And I think perhaps this is one of the reasons that the scriptures emphasize the
actual consumption of the book. That's right, that's at the point that he
takes the book and he eats it, so he makes it the inner.
It's not just an external reminder, but it ends up being something which then
is integrated and then brought into the heart. I mean, that makes so
much sense because that also explains in some ways what Christ is doing with the
entirety of the law, which is to say, you know, it's like,
it's not that I'm getting rid of the law, folks, or is
that I want you to eat the law. I want you to put it
inside you. It's inside you, then it's generative. But if it just
remains outside you, then it could be dead letter and a bunch of rules
that don't make any sense. Yeah. Yeah, this is Jonathan Pegel.
Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everyone, I am here with Seraphim
Hamilton. Those who know my channel have seen him, but also in the
circles around symbolism and Bible interpretations. Seraphim is Orthodox, and we're finding more
and more that our ways of thinkings are kind of coming parallel to each other
and joining in different ways. So we thought we would today explore the role
of the Bible, but not just the Bible, but the idea of the
book itself as an object that we see sometimes in icons with Christ holding a
book, or the way that we have the book in liturgy. We possess
it, we kiss it, we do all these things with the actual physical
book. And what's the relationship between that the physical object, it's meaning,
it's participation in our liturgies and in our culture. And so Seraphim, thanks
for joining me. Well, thanks for having me Jonathan. So what's your
first of all, it's art. What's your take on the role of the
book in our liturgical practice? So the interesting thing about the scriptures, I
think, is that they're not just a medium for communicating information in sequence.
I think because we're so saturated by texts since the invention of the printing press,
and especially since the rise of newspapers and the internet just mass print culture
in general, we have started to lose focus on the book as an object
with its own kind of sacramental significance. So even in relatively recent history,
this wasn't totally lost. If you just think of the phenomenon of a family
Bible. The family Bible functions as a kind of relic which passes from generation
to generation and expresses the character of the family. It's something which binds each
generation to it's the history which has preceded it. But today I feel like
we come to the Bible and we treat it more as a text which is
meant to simply communicate information, so you can write it on print out paper
and that's whatever. But in the liturgical Christian world, clearly the scriptures and
books more broadly play a more central and different role. In that you mentioned
that Christ is holding a book in most of the icons that we depict of
him. If you think of what the Orthodox liturgical world looks like when you
go to the altar, you have the sacramental table where you have the Eucharist,
the body and Blood of Christ, next to the Gospel Book. And
the Gospel Book isn't just something which is printed out on computer paper. It
is richly adorned with like anography and things like that. So it itself as
a physical object plays a key role in revealing to watch us the nature and
the glory of Christ. And there's so many different things that follow out from
this, and I think when you go back to early Christianity, one of
the most interesting things that you see is that Early Christianity was quite distinct from
the classical lid in a intelligible constellation of ways. And one of those ways
is the unique bookishness of the Early Church. This is something that Larry Hurtado
has done some really interesting work on. He points out that early Christians arguably
seem to have been literate at a higher rate than their non Christian counterparts were.
And this is a really significant fact when you take into account that the
Early Church seems to have been a reasonable cross section of the Reco Roman society
within which it lived. So if you have let's just say ten percent of
the society as merchants, you can expect ten percent of the Early Church to
be constituted by merchants. If you have let's say thirty percent of the society
is dirt poor, well, then of the Early Church is dirt poor.
So one of the things that distinguished the Early Church as a society within a
society is its higher rate of literacy. And so what I want to suggest
is that this has a profound symbolic significance which can be explained in terms of
the map of biblical theology, the symbolism of text that we find in the
Bible, and it has an explanatory role in telling us why tradition looks the
way that it does, why we have such a thing as a tradition of
the Church fathers, and so on and so forth. The textuality of the
early Church and of the Church more broadly is something we take for granted,
but I think it's a hugely significant fact. One of the things we see
is for sure, in the burgeoning Jewish identity after the detruction of Jerusalem,
the Torah seems to become the focus of the liturgy itself, you know,
as they lose the temple and as they lose the sacrificial system. Like if
you go to a synagogue today, the closest thing to the locus of sakra
of sacredness, that say, in a synagogue is the I forget how they
go They called the tabernacle with the with the Torah inside that's you know,
handwritten and has a you know, is sometimes even covered with a kind of
cloth to veil it. And so there seems to be a at least a
parallel between the manner in which the physical book itself functioned in the in Christianity
and how it ended up functioning Judaism. I don't know if you thought about
that well. I think that scholars will often talk about the difference between the
Judaism prior to the destruction of the Temple and the Judaism which follows the destruction
of the Temple in terms of an increased significance of Torah study relative to the
Temple. So, the Temple was the place where heaven and earth are linked
together. It is the center of the world since the entire creation is derivative
from God's life and heaven. Because Heaven actually dwells in the Temple, that's
where all creation flows out from. But with the destruction of the Temple and
the exile of the divine presence, it has suggested that Jews had to turn
to an alternative kind of spiritual or symbolic center. I don't think that's entirely
false, but I think there is a specific reason why the Torah is ready
made to take the place of the Temple. One of the things that we
find when we study the Torah is that it itself appears to be a kind
of textual tabernacle. It is a place where the Divine name is woven into
every letter of the text. So let's just think about what the tabernacle and
the Temple fundamentally are. What the tabernacle and the Temple are. Is there
a place where God's life, God's character, God's quality dwells with us.
And because God's life, character, and quality is the principle for the existence
of everything in creation, the indwelling of His presence with us in the Temple
constitutes a kind of exegesis of the nature of the world. It gives us
by giving us the Divine name, the names or meanings of all created things,
and that from the very beginning of the scriptures is never separated from the
medium of the physical text itself. So if we think of what is actually
put in the Holy of Holies, which is in the inner sanctuary of the
Temple of Solomon, what is put in the Holy of Holies are texts.
So you have manna from heaven, you have the rod of error, and
you also have the Ten Commandments or the Ten Words. And then also there
are various instances in the Biblical narrative where we read about a prophet or a
king depositing a sacred text within the boundaries of the temple or the ark of
the Covenant. So obviously the paradigmatic example of this is the Ten Words or
the Ten Commandments, which is physically engraved by the finger of God and does
manifest and communicates his presence. But also we read about Josiah when he's renovating
the temple, removing an entire copy of the Torah from the boundaries of the
Temple, and this is something which carries significance in the Patristic tradition. So
in the Patristic tradition, the strictly canonical books of the Bible of the Old
Testament are those books which were found in the walls of the Temple. And
that is because the Temple is an ex of Jesus of all creation, because
God's name dwells therein, and the Torah, the physical text itself, is
the verbal exa Jesus of the meaning of God and of creation. So if
you look at traditional Jewish ex Jesus of the Torah, and I think that
this is a right way to look at things. I think that what they're
seeing in the text in many cases is really there. One of the most
significant practices that they pursue is looking at the numerical values of certain words.
So the divine name, the tetragrammaton the four letter name of God yadhey Vave,
has a numerical value of twenty six. And if you look at texts
where the divine name is an idea has a special significance. It is consistently
presented in a number of words which is either twenty six itself or a multiple
of twenty six. So that sounds to a lot of people really really kooky,
and it's fine to be skeptical of it, just if you're hearing it
for the first time. But I would encourage folks to pursue this and detail
and look at the writings of guys like CJ. Labushing, who has looked
at the actual values of the number of words and letters in passages of the
Torah, and you find that twenty six really is woven through the whole thing.
And then when you consider that Deuteronomy twelve and other texts speak of God's
presence dwelling in the temple in terms of God's name dwelling in the temple,
then the idea that the value of that name is woven through the text itself
has the significance of revealing the Torah and the Bible more broadly, as that
within which God's presence in some sense flows, And there's a whole myriad of
implications that then can be cashed out from that, both in terms of biblical
exe Jesus, but also in terms of Christian theology of the word name and
so on. And so one of the things that happened is in the Christian
I mean, I'm curious, because I'm not I have an idea about this,
but I'm not sure. One of the things that happened in the Christian
century is the development of the book per se, you know, the movement
away from the scroll and the development of the book as an object, you
know, and the move towards vellum as well, you know, to have
you sheep skins to create these books. And so I don't know if you
Because the way we represent Christ, especially the Pantocrats, are as the judge
of all things. We show him a book, you know, not a
scroll, although sometimes we show Christ showing the scroll, you know, in
his hand. In some of the icons. Do you see there's some kind
of meaning to the actual shape, like do you do you feel you see
some movement in that direction. This is one of the things that Larry Hurtado
really focuses on, which is that the codex, which is a bound book
which resembles basically the shape of our modern book, while it exists in pre
Christian times, it really was almost never used for actual texts. So essentially
the codex was a medium for scratch paper. If you were taking notes in
a class, you would use a codex. If you're writing a diary or
something, or just writing your shopping list or the equivalent, in the ancient
world, you would use a codex. But it's Christians who pioneer the use
of the codex or bound book for the actual embedding of their sacred texts.
And this is a really exciting and interesting point, just just to emphasize how
sharp the difference is. You look at the second century. Most of the
codices that are found in the second century are of Christian origin. Now,
in the second century, the early Church was still a tiny, tiny sect.
It was only in the third century that it began to be a force
to be reckoned, with which the emperors really took notice of. But in
the second century, it was quite a tiny sect, and the vast,
vast majority of texts that we have from the second century are pagan texts,
but more than half of the codices that we find are Christian texts. This
is also true across the Christian world. So even though the early Church was
very small, it was very widely distributed across the Greco Roman world, and
the use of the codex as a medium for communicating sacred literature is found across
the whole breadth of the Christian world. There are also other aspects to the
physicality of the text which distinguish Christian literature from its pagan and sometimes Jewish counterparts.
One of the features that we find in the Codex Coteses, especially of
the New Testament, is the use of this device called the nomena soakra.
The nomen issacra obviously is Latin for sacred name, and what it describes is
this phenomenon. When you take a Christian manuscript of the New Testament, it's
almost always of the New Testament scriptural, you find that the scribe would abbreviate
divine names with like, you know, let's say icxc so, where the
New Testament says Jesus Christ Jesus Christos the scribe would simply replace that with ICXC.
We also find that the Christian scribes did the same thing for God and
for often the Holy Spirit as well, which tells you something about their theology
of God, but it tells you something about the way that they conceived their
scribal project. So the physical text itself visibly expressed the distinctness of the early
Church, both from the Old Covenant and from its broader Greco Roman context.
So I think you can look legitimately at the course of covenant history in terms
of the transformation of history from a covenant that is centered on the scroll to
a covenant that is centered on the codex. There's a few things that the
codex does which distinguishes it in terms of its practical use from the scroll.
The most important thing that the codex does is the codex allows you to store
more text on this single medium than you would on the scroll. So we
have books like in the Old Testament, the Book of Samuel, which really
is one book with a single literary structure, but we have First and Second
Samuel because it had to be divided into two scrolls. By contrast, we
have codeses from the early Christian period, which are compilations of books, the
whole set of the Letters of Paul, or the whole set of the Four
Gospels and things like that. And what the Codex allowed the early Christian scribes
to do was take the books of the New Testament and arrange them in a
particular order and present them on a wide scale for mass consumption. So true
mass consumption of literature really begins with the printing press. But I would suggest
that we see a foretaste of this from the beginning of the Christian era,
because we read things like Saint John Christistom in the fourth and fifth centuries is
encouraging his audience, which is just composed of normal Christians. They're probably mostly
not super poor, but also not super wealthy. He says things like,
you know, don't just believe what I say. Consult your scriptures. And
that's just a striking statement that someone in his age would make, because we
would assume that really nobody has copies of them. There are things that get
said which suggest actually they were being widely studied and consumed, even in the
home, and that relates to the origin of the Codex. I think basically
as scratch paper. The Codex originate as scratch paper for relatively normal people.
It doesn't originate as a medium for sacred literature. But the fact that the
Codex seems to take on in the early Church a uniquely sacred character indicates something
about the way in which the divine Word has been communicated to us in the
New Covenant. So, in the Old Covenant, the only people who were
really scribes were the king and his courts, the aristocracy, and then of
course the priesthood, who was responsible for teaching the Word of God. In
the New Testament, Jesus says that you once called you slaves, but now
you're called children and friends, because I have told you everything. The incarnation
of the Word of God coincides with the revelation of everything that can be revealed
concerning God, and I think symbolically that is related to the elevation of this
scratch paper to sacred literature, which then expands the range of people who have
access to the Word of God. So God becomes incarnate as a Jewish man
from this obscure little town from Nazareth, and in the process he elevates the
lowest form of physical writing to the unique medium for the scriptural text itself.
Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting that's definitely an interesting idea. And so
what do you see, For example, in the Orthodox tradition, we do
have liturgical use for text, like there is a sense in which the text
is to be treated with respect. Generated you know, there's a procession in
order to bring the Gospel out during the Little Entry, and so how do
you see that, because it seems like in that case the text is standing
in for Jesus himself like that, Yeah, that we that we get that.
It's that that the text is standing in for Christ. Yeah. So
if we look at the little Entrance and we compare it to the to tell
people what the little entrance is because they probably don't they don't people might not
know. Tell you, do you want to explain it like the two entrances?
Yeah? Yeah, So the Orthodox liturgy is divided, I would suggest
into basically three parts. Uh. In the early part of the liturgy,
you have what's called the little Entrance, and that is where the priest who
has been standing at the altar, he's been facing God, so all the
people face in the same direction. The priest takes the Gospel book and he
comes out from behind the iconistats out to the people, and then he goes
back up to the altar, and he holds up the Gospel book and he
says, wisdom, let us attend, and we say, come, let
us worship and fall down before Christ. And then he goes up and he
approaches the altar. Now, in the earliest period, the little entrance was
actually the first time that the priest would approach the altar. During weekday services,
he would stand at some distance from the altar, but during the Sunday
liturgy, it was this moment in the service that he would actually approach that
physical altar. Now, the great entrance happens after the little entrance, and
between the two, the priest or the deacon, usually if there is a
deacon, will read the Gospel, so he will read the Word of God
out to the people. There will be an exposition of the Word of God.
And then very soon after that, after the exposition or sermon concludes,
the priest will come out with attended by the deacons and the readers and the
altar servers, basically attended by everybody who's serving with him and is going to
carry the sacred elements of the Eucharus. So this is the bread and the
wine which is going to be transfigured into the body and blood of Christ.
And as he approaches up towards the altar, he praised or commemorates a whole
variety of people, so the President of the United States, all civil authorities,
and then at the end of that he prays for people whose names are
written down on this special piece of paper where people can write their names down
to be interceded for. So these are two approaches up to the altar,
which is then set with the Gospel book on the one hand, and the
eucharistic elements the bread and wine, on the other hand. And these two
approaches are different, but they're also closely analogous. This is the time in
the liturgy where the priest makes this same kind of motion, and it's highly
significant that on the one hand he's processing up with the Gospel book, which
contains the spoken words of Christ, and on the other hand he's processing upwards
with the element which actually physically are transfigured into the body and blood of Christ.
So, as you said, that suggests an analogy between the written text
of the Gospel, which is the words of Christ turned into pen strokes and
paper and the eucharistic elements. So the Eucharus of the body and blood of
Christ. In another sense, the Gospel is the body of Christ. So
you mentioned something which I think is very very interesting, and it's something that
I think we often just allid over when we think about what texts are again
because we're so used to computer paper. But even computer paper is made out
of trees. It's just not as visible. Talk about sheep skin, right,
what are we receiving when we receive the Eucharist. Well, what Orthodox
and Catholics believe that we're receiving is we are receiving the body and blood of
the Lamb of God. So we are actually taking that into ourselves. I
think it's quite significant just in the providential course of history that sheepskin is one
of the materials on which these physical texts are in great and you can talk
about this in terms of other media for texts as well. Even computer paper
comes from trees. We are writing on trees. What we're receiving when we
receive the Eucharist is we are receiving the fruit of the tree of life.
This correspondence between things that we eat and things on which we write is a
significant correspondence. And actually this analogy is drawn upon and developed in a variety
of different contexts in the scriptures themselves. So in Ezekiel chapter three, the
prophet Ezekiel has just been called by God as a prophet, And what that
means in the Old Testament context is he's been brought into God's courtroom, which
is the temple. It's the palace in which God sits as king and dwells
with his people as their king. He's been brought into that courtroom and he's
been made one of his court attendants and emissaries. So now Ezekiel has been
invested with the particular authority and role of speaking out God's word to people.
When he speaks in these contexts, it is God speaking well. One of
the first things that happens after Ezekiel is given that role is God gives him
a scroll and tells him to eat the scroll. He is able to actually
eat the book and take it into himself. And it's because Ezekiel eats the
book and takes it into himself that then through the rest of the story he
is able to speak it out to other people. Now that's a dynamic which
is not only present here, it is present in other context which are quite
explicitly Eucharistic in Revelation chapter ten, and Revelation has many, many connections with
the Book of Ezekiel. In Revelation chapter ten, Saint John stands before the
Angel of the Lord. I would suggest that the figure in Revelation ten who
has called another angel is actually Christ himself. That's a bit of a different
issue. But regardless of what you agree with me on that, the point
is clear that the Angel gives John this book and he tells him to eat
it with the specific phrase take and eat. And we're told in Revelation as
we hear in Ezekiel that the book was sweet as honey. A variety of
things are going on in this context using these particular words. Taken, eat
is the Eucharistic word of institution. This is how Jesus brings the Eucharist before
us in the first place. In the Johannian literature, John doesn't give us
an explicit narration of the institution of the Eucharist. He knows Matthew, Mark
and Luke have already done that. But what he does give give us is
a myriad of images which express the mystery of the Eucharist to us. So
this is one of them. In Revelation chapter ten, take an eat,
and what's John eating? Well, he's eating the Word of God. Well,
especially in John's theology, what is the body of Christ? Well,
the body of Christ is the incarnate place of the Word of God. Christ
is the Logos through whom the world was made. He is the Logos who
is expressed to us in the medium of writing scripture, is the Logos who
is presented to us in physical, incarnate form in the Eucharist itself. And
then when we read that the words which John eats were sweet as honey,
well, that refers back to the taste of the manna in the Hebrew Bible.
While Israel was wandering in the wilderness, God gave them special bread from
heaven, which they called mana. And we're told in one text what this
tasted like. It tasted kind of like wafers and honey in their mouths.
So it's bread, but it also has this sweetness to it. And so
when John and Ezekiel when they eat the book, it is being said to
be like manna from heaven. And this is significant in terms of the character
of this reference in Revelation, because Jesus in John's Gospel speaks of bread from
heaven being his own body and blood. So we have an example here of
the way in which Scripture is just interconnected with everything. Every passage in some
sense is interconnected with every other passage. But there's a logic to it.
It's not just schizophrenic madness. You see the way the images connect together.
You start to get, i think, a sense of the coherence of the
Bible in a way that really elucidates and a nests together with our Orthodox liturgical
I'd love to get your take on why, because I kind of have my
thoughts about that, but I'd like to get your take why the book is
sweet in the mouth but bitter in the stomach. Yeah. Yeah, So
what happens after Revelation ten And there's multiple dimensions in which this question can be
answered, But what happens after Revelation ten is John is going to prophesy concerning
nations and tongues and kindreds of people. So it's a similar thing to Ezekiel,
Right, So Ezekiel almost eats the word and then he prophesies. Well,
John does the same thing to the Word, and he prophesied there's an
immediate sweetness to tasting of the Word of God. But at the same time
we are also told in the scriptures that we are only glorified by suffering.
And this is precisely what John sees in the visions which follow. The visions
which follow his consumption of the Word of God pertain to the destruction of Babylon
and the persecution of the Church. And I think we have another eucharistic connection
here which can more precisely give an answer to your question, because in Revelation
chapter i think it's chapter fifteen, we have the Great harvest. We see
the Son of Man sitting on his throne, and the Son of Man orders
the people of God to be harvested out. And this is another eucharistic image
we see in Revelation. If you look at the structure of the temple,
which is disclosed in the early chapters of Revelation, it seems to be evident
that actually there's an implication that the table of showbread is missing its showbread.
It's an argument James Jordan and Peter Lightheart have made in their work on Revelation
and the kind of resolution of that discord comes in these later chapters of Revelation,
where the eucharistic harvest of the people of God is what steps God's table.
And again this is something which underscores the significance of what the eucharst is.
The Eucharist is about the body of Christ becoming our body as well.
That's why we have relics of saints under the altar on which we set the
Eucharist. It's Christ's body, it's our body because we partake of Christ's body.
And so what John is seeing here is he's receiving the Eucharist. He's
receiving the Word of God. But the word which he receives is one about
the suffering and persecution of the Church and their glorification through immense pain. So
I think that's at least part of the answer. I don't, especially with
something like Revelation, give a completely answer, because one of my intuition was
that it's related to the tay to the vinegar or the you know, the
bitter wine, or the that Jesus drinks before dying, and so it does
connect to what you're saying, but it also makes this strange. There's interesting
connections between the book that tastes like bread and then the the it that ends
up tasting like being like wine or like the vinegar that that Christ drinks before
dying, and so related obviously the suffering and this image of of the bitter
wine or the bitter waters that you see in the Old Testament. Yeah,
I hadn't thought of that connection, but I think that's probably a major part
of what's going on here because in John's Gospel, I would suggest to viewers
that you can actually map out seven specific images of baptism in John's Gospel and
seven specific images of the Eucharus, and I think one of those images in
John is found in John nineteen where Jesus drinks of the vinegar on the bitter
cup. Yeah, definitely, all right, that's just that's super interesting.
And so the the image that you see in the way that when Christ is
there with the book, A lot of people always think that this is the
Gospel, but I think the better understanding of that book is that it's the
book of Life that's described the relation because Christ is coming back to judge the
world. You know, that's the image that we see. And so what
do you see as that mean as that meaning. What do you think that
that Book of Life is. You know, the idea of having your name
written in the Book of Life and its relationship to the icon of Christ,
especially that Christ is holding that book. You know, he's blessing with his
right hand, He's holding this Book of Life in his left hand. You
know, have you thought a bit about the meaning of that relationship. Yeah,
so I think that having your name written in the Book of Life pertains
to the things that Jesus has already said in Revelation about to the wanting overcomes
one who conquers, I will give the name of my God, name of
the Spirit of my God, and my own new name. And so we
are named with the name of Christ himself. And that theme of the name,
which endwells Christ, has a biblical context, going back to Genesis chapter
one. The idea of naming always relates to the notion of the logos.
So in the Old Testament, when Christ shows up, he shows up as
the Angel of the Lord. And the most explicit description that we have of
the character of the Angel of the lord's found an Exodus twenty three, where
God says, my name is in him. A name is what expresses a
person's inner life. It's what expresses their character and who they are. Even
think of something like the meaning of names, they usually cash out some kind
of quality. We call someone faith because we're describing them with this adjective of
being faithful. Well, Christ's names are like that too, and the New
Testament uses this phrase. We're baptized into the name of gen Jesus Christ,
so his name is engraved on our heart. And I think what's going on
in Revelation we hear about our name being written in the Book of Life is
in the same word that God the Father says to Jesus by the spirit,
I love you because we are named in him, because we share in that.
We share in that very same word which God speaks in relation to his
son. And that's what a book really is, right. A book is
a word that is given so that it might be read. And what we
see in Scripture is there's this promise of the New Covenant where God is going
to write My law on your heart. I think we need to take that
as meaning something more than by nature we will be inclined towards the good.
I think part of what's going on when we read about his law being written
on our heart. Is it's written on our heart in such a way that
other people can read it so that they come to share in that name as
well. So that's what I think is going on in the symbolism of the
book and being named with the name of Christ. I think the Book of
Life in a sense has only one name in it, Jesus Christ, and
we have that name engraved on our heart when we share in his life and
call upon the name of his father. Mm hmm. That's interesting. I
tend to see it. One of the things that I see in the icon
of Christ related to the book is there seems to be a relationship between that's
a direct influence and indirect influence. So when you see, because we don't
have the Gospel of Christ, we have the four Gospels, right, there's
a sense in which there's a you know that hidden behind the book is Christ
himself. You know, the book is a kind of embodiment, but it
is multiple, right, It's not just like the warm body. And so
that is one of the ways that I tend to see the book is that
as something like a Christ is blessing. So that's a direct influence, right,
He's like he's speaking, he's saying, he's he's blessing, he's cursing,
and then in his left hand he holds the res result of that as
the And you see that. The other thing that gave me that insight was
actually the Icon of pentecost which is that in the Icon of Pentecosts, you
have the Holy Spirit from above descending onto the apostles, and then you have
the apostles filled with the spirit, and then at the bottom of the icon
you have this strange figure of Cosmos that's holding scrolls, these twelve scrolls that
are like, I don't know, the twelve written teachings or the twelve contained
like final body for the teachings of this this spiritual So I see a form
of embodiment, you could say, see it that way, a form of
kind of making concrete. And so that's also one of the ways that I
that I kind of thought of the idea of the names in the book,
too, is the idea of you know, this final gathering, of the
final counting, the final counting of the things that are part of the of
the body. So you gather all these all the week, the chaff gets
gets get taken taken care of and the weed is gathered in the in the
barn. And I have this this idea of also this gathering of the names
in the book that are kind of like the final Virgin, like an image
of the heavenly Jerusalem also as well, like this kind of final square,
you know, revelation of the of the divine presence. Yeah, and so
I've always thought that the shape of the book has to do with that,
that it's not an accident that the book is a square kind of like the
arc of the Covenant or the Church itself, or you know, the heavenly
Jerusalem as this you know, as the final resting place, let's say,
of revelation something like that. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's true.
And I think that connects with a lot of other things that books are
linked with in the Bible. So when you think about what it means for
something to be perfectly holy, perfectly consecrated to God, we take the raw
material and it doesn't seem to have much order or structure. It's just a
rock. Its angles aren't really related to any to each other in any kind
of visible or obvious way. Well, then you start working at the rock,
you start turning it into a specific shape which corresponds to an idea or
a form, or you can even say a name. And when a thing
is prepared, when it's shaped and made beautiful and correspond which with the logos
that you have in mind for it, then that thing is prepared to be
offered or consecrated to God in his sanctuary. It is prepared to come into
its own as the final form for which it was intended in the beginning.
And I think what we see in textuality in scripture is textuality comes into being
when a thing has come into its own. So when a thing has become
what it's meant to be, then it is written down or engraved. It
is ready to be remembered by God because God now keeps that thing in mind
according to what it truly is. So one of the examples of this dynamic
and in scripture, you know, would be the story of the Art in
the Flood. So Noah takes the raw material of the world and the garden
of Eden, you just have a bunch of trees. But the next time
you see wood being mentioned is in the story of the Flood, and the
word for word for tree is the same. Noah takes these trees and he
shapes them, and he molds them into a very precise form which corresponds to
the intention which God had in mind for it. And then that is the
seed from which the whole world is reborn. So the only reason the world
survives is because Noah with God, has made a miniature representation of a perfect
world. And it's out of that perfect world that the Word is reborn.
The world is reborn. And it is in Genesis eight one that you find
the turning point of the story, which is that God remembered Noah and those
who are with them. So God knew Noah to the core and then made
a new world out of him. Well, that idea of memory is an
idea which is connected to sacramentality in the church. Obviously, do this as
my memorial, Do this in memory of me or memory eternal God, Remember
this person in your kingdom, because if you keep them in mind, then
they'll continue to exist as you know them. Well, books in scripture and
just kind of intuitively are linked intimately with this notion of memorial. So in
Exodus chapter seventeen, you see this Israel defeats the Amalekites and a curse is
placed in the Amalekites, which is going to last forever. And in order
to perpetuate that, God commands that these events be written down in a book,
and then that book is called a memorial. So the same terms are
used for sacraments pretending to bread and Passover and texts as well. And that's
why I would suggest that you have these relics deposited in the Holy of Holies.
The Holy of Holies is where God's eyes are always fixed. That's one
of the phrases that gets used about the temples, the place where God is
always looking, He's always paying attention to it. And in the Holy of
Holies you have these memorials of the events of the Exodus, which made Israeli
people in covenant with God. And that includes the texts that includes the Manna,
so on and so forth, and so you put in the set sanctuary
those texts which represent the way that you want God to think of us,
right, so we want God to think of us in Christ, and so
in the sanctuary you have the revelation of God, the logos in Christ.
And I think that's the same kind of thing that we're seeing when we have
a book of life with our name in it. Yeah, you can just
see. The only other thing is is that occurs to me now is the
specific kind of imagery that appears in early Christian texts like the Nominasakra doesn't really
save you much space. But what it does is it gives the physical book
a specific look to it, and that look is part of the point,
is part of what makes text not just kind of like an icon, but
I would suggest in certain sense an icon itself. Well one of the So
this is interesting, what you're saying is interesting because there's also that always makes
when we go to are in one direction, always makes my mind go in
the other direction. That's I'm trying to find counterexamples in my mind. But
there's there's an interesting idea I think about, let's say, the manner in
which the possibility of the of the text being forgotten or not being or not
being connected right, the idea of what Saint Paul when he talks about the
dead letter and the problem of embodiment, and the problem that happens when the
embodiment is no longer connected to the memory. So you know, the the
the image to me of that is really the arc of the Covenant when it
goes among the what is the Amalekites or is the the Amalakites? I forget?
When the Archite or is it the Philistines? Yeah? Yeah, when
the ark of the company goes goes out into the Philistines, and it's no
longer connected to the Holy Place. And then in going out of the Holy
Place, then it becomes actually a becomes a space for death and curses and
and uh and extra growth. You know, you can say it that way
of parasites and extra growth, this kind of meaningless growth is a good way
of thinking about it. And so there's always this way in which the the
outer shell, right this the written text, and the way in which it
can become a kind of fetish if it's not properly connected to the two.
I know, you see that, right. You have the the what is
it hocus focus? You know, this idea of using the the holy the
holy words in order to create magic, or all these these types of of
using the text also as talisman's you know, you have all these practices of
you know, writing the word on a on a piece of paper and then
holding it in a talisman as a a kind of magical protection. It seems
like all of that is also possible with the question of the book or the
question of of texts. Yeah, especially you know if I because one of
the things that has been fascinating me is the Fedris. In Plato's Fedris has
this whole image about writing, about how writing is a supplement to meaning and
how it's a memorial but it's also a forgetting or it makes it makes it
so that the the law isn't written in your heart. Right, the law
has to be written in a book. It means that it's not written in
your heart. So's there's a kind of supplementarity to writing, which can also
be dangerous once if the text or this outer thing is disconnected from its meaning
and its purpose. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a really good point.
I think you know, this is something that we see in all kind
of theophanies in scripture. You know, a theophany can both fill you with
words by which you praise God and it can also just knock you out so
that you know you're just babbling. And you know, this is something you
see in the story of King Saul. Right, King Saul, he is
overcome by the spirits and he speaks out praise to God. That's when he's
at first Amuel ten. He's given another heart. And then after Kingsaul falls,
the spirit comes upon him again and he falls on his face and he's
rolling around, you know, he's literally and I think there's actually I'm not
just being funny here. He's a holy roller, like the spirit. The
spirit of God comes on Saul and he starts rolling around on the ground.
I mean there's something. Yeah, the tradition of how the tower babble fell
is that the spirit of God descended on it. That's what made it fall
and made people babble. It's not like you know, so that's an interesting
that that duality is interesting to think about it definitely. Yeah. Yeah,
it's a wind, you know that. And you find that in a lot
of traditions, you know, the languages are dispersed when a great wind comes
and knocks over the tower the tree and the languages fall out. And it's
interesting. Pentecost, of course it's the spirit and we hear about a great
rushing wind, fire and so on and so forth there. And I think
perhaps this is one of the reasons that the scriptures emphasize the actual consumption of
the book. That's right at the point that he takes the book and he
eats it, so he makes it the inner. It's not just an external
reminder, but it ends up being something which then is is integrated and then
brought into the heart. I mean, that makes so much sense because that
also explains in some ways what Christ is doing with the entirety of the law,
which is to say, you know, it's like, it's not that
I'm getting rid of the law, folks, or is that I want you
to eat the law like that there you could see that I want you to
put it inside you. It's inside you, then it's generative. But if
it just remains outside you, then it could be dead letter and a bunch
of rules that don't make any sense. Yeah. Yeah, And this is
actually I always suggest to folks so that this is a big part, if
not the part of what the ritual law about only eating animals, which true
the cut is about the torre uses this language about the Word of God is
in your mouth and in your heart, and so you can only eat animals.
We're always moving their mouthsy're always chewing it up, and they're swallowing it
down and then bringing it back up, which is what you say and Ezekiel
and John and so on and so forth. And to be honest, I
think that there's a lesson here in some of the ways that I think Catholic
and Orthodox apologists can illegitimately invoke the Bible. It's kind of a talisman,
like we gave you the Bible, but you know, you got to actually
read it. You actually have to study it. You know it we gave
you the Bible is not a good apologetic to Protestants if you've never you know,
actually don't know it. Yeah, more than you do. It's like
you have to. My brother uses the exact same image. He says,
we have to ruminate, like that's the that's our job, you know.
You you can't just it's not just the text. You have to let it
sit and let it turn this kind of inner turning where that's when it yields
fruit. Definitely, definitely, Yeah, Wow, this is really this is
this is very this is very good here. I think it's a good place
to stop, you know, like bringing the bringing the law into your heart
is a good place to to go. And so where can people find your
work? Yeah, so I am at YouTube dot com. Slash cabaine k
A b A n e H. But you can also just find me by
searching saraphrom Hamilton, which is my channel name. I try to produce videos
relatively regularly. There's stuff that's being worked on right now that's going to be
released soon. Also, I post five times a week. I had saraphrom
Hamilton dot substack dot com. Half of those are just available for everyone.
Half of those are available to those who sign up at five dollars a month,
and you can a week five times a week. So lately, I
mean full disclosure of the past month. I just had my first born,
so I haven't lived up to the five times a week standard. But there's
a lot of back uh backlog stuff there. And now what is it?
Is it Bible commentary? What? What are what are your your your five
posts a week? So most of it is Bible common Harry. A lot
of it represents my kind of step by step work through Genesis one. So
right now I'm writing a book on Genesis chapter one and the interconnections that it
has with the whole rest of the Bible. Because the Bible was cumulative,
the symbols that you see in revelation have been developed in a systematic way from
Genesis. So when God speaks a word and the earth responds by producing fruit,
trees and grain plants, that is why the prophets represent the union of
God's word with creation in terms of an agricultural harvest that starts there. The
gathering of Israel. Well, that language of gathering first appears in terms of
the gathering of the disbursed waters. That was my last post, So this
is an exploratory journey for me. I'm super excited to find all of this
stuff in the text. So I post a lot on Genesis one, but
also a lot of other biblical subjects. So yeah, everybody check it out.
And June we'll probably see more of seraphim On on a Symbolic World YouTube
channel as we as we kind of developed this discussion and collaboration. So Sefian,
thanks for your work and people make sure to check his work out.
Thank you so much.