Mysterium Fasces

00:00:00.000 Rich men have turned poor and gone hungry,

00:00:09.260 but they that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing.

00:00:21.220 Plus, the Lord shall not be deprived of the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing.

00:00:51.200 Rich men have turned poor and gone hungry,

00:01:11.700 but they that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing.

00:01:13.700 But they that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good.

00:01:15.700 They that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing.

00:01:17.700 They that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing.

00:01:45.700 They that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing.

00:02:15.700 I was visiting with family where I was in a position that I couldn't really reliably make podcasts.

00:02:20.740 But we're back in the subtle now, and so you should expect Mysterium Fashies to appear Saturday or Sunday as is regular.

00:02:26.960 So to re-inaugurate our current season, so if you will, we've got a favorite guest.

00:02:35.260 Father Raphael Johnson is joining us today to discuss, as we mentioned before, the gospel.

00:02:40.120 Father, thanks for appearing in the program once again.

00:02:43.600 Oh, it's always my pleasure.

00:02:44.740 Yours is one of my favorite shows to be on.

00:02:46.480 For some reason, you and the other guys bring out the best in me.

00:02:49.600 So it's always my pleasure.

00:02:50.440 Well, you know, we're glad to be able to extract your labor for our own profit, so to speak.

00:02:55.980 So the reason I picked the topic today, I mean, it seems like a pretty obvious one.

00:03:03.240 But as I discussed with you before, it really isn't.

00:03:05.860 We've got a Caliuga news story that we're going to cover later that perfectly attests to this fact.

00:03:10.300 But this podcast is specifically about the intersection of the Orthodox faith with politics, similar to yours, and the political life.

00:03:21.040 And obviously the foundation of that is the Orthodox gospel.

00:03:25.220 And I'm convinced that most people have never heard the gospel preached before.

00:03:30.640 They've heard heretical versions.

00:03:32.480 They've heard erroneous versions.

00:03:33.800 They've heard just lies.

00:03:35.180 And so I think that it's proper and appropriate to just actually, on a Sunday, sit down and tell people what the foundation of the good news of Jesus Christ is.

00:03:49.760 Well, I don't know if you know this or not.

00:03:51.380 I may have said this elsewhere.

00:03:53.560 But the reason I got into this field is that my father is a funeral director.

00:03:57.980 And when I was working for him, I drove the hearse.

00:04:02.140 I got fired from that.

00:04:02.940 I got fired from all jobs from him.

00:04:05.180 But one of the reasons I got fired from their hearse driving job was that, you know, the clergy rides in the hearse. 0.95

00:04:12.840 Now, this is late high school, you know, early college.

00:04:15.840 And I would ask them questions.

00:04:18.380 And actually, they were pretty good ones. 0.97

00:04:20.400 And I was shocked at their ignorance.

00:04:23.880 There was, you know, a couple of elderly Catholic priests who were good. 0.99

00:04:27.780 The rest were absolutely incompetent. 0.97

00:04:29.940 They didn't understand. 0.98

00:04:31.220 They couldn't answer anything.

00:04:32.180 The stuff we're going to do, even basic, basic stuff.

00:04:36.660 It was just a gig to them.

00:04:38.120 It was something that made them feel good.

00:04:39.440 It made them feel moral.

00:04:41.220 You know, they were counselors more than anything else.

00:04:43.000 And I must have driven hundreds of clergy of every denomination when I was working for my dad.

00:04:49.380 And I was absolutely shocked beyond belief.

00:04:51.240 These people don't know anything.

00:04:52.160 Yeah, that is the unfortunate reality.

00:04:56.460 And it is, in North America, multi-denominational.

00:05:02.140 I mean, some sectors it's a little bit better, hardcore traditionalists.

00:05:05.900 But it's roundly awful, roundly awful.

00:05:09.020 And so, hopefully, we've got, you know, at least one good priest here that can do his job well.

00:05:15.360 So, this exact problem is, as I said, why we're going to do this podcast.

00:05:23.780 And so, just to kind of talk to our listeners that are not necessarily Christians or Orthodox and don't intuitively understand why the preaching of the gospel is essentially the central exercise of this podcast when it's nominally political.

00:05:38.280 Well, it's because the myth and metaphysics that is contained within the Christian worldview are foundational for any questions of political or social life.

00:05:49.280 As we've talked before on the show about over and over again, the maxim of theology is lex arendi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.

00:05:57.420 That the law of prayer is the law of belief, and that's the law of life.

00:06:00.760 The way that you relate to the highest metaphysical, philosophical truths, even if you don't consciously intellectualize them in a systematic way, is naturally going to affect everything else in your life that's predicated upon those truths, which is everything.

00:06:17.240 You know, when we're talking about basic logic, who are we? Where are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

00:06:22.400 These questions are absolutely necessary to orient oneself in the world in a way that's meaningful.

00:06:32.140 And the absence of answers to these questions does not mean that you're simply agnostic, because we all have to operate on the basis of these questions.

00:06:42.520 It means that they're simply filled in by whoever's around.

00:06:45.460 That's why scientific empiricism can so fervently deny the existence of metaphysics, yet itself has many, many metaphysical presuppositions and predicates.

00:06:57.160 That its adherents practice every day and vociferously defend, even though they don't have any reason to believe that they believe it.

00:07:05.620 Father, would you like to add or go on?

00:07:08.960 Well, that's a lot. You said a mouthful there.

00:07:11.200 Yeah, I did, but that's, you know, I mean...

00:07:14.160 You know, one of the central notions, what you just said, is that the positivist empiricist types actually believe there's such a thing as an abstract person and an abstract perception of something that then goes into the machine of their brain, but then processes it into Mahalo.

00:07:32.160 They really believe that.

00:07:33.700 And I think a lot of them don't really think too hard about it.

00:07:35.720 You know, science is a scientific establishment.

00:07:39.320 There's no, you know, abstraction out there.

00:07:40.960 It's a self-interested, nine-to-five, very wealthy establishment, a very powerful establishment.

00:07:48.460 And they don't really have, you know, the time or the interest to really care about this kind of thing.

00:07:54.340 But the simple notion, when I read Barclay for the first time, for example, his whole argument is proving the existence of matter is impossible.

00:08:03.180 Because all you could show is your perception of it.

00:08:08.920 And it was maddening to me.

00:08:11.040 I never read, you know, I was a young man reading him for the first time.

00:08:14.000 I didn't know how to answer it.

00:08:16.600 The assumptions that you make, the fact that your logical design for anything matches up with what's external to you, or even that it's actually external to you.

00:08:26.820 And these are wild assumptions from the point of view of a positivist.

00:08:32.600 They don't, and I don't think they think about it very much, because it ultimately comes down to power.

00:08:37.700 But those are just two very basic fundamental assumptions that they make of a metaphysical nature.

00:08:43.340 And I don't think they understand that they're doing it.

00:08:45.160 That was Leo Strauss' big thing in attacking the empirical mind.

00:08:53.320 You know, simply these assumptions that you actually are perceiving something that's real, and you're not changing it in any way.

00:08:59.940 Your desires don't change it in any way.

00:09:01.960 And this is completely false.

00:09:03.860 And it's, you know, one of the first concepts I came across in college that changed my life.

00:09:12.060 Yeah, certainly, certainly.

00:09:13.560 And so, yeah, the, one of the things that I think a lot of our listeners have done is, as they've moved into the far right,

00:09:22.960 and many of them have come into this kind of sphere of influence recently, they've also radically shifted their spiritual lifestyle.

00:09:30.500 I mean, I know, speaking from a personal perspective, I certainly have.

00:09:33.240 And so I think that the, this kind of further compounds the demand to examine exactly what the core myths that people believe are,

00:09:45.140 and to kind of do an inventory and spring cleaning, so to speak.

00:09:48.820 Because, as you've talked about before in your show, we're steeped in this new Babylonian, you know, culture.

00:09:56.780 We've grown up in it.

00:09:57.800 We're molded by it.

00:09:58.960 We, you know, in a way that the apostles never could have even come close to of imagining.

00:10:07.060 And so that, that sinfulness, that corruption, needs to be consciously and purposefully expunged, you know,

00:10:15.160 through discernment and asceticism in the sacraments and so on.

00:10:19.240 It took a very long time to break out of the nominalist, empiricist point of view, because this is how we're all raised.

00:10:28.560 It's assumed to be true, and this is why reading The Republic at 17, you know, blew my mind, almost literally.

00:10:39.260 Because, you know, and I've actually heard a student saying to me, you know, how do you argue for the forms?

00:10:45.540 It seems to be so, so against everything that we're, not just that we, how we study, but how we're raised.

00:10:52.220 The only thing that exists is the individual, and universals are things that we create.

00:10:57.260 Now, they don't actually, they can't put it that way, but that's the assumption.

00:11:01.420 It took me a long time, and actually Hegel was a huge help in that area.

00:11:06.940 It took me a long time to break out of that, because we're, we're hardwired into that kind of thinking.

00:11:14.420 Nomalism, as you know, I've said in this show before, is, is clearly a heresy, in that it simply denies God's action and creation.

00:11:23.640 But breaking out of that, and this is how, you know, I don't know how we can judge people.

00:11:28.120 If it takes me, you know, years to break out of it, how long, you know, people who aren't in this field, don't think about it too much.

00:11:33.560 You know, and, and nomalism destroys any, any kind of religious idea, any kind of tradition.

00:11:40.040 It's not even, it's not even consistent with itself.

00:11:42.740 But you can't have an industry without it, you can't have democracy without it, you can't have liberalism without it.

00:11:47.820 It's a wildly artificial concept.

00:11:51.420 And so, people with this assumption, instead of assumption, pick up the gospel.

00:11:56.800 They don't know what they're reading.

00:11:58.920 The assumptions going into the gospel are so extremely beyond how they think on a day-to-day basis.

00:12:05.020 I think they could just pick up this book and read it like a People magazine.

00:12:09.200 And, but they don't know that.

00:12:10.220 They don't know that they're in no position to do it.

00:12:11.680 So, people saw, I mean, you know, it's, it's maddening.

00:12:16.340 And I'm discovering now, as I've said before too, that because of that, we're speaking two different languages.

00:12:22.960 And conversations with the ordinary American, God forbid, are becoming very, very difficult.

00:12:30.820 Yeah, and it is, it's a trend that I've, I've had many people remark to me from around the world that there is sort of a sheep and goat effect.

00:12:39.300 I've even seen it within my own family.

00:12:41.180 There's, there's just this sort of a radical, um, polarization that is, uh, increasing in intensity.

00:12:48.780 A topic for another time, perhaps.

00:12:51.440 Um, so, to get in, I mean, to the, the beginning of our, our show, I think that the Christian religion is fundamentally based around Christ.

00:13:01.140 And Christ, two Christians, is a savior.

00:13:05.240 Um, and most people don't actually really comprehend what he saves them from.

00:13:11.180 Christ is a savior from sin.

00:13:13.260 We know that.

00:13:14.100 But what is sin?

00:13:16.040 Sin is not, um, sort of breaking, uh, speeding.

00:13:22.140 Sin is not, um, a, uh, some sort of, um, arbitrary, uh, breach of a code of conduct.

00:13:31.840 But sin is rather corruption.

00:13:34.100 Sin is deviation from the law itself.

00:13:37.580 Sin is what puts us outside of ordered living, harmonious life.

00:13:43.800 So sin, in other words, is death.

00:13:48.180 So, um, for the Orthodox Church, and I think we've actually discussed this, uh, privately at some point, that, um, that sin is not an action.

00:13:58.000 Uh, an action is a result and consequence of sin.

00:14:03.540 But sin is a mental state.

00:14:06.340 It's an attitude.

00:14:07.680 It's, uh, it's how we look at things.

00:14:09.380 It's almost a mood that's based on disorder, as you say.

00:14:14.460 Uh, conforming yourself to, to the modern world.

00:14:16.700 Our motivations are almost undiscernible.

00:14:20.360 I mean, we've read enough psychology to know this.

00:14:23.000 Uh, our motivations are, are all over the place.

00:14:25.480 So to say how much you're responsible for an action or not is very difficult.

00:14:28.900 But that's not even the question.

00:14:31.040 Your actions, especially in this world, they're probably going to be messed up quite a bit.

00:14:35.320 The point is, what is the foundation?

00:14:38.020 Is, is the action, um, an aberration with who you are?

00:14:42.880 Or is it integral to who you are?

00:14:44.620 Um, so, you know, I was born and raised in, in, in the Nova Sordo Catholic Church.

00:14:48.920 Very, very nominal.

00:14:50.360 Um, and I was, I was, I was raised, I went to a Catholic school and I was told that sins

00:14:55.040 are like, you picture your soul as, as, as a circle and then it's a little, um, stain on

00:15:01.300 it and you're, you know, you sin a lot, a lot and people's black and then you go to confession 0.98

00:15:06.960 and that wipes you clean.

00:15:09.120 Even today, I, I'm, it's difficult for me to break out of it because I was, I was so young

00:15:12.880 when I, when I first heard it. 0.58

00:15:14.620 Um, and if you sit, if your soul is, is too black, you won't get into heaven. 0.96

00:15:19.920 And, um, this is the, the ludicrous way that I was taught, uh, how sin and, and, and forgiveness. 0.95

00:15:26.180 So if we're when Catholics, they do something wrong and they're out in the street trying 1.00

00:15:29.240 to wave down a priest to do the magic spell, uh, to make it okay. 0.65

00:15:33.540 So if they drop dead, you know, they won't, they won't burn forever.

00:15:37.280 Breaking out of that was just as hard as breaking out of the, the nominalism.

00:15:41.180 Um, those acts are the consequence of sin.

00:15:44.860 Yeah, precisely.

00:15:49.280 And so this sin is a macro and micro universal force.

00:15:55.120 It grips us in our own internal life, our own internal cosmos, but it also grips the entire

00:16:01.560 universe around us.

00:16:02.540 And I think that this point is the most compelling argument for Christianity because it's something

00:16:08.560 that everybody can see readily and agree upon that there is suffering, there is death, there

00:16:14.260 is the product, the actions of this, uh, disordering of the energy in the universe.

00:16:20.480 Um, the problem of evil, so to speak, philosophically.

00:16:24.120 And so this, um, is so self-evident.

00:16:27.680 This is sort of the philosophical question.

00:16:30.280 And so I think that this is the perfect foundation to start is that Christ comes into the world

00:16:36.740 to save us from this death and this corruption.

00:16:41.820 Uh, you hear the phrase all the time, um, Christ died for our sins.

00:16:46.980 If you want to have a good time, ask what the hell that means.

00:16:50.960 Because you'll get stuttering and you'll get even well-educated people, you know, good

00:16:54.300 people, even our people, um, have no idea what that means.

00:16:58.400 Why did he have to die?

00:16:59.600 Why that way?

00:17:01.100 You know, why couldn't he just have knocked his fingers?

00:17:03.800 You know, um, uh, and that's, you know, so these phrases, they're said all the time

00:17:09.580 and they're almost now corny.

00:17:12.020 So people are afraid to use words like, you know, Jesus loves us or something like that

00:17:16.220 because the way it is today, it's the corniest cop out.

00:17:20.480 You could tell someone and I find myself embarrassed because, I mean, not because of the reality

00:17:26.580 that that's communicated there, but how it's perceived.

00:17:29.460 Even the concept of love, you know, how we use the word today bears zero relation to how

00:17:35.580 it was used 200 years ago, you know, let alone 2,500 years ago.

00:17:40.660 And the last 10 years of my career, I'm starting to realize that language, how we use words,

00:17:45.180 is at the root of all this.

00:17:46.100 Um, and therefore, anomalism is at the root of all this.

00:17:50.260 And that's, you know, talking about using numbers, um, words like sin, words like, uh,

00:17:55.000 justification and action and constitution.

00:17:57.980 You know, even in our English translations, we're not reading these things, um, that they're

00:18:03.560 not using these words in the same way.

00:18:05.060 We're in such a disordered state.

00:18:07.140 You know, the modern West was inconceivable to the church fathers, inconceivable to the 0.98

00:18:12.700 prophets, inconceivable to, you know, I could only imagine if Maximus the Confessor was here

00:18:18.880 today and what he would say.

00:18:21.140 I suspect he would say that salvation is not possible.

00:18:23.520 Because this is just beyond the, or the regime today is a big mechanism to get us to sin in

00:18:32.900 all senses of that term.

00:18:34.020 That's what it is.

00:18:35.360 And, um, it's based on self-interest and consumerism.

00:18:38.680 And so, you know, we, we, the ultimate, the bottom line comes down to the fact we're going

00:18:42.940 to have to get used to the fact that we're, our actions are not going to be, a lot of the

00:18:47.340 time are not going to be, uh, Christian ones. 0.86

00:18:49.780 Uh, we're hardwired for something very, very different.

00:18:51.660 But that's not what we're talking about here.

00:18:54.560 Um, you know, ultimately, uh, language, especially the word sin, um, and salvation and things

00:19:00.060 like that.

00:19:00.520 These, you know, it would take three hours to explain to the average Protestant preacher

00:19:05.660 what would we mean by that.

00:19:07.820 And they wouldn't understand it anyway, because they don't recognize the church father.

00:19:11.920 It's, it's, it's, you know, it's one of the most difficult aspects of my life.

00:19:15.000 And I think yours too.

00:19:17.240 Yeah, indeed.

00:19:18.240 And so the only thing that I can hope is that our listeners to the show have been prepared,

00:19:22.500 um, with the language that we're going to use by listening to this podcast previously.

00:19:27.480 I mean, we're going to try to elaborate as much as possible, but there is, um, a certain

00:19:33.440 basic familiarity that you have to have with, with the, you know, Christian concepts and the

00:19:40.020 way in which we utilize language, uh, in this part of the, uh, in this part of the internet,

00:19:46.620 so to speak.

00:19:47.460 So I think that, yeah, you're precisely right.

00:19:51.260 And so instead of sin, I think corruption is more, uh, illustrative.

00:19:56.820 I had a union theological professor once tell me this anecdote.

00:20:01.480 He said that in order to understand corruption, it's actually not so difficult in the English

00:20:06.440 language.

00:20:06.940 We have many different words to describe the same effect.

00:20:10.100 Uh, I'm falling apart.

00:20:11.800 I'm beside myself.

00:20:13.120 I can't keep together and so on.

00:20:15.520 So I'm disintegrating.

00:20:17.400 Right.

00:20:18.180 And so we understand at a fundamental level that corruption is wrought.

00:20:25.200 It is the movement from an ordered state to a disordered or a chaotic state.

00:20:31.280 And the anecdote that he used to illustrate this was one time he was, um, in a parish and

00:20:38.560 he got a call from one of his parishioners who said that her brother hadn't shown up for

00:20:43.200 Sunday dinner.

00:20:44.100 And he always shows up for Sunday dinner.

00:20:46.260 She asked him to go over to his house and check on him.

00:20:48.660 So he went over to the house and when he showed up there, the police were already there because

00:20:52.200 they had been phoned by the sister.

00:20:53.480 So he identified himself and, you know, said who he was and they went inside the house.

00:20:57.020 Um, and so immediately, you know, there was a stench.

00:21:01.740 So he knew, knew the man was dead.

00:21:04.060 Um, and when he went to look for the man, they found him seated in his armchair or seated

00:21:09.540 in his armchair, um, where he had been a week ago.

00:21:13.520 Um, and he had been left there for a week.

00:21:15.960 And what had occurred is that over the week that the corpse had been in the chair, it had

00:21:21.880 disintegrated into the chair.

00:21:24.920 So that the man's corpse and the chair were not distinguishable from one another immediately.

00:21:33.520 So this is what corruption, disintegration is, uh, in its finest essence.

00:21:40.540 It's death.

00:21:42.740 Rock.

00:21:44.400 So this is what we mean when we say sin.

00:21:46.740 And we mean that this is, this reality on an internal level, um, but also on a world level.

00:21:55.200 Uh, when we say Christ came to save us from sin, we don't just mean our own personal sin.

00:22:00.180 We mean from the death of the universe, uh, from that, uh, mechanistic cause and effect from

00:22:07.300 the tyranny of power in the world.

00:22:09.980 One of these words that's very relevant to what you just said is integrity.

00:22:17.380 Most people, I think, use the word integrity in conversation to say that he's a good guy

00:22:22.400 or that maybe he's honest.

00:22:24.040 I think it's usually as a synonym for honesty.

00:22:26.880 But clearly the word says integrate in it.

00:22:29.760 To integrate the parts of yourself in your life and every aspect of yourself into one entity.

00:22:37.040 That there is a single core principle that informs everything you do.

00:22:41.780 Now, because there's no community, because there's only, you know, individuals, abstract individuals,

00:22:47.420 um, you have a different personality at work.

00:22:50.240 You have a different personality at home, different personality with your, when you, when you're out,

00:22:54.500 you know, playing, doing whatever you're doing.

00:22:56.000 You have a different personality with your friends.

00:22:57.640 And this has been for many years now, a huge issue with me.

00:23:02.620 I've gone out of my way to be the same person, no matter what's going on, which can be awkward

00:23:07.360 in some time.

00:23:10.160 But there are people, I know, I was married to one, um, that these personalities don't really

00:23:17.900 adhere to anything.

00:23:19.560 There isn't a person underneath there.

00:23:21.860 All they are, are these masks that they wear, um, to please people, uh, in different contexts.

00:23:30.000 And, um, that's, that's one of the most, and this word integration or integrity is exactly

00:23:35.460 what you're talking about.

00:23:37.000 To be fragmented, um, is how most people live, whether they want to or not.

00:23:42.360 And to be integral is extremely difficult because it means you have to have this single principle

00:23:47.880 you will not budge from that you will, that will inform, um, everything you do.

00:23:54.780 And sometimes people see you as severe.

00:23:57.520 They see you as a man of principle or something like that, something good or bad.

00:24:00.980 Um, and the, the misuse of the word integration is, is, or, um, integrity is essential.

00:24:08.000 And modernity is based on this fragmentation.

00:24:11.460 Um, if you base everything on the individual, as anomalists have to do, even that word individual 0.95

00:24:16.320 is arbitrary.

00:24:17.640 You know, the individual is actually universal, but when that's the case, um, you're not the

00:24:23.020 same person from day to day for different, uh, different elements in your life.

00:24:27.900 And after a while, for some people, you realize that there is, there is no person under there.

00:24:32.800 That's all they are is these masks.

00:24:35.860 Yeah, precisely.

00:24:37.700 Um, there are many, I think, yeah, this, uh, this is the danger of spiritual deception is

00:24:45.420 that when you replace your foundational personality with a mask or you convince yourself that your

00:24:51.020 own internal corruption or sin is righteousness, then there is no possibility for repentance.

00:24:56.900 Um, because you don't even recognize your own, your own corruption.

00:25:03.420 Well, we, you know, we could rationalize anything.

00:25:05.940 And I think for the most part, people, um, aren't particularly rational, illogical in their

00:25:11.360 action.

00:25:12.220 They're too self-interested for that.

00:25:14.420 But they, most people, and none of us are innocent of this, of course, to rationalize past

00:25:19.820 actions.

00:25:20.740 I mean, we could become geniuses at that.

00:25:23.100 You know, we've become philosophical.

00:25:24.940 We're trying to do that.

00:25:26.520 And if you have, if you're capable of that, and if you have people saying yes to it, for 0.90

00:25:31.400 some reason, you could rationalize any damn thing. 0.81

00:25:36.300 Precisely.

00:25:37.260 So this, back to the issue of corruption.

00:25:40.480 The reason why corruption, I think, is also an excellent point to start is because there

00:25:43.680 is, it is a presupposition that most philosophical systems don't actually deal with.

00:25:48.320 They don't answer the question of why do we have corruption in our, in our universe, especially

00:25:54.260 post-medieval philosophical systems.

00:25:58.980 Um, I mean, on its surface, this is a question that needs to be addressed because we know from

00:26:05.800 the spiritual realm where numbers and formal concepts inhabit, uh, it's relatively unchanging.

00:26:12.000 It's eternal by definition.

00:26:13.240 And so the perfect in the spiritual realm remains perfect.

00:26:17.680 There is no corruption.

00:26:18.980 There is no change.

00:26:20.320 And so if we have a, if we take a very basic metaphysical view that the physical world derives

00:26:28.280 from the metaphysical world, the spiritual world, why then is there corruption in the

00:26:33.880 physical world if the spiritual world is eternal and perfect?

00:26:37.520 And so the Christian answer to this question, uh, is, uh, in Genesis, it is that man brought

00:26:47.780 disorder to the world through his sin, through his, his corruption, his deviation from the

00:26:53.820 order that God had set out for him.

00:26:57.440 You know, Adam and Eve were innocent.

00:26:59.620 They weren't perfect.

00:27:01.240 They communicated with God, um, intuitively.

00:27:04.980 They didn't need concepts.

00:27:06.160 They didn't see themselves as individuals.

00:27:09.100 They saw themselves as, as one with and integrated with the creative world around them.

00:27:14.660 Um, the fall and what came after the fall was this gradual weakening of human thought.

00:27:23.240 Uh, we had to use concepts and language, no more intuition.

00:27:27.880 God became more and more abstract.

00:27:30.240 We became more and more self-interested.

00:27:32.080 And I think over the centuries, the millennia, our consciousness became shrunken.

00:27:37.760 You know, I think, um, Adam and Eve were able to conceive of the world universally just

00:27:42.260 as part of their own selfhood.

00:27:43.860 In our case, of course, all we know is our own, our own personality.

00:27:47.120 And I think over the last two centuries, that's gotten worse and worse and worse.

00:27:51.020 I think it is possible, um, to have a consciousness that more than just you, and we take that for

00:27:57.480 granted that, you know, it's just us.

00:27:59.020 But I think, you know, a real community where you're born and raised in the same place over

00:28:04.340 generations, um, that you have a consciousness that's far greater than yourself.

00:28:09.240 I mean, when we think about our world around us, we do it from our point of view.

00:28:14.300 We have no choice there.

00:28:15.760 But I think it was possible many, many years ago, uh, to think from a communal point of

00:28:20.740 view.

00:28:21.400 And that's almost inconceivable to us now.

00:28:23.960 But the greater and greater we were separated from God and truth, the more we were forced

00:28:29.100 to use sentences and concepts and language and numbers and symbols.

00:28:33.460 And the more we became self-interested, this is now that natural order seems violent.

00:28:40.180 Animals are scared of us.

00:28:41.940 We're scared of each other.

00:28:43.680 Even good friends, uh, realized that they could turn on them at the, any, any moment.

00:28:49.220 So, as you well know, the Greeks and Romans have the idea of the golden age.

00:28:53.740 Um, and it's been a devolution ever since then.

00:28:58.200 And as opposed to our modern point of view that says that we're evolving and things are

00:29:02.780 getting better in every respect, which they have to believe if they accept that, that

00:29:07.260 point of view.

00:29:08.100 So, I don't see evolution anywhere.

00:29:10.140 I see devolution everywhere.

00:29:12.240 In your, uh, episode of, the Slavophile episode of the Orthodox Nationalist, you talked

00:29:17.860 about how Russian peasants were said to be able to talk to animals.

00:29:23.280 Um, my, uh, my father is, uh, an anthropologist and has done a lot of work with, in the, um,

00:29:30.400 with, uh, Indians in northern British Columbia.

00:29:33.680 And so they have a extremely complex social order and their, uh, oral history goes back

00:29:40.040 to the end of the flood, uh, the end of the Great Deluge.

00:29:43.400 And so they've been living in this particular place underneath this one mountain for 10,000

00:29:50.260 years doing the same thing, fishing salmon.

00:29:52.220 And so Indians in that part of the world can talk to animals. 0.98

00:29:58.480 Uh, and they joke is that, you know, uh, animals don't speak English.

00:30:01.820 They speak Indian.

00:30:05.500 Well, it wouldn't be, you know, speaking to animals, it's not like they, they speak in

00:30:09.680 English or, or, or Indian sentence and they listen.

00:30:12.260 No, obviously.

00:30:12.900 Yes, indeed.

00:30:13.940 But I mean, I think what they mean is, is it's intuitively.

00:30:16.920 They have a connection that, that doesn't require words.

00:30:20.400 They know each other so well, you know, they were raised together in, in, in, in a sense.

00:30:24.860 The, the Russian idea that peasants could speak to animals comes from the left.

00:30:29.600 When the populist movement in the middle of the 19th century tried to go to the people, 1.00

00:30:33.140 they dressed up in what they thought were peasant clothes and they look like idiots, of 1.00

00:30:37.900 course. 1.00

00:30:38.560 And, uh, they went out into the countryside trying to be a peasant and hundreds of these

00:30:43.600 people converted because they had no idea that it was, when they actually were dealing

00:30:48.000 with peasants on a, on a day-to-day basis, the knowledge that they had, all intuitive,

00:30:52.300 whether it be about the weather or the soil, all these scientific things, they could never

00:30:56.580 put it into concepts.

00:30:57.940 They could never explain it to you in a book, but they were extremely impressed with how,

00:31:02.140 uh, even Alexander Herzen, uh, says something similar.

00:31:05.680 Um, the concept of talking to animals is really common in that era because these people going

00:31:10.660 out to the countryside, you know, they had very little contact.

00:31:13.600 With peasants, you live in St. Petersburg. 0.99

00:31:15.920 And the fact that they, they know what animals need just by looking at them, that became a

00:31:20.700 common thing in the 1850s.

00:31:22.960 Um, and, um, I was, I didn't understand that at first, but if this is your life and this

00:31:30.300 is where your father's and grandfather's life and all this accumulated knowledge, um, after

00:31:35.400 a while, um, animals and human beings can read each other.

00:31:42.340 And, um, that, that was something I wasn't expecting to hear from the left.

00:31:46.560 And a lot of them were, you know, we thought their ideology for that reason, that there's

00:31:51.800 knowledge here that we have no concept of.

00:31:53.840 They're not these primitive people that need our help.

00:31:55.700 It's the other way around.

00:31:58.740 Yeah, indeed.

00:32:00.320 Indeed.

00:32:00.740 And when this is, um, as we talked about before, disintegration as a synonym for corruption is

00:32:06.740 these two are necessarily opposites.

00:32:08.480 And so one of the things I think that the nominal idea has done to the idea of salvation

00:32:13.420 is it has, um, and we're going to get into this later on, it has created this, um, neutralization

00:32:20.900 effect of Christ's saving act upon the cross, whereby man moves from a state of sin into cleanliness,

00:32:28.240 but he's, you know, he's not, not exactly glory, not exactly extreme integration or, um, and

00:32:35.120 so on, which is exactly what the Orthodox view of salvation proposes that man's salvation

00:32:41.260 means he moves beyond the state of his forefather, Adam into heavenly glory.

00:32:46.680 And we're going to talk about that, I think a little bit later on in, in a little bit more

00:32:51.020 detail.

00:32:51.680 So I wanted to kind of get back to Genesis, um, and to continue to focus in on this myth

00:33:00.160 as the foundational explanation for corruption.

00:33:04.220 So it's, it's essential to have a good understanding of this, to know what Christ came to do, because

00:33:09.280 he's described in scripture as a second Adam.

00:33:13.540 You're referring to the expulsion from the garden.

00:33:15.960 Indeed.

00:33:17.900 Which again, started this process.

00:33:19.980 That continues.

00:33:21.780 Um, here's, let me give you the thumbnail sketch of, of what's going on here.

00:33:26.560 Um, when Christ came to earth, when he took all of our sins upon us in the garden, he reconstituted

00:33:34.280 Eden in the church that he founded.

00:33:36.920 Now, most of us, that's, those are just, that's just verbiage to most people, ourselves

00:33:40.460 included.

00:33:41.560 Because of all of our, you know, the things that we, our sins, our self-interest, our fear,

00:33:45.020 whatever it is, we can't experience that.

00:33:48.160 But, um, it's just a singular, uh, I don't want to use the word institution, but it's

00:33:52.920 the presence of grace, energy, same word, uh, on our, our aesthetic life, in all senses

00:34:00.460 of that term, the prayer life and everything else, is allowing us to perceive that and feel

00:34:05.880 that with greater and greater clarity.

00:34:07.360 Nothing changes when we die, because we meet God, we're experiencing the same energy, but

00:34:15.220 whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing, has to do with how prepared we are.

00:34:20.420 And that this is, that's the nutshell concept.

00:34:23.100 We're not talking about legalism or a set of rules like a penal code.

00:34:27.560 We're talking about, um, getting ourselves into a position where we could experience what

00:34:31.820 Eden really was in the church.

00:34:33.860 I haven't gotten there yet.

00:34:35.080 I don't know.

00:34:35.780 But it, you know, this is, this is what the doctrine of salvation is.

00:34:39.340 It isn't, you know, you know, having a ticket that says, you're okay, and you get into heaven

00:34:43.680 and the gate opens, you know.

00:34:45.380 And even today, I find myself, it's really hard to break that, that spell.

00:34:49.460 Um, and the magical sense of, of all of this is really hard to get around.

00:34:58.060 You know, this is how we're raised.

00:35:01.320 Uh, excuse me, I had my microphone muted precisely.

00:35:03.360 Well, it's such a deeply conditioned presupposition in the West.

00:35:06.160 I mean, it's, it's, you know, five, six, seven hundred years, uh, this is the nature of salvation

00:35:12.460 that has been presented to us, you know, culturally, racially, ancestrally, and so on.

00:35:16.520 And so, yeah, I mean, it is, it is, um, you know, even for a traditionalist, you know,

00:35:21.400 somebody, uh, who rejects the modern world, you know, this is an error that is very pre-modern.

00:35:29.900 And even, yes, even for us, I don't care how advanced you are intellectually on this level,

00:35:34.140 maintaining this in your day-to-day life is exhausting.

00:35:36.400 Because the default way of thinking is a nominal, legalistic way.

00:35:42.180 We see the church, you know, like a government.

00:35:45.720 And, you know, even church fathers have used this metaphor, but they don't mean it literally.

00:35:50.800 You know, we think of the, the law as a, as a code of rules.

00:35:54.780 If we break it, we're in trouble.

00:35:56.280 Um, the, the problem there is that we're always going to break it.

00:36:01.060 And God knows this.

00:36:03.080 And sometimes you get, I mean, on the one hand, you get the ecumenical crap that God saves everybody. 0.99

00:36:07.780 But you do have a lot of our people who seem to promote this idea that God is a monster. 0.94

00:36:14.100 That God truly enjoyed, uh, throwing all of these temptations at us.

00:36:18.460 And when we, and if we fail, we, uh, are punished for.

00:36:22.060 And we burn for eternity.

00:36:24.460 That's, that, that's not God.

00:36:25.580 God is not a monster.

00:36:27.200 God is a father.

00:36:28.840 Well, when our little, my little son, when he was little, comes up to me and said, I'm sorry, I did something again. 0.94

00:36:33.880 What do I do, punch him in the face?

00:36:35.740 No. 0.98

00:36:36.700 You know, we forgive him immediately and continue to help him.

00:36:39.920 And there's no, there's no difference.

00:36:41.260 The Psalms, uh, describe God as exactly that.

00:36:44.480 He's not looking for any excuse to have us burn.

00:36:48.060 It's quite the contrary.

00:36:49.620 And the same thing goes for the saints and everything else.

00:36:52.560 Um, but if you take the legalistic view,

00:36:54.760 the nominalist view, the positive view that, that all there is, you know, there's laws and then you step on it and you, you, you, you break the law and like a landmine and it goes off and you're finished.

00:37:03.900 Um, that's what God ends up being like.

00:37:05.580 And it's, uh, it must be a miserable way to live.

00:37:07.720 But when I was a Roman Catholic many years ago, that is, that's exactly how I live.

00:37:12.640 And if I didn't get to a priest now, I have the sin on my subconscious.

00:37:16.400 If I died, that's it, I'm burning.

00:37:18.320 No matter what else I've done.

00:37:20.020 And that kind of, that's, that's, you know, you've got to create more neurotics than anything else.

00:37:23.820 It's, it's, it's an error, but it's very easy to fall into that error.

00:37:28.160 Indeed.

00:37:28.540 And this, this relationship, I think, is the most accessible and, uh, essential message is that, um, Christ came to earth that we could become as Christ.

00:37:40.020 Um, and I think that it's, uh, it is, um, Irenaeus who says that God became man, that man might become God.

00:37:48.460 And this is the, the message of theosis, that God is to us an adopted father.

00:37:55.820 We become his adopted sons in the way that Christ is his son.

00:38:01.400 Right?

00:38:02.220 In totally integrated with the grace of God, his action, his will, the, the, the order itself.

00:38:08.960 Right?

00:38:09.480 Uh, vitality, life itself becomes, uh, a, a permanent and inseparable part of us, uh, because we can become temples of the Holy Spirit.

00:38:19.700 So this, this relationship, it is, by definition, between a father and a son.

00:38:25.020 And if you're a son of God, you're a brother of Christ.

00:38:28.460 There is a, uh, a, a vertical and horizontal integration with the Holy Spirit.

00:38:33.120 It's, this is the notion of periphoresis.

00:38:35.920 The, the total integration of the life energy of the Holy Trinity to the point where it's indistinguishable.

00:38:44.520 The, the actions of the persons are indistinguishable from one another.

00:38:47.800 The same union professor who I quoted earlier described it in the mode of, uh, Ukrainian dancing.

00:38:55.160 That they get dancing so quickly that, you know, you're, you're trying to look for your son, you know, or your daughter, see where they are, and you lose track of them.

00:39:02.660 You can't tell the individual identity of any of the dancers.

00:39:06.840 They become a collective, a unit, through that integration.

00:39:09.620 Well, the liturgy says in the Eastern Church that we cannot pray as we should without the teaching of the Holy Spirit.

00:39:18.520 That means we're not making a choice to go up and pray our services or whatever we do.

00:39:24.080 Um, this is how God expresses himself.

00:39:27.260 That's what being a member of the Church is.

00:39:29.820 Now, you could choose to ignore that and do whatever you want.

00:39:32.040 Um, and this is why we can't take credit for it.

00:39:36.360 Um, anyone who prays properly, like an Orthodox person, has to, by definition, have the Holy Spirit, uh, with him. 0.56

00:39:44.440 Because you would not be able to do that without, uh, and essentially it's not, it's, you, you're being, you're, uh, an instrument.

00:39:50.320 You're a vessel.

00:39:51.360 The very fact that Christ sits on the right hand of the Father means that glorified human flesh is now part of the Trinity.

00:39:58.300 This is what enrages the demon.

00:39:59.620 That, that, you know, fecal matter, as some of the possessed people have said, uh, these, these bags of feces, is what demons call us, um, is somehow now sitting at the right hand of God.

00:40:14.400 Uh, and it tortures him.

00:40:17.300 Uh, you know, so this is, this is the, this is the essential issue here.

00:40:23.300 Absolutely.

00:40:24.340 Absolutely.

00:40:24.860 And so the, returning to, to Genesis, the identity of Adam as the first man, and as the image of, of God, um, I think is essential to understand, to know why his expulsion from the garden affected the universe in the way it did, and it affected us as his descendants in the way it did.

00:40:44.720 Um, and so Adam was, as the first man, the icon of the human race before the incarnation of Christ.

00:40:53.440 He was the bearer of the high priesthood, the royal steward, right?

00:40:59.580 The, the, uh, chamberlain, so to speak, of the world and the garden that God had created for him.

00:41:05.080 And so Adam, as the patriarch, you know, and to kind of, uh, give some of our listeners just a little bit of, like, background, you know, God believes in corporate identity.

00:41:15.940 Uh, he's not an individualist.

00:41:17.700 You know, people have, um, people are, are dealt with on, uh, you know, corporate manner.

00:41:26.940 So, in groups, in, in, uh, kin lines, familial lines.

00:41:30.860 And Adam, as our familial patriarch, was, in a sense, operating in a relationship with God on behalf of us all.

00:41:38.920 And so he is, go on, go on, Father.

00:41:41.840 No, no, no, you, you finish up.

00:41:43.040 I mean, I'll be just, so I was going to say that this, this is why Adam's acquiescence to Eve's temptation, uh, um, drew not only himself, but his descendants,

00:41:55.260 because we inherit, uh, from him his mantle as humans in, in the image of God.

00:42:00.700 And we inherit, like, why is his corruption?

00:42:03.380 You know, uh, people don't ask why, you know, the children of people with genetic illnesses, uh, carry that genetic illness.

00:42:12.380 Corruption in the sense, uh, that's why many Orthodox authors use the term ancestral sin rather than original sin, uh, to distinguish it.

00:42:20.200 This is the view, is that this is an inherited state, a mental way of being.

00:42:25.700 As, uh, you described it, Father Johnson.

00:42:28.800 Well, um, let's get something straight, and you, you, you stated it briefly, and we have, I want to emphasize it.

00:42:35.840 The idea of the individual person, the isolated ego, is revolutionary in the modern world.

00:42:43.760 No one saw human beings that way before.

00:42:46.000 Um, it doesn't make sense.

00:42:48.680 It's a complete myth, um, that goes along with the, you know, the modern development of industry and, and, and the imposition of the Kabbalah and its, its view of, uh, changing and fixing nature onto all of us.

00:43:02.420 Um, the individual ego.

00:43:04.740 You know, you know, we think of ourselves as individuals. 0.95

00:43:07.340 Um, it's a ridiculous way to talk.

00:43:09.420 No one thought of that before, before the modern world. 0.55

00:43:12.480 There is no way the isolated ego could function for five seconds without a community.

00:43:17.400 We're born helpless.

00:43:19.840 Uh, the very fact that, that someone who supports individualism will argue with me, and he will use arguments that he didn't invent, that he got from, from elsewhere.

00:43:30.700 And language, and a logical form, that he got from elsewhere.

00:43:34.540 So, the very act of arguing for individualism defeats it.

00:43:39.040 Everything that we do is, is communal.

00:43:41.120 And I, I have papers on this.

00:43:43.120 The idea of a bishop is not some guy.

00:43:45.920 It's an office.

00:43:47.740 It's a, it's a synod.

00:43:48.860 It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a diocesan sober.

00:43:51.080 It's, it's not just one individual.

00:43:52.960 When a, when a bishop, uh, writes something, the tradition is to use the word we.

00:43:58.060 It's not an individual.

00:43:59.180 There was no such concept.

00:44:00.700 Uh, a king on the throne.

00:44:02.180 That was, the assumption is that you had a, you had an aristocracy around you.

00:44:06.620 Um, everything was communal.

00:44:08.280 There was no, so the idea of the isolated ego is from Descartes.

00:44:12.440 And it is, it's, it's, believe me, that's our default setting is revolutionary, completely revolutionary.

00:44:19.820 It's a nonsensical way to think.

00:44:21.640 The, the, the ego is a complete myth.

00:44:23.860 And that really is at the root of our social problems.

00:44:27.160 So that, you've mentioned it, and I want to, I want to just stress it right there.

00:44:31.440 Absolutely.

00:44:32.280 This is, um, I once took a course on the gospel.

00:44:34.440 And the first half of the course, the professor just was basically teaching cultural anthropology.

00:44:39.220 Um, because there's no way that you can begin to understand at all, uh, what the words that are written there, if you don't understand the context in which they were written.

00:44:48.320 Because the presuppositions, the worldview is so radically different, um, as, you know, as to be a different language, totally, even in English.

00:44:58.020 And so this is one of the core concepts that, um, he focused heavily on, is the corporate identity.

00:45:02.520 That there was no individual, uh, individual identity, uh, you know, in the pre-modern world.

00:45:09.260 It was simply impossible for the reasons that have already been outlined.

00:45:13.460 And so this is why, you know, God contracts with people, you know, in group identities, as nations, right?

00:45:22.700 As churches that, uh, you know, uh, pan-national organizations and so on.

00:45:27.000 And tribes, families, right?

00:45:29.600 Single men and so on.

00:45:31.340 And so these people, these nations, these tribes, I mean, it's not just like a nominal addition of every one of the members.

00:45:38.320 It's not the sum of the parts, but it's an icon or a reflection of the heavenly archetype that they are based upon.

00:45:45.740 The ideal nation, the ideal man, the ideal council, and so on.

00:45:50.920 The ideal military.

00:45:52.260 And that's more significant, it's more real, it's more concrete than the day-to-day expressions of that nation or family.

00:46:02.980 How many times does the word nation show up in the New Testament?

00:46:06.400 I mean, it's constant.

00:46:07.960 They're always referring to, uh, social groups.

00:46:11.720 Uh, you know, the Gentiles or the nations. 0.97

00:46:14.480 They're not referring to people as individuals coming to the faith.

00:46:17.860 They're talking about extended, and we say family, remember, the extended family.

00:46:22.260 You know, it's a very large organization.

00:46:26.700 The nation as an ethnic group was assumed back then.

00:46:30.780 I mean, you have liberals now saying that the nation is a brand new concept, and yet it's all over the, both the Old and the New Testament.

00:46:37.720 It was both a religious entity and a social entity, a cultural entity.

00:46:44.060 And really, especially in the Old Testament, those weren't distinguished.

00:46:46.820 That's also a modern concept.

00:46:48.300 We could separate those things.

00:46:49.320 Most of our arguments, or at least my argument, for nationalism in the Church comes from the Old Testament.

00:46:55.980 And I know this is slightly off topic, but I'm going to make a prediction here.

00:47:00.040 Um, the Old Testament, the next, I don't know, couple decades, is going to increasingly be, uh, rejected by the modern Church.

00:47:10.300 Because in no way can their agenda fit with the Old Testament.

00:47:16.600 And yet it's canonical scripture.

00:47:18.040 It is equal to the New Testament with the exception of Christ. 0.81

00:47:21.780 I've said this before, and I'll say it again.

00:47:23.680 Um, Christ didn't have a political agenda because it was already done.

00:47:27.320 He assumed that his readers, uh, sorry, his listeners, uh, knew the prophet and knew the law, at least to some extent.

00:47:33.000 It's not an accident that the Old Testament is attached to the New One.

00:47:37.580 Christ makes no sense outside of the, outside of the Old Testament.

00:47:42.480 If you take Christ by himself, it's, you know, he doesn't say very much.

00:47:48.200 The point is, is that the prophets already did.

00:47:51.120 They laid out both the religious point of view and the political point of view.

00:47:54.700 And I have, I have very good bishops and priests over the years saying, well, it doesn't matter.

00:48:00.220 The Old Testament is, doesn't, is not binding on us.

00:48:03.340 Um, yeah, they're like the Psalms, I guess.

00:48:05.960 But that's pretty much it.

00:48:07.600 And when they lose an argument over the national issue, uh, that's what they end up doing.

00:48:11.920 Is that, you know, Ezra, as you know, one of my favorite Old Testament characters, was a vehement nationalist.

00:48:18.000 You know, he makes us look, you know, very, very weak, um, against mixed marriages and all that stuff.

00:48:23.280 Death for race mixing, I believe, right? 1.00

00:48:25.440 He says so, and he was, he was tearing his beard out, and he was so outraged.

00:48:29.920 But the concept of a religious, uh, life and the national life were the same.

00:48:34.180 Because nations are generally based on a, on a single religion that unifies everybody.

00:48:38.960 So, I'm going to make that prediction right now.

00:48:40.920 You're going to start seeing, uh, the Old Testament really more and more loudly being rejected.

00:48:46.540 I had a bishop, a very good bishop, tell me that if Christ didn't explicitly say it's okay,

00:48:53.700 the Old Testament is irrelevant.

00:48:56.720 And I asked him to clarify, and he said the same thing again.

00:49:01.540 Uh, and of course the context was, I was beating him in an argument about nation.

00:49:06.200 The prophets are national socialists.

00:49:09.800 You know, I mean, adjusting for the, for the era, of course.

00:49:12.880 They say exactly what, what they say.

00:49:15.020 Well, what we say generally about politics.

00:49:16.500 You know, these weren't separable things.

00:49:19.420 Family, nation, grace, religion, uh, culture.

00:49:23.760 They were essentially one and the same thing.

00:49:25.060 Only the modern world cuts these up into pieces and tries to say that they're, that they're separate.

00:49:29.480 So, of course, this was racial and ethnic, clearly.

00:49:32.860 Not solely that, but it was.

00:49:36.100 And I believe because, you know, the context, as you say, the context of Christ is the Old Testament.

00:49:41.380 Especially the prophet.

00:49:42.920 Christ acted like a prophet.

00:49:45.340 He, you know, he had the same presence as a prophet.

00:49:48.340 He quoted them.

00:49:50.760 Um, that's a pretty strong endorsement of these guys.

00:49:55.820 And, you know, the prophets were extremely political.

00:49:58.280 Uh, economics was a huge concern of theirs.

00:50:00.340 Foreign policy was a big concern of theirs.

00:50:01.780 Christ didn't have to lay out the political agenda because it had already been done.

00:50:07.220 And he assumed his hearers, uh, knew it.

00:50:10.260 So, reading Christ without the prophets and, you know, Deuteronomy and the law, uh, makes them seem nonsensical.

00:50:16.860 And that's, talk about the context.

00:50:18.380 That's the essential point.

00:50:20.060 This is it exactly.

00:50:20.880 And I agree with you, uh, Father.

00:50:22.860 I mean, I've heard it myself.

00:50:24.060 The neo-Marcionism is, I mean, it is the, um, I would say it is the universal ideology,

00:50:30.880 universal theology, rather, of, uh, Novus Ordo Catholics.

00:50:34.480 Um, but I've heard it from Orthodox people, um, especially, and surprisingly,

00:50:38.440 those who grew up in Orthodox countries, like from Greece, who just say, oh, well, you know,

00:50:42.380 the Old Testament doesn't apply to us.

00:50:44.940 You, right?

00:50:46.140 I mean, you know, and it's, it's wild.

00:50:49.160 I mean, you can send them, um, you know, the law codex of Justinian, right?

00:50:53.000 And, you know, point out that, you know, it's supervised by two saints, uh, wrote this law codex,

00:50:57.480 making arguments, you know, for whatever.

00:50:59.380 Or, you know, and they just say, well, you know, uh, that's not what I was taught.

00:51:04.460 Whatever.

00:51:07.640 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:51:08.380 That's a big argument.

00:51:09.300 Yeah, that's not what I was taught.

00:51:10.540 Yeah.

00:51:11.440 Everyone knows that that kind of thing isn't, isn't true or good.

00:51:15.160 The Old Testament is harsh.

00:51:17.320 Um, and what we do is precisely what the prophets did.

00:51:21.600 We were doing the exact same thing to a group of people who were unworthy,

00:51:25.500 who have ever heard the gospel in the first place.

00:51:26.980 We're not perfect, of course, but we're in the same position as the prophets.

00:51:31.660 We use the same kind of language.

00:51:32.700 We're harsh.

00:51:33.300 We're confrontational.

00:51:35.020 Um, we take no prisoners.

00:51:37.720 And, unfortunately, you know, they all got killed.

00:51:39.920 That is the prophetic, um, lifestyle.

00:51:44.100 Just to make an addendum before it slips my mind,

00:51:46.000 the ludicrousness of, of divorcing the Old Testament from the New Testament is,

00:51:51.180 I mean, should be self-evident to most of our listeners.

00:51:53.620 But, like, the whole Gospel of Matthew is about Christ, I mean,

00:51:57.640 essentially embracing, um, the, the royal Davidic kingship.

00:52:02.300 I mean, he, he, he is like the new David, and he rolls around with, you know,

00:52:07.480 his armed Hezekiah, uh, humiliating his enemies.

00:52:13.980 You know, and just, and it's, it's, yeah, as you say, nonsensical.

00:52:18.700 A topic for a different day, perhaps.

00:52:21.600 So the...

00:52:22.600 Well, and that's important to the Gospel as well.

00:52:24.140 I mean, I think that's essential to what we're talking about here today, too.

00:52:26.880 When, when Christ is on the cross, uh, and he was speaking,

00:52:30.980 what did one person say?

00:52:32.260 Oh, he's speaking to Elijah.

00:52:33.900 They immediately associate him with prophet.

00:52:36.820 Transfiguration.

00:52:37.580 Two prophets.

00:52:38.960 The Church Fathers, um, wrote a lot,

00:52:42.560 analyzing, you know, the different books of the Old Testament.

00:52:45.140 But to hear that from good bishops and good priests today,

00:52:47.600 it's, uh, it's very disturbing.

00:52:51.740 Indeed.

00:52:53.760 So the...

00:52:54.720 Um, back, so to Adam,

00:52:57.640 the expulsion from the garden,

00:52:59.240 um,

00:53:00.360 is what brought our world into sin,

00:53:04.060 not just our own internal passions.

00:53:07.620 Now, to...

00:53:08.720 I think that it'll be helpful to discuss the...

00:53:11.720 a little...

00:53:12.220 zoom in a little bit on the macro and micro corruption

00:53:14.380 that is present in our, um,

00:53:16.660 in our current state,

00:53:17.540 because then we can understand exactly what it is

00:53:19.540 that, um, salvation is coming to fix.

00:53:22.040 So on the micro level,

00:53:23.140 our own sinfulness is caused by,

00:53:25.400 um,

00:53:26.480 disordered passions,

00:53:27.900 is the language that's typically used.

00:53:29.740 And what this essentially means

00:53:31.000 is that the various drives and desires of our body,

00:53:33.820 which are good and natural,

00:53:34.800 hunger,

00:53:35.540 so that we can continue to live,

00:53:37.220 um, you know,

00:53:38.060 a thirst,

00:53:38.940 uh, lust that we can continue to procreate

00:53:41.260 and, um,

00:53:42.760 produce life or sexual, uh,

00:53:44.800 eros,

00:53:45.180 these become directed away

00:53:47.200 from their natural ends

00:53:48.780 of reproduction

00:53:49.720 or sustenance

00:53:51.240 and so on,

00:53:52.500 uh,

00:53:52.740 and become disordered.

00:53:54.300 And so, um,

00:53:55.700 hunger becomes gluttony,

00:53:57.500 you know,

00:53:57.820 um,

00:53:58.260 sexual eros becomes, 0.51

00:53:59.700 you know, 0.56

00:54:00.140 adultery,

00:54:00.740 lust,

00:54:01.500 uh,

00:54:01.860 anger,

00:54:02.620 wrath,

00:54:03.820 you know,

00:54:04.300 righteous anger becomes,

00:54:05.720 you know,

00:54:06.160 wrath and leads to murder

00:54:07.380 and so on.

00:54:07.920 And so the,

00:54:09.140 these disordered passions

00:54:11.060 are the result of the fall,

00:54:13.500 uh,

00:54:14.560 of man,

00:54:15.060 the expulsion from the garden.

00:54:18.840 Well,

00:54:19.440 and,

00:54:19.760 you know,

00:54:20.020 I know it sounds self-serving

00:54:21.480 from my point of view,

00:54:22.240 but nominalism

00:54:23.360 is the ultimate consequence

00:54:25.780 of the expulsion.

00:54:27.520 The separation,

00:54:29.620 the immediate separation,

00:54:31.100 uh,

00:54:32.000 from God

00:54:32.580 after the expulsion

00:54:34.120 led,

00:54:35.740 and speaking very,

00:54:36.440 very broadly,

00:54:36.940 of course,

00:54:37.140 led to the development

00:54:38.320 of language

00:54:38.880 and logic

00:54:39.780 and reason

00:54:40.840 and science

00:54:41.360 because now

00:54:42.660 nature is hostile.

00:54:45.100 It doesn't give you

00:54:46.260 what it wants,

00:54:47.180 um,

00:54:48.500 freely.

00:54:49.040 You have to go

00:54:49.700 and work for it.

00:54:50.960 And sometimes

00:54:51.800 even that doesn't work.

00:54:53.700 Uh,

00:54:54.280 and what we were talking

00:54:54.900 about before

00:54:55.420 is that this is precisely

00:54:57.640 how

00:54:58.080 sin

00:54:59.100 infected

00:55:00.220 the natural world.

00:55:02.400 Um,

00:55:03.640 the concept of sacrifice

00:55:04.680 comes from the fact

00:55:06.420 that we always want,

00:55:08.020 because of these passions,

00:55:08.800 we always want,

00:55:09.660 uh,

00:55:10.300 nature to give us more

00:55:11.520 than she is prepared

00:55:12.820 to give.

00:55:14.480 Well,

00:55:14.880 that requires sacrifice.

00:55:16.040 You can't do that for free.

00:55:18.700 And,

00:55:19.280 slowly but surely,

00:55:20.900 um,

00:55:21.340 man is so separated

00:55:22.400 from God

00:55:23.240 that he really forgets about

00:55:24.200 or he sees him

00:55:25.440 only in symbolic terms.

00:55:27.660 Uh,

00:55:28.100 and so anomalism,

00:55:29.080 uh,

00:55:29.380 eventually is the ultimate result.

00:55:31.080 Again,

00:55:31.500 I'm speaking in very general terms here.

00:55:33.300 It's the ultimate result

00:55:34.360 where

00:55:35.160 God isn't present

00:55:36.200 in heaven

00:55:36.880 or in nature.

00:55:37.540 And it's just this,

00:55:39.140 this chaos

00:55:39.820 of hostile matter

00:55:41.600 against our personhood.

00:55:44.560 And this is,

00:55:45.320 this is,

00:55:45.620 that's the final end.

00:55:46.640 You know,

00:55:46.760 that's,

00:55:46.940 that's the call

00:55:47.340 you at the end of that

00:55:48.480 Iron Age.

00:55:50.680 Um,

00:55:51.260 and,

00:55:51.740 and of course,

00:55:52.180 postmodernism

00:55:52.820 and Nietzsche

00:55:53.360 and everything else.

00:55:54.280 This is what it comes from.

00:55:55.400 It's a very lengthy process.

00:55:57.820 But now,

00:55:58.700 for us to think about God

00:55:59.720 or the Father

00:56:00.380 and to experience him

00:56:01.260 like a real person

00:56:02.000 is very hard.

00:56:03.860 This is not how

00:56:04.600 we were born and raised.

00:56:05.280 And this is,

00:56:06.940 this is a constant trouble

00:56:07.720 we have to,

00:56:08.200 we have to deal with.

00:56:09.320 You just said

00:56:10.140 their person

00:56:10.780 and I think this is

00:56:11.720 exactly correct

00:56:12.780 is this is who God is.

00:56:14.920 Not

00:56:15.360 just one person

00:56:16.660 but three persons.

00:56:18.100 And the nature of a person

00:56:19.340 is that they can have

00:56:20.600 relationships with one another

00:56:21.980 and make contracts,

00:56:24.260 communicate.

00:56:25.920 And so the,

00:56:26.760 the Holy Trinity

00:56:29.020 being a community

00:56:31.160 of persons

00:56:31.860 that share

00:56:32.740 one life

00:56:33.680 and one essence,

00:56:34.740 this is the model

00:56:36.140 for the universe.

00:56:37.460 And so when Adam

00:56:38.560 was in the garden

00:56:39.360 and he was innocent,

00:56:42.620 he was a temple

00:56:43.700 of the Holy Spirit.

00:56:45.400 He was vivified

00:56:46.540 by the very force

00:56:47.900 which keeps the universe

00:56:49.520 ordered to begin with.

00:56:51.240 And so there was

00:56:52.020 not a need

00:56:52.800 to express

00:56:54.600 the spiritual reality

00:56:56.920 around him

00:56:57.600 through derivative symbols,

00:57:00.160 through noises.

00:57:00.460 through noises.

00:57:01.400 The actual

00:57:02.520 essence

00:57:03.860 of these things

00:57:04.840 could be communicated

00:57:05.860 on a direct

00:57:06.640 spiritual level

00:57:07.720 and were immediately

00:57:08.800 apparent to him.

00:57:10.880 This is why Adam

00:57:11.820 can name

00:57:12.620 the things in the garden.

00:57:14.180 The name is

00:57:15.040 the icon

00:57:15.940 of its soul,

00:57:17.120 of its essence.

00:57:18.340 And so when Adam

00:57:19.000 is expelled

00:57:19.740 from the garden,

00:57:20.480 he loses

00:57:21.000 this intuitive connection

00:57:22.240 not only with himself

00:57:23.840 as a reflection

00:57:25.220 of Christ,

00:57:26.200 the Logos,

00:57:26.780 but with the broader

00:57:28.420 cosmic order

00:57:29.320 around him.

00:57:30.760 And because the curse,

00:57:31.780 the curse of mechanism

00:57:33.100 in a sense

00:57:33.600 is put upon his shoulders,

00:57:36.360 man is forced

00:57:37.420 to continually

00:57:38.280 leverage more

00:57:42.280 and more resources

00:57:44.680 from the world

00:57:46.220 around him

00:57:46.780 through the use

00:57:47.540 of these machines,

00:57:50.580 these power extensions

00:57:52.020 and so on.

00:57:52.660 Well, that's

00:57:55.340 one of the best

00:57:56.120 ways I've ever

00:57:57.500 heard it put.

00:57:58.980 This slow

00:57:59.960 alienation

00:58:01.200 forces science

00:58:02.660 to come into existence.

00:58:04.960 And because

00:58:06.000 we're always seeking

00:58:07.160 to extract

00:58:07.860 power and resources

00:58:08.920 from nature,

00:58:10.560 maybe through technology

00:58:11.820 or whatever it is,

00:58:13.440 we become

00:58:14.020 very suspicious

00:58:15.120 of each other.

00:58:17.700 You know,

00:58:17.940 Thomas Hobbes

00:58:18.480 made the point

00:58:19.060 in Leviathan

00:58:20.560 that it doesn't matter

00:58:21.600 if people

00:58:22.840 in a community

00:58:23.320 are good.

00:58:24.440 It just takes

00:58:25.100 one person

00:58:25.840 to start

00:58:26.240 arming himself

00:58:26.840 and even the best

00:58:28.720 of people

00:58:29.100 have to arm

00:58:29.640 themselves

00:58:29.960 in retaliation.

00:58:31.960 So all it takes

00:58:32.820 is one person

00:58:33.400 to destroy

00:58:33.820 an entire community.

00:58:35.920 And that's

00:58:36.120 the foundation

00:58:36.640 of what we're

00:58:37.800 talking about here

00:58:38.440 is the gradual

00:58:39.540 mistrust

00:58:40.040 and separation

00:58:41.140 of individuals,

00:58:42.540 which of course

00:58:43.380 develops into

00:58:44.180 a hostility

00:58:45.740 with the natural

00:58:46.240 world as a whole.

00:58:48.280 The animals

00:58:48.740 are afraid of us

00:58:49.440 and we see nature

00:58:50.580 as frightening.

00:58:51.920 Most of the time.

00:58:53.280 The saints,

00:58:53.720 however,

00:58:54.200 did not.

00:58:54.840 And this is why

00:58:55.200 we talked about

00:58:55.720 the peasants

00:58:56.040 being able to

00:58:56.560 speak to animals

00:58:57.440 in an intuitive way.

00:58:59.820 This is what grace does. 0.98

00:59:01.380 This is what,

00:59:02.240 you know,

00:59:02.520 they're far closer

00:59:03.460 to Adam

00:59:03.880 than we are.

00:59:07.620 Indeed.

00:59:08.380 It's funny

00:59:09.000 that you should

00:59:09.520 mention that

00:59:11.520 my own personal theory

00:59:12.980 is I think

00:59:13.420 that old Babylon

00:59:14.140 was probably

00:59:14.740 a highly advanced

00:59:16.060 technological civilization.

00:59:18.500 it's neither here

00:59:20.880 nor there.

00:59:21.820 But I think

00:59:22.100 they say that.

00:59:23.040 I mean,

00:59:23.220 it clearly was.

00:59:24.280 Yeah.

00:59:25.620 Yeah,

00:59:26.140 and I think

00:59:26.400 that there's

00:59:26.740 actually quite a bit

00:59:27.980 of archaeological

00:59:28.380 evidence to

00:59:29.300 demonstrate

00:59:30.180 that they did

00:59:30.960 possess superior

00:59:32.320 technology to

00:59:33.000 our own

00:59:33.360 current era.

00:59:37.840 Now,

00:59:38.240 anyway,

00:59:38.560 regardless,

00:59:39.020 that's not the

00:59:39.720 topic for today.

00:59:41.300 so I think

00:59:42.020 that we've

00:59:42.640 come to a

00:59:43.840 natural break

00:59:45.580 in our show.

00:59:47.140 So we're going

00:59:47.600 to go to

00:59:48.120 some light music

00:59:49.780 perhaps,

00:59:50.400 and when we return

00:59:51.320 we're going to

00:59:52.240 talk about Christ.

00:59:54.540 So to our listeners,

00:59:55.940 stay tuned.

00:59:56.600 Thank you very much.

01:00:03.300 Thank you.

01:00:04.880 Thank you.

01:00:06.620 Thank you.

01:00:08.480 Thank you.

01:00:38.480 Thank you.

01:01:08.480 Thank you.

01:01:38.480 Thank you.

01:02:08.480 Thank you.

01:02:38.480 Thank you.

01:02:40.480 Thank you.

01:02:42.480 Thank you.

01:03:12.480 Thank you.

01:03:42.480 Thank you.

01:03:44.480 Thank you.

01:03:46.480 Thank you.

01:03:48.480 Thank you.

01:03:50.480 Thank you.

01:03:54.480 Thank you.

01:03:56.480 Thank you.

01:03:58.480 Thank you.

01:04:00.480 Thank you.

01:04:02.480 Thank you.

01:04:04.480 Thank you.

01:04:06.480 Thank you.

01:04:08.480 Thank you.

01:04:36.480 Thank you.

01:04:38.480 Thank you.

01:04:40.480 Thank you.

01:04:42.480 Thank you.

01:04:44.480 Thank you.

01:04:46.480 Thank you.

01:04:48.480 Thank you.

01:04:50.480 Thank you.

01:04:52.480 Thank you.

01:04:54.480 Thank you.

01:04:56.480 Thank you.

01:04:58.480 Thank you.

01:05:01.480 Thank you.

01:05:02.480 Thank you.

01:05:04.480 Thank you.

01:05:06.480 Thank you.

01:05:08.480 Thank you.

01:05:10.480 disintegration and decay all the time because of these natural forces. We're looking at the

01:05:14.820 hurricanes, for instance, in Florida, whether those are natural or not, no comment. But the

01:05:22.380 point is that the world itself, if we accept that corruption is inherent to it, we have no

01:05:31.300 conclusion but to come to that the physical world is evil. It's shitty inherently because these 0.85

01:05:36.960 titanic forces of nature operate totally indiscriminately with no morality. And so I 0.89

01:05:43.040 think these, you know, this is again going back to these philosophical presuppositions. You know,

01:05:47.960 people just take this for granted. You know, they don't, you know, ask the question, why? Why is it

01:05:53.200 like this? And most Christians are actually not able to tell you that the world is like this because 0.99

01:05:57.780 of Adam's corruption, his sin, because he was the high priest of the earth and he violated, he

01:06:06.120 desecrated his own temple.

01:06:09.960 What most of the fathers will say about Adam's sin is that it was about power. It was that he

01:06:19.600 has knowledge that he can impart to him, where he couldn't just live in harmony with everything,

01:06:25.880 but he can control everything. Obviously, what we read in Genesis is a very brief thumbnail of what

01:06:33.580 actually happened. And none of the fathers deny that. But most of them will say that he was offered

01:06:42.620 something. He was offered knowledge or something like that, that would allow him to lord it over

01:06:47.820 nature, not just exist in this childlike existence, but to be able to go further.

01:06:53.360 And as I said before, this, over time, introduces sin right into the very nature of matter, where it's

01:07:03.200 always hostile to us and gets worse and worse as time goes on. I don't know if you could trace

01:07:08.960 like hurricanes to pollution or how, you know, the earth has been so violated by machinery. I mean,

01:07:16.240 I don't know if that's possible, but we have no doubt affected the weather. And a lot of natural

01:07:21.600 disasters are because of, because of how humans treat the world.

01:07:25.280 Yeah, precisely. But I think the aerial realm is a reflection of, you know, our own spiritual

01:07:32.480 state. And I mean, that, that's why, I mean, the heavenly firmament is like an icon of the real

01:07:40.320 spiritual heaven, you know? So, I mean, there's a reason why anomalous, you know, celestial movements

01:07:46.240 and weather patterns and stuff were taken by the ancients to be omens of spiritual things,

01:07:50.640 is because they knew that they were actually integrated.

01:07:56.000 Well, when, you know, when I discovered, you know, one of the most important facts about

01:08:00.720 epistemology, you know, when I discovered that human beings will not look at the same object

01:08:08.800 in the same way. The, the positivist concept says there's an abstract perception and an object

01:08:14.800 out there, and we all would look at it identically. And if you use the scientific method,

01:08:20.800 we'll come to the exact same conclusion. Well, the truth of the matter is, is that our psychology

01:08:27.680 does more to create the object than the object itself does. That when we are steeped in sin,

01:08:34.320 we don't see another person. We see a victim. Someone who's dominated by lust, for example,

01:08:41.840 doesn't see attractive women as human beings, not by any, any means. He sees them as, as possible

01:08:47.200 victims as something to conquer. They are not seeing a beautiful woman in the same way that a 0.99

01:08:54.480 saint would or someone else would. And that these sins and disorders affect our perception and affect

01:09:02.000 what we think we know to the point that, you know, we believe very illogical things because we're

01:09:07.600 dominated by one emotion or another. People who are very depressed, for example, see,

01:09:12.880 see every sentence that someone says as some insult or as, you know, proving that you're a loser or 1.00

01:09:18.640 stupid or whatever it is. This all comes, it all comes from the same source. And epistemology, 1.00

01:09:24.880 the way we see things is getting worse and worse and more narrow and more, um, uh, more vitiated

01:09:32.080 because we don't see the natural world as something having meaning in itself.

01:09:35.680 Uh, it's about us and we see what we can make out of it. We're not even seeing objects

01:09:40.880 at all anymore. We're just seeing ourselves.

01:09:42.720 Yeah, indeed. And I think that this, uh,

01:09:51.760 this was a, it's, we, I mean, a critical revelation, but it's very easy on a personal

01:09:56.720 level to confirm. I mean, if we go to lust, it's a very, very powerful drug, you know, uh,

01:10:02.640 and it's the most dangerous drug in the world. I mean, you know, everybody, every man knows how it

01:10:07.200 feels to have your blood up and the way you look at the world is different. It looks different

01:10:13.520 physically. You pursue your perception of it is totally altered. I mean, it's, it's, we take it

01:10:20.400 for granted. And so, you know, I remember so much of, of Orthodox theology is things that are readily

01:10:27.280 apparent to anybody who has had any experience with the real world that are just formalized into

01:10:32.400 language. And it lies at the foundation of sin because sin is destructive, um, because we're

01:10:41.920 not seeing the world anymore. It completely alters how we view the natural order. And that means our

01:10:48.480 actions are altered and our view of truth is altered. You know, especially when a society is dedicated to

01:10:55.120 this, we live in illusion. This is what the cave, um, metaphor was about in Plato.

01:11:02.240 We're not seeing the natural order. We're seeing the regime. We're seeing how the regime has filtered

01:11:08.080 our understanding. And breaking out of this is, you know, the first step in salvation.

01:11:15.840 You know, then someone can see that the saints, like Seraphim of Sarov could see logos in the natural

01:11:22.480 order. Um, not just the, the accidents, you know, the colors and shapes and things, or how much he's

01:11:29.200 scared of it or whatever it is. And, you know, he had a bear as a friend. A lot of the saints, um,

01:11:35.440 you know, had gone back to the, uh, the garden in that sense that, um, the natural order was not

01:11:42.240 hostile anymore. And it's part partially because they're able to see the world for what it is. We

01:11:47.360 can't, we live in total illusion. And yet the most extreme example is falling in love. Oh my God,

01:11:52.880 the things that we do. It's like being drunk. And then we're out of it. We look back and say,

01:11:57.040 oh my God, that couldn't have been me. You know, and this is how the passions, uh, operate. It, it,

01:12:03.600 it destroys the world around us and replaces it with a total illusion. And it's extremely dangerous.

01:12:08.880 And that's really the nature of sin. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, this is what Christ has come

01:12:17.840 to rescue us from, uh, on a personal level and on a world level. This is what we say, uh, Orthodox

01:12:24.400 Christians, we say every day in the creed that we believe in the age to come, the world to come.

01:12:29.280 And we look, we look forward to it is that the, the card that Christ will glorify not only us,

01:12:38.640 but the whole physical world. And this is what the end of the book of revelation is about is that

01:12:43.920 there is a resurrected, glorified, perfected world better than needed that awaits, uh, you know,

01:12:51.800 those who, who want it essentially who, you know, to whom it would not be, uh, an abomination

01:12:57.160 because they've set themselves up against order and, uh, made passion their own, uh, their master

01:13:05.000 essentially. And so the, go on, please. The distinctions between spirit and matter or mental

01:13:12.600 and physical, these are going to disappear. These distinctions that we make that come from,

01:13:17.800 from our own limitations. Of course, we know it's all integrated, you know, it's one creation,

01:13:22.600 but because we're so limited and sinful that we have to divide everything up into pieces,

01:13:27.160 to be able to understand it, that will disappear completely. And again, that's something else

01:13:31.640 that Adam was able to see. Um, and we can't even, we can't even talk about it because words can't

01:13:37.000 describe it. I think this is a big part that, as you say, the end of the revelation, um, the entire

01:13:42.280 natural world, uh, and all of human nature. When we say human nature, we're also referring to economics

01:13:46.920 and politics. We'll finally see for what it is for the first time.

01:13:50.280 Indeed. And so this is, uh, the person of Christ enters as the, uh, promised savior.

01:14:02.680 And as, as we've discussed, and so the, I know that there are several church fathers and there's

01:14:07.640 a little bit of a debate on the, on the subject as to whether Christ would have come if Adam had

01:14:12.440 fallen into corruption or not. And I know that the majority opinion is that Christ would have come

01:14:17.480 because the action of the incarnation of God is the inter perfect integration of the human nature

01:14:28.200 with the divine nature. What this means in Orthodox theology is that God, that comprehensible ordered

01:14:37.800 person of the logos, the word which created the universe, whom we are fashioned after as living beings,

01:14:45.800 totally assumed everything that is proper to man, that he created the same flesh and blood essence

01:14:54.840 that we share and that Adam shared. Indeed, he put on not only the, the soul and the will and everything

01:15:00.840 spiritual to man, but the flesh and blood is the genetics, the DNA that he had inherited from Adam and,

01:15:07.160 you know, from, uh, the nation of Israel. And so the, what occurs is that there is a glorification

01:15:19.880 of the human nature with the divine energy that it doesn't, uh, extinguish it. It doesn't suffuse it. It

01:15:27.400 doesn't quash it out. The divinity of Christ perfects his humanity. And so this is, this is what we mean when we

01:15:36.200 say grace or, or light or energy or truth. It's all this, the same thing. It's the will of God.

01:15:41.080 That's why the Christology, uh, the dilothelitism is so important. That just means that Christ has two wills.

01:15:48.680 He has the one common will of God, the one God, and he has his own proper human will that work together

01:15:56.280 in free cooperation, that they're so intimately linked and well integrated that there is no

01:16:03.720 distinction or discrepancy between the choices of either. That's how obedient he is to the will of

01:16:10.040 his father. You know, for many years, I, I couldn't wrap my brain around why this tore the world apart

01:16:19.800 for the first millennium of Christ. You know, modernist theologians say, oh, this is all a

01:16:25.400 misunderstanding. You know, they're speaking different languages, of course, wasn't true.

01:16:29.720 Um, and this is all just academic or, or, or meaningless, uh, trifles. Uh, the council of, of

01:16:37.960 Chalcedon, which finally laid out exactly what you just said, was the single most significant event,

01:16:46.520 uh, in Western history. Our entire sense of freedom and justice and truth comes from that.

01:16:57.160 If there was a tilt to one side or another, our relationship with God would be completely different.

01:17:02.840 If humanity was absorbed into the divine, then our freedom would be meaningless. We would really have

01:17:09.160 no purpose other than to be passive recipients of things. On the other hand, if man was stressed,

01:17:16.200 um, at the expense of, of God, then you have Nestorianism, that we could pretty much live as we please.

01:17:22.600 Um, and you understand in both cases, the state wins. This is why emperors were heretics far more

01:17:31.720 than they were Orthodox in the first millennium in the Byzantine Empire. Because if God is separated from

01:17:37.160 man, that means the state can do what it wants and doesn't have any higher authority to answer to.

01:17:42.120 If God simply absorbs human nature, well, you can very easily, uh, interpret that to mean that the state

01:17:50.440 is supreme and everyone is just a passive recipient of law and power. This is why, uh, people killed each

01:17:57.720 other over these issues for the further, that, that 400, 500 year period. And I learned about it just in

01:18:04.520 like a flash of lightning. It hit me. Um, these are anything but academic discussions. And you, you know,

01:18:12.200 you have theologians all over the place who just don't get it. They think, oh, I can't believe they got

01:18:16.040 all upset about two wills or one will. You know, all this nonsense, how primitive they were back then.

01:18:21.800 And it's the very core of how we perceive ourselves. Chalcedon, um, changed the universe forever.

01:18:29.960 Absolutely. And this is, um, this is, uh, incredibly, incredibly important to understand

01:18:39.320 and something that is, uh, not grasped by many. I mean, to give an example with, with the two wills,

01:18:45.880 the, I mean, if Christ only, if Christ only had one will, uh, one divine will, and he, there was no

01:18:51.720 human will to him. Number one, that would mean he's not fully human. So the flesh and blood that he put on

01:18:57.400 is in some sense deceptive. It's in some sense, uh, an illusion, you know, cause he's not the same

01:19:01.880 as us. He doesn't have to have the same, you know, human spiritual essence. But number two,

01:19:06.840 it means that in our own salvation, if that's true, our own will doesn't mean anything that our,

01:19:10.760 we like our freedom, uh, to sin, uh, is ultimately irrelevant. It's just cause and effect that in the

01:19:16.600 garden, Adam never could have refused the devil's offer, making God a tyrant. And because the only,

01:19:22.920 uh, end, uh, the view of salvation, if there's one will is that God sort of just enters you,

01:19:28.600 possesses you and, you know, puts you into his order as a chess piece. There's no cooperation

01:19:33.880 whatsoever. You don't get a choice. Well, right. I said the exact same thing a minute ago, just at

01:19:39.480 a different level. Exactly. At the state level. That's how fundamental this stuff is. And I hear all

01:19:44.920 the time. Uh, Christians having no idea why everyone got so worked up about this stuff 1.00

01:19:50.840 and humans, especially Europeans and Americans today are so debased and our reason, our noose, 1.00

01:19:57.560 not logic, but our, our reason is either not present or is highly defective that they can't extract

01:20:05.240 the consequences of exactly what you just said. If one side of the balance is stressed at the expense

01:20:12.120 of another, humanity would be completely different today. And this is exactly why,

01:20:17.640 for better or for worse. Um, and this is why, and I'll say it again, um, you know,

01:20:24.360 I've heard the argument used that, that, you know, the emperor simply imposed orthodoxy on people,

01:20:28.200 and that's how it, that's how we're orthodox today. There's no real truth to what is his power.

01:20:32.280 And the easy answer to that is that the emperors were heretics. It was, it served their interest.

01:20:38.360 A huge number of, uh, emperors were, were heretics and forced, uh, heresy on the church for the

01:20:44.440 reasons we just described. The state wins in both cases. The only time the state loses is in, in

01:20:49.720 Chalcedon. And this is why, um, so many of the heresies, actually all the heresies, major ones,

01:20:56.360 were sponsored by the state at one time or another. Um, because the, the balance is about, um, uh,

01:21:03.720 and not just, you know, human, humanity to divinity, but also human beings to the church,

01:21:08.120 uh, the community in relation to, to society and the state, all of these things are contained in

01:21:13.640 it. And also when we talk about human nature, not talking about some abstraction, we're talking

01:21:18.200 about everything that's proper to human being. That includes nations, believe it or not.

01:21:22.600 It includes government, it includes economics, it includes everything else. And, and so, but people,

01:21:28.440 I think are just debased so, so greatly that they just can't see the, um, including educated people

01:21:34.200 can't see just how intensely significant these debates were.

01:21:39.720 Indeed. And this, this is, yeah. And it comes down to this, is that any change to the person of

01:21:45.080 Christ changes salvation because Christ is our salvation, exactly who he is personally.

01:21:51.960 Um, and that is why we are Christians. We are little Christ striving to become like him, sons of God.

01:21:59.000 And so to, to change the nature of that relationship between Christ and his father,

01:22:03.720 which is what we're trying to be, that model of perfection is to, uh, absolutely and totally

01:22:09.400 change the nature of civilization as we've exposed and demonstrated and, uh, the cosmos.

01:22:15.960 But we would have no concept of freedom. We would have no concept of a voluntary will

01:22:21.320 that could reason for itself and choose extra wine without Chalcedon. Um, because if it's

01:22:28.120 tilted one way or the other, civilization would have developed in an extremely distorted way.

01:22:32.440 Now, of course, today we have what would happen if we were, you know, Aryans.

01:22:36.600 The Aryan or Nestorian world is what we live in, uh, and to an extreme degree. 0.98

01:22:41.400 So we live in one of those perverted areas. It's a desert. It's far worse than a desert.

01:22:47.080 Um, and to some extent, I guess, Islam may have something to do with, with the, the idea of

01:22:52.120 simply absorption into the, into the divine will, where the, the human being really is more or less

01:22:57.240 passive in relation to God. And of course the state, because these things always have a political and

01:23:03.080 economic, um, consequence that even at the time, I don't even think they were able to comprehend.

01:23:09.480 But they were simply more rational, uh, than in human beings are today back then.

01:23:15.800 It's true. So back to the figure of Christ, um, the symbol of Christian salvation, you know,

01:23:23.640 is the cross of the Christian religion is the cross. Um, you know, again, it's something that's

01:23:27.880 been totally destroyed by nominalism has had all of its original meaning stripped away from it.

01:23:33.400 People don't know what the cross means or why it has power. Um, you know, but just to kind of go

01:23:39.240 back to basics, I mean, the cross is an instrument of execution, right? It is the, the means by which

01:23:46.040 Christ passed from life into death, how God died. And so this action should tell you what 0.55

01:23:53.560 the foundational myth, the core of the Christian religion is about. It is exactly about Christ's

01:24:00.360 passion, his death, his descent into Hades and his resurrection and ascension into heaven.

01:24:07.240 People often forget, um, that when he was in the garden,

01:24:12.520 what he, what he dealt with in the garden was far worse than the cross.

01:24:16.040 The cross was a walk in the park compared to the garden. He had to take all the sins of humanity,

01:24:25.000 past, present and future, thrust onto his person all at once. This is what he was afraid of.

01:24:33.560 And then once these acts and these ideas and these contexts were placed within his human nature,

01:24:41.000 this is why he sweat blood. It's a, it's not, you know, you hear about it once in a while when

01:24:45.400 the capillaries in the skin burst under extreme stress. There's a name for it, I can't think of it.

01:24:51.320 But this is exactly what, um, what they're talking about. Where Christ, in order to destroy these sins,

01:24:57.640 did it quite literally, um, bringing them on his person. And that's what went up on the cross.

01:25:04.760 Uh, only through God's power was he not killed by this. Can you imagine the suffering that every

01:25:11.480 sin that's ever been committed, past, present and future, would do to you if it was a thrust on you

01:25:15.960 all at once. And this is what Anton Kropovitsky once reminded us of in his work on, on salvation.

01:25:23.640 Um, he voluntarily took this punishment that was meant for us and he took it on himself. And the

01:25:30.440 stress that it caused him personally was so severe that his capillaries in his skin burst.

01:25:39.000 Yeah, exactly. And so it's this, um, this reality, this archetypal man that is, um, nailed to the

01:25:47.160 cross that is put to death as the first of Christ's conquests over evil. Uh, so this is

01:25:54.200 what the cross represents. Um, I mean, of course, there are many different layers and depths, but it

01:25:59.400 is the death and destruction of the sinful human nature, which brought the world into sin.

01:26:07.080 Now, it doesn't mean that we're no longer free. And it doesn't even mean that the effects of of sin

01:26:16.040 in the world have been overcome. Only in the church is that relevant. When I first heard the hymns of all

01:26:22.760 the great feasts, they all say the same thing. The world has been renewed. Uh, the wall between God

01:26:28.040 and man has been knocked down, everything else. And I said, well, that's not what I see, even in my own

01:26:32.680 life. Well, there's one place where that's the case. It's not in the entire cosmos. It's within

01:26:38.840 the church and only in the church. And if we had the ability to see past our hangups and self-interest,

01:26:44.760 we'd be able to experience that too. So it's the church where that's, um, where that's applied.

01:26:50.440 Outside of it is the same chaos it's ever always been. Yeah, absolutely. And so this, the,

01:26:57.080 the, I think that to, this is the, the perfect transition because it is exactly through the

01:27:05.960 church that an individual Christian enters into that same spiritual reality that Christ entered

01:27:11.400 into. And this is what, you know, baptism is what happens to children when they fall off of boats.

01:27:17.000 It's drowning, it's death, right? Submersion in the, the, the, the disintegrating waters, the corrupting

01:27:25.000 waters. Except with Christ, right? He has inverted the evil back into its proper cosmic order, glorified,

01:27:33.960 uh, previously the instruments of death and destruction and subverted their purpose into

01:27:40.200 nobility, into life, the life-giving wood of the cross. And this is, we can't access this

01:27:48.040 grace. We can't access Christ himself because outside of the church, outside of the Orthodox 0.98

01:27:53.080 church, the Holy Spirit is not there for us to come into communion with him.

01:27:59.400 You're exactly right. And this is a stumbling block for a lot of people. Um, we're not talking

01:28:04.760 about holiness in the sense of goodness. Holiness is something completely different.

01:28:10.200 Holiness is about the ability to love, um, to suffer, uh, for the church and for, for other people,

01:28:16.760 um, for their own betterment, even at, even at your expense. Love has nothing to do with,

01:28:21.960 with justice. But, um, outside of the church, there is no salvation because there is no truth.

01:28:28.360 They are subject to the same cause and effect that Adam was when he was expelled, uh, from the garden.

01:28:34.520 I'm sure you can find exceptions. God is certainly not, not limited, uh, to, to our canons. Uh, I'm

01:28:42.280 sure there are exceptions out there. I think, you know, even Plato may have been one. I think, uh,

01:28:46.440 St. Justin Martyr said that. Uh, I think Maximus said that as well. But this is where grace is.

01:28:53.480 Grace is just another, that word is overused and sometimes it starts to sound a little corny to

01:28:58.680 people. Grace is nothing more than God's presence. It's energy. This is what we're talking about with

01:29:04.120 the essence energy distinction. It's simply his presence, the effect of his presence. Uh,

01:29:09.320 what logos, when it's finally perceived in nature is holding everything together rather than nature,

01:29:13.640 just seen as, as this, you know, mechanism cause and effect that we want to dominate for some reason.

01:29:18.440 So this is the concept here. And, and, uh, it's, it's really important to clarify this

01:29:24.280 because most of us have, myself included, always fighting against the legalistic conception of

01:29:30.040 salvation. Right. And so I think that the, the opposite of the legalistic conception of

01:29:36.360 salvation is I would say the personal conception of salvation, which I think is just the most universally

01:29:41.320 relatable is that the, the purpose of the Christian mysteries, the Christian, um, initiation is

01:29:48.280 to change the way we relate to God, our father and our creator is through Christ. Our human nature is

01:29:57.880 glorified with that same divine energy that filled him. And when we enter into baptism, we physically, we

01:30:05.880 spiritually, our whole essence, we enter into the birth, the death, the descent into Hades and the resurrection

01:30:14.280 of Christ. And it, we become as, you know, Paul says, you know, new creation, right? This is why it's so

01:30:22.680 essential because this is the, uh, it is how we put on Christ. And without that, our relationship with

01:30:31.240 God is not filial. It's, it's one of strangers. We don't know him. Our, our hearts are too corrupt to

01:30:39.880 perceive, to perceive, you know, not even to perceive, our hearts become so corrupt that God's

01:30:45.320 presence is a rebuke and hellfire to us.

01:30:49.880 And that's the nature you see in, uh, Isaac of Syria. Um, that's the nature of heaven and hell. 0.99

01:30:55.480 And that's something that you wouldn't see in the Protestants or, or the, or the Roman Catholic.

01:31:00.280 These are places of punishment or, or of happiness. No, it's the same place. It's about how we are able

01:31:10.040 to deal with, uh, the energy of God. Um, if we've prepared ourselves and we're used to, you know, being

01:31:18.120 in the church and being part of it, it will be the most extraordinary thing, like meeting your father

01:31:21.800 for the first time. Um, just a more extreme variation of that. Hell is for people who have stubbornly

01:31:28.440 rejected him, who just refuse to use their reason and come to the knowledge of the truth.

01:31:34.520 And, um, it's, it's scorching in a very strongly emotional sense. I don't like the metaphors of,

01:31:44.520 you know, you know, people laying on rocks and with ragged clothing, you know, and demons with

01:31:49.080 horns and stuff like that. I mean, that's, that's okay. It's for the simple people, but, but that's not

01:31:53.800 really what we're talking about. Church fathers spoke of our internal states, um, how we, how we

01:31:59.720 lived our lives and how we lived our lives is based on how we've organized or integrated the

01:32:06.280 faculties of our mind. Either they're dedicated to the truth or you have, we said before, these masks

01:32:13.560 for different things for the sake of our own self-interest and self-promotion. Everything is

01:32:18.440 connected here. And, um, we know, and God knows because he was a man, uh, is a man that our empirical

01:32:26.280 self, our day-to-day self is going to fall all the time. I didn't convert until I was in my mid-twenties.

01:32:32.600 That means, you know, for a whole generation, I was saturated in sin, hardwired into sin. So I know

01:32:42.360 there's going to be things I just can't overcome. Um, it would have been wonderful to be born in a

01:32:47.320 monastery a thousand years ago, but I wasn't. I was born at the height of the sexual revolution.

01:32:53.640 And, and, um, with the notion of giving into your passions and that there, there is no sin and

01:32:58.020 everything else. Uh, so when you finally come to the truth and are cleansed in your mid-twenties,

01:33:03.960 now, you know, God has to, God realizes, of course, he can't do anything unjust. He realizes that we're

01:33:09.640 going to suffer and it's going to be very, very difficult. When I came to orthodoxy, I didn't want it.

01:33:14.180 You know, at that age, I want to get laid. You know, I wanted to party. I was in school.

01:33:19.140 I came to the truth because I had no choice. It was true. And it was very difficult to, um,

01:33:25.380 to transfer into that, into that way of life. It was brutal on me and on a lot of people. You lose

01:33:29.780 friends, you lose relatives. We don't come to this because it's fun. It's very hard life. So something

01:33:35.540 pretty powerful has to happen to us, um, before we make that, that decision. The problem for a lot of us,

01:33:40.580 I think the two of us included, is that when we decided to convert, you know, we have been steeped

01:33:44.820 in evil for our whole lives. That doesn't just go off with a light switch. And that's our struggle.

01:33:50.900 Yeah, that's it exactly. Yeah, I mean, I can speak from my own experiences that the, you know,

01:33:58.420 when you grow up with access, like, to the internet, as myself and I think a lot of the other young men in

01:34:03.220 the far right does. I mean, it corrupts you, um, in such an extreme way at such a young age, um,

01:34:12.020 that it's, it's, uh, I mean, it'll kill you basically. It'll just kill you if you don't deal

01:34:17.460 with your issues sooner or later. So basically you'll just kill yourself. So that's why the, uh, 1.00

01:34:24.500 you know, I think in a sense the modern world is good at producing repentant sinners because it

01:34:29.620 really kills people a lot more quickly. Those who, uh, spiritually anyway, those who reject it.

01:34:35.140 But back to the, the topic at hand, because our time is limited. The, so the, uh, when Christ died on

01:34:46.900 the cross and he descended into Hades, he preached the gospel to the souls who were there. Hades or hell, 0.82

01:34:55.940 the underworld, um, you know, uh, hellheim, this is a universal cosmological conception almost, uh,

01:35:03.540 almost every single culture in the world that religion has a concept of, you know, the shadowy

01:35:08.740 underworld, the, the waiting place, not necessarily a place of torture. Um, but it's just kind of where

01:35:13.380 people mill about, uh, where their souls descend after death, if they're not ferried off to some

01:35:19.060 other abode. And so this is also usually a good indication that it's a correct cosmological, uh,

01:35:27.780 theory, you know, if everybody has that same view. And so Christ is our growing father.

01:35:33.220 No, I just said that's right. Yeah. And so when Christ descended into Hades, he preached the gospel

01:35:38.500 to everybody who had ever lived, not to the people who were waiting for it, the prophets and, uh,

01:35:43.700 the Israelites who had been faithful, who were expecting him to come, they rejoiced, but it 0.97

01:35:49.220 wasn't just them. It was every pagan who had ever lived. Every descendant of Adam, you know,

01:35:54.980 was given an opportunity to hear the truth, right? And Christ's ascension on the third day,

01:36:02.100 you know, it says in the, uh, the saints rose from the tombs with him. All who accepted the gospel

01:36:08.020 in Hades ascended with him into heaven? Well, let's be careful. Hades and hell are two different

01:36:14.260 places. Um, Hades or Sheol is the underworld. It's not really a place to suffer. Um, it's important to

01:36:21.460 me to make that distinction because as we've already discussed, most people couldn't comprehend

01:36:26.900 the gospel truth if their life depended about it. Uh, they simply are, we're part of a society

01:36:32.900 or that language doesn't even resonate. They hardly know what the terms mean. How do you judge someone

01:36:38.500 like that? It's not their fault that they were born into this rotten era. Um, Sheol is, you know, 0.99

01:36:45.380 a place of, you know, almost semi-consciousness, um, um, uh, where human souls is kind of mill about

01:36:52.740 in darkness, not bad, not good, you know. Uh, and I think a large number of humanity can end up

01:36:59.460 there permanently. Um, and when Christ descended into Hades, uh, into Sheol, as they say in the

01:37:07.060 Old Testament, um, he preached to people. Now, of course, the prophets and John the Bank, you know,

01:37:13.140 that was, that was no problem. This is what they were expecting. But if people were simply irrational

01:37:19.380 and lived like animals, then the preaching of that gospel was going to be meaningless.

01:37:24.100 It's not going to be automatically, um, this is God talking to us. We have to believe it.

01:37:28.100 They have to have a chance to make a choice. And unfortunately, I think those without the

01:37:33.700 rational faculty, which is a lot of people, uh, not just then, but now are simply going to reject

01:37:38.820 it there. And there's no reason to believe that they're going to accept it. They simply don't have

01:37:43.220 the mentality to. Um, and this, that's a very important distinction. Uh, I guess another limbo

01:37:50.020 in the Catholic Church comes from the Latin, uh, on the edge of. So it's on the edge of hell. 0.76

01:37:55.620 It's, and that's another way of looking at it. But this is a place where people go between heaven

01:38:00.900 and hell. Simply can't be judged. There's no foundation to judge them. Uh, judgment is for

01:38:06.740 those of us who know the truth. That's, that's a very important distinction to me.

01:38:13.220 Absolutely. And this was a big, um, different, a big distinction for me when I entered into

01:38:17.780 Orthodoxy is the understanding of the nature of the underworld. Um, you know, that, that cosmology

01:38:25.140 that, uh, of Hades and so on. And it was something that had always, uh, intensely confused me about

01:38:29.620 Roman Catholicism. Um, so yes, this, this is what happens is that when we are baptized, all of this

01:38:38.420 basically have occurs to us at once, uh, you know, we die, we go into Hades and then we are resurrected

01:38:44.980 with Christ. Um, you know, and ascended to heaven spiritually, it's a, a symbolic prefigurement. Now,

01:38:51.060 again, we use the word symbol, not as, uh, a, a lesser manifestation, but rather as a gate into a

01:38:58.420 greater reality, right? It allows us to access the heavenly kingdom, that grace of God through which,

01:39:05.780 you know, our souls can be glorified and we're saved when, when we're freed from, uh, this,

01:39:10.580 this kind of corrupt body with the, um, that conditioned, that gnomic will, as you referred

01:39:16.180 to previously, you know, father, this, the, that hard wiring, you know, this is, this is what it is,

01:39:21.140 uh, a prefigurement of, this is what it is pointing to. This is why it's saving. This is why it cleanses.

01:39:27.540 This is why it freezes us from sin is because this is the process. We become a new person when we

01:39:33.780 exit the baptismal font. At the same time though, you're absolutely right, but our freedom isn't

01:39:41.060 taken away. This is the problem. The problem that I had after my, when I was, uh, uh, chrismated,

01:39:47.860 um, was the fact that, you know, someone to the old Adam was still there. I at least now had the 0.98

01:39:53.860 opportunity and the means to conquer it, but our freedom doesn't go away. You know, we still sin a

01:40:00.180 whole lot after all that. And of course we're surrounded, uh, by sin everywhere.

01:40:06.660 Um, and that's, you know, it's an unfortunate reality. Uh, a thousand years ago, it was much

01:40:11.220 easier because you had communities, um, that functioned very, very differently. You couldn't

01:40:16.660 get away with the stuff, uh, then you could now. Um, being anonymous is, is, you know, was impossible

01:40:22.500 back then. And the social sanctions against certain kinds of behavior that don't exist today.

01:40:27.700 Now we're, we're surrounded with it. And, um, and of course, God knows this and we're not judged

01:40:35.380 on this because it's definitely going to happen. It's definitely going to happen. Um, you know,

01:40:40.420 we're alcoholics. As I've said to you before, we're alcoholics being forced to work in a bar

01:40:43.940 surrounded by people, uh, who tell us that there's no such thing as alcoholism.

01:40:49.460 If we take a drink, we're not going to go to hell for eternity. You know, that would be the most

01:40:53.220 ridiculous, unjust thing. What we are judged on though, is, um, how we've, how we, how we've, uh,

01:41:02.100 stayed the course, how we've stood up, how we have developed the mindset such that we're not

01:41:08.020 affected by that, that language anymore. That our, our ideas and our concept of how, how we think,

01:41:14.740 our cognition is integrated around God and church. Yes, we're going to fall. We're going to take drinks

01:41:20.500 all the time. It would be almost impossible for us not to, but that's not the, that's not the

01:41:25.460 issue. Getting back up again and saying, yes, this is still the truth. I don't care how many times I

01:41:30.580 fall. That's the, that's, this is, this is the issue. This is what we're judged on.

01:41:35.060 Exactly. Well, I mean, even, even just at a minimum level, recognizing that you, you have a problem

01:41:41.700 and that it's not good and that it would be better if you did not engage in these things.

01:41:47.060 That's enough. I mean, that's what, that's what the thief who was crucified next to Christ.

01:41:51.300 That's what happened to him is he, he just said, yes, I know, you know, I was, uh, I'm abandoned

01:41:57.140 and I deserve no mercy, but have mercy on me, son of God. And he was saved that day.

01:42:02.820 I would say the majority of people that I know, um, non-orthodox people that I know 0.99

01:42:08.340 will not take responsibility for the things that they've done. They rationalize it and they even try to

01:42:13.620 make believe that their sins are in fact virtue. So having so, and that's easy to do. No one likes

01:42:19.780 to take responsibility for things. But so many people in my life in the past and even now just

01:42:25.060 are pathologically incapable of taking responsibility for the things that they've done wrong. They blame

01:42:29.780 everybody else. You know, I didn't do it, or maybe I did, it's not my fault, something like that.

01:42:34.260 The fact that we were able to look at ourselves and, and admit that we have this problem,

01:42:39.540 that's a miracle in and of itself. Exactly. So the, after the ascent, uh, the resurrection of

01:42:46.660 Christ and the proclaiming of the good news, which is what the gospel means from the old

01:42:51.940 Germanic gospel, gospel, good story, the good news. So this comes from the Greek word evangelion. And

01:42:59.220 an evangelion is the good tidings of victory after a battle. The gospel is that Christ defeated death in

01:43:08.180 Hades. He has gained victory over all opponents, the entire world and all of its adversaries.

01:43:17.700 And so as a Christian, we rejoice that our savior has slain our greatest enemy, death itself. And it

01:43:25.940 has no power over us when we pass from this world into the next. This is what the sacraments and the

01:43:32.420 church life prepare us for and condition us to be, essentially, to be little Christ, to little 0.86

01:43:39.700 warriors against death. Soldiers in God's army of life, so to speak. You know, in my life, I've met

01:43:47.780 thousands of traditionalists, both, uh, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, and they struggle with that concept.

01:43:54.020 The last thing they do is rejoice. Um, they still have this idea that because things are so bad,

01:43:59.940 most of us are going to burn forever, so to speak. That God is this monster that's looking for any

01:44:05.860 excuse, uh, uh, to send us to hell. Um, the fact that we can rejoice that the battle has been won. 0.95

01:44:13.060 All that means for us is that we have to, uh, integrate our mind and our thinking that way

01:44:18.900 and focus and stay the course regardless of what happens to us or even what we do.

01:44:23.060 Uh, and that's really all, that's, that's a minimum. You know, for us, that's a massive job in and of itself.

01:44:30.740 And this is, you know, this is how we prepare ourselves. The very fact that we sin, um, the very

01:44:35.860 fact that we were constantly suffering with this stuff, this is exactly the preparation that we're

01:44:40.340 talking about, that when we, when we experience, uh, God directly, we'll see the final relief from all

01:44:45.700 of this. Um, but, you know, traditionalists will say that talking like that, it looks like,

01:44:50.820 it sounds like you're, you're excusing sin. That people will take it the wrong way and say,

01:44:55.060 oh, the sin doesn't matter. Now, what I'm saying here is that sin is just inevitable.

01:44:59.860 Sin as an action rather than the state of mind. Now, the state of mind, that's harder. There's

01:45:05.300 nothing for you to stay the course with, nothing for you to stay firm on. We're going to sin,

01:45:10.100 especially in this society. It's all it is, is a machine for us to sin. We're going to do it.

01:45:14.500 But the point is we suffer because of it. We learn from it. And no matter how many times

01:45:20.180 we get knocked down, we maintain the integral sense of what a Christian is supposed to do 0.86

01:45:25.620 and believe and get back up again and we keep going and it sucks and I'm tired of it. But this

01:45:31.540 is where, um, this is where the judgment comes in. This is, this is what God, especially at this

01:45:35.780 point of view, this is what he's, and he's looking for any excuse to save us, not the other way around.

01:45:39.460 Exactly. And so the, the final kind of, um, step of that sacramental initiate, uh, initiation,

01:45:49.140 the, the passion of Christ is after his ascension into heaven, where, as we talked about before,

01:45:55.780 the, the human body, flesh and blood born of a woman, uh, that walks around on the earth and labored and 1.00

01:46:02.580 was suffered and died was physically assumed into the, you know, into heaven and seated at the right

01:46:09.300 hand of the father beyond the highest echelons of reality. Matter is incorporated into eternity

01:46:16.260 at a core fundamental level, right? This is, this is a, a taste. The, the, the amount that we can

01:46:22.820 comprehend of this is a taste of what the heavenly life will be like. The, the second event, right,

01:46:31.220 that corresponds with the sacrament is charismation and the Pentecost. Pentecost, the descent of the

01:46:37.860 Holy Spirit, the advocate is the application of these, uh, of Christ's victory to his apostles,

01:46:46.580 to his followers. It's the, the recreation of the Garden of Eden on earth. And so the, the chrismation 0.95

01:46:54.020 is the filling of life with the cleansed vessel. The new son of God is reanimated with the very

01:47:00.900 spirit of God through the church in God's household. You're exactly right. The sacraments can't be looked

01:47:09.700 at. And there are some Roman Catholics who still do this as magic spells that, you know, they, they utter the 0.99

01:47:15.860 words and something magical happens. That's really hard to break. Um, that, that habit of seeing it that

01:47:23.460 way. A sacrament is simply a, an external expression of something that already is there. Um, water for

01:47:33.060 baptism represents woman, always represents the masses of people. It represents death, drowning represents 0.99

01:47:41.380 chaos. It represents a uniformity, all of these negative things, um, that we suffer with, uh, every

01:47:48.740 day. On the other hand, the olive oil is to this day, is it, is it, you know, everything it touches,

01:47:56.500 it heals. It is, it is one of the most incredible substances on, on the planet. Uh, they knew what they

01:48:02.900 were talking about back then. So you've gone through the water and now, um, and of course it's dark,

01:48:08.340 water's dark and cold and we get the deeper and all that stuff. Uh, this was a universal symbolism

01:48:12.820 for water, but for olive oil, oil in general, you know, we say, Lord, have mercy. I mean,

01:48:17.540 that's where mercy comes from. Mercy is another word for, you know, uh, for oil. It, it, it cleanses us.

01:48:24.420 It, it, um, as water does, we come out of it. Uh, it heals everything, but these objects don't do the

01:48:31.540 work. They're simply, you know, they are because we're in bodies and we perceive with our eyes and

01:48:37.540 ears. Um, we need this physical, uh, reminder, a manifestation. Um, so everyone knows that's

01:48:44.820 what's going on here and we know, we remember what's going on here. And so we, one of the

01:48:49.860 biggest problems we have and I have, I think we all have is forgetting that and seeing sacraments as

01:48:56.260 magic spells. And I think that makes clergy, uh, into little gods and deities. And that's not the

01:49:02.740 case. Um, there's nothing special about bishops or priests. Uh, they have no greater access to

01:49:09.220 grace than anyone else. They're just, uh, been trained, especially by the church to point out to us

01:49:16.980 where, where the grace is manifest and how we can experience it. So that, that balance has to be

01:49:22.900 maintained. Roman Catholics, especially when I was growing up, they had this, you know, everything,

01:49:26.500 the priests were these magicians, you know, the only way you could be forgiven is by the words of

01:49:32.020 absolution. It's not true. And that's not how it works anyway. That's not what confession is anyway.

01:49:37.460 It's not a machine to, to wash you off. It's relationship between the spiritual father and

01:49:41.940 spiritual son. And it's a danger. I still have it today. You know, these aren't magic and it's a fine 1.00

01:49:49.540 line between the sacraments and magic. And you have to be very mindful of that.

01:49:55.780 Absolutely. Absolutely. And so the, the conclusion, the culmination of, of the sacraments of the life

01:50:02.580 of God is divinization, is theosis. Um, this is what God has promised to us is that, uh, if we remain

01:50:11.380 true to the truth, the personal truth of Christ himself, that we shall be as gods. We shall be

01:50:19.220 like Christ really like theosis to become like God. Um, and so he, in a sense, this is the,

01:50:27.860 you know, the devil, this is what he, he offered us the false version of this, uh, in the garden.

01:50:33.140 And so the, the promised reward for those who reject, you know, his, uh, his deception is in a

01:50:39.220 sense, the real deal. Uh, but it's not to, to make, to understand, to clarify the reason why

01:50:45.940 the distinction between the energy and essence is so important is that when we become sons of God,

01:50:51.220 we're not sons of God, like Christ by essence, right? Our essence is as sons of men, but we're

01:50:57.940 made sons of God by that energy, that grace by adoption, right? It's a choice, a free integration

01:51:06.500 of new life into the essential whole. That's what the Orthodox life is about. That's what salvation

01:51:14.660 is about. And so, you know, you, you go to heaven on earth. That's what it's, you use this material world

01:51:21.860 to ascend the ladder into heaven. And when you die, if you've been on the ladder, you're already there.

01:51:27.780 Well, the saints, you know, lived in, in some, at least in some cases, in an ecstatic state. Uh, the

01:51:35.540 martyrs as are being tortured are, are brought into a different state and heaven is, is experienceable,

01:51:41.140 uh, on earth. There's not much of a difference between, uh, the grace here and the grace there.

01:51:47.780 Um, it's more intense because we don't have the body before the final judgment. Um, but the concept is

01:51:53.940 exactly the same. There isn't much of a distinction that you said would become like Christ. And for a

01:51:59.940 lot of people, myself included, a long time ago, that was just meaningless verbiage that everyone

01:52:04.180 just says, but doesn't know what it means. When I think of Christ's life, especially in during Holy

01:52:08.740 Week, and what I see is the masses of the population manipulated by the elites, attacking somebody who is

01:52:17.940 just and good, who's come to a radically unjust and bad society. And therefore they're going to

01:52:23.620 vomit him out immediately. Um, all of his friends abandoned him. They tortured him. Their institutions

01:52:31.460 like, you know, a trial and everything else, uh, failed because they simply lied and they had fake

01:52:36.500 witnesses. Um, total humiliation, total abandonment. And then finally, after mountains of torture,

01:52:44.740 he dies. And unfortunately, uh, that's going to be a lot of us, uh, maybe not necessarily in, in,

01:52:53.940 you know, to that extreme, but we've all been in a position where because of all of this, we've lost

01:53:00.020 family, that friends want nothing to do with us, uh, that, um, we're treated as, uh, second-class

01:53:05.700 citizens. Um, and the prophets were the same way in the Old Testament. And it's not to say that we're so

01:53:11.540 wonderful and we're so holy. It's just that, um, God has given us the truth. And when you put people

01:53:17.940 like us, despite all of our sins and problems in a sickening cesspool of society like America 0.87

01:53:23.860 or Canada today, um, you're going to be like a freak. You're going to feel like one and you're 0.98

01:53:29.780 going to be treated like one. So that's not the metaphysical aspect of it, but I see a lot of our

01:53:35.620 lives as, as Christ, um, as Christ experienced it. Remember Palm Sunday, this is a political

01:53:42.100 concept. Palm Sunday, the people loved the man. They were almost forcing him, right? And then less

01:53:48.580 than a week later, it's the same people were screaming for his, uh, execution. This was always

01:53:55.060 very important to me that this is the water. This is what the masses are. And the elites know how the

01:54:00.660 demons know how to manipulate them such that they don't even remember what they said a few days ago.

01:54:06.100 I've experienced this. Uh, I think a lot of us have. So that's the, that's the more practical

01:54:10.420 day-to-day way that we actually live like Christ. And if we are suffering and we're being treated in

01:54:13.940 the same way, we're doing something right. Absolutely. Well, this is, Christ says this

01:54:19.780 exactly. Take up your cross and follow me. I mean, he wasn't, he wasn't, uh, joking. You know,

01:54:28.100 he wasn't being hyperbolic. Uh, that's what he was promising his, his followers is that they could be like

01:54:33.860 him in all ways, including, you know, his, his total humiliation and death and suffering.

01:54:40.340 Uh, that is the promise of Jesus Christ for his followers, but that ultimately they will be

01:54:45.540 vindicated in the end. Well, one of the greatest arguments for the gospel is that it's in no one's

01:54:51.780 self-interest to write it or to follow it. I mean, essentially what Christ said is that,

01:54:57.700 you know, you follow me. Now you can think of the context, you know, the crisis living 2000 years

01:55:03.700 ago and a total outcome, a nobody doesn't even have a job surrounded by women. Um, uh, no real 1.00

01:55:13.460 location, you know, just, just, you know, causing trouble wherever he goes, uh, who is then is executed

01:55:19.300 in the most humiliating way possible because the cross, that was the final, that was the worst way.

01:55:24.580 It was like being convicted of child molestation today by that same kind of, um, reaction people

01:55:31.220 would have. Yeah, follow me. And by the way, your life is going to suck, you know, because you're

01:55:36.740 going to suffer and you're going to, you're probably going to get killed and then maybe you'll get into 0.99

01:55:41.840 heaven, so to speak. Now, what kind of a religion starts off like that? The only way that that could 0.73

01:55:49.240 have conquered the world is that it's true. The, the, the apostles, the apostles wrote of themselves

01:55:55.260 being cowards, running away at the first sign of trouble when, uh, when Christ was, was, uh, was,

01:56:01.540 was arrested. They're not going to write that to humiliate themselves for the world unless it 0.95

01:56:07.420 happened. And it's always been one of the great arguments for the gospel in that it's the only

01:56:11.100 religion in the world that it's in no one's interest to create or follow. Given the bias of

01:56:17.960 the time in both Jewish and the pagan world, Christ was a, not just an outcast, but a criminal. 0.77

01:56:25.600 He didn't fight for himself. In the worst possible way, he was tortured to death. No one at that era

01:56:31.440 would respect someone like that. No one. And yet they wrote it anyway. And if you want to start a

01:56:37.200 religion, that's not what you say. That's the opposite of what you say. It's like you're trying to

01:56:40.180 drive people away. They write it like that because it's true. That could be the only reason.

01:56:47.540 Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, I think that we've more or less been able to convey most of the

01:56:56.140 essential points of, of the Christian religion and orthodox mysteries. But to kind of sum up,

01:57:04.560 the gospel is that Christ has been victorious over death and liberated us from the corruption of the

01:57:10.160 world. And that by accepting baptism and entering into his church, his household, we're adopted as

01:57:18.060 sons of God. And we become perfected just like he was. But ultimately, that perfection comes by

01:57:26.640 imitation, by living or attempting to live the life that Christ lived, which was, as most of you know,

01:57:34.880 not exactly glamorous.

01:57:37.940 Let me, let me modify something I said a minute ago. Your life is going to suck. That's, I mean, 0.99

01:57:43.140 in the worldly sense, it's true. But we don't see it that way. We should be rejoicing. We should be

01:57:50.040 very, very happy. Because the battle has largely been won. This is a temporary problem. From the world's

01:57:55.100 point of view, our life, how can you possibly want to do this? You're miserable. How can you possibly 1.00

01:57:58.920 live that way? But we cognize things and think in such a way where what causes happiness is very

01:58:05.960 different from what the world does. We don't think our lives suck. But those outside who can't even 0.98

01:58:11.100 comprehend what we do, they just think we're nuts.

01:58:13.020 Absolutely. And this is the nominal, we'll leave with this, the nominal, the nominalist mindset is so,

01:58:24.400 you know, total. The greatest spur of that, the greatest lie that has ever been told about

01:58:31.260 Christianity, which is that it is this life denying religion, that this Nietzschean idea that 0.53

01:58:38.200 that Christianity is life denying is something I can never forgive before. Now, of course, 1.00

01:58:42.120 heresies, there are heresies, absolutely, that are life denying. But orthodoxy, in its essence,

01:58:48.100 is a religion of precisely that, life. The moral rules, the law of God, the way that we're called

01:58:58.260 to model ourselves after, it's not to restrict and chafen and chastise us from the goodness of life.

01:59:07.180 It's not some sort of, you know, no fun, puritanical garbage, but precisely the opposite.

01:59:16.020 It allows our life to flourish. We become, we enter into this state of eudaimonia because we're 0.86

01:59:23.040 properly ordered, because we remove those things which destroy us. You know, I mean, every moment that

01:59:29.420 we exist, we breathe life, our body is constantly being disintegrated, being destroyed by the bacteria

01:59:34.720 in our environment. And as soon as we stop fighting, as we stop living, stop regenerating,

01:59:39.880 we decay, we disintegrate. You know, imagine what life would be like if that disintegrative force

01:59:45.920 didn't exist.

01:59:47.460 It's impossible.

01:59:51.980 That's what the glorified human person is in Christ. And this is what the remnant is going

01:59:56.260 to look like after the final judgment. And that's why, as you know, in Revelations, they

02:00:02.060 have people in white robes and all that. We will finally be ourselves. The life-affirming,

02:00:08.260 life-denying thing, I agree, is laughable because the implication is that life-affirming means to

02:00:15.320 be driven by your passion. And that's the very definition of not being free. You become

02:00:22.440 a slave to these things. And they're never satisfying anyway. That's what they mean by

02:00:26.980 life-affirming, and they have a very twisted sense of what life is. We are the only free

02:00:30.820 people in existence for that reason.

02:00:33.920 Absolutely. All right, Father, I think that we've come to the end of our show for this week.

02:00:38.280 So, to all of our guests, thank you for joining us. I'm your host, Florian Geyer. It's always

02:00:45.720 a pleasure. Now we're back in the saddle, so you should expect, as I said, regular releases.

02:00:50.500 Joining me today, I had our honored and esteemed guest, Father Johnson. Father Johnson, thank

02:00:55.640 you for joining us on a Sunday to preach the gospel.

02:00:57.340 You know, you bring out the best in me. This show is a gift to all of us. I really appreciate it.

02:01:05.700 I'm flattered. To our listeners, I'll leave you with a quote from the Gospel of John.

02:01:13.840 The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world,

02:01:18.620 and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home,

02:01:24.280 and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his

02:01:29.560 name, he gave power to become sons of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will

02:01:35.800 of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Shalom.

02:01:40.940 Spits voran, drauf und ran.

02:01:48.760 Spits voran, drauf und ran.

02:01:50.860 Setzt aus Klosternach den roten Arm.

02:01:54.700 Spits voran, drauf und ran.

02:01:58.760 Setzt aus Klosternach den roten Arm.

02:02:02.360 We'll be right back.

02:02:32.360 We'll be right back.

02:03:02.360 We'll be right back.

02:03:32.360 We'll be right back.

Mysterium Fasces Episode 34 — The Gospel

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