Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, all you giant-killers and dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855–237-2346. And Matushka Trudi is taking those calls tonight, and we’re going to get to them in the second part of our show.

And now a word from our sponsor. Lord of Spirits is brought to you by our listeners, with help from the Theoria School of Filmmaking. Theoria School of Filmmaking is the first Orthodox film school. The primary instructor is Jonathan Jackson, a faithful Orthodox Christian speaker, writer, and five-time Emmy Award winner. To learn more about Theoria, please visit theoriafilm.org; that’s t-h-e-o-r-i-a film dot o-r-g.

Fr. Stephen De Young: I feel like we should clarify something.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s because people might make an assumption, because Theoria Film School—or School of Filmmaking, sorry, is through a Christian educational institution. This is not teaching you how to make, like PureFlicks or those straight-to-DVD movies at Walmart. This is legit.

Fr. Andrew: That is true.

Fr. Stephen: This is teaching you how to make good things.

Fr. Andrew: That is indeed the idea.

Fr. Stephen: Like if Rob Zombie had gone to the Theoria School of Filmmaking, that Munsters movie would not exist, we can safely say.

Fr. Andrew: I… hadn’t thought about saying that before today, but now I’m going to say, at least once a week.

Fr. Stephen: Okay!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So tonight, everyone, we’re going to be talking about spirits. This is yet another word that gets used in Christian contexts and also in the general culture, that almost never gets defined very precisely, certainly not with any reference to how ancient peoples would have understood it in their own languages, times, and cultures.

Is a spirit a ghost, some kind of disembodied pale green being that’s basically human but lacking materiality? Is “spirit” just an impersonal metaphor for observable collective phenomena, like “school spirit”? Or, Fr. Stephen, is this all just some tired Scooby-Doo plot that would have come off if it weren’t for those meddling kids? What do you think?

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to decline to comment on that last one, because I feel that, like mermaids and hobbits, Scooby-Doo is now a culture-war minefield, so I’m just going to steer clear of it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, yeah. It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Right, I mean, other than, you know… We can all agree: Scrappy-Doo, not a good addition to the show.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what was that all about?

Fr. Stephen: That I think is safe.

Fr. Andrew: That was the shark-jumping moment for Scooby-Doo.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I’m going to try to play it safe now. I’m going to get myself into trouble at some point in this show, but here at the beginning, let’s play it safe.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. So where do we begin?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, so we’re going to start by talking about the words that get translated as “spirit,” because our purpose here is to explain what a spirit is. And so we’re going to start with the words, and we’re going to see what clues that gives us, and proceed from there, as things get more and more complicated.

But one that we talked about—way back in the long-ago time, in the before time, when the grups were still around—was the way the word Elohim in Hebrew was used in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a word some people get excited about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So that word is translated in different ways. The normal— probably the— well, not “probably”: the most common way it gets translated, even though it’s a plural, is as “God” with a capital G, because, obviously the Old Testament talks about the God of Israel a lot. That’s the way it’s most commonly translated, because that’s whom it is most commonly referring to, or to whom it is most commonly referring?

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Don’t want to end a sentence with a preposition.

Fr. Andrew: You can. [Laughter] I won’t turn you in this time.

Fr. Stephen: In deference to you, sir, I will not do that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not one of those rules that I like to stand on.

Fr. Stephen: It’s something up with which I will not put.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And in that case, as we’ve mentioned before, the reason for it being a plural, you’ll hear this plural of majesty thing, which, technically speaking, doesn’t exist in Hebrew, and you’ll have some pedant point that out to you, but there is something in Hebrew that we’ve talked about on the show before called a superlative plural or an intensive plural, where something is made plural… The place I remember we talked about this, other than the word elohim was behemot or Behemoth.

Fr. Andrew: Beast of beasts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which, yeah, technically is a plural, a feminine plural, so technically could be translated “cows,” but is used with masculine pronouns—that’s why we refer to Behemoth as a “he”—and is used to refer to one being. And so we understand that to be, as you said, the beast of beasts—or the mountain of mountains, the greatest one, the Superbeast. Apparently, since it’s October, it’s Rob Zombie night. I don’t know. [Laughter]

But there are places in the Old Testament, on anybody’s reading, where it is just being used as the plural for “god,” so it’s used to mean “gods.” It’s referring to the gods of the nations, the gods of some particular nation, the household gods of an idolater, but it’s the same word. There are also places where that term is used to refer to angels, both fallen and unfallen, and just referred to as “gods.” A lot of these are hidden in English translations, because people get squeamish about them, because—and we won’t go back all through this again—as we talked about the category of monotheism is a late one, but then once it came around, we can’t say “gods” to refer to angels because that makes it sound like we’re polytheists. We translate it— They’ll change it in English translations to “angels” or “spirits” or something else.

And then, finally, as we’ve talked about before, there are a few places where elohim is used to refer to the spirits of deceased humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like when the witch of Endor calls up the Prophet Samuel from the dead.

Fr. Stephen: Or the—and we talked about this, and this is super-controversial, so we’re not going through it all again, but back in the catalogue, The Lord of Spirits back-catalogue, we talked about the ritual of a slave sort of becoming a permanent member of a household, in which they are brought before, essentially, the ancestors of the clan. And so anybody who hasn’t listened to that episode, if you’re freaking out, go listen to the back-catalogue; you’ll find it. There’s transcripts, too. You can search them.

So what that means is that, essentially, if you loop all these together, as we’ve said, the word elohim is just used to refer to what we might call spiritual beings. And, you know, because we’re going through the different words that are used, we need to go through this one. It doesn’t give us a lot of help in terms of what a spirit is, because all we’ve basically said is that “this word is used to mean ‘spirit.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: “Here’s an example of things we call…”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So now we’ll move on to the words that are specifically translated as “spirit.”

Fr. Andrew: So we’ve got Hebrew, we’ve got Greek, we’ve got Latin. These are kind of the main ones. And we’ll talk about English!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, in a special segment.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: So the Hebrew word that’s generally translated as “spirit” is ruah, and those of you who may go to Antiochian churches may immediately recognize the Arabic cognate word for “spirit.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, ruh.

Fr. Stephen: That word, ruah, literally means “wind,” and so you get some interesting translations sometimes in places where it occurs. So when they’re able to tran— like when it’s talking about the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit, or it’s very clearly talking about a spirit—they’ll translate it “spirit.” But other places where, on an immediate surface read, “spirit” doesn’t seem to make immediate sense, they’ll try and do something with “wind.” And one of the most infamous examples of this is in Genesis 3:8.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is so weird! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Which is where Christ comes walking in the garden to find Adam and Eve, or Man and Woman as they’re known at that time. And it says—literally in the Hebrew, it says that he comes walking “in the spirit of the day.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the word there is ruah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, ruah hayyoum. So he comes in the spirit of the day. Now, when you look at different English translations, you will not only find various different translations, but you will find exactly opposite translations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like some of them it says “in the cool of the day,” and others it literally says “in the heat of the day.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, or “in the breezy part of the day” or “as the wind was blowing.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean what was— That’s so bizarre! I’ve always heard— I think the one I’ve heard the most as I was growing up was “in the cool of the day,” and maybe that’s what’s— I’d have to go look at the KJV.

Fr. Stephen: That’s probably King James.

Fr. Andrew: Because that’s what I grew up hearing is that particular Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and I think part of what was motivating that was both the thought that it referred to the time of the day, but also I think that they’re trying to paint a picture, like: “Oh, there’s a cool breeze blowing in the afternoon, and so God goes for a walk, like we all do, as is common.” [Laughter]

So in the past, we have recommended, for people who don’t want massive amounts of student debt, like I have, to learn ancient languages, but want to do serious Bible study, to get the NET Bible with the full notes, because they have, of course, extensive notes on these kinds of things.

And so the note on this verse is kind of interesting, because they sort of go all over the place in the possible ways you can do something with it.

Fr. Andrew: I’m going to read this, everybody, but don’t get lost. We’ll revisit the important parts.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So this is what the NET Bible says about this particular word.

The expression is traditionally rendered “cool of the day,” because the Hebrew word, ruakh, can mean “wind.” U. Cassuto (so this is obviously one of the scholars) concludes after lengthy discussion that the word refers to the afternoon when it became hot and the sun was beginning to decline. J.J. Niehaus offers a different interpretation of the phrase, relating yom, usually understood as “day,” to an Akkadian cognate, umu, which means “storm,” and translate the phrase “in the wind of the storm.” If Niehaus is correct, then God is not pictured as taking an afternoon stroll through the orchard but is coming in a powerful windstorm to confront the man and woman with their rebellion. In this case, the phrase qol yyhvah, “the sound of the Lord,” may refer to God’s thunderous roar, which typically accompanies his appearance in the storm to do battle or render judgment.

I had never heard of that, that last bit, before, ever! Only vaguely do I have a “heat of the day” in the back of my head somewhere.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. And you can sense the influence of the “Yahweh as storm-god” stuff in there, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the sound of Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: That him “appearing in a storm to do battle or render judgment is typically accompanied by a thunderous roar.” Give me an example… Anyone. [Laughter]

But so there is something—as usually happens, as with people who are way off but are serious scholars, there is something there that he has keyed in on, not entirely for the right reason, I don’t think, but there is something he has keyed in on. And that is a somewhat different understanding of what “the day” means, because it isn’t… There is the definite article there in Hebrew, and when you see references in the Old Testament, for example, to the day, not like “one day,” like we get in Genesis 1, like “a day,” but “the day,” they’re almost always referring to the day of Yahweh, the day of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the time where he’s going to bring justice.

Fr. Stephen: Right, when he’s going to visit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like: “Wait until your father comes home.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so I would submit that you can translate it as he comes walking “in the spirit of the day.” So Niehaus has indirectly and colored by sort of his other presuppositions—he has at least pulled out this idea that there is— what’s going on here in that phrase is that there’s this judgment motif, that justice is now going to be rendered. Things are going to be set right; things are going to be corrected that have gone wrong.

But it is also true, even though I’m saying you can understand it as “spirit”—there are also places where it just clearly means “wind.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s clearly just what they’re saying.

Fr. Andrew: Sometimes the wind is just a wind.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so in Hebrew, and really in Akkadian behind it and in all these cognate languages, there is this connection always between the idea of a wind and the idea of a spirit, coming out of these Semitic languages. So then, when we move to Greek and you get to the word pnevma—I’m going to use modern Greek pronunciation for the sake of our Greek listeners and them not keel-hauling me…

Fr. Andrew: The Erasmian keel-haul, tonight on a very special Lord of Spirits!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I’m going to be hoisted on my own petard!

Fr. Andrew: Nice, nice. I caught that reference!

Fr. Stephen: And the word pnevma means “breath, wind, or blow.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so almost the same semantic space, semantic range, but not quite, but still pretty much the same, “breath, wind,” yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But here’s why that’s important. Because when the time came to translate the word ruah into Greek, in places where it clearly is referring to a spirit, in the sense that we use the word “spirit,” they chose the Greek word that means breath, wind, blow. So what that tells us is sometimes a word has an original meaning and then starts to get used by analogy for something else and ends up losing its original meaning, like the meaning of the word drifts and migrates. So the fact that that translation choice was made means that, as we’re getting into the third century BC, that idea of wind and breath was still being connected to the idea of spirit. This hadn’t just shifted into a word that meant “spirit” and lost those other meanings.

That of course also, once we get into Greek, raises the question of the relationship between pnevma and psyche, or “soul,” that we translate as “soul.” And this is— The clearest place to see this probably is once again in Genesis, but in Genesis 2, and this also pretty well applies between the Hebrew word ruah and nephesh, which is the word that gets translated “soul” from Hebrew. And that’s where, when God creates Adam, he breathes into Adam’s nostril, and once he has breathed into him, he becomes a living soul. And so when we make a distinction between “soul” and “spirit,” we’re making essentially a distinction between “spirit” as the animating force in a being and the “soul” as the life itself, so between “animating force” and “life itself.”

So that’s a distinction you can make, at least in speech. Aristotle has that category: distinctions possible only in speech. There’s some things you can’t reality but you can divide in how you talk about them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a conceptual distinction that one can make.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like talking about, you know, a ray of light, its brilliance, and you can pull these apart, but you can’t actually. They’re not different things.

And so this is why—the fact that this is a possible distinction between animating force and the life itself is why you find in different Church Fathers different ways of talking about whether a human person is body, soul, spirit; body, soul; body, spirit: these different ways of divvying things up. Because some Fathers will, for some particular reason, want to make this distinction between spirit and soul, between a person’s life and the animating force within them. And so they’re making some kind of argument. They’re not writing sort of this objective treatise of “No, there are these three things, and if you say there are not these three things or if you label them differently, you are wrong!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, it’s not an anatomy of the invisible element of the human.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s— They’re making some point down the road, and for the purposes of making that point, they make this distinction. Or, because they’re making a different point, they don’t need to make that distinction; that distinction isn’t relevant to what they’re talking about, and so they don’t make it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like if I was to say human beings have both a material and an immaterial aspect, and then I might just say we consist of body and soul.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then if someone came—again, being pedantic—and say, “Oh, are you denying that man has a spirit, then?” they would clearly not understand what you are saying.

So this is not a contradiction. And a good example in modern internet discussion, for this kind of distinction-making, is the perennial question of “Is blank a sandwich?”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, are hot dogs a sandwich?

Fr. Stephen: Are hot dogs a sandwich? Are hamburgers a sandwich? Is a burrito a sandwich, because it’s wrapped in bread?

Fr. Andrew: A breakfast burrito sandwich!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, I have participated in many of these, and I have won every argument. [Laughter] And there’s a whole…

Fr. Andrew: Is there a video of that?

Fr. Stephen: We call a chicken sandwich a sandwich, but a hamburger that has the exact same ingredients of beef versus chicken, we would say that’s a hamburger and not a sandwich. Inconsistent!

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: But there’s not, beyond just sophistry that I would use to win those arguments… [Laughter] There is not an actual right or wrong. There is no metaphysics or ontology under which something absolutely is a sandwich or absolutely is not a sandwich.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I prefer the argument from authority, where it actually has to have a seal of approval from the Earl of Sandwich himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’re an originalist when it comes to sandwiches.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So any ingredient which he did not encounter should not be on a sandwich by that argument.

Fr. Andrew: That’s correct.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s why we’re using that as an example. So no one who makes the distinction between “soul” and “spirit” thinks they’re separate things, they’re like objects. [Laughter] These are distinctions made in speech for a particular purpose, in the same way that we categorize different foods in different ways for particular reasons of use and convenience and that kind of thing.

So that’s Greek. There’s a lot of consistency there, and then there’s even more consistency when you get to Latin, and you get to the word spiritus, which is where we get the English word “spirit,” obviously.

Fr. Andrew: And we should say that the Greek word, pnevma, we have it in English with words like pneumatic and pneumonia, which all have to do with—

Fr. Stephen: Pnevmatic and pnevmonia. Come on.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me. Pnev-mo-ni-a.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t want the Greeks to get mad at you.

Fr. Andrew: Excuse me, I had to go to hospital for pnev-mo-ni-a.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] No Greeks would complain if you pronounce it that way, I guarantee it.

So spiritus also means “breath or wind or blow.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, pretty much exactly parallel to the Greek.

Fr. Stephen: Now one small difference is that Latin generally—this isn’t 100% true, but the Latin language essentially treats spiritus and anima as synonyms, anima being the word for soul. Now, despite that, because of what we just said about “soul” and “spirit,” there are authors who will use them not as synonyms, and use them in some technical way.

Fr. Andrew: Latin authors.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to distinguish things. But linguistically, in Hebrew and Greek, we’re talking about different words that have different cognitive domains. With spiritus and anima, in the language, we’re not. But because of course things are translated into Latin and you have, for example, Latin theologians who are influenced by earlier traditions, they will sometimes make more technical distinctions between those words.

Fr. Andrew: And we do have English words that come from the Latin that mean exactly the same kind of concept, so like “respiration,” and my favorite conspiracy, which means “breathing together,” literally. But no one uses it that way, strangely enough. I don’t know why… [Laughter] Come, let us breathe together, and we will overthrow a government!

Fr. Stephen: Uh-oh. We’re on a watch-list now.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t say which government!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: It could be student government! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I actually was impeached as class president at one point.

Fr. Andrew: Are you serious?

Fr. Stephen: I am dead serious. I wrote out the impeachment, though.

Fr. Andrew: That’s glorious. You were acquitted, were you?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no. Well, it’s a long story. We won’t go into it here, but it did happen. Student government can be a messy thing.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a bunch of people now doing deep Google searches to see if they can discover your high school yearbook.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think it’s online. They would discover many interesting things. Like, there was— The first day of all the clubs was picture day, so I went to every single club on picture day, so it looks like I was in every club in the school, even though I never went to another meeting.

Fr. Andrew: So I went— I was for five minutes in Latin Club. There was no Latin Club except for the day for picture day.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, well, there you go.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Hey, we have something in common! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Falsifying yearbook evidence…

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. Spiritus, yeah, back to Latin.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no. Now we need to move on from Latin—to a special segment.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s right! It’s time, everybody! [Laughter]

[Theme music] Father Andrew’s Etymology Corner! [Baby cheer]

Yes, it’s been a long time since we’ve had Etymology Corner, and we’re going to be talking about English! The English word! “Ghost”! It’s a great word in English, and we tend to use it these days to refer to something we’re going to talk about later, but traditionally “ghost” refers to spirits. It’s the general word for “spirit.” It actually has a kind of a different origin from these other words we’ve been talking about, from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, where the idea of wind and breathing and spirit are all kind of connected together. In English it does not have that same origin.

Fr. Stephen asked me: Is “ghost” related to “gust”? And I am sorry to say they are not related; they are not cognates. [Laughter] They do sound a little similar, it’s true, but this is what we call a “false friend.” False friend: it’ll betray you in the end, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Unlike Burton Guster, who is a true friend who would never betray anyone.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So “ghost” in English… We’ve also got, for instance, the German word Geist, which is essentially the same. “Ghost” in English comes ultimately from a Proto-West Germanic word, gaist, which comes from a Proto-Germanic Gaistaz, which ultimately comes from a proto-Indo-European root that I’m not going to try to pronounce. But that proto—

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got to bone up on your Sanskrit, man.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know. It’s like gheysdos, gheistos? I don’t know, yeah. Sorry. And that one actually ultimately that word comes from a word that refers to anger or agitation, which kind of makes you wonder: How did we get from that to this sense of “spirit”? And it’s—the overlapping concept is fear or terror. So the idea that when you encounter a spirit, this is what you feel. So that’s how we get the modern English word “ghost.”

Interestingly, we mentioned “gust.” “Gust” actually comes from a root that refers to pouring. So “gust” and “gush,” for instance, are cognate with each other, and have this idea of a pouring-out. So gust is a certain pouring-out of wind. But, yeah, alas, they are not connected together.

But, yeah, “ghost” does have a cognate in Sanskrit that refers to anger or hatred, and one even in Persian that refers to something that’s ugly, hateful, or disgusting. But generally in Germanic languages, it’s all “spirit.” It means spirits, but there is not this sense of breath or wind in the English versions. Fun, though, especially if you read stuff that’s early modern English and in Middle English, you’ll see the word “ghostly” used in exactly the way we would use the word “spiritual.” So a very ghostly person does not mean someone that haunts your house, and Casper the Friendly Ghost kind of thing, but rather a ghostly person is a very spiritual person, and you could even refer to having your ghostly father. So I’m just going to suggest to everybody listening at home right now that next time you contact your father confessor that you refer to him as your ghostly father and just sort of see what happens. I’m just sort of throwing that out there for everybody.

Fr. Stephen: “I’m ghostly but not religious.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go! Exactly! So right! That’s a very ghostly thing for you to say!

Fr. Stephen: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! “I just feel so ghostly today.” Yeah, it’s too bad this usage has kind of gone away. But that’s of course why you see “Holy Ghost” in early English Bibles, because “ghost” in that period did not mean something spooky or whatever; it just was the word for spirits. Later on it kind of gets separated out from the same concept as “spirit” to refer to a particular kind of spirit, which we’ll talk about, that concept. But, yeah, so there you go. That’s English “ghost.”

[Theme music] Father Andrew’s Etymology!

See, we’ve got theme music for both before and after.

Fr. Stephen: I’m glad you had that read.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, yeah. Oh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: I was briefly nervous that you wouldn’t have it ready, not even so much that it would’ve let down the listeners, but I think you would have let yourself down if you hadn’t had it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, you better believe it. Oh, absolutely.

So there you go. You’ve got Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English for this word for “spirit.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we haven’t gotten a ton of help with our main question yet. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No. Well…

Fr. Stephen: Basically what we’ve gotten is that it has something to do with wind, maybe? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Well, we’ve never really been known to rush on this show.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right, we’re taking our time. I’m just summarizing where we’re at. Here’s where we’re at: not a lot. So, yeah, we’re not focused on productivity here. [Laughter] So now we can turn to something that maybe will give us some more help. We looked at the words, so let’s look at some examples. We’ll look at some examples of spirits, for example, in the Scriptures. Maybe we can look at them and see what they have in common, and that might help us define “spirit” as a category or something. Spoilers—it won’t help us much, but we’re going to go through this anyway!

One example would be human spirits, and those aren’t entirely disembodied. We hear about a person’s, like a living person’s spirit, like Adam. But then there are also the spirits of people that continue to exist, if “exist” is the right word—continue to be, to do things—after the physical death of the human in question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we sing, for instance, when we’re doing a trisagion or memorial; we sing, “With the spirits of the righteous made perfect.” We’re talking about departed humans.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then in that case, since it is the spirits of the righteous made perfect, those are good ones.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: There’s also bad ones.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true. Evil spirits.

Fr. Stephen: So you’ve got the Rephaim, ending with Og, who was the last of them, and who we also know from a really creepy Ugaritic tablet where they were offering animal sacrifices to the Rephaim so that they would let the newly dead king pass into the underworld—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, appeasement.

Fr. Stephen: Isaiah mentions the Rephaim rising up to meet the devil as he was thrown down into the underworld. Don’t try and figure out the timing on that, because, just like we’ve said “what time zone is heaven in?”: What time is Hades in? [Laughter] And of course it’s always a good time to once again mention that quote from St. John Chrysostom, where he talks about how people become demons, which is there was, at that time, a belief that if someone died a violent death or died in some horrible way, their spirit would come back and be malicious, and that of course is what a demon is. From a Christian’s perspective, the word “daemon” just means “spirit” in Greek, but from our perspective as Christians and from the Jewish perspective, those are malicious spirits.

So that belief from St. John Chrysostom’s time is kind of still around today. If you ever have watched a horror movie, that you have people who die some kind of violent death that come back and haunt places and do malicious things. But St. John Chrysostom says that’s not how they become a demon. Someone becomes a demon by living a life like the demons, by becoming like the demons in their life through their sin and their wickedness and giving themselves over to the passions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Live like a demon now, and you will be like a demon after you die. That’s what St. John Chrysostom literally says.

Fr. Stephen: Literally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not figuratively, literally!

Fr. Stephen: Not figuratively, literally. So there’s one example of spirits. Then there are of course—as we mentioned, there are angelic or demonic spirits that were never humans. And we know, according to the Scriptures, that these are spirits, regardless of their rank, regardless of fallen or unfallen—these are spirits that were created by God, by Yahweh the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re not eternal, they’re not uncreated: they’re created.

Fr. Stephen: Right, even though they’re sometimes called elohim, sometimes called “gods,” in the Old Testament and other related literature, they are not gods the way he is God, capital-G. He is other, because they’re created by him. Now of course this is in—this is the biblical correction to the broader ancient pagan world, where they agreed—they did not think that the spirits they worshiped were eternal. They not only believed that they came into existence at some point—we mentioned in the thunder-gods episode that there were several places that were identified as pilgrimage sites were Zeus was born, for example. So they believed they came into being at some point, and they could die. They could be destroyed; they could be defeated going forward.

And often, as we’ve talked about, not only were they said to reproduce with each other, but there was the succession myth and sometimes, like in Hesiod, multiple layers of succession, where it was acknowledged within the stories that previously some other god had been worshiped as the most-high god, but now this other god came in and overthrew him and now he is, and, oh, now his son came and overthrew him.

And so even in—the disagreement between, for example, the Old Testament texts and pagan polytheism from the surrounding nations is not that they said their gods were eternal or even that their most-high god was eternal and Israel’s said, “No, it’s Yahweh”; it’s that both had this layer of spiritual or divine beings that came into existence, and then in Israel there is this other beyond-being. There is Yahweh who created them all.

Fr. Andrew: And we should emphasize, too, that just because the pagan stories say things, for instance, about them reproducing with each other, that’s not what’s actually happening. That’s just simply the story within those pagan religions.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Because they don’t have reproductive faculties, however you want to understand that.

Fr. Stephen: And those are late stories.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because as we’ve talked about before, in reality there would be one or two gods of a given place, but then, as larger social units come together, they integrate their beliefs in those gods. And how do you do that? Is it just a bunch of competing individual gods? Well, no, you construct this family tree. You connect them to each other.

Fr. Andrew: They’re grouped together.

Fr. Stephen: So even those parts of the story are sort of late to the party in that way. But, yeah, so this idea of contingent gods, it’s that the nations around Israel did not have this idea of anything beyond that layer of these sort of contingent gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all their gods were, by their own definition, kind of lesser.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so even like the word daemon in Greek, which was generally applied to, you know, spirits of this or that lake or this or that forest, sort of lower-degree spirits, was sometimes applied to Zeus. So there was less hierarchy there than— [Laughter] There was no kind of ontological hierarchy, no hierarchy of being there; it was just a question of sphere of authority or what have you, and that could change.

So then the other example, the big example, of course, from Scripture, of a spirit is the Holy Spirit. And it’s worth—because this doesn’t get talked about as much by anybody, including me—the section on Christ in Religion of the Apostles is a lot longer than the section on the Holy Spirit, you’ve probably noticed—

Fr. Andrew: I did notice that!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Because, frankly, there’s less about the Holy Spirit in pre-Christian material.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just not as mentioned in the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Appears, but was not the subject of a lot of discussion. And there’s various ways to approach why that is. Because of the view I have, vis-à-vis ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism’s understanding of there being multiple hypostases of Yahweh the God of Israel, I think it’s mainly because the idea of Yahweh and the Spirit of Yahweh being a hypostasis of Yahweh, like, just made sense to them, so there was less cause for discussion. Like, contained within the name, “the Spirit of God,” was sort of the relationship they needed to understand, whereas the “two powers in heaven” literature, trying to understand the relationship between Father and Son, that was more complicated, more murky, until the Incarnation. And so there was much more cause to debate and discuss and speculate in Second Temple Jewish circles.

But because it’s sort of less talked-about, it’s worth making a few clear points here about who the Holy Spirit is in Scripture and as that’s been sort of defined in theological terms by the Church…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean in the fourth century you get a decent amount of theological reflection and definition on the Holy Spirit, like St. Basil, of course; he’s got a whole text on this called “On the Holy Spirit.” St. Gregory the Theologian, he talks about this as well. It’s confirmed in the Second Ecumenical Council that the Holy Spirit is divine. So, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so St. Basil’s ultimately going to say that the Holy Spirit is the image of the Father in a similar but not identical way to the way the Son is, and that’s the difference between the Son being generated, the Son being begotten, and the Holy Spirit proceeding. And as the Fathers all say, if you ask me exactly what that means… Who knows? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think one of them says if you try to figure out the difference between the two then you’ll go insane. I can’t remember who that is, but yeah. So don’t try this at home, kids!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. To put that in the terms that we were just using and that we use now fairly commonly on the show, the Holy Spirit is a hypostasis of Yahweh the God of Israel, and he is seen in the Old Testament as the presence of God, the theophanic glory cloud in the tabernacle and the Temple, as the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud that leads Israel, as the tongues of flame at Pentecost, and descending—“and the manner of his descent was like the descent of a dove” at Christ’s baptism. They say that specifically, because the Holy Spirit did not turn into a bird…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s okay iconographically to depict this in this way, but that’s not…

Fr. Stephen: Only in that icon, by the way. Don’t go around painting birds; that’s not the Holy Spirit.

But so that is the—those are the places where we see him. And particularly in terms of the Presence, capital-P, of God in the tabernacle and the Temple is clearly the place where you see a hypostasis, a localization: This is God himself. But this is not the Person that Moses spoke to face-to-face, and this is not the Person whom Moses was told he could not see and live. This is a third Person.

Fr. Andrew: Is this where we’re going to do the honorable mention about early Japanese Bibles?

Fr. Stephen: You can go for it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So, yes—disclaimer, I do not speak or read Japanese, but apparently in early Japanese Bibles, “Holy Spirit” was translated by the phrase which in Japanese would mean “divine wind,” which—now, write in, Japanese readers or speakers: let us know if this is true or not—it would mean that it’s kamikaze. Doesn’t that mean “divine wind?” I’m sure we’re going to get some “Um, actually"s in the email for this.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Send “Um, actually"s, send corrections, send hate mail accusing him of racism—to Fr. Andrew Damick at Ancient Faith.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there we go. Thank you very much, everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, then…

Fr. Andrew: The Father, the Son, and the Kamikaze. That just doesn’t work for me; I can’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So then our question again: What is a spirit? Has that helped us? Well, it was kind of a necessary step, I think, but, I mean, what [do] a human spirit, the Holy Spirit, and—I mean, from what we’ve just said—say, a demon have in common? They’re all spirits, but that doesn’t really help us define what that word means.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: So let’s try… So what is a spirit? We’re still not getting very close. Let’s try what a spirit isn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the apophatic approach. We are Orthodox, after all. [Laughter] We’re required to say some apophatic things, but you can’t really say things that are apophatic, can you? Just throwing that out there.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to myth-bust some common notions of what a spirit is. So probably, if you ask somebody today… So our little thumbnail for the episode, I found a photo of what’s called “spirit photography” that was very popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. But today if you ask somebody to picture a spirit, they probably picture something like a Force ghost.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so Star Wars fans, you may recall in… Now, let’s see, did they show up in Episode IV—which was just called Star Wars when it first came out?

Fr. Stephen: No, but in Episode V…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you get—

Fr. Stephen: I believe. Didn’t Obi-Wan show up and talk to—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Obi-Wan appears to Luke on Hoth to tell him to go find Yoda, and then you get— In Episode VI, of course, you get a couple of different Force ghost appearances. So you get Obi-Wan Force ghost appears to Luke on Dagobah, after Yoda dies, and then at the very end of the film you get…

Fr. Stephen: Obi-Wan, Yoda, and David Prowse.

Fr. Andrew: And David Prowse!

Fr. Stephen: In the canonical version, so.

Fr. Andrew: That’s correct. ...that show up on the forest moon of Endor. And then, of course, later Force ghosts and stuff. But that’s right. So basically you’re getting people that are kind of glowy and people-shaped, and they have the same voices—

Fr. Stephen: Immaterial human-shape, like an outline of what they looked like when they were alive, the deceased person. If it’s not a deceased person, it’s an angel which is an outline of a person with wings.

Fr. Andrew: Michael Landon, perhaps. [Laughter] Roma Downey? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Eh, Christopher Walken.

Fr. Andrew: Or Patrick Swayze. Ahhh! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Tilda Swinton. [Laughter] In any of these cases, it’s sort of this hazy outline, and you see this all the time. You see this in the Doctor Strange movie: spirit leaves the body and it’s just sort of the vaguely translucent outline of the person, including their clothes.

Fr. Andrew: Astral projection.

Fr. Stephen: Including their clothes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s kind of interesting.

Fr. Stephen: Whatever they were wearing at the time.

Fr. Andrew: Well, thank goodness. I’m really happy, though, that it includes the clothes.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. Although I do have to think Beetlejuice was not wearing that outfit when he died.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] A fair play.

Fr. Stephen: So all of those are wrong.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: So zero spirits are really portrayed that way in ancient literature or in Scripture.

Fr. Andrew: Well, I mean, where do you get this concept of ectoplasm, then? What is that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get there in a second.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because I do have to say the closest thing you get to that might be in the Greek conception of Hades, like in Homer’s Odyssey, when the Shades show up.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Shades.

Fr. Stephen: But what that is is literally the opposite of a glowy outline; that’s the person’s shadow.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That’s kind of the closest you would get to something like that.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, I’m having all kinds of Peter Pan issues suddenly! [Laughter] Huh! Okay, okay, I’m just going to work on this while you say your next paragraph.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Yeah, that’s your own… Yeah. [Laughter] But the question moves to: If a spirit is something that can sometimes be seen, and is normally invisible—but if it can sometimes be seen, and if it is a finite being, which we would say, except in the case of the Holy Spirit—if otherwise it is a finite being, then shouldn’t it be made out of something?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what’s its sort of matter?

Fr. Stephen: A finite being, if it’s not made out of something, then how would it be finite?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it has to be circumscribed in some way.

Fr. Stephen: So you get these theories. You get like ether, then ethereal being. So it’s made of ether, which is some kind of thick air. You get Thomas Aquinas with the “quintessence,” which is just sort of the “fifth thing” that angels are made out of. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Not the fourth thing, not the sixth thing: it’s the fifth thing!

Fr. Stephen: The Spiritus movement came up with this idea of ectoplasm!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and thank goodness, because, you know, now we’ve got Ghostbusters.

Fr. Stephen: Goop! [Laughter] With apologies to Gwyneth Paltrow. Why am I apologizing to her? It’s a racket. Send the lawsuits to Fr. Andrew Damick…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, see, that’s the one thing I won’t take. I won’t take any lawsuits. Yeah. I’m insured, don’t worry.

Fr. Stephen: You will not be served. You will dance back as hard as you have to to make sure you are not served.

But, yeah, so ectoplasm, the little—if you want to know more about ectoplasm… In Spiritism, they… the various mediums—is the plural of “medium” still “media” if you’re talking about people?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t… Oh, man. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Anyway, various mediums…

Fr. Andrew: You’re sending me looking things up now! [Laughter] Various mediums, larges, and smalls!

Fr. Stephen: So, right, if you don’t have… Like if you’re going to say, “Oh, I’m talking to your departed grandmother—person whose name starts with J—and they’re telling me X, Y, Z,” People start to catch on: Well, is there any actual evidence that you’re talking to anything? Or that anything’s really happening other than the spooky lighting and whatever?

Fr. Andrew: It is “mediums,” by the way.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Is there any evidence? And so ectoplasm is sort of concocted as a visual representation of the presence of a spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Ha.

Fr. Stephen: And they would actually concoct some goop that they said was ectoplasm.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, nice! I’m having You Can’t Do That On Television flashbacks suddenly. Did you ever watch that show?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it was usually kind of clear and slimy, actually, not green.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well. I mean, green goes—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I mean, slime actually canonically is clear, not green.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true. Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: And then it seems to have been first used by mediums, who would sort of expel it from their mouth or other bodily orifices…

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: ...to indicate that a spirit had come upon them. But then was also used— As things got sort of more advanced and theatrical, they would sometimes have a person whom they’d give sort of cakey make-up and have stand kind of in the darkness who was supposed to be the dead person. And they would have that person sort of expel goop in various ways in order to identify this as a “spirit.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And people believed it.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s just… But, hey, people believe all kinds of crazy stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in certain parts of Florida—

Fr. Andrew: I tell people now I’m just ready to believe just about anything, when someone says, “So-and-so did this,” I’m like: “Yeah, I’m sure they did.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. In certain parts of Florida, they still do. [Laughter] And, yeah, Harry Houdini left a lot of good notes, because he went around debunking a lot of these people in the early 20th century.

Fr. Andrew: Huh! I did not know that!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. His mother had passed away, and he had been in his grief sort of desperate to contact her, but, being Harry Houdini, he could identify chicanery pretty quickly, and realized these were all fakes and then decided— and then got angry and decided to take them all down. But anyway, slight digression…

Fr. Andrew: There should be a scholarship named after him. [Laughter] It seems like a good way to memorialize that!

Fr. Stephen: No, and since it’s in northeast Pennsylvania, it should be at St. Tikhon’s. We need to get on that.

Fr. Andrew: The Harry Houdini debunking-Spiritist-nonsense scholarship?

Fr. Stephen: The Houdini Museum is up there, man.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. There is a Houdini Fund. It’s in the Society of American Magicians.

Fr. Stephen: Well, sometimes you want to disappear. But so this points to a problem, again. The reason we’re bringing all this up is not just because it’s kind of weird and cool, and it’s October, but because it points to a flaw in our thinking about spirits, because again we’re trying to think of them as things, so they’ve got to be made of something. We’re thinking of them as things in a materialist sense, so they must be some kind of object that’s made of something and that—whether we can always see it or not, they have to have a stable visual form.

Fr. Andrew: By the way, I have to say that we just got an “Um, actually” from YouTube. They said, “It’s not very important in the long run, but Sebastian Shaw—not David Prowse—appeared on Endor’s forest moon. Sorry for nerding out”—you don’t have to be sorry for that! Never, ever, not on this show.

Fr. Stephen: We’ll accept it. And this is Sebastian Shaw the actor, not the Black King of the Hellfire Club in X-Men comics, for the record.

Fr. Andrew: Correct, yes. I caught that reference as well. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is one sort of flaw in our thinking, is in trying to think—trying to give them a body and think of what their body is made of, and that points to the bigger problem, and the bigger problem is that we want to think of spirits as humans. We want to think of them as basically like us, and, you know, if we’re talking about the spirit of a departed human, then they are in some ways like us, but in other ways not. And if we’re talking about a spirit that was never a human, and then when you get to the Holy Spirit especially, then they’re definitely not like us.

So it’s not just: these are ethereal humans, or these are humans who have wings, or these are humans who can turn invisible or walk through walls or whatever else. These are either not exactly a human now until the resurrection, or not a human at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I mean, you can tell tell—correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but you can tell that this idea is really old, because, for instance, when Christ appears after his resurrection, doesn’t it say that the disciples “supposed that they saw a spirit,” one of the times that they encountered him?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And he says, “Handle me and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” So, yeah, there’s this idea where we want to treat them as other selves. And this happens in other areas. I mean, people do this with their pets, try to turn them into other humans; people do this with all kinds of non-human things. But we also do this with spirits. So “spirit” is not a subcategory of human, nor are “human” and “spirit” some kind of subcategory of some third thing, other than “created being,” but then that includes everything except God. [Laughter] So that’s not helpful.

And so really, instead of looking at a spirit as an other self, someone else like us, we have to look at a spirit as an other other: this is a different different thing. And so now that we’ve taken that negative approach, again, we’re still not all that much closer to what a spirit actually is, now that we’ve covered the “isn’t” part.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because we’re going to try to define it from 30,000 feet up, like a sort of taxonomic…

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when we’ve talked about— Obviously this show is called Lord of Spirits; we’ve talked about spirits a lot in different contexts. And usually when we talk about them, we’ve talked about them from the top down. We’ve talked about God creating them; we’ve talked about how, like angelic beings, and then the saints are the means through which God administers his creation; we’ve talked about how God has allowed the demonic spirits to rebel in order to use them for this greater purpose, to bring about repentance in people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sort of big-picture kind of cosmological stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we’re not disavowing any of that, obviously, but that entire approach doesn’t help us with this question of what spirits are, because we aren’t up at the top, above them, to look down on them. And we’re not God. [Laughter] So going from up top and trying to understand what they are based on these things isn’t going to give us a definition.

So as we move into our second half—teaser—we’re going to be going at this, to answer this question, “What is a spirit?”—we’re going to be going in the opposite direction. Instead of going from the top down, we’re going to be going from the bottom up. So we’re going to start actually with things that are below humans and go to humans and then work our way up to what a spirit is.

Fr. Andrew: All righty. Well, we’re going to go ahead and take our first break, and we will be right back with more Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone. It’s the second half of The Lord of Spirits. We just talked about what spirits are not, and gave some examples of what they are not. As we mentioned at the end, we’ve been taking a sort of top-down approach, looking at spirits from kind of the grand, cosmological story, but now we’re going to take it very much from the bottom up and begin with things lower than ourselves. So you’re welcome to give us a ring at 855-A-F-R-A-D-I-O, AF-RADIO; or 855-237-2346, and we would love to talk to you during this second part of the show.

Fr. Stephen: Unless—

Fr. Andrew: So, bottom up, right?

Fr. Stephen: Unless.

Fr. Andrew: Unless!

Fr. Stephen: You’re calling to defend that Munsters movie, because you’re just being a contrarian. No one liked that movie. Don’t even come up with that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I hear you, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Get away from me with that. Anyway, back to our topic.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’re so opinionated, Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen: I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Where were we? We’re going to talk about bats?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re going back to our friend Thomas Nagel.

Fr. Andrew: Good old Thomas Nagel, who— he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a bat!

Fr. Stephen: No, and demonstrated to all of us that none of us do either. Right, so— Hey, there might be first-time listeners. Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper in philosophy called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” basically pointing out that we don’t know and we can’t know as humans. We can imagine what it’s like, what it would be like for our human consciousness and awareness to be in a bat body, because of like a witch or something, or that horrible episode of ToS, “Cat’s Paw.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, believe it or not, there’s actually a Wikipedia article about this, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s not what it’s like to actually be a bat. That’s that humanizing again. But what— One of the things that paper presupposes is an idea regarding consciousness and awareness that is more recent than I think people realize. Even in the 19th century, somebody like Hegel basically thought that animals were automatons; they’re like machines.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that they just—they’re sort of pre-programmed, and they do things based on pre-programmed instinct, that they don’t have [consciousnesses]...

Fr. Stephen: And that if you trained a dog to do tricks, you were just reprogramming it, essentially.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, your dog doesn’t love you, he just—

Fr. Stephen: Your dog isn’t even aware that he exists. There’s no awareness. And so consciousness was treated sort of like binary, one or zero, or like a light switch. When you get to humans, the light’s on; humans, at the end of— I mean, if we’re talking about the 19th and early 20th century, the end of evolution consciousness just appears. And it’s accidental, in that kind of framework. But everything below humans on the scale was at a zero; the lights are off. That’s kind of counter-intuitive to us even now.

Fr. Andrew: You know, most people do believe that their dogs love them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] Well, but, we’ve got to be fair. In the 19th century, people had pet dogs, and they’re interacting with them. It’s just there was not an acknowledgment of sort of consciousness, of reasoning. As we found out more and more that animals have language abilities, communicative abilities between them, and so there was a revolution in philosophy of mind and in consciousness research to say, “Hey, clearly a lot of these animals are conscious. They’re able to actually make decisions, to choose to value one thing more than another thing. They’re not just purely driven by impulse.”

And so animals do have some kind of consciousness, some kind of awareness, but at the same time as Nagel is pointing out, that doesn’t mean: Oh, what consciousness and awareness means for them is the same thing as it means for a human.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, clearly your dog’s consciousness is not as complex as yours.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry for people who—sorry to all those people out there who refer to their pets as their “children,” but…

Fr. Stephen: I have one heathen dog who’s pretty clever, in a devious way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I believe you!

Fr. Stephen: And, to be fair to the people talking about dogs as their children, it is a scientific fact that when a dog-owner looks their dog in the eyes and pets them, the same chemical is secreted in their brain and the dog’s brain as in a parent and a baby human.

Fr. Andrew: How about that.

Fr. Stephen: So they’re being chemically tricked into thinking that, to be fair to them.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Okay. You’ve been in the South long enough, you’re giving back-handed compliments! That’s good! [Laughter] Congratulations, man! You’ve [acculturated]!

Fr. Stephen: But so Nagel’s making the important point that, when we say, “Okay, so these animals are conscious, we’re not giving them a “one” instead of a “zero,” but that this is— Consciousness and awareness is more of a continuum. It’s more that there are levels of consciousness and levels of awareness. And this is why— So if we’re trying to talk about, like, what is the consciousness or awareness of an angel like, as we’ve said before on this show, this is what—we have no idea, any more than a dog understands what it’s like to be a human, or a pig or a dolphin knows what it’s like to be a human, whatever “smart” animal you want to use: a chimp, a bonobo. [Laughter]

And of course then when you’re talking about God, he’s not even on this continuum. This isn’t even a relevant category to God; this is a relevant category of created beings. So then the question becomes… So if we acknowledge: Okay, there are these different levels of consciousness—and there are levels of consciousness above human consciousness and awareness, and there are those below human consciousness and awareness—then the question is: Well, where does that sort of end as we go below?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, do worms have consciousness? Do planets have consciousness? Does my oak tree have consciousness?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Is there a point where we get to a zero? Is there a point where we get to just: the lights are out; there’s nothing?

Fr. Andrew: Zero-Kelvin consciousness?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] Yeah, absolute zero. So one place we could suggest maybe drawing that line would be between animal life and everything else. So, sure, an earthworm’s consciousness would be super rudimentary, like very low-level, like 0.000001, if human consciousness is one. But then you could say, well, that’s the dividing line: is animal life versus everything else. Problem with that is that we’re discovering more and more that there is some kind of plant consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Like they are able to communi— Some kinds of plants are able to communicate with each other. I’ve read about forests, for instance, that pass information through their roots, which is crazy to think about. And not even just aspens, which is a single organism with a whole bunch of things up top that look like trees—they are trees, I suppose—but that separate organisms talk to each other. A very kind of, if I may say so, Fellowship of the Ring moment with the old forest. [Laughter] Just throwing that out there!

Fr. Stephen: You’re just setting raw meat to the all-one-podcast people.

Fr. Andrew: I know, but the concept is very relevant! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, and they’ve done studies recently where plants, they can, like on a tape, play— Okay, kids, a tape is a magnetic strip… [Laughter] They can take a recording…

Fr. Andrew: And you put a pencil in the hole, and you turn it, and—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so they take a recording of the sound of water—so there is no actual water; it’s just the sound of running water, like a stream—and they play it near a plant, and the plant’s roots will start to move in that direction, toward the sound.

Fr. Andrew: That’s crazypants.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] So, yeah, there are a lot of things like this that we’re discovering. So, okay, instead of the earthworm being 0.000001, we’ll say a plant is 0.000001. But basically we could say the dividing line is: something that’s alive versus something that isn’t, so something like a rock. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But…

Fr. Stephen: But! [Laughter] If we’re understanding this kind of conscious awareness as the ability to send, receive, process information, for example, then plate tectonics would represent a type of consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. Well, that’s kind of weird to imagine…

Fr. Stephen: And a computer network, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, neural nets are completely inert in terms of biological life. It’s modeled after human brains, I guess, on some level, although I don’t really know anything about this stuff, but that’s what I’ve heard. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so we’re not saying, again, like the earth, you could talk to it, and it’s like a woman—because that’s humanizing. That’s making the humanizing mistake. But where we ultimately get to is that any ordered system that transmits or processes information has some kind of at least tiny rudimentary level of consciousness. It’s somewhere toward the one end, toward the bottom end, but is on sort of this spectrum of consciousness.

So, that said— We’re going to be hard on people’s heads, I think, with some of this second half…

Fr. Andrew: That’s okay. We’re ready to go there. It’s been a while since we’ve done a bit of mind-bending, but this time we’re talking about the mind in your stomach. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and now, for the record, I don’t want people to start calling me Dr. Mindbender, because I have a full head of hair, and I lack his incredible mustache.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, mm, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I have occasionally thought of buying a monocle, but I don’t think I could pull it off.

Fr. Andrew: Someone’s going to send you a monocle now, by the way. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’ll take a monocle! If anybody just wants to send me a monocle, like two-times magnification, I will accept this as a gift.

Fr. Andrew: Photos will be required, of course.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, that’s fair enough. It doesn’t cost me anything. [Laughter]

So one of the by-products of what we just said is going to be that any given organism—and we’re going to use the human organism here as an example because, as we were just saying, we can best talk about human consciousness. That’s the kind of consciousness and awareness that we can know the most about and understand the best, because we’re humans. Any dogs listening, sorry. Cats don’t pay attention to anything, so we don’t have to worry about that.

Fr. Andrew: They don’t.

Fr. Stephen: They’re completely solipsistic. But so, using a human as Exhibit A, you contain multiple systems that would have a level of consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean I’ve heard people talk about that your gut is almost kind of another brain on some weird level.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, your gut biome, the bacteria in your gut biome, who keep you alive, they communicate with the bacteria in other people’s gut biomes through the air.

Fr. Andrew: Ah-ah-ah! See, that’s creepy. [Laughter] That’s… I mean… I never watched Alien because, as you know, I do not watch anything that even reeks of being a horror film, on purpose.

Fr. Stephen: The new Hellraiser is really good on Hulu. I don’t know…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, I’m not— Not even a little bit. That’s the one with the pins in the head, I think?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, no. But, yeah, the idea that there are gut bacteria that somehow are trading information inside me that are then speaking in some way to those in other people— I mean, that is kind of Alien-level stuff right there.

Fr. Stephen: They’re having ongoing conversations with the rest of your immediate family’s gut biomes.

Fr. Andrew: Ahh!

Fr. Stephen: House together.

Fr. Andrew: Ahhhh! [Laughter] This is scarier than last year’s Halloween episode!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? But they’re bacteria. They’re a separate organism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the bacteria are not you, but you certainly can’t live without them.

Fr. Stephen: And through that communication, we’re saying, see, there’s a level—there is a certain very low level of consciousness going on there, that is contained within you, that is your gut biome. This is true of some of the organs of our body. So the human heart regulates its own rhythm, and biological males and females of the human species have slightly different heart rhythms. And if someone gets a heart transplant from someone of the other biological sex, their heart that they receive will maintain its previous rhythm in their body.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it still beats like a girl or a boy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so other examples are the parts of your brain.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are parts that are kind of going off on their own and doing their own thing.

Fr. Stephen: Your brainstem is not only regulating your breathing and your heart rate and stuff, but your brainstem is adjusting those things. It is receiving information from your body about the oxygen level of your body and therefore causing you to breathe harder or to yawn.

Fr. Andrew: I say we’re all going to yawn now, since you mentioned it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right? And that’s not the subject of your conscious thought.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, I’m not sitting there saying, “Time to yawn… go!”

Fr. Stephen: In your conscious awareness.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like it’s there’s almost separate stage manager in there that’s telling the stagehands what to do!

Fr. Stephen: Your cerebellum is governing your balance and motion without you thinking about it, most of the time.

Fr. Andrew: So you’re saying that my brain has brains.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Do they taste different, different parts, to zombies? Or is that, again, last year’s Halloween episode.

Fr. Stephen: The mind is a terrible thing to taste.

Fr. Andrew: Ah! [Laughter] I feel like I alley-ooped that one for you there.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, you did. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: See, that’s a call back to a previous episode where I couldn’t remember that word. Yes, thank you, everybody. You wouldn’t believe how many people wrote in to tell us that! We must have gotten ten “alley-oop” emails, at least.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’ll generate some more emails.

Fr. Andrew: All right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Is calling that an alley-oop a reference to the old “Alley Oop” ‘50s novelty song?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. You know, I don’t even know that one.

Fr. Stephen: Or it is a reference to the comic strip, Alley Oop?

Fr. Andrew: Write in! Let us know, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And then we could go to the different cells of the body that are receiving information and regulating things and processing things.

So the human body, then—the human organism, you, the listener—[is] made up of a big pile of interconnected small consciousnesses that are all operating together to keep you alive and allow you to function and do the things you do. And then what we think of as our consciousness, as our awareness, our point of attention, our nous, is something that comes in over the top of all of those sort of sub-systems that are all operating.

And so then what are we talking about, then, when we talk about that consciousness? So this is what is called—you see this in Aristotle, you see this in the Church Fathers, you see this in St. Maximus—this is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the natural will. It’s the “natural” will because it’s related to our nature as a human. It is this directedness and propulsion that moves any given thing, anything that has a nature, has a natural will, that moves it toward its telos, toward is perfection, toward its completion.

And so there are various elements of that. For example: stay alive. [Laughter] There’s sort of these basic things. And that natural will of the whole will override, or at least can override, the individual [sub-consciousnesses] of the various elements. So if you put your hand in a fire, you’re not going to make a conscious decision to pull it out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s very much unconscious.

Fr. Stephen: The nerves… But that information goes somewhere, and something pulls your hand out, but you’re not making a conscious decision to do it. But you can—at least attempt to keep your hand in the fire despite the pain, for some reason, some larger reason.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, an overriding thing. Like if you—if the Gom Jabbar is being held at your throat, for instance, you might do that.

Fr. Stephen: “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that leads to total obliteration.” Anyway. And then this—natural will is where the human energy comes from, our human activity. Our human activity is the working-out of this natural will.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah, which, I mean… The theological, technical term for this is “energies, energy.”

Fr. Stephen: In-working, working in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Working, yeah. Operation, if you need a Latinate word.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so—we’re there. [Laughter] A human spirit— What we’re getting to here is that a human spirit is this complex of faculties centered around the natural will and energy. Your will and your activity. That will and that activity that comes over top, that comes over and above.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of an organizing…

Fr. Stephen: As an organizing principle, a directing principle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but with a sense of—consciousness… exhibits consciousness, yeah. Okay, so, I mean, if someone’s trying to say, “Well, what’s my spirit?” could you say, “It’s the me that I feel as me”? The awareness—

Fr. Stephen: Well… Now you’re talking about the self, and that’s a whole other rabbit-trail.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all right. But, I mean, we all have, for instance, this constant experience of being ourselves…

Fr. Stephen: Well, maybe.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh! Okay. I don’t know what it’s like to be anything else.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but there are also experiences, going back to our nous episode—there are experiences of losing the concept of self.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, sure.

Fr. Stephen: So I don’t want to hang a lot on self, on the idea of self.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, but this is something sort of adjacent, right?

Fr. Stephen: This is more like when we were talking about the nous. We were talking about awareness. This is the lights being on. We’re not always aware of ourselves, but we’re always aware. Our awareness can be directed at other things other than ourselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, please, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Even, potentially, to the point of self-forgetting. So, yeah, we’re talking about this overriding awareness, and we’re talking about this natural will and activity of ourselves as a whole. So that’s a spirit within a body. And so what we’re going to say, then, about a spirit not in a body is going to be parallel to that.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. This is where it’s going to get harder, people. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So a spirit of a disembodied human is that will and that activity, that sort of complex of faculties continues to exist but without the physical body which it was animating, which it was making alive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that would be a dis-embodied spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it continues to exist in an unseen way. And so then this is what we’re going to say about angelic beings, this is what we’re going to say about demonic beings—that there is this will and this activity that exist without a material body, a meat body, that it is animating and organizing, in most cases. Now there are cases like demonic possession…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: But we’ll get more to that kind of thing in a minute.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so, just to kind of hit a couple of objections off at the pass here, if you’re talking about will and energy, will and activity, that direct… you know, even just a human person, a human body, but a will and activity that direct groups of people, for instance… Someone might say, from a materialist point of view, “Well, that’s just your perception,” that it’s just an observable sort of phenomenon; it’s not that there’s some personal being actually doing that. That the “spirit of the age” is just a metaphor.

But the reason why we would argue that that’s not the case is that there is, in fact, will and action. It’s not… There’s something more than just kind of the collective set of whatevers.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Will and action implies a subject, not just an object.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s someone doing the willing and the acting.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is actually how “spirit” is related to “wind.” So here’s a practical example from one of my heathen dogs.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: One of my dogs, Sasha, she is goofy and adorable; not the sharpest tool in the shed. And she, if she is out in the backyard and she’s trying to do her business or she’s trying to figure out what a smell is or whatever she’s about in the backyard, and the wind blows, she doesn’t understand what it is. She thinks something is touching her or pushing on her, but then she turns towards it and she can’t see anything. She does this all the time. Like, we can’t take her outside to do her business when it’s windy because of this, because she’s just constantly distracted and freaking out about what’s touching her. [Laughter]

There is this movement, there is this activity, there is something happening, but there’s no visible agent, no visible subject that’s acting upon her.

Fr. Andrew: This has become very poltergeisty now.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and so she can’t sort of process that something’s happening: there has to be something that’s doing this. Even when we say, “The wind is blowing,” well, what’s the wind if it’s not the blowing?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it’s not air. Air might be being blown...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so we even in speech have trouble with that! We have to put an agent there, doing an activity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. By the way, I just had to look this up. “Poltergeist” literally means rumble-ghost.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, well, there you go.

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t that great!? Rumble-ghost!

Fr. Stephen: They’re here, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That’s my next band name.

Fr. Stephen: Is that a dead Rumble Fish? Anyway. So this is why we get Christ saying the Holy Spirit blows where he will, and no one knows where he has come from or where he is going. So this is sort of built into the concept in that way; this is the connection to wind—is that wind is an analogy for something that is sort of an agency with no immediately identifiable agent. An activity with no immediately identifiable actor. And so then who the particular spirit is would be the actor or the agent or the one doing the thing. But that’s the idea connection there.

And so when we talk about angelic beings now, angelic and demonic spirits, we’re talking about levels of consciousness, as we said, that are above the human, that are sort of further up that sliding scale.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they have a broader… effect?

Fr. Stephen: Well, they have another level of consciousness. We can’t describe it, because we’re not them. We don’t know exactly what that’s like. We don’t know exactly what that entails. But if consciousness is based on organization and transmission of information, then the place to look for these higher levels of consciousness—just as my human level of consciousness is of a higher level than the consciousness of my organs or the bacteria in my gut or my cells, the place to look is then the next step up in terms of organization and communication.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so, communities, families…

Fr. Stephen: So we’re looking at a place, a community, a clan, a tribe, a family, a people-group.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and again, to kind of counter that— to head another objection, similar objection off at the pass. Someone might say, “Well, families and communities are really just a bunch of individuals who happen to be doing things together. They’re like atoms.” But, I mean… atoms, right? [Laughter] Atoms do things together, and they make molecules and they make compounds, and that’s something more and other than simply the collection of atoms. It’s not just a stack of atoms.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Water has properties that hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms don’t have.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, totally! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so it’s not—the whole is not just the sum of its parts. And this is obviously experientially true, too. That when one of these groups forms, there is a level of consciousness above that of the individual human persons who make it up, that has a kind of will and has a kind of activity. And so this, from the bottom-up, is what ancient pagans, ancient folks, called the spirit of a place or the spirit of a city or a people or this clan or this family.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they didn’t conceptualize it as a metaphor.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It is the identifier for that higher level of organization and will. And sometimes that will overrides the will of individuals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s where it gets weird and…

Fr. Stephen: And is willing to sacrifice certain of those individuals for the good of the whole organism, the way you might keep your hand in the fire.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, and like an example that we know even from our own experience is that crowds of people tend to do things that individuals would not.

Fr. Stephen: People get caught up in it.

Fr. Andrew: They have their own kind of mind.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that there’s a spirit of a place and a time that people are caught up into. And so these collective units take on a will of their own. They have activities of their own, things that they work together and do. And so the spirit of that unit is the collection of the collective will and energy that has its own overriding factor.

So then how does the person who is within one of these units—which we all are… Modern culture has done its best to atomize us and separate us from all of these, and that’s why we keep feeling like we’re dying, for the same reason that if I cut off my finger it wouldn’t do well on its own. Because, remember, the spirit is what animates the thing and gives it life.

So the person who’s in one of these, there is this collective will and energy of the whole, of the spirit of the whole, and the person has to choose whether to participate in, to take part in, to co-operate with, to synergize with—synergeia—to take their will and their energy and merge it, cooperate with that of the group, or to resist.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which, I mean, this is going to seem like a weird example, but really it is the one that popped into my head. Which is why, when I worked the 1997 Jimmy Buffet concert at Hardy’s Walnut Creek in Raleigh, North Carolina, concert-goers could either choose to contribute to the river of beer and vomit in the cable troughs, or they could choose not to do that. You wouldn’t think that contributing to that would be the kind of decision that someone individually would make, but, weirdly enough, a lot of people made that decision. And then the poor stage-hands had to pull those cables out of there. So we were choosing, obviously, to resist it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It could’ve been worse.

Fr. Andrew: But yeah, I— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It could have been at Woodstock ‘99.

Fr. Andrew: I avoided that quite on purpose. [Laughter] Let that be a lesson to you all! But, yeah, there’s… You know, we’ve all had experiences like this, where you’re in a crowd of people particularly, or even in just a small group of people, and everything is kind of going one way or another…

Fr. Stephen: Or just your family.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Just your own family.

Fr. Stephen: Your family dynamic.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Right! Family systems! We talk about family systems, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so this— When we’re talking, then, about those systems, this gives us important language and understanding that we can only have from our Christian perspective. So sometimes we’re in a unit that the spirit is, like, corrupt, whether it’s a family, whether it’s just our culture, whether it’s any other kind of group that we join, and it’s corrupt and it’s evil, and it’s corrupting. The language we need to use to understand the change is not just: “Hey, I need to go and convince all of these folks that what we’re doing is a bad idea, and, hey, here’s a good thing to do,” because—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not cognitive.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a collection of individuals. It has a life of its own. The language we need to use is the language of exorcism.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm!

Fr. Stephen: We need to remove the spirit that is there animating it now, and then understand how to invite a different one. Like getting rid of Aphrodite and bringing in St. Demetrios, if you’re in Thessaloniki.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yes! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so we have this idea bred into us, regardless of what you think of it as a form of government, of sort of democracy; that all of these collectives are just individual— a bunch of individual people who all have their own thoughts and ideas, and any events that happen or any kind of larger movement of anything is just that there’s a whole bunch of people who happen to have the same ideas, or who have convinced each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, basically, like voting. They’re all voting.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah, and if— And those people were all perfectly free to accept perfectly different ideas, and if they had then things would have gone in the opposite direction. And so we just need to go and reason with people, with individuals, and convince enough of them to go this other way. But again, that isn’t how any of this works. As we’ve talked about recently on this show, these ideas come after the fact. These ideas come after the fact. In fact, we’ve talked about where thoughts and ideas come from before.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, they come from outside. People are permeable.

Fr. Stephen: They come from outside. And so the ideas that are going to arise in a community that’s animated by a corrupt and evil spirit are going to be corrupt and evil ideas. 20th-century history is full of this!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, indeed.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a question of irrationality. Some of the people… Maximilien Robespierre was pretty sure he was the most rational man on the planet.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. I recall… I can’t remember what I was reading—this was from years ago, but I recall that a major kind of turning point in terms of people’s awareness of this reality is in looking at the evil of the Holocaust, because a lot of what was going on in that was simply this sense of “well, so how do you kill millions and millions of Jews?” Well, it’s basically just sort of a big engineering problem, that you just solve that. And the reason why I think that was, in some ways, a turning point in awareness of this was there was this idea that lots more education equals a more moral world. But the level of education and sort of scientific knowledge required to kill millions of Jews was very high—it was a big engineering problem—and yet it did this deeply, deeply evil thing. But that’s because there was a different spirit animating that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and… I said I was going to get in trouble later in the show, but what the heck.

Fr. Andrew: Is this that moment!?

Fr. Stephen: This may be it!

Fr. Andrew: Okay! Everybody, take out your pens and paper!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and people forget that Hitler’s original plan was to wipe out about 90% of the Slavs, take their land, and enslave the rest, to work for the glory of Germany. Why was he going to do that? Well, he looked at all the other nations of Europe—and this was built into European culture, and American culture, for that matter. The way all of them became wealthy was through colonialism. They went to other countries, they killed— Look at Belgium and the Congo. They killed most of the people and enslaved the rest, and therefore enriched their home country.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is what empire does.

Fr. Stephen: And Germany had no colonies, so he decided to make some in Eastern Europe. That’s what the whole Lebensraum was. So this wasn’t a thought that just Hitler had because he was a very naughty man; he was just an evil dude, born evil, and so he came up with this horrible idea. This idea was in the spirit of the age. This was what everyone was doing. This is what the United States was doing on its western frontier. This was what all the nations of Europe were doing in their various colonies. They were all doing this. And so the idea came to him because it was in the air; it was in the zeitgeist.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it was admitted to the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist.

Fr. Stephen: In the spirit of the age, that’s where it was. So that is a sort of perfect example of this, of these ideas emerging. And then racial ideologies emerged out of that. These people weren’t racist and so they went and set up colonies. These people went and set up colonies and did this, and then to justify it the adopted racial ideology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you get eugenics and that kind of nasty stuff.

Fr. Stephen: All these ideas, again, come after, to justify what we’re doing. So these are perfect examples. This is where ideas come from.

So this is why— What this is usually called in the New Testament—the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age—is “the world.”

Fr. Andrew: Mm, yeah, to be distinguished from the world as in, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, not the cosmos as in the creation; not the material creation. “The world” is talking about this spirit of the age, the powers and principalities. This is always demonic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the Bible uses that word in both of those ways, and it’s important to distinguish. Like when Christ said he came not to condemn the world but to save it, he doesn’t mean he did not come to condemn the spirit of the age, but to save it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. St. Paul says that the devil is the god of this world (small-g). That’s what he’s talking about there. And so Christianity has always been over against that and has always seen the thoughts and ideas that come out of that as what has to be fought and resisted in spiritual warfare and in the Christian life. So hopefully that gives a better idea, historically, of what we’re talking about.

And so what this means is that, when the Scriptures tell us to “test the spirits,” this doesn’t mean, “Hey, when a spirit appears to you, when the Force ghost shows up and says: I bring you a message, you give it some kind of quiz to determine whether it’s an angel or a demon.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: That’s not what we’re talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not a kind of taxonomic activity to determine what its species is. “Could you please provide a sample of your ectoplasm so I can take it back to the lab?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the spirit we encounter in the woods, the spirit we encounter in our civic life, the spirit we encounter in our parish community, the spirit we encounter in our family—the spirits we encounter determining whether this spirit is fallen or unfallen. And this is the divide: every spirit which is good, every spirit which is angelic, is going to lead us to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. What direction is this being taken? What’s the fruit?

Fr. Stephen: And every spirit which is fallen is going to lead us to destruction. That’s the dividing line.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is why martyrs are essentially dissidents against the spirit of the age. They will not comply with that. But we’re not taught as Christians simply not to comply with any spirit—that’s not even a possibility—but rather to be conformed to the Holy Spirit. But we’re supposed to resist the spirit of the age, with its manifold nefarious manifestations.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so Jupiter is not an idea somebody came up with some day. Jupiter is the spirit that motivated Rome to go out and create a wasteland of the world and call it peace, to quote Livy, or paraphrase Livy. And that’s what the Scriptures mean when they say all the gods of the nations are demons. They are spirits which are leading you to destruction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s funny, because demons are these kind of lesser spirits, and so it’s a sad commentary, essentially, the nations are being led by these petty tyrants.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and that’s not just a hypothetical thing where he’s off somewhere—there’s some demon who’s like a black, dark, smoky, brimstoney Force ghost, rubbing his hands together, with horns and a tail. Like: “I’m going… Here’s what I’m going to get them to do…” And then he convinces people to go along with his plan by offering them things. That’s not how it works. [Laughter]

But that spirit is at work, and people experience it. They feel it. When the Romans gathered together, when they held one of their triumphs and paraded the slaves they’d taken, giving glory to the general who won the victories, that spirit was there, motivating it, and everyone there encountered it and felt it there and chose to participate in it and follow it and be transformed by it, or to rebel against it and reject it. And there were consequences for the latter.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, with that said, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and we will be right back with the third half of Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: You know, I had almost completely forgotten that I had recorded that promo.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you know, I hope people got the message of that important commercial, but I have to say I was distracted by the best part of it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh?

Fr. Stephen: Which was the public domain sports montage music that was playing in the background.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! We make use of royalty-free music on Ancient Faith Radio, although once in a while—

Fr. Stephen: See, and if people give to Ancient Faith, maybe someday I can just play clips of all these songs I sub-reference.

Fr. Andrew: There you go! Well, that would be pretty expensive, probably! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, come on… [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know, once in a while we do purchase licenses for music. So, you know, just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: Can I get William Shatner’s version of “Spirit in the Sky”?

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy. So you know, we could—we could theoretically play a little clip of William Shatner’s “Spirit in the Sky” if we were to offer commentary about it.

Fr. Stephen: I can just gush about it ad infinitum.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. So that would fall into the fair-use doctrine of copyright law. But again, it would just be a clip, and it would have to be for the purpose of commentary and review.

Fr. Stephen: Especially when you get to the guitar solo and Frampton, Peter Frampton just comes alive.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: There’s nothing better than a song written and performed by a Jewish person—about Christ, in the folk-rock genre.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I do have a soft spot in my heart for the Norman Greenbaum original.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, who was also Jewish.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] The Shatner version is pretty great. Did I mention to you, by the way, that Shatner is a Litvak? He is of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he is.

Fr. Andrew: Just putting that out there. And Canadian.

Fr. Stephen: Your nationalistic pride is now…

Fr. Andrew: It’s not nationalistic pride! I don’t know what it is exactly, but, yeah… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Lithuania über alles, I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! That’s very dark considering where we were in the previous [part of the] episode, previous half!

Fr. Stephen: I know. I know no bounds.

Fr. Andrew: Whew! Thank you for that humility machine that is your Dutchness. [Laughter] All right, so it’s the third half. Feel free to give us a ring: 855-AF-RADIO; we’d love to talk to you about spirits.

But, speaking of “Spirit in the Sky,” that’s what this third half of the episode is about. So, all right, where are we now?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so now that we have some kind of at least working if brain-hurting idea of what a spirit is, here in our third half we’re going to talk about how that applies to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit, capital-S, Spirit of God.

So, spoilers where we’re going to go with this, that the Holy Spirit is called the Holy Spirit because he has an analogous function. He operates in a way that’s analogous to the things we were saying about spirit in a general sense.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he is not a particular individual of a general category called “spirits,” just like God the Father is not “a dad.” He’s not like your dad, but there is an analogy of sorts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, properly understood, by the way, just to clarify in our Orthodox understanding, the analogy goes—this analogy goes top-down.

Fr. Andrew: Right, we’re theomorphic.

Fr. Stephen: As St. Paul said, the fatherhood of God is whence all other fatherhoods are named.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just like when St. Paul says that marriage is like Christ and the Church, not saying Christ and the Church is like marriage.

Fr. Stephen: The analogy is not that the Holy Spirit is kind of like a created spirit; it’s the other way around.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, created spirits are kind of like the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: We refer to created spirits as spirits because they are in some way analogous to the Holy Spirit, who is eternal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Important distinction. As we like to say: continuities and discontinuities.

Fr. Stephen: So the Holy Spirit is called— actually, most commonly, when he’s directly referred to, other than the appearances we referred to in the first half, is referred to in the Old Testament as “the spirit of God.” And in the case of the spirit of God, St. Paul again brings out sort of the analogy, for example in 1 Corinthians 2:11.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! This is one of these verses that you don’t hear a lot of sermons on! [Laughter] Or I don’t remember any. I don’t know, maybe you’ve preached a few. So, yeah, 1 Corinthians 2:11:

For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the spirit of God.

Probably because it’s just… it’s not an easy verse to kind of suss out. It’s not like: “Okay, here’s an inspirational verse that I can get… Yeah, that’ll preach.” But there it is, 1 Corinthians 2:11.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as a side note, I’m going to be very contemporary in circles that you don’t run in, but 1 Corinthians 2:11, just on the face, means that everything that God the Father knows, the Spirit knows. Sorry, James White.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know who that is.

Fr. Stephen: But you don’t know what it’s about, I bet.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So in the New Testament, there are a lot of different ways the Holy Spirit is referred to, “the Holy Spirit” being the most common one. But he is also referred to as the spirit of Christ. And this, plus what we’ve said about spirits, plus what we just saw in 1 Corinthians 2:11, connects it to the idea of the mind of Christ, not that we’re saying those are the same thing, but there’s clearly a connection there. And if “spirit” is referring to this consciousness and awareness of this complex of faculties, then that one makes sense. So St. Paul makes that analogy in Philippians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he says: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” Which—I like the fact that this translation—this is the ESV—makes that very clearly plural, because some translations: “Have this mind in you, which—” in Greek it is plural, but in English it’s ambiguous because we’ve lost the “thou,” or “thee” in this case. “Have this mind among yourselves.” And I like also “among.” This definitely has this kind of “spirit”...

Fr. Stephen: Collective idea, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: “...which is yours in Christ Jesus.” If you’re in Christ Jesus, then you have this mind among yourselves.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But the place where St. Paul gets most explicit and draws out and develops this the most is actually in another place, in 1 Corinthians 12, and this is a famous—what’s usually described as a famous analogy or a famous metaphor—

Fr. Andrew: The body of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re here to say: not a metaphor.

Fr. Andrew: Not a metaphor!

Fr. Stephen: Not an analogy. But we need to read this in terms of what we were just saying in the second half about the way in which the spirit of a human person relates to their body. And so St. Paul is famously going to say that the Church is the body of Christ. And, again: not a metaphor. And he says, “You are members of it,” and he’s using “members” in the sense of bodily members.

Fr. Andrew: Body parts.

Fr. Stephen: He even gets a little— One person’s an eye and one person’s a foot, you know. So he makes kind of explicit that that’s what he’s talking about. And so if we understand, then, a spirit as this faculty that animates a body, then what St. Paul is saying here is that the Holy Spirit, who shares the divine will and energy with the Father and the Son—the Persons of the Trinity have one will and one energy—that the Holy Spirit then is animating the Church as a body, making out of the diverse persons a single organism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that human bodies are analogous to that, just as the person that is Andrew Damick actually consists of, as we mentioned, a bunch of self-regulating elements, including organisms that are genetically other than I am, bacteria and such, and yet they are necessarily part of who it is that I am. And that’s a kind of lesser version of this, of the body of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And for St. Paul the way in which that animation of the body works out is by the diversity of gifts received from the Holy Spirit. That animation means that each part—each member, each organ within the organism, each cell within the organism—is empowered by the Holy Spirit to perform its function, is made alive in order to perform its function, within the whole. And then, because a human person still has consciousness, and the nature of human consciousness, you can choose to cooperate or to resist. You can cooperate with the spirit, with the Holy Spirit, you can cooperate with God, with the divine energy; you can resist.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I love that word “cooperate”: “co-operate.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, synergeia.

Fr. Andrew: Operation is together. Synergeia, if you need to use the Greek version; synergize. But working together, to use good old-fashioned plain English.

Fr. Stephen: And this is why, from the very beginning, all the way back from the book of Exodus, why dissenters—why people who resist, the resister, the rebel—against the Holy Spirit, the one who grieves the Holy Spirit, has to be removed from the body, because they’re like cells or organs that have become cancerous.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which are self… They have gotten kind of out of control and are only serving themselves.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and are self-destructive, but, if not removed, will destroy the body. And this is why you always have this means of removal, if there is it, but that’s something they choose.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as difficult as it is to countenance that, it’s also just a reality, unfortunately.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is what we mean— We say all the time, and we’ve said on this show, that what we mean in the Orthodox Church by “Tradition” is not a bunch of secret stuff that we decided not to write down in the Bible, that bishops find out about when they get consecrated—they tell them orally all the secrets—no one still writes it down, but the other bishops come and whisper in their ear all the secret extra teachings. [Laughter] That’s not how Tradition works.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, in fact, they do write it down.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, everything is written down!

Fr. Andrew: Like, at least in the Church of Antioch, for instance, there is an instance of a bishop writing his profession of faith in a big book that they have in the patriarchate. And he has to sit there and write it out by hand. And the bishop who ordained me as a deacon, Bishop Thomas—and didn’t he make you a priest?

Fr. Stephen: He did both for me.

Fr. Andrew: He did both?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, deacon and priest.

Fr. Andrew: As far as we know, he’s the first bishop to write in that Antiochian patriarchal book his confession of faith in English, which is kind of cool. But, yeah, it has to be written out. It’s not a, as you say, secret whispery thing for the ear.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that’s not what Tradition is. It’s not like the oral Torah in the Old Testament, and that differentiates our view of Tradition somewhat from the Roman Catholic view of Tradition, as a separate source of authoritative teaching.

But we say that Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Well, that sounds nice, but it’s also a little woo-woo if you don’t understand what we’re talking about. [Laughter] Like: “Oh, okay, you’re just trying to take all the crazy stuff you do and say God told you. Right? Is that what you’re doing?” That’s not what we’re doing.

But this understanding of the visible Church as the material body and the Holy Spirit as the animating spirit of that body is what we mean by that. So the history of the Church is the history of this organism, the body of Christ. It’s ultimately the history of the life of Christ in the world, but the Holy Spirit is the spirit who’s animating that body. And so this is what we’re talking about when we talk about Tradition. And so there are things that come into that life that are accepted, things that come into that life that are rejected. There are things which shift form. And that’s all okay, because we have this personal, active understanding of the Holy Spirit and of Tradition.

And that allows us… As St. Paul is talking to the Church in Corinth, at the level of this individual Christian community in the city of Corinth, about the dead center of the first century AD, and Corinth was about in the center of Greece at the time… So when he talks to them about the diversity of gifts and the diversity of the members, he’s talking about literally that—what we would call a parish community, and that there were different people there with different gifts, who were part of the body in different ways. But this is true on the macro-scale, too, in both time and space.

This is why the Orthodox Church has always allowed for diversity in a whole lot of things, from language to some of the details of liturgical ritual performance, to not just the language but even the text and what books are in the Scriptures—that all of these things are not only allowed for, but they can be seen to be a good thing in that all of these are expressions of this life. And all of these different things that are accepted and are a part of the life and tradition of the Church are all part of that diversity of organs within the organism that allow the whole organism to function and be what it is.

So this all kind of fits together in that way, but it’s kind of fractal. It’s at the level of the individual parish community and all the way up to the whole Church, and then all the way up to the whole Church throughout time.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why it’s so hard to sort of pin down in a kind of objectifying way.

Fr. Stephen: Right: “This is the Orthodox view of blank.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t dogmas; it doesn’t mean that. But if we try to use the kind of thinking that we use to create taxonomies of material stuff and we try to turn that towards what the Church is, then it’s a total category error. The animating will and energy of the Church is the Holy Spirit. You can’t put the Spirit into a spreadsheet or a box, and by that I don’t mean that anything goes, because there are different spirits that are trying to animate us. The question is to be in the Holy Spirit, to be in Christ.

I think that’s one of the problems, that there’s this modernist assumption that unless you’re willing to put things in the box—and you have to pick the right box—that you’re saying that anything goes. But that’s simply not true. We see how the Holy Spirit is consistent through the ages, for instance. There is a diversity, but it’s a diversity within and animated by the one Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to do that kind of dissection and scientific study, the organism has to be dead. [Laughter] And the Church as an organism, the body of Christ, is un-killable. So, out of luck on doing that.

So, yeah, this also has the effect of meaning that the visible Church, the Church, has to be a visible thing, composed of actual human persons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not… It’s not an abstraction, and it’s not just the list of all the people who believe in Jesus.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The Holy Spirit can’t animate another spiritual entity.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what do you mean by that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, a spirit animates a body.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Right…?

Fr. Stephen: So if your understanding of the Church is as an abstraction or as another spiritual entity, it itself is a spiritual entity. You don’t have a spirit animating another spirit in that way.

Fr. Andrew: Right, okay. The wind doesn’t blow the wind.

Fr. Stephen: Right! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Got you.

Fr. Stephen: So that sort of completely fails to understand what St. Paul is saying, which again is not an analogy or a metaphor. It’s very real. He’s talking about—these are actual people who make up the Church. So the way you— To get to the idea that the Church is this invisible spiritual entity or an abstract category or something, you have to proceed from the basis of individualism again. That this is a collection of like-minded individuals. Even if you just want to say, “This is everybody who believes in Jesus. Okay, this is everyone who has a certain idea.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not what it is.

Fr. Stephen: And that would mean, as we’ve been talking about all episode—that would mean that there is no spirit animating it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that it’s just a sum.

Fr. Stephen: That would make the Church the same as the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, a Star Trek convention…

Fr. Andrew: Some people try to treat it that way.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? Now, all those things I just named, I would hold there’s a spirit animating those, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, of course.

Fr. Stephen: But our person who wants to see these things—all of these things as just collections of individuals who have the same ideas, that’s the opposite of believing that there’s a spirit enlivening and animating this entity. And so this also means, as we’ve talked about on the show before, several times, in terms of what a body is, that the Church, as the body of Christ, is the embodiment of Christ in the world. The Christ is this nexus of powers and potentialities through which Christ acts in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, isn’t this what St. Paul says in Ephesians? I can’t remember the chapter where he says as he is, so are we in the world. That the Church is Christ in the world, truly. And thus the beginning of the book of Acts, where St. Luke says: in the previous text, meaning the Gospel of Luke, I wrote about all the things that Jesus began to do and to teach, meaning that the book of Acts is all the things that he continues to do and to teach, through the apostles.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Church is to actualize the will and energy of Christ, the will and energy of the triune God in the world. And this is directly parallel—this is why, in the book of Revelation, when you see the beasts who are the embodiment of world empire, starting with, at St. John’s time, the Roman Empire, they’re always this sort of flip-side parody of the Church. So there’s a mark of God that he puts on his people; so there’s a mark of the beast.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a dark baptism, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the beast from the earth is sort of this evil-looking sheep. [Laughter] This sort of fake lamb, because Christ is portrayed as the Lamb, because it’s the flip-side, because these empires, these pagan empires, these empire spirits, they’re actualizing the powers of evil spirits, these evil spirits in the world, the works of the evil one, as St. John says in 1 John. And, you know, because people get excited—this is what the giant clans are doing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’re being the bodies of demons.

Fr. Stephen: Completely given over to this. And of course, this is on a scale, but sort of the culmination of this is what’s called demonic possession, in a negative sense, in the New Testament; in a positive sense, in some other things that we’ve talked about, where literally just a person’s body is being animated by an evil spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in the fullest, weirdest, freakiest sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And their human consciousness has just been sort of submerged the way my gut biome’s is by me.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… That’s scary.

Fr. Stephen: That’s sort of the full darkness of that. But this is also what, when we talked way back at the beginning a little bit, we broached some of the things from the fourth century that the Holy Spirit— that the holy Fathers in the fourth century said about the Holy Spirit… And this is what, for example, St. Gregory the Theologian sort of hammers on about the fact that, in order to be able to divinize or deify, in order for theosis to happen, because that happens through the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit must be God. So we say the Holy Spirit is divine and deifying.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is who he is and what he’s doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so theosis happens, again, within the Church’s organism, as we sort of conform our will and our activity in the world to that of God, through the Holy Spirit, who is animating and enlivening the Church, following Christ. And so this is why the body of the Church is where salvation happens. This is the locus. And this is why, when the question comes up of salvation outside the Church, it’s always a question of the Holy Spirit. That’s why St. Irenaeus goes straight to: We know where the Holy Spirit is—he’s animating the body of the Church—we don’t know where he isn’t. The Holy Spirit is God…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no one would be drawn to Christ unless the Spirit draws him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the Spirit is at work in the world in other places, but, like the wind, no one knows where he has come from or where he is going. But we know what he is doing in the Church. And so this is why, if someone comes to us and says, “What must I do to be saved?” we bring them into the Church, because that is the place where we know it’s happening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s also why we know that when someone comes, the Holy Spirit has worked in them to do that, because that’s what he, as the animating spirit of the Church, does, brings people in and conforms them to Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is why he’s identified over and over again as the Giver of Life. This is enlivening, making alive, animating.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, some final closing thoughts. You know, one of the things that happens a lot these days is people look at evil happening in the world, especially when we look at it happening on massive scale. But it doesn’t just have to be in 2022; we mentioned some other evil happening just earlier in the 20th century. But, I mean, this is human history. But we know about the evil happening now.

One of the things, questions people often ask is: “How could people do that? How could it come to this? I don’t understand.” And, as modern Western people—I think most people listening to this, probably that describes them, maybe not everybody, but modern Western people, it’s hard for us to understand this, because we tend to be individualists. And so when we ask, “How could it come to this? How could people do that? How could this great evil have happened?” all we can conceive of is individual people making individual decisions, and: “Why would anyone ever choose that?” We can’t get inside their head, why they would ever do that. “Why would all these people follow a person who leads them into evil?”

But if we look with the eyes of the Christian tradition, the eyes of the Scriptures, the eyes of faithfulness, then we see that there are spirits animating—whole peoples, individual people of course—that they do have a spirit about them. And when we recognize that, then it makes sense how you get these phenomena of whole peoples doing evil things. But also how you can sometimes, thanks be to God, have whole peoples do good things. Renewal does occur.

The great renewal is still, from our point of view in the future, with the resurrection and the end of the age, but there are lesser renewals that can come. And that is why, as Christians, we always are people of hope. It’s not because we think: Well, enough people are going to get their minds change and so eventually collectively we’ll have something better. That’s not what it’s about. Rather, it is that the spirit of God moves, that the holy ones who are obedient to him move, and there is a renewal that occurs, centered in the people of God. And that that can benefit the whole world, even the people that are not part of the Church as yet. So we see renewals once in a while.

And we should be hopeful, because we know that when we conform to that, then there is animating character that we ourselves become conformed to. If we’re individualists, we kind of don’t like that idea—like: “Don’t make me do anything!”—but the reality is that even if we try to be utter individualists and we try to resist the Holy Spirit, then we are actually not being truly individualists, we are simply conforming to another spirit, or, as we like to say on this podcast sometimes: there is no neutral ground. You’re either following the spirit of God and being enlivened by him and being conformed to his will and energy, or you’re being conformed to the will and energy of a dark spirit. There’s no middle ground. It’s just not a possibility. And that’s because, as humans, we are permeable. We are always being animated. There’s no way around it.

So we have to choose. We have to choose to cooperate with the spirit of God if we’re going to become like him, if we’re going to be like Christ, if we’re going to receive eternal salvation. The thing that— Well, there’s a lot of things that are profoundly helpful about that, but the one thing that I want to zero in on that’s profoundly helpful about that, is that if we can lay aside our individualism, then we can choose to align our wills with God, but we also realize that the victory does not depend on any one of us or even a collection of us. We don’t have to get enough votes in order for the world to be saved. [Laughter] That’s not how this works. It is an act, truly, of God.

So then the question is: Will I be on board with that or will I not? To me, lifting that responsibility off of ourselves is profoundly hopeful and freeing, because it means that there is a force, a good force—not the Force—but there is a good Spirit at work in this world. There is a good Spirit at work in this world, which is above and beyond all other spirits. He is the Lord of Spirits.

Yeah, this was kind of a tough episode in some ways. A little bit of mind-bending. It’s been a while since we did one of those, but I think it’s good for us. And I believe also that we, having learned some of this, then our ability to read the Scriptures is enriched and deepened. Especially take a look at 1 Corinthians 12, where St. Paul talks about the body of Christ. But at the beginning of the chapter, he’s talking about the Spirit. Fancy that! He begins talking about the Spirit, and he begins talking about how they’re led away from idolatry and they now are in the spirit of God, and the spirit of God gives gifts and the spirit of God makes us the body of Christ. So, yeah, check out 1 Corinthians 12, having listened to everything that we just said, and I think you’re going to read it in a very different way, and I hope a very beautiful and hopeful and, frankly, encouraging kind of way. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So a great man once said, “I’m not here to take the temperature; I’m here to change the thermostat.” And I’ve been honest about the fact that I don’t read all the emails. If you want me to read your email, the best thing to do is just be hyperbolically and insanely critical of me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: So if, for example, you go on Goodreads and write a 2,000-word screed about one of my books, about how I’m the evillest man who’s ever lived, rest assured, I will read it and enjoy it thoroughly.

But one thing I notice as I go out, trying to find criticism of myself, one thing I’ve seen sometimes about Lord of Spirits in particular is that we have some folks who will say they like the show, but that essentially Fr. Andrew and I are too sectarian; that we present information, we present things that they want to hear and are eager to hear and that are helpful to them, but that we place that within this grid of Orthodoxy that they don’t accept or don’t want to accept or aren’t interested in, and so they wish that we would just sort of give them the information in a way that they could fit it into their current grid, their current paradigm, their current understanding, from some other Christian group, or some other group in general, or just their own personal views.

And we’re not going to do that. [Laughter] But the reason for that is the quote I started out with. We’re not here to take the temperature; we’re here to change the thermostat, because one of the things that has most greatly hindered our church life and our lives and influence as Christians in the modern world—and this isn’t— it hasn’t hindered God, but it’s hindered us—is we have a set of self-imposed limits that we don’t even realize are self-imposed limits, because we’ve inherited this whole framework for understanding the world and understanding human activity and understanding the way the world works and politics works and religion works and history works that’s all based around principles that are fundamentally not Christian, that are based in sort of hyper-individualism, that are based in materialism, that are based in a secularism that concretely means that religion is purely a set of ideas and it’s disassociated from, or disassociateable at least from everything else. We’ve inherited all this.

And by holding to this, we sort of limit our own horizon and limit our own possibilities. We limit what can happen in our parishes, in our families, in our own lives, in our communities, our civic life, in the life of the countries we live in, in the life of the world. We put these limits: this is what we can do. Again, God isn’t limited by them.

And so what I at least hope to do with this show, and have always hoped to do with this show, is not just feed a little more information into that hopper, not just sort of expand the paradigm a little with some new thoughts, not just sort of adjust the thermostat that’s already there, but to try to bring a completely new way—that isn’t really new; it’s new to us, but not new, like, to paraphrase St. John in 1 John, it’s new and not-new at the same time—a new-to-us whole paradigm for understanding who we are, what the world is, how it works, what’s in it, how it relates to each other. And then, based on that, a new understanding of ethics, a new understanding of politics, a new understanding of history, a new understanding of all of that, which, again isn’t really new. It’s always been there, but maybe now new to us.

So that means we can’t just tinker with the dials, we can’t just rearrange the furniture a little bit, we can’t just slap a new coat of paint—we have to overturn everything and start over again. To paraphrase Nietzsche, we have to re-evaluate all our values. We have to look at all the things we thought were most precious and most important and say, “How important are they really? And what is really important? How are we to live? What does it mean to be a Christian? What are we to be doing in the world?”

And when we’re willing to do that, when we’re willing to do that—it’s not easy; I’m still doing it, everybody’s still doing it who’s even trying to do it, is still in progress—but when we do that, the first effect it has is that those limitations disappear. The limitations we put on ourselves disappear. The things we think in a wild dream and say, “Oh, pssh, come on”—those things all of a sudden become thinkable and possible and even doable, because we are no longer limiting ourselves to: “Well, I’m never going to be able to convince enough people to go along with this” or “There’s just not enough money for this” or “That kind of thing doesn’t happen any more. I believe it used to happen back in the day; I’m not denying that the saints did this or that or that this or that happened, but it doesn’t happen any more. It doesn’t happen to me for sure. It doesn’t happen in our parish; it doesn’t happen in our city.”

All those limitations sort of disappear, because the Holy Spirit is God, meaning he can do anything. He can do anything he wills. And that means that we can do anything, as St. Paul tells us, when what we’re doing is cooperating with that will. Your parish can be transformed, your family can be transformed, your city can be transformed. Any country on this planet can be transformed. This whole planet can be transformed. And it doesn’t require you winning an argument, coming up with a brilliant idea—it doesn’t require any of that. It just requires each of us, for ourselves, to cooperate with God and with what he is doing in the world. And then things start to transform, and they start to happen for us. And great and wonderful and amazing things can happen.

So when, even in this episode—and I know I do this a lot, when I say, “Sorry, Calvinists,” when I say, “Sorry,” somebody else—a shot at James White earlier this episode—when I do that, I’m really not doing that out of a kind of chauvinism or out of a “team spirit” for the Orthodox Church—“My dad could beat up your dad.” I’m doing that because the kind of transformation that needs to happen isn’t going to be possible for me—I’ll speak for myself—under those other paradigms and ways of thinking.

And we’re saying that: Here’s how you should understand spirits, not just as this exotic and interesting thing—“Ooh, I’m into this weird stuff”—but because this understanding is going to open things up for people, we hope. I may be wrong about some of it, but we hope it’s going to open things up for people. It’s going to make things possible for people that they didn’t see as possible before. Because they didn’t see them as possible before, for them they weren’t. That’s always the goal.

The goal is to try to set you free from some of the shackles that the spirit of the age has put on all of us. And so hopefully that’s what we’re doing. And so, yes, I will be kind of a radical sometimes in calling for these things. And if you’re able to listen to the show, as someone who’s not Orthodox and who disagrees with half of what I say and you’re able to find things that are—individual things that are helpful for you, God bless you! You do you. Okay. But that’s never going to be our goal. That’s never going to be what we set out to do.

What we set out to do is to try to change everything and liberate everyone, which sounds crazy, except for the fact that we’re hoping that we’re doing this in tandem with the Holy Spirit who’s God himself.

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

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 Pacific, including, next time, our annual Halloween episode.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! Halloween episode next time, everybody! And if you are on Facebook, you like our page and join our discussion group; you can leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it and benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, obey the public domain sports montage music and go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: And, hey, everybody, tomorrow, Friday, the 14th of October, there should be a new Ancient Faith Radio app in your app store on your phone! Thank you, good night, God bless you.