big event, watching it through their phone. I think in a lot of ways the state we’re in now is worse than the ancient pagans. The ancient pagans were communing with demons, but at least the whole family was communing with the same ones. [Laughter] Whereas…

Fr. Andrew: It’s not an endorsement either way, by the way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, whereas now, you know… And 50 years ago, it was the isolated—not to go back to last episode, but the isolated nuclear family all at least staring at one TV. Now everybody has their own screen, and so each one is having this stream of images—because that’s how we receive information now, is almost purely through images—fed into them, separately, on a separate stream, and each one of them is being formed by it separately, and thereby being alienated from each other and from everyone else.

And so this is sort of profoundly anti-communal technology. This is not just breaking down the family, but every kind of social bond that there is, so that the only thing any individual is connected to anything through is through that conduit of their feed. Yeah. So I just want to be Debbie Downer. [Laughter] And once again tell everybody to quit social media. And we’ve told ourselves this fiction, that all this stuff is making our life better—and we all know it isn’t. None of us are happier because of it. None of us feel more connected to people because of it. We’re just fooling ourselves. So there’s going to be a crisis point at some point, barring some catastrophe that destroys the internet and sets us all free; I don’t know which way it’s going to go.

But, yeah, we’ve lost the hearth, and I think a key part—we’ve talked about this on the show before—a key part of trying to rebuild and come together again as families and extended family and as community has to be rebuilding the hearth. And a real, practical way to start with that is the prayer corner, the icon corner.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I’m a big fan of almost anything— It’s interesting— Well, I’ll just back up. I’m a big fan of almost anything that gathers together the family and focuses on a thing. Like, it’s really worth it to do family dinner every night if possible; if it’s not possible on a given night, you’re going to do it tomorrow night. I’m a big fan of parents reading to the whole collection of kids all at once, even the one that can’t stop wiggling. I think these are just such critical, critical things that in former generations were taken much more for granted, and now the atomization of even the people living in the same house has really accelerated.

You know, at the beginning of the pandemic, it looked like maybe there was some reversal of that, but I don’t know; I don’t it lasted, maybe a hot minute. But, yeah, I think what Fr. Stephen said is right, that we’ve kind of lost the hearth. Does that make sense, Father?

Fr. Elijah: No, it makes absolute sense. When we first moved here to northern California and we bought our house, there was actually a big, blank, unpainted square where the TV used to be from the previous owners, and we intentionally actually set that up as our hearth/icon corner to kind of replace technology with.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Elijah: So we have a facing-east one that we usually pray towards, but we also have that, like a symbolic hearth icon corner, where the TV previously was with the previous owners. So I really appreciate all that you’ve mentioned.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God.

Fr. Elijah: Thank you so much, and just if I could say one brief thing. Over a decade overseas in Southeast Asia, so much of what you’ve—this podcast has talked about—the territorial spirits and all these different things, even this very episode—is alive and well, especially in Thailand and Southeast Asia, and it’s shocking how much similarities there are to what you and Fr. Stephen were talking about and what’s actively going on in Southeast Asia. Just amazing. Thank you so much!

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. And I’ll add, it’s growing here in America, people engaging in these… And I think in some cases, it’s because people are seeking out some kind of hearth. They’re getting it wrong, but I think that’s part of what’s going on. Well, thank you very much for calling in tonight, Father.

Fr. Elijah: Thank you so much, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So we were just talking about how ritual shapes who you are, especially through the elements of it often including language, art, and music, shapes the way that you think about God and other people and how you interact with them, how you see them, and so forth.

How does idolatry and what it does in that regard, how does that contrast with Christianity? The hope is that it’s doing something to you as well, but functioning in a different way and having a different result.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, without going too far down a rabbit-trail, one of the problems in understanding what Christian “ethics” is, is that we’ve inherited this thing where we divvy up the Torah somewhat arbitrarily. But in the Torah there’s no distinction between “here are the rituals by which you worship your God,” “here is the way you treat each other,” “here is the way you govern your community and order your community.” These are all part and parcel of the same thing, and so what we normally think of as Christian “ethics” actually has a ritual dimension. We’ve talked about this on the show before.

So when we see the scene of the Last Judgment—and we’re about to start the Triodion—in Matthew 25 and the parable of the sheep and the goats, we’re told about what makes the sheep sheep and the goats goats. The basis of their judgment is not what they believed, the results of a theology test, or anything else; it’s what they offered to Christ. And it’s what they offered to Christ through the least, the lowest of humanity, the poorest, the most needy, the least able to repay. That they were the vehicle through which people made offerings to Christ—or failed to make offerings to Christ.

And so this gets back to what we were talking about a little last time, the idea that humans being made in the image of God makes them icons of God, that they are iconography, and how this is the opposite of idolatry; that they are sort of conduits to God, to Christ. So when you offer a cup of cold water to a little one, you are offering it to Christ. It is an offering to Christ in the sacrificial sense. Hospitality offered to other humans is hospitality offered to Christ. So this is why we have as one of our two paradigmatic commandments: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And that it is why it is linked—that’s why Christ says it is like it; it is parallel to it—“Love the Lord your God; love Yahweh your God.” Why? Because those two are the same thing. You love God, and you love him through his image.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why it says also, “If a man says he loves God and hates his brother, he’s a liar.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. You can’t not do both. Idolatry, then, if we’re correct that it’s an inversion, that it’s the opposite of iconography—idolatry is a means of worship that is directed at controlling spiritual forces. And sort of the most gross form of this, of course, is ancient magic. But all ancient ritual centered around idolatry had this same element, that the idol, as this access point, is the place where you can stick your lever to move deity. This is the spot where I can put it, and I can pull and I can bend divine forces to my will; I can bend spiritual forces to my will. So if I do it and I don’t get the result I want, well, maybe I did the ritual wrong; maybe the priest messed up, so we kill him and try again with another priest; maybe there were some Christians around who didn’t participate, so we kill them and try again with another pagan ritual—but there was some problem that caused the gods to not accept the offering and not do what we wanted, or maybe we need to offer more.

It was very common in the ancient world to just straight-out offer bribes to god, to make offers to them. We even see that in Scripture, the story of Jephthah. Not the part with his— Well, it does include his daughter, but when he makes the vow, he’s kind of offering God: “Hey, if you give me victory, then whoever runs”—and it is “whoever” in the text—“whoever runs out to see me, I’ll sacrifice to you” in Judges, sort of offering, trying to make a deal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, with a human sacrifice.

Fr. Stephen: And this kind of instrument mentality is the opposite of love.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because love sets free; love functions in freedom. Love is not about trying to control anybody. I mean, that’s not what love does; it doesn’t control.

Fr. Stephen: Right, if you’re trying to manipulate God and trying to get him to do what you want, that’s not the same as loving him.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not humility, it’s not— Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s the difference between prayer and magic.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right.

Fr. Stephen: And we’ve talked about before about how sometimes people try to use prayer as magic. “Well, if I just pray hard enough and get enough people to pray and pray the right prayer, that God’ll do what I want.” That’s not prayer now; that’s magic. That’s ritual magic is where you’re heading with that.

But so if that’s how you view God or the gods, if that’s how you view the divine, if that’s how you view the spiritual realm, how is that going to bleed over into how you view other people and how you view things in the world?

Fr. Andrew: Right, and also, if you read the actual stories of these gods, this is the way they act. So these are the exemplars. As I think we’ve pointed out on this podcast before, if your society worshiped Zeus, what does it do to your society when your most high god is a serial rapist? That’s the ultimate in being in your society is this kind of being.

Fr. Stephen: And your queen of the gods is just vengeful and jealous and constantly sort of hysterical and enraged—pun not intended. That this, then, shapes how these people who participate in these rituals—and it’s reaffirmed, and their conscious reshaped, every time they do these rituals. The person who goes and casts a love spell is not only trying to manipulate spiritual forces; they’re trying to manipulate another human into giving them what they want. And so this is an…

Idolatry, at its core, represents an approach to the spiritual world and even the material world, because those are going to bleed over into each other, based on instrumentality, based on seizing control of the levers, taking control of fate. By one means or another, through an exercise of power and expertise and technique, I am going to become the master of my own destiny.

This is where we can now wrap around again to talk about the way in which material goods, things like money, can be talked about in terms of idolatry. We talked earlier about how, at the beginning of the second half, that can sometimes be done in sort of a hackneyed way, where it’s just like: “Oh, well, if you think about anything other than God, you should be thinking about God,” that sort of Platonic idea. But the goods of this world, the good things of this world, can be viewed in this sort of instrumental way. So an example from Scripture is when Christ tells the parable of the rich fool. He has this big harvest, so he builds more barns, he fills them up, he says, “Ah! Now I have all this food. I can now take my leisure, I can retire, I can enjoy good things for the rest of my life.” He thinks because of his wealth and success he now has command of his life, and he’s then called a fool because he’s going to die that night.

And so his money, his wealth, his planning—all of that did not allow him to seize control of the forces of the universe, did not allow him to seize control of his fate. And so for him that wealth and planning and success were idolatry. He was participating in idolatry because he was using them as the lever.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and like all idolatry it just proves that the lever is garbage, that it doesn’t actually do what it claims to be able to do.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s less powerful than the person who is trusting in it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, if you think about even now… Like, this has happened maybe not enough, but it’s happened a number of times in recent years: we see people who are ridiculously wealthy and powerful that they lose it all, and they end up in jail or dead or whatever it might be, thus proving again the parable of the rich fool, that just because you have all the whatever in the world does not mean that you’re going to get the results that you want. You have… I mean, how many times does it say in Scripture that the people who are in places of power because God has allowed them to be? That the people who have things because God has given them to them? It’s emphasized over and over again.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, over and over again in liturgy, in Christian worship, because it’s about love, it’s about offering ourselves and everything we have and everything we are to God—and also offering all that to our neighbor who is in need. That’s the opposite of trying to take control of God or take control of our neighbor.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s notable in ancient pagan culture that social stratification was considered absolutely the norm and that if you were above another person it was completely correct and right and normal and natural for you to step on that other person and make use of them, because you were in the position that you were in because the gods had put you there, and it was normal that you should treat other people as less than you, and, in many cases, as not even being people. That’s the way that the whole ethics of the ancient world worked, was based on this web of manipulation and control and people stepping on each other’s faces.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we can approach it, to use the language Isaiah used: What is it that you’re counting on to save you, to deliver you, when everything goes wrong? Are you planning on: “Well, I’ve got a lot of money saved up, so when the chips are down, I’m prepared. I’ve got my money, I’ve got my Bitcoin, I’ve got my gold buried in the backyard. I’m going to be fine because of that.” Or some relationship we have: “I’ve got the right friends. I’ve got the empire. I’ve got this taken care of, that taken care of.” Where is it that you’re looking for your salvation when that happens? If it’s some kind of instrumentality, then that’s idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, something occurred to me when we were talking about all of this earlier, which is that… this sense of trying to offer bribes in order to get what you want. I mean, when Christ is in the wilderness and the devil comes to tempt him, it’s almost like the devil is trying to treat Christ in an idolatrous way. Like: “I’ll do this for you if you will only do this.” Like he’s trying to bribe him to get what it is that he wants. I mean, it’s not—the analogy doesn’t completely hold, but again it’s that theme of instrumentality and manipulation and control, which is what the pagan gods demonstrate; it’s what they expected, and it’s absolutely the opposite of what God demonstrates and what he expects and what he—you know, he came and offered himself. That destroys all the bribes, that act of total selflessness and self-giving.

All right, well, to wrap up our conversation this evening, the big thought that I had, especially here towards the end is that so much in the modern world as we now experience it is designed to make us believe in magic. It’s ironic, because supposedly we’re modern, enlightened, rational people who don’t believe in magic. But how much that we’re being offered constantly is about “if you do this thing, then you will get these results”? And it’s utterly addictive, whether it’s our health or our financial situation or our technology, some kind of book that tells you how to fix relationships or whatever it might be. We’re being trained to engage with the world in magical means, magical ways, all the time. That’s not to say that we… that there is not a certain kind of instrumentality that is normal, like if I need to make myself breakfast, I pull out the ingredients and I make breakfast. I should expect the results, but at the same time, as a Christian, I have to surround this stuff with prayer and with gratitude to God for even giving me the ability to do those things. But again, it’s so tough when we have so many buttons, literally, in our lives not to think of other people and even think of God himself as a kind of button. If I just press this button, I should get this; if I just do this for this other person, I should get that. But that’s not the way that God shows us how to be.

This past Sunday, in our tradition anyways, the gospel that we read was the gospel of the Canaanite woman who comes and approaches Christ when he’s up in the region of Tyre and Sidon and asks him to heal her daughter who’s possessed by a demon, of all things. And she asks and she asks, and he—the Lord Jesus initially ignores her, and then eventually says things that could be taken as insulting towards her. But she keeps going, and she says, even when he says, “I was not—it’s not right to [take] the food of the children and give it to dogs,” basically calling her a dog, and she persists and says, “Yes, but even the crumbs that fall from the master’s table, the dogs might ask for those.” So she approaches him with this humility. She doesn’t offer him a bribe; she doesn’t try to manipulate him. She just makes this request, and she accepts even what seems like insults from him. She accepts the bad treatment of his disciples who tell him to send her away, like: “She’s bugging us, Lord; send her off!”

And his response to her is: “Great is your faith.” “Great is your faith,” he said to her. And this is what faith in the Christian sense really is; this is what faithfulness in the Christian sense is: to draw near to God and to ask for his mercy and to show gratitude and humility, and to receive whatever it is that he offers, whatever he’s going to give, to realize that that’s the thing that we actually need for our salvation. Not to come in saying, “Look, this is what I expect, Lord, and you’d better do it. Don’t you know how much I did for you,” that kind of thing, which, again, that’s magical thinking; that’s manipulative thinking.

And so I think we need to be mindful in our modern period of how much we’re being trained to be manipulative and to have these kinds of instrumentalized expectations of God and of other people. Like Fr. Elijah called earlier and made mention of attention, where we put our attention. I think so many times we just can’t be bothered, and so we don’t put our attention where it really should be. We’ll pay attention to God long enough to get what we want, and then when we get what we want, we look at something else. So I think a lot of the cure for this is to reorient our attention towards what is highest, towards what is noblest, towards what is good and beautiful and holy, and to practice gratitude for all that we receive, and receive it as from the Lord, because he has sent it to us for our salvation.

It’s not easy; it’s one of the great struggles of the modern age, but I think this is the way of salvation for those of us who live in this particular set of surroundings. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So one of the most difficult things, one of the most terrible in the original sense things, about our life in this world at this time is that we have a future. We don’t usually think about it that way, but the future is a thing that kind of always torments us, whether we want to admit it or not. In fact, a lot of people will say that they are sort of tormented by their past, but most of the times when people are tormented by their past, it’s actually more that they’re haunted by some possible future that existed in the past but now doesn’t and can’t. We look toward the future, and we see a lot of negative possible futures, things that we don’t want to happen, that we don’t want to transpire, roads that we don’t want to travel, and ways that we don’t want to live. And we want to ward those off, and we can imagine futures where we want to live, that we want to be true, that we want to come to fruition, and we want to find ways to sort of guarantee those, to make those permanent and secure in our minds.

And that’s what draws us. That’s what drew ancient people to idolatry; that’s what draws us to various forms of idolatry. We want to find the lever; we want to find the button, the place where we can apply the pressure, the procedure we can follow, the ritual we can do, that will make sure that those good futures we want happen, and those bad futures that we don’t want, don’t, so that we won’t have to look back at our past any more and see those possible good futures that died and those negative futures that became our reality.

The problem is—they don’t exist. The problem is that we have a future because we’re finite and we don’t know what’s going to come in the next moment and the moment after that and the moments after that. On the other hand, Christ has given us a hope. And I use the article there on purpose. It isn’t just that Christ has given us hope in a general sense, like the last thing out of Pandora’s jar, where “Oh, things’ll get better,” “Oh, tomorrow’s another day.” Tomorrow may be a worse day; things may get worse and not better in any given person’s life, let’s be honest. But he’s given us a hope, a particular hope, and it’s a particular hope because it’s true. It’s not a possible future; it is the future. He’s described it to us; he’s outlined it to us. Christ is bringing it about in the world as we speak. It will happen.

And rather than giving us a vote, rather than us getting to choose what our part in that is going to be, what our lot in life is going to be, what we want our personal future to be, Christ has given us that as a promise and told us that therefore we don’t need to worry. We don’t need to spend our time worrying about what we will eat and what we will wear. We don’t need to spend our time worrying about those negative futures or imagining those positive futures. He has the future in his hand, but, more than that, he’s told us how to participate in it. He’s told us how to do our piece in bringing that future about. He’s given us the tools to transform ourselves and our lives, to transform our families, to form and transform our communities, to transform our world ultimately, which is what that future is going to ultimately mean.

And rather than trying to cast a vision for ourselves, make a mission statement, try and create some future that we find to our liking for whatever reason, usually based on our base desires and passions, we can instead spend our time and our effort working toward the future that is real. And when we do that, that’s when we find the freedom from that worry; that’s where we find the freedom from worry about the future, the freedom from being haunted by the past and what could have been or what we think should have been or might have been. And that’s where we come to day by day, regardless of our external circumstances, whether we’re locked down in our houses, whether we’re getting a promotion and a job, whether we’re paying off the mortgage on our house, whether we’re losing our house because we can’t pay the mortgage—that’s where we experience the future that is in Christ, the love and joy and peace of the Holy Spirit, regardless of those circumstances.

So every one of us has something very concrete that we can do, over and over again, at every moment of every day. We can pray. We can show love to the person who’s sitting across from us or standing next to us or near us. We can just listen to them. We can just smile at them. We can just pay them a compliment. We have all kinds of work to rebuild the alienation we were talking about tonight, to rebuild all of the broken relationships we were talking about tonight. And as we do that, the future comes more and more into focus, becomes more and more real, because that’s what St. Paul told us in Hebrews, that our faithfulness to what God has called us to do is the substance of the things that we hope for. It’s what makes them substantial and real.

Fr. Andrew: Well, thank you very much, Father, and that is our show for tonight. Thank you, everyone, very much for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d still love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; or you can message us at the Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. I read everything, Fr. Stephen skims some things, but we can’t respond to everything, that’s for sure! And we do save some of what you send for possible use in future episodes.

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, except for next time when it will be Memorexed.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. If you are on Facebook, like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support, and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

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