Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers and dragon-slayers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and we are live—unlike two weeks ago, when we were live but not live. But we saw you. It was weird. I don’t know. It’s strange, having met so many of you now. Did it make it weird? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. But we’re going to soldier on. So if you are listening to us live, you can call us tonight at 855-837-2346. Talk to us! We’re going to get to your calls in the second half of your show. And Elijah is going to be taking your calls. He’s sitting in for Matushka Trudi tonight.

Fr. Stephen: And listen, folks. I just found out: this is a kid. [Laughter] This is an ingénue. He as a certain playful insouciance, if you will. [Laughter] Don’t be calling in with your sailor-talk and teaching him words he’s never heard before, okay? Keep it cool.

Fr. Andrew: Duly noted. You know, the sad thing is Elijah—it would be really uncouth for him to just break in and say, “Hey, now! I’ve heard some words!” So he won’t. [Laughter] All right! Now it’s time to sell some coffee!

So Lord of Spirits podcast is brought to you by our listeners, with help from Lore Coffee Roasters. Lore Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee company, owned and operated by two Orthodox Christian families working to glorify God in all things. The Lore team is focused on sourcing and roasting the highest quality coffee from all over the earth, even Vanuatu—ah, maybe not—and having it delivered to your door in a seamless experience. They have built a subscription platform on their website, making it easy for you to choose your coffee, how much of it you would like, how often you want it delivered. They are also equipped to deliver wholesaling solutions for select partnerships. Help support Lord of Spirits by choosing coffee from Lore Coffee Roasters, an Orthodox specialty coffee company, and be a part of the story behind good coffee! You can view their coffee library and subscription plans at loreroasters.com. You can follow them on Instagram and Facebook at Lore Coffee Roasters—and, hey, there’s a discount! 10% off your first order. You can use the discount code: LOS10. L-O-S, one, zero. So get your coffee. I’ve had some. It’s good! Liked it; would drink again. So, yes.

I have a little advertisement of my own, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Shameless self-promotion.

Fr. Andrew: Shameless self-promotion! I mean, you did say that I get to be the Stan Lee of online Orthodoxy.

Fr. Stephen: Go for it.

Fr. Andrew: Excelsior. Right. So if you’ve been living under a rock—which is one of my favorite expressions, the idea that someone doesn’t know what’s going on lives under a rock. If you’ve been living under a rock, you may not be aware that there is a new book written by your humble servant, with a foreword written by the Very Reverend Dr. Ogre, sitting on the other end of the line from me, and it is titled simply, The Lord of Spirits: An Orthodox Christian Framework for the Unseen World and Spiritual Warfare. It is a distillation of much of the podcast, but also a lot of new material that even super, super ravenous Lord of Spirits listeners have never encountered before—at least not from us. Get yourself a copy: store.ancientfaith.com. They’re apparently selling like hotcakes, which— Apparently hotcakes sell really well, thus lending us that metaphor. I’ve never bought one that I can recall.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t know. Is IHOP stock doing that well?

Fr. Andrew: I… I… do not know! I have not been to the International House of Pancakes in some time. And is the IHOP actually international?

Fr. Stephen: I feel like there was a marketing error with this book, though.

Fr. Andrew: Oh?

Fr. Stephen: Because, I mean, I think the big selling point was, like, the first three pages… [Laughter] And you gave those away for free in the sample.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true. People can read your foreword for free in the sample and the introduction and chapter one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then it’s like, you know—you got the best part.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I know. Well, you know, I mean, this podcast is free.

Fr. Stephen: You don’t serve people with dessert first. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It is one of the best forewords I have ever read—this week.

Fr. Stephen: You read a lot of forewords, do you? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I am one of those people who, like, okay: This is a really boring introduction on this major academic work, but I will read it because it is in the book. So everyone should be a completist, unless you’re Jamey Bennett; he never finishes books he doesn’t like.

Fr. Stephen: Does he— See, I feel “I don’t finish books I don’t like” is really an excuse for unread books that he and many other people have. He’s just not willing to man up and admit it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Call us, Jamey Bennett! Let us know what’s going on with all of that!

Fr. Stephen: Gird up your loins and admit that you just haven’t read all your books.

Fr. Andrew: Let’s get your wife on the phone. I want to hear about what she thinks about this big stack of books that you’ve got lying around, partly read.

All right, well, tonight we’re heading back into deep waters, discussing questions of interpretation of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers: What do these texts mean? How do they get applied? And is our thinking on this question usually kind of modernist? And if so, how do we get out of that way of thinking? So, it turns out that the answers to these and so many other questions start in Genesis 1, which—big shocker, right? Like we don’t ever do that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you’re burying the lede here. You’re making it sound like the creation with the world, but we’re actually going to go back before that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! That’s right: Genesis 0.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re going back as far as you can go back. There’s no more back. Before that, “back” was not in existence yet.

Fr. Andrew: We can say words like “nothing,” but you can’t think of nothing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because when you think of nothing, you’re thinking of something.

Fr. Andrew: Like in The Neverending Story, the Nothing was definitely something. You saw it coming at you.

Fr. Stephen: Now you’re traumatizing people. You’re traumatizing people about the horse. You don’t need to do that. A whole generation…

Fr. Andrew: I know. You know, I watched that movie again a couple of years ago. It— Ahh. It did not hold up for me. I felt really bad about that, too, because it had this wonderful little space in my childhood memory, and then I kind of killed it by watching it again.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. People should post more courtesy lists of things to not revisit. Like, I’ll put on the list Super Friends and ThunderCats.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh, yeah. I never— Yeah, I haven’t gone back.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t go there, man.

Fr. Andrew: Now that you’ve said that, I think I won’t. I will occasionally— I do occasionally say things like, “ThunderCats, ho!” I mean, every so often, just in my life, but I’m not watching the show.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Usually you’re throwing gang signs when you yell that, too, which is the weird part, but— We won’t discuss your lifestyle outside of the show.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: Your personal life should remain your own, on the mean streets of Emmaus.

So, yeah, we’re starting at the beginning of beginnings. Also, fair warning: we’re going kind of deep in this show. So we’re kind of going into the deep end. We do that every once in a while. It’s been a minute since we did that, but we’re doing it again. So everyone’s warned. But we’re starting out by sort of reviewing a little bit of stuff that we’ve talked about in the past. This episode as a whole, we’re going to be picking up information—we’re going to be picking up some threads from some past episodes and kind of weaving them together to look at— bring some things together and look at things from a certain perspective. So we’re going to start out with some comfortable review before we dive into the deep end.

Fr. Andrew: Settle in, kids. These are all parts of the book you’ve read before.

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to play the hits here for a minute before we get into the new material. [Laughter]

One of the— Probably the overriding theme tonight that we’re going to be talking about—because we’re talking tonight about meaning, and meaning is inextricably related to order, and so order as in patterns, as in systems, as in structures, you kind of can’t have meaning without it. Chaos does not have meaning, sort of by definition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, jibberish is not meaningful until you put some kind of order on it.

Fr. Stephen: Nothingness cannot be put in order, because it’s nothing, and if it gets put in order it becomes something. And that’s how we’ve talked about creation in the past, that the way Genesis 1 presents God’s creation of the world is in terms of this two-fold pattern. He’s dealing with the two problems of the earth at the beginning of his creative act, being formless and empty, and so on the first three days he puts the cosmos in order; on the second set of three days he fills it with life. And that these two things are commensurate: things being put in order is what allows life to flourish. So this is not an order at the expense of life, like a kind of tyranny, but this this is also not life grown out of control and turning into chaos. These two mutually go together.

So we’ve talked about this a lot in creation, but the question we maybe haven’t asked and therefore haven’t answered is: What is order?

Fr. Andrew: Mm, you just sort of assume people have some sort of idea of what that is—which, you know, we do, but maybe let’s look underneath that.

Fr. Stephen: And what would the definition of “order” be? How do we define it? How do we understand what that term means? You can’t— Sometimes, when you’ve got something that’s in kind of a polarity or a distinction— So, we’ve got order, order as opposed to chaos—you have order on one side, you have chaos on the other; being and non-being. But you can’t define order in terms of a lack of chaos, which is sometimes how we’re tempted to do things. You define darkness as an absence of light, but you can’t define light, then, as an absence of darkness, or at least if you try to it makes it clear that you don’t know what either term means, if you’re just describing them as the lack of the other. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Although when I was a stagehand, we used to tell people—some performers that would come to our theater—that we had spray cans of “Light Be Gone,” because they would complain about light being on a particular part of the set or something like that. “Can you light this, that’s two inches from that, and not that?” Like: “Oh, let me just go get my can of ‘Light Be Gone’ here.” [Spray can noise]

Fr. Stephen: You know, there is that black paint now…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, that sucks all light into it.

Fr. Stephen: That absorbs all light, yes.

Fr. Andrew: One time we were actually asked to light a dancer but not the floor that she was standing on. And we’re like… “Okay, we’re going to have to have a meeting.” [Laughter] Good times.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that dog don’t hunt, because what chaos is, definitionally, because chaos as we’ve talked about it is non-being— “Non-being,” the very structure of the word, it’s a negation of being. So of the two terms, “order” and “chaos,” “chaos” is the one that’s a negation. Chaos is an absence of order, not vice-versa. And I know this already was a hard concept, because we still get questions about this from people who listened to the old order and chaos episode where we talked about God being presented as creating things out of primordial chaos, and we get the question: “Well, who made the primordial chaos?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they would probably think of the primordial chaos as being like the Nothing in The Neverending Story, like it’s this big roiling cloud of darkness.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “It’s a thing!” And the whole point of it is that it’s no-thing. If someone created it, it wouldn’t be chaos any more. And that question is sort of like asking, when someone created ex nihilo, out of nothing, you’re saying, “Yeah, well, who created the nothing?” [Laughter] Nothing created the nothing! It’s nothing! It’s not a thing! Yeah.

So I know that’s already hard, but chaos is just a negation of order. So then what is this order that we’re talking about when we say that God ordered the creation? There are different ways that this can and has been understood. For example, some folks—Plato is one of them—will posit that there is some kind of order, some kind of pattern, that is external to God, meaning it’s not God himself, and that imposes some kind of necessity on God as he creates.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he has to obey it.

Fr. Stephen: Follow it. Yeah, follow that pattern, follow that. Plato in the Timaeus, the Demiurge creates everything after the pattern of the eternal forms, so there the eternal forms are external to the creator for Plato, and the creator is beholden to them. Now, there’s obviously a big problem in terms of that with the Christian God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because God doesn’t have to obey anything!

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s certain people on the West Coast with three initials who don’t follow that, who say that God has to obey the laws of logic, but those people are fractally wrong, so you’d expect them to be wrong about this, too. [Laughter] So that is not the Christian God, so that’s a nope on the idea that there’s some external pattern or order or system of justice that God has to obey.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, again, if there’s something above God, then you should worship that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, then that’s actually God. So there’s another way of looking at this where this order or this pattern is something that is not God himself, that is separate from God, but is not above him or does not impose any necessity on him, meaning it’s contingent. So either God created this pattern and then created everything else according to the pattern, or this pattern is in some other way subsidiary or God could have used a completely different pattern if he wanted to…

Fr. Andrew: It’s sort of like God as a divine architect who makes blueprints beforehand and which he could have made in whatever way. And this, by the way, Tolkien fans, is the model that’s presented at the beginning of The Silmarillion, the Ainulindalë—easy for me to say—where there’s “the music,” which is basically the blueprint for creation, and then creation follows from that. But that’s not what’s in the Scripture; it’s not the Christian tradition, as cool as that is in Tolkien, but that’s not what we see.

Fr. Stephen: But this is a different view. So in order to get at the biblical view, we have to go to one passage that I know is always at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and that’s Proverbs 8:22-31. You probably don’t even have to read it. You probably have all memorized this.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. Proverbs is one of those books that I think really gets ignored by a lot of Christians, but if you just at least read it or listen to it and try to do some of what it says, that’s kind of— I mean, it is a blueprint for good Christian living!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if you— And this passage in particular, if you’re not aware of this passage, you will not understand any Church Father ever.

Fr. Andrew: Mm, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Quite literally.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so Proverbs 8:22-31. The speaker here is identified as Wisdom. So, starting with verse 22:

The Lord fathered me at the beginning of work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths, I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water; before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth. Before he had made the earth with its fields or the first of the dust of the world, when he established the heavens, I was there. When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.

That’s a cool passage, but it’s in Proverbs which no one reads!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so people don’t even know it’s there! They’re busy talking about the ideal woman in chapter 31.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! Yes, that’s the part of Proverbs people know.

Fr. Stephen: So this is— Let me go ahead and break a few hearts, because I know that, despite my best efforts, there are some people out there in the audience who are still clinging to this whole “some version of the Greek Old Testament is the canonical Old Testament.” So the Greek actually completely bolluxes this text in a heretical way. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, especially the first verse, verse 22.

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got to deal with that if you’re going to be a Greek OT supremacist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so here’s what the Greek says. It says, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work.” That’s what it says, “The Lord created me,” but what does the Hebrew say?

Fr. Stephen: Rather than “fathered me.”

Fr. Andrew: “Fathered” or “begot,” which is just a good older English word for that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “that I was brought forth” is, again, the Hebrew word for yeled; it’s “giving birth to.”

Fr. Andrew: And so, here’s the thing. You can try to understand the Greek in an Orthodox way, but it’s a big stretch, which— The Arians knew that, and so they said, “See? See? He’s a created being!”

Fr. Stephen: There’s a line in the Creed, “begotten, not made,” that is specifically correcting this.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So it’s just not the best translation there in the Septuagint.

Fr. Stephen: And we can understand why, in the third century BC, rabbis in Alexandria, dealing with a Gentile audience who’s going to be reading this, would be uncomfortable talking about the idea of God begetting, fathering, giving birth, and so they kind of shrank away from it and changed it. But the original was important.

You notice, in the passage, all the language about mountains and springs and the depths and the limit of the sea, this is all the language of the first three days of creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where God brings order to the chaotic world, creates the structure.

Fr. Stephen: And so here in Proverbs 8:22-31, the pattern by which, through which, after which God creates the cosmos is his wisdom, his Wisdom which is here personified. So this right here, this is how Trinitarianism works, the original version, not various versions that are around today. So we’re talking about Yahweh—that’s the Lord at the beginning—we’re talking about God, capital-G, God the Father, because he’s fathering. God is never without his wisdom. There wasn’t a time when God was foolish and then he acquired wisdom. This is basic. God is never without his wisdom, yet here we can see that his wisdom is distinguished from him, can be said to be with him, to be alongside him, to be working with him, to be his delight, etc., but his wisdom is not external to him. It is not has if he has no wisdom and he has to consult with Wisdom as this separate being. It is his wisdom. It’s his wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the biblical Trinitarian theology that the later, more philosophical formulations are protecting, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and explaining, in Greek. [Laughter] And the relationship between the two, these two personal beings who are not external to each other, is described as one of begetting. Again: begotten, not made. And one is begotten from the other and not vice-versa.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s a derivative relationship.

Fr. Stephen: Right, between one and the other. And that derivative relationship is why there’s still one God, because there’s one first principle. And the Son, the One who is given birth to, is the image of the One who gave birth. Remember, this is how father and son works; we’ve talked about this a lot of times, biblically. They’re the same thing; they’re not different things. That the son is the exact image of the father.

So when the Hebrew Scriptures, when the Old Testament, describes this pattern, this order, in which and through which God creates everything, it describes it as this divine Person who is begotten of God before anything is created but has to be begotten timelessly, because, again, God is never without his wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so eternal begetting is right here in Proverbs 8.

Fr. Stephen: And who is the exact image of God. And the original readers of this—ancient Israelites, Second Temple Jewish people—understood this, and they interpreted Genesis 1 in light of this, in light of this understanding. And so when you go back to Genesis 1 with this in mind, what do you find? Well, God creates by speaking in Genesis 1. We kind of take that for granted, but God doesn’t take his hand and burrow things out and build up mountains; he speaks. And so it’s his Word that is the mediating factor between God and the creation. And so an even more common name for God’s Wisdom in this context becomes the Logos: the Logos of creation, the pattern of creation. But Logos again, like Wisdom in Proverbs, is a Person, a Person who has always been with God. God has never been mindless: he’s never been without his logos; he’s never been speechless: he’s never been without his logos. So his Logos is not external to him, is not contingent. This isn’t a contingent being. God’s logos couldn’t be a different logos; God’s wisdom couldn’t be a different wisdom, because this is an eternal, timeless Person whose begetting was timeless. God couldn’t have a different logos.

And you find this very clearly: first century BC, Philo of Alexandria. You find this very clearly, this fully developed line of interpretation, and it’s right there for, say, St. John to pick up at the beginning of his gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. John 1 is basically a recapitulation of all this.

Fr. Stephen: And the state it was at that point, that this was the understanding, derived from and of the Hebrew Scriptures previous to that point.

So now we need to put a pin there for a second—

Fr. Andrew: There’s going to be a lot of pins in this episode, people. [Laughter] Get out your pincushion.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is the Charlie Day wall of Lord of Spirits episodes. So we’re going to put a pin there for just a second. We’ve got a couple more threads to pick up from another old episode, and that’s actually the episode we did about God’s body.

Fr. Andrew: Those are early episodes, I think, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We’re digging in the crates. We’re setting the Wayback Machine. So in that episode we talked about how man is made in the image of God. We talked about that a lot. But man being made in the image of God— But we specifically in that case talked about the fact that the language that often gets read, especially in the Christian Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, as being anthropomorphic language—language that talks about the eyes of God or the ears of God or God being long of nose—that tends to be read by modern people as anthropomorphism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that God is being made to look like a man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that humans are sort of imagining God in some kind of human form or mold. But what we talked about there is that, for the Hebrew Scriptures, the opposite is true, and this is the key to understand man being made in the image of God: that humanity is actually theomorphic in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and one of the ways that this gets illustrated iconographically is if you ever see an Orthodox icon of the creation of Adam, number one, the One doing the creating is Jesus. It’s not some faceless Jack Chick-god on his throne; it’s Jesus: it’s clearly Jesus. He’s creating Adam, and Adam is made to look like him. Adam looks like Jesus as the creation is happening. So that gets expressed in icons in that particular way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So when we talk about God’s eyes, we’re talking about the power of sight; we’re talking about that in the truest sense. And then human sight is a derivative type of that power.

Fr. Andrew: God’s powers are not just big versions of human powers; human powers are little versions of God powers.

Fr. Stephen: Small, diminished, yeah. [Laughter] And so God creates essentially little potential small-g gods. This is the front side of what we call theosis. And the way they move toward that goal is intended to be by imaging God, meaning by continuing the work of God in creation, continuing to set creation in order, continuing to fill it with life. We’ve talked about this before. And so humanity— God is continuing that work, and humanity participates in it. God in his grace allows that work to be mediated through humanity, and that is transformative to humanity, shaping humanity further in the likeness of God.

We’ve talked about how, in paradise, when man and woman are created, they’re created with the intent that the two of them would leave the garden, because the garden is not the whole of the earth—leave the garden, taking paradise with them, and spread out and turn the world into paradise by putting it in order and filling it with life, filling the earth and subduing it.

Fr. Andrew: Edenization, as it were, of the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And to do this is to humanize the world, because that action is mediated through humanity. And even though humanity disobeys, the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation is such that the world is humanized anyway. So Adam gets told, “Cursed is the ground because of you.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. No matter what we do, we’re going to affect the world.

Fr. Stephen: And so if we’re not doing what we’ve been called to do by God, then our sin, our wickedness, is going to despoil, taint, twist the rest of creation around us, because this humanization is unavoidable, but that’s because of the relationship of humanity to the rest of creation. What this fundamentally shows is that the order, the pattern in which the whole creation is made is fundamentally human-shaped. The pattern is human. The pattern is human, which means the Logos is human.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: The Logos is human. And it is this divine-human Logos that is made flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ, as the Fathers say, without change or alteration.

Fr. Andrew: Which is, again, another mind-bending concept that we’ve talked about a number of times, that the Incarnation is eternal.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so the perfect image of God in Christ is also the perfect humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s the Man. [Laughter] The Man.

Fr. Stephen: And at the same time. At the same time. And this means that Christ is both the origin of humanity in being the pattern through which humanity, the rest of creation, and the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation come into being; and he’s the telos, the end, the purpose, the goal of humanity. Theosis in the Orthodox Church means becoming by grace what Christ is by nature. Christ in his Person is the perfect union of God and man, and so we become by grace, meaning our humanity is united to God, perfectly, in Christ. We experience that through the participation in the work of God in the world, and this is what it means that Christ is the Alapha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the meaning and the purpose.

Fr. Andrew: It’s really just astonishing just to contemplate that.

Fr. Stephen: And I know this is mind-bending stuff we just did in the first half. I’m about to not-help. If you want to read more about this, read St. Maximus the Confessor, who is not easier to understand than what I just said.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No.

Fr. Stephen: But that is whom to read.

Fr. Andrew: St. Photios the Great, one of the greatest scholars in the history of the Orthodox Church, he described St. Maximus as being like a labyrinth. [Laughter] Like, he felt lost!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this is heady stuff, but this is the key to understanding the way in which the Fathers, the way in which the Church, the way in which Christianity, frankly—this is why the Person of Christ is at the center of all seven Councils, seven Ecumenical Councils. Because this is the key. Christ, the Person of Christ, is the key to understanding everything, literally. The creation. [Laughter] And he’s our way to come to know God. So literally everything. And this is— St. Paul comes back to this again and again and again and again: in him all things hold together; through whom and for whom and to whom all things were created—talking about Christ. This isn’t just rhetorical flourish.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not some object floating in space; he’s the One who fills all in all.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this isn’t a love song. “Baby, you’re everything to me: you’re the sunrise; you’re the sunset.” [Laughter] That’s not what’s— This is actual communicative; this is trying to convey who Christ is—

Fr. Andrew: This is big. This is bigger than… bigness. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —and the role he plays, not just rhetorical flourish. So as heavy as this is— And the reason why statements like this, like the ones from St. Paul I was just referencing sound almost rhapsodic, almost hymnic sometimes, is because this is so big and so heavy. The enormity of it.

Fr. Andrew: Poetry is kind of the only way to talk about this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The sheer enormity of it is something that can— And, again, this is not this thing that Christians come up with in the fourth century. This is something in the Hebrew Bible that was understood by Jewish people centuries before the birth of Jesus. They understood it. They understood who the divine Logos was. They had these ideas. They hadn’t met him yet. But so what the New Testament is saying, what St. Paul is saying, what the gospels are saying is: Now we’ve met him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And he became flesh and dwelt among us. All right, well, with all of that, while you ponder that a little bit, we’re going to take our first break, and we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back!

Fr. Stephen: Déjà vu all over again!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know, I know! What happened? Those Faithtree people must have paid, like, 75% extra for that.

Fr. Stephen: Remember, we’ve got a kid engineering the show. He’s got small fingers, small hands.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Man!

Fr. Stephen: He’s doing his best.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Really throwing him under the bus! It’s great. He’s never going to want to do this again, like: “No! Forget those people!” [Laughter] Welcome back, everybody. Yeah, so feel free to give us a ring: 855-AF-RADIO; 855-237-2346, just like the Voice of Steve just said, although— I don’t know, should we call him the Voice of Steve anymore? I think he feels a little bad, like people meet him and are like: “Are you the Voice of Steve?” I’m pretty sure he’d rather say, “Aren’t you the Be the Bee guy?” which is what he got before. So I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: He knew the job was dangerous when he took it.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. My boss was just saying that to me the other day! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In for a penny, in for a pound.

Fr. Andrew: Because apparently there was some show called Super Chicken, which was like a—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Andrew: And apparently the line, “You knew this job was dangerous when you took it,” is in that show.

Fr. Stephen: Bok bok ba-kaw! Super Chicken! Yep.

Fr. Andrew: That was a reference I didn’t know until Melinda mentioned it to me, which— She was so happy that she knew a pop-culture reference that I did not. I was like: “Well, you know, welcome to my world.”

Fr. Stephen: She was happy that she knew a pop-culture reference that you didn’t?

Fr. Andrew: Correct! Exactly! Exactly! [Laughter] She grew up— Not that we’re here to talk about her, but she grew up in a Swedenborgian enclave or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, okay, but that’s like, you know… They weren’t: “Hey, I’m the world’s tallest short person.”

Fr. Andrew: I mean, they weren’t watching Hanna-Barbera.

Fr. Stephen: If she knew one I didn’t know, that would be something to brag about, but, of course, I have heard of Super Chicken, and even mimicked his battle-cry moments ago.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. [Laughter] So, yes. All right, well—

Fr. Stephen: He was a super chicken, not a flavor. I don’t know. I don’t know if he—

Fr. Andrew: I remember Danger Mouse… Yeah, so, oddly enough, we actually do have some calls coming in.

Fr. Stephen: All right! Are they coming from inside the house?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t see anyone inside my studio… No, this one I think is coming from Tennessee. So we’ve got Will, who’s calling, and he has a question about Sophia and Logos, which— yeah. So, Will, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

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

Fr. Andrew: We hear you.

Will: Fantastic. So, question— I suppose, first off, just to clarify for myself, is— When we’re talking about Sophia as portrayed in Proverbs, Wisdom of Sirach, and we’re talking about the Logos—do those have the same reference? Those are both Christ?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in those contexts—

Fr. Stephen: I’d have to look at what passage in Sirach you’re talking about, but Proverbs and— Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Yes, because sometimes, if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t—or maybe some of the Fathers, I’m not sure—refer to Wisdom and identify that as being the Holy Spirit. But in this case, it is the divine Logos; it is Christ, the Son of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we have plenty of hymns that talk about Christ as the Wisdom and Word and Power of God, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, from the Paschal Canon, for instance.

Will: All right, so, following up on that, in that passage in Proverbs, when it’s referring to Sophia, it’s using feminine terminology there, feminine— I believe it starts out within verse one or two; but when it’s the Logos it’s using masculine terminology. My question is, one, is this important, or is this just some grammar thing of different languages have different grammars, and so those are just grammatically one is feminine and one is masculine? But if it is important, then what’s going on there? Why is—? When we’re thinking about it as Sophia, is it portrayed in the Scripture as feminine, whereas when it talks about Logos it’s referred to in masculine terms?

Fr. Andrew: It’s really just grammatical gender. It has… Like, why is a table female—or feminine, in French? It’s nothing particularly feminine about tables; it’s just the grammatical gender. Really!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Did we lose you?

Will: No, no, I’m still here. I was just— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Like, really? Really? Are you sure? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And part of the issue here is that, in Anglophone America in particular, this has become this huge, bizarre, political thing—not recently. I mean, over the last 70 years. I mean, the whole pronouns thing is relatively recent, but this sort of hyper-focus on gender and its relation to sex— I mean, the bigger question in this Proverbs passage is: How come the verb yeled, means to give birth to, keeps getting used to refer to God, the Father?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Fathers don’t give birth to children. [Laughter] That’s not the normal use of the language.

Fr. Andrew: You can’t absolutize…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this passage is very clearly sort of comfortable using these terms that would normally be feminine. And you can’t avoid that with the way we talk about the Holy Trinity. We say “begotten of the Father.” Christ does not have a mother in terms of his divinity; he has a mother in terms of his humanity. We have that hymn in vespers that says he is without mother on the side of his Father, and without father on the side of his mother.

So, yeah, the Scriptures are fairly comfortable with that. There’s not— It’s not making any kind of political or gender or feminist statement when it uses this kind of feminine language about God, or language which is typically used about women for God. It just does. That’s sort of a hang-up we have as modern people, one way or another, specific— almost entirely specific to the United States, sadly.

Fr. Andrew: It looks like we actually lost Will, but hopefully he heard—

Will: Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Oh! We got you back!

Will: Yeah, I was lost but now I am found. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Hopefully you were blind and now you see.

Will: Well, I see better after listening to these podcasts.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God.

Will: I am one of those people who made the Peterson-Pageau-Lord of Spirits pipeline, and I know one thing that’s the Pageaus talk quite a bit about is about masculine-feminine—

Fr. Andrew: Oh! We lost you again, Will.

Fr. Stephen: What was that clicking sound?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. That’s… yeah.

Will: Oh dear.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Are you back now?

Will: I’m very sorry. Yeah, I will try to make this quick because I don’t know what is happening, but they talk about how— The Pageaus talk a lot about how reduced masculine-feminine down very narrowly to just talking about sex in particular, focusing on human sex, but it has a much broader concept; that’s more of a relational concept. I was wondering if those are talking about different perspectives of relationships or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s talking about the relationship between God and his Wisdom—we would say between the Father and the Son—and even though it’s a little bit of a weird use of the term, in that that would usually be used to refer to a mother and a son, that verb. It correctly describes the relationship, because it’s trying to differentiate that relationship from something that’s created or made, that’s external, whereas giving birth, that’s an internal function.

Fr. Andrew: All righty.

Will: Well, thank you. I’m going to take my leave before I’m kicked off again. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like, man, I’ve been playing Alan Wake II, and that clicker’s been freaking me out. [Laughter] I’m in the only room in the church with a light on, too. This is…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s a squirrel calling from somewhere inside the church!

Fr. Stephen: I do recommend the Alan Wake game. They have paid no promotional… But if they’d like to, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. All right, well, why don’t we go ahead and roll on. Yeah, so it’s hard to summarize what we talked about in the last half, but— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Hopefully you were listening. If you’re just tuning in now, sorry! This is going to be a rough one.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true. But we talked a lot about Proverbs 8:22-31, which is what we were just discussing with Will, and how Christ is the Wisdom who is the basis of the order of the world. I think that’s probably the best way to summarize what we just said. [Laughter] There’s so much more! But, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So, yeah, we were talking about— I mean, basically, in a nutshell—and I do not know what kind of nut has a shell such as this, but in a nutshell—we were talking about what order is. When we say that God created the universe by putting it in order, what is that order we’re talking about? And ultimately, that order, that pattern, that logos, that wisdom is Christ. It’s the Person of Christ. That’s my nutshell summary of what we—

And so now we’re going to turn here in the second half to looking at how that order in creation functions. So this half we’re going to be talking about the meaning of life, briefly.

Fr. Andrew: Which, as everybody knows, is 42.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And as I said to you earlier, the thing that disappoints me about that reference is that the part that’s really funny to me is what comes after that in context, which is that they create this planet-sized computer that they have churning to determine the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, over, like centuries—I think it’s millennia—and it finally spits out the answer, and the answer is 42. And the immediate response is that all of the universe’s philosophers, theologians, scholars, and thinkers all begin to now study: What is the question the answer to which is 42, that explains the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? [Laughter] So it solved nothing, getting the answer. Because sometimes it’s the journey and not the destination, people, and friends we made along the way. [Laughter] So long, and thanks for all the fish.

So meaning and life, meaning… Meaning. It’s hard to talk about meaning without using the word “meaning.” What does “meaning” mean? But so what does it mean to even ask the question about the meaning of life, an individual life, life in general, the meaning of the world? What does it mean to try to uncover the order and the pattern of the world? You can just give the right answer based on the first half and say, “It’s Jesus!” But now you have to do what all those philosophers and theologians and scholars have to do: now you have to come up with the right question to understand the answer.

So we’re moving on to: What’s the question? What’s the right question? So we’ve talked before—now we’re going back to another episode, pick up some more threads from, I think, the episode about the nous is where we talked about this—about the order that is out in the world, in the world around us and the nature of things; that there is a system or a web of relationship, relationships between people and things in the world. It is within that system and web of relationships that any given person or thing finds its identity: what it is.

This is an important concept, because the way most of us have been taught to think about—and there’s a heavy amount of Aristotle in this—is that what a thing is—the identity of a person or a thing, an object, anything—is based on some kind of internal patterning of the object. So it’s something that’s internal to the object or internal to the person. Who a particular person is, their identity, is something internal to them is sort of what we’ve been taught. And this is the opposite of the case.

So if we imagine an island in the middle of the Pacific where no humans have ever been, and we imagine that there is a naturally occurring shard of metal lying somewhere on it that is shaped like a hammer, that object is not a hammer.

Fr. Andrew: But— But— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s not even an object shaped like a hammer until someone sees it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, on some level this is the “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” [Laughter] Phenomenologically, of course, the answer to that is no, because sound has to be heard to be a sound.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It will create vibrations in the air, but that’s not a sound. But so that object is just an object until it enters into some system of relationships with something else. So if a crab has to crawl over it, it is still not a hammer; now it’s an obstacle, because the crab has to go around it or climb over it or whatever. And when the crab is gone, it ceases to be anything, really. It is just an object. And, yes, it doesn’t cease to exist in the modern sense of existence. It continues to have ll of the mathematical… You could go—but again, this would require you to go see it. Hypothetically, if you went and saw it, you could take the measurements, you could do all those things, and even if you weren’t looking at it, it would maintain those measurements and everything, but it wouldn’t be anything in particular.

Any given object can actually be a variety of different things.

Fr. Andrew: Sure. I mean, you know, how many people here haven’t used a screwdriver as a hammer at some point? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: Which— Please don’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: Or I walk out on my front lawn and I find a hammer, I can say, “I’m going to use this for a hammer.” I can say, “I’m going to use this to crack walnuts; it’s going to be my nutcracker.” I could say, “I’m going to use this as a weapon to knock around my neighbor, who’s been bothering me.” And so whether this is a food utensil, a household tool for driving nails, or a weapon depends entirely me as a human, as a human observer and interactor, and how I choose to relate to this object. I could even fail to recognize that it’s a hammer. I could just say, “Oh, there’s some piece of metal trash here in my yard,” and interact with it as that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially if you’ve never seen one before, maybe, so you have no intentions for that shape.

Fr. Stephen: Or if it’s rusted and corroded.

Fr. Andrew: Or in pieces or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it has its identity within this system of relationships. Abstracted from all those relationships, it isn’t anything.

Fr. Andrew: Which I know is hard for people to understand, but consider again the problem of the set of molecules that you’re carrying around right now. Those all belonged to something else; they were put in relationship to something else and were something else. So this works on the macro level, too, not just sort of the molecular or atomic level.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah. And, you know, this is observable with familiar objects. So if I have an object that used to belong to my father who is now departed this life, even if it’s a random object like a stapler, that stapler is something different to me because balled up with it are memories of my father that have nothing to do with stapling things, but, because it was his stapler, there are all these things, that when you see that stapler, simply do not exist for you, that probably don’t exist for anyone but me and maybe my siblings and my mother, if they even recognized it as my dad’s stapler, which they might not, in which case it would be gone for them, too.

And then when you move to people, people can look at my wife and see that she’s a woman, but I look at her and I see my wife. That is different. She is someone different to me than she is to other people. So this is just a reality in our everyday lives. When we try and take a materialist, scientific kind of view of the world, we’re just denying all of these things; we’re trying to fake denial of all of these things, but they’re still true to us. I don’t care how much of a scientist you are, you value the lives of your close family members more than people you’ve never met and never will. You may feel horribly guilty about that, but it’s the truth. These are just truths of how we operate in the world, and we couldn’t operate otherwise.

If we tried to interact with everyone and everything in the world based on its mathematically computable measurements and that’s it, with no associated memories, with no intent, with no relational subjective element—you couldn’t function in the world. You wouldn’t be a human, at least; you’d be a Roomba. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: This may be the first Roomba reference on the podcast. It’s amazing! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But my vacuum cleaner’s named Rosie. She has googly eyes; she vacuums the floor. Even though I have personified her, she is not a person; she is operating based on mathematics and is not even really a “she.” [Laughter] That’s just my sexism: she vacuums, so I— [Laughter]

And so any sense of meaning and purpose for anything or anyone, requires an external observer.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there has to be a relationship in place.

Fr. Stephen: There has to be an external observer looking at the thing and relating to it in some way. And there is no view from nowhere, as we’ve talked about. That’s the second most common quotation from Thomas Nagel that’s on this show. And for there to be a human order—we’ve talked about how the order of creation is a human order—that requires a human observer, because the first most common quote: “We don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.” We know that a bat perceives the things in the world according to its own relational qualities, but we don’t know what that is, because we’re not a bat. But we know what it is to be human, and so we observe things, we give things purpose, we utilize them according to the human mode of understanding and consciousness. We put things into that human order.

But when we’re talking about putting things in order— So we talked about in the first half, that the way human beings participate in this is by continuing the work of God, participating in the work of God in the world, to put things in order and fill them with life. On this level of order, there are two inseparable elements of it. One of them is a passive recognition of the order that already exists in the world. We don’t come to the world as this sort of clean slate that we get to then connect all the dots however we want.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You’re born into a world that exists.

Fr. Stephen: And is already ordered to some extent, rightly or wrongly. There is already a system of relationships in place between people and things. And so we come to passively recognize that order.

But the other inseparable element is our actively putting things in order, our actively, relationally interacting with and through the things in the world, interacting with other people, which serves to shift the order of things in one direction or another, to establish order where it’s breaking down, to shore it up. And these two things always go together.

So what does this mean in terms of the meaning of life? And there I used the verb—or I used the word “mean” again: What does this mean? So, on the one hand, there are people who approach questions of meaning and purpose and the meaning of life from the perspective purely of that kind of passive discovery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Meaning is out there; we have to find it.” This is the same idea behind when people say things like: “Words mean things,” that this is what they mean by that.

Fr. Stephen: “I’m going to go find myself.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s that as well.

Fr. Stephen: “I’m going to go discover who I am.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this sense, like it’s an archaeological activity.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “The truth is out there; I will go find it.”

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: But in a way where we’re totally passive. “There is some meaning of life; I’m going to learn what it is, passively. God or someone wise or something is going to tell me, is going to inform me. Some experience I have is going to cause me to see what it all means.” And so that is wrong, because that is taking purely that passive approach.

The other pull is to take only the active approach, where meaning formation and purpose formation is the triumph of the will. This is Nietzsche, frankly. “I am going to go out, and I am going to order the world after my own will, and if I can’t order the world, I’ll at least order my world. I will force it to become what I desire it to be. It is just all moldable, all malleable; I can actively shape it into whatever I want.” People have varying degrees of success with that. Some people like Napoleon have pretty good runs, and then the run ends. [Laughter] But you keep getting confronted by the non-malleable parts. So that is also an error. That is also an error.

So the reality is in between, the active and the passive taking place at the same time, where as we actively live and make choices and give order to our lives and to the world around us, we also discover the order that is already there and discover how we fit. These two things happen at once.

This doesn’t mean— We could also take those two poles and talk about variety and lack thereof. Views which say the order, the meaning, whatever, is out there, is completely out there and we just have to find it, that tends to mean that the order and the meaning that are out there are very general. People who think in that way talk about the meaning of life, not the meaning of my life. So the idea is that this meaning, this order, is kind of general; it’s for everybody. There’s just this one order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s: “Every rose has its thorn. Every night has its dawn.”

Fr. Stephen: “Every cowboy sings a sad song.”

Then the other side, the sort of “I am going to shape the world to my will” is very individualistic. “I am going to assert my meaning in the world, but that’s my meaning, not yours.” [Laughter] “It’s over against yours, if you even have one, if you even have the kind of will that I have.” And so then there’s this sort of infinite variety of orders to which the world could be subjected by your will, which is kind of trying to make you an unfettered creator-god, which— Good luck with that.

And so, again, neither of these poles is accurate. So what we have when you have both the active and the passive working together is you don’t have a variety of orders, but you have a variety of instances of a pattern, of the same pattern. I think a good visual example of this, drawing it back to what we were talking about in the first half, is in Orthodox iconography of the saints.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they look different, but they kind of all look the same as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s this level where they all look the same, and that’s deliberate; that’s not bad art. [Laughter] That’s not stylistic. They look the same because these are all humans who have been formed into the image of Christ. They’ve been formed into the same image—the Logos, Christ—and so they all kind of look the same. But at the same time, they’re all different people who have been so formed, and so they all look a little different. So the saints show us myriad ways of being Christ-like, in different places, times, situations—for men, for women, for children, for elderly people, for people in between, all the way across the gamut.

And to fulfill our purpose— If our purpose is to humanize the world, if our purpose is to turn the world into a garden, if our purpose is to put everything else in order, first, humanization of the world requires the humanization of humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I think that we’re going to get into application a lot in the third half, but just as a piece of application here— Everybody wants to change the world, as it says, but no one thinks of changing himself. There’s an order in which this has to happen. We can’t effectively make the world in the way that God desires us to if we’re not already on the path to holiness ourselves. It just doesn’t work. So one can have a lot of opinions and do a lot of things, but unless one is actually engaged in this humanization for oneself, it’s going to end up being distorted, because you’re going to shape it according to how you are.

Fr. Stephen: Although, I heard the saying is: “Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change the toilet paper roll.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Also true!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if they do, they hang it up backwards, and then you’re like: What!?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: So this means for there to be any kind of broader meaning to the universe, to the cosmos, there first has to be a meaning to your human life. And that isn’t something that’s just discovered; that’s something that’s discovered and constructed at the same time.

But this isn’t an individual human life, for the reasons we’ve just described; that, abstracted from relationships, no one and nothing is anything. So if you are completely alienated and isolated and alone, as our culture is desperately trying to do to you, you’re going to have all kinds of issues about your identity, because you’re not in active relationships with other humans, which is what that identity is based on. And so for meaning to happen, it has to happen in terms of not just human life but communal human life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re meant to be together. You come into this world with a communal relationship, namely, your mother. It is inescapable!

Fr. Stephen: And that communal life is active, it’s dynamic, it’s participatory. And on our own, we’re nothing. This is why the Church was established, whether we’re talking about the assembly of Israel in the Torah that we’re going to talk about in the third half, or we’re talking about the Church as we know it today.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even the ancient concept of what a person is—it’s reflected in both Greek and Latin—the word in Greek for person generally is prosopon, and in Latin it’s persona, and both of these refer to the face. So if you think about this for a second, your face is not really available to you; it’s only available to the people around you, who see your face. I mean, now we have mirrors and so we have this idea of seeing our own faces, but mirrors did exist in the ancient world, but they weren’t that common and they weren’t that great, so most people never really saw what they truly looked like, only other people. So even the ancient idea of a person is about relationship with other people.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this can’t be emphasized enough, that, just like in the Old Testament, in the New Testament a community is formed. Christ doesn’t ascend into heaven and leave a book for people to go and read and find all the answers about life and its meaning and whatever else. He creates a community, a community in which Scriptures are read, in which there is a way of life that is practiced, in which there are rituals that bring the community together and bind them together and bind them together to God. That’s what Christ leaves; that’s what he sends his apostles to do. That’s how this meaning is formed.

And so, again and again, we have to point out, because our culture is so aimed at alienating and isolating everyone and leaving them alone, because then you’re easily manipulable—you can be told who you are, you can be taught to express who you’re supposed to be now by what you consume, etc., etc.—we’ve talked about this before—in the face of that, the answer to that—this sounds overly simple, but it’s: Go to church. [Laughter] It’s really that simple.

Fr. Andrew: I think one of the reasons we’re so fragile— And by this I’m not just saying, “You guys are a bunch of snowflakes!” [Laughter] Although kind of— no. —is because we have so few or so shallow relationships. Anti-fragility is about a dynamism of a complex web of relationships. If there’s only one person whose opinion you care about, if that opinion shifts in a way that’s negative, it’s going to be devastating for you. But if you are within a relationships of people who love you and value you and interact with you and admire you and respect you and treat you as a human, and then one of them kind of goes off the deep end, you can handle that much better because of that whole web of relationships that you’re in. You have resilience because of that. And I think that one of the things that this sort of late-capitalism age that we’re in has done, as you said, Father, is isolating everybody. And so it’s increasing fragility, because we have fewer relationships and our relationships are not as deep. So it really is a problem, and I think it’s creating these crises of meaning and understanding meaning, which of course is what this whole episode is about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And there are internet communities out there, for example, that are really trying to keep this plate spinning and are really trying to keep isolated and alienated people out there from completely losing their minds and going off the deep end and going into self-harm—and it’s good that they’re doing that, but those aren’t a substitute for real community. Those are trying to do triage; those communities are trying to do intensive care for people who really need in-person community and relationships.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like if someone’s suicidal and they happen to, thank God, call a suicide hotline and there’s a voice on the other end talking to them, that, God-willing, helps them not to do that thing, that’s good, but it’s nothing like if there’s someone there with them. The only reason that hotline exists—

Fr. Stephen: Right. We people to have a support system where they don’t need to call a stranger when they reach that point.

Fr. Andrew: The only reason that hotlines exist is because of the isolation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so better to have someone. And you can. You can. The Church is maybe the last place. The union halls are gone; all this other stuff is gone that used to provide community, the neighborhood pub… All that’s been stripped away. But the Church can still be that. So what does this all mean? This means that, as I said at the beginning of this half, trying to formulate the question to which Christ and the meaning he embodies is the answer, is that the way we formulate the question is by actively living, by actively giving meaning to our life and discovering the meaning that is already there, discovering the order that’s already in the world, discovering who other people are and how they relate to us, discovering the things in the world and how they relate to us, and being discovered by them. And then, through that, making a life, crafting a life.

I’ll say something nice about Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre once said that by making choices you can make your life a melody, which is a little frou-frou, but… [Laughter] But what he’s saying there is that you could live your life in a way that’s intentional, that gives it meaning, that gives it beauty, that gives it purpose, but that [requires] not just a passive approach but an active approach, an approach in which we struggle to embody the order that is in the world, that we struggle to embody who Christ is. This is what justification, being put in order ourselves— This is what justification is about. This is what repentance is about: getting ourselves right first.

And so meaning is discerned and created at the same time. And ultimately at the end of the day, as we pursue this path, the meaning we find is embodied in us because we become a human person. And in becoming a human person, because Christ is the human Person, we also become like Christ, we also are united to God in Christ, we also find salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, I know these first two halves have been pretty heavy stuff, but it’s going becoming much more applicable in the third half. So you’ve come this far! We’re glad you’re here with us. We’re going to go ahead and take our second and final break, and we’ll be back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t even know that that commercial existed!

Fr. Stephen: You drug that poor man out of retirement just to introduce you.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No! I didn’t!

Fr. Stephen: Hasn’t he suffered enough? Hasn’t his reputation been drug enough without you associating it with yourself?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter, sign] Yeah, I wouldn’t have done the plug earlier if I’d known we were going to hear an ad from John Maddex himself!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, that does…

Fr. Andrew: It’s a little redundant, I don’t know. But, yes. With a clip from the audiobook, everybody, by the way!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, is that what that was?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Right now you can only get the paperback, but the ebook and the audiobook should be available within weeks. We’re not sure exactly when, but, God willing, they’ll be out there. But, yeah, you can get the paperback right now.

Fr. Stephen: Does the audiobook come with a gag reel?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Only from the foreword.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. See, I’ve wanted to do a gag reel. I have suggested it. I’m going to peel back the curtain!

Fr. Andrew: Uh-oh.

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to peel back the curtain. Consider this a worker protest. [Laughter] Folks who have purchased my audiobooks, write to Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: —and let him know that you believe in my freedom to do bits and make jokes during my audiobook readings. They have been stifling my creativity and making me just read the text of the book, and not allowing me to do clever asides. So if you want my clever asides, write to Fr. Andrew and demand them!

Fr. Andrew: Make up expanded, revised, bonus edition of the audiobook! [Laughter] It includes all the outtakes.

Fr. Stephen: I’ve got more books coming! [Laughter] They could be at least 27% more entertaining if I could do this.

Fr. Andrew: And we have an army of editors, my friend. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: To make sure that doesn’t happen! That’s my point!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! That’s right, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: People, reach out. Express your will.

Fr. Andrew: All the hate mail comes to me anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, this is the suggestion category. [Laughter] #FreeFatherStephen #Audible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Like, “free” as in “free speech,” or “free” as in “free beer,” because—?

Fr. Stephen: Uh, speech.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay. [Laughter] All right.

Fr. Stephen: Although, if you have any of the other, I am Dutch…

Fr. Andrew: Now, there you go, yes, yes. Yeah, so, welcome to the third half. Now we’re going to actually— Now you’re like: Wait! I thought this episode was supposed to be about biblical interpretation or something! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: When do we get to the topic before the end?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, rarely. One out of ten times, I think.

Fr. Stephen: You have to start before the foundation of the world to get here to how to read the Bible. It’s just how these things work. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So now we need to talk about how this human mediation of meaning into the world, into God’s created world— how that works functionally within the community we were talking about at the end of the last half. So we’re going to start with Moses. So now we’ve at least moved to Exodus from Genesis, over the course of an hour and a half.

Moses is the first leader of the ekklesia, as the Greek of the Old Testament would have it, of the assembly of Israel. He’s the first leader. And so Moses is the image we get in the Torah right from the beginning of how human leadership is going to function within the community of God’s people. One of the things you notice when you read closely through the Torah is that the words that God says to Moses and the words that Moses then says to the people are not identical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can compare them. It’s not simply Moses repeating word for word.

Fr. Stephen: They’re right there, together. God comes and says something to Moses, very often prefaced with, “Say to the sons of Israel: X, Y, Z,” usually relatively terse, and then Moses goes to the aforementioned sons of Israel and says, “X. X1, X2, Y. Z1, Z2, Z3.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which on its face might seem like: “Wait, Moses, you’re not doing what God said to do.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “You’re adding to what God said. You’re not supposed to add or take away.”

Fr. Andrew: But the Scriptures never treat him that way.

Fr. Stephen: No. No, quite the opposite. He’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing when he does this.

Fr. Andrew: He’s creatively engaging with what God said because this is what his role is as a prophet.

Fr. Stephen: And not changing it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not changing it; he’s explaining it, applying it—

Fr. Stephen: Adding detail, fleshing out, applying. So a good example of this is when God commands to Moses and then tells Moses to speak to the Israelites concerning the dedication of the firstborn, meaning God says, “Every firstborn male that opens the womb is mine.” This is after the death of the firstborn in Egypt. He says, “Therefore firstborn of any animal, you will take and you will sacrifice to me. Firstborn human son, you will go and make this offering instead,” because he doesn’t want human sacrifice. That’s what God says to Moses.

Then when Moses gives this commandment to the Israelites, he fleshes it out with all of this detail, one of which detail is: “Don’t sacrifice donkeys!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Did God surely not say…?

Fr. Stephen: ...Thou shalt not sacrifice yon donkey? So this gives you a window into modernist biblical studies in that biblical studies people read that, and here’s where they instantly go, because this is the hermeneutic they’ve been taught: “Aha! There must’ve been some kind of pagan donkey sacrifices going on in ancient Israel, and a later author is putting into the mouth of Moses that these donkey sacrifices must stop!” [Laughter] If you don’t believe me, go do a search of journal articles: you’ll find them on pagan donkey sacrifices. Some of them trying to connect it to Lilit, the donkey-rider, and you get all that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, right! Lamashtu and so forth. Hey, everybody! Donkey-centaurs.

Fr. Stephen: But as usual, if you just read what it says— [Laughter] Let’s at least try to take it at face-value first. Let’s see how that goes, and then we can do other things. It seems pretty clear that Moses, as he’s explaining this to the people, sees: “Well, wait a second. There are animals that we don’t sacrifice, because they’re unclean. So we’re going to need to weigh in with an opinion here. God said every firstborn animal you sacrifice to him; unclean animals we’re not supposed to sacrifice to him, so what do we do about firstborn male unclean animals?” And so Moses gives a ruling. He says, “No, your firstborn male donkey: you don’t go sacrifice that. You offer this other sacrifice instead when your firstborn male donkey comes.” This is very simple. This is: we don’t need to do any weird research. We don’t need to hypothesize different dates of authorship. Just: Moses has to make a ruling, a very practical ruling. This is a question that would come up. “Hey, my donkey just gave birth. Do I sacrifice it?”

And Moses, as the prophet, as the leader appointed by God, is the one who has to make these calls. And God doesn’t expect him to be like: “Oh… God didn’t explicitly mention that. Let me go. Let me pray on it. Let me go toss the urim and thummim and get a ruling on the donkey sacrifices.” The authority that God has invested him with is precisely the authority to make these calls, the authority to apply what God has said to the practical life of the people.

So that’s a micro-scale example. If you want a macro-scale example—and again, this has ridiculously confused and spawned so many journal articles and dissertations it’s amazing in terms of biblical scholarship—the differences between Exodus and Leviticus on one hand and Deuteronomy on the other, and you can take any particular feast, any particular sacrifice or observance. “These must be by different authors. These must have been written centuries apart, dah-de-dah-de-dah-de-dah.” Let’s try again. Let’s take it at face value. Let’s see how that works out before we do anything else.

So what’s actually presented in the Torah as happening? What’s presented in the Torah as happening is that Moses speaks to God face-to-face. God gives him the Torah; God gives him commandments. Moses comes in Exodus at Mount Sinai—Leviticus also takes place while they’re at Mount Sinai, by the way—and Moses then takes and applies, like we were just talking about with the firstborn— applies that to the life that those people are going to live, because these people are living, wandering as nomads in the Sinai desert, in a camp with the tabernacle at the center.

So if you’re living in a camp in the desert with a tabernacle in the center, then the way you observe Passover, the way you observe any of the other feasts on the calendar that involve sacrifices, that’s going to take one shape, because you always have access to the tabernacle: it’s right there. And these are people who are going to end up living the whole rest of their lives living in this camp, living in the desert, living nomadically.

Again, taking it at face value, what Deuteronomy says is happening is that Moses is giving the Law, giving the Torah again—that’s what “Deuteronomy” means, “second law,” devteros nomos—he is speaking to the next generation. All those people he was talking to in Exodus and Leviticus are dead, except for Joshua and Caleb and himself. This next generation is about to go into the land and settle there, and they’re going to settle all across it. They’re going to settle all across Canaan. Some of them are going to settle in the Transjordan; he already knows at the time he’s saying this, within the text.

And so when he gives instructions, say, for observing the Passover, if you’re living in the Transjordan, if you’re living in Dan, the tabernacle’s only going to be in one place, and it’s not going to be near you. So your relationship to the sacrifices in the tabernacle is about to change. The way you celebrate the feasts is going to have to change. You’re going to go to supporting your family by farming instead of scooping up manna off the ground every morning. There’s going to be a whole change in the way of life. So the same commandments of God, the same patterns revealed to Moses by God, the same Logos that Moses sat and talked to face-to-face, is going to be applied to a generation of people settled, living an agrarian life in the land, in ways that are different in various ways from how that same Logos applied to them when they were living nomadically in the desert in a camp with the tabernacle at the center—not radically different, not “black is white, white is black,” not “this was a sin before and now it’s wonderful.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s going to be consistent and not contradictory, but it’s not going to be identical.

Fr. Stephen: Two different instances of the pattern. Two different instances of the same pattern, applied to a different generation of people living a different way of life, but the same pattern being applied to it, taking a subtly different shape.

And Moses’ job in Deuteronomy, because he’s still alive until the very end of Deuteronomy, is to continue to do that, to take it and apply it. And in chapter 31 of Deuteronomy, he passes that authority on to Joshua, passes that authority on to Joshua. But even within that— This is something of an aside, but we may do an episode on this at some point; this is the tease for the apostolic succession episode that might happen in the future. Even in the context of Joshua becoming Moses’ successor, there is the reiteration that there is no prophet like Moses and that there is a difference there as well. But we’ll get to that in another episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, successors to the apostles aren’t just new apostles; they’re successors to the apostles.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but that’s a future episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a bingo card box we haven’t checked in a while, referencing a future episode, but there it is.

Fr. Andrew: People were starting to believe that the podcast really was almost over, because we stopped doing that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that’s what keeps them tuning in, though: you never know when it will go away. Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Pave paradise; put in a parking lot.

As we were just speaking about bishops, this role that we see Moses play, this is the role of leadership: this is the role of leadership in the Church, from St. Ignatius on. The bishop is there to bind and to loose, to rightly divide, all of these terms that we’ve extracted from the King James Version of the Scriptures. [Laughter] To apply the Scriptures, the canons, the teachings of the Church: to apply those to the communal life of the Church.

And so when you look at the historical life of the Church, we see this vast variety of instances of the same pattern. You can take the Church in Russia in the 13th century, the Church in the Roman Empire in the seventh century, even the Church in the United States today, the Church in Japan in the 18th century—pick your century and your local Orthodox Church: that is an instance of the same pattern.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and notably they’re not identical to each other. They’re consistent with each other, but they’re not identical to each other. The more you read Church history, the more you see this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, despite this, and part of what we’re going to be decrying for the rest of this half, is there is a tendency for people to treat the past applications of bishops, the ways in which the leadership of the Church has applied this pattern to its life in some particular place at some particular time, and treat that as precedent, as establishing a precedent. What do I mean by that? By essentially elevating that particular contextualization to the level of the Logos itself, saying, “That is not part of the contextualization; that is part of the pattern.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And as you look at Church history, you see this, that there are some things that are constant. For instance, we always have bishops. But there are some things that are not constant, like we no longer have the minor clerical role of door-keeper or exorcist. So there’s things that keep going, and there’s things that don’t. And there’s new things! That’s the thing that scares a lot of people, like sometimes there’s new things that are introduced, but they have to be consistent with the pattern in order to be actually Orthodox. You can’t just say, “Well—”

Fr. Stephen: Right. There are new technologies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: At some point we’re going to have to come up with an Orthodox ethic of engagement on social media. It doesn’t just exist, but it’s not just going to get pulled out of the air either.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we also can’t just simply say, “Well, anything new is bad. We must not do that,” because, number one—

Fr. Stephen: Unless that’s social media, because that’s bad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] But, number one, that’s just not true. There have been new things in the life of the Church. But, number two, no one is consistent about that. Everybody has— When I was younger, I formulated the idea in my head about what I called the Luddite line, which is the level of technology I will not— Past this point, I start to refer to pieces of technology as “this thing.” [Laughter] This is the point at which I become a Luddite: I don’t do that. But people do this in Church life, too. “Well, you know, I’m okay with using codices, but there better not be some kind of digital thing being used at that chant stand.” But, I mean, codices were a brand spanking-new-fangled technology at some point. I’m sure all the old scroll-singers were like: “Ah… I don’t know about that. You shouldn’t be turning pages; that’s wrong.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. But also you can imagine, because we have the equivalent now, somebody hearing Deuteronomy who had talked to their parents before they had died in the desert, saying, “Well, wait, that’s not what you said before! You said we were supposed to celebrate Passover this way; I’m going to keep doing it the old way, because that’s the way God said!” That’s a good way to get the ground to swallow you up in the Torah! [Laughter] That’s not good, but that’s what people do now by trying to take: “Well, this is the shape it took in 19th-century Russia or in my reconstructed imagination from having read a bunch of books or whatever, therefore this is it.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s always this sense of “the Church as I’m experiencing it now in my local parish” does not measure up to this idea that I have of some other time and place.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, to get at this, we’re going to come at this from a little different direction, because we’re going to go now to the level of texts. So one question that I still get occasionally, despite the way I react—and I’m sure Fr. Andrew gets it once in a while, too, but I’m talking about Scripture all the time—is somebody’ll hear something in Scripture that they haven’t heard before or that strikes them as odd or that they disagree with, and you get: “What Church Father said it means X?” whatever you just said. This is an incoherent question. By that I don’t mean this is a dumb question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s understandable.

Fr. Stephen: There are no stupid questions. There are many inquisitive idiots, but there are no stupid questions. [Laughter] It’s not the question’s fault.

Fr. Andrew: If you are an inquisitive idiot, we’d like to hear from you. If we already have— No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: When I [say] “incoherent question,” I mean the question itself does not make sense. It does not make sense, because there are presuppositions that undergird the question. There are things that would have to be true for the question to make sense—that aren’t true.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and one of them is like— It’s funny. Just think this through for a second, folks. If Orthodox life equals doing things that are locatable in some text of the Church Fathers, then that means, because the texts of the Church Fathers did not simply drop out of heaven along with the creation of Adam, then that means that there was some point in the life of the Church where certain things were not written down when certain Church Fathers had not yet been born. And yet they at some point said or wrote a new thing. So then you have to decide: “Okay, well, up to this point, this is all what Orthodoxy is, and then after that it’s all kind of optional or suspect or whatever.” That’s just one level on which this is incoherent, is it doesn’t actually— You could not apply this standard throughout most of Church history, setting aside the problem that throughout most of Church history most people did not have even access to the Church Fathers, to most of what the— Even if you were living— Let’s say you were living relatively later in the period, like if you were St. Gregory Palamas, you still didn’t have access to all the writing of the Church Fathers. He didn’t. He had the ones he had access to.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and he had access to an awful lot compared to 99.9% of Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Who were illiterate, on top of everything else. But, yeah. And I really want to focus on the “it means X” part. “It means X.” “It,” the verse, whatever you want to plug in for “it,” the text, “means X.” So this assumes that the Church Fathers, or any Church leader with teaching authority, when they are interpreting texts, Scripture and whatever else, are appealing to an external, free-floating objective meaning, that there is for each text of Scripture a meaning; that meaning is objective—it is not related to any kind of context, it is objective, it’s free-floating out there—and usually I am guessing people would say something like “through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Church Father seizes it and grasps it and tells it to us.”

But that’s not what any of the Church Fathers thought they were doing, or were doing from their perspective. That’s not how they thought meaning works. And it’s incoherent in terms of how meaning works. The idea that St. Paul, when he wrote his letter to the Church in Rome, that essentially what it amounted to was a bunch of lines of code, that, when read properly with the correct kind of spiritual illumination, would reveal to you some truths not contained within the text itself—that doesn’t make sense; that’s not coherent. That’s not coherent.

What the Church Fathers did was they took texts—Scripture, other texts, the writings of other Church Fathers, hymnographic texts, whatever else—and they applied those texts to the lives of actual communities, the communities over which they were leaders. So they took the text and they applied it. Again, their particular application of that text, a particular application of that text, is an instance of a pattern; it is not the pattern itself. So when St. John Chrysostom preaches, you may be reading a florilegium or a quote-mine of St. John Chrysostom quotes, you might be reading it in a book on a topic, but when St. John Chrysostom says— Most of St. John Chrysostom’s writings are bits, pieces, chunks, however much, maybe the whole homily: sermons he stood and he gave and delivered to an actual group of people at the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century, in a church, in a place, who were dealing with issues at the time. Some of them are very topical! Homilies on the statues, dealing with current events.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or all those things about horse-racing and so forth. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And he is applying the Scripture that he just read, that he’s preaching on, to their lives. So, to take St. John Chrysostom’s—any of his contextualizations into the life of those peoples, to take that and to treat it as if it were the Scripture itself, would probably— I don’t think— St. John Chrysostom was probably too holy to smack you upside the head, but you might get the verbal equivalent from him, to act like what he said in his homily was the same thing as Scripture. He in no way… And they’re not getting that from nowhere. That’s what he observes the apostles doing in the New Testament! St. Paul writes letters to actual people in an actual church in an actual city dealing with actual issues.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re not— And just read the epistles. It’s obvious that they’re to people and from a person. There’s a particularity to it. And I think that’s one of the problems, that for whatever reason we often are not comfortable with that particularity. We want them to be basically like these philosophers who are simply stating principles.

Fr. Stephen: Abstract theological principles, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: That are eternally true and have nothing to do with human life.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that’s not— So the eternal Truth has everything to do with human life, because it’s Christ. See our first half.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s always—

Fr. Stephen: You can’t separate the two.

Fr. Andrew: There’s always what in our dogmatics classes were called the soteriological motive, which— everything that the Church Fathers write or the apostles or the prophets is for the salvation of the people who receive it. It’s not just to set up: “Okay, I’ve got this theological system in my head and I want to put it on paper.” It’s for people to receive it so that it can be salvific for them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in their particular lives, in their working-out of the meaning of their life, that we talked about in the last half. And the reason the apostles are doing that in the New Testament is because that’s what they saw Moses doing. That’s how leadership works in the people of God.

And so if you have read any of the Church Fathers, you very quickly realize that another way in which that whole idea of “It means X” fails is that the Fathers are always talking about there being multiple layers or levels of meaning to texts. All the time. Even if it’s just at the sort of basic, literal, and then spiritual level, but then you get way more advanced than that, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and sometimes— Just to give one example, this upcoming Sunday in a number of churches—I don’t know if it’s all of us—the gospel reading is the Good Samaritan. I mean, there’s a bunch of different ways that the Church Fathers read this passage, but two of them are that the man who gets beaten up and is by the side of the road is the soul and that the good Samaritan is Christ and that the innkeeper is the Church. It gets read that way—for instance, you can find that in St. Theophylact of Ohrid, who I think is basically just taking that from Chrysostom, if I recall correctly. But then also you get exhortation that you should be as the good Samaritan, or that you should be as the innkeeper. That’s not completely— like, it’s not identical with saying that the good Samaritan is Christ.

In a logical sense, it’s contradictory to say that the good Samaritan is Christ and should be you, but these are different ways of reading this to apply it for different purposes. So talking about yourself as the soul that’s beaten up on the side of the road is an important part of application. It’s about Christ’s salvation of you. But then also you should be like the good Samaritan or you should be like the innkeeper is another side of it, which is: Okay, you have a duty to behave this way to your fellow man. So they’re not completely compatible with each other in terms of those readings, but they’re compatible with the overall pattern of what it means to be saved and what Christians should be doing, as one example.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So part of the problem here with understanding the layers of meaning thing is, bluntly, bad education. People who have learned— This is why— This is going to be another one of those “I don’t care” moments. This is why MDiv degrees are such a bad idea! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And you’ve got one! And two-thirds of another one!

Fr. Stephen: Almost two! [Laughter] This is why MDiv degrees are a bad idea—

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn.

Fr. Stephen: —because one of the worst things that could be done to someone is to teach them a little about a topic, and an MDiv degree is one in which you are taught a little about a whole bunch of topics. And the little—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, unfortunately, sometimes people… I mean, I’m guilty of this. Clergy think that their favorite subject in seminary, they are an expert on that because they studied it in seminary.

Fr. Stephen: Four years, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s supposed to be a broad sampling of stuff. That’s what it is. It’s a survey.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And the little bit that you get taught about patristic biblical interpretation is what? Is: there’s Antioch and there’s Alexandria. In Alexandria, they interpret things allegorically; in Antioch, they interpret things literally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is an oversimplification as it is.

Fr. Stephen: It’s just— It’s bunkum. It’s nonsense. It is false. That is literally not true. Again, first of all, literal and allegorical are not opposed to each other. That’s not a choice you have to make. That’s not a choice anyone made. Actually read some of Origen’s—Origen, Mr. Allegory! Read some of his commentaries. He talks about the literal meaning all the time. He just also talks about other additional levels of meaning. Read St. John Chrysostom. He never uses an allegory, is that what you’re going to tell me, because he’s from Antioch? It’s nonsense! It’s nonsense, and it gives this impression to people, having learned that nonsense, that allegory and literal are opposed to each other, and they’re not! Allegory is a mode of application. It is a way of taking a text that does not seem to have any immediate, direct application to the life of your community, and applying it to your community. “Do not eat the owl, the night-hawk, or the sparrow” has no direct application to my community here in Lafayette, Louisiana, because they are not bound by kosher food laws, and they’re Cajuns, so they’ll eat an owl, a night-hawk, or a sparrow if they darn well want to. Fry it up; it’ll taste good.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] With enough hot sauce…

Fr. Stephen: Right, Tabasco, all good. But that doesn’t meant that text is now irrelevant. I can go through and talk about, in a bible study on Leviticus, the food laws, why they were what they were, how they’re structured, and I can bring things out of those structures, maybe using a little bit of allegory, that are applicable and are helpful to the life of my community now. So allegory is literal plus.

And we even have to define “literal,” because what passes for literal now in certain circles, “literal” means “What would the average bone-head reading this in English think?” [Laughter] So that’s number one. “What is the plain meaning of the text if you just read it to someone in English?”

Fr. Andrew: I know. And it’s so funny. Sometimes people— If it’s not super obvious or something, people will say things like, “Well, you’re confusing people, because this could be read in some wacky way.”

Fr. Stephen: Arcane way, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Well, welcome to all of text.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, any text could be read in an infinite number of ways. That’s what literal means. Or literal means you take some scientific materialist interpretation of it: that’s literal. Neither of those is literal! You can go read St. Augustine’s literal interpretation of Genesis. That’ll tell you what literal is. Literal is the original context. That’s the literal level of meaning: this is what it meant in its original context, when Moses said this to them at the foot of Mount Sinai, or on the plains of Moab; when Christ said this to the people of Galilee, standing on a hill. That’s the literal meaning.

And if you deny that, by the way, if you deny that original context, you’re not going to get very far in terms of understanding and applying the text, if you just toss that out for some bizarre reason. That’s the literal meaning. And so then the further layers of meaning, the other levels of meaning, the spiritual meanings, the allegorical meanings: these are new and renewed contexts into which the text is being applied. And of course we now have the issue that we’re living more than a millennium after the vast majority of the Church Fathers, meaning they themselves have to be interpreted and applied. I have to look at what St. John Chrysostom was saying about the statues and what was going on with the statues in the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century; I have to understand that in its original context, and then I have to apply that in today’s context, and we don’t have an emperor with statues of himself.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say: How do I apply that to municipal art?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! There’s a move there that has to happen. It has to happen. And the bishops of the Church are the ones charged with making that move, and they delegate partially some of that teaching authority to the presbyters whom they send out to represent them in the parishes. It’s how Church government works.

So an example of this that I like to give, because it’s part of my dissertation— Part of my dissertation: What did everyone ever say about 1 John 2:2? And so what you find in most of the Church Fathers who comment on 1 John 2:2 is they say something on the order of: “Here St. John refutes the Donatists.” Like, fourth-century Donatists.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, remember, everybody, the Donatists are from hundreds of years after the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: And if you read what the Church Fathers say, they’re not just saying, “Oh, here St. John refutes the error that people like the Donatists made”; they’re saying, “The fourth-century Donatists in Africa”—they’re very specific that St. John is refuting them, these Donatist churches in Africa.

Fr. Andrew: And by that they don’t mean St. John is prophetically predicting that Donatism will exist and giving a response to it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and writing this verse for that, and therefore— So when Bede writes that, the Venerable Bede writes that in the sixth century, he’s not saying, “Oh yeah, that was about those African Donatists in the fourth century, so now just don’t worry about that verse; just skip it. That was about that. That’s what that was.” [Laughter] He doesn’t do that, obviously. He still thinks it applies to them, and he records that, but so the idea that that’s what the Fathers were saying, was that St. John had a vision of the Donatists and wrote this verse just for them in Africa, is ridiculous, and that the verse has no other layers of meaning. This is a contextualization. This is an application made by the Fathers of the Church to a situation in the Church in their day. There was this schism that happens in Africa of the Donatists, and the Donatists claim that the salvific grace of God is confined to their churches in Africa and that no one else has valid sacraments, no one else can be saved except their churches in Africa. And the Church Fathers say: “Ahem!” and point to 1 John 2 and make an argument, basically.

Fr. Andrew: Atonement for the whole world.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But that’s just one contextualization. That text can be recontextualized. That pattern can be re-instanced in manifold different ways. They’re not going to be radically contradictory, but they’re not going to be identical either, because different eras of the Church and different places are going to face different issues that they need to deal with, but they’re all going to be dealing with them according to the Truth that is Jesus Christ, according to the Logos.

And so there is this strange quest for contextlessness. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “This thing means that, period.”

Fr. Stephen: It may just be Plato-brain: we’re all looking for the ideal form; we’re all trying to get away from particularity and the material and the messiness of human life. We don’t want that; we want to extract ourselves from that—but that way lies nothingness. That’s nihilism! As we already said, a person, not related to anything, is nothing, has no identity. Platonism ends in nihilism.

So the key thing here is there is no system of interpretation or rules or processes that are free-standing, that are objective, that stand outside of reality, against which you judge reality. And so that means anyone who says, anyone who makes a statement of meaning—“this verse means this”; “this quote from the saints means this”; “what’s going on in this situation means this”—they are doing the act of application. That is what they are doing. And all such statements therefore are opinions.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, opinion doesn’t mean not-true or “that’s just your opinion, man.” It’s a ruling. Judges issue opinions, and people don’t— I mean, I’m sure some people do say to them, but people normally don’t say to them, “Well, that’s just your opinion, Your Honor!” [Laughter] Like, no, that’s the legal ruling.

Fr. Stephen: “It’s just your legal opinion!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. But the thing that they issue is called an opinion, because this is their application of the law in this case.

Fr. Stephen: Right, their ruling is being made in that sense. And therefore opinions issued by various people—“here is how the canons ought to be applied in this instance”; “here is how the Scripture ought to be applied in this instance”; “here’s how whatever ought to be applied in this instance”—whether that opinion, that ruling, is worthwhile, is something you should care about, is something you should pay attention to is purely based on the authority of the one opining. Is this a person whom God has entrusted with the authority to issue these opinions and judgments or not? And if the answer is no, then that is just your opinion, man. That is irrelevant!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you can give advice.

Fr. Stephen: Someone could give their opinion on my pending court case, but unless they’re the judge, it doesn’t matter! [Laughter] It doesn’t matter: they’re not the person whom God has put in the position with the authority to do that, to make that call, to make that application in this instance. And that’s what all of these things are, is they are the applications. Taking the Logos who is Christ and applying him ultimately to the various situations in the life of the Church and our own life, applying them in a way that gives them meaning, that allows them to be navigated, and that ultimately leads us to salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, to give some final thoughts on this… To me, a very fascinating and provocative conversation… I’ve talked about this a couple times before, and so hopefully this won’t be too redundant with other things I’ve said, but within this context, God willing, it’ll be something usefully new. I myself, by my personality, by my training, by my habits, one of the things that I am is an antiquarian: I love old stuff. I love going to museums and seeing old stuff perfectly preserved or restored or whatever. The idea that you would take an old painting and just change it because you think it would look better in some other way, that horrifies me—as I hope it would most of us. One of my favorite museums here in the US is the Cloisters, which is in northern Manhattan: a beautiful museum of medieval art, so therefore it’s almost all Christian art. And I think that the way that a lot of Orthodox Christians approach Orthodox Christianity is an antiquarian way.

This is kind of a modernish idea, that you take this thing from the past and you encase it in a display case, and you look at it, and that’s the thing that it is. And we treat Orthodox Christianity that way a lot. People tend to pick some particular time or place, or maybe some popery of times and places, bits that they like from various things, and for them, then they say, “This is Orthodoxy. This is the thing.” And then they judge what other people are doing according to that. They judge often maybe their parish priest, their bishop. It sometimes was said about the Protestant Reformation that in the Reformation everyone is a priest except for priests, and I think that this attitude for Orthodox Christianity is: everyone is a bishop except for bishops, that the opinions of people on social media about various things are given more weight by some people than the people whose job it is to actually take care of our churches.

I know that it can be scary. [Laughter] What if it all goes wrong? I know, Father, that this is part of what you’re going to talk about, so I don’t want to get too deep into it. It’s an important question. What if bishops make the wrong decisions? I understand. America is founded on the idea that important people make the wrong decision. [Laughter] That’s why we have a country. But what I will say is this, on the positive side: that as you look at the history of the Church, there it seems to me was always this assumption that the Church continues to be alive and active and that bishops have real authority in the moment to do their jobs; that the Church can act creatively in the moment to apply the life in Christ in that time, in that place, in those particular situations. What is said to one person or one community may not be applicable to another person or community, or it may need to be said in a different way.

And that life in Christ, life in his body, the Orthodox Church, is not life in a museum. Now, I’m not saying that as some kind of revolutionary. I’m the opposite of a revolutionary! Anyone who’s ever met me or read anything I’ve ever written or listened to what I say knows that that is not my deal at all. I didn’t become Orthodox to make some improvements. [Laughter] There is nothing for me to improve. At the same time—and this is not contradictory—we see that the Church continues to function creatively. New things are being said which are consistent with all the old things. That’s where it goes off the rail, is if you say a new thing that’s not consistent with the old things, that is not the application of the same pattern which is Christ.

So I think that we live in a world that’s kind of messed up these days particularly. There’s a lot of really strange malaises and pathologies that we’re living in here now in 2023, and so I understand the response to that, like the feeling that the world is declining, the feeling that “wow, this is the craziest things have ever been,” and, number one, that’s simply not true. If you read the history of the world, there have been some way crazier times, way more apocalyptic moments. I mean, for some people, this is a very apocalyptic moment. There are people living in places where their world is on fire, so I get that. I get that.

But to me the response to that, even if— Let’s say this is really it; let’s say this is the true end, the final end of the world is coming very, very soon, within a year or whatever, five years, ten years, 40 years, I don’t know. Let’s go full Hal Lindsey. Say that’s true. The response to that is not to draw back and encase the Christian life and simply demand that everybody stare at this museum exhibit of Christianity. The response that the Church has always had in various apocalyptic moments, in confronting various antichrists, which St. John said had come—multiple in his time had come, and more will come—the response of the Church is creativity, is building something new. As things collapse around, the Church builds something beautiful and new. Number one, so the people running from the collapses have somewhere to go, but, number two, because our job is to participate in the kingdom of heaven, which is this building project. We’re supposed to be engaged in the building project. And what’s being built is not like a big fortress; what’s being built is the new Jerusalem.

And so to me that’s not only a way more hopeful approach to societal collapse and decline on whatever level that’s actually true— I only see what I see; it looks pretty messed up in many ways from where I am, but the truth is that most of what I see that makes me think of collapse is stuff I see kind of “out there.” My life, my actual life— My town is not collapsing; it’s a good place to live, thank God. It’s a good place to live. I’m not saying other things aren’t happening, but my life? That’s the reality of my life. God is blessing us at this moment and this place. And that our task in the world is: continue to, with confidence—because Christ is our head!—to move forward with confidence and to do this building.

I think sometimes people act— Christians act like atheists. They act like God is not with us, despite that being one of his names: Emmanuel, God with us—that he’s not with us, that it all depends on us, so you had all better get it right. You had all better be perfect and pure; you had all better say the exact right things, because if you don’t… Like, have some faith that God is here and he’s working, and he’s going to take care of stuff. And even if someone gets deeply messed up and hurts a lot of people, God is going to bring justice and vindication to that situation. He will. Maybe not on the timetable that I would prefer—probably not—but he will. God has this. And our response to that is not to either act like he doesn’t have it or to sit back and to say, “Okay, you do everything in there, Lord,” but, in knowing that he has it, then to function creatively within that, because that’s what the Church does. The Church is alive. It’s alive. It’s not some moth with a pin stuck through it, put up on the wall, that everyone can admire and don’t touch it. That’s not what the Church is. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So… Yeah, I’ll double down on the provocative. St. Silouan at one point says that if your spiritual father tells you to sin, you should do it, for your salvation. He says that if your spiritual father tells you to do something and you do it out of obedience and it turns out that it was sin, God holds your spiritual father accountable for that, not you, and your obedience can save your soul. The problem is— The problem you have is that you sat there and you judged your spiritual father’s words, trying to decide for yourself whether what he was telling you to do was right or not. That’s the problem you have, not that he might have told you to do the wrong thing—which he might very well have, because as someone who is a spiritual father, I’m sure I get it wrong. I’m sure I get it wrong sometimes, at least sometimes.

One of the worst things that certain forms of Protestantism do to people is they set up this situation for a person— By the way, I have some Protestant friends who think this is a feature, not a bug, so your mileage may vary, but to me this seems like a heavy weight to get thrown onto a person: that an individual person, as a Christian, has to essentially sort of figure out Christianity for themselves. They’re responsible to go and read the Scriptures themselves, to read spiritual books, to decide what they believe and where they fall on all manner of theological issues and issues of Church life. I mean, basic things: Do you baptize babies or not? How often do you celebrate the Eucharist? What even is the Eucharist? The Trinity: how do you view the Trinity? How do you view Jesus’ humanity, and divinity? The interpretation of all manner of Scriptures. You have to go and understand and decide for yourself all of these things, and, by the way, at least some of them, if you get them wrong, you’ll go to hell for eternity. That, to me, is a burden no human can really bear if they understand what’s being asked of them. That’s an unbearable burden.

Nonetheless, you don’t have to go very far in the Orthodox world to encounter Orthodox Christians who try to approach the Orthodox faith in the same way. They think that what they are to do as an Orthodox Christian is to go and—usually not the Scriptures—to go and read Church Fathers and to read various books and decide where they stand on all of these issues and what the true Orthodox position is on all of these issues, because “if you get any of them wrong, you’re not really Orthodox, and therefore probably not on the path to salvation.” If you’re going to do that to yourself, might I suggest that Protestant services are much shorter, they’re scheduled more conveniently, and a lot of them you can drink coffee. So why take all the bad parts and none of the good parts?

The Orthodox Church has done this great favor for you, of having preserved the Christian faith for 2,000 years, handed down from the apostles; of having this rich history of leaders appointed by God—God even appointed the bad ones; God even appointed the heretics—leaders appointed by God, who fallibly interpreted and applied the deposit of faith, fallibly interpreted and applied the Scriptures, fallibly interpreted and applied the canons, all the way down to the present day, so that you can now come and be a part of a community that is working out its own salvation, that is overseen by fallible leaders who will be doing their fallible best to bring all of that to bear, which is ultimately the Logos, which is ultimately Christ himself—bring him to bear on your life and help you to find salvation, so that you don’t have to try to do this by yourself, so that you don’t have to make this high-stakes wager on your own theological acumen, so that you can follow rather than lead, and be secure in that. This is a gift that the Church gives you, to be able to follow your spiritual father and his guidance, to not have to do what is right in your own eyes and hope that its end is not destruction, contra the Scriptures; to do rather what is right in the eyes of the authority that God has established and put over you.

Now, I’m not saying this because I’m a priest and I don’t want people to criticize me. Please criticize me! I enjoy it. Because, number one, nothing you could possibly say about me publicly is half as bad as the truth, and, number two, I really do find it sickly entertaining when people say outlandish negative things about me. So criticize me to the hills, I don’t care. That’s not what— And you certainly don’t have to look very hard to find bishops misbehaving in all manner of ways, making bad decisions. Again, everybody’s fallible.

I’m not apologizing for anybody, but I’m talking to you. I’m talking to you as a person, a person who’s trying to become a human person, who’s trying to figure out what their life means, is trying to become like Christ. You’ve got to test the spirits. The spirit that wants you to decide what real Orthodoxy is and then compare your priest and your bishop to it—is that spirit leading you to become a fully participant part of your community and find salvation, or is it pulling you away from that? Then you know what kind of spirit that is. Doesn’t matter how it presents itself: doesn’t matter if it wears a cassock, doesn’t matter if it claims to be from the holy mountain or heaven itself—that’s not the spirit that’s leading you to salvation. The Spirit that’s leading you to salvation is the Holy Spirit. It’s leading you to become part of a community, to discover there who you are, and how you relate to the other people in God’s world and to God’s world itself, and how you as a person can become like Christ and figure out what it all means.

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

Fr. Stephen: 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, where we’ll ask, “Why are we here? What’s life all about? Is God really real, or is there some doubt? Well, tonight we’re going to sort it all out, for tonight it’s ‘The Meaning of Life.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And if you are on Facebook, you can follow our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings in all the important places, but, most importantly, please 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. “What is life? What is fate? Is there a heaven or hell? Do we reincarnate? Is mankind evolving, or is it too late? Well, tonight there’s ‘The Meaning of Life.’ ”

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