Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers—but not vampire-hunters: we talked about that. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana—Cajun country!—and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, on the very edge of Pennsylvania Dutch land. If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO: 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is taking your calls tonight—and it is her birthday! So if you call, you had better wish Matushka Trudi a happy birthday. I will have her write down the names of those who did not.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Also, if you call in, speak quietly. I’m still recovering from Mardi Gras.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, well, you do live in Louisiana.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So please call. We’ll get your calls in the second part of the show.

Lord of Spirits is brought to you by our listeners and also by Chrysostom Academy. A lot of you listeners out there work from home, and if you’re telecommuting you can probably live anywhere. If you’re a parent of school-age kids and you’re like me, working from a virtual office, then one of your big considerations for where you live is where your kids go to school. I love living in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, and part of why is because my kids go to Chrysostom Academy. I’m not kidding; it’s true. And it’s a pan-Orthodox classical school with elementary through high school students. It’s on a beautiful, 55-acre campus, has the highest academic standards, and it’s focused not just on educating the mind but forming the whole person in Christ. So if you don’t live here yet, think about moving to the Lehigh Valley and sending your kids to Chrysostom Academy. Even if you don’t telecommute, our local economy is growing; there are actual jobs here, and we’ve got eight Orthodox parishes in our local area. So you can visit ChrysostomAcademy.org—again, that’s ChrysostomAcademy.org—to see what I’m talking about.

Fr. Stephen: You can get a legion of people to head over there and make Peeps.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! They make Peeps not too far from where Chrysostom Academy is located. That is actually true.

Fr. Stephen: There you go. Your children will learn; you will Peep.

Fr. Andrew: Also, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is from Chrysostom—he’s not from Chrysostom Academy; he’s from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say—that’s a claim you can’t back up!

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know. I think he went to Liberty High School, maybe—I’m not sure—which I’m not advertising that. Yeah, the only really big drawback if you come here and send your kids to that school is that, on some level, you will have me as your neighbor. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: You’ve successfully disrupted everything. Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. [Laughter] But yes. My wife and I love having our kids there. It’s great; it’s really fantastic. We’re so glad, so glad it’s there.

Also—one more little ad—we’re still selling tickets for our Lord of Spirits Conference on October 26 – 29, 2023. Right now only commuter tickets are available. That means you’ve got to get your own hotel room or some place to stay—B&B or whatever—because y’all have sold out the lodging at the Antiochian Village. You maniacs! You can still go to store.ancientfaith.com/events to get your ticket, and there’re actually not even that many commuter tickets left. It’s pretty nuts.

Fr. Stephen: They say that Mr. Durden is building an army.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, the first rule of Lord of Spirits club is—no, wait.

Fr. Stephen: No, you can talk about the convention.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, that’s right.

Tonight—tonight we continue our conversations on the sacraments of the Church, and we’re talking about the holy mystery of unction, which can be slippery to get our minds around. What does it do? Why don’t we see miracles every time it’s applied? Is sin related? And so on. So where are we going to start this time, Fr. Stephen? Should we just go ahead and start with Genesis?

Fr. Stephen: I think somewhere, someone has probably mapped out the broad structure of a Lord of Spirits episode.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s just a generic Lord of Spirits episode out there that anyone can do at home now.

Fr. Stephen: You know, actual topic in the third half. [Laughter] Starting somewhere in the murky depths of prehistory, working our way through.

I did want to comment, before we get started, on a more serious note, on the passing of Dr. Michael Heiser, which I want to comment on for a number of reasons. A lot of our audience is very familiar with his work. Some people have gone from reading his work to becoming part of our audience, and other folks, vice versa. Because we don’t… Other than friend of the show, Bart Ehrman, we don’t comment on a lot of people on the show—occasionally we get things: “Why don’t we talk about him?” people hypothesizing various theories as to why we don’t talk about him, and this and that. And so, with his passing earlier this week, I wanted to kind of clarify things regarding that and say a few words.

As I mentioned, I don’t like talking—other than friend of the show, Bart Ehrman—I don’t like talking about people. I have as a general policy to be ruthless with ideas and compassionate with people. When you don’t talk about people, you just talk about ideas, it looks a lot less like a personal attack and more like just critique and give-and-take and working out ideas.

Fr. Andrew: 19th-century Germans, though, are fair game.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But even then, I rarely name them.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: And Dr. Heiser was a firm believer in the peer-review process. One of the things— Obviously, I didn’t know him personally; as far as I know, he didn’t know I existed. But beyond pretty much anyone else I’ve encountered in academia and scholarship, he thoroughly believed in the peer-review process, in give-and-take, in hashing things out in that way, in the community of scholars. He literally, on his deathbed, had new issues of journals on his nightstand in case he wanted to read. That’s how dedicated he was to scholarship.

I have never, and never plan on, saying anything negative on his published, peer-reviewed scholarly work on the Old Testament, which is top-notch. Obviously, in terms of some of the popular stuff, he was an Evangelical; I’m an Orthodox priest, so we’re coming at things from different perspectives, and we’re integrating the scholarly data in different ways in our viewpoints. There were times back in the day when I was still in the dark realm of social media where I know—and probably some people remember—I publicly disagreed with him about some things, but, again, that was part of this give-and-take.

Despite my policy of not wanting, on this show, to get into personalities and stuff, when a scholar looks at another scholar’s work and takes it seriously and thinks it’s important enough to try to critique it, that’s actually a compliment. That means that you have a very high impression of that person. When someone publishes garbage, you don’t bother to respond to it. [Laughter] When someone publishes something important or puts something out there that’s important, that’s when you step in there and you critique it.

Mainly I wanted to make that plain, because I didn’t want any more rumors and weirdness about things. And on the whole I want to say: Memory eternal to the servant of God, Michael, departed this life, and that my prayers, at least, will continue to be with his family—and with him, since I’m Orthodox. But I just wanted to say that. I didn’t want to sort of pass that over in silence with his passing this week.

So now we have to figure out how to get out of that mood and into our topic for tonight!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Needs more giggling.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, exactly. We’ll just…

Fr. Andrew: More recitations of the word “Right!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah? Right?

Fr. Andrew: Right!? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Back to Genesis.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So we are indeed beginning at the beginning, which is a very good place to start. Tonight we’re talking about, as you mentioned, the mystery of holy unction, also known as the anointing of the sick, which is practiced in the Orthodox Church. In some Orthodox churches, as mine, it is administered to everyone on Holy Wednesday, or at another time in Holy Week, and is also administered to the sick. That said, the place where we’re starting out tonight may not look like it’s directly related to that. Unless this is your first time listening, you’re used to that by now! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The question is: How will they get there?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, how will we get from where we’re starting.

Fr. Andrew: I actually had someone contact me recently and say, “Could you guys just release the bits you do at the end, as a separate clip show or whatever?” And it’s like, you know, I get what you’re saying, but the reason why that stuff at the end is meaningful is because of the road that we walked together.

Fr. Stephen: It’s about the journey, not the destination.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, man! [Laughter] It’s the friends we made along the way.

Fr. Stephen: There we go. There I go, being a surfer-boy again. At the place where we’re starting is essentially: Who are you?

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: Who? Who? Who? I really wanna know. Anyway. And “Who are you?” meaning: What is a human person? What is a soul? What is a body? How do they relate to each other? And so, to get into that, of course we have to go back to Genesis. We have to go to Genesis 2, Genesis 2:7, to the creation of Adam, the creation of man.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is a passage we’ve talked about before in other contexts. That’s one of the cool things about especially the beginning of Genesis, is you can talk about these chapters from a gazillion different angles, and they’re all very fruitful, not to mix my metaphors too much. [Laughter] So, yes, Genesis 2:7:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Or sometimes it’s translated “became a living soul.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And this of course gets quoted later by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:45, when he compares that to the relationship between Christ and the spirit who gives life, but that’s a rabbit-trail we won’t go down this evening, because that’s one of the trickiest verses in the Bible to translate.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s the year of the rabbit, though, so… I’m just throwing that out there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Eh. Don’t know what to do with that.

Fr. Andrew: Our year, man! That’s what all the Chinese people tell me, that, because it’s the year of the rabbit, this is our year.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: I’m just saying.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. So what you’re saying is you want me to go for it on 1 Corinthians 15:45?

Fr. Andrew: No, no, no!

Fr. Stephen: I was just clarifying.

Fr. Andrew: I was just throwing that out. Maybe—

Fr. Stephen: I mean, I could...

Fr. Andrew: —on some future episode, when we’re feeling like we need to go for four hours! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So what do we see here? He becomes a living being, a living soul, when the breath of life is breathed into him. And so I’ll just say early on: Sorry, Platonists; you’re really going to take it on the chin for this one. So the soul here is not a thing.

Fr. Andrew: Not a glowing orb that rises up out of your chest when you die?

Fr. Stephen: It’s not shaped in any way. Yeah, or a green mist that Shang Tsung eats, no. It’s not a thing; it’s not an object. So you have—Adam’s body is formed, and then that form, that body, is given life. And so nefesh in Hebrew, psyche in Greek, is a way of referring to that life, the life of the living thing. As we mentioned before on the show, everything that’s alive has a soul.

Fr. Andrew: Right, animate is ensouled.

Fr. Stephen: If you are animate, you have a soul—pun intended for you Latin speakers. Animate and inanimate literally mean souled and soulless in Latin. But there are different types of souls. So, yes, animals have souls; no, those are different [from] human souls. They’re not identical.

Fr. Andrew: Your dog has a dog soul.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and your tree has a tree soul. So what that reveals, when we talk about the type of soul, the type of life that is in a particular type of body—and “particular type of body” is exactly the kind of language that St. Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15 to talk about animals and people—the type of life that’s in that particular type of body is directly related to that body.

Fr. Andrew: You can’t just trade out souls?

Fr. Stephen: Right. They can’t, like, migrate back and forth between trees and—

Fr. Andrew: Ghost in the Shell?

Fr. Stephen: —and cats and a human.

Fr. Andrew: Or Freaky Friday? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s two humans, but we’ll get there.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. Yeah, that’s true, but still.

Fr. Stephen: This shows that that life, the life of that body, being a particular type of life, also reveals that the soul, that life, is an organizing principle of that body.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and often when that’s being discussed, the word “spirit” gets used. See the spirits episode, where we talked about a spirit as being the kind of… as the animating force, the organizing principle, the thing that’s pulling everything and making it go, so to speak—I don’t want to use a puppet metaphor too much, but you know what I mean.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. You could groom a wolf to look like a German shepherd, but it would still be a wolf, not a dog, part because it has wolf soul, not dog soul. That’s overly specific, but still.

Fr. Andrew: It’s hungry like a wolf.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Not like a dog.

Fr. Stephen: Not like a dog. So the type of life, the type of soul that is in the body, organizes the body. And if you stop grooming that wolf, it would go back to looking like a wolf. The acorn will always grow into an oak tree; it will never grow into a fig tree, because the what-it-is is already there in the life that it has, even as the body changes.

Fr. Andrew: I have each of those in my yard, and the acorns that the oak tree gives off never become fig trees. So I’ve done this with science.

Fr. Stephen: Can verify.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Many such cases.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: This is why— So sometimes—and we’ve brushed over this before in previous episodes—sometimes there are places—arguably in the Scriptures, definitely in the Church Fathers—where the soul and the spirit are or are not distinguished from each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in patristic models you get both: human beings are body and soul, and then also you get: human beings are body, soul, and spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, or even body and spirit once in a while. So what’s going on there? I think we’ve at least once had a caller ask us that question: Which is it? What we have to remember here is that just because you make a distinction in speech, that doesn’t mean there’s an actual distinction. So you will see things, like when the Church Fathers are talking about the Trinity, they’ll talk about a ray of the sun and its warmth and its light. Like, you can talk about those things separately—you can talk about the warmth of the sun and the light of the sun—but in reality those are not really two separate things. But you’re able to distinguish those in speech. So sometimes the Fathers, when they separate soul and spirit as two different things, they’re making that kind of distinction. That doesn’t mean that they’re actually two separate things, because neither of those is a thing in the sense that we think about material objects. And when that distinction is made, it’s a distinction between just the life of something and life as that organizing principle.

So if you go back to our episode on “What is a Spirit When It’s at Home?” we talk about how a spirit is sort of an organizing principle, like a higher level of collective consciousness. And so that organizing principle aspect is what they’re calling spirit when they separate the two; and the soul is just referring to the life of the thing itself. But you don’t have to distinguish those.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and maybe it’s analogous but not identical to “I’m me, but then I’m also a father, but “I” and “my being a father” are not two different things. I’m still me when I’m acting in a fatherly way, but that’s… We could talk about it, but it’s still me the whole time. It’s still one man.

Fr. Stephen: Husband-you, father-you, son-you are not different yous that are partitioned from each other, but we can speak about them separately.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: That’s kind of what’s actually going on with the soul. You can’t picture a soul. [Laughter] It doesn’t look like anything. It is the life of a body. When we’re… If you’ve seen someone or something die, what we’re identifying—what’s called a soul is the difference between the thing when it was alive and the thing when it’s dead: the thing that’s gone—which is not a material thing.

Fr. Andrew: We’ll talk a little bit more about why it’s hard to talk about that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so what tends to happen, especially in languages like Latin and English—both of them have a bad tendency to do this— This is why Heidegger said you can only do philosophy in Greek and German, not just because he was—

Fr. Andrew: That’s not chauvinistic at all.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, you know, he was a native German speaker, and his Greek was better than his Latin, so there might have been some influence there. [Laughter] But English and Latin tend to reify things.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s just the way that it kind of tends to work. And with English, we’ve got articles to make it even more possible! The soul.

Fr. Stephen: And this causes all kinds of theological problems if you’re not careful. People all the time in English will talk about Christ’s human nature and his divine nature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as though they’re separate things: “His human nature’s doing this…”

Fr. Stephen: Like they’re two things, and that’s Nestorianism: that’s bad. Or talking about a soul, as if it’s a thing, in this particular case. And that language is deceptive and plays into some bad conclusions like the ones come to by Plato and John Calvin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of “Sorry, Plato” and “Sorry, Calvin”—and even some “Sorry, Origen” in this part of the podcast.

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to be apologizing a lot. A lot of sorrys.

Fr. Andrew: This is how apologetics works!

Fr. Stephen: And the reason I wrote in “Jean Calvine” is that he famously, to the chagrin of many Calvinists, but he quoted as true Plato’s statement that the body is the prison-house of the soul.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, John.

Fr. Stephen: Not his best moment, by anyone’s standards. He, by doing that, was buying into a lot of bad presuppositions, because of course for Plato the soul is the self.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s who you are.

Fr. Stephen: You are your soul, which is in a body.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like it’s a big mech: you’re inside and you’re pulling some levers. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’re embodied, but that’s not a particularly good thing; in fact, it’s kind of a bad thing. And that’s why it’s a prison-house. And the goal is to get out. So there are a number of things in Plato that flow from this and that have been sort of wholesale adopted in Western thought, like the idea that the soul is immortal—and by that we don’t mean that we think souls vanish and disappear or something at some point, but the idea that the soul is innately immortal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not able to be destroyed or to die.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not able to die, right. And there are extreme forms of that when you veer into Gnosticism, where it’s some spark, it’s some element of God himself, like some element of the divine essence in each person or something, but there’s less extreme versions, which is just that the soul is immortal in and of itself, not related to—

Fr. Andrew: Which— say at least other kinds of conclusions, like that they pre-exist this human life.

Fr. Stephen: If they’re immortal and go on forever… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, looking at you, Origen; looking at you, Mormons.

Fr. Stephen: Well, to be fair to the Mormons, the Mormons do think they came into being at a point.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, that’s true. That’s true, yeah. Sorry, Mormons.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s a little different. They do believe they pre-exist embodiment, but not the way Plato and Origen do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We do have some Mormon listeners, actually, so: Hey, Mormons!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so be fair. But… Those are more or less unsubtle ways of doing the pre-existence of the human soul. There are more subtle ways. So, for example, one of the more subtle ways would be, again, in Calvinism, where the human soul essentially pre-exists in the divine decree.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s in the mind of God, and therefore it has an existence of sorts.

Fr. Stephen: Within the divine decree in the eternal mind of God, not only just sort of a general sense of a person is going to come to exist—not just like God knows what’s going to happen—but that person’s actual character—every action they’re going to take in their life, everything they’re going to do, whether they’re elect and going to go to heaven or they’re a reprobate and going to go to the bad place—all of that is reality before they come into being. And so this is a more subtle way to do that, which is not ultimately less problematic. And because what it leads to, in any of those cases—and this is why I’m bringing Calvinism into that; it’s not just to slander them and call them Platonists—it’s because, in any of those cases, what you end up with is the—and, again, the Mormons: there’s some nuance here—you end up with human life on this earth just being the playing-out of the identity of the soul that already exists. So essence pre— Your essence precedes your existence.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so this actually has a lot of— I mean, this all sounds very philosophical and metaphysical or whatever, everybody, but—but!—it actually has some actual, practical ways that this gets played out in the way that people think of themselves and the way they try to lead their lives and the way that they do their relationships.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We even talk about this. People who are pregnant, and their male spouses—sorry, everybody.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Man! Right, so I mean people will talk about: “I need to find out who I really am…”

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say: “I can’t wait to meet this person.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, right. “I can’t wait to meet…”

Fr. Stephen: “And get to know who they are,” when they’re a fetus. They aren’t anybody yet; they’re a fetus. They’re human, but they don’t have, like, a personality. They don’t have a favorite flavor of ice cream.

Fr. Andrew: They don’t have a favorite Shakespearean play.

Fr. Stephen: As much as I’m sure you’ve tried when your wife was pregnant, to play Kenneth Branagh productions, sort of at them in utero to get them to pick one.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Hey, Much Ado About Nothing is a brilliant piece of modern cinema!

Fr. Stephen: Okay, I enjoy it also, but, come on, man, at least go for Baby Mozart or something. [Laughter] So, yeah, the idea that these things about you already exist and they just kind of play themselves out, you just figure them out as you go through life. You’re a good person or a bad person when you’re born.

Fr. Andrew: Or even this plays into the whole idea of soulmates, for instance. “I’m meant for this one other person, because this is who we are from all eternity” or whatever. I actually— One of my favorite non-Middle Earth things that were ever said by J.R.R. Tolkien is he said, “The soulmate is the person you’re actually married to.” I love that, because it’s about the way that things actually are, not living in this virtual reality about how you think about things, but, you know, life as it really is.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, except for me and my wife, who are like Hawkman and Hawkwoman.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so there’s that one.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, for most people.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] For most people!

Fr. Stephen: Non-Thanagarians. And so there’s this idea, then—and it’s everywhere; it’s everywhere: “This is who I am”; “I need to figure out who I am”; “I need to reveal who I am”; “I confused about who I am”—

Fr. Andrew: Or “this is just who I am,” which is a way of saying, “I can’t and won’t repent.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this has actual consequences, this view of the person being the soul, the soul already existing and being immortal, and then it just finding itself in a body. So there are consequences of this. When we jettison that view, that Platonic view, and get down to: No, the soul is just the life that is in your body, that is animating it—and one of them is—and I know you loved this phrase when I told it to you earlier—“If you weren’t you, you wouldn’t be you.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s very similar to one of my other favorite phrases: “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] But here’s what this means. This goes beyond “You don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.”

Fr. Andrew: This is the next level, everybody, so write this down.

Fr. Stephen: This is the next level of battiness. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And cosplay.

Fr. Stephen: —is “If you weren’t you, you wouldn’t be you.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How do you cosplay that? I don’t know!

Fr. Stephen: Creativity. So what that means is— We sit and we think and we fantasize, like: “What if I had been born in 16th-century France?” or “What if I had been born in the Roman Empire?” “What if I had been born in—pick—19th-century Russia?” We fantasize; we think about it. But here’s the sad truth: You’re doing the same thing as imagining what it would be like if you were a bat, because you’re assuming—

Fr. Andrew: Or like Freaky Friday.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re assuming that your formed identity would just be sort of taken out of your current self and be deposited in some body in that place and time, which isn’t how that works.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Human being are muy permenable— permeable. That’s what I get for trying to start with the Spanish word. Permeable! [Laughter] You’re not exclusively a product of your environment or whatever, but you’re not not a product of your environment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you—if “you” had been born in 16th-century France, that would be a different person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you’d be a lot more like the other 16th-century French people.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that there is no way in which that person would be you. There’s not. Even if you find a photo of a person from a couple centuries ago that looks like you, that’s still not you.

Fr. Andrew: It could be time-traveling you.

Fr. Stephen: It could be time-traveling you from the future; it could be that Nicolas Cage is a vampire, but probably, in general cases, it’s not you. And this means that—what we’re getting at here—is that actually your body is more related to your identity than your soul is.

Fr. Andrew: You have to unpack that one, because I’m fairly sure a lot of people are going: “What!? What!?”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. Human souls are more like each other than human bodies are.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s the life of the body. The genitive is… Yeah, it goes the wrong way.

Fr. Stephen: Human life force. It’s human life that is in your body. And so this— If you want a place where this comes out in theological history, this becomes really important— This idea of the soul becomes really important in the debates regarding Apollinarianism.

Fr. Andrew: Quick review for everybody who hasn’t been reading about the early heresies. Apollinarianism is a teaching—this is the basic version of it—that Christ did not have a human soul; instead, the Logos, the Word of God, functioned as the controlling element of his body, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this was held by ancient people and by certain quasi-Christian apologists on the West Coast.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh.

Fr. Stephen: See, I don’t name people…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. Some other guy that uses three names all the time… That’s what that’s all about.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, it’s weird. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Your middle name isn’t “duh”? Stephen Duh Young?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s De. My middle name is De.

Fr. Andrew: De.

Fr. Stephen: So why is that relevant to this? Well, the perspective from which the Apollinarians are coming is essentially a sort of Platonic view of what a soul is. So for them, if the soul is the self, if the soul is the person, if the soul is the identity, and you say that Christ had a human soul, then for them you’re saying he was, what, two people?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And aforementioned unnamed person makes a similar kind of argument.

Fr. Andrew: I’m trying to come up with a— One analogy—again, just an analogy, everybody—that seems to work in my mind is: You could have a computer with a motherboard, and this is sort of the concept, in some ways, of the way we think about human souls and bodies—the motherboard is really the thing making the computer go, and if you pull it out, you could put in a different one; it’ll function differently. But I think souls are more like batteries, although you can’t just switch them out, so that’s where the analogy falls to pieces.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no, it’s more like the power itself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, there you go. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It’s more like the power itself.

Fr. Andrew: The power itself, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So you can see why the Apollinarians have a problem with that view of the soul, but if you understand that the soul is just the life of the body, then of course Christ had a human soul. He had a human body, and he’s alive. [Laughter] So definitionally he had a human soul.

Fr. Andrew: And human bodies are not animated by anything but human souls. There’s not some other way to do it, which strongly suggests, then—because we could imagine other ways to do it: we have these things in our literature—Apollinarianism is in fact theologically a zombie jamboree.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, a dead man’s party. Leave your body at the door.

This decision here regarding Apollinarianism, again, in addition to the idea that the soul is not the identity of the person—it’s not the self, that it is the life force of the body—this also means there’s nothing conflicting—because the divine Person of the Logos is also not a soul. A soul is a different thing. He’s not an identity or a center of consciousness. The Logos, the Son, is a divine Person who takes upon himself human nature, which includes a human body, a human soul, those things. But there is no sort of extra self in there somewhere, or the divine Person of the Logos is not something that can be slotted into a body. In case I haven’t made enough people grumpy at me, this includes biological sex; I’m sorry.

Fr. Andrew: And by that we mean the state of being male or female.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in terms biological sex, not gender.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which I should point out, by the way—and I don’t have my jingle geared up here, but the word “sex” itself, it’s etymologically related to words like “sect” and “section.” It means “difference.” It’s difference. That there is no sex, that’s… Literally “same-sex,” it means “same-different.”

Fr. Stephen: Oh, now you’re really trying to get people…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m just putting that out there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no, it includes that. So if you are an animate human body, and if your soul is not some center of the self or some conscious— You aren’t other than your body. You can have feelings and experiences like that—and people do—but that is not because there’s some kind of mismatch. You can’t actually—sorry, Nietzsche—be born out of time. You can’t be born in the wrong time, because if you were in another time you wouldn’t be you.

Fr. Andrew: Or in a wrong whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Or in the wrong body.

Fr. Andrew: You are what you are.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because you wouldn’t be you. It would be someone else, and there are other people in the world—

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

Fr. Stephen: —who are those other people who you would be had you been born where they are. And so this also means that we, as an animate, as a living human body—we in that sense, we’re an object in the world that other people see and encounter and interact with. So when someone sees me, like when I walked into the church this evening, and a parishioner whom I won’t name was on her way out because she doesn’t want to be mentioned on the show, when she saw me, she did not see my soul...

Fr. Andrew: I see your soul, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: She did not see my inner identity, my inner self. She did not behold my essence. She saw the living human body in the world that is me. That’s what she saw, and that’s what made various noises and gestures at her that she interpreted as speech. [Laughter] And that’s how we relate to and see each other.

This reality, that we are living human bodies, is why relics are a thing. See our relics episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Because those pieces are that person.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is why when the Scriptures talk about what we call the intermediate state or the state of the soul after physical death, this is why everything is so vague and nebulous and mysterious.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even we’ve got the language of being “hid with Christ.” Your life is hid with Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Or all the language about sleeping. We don’t— The Orthodox Church doesn’t teach about soul sleep, but that language is certainly all over the place. This is why it’s so ambiguous and nebulous, because this is a weird and unnatural thing.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not how we were made to be.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Human beings were not created to die, physically or spiritually. And so it can’t be nailed down. If you go with the Platonist view—and this may be one of the things that makes it attractive to folks—then that whole thing makes sense. If an orb sort of goes out of my chest, like Negative Man, and flies up into heaven or goes down into the ground, and we have this image of our shadowy self or force ghost or orb or whatever is floating around in one place or another and then returns to our body in the resurrection, I mean, that’s still weird but it’s easier to wrap our head around, whereas the language of Scripture, you frankly just—you can’t nail it down at all, which is exactly what you would expect if the other is actually what’s true.

Fr. Andrew: We use metaphorical language. We talk about the soul taking a journey after death. We use that. We talk about the soul going into the underworld, or the soul going in to be with God or into Abraham’s bosom, but ultimately it’s metaphorical language. It’s okay to use it, but we need to understand that it’s not ghosts wandering around. There’s no ectoplasm being left in a trail. We talked about this on the spirits episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this is why the bodily resurrection is so concretely important, that the… For you to be you, for you to live forever, you have to be back in your body. Otherwise it wouldn’t be you. And so your identity requires—you maintaining your identity requires the bodily resurrection. This is ultimately why the reincarnation dog don’t hunt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s not— And it’s funny because a lot of the reincarnation doctrines include this idea of losing your memory of who you were before, which says that you’re not really you! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’re not actually that person.

Fr. Andrew: You’re functioning as you are a different person. You wouldn’t be the same.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t work.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not—sorry, Indigo Girls—it’s not how long till my soul gets it right.

Fr. Stephen: And you will— This is also why that whole “uploading your brain to a computer” thing will never work.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. Actually, no: thank God!

Fr. Stephen: Because what will happen is you will die and a computer simulation, AI, with your memories, will have the experience of waking up inside a computer.

Fr. Andrew: Usually that’s the point where there’s some kind of disembodied scream in all those scenes.

Fr. Stephen: But that ain’t you; you’re dead.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, because that’s not you.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so a question that might arise, that we might anticipate from this—there’s a couple—one might be: Wait, are you now turning around over against the whole theme of your show and telling us that there is no spiritual element of humanity? The answer to that is, of course, no. We already talked about soul/spirit; we talked about how—go back to the nous episode—how humans interact with the spiritual world. There is, of course, a spiritual element of man. But another one might be—and this is related—that we keep saying, “Sorry, Calvinists,” but haven’t we smuggled in a kind of determinism?

Fr. Andrew: Right, if the material is the real you, does that mean that you are just the product of a bunch of chemical reactions and such?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, cause and effect, biological determinism. “If I had been born in that family, I’d be that person.” And that’s true at the start, yes, if you had been born in that family, instead of that person, you would be that person! [Laughter] If, 47 years ago, I had been born the son of Fr. Andrew’s parents, I would be him, and I wouldn’t be me.

Fr. Andrew: That’s gross. [Laughter] Sorry, just shot that out there.

Fr. Stephen: But that would have happened, and I would be a different person. But—but—if you’ve been paying attention to what we’ve already said, that doesn’t mean that I would have done all the things that Fr. Andrew did. That doesn’t mean I would have made all the same decisions; it doesn’t mean I would have made all the same choices, because part of the fact that my life isn’t just the playing-out of what I already am is that I’m then free. And the way, for example, Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae says this is he talks about this as being one element of humanity as imaging God, is that just as God is absolute—meaning indeterminate, undetermined, free—God is not bound by anything. Sorry, Calvinists, with your justice thing. God is not bound by anything. Humans, as imagers of God, according to Fr. Stăniloae, are to some degree—a lesser degree: a lesser degree, also absolute: able to separate themselves from the material system of causation, of cause and effect, and make actual choices.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, not to give too much ammunition to that Eugene guy, but this is actually part of Tolkien’s anthropology in the—

Fr. Stephen: Oh! Why, though!

Fr. Andrew: I know! I mean, what can I say? But this is something a lot of people have read, you know? It’s a moderately popular set of books.

Fr. Stephen: I guess. I watched the movies once.

Fr. Andrew: [Sigh] Oh, man. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit ones. My favorite.

Fr. Andrew: Ugh. They really should have just called those The Dwarves, because that’s what those movies were about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But that is not this podcast.

Fr. Stephen: That and forbidden love.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man!

Fr. Stephen: Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: If I have any goats with me tonight, you have them.

Fr. Stephen: That was the best part of those movies, was that relationship. Anyway, go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Is that where that woman hooks up with a dwarf?

Fr. Stephen: Triggered!

Fr. Andrew: Is that how— Yeah. So, yeah, Tolkien, one of the big things that distinguished humans from elves in his world is there’s the music, which is sort of the blueprint of creation from the very beginning. Humans have the ability to go outside the music. They can do stuff that’s unexpected even to the Valar, who are sort of the angelic beings in Tolkien’s world, whereas elves can’t do that. It’s why humans have this sort of redemptive capability that no one else does. It’s interesting how deeply Christian all that stuff is. How about that! But, yeah, it’s interesting that— I mean, he messes around a lot with the whole idea of fate and free will, and one of the constants in it is that humans, even though they’re not omnipotent—they’re not universally capable—they do have free will; they can actually do unexpected things, things that are not expected, not to God, but to pretty much anything else in the whole creation. And that’s true! That’s for real.

All right, well, we’re going to go ahead and take our first break, and we’ll be back in a moment with the second half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. Give us a ring at 1-855-AFRADIO. You know, with all this “who” question we keep asking, there’s two things I wanted to mention. Number one, I once, during my stagehand days, actually worked a The Who concert. So I think it was, like, 1997, maybe, which is before some of y’all were even born, although their drummer was Zak Starkey, the son of Ringo Starr.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that the very first line in Hamlet, since I already mentioned Shakespeare—the very first line in Hamlet is: “Who’s there?” When I took a Hamlet course as an undergrad, we spent three and a half weeks on “Who’s there?” Every time I say that in the presence of my wife, she’ll be like: “Eugh!” But it was one of the best three and a half weeks that I’ve ever had in my educational experience, so I’m just throwing that out there for all the English lit nerds. “Who’s there?”

You don’t have anything to say to that, Father? Or maybe he stepped out! It’s all mine! Here we are at Lord of Spirits, just Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, no Fr. Stephen De Young: What could happen? We don’t know. All kinds of things that could happen.

Fr. Stephen: Things are happening?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s back! I was ad-libbing, and you didn’t hear the brilliance that I just threw out at everybody, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Need to run longer commercials.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know. We’ll have a talk with Trudi about that. Happy birthday, Trudi!

Fr. Stephen: There’s got to be something we can advertise, for Pete’s sake.

Fr. Andrew: I know! [Laughter] Yes. I was just mentioning I once spent three and a half weeks studying the first line of Hamlet, which is: “Who’s there?” Very relevant to all these questions we’ve been asking about “who” and The Who.

Fr. Stephen: So was that a stunt?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No! Not at all! Talking Shakespeare, no. That’s one of the other things I’m nerdy about that people don’t generally know if they listen to my podcasts, that I’m a super-big Shakespeare fan.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “Something Rotten in Denmark”: your new podcast from Ancient Faith Ministries.

Fr. Andrew: Amen! [Laughter] “The Poisoned Chalice”!

Fr. Stephen: Whenever you get tired of that Rohlin guy, just…

Fr. Andrew: It’s an idea.

Fr. Stephen: Just shove him aside and go Shakespeare.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. [Laughter] No more medieval; we’re doing Renaissance now, boys. Yeah [Laughter] Okay, well, welcome back anyway. It’s the second half. We just got through doing a whole 48 minutes of “Sorry, Calvinists; sorry, Plato; sorry, Origen; sorry, [Inaudible].”

Fr. Stephen: Mostly Plato

Fr. Andrew: Mostly Plato, yeah. A little bit more Plato-brain.

Fr. Stephen: Idealism is lame. Flee Plato-brain.

Fr. Andrew: Is Plato some kind of wild-eyed idealist?

Fr. Stephen: He’s an idealist in the truest sense.

Fr. Andrew: The original. I have an idea of Plato…

Fr. Stephen: Maybe he’s still the best. This is one of those parts where we’re just riffing, and there are people out there typing angry reviews and comments about—

Fr. Andrew: This show could be 50% shorter if you cut out all of the giggling, all of these saying, “Right!”

Fr. Stephen: All the nonsense.

Fr. Andrew: All the nonsense.

Fr. Stephen: And then other people will reply and say, “But we’re here for the nonsense.”

Fr. Andrew: “We love the nonsense! We’re here for it.” [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But enough nonense.

Fr. Andrew: Now we’re actually moving into—we’re getting closer now!—to our topic.

Fr. Stephen: —to sense. Oh, our topic.

Fr. Andrew: A little bit closer, yeah. Healing. Healing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, our second half. So we’ve talked now about what a human person is. Now we’re going to get into what it means for a human person to find healing. Of course, the concept of healing is found throughout the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: But there are, I think, two significant phases that we can identify in terms of how healing is talked about in the Scriptures, one being an early phase in ancient Israel, the other coming later in Israelite history and then flowing into the New Testament. This is not a change in the sense that there was sort of one view, and that was abandoned in place of another view.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s just a question of perspective, a looking at the same— One is kind of from 50,000 feet, and the other is kind of zoomed in.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and keeping both, as we’re going to see when we get to the end of this half—I make a promise to you, dear listener—keeping them both together is going to be important. The way that the two connect to each other is going to be important. So we’ll start with that sort of first phase, the ancient Israelite phase, and we’re starting in the Torah, really, with this phase. The way in which illness, sickness, ill-health, lack of health, is talked about in this early phase is in terms of plague.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so mass bad-health. The pandemic, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Yes: waves of pestilence or plague coming upon populations and spreading. One of the earliest places we see that is actually in the form of a sign that’s given to Moses by God before he is sent to speak to Pharaoh, to demand that Pharaoh let the Israelites go.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is one of the weirdest— It’s a weird, weird thing.

Fr. Stephen: So we don’t have to talk about the staff turning into a snake and eating all the other snakes, because everybody listened to the battle wizards episode.

Fr. Andrew: That was a cool episode.

Fr. Stephen: And so they know that that was a traditional Ancient Near Eastern wizard duel. But the other sign that Moses is given, where he puts his hand into his coat and pulls it out and it’s leprous—it’s infected with a plague—and then he puts it back into the coat and pulls it out and it’s healed. What is this one about? Why…? I mean, it’s a cool trick, but, I mean, that’s not why God gives signs, right?

Fr. Andrew: No, right. If you’re going to come up with some spectacular thing to show you’re a powerful sorcerer, this is not the one that you would pick, probably. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, he didn’t have Moses go and pick a quarter out from behind Pharaoh’s ear, right? Like, this isn’t just tricks. [Laughter] This is to show not just the power of God, but something specific about the power of God, because of course the purpose of these signs, even though God not only knew they weren’t going to work but told Moses they weren’t going to work before he went and did them for Pharaoh—

Fr. Andrew: Encouraging…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, here, you do this…

Fr. Andrew: “It’s not going to work, Moses, but…”

Fr. Stephen: “It’s not going to work, but go do it!” —is that Pharaoh had no reason to respect the god of a bunch of slaves.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because not only out of his pride or whatever, but also, think about this. If you remember the spirit ideas… They’re a bunch of slaves, so how great could their controlling spirit really be? Like, if this is the best he can do for them.

Fr. Stephen: In Pharaoh’s mind, “Mine are clearly better, because I have enslaved you.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “My gods empower me, and your god is… your god is really not great.”

Fr. Stephen: And so this is showing the power of God, but showing a specific power of God, that God has control over plague. God has control over plague.

Fr. Andrew: Which is, of course… Plague in the ancient world—I mean, that’s tough!

Fr. Stephen: There was a plague of plagues.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, just… It’s uncontrollable. Everybody feels helpless. It’s the worst. It’s really, really bad. I mean, we all know what that’s like now.

Fr. Stephen: And this was well through history. I mean, we had a pandemic, and I know a lot of people died, but—sorry, folks—compared to, like, the Black Plague… COVID was not the Black Plague.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where it’s like one-third, I think, of the population dies?

Fr. Stephen: Of Europe, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what is this vision, then, of what disease, what ill-health, what plague, what pestilence is? Well, it’s this force out there in the world. It’s this force that’s out there, active in the world, that can come and visit destruction upon you, or that maybe there might be some way to ward it off, to either stop a plague once it starts or ward it off and keep plague from befalling you and go befall someone else instead. And this force out there in the world had a name in the Ancient Near East. This demonic force of pestilence was called Resheph, or some very close variation with those consonants, in the ancient world. And when I say in the Ancient Near East, in the ancient world, I mean pretty much everywhere and over a long period of time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a long period of time!

Fr. Stephen: The earliest inscriptions we have about Resheph are in Syria and from the third millennium BC, so the 2,000s BC.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so that’s 4,000 years ago, roughly.

Fr. Stephen: More like 4500, frankly.

Fr. Andrew: Four and a half thousand.

Fr. Stephen: About 4500 years ago. And then we have mentions in Ugarit; in Syria; in Anatolia, meaning Turkey, like the Hittites in south-central what’s now Turkey; Egypt—the Egyptians assimilate Resheph, which is very rare for them to assimilate a Semitic god from outside—the Carthaginians have Resheph—we’ll talk about a little detail about that in a minute—all the way up to Cicero in the first century BC mentions the Phoenician Apollo, whom he calls Apollo Arsippus. If you look at the consonants of “Arsippus,” it’s “Resheph.”

Fr. Andrew: You’ve got the ruh, the sshshshss kind of… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there are depictions of Apollo that match depictions of Resheph.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’re talking basically 2500, 3,000-ish years of belief in this demonic presence—which, I mean… Again, plagues are a big deal, a big, big deal in the ancient world. Like, they rock everybody’s world in a really awful way.

Fr. Stephen: To give you an idea of how prominent he was throughout this period, there’s a treaty between Philip of Macedon, whom you might know as Alexander the Great’s dad, and Hannibal of Carthage, the elephant guy, in the fourth century BC, and in that, one of the gods invoked from the Carthaginian side is Resheph.

Fr. Andrew: That’s not nice. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s a way of… The idea is: “If I violate this treaty, may plague fall upon us.”

Fr. Andrew: A curse, yeah, like a big curse come upon me.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because these treaties, these covenants, have blessings and curses. Kind of like Deuteronomy.

So how is Resheph depicted? Resheph is always depicted as an archer. This is common across all these cultures. And he has these arrows that are often depicted as kind of fiery, burning arrows, but the burning is aimed at the idea of infection. Someone who has an infection runs a fever; their body becomes hot. And so the image of Resheph as this force behind plague is that he comes to an area, he launches his arrows into the population, they hit indiscriminately the way the plague does and strike people down. So when we say he is worshiped and stuff, he’s invoked as a curse there, and the worship is more sort of the warding-off: We keep him happy, we ward him off, we keep him at a distance, maybe try to get him to go after our enemies if it’ll help us.

So there are a lot of places in the Old Testament, and in the Scripture as a whole, where this imagery shows up. We’re not going to go through all of them. We went through a little bit of Resheph stuff another previous episode, and I know we talked about at least the Job passage that we’re not going to talk about tonight there, but we’re going to talk about a few passages that either directly mention Resheph or allude to him in the Old Testament to make a particular point.

Fr. Andrew: Part of the reality, of course, is that as we’re all reading translations of the Bible, we’re— Often what happens is these names get translated according to what the name means. It would be like, for instance, if you’re translating the New Testament and you come across the apostle I’m named after, instead of saying, “And Andrew brought the boy with the five loaves and the two fish,” it says, “And The Manly One brought…” [Laughter] That would be what’s going on there.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s deliberate in a lot of cases, in modern translations. It’s trying to demythologize the text.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And, admittedly, these names mean this thing that the god is associated with, but there’s a reason for that! It’s all kind of bound up as one image. So, yeah, the first example is Deuteronomy 32:23-24.

And I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend my arrows on them. They shall be wasted with hunger and devoured by Resheph and Qeteb. I will send the teeth of beasts against them with the venom of things that crawl in the dust.

“Resheph” there, if you were looking at the ESV, it’ll say “devoured by plague,” and then “Qeteb,” “poisonous pestilence.” So that’s why you don’t see Resheph and Qeteb probably if you pull your Bible off the shelf and look at Deuteronomy 32:23-24.

Fr. Stephen: Depending.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, maybe; who knows?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But we should also mention here, Qeteb—and there’s also a Deber—who are other sort of demonic forces associated with disease and pestilence, who get paired a lot, as you’ll see, with Resheph.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So there’s another one, Psalm 78:48. This is a psalm, so this is much later after this happens, but it’s talking about the plagues sent on Egypt.

He gave over their cattle to the hail, and their flocks to Reshephs.

In the ESV, that gets translated as “thunder-bolts,” so a little bit less of a literal translation, but, again, it’s like that god threw Reshephs at them, their flocks.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, plagues on Egypt. God is kind of unleashing these forces on them.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so another one is Habakkuk 3:3-5.

Fr. Stephen: Habakkuk being everyone’s favorite book of the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Avvakum, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: There’s cool stuff in there!

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah!

Fr. Stephen: But under-read.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so verse three:

God came from Teman, and the holy one from Mount Paran. His splendor covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. His brightness was like the light; rays flashed from his hand, and there he veiled his power. Before him went Deber, and Resheph followed at his heels.

Fr. Stephen: We just heard verses three and four a bunch of times in church, by the way.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: By paying close attention. But notice in the last verse, in verse five— So it’s talking about God in his majesty, processing, and before him goes Deber; after him is Resheph. So they’re like pets he has on a leash. They’re forces that are under his control.

Fr. Andrew: We saw that kind of thing before with Leviathan, the idea that Leviathan is, despite being this primordial, massive, underwater sea-serpent, also like his cat that he sort of plays with. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in these quotes you see that it’s not denying that this force exists out in the world, but it’s placing this force under the control of Yahweh the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Right. That’s the whole hand-in-the-coat thing.

Fr. Stephen: As we said before on the show, this is a major element of theodicy in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, is that God is in control of these things, even these things which are evils, and he uses them to his ends to bring good out of them. And so, since he has control of them, you can have an exorcism prayer like Psalm 91 (or 90 in the Greek numbering), which is the first of the Davidic exorcism prayers found at Qumran; it’s also in the book of Psalms in our Bibles.

Fr. Andrew: Well, and isn’t that verse— Isn’t that psalm used in the Orthodox funeral service as well?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: “He that dwelleth in the shadow of the Almighty shall…” See, I’m blanking now suddenly on it.

Fr. Stephen: “...shall abide in the shelter of the…”

Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen: “...the God of heaven.”

Fr. Stephen: Is that our English translation?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, Psalm 91:5 (or 90:5, if you’re looking at the Greek version):

You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day.

And it’s not “nor the Resheph that flies by day”—it does say “arrow” there literally—but it’s a reference to that: Resheph, the bowman.

Fr. Stephen: And if you go into the next verses, you get Deber, you get these others people who hang around with him all the time in the other things we’ve read. And then probably the last time—not probably: the last time that we see Resheph sort of in person, as it were, in the Bible is in the book of Revelation, in which he is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we have to do a whole episode on that at some point. So, Revelation 6:1—this is where you get the horsemen—includes this line:

And I looked, and behold: a white horse, and its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out, conquering and to conquer.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so note the bow. And this is the horseman who’s generally called Pestilence.

Fr. Andrew: Pestilence.

Fr. Stephen: You have War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is Pestilence. How is he getting identified as Pestilence? There’s nothing about disease there—it’s the bow.

Fr. Andrew: The bow, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And Resheph. And so this last image of the horsemen riding out as the seals are broken is of God in judgment essentially unleashing everything, letting it go. And the character that that gives to God’s sort of final judgment at the end is that it’s not that God goes and does these horrible, brutal things to people; it’s that God stops protecting them. There’s been this period of time—this is another piece of biblical theodicy— There’s been this period of time where God has been protecting people and preserving people, to give them time to repent. But eventually that time for repentance comes to an end, and he lets things go, and they go to their end. So it is in the context of the removal of protection, not God inflicting harm or violence.

Fr. Andrew: Right. God’s not throwing the arrows himself; he’s letting this force go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and why is this force in the world? Because of human sin. So that’s sort of this first stage, where plague, disease, ill-health, this is a force, a kind of— with a name. It’s a force; it’s a demonic force in the world. Then, as we transition into the latter, or, frankly, to the period of exile and afterward, and start moving toward the Second Temple period, we start getting examples, starting in the Old Testament, specifically with the prophets Elijah and Elisha, of sort of what we would think of as more traditional healings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it kind of zooms in now on individual people in many cases.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, being healed by other individual people. Well, by God through other individual people.

Fr. Andrew: Well, Elijah and Elisha, the big things about them are, you know, raising people from the dead… That’s huge. [Laughter] We’re used to reading the Bible, and we’re like: “Oh, yeah, a lot of people get raised from the dead, but…” No, that’s huge. Someone comes back.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So there’s the raising of the widow’s son, the raising of the Shunammite woman’s son by Elisha. So Elijah does it, then Elisha does it. Then there’s the healing of Naaman the leper by Elisha.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Go dip yourself in the muddy Jordan River.” He complains, “Aren’t there much nicer rivers?” “Dip yourself in the river, dude.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s Syria, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So he’s healed of his leprosy. This is God healing a person through the prayers, the intercession—through another person. And in these cases… So the leprosy that’s afflicting Naaman is not personalized. There’s not sort of an exorcism that’s done. And dipping yourself in the Jordan does not have the character of an exorcism.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: It has the character of cleansing or purification, even though it wasn’t up to his standards in terms of water purity. [Laughter] And there’s not—there’s no mention, like there is, say, in Tobit— There’s no mention that the widow’s son or the Shunammite’s son, that there’s some demon involved somewhere.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’re just sort of subject to these kinds of effects that are in the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is really— This kind of healing is dealing with the effects of illness, disease, death, decay, pestilence on the body of a person, on the person. To make a comparison, you look at, for example, we’ve talked a couple of times on this show about Korah’s rebellion, when Korah stood up against Aaron and his family who had been designated as high priests; Korah and other Levites, they said, “Hey, aren’t all the Israelites holy? Aren’t we all priests? Why are you putting on airs?” And not only does the ground swallow them up, but this plague breaks out in the camp. There’s this outbreak of plague; people start dying. They go: the priests go, and Aaron goes, and they take their censers, and they go and stand between the living and the dead, and the plague is stopped. That’s very clearly a depiction of plague as this evil spiritual force, this demonic force that needs to be stopped by priestly action.

That’s very different, again, than what we see here with the healing of the person, and there’s a direct parallel here to the way the Bible talks about sin, especially the way, say, St. Paul talks about sin. As we’ve said many times on the show, most of the time—the vast majority of the time—when St. Paul talks about sin, it’s in the singular. He talks about “sin,” not “sins.” When he’s talking about particular acts, he usually calls them “transgressions” or “iniquities,” or it’s translated in different ways, but he’s referring to acts. But when he talks about sin, he’s talking about sin as this force in the world, the way sin was crouching at Cain’s door. There was this force of sin that’s at large in the world that needs to be wrestled with and struggled with. It’s trying to master you; you must master it.

At the same time, the Scriptures do talk about, and even St. Paul sometimes talks about, sins, the individual actions committed by people and their consequences on those people, on their relationships with other people. Those both exist in terms of sin, and those both exist in terms of sickness, in terms of disease, in terms of ailments. There is this demonic force out there of plague, of pestilence, of disease, that is out there in the world, that has to be put off, that we pray to God—priestly action: there are prayers. And then there is the actual healing that has to happen with the individual person from the consequences of that.

And so the fact that these are so conceptually parallel, when we get to the gospels and we get to Christ’s healings… Of course, all the people Christ heals, there’s too many to list. Even as long as we run this program, we could not run through every person Christ heals and not be here for at least until tomorrow. But one thing that you can notice, at least on several occasions, like Luke 5:17-26, Matthew 9:1-8, Mark 2:1-12, which all happen to be the healings of paralyzed people… One thing that you can notice is that Christ, in his healings in those cases, explicitly connects the forgiveness of sins to the healing he is doing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Let your sins be forgiven; take up your bed and walk.”

Fr. Stephen: That these are directly connected. So sin and disease are really paralleled in their biblical conceptions. Sin is talked about like disease; disease is talked about like sin. They’re talked about in these parallel ways.

So then! Once again, questions potentially arise. Are we faith healers!? Speaking for myself, no.

Fr. Andrew: Positively confess your healing, Fr. Stephen! [Laughter] See, my friend, Michael Landsman, has taught me how to speak this way.

Fr. Stephen: Ohh. He’s a bad influence. [Laughter] So, right. I at least am not a faith healer. I will let Fr. Andrew answer for himself.

Fr. Andrew: I— No, I’m not. No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, so why? And what do we mean by “faith healer”? We’re not just using that as a pejorative, or to talk about certain grifters of the 1990s on television. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And we’re also not, in this case, referring to saints who… We’ll address this, but who healed people through prayer. That’s not what we’re talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’re talking about the phenomenon in—what would you say?—primarily in Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, though not entirely, but primarily.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, primarily, and especially kind of the word “Faith Pentecostalism” particularly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s not limited to Protestantism. There are other groups. There are groups within Roman Catholicism. There are other groups that are in that Pentecostal-Charismatic mold—and plenty of Protestants who aren’t.

So that idea that you can sort of claim healing, or that if your belief, if your faith is strong enough, you will be healed.

Fr. Andrew: Believe harder and—boom!

Fr. Stephen: And this kind of thing exists outside of Christianity, like The Secret and all that kind of stuff, where that’s taken to a weird, pagan place of sort of visualizing and declaring reality.

Well, wait. If we’re saying that sin and illness are so similar and so parallel, why don’t you, then? Well, you can’t do that with sins either.

Fr. Andrew: You can’t just: “I declare myself forgiven. I claim this forgiveness!”

Fr. Stephen: “I declare victory over this temptation!” You can try it, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, people do; people say that stuff, but the truth is repentance takes work.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you have about the same track record, I imagine, of declaring victory over addiction and declaring someone healed. Probably about the same success rate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’ve actually got to work at it. You’ve got to be re-formed. Now, I’m not saying you have to be Reformed. [Laughter] You’ve got to be re-formed.

Fr. Stephen: Formed again.

Fr. Andrew: Formed again, that’s right. I like the word “formed.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so receiving forgiveness isn’t just a declaration. It requires repentance. It requires work. See our recent repentance episode. It required— There are things you have to do. And in the same way, health: there are things you have to do.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the way it normally works.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] You can’t just declare yourself healthy. You can’t just declare yourself forgiven.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I’ve never heard somebody declare weight loss. That would be a trick!

Fr. Stephen: I do that every morning.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How’s that working out for you?

Fr. Stephen: You can see my track record. [Laughter] But also you can’t just pray for it. So we would say that if you’re diagnosed with something or if you have a condition or there’s a health problem, and you don’t seek any kind of medical intervention, you just pray about it, that is exactly as problematic as “I have sinned against someone and all I do is pray by myself about it.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like if I steal your car: “God, please forgive me. I’m going to keep the car, but, God, please forgive me.”

Fr. Stephen: You don’t return the car, you don’t apologize, don’t try to do anything—just pray about it and feel better. Again, that’s not how either of those work. So, then, why do we pray? Well, we’re going to get more into that—why do we pray for healing?—because saying, “Don’t just do it,” doesn’t mean “Don’t do it at all.” [Laughter] But that’s because God works through means. God heals a lot of people through medications and through doctors.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because ultimately he provided all that stuff. He provided the doctors’ ability to gain that knowledge, he provided the raw material—he provided everything.

Fr. Stephen: And he forgives, in the sense of healing and restoring, a lot of sin through kind words, shared meals…

Fr. Andrew: And even repentance is described as being a gift from God. It doesn’t mean he zaps you and says, “Bam! Now you’re repenting.” It’s: “Okay, here’s how you repent: Here’s all the means you need, and it’s going to work, because I’m giving this to you, but you’ve got to use it.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So it’s not something you’re entitled— Forgiveness is not something you’re entitled to, that you can claim, and bodily health is not something that you’re entitled to, that you can claim.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, word of faith preachers.

Fr. Stephen: Folk, et al. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right, well, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break for this episode on unction here on The Lord of Spirits, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: You know, I’m wondering if this has the most “sorry, whoever"s that we’ve ever had on Lord of Spirits. I mean, you do throw a lot of “sorry"s in Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is, I think, the apology episode, really. [Laughter] Or the most Canadian episode, one of the two.

Fr. Andrew: That’s: “Sore-y, Calvinists.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “Sore-y.”

Fr. Andrew: My accent is not good.

Fr. Stephen: Well, now we’ve alienated them.

Fr. Andrew: Sore-y, Canadians! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I do have to say, with that commercial, that sounds like a wonderful book. I have not read it yet, so I’m not being critical of the book, but my issue with the commercial is that any time I hear “Part Blank, Part Blank,” my brain fills in “All Cop.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! I would never thought that I would hear the confluence of “Robocop” with an Egyptian…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, anything! Anything. “Part German Shepherd, part poodle: All Cop.” It doesn’t matter; that’s where my brain goes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Nice!

Fr. Stephen: It’s just a wording thing.

Fr. Andrew: Understood. Well, I’ll send that note to our marketing department.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, pass that on for me, if you would.

Fr. Andrew: Well, they all listen to this show, so, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they love my advice, I know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And heed every last syllable of it.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes.

Fr. Andrew: So, all right. Well, for those of you who have your generic Lord of Spirits episode scripts out, you know that the third half is the one where we begin talking about the thing that this show is actually about. I also think, because I knew I had to throw this out there, if anyone ever creates the Lord of Spirits wiki, that probably the generic show outline is going to be one of the articles.

Fr. Stephen: It should be.

Fr. Andrew: It should be.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, think of the amount of material that’s there, just like song references.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Exactly! Exactly! In-jokes—I mean, there could be all kinds of wiki pages out there, people.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So, you know… Just sayin’… Just putting that out there…

Fr. Stephen: I think most of our audience, though, are people with long commutes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. They’re not going to be typing while they drive.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t live themselves for wiki editing. I think that’s the flaw in the grand design.

Fr. Andrew: True. Well… Once we have self-driving cars, watch that wiki—there’s going to be a proliferation of wikis!

Fr. Stephen: There we go. I have a parishioner with a self-driving car, but it’s scary.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, neat! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Ehh, it’s kind of scary. Because here’s the thing you’re not thinking about. So the self-driving cars have an ethical algorithm: what to do— Pedestrian jumps out: what do you do?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, do you save the pedestrian or do you save the driver?

Fr. Stephen: There are a certain set of scenarios in which your car will choose to kill you rather than someone else or someone else’s. So before you drive a self-driving car, be aware of that. It will go HAL-9000 on you, given the right circumstances.

Fr. Andrew: Well, most of us are not going to buy self-driving cars. Most of us are just going to order them on our apps. They’ll just show up at your house, pick you up, take you where you want to go.

Fr. Stephen: My strategy is to drive, like, a 25-year-old car, and instead of replacing the car, you just replace one part at a time.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, the car of Theseus!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s the Johnny Cash method of new car purchase.

Fr. Andrew: I thought about Johnny Cash earlier when I was reading that bit from the Apocalypse, because I always—whenever I read the book of Revelation, I hear it in the voice of Johnny Cash.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you can hear him read it on YouTube.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! I know! [Laughter] I know.

Fr. Stephen: This is that banter again that all those people don’t like. Some do, but not all of them. Skip this part of the transcript.

Fr. Andrew: Skip, skip, skip! So, okay, well, now we’re actually going to talk about the sacrament, per se, but of course all the stuff we talked about goes into this: you can’t just listen to the third half. Yeah, so kind of Ground Zero, as it were, for scriptural references for this is—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, when someone asks you, “Holy Unction? Where’s that in the Bible?” Here you go.

Fr. Andrew: “Where’s that in the Bible?” It’s literally, explicitly commanded in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So I don’t know why a lot of people don’t do this. We do it. So, James 5:14-15.

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the presbyters of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

Note that connection between forgiveness of sins and healing of sickness. It’s right there together in one sacrament.

Fr. Stephen: It’s right there, and this is why we had to go through that other stuff before we got here: How are they connected? And so why is this a sacrament or why is this a mystery of the Church? Well, like the others, this is God working through created material means.

Fr. Andrew: It’s oil, and it’s presbyters and their hands and their prayer…

Fr. Stephen: And at one point the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s God who does it. God who will raise them up.

Fr. Stephen: Right, God doing it through, just like, as we saw with baptism, you’ve got water; chrismation, you’ve got myrrhon, you’ve got oil; marriage, you have a man and a woman. You have these materials that are how the mystery works, and here you have oil: God working through the oil. And for folks who aren’t Orthodox or maybe haven’t been to an unction service—because not all Orthodox churches do this regularly—several of the details in here are followed in the way that we do it in the Orthodox Church. Like you’ll notice that it says “presbyters,” plural: ideally, the unction service is served by seven presbyters, seven priests.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and one of the ways that this gets expressed within the service is there’s seven gospels— and traditionally seven anointings, although the way it’s usually done with lots of people at once is one anointing at the end.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so the people are prayed over, as it says, and there is actually one point where they are blessed with the Gospel book, the Bible itself, and the prayer speaks of God’s healing hand, which is present in that Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, very powerful.

Fr. Stephen: So to give you sort of more of an idea of how we do it. That’s when we do the big service. Oil from that service is also kept, and so in situations where someone’s in the hospital, someone’s sick, the presbyter, the priest, can go and anoint them. You don’t need to gather up seven priests and do the whole service every time someone needs to be anointed. That’s usually done when you’re doing it for the whole congregation, the whole community.

Fr. Andrew: That’s theoretically the ideal, that you would do the whole thing every time, but it’s just not generally practical.

Fr. Stephen: Here again, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, you see the forgiveness of sins and healing sort of inextricably linked together. Even though they’re linked and we talked about, in the last half, how we see that in Christ’s healings, how they’re linked, and we talked a little bit about how they’re related in being parallel to each other, there are still a lot of ways in which those two dots get connected that are really bad. [Laughter] And the reason I say they’re really bad is not just: “Oh, that is incorrect theology. You used the incorrect preposition. You are a heretic, sir on the internet.” [Laughter] They’re wrong and they’re bad because of the consequences they have for people, and especially in this area of healing and the idea of miraculous healing, people have done horrible harm and damage by misunderstanding this.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Literally people have died without medical treatment because of these wrong theological understandings.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or had their faith destroyed, their faith in Christ, because: “Well, your faith is too weak, and that’s why you’re still suffering, you know.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so people have been victimized in any number of ways by these. That’s why we’re saying these are really bad. The first of those, the book of Job being Exhibit A, is that there’s a causative relationship between sin and suffering or illness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “You did something bad, and so therefore you are sick or suffering. You’ve got sin in your life.”

Fr. Stephen: “This is your punishment.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “You’re being punished. God is smacking you down because of the band thing you did.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and relatively few—not no one, unfortunately, but relatively few people would say it that explicitly, but a lot of people think it. [Laughter] It’s in there at a certainly level.

Fr. Andrew: “Why is that person or that family suffering so much? Oh, they must be bad.”

Fr. Stephen: Must be something going on; there must be something wrong. Another really bad one is that sin or illness or, hey, the world is kind of illusory; it isn’t real. This is “Sorry, Mary Baker Eddy” for the first time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I know!

Fr. Stephen: Boom!

Fr. Andrew: In almost three years of podcasting together, finally get to say: “Sorry, Mary Baker Eddy.” I don’t know if we have any Christian Science people that listen to this show, but if we do, I want to hear from you! I just want to know that you’re out there and say: Welcome. We’re glad to have you.

Fr. Stephen: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, I say thee nay!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Oh, and my favorite, okay—I just have to throw this out there. For those of you who have not read a certain little book called Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy—

Fr. Stephen: It’s not good.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s a series of sermons, sermon lessons that they read from Mary Baker Eddy’s stuff, and one of them is called something like, “[Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force?]” I think that’s what it is. But it’s this idea that everything is just the function of mind. So sickness is because you’re thinking bad.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which is what sin is within that system.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: It’s sort of this delusion, and it’s sort of… If you look at her influences… Man, I’m really trashing the Christian Scientists! I was much nicer to the Mormons. [Laughter] If you look at her influences, it’s a bunch of half-rate, quasi-Hindu grifters in the early 20th century, sort of people who set themselves up as “swamis” and that kind of stuff.

Fr. Andrew: That whole kind of New Thought movement is—I’m sorry, it’s really whacky. It’s actually interesting: you can trace it down into the mid-20th-century Word of Faith faith healers. There’s this line that you can trace pretty easily between that movement in the 19th century and then this other stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and again, the reason I’m going harder on this is how destructive it is. People refusing to give their children medical care. This is serious stuff at this point.

Fr. Andrew: “Faith harder and everything’ll be fine.”

Fr. Stephen: This isn’t just: “You added the filioque to the Creed,” which is bad enough. Sorry, Roman Catholic friends.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Who else have we not apologized to in this episode!?

Fr. Stephen: This is a whole—

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t think they would be the one.

Fr. Stephen: This is a whole other level. It’s a whole other level of destructiveness.

Fr. Andrew: I thought this would be an innocuous, unctuous episode, but…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it has not been so unctuous after all!

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, no. Yeah, so that sense that the world, and of course sickness, is illusory: that’s sort of second in our rogues gallery of errors as far as the relationship.

Fr. Stephen: As my father once pointed out to me, he had never been inside a Christian Science reading room where everyone wasn’t wearing glasses.

Fr. Andrew: Hah.

Fr. Stephen: So take that as you will.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ll keep that one for later. That’s good.

Fr. Stephen: But probably the most common one, because I don’t know that we had any Christian Scientist or Church of Religious Science folks for me to run off just now, and as I said not a lot of people would verbalize that, “Oh, yes, you got sick because you sinned.” They wouldn’t at least verbalize it that way. This third one is held by just about everybody who’s an American.

Fr. Andrew: And usually unconsciously. Often consciously, but usually unconsciously.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s that there are these partitioned, sort of separate spheres. There’s sort of physical health, which is this science-based thing, of biochemistry etc., etc. There’s mental health, which—

Fr. Andrew: And there may be crossover between these things.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s mental health, which may also be reducible to biochemistry, or may not, depending on your point of view, but that’s a separate thing. And then there’s spiritual health or issues of sin, which are this third, separate, other thing. And that, ultimately, they don’t connect. In a lot of places, this is a reaction to especially the first bad view. So they don’t want to say—they’re horrified by someone saying, “Oh, you got sick because you sinned,” and so they say, “No, sin and physical health have nothing to do with each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Look, it’s just an illness. This is not your fault.” All that kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: “Sin is this legal thing of sin and forgiveness. Mental health is this other thing that we address through psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. And then physical health is this sort of other thing.” The problem with this is even though a lot of people, if not most Americans, when asked, will say, “Yes, these are these separate spheres,” functionally we all know that they overlap all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because you’re having one kind of experience, all at once. The wretchedness that you feel in the midst of having COVID for the eighth time or whatever is not… You can’t just say, “Well, my body’s feeling kind of like crap, but I’m good.” Like, you might say that to yourself, but that is not how you feel! [Laughter] That’s not how you really are being.

To try to work this out in my head, the sort of thought experiment that worked for me was saints suffering from disease. A saint is a very holy person. You would certainly never say about them, “Well, they’re suffering a disease because of their sins, because of their bad sins.” You wouldn’t say that. And certainly we’re not going to say it’s an illusion, but we might be tempted to say, “Well, their soul’s in great shape, but their body, you know—” or “God has allowed this to happen to them,” whatever. But they are not partitioned out, because they’re still embodied humans. A saint might well feel, while they may have some major ailment—they might feel depression. They might feel the sense of spiritual struggle. Those things are going to go along with it. That doesn’t mean they’re any less holy. It’s still a physical, spiritual, embodied, soulful, all-at-once thing. It’s all together. It’s one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if you’re living with chronic pain, you’re going to experience periods of depression. And especially during those periods of depression, it’s going to be hard to pray.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or maybe anger, which… I mean, anger is a spiritual experience, too. It’s all those things together. It’s spiritual and physical: you feel hot, you feel energized when you’re angry.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you’re going to— If you’re dealing with crippling anxiety and stress, that’s going to have physical consequences to your physical body. That’s going to do damage to your physical body. That’s going to, again, make it very difficult to pray. It’s going to make it very difficult to focus. It’s going to make it very difficult to find time to attend church and to participate in the Christian life the way you know you should. There’s not a causative relationship here. All of this is real; none of this is illusory, but it all overlaps. You’re a whole person.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, and I think one of the reasons why people try to separate it out is because they’re looking for solutions. “Well, look, you’ve got a headache: just take the pill.” Which, okay, you take a pill—you might well feel better, it’s true, but the experience is more than just a pain in your head; it’s also all these other things at the same time, as we said. And so shouldn’t you also be praying? Shouldn’t you also be maybe dealing with… Your headache might well be connected to other things going on in your life? Shouldn’t you also deal with them, all those things together. If you just constantly treat the symptom, then you might not be dealing with the overall, true disease.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and healing brought to one part of that… So certain people can only address certain parts of that. So your local family doctor cannot address the spiritual part.

Fr. Andrew: Right, probably not.

Fr. Stephen: I as a priest cannot address the physical part.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s not your deal.

Fr. Stephen: If you’ve got low-grade kidney failure, you’ve got to go to a doctor, not to me. While you’re getting treatment for kidney failure, I will come and talk to you and hear your confession and anoint you with oil! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Are you saying people who eat Cajun food might have kidney-failure issues? I don’t know… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know. Dehydration from all the sweating we do in August? I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! But it should be emphasized that what you can do for that person and what the kidney doctor does for that person are both from God! Both of those things from God.

Fr. Stephen: And are both things they need.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: Just getting your physical health in order, if your mental and your spiritual health are out of whack, isn’t going to do a lot of good for you, because it’s going to start failing, too, because these things overlap. And, vice-versa: when you’re struggling with mental illness or physical illness, as that starts to be alleviated, that struggle starts to get alleviated and you get help with some of those things, one of those things that does is, for example, open up space for repentance, for going and making amends, for going and dealing with things that you know you need to deal with as a Christian, but that you couldn’t because of the other things that were going on.

So these things all go together. Not only does the suffering overlap and relate, but the healing is holistic, and the healing overlaps. So what we’re talking about when we’re talking about healing in this full-orbed sense, this kind of healing that we’re praying for when we perform the anointing of the sick, this is the restoration of the whole human person, so that includes your biological life, includes your spiritual life—the life of the soul, which is the life of the body. It includes the health of the relationships that you have with the world around you and the people around you. It includes the restoration of your identity, because your identity is formed out of those relationships and those interactions and those roles you play in society. All of that is restored as you are healed.

So it’s not just like: “Oh, my body is healed. My soul is healed. My mind is healed.” You are healed. The you that you are is what’s healed. [Laughter]

So, all that said, obviously there are a whole lot of people who receive the anointing of the sick and not only aren’t healed immediately, sometimes aren’t healed at all; sometimes it’s someone who’s approaching physical death, and even though they receive the anointing of the sick, they still die. So why is that? [Laughter] Does God not want to heal people? Is there some stuff he can’t heal? Is there something they did wrong to not receive healing? Well, we already ruled that last one out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, and just like it’s our practice generally to anoint people when we full-well believe that they’re dying. Is that like a Hail Mary pass or whatever that we’re trying to do with that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we don’t do last— In the Orthodox Church, we don’t do last rites per se, like our Roman Catholic friends. We do the anointing at various points, but that includes when someone’s on their deathbed. We’ll go and give them the anointing of the sick. Our unction is less extreme, you might say.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Nice.

Fr. Stephen: So why is this? Well, you remember—and we’ve talked about this several times on this show—all the way back in Genesis 3: “It is not good for man to live forever in this state.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah, that.

Fr. Stephen: And it still isn’t. It still isn’t. St. Paul was still able to say, “You know, it’s better for me to depart this life, but it’s better for you if I stay.” And so it is not aimed at— The sacrament of unction and God’s healing in general is not aimed at keeping humans alive forever in this world. Lazarus died again later.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, everybody who got raised died again.

Fr. Stephen: All the people whom Jesus healed died eventually. But the healing we receive in this life, the restoration we receive—the partial restoration we receive in this life—gives us more time to repent, gives us more time in this world to serve the purpose of our life in this world, which is repentance, which is transformation. But there’s a point at which that is done, where the repentance we need to do is done, or we’ve run out of chances.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t want to be at that point.

Fr. Stephen: God has been gracious to us; you run out of chances. But on the positive side, that what God required of us in terms of repentance, in terms of the good works he’s given us to do in this world, etc., that’s done. And then it is time for us, for our life in this world to end. And that is because the ultimate, the final restoration of the human person, and our identity, where we really become who we are, is in the bodily resurrection. That’s what this is aimed at. So the healing we receive now is sort of a temporary measure; it’s sort of a foretaste. It’s a gift; it’s a blessing. It’s a little bit of an extension of our lives here, to allow us to do what we need to do. But it’s not a substitute. It’s definitely not a way for us to try to avoid us moving on through death as Christ died, to our bodily resurrection as he was raised from the dead. It’s an anticipation of it, not a staving-off of it.

Fr. Andrew: So, as we wrap up, the first thing I want to say is: I can’t believe we’re at almost— we’re actually right at this moment under two hours. How about that? Maybe it’s because we extracted a lot of giggling that we would have otherwise included. I don’t know. [Laughter]

But, on a much more serious note, there’s a couple things I wanted to leave everybody with. One is if you’ve ever been at a holy unction service that I’ve served, especially during the years that I was doing pastoral ministry still, and I preached afterwards, which I did once in a while, I would often raise one question, which is: Okay, we’re all coming in here for this healing sacrament. Why is it that everybody is not walking out, miraculously cured of whatever they walked in here with? And that’s even aside from the fact that most people who come into the unction service are probably relatively well in soul—relatively well in body anyway. But, you know, especially as you get past middle age, you’ve got something that hurts, probably, something that’s uncomfortable on a regular basis. Why doesn’t holy unction just make that go away?

If you’ve listened up to this point, you probably know the answer to that, which is: It’s not that this is some kind of head fake on God’s part, like: “Yeah, this is the healing sacrament, but… Suckers! Most of you are not going to get healed most of the time!” That’s not it at all. That’s not it at all. This sacrament is for the healing of soul and body, and it’s not like: “Well… Okay, well, we got the soul in even if the body isn’t going for anything at this point.” No, that’s not it at all, because, as we started out: Who is a human? You are a body. You are an ensouled body, an enlivened, animated body. It’s who you are. And so the sacrament affects your body in all of the senses that that means, not just in terms of the materiality that we tend to think about when we think about the body, although including that for sure, but also, frankly, see our body episodes—all of your powers, all your potentialities: all of those things put together. So is it not working?

It is. It is, but where is it aiming? And the whole point of it is the resurrected person. It’s aiming towards the resurrection. And how are you resurrected with the resurrection of life rather than the resurrection of damnation? You’re raised to the resurrection of life with faithfulness to Christ, by holding fast to him, by always coming back to him. And that’s what unction is for. It aims at that, at enabling you to do that in this life, so that, in the resurrection, you are who you’re supposed to be in your fullness.

The second thing I wanted to mention, and it’s related to the first for sure, is a lot more personal, but it’s not exclusive to me, because I know that probably a lot of you listening out there have experienced this. So if you’re married, there’s a good chance that you and your spouse have experienced a miscarriage. Statistically, it’s a really good chance. And that’s a difficult thing to experience. My wife and I have experienced that. And there’s so many feelings that go along with that. It’s not just a sense of a loss of potential, like you’re coming up with baby names, you’re maybe outfitting a room, you’re telling your other kids if you’ve got them—it’s not just that, but there’s also a sense of not quite knowing what to do with the person who died but was never really present to you in the most palpable way. Certainly Mom feels the presence of that child in ways that nobody else does, and she’s the one who suffers the most.

There’s a lot of things that you can do to heal from that suffering, but that’s not the thing that I want to talk about. Rather, I want to pass on to you something that was passed on to me that had obviously been passed on before. So in one of these experiences that we had, I was actually away from my wife at the time; we were not in the same part of the country. It was tough, very, very tough for that to be the— I mean, we couldn’t have planned for that. And so I was actually at an event with a number of other clergy, and I ran into one of our bishops. I’ll just go ahead and say who it was, because I’m grateful for this. It was Bishop John, so if you’re in the Antiochian Archdiocese, you might know Bishop John. And he says to me, “How are you doing?” It wasn’t just casual. If you ever talk to him, he’s very… He’s a good pastor kind of all the time. I knew him; I’ve known him for years, and so I told him. I told him what had happened.

And he passed this on to me. He said, “You know, have you ever heard about what Fr. Thomas Hopko used to say about this situation?” And I said, “You know what? I have not.” And he said— I’m not passing this onto you to tell you that this is some kind of dogmatic teaching, but it’s something that I believe is true. That’s where I’m going to put it. He said this: God gives everyone everything that they need in order to be saved. Everyone in this world, God gives them everything that they need. Everything in your life is there for you for your salvation. And if you use it, you’ll be saved. You have what you need. And what Fr. Thomas Hopko would say is that when God takes someone like this, in this situation, the situation of miscarriage, it’s because that person already has— They’re already fit; they’re already ready to go. And so it’s their moment. God is already receiving them.

Again, I’m not saying this is some kind of dogmatic teaching, if you don’t believe this you’re not Christian or not Orthodox or whatever, but I think that this aims at a lot of what we’re talking about, that the ultimate goal for us, as creations of God, is to be with him, is to be fit to be with him, to be prepared to be with him. And that’s what unction is aimed at; that’s what unction is for. Just because we don’t walk away with miracle cures doesn’t mean it’s not working, just as with any of the other sacraments. Just because you don’t walk away glowing or whatever doesn’t mean it’s not working. It’s making you more and more fit for the kingdom of God, more and more fit, ultimately, for the resurrection, for this embodied whole humanity, cured of corruption, with God forever. That’s what it’s for. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: You do need to speak for yourself a little bit. I am positively radiant nearly all the time. [Laughter] That is the adjective, I think, that best describes me in most people’s minds. [Laughter]

So earlier, when we were talking, I made a reference to essence not preceding existence, that who you are does not precede the life you live. Our more philosophically inclined or francophilic listeners may have caught a sort of reference to Jean-Paul Sartre and his—famous-among-nerds?—axiom that existence precedes essence. And by that he meant that we sort of come into being and we aren’t anything in particular, and as we make choices in our life, those choices define who we are. And he used the example at one point of how you can compose your life like a melody through the choices you make. And, you know, I mean, that sounds nice, but… it’s the opposite extreme.

It’s the opposite extreme. So on one side you have those who would tell us that before you’re even born, you are X, you will always be X; X is just going to play out over your life. On the other side, you have people, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who are so obsessed with the idea of ultimate freedom that they’re not willing to acknowledge that you’re born in a particular place in a particular time in a particular body with particular genetics and with particular heritage and you speak a particular language and that shapes how you think about things and how you see the world, and you have particular experiences early in life that aren’t subject to your control. He wants to ignore all of that.

And in between we have one of the truths we were kind of trying to get at in this episode, coming back to what Fr. Stăniloae said about a human person being, in some sense, absolute, because that quality that God had given to us, that he’s built into our constitution, of being able to step outside of, to evaluate—and I won’t go down this rabbit-hole now, but you can go back to the episode: this is really a function of the nous, of reason in the truest sense—to look at our lives, to, like the prodigal son, come to our senses.

That is something that we possess as a capacity, as part of our human nature, at every moment in our lives, not just at the first moment or at the early moments, but until the very last moment when we draw our last breath—meaning no matter how you’ve spent the last umpteen years, no matter who you’ve been, no matter how distorted that is, no matter how much guilt that’s heaped upon you, no matter how much you’ve hurt yourself and other people, no matter how much damage you’ve done, no matter what people think of you, no matter what you think of yourself, that can all change.

You can break character; you don’t have to keep playing the part you’ve been playing. You don’t have to keep operating within the relationships and the patterns that you’ve been operating in. But that’s also not—again, contrary to at least one reading of Sartre—not something you do by snapping your fingers. That’s not something you can declare. It’s not something you can wake up one day and just say, “Okay. Done with all that. I’m a whole new person now.” It starts there, and then it takes a lot of work: the work of repentance, the work of making new choices; the work of repairing damaged relationships, of repairing loss of respect, from other people and for yourself; the work of making peace where you’ve been making conflict and trying to win; the work of being healed, as a whole and complete person, in every way: transforming yourself, transforming your life. Because, again, identity is not found back before our birth, it’s not found at our birth, it’s not found at some high point in our life—age 30, age 40. It’s found at the point of the bodily resurrection. That is the point in our life and our existence where we most truly will be who we are, and until then we are actively shaping that, actively transforming that—and free not to pivot on a dime, free not from the consequences of our past actions, as if they can just be brushed aside, but free to begin the work of becoming that person who we want to be on that day instead of the person who we may have been.

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

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. “Then I put my codes in the machine, but the world I found was made of faulty dreams.”

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Fr. Stephen: Boo!

Fr. Andrew: —but not as dark as Twitter!—follow our page and join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. “Fly out of the doldrums and recall the log from the early database of your love.”

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