Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back, everyone, to The Lord of Spirits podcast where we’re going to be taking a voyage into the unseen world. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and joining me tonight is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, from Lafayette, Louisiana, and if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we’re going to get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So William Shatner, who just turned 90 three days ago, is having video recordings of himself made so that when he eventually dies, in a century or so an AI-driven computer program will allow people to have conversations with him. The question then is raised: Will that be the real William Shatner? What if everyone treated him as William Shatner? Would William Shatner be a human being any more? Where and what would William Shatner even be?

And while you ponder that question, we’re going to start talking about what it means to be. You’ve probably heard that therapeutic saying, “You’re not a human doing; you’re a human being.” Well, actually, you are a human doing, but that’s because it’s the same thing as being a human being! Are you a human doing or a human being? Yes, you are.

But isn’t this episode supposed to be about sacred geography? Well, Fr. Stephen, explain all that for the people in the back. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen De Young: Or we could just keep talking about William Shatner…

Fr. Andrew: There we go!

Fr. Stephen: I’m perfectly happy to do that, too.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. His birthday is March 22, a major holiday.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, at least in his native Canadia I know that it is.

Fr. Andrew: And William Shatner, by the way—he is a Jew, but he is a Lithuanian Jew. I just wanted to put that out there; it’s very true.

Fr. Stephen: So. But the great William Shatner aside, yes, we’re going to be talking about a bunch of mind-bending things. I would go by Dr. Mindbender, but I don’t have the mustache for it and I don’t even own a monocle. [Laughter] That’s just a “hey, buckle up, guys” warning at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although I’ll tell everybody it’s going to start out harder and then—I hope, anyways—get easier as we go. And I think—I’m not sure; we’ll have to ask the audience whether we think by the end of this that this is going to be more or less mind-bending than our episodes on bodies. Stay tuned…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but you already started it with the “to do is to be, to be is to do,” or as the great Frank Sinatra sang, “Do be do be do be do.”

Fr. Andrew: And also, “I did it my way.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, there at the beginning. All that aside, 80% of kidding aside, we’re sort of starting out with, as you said, what it means to be. This may seem like a weird question because, you know, aside from certain former presidents who asked what the definition of “is” is, that’s not a definition we think about a lot on a day-to-day basis. Something either exists or it doesn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is either a thing or it’s not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we at least think we’re pretty clear on that, but that’s because we’ve been enculturated into a certain idea of what it means to be, what it means to exist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is really critical to look at, because one of our core missions on this show is combating materialism, and this kind of cuts right to the heart of at least one of the issues pertaining to materialism.

Fr. Stephen: And before we can get to talking about how a place is a place, we have to define what that “is” means. What does it mean for something to be something. So in our idea of being, being is sort of opposed to nothingness, but even as we say that, the English language has this tendency to reify things. Latin does the same thing. So “nothingness” or just “nothing” is a noun.

Fr. Andrew: No-thing is a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we think of it like it’s a thing. Like, there is nothing: we think of it as if there’s something, and that something is nothing, which of course is self-contradictory.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly, and I think when we think of this doctrine of creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, the idea we have behind that is “At first there was something called ‘nothing,’ but then there was something called ‘something.’ ”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, then there were things; instead of that nothing, there were things.

Fr. Andrew: But nothing is not a thing. Literally, it’s not a thing; it’s just a non-thing. It’s not even an it. You can’t even give it a pronoun.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we think of what it means to exist for us, because again we’re coming from this materialist viewpoint, is something exists if it has material reality in particular.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if there’s atoms you can spot, molecules.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Horses exist because there are horses made of matter that I can go and see. There’s one just down the block from me, because I’m in Louisiana. But unicorns do not exist, because there are not material unicorns that I can go and see and touch in the world. So a horse is; a unicorn isn’t, is how we look at it.

So, then, as you mentioned with creation ex nihilo, if God made a unicorn, that would mean that he took this thing from non-existent and then made a material one. That would be sort of how we read that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then there’s this fun, messed-up place people go: “Well, it existed in the mind of God.” Like, wait wait wait—how do you know…?

Fr. Stephen: Whatever that means. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right: how do you know what’s in the mind of God? I mean, setting aside all that wonderful theology from St. Maximus the Confessor about the logoi, whatever, whatever, that’s not what people generally mean when they talk about it.

Fr. Stephen: The logoi are in things—but anyway we don’t want to go down that rabbit-trail. Yeah, that’s not what St. Maximus was talking about, like God has a brain, like God has a giant brain and there are all these ideas floating around in it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, here’s an idea—

Fr. Stephen: —that occurred to him at some point, so that he made it up.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so the key then is to get to—because we’re Christians—the biblical doctrine, if there could be said a biblical doctrine of non-existence… [Laughter] Or really, here we go— We can’t even not talk about it, right? So I guess the big question then is: What happens at the creation?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So in the ancient world generally and in the Old Testament in particular—and this is true of the New Testament also—being is not opposed to nothingness or non-being, which again, our English language wants to turn into a thing. Existing isn’t opposed to being imaginary or an idea, for any ancient thinker. So “being” is opposed to “chaos,” and this takes various forms.

In Genesis 1—and we’ve talked about Genesis 1 a little bit on previous episodes, and we’re going to refer back to that a little bit here; we’re not going to go through it all again—you start out with primordial chaos. That’s what the waters represent that are sort of there at the beginning of Genesis 1 that the Holy Spirit is hovering over, sort of brooding over, the way a hen broods over her chicks or over eggs. You have this primordial chaos at the beginning, and then creation is then setting things in order. So to be means to be ordered as opposed to chaos.

Now, when we’ve talked about this before we’ve gotten the emails. “Well, who created the chaos?” “Who created the chaos?” “Where did the chaos come from?” Because when we’re talking about these waters, we’re not talking about H₂O. H₂O is an ordered thing; that’s an ordered molecule. This is water as it symbolizes and represents chaos, just utter chaos. But the question, “Who created chaos?” for an ancient person would be the same question as “Well, who created the nothing that was there before God created?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s inherently contradictory in the ancient conception. It’s like saying, “Who ordered the chaos?” Well, if you ordered it, it’s not chaos any more.

Fr. Stephen: If you created it, then it wouldn’t be chaos; it would be put in order, because the act of creation would be putting it in order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it’s important to distinguish this. I mean, I don’t know how many people we’ve got in our audience who know a lot about Mormon theology, but I’m just going to put this out here because it’s actually a really important element of Mormon theology. Joseph Smith taught that all matter is uncreated, and so everything is just rearrangements of pre-existing matter. That’s why he can say, for instance, that human beings are… what human beings are now, God was just like—although he didn’t put it in those terms—that God was what we are, and that we can become exactly what God is, because it’s just pre-existing matter that gets rearranged, and some of it gets elevated to be a god.

This, what we’re talking about, is different from that, because that theology is predicated upon materialism. It’s predicated upon the idea that there’s just a bunch of sort of building blocks out there in a big pile, and then God started putting blocks together and making stuff out of those blocks.

Fr. Stephen: An important element of creation ex nihilo is not the idea of void, as the pre-existing initiative. The important aspect of creation ex nihilo, what the Fathers are aiming at with creation ex nihilo, is to say that there is no thing which is co-eternal with God, matter or anything else—matter, energy, time/space…

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. The created and the uncreated, there’s a radical disjunction between them forever and always. Always.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but again, when we say, “Nothing is co-eternal with God,” we don’t mean that there is a thing called “nothing” that is co-eternal with God.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m having flashbacks. Every time we say “the nothing,” every time you use the phrase “the nothing,” I start thinking about The Neverending Story, which, I mean, I watched that again recently, I’m like… [Sigh]

Fr. Stephen: Reliving the childhood trauma of the horrors of going into the…

Fr. Andrew: It didn’t… Forgive me if there’s fans out there. I felt like it didn’t hold up. Ugh. Sorry. I loved it when I was a kid, though. Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, there’s also the Void for Century fans, but that’s a deep cut. We probably…

Fr. Andrew: It’s not one I know, but okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So what it means to be created and therefore what it means to exist—because everything that exists has been created by God—we wouldn’t say, as Orthodox Christians at least, that God exists, if by “exists” you mean the same thing as the chair I’m sitting in exists.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and even just linguistically it doesn’t work. I mean, not that the etymologies, everything, but this gives us a clue. The word “exist” literally means to have your being out of something. Ex-iste. God doesn’t have his being out of something; he is being.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So everything we talk about existing, we’re talking about created things. So we can’t even predicate that verb of God in the exact same sense as we do of the things he created.

So what it means to exist, then, is that God has created it, and that means he has set it in order and he has placed it within a web of relationships. So to exist means to be not only set in order internally, as a thing, but to also be connected by this web of relationship to other things, to the rest of the things in the world.

We have an example, or at least I have a favorite example to use, which is that of a tower. So if you have a tower, someone builds a tower, this tower serves as a tower. The matter that makes up a tower is being a tower. Centuries pass; the tower crumbles. The tower no longer exists. There is no longer a tower. There is a pile of rubble, and that pile of rubble contains most of the matter that was part of the tower, but it’s no longer a tower; now it’s being a pile of rubble. So “being” is a verb.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Which is why I threw out that whole “human being, human doing” thing at the beginning.

Fr. Stephen: So the same matter is now being a pile of rubble, and someone could come and take stones and wood from that pile of rubble and go and turn it into something else, place it in a new order and set it up in a new set of relationships, and it could become a table or a wall or something else. And then that matter, the same matter, will be being that.

Fr. Andrew: “It will be being.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It will be being a table or a wall. That’s what it will be doing. It will be being a—whatever it is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I just have to throw a bone out there for those who think that this podcast has something to do with J.R.R. Tolkien—you know who you are, up there in Minnesota. So it’s interesting. You mentioned the image of the tower and the pile of stones. Tolkien actually uses exactly that image in his image called, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in which he is complaining about the way critics look at Beowulf, this epic poem in Old English, and they just want to look at the parts and the influences and that sort of thing. And for them, that’s what Beowulf is. He’s like: no, no, no, no. Beowulf is this poem as it is; that the bones that you put into the soup are maybe interesting, but the point is the soup.

He talks specifically about a tower and how people came and knocked down the tower because they wanted to analyze which stones came from an old house nearby and which were those quarried from here or there, but he said, but he could see the ocean from the tower. So he’s making the point—he’s talking about story-telling and literature, but he’s making the point in another way, that the way that this story functions, by being Beowulf, that’s what it is. Certainly we can look at all the influences that went into it and so forth, and that can maybe deepen our understanding, but if that’s all we think it is, then we’re missing the thing that it actually is.

I remember, for instance, there’s a great episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard and gang run into some aliens, and they refer… they have to run them through some kind of translation matrix, and the aliens refer to them as “ugly bags of mostly water,” which is exactly the way of expressing this thing. It’s like, well, human beings are not bags of water, ugly or not; we’re human beings. And so the aliens were essentially analyzing humans according to their constituent pieces. Like, that’s what they are, is mostly water. Well, that’s true—I do comprise mostly water—but that’s not what I am.

So I think it’s a problem that we run into. We do think about it. We run into it in literature and some of this other stuff, but it’s… I think that the difficulty is that… You can hear it expressed for instance—and we’re going to get into this, but just to kind of tip the hand a little bit—people will say things like, “Well, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there in Jerusalem, is that really the place where Jesus rose from the dead? Is that really the spot?” And that is a materialist reading of this issue, because you’re looking for, I guess, a piece of dirt or whatever. You could even, if you really want to analyze it out and really be super materialist about it, you could say, “Well, the truth is that the planet Earth is not even in the same position it was when I began this sentence, so no place is the same place. It’s just not even…” [Laughter] Or the fact that molecules trade out, in everything: is it the same thing? It actually is the same thing, even though the material is not exactly the same material. So, yeah, like you said, this web of relationships.

And it’s fascinating to think about what that means in terms of creation, what creation is. It’s really vibrant, understood that way, really powerful. It’s not the sort of static sort of stuff. We’re not animists, but you can kind of see where animism gets its sense. There’s this sort of life in everything as a result. It’s not an easy… It’s not easy to think about, but I think it’s important that we at least spend some time trying to tease some of this stuff out anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I like that you phrased it as “Picard and the gang,” so it was sort of TNG by way of Scooby-Doo, having some kind of wacky antics.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wesley is definitely the kind of Scooby-Doo of the… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He’s more Scrappy, I think.

Fr. Andrew: You think he’s more Scrappy-Doo? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So we’ve talked before about sort of the four main means we have of interacting with reality as humans, those being language, art, music, and ritual. We’ve kind of defined what those are before, but I want to hone in now, based on what we’re talking about, on what that “interact” really means.

What these four things are is they’re four creative actions. They’re ways by which we as humans place reality in order, place in order and then put together these connections, this web of relationships between things and other things, put them in order, put them in their place, and establish their relationship with one another. We do that through language. We talked before about the naming of the animals, and that being this putting in order and the Hittite iconography of kings naming animals to show this kind of ruler, dominion and justice and establishing order. We do this with art. Art we use to express the relationships between things and the web in which they sit. The same with music, and the same with ritual. Ritual is making a time and a place—and we’re going to go deeper into this as we go tonight, but it’s making a time and a place be a particular time and place when we celebrate rituals.

Fr. Andrew: And this is also probably the good moment where we can give a shout-out to all of our friends who have joined us via Jonathan Pageau who talks about symbolism being inevitable. That’s just another way of talking about what we’re saying here, is that recognizing patterns in the world is not just this sort of human act that’s sort of arbitrary, but it is inevitable, and it is what makes things what they are, which might sound a little… That might be a little controversial to say, but how can we conceive of a thing without conceiving of it? [Laughter] Or just the fact that even—I don’t know if… Physicists now even say that material particles behave differently when they’re observed versus when they’re not observed. So even on the purest material observable level like that, there’s something going on there that has to do with human consciousness and the way that human beings organize their understanding of what’s going on. We’re not just observers in a detached… Detached observation is not even a possibility.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I of course am going to double down even further.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: What we call “the world” is the product of human consciousness. It doesn’t exist outside of human consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: Which is not solipsism, but why? Why is it not solipsism?

Fr. Stephen: No. Well, first of all, we’ve just defined existence as being an order and being within this web of relationships; that that requires human consciousness. But let’s give some examples. So when I say the word “bat,” there’s something “it’s like to be a bat,” but you can’t even know what it’s like to be a bat, so we have no access to what it’s like to be a bat or what “bat” or “batness” means from a bat perspective. I say “bat,” and you think of a scary thing or a cute little baby thing you saw on a video from The Dodo or you think of getting vengeance for your parents’ death against crime on the streets.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] On Guam they would eat them. They would eat them; they would eat fruit bats.

Fr. Stephen: You would think food!

Fr. Andrew: Not recommended, actually. You could get some diseases from that… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but none of those things we just listed exist without human consciousness. It’s not scary unless it’s scary to a human. It’s not cute unless it’s cute to a human. It’s not food unless it’s food for a human. If Bob Kane and Bill Finger had never written a set of stories, or you weren’t aware of them, you would have no idea of what I was talking about about fighting crime in Gotham City. So when Bob Kane and Bill Finger wrote those stories and put those stories together, they created something that is now part of what a bat is, for me and for everyone else who’s heard those stories, and you can’t unhear those stories.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Or one could say, “Obviously Santa Claus exists…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: If one were so inclined.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: And unicorns.

Fr. Andrew: Right, although, to give a counter-example, before about 2500 years ago, the color blue did not exist. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is something that… And people will say, “Well, wait. The things that are blue now were blue then, right?” Like, lapis lazuli was blue. Well, yeah, they were, but no one perceived the color blue. When you read ancient accounts… Homer talked about “the wine-dark sea.” He looked at the Mediterranean and thought it was burgundy. That’s what he saw.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the sky, right?

Fr. Stephen: Is white.

Fr. Andrew: Is white, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Or at dawn it’s red. At dawn and sunset it’s red, and during the day it’s white. And there are still—you can go on YouTube and look this up—there are still tribes in Africa who don’t have the color blue. They still say the sky is white. And researchers, anthropologists, will show them color swatches, and there will be like three red and one blue square, and they won’t be able to tell them the difference. They honestly will not see any difference.

But then, if you keep watching the videos, they can be taught to see the color blue, and then once they’ve been taught to see the color blue, the color blue is immediately obvious to them; they can identify the blue square instantly and they can’t unsee the color blue. Now blue things look blue to them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I recently had a conversation with somebody in which… So I have… If you ever meet me in real life—which you have, and maybe some of you listeners have—I have an annoying habit which I constantly have to restrain myself from engaging in, which is—let’s put it this way—enhancing other people’s pronunciation of English. [Laughter] And the person I was having a conversation with said a word, and I was like: “No, no, no, the word is pronounced this way.” And then I suddenly realized what I had done. It was simply a matter of stress. I don’t even remember what the word was; I can’t even think what the word was.

The person said it with, say, stressing the first syllable, and then unstressing the second, when it should have been the other way round. For instance, the word—I don’t know why this popped into my head, but: “dismay.” They would have said dismay: “I was dismayed.” And I said, “No, it’s dismay,” and the other person said, “That’s the same.” I was like: “You don’t hear a difference between dismay and dismay?” And they said, “You just said the same word exactly the same way two times.” I was just baffled at that. For whatever reason, they just didn’t perceive that; they just did not perceive the stress in that word.

You know, as you said, you can be taught to perceive things like that, and I think it’s one of the reasons why it can be difficult, especially as an adult, to learn another language, because you just don’t perceive what sounds important and different to speakers of that language. Or sometimes our perception is submerged. So for instance a classical example in English is the words keel and cool. Well, if you feel what you’re tongue does at the beginning of each of those words, you can tell it’s in a different place, but English speakers perceive those as starting with the same sound. Whereas there are other languages where those are distinctly different consonants. As another example, not visual, but in this case aural.

Fr. Stephen: But, Father, it’s Great Lent, and it’s time for us all to take an honest inventory of ourselves. I feel like you need to not make excuses and just embrace the fact that you’ve been a grammar nazi for a good portion of your life.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, it’s not all about grammar, you know… There’s a… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah, I’m sure, there’s depths to plumb there, but I am not your spiritual father, so you can address that with him.

So this… One place where this becomes really important—I already brought up the bat—we also don’t know what it’s like to be an angelic being, and how, then, angels perceive the creation is entirely different than how we do. But this is important, and I know we have some of our listeners aren’t listening live right now, because they’re at their Annunciation services tonight; we had them this morning, you and I. But this is all over the place in the liturgics of the Annunciation. What we find with spiritual events and spiritual realities in the Scriptures is that they are revealed. The language is of revelation, not of them becoming real or happening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s really important.

Fr. Stephen: One of the big examples, of course, is how the Scriptures can talk about the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, and yet we still have time-space coordinates where Jesus Christ died on the cross outside Jerusalem, at an actual time. Well, how does that work? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. One of the liturgical texts—and this was actually just being asked about in our Facebook group—from Annunciation, from vespers last night, said something about the Archangel Gabriel revealing the pre-eternal counsel of God to the Virgin Mary. And the question was like: Well, how can something be before eternity? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is the… The feast in Greek is actually the Evangelism of the Theotokos.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she’s being preached the Gospel.

Fr. Stephen: Literally, how can she hear about a victory of God that from her perspective hasn’t happened yet? Because we look at it as the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist, because we’re thinking of existence as this “coming into being.” It’s not materially real yet, and so that means it doesn’t exist yet. But the language over and over again in the Scriptures is that these events, these things, these truths, are revealed: they enter into the realm of human consciousness, at a particular time and in a particular place. They sort of intrude. They intrude into the world of human experience, the world of human consciousness that we’ve been talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which then makes you question, for instance—we as a sort of short-hand talk about the pre-incarnate Christ, for instance, visions of the Son and Word of God in the Old Testament. But what does it mean to be pre-incarnate in these terms? It’s that he is revealed…

Fr. Stephen: God is not on a parallel track to us, and then like he jumps the track down to our track and jumps back to his track.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why, then, we can say that he’s incarnate without change. That’s not a sleight of hand. We’re not saying, “Well, there was really a change, but there’s also part of him that didn’t change.” Like, that’s not right.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’re talking about Christ entering into the realm of human experience and consciousness at a particular period of time. And we’re going to go into some things related to this a little later on in the second half, but, to tease that a little here, even though there’s one sort of archetype, one archetypal point at which these events and these truths come into the world of human consciousness, they can also do so again, both before and after.

Fr. Andrew: So you might almost put it in this way, that, for instance, the incarnation of the Son of God affects both what happens from our point of view after and before, which is, among other… I mean, to put it in soteriological terms, is why Old Testament saints can be saved, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Like I said, we’ll get into that more in just a little bit. We’ve got a little more groundwork to lay before we get there.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, let’s back it out a little bit, then, and throw in a little bit of Greek philosophy since we like to do that once in a while.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Why not?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why not? And just for all those people who are like: “Oh no! They’re… You’re paganizing…!” No, no, no, no. This is just to help us understand the terms.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll have you know, many of our Orthodox brethren support the spirit of Hellenism, so we’re just doing our little bit here, by talking about the Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: Today is March 25, 2021, so there you are. 200 years ago, something happened…

Fr. Stephen: So that is… Now we talked about what it means to be, what it means to exist: to be in order, to be within this series of relationships. That is something that is done within the realm of human consciousness, as it is relevant to humans. So now we’re moving to the… slightly to what does it mean for something to be what it is, because it doesn’t just exist; it exists as something. It is something.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is a basic sort of obsession with ancient philosophy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is the big question of classical Greek philosophy: What makes a thing what it is? This is: you go back to the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus, famously. “You never step in the same river twice.” We say that’s the same river, but if we’re talking about a material perspective, the water keeps moving. So the river, the Mississippi River that I can drive over and see right now, isn’t the same material river that was there if I went and looked yesterday, or that will be there if I go and looked tomorrow. So Heraclitus’ perspective is that everything is flux, so that everything is really still chaos.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, deep down.

Fr. Stephen: And we are just sort of conventionally, in order to operate and function, sort of putting… making assumptions and putting categories on things. David Hume kind of takes this to a ridiculous extreme when he says you walk out of a room and you walk back in, and you just assume that the furniture is all the same furniture. You can’t actually prove that.

Fr. Andrew: I’m trying to roll through the Monty Python’s philosophers song in my head to sort out all these various philosophers, but it’s just not coming to me.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “David Hume could out-consume and drink you under the table.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes. Right, so everything is fundamental chaos. I remember one of the pre-Socratics, Thales, say that everything is water, but now, knowing what we know about water, that doesn’t mean everything is liquid.

Fr. Stephen: No, it means that everything is in a state of change. Parmenides, then, is sort of the opposite of that, who’s sort of: it is what it is. Just, things are. So this is… If we want to go to a more modern person like Heidegger talking about the brute facticity of reality, right? [Laughter] You’re suddenly aware that you exist and there’s this other stuff, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It just is what it is.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and if you can’t handle that, then you go in the Jean-Paul Sartre direction and everything. The fact that there’s other things—I hate that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, especially other people.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: So one of the sort of thought experiments that’s used by many Greek philosophers to address this and to think about this and that was mentioned on WandaVision if people have watched it—and don’t worry, we’re not spoiling; we’re not spoiling anything in WandaVision, if you haven’t see it yet, but it’s referenced there—so I said, “Hey, let’s come at it from this perspective, because people have heard of this now.”

Fr. Andrew: Right? It’s now—a thing!

Fr. Stephen: They’ve heard the story, so now they can’t unhear it.

Fr. Andrew: They can’t unhear it; that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s the ship of Theseus. Theseus, of course, great Greek hero. They have his ship on which he took his famous voyages on display. Well, as anything made out of wood does, it starts to rot. As the planks of wood start to rot, they replace them with new planks. Eventually you reach a point where none of the original wood is there. Is it still the ship of Theseus?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he never stood on any of those actual planks.

Fr. Stephen: Materially, it is a different object. So does it still have that identity as the ship of Theseus?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this works even on the very human bodily level, too, where every single atom in your body gets traded out. I don’t remember how often it is.

Fr. Stephen: It’s every few years. It’s every seven or eight years.

Fr. Andrew: Literally, you are not the… Literally, I am not what I was when I was a kid.

Fr. Stephen: Right. None of the matter that was chrismated is still in you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that was 23-plus years ago now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so identity in that sense can’t be a material thing, can’t be based on a material definition. Now, nobody noticed it, which kind of saddened me, but when we titled the episode, I said Boat of Theseus. See, I changed one element of the name. Is it still the same thought experiment?

Fr. Andrew: It’s a little too subtle, maybe. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: See what I did there? It’s like an inception! ...No one saw what I did there. Okay.

But so then how do we say… Do we just say, “No, it isn’t the ship of Theseus any more. The ship of Theseus is gone. The ship of Theseus has ceased to exist and now you have a replica”? So that’s one possible answer; that’s the materialist answer, that this is a replica of a ship. The real ship of Theseus has rotted away and disappeared. That is going to cause a lot of problems when we come to the human body’s matter being replaced every seven or eight years, because that means you’re not you; you’re a replica. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and here’s the thing. This is not only a problem in terms of questions of consciousness and so forth, but, for instance, think about the legal ramifications. Let’s say someone assaults me in an alley, and the police only figure out the identity of the person who does it ten years later. Is it right to try that person for assaulting a material being that no longer exists? So even our whole—everything we do is predicated upon different notions of identity than the one that tends to function in our head. It’s predicated upon non-materialist notions, like there’s something called “Pennsylvania.” I mean, what is that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the answer to this, from the biblical perspective and from the perspective of Orthodox theology and influenced by, in a lot of ways, Aristotle—and I won’t go down a rabbit-trail about Aristotle and St. Maximus or St. John of Damascus—is that, yes, that is still the ship of Theseus, even when all the matter has been replaced. Even when it’s been replaced two or three times, that’s still the ship of Theseus.

Why? Well, because to exist and to exist as a thing means to be placed in order and placed in that web of relationships. So the ship of Theseus, that matter—it’s a different set of matter, but that matter is, at that time, being the ship of Theseus. The people who come and see it see it as the ship of Theseus; they experience it as the ship of Theseus. It’s playing the role culturally, societally, the role in human conscious experience of the ship of Theseus, so it is the ship of Theseus.

And this is primarily a question, then, of what’s called teleology, of purpose, of function. So what makes it what it is is this idea of purpose and function and aim and goal. It is a particular sense of that web of relationships.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and what human beings do with or how they understand a thing is what makes that thing the thing it… Or I should say is a significant element of that. For instance, the coffee mug that is currently in my hand: I did in fact drink coffee out of it. You could say it’s a cup. You could say it’s ceramic. You could say it’s a painted piece of ceramic. But what makes it a coffee mug is that’s what I use it for. I could smash it into a million pieces and make a piece of art out of it, and it’s not a coffee mug any more; it’s art—probably terrible art, because I’m not an artist. But coffee-mug-ness is not a thing, like an independently existing thing. It’s just, as you said, teleological.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the purpose and the use and the way it is situated in that web of relationships. If I take my old iPhone and drop it on an isolated island, and people who have never heard of an iPhone find it, it will not be an iPhone. It might end up being a mirror. It might end up being a curiosity. It might end up being so much garbage. But it won’t be an iPhone, because it will not be functioning as an iPhone in any real sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So to kind of summarize some of this: being, nature—these are dynamic verbs…

Fr. Stephen: “Nature” as in the nature of a thing, not “nature” like nature outdoors. The nature of a thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Nature, capital-N. Yes, that these are verbs. Being. Be the being? No. [Laughter] You are a human doing, yes.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve touched on this a little when we talked about bodies and we were talking about Christ’s divine and human natures, that these are powers and capacities, that these are dynamic ideas, not… If you reify them, if you turn them into things—his divine nature is this one thing, and his human nature is this other thing, and they’re related in some way—congratulations, you’re a Nestorian. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then also another thing we’ve talked about is what it means to be in the image of God, and it’s better maybe to say that we are imagers of God, because talking about the image of God people tend to think, “What parts, what human parts, what human aspects are like something that God has?” but the point is to do the works of God.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we are created to function as the image of God, to image God.

Fr. Andrew: We are the image of God, and we are made to be imaging God at the same time. Right before we go to break, this actually has… Just to try to bring it down: we’ve talked about it in very rarefied metaphysical terms here, but just to bring it down to maybe a soteriological level… Even though this show isn’t about apologetics, we occasionally do make some comparisons with other kinds of theology. So here’s the question: What does it mean to be a saint? What does it mean to be—again, be—a saint?

I’m going to super-simplify here, so I’m sorry, and for those of you who haven’t read… I actually have a 400-plus-page book where I do a lot less simplifying about these kinds of things, but anyway. To super-simplify a little bit…

Fr. Stephen: Plug, plug.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thank you, yes. I didn’t name the book. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: Available at store.ancientfaith.com. [Laughter] So what does it mean to be a saint? Most kinds of Protestantism, if you are a Christian, truly, you are a saint, period, end of story. You don’t need to do anything to become more of one; that’s just what you are: you’re that thing. Whereas the way that Roman Catholicism tends to function—so this is one of the debates between them—it tends to be that you aren’t a saint until you’ve sort of reached a certain point, which is why there’s this whole theology of satisfaction and merit and all that stuff.

Whereas Orthodox theology, having this understanding of being that it is a verbal thing—and by that I don’t mean it’s just words; it’s action: it is teleological—you are a saint and you need to become a saint in maturity, perfection; you need to become what you are. Of course, this is what St. Paul says as well.

Now, I know full well that many Protestants, many Catholics, would agree with what I just said about Orthodox Christianity, and if so, great; but nonetheless, there is this sense of both a reality and an urgency at the same time, an actualization of this—that’s probably not the write word—and a still-becoming at the same time, that is really core to Orthodox soteriology, what it means to be saved.

So before we go to break, is there anything you wanted to add to that or correct or “well, actually” here?

Fr. Stephen: Let me, just a little, to minorly flesh that out. I won’t take too long, but… Right, so this is, if you’ve heard this talked about outside of, and maybe even within, some Orthodox circles, especially when it comes to the Bible and biblical studies. They’ll talk about what’s called the eschatological tension between the already and the not-yet, eschatology being the study of the last things. So there’s this idea that we’re all reading the Bible and we’re smart people, right, so people could see that, yes, St. Paul will sometimes refer to people as saints and then other times refer to those same people as those called to be saints. So that’s what this tension is. In some sense they already are; in some sense they’re not yet, but they’re called to be that.

And that tension then gets resolved on certain issues in certain ways, so I think what Fr. Andrew was referring to here was—particularly if you take the example of, say, justification… In the traditional classical Protestant Reformation understanding, you’re declared righteous. You’re declared saved. You’re declared a saint and so you are a saint, whether or not you actually become a saint in your life, whether there’s any visible change in your way of life, even if you remain a sinner. Luther referred to this as being justus et peccator: at the same time you’re just and a sinner. So he resolved that tension to the one side, to the already. Classical Tridentine Roman Catholic theology, then, resolved it in the other direction, in the direction of the not-yet, that you are in the process of becoming that, but you only are a saint once that process is completed. So you’re called to be: resolving it in that direction.

Whereas I think the Orthodox solution to that and what I think St. Paul is really getting at is that your identity is your telos, your end, your purpose, your goal. So you are a saint because you’re called to be a saint. The fact that that is your end and goal is why you are that already, because that’s how identity is formed. So both of those can co-exist at the same time. This is why St. Paul’s always talking about growing to maturity, all this language of telos: maturity, perfection, completion, as this goal. It’s not you become something different; it’s what you are comes to its fullness and completion.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So before we go to a break, which we’re going to do in just a second, I just want to add this little kind of caveat off to the side, which is: I know that a lot of these concepts are difficult. They’re difficult for me. Like, I’ve conceptualized a lot of them now, but that doesn’t mean that I have the habits of thought that are not materialist. We still have those habits of thought, and you can’t just flip a switch and decide, “I’m not going to think this way any more.” It doesn’t work that way, but nonetheless, these habits of thought, they can introduce a lot of distortions in our understanding of what Christianity is, and even though we can’t necessarily just radically change them, we can at least enter into criticism of them and correct ourselves and return back as much as we’re able. So that’s a lot of what we were just now doing, and, frankly, it’s what a lot of this show is about.

All right. Well, let’s go ahead and go to a break, and we’ll be right back after this.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you so much, Voice of Steve! Always happy to have you with us.

All right, this is the second part of the show. We do want to hear from you: 855-AF-RADIO.

So we took a trip into metaphysics, and you definitely bent my brain a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] The metaphysics of identity, yet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right? Exactly. Let’s start easing into “place.” [Laughter] Man, there’s so many good puns possible with this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: “Good pun” is an oxymoron, for the record.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] But it’s what so much of our hymnography is based on, is punning. It’s true, it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Enh… Not every wordplay is a pun. But anyway, we’re digressing radically at this point.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, let’s talk about place, because we’ve talked about what it means to be, what is being, humans are human doings, but does that have to…? I mean, is it just humans? Obviously we’re seeing that everything has its own sort of teleology. So what is… How does this work in terms of place, then?

Fr. Stephen: The first half of the show was not just me getting excited because they mentioned something about philosophy on WandaVision and going off on a digression, I promise. It was laying the ground for this, and now we’re going to talk about place, and sort of the place where—ha ha—this rubber meets the road is this idea of God being in a place. I don’t know if this has ever jumped out at anyone, but this is something that’s going on all through the Old Testament, for example, where we say that God’s everywhere; there isn’t a place where he isn’t—but then he’s like really in the tabernacle, or he’s really in the Temple, like he’s there a lot or something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and wasn’t it Jacob who built an altar and called it Beth-el because “the Lord is in this place.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, as we read last night. Beit-el, the house or temple of God, after he saw—oh, here we go again, ruining your Sunday school—it’s not a ladder; it’s a ziggurat, with stairs up.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Jacob’s ziggurat.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s another digression. So, right. There are these places where God, like, extra is, or something. So this is what we’re going to talk about now. What does it mean that God is somewhere in particular, in addition to being everywhere in general? [Laughter] And you can’t really separate space and time in this regard, and here’s what I mean: any time that the Old Testament, for example—we could talk about this in the New Testament, too, but we’re going to use the Old Testament—says that God is in a particular place in this special way, he’s in that particular place in a special way, for a particular period of time. So it wasn’t that he just happened to live on Mount Zion and David found him there when he captured Jerusalem.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Oh look, honey!”

Fr. Stephen: God came to dwell there. He came to dwell there on Mt. Zion, and then Ezekiel sees him, at the time of the exile, leave. So his presence was no longer there. So it wasn’t just sort of a set of spatial coordinates, but it was also like spatio-temporal coordinates, for all of the fans of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff out there.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and just to give an example, a much smaller example of this, I’ve lived in 23 different homes, and so my family has long had the weird little habit of, whenever we happen to be visiting one of the towns we used to live in, we might go and drive by the old homestead. But it’s interesting: with only one exception, I’ve never gone up to the door and knocked on the door and said, “Hi, I used to live here. Would you let me inside?” So the one exception is I actually drove up and I was sitting out on the curb in front of the house, just sort of looking at this house that I lived in when I was a kid, and then the owners came out. [Laughter] “Who is this guy looking at our house?” And I told them, and they invited me in, which was really great. But the point being that… So when I went in there, it wasn’t my house. I mean, it was the house, but it wasn’t my house. It was no longer my home. It was no longer being my home. And there’s a distance when it’s no longer functioning in that way. My presence is no longer there; it doesn’t belong there any more.

So obviously, we’re not just saying that when it involves God it’s much bigger, but at least it’s a way that we can understand what we are talking about in some small way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when we’re within the Divine Liturgy and we say, “Christ is in our midst,” we don’t meant that when Liturgy’s over, he departs from us and is gone somewhere, and then when we come back for Liturgy he shows up again. This is not as opposed to absence. This is a contemporary example in our ritual life of that presence at a particular place for a particular time.

And this is where we’re going to go deeper into what we started to get into a little in the first half in terms of this idea of spiritual realities or heavenly realities or eternal realities—whatever language we want to use to describe them—intruding into the realm of human conscious experience and becoming part of that web of relationships at particular points in time. As we referred to, as we mentioned we were going to go deeper into, so again, that example of Christ being the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world is Jesus Christ who died on a hill, an actual hill, outside the actual city of Jerusalem in, as we argued in the Christmas episode, 30 AD.

So that’s the point at which that event didn’t become true or become real, but was revealed and entered into the realm of human conscious experience. That even, as I mentioned, can then become present again. So another day in another place can become that time and place, and that happens through ritual. Ritual makes the current time and place that time and place. And in terms of the Cross, we’re going to do that on Holy Thursday. That’s why when we sing, we sing, “Today…” not “Back then…”: “Today,” because we’ve made that day ritually the original day.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and as an example, we made the mention about Hellenism earlier. Today is the 200th anniversary of the Greek war of independence, but actually it’s kind of not, because they were on the old calendar. But I mention that because it still is, because the Greek people are celebrating it, so it is the anniversary of their war for independence. It doesn’t matter that the clock hasn’t turned a certain number of times or whatever. It is because this is them doing it.

Even on a much more mundane example, like my birthday is always a fast day, no exceptions. It’s a single fast day. [Laughter] And so, ever since I’ve become Orthodox, largely speaking, if my birthday gets celebrated, it gets celebrated on some other day because, I mean, it’s kind of a drag to celebrate your birthday on a fasting day. Does that mean that the celebration is false? It doesn’t mean that. My birthday becomes that moment, even though the date on the calendar… We didn’t, as part of the celebrations, say, “Okay, today now is that date.” We don’t do that. But that’s why, for instance, within the Orthodox Church we’ve got a multiplicity of calendars in function. It can be Theophany on the new calendar, and if you’re 13 days later at an old calendar church, it is again Theophany. It’s not “not really Theophany” or the earlier one wasn’t really Theophany. It is. It is, because, as you say, you’re ritually participating in it. You’re actually doing the thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you have… There is for any of these things, for any of these mysteries, a paradigmatic date on which it was revealed, an archetypal point. So for the crucifixion we talked about that, but let me give another example, because this really cuts to the core of how worship, particularly ritual worship, is understood in the Scriptures.

We’ll take the feast of feasts: Passover. So there’s an event where the Israelites are set free from Egypt. And, as we’ve talked about, they’re set free from bondage to the gods of Egypt. That’s an event that happens. As we’ve talked about before, the ritual celebration of that is actually described before it happens. And when that ritual celebration happens later, they don’t say, when asked by their son, “How is this night different from all other nights?” they don’t say, “Well, X number of hundreds of years ago on this date, our ancestors were set free from Egypt.” They say, “Tonight is the night that we are set free from Egypt.” Us, sitting here, wherever—in Babylon, in Rome, in Munich, in Toronto.

Fr. Andrew: Brooklyn.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. We tonight are set free from Egypt, because ritually, that original archetypal day has been made that day.

Part of what happens in the separation of Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity is a debate over which event is the archetypal Pascha. Is the archetypal Pascha event the exodus from Egypt, which it refers back to? Which would make Christ’s Last Supper just an instance, the Mystical Supper an instance of that event, projected forward. Or, is the archetypal event the death and resurrection of Christ? Of which freedom from Egyptian bondage was a retrojection into the past, was an intrusion into the past, the Christ event intruded into the past and into all those subsequent Passovers, and now into the future.

And when I say there was a dispute, this dispute is enacted in the liturgics of Rabbinic Judaism. A lot of our non-Orthodox Christian friends like to, at some point, go and experience or see or watch or reenact a Passover Seder.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I have family members who do that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and they generally react to it like: “Oh, wow. There’s all this symbolism about Christ there.” And this is an unfortunate historical misinterpretation, because the way a Passover Seder is celebrated today is a product of Rabbinic Judaism, later Rabbinic Judaism, and there are things that are deliberately borrowed from Christian liturgics. “This is the bread of our suffering,” says the father when he holds up the bread. That was not in the Mystical Supper. That was not in Passover before about the third century AD. That was taken from “This is my body.” It went the other way.

So the Passover Seder was restructured in Rabbinic Jewish liturgics to explicitly make the claim that the Exodus Passover, the first Passover, is the archetypal and paradigmatic Passover, of which the Mystical Supper is an instance, not the other way around.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Okay, so before we get deeper into that, we actually do have someone calling. Austin is calling, and, Austin, are you there?

Austin: Yeah, I’m here. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you. So, Austin, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is your question, your comment for us tonight?

Austin: All right, so it’s not really related to today’s episode, but it was regarding sort of the life after. Well, I guess the world to come, I would say. Is it like a… or do we have a teaching, is it black and white to where everybody experiences the eternal condemnation the same, and everyone experiences the eternal life the same, or is there an idea of some sort of gradient differences?

Fr. Andrew: So it’s actually deeply related to what we’re talking about. Does that make you happy to know that? [Laughter]

Austin: That does, actually, yeah!

Fr. Andrew: No, so here’s how I would say it’s related. Let me make sure I’m getting your question right. You’re essentially asking if people who are among the saved, are they all having the same experience, or are some people having a sort of “better” experience than others; and then those who are among the damned, are some having a worse experience than others? Is that what your question is?

Austin: Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so here’s how it’s related, in my understanding. We started out by saying that the world as we know it is essentially a product of human consciousness, so that means that the orientation that you have towards God and towards participating in his works or towards participating in the works of the demons, the orientation that you have is going to be the key thing in terms of what your experience of that participation is. So why is it even in this present life that there are saints who experience the presence and the power and the love of God in a way that is way more intense than anything I’ve ever had in my life? If you believe what they say, they’re clearly experiencing something that I’m not. And certainly there are people who have had much more demonic experiences in life than I have had.

And it’s the same, really, in the life of the age to come. It’s because of the way that we orient ourselves towards it. Why is it that saints have these kinds of experiences? Look at their biography and you’re going to see a lengthy, usually, and definitely intense dedication to prayer and to selflessness and to almsgiving and all of this kind of stuff. They have oriented themselves to do the works of God, and so they experience God in a much more intense way than I do. The life of the age to come is simply the fullness of all of that. Fr. Stephen, am I getting that right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, and we are eventually going to do an episode on the nous and the nous as means of perception and experience and spiritual experience and that—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we loop back around to everything.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’ll get into that more deeply. There’s also firmly within the Orthodox Christian conception the idea that the saints in glory—which hopefully will include us—will continue to progress into eternity.

Fr. Andrew: “From glory to glory.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, that it’s not just sort of this static state where you go to heaven and you’re sitting on a cloud or everything’s made of milkshakes or all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt or whatever.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man!

Fr. Stephen: That we’re continually… we have a continually deepening experience of God. There is not necessarily a corresponding teaching that [for] all of those under condemnation things will just get infinitely worse and worse, at least I don’t see that anywhere. And in fact there are a lot of clues—and we’ll talk about a big one of those clues in our very next episode about the underworld—in terms of the experience of those who face eternal condemnation, that there is some differentiation there. And that differentiation there is not that “oh, your sins were worse so you’re going to get punished harder”; it’s more of a distinction of mercy and grace being shown. But we’ll get into that more fully in the very next episode.

Fr. Andrew: So does that help you out there, Austin?

Austin: Yeah, that is a great answer, and I can’t wait for the next episode.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy, it’s going to be so fun. All right, well, thank you very much for calling in tonight.

Austin: All right, well, thank you for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: Absolutely. [Laughter] I saw on the call board what his question was and I was like: Oh, this is cool! Like, it’s just another facet for looking at these things, right? Again, this teleological understanding of what reality itself is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and continuing what we’ve been talking about, that this is what the Scriptures see as the primary work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit creates, as we said; the Holy Spirit is hovering over the waters, hovering over the chaos, brooding over it. It’s bird language. In Genesis 1 it is involved in creation, and then in re-creation in the way that the New Testament authors speak of the Holy Spirit, but also the promise of the Holy Spirit in the Prophet Joel and in Jeremiah and Ezekiel is of re-creation, being put back in order and having the correct web of relationships restored. Both of those pieces are equally important. And then also metamorphosis and transformation. Not coincidentally this is how we understand what happens in the Eucharist in the Orthodox Church, that it’s the Holy Spirit who makes the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah. So we actually have… We got a message with a related question. This was a written question. I just thought this was a good one to put in here, because I think it’s a good transition to the next thing we’re going to talk about. So Laura asks this. She emailed this to us, if I remember correctly. She says:

How does the Celtic concept of “thin places” fit into these ideas of sacred geography? They’re described as spiritual porous places where the barrier between the seen and unseen grows thin. Are some of these sites sinister and others good? In Scotland and Ireland some of these were pre-Christian pagan sites that later became sites of Christian churches or saints’ shrines.

I think that this feeds—so thank you for that, Laura—I think that this very much feeds into what we were talking about, especially when you mentioned the idea that God is sort of really present in some places at certain times, but then there’s also this other side, like if you go to this particular place you’re more likely to have some kind of experience of the other world, of God himself, of the saints. Is that…? Is there something that’s sort of stuck there about the materiality of that place, that it’s become spiritualized? Or is it the fact that people go there? Or kind of… por qué no los dos? Why not both? Like, what’s going on there with “thin places”? It’s a cool concept.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, yeah, we got into this a little bit in our first episode on sacrifice, that the earliest ritual sites are places where there were encounters with spiritual beings. Unfortunately, some of these are negative spiritual beings, not just encounters with God like in the Old Testament, but also encounters with the demonic and other spiritual realities. So these places were marked and became ritual sites precisely because, as we were saying, part of the function of ritual is to make a previous day today, to make a previous event recur, to participate in that event, to realize it again, to re-present it, not represent it in some kind of disconnected way, but re-present it.

And so you see this a lot with some biblical examples. You see this a lot with standing stones, stone monuments, and this isn’t just something the Israelites did. This is something all their neighbors did. You would put a standing— Joshua, when they cross the Jordan, puts a standing stone there with an inscription on it, saying, “This is what happened here.” And so these other places, the same way, these places. So a stone would be put there, and ritually… When you have a lot of rituals… Ugarit did this a lot. So there were these places where that was the place where something happened in the story of Baal, where one of these events in Baal’s life was associated with this place, and there would be a standing stone there with an inscription, and they would go and anoint the stone as part of the ritual of making that event present again, and then re-enacting the story—sometimes grotesque stories, but re-enacting those stories ritually to make that event present again to participate in it.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting that even here in the US. we have historical markers. But why put those up to begin with, if it’s not in some way, even very reduced, to try to ritually participate in the thing that happened there?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then some people take it further. They don’t just go and read the plaque at Gettysburg. They get dressed up and go and re-enact the battle, to participate in it themselves and connect and to try to re-present it again in this kind of ritual way. So this is why these sites then become Christian sites, because this is again a re-creative act. This place has been the place where Baal did XYZ; now this is going to be the place of this martyr.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is the place where God put the smack-down on this particular demon.

Fr. Stephen: It’s going to be put in a different order now, in a different set of relationships. So this place is now going to be a different place than this place was previously.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Cool. All right, so I know that the next thing we’re going to discuss is about the compass directions.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re getting close to our actual topic.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: We’re closing in on the actual topic of the podcast.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. Sacred geography! [Laughter] A lot of groundwork, as always, has to be laid before we get there. Yeah, okay, so cardinal directions. What’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and that’s not the guy who tells you where things are at the Vatican gift shop, Cardinal Directions.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like Basil Exposition. [Laughter] These are the four main compass directions. These have clear associations, and when I say that the compass directions have associations, this means they’re not identified with a particular place. No matter where you are, east is east and west is west, and north is north and south is south—unless you’re at the north or south pole, which ancient Israelites weren’t, so they didn’t have to worry about it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, what do you do? It’s all south from here, if you’re at the north pole? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Nowhere to go but down.

Probably the most familiar one of these—we’ll probably go from most to least familiar through these—probably the most familiar is east, the association with east.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s where all the good stuff is.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Christian churches are supposed to face east. But as we’ve been discussing, no matter which direction your church points, it points east.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And Christian graves point east.

Fr. Stephen: Face east. We have the hymn talking about “the east of the highest” that we talked about in our Christmas episode. And that is because we are told in Genesis 2 that when God plants the garden of Eden, when he plants paradise, he does it “in the east.” And he doesn’t say east of what. He doesn’t say “east of blank he planted a garden”; it just says he plants it in the east. And you may say, “Well, that means east of Jerusalem,” right? Well, here’s the problem. Later on, as we’re going to talk about in the third half, Jerusalem comes to be identified as the place where paradise was!

Fr. Andrew: Right, east of east.

Fr. Stephen: So it can’t be east of itself. Yeah, so it’s just the east. The east is the place where paradise is. The east is the place where God dwells. So if you’re going to face toward God, you face east, because that’s where paradise is and where he dwells.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and interestingly again, this points to a teleological reality. So facing east is a matter of facing east. It’s relational, it’s volitional, it’s…

Fr. Stephen: It’s orienting. You’re orienting yourself.

Fr. Andrew: Literally orienting, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Toward the orient. So probably the next more familiar is north, which may not be immediately familiar to anyone, but north, which… We think of north as up. When we draw maps, north is pointing up at the top of the map. That wasn’t the case in Ancient Near Eastern maps. Ancient Near Eastern maps, up was what we would call [east]; [down] was the Mediterranean, which means that north was to the left. So that already gives you a clue that there’s something sinister about it.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, literally. For those of you who know a little Latin…

Fr. Stephen: It is the left-hand side. And so the north is, throughout the Scriptures, the abode of evil. So Baal and his council of gods met on Mount Zaphon. Zaphon is Hebrew for “north”: the mountain of the north. One of his titles was Baal-Zaphon, Baal of the north, and it wasn’t just that there were a lot of Baal worshipers in Lebanon, though there were.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not about Lebanon as the abode of evil. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this is the place of the north. So when we read the resurrection gospel in matins, we read it to the north. So we proclaim the gospel of Christ’s resurrection, the news of the defeat of the powers of evil, we proclaim it to them, by facing towards them. And my understanding is that in Western liturgics, traditional Latin liturgics, they read the gospel all the time toward the north.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, not now but traditionally, that’s the way it’s done.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that they would always read the gospel to the north, for the same reason. You’re telling them about Christ’s resurrection to proclaim their doom.

Fr. Andrew: Right. The Gospel isn’t good news for everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. So then that’s north. West, as we mentioned, would be the Mediterranean Sea, and the sea, as we’ve already talked about, the waters of the sea is chaos, chaos or destruction. And then south—south is kind of interesting in that the south, when you talk about things in the south, the south is sort of always the predecessor or precursor to civilization, not in the BioWare RPG sense [Laughter], but in the sense of civilization is seen to come from the south to the north. So the Greeks believed their civilization came from Egypt. The Akkadians, Akkad, believed their civilization came from Sumer.

And then, importantly in the Old Testament, there are all these texts that are referred to as the “Yahweh from the south” passages, where Yahweh, the God of Israel, comes up into… comes to dwell on Mount Zion, but he comes from Edom and Midian, and that’s related to the fact that Moses learns about Yahweh from Jethro the priest of God Most High, his father-in-law, who’s an Edomite. The Edomites and Midianites had continued to worship Abraham’s God, and Israel receives that worship back from them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a sense that the south is kind of the ancient, the old-school, the past. Where I live obviously that would be in Lancaster County, where all of the Amish people live and the Mennonites and stuff. So, see, it works here in Pennsylvania, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this is… The Queen of Sheba who comes to visit Solomon is the queen of the south, not just because the Sabean kingdom is in Ethiopia and Yemen, but it’s that this ancient civilization comes to see Solomon for his wisdom. It’s sort of a flip of the natural thing. You would expect Solomon, as the king of this sort of newer dynasty, to go and inquire of the ancients, but it’s sort of this reverse of that, where the ancients come to inquire of him, because he knows Yahweh and so he has the true sort of wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I should add here, by the way, that some of my Baltic ancestors, there was a legend among them that civilization came to them from Rome, that the ancient Lithuanians were in fact Romans who made their way north at some point. But, I mean, even the same thing holds within Norse mythology, right? Like if you read the Eddas, at the beginning of the prose Edda—which, I mean, the prose Edda is actually written by a Christian, so it’s interesting that he puts it this way, Snorri Sturulson—he says that what the Norse worshiped as gods were actually heroes who had escaped from Troy. So there is again this sense that what’s way down south somewhere, that’s the source of our civilization and order and all that kind of stuff. It’s interesting how that theme gets reused over and over and over again, that south is where all the civilization comes from.

Fr. Stephen, you still there?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, sir.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, just… I heard some crackling, and I was all: Oh no! Are we having those issues again?

Fr. Stephen: No, I was just trying to prevent the Mexican radio station from…

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, good!

Fr. Stephen: Trying to block that.

Fr. Andrew: Civilization from the south breaking through in on you right now!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot of good food from down there, although you’re in Louisiana; you have a lot of good food down there as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, we have the easiest Lents ever with all the seafood.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go. Yeah, okay, so the way that this plays out is, for instance, we have the tradition of praying towards the east, but it’s towards the east, not towards, for instance, Jerusalem, and which you would have to adjust which direction… which, by contrast with Muslims, who always pray towards Mecca; they try to figure out where Mecca is and pray in that direction. It’s a kind of materializing of the place, of the direction of prayer. There’s a spot. But ancient Israel and of course the Church as Israel prays towards the east. From wherever you are, it’s always east. It’s not towards a particular spot. It’s relational.

All right. Well, the second half was actually briefer because we didn’t have to do as much metaphysics this time. So we’re going to go ahead and go to break, and we’ll be back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits. So let’s go to break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast. Before we get into talking about the mountain of God—finally now, here’s the topic, right? one of the main topics of tonight’s show—I just want to lay out for you… I put this in our Facebook group, but I just want to lay out for everybody a kind of road map for our next few episodes. So today we’re introducing the idea of spiritual geography, of sacred geography, and now we’re going to be talking about the mountain of God. Next time, two weeks from today, we’re going to be talking about the underworld. And then, two weeks from then, well, my unofficial—I will have to see if this passes muster with the brass—my unofficial title for that one is “The Lord of Spirits Goes to Hell,” but we’ll see.

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to help you have the most metal Pascha ever.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! Absolutely. And then, post-Pascha, not immediately right after, but I think it’s the week after that—so remember we’re on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month—so the second Thursday of May, we’re going to be doing a Q&A episode, and it’s going to be just Q&A. We had a couple of calls tonight that were not super connected to what we’re talking about, so we told them please call back later. So we will be doing a Q&A episode, so that’s going to be a lot of fun.

The other thing I want to let everybody know about is that, because we get questions about this it seems every other hour in our email or in the Facebook group in particular, is that—he doesn’t like to toot his own horn, but Fr. Stephen has a book coming out, and, God willing, it’s going to be coming out right after Pascha. These timelines are always a little flexible because of the printing and all that kind of stuff. But it’s called The Religion of the Apostles, and it’s going to be covering a lot of the themes that we talk about in Lord of Spirits, and—this is the main reason I mention this—one of the questions we constantly get is: Can you give us suggested reading for some of these topics? And you know what? There’s going to be a bibliography. There’s going to be a bibliography, and a big index in the back. So I’ve seen the manuscript; you guys are going to love it. It’s just a tool, again, to help us talk about and to understand some of these same topics better. It’s called The Religion of the Apostles. So that’s coming out, God willing, shortly after Pascha.

All right. The mountain of God. Here we are now finally.

Fr. Stephen: We’re coming down the mountain. And everyone has their own opinion… [Laughter] That’s a reference you didn’t get, but anyway…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I don’t know. It sounds biblical, so I’m going to laugh.

Fr. Stephen: It wasn’t at all. But anyway…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, well. Whatever.

Fr. Stephen: The opposite, almost. [Laughter] We’re talking about not just any mountain, but the mountain of God.

Fr. Andrew: The mountain of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there is a mountain of God, but several mountains have been being the mountain of God at different points in time.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. “Have been being.” Gotcha. Past per— Wait. [Laughter] The double pluperfect past— no. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: This is part of your penance as a grammar nazi is having to listen to me doing things like that to the English language.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: So when we’re talking about the mountain of God, we’re talking about, first of all, the place where God dwells. But another biblical name for it is the mountain of assembly, which in Hebrew is har moed; har is mountain, and moed is assembly. That’s the same word for assembly that gets translated in the Greek Old Testament as ekklesia, which of course gets translated as “church” in the New Testament. Sometimes our English translations obscure that, the idea that the Church is the same assembly as the assembly we’re talking about, which is God’s divine council which meets atop the mountain.

So this isn’t—I mean, you’re probably immediately aware that the idea that God lives on a mountain and that the divine council meets on a mountain—we’ve already mentioned Mt. Zaphon in Baal-worship. Probably Mount Olympus springs to mind for a lot of people. Lots of gods meet on mountains. The Egyptian creation story starts on a mound. This is kind of a universal thing that there was an understanding by everyone in the ancient world, a preserved memory, that God lives on top of a mountain.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, so is this why in the psalms it says, “I will look up unto the hills from whence cometh my help?” Is that what it is?

Fr. Stephen: That’s actually different from how we read it, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. Just throwing that out there.

Fr. Stephen: That’s actually… “I lift up my eyes to the hills”—I’ll go ahead and talk about this—that’s one of the songs of ascent, when people are on their way to Jerusalem. That reference to looking up to the hills, that’s a reference to the high places of the pagan gods.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! Okay.

Fr. Stephen: That you have to go past on the way. That’s why the next thing is “I lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help.” I gave you an old KJV there. “From whence cometh my help”—my help comes from Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: The Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Not from any of them.

Fr. Andrew: Not—exactly. It’s a contrast. Ah, okay. All right. Not those hills, but the hills, but the mountain. Don’t settle for lesser hills, people.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] Or mounds or just humps.

Fr. Andrew: Barrows. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And this of course is why we have ziggurats, step-pyramids, pyramids.

Fr. Andrew: The hanging gardens of Babylon, which all Civilization players know about. Sid Meyer’s Civilization.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, these are all re-creating the mountain of God. These are human re-creations of the mountain of God as temples, so that they can ascend it ritually. Tower of Babel, that’s what’s going on in the tower of Babel.

Fr. Andrew: The ziggurat of Babel.

Fr. Stephen: And then hanging gardens of Babylon is a really good example. It was seen to be a garden, on top of the mountain, in which the Most High God and the divine council dwelt, and they dwelt in particular in tents on top of the mountain. So this is going on in, for example, in Hebrews, when it talks about how Moses came into the sanctuary on top of Mt. Sinai and created the tabernacle as a sort of re-creation and icon of the place that he experienced there and the heavenly sanctuary on top of the mountain: that’s literally the tent, the tabernacle, where God was dwelling and where the assembly was meeting on top of Mt. Sinai, because Mt. Sinai was at that time the mountain of God.

Fr. Andrew: So when they moved around with the tabernacle, would they then try to erect it up on top of something, or does it…?

Fr. Stephen: If they could. It was at the center of the camp. We actually get at the book of Numbers, which I know is everyone’s favorite, it actually describes in detail where each tribe camped, like, the exact layout of how the camp would be and how they would file in and how they would file out when they broke camp. So, yeah, it was in the center so that even if it was on a flat, you still have the idea that this is the peak; it’s the center. It’s the focus. So that’s why you have a tabernacle.

This is also related to why, on the mount of Transfiguration, when St. Peter sees Christ meeting with the divine council in the persons of the Prophet Elijah and Moses, he says, “Let’s build three tents.”

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: “One for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah,” because he sees: Oh, Mount Tabor here has become the mountain of God. This is the place for us to dwell. So the first sort of instantiation we see in the Bible of the mountain of God is Eden itself.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, where you’ve got… And if I recall correctly, it doesn’t explicitly say in the Genesis text that it is on a mountain, but it does say that there was four rivers flowing out from it, all in different directions, and they’re all obviously flowing out from it, so that means they have to be going downhill.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so logically we are on an elevated spot. Those rivers are presented as the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Danube.

Fr. Andrew: Which don’t flow from any actual geographical spot in the world.

Fr. Stephen: Actual geographical point, right. But the idea is that the whole world is being watered, being nourished, by this water that is coming out from the presence of God, from the place where God dwells there in paradise. While the four rivers just sort of suggest that, if you read Ezekiel 28:13-16, which is part of Ezekiel’s prophetic recounting of the fall of the devil, he refers there to Eden as a mountain directly.

So this is the mountain of God sort of presented as itself and not directly associated with any particular physical location, as much as History Channel documentaries would want you to believe otherwise.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like the archaeological search for Eden. Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yes, but—but, going forward, mountains that are in the world and that you could go visit become the mountain of God for certain periods of time, temporal spatial coordinates, as we said. One of them we already mentioned, Mt. Sinai, becomes the mountain of God, and Moses ascends, he enters into the council, he enters into the sanctuary, the tabernacle there, as Hebrews talks about. St. Stephen, in his sermon in Acts also references this. I’m sure at some point we’ll end up doing an episode where we talk about the Law being given by angels, which is referred to several times in the New Testament and is nowhere in the Old Testament. So that’s our first one.

Our second one, then, is Mount Zion, where the Temple is ultimately built. As we mentioned, David didn’t come into the city and find God there and say, “Oh, hey! I found the mountain of God.” [Laughter] Mission accomplished.

Fr. Andrew: We got his address… We tracked him down. “Hey, you guys. God lives here!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But Zion, when it becomes the place where God dwells, becomes the mountain of God, becomes paradise. So when the Temple is built, all of the iconography of Eden—the pomegranates, the fruit trees—all the iconography of the Temple are built as a garden. It’s now a garden on top of a mountain, because this is the place where God is going to dwell until, as we mentioned, Ezekiel sees it leaving. But the Temple, the idea of a temple in the Scriptures, maintains this connection to paradise. So when Ezekiel prophesies a future temple, he describes it as having waters flowing from it that water the whole earth, which is a clear reference back to Eden and the four rivers.

Then when we move into the New Testament—and some of our listeners are probably hearing this right now instead of us if they’re in church, or they recently heard it, or they heard it this morning and last night—but the Theotokos coming to be described as paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Not only is there the image, of course, of the Theotokos as the eastern gate through which the Lord enters, but then there’s the hymn of the katavasies of the cross, where we sing, “Thou art the mystical paradise,” where she’s described as a mystical paradise endowed with speech in some cases. Why? Because she’s the place where God dwells. If she’s the place where God dwells, then that makes her into paradise.

Fr. Stephen: Right, she is paradise while God is dwelling within her.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s where paradise is: it’s the place where God dwells.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the reason why we talk about—and last night at vespers we read that section of Ezekiel’s temple prophecy about the gate facing east—this isn’t just a wild allegorical thing, allegorical detail. It’s because of the understanding pretty much unanimously in the Church Fathers, because they’re getting it from the New Testament, that Christ is Ezekiel’s temple. We especially see this in the Johannine literature at all, and St. John in his gospel makes this point about as bluntly as you can, because he presents the episode where Christ says, “Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days,” and then St. John adds the editorial note: “He was speaking of the temple which is his body.” Just in case you didn’t piece that together!

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting, you could still read that as saying—and people do—like: He just means “temple” as a kind of metaphor for his body. But, like, why would he pick the temple? Why not just say “a house”? It’s a particular… It’s about temple; it’s about paradise. He is… Where he is is the mountain of God. That even our churches become the mountain of God. Why is it that ideally altars, within the sanctuary of the Orthodox Church, are placed higher than… Even if it’s like our parish here in Emmaus, it’s just one step up. But there’s others where there’s a few steps up. Why is it always higher? It’s not so everyone can see. And it’s why, God help me, but…

Fr. Stephen: On the altar there’s a tabernacle…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Literally there’s a tabernacle!

Fr. Stephen: With God in it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s why also, for instance, I mean, I’ve seen this in some churches where the seating is like in a stadium or like in a theater, where the altar is down at the bottom, and I’m like: Nooo! This is exactly the opposite of the way it should be! Don’t have it raked! If it’s going to be raked, it should be raked the other way. But anyway…

Fr. Stephen: And when Christ says that, he’s saying that at Herod’s Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Right! “I’m the real temple.”

Fr. Stephen: So he’s very deliberately making the point. There’s this prophecy that the temple would be rebuilt, that there would be a new temple in Ezekiel. This this Herod put up ain’t it. Christ is saying, “I’m it.” Christ is it.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s also why there are certain Christians—Dispensationalists; I’ll just put it out there—who believe that there’s going to be some prophetic moment where a temple gets built in Jerusalem on the temple mount…

Fr. Stephen: Ezekiel’s temple. Material building.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s Christ. It’s already happened. Christ is the new temple.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the proof of that is that Ezekiel says that is the temple where God will dwell forever.

Fr. Andrew: Forever.

Fr. Stephen: Forever. When you get to, again, the Johannine literature, you get to Revelation 21: in the new heavens and the new earth, there is no temple, St. John says. And he says the reason there’s no temple is because God and the Lamb dwell with them. Because Christ is there, you don’t need a building. So if Ezekiel is talking about a physical, material building, that building will have to be destroyed after it gets built, which means God won’t be dwelling there forever, which means it’s not what Ezekiel’s talking about. So that just doesn’t work as an interpretation of Ezekiel.

But if we accept that what Ezekiel is talking about is Christ, then this gate-facing-east thing makes perfect sense. East: that’s where God dwells. So if God is going to come to dwell in a human body—“body” understood in the ancient way—if he’s going to take a human body, a human nature, he’s going to come from the east, where he dwells. So the gate that faces east is the gate through which he will come, and it’s Ezekiel who adds the details that only the prince will come through that gate and no one else, and the gate will remain shut.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s also then why we get all this cool imagery in Scripture of water flowing out from Christ, because he’s paradise.

Fr. Stephen: In the Johannine literature especially. St. Photini…

Fr. Andrew: You’ve got the woman at the well, right, you’ve got her. But even when he stands up in the synagogue and reads, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink…”

Fr. Stephen: On the last day of the feast, yeah. “I will give them water, and waters will pour forth from his belly.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so believers become the mountain of God. Believers become… “Don’t you know that the kingdom of God is within you?” That paradise is within you? Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within you, and your body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and also, just to mention this awesome image from the prophecy of Daniel, the stone from the uncut mountain that smashes all of the idols and all the kingdoms of this world and then grows to fill the whole earth.

Fr. Stephen: Grows into a mountain, yeah, it’s a rock that…

Fr. Andrew: Into a mountain, right.

Fr. Stephen: It grows into a mountain that fills the whole earth. The same way that God comes to fill, that paradise comes to fill the whole earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: And so the last sort of element of this that we get from Scripture is that the holy mountain at certain points comes under siege. So one of these we’ve already talked about back in the giants episode—so everybody get excited.

Fr. Andrew: Yay!

Fr. Stephen: —the Amalekites, when they come to Mt. Sinai. The Israelites, when they come to Mt. Sinai, Mt. Sinai is being the mountain of God at that point. And so the Amalekites come and lay siege to them and to the mountain, and there’s that passage where it says the Amalekites have dared to lay a hand upon the throne of Yahweh, because it’s become the mountain of God: that’s where his throne is while he’s there meeting with Moses. That’s where his throne, his dwelling, enters into the realm of human conscious experience. It’s in that place at that time. And so they lay siege to it.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s why, then, Israel is sent to go and to take God’s revenge against the giants, against the Amalekites, because they attacked the throne of God, effectively.

Fr. Stephen: And this, then, happens again in Revelation again. This is Armageddon. A lot of people—again, I’m sorry, History Channel documentaries; they really want this to be Megiddo…

Fr. Andrew: Are you really sorry to the History Channel documentaries?

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, not sorry, History Channel documentaries. There’s no aliens involved and this isn’t Megiddo. “Armageddon” is a Greek translation of har moed. It’s an ayin: is the “e” in moed, the “eh” sound. In its ancient pronunciation, that was pronounced like /G/, very close to a hard-g sound. So, for example, Sodom and Gomorrah, the /g/ in Gomorrah, it’s actually an ayin; it’s actually this letter.

Fr. Andrew: Which, if you know how to speak Arabic, you know how to say the ayin.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So it’s not Megiddo; it’s har moed. This is the mountain of assembly. All of the enemies of God, led by the dragon and the beast, gather around like the Amalekites, to lay siege to the mountain of assembly, and then are defeated and destroyed in the imagery of Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Right there. Wow.

Fr. Stephen: But what this means is that wherever God’s paradise is, wherever the dwelling-place of God is, that place is going to be under siege by the enemies of God, by the spiritual enemies of God. That includes within us. This is part of the basis of our understanding of spiritual warfare. If the Holy Spirit is dwelling within us and we’re the temple of God and we’re the dwelling-place of God, then we become paradise within and the mountain of God within. Then that means there’s going to be a siege; we’re going to be under attack by God’s enemies. So this forms an important base, deeply connected to our understanding of spiritual warfare. The mountain of God is not some physical mountains, but it’s inside you. It’s part of your internal geography.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, well, to wrap up this first of our two episodes—or is it three?—about spiritual geography, sacred geography… Especially on that last note, which I think… I mean, it’s all fascinating, but I think this last note in particular—not the only place, but one of the places—where the rubber meets the road. If paradise is within you, the mountain of God is within you, and you’re going to be under siege by the enemies of God, not just because people get excited when we talk about Amalekites.

I remember—and we just actually marked the commemoration of his passing a few days ago—a priest that I knew, Fr. Alexander Atty. Was he the dean when you were at St. Tikhon’s, or was that after?

Fr. Stephen: That was after.

Fr. Andrew: A little after, okay.

Fr. Stephen: I met him a few times, though.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So Fr. Alexander Atty, who passed away, untimely from our point of view, of cancer, just a few days actually after Metropolitan Philip of the Antiochian Archdiocese. So it was 2014, and it was later in March, so just a few days ago. I remember one of the things that he said to me one time, and this was in the context of giving advice. He was a very experienced pastor; he was a pastor for decades at St. Michael’s Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

He said: Make the place you’re in into paradise. The specific context at the time was the parish where God has put you as a pastor, make it as paradisaical as possible. But that’s not the only application of that. So if the kingdom of God is within you—and again this emphasizes this, as it’s called, eschatological tension of both now and not-yet—so if you are a baptized Christian, then you are the place of paradise, because you’ve put on Christ. “As many as have been baptized, have put on Christ.” And if Christ is the temple of God, if he is paradise, then it’s within you.

So if you’ve done that and you are the paradise of God, but you also are not-yet, because we’re still on the journey—it’s both now and not-yet; become the thing that you are—that means that spiritual life is about making yourself paradisaical. This is one of the ways of talking about it; it’s not the only way. And so how do you do that? Well, what is appropriate for a temple? What is appropriate for paradise? What does that look like? What do you do there?

Number one, you are there to be with God. You are there to commune with God; you are there to worship God. That’s what a temple is; that’s where paradise is. It’s the place where Adam meets God and where he is one with God and he is in communion with God. So that means that prayer and worship are utterly core to who we are. It’s not just sort of something that “helps” with spiritual life or something… “I make sure I try to do that every so often…” It doesn’t “help.” It is who we are.

But also, think about all the things we’ve talked about in terms of sacrifice in previous episodes and about purification of the temple of God and all of that. That also applies to you, to who you are. All of these things that are the way that a temple functions and is treated and people go there and do those things, all of that is who you are.

And even this image of pilgrimage: we started with that when we started talking about sacrifice. There is an internal pilgrimage that you make within, which we participate in by making external pilgrimage, and by that you can mean going on a long journey, but it also means simply the pilgrimage you make on a Sunday morning when you get up and you go to your church, even if you live right next door to it. But it’s also the pilgrimage that you make when you wake up and you walk and you stand up in front of your icons.

In the morning and at night, you’re making that pilgrimage to this holy place, because you are paradise, and you are making yourself paradisaical by then going to another paradise, so to speak, within your home, within your community. All of these things. It sort of stacks, paradise upon paradise. And why do we go to the saints? Because the saints have become paradise. We go there because we meet with God there, and we connect with God there and commune with God there.

All of this reverberates just beautifully, beautifully. And if we, even with these sort of difficult metaphysical concepts that we began with, about being a human doing, that “being” is a verb, that figures into this very, very deeply, and if you understand this the right way and you’re oriented the right way, then you’ll know that it’s not a matter of “Am I good enough? Have I done enough? Did I go to church enough? Did I love my neighbors enough?” or whatever, because, again, that’s a very quantitative approach to these things. The question is: What am… How am I being? How am I being? Am I fundamentally oriented towards God and going to that mountain of assembly to meet with him? I sometimes tell people it’s not a matter of progress or distance or arrival, it’s of sort of vector, so to speak, to use a mathematical term: what direction are you moving in? And that’s spiritual life from this particular angle.

I love this conversation on sacred geography. The first place I go is this question like Laura talked about, when I learned about the idea of “thin places,” I was like: Whoa. There’s places you can go, where you can meet God? And the answer, of course, is yes. But also, thinking about that beautiful advice given to me by Fr. Alexander Atty, that the place I’m in can become paradise, that this studio that I’m talking to you from right now—it is paradise, because here I meet with God, and that’s the purpose of this place.

My prayer is that all of this will help to contribute to your paradise, which is not a separate one from the paradise; it’s simply participation in Christ himself, who is the paradise where we worship the one true God. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this is kind of obligatory, but, I mean, as you said, you can find paradise anywhere. You can find it in Paradise City. You can find paradise by the dashboard light. [Laughter] Anyway. That was low-hanging fruit.

I know we have a fair number of listeners who aren’t necessarily Americans, but I think this may apply beyond America. I can say for us ‘Muricans, our heroes are individuals. Our heroes are lone wolves, the tough cop who plays by his own set of rules, you know. You don’t see a lot of TV shows and movies of people who do things by the book and sort of do a solid job. We all want to be individuals and achieve individual excellence. That’s what we’re oriented toward.

But one of the consequences of everything we’ve been talking about tonight, but especially in terms of identity and the time we spent talking about identity and what makes something what it is, including what makes you and I who you and I are, is that it’s not just about us being put in order; it’s not just about us. It’s not just an internal thing, of being justified and set in order and properly arranged, though this tends to be the focus of a lot of our Christian life and thought, is: I need to get my stuff together; I need to get myself straightened out; I need to repent of my sins and get my stuff okay so that I go to heaven when I die, and I need to find salvation for myself. That could even just be: I need to become a saint. I need to achieve some kind of spiritual excellence, some kind of spiritual level.

But just being set in order, just being a certain thing, isn’t your identity. Your identity includes and is dependent on that web of relationships we were talking about; the way we fit into the rest of creation, including our fellow humans, but going beyond our fellow humans to all of the rest of creation; having that set of relationships, those connections, being right, being set right, being put in order and in their proper order. Without that, we can’t be internally set right. This is why, all through the Scriptures—famously in 1 John, but all through the Scriptures—you can’t love God and hate your neighbor. You can’t have things right with God, you can’t be justified and have things be out of whack at the same time. I don’t want to pick on him too much, but I’m sorry, Martin Luther. You can’t be just and a sinner at the same time. You just can’t.

So we have to always remember, and especially now during Great Lent, when we’re really focused on this—we’re focused on repentance—that this is not just a move inward. Everything that we said about paradise being within you and the kingdom being within you is absolutely true, but that doesn’t mean that you fold in on yourself and become a solipsist and become entirely self-focused, because finding yourself and finding what is within you is only going to happen through correcting that web of relationships. You’re going to find yourself in other people; you’re going to find God in other people.

And when we’re loving our neighbor and we’re setting things right and we’re making amends as part of our repentance and we’re putting everything around us back into order, that’s what’s going to cause all those things within us that are out of joint and out of place to slide back into place. That’s where things are going to come together, and we’re going to find out who we really are and what it really means to be a human, and thereby, by discovering what it means to really be human, to discover what it is to be like Christ and to become like God, which is what we call theosis and what salvation is really all about. It’s about becoming a son of God, as we’ve said before, becoming like him, becoming like Christ. That doesn’t happen for us all alone on our own. That happens for us as part of the Church, as part of a community of the faithful, both those who are alive with us here in this world now and those who have gone before. We all find salvation and restoration and paradise together.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, next time we’re going to be following Orpheus and taking a trip into the underworld. But that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and God bless you and may he give you a beautiful, beautiful Lent.