Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hey, everybody! Welcome back. Good evening, all of you giant-killers and dragon-slayers—but not werewolf-hunters. 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 the borough of Emmaus, Pennsylvania. If you’re listening to us live, you can call at 855-A-F-R-A-D-I-O: 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is taking those calls tonight, and we’re going to get to those in the second part of the show.

Tonight we’re going to be talking about the soul. What is it, really?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah, what’s up with that?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, what is up with that? This is one of those words that gets used a lot by Christians, all the time, but often without a clear sense of what it is or even how the way that we use the word has been deeply influenced by non-Christian philosophies. So how is the soul actually understood in the Scriptures? And how different is that from the common conception.

So that’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight. I’m not sure if you’re going to walk away feeling like your mind is more bent or a little bit clearer, but I guess we’ll just see what happens.

Fr. Stephen: So, number one, bro, you didn’t even “Christ is risen.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true. Christ is risen!

Fr. Stephen: Like some kind of card-revoked…

Fr. Andrew: I was assuming this would be for all the people listening after the Ascension. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Some kind of card revoked…

Fr. Andrew: Christ is risen! He truly is risen!

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] You and that. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I got “Um, actually"ed and we’re not even 30 seconds into the show.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. Yeah, in terms of the title of the show, it was either this or “How do you sell soul to a soulless nation that sold its soul?” And that has decidedly less pith as subreferences go.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. Won’t show on all displays so people can actually read it all.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. People would just get confused. We went with non-confusing with the current title.

Yes, and as you mentioned certain episodes of this program can be slightly brain-breaking. This is probably going to be one of them. But back when we did the “Unctuous” episode, about the sacrament of unction, in the first of the three halves of the program, we talked a little bit about the soul, and some of the response we got was: Enngh?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly like that, too. We got emails that just had that one word— No, not really.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, spelled the same way, everyone who sent it, too. That’s what was really amazing. [Laughter] And so basically we’re going to take all three halves of this episode to try to break— revisit that and break that down in some more detail, because we did. And this is sort of the… We’ll call it the conclusion of a planned trilogy, even though we’re stretching the definition of “planned” a little there. [Laughter] Any time it’s concerning me, the definition of the word “planned” is stretched.

But with our episode on the nous and our episode on “What is a spirit?” this is sort of the “What is a soul?” episode. So if you found those other two I just mentioned a little brain-breaking, that’s what we’re talking about tonight.

Fr. Andrew: And I’ll add this, which is: I like to look up etymology to see if possibly that sheds some sort of light on what we’re discussing, but the truth is that the English word, “soul,” it comes from Old English. It heads all the way back to a Proto-Indo-European word that literally means exactly the same thing the whole time. It is a persistent word that has always meant this—which is pretty rare!—but, as a result, sheds no light on how the word is used…

Fr. Stephen: On anything whatsoever, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: ...changed over time, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And we’re even going to see that there’s a— When we talk about, for example, the Hebrew, and thereby the Semitic in general, term for “soul,” because it’s… I mean, it’s the same tri-literal root; it’s the same consonants in Syriac, Arabic, everything—and the Greek word have a huge amount overlap in their respective lexical domains.

Fr. Andrew: And we’ll talk about that!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So there is just sort of… There is a word for this, and this is it. Yeah. So we’re going to start, as is our wont, at the beginning of the book of Genesis. And this is part of where we started back in the aforementioned episode where we started talking about this a little. This is with— Even though this isn’t the first time the word that’s translated “soul” appears, this is where we’re going to start, and then we’re going to back up almost immediately and pick up the previous one. But in Genesis 2:7, we read about the creation of Adam, the creation of man. He’s formed from the dust of the earth, and then…

Fr. Andrew: And then it says… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Pregnant pause for dramatic effect.

Fr. Andrew: I know! I was like: Wait… Is he, like, stage-managing me? I don’t know. And suddenly Genesis 2:7.

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

That’s how the ESV does it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s literally “a living soul,” nephesh chayyah. Notice the language here, though. The language is not what we might expect, based on the way we typically talk about what a soul is in our culture, in that you have this body made of mud, dirt, and then breath is breathed into his nostrils, and he becomes a living soul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, rather than the idea of: “Okay, here’s this soulless body, and God makes a soul and puts it inside,” which I think is the way that people tend to think of it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or they might say, “Well, breath: breath is spirit. Breath, soul: he’s breathing the soul into the body.” But again, that’s not how it’s phrased. That’s not how it gets phrased.

So the soul—as we’ve said before when we’ve just short-hand defined it, the soul is the life of a living being. So what’s really being conveyed here in Genesis 2:7 is that once the breath of life is breathed into the body made of dirt, it becomes alive; it becomes animated, which… the Latin word for anima...

Fr. Andrew: Right, it just means “soul.”

Fr. Stephen: The Latin word is anima. [Laughter] So it becomes ensoulled; it becomes alive. He becomes alive.

So that means that when we’re talking about the soul, what we’re doing is we’re talking about— We have some living entity, be it a human or something else, that is alive. And we’re talking about that life. We’re talking about the life. While you say… You can’t separate that out; you can’t quantify that. You can’t… Despite many efforts in the late 19th and early 20th century, where they would weigh bodies of dying people to see if they could determine how much the soul weighed after death…

Fr. Andrew: I know! I love that stuff.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s not something you can separate and section off in a scientific way. But at the same time, if you’ve ever watched a person die, which in our modern society a lot of people who aren’t priests haven’t… But if you’ve ever had to put a pet down, if you’ve ever watched something that was alive die, you know that there’s a palpable difference between that being, the moment before and the moment after. A change has taken place. The life that was there, that life is now gone.

Even though we can’t scientifically quantify it, we all know this experientially. Experientially, we know that it is in some sense… that the life, the soul, is a thing, but not a thing in the sense we normally talk about it in material terms.

As we sort of briefly mentioned in passing, in terms of Genesis 2:7, the Hebrew word for “soul” is nephesh. Those consonants, those three consonants are shared in every Semitic language I know of as the word for “soul.” Vowels, of course, are different, because words are vocalized differently in different Semitic languages, but the consonants are the same. And the way it is used, because words of course have their meaning from usage, when you survey sort of all the uses of that term available to us is that, in addition to places where it’s obviously talking about life and being alive, it is used to refer to desires and appetites.

So that idea is deeply connected here at sort of the base level from Akkadian on, Semitic languages, the idea of desiring, the idea of appetite, and the idea of being alive. It may not be obvious how that applies to all kinds of creatures. We’ve said before on the show: Everything alive has a soul, but there are different types of souls. So a tree has a soul, a dog has a soul, a human has a soul—but they’re different types of souls. With a tree, it may not be obvious that a tree has appetites and desires, but if you study plants, if you study them at all, you know that they do. Roots grow—

Fr. Andrew: Ents. I mean, come on.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Roots grow toward water. And they’ve even done some crazy studies recently where, if you play sounds of water on a tape recorder, roots will grow toward it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which is weird! They don’t have ears, yet somehow…

Fr. Stephen: Right. So roots grow toward water; leaves grow toward the sun, to get sunlight. So they do. It’s purely at the level of just nourishment, but it’s there.

Animals, of course, have those same kind of drives, plus some additional ones. They’re looking for nourishment, they’re looking for food, they’re looking for these things, but they’re also looking to reproduce—and not only to reproduce the way plants reproduce themselves, but animals, especially as you get higher up, more advanced animals in terms of their socialization and social forms, they have social forms. They will travel in packs; they will have hierarchies with in those packs; they will mate for life; they will raise their young. And so there are these other additional sort of desires and appetites as you move into the type of soul that an animal has.

Then of course when you get to a human, it becomes sort of all the more complex in terms of our desires and our appetites and how we relate to those. It shouldn’t totally shock us, if we learn a little Hebrew and we read Genesis 1:20 and we—yeah?

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, it uses the word “souls” to refer to things other than people.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, specifically God creates all the swarms of “souls” in the waters. It’s referring to, like, fish.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, is this the part where we say that birds don’t have souls?

Fr. Stephen: No, birds do have souls.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m just kidding.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you think they aren’t real!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are people… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Unless you think the CIA has killed them all and replaced them with drones.

Fr. Andrew: I think I have seen theological arguments from Genesis 1:20 saying… Because it says—it says this: “And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with the swarms of living souls (or creatures) and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.’ ” They say, “Well, see, it says the waters have souls in them, but the heavens don’t. It doesn’t say ‘souls’ for birds.” And there’s a whole argument then saying that birds don’t have souls, which—I don’t know what the point of that is, but it’s out there. [Laughter] I’m not kidding! I’ve seen this!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I know. David Hume said, “There is no philosophy so absurd that someone has not held it.” [Laughter] But yeah.

And so when we’re talking about a soul here, to an extent we’re talking about going beyond just the life of a living being; here’s another angle on it: we’re talking about a kind of embodied desiring, a kind of embodied desiring. And that embodied part is important, because this isn’t just “body” in the broad sense the way we use it a lot on Lord of Spirits. This is “body” as in a biological body: biological body has a soul. So we don’t talk about angelic beings having souls.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Hm! Angel souls…

Fr. Stephen: And if someone—I don’t know who would do this; I’m certainly not going to mention his name again, because I’ve mentioned it enough—but if someone were to say that God is a tripersonal, immaterial soul—

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: —this would be a crazy person who should be avoided. [Laughter] I’ll let people do their research on that one, but you can probably guess after last episode. So that obviously doesn’t make any sense. Christ has a human soul, but we’ll get back to that later on, though not to the person.

We’ve also talked about—we did this briefly in the episode on unction—the way in which “soul” and “spirit” are sometimes distinguished and sometimes not.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because for instance sometimes even some of the Church Fathers describe humans as being body and soul; some will describe them as being body, soul, and spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and this has triggered in a lot of circles… And this is before the internet is what’s amazing to me, because usually this is the type of argument that you only get on the internet but whether—which one is right?

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Are humans bipartite or tripartite? Let’s fight about it! [Laughter] So that’s kind of missing the point, because the truth is humans are neither bipartite nor tripartite; they’re wholes. When we make these distinctions, we’re doing exactly that: we’re making distinctions in speech, where we’re distinguishing, for example, the body from the soul. But as we just talked about in Genesis 2:7, distinguishing Adam’s soul from his body in the way in which those terms are used in that verse doesn’t even make sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he becomes a living soul. A soul is not added to him, it’s not included in him: he becomes a living soul.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we’re distinguishing “body” and “soul” in speech, and our primary basis for doing that is, again, that experiential basis of us having encountered a dead body, which is a body without a soul, a body without life in it. So we’ve labeled as “soul” that thing which is different between a living body and one which has died. But it’s on that experiential basis that we make that distinction, not that these are two separate things, not that there’s a ghost in the machine or your soul is in your skull and sort of piloting your body around using levers. What was that man? What was that Eddie Murphy movie? Was it Meet Dave?

Fr. Andrew: I never saw that one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was it. You shouldn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, good. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not only is it not Meet Dave, it’s not even Herman’s Head.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter] I did see Ghost in the Shell, though.

Fr. Stephen: The animated one?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the animé.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, okay. I thought for a minute you meant the live-action one, and I was like: Seriously?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, that’s right. That did come out. I never saw that.

Fr. Stephen: Ugh. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It was a disappointment, evidently.

Fr. Stephen: It was horrific. [Laughter]

So within that— That’s the basis on which we distinguish between “soul” and “body.” So what distinction is being made when someone distinguishes between “soul” and “spirit”? Because a lot of times this seems to be used interchangeably, at least in our speech. We’ll say that someone’s spirit has left their body when they die, in just our common way of speaking. So really what’s going on when those are distinguished, theologically, soul and spirit, is the soul is still being treated as the life of the body, but as we talked about in our episode about what a spirit is, a spirit is an organizing principle of a being or of a collective. It’s sort of the consciousness, that level that organizes it. Distinguishing between soul and spirit is really distinguishing between these two aspects, which we could just refer to as the soul, or we could refer to a person’s spirit being that organizing principle, that is of course not actually separable from their soul, but that we can speak of differently.

Fr. Andrew: Is it like soul functioning in a certain way? Is that—? Of course, these are just sort of distinctions in the mind.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s sort of a power of the soul.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So you’ve got life itself and then life as organizing principle.

Fr. Andrew: Got you.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And that element of the soul is also something that we know experientially, because if you’ve seen a dead body, of anything that was once alive—it doesn’t have to be a human body: an animal body, even a dead plant—what immediately happens, in addition to that change we see where the life is gone, that body also begins to break down and decay. When Adam died, his body went back to the dust. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Went back to the component parts, because the life leaving also took away the organizing principle of the body.

Fr. Andrew: So it dis-integrates, then.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: And I think it would be useful… We might be tempted to try to analogize this to DNA, which is this encoding that tells everything in the body how to grow and all the other things DNA does…

Fr. Stephen: But I thought Noah took DNA from all the species on earth onto his space ark.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That was Titan A.E.

Fr. Stephen: Oh! Sorry, okay. Never mind.

Fr. Andrew: That was another good animated film! [Laughter] Actually, I really liked Titan A.E. It was a fun movie, but it also had a really good soundtrack, much more…

Fr. Stephen: Not as good as the Transformers movie!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true. The original one with “Dare to Be Stupid”?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “You’ve got the touch, you’ve got the power.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I mean DNA, it’s kind of an encoding, but it’s not… It doesn’t have any sort of agency or consciousness. It’s code.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and also ancient people didn’t know it existed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So they’re not talking about it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, then the other thing is that the human soul as spirit, among other things, is not in charge of just the stuff that’s definable by your DNA, but also by the other organisms inside you that have different DNA but nonetheless form part of your body.

Fr. Stephen: You as a collective organism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: When you’re standing there talking to someone, your gut flora is chemically communicating with the gut flora of the person you’re talking to.

Fr. Andrew: You know, that doesn’t feel any less gross than the first time you said that on this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But just think about it next time you’re standing out on the street and talking to people.

Fr. Andrew: I’m trying not to! [Laughter] “Hey, what’re you talking about down there, guys?” Right. So, not DNA, although a certain analogy could be drawn, but it doesn’t go very far.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so when you have other places where that distinction between soul and spirit isn’t made, that distinction is just not being made. [Laughter] It’s like we can distinguish between… And sometimes the Fathers will do this when they’re using the sun as an analogy for a Trinity—and all analogies for the Holy Trinity are bad analogies, de facto, because you’re comparing the uncreated to a created being—but they’ll talk about a sun ray, the light of that ray, and the heat of that ray. We can talk about those separately, but those aren’t three separate things bundled together into a sunbeam, that you could actually divide out.

Fr. Andrew: Add the heat, include the light… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And don’t come at me with this tinted windows thing. You know that’s not what we’re talking about. [Laughter] So that’s what’s going on with that distinction.

There’s another distinction that we do need to make. Way back in the long-ago time, in the before time, when the grups were here, we talked about the nous, and we talked about consciousness and we talked about what that means. So we need to distinguish that faculty of the nous from the soul. They’re not the same thing. In terms of the Hebrew Bible— In the second half we’re going to talk more about Greek, but in the Hebrew Bible there’s not really a word for nous in Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: Does that mean that Hebrews didn’t have nouses? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, they had minds. But you find other words, often “heart” and other words, used to talk about the kind of thing that is spoken of in Greek through nous. An example where you can see that is back in Deuteronomy 11:13; it talks about loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, and strength. People familiar with the New Testament probably already notice something missing. Luke 10:27 adds dianoia, which is what gets translated as “mind,” and the root word there with the preposition in front of it is nous.

Fr. Andrew: But Deuteronomy 11, it has no mind! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So I guess you don’t have to love God with all your mind; you can just do the other things and your mind can wander.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, look. If you can make original series references, so can I.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “Brain, brain, what is brain?” So clearly— And no one argues: in Luke 10:27, nobody argues with Christ, like: “Wait a minute! You added something!” [Laughter] Because very clearly it’s talking about loving the Lord your God with your whole person, and so using— In Greek language, in Greek terminology, that is part of your person, and so that’s why it gets included when the same idea is being expressed in Greek.

So if there isn’t a word for it, how is this distinction expressed back in the Hebrew Bible? Well, there are all of these places in the Old Testament—and plenty more in Orthodox hymnography, but a lot of them in the Old Testament—where you will see the soul being addressed. It will say, “O my soul”—so who’s talking? Clearly in this picture—

Fr. Andrew: “I said to myself…”

Fr. Stephen: —the “I” who is addressing the soul is not the soul, because otherwise it would be like: “I said to myself, ‘Self!’ ” So that’s not what’s being addressed. And sort of Exhibit A of that, that if you go to an Orthodox church for matins—and you should go to matins—

Fr. Andrew: Best services, really.

Fr. Stephen: —in the six psalms at the beginning, one of the psalms that we read is Psalm 103 (or Psalm 102 in the Greek numbering), which begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” So this is this unidentified speaker—unidentified at least in the text—speaking to his own soul. And so, for a little bit of nous-review, not to be confused with the New Zoo Review, when we talked about the nous—and you can go back and listen to that episode again—we talked about how ultimately the nous is a sensory organ, that the mind has a point of attention that it can direct in various ways, and a person can direct that point of attention at their own soul, at the life of their body, at this embodied desiring that is within them, and speak to it.

We’re coming off of Great Lent and Holy Week and Pascha. If you were around for the Great Canon of St. Andrew, all or any part of it, you heard a lot of this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like the kontakion especially.

Fr. Stephen: “O my soul, O my soul…” And talking to it specifically about its desires: its desires, its appetites, and what it was acting upon. As we talked about back in that episode, when we’re talking about nous and we’re talking about our understanding of consciousness, there is this older understanding—and by “older” I mean in Western philosophy, shall we say, if that’s… Western anything is kind of a bogus category, other than Western Christianity, and even that’s iffy.

Fr. Andrew: Western zones.

Fr. Stephen: Western civilization, definitely iffy.

Fr. Andrew: Westerns.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like what is the line between country and Western? Is that not a dotted line?

Fr. Andrew: “Here we got both kinds of music: country and Western.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Soul, rock and roll, coming like a rhino. So there’s this older view, even up to Hegel who thought animals were basically like machines, that consciousness is like a light switch: on-off, binary thing.

Fr. Andrew: You have it or you don’t.

Fr. Stephen: Humans: the lights are on. It’s like something to be a human. Pretty much everything else: lights are off. It’s not like anything. There’s no awareness, there’s no consciousness, there’s no nothing. And you even see this reflected in—man, we’re having a heavy Star Trek night—you go watch “Measure of a Man,” and it’s: Is Data conscious? That’s the whole debate. Is he conscious, is he sentient—what does that mean? They’re arguing whether the lights are on or the lights are off. Is it like something to be him? Well, obviously it is.

This is one of the problems with all these arguments about AI that everybody’s having now. What happens when computers become aware, when they become conscious? That happened a long time ago. Your graphing calculator had a very low level of consciousness—because, as we talked about in that other episode, all consciousness is— Consciousness is on a continuum, and it arises within any ordered system through which information is transferred. That doesn’t mean it’s all human consciousness. We’re back to: What is it like to be a bat?

Fr. Andrew: We actually had someone on YouTube ask, “Is AI a spirit and becomes a soul”—maybe he means it the other way—“if uploaded into a robot body?”

Fr. Stephen: So unless it’s in a biological body, it will never be a soul.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you found a way to create something that would serve to give life to a biological organism, which… Like, that’s not even a trajectory we’re on, creating a soul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Someone else asks, “Is asking ChatGPT a question the same as divination?”

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] No, because if it were, then typing a math problem into a calculator would be divination.

Fr. Andrew: Or Googling.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, would be divination.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t think we have a whole lot to do an episode on AI, but there’s been a whole lot of AI—

Fr. Stephen: Nor would I want to.

Fr. Andrew: —we’ve been interacting with for a long time, everybody. Just because there’s ChatGPT now doesn’t mean there’s suddenly AI.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and your computer is conscious at a very low level. The tectonic activity of the earth is transferring information. The earth itself has a very low level of consciousness. Atoms have a very low level of consciousness.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, I saw that in Avatar!

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a human consciousness. We’re not saying they’re human; that’s what everybody jumps to, like: “Oh, you’re saying it’s got a human personality in it.” You don’t know what it’s like to be a bat, but it’s like something. The lights are on; somebody’s home, but that somebody isn’t a human. But it experiences the world, it processes information, it has memories, it forms plans, it communicates. It’s conscious. There’s a thing. So artificial consciousness, as soon as we started making machines that could process information, receive and process information, they had some low level of consciousness. They’re not biologically alive, and they’re not humans.

Fr. Andrew: And they don’t have souls.

Fr. Stephen: And they don’t have souls, because they’re not biological lifeforms.

And don’t come at me with this Picard, season three, stuff, because that’s a whole other…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I still haven’t watched it!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and I’m not spoiling everything for Fr. Andrew—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: —so don’t even start with that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thank you. I probably will watch it. But my take-away from this is: Data is conscious but does not have a soul.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. There you go, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because it’s not biological, and that’s what we mean by “soul.” Technically, angels and demons are conscious and don’t have souls.

Fr. Andrew: Soulless minions of—what is it? [Laughter] Soulless minions of something. I’ll have to look that up.

Fr. Stephen: It has to be— It doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent and it doesn’t mean they don’t have free will. Anyway. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Soulless minions of Orthodoxy—which is a Deep Space Nine reference.

Fr. Stephen: It is a Star Trek-heavy night. Sorry, people.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true, it’s true! Completely unplanned! This wasn’t in the script!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and unprovoked and unwarranted, but it’s happening. So, yes, consciousness is on this spectrum. And that means that effectively noesis, which is the property of the nous, is something that exists in other forms of life besides humans, but again, not in the same way. There is a unique connection and a unique type of soul—we’re going to get into this more in the second half—that a human has, that is unique and different, as we go on and get further and deeper into our definition of what a soul is. It is different [from] that of any other living thing in creation.

And that is for a reason, because, remember: Humanity is formed in the image of God, humanity is created to continue the creative work of God, which is to put the creation in order and to fill it with life. That includes other living things in creation: that includes animals; that includes plants. Plants and animals are linked. They also eat each other, but— We put them in order and we foster that life. This is why, as we’ve talked about before, the garden is sort of the perfect image of this. A garden is in order, and it is in good order, but that good order has not produced sterility; rather, that good order has allowed that life within the garden to flourish. So it’s that perfect combination of the two.

So when humanity is created and is sent to turn the world— originally to turn the world into a garden, into paradise, part of that includes the world being humanized: the inhuman parts of the world being humanized by being put in order and being filled with life. Plants being cultivated by humans, animals being domesticated by humans. And through those, they are transformed. We don’t have time to go through all this here, but there are some good documentaries online about the history of wheat. That may sound boring, but go find out what wild wheat looked like before human agriculture began on this planet.

Fr. Andrew: Well, even dogs— Dogs. It’s hard to believe that everything we call a dog is in fact the same species, but it sure is! I mean, St. Bernards and chihuahuas are the same species.

Fr. Stephen: And close to the same species—as in, they can interbreed—with a wolf.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But they’ve been humanized, through human intervention, and that’s changed them and transformed them in ways that most of us consider positive.

The rest of creation finds its fullest connection to God through humanity, ideally, but this is also why the fact that that’s how creation can find its fulfillment is through humanity and humanity finds its fulfillment in the humanity of Christ— That also means that when humans turn to sin and evil—as Adam found out, “Cursed is the ground because of you”—that also has effects on the rest of creation and can have the opposite effect of disorder, sterility—on the rest of creation due to our sin, because we form the rest of creation after ourselves. And if we’re disconnected from God, then the rest of creation will be, too, when we get done with it.

So if the soul is the life of a living being—and we’ve talked a little bit more about soul, but we have to also define the word “life.” We’ve defined it in kind of negative, experiential terms—life is that thing that is gone when something dies—but that’s a negative definition, not a positive definition. It’s sort of not-being-dead; it’s the thing you lose when something dies. But we actually get, from St. John in his gospel a handy definition of what life is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, this is from Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. He says this in John 17:3:

And this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s your definition of life. Life is knowing God the Father and knowing Jesus Christ. And you come to do the former through the latter. You come to know the Father by coming to know our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what life is. And so in the past, several times on Lord of Spirits, we’ve referred to St. John of Damascus’s discussion on the difference between physical death and spiritual death. He says that physical death is the separation of the soul from the body—the soul leaving the body; the life departs from the body—and spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s way worse.

Fr. Stephen: Right, way worse. But what we see, and what Christ says here in St. John’s gospel, is that then there is a corresponding distinction and connection between physical life and spiritual life. So physical life is the connection, the union, of the soul with the body, a la Genesis 2:7 where we started out. That’s physical life. And then that means that spiritual life is the connection of the soul to God. And as we’ve talked about when we’ve talked about the distinction before, spiritual death is the real death; physical death is the result, is the inevitable result of spiritual death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so if spiritual life is the connection of the soul with God, then what we see with God breathing into Adam and him becoming a living soul, what we’re seeing there is Adam becoming alive and being connected with God kind of all at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s the breath of God that’s breathed into him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why— I mean, I’ve seen— I can’t remember who now, but I’ve seen at least one Father say man is body, soul, and Holy Spirit, to kind of express this idea about connection with God.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so one of our definitions then here— If this is our definition of life, and if soul, if the soul of a living being is the life of the living being, then the soul represents the connection to God of a living being, through which it has physical biological life. That means everything living is connected to God. Not everything is God, is part of God—

Fr. Andrew: It’s not Avatar all over again?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —but is connected to God. And so this is why we see what we see about blood in the Bible, starting in Genesis 9. So Genesis 9: the flood is over. Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives spill out of the ark, and God gives them permission to eat animals, to kill and eat animals for food. But immediately you can’t eat blood or drink blood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he gives that proviso when he gives that permission.

Fr. Stephen: Because the blood of the thing is the life of the thing, and that life belongs to God. You can’t consume it. You have to pour it out; you have to return it to God. The blood of sacrifice, says Leviticus, is poured out at the base of the altar. You can’t consume it, because it’s the life. And then in that same context in Genesis 9, right there at the same time that he’s saying this, he says: This applies in a unique and special way to human blood, because humanity is made in the image of God. And because humanity is made in the image of God, he will demand an account for every drop of human blood spilled. And he goes on to say not only from every person who spills human blood, but from every animal that spills human blood, he’s going to demand an account. The lion that eats a guy is going to have to answer to God for it is literally what the text says. And that’s a way the Scriptures use to kind of take something to an extreme, to say: Here’s how serious this is.

Fr. Andrew: Start to think: When will we get to see the animal judgment? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not to be taken literally… But it’s just like at the end of Jonah, which we heard on Holy Saturday, there’s all these people who don’t know their right hand from their left—and many cattle. [Laughter] Think of the cows, Jonah!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Not the livestock!

Fr. Stephen: That’s this idea of going to the extreme. And so it’s the same thing here, that human life is the connection to God, and so taking life is a very serious matter.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. All right, we’re going to go ahead and take our first break, and we’ll be right back with the next part of The Lord of Spirits

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that was awful.

Fr. Andrew: I had no idea that you had done an ad read for the book!

Fr. Stephen: I did that late last night, that’s how quick the turnaround was.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: And I basically just did Telly Savalas’s [Players] Club commercial from 1987.

Fr. Andrew: I recognized the intonation and the inflections, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Who loves you, baby? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: Also the Voice of Steve cut you right off on the outro. Did you notice that?

Fr. Andrew: He did! And all you got was: “—Stephen De Young will be right back!” Like: Oh, I guess I’m not invited to the second half.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and then he changed my pronouns to “they.” [Laughter] That was… That was odd. I’ll have to dock his pay for this episode.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! Whoo. All things will become Steve.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, pretty much. They’ve already changed your name to Stephen, so.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know. I had someone at a speaking engagement give me a book, and they inscribed it: “To Fr. Stephen.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Is it something I’d like?

Fr. Andrew: I’ve considered sending these to you, actually! They’re like: “Could you send this to him?”—no.

So this is the second half of the show, and we’re ready to take your calls. So you can call us at 855-AF-RADIO; 855-237-2346. Let’s talk about souls.

Fr. Stephen: So you get a little read-out when there’s a call, right?

Fr. Andrew: I do. A thing pops up on my screen that says who’s calling.

Fr. Stephen: With a topic?

Fr. Andrew: And it has their name, often wherever their phone is from, which might not be where they’re from, and sometimes whatever it is they’re calling about. That’s all courtesy of Trudi.

Fr. Stephen: So does Trudi know how to spell: “Whaaa?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: [Noises of confusion]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Might be a skill she needs to develop in the immediate future somehow.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! Yeah, we actually do have— She just said to me she does know how to spell— She didn’t spell it out; she just told me she knows.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. Good. Does she use the Canadian spelling, though? I think there’s a u; there’s an extra u.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. She does have kind of a Canadian accent. I don’t know if that comes through with the spelling as well. But, yeah, we actually do have a call coming in. So we have Paul calling in from Texas, who has a question about the spirit as an organizing principle and what the relationship of that is to consciousness. So, Paul in Texas, are you there?

Paul from Texas: I am here, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Paul from Texas, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Paul from Texas: Thank you very much. Okay, so I had a much more in-depth question, but y’all just basically demolished it with the first half, so…

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Okay, you’re welcome.

Paul from Texas: No, thank you, thank you. [Laughter] You got me out of some bad habits.

Fr. Stephen: I would prefer that we answered it rather than just demolishing it, but… [Laughter]

Paul from Texas: Ha! Well, in doing so, you did answer it. You just demolished some pre-conceived conceptions I had.

Fr. Andrew: Does this mean we get to make Demolition Man references now, because I am so ready for that.

Fr. Stephen: I have spent the last four or five weeks overlapping Pascha trying to get all of the Zoomer members of my congregation to watch Demolition Man.

Fr. Andrew: It’s such a fun movie!

Fr. Stephen: I successfully got them to watch They Live, which is an American classic. Now we’re on to Demolition Man. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Sorry.

Paul from Texas: Wonderful.

Fr. Andrew: You probably weren’t expecting us to make Demolition Man— Have you seen that movie, Paul?

Paul from Texas: I have not. I don’t know if I’m too young or what. I don’t know what the deal is.

Fr. Andrew: It’s from the ‘90s…

Fr. Stephen: You need to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s great, especially if you’ve ever read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Paul from Texas: I cannot say that I have, but I can add that to the list.

Fr. Andrew: So read that book first and then watch the movie, because the movie is way funnier if you’ve read that book.

Paul from Texas: Roger that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It is muscular action heroes living in a soy future.

Paul from Texas: Soy future! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Leary, Wesley Snipes…

Fr. Stephen: Wesley Snipes, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, what’s not to love? It’s so fun, yes. Okay, sorry, Paul.

Fr. Stephen: Now your actual question. [Laughter]

Paul from Texas: Okay, so I’ve got kind of little chunks here. The first is you said that consciousness is basically going to be a factor for any kind of organized system, and you discussed—leaving aside the notion that you said the spirit is kind of like an aspect of the soul in the sense that it’s the organizing principle of it—since there can be spirits without souls, does that mean that spirits are organizing principles, and consciousness is a factor of all organizing systems, that consciousness is going to be present in any form of spirit, depending on the level?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Paul from Texas: Wonderful, yes. A classic Fr. De Young. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Yes.”

Paul from Texas: And secondarily, whenever we talk about the fact that you also said it’s our job to organize basically the creation—that’s the job that God gave us—in a manner of speaking, does that make us, by merit of Christ’s relationship with us and how he unites us with God, the organizing principle for the rest of creation and as a part of the reason that everything is a mess? Could that be said in light of what you’re teaching us now as being—? Since we’re at war, so to speak—not “so to speak”: we are at war with the dark powers—it’s our weakness and submission, willingly, unfortunately, too many times, with the dark spirits—that it’s that war of organizing principles that then causes the problems with reality as we know it?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] Yeah, that’s what we talk about— When we talk about creation being subjected to futility through human sin, that’s what we’re talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also that the creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God. It’s really that you could also put that as the creation’s ready for its patron saints.

Paul from Texas: Oh! Very nice.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not too jump too far ahead, but you are tracking with where we’re going. You are tracking this.

Paul from Texas: Okay, now if you’ll permit me one final little question?

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Paul from Texas: Okay, thank you.

Fr. Stephen: That was it. That was— That was the question.

Paul from Texas: No, no, no, no! [Laughter] Like the D&D movie.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Paul from Texas: You also had made mention—I think it was in the spirit episode—that we’re not our spirits, so to speak: we’re our bodies. I definitely understand that, because even our awareness of ourselves, our aggregation of memories and everything, comes from the body; we wouldn’t have it without it. But could you elaborate on that in light of the fact that getting rid of the timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly—or however that order goes; I don’t watch Dr. Who—leaving that aside, the saints are hypothetically at the throne of God without their bodies until we unite with them and we all get resurrected together. So how do they maintain their sense of selves without their bodies if we are our bodies by necessity? Am I just assuming too much of what you said by assuming that that means at all times?

Fr. Stephen: You have given us a perfect segue to our second half.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Paul from Texas: [Laughter] Oh no!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so just keep listening, Paul from Texas.

Fr. Stephen: You’re tracking with us! You are tracking with us: this is good.

Paul from Texas: Oh, no, I definitely want to. Last year after you played havoc with the Tetris set of what I had thought of before, I definitely wanted to make sure I was following along!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, we will just grab your Etch-a-sketch and shake it violently. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say—this is a joke you’ll get later, but you do need to learn how to use the three seashells.

Paul from Texas: Three seashells? Okay. Okay, I’ll hold onto that one! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Make sure you watch the movie we suggested. [Laughter]

Paul from Texas: I’ll read the book first. I got you, I got you!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, okay. Thank you very much for calling, Paul.

Paul from Texas: Thank you very much, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so we also have Nathan, calling from the great state of Kentucky. So, Nathan, are you there?

Nathan: Yes, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Welcome, Nathan, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Nathan: Well, this talk about—this came to me with your unction episode, that we are our bodies and that there’s— If there’s not really a separate self, it made me wonder, then, if you have a loved one who is hit with dementia or Alzheimer’s, does that mean the person you knew and lost is gone, like a hard drive just being wiped out?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I… Number one, I would not say that they’re— We talk about them as being sort of “not there.” That’s the language that we use, but it’s… Number one, I’m not a psychologist; I’m not a doctor or anything like that, but my understanding of the condition is that it’s an impairment of the way that the mind within, the mind functions as it manifests itself to us. That doesn’t mean that they’re gone or that they’re lost, because still there’s life in the body. There’s still that organizing principle even if it’s functioning at what might appear to us a lower level of consciousness at the moment. But they’re still themselves, even if there’s all kinds of wacky behavior going on, or maybe sometimes almost no behavior going on, because there’s all kinds of levels of dementia. There’s the kind where you just forget stuff, and then there’s all the way to the point where you’re just lying there.

Nathan: Or when they behave like a completely different person, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I’ve known people—I’ve done pastoral work with people where their dementia advances and they become very violent, for instance, or they start cussing a lot, whereas they never would have—those kind of restraints would have been in place before; they wouldn’t have done that stuff. They would not have obeyed those impulses. But I would definitely not say that their soul is gone, because the body is still alive. I don’t know. Father, do you want to add or correct or adjust?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. To me, the identification of a person with their living body does the opposite. If you are your soul and your soul is some kind of psychological self or something, then it would seem to me that that’s where you’re kind of losing a person, and that’s also where you get arguments, like Peter Singer back in the day, that unborn children and even infants aren’t human. If you are embodied desiring, if you are a living soul, [if] you are a body that is animated—that is what you are as a person—then a fetus in the womb, a six-month-old, a three-year-old, a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, a 75-year-old, an 85-year-old with dementia is still that person, regardless of their ability to interact, regardless of their facility with language, regardless of how their memory is, regardless of what they’re able to articulate, what math they can do, what abstract concepts they can comprehend. They’re still a human person and they’re still the same human person, just at different stages in their life—but they’re still the person.

So to me, this is an important distinction to make for that reason. If the body’s just a husk and the “real you” is just this nebulous thing within, if you lose contact with that nebulous thing within, you might be inclined to think that the person is gone, even though the person is standing right there in front of you.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense to you, Nathan?

Nathan: Not entirely, but I’ll keep thinking on it. I appreciate it! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Sure.

Fr. Andrew: Chew on it a while; see what you can do with that. Yeah, it’s a tough— It’s a mind-bending thing, because it’s not how we’re used to thinking. We don’t tend to think of ourselves as being bodies. We tend to say I have a body, not that I am a body—but you are. You’re a souled body. You’re a soul man, if I may. [Laughter] That’s what I wanted to call the episode, by the way, but Fr. Stephen—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he wanted to name this episode after one of the most racially offensive movies of the 1980s.

Fr. Andrew: No, not the movie, the song! The song! Man! [Laughter] I never even saw the movie! Typical, I know, but… “Soul Man,” it’s a great song.

Fr. Stephen: I’m protecting you from yourself, once again.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you so much. [Laughter] All right, thank you very much, Nathan, for calling in. All right, rolling on.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. So, book has been plugged, callers have been talked with—

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Apologies to fans of C. Thomas Howell, though. If you’re a fan of C. Thomas Howell, like, who even are you? [Laughter] Anyway. Yes, so now we’re going to continue talking about souls. Now we’re moving on to Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Greek souls! It’s like Greek Easter.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, with lemon.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. They’re all named… Spiro!

Fr. Stephen: The Greek word for “soul,” famously, is psyche, sometimes pronounced in English “SYK-ee.” It’s where we get “psychology,” etc., “psychic.” But it literally, etymologically, refers to not just breath but breath in terms of the act of breathing. And so again, if we’re defining the soul experientially as that thing which is gone when something that was alive dies, one of the most obvious features if you’re dealing with humans and animals is they stop breathing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why then we have the common expressions of someone “breathing his last,” all that kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that seems an obvious connection in terms of why this word, this Greek word. But the Greek word psyche also includes the idea of will and desire. Just like we talked about the Hebrew term including kind of desire and appetite, that idea is included; also the idea of will. Now this is the concept of the natural will, not the way we commonly use “will” when we talk about free will, like making choices. We won’t go down the whole St. Maximus the Confessor rabbit-hole right now on that, but the natural will is something which every living being has, which is sort of the internal push, the internal motor that directs them to continue living and to grow and to thrive. The acorn has the same nature as the oak tree, but there is this internal force connected to its life, connected to its soul, that causes it to sprout and bud and grow and stretch out the roots and stretch out the branches. That’s what we’re talking about with the natural will—like, I will live, I will grow, I will thrive, that kind of thing—whereas the will in terms of decision-making, in terms of making choices is: “I’m going to have Apple Jacks instead of Golden Grahams this morning for breakfast,” which is usually a good choice—

Fr. Andrew: Really? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But if you get the original recipe Golden Grahams with the honey in the recipe, that might win.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I remember those. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You don’t want them new-fangled Golden Grahams.

Fr. Andrew: I had pancakes for breakfast.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So it’s that kind of will that we’re talking about in the soul, that the soul has this sort of internal drive. And so in Greek thought—so when we talk about Greek thought, we’re talking about Greek philosophy, basically. In Greek thought there are these different powers of the soul, and not everything that has a soul has all of these powers. In fact, which powers of the soul a given living creature possesses is going to determine kind of what kind of creature it is.

At the base level, everything that has a soul—everything that’s animate; everything that’s alive—has what’s sometimes called the vegetative or nutritive power of the soul, which is basically: eat, stay alive—

Fr. Andrew: Grow.

Fr. Stephen: —reproduce. And that’s plants, animals, humans: all of them have this.

Then there is the desiring part. Usually in Greek this is epithimia, which is shared by animals and humans. This is more that animal level that includes some of those things we talked about in the first half, like mating for life, caring for offspring, these more advanced things, but also includes, for example, animals will eat more than they need to eat to survive. They have other kinds of desires. They have social desires, other kinds of desires that they want, to seek to be fulfilled beyond just eating the minimum to survive, procreating, surviving the elements. There are sort of more advanced desires than that.

And then humans only, in Greek thought, have the noetic power of the soul. In Greek thought, the nous is seen as a power of the soul; it is reduced to and made part of, essentially, the soul. Of course, as we mentioned, only humans have it in Greek thought; everything else is not conscious: everything else, lights off, in this ancient Greek thought. But, because— Notice, the nous is folded into the soul, which is this separate capacity in sort of Jewish and Christian thought, is folded in Greek thought into the soul. And so that means the soul becomes now self-contained. The soul contains all the powers of the human, and therefore the soul, being so self-contained, can be understood as being the whole self.

And so you see this reflected especially in Plato if you read the Timaeus, the parts of it that aren’t corrupt. [Laughter] If you read the Timeaus, Plato’s setting out— Because Plato here… Now, this is going to sound totally ridiculous, and it is kind of ridiculous, but I want to be fair to Plato even as I criticize him. Plato… The Timaeus contains Plato’s creation myth, essentially, what passes for a creation story for him, at least, but he presents it, as he usually does with such things, as “the likely story.” So he is not intending us to take this totally literally. Let me say that as a proviso before I say what he said, that he is not intending us to take this totally literally, I don’t think.

In the Timaeus, he says that when humans first come into existence, they were just heads, spherical heads.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just a fun image.

Fr. Stephen: Spherical heads with the soul inside. And the head was basically there so you’d have a skull to protect your self and keep you from dying.

Fr. Andrew: They’re like beholders!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, without all the eyestalks, and unable to float, because he says the big problem with humans just being heads is that as they were rolling around, they would roll into ditches and get stuck places. [Laughter] Again, he’s not intending us necessarily to take this literally. And therefore they needed to develop bodies by necessity, to sort of carry the head around and feed themselves and interact with things in order to keep the head alive, to keep the soul in the head.

But beyond the story sounding kind of goofy, the point he’s conveying—and it goes all through Plato’s writings, and is the earmark, possibly, of the Platonic tradition—is this kind of dualism, where the body is a vehicle that transports the soul around.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— This is basically our modern conception, effectively. I mean, I’m sure we owe a bunch to Descartes as well, but still it’s basically Plato. That’s the way most people think about souls and bodies.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This is embedded even in our language, in ways we don’t realize. For example, the Greek word organon literally means a tool or an instrument. Your bodily organs or your body as an organ or an organism: it’s your tool; it’s your instrument that you’re using. So this is Plato’s view. This gets widely endorsed in the West. It’s not all St. Augustine’s fault. It’s partly St. Augustine’s fault; Boethius more so: looking at you, Consolation of Philosophy, Anselm even more so.

So this view carries through, and this isn’t a view that gets rejected later in Western Christianity. In fact, famously, John Calvin agreeingly quotes Plato, that the body is the prison-house of the soul. So this carries through, and it is deeply in Western culture. And in fact we’re even used to talking about—and sometimes even our liturgical translations even unhelpfully use this language—that talk about “the immortal soul.” So they’ll say that a saint did not attend to the body, which is mortal, but attended to the immortal soul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the apolytikion, I think, for female monastics.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s not a good translation. It says—it’s literally: “Did not attend to the body, which dies; but to the soul, which is undying,” which is not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: As immortal, right.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Because “immortal” means does not have the property of mortality, and thereby implies that, unlike what we clearly see in Genesis 3 and the distinction we were talking about with spiritual death and physical death, that the soul is innately immortal and that the body is innately mortal—neither of which is true in Genesis 3. In Genesis 2, Adam is created immortal because his soul is connected to God, which gives life to his soul which gives life to his body. When he is expelled from paradise, he becomes mortal in that his soul is cut off from God and therefore his body begins to die.

So our soul is just as mortal as our body, but what it means for a soul to die—spiritual death—and what it means for a body to die, while parallel, is not identical. Plato, on the other hand: the soul is immortal, no matter what.

Fr. Andrew: And pre-existent, too, right?

Fr. Stephen: yes, pre-existent, and will continue to exist. It’s not dependent on God’s sustenance, it’s not dependent—of course he doesn’t have the Jewish or Christian God—it’s not dependent on anything. It is immortal. Therefore he has reincarnation. So the soul gets born in one body, another body, another body—because it’s immortal! So for him, learning is just remembering stuff, because in between… Hm?

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, the big math problem I always had with reincarnation is that there’s more people now than there have ever been. So are there new souls being created or souls…

Fr. Stephen: There are different answers, if you ask people who believe in reincarnation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Some of them think they split.

Fr. Andrew: They split, yeah, which explains why so many people can claim to have been— Because a lot of people, when they talk about their past lives or whatever, it’s interesting how many people all claim to have been the same one past person, so I guess if you have the split idea, then that kind of works out.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The thing here is that this is the identical soul just inhabiting another body for Plato. And in between—one body dies, soul goes off to the heavens, to the world of forms, the eternal world, beholds all these things, gets dunked in the Acherusian lake—call-back to an old episode, for all you old heads out there in Lord of Spirits land—and because of that dip in the lake forgets everything.

Fr. Andrew: How long till my soul gets it right?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And then you’re born again in a new body, and over the course you remember things. Of course, Plato had an experiment to prove this, where he took a slave boy and drew some geometric shapes in the sand and said, “Look! He can understand it and he’s a slave; they’re idiots.” [Laughter] “So clearly his soul lived before.” That’s a tl;dr version, but I’m not misrepresenting it. That is what he basically says.

Yes, the soul doesn’t— Adam’s soul, as we saw, did not pre-exist.

Fr. Andrew: No, the body existed before his soulfulness.

Fr. Stephen: Souls do not pre-exist. They don’t exist as spheres like Origen thought. They don’t exist as rough spheres the way Plato thought. They don’t pre-exist in a divine decree somewhere, like John Calvin thought. They can’t. They’re the life of a biological creature.

When, at conception, a person becomes alive, there’s a soul there, because that being, that creature, is connected to God who is giving it life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they’re alive!

Fr. Stephen: He, she, life. That would be assigned later, I guess. That was a joke.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Just clarifying. So it is this connection. This means, as we talked about in the “Unctuous” episode, that our life in this world is not sort of the unfolding of the identity of our soul that already exists…

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s no Freaky Friday. You can’t switch. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And there’s no “I need to go out and discover who I really am”; this is stuff is sort of “set” eternally and then it just plays out a la Calvin, or this stuff is sort of set eternally but I discover it about myself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and one of the big problems with this model is that it basically precludes the possibility of repentance.

Fr. Stephen: Of change of any kind.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, repentance being the worst problem.

Fr. Andrew: “It’s just who I am.” Well, change who you are! You can change: that’s the good news! You can change who you are! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, because as long as you are alive—yeah. So as we said in the “Unctuous” episode, “If you weren’t you, you wouldn’t be you.” [Laughter] So if I had been born in 11th-century France, I would not be “Fr. Stephen De Young, but in 11th-century France,” I would be a completely different person.

Fr. Andrew: Be: Père Étienne De Jeune! [Laughter] Just kidding!

Fr. Stephen: There would not be… There would be no commonalities for you to be able to say that was me. That would be a nonsensical statement that that would be me. How would it be me? That’s another person.

The time you live, the place you live, the experiences you have, the relationships you have with other people—all of this is what makes you you. The decisions you make—this makes you you. The soul’s not like this independently existing thing that could’ve been dropped anywhere, could’ve been dropped into another place and another time and that would have meaningfully been you at that time and place.

So as our callers both kind of mentioned, your body is far more related to your identity than your soul is. Souls are more alike than bodies—if they’re human souls. The difference between my soul and Fr. Andrew’s soul, if we can even talk about this—if you can extract this in some way and observe it in some way and compare the two—they’re both human souls, and there’s not a lot of difference.

This goes against—I mean, not to name names, but Apollinarianism, which of course was the ancient heresy—still cropping up today, unfortunately, among certain folks—that Christ did not have a human soul.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that he— The Logos inhabits his body and functions the way that a soul would function.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so his body is essentially inanimate; his body is just a body that’s animated by the second Person of the Holy Trinity coming and animating it or puppeting it or using it as an instrument, a la Plato.

Fr. Andrew: Like a mech.

Fr. Stephen: This is as opposed to the Orthodox belief, which is that Christ has a human soul. He has a perfect human soul, which represents the perfect unity. If, as we’re saying, the human soul is the connection between the human and God, then Christ has a perfect human soul which represents the perfect unity of humanity with God. And that’s the whole basis for our understanding of salvation. This is why St. Gregory the Theologian says that if you believe Apollinarianism, salvation as Christians understand it is impossible.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because the human soul has not been deified then.

Fr. Stephen: The human has not been connected to God in Christ. God just showed up in a human suit—which doesn’t transform humanity, doesn’t transform human nature.

And so this— Again, I won’t name names. There are some— But now I get to be a little self-critical. Now I get to talk about some Orthodox people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Yay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] In our modern age— And I’m sure there are non-Orthodox people saying the same things, so I don’t think we’ve cornered the market on this and it just crept into certain folks in the Orthodox world. In our current world of confusion about sex, gender, et al., where a lot of folks seem to not even know the difference between the two, occasionally you will see even these Orthodox people, and I’m sure plenty of others, talk about how: “Oh, the soul doesn’t have gender. The soul doesn’t have biological sex,” and try to use this as some kind of argument for something in terms of gender theory. And it’s not even real gender theory; it’s like this weird, watered-down cultural thing, version.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s kind of trying to correct an error with another error.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but here’s the thing. The answer to that is: Yeah, human souls are kind of human souls.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because inasmuch as that human body is a human body, its soul is the life of that body, not some other body.

Fr. Stephen: Part and parcel of what Genesis 1 teaches us is that, because male humans and female humans are both humans, they both have human souls. This is not a big revelation. Again, it’s your body that differentiates you. It’s not that every person in the world— How ridiculous would it be for someone to come and say, “Everyone in the world has the same body but a completely different soul”? That would be absurd. But that’s just one step beyond the absurdity of Platonism broadly constructed, which is: Souls are all completely— All souls are completely unique and different, but bodies are interchangeable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— That’s what we’re watching work out in the culture in general now, is that bodies are just so much parts they’re like Legos.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, yes, human souls are all the same, and your biological body is either—if you’re a human, not an anemone—if you’re human is either biologically male, biologically female, or intersexed. And then, beyond that, gender is the social construct of, in our culture: here is how men dress, act, present themselves; here’s how women act, dress, present themselves. And that changes over time; the biology doesn’t. Reproduction works the same way. If you don’t know where babies come from, that’s not my job. [Laughter] But that hasn’t changed. That is a trans-historical human constant, where babies come from, biologically.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, it is. The sheer facticity?

Fr. Stephen: The brute facticity? Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: The brute facticity of existence.

Fr. Stephen: Our identity is not this internal thing that’s eternal that we’re born with and that we later discover. Our identity is something that is formed over the course of our life through our choices, our experiences, our relationships, externally, with other people. What we do, whom we love, the family structures, the community structures we become a part of, and how we operate within them—that’s what forms our identity.

The big problem with identity in our culture is that everyone is so isolated and alienated from everyone else that they’re sitting in front of their computer and they don’t know who they are because they don’t have any of these relationships or community structures or family or social structures. Aristotle made this plain a long time ago: If you live alone, you can’t be human. If you live alone, you’re either a beast or a god. Animals can live alone; he thought the gods could hypothetically live alone—but humans can’t. So you’re either going to have to become superhuman, like, say, St. Anthony, who became like God out in the desert, or you’re going to become subhuman. And unfortunately our culture and society is trying to grind us all down into subhumanity by isolating and alienating us. But the way to fight back against that, the way to understand who you are, the way to become the person God created you to be, is to go and find it outside in relationship with other people, in love shared with other people.

Your animate body is an object of the world, and it’s the subject in all of these relationships. Nobody interacts with someone else’s soul. You may tell your girlfriend, as you gaze into her eyes, that you’re staring into her soul, but…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Like: “Look, look! I can see it in there! I can see it. It’s right behind the left…” Wait.

Fr. Stephen: We’re not going to hate the player, but we’re going to hate the game on that one. It’s nonsense. And as you progress through Western philosophy, you go even beyond Plato, where the soul becomes sort of the thing in itself. Rather than seeing the soul as the connection, the active connection and relationship between a created living thing and God, the soul is just seen as itself sort of an object, a sort of you. This then affects and distorts how we understand—and our first caller was already sort of leading into this—that the unique nature of the human soul and the unique relationship between humanity and God… So the language that we started using from the beginning of this show, when we talked about the spiritual world and the material world, and one of the things we tried to hammer home, especially in the early episodes, is that these are not two separate things, but that these are overlaid; these are really one thing, together, differently perceived.

Fr. Andrew: That’s why I like the words “unseen” and “seen,” because it’s very good shorthand for describing the fact that there is this one world.

Fr. Stephen: And there are seen elements and unseen elements: creation visible and invisible, as the Creed says.

Fr. Andrew: Which is literally a dogma of our faith.

Fr. Stephen: One creation: there’s visible and invisible parts. Sometimes when people hear the Orthodox language of “Well, humans have—” And it’s said in different ways that are kind of sloppy. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s just they give the wrong impression, based on all of this cultural baggage. They’ll say, “Well, humans have a material part and an immaterial part, so they’re sort of the bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world.” And what that kind of makes it sound like, if you’ve got a bad case of Plato-brain from growing up in our culture, is: “Well, my soul is living in the spiritual world, or at least potentially could, and my body is living here in the material world.” And so you go and do DMT or something to “enter the spiritual world,” or try different meditative practices to “enter the spiritual world and leave the material world behind” and all of this, and this is a fundamental misconstrual of what that all means.

Fr. Andrew: No astral projection, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, not once. [Laughter] But what we’re talking about, when we talking about humans being that bridge, it’s precisely having this unique connection to God in Christ, because remember life is not only knowing God the Father but also knowing Jesus Christ whom he sent. It’s through Christ that this connection, this special human connection, comes into being. So it is that we are connected to God and to what God is doing in the world, both the visible and invisible creation, that allows us to serve that bridge, and why the transfiguration, the redemption of the world, happens through its humanization, because in Christ humanization becomes divinization. But we’ll talk about that more in the third half.

But last note here, this is why, as we mentioned before in the unction episode, bodily resurrection is so critically important to Christianity, and why, when St. Paul brought up resurrection, bodily resurrection, in Athens, they all laughed at him and told him to buzz off.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a complete joke in the pagan world.

Fr. Stephen: Other than St. Dionysios and St. Hierotheos. But other than them! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We will hear you again.

Fr. Stephen: Because that was absurd to them. Because what does it imply? It implies that my body is an intrinsic part of my identity, which flies against everything they believed about the soul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why would you want that back?

Fr. Stephen: Because this Jewish conception, this Israelite conception, this Hebrew conception, Second Temple Jewish, Christian conception is totally different [from] the Greek philosophical perspective of what the soul is, as a self contained, the whole self, the person themselves, and the body is just… interchangeable whatever.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that wraps up the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve. Got it right this time. I appreciate that.

Fr. Stephen: He threw you a bone.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed. We do have a caller, but before we take you, caller, I just want to mention we are still selling tickets for the Lord of Spirits conference, to be held at the end of October at the Antiochian Village in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. You can go to store.ancientfaith.com/events and get your tickets. There’s only, I think— I don’t know, a couple dozen spots left. We’re looking at close to 250 people coming. It’s pretty great.

And there now—there are cabins! Because we’ve sold out the Antiochian Conference Center completely. But now you can actually get cabins at the camp, which is right next to the conference center, and you can fit eight people into each one of those cabins. It’s much cheaper, but it’s not quite the level of amenities that you would get down at the conference center or at some other hotel or whatever, but it is a very cheap option for lodging. Again, that’s store.ancientfaith.com/events. It’s going to be a whole, whole lot of fun come the end of October! I fully expect to see at least one person in a bat costume. I’m not telling anybody to do that, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen.

Fr. Stephen: Let me just say if you do get one of these last tickets and you decide to stay in one of the cabins, and when you get to the cabins you find like a really weird, gross-looking leather-bound book and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, do not play the tape.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good advice for life.

Fr. Stephen: I’m just saying, is all.

Fr. Andrew: From Fr. Stephen De Young.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t play the tape. We will have a lot of clergy on site for exorcisms, but still… [Laughter] We want this to just be a fun, cool weekend.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t play it forward; definitely don’t play it backwards.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t need all that hassle.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. So we do have a caller. We have our friend, Samuel from Virginia, God’s chosen country, calling in. So, Samuel, are you there?

Samuel from Virginia: Yeah, I am there, Father.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast, Samuel from Virginia. What is on your mind?

Samuel from Virginia: Well, when I was hearing you talk about the human soul being a unique thing, I was wondering how that relates to man being created in the image of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think one particular element, as we’ve talked about the image of God many times on the podcast, is that we are imagers of God. So the human soul is that connection to God. Everything that has a soul is connected to God, but we’re connected to God in a unique way, in a human way. And we image God in the world in a way that everything else doesn’t. That is at least the connection that I would immediately make, pun fully intended. Father, I don’t know—what would you add to that or expand outwards?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, and that of course is grounded ultimately in Christ and in the union of our shared humanity with God in Christ and what that means for humanity. Christ did not become incarnate as any other kind of creature, angel or otherwise. We tend to— This is the thing from an Ecumenical Council that I find we talk about the least. Chalcedon said that Christ is, according to his divine nature, consubstantial with the Father and the Spirit, and, according to his humanity, consubstantial with us.

And even though our Christology is very clear about this, there still tends to be a mode of thinking when it comes to the Incarnation that God became a man, with our concept of individual, an individual human person, and not that Christ represents the union of humanity that we share with him, with God. And especially when we’re talking about the human soul, and also when we’re talking about the image of God, because this is where the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff comes in. If you look at an icon of the creation of Adam, the way him being created in the image of God is expressed in our iconography is that you have Christ there shaping his body, and he looks like Jesus. That’s sort of our iconographic way of expressing that. From the get-go, there’s this unique connection and therefore a uniqueness to the human soul and connection to God, beyond other living creatures, that is part and parcel of that imaging.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Samuel?

Samuel from Virginia: It kind of makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for calling. We’ll probably talk to you again in the future, I am sure, because you are a repeat caller!

Samuel from Virginia: Yep. Christ is risen.

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t care what you say. I’m going to say: Indeed he is risen.

Fr. Andrew: You can say “indeed.” It’s fine! It’s not the most euphonious way of saying it in English, but it’s okay. It’s all right. I’m not going to correct anybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In person.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well. And speaking of repeat callers, we actually have Paul from Texas calling back with another— [Laughter] Yeah, it’s you again, Paul, is it?

Paul from Texas: Yes, it is, and God bless you and I believe it was Trudi for letting me back on.

Fr. Andrew: You are I think the only person who has called twice in a single episode.

Paul from Texas: Look at me, making a landmark achievement! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Did you put on a hat and sunglasses before you called tonight?

Paul from Texas: Um, coincidentally, perhaps.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay!

Fr. Andrew: A little plastic mustache? [Laughter]

Paul from Texas: You guys moved on to a new topic, and I was like: Oh no, a new question! And I thought I’d try my luck.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Have you watched Demolition Man since we talked to you last? [Laughter]

Paul from Texas: I haven’t. I have not found the time. I apologize, Father.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well. Okay. Get on it.

Paul from Texas: [Laughter] I’ll work on it, I promise. Okay, so my question is— You got into detail talking about the will and especially kind of detailing the difference between the very basic life-form kind of will that even bacteria might have for eating and whatnot, propagating, and then the difference of the higher version of the will, which, granted, is not necessarily alone to us, but ours is of a much higher magnitude. I was hoping— This is probably because I have a very rudimentary understanding of the argument, but I was hoping you might elaborate, at least a little bit, as long as it doesn’t get too off from the show, of how that relates to the dispute between the Orientals and the Orthodox Orthodox, about Christ having one will, both divine and man, or two wills, one divine and one man.

Fr. Stephen: That’s going to really endear you to them, referring to them as the “Orientals” and us as the “Orthodox Orthodox.” [Laughter] But you may not be worried about that, so.

Fr. Andrew: Your Armenian friend will not be buying you a beer next week.

Paul from Texas: [Laughter] I’m sorry, all of you out there!

Fr. Andrew: Correct me if I get this wrong, Father, but I think you might be mixing up terms a little bit from what we were talking about. So we were talking about—

Fr. Stephen: He’s not.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, he’s not? Okay. We were talking about different types of souls, but there’s also will, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s not totally off-topic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. I mean, will is the…

Fr. Stephen: Sorry to pre-emptively “Um, actually” you like that, Father.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s okay. Will is a thing becoming what it is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the internal. And so this is— Understanding the natural will— This is why it comes up in St. Maximus the Confessor, is because he’s dealing with the issues surrounding what’s going to be the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which is going to establish that Christ has two wills, and why he’s talking about the natural will, the gnomic will. We’re not going to go over, again, all the way down that rabbit-hole.

But sort of the paradigmatic point in Scripture for this is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, when he says to his Father, “Not my will, but yours be done. If it be your will, take this cup from me, but not my will but your will be done,” what’s going on there. The natural will that we were talking about, the quality of the soul, this drive, is exactly why we say Christ had two wills. So Christ’s human soul, which is a faculty of his human nature, has a human natural will, which human natural will is the drive to live, to survive, to not die, especially not die a horrible death. And that’s not bad. That’s not evil. That’s a good thing.

Fr. Andrew: That’s normal. That’s how you know he’s human, one of the ways.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is taken as evidence: Christ has a human natural will. He does not desire— He has this will to live, to not die. But while he has that, he also shares the divine will of the Father, which was to die. And so this is not— We do not mean— Sometimes people think that when we say Christ has two wills we’re saying he had two different minds or two different consciousnesses, like a human one and a divine one, and that’s not what we’re saying. The Holy Trinity shares one will, because they share one nature.

What we’re saying is that there is within him as a human, having a human soul, a human will, which caused him to grow to adulthood physically, to human physical adulthood, and to eat, and these other things. And that’s not bad. But that when the time came where that natural good human will to do that needed to be subjected to the divine will, which was to lay down his life voluntarily, then that is what he did.

Paul from Texas: Got you. Which is a perfect example of obedience as a son, but it’s reminiscent of—maybe I’m mistyping here, but of the Theotokos when she first said, “Let it be so done to me as you said”?

Fr. Andrew: Sure!

Fr. Stephen: Right, because, like we talked about in the first half, your nous can talk to your will, or to your soul, I mean. And will is a power of the soul. So you can look at your soul; you can look at the things your soul is desiring. The fact that it’s a natural will doesn’t mean you’re a slave to it. You can talk to it, you can restrain it, you can control it, you can guide it.

Fr. Andrew: Which is part of what morality is.

Paul from Texas: And this kind of feeds into the notion of us growing as a race and as individuals, kind of like when Paul talks about both the Law and as the angels, correct? How they’re over us as teachers until we reach a certain point.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So you can sit there, and your natural will is saying, “Eat the whole tray of brownies.” [Laughter] But your higher function says, “No, your wife baked these brownies. She wants some of the brownies!” And so you restrain yourself: you eat only most of the brownies. [Laughter]

Paul from Texas: Kindness, truly! Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Fathers. And, as a newly Orthodox, forgive me for forgetting this, but: Christ is risen!

Fr. Stephen: Indeed he is risen!

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen!

Paul from Texas: [Laughter] God bless you! Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: Okay. We’re going to take one more caller. We have a guy named Stephen from California calling in. I think he’s got a bit of a mind-twister. So, Stephen, are you there?

Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Can we call you Bruce so it doesn’t get confusing? [Laughter]

Bruce (Stephen): Yes, I’m sorry. Hi, Steve and Steve. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Bruce (Stephen): Anyways, my question is in regards to the body-soul dynamic that you’re talking about. Once you’re dead and you’ve been in the ground for long enough, your body kind of goes away and becomes like some other thing, like maybe eaten by… It becomes like grass and the full circle-of-life thing. So after everybody’s resurrected, how would that resurrected body be you if it’s not the same stuff that makes up the you that is currently you if that makes sense?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! I’m tempted to just say: Listen to the body episodes from way, way back, but just briefly: A body is not the stuff. It’s not reducible to the stuff, and the reason why that’s the case is because, for instance, that most of the stuff that currently constitutes your body is not the same stuff that has always been there. You’ve traded out a lot of stuff over time and yet you’re still you.

So it’s not about the parts; it’s not about the atoms, the molecules, whatever. A body is the collection of all of these things together. It’s not— You are not the sum of your materiality. It doesn’t matter that your atoms and molecules are going to get traded out. It doesn’t matter that a king can make a progress through the guts of a beggar. That stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is that you, as your body, are more than that. There’s something going on there that’s… And that’s part of what the soul is: it’s the life of all of that together.

Yeah, you don’t lose consciousness by your corpse decaying, and you don’t become a completely other person in the resurrection. You’re still you, although you are a different person in the sense that your body’s been transformed. It’s like St. Paul says that the resurrected body is almost—it’s the relation of a plant to a seed, sown in corruption, raised in incorruption. So there’s going to be a big difference. We don’t know exactly what the difference is going to look like, although it’s going to maybe be sort of angelic on some level. It’s still you; you’re still you. There’s a persistent you in the midst of all of that. Father, do you want to add anything to that, or correct or whatever?

Fr. Stephen I think it’s every seven years that all the matter in your body changes out.

Fr. Andrew: Or a lot of it. I’m not sure that all of it does, but a lot of it for sure.

Fr. Stephen: Almost all of it sloughs and shifts. Yeah. I mean, when I see Madonna shamble out on stage recently, I still believe it’s Madonna.

Fr. Andrew: God bless her.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t look like her, and I don’t believe there’s any original parts, but it’s still her. I think she’s the modern-day ship of Theseus. That’s where I’m going with this.

Fr. Andrew: HowStuffWorks.com says that the body replaces cell types every seven to ten years with the exception of neurons in the cerebral cortex, which stay from birth to death apparently.

Fr. Stephen: There you go.

Fr. Andrew: So there’s a tiny little bit that you’re carrying around the whole time.

Fr. Stephen: But the whole rest of you, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Most of it’s not. Does that help, Stephen—Bruce, sorry. Bruce? [Laughter]

Bruce (Stephen): A little bit. So does that mean that there’s an immaterial version of your body that’s, like… That stays behind even after the material stuff is gone, or does your soul record the aspects of your body that makes you you after your physical body is gone? ...Hello?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know—

Fr. Stephen: That’s the sound of Fr. Andrew punting on that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I don’t know how to answer that one! I mean, you have— Like, the saints are embodied.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we’re going to get into that this half, a little bit.

Bruce (Stephen): Okay, so sainthood.

Fr. Andrew: You’re tracking! You’re tracking.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but the other element to this is in terms of what a resurrection body is like, our touchpoint is Christ’s body. And this sort of helps and doesn’t help at the same time. It helps in the sense that we can make certain points: St. Thomas could touch him; the wounds are still there. St. Thomas can… He says, “Handle me and see. A spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” From which people conclude that Jesus had no blood, which is just amazing to me, but anyway… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I know, what is with that?

Fr. Stephen: “A spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see that I have.” So he was— There’s some kind of materiality and tactile thing there; at the same time, he can sort of appear with the doors being shut and locked, in the midst of his disciples.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s something different going on there, but we don’t know exactly how it’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: And his body can be everywhere on Sunday morning. So that’s why I say it helps and it doesn’t help. [Laughter] We can see that there are ways in which the way we normally think about particle physics don’t apply to the resurrection body, but we can see that it’s not utterly immaterial, that there’s a distinction there.

Bruce (Stephen): Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, I hope that helps, Bruce—

Fr. Stephen: And we are going to get into that more as we go into this half.

Bruce (Stephen): All right, well, I’ll be looking forward to it. Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: All right. It’s always nice to hear from the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter] All right: part three! The third half, because it’s a show and a half, everybody. So, all of that said, what is eternal life?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Aside from what Jesus said—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, to know the— So we’re back to where we started, yeah, with St. John’s gospel.

We need to kind of change our thinking about what eternal life means—and here’s what I mean—because Scripture speaks about it very differently, the Fathers understand it very differently, than we typically do, because for us we typically understand eternal life in a quantitative way rather than in a qualitative way, meaning—

Fr. Andrew: You’re going to live forever. Who wants to live forever?

Fr. Stephen: Right, we think that eternal life means there’s sort of this endless succession of moments into the future and they’re all going to be pleasant. [Laughter] This sort of— And that time and space and everything will basically be experienced the way it is now, just without all the bad stuff, and it’ll never stop. Whereas in Scripture and in the Fathers, eternal life is a qualitative issue: it’s a kind of life. It’s a kind of life, not just an extent.

For those of you who may have watched The Good Place, now back in the day—it’s now been off of the air for a while—this is… Without finding the correct Christian answer, the show kind of found the flaw in this kind of cultural view of eternal life as this endless succession.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the way it depicts it, even for people who get to “go to heaven,” is that it’s this endless series of pleasing experiences: you can do whatever you want. And eventually what happens at the end of the show is the main characters all get bored of it, basically, and they step through a hole into oblivion.

Fr. Stephen: Well, maybe oblivion. Nobody knows what’s on the other side of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re just gone, all of them.

Fr. Stephen: I have a film theory about the whole show, by the way.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Really?

Fr. Stephen: My film theory about the show is that they are never in the bad place or the good place; they’re in purgatory the whole time.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Rewatch it and think! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Everybody, pull out your Dante.

Fr. Stephen: It’s when they’re done with purgatory, they go through the gateway, and that’s when they actually go to heaven. But, yeah, that reveals the flaw, because it would. I mean, if your view is: “I just get to eat ice cream for every meal, my favorite flavor!” Endlessly. [Laughter] That’s not eternal life. That’s not what we’re talking about.

It’s a qualitative issue. We don’t know how—we’ve talked about this before, of course: time and space don’t exist—we call time and space, those are factors of our human experience, of our current embodied human experience. Because we were just talking about Christ’s resurrection body clearly kind of experiences space differently. Now, he’s God, so we can’t even fathom it, but even from the perspective of his human body he is able to go from one place to another without traversing the space in between, which includes locked doors. And it doesn’t take him time to do that.

Whatever our experience of time and space is going to be like in the life of the world to come, or even if we’re just talking about the intermediate state in between—again, with the intermediate state, which is what we call that period of time between when we die physically and the bodily resurrection of the whole creation—are we going to experience time? We tend to have this cultural view that you’re in heaven or in hell or in Hades, kind of waiting, like it’s the waiting room and you’re either in the good waiting room or you’re in the bad waiting room. I can tell you for sure, it ain’t like that. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like, but how exactly does that work, we don’t know.

But there’s a very important verse—couple of verses, actually—in terms of this, in terms of what eternal life is, in St. John’s gospel that we read back on Lazarus Saturday morning just a few weeks ago.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s really a intriguing little exchange between the Lord and Martha, where he says to her, “Your brother Lazarus will live again.” But, yeah, he goes on to say this—this is John 11:25-26:

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

So, yeah, there’s a lot of parsing we can do to make that a little bit less of a riddle.

Fr. Stephen: And especially when we’re reading big chunks of St. John’s gospel, like the first gospel reading at the Twelve Passion Gospels in Holy Week. It’s easy to see this as, okay, a thousand deep theological riddles just whisked past me, because there’s so much of this that’s so… You have to break it down so much.

Yeah, Martha had come out to see Jesus. Jesus asks her, tells her that Lazarus will rise from the dead; he’ll be part of the resurrection. And Martha says, “Yes, he’ll be raised up on the last day.” So she believes in the bodily resurrection at the end of time. But this is, then, Jesus’ response to her, is that he’s not talking about the end of days; he’s not talking about the last judgment and that final resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s talking about the first resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: He says, “I am the resurrection.” Jesus is the resurrection. Of course, it’s translated as “believes in”; this is more like “is faithful to.” “Whoever is faithful to me”—and it says, “though he die, yet shall he live”—we’ll pause; just leave that for a second. Then he immediately says, “And everyone who lives and who believes in (or is faithful to) me shall never die.” So that just sounds like he contradicted himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Though he die, yet shall he live; whoever believes in me shall never die.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he just said, “Though he die, he won’t die.” What? What? And so this is a place where that understanding of the difference between physical and spiritual death becomes critically important, because what Christ is saying here is that: “Whoever is faithful to me, though he physically die, yet shall he live spiritually; and everyone who lives and is faithful to me shall never die spiritually.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so in other words, whoever is faithful to him, even though his soul is going to separate from his body, yet his soul will remain connected to God—

Fr. Stephen: In Christ.

Fr. Andrew: —and not be separated from God in Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And that’s why he says that he is the resurrection and the life, because it is through him—it is in Christ that that person’s soul remains connected to God, though it be separated from his body.

So we have to come back to an understanding—an ancient understanding of the term “magnanimity”: being magnanimous. This means something totally different now! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Now it means you’re basically generous.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but if you break down the Latin again: animus, “soul.”

Fr. Andrew: Magna-anima.

Fr. Stephen: Magnus-big: being great-souled, having a big soul. And this is part of our understanding of the saints in this life, that in this life already—they’re already experiencing eternal life, because their connection to God is already great, is already big, is already deep—whatever adjective we want to use to describe it, however you want to picture it. And that means this is the connection—this is the conduit, this is— through which God gives life to them, including their body, because, again, that’s who they are. The soul gives life to the body; the connection to God gives life to the body. And so this is why their sainthood in this life is expressed not only—it is expressed through what we might call now moral behavior, through the fruits of the Spirit being manifest, life being manifest and fruit being manifest abundantly, and that includes the moral aspect—but also read sometime how long these non-martyred saints lived in the Synaxarion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a lot of them… A lot lived to over 100.

Fr. Stephen: A great old age. This is also why we have incorrupt relics of saints, and saints whose relics give off fragrances of plants and flowers and life, even though they’re relics. It’s a “dead body.” But the body still has this. Go back to our relics episode.

And so that connection to God is not broken by physical death. When that saints eventually does physically die, that does not have a negative effect; that does not cut him off—or her—off from God.

Fr. Andrew: Or from us.

Fr. Stephen: Through Christ. Yes, they are in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: If we’re all in Christ, why is death a problem?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why Christ says, regarding Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “God is not the God of the dead but of the living.” And he says that as a proof of the resurrection to the Sadducees. The Sadducees— The resurrection the Sadducees denied is the one that Martha believed in, but when Christ wanted to demonstrate the reality of the resurrection, he talks about somebody who died 2,000 years before as still being living. Why? Still connected to God.

Also— And that may poke at some of our Protestant friends a little bit, who object to us singing the prayers of saints, etc., because they say they’re dead—which of course they’re not—now we have to poke a little at our Roman Catholic friends, with the beatific vision and all, that that connection is also not broken or negatively affected by the eventual bodily resurrection. In fact, it’s deepened by the bodily resurrection. The bodily resurrection will be greeted as a good and beautiful and wonderful thing, to be in the body again—sorry, Plato—that is superior. The communion with God in the body is superior to that experienced in the intermediate state.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the post-death, pre-resurrection state.

Fr. Stephen: Now the negative side of this, this also tells us that everything we’ve just said about eternal life, also reveals to us something about what is meant by the imagery used in the Scriptures regarding eternal death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of which there’s a bunch of different imagery. But yeah…

Fr. Stephen: And this is one piece of it. You sometimes get folks who… the theological term for this is “annihilationism,” where they say, “Well, okay, so where do bad folks go when they die?” They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly. They say they just… “Well, see, look: it says eternal death. So that means they just die. They cease to exist and then they, you know, that’s it. They’re gone. They’re annihilated.”

Fr. Andrew: But that’s not what death is. Death is not non-existence.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s not what happens to you when you die. You don’t cease to exist. When you physically die, your soul separates from your body. So eternal death, like eternal life… Eternal life is talking about the quality of spiritual life, the deepness and richness of the connection to God. Eternal death, therefore, unfortunately is an image of being cut off from the source of life, being cut off from God.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a sub-human state.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because just as—and the Fathers use this language. Just as this quality of eternal life, this quality of the human soul is unique to humans, for that to be fully realized is to become truly human, to become fully human. Therefore the opposite, being cut off from God as the source of life, is to cease in some sense to be human, for humanity to be diminished. And may this happen to no one, but the Scriptures hold it forth as a possibility to be avoided, and a horrible one.

So that was the first half of our third half; now we have a second half of the third half.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Here we go! That’s a lot of halves.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a bunch of people whose brains aren’t breaking over the soul stuff, but this half language is just triggering them unbelievably.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know. And it’s evergreen, too. People come back: “How come they say there’s three halves?” It’s just great. Welcome, new listener!

Fr. Stephen: So now we are going to talk about what it means to become a spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you get this language in Psalm 104, which then gets echoed in Hebrews 1, where it says about God, “He makes his angels spirits.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, “He makes his angels spirits,” which is interesting language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not the language of: “He created them as spirits” or “He created spirits, and he called them angels.” Those things are true, but there’s something more happening there.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, yeah, we think: “Angelic beings… Well, wait, they are spirits. How can he make them to be… spirits?” Well, in the first place, angelic beings are finite beings. They’re vast cosmic intelligences, but they’re not infinite.

Fr. Andrew: They’re finite in a way different from our finitude, but still finite.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’re created beings, unlike God. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: God is the only infinite.

Fr. Stephen: And so it’s a different kind of finitude, and St. John of Damascus says that God alone knows their limitations. They’re not obvious to us, because right now at least we’re below them. We compare them to our own limitations and they seem virtually limitless, but from God’s perspective they’re limited, and he understands their limits because he put them there when he created them.

But, as we talked about in our episode about what a spirit is, spirits are these organizing principles of larger collective creative realities. We talked about this, that a spirit is this organizing principle for— at a higher level of consciousness than an individual being, this organizing principle for a collective. And it’s not immediately obvious how a finite being can do that. I mean, we could think about a general or a king who is of course a finite being and gives orders to other beings, but the general is not like the consciousness of his army, and the king does not represent in himself the consciousness of all his people. So it seems counter-intuitive that a finite being could be that, unless of course, as the psalm and Hebrews says, God makes that finite being to be the consciousness, the organizing principle, of a larger reality.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s sharing his ministry with that being.

Fr. Stephen: His governance of creation, he is sharing it, and that is how he is sharing it. He’s not making him like the viceroy, where God gives him orders and then he passes those orders on. That’s external; this is different [from] that. Well, in the same way, if we understand this with angels, a human person is likewise a finite being, with a soul as the organizing principle of himself; the soul functions as the spirit, as the organizing principle of the human person. That soul is connected to God in Christ, who is the Logos, and as the Logos is the organizing principle of everything, the whole creation. And so, as we quoted in St. John’s gospel, knowing God means knowing Jesus Christ whom he sent.

So in a parallel way to the angels, through this connection of their soul to God in Christ, the saints are made organizing principles for larger connective realities, through being in Christ. And so this is what lies behind the language of the saints in glory being equal to the angels, of their governing. It’s not this external governing. And “equal to the angels” is not just status; it’s a role and a function and an activity. And so in a sense the saints have a body that’s a greater body than the material human body, which they will have again at the resurrection.

But this is also what’s behind— And this is probably the— I mean, I was going to say this is the best place to understand this. This is a brain-breaking part that’s hard to wrap our heads around, because we’re finite humans, but a place to see this, a way at this, at least, is the idea of heavenly patronage, both of individual people and collectively. So think about St. John the Forerunner and the way in which the Prophet Elijah’s life became the ordering principle for his life, and why St. Luke said he came “in the spirit and power of Elijah.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not just a metaphor.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not just a metaphor; it’s not just external imitation. There’s an actual direct relationship there that is formative. What’s true there with an individual with a patron saint is also true with churches, nations, organizations, any other collective group that takes a spiritual patron. That spiritual patron that they take is going to then be transformative and become the organizing principle for the life of that collective group or unit. And this is also then, of course— Sine qua non of this is the Holy Spirit, who, when he comes into us—unless we’re grieving the Holy Spirit—will become the organizing principle for our life, the ultimate one, as we become like God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, to wrap up, one of the questions that comes up a lot just in Christian life, in parish life—and I think this is a question that maybe kids ask more than adults, but I wish adults would ask it a little bit more—and that’s this question of: What is heaven like? What does it mean to be saved, ultimately? Ultimately, it’s the same question. Our minds, I think, because, especially for those of us who grew up here in the United States, things we see on TV, our image of what heaven is like probably defaults in many cases to kind of the cartoonish thing of people sitting around on clouds and playing harps. Of course, that’s not it. [Laughter] But then also we might get a little bit higher and see this kind of ethereal, again cloud world, with golden gates standing there, all that kind of stuff. I’ve had people tell me that they think that heaven sounds boring, that it sounds really, really dull. And it’s usually because the imagination of it is something even less than what we saw in The Good Place, even less complex than that, less interesting than that.

One of my favorite expressions for what exactly it’ll be like—which, again we don’t totally know. We know some things that we can talk about, some things that have been said in Scripture, things that have been said by the saints, and so forth. But one of my favorites of course comes from one of my favorite writers, and that’s J.R.R. Tolkien, who, in one of his letters to one of his sons, he has this to say. He says:

There is a place called heaven where the good here unfinished is completed and where the stories unwritten and the hopes unfulfilled are continued. We may laugh together yet.

And while I don’t think that that encapsulates, and it’s not a sort of a— I would not describe it as a dogmatic definition of what the life of the age to come is like, I like it a lot because what it does is it helps us to see that the beauty and the good and the— all of those things that we love in this life that seem to be unfulfilled—because of the imperfections of this life, because of the reality of what life in this world is actually about—that that is going to be fulfilled, completed, and especially I like the word “continued.” He talks about stories unwritten are continued.

One of the reasons why I think that that’s so beautiful, aside from just giving us an anchor from our own experience that we have now in order to try to imagine what it’s going to be like is that also it’s an image that the life of the age to come is a creative life, that it is not simply this static thing. Now, time is going to work differently for us; we’re going to experience it differently than we do now, for sure, but we don’t— What will motion without time look like? I don’t know. Or whatever, you know. I don’t know, but nonetheless the idea that the life of the age to come is going to be a creative life and a constructive life, however that can be construed, I think is a very beautiful and hopeful thing.

I heard someone one time react to some of the stuff we’ve said on this show and say, “Life of the age to come is basically becoming middle management?” Well, no! Because it’s not like an earthly bureaucracy, where all that is just super dull. [Laughter] It’s not like that at all. Instead it’s an invigorative, energizing, creative, interesting existence. Again, we don’t know exactly what it will look like—I probably said that ten times now—but we do know that the saints who are experiencing it as a foretaste now, or, depending on how you experience time, they’re experiencing it fully now, that they are joyful! They’re not showing up in dull suits and saying, “Oh, yes, I had to check 27,000 files just this morning.” [Laughter] That’s not their experience. And it’s also not showing up with robes and harps and stuff, although, you know, a harp can be a beautiful image of creativity and all kinds of wonderful things.

As we conceive of the soul and try to get our heads around it as much as we can, I think that seeing the destiny in Christ of the soul, of the life of the body, as being a truly lively life—that it is truly an energizing, energized, creative life—puts a frame around what we’re trying to accomplish as Christians that I think is really beautiful and hopeful and gives us a lot to fix our eyes on and strive towards, that in Christ this is where we’re going, that we can become all love. What an amazing, even just thought to have, even if we don’t quite understand the reality yet. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Be careful there. You don’t want to tick off the harpists.

Fr. Andrew: I know! The harpers?

Fr. Stephen: They’re almost as bad as the flautists. [Laughter] They’ll really eat your lunch if they come after you.

So, yeah, you mentioned this “middle management” thing, and the sort of externality with which we view this idea of God’s dominion over creation ultimately and then the angelic beings and the saints who are going to participate in that. But as we talked about tonight, it’s much more intimate and direct and deep than that. As we’ve said a lot on the show, there’s not sort of neutral ground to stand on. We talked about, also in the second half, identity. Part of the problem with taking this kind of quasi-Platonic approach of identity being something innate in me that I discern is that when people go to seek their identity and they don’t realize that this identity is something that’s going to be found outside themselves in relationships—not just with other humans, but with other spiritual powers, be it the Holy Spirit, be it some other spirit—is that they are very quickly led into certain traps, because, just like material nature, spiritual nature of course abhors a vacuum.

There are plenty of powers and principalities out there that would love to get their hooks in you and form you and become the organizing principle of your life. Probably the biggest one in our culture here in the US, and I imagine in most of the Anglophone world that would be listening to us is Mammon, the pursuit of— And Mammon, the Aramaic word includes not just money. It includes that, wealth, but it also includes the concept of reputation, and that may be in our very contemporary world—the world of social media, the world of instant and weird celebrity where people are just famous, not famous for doing anything, just famous—that desire for clout, for influence, for celebrity, maybe even the more powerful of the drives connected to Mammon, maybe even more powerful than the drive to get money, though that’s certainly around, too.

And these competing things will very quickly seize hold of us, reorganize our life, reorganize our very identity, our sense of our self, our sense of who we are, and begin to transform us, as we said, in this life already into something less than human, into something less than what God created us as and what God created us to be, and that is a progressive thing. It is a progressive thing. If we aren’t deliberate about becoming the person who God created us to be, then we will 100% fall into that. It takes work. It takes work to be a Christian. It takes hard effort. It takes determination. I tell people all the time: If you’re trying to decide what to do, figure out what the easy thing is to do, take that off the table; it’s always wrong, 100%.

We’re going to have to do very hard things. We’re going to have to do things that don’t feel good because they don’t gratify our desires. We’re going to have to do things that go against the grain and that are difficult for us. And part of the reason they’re going to be difficult for us is that we’ve been formed by these other things, because we’re literally going to be trying to become a different person, and that’s not easy—not pretend to be a different person, but actually become a different person. To actually have things be true of us that maybe aren’t true of us today, but we want them to be true of us in the future, and we’re going to have to work and fight to get to that truth. And we’re going to have to wean ourselves off of a lot of the things that have become comfortable and pleasurable and have become crutches for us.

Life in our world, as we’ve talked about before— Our current world is constructed in an inhuman way. There is not a way to operate and function successfully in our world as it’s structured today and be sane. So some of the things we develop we’re developing as crutches just to try to survive in an insane world. But some of those crutches are alcohol, drugs, pornography, mindless entertainment, patterns of self-destruction that we know, while they may be helping me get from today to tomorrow, they’re not helping me become the person I was created to be. They’re not helping be a human being. They’re not helping me find and experience and give and receive love. They’re not producing joy in my life. They’re not giving me a sense of peace. They’re not bringing peace to the world around me. They’re not solving the problems that are causing me to run to them in the first place.

My takeaway tonight is that each of us needs to become very deliberate about the person who we want to be in Christ. We need to start with every decision we make, no matter how big or small, asking ourselves: Is this going to bring me closer to that person who I was created to be in Christ, or is this going to take me further away? This could be with decisions that seem minor, as minor as: What am I going to have for lunch? Is a fast day or not? Or this can be as major as: Whom should I be dating? Whom should I marry? What kind of job should I work at? What kind of career should I pursue? Should I pursue a career? On down the line. Because if we aren’t doing that thinking, if we aren’t focusing ourselves and our attention on where we want to go, we will get pulled to all kinds of other places that we don’t want to go.

But there’s always hope, as long as you’re alive. As long as you’re alive, you can start making those decisions and start moving in that direction. No matter how far gone you’ve gotten, you can start to head in that direction. But we have to start to act rather than just be acted upon. We need to start choosing who and what kind of spirit is going to be the organizing principle of our life, not just falling into whatever one is nearby and seems attractive at the moment or wants to get its hooks in us. And if we do that, it will not be easy; there will not be a point where it gets easier. There will not be a point where we’ve arrived and it’s like: Okay, now I can coast. It’s why Christ said if you want to follow him, you have to pick up your cross and follow him. The walk you take with a cross ends with you dying upon it.

But that is the road that leads, through the cross, to the resurrection, that leads to eternal life, which is something we begin to experience in this world and then continues into the next and ultimately into the life of the world to come.

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

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific—but you won’t hear them if you’re watching Channel Zero.

Fr. Andrew: If you’re on Facebook, you can follow our page and join our discussion group. You can leave reviews and ratings everywhere applicable, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to love it, or maybe hate it or be irritated by it. You never know.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air so you can listen to all these podcasts in your ‘98 Olds, which is, of course, bulletproof.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, and may God bless you—and Christ is risen!

Fr. Stephen: Indeed he is risen.