Speaker 1: So so so so.
Speaker 2: Dire wave. Our anthropology is not derived by human psychology
or you know, urcal data from I T or something
like this. It's derived from the revealed aspect of what
we see prisology, and so there's no real way to
diagnose me. That's a problem and understand man and Man's anthropology,
as I said, without the arright theology. Hello, hey, how
are you being well? Excellent? So we are live? Is
that cool?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's fine, okaytally fine, excellent. I'm an idiot.
I had it at seven and was at nine. For me,
I was like I was there at seven. I'm like,
what's going on? And I realized, No, I'm I am
living the other direction.
Speaker 2: I did. I don't understand time zones. I'm always like
I don't know how what who came up with that
or how they work. It's like another dimension or something.
I don't even know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really struggle. I always struggle, And it's so
it's weird because I had to do with it all
the time, but I still forget which way it goes.
Speaker 2: I just teld Jamie to schedule things and then everything
gets confused because she's like me, she's no good at scheduling,
so everything it's all screwed up. But welcome. We got
the man himself, Jonathan Pazio finally has joined us. He's here, everybody,
and I know a lot of people have been waiting
a long time for this stream to actually come about,
and so I'm really thankful for him to be here
to join us, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
He suggested obviously the most logical topic, which would be
to discuss icons, and of course Jonathan is an icon carver.
I will read his bio for you guys if you're
not familiar with Jonathan in this audience. It says his
bio says he is a professional artist, writer, public speaker.
He delivers lectures every year in universities, conferences, and other
venues around North America. He speaks on art and especially
the symbolic structures that underlie our experience of the world.
His YouTube channel, of course in the podcast is Symbolic World.
It's linked in the show description for you guys. He
also furthers the conversation on symbolism, meaning and patterns and
everything from movies to icons to trends. Definitely got some
overlap there with movies and pop culture. As an artist,
Jonathan is one of the only professional art on carvers
in North America. That's fascinating. He takes on institutional and
personal art commissions from all over the world. You can
view his carving works at the Carving website, which I
also I believe I linked. And then he is the
editor and contributor to Orthodox Arts Journal, which looks at
the revival and significance of liturgical art today. He also
gives weekly carving we should me week long carving classes
with Hexamron School with Liturgical Arts credit, which is credited
by pont Defects University. And Jonathan, is anything else you
want to add to that bio before we get into it.
Speaker 1: No, that's the deluxe bio you got there. So that's good. Thanks.
Speaker 2: Well, I always want to give people the full you know,
like read because when people do my bio there, I
was like, there me something really quick, dude, So you
look talk about movies or whatever. It's like, well, I
do some other things too, but yeah, I do talk
about movies.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but it's hard when we have when we
had doing so many things, like you're also someone who
does like all these different things. So when people look
at our our identity, they're like, who is this guy? Like,
how what? These things don't seem like they don't fit
in neat boxes.
Speaker 2: Let's say, right, yeah, and the whole internet world has
created for those of us to make our own content.
This weird thing where like if we're talking to our
grandparents or the boomers and they're like, what do you do?
And then like, well, how do you describe that? Like
I sell myself on the internet, They're like, well that
sounds scandalous. No, not in that way. I sell myself
in the sense of right, all right.
Speaker 1: I need to use that one When people ask me
what do you do? I'm like, I'm an artist, but
I also do this YouTube thing. You know, it's hard
to exprime. Yeah, I sell myself on the Internet. There
you go.
Speaker 2: So let's get into the topic tonight, which is iconography,
the reality of symbols, symbolic reality that we did a
couple podcasts recently on the philosophy iconography. So I want
to get into that with you tonight. And why don't
you start with giving us you perspective as you approached orthodoxy,
maybe a little bit of background where you came from,
when you got into the Orthodox Church and then what
led to you, like applying your artistic talents to that domain,
and then we'll get into the deep symbolism of yeah,
of icons.
Speaker 1: So I grew up in a Protestant background. My father
was a Baptist minister when I was younger, but converted
from Catholicism. And Quebec here, you know, it was like
the most Catholic place in the world. Basically, I think
like during World War Two, the Vatican had secret plans
to move to Quebec, you know, if Musolini won the war.
So it's a pretty it was like the most Catholic
place in the world. And then the sixties there was
this massive flip and everybody kind of went crazy, like
everywhere else in the world as well. And but part
of the people that kind of left the Catholic Church
in the sixties and seventies became Evangelicals, and that was
my parents. It was part of them. For them, it
was like a real authentic move towards understanding Christ because
the Catholic Church was quite superficial. Also in Quebec it
was like just a Catholicism anyway. So I grew up
in that Milieure, and I was a very artistic from
my young age. You know, I thought I was going
to do comic books, and I thought I was going
to be a painter. And I went to college in
fine arts and really struggled the whole time, just struggled
all through college. I was doing really well, like I
had really good grades, and I was doing well in
terms of performance, but it was a struggle, like to
a double struggle. One was being evangelical and making images,
because there's like an implicit hostility. It's not explicit, you know.
I mean, if you ask a Baptist if they think
paintings are wrong, they won't say they think that, but
don't bring them into church for sure. And also they
struggled to kind of explain it theologically, like what role
do these objects have in the world. So I was
struggling with that, and then I was also struggling as
a Christian in the contemporary art world, because contemporary art
is so cynical and so ironic. It's just you know,
commentary upon commentary and this kind of weird you know,
making art about art all the time, and elitism and
all that stuff, and so for me, it was like
it was such a struggle that my whole art work
art practice ended up being about that. It was making
these images with like the bronze serpent and the Tower
of Babble and the problem with images, and it was
it was just kind of convoluted and crazy. Uh. And
so it was so funny because my professor that was
in charge of me the last day, on my last evaluation,
she said, Johnathan, don't worry. You're getting a's. You know,
you're doing well, You're fine, but really, what are you
doing here? You really don't belong here. You should go
to seminary or something. Uh. And I was cocky, so
I just rolled off my back. But she was right.
She was totally right. And so I finished school, got
a studio, did the did the artist thing, got like
a post industrial studio, you know, space with friends and
painted and did all that. But the crisis just kept
growing and it turned into like a spiritual crisis, I
would say, right, it turned into a spiritual crisis where
things just weren't connecting in terms of meaning and in
terms of my faith, and you know, I just I
started to perceive that it was just this weird narrative
of Jesus dying on the cross, laid over a materialist substrate,
and it just didn't it just wasn't making sense, and
so I started, so I destroyed all my art to
stop painting and just dropped it completely abandoned it and
started to search and reading and reading and reading, and
obviously led me into weird corners at first, reading kind
of more, you know, reading things from other traditions, reading
things from kind of more kind of esoteric Christianity. And luckily,
in my kind of wild search, I discovered the Church Fathers.
I discovered Saint Gregor Nissa, I discovered Saint Maximus. I
discovered also Vladimirloski, who I would say Vladimirloski basically converted me.
And and obviously with Vlatimirloski and then with Uspenski, I
also discovered the traditional imagery of the Church. And at
first it was like discovering kind of medieval imagery in general,
and just falling in love with this art because I
realized that it was really kind of this It was
really like a language. It was more than just visual images.
It was like this internal language, just kind of internal algebra,
which was actually similar to scripture. It was like these patterns,
repeating patterns and images that referred to themselves and to
each other and kind of point to each other. And
also in the architecture, how certain images are in certain
places in the church, and how they kind of reflect
each other, you know, like let's say, in the Apps
you have certain images, in the Western Wall you have
certain images. And so I really started to see it
as like this amazing symphony of images, and I just
fell in love with it. And that's really that. So that,
let's say, the more theoretical part discovering the saints and
discovering especially the mystical part of Christianity, and then discovering
this amazing language of kind of medieval art, at first
being sad because I thought it didn't exist anymore, and
then then then discovering Uspenski and this kind of rediscovered
the icon and thinking, yes, it does exist, and I
need to become Orthodox. So so that's what led me
in two thousand and one is the first time I
went into an Orthodox church and it was during a
it was during a vesperal liturgy. I know, it was
a pre sanctified liturgy in the middle of the week,
and you know, it's like presanctified. It's dark and you're
bowing your forehead to the ground, and there's candles and
and there's this really kind of intense, very solemn, you know, liturgy.
And I knew right there that I was going to
become Orthodox. It was just a question of time, you know,
just that first time in the church. And so then slowly,
you know, I started to I wanted to paint icons.
Actually that's what I wanted to do. But at that time,
and in two thousand and two, thousand and one, two
thousand and two, there weren't any teachers. You just it
was really people really struggling to find teachers. And I
knew it's something. The painting is very complicated. It's it's
it's very technical, and so I knew that I couldn't
improvise the painting because it was like egg you have
to learn how to make egg paint and all the
guilding and you know, all these layers and stuff. I
was from contemporary art, like, I had no technical skills whatsoever.
And uh, and so my parents cut down the tree
in their yard and they said, Jonathan, do you want
some of this wood? Supposedly you can carve it. It
was Linden Tree, and I thought, ah, I'm gonna make
a blessing cross, like I was just super hyped. I
had no tools. I had exacto knives, like carved this
whole cross with exacto knives. Like the actual shape of
the cross that carved with exacto knives, which is really
embarrassing to think about now. And I showed it to
the priests at the church where I was going. I
was still a catechumen, and he was like, you know,
this is okay, you should you should keep going and
uh and then I did and I kept going. And
you know, there's a lot more to the story. But finally, uh,
many years later, my bishop gave me a commission for
a panagia, for a for a pendant and then of
a cross. And I asked him, I said, if I
if I do this commission to me, this means that
this is like a blessing to me for me, for
me to do this, and he said, of course, and uh,
and then I'll be honest. From then on, I never stopped,
like I just always had commissions and I've been carving
now full time since two thousand eleven. Pretty much.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah. Yeah. So there's some parallels there that
I can recall in my journey as well, where I know,
when I was in the Protestant world, one thing that
always sort of entranced me was the symbolism that I
would see in the arts. So I would see symbolism
in film and literature, and then when you take college classes,
you do these readings of the texts and so forth,
and then I realized that, you know, this was everywhere
in scripture. And then when I would go to church.
I was at that time in a pretty hardcore Calvinist
church that was very kind of a conoclastic, and there
was like, there's, yeah, there's a symbolism everywhere out there
and everything, but God doesn't like it basically, and that's
what I and I would get into these arguments with
my Protestant pastor because I'd be like, well, but don't
you think even in the New Testament there's you know,
Paul talks about Tupo host typology and don't you and
he was like, no, no, no, you can only talk about
symbols when it specifically stated in the New Testament or
some weird rule that he had. Yeah, I remember that
was kind of when I was starting to think maybe
I need to look at you know, church fathers or
out side of the realm of Protestantism. And at that
time I didn't know about orthodox I just kind of
drifted towards the Roman Catholic world. But my question would
be there, I like that you said the scripture is
really kind of a a lexicon of symbols that way.
And one thing when I was Roman Catholic, I read St.
John Damascus and his defensive icons, and I remember him
kind of presenting iconography like another way to read everything. Right,
So in other words, reality is kind of like an
iconographic text that we read our experience. As we read them,
we interpret them. The Bible is a book we read
and interpret, and icons that we do the same thing.
So at that stage, you know, and I was coming
into the Roman Catholic world, I just saw, oh, well,
icons are just you know, a neat thing that's like
maybe another form of religious art, right, But I think
there's something significant that I didn't know that that you know, eventually,
as you get into Orthodoxy you kind of learned. But
before we get into the significance and distinct set apart
nature of iconography, could you go into maybe your take
on how you see what John Damascus calls like an
iconographic representation of the world, the way that we can
we can see the world as kind of a well,
I forget the word you use, but like a network
of symbols or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that, you know, we realize. I think
it's it's we're in a good moment right now. In
terms of even secular people, like they can kind of
understand the problem of multiplicity, right, the problem of you know,
what is it, uh, this kind of explosion of detail,
that everything is too complicated if you if you if
you don't have patterns that organized reality, right then then
everything has a million of details and it's like indefinite
amount of details. And so what you realize is that
even our just basic perception of the world is always
pattern it's always it's it's teleological, right, You're always judging something,
whether it's a good whatever it is you're looking at,
and that lays itself out in a hierarchy. And that's
what I think is going on in scripture and in
icons that is it's a condensed form of your everyday experience.
It's kind of like a map or like the most
condensed version of something that you can actually experience every day.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And so so I think that like, for example, like
the if you really look at the text in Genesis,
you really have this amazingly condensed, like one of the
most condensed stories that has ever probably the most condensedory
has ever ever existed, and just lays out this image
of reality, this limite of heavy above and below, and
then this hierarchy of this ontological hierarchy. Uh, and you
know the problem of going down the ontological hierarchy and
the possibility of of let's say, being up in the garden.
All of these all of these things are actually related
to our experience of the world. And then icons they
do it in a visual way. It's, uh, it's not
in time, but it's in space. And so in icons
you can actually do things that you can't totally do
in scripture because it's it's simultaneous. So you have this
kind of simultaneous experience of of a space that's laid
out exactly like in Genesis. So you have above, you
have below, and it's very graphic in an icon compared
to like let's say a baroque image, where the perspective
can be from anywhere, it can be from underneath or whatever,
and there's all this idiosyncrasy in an icon. You have
you have the top part, which is Heaven, the bottom part,
which is Earth, and then inside that things will be
laid out in a a in an ontological hierarchy, So
you won't have the hand of God coming from below.
That'd be stupid. I mean, it's so intuitive, it's so
intuitively right that we don't even question it. But nonetheless
that's how that's how the the icon will present itself.
The glory of God will peer above or the hand
of God will peer above, and then the things that
are at the bottom, you'll have this cracked earth, often
with like openings into the darkness at the bottom of
icons to kind of show you this cosmic image. You know,
even in the even in an icon that's not talking
about that, it will still have that pattern, that pattern
within it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes me think of approximations in scripture. There's,
like you said, not an exact one to one because
of usually scripture, if it's not like a poetic text
or a prophetic text, it's presenting things in a you know,
linear storytelling model. And but if you look at Apocalypse twelve.
You have that excellent example of with Mary. She's also
an image of Israel. She's also an image of the Church,
and she's also an image of the historical battle of
the Serpent with the people of God. So you have
basically all of time and space, you know, squished into
this image of Mary as Queen of Heaven. And I
think it just made me think of that when you
were talking about how it's kind of presenting a series
of patterns condensed into one event. I remember when I
was Protestant or coming into it to back in the
two thousands into rom Catholicism, I was I was having
a problem with this. I was thinking, how as a
Protestant could I convey what I'm understanding to you know people,
And I thought, well, if you think about the way
that the Bible for a Protestant is called the Holy Bible, right,
I mean, it's like it has this notion of it
being set apart as a special book. And but and
then when you try to, like, uh, explain iconography to
people who who are reticent to go down that route.
If you think about when you read Luke one and two,
the story of the of the of the Annunciation and
you're you're getting this kind of image in your head.
I'm not saying that we should, you know, come up
with imaginary images. I'm just saying that it's kind of
unavoidable as a human when you read the text, you
kind of get this story in your head, and then
when you look at the eye kind of the annunciation,
you're looking at a like you said, like a single
encapsulated image that's telling you the whole presentation of Loot
one and two about the you know, the birth or
the message of the incarnation of our Savior. So it
really clicked with me one day where it was like,
you know, if you can if we can convey that
to the Protestant then and that's a huge hang up,
you know, for so many Protestants des ideed of images.
We can convey the fact that it's really not doing
anything different than what scripture is doing. It's just doing
it in a different medium, in a different.
Speaker 3: Form, and it's creating different It does end up creating different,
different possible insights into the mystery of Christ that scripture
doesn't do exactly in the same way.
Speaker 1: You know, you look at an image of the crucifixion
or one of the best versions. One of the best
images to kind of understand this is an image of
the ascension. For example, So you have this image of
the ascension, you have Christ up above, you know, being
brought up by the Marcaba. He actually has wheels underneath it.
And so that's not in the text, right, that's not
in the text. But the icon is connecting you saying,
you know those times where Elijah went up, you know
where this chariot that Ezekiel saw. It's like, this is
related to this ascension, you know. And so you have
Christ going up into the heavens, and then at the
bottom you have in the center you have the Mother
of God often standing on a pedestal, which is interesting.
So it's like Christ, the heaven is thrown and the
earth is his pedestal, right, and so the Mother of
God in the center, and then the disciples all gathered around.
And then you look at the icon and you're like, well,
why is Saint Paul there? Because Saint Paul was there,
wasn't there at the ascension right point, But he's there
because it's that concentration. It's like that possibility of saying
this is an event that happened. It's an image of
an event that happened, but we're going to show to
you in a way that it is actually revealing the
mystery of the Church itself and the cosmic mystery of
what Christ is doing and it's and it becomes an
image of both the ascension and the and the last
Moment and the return of Christ at the same time.
This is something that is hard to do in a text,
but in an image you can create these these cosmic
maps that are just astounding when you start to think
about it.
Speaker 2: That's a great point. There was one of the debates
that was that was had at the Moscow Icon Synods.
Somebody was discussing how icons can tell us things outside
of time and space, they can tell us things in
that higher dimension because and he used an example. I
want to say, it was an example of some of
the icons that present other people at at Pentecost who
aren't actually at Pentecost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the same thing as as ascension. Saint Paul is
there and the evangelist are there.
Speaker 2: And yeah, that's a great point because one thing that
really struck me when I got into Orthodox theology was
that the mysteries and the theology is being presented in
time and space, but also above time and space, and
so even the the the perspectabilism of icons is intended
to give you that window into heaven so that you're
outside of just the here and the now. So just
like Christ's Cross, as Saint Maximus says, the benefits can
be applied before and after the actual event. The same
idea is going on with iconography, where we're actually looking
into the eternal realities and so their windows into heaven.
And I wanted to get into the neoplatonic stuff as well,
if you're okay going in that direction, yeah, because I
think neoplatonism has both pros and cons in this side
of iconography, because on the one hand, you got a
type prototype relationship of the patterns that relate back to
their archetype. And then you've also got a misuse of
neo platonism when you get into the icon councils, I mean,
excuse me, in the iconoclass, because they were trying to
say there's nothing significant about an icon. Everything is just
an icon of the ideas. And so there's two extremes
that we can go. We can like the Protestant you
know extreme, the iconic class extreme. And then there's I
think the middle position, the balance position of orthodoxy, where we,
as Saint Gregory Palma says, we're actually affirming it's not
an either or dialectic between history versus the suprahistorical. It's
a both. And because Christ is suprahistorical, he transcends, he's transcendent,
but he's also imminent, and he also came into time
in space.
Speaker 1: And there's also all of these problems end up being
solved by hierarchy in general. That is, there are concentrats
and you can, like I always imagine that this pattern
like a mountain, right, It's like, as you go up
the mountain, there's like a concentration of reality towards that
space where heaven and earth meat. And let's say, the
higher you go, the more liturgical the world becomes, the
more pattern, the more like a poem, like a or
like an icon the world becomes. It doesn't mean that
at the bottom of the mountain God isn't manifesting himself also,
but there is a reality in which even though you
can bring let's say, the power of the liturgy into
your everyday life, into your everyday life, there is nonetheless
a hierarchy in which it kind of flows through that. Right,
It's like for you to be able to kind of
see God in like taking your cup of coffee, you know,
you also have to you have to be connected through
the sacraments and through this more concentrated version of reality
for things to kind of lay themselves out properly. And
so that the kind of argument where it's like, you know,
I can pray to God on the toilet, you know,
no problem, Like I get talk to God anywhere. And
that kind of reduction of reality is like you said,
it is. It's almost like a kind of not like
a kind of subtle narcissism where there isn't this idea
that that the forms the real the forms in the world,
not the forms. But let's say that the actual particulars
in the world they actually do manifest God at their
level of reality, like sam Maximus tells us, like they
just kind of embodied different aspects of God to their capacity.
Let's say, and the the icons of the sacraments and
the liturgy are just more concentrated and more kind of
are closer to the top of the mountain.
Speaker 2: Let's say, Yeah, that's that, that's that great analogy of
you know, the life of Moses and going up the
mountain that we see in the cap of Dosians. I
mean one thing that I would ask, I want to
get your take on, because this comes up a lot
when if we're talking to Roman Catholic friends or people
who are in that line of thinking in which I
used to be in, and I would think, well, look, uh,
you know, Orthodoxy and Catholics does don't really differ on this,
because we all believe in religious art and we all
believe in religious imagery. And my take would be that, well,
we do have actually a diference in regard to the
Seventh Ecumenical Council because we see iconography, at least in
my understanding, we see it as not just religious art.
It's actually another class of things that's particular to the liturgy.
And I'm not trying to be overly rigorous. I know
there's some flexibility in the liturgy, and you know, Russian
styles of icons versus Greek styles of icons. I'm aware
of that, but there is I think a market to
difference between say, Renaissance style art, which I think we
can appreciate. I just at an interview with my priest
who's a specialist in Renaissance art. So I have no
problem with an appreciation for Renaissance art style, but there's
definitely definitely a different norm and practice that we see
in the Orthodox world, you know, liturgically speaking, as opposed
to what we see in the Sistine Chapel. So even
though we can appreciate it, could you speak to how
would you explain to somebody who thinks that, well, what's
the difference? Who cares if it's an icon or assisting
chapel at all means a thing? Or do you think
do you think there's a significance.
Speaker 1: There's definitely there's a there's a very significant difference. One
of the things we see that happens is that after
the Seventh Decamentical Council, the images that we use become
become they appear. They appear pretty fast. Actually, you know,
they were based on prototypes that existed before, and so
you do find threads of many of the images that
we find we see today in pre uh pre seventh
Dicamenical Council art that you've seen in Rome and you've
seen different areas, but after the Council, you really see
this kind of formalization of the image, and what's going
on is really a it's like we realize what the
role of the image is like we we actually kind
of gave ourselves a frame for it, you know, because
it was a little maybe unclear before. We gave ourselves
a frame. And now we made those images as theological
as possible. They were just refined in their into their
most theological form. And so what happens is that there's
always flexibility. The Orthodoxy is not like a like a
military operation. There's there's always a place where it's a
the more rigorous tradition and the flexibility of the milieure,
the flexibility of the even of the artists will appear.
But there nonetheless has to be certain things which are
unsaid that have to be respected, and that just comes
from getting the mind of the of the church, right
as once you're in the world and you start to
look at icons and look at icons and look at
icons and have someone to teach you, or you read,
or you you start to see what is essential and
what is idiosyncratic. But those essential things are very essential.
And what you're doing when you're participating that is it's
almost it's almost liturgical, even in a briefly sense that
is that for the liturgy to exist, like you said,
there is a little bit of variability, but there are
some things which really need to be there for it
to be an effective liturgy. And there's the same thing
with icons there's certain elements which really need to be
there for it to be for it to be let's
say canonical, or to participate in the liturgical life of
the church, and so and so. I think that that's
something that even you can see that even as the
Orthodox Church went towards Western art and it did, you know,
in the in the eighteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth nineteenth century. Nonetheless
you can look at a lot most of those images
and the elements that the iconograph, iconological elements, they still
had to put them in there because they instinctively knew
that if you don't have let's say, you know, the
skull of Atom, you know in the in the image
of the Crucifixion, if you don't have certain things, certain
basic things, if you don't have Christ in the cave,
if you do for the Nativity, if you don't have
certain basic elements, then you are definitely someone's going to
rip your icon off the wall. Like the people are
actually going to become aggressive and are going to want
to destroy these these images, whereas in the Catholic Church,
you know, Pope Benedict said that that the Catholic Church
never fully accepted the Seventh Ecumenical Council. And I think
that that it's true. And what it and what you
can see is that although all this say, all the
way up to the thirteenth century, you have an iconographic
sense and and a rich iconographic sense, but you can
see more variability, let's say, and then that more variability,
which was okay at the beginning, starts to then break
down into idiosyncrasy and you know, little dogs at the
at the at the in the front of paintings, and
you know, wanting to show all these kind of more
sensual images, and you know, just this just just just
a breakdown of theology and the image where theology becomes
secondary to the to the effect.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, that's a great That's that summarizes it perfectly
that in the Roman mindset is the theology is subordinated
to the practical usage of the usages of the enemy,
or in me, the imagery. Excuse me, I'm sorry, Roman Cathoxs.
I'm not calling you guys. It was a slip of
the tongue, right, they're gonna say Freudian slip exposed to
clip it right. No, But so the I'm glad that
you mentioned the beginning to the Aspensky Lawski book Theology
of the Icon, because that volume two is great for
going into the history of the the Icon discussions and
debates and councils, you know, after the Seventh Council, and
there's there's a great chapter on Palamas in there where
you know, before I looked at Orthodox theology, I'd never
thought about that Saints have a golden halo for a reason.
Like it's not just because they're like an angel or something,
you know. I think like when I was Protestant or Catholic,
I was, Oh, that's just like showing that they're like
heavenly or whatever. Dude, No, it's actually teaching the Palamite
doctrine of the uncreated energies, that the Saints actually possess
and participate in the uncreated light. And that's what that
you know, golden halo actually signifies. And then you look
at when you look at the icon of Christ, right
and you see him with the I am right, that's
the Greek letters that Christ wears in at least the
Byzantine Icon of Christ. And so I started, really, oh,
so this is the the icon has to teach write theology.
And that was like a big thing that off in
my head, Like, you can't just do anything in an
icon because you want to convey the right theology of
the right meaning. And so that's what's so key here
is that it's not so much about the I think
the way Saint Jerome spoke of Scripture, he said, it's
not so much a matter of the of the words
that is, as it is the meaning, Right, what are
we conveying in this That's the key point here. So
maybe there's flexibility and the means of the medium itself,
but the meaning is what's key. And I think that, Yeah,
you talk about that quite a bit.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that actually, I think one
of the things that helped preserve the meaning in the
Orthodox Church was also the fact that the icons are
like I hate the word system, but let's say they're
like a full language, right, So it's like the images
aren't independent from each other. The images are all talking
to each other. And so because of that, it also
becomes complicated to to let's say, affect one image, because
there's like a whole underlying language which makes all these
images like talk to each other, like I said, and
so you know, and so let's say you have that said,
the image of Christ's and glory. You know, you have
him in the Dome as you know, the Pantrocrator, as
the one returning at the end of time. But then
you'll also see him in the Akonostasis as Christ in
the center with as with the Mother of God and
Saint John on on the side, and then you'll see
it in the Last Judgment, you'll see in the ascension.
And so this image of Christ's and glory becomes you know,
is moved from into different icons to show different aspects
of the mystery. And that's true for a lot of elements.
And so because of that, it's I think it's one
of the things that kind of held the language much
longer because people realize that this isn't just like I'm
just not I'm not just making like some image of
the you know, the transfiguration, because I you know, I
like to and because the church asking too. It's it's
that that image of the transfiguration in the icons of
the feast has to be standing next to the other
images of the feast, and there has to be a
kind of theological and imagistic coherance among all these images. Uh.
And the fact that the images were also in the
church right as in the West there was less of that,
especially after the Gothic period, there was less and less
painting on the walls and more and more, you know,
just kind of paintings hung up in the church. Uh.
That I think that also transformed this this kind of
sense of of of an entire sacred space that has
all these images referring to each other.
Speaker 2: One thing that comes to mind there is the notion
of sacred space, and that sacred space is supposed to Uh.
There's a good book by Marchelia Iliada on the Sacred
and the Profane. He talks about the sacred space and
being outside of time and space. And I think that
the temple and the Temple's imagery and the the imagery
of the Ark of the Covenant, and the imagery of
the Tabernacle, all of that was, you know, uh, preparing
the way for what we have in reality, you know,
in our temples, in our churches, and so I know
you you've commented on in the past as well as
we have on this channel, say Maximus as mysticgogy of
the church. How does that play in it? How does
the whole space of the church play into this in
relationship to the icons.
Speaker 1: Well, if you look at like if you look at
the the image of the church, let's say the most
traditional version of the of the Orthodox Church, with the
dome and with an apse and then with a square
or across at the at the bottom, you really have
an image of the of the ascension itself. It's it's
an image the early images of Christ up in the
dome were actually images of the ascension.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you have the disciples below that were kind
of like the earth that was looking up towards Heaven
and seeing Christ above. And so I think that you
can see that the church is a is a microcausm.
It's a it's one version of the human being is
the microcosm. But it's like one higher version of that
microcosm is the actual church itself, because it has a
square at the bottom, which is the Earth or the
New Jerusalem. You know, all these are the or the
tabernacle or the you know, the the not the Tabernacle,
but the Art of the Covenant, which was also this box.
So it's like receiving the glory of God below and
then above you have the Dome of Heaven, the rainbow,
and you see Christ sitting on a rainbow. In some
of the early icons, it's like this round part and
so and so the church becomes really like an image
of the entire cosmos itself, and then the icons within that,
within that space will then reflect their different place in
in the so like you wouldn't have an image of
the DORMITIONI in the dome of the Church, right, you
put an image of the dormicion on the western wall
because it represents the end of the liturgical year, because
it represents the mysterious end of the life of the Virgin.
You know, this death that is going to move towards resurrection,
but it still has to be recognized as this last
moment or the last judgment. On the western wall, for example,
these two images are there because the western wall has
reality in the liturgical space. You know, this image of
this image of Christ, you know, coming like a lightning
bolt from the east to the west. You know, this
kind of imagery of moving from the beginning to the end. Well,
the Church has that that shape itself. And so at
the in the east you'll have the panagea, you'll have
the rising of the sun you could say, with the
Christ coming out of the of the Virgin. And then
in the west and you have the end of that process,
which is the death of the Virgin or the last judgment.
So those are little little images of how the Church
participates in this in the in the kind of cosmic image.
But you know, it's there are so many everything about
the way the icons are placed will have that will
kind of have that same shape.
Speaker 2: Let's say, oh yeah, that's great. One thing too that
struck me reading Saint Maximus, which I'm sure you would
resonate with, and I want to get your comment on
this is Maximus has a very positive view of nature,
the natural world, and so he sees the natural world
as in fact, one of the embodiments of the Logos.
And he speaks of, you know, three different embodiments. He
speaks of the embodiment of the Logos in the Virgin,
the embodiment in the humanity, that he that he took
the Virgin, and then he speaks of the embodiment in
the church and in nature in the sense of he
calls it a veil that the logos wears. And I'm curious,
is there a relationship between iconography and the natural world
in the sense that is there a regularity to the
way iconography presents animals, tree life basically in the natural world.
Speaker 1: Well, many of the many icons they represent the desert,
like most of I say, most of the icons, they
tend to represent the world as the desert. And so
you can see then there's something of the wilderness, let's say,
So there's something of monastic, very monastic about you know,
how the iconographic tradition God develops. So that's why you'll
see always see behind Christ these cracked earth, these these
kind of cracked earth mountains, and you see often cracks
at the bottom of the of the world, you know,
with with with holes where sometimes you can see darkness
at the at the bottom. And so usually it's seen
as as as wilderness. And so it's so there's this
ascetical there's more of an aesthetical vision in let's say,
the way that the iconographical tradition got transmitted. But there
are other ways to see what sat Maximus talked about,
which I see it has to do with ornamentation. So
in a in a church, which you'll have is you'll
have images, but then also on the between the images
you'll have foliage. You'll have uh, you know, foliage with
animals in them and all this kind of a natural space.
So you can actually get that hierarchy of revelation in
the very structure of how images present themselves, Like if
you look at a medieval manuscript, like even a western
medieval manuscript, you really get that that structure where you
have the image in the center, and then on the
outskirts of the image you'll have foliage. You'll have all
these these these ornaments that are made of leaves and
have animals in them and sometimes even have monsters and
you know, and the gargoyle type creatures. And so there
is this idea of this this kind of basic cosmic
image of everything, of everything kind of participating in this
in this pattern, even to the end of the world,
you could say. And so I think that that's probably
the best way to see it. And but in icons,
really we've developed this more of an aesthetic image. So
the trees are very sparse, you know, there's a there's
kind of like a there's more of a desert imagery.
If you look at the icons, you'll start to notice
it if you haven't noticed it before, that that tends
to be the way that the tradition developed.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, and you know this life being that passage
through the desert wandering too, you know, the esqaton and
being you know, the Promised Land. I wanted to ask
to you about, uh they you mentioned the We were
talking about neil Platonism earlier, and you know, when I
first met you had we had heard a lecture about
the Neoplatonic idea, the Plutonian idea of this sort of
journey that goes on from creatures that that sort of
go out from God and then they go through a process,
a cycle, and they come back to God. Even the
Pagans seem to have had a notion, as we know
from like the orphic mysteries and this kind of stuff
of nature goes through this sort of cycle right of birth, death, resurrection,
and then we have a cycle obviously in the church
as well, where we have the liturgical cycle. And I've
always just found it amazing if we think about it,
that the whole purpose of the liturgical cycle is actually
a commentary in a way on nature, the cycle of
the natural world. It's like, the real meaning of the
natural world is this stuff is the liturgical cycle? Would
you would you agree with that?
Speaker 1: I totally agree, And I think that it's actually a
key that a lot of people want to dismiss because
they're afraid that they have paganism. So a lot of
people if you point to them, right, so you've you've
heard that argument before, right, it's like, oh, the Nativity
of Christ is just it's just the solstice. You know
that the Christians try to take over all that kind
of nonsense. But I think that we can we can
actually flip that back on us, because I do believe
it is about the solstice. But what it's doing, it's
actually revealing the cosmic mystery of the solstice, in the
incarnation of Christ, in the darkness of the cave, this
hidden mystery which is not yet completely revealed, in the
in the lowest place, you know, in the manger, in
the place where the animals eat, like the lowest part
of the world. And then we'll start to reveal himself,
you know, as the year kind of moves on and
so like to me, that's not a problem at all.
And of course, I mean, you know the fact that
we have the dormssion at the fall, all of these
things make complete sense in terms of just the natural
cycle of things. But like you said, it's not people
see it in the upside down way. They think that, oh,
it's just Christian trying to take over these these pagan holidays.
And not these pagan holidays, these are just natural cycles
that God created, and Christians are now trying to reorient
them towards their ultimate meaning. And and and even if
they do use and I don't even have a problem
to the extent that sometimes Christian actually took some of
the pagan elements and then redirected them towards their fullness
of meaning. Either it doesn't it doesn't bother me at all,
because you know, if you tell me that Christmas isn't
about celebrating the nativity of Price, then you're just it's
this is it's bull like, that's what it's that's what
that's what we celebrate. And and if there are some
you know, like some like say the Christmas tree, like
it's some people say all this is an old pagan tradition,
blah blah blah blah blah. It's like, okay, fine, but
when I look at a Christmas tree, it's like, I
don't know. I see a star up there, and I
see all these lights going down, and then I see
christ below in the major and I'm like, I know
that that's pretty good pattern. I don't actually don't have
a problem with it at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a kind of a basic problem that
we always address on this channel because a lot of
the you know, evangelical crowd, they get upset about that
kind of stuf. And if you use this or that symbol, Oh,
then symbols only have one meaning and they always mean
this occult thing. No, No, symbols have a lot of different meaning.
And the example we always give is, look, Jesus is
the lion of the tribe of Judah. Okay, Satan is
the lion who goes about seeking human madd apower. So
a lion can have different reference in different senses, different contexts,
and so in the same way. A lot of symbols
actually work this way. So we can't have like a
you know, isomorphic single sense to which symbols always only
mean this thing. Another good example of this that you
touched on a minute ago is the microcosm macrocosm element.
This is something that it's probably debated, I would say,
as to the actual origins of this, because on the
one hand, we could say, well, now, wait a minute,
this is an esoteric, alchemical, neoplatonic thing. Well, yeah, the
neoplatonists talk about Man as a microcosm of the macrocosm,
but Paul speaks of Christ as the microcosm of the macrocosm.
So it really doesn't matter who's using the argument or
where it comes from. If it's true, it doesn't matter, right,
And so we can appropriate those things we can, And
in fact, some scholars even argue that that idea was
actually in Jewish theology prior to Paul. It was already there.
That you know, Israel is a kind of a body
of God. There's a whole tradition in Jewish theology of
Israel being the bride and body of God and this
kind of stuff. So there's fluidity in these ideas that
we don't have to have this rigid notion that if
a pagan philosopher says this, then it must have come
from him, and it must have come from demons. Now,
you know, that's a silly kind of idea approach to
these things, because again, even Saint Paul right in his epistles,
he calls, you know, Christ the new atom, and by
being the new atom, he encapsulates as a divine hypostasis
with a human human nature. He encapsulates not just all
of human nature, but according to Romans eight, cosmic scope
of all reality and some same Maximus can go so
far as to say that Christ not only reconciles all
of dispersed discrete human nature that was fragmented from the Fall,
but he says all of cosmic reality is restored in
the incarnation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and same Maximus goes, Same Maximus like, people really
just have to read him, because I mean, he really
talks about how the entire cosmos is meant to be divinized,
Like it's not even just man like through man, yes,
but ultimately all of creation is headed toward divinizations. That's
the reason why I was created in the first place, basically,
And so I totally agree with you, and I think
that that's to me and I think, like you said,
I think what it is it's a weird thing because
you see the Orthodox circles too. It's like Orthodox Orthodox
people they kind of converted from Protestantism and were very
anti Catholic and so saw a lot of like weird
or interpreted a lot of Catholic things as weirdly esoteric.
Then they become Orthodox and they keep doing that. But
it's like you have a lot of stuff that if
you keep doing that, you're gonna run into major problems.
Like when you see your bishop with a staff that
has two snakes on it, You're going to run into
a major problem, my friend, because it's like it's like
you you have to drop that type of thinking and
rather see the image for what it is, in its
context and how you know, how it can be, how
it can be even if it was taken from some
pagan source. It can be reoriented because Christ redeems, you know,
but it has to be reoriented obviously, Like you're not
gonna have heavy metal music playing in a in an
Orthodox church because it just you know, it's not it's
not reoriented in the proper, the proper way or in
the proper hierarchy. But some things have been and that's
completely fine. Like the image of let's say a domed building. Uh,
you know that came from Roman. It came from Roman architecture.
But it's an But like, who why would you deny that?
It's an amazing image. It's a it's a powerful image
that is completely coherent with biblical symbolism and the Biblical
way of describing reality. And so it's like, why would
you why would you throw it away if you can
now reorient it towards Christ?
Speaker 2: Yeah, saying uh uh, Muslims had steeples aka minarets before Protestants,
and so if you're a Protestant, you're getting your steeple
from a Muslim. Just joking, but yeah, I know exactly.
You played the genetic fallacy there where it has nothing
to do with whether it's true or false. But so, uh,
let's see, you did bring up something there I wanted
to ask you about. Oh so, I remember one of
the first things I read from you, and I did.
I don't think I realized at the time when I
had read it that that was you, And it was
I believe an essay that you had done. It was
an excellent essay, by the way, on that very thing
that the double headed snake on the staff. Could you
maybe go into that because I actually get not not
a lot, but every now and then I get, you know,
a Protestant who say, what is this? This looks it
looks a cultic, and it's like, no, no, you have to
understand the context of the symbolis. I mean, do you
think that the bronze serpent on a pole was it
was a cultic? No, it's in numbers, it's in John three.
So could you could you go into some of that
because your essay was really good on that, well.
Speaker 1: It had it's a very it has to do it revealing.
It reveals very much a mystery of Christ, very much. So.
That is, it's not just about even understanding the staff
of the of the Bishop, of the two servants. It's
understanding first of all the serpentine shape that Christ has
on the cross itself, you know, and that you can
understand its superficially. It's saying, okay, he's the bronze serpent,
you know, but this is this is there's a there's
an even deeper mystery to that, which is the snake
in the garden. You know, there are different ways of
understanding the snake in the garden. Obviously, you know, you
can say it's satan, you can say. But a good
way I think of understanding it, which makes sense and
kind of orthodox anthropology, is to understand this the snake
as the purveyor of death, that the one who's bringing death,
you know, because he's lying about the nature of reality,
and he's going to bring humans into fragmentation and dispersion
and and so and so it's death. It's changed as well, o, right,
change in the negative sense, change in the sense that
here you're in the you're in the proper state, and
now we're going to change you back into the lower state.
But what Christ does is he reverses that process. Right,
he uses death against death, you can say, right, he
dies to restore life. And so because of that, the
idea that Christ becomes the serpent on the staff, Moses
already did that. Moses already took the debt these things
that are bringing death at the bottom of the world.
So you have all these slithering things that are the passion,
that are all of these these fragmentation of the world
at the bottom that are that are stinging you and
and and you're dying because of that. And so Moses
takes that like medicine, right, medicine is is made out
of the poison, is made out of the disease, or
made out of the say a cure, cure is made
out of the of the poison. Right, So he takes one,
he lifts it up on the on the on the
stick like on the he puts it up on the
top of the hierarchy. And if you look to that,
then all of a sudden that ends up curing your death.
And it's like an image of Christ. What Christ is
going to do. Christ is going to do exactly that.
He's going to turn death against itself and he's going
to So when you look at the image of the
staff of the bishop, that's what you're getting. It's actually
really related to the to the to the image of Asclepias, right,
it is related to that in terms of the meaning
that is you have. There's a there's a tradition according
to which the Asclepias what he did is that he
cut the gorgon in half, but didn't cut in half.
He would take blood from the right side of the
gorgon in order to heal people, you know, implying that
blood from the left side of the gorgon would be poisonous, right,
So you have from one side you have the raising up,
and then one side you have the pushing down. And
so that's the way to kind of understand these two
snakes on the side of the staff, which is the
good thief the bad thief, right, the one that goes up,
the one that goes down, the two possibilities of change,
you could say, one which is using change to bring
you up towards God, and one which is manifestation of change,
which brings you down into death. And so it's actually
very it's very much coherent with So another way was
represented in the medieval art was that you would have
Christ on the cross kind of s shape. Then you
have the serpent at the bottom of the cross coming
up to bite him on the like coming to bite
his heel. And so you would have the two snakes
on the cross as being these two aspects of death,
one which is bringing you towards life, and one which
is trying to pull you down towards towards towards death itself.
And so those two serpents end up being a similar,
similar version of that same that same structure.
Speaker 2: Let's say, interesting, Yeah, what are some other maybe top
if you could think of a few misinterpreted symbols, like
what are some of the things that you think most
people will get really wrong or have totally you know, overlooked,
or what what are you know if you want to.
Speaker 1: The one that I've seen online all the time is
when they see an image of the pope wearing a
cross with a skull on it, and then people freak out.
They're like, he's you know, he's a Satanist because he
has a skull on his cross, right, And so that's
one of the major misunderstood, uh, misunderstood symbols because that's
a that's one of the oldest traditions of how to
represent the crucifixion, which is that you represent Christ on
the cross and then you represent the skull of Atom
at the bottom. It's actually similar to what I said before,
So you have the death of Adam at the bottom
of the cross, then you have the death of Christ
at the top of the cross, which is actually restoring
the death of Adam, and then you see the blood
of Christ going dripping down onto the skull of Atom
in this like cave uh. And so often people are
confused about seeing why is their skull you know, the Crucifixion,
especially like if it's on a on a cross on someone,
like they just see the skull at the bottom of
the cross and they freak out and they wonder what
it is. But it really is, it really is representing
the mystery of the really the mystery of the Crucifixion,
which it is hard to you know, it's like we're
so used to seeing Jesus on the cross that we
we we just kind of dismiss it. But man, what's
going on there is is very very mysterious and very
strange because it is this ultimate trick played on death
of kind of taking death into into God and therefore
you know, transforming its basically the joke of of like
you know, the of Hades and death thinking they've got
God because they're bringing them down to death. And then
it's like bringing a candle into the darkness. Like if
you bring candle into the darkness, the opposite happens, right,
you don't. Darkness doesn't win, right, Darkness loses. So so
that type of so let's say, what else is? What
else is a big, a big misunderstanding?
Speaker 2: What about the double headed eagle? You know, this is
everywhere in Orthodoxy and people, Oh, that's a Scottish rite
masonic thing. Well, no, no it's not. It's that existed
way before there was any Scottish writer and masonry. So
I don't know if people know this, but that goes
back to the Byzantine Empire into the.
Speaker 1: Well. The double headed serpent is really the two powers
of Christendom. You could say it represents the represents the
Church and the state. You know, usually you see them
kind of together, but it also represents the in a
deeper fashion. It represents the two aspects of Christ. I've
written some articles on that too. People are interested, which
is that Christ contains those two powers within himself. You
could say one is something like a torritas direct influence.
You see with his right hand he's blessing, so it's
like a direct influence. Right It's like I have direct
authority over you. And then the other side is secondary
power or like it's the written word. It's the written text.
It's like a it's like an envelope around real authority.
It's like the indirect indirect authority you could say, indirect power,
you could say. And so that ends up being represented
in different ways, you know, whether it be the Church
as having the direct authority and then the state having
this more indirect more more physical power, but less authority.
You could say something like that, right, So the scripture
has more power in the sense that you can look
at it, you can analyze it, you know, you can
apply it directly, but it has less authority because it's
not this direct influence of the logos himself. So often
that's why you'll see, for example, that two headed ego.
Often see them like holding the two keys of Peter
sometimes because those are also this idea of like these
two powers that are facing each other, right, the power
to bind and to unbind. It really is this kind
of duality that exists ultimately that is ultimately united in Christ.
All these dualities kind of come together into Christ.
Speaker 2: So yeah, another, I mean, what about the eye of Providence,
because this one comes up all the time. People ask
all the time, and they'll always say, well, I was
I saw at church one time that had any Well,
even that is not again always signifying something Illuminati or Masonic.
It's a symbol that goes back to the ancient world
that just signified something like one of the divine attributes
like omniscientz right, God sees all, God knows all. So
again it's a situation of context, giving the interpretation, giving
the meaning. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 1: I mean, I totally agree, you know, because this this
becomes silly, like you said, where I had this experience
of going into a Catholic church right here in my city,
you know, like it's like a you know, it's like
Quebec was a rural area. You know, it's not like
there was no power here. And so in this like
rural church, we walk in and the guide is giving
us a tour of this. It's still a historical church,
maybe like eighteenth century paintings, and so in the in
one of the one of the roof arches, there's a
there's an eye of providence, and the guy in the
tour says, oh, it means that this church was made
by the Illuminati, And like, there's no way that this
eighteenth century rural church in Quebec was made by the Illuminati, right,
But it's actually an image of It was seen as
an image of the Trinity because it was a triangle.
And then it also had the notion of like you said,
omniscience or the capacity to you know, this this eye
that sees all is what it's supposed to be, and so,
you know, it's just like any symbolism. It I think
it ended up being misused. And one of the problems
that people have is that people don't like, for example,
a Freemasonry. People don't understand that Freemasons took their symbolism
mostly from Christians, not the other way around. And so
the Freemasons at the outset, you know, we don't exactly know,
you know, exactly where it comes from. They say they
were the cathedral builders, that they had these this knowledge
of architecture and this knowledge of building cathedrals, and so
let's say that that's true. It means that at some
point they went off the rails and started acting in
different ways, but that even their own symbolism isn't necessarily evil.
Maybe some of it is, especially when when when the
more occult things start coming in the nineteenth century, but
before that it's like a lot of it is just
Christian symbols, and it's and so it's not necessarily evil
in itself, you know. I actually, you know, I was
talking to this. I met just randomly some some thirty
third degree Mason who is Protestant, right, and I didn't know.
I didn't, like, I've never really studied Masonic sembly. I'm
not that interested in it. But he was telling me
about how they had the cut stone and the uncut stone,
and they had these two aspects of their thing, and
I was thinking, that's actually very biblical, like, like that
aspect of symbolism, Like I can totally understand the idea
of that. You know, you see it, like the idea
that some alters need to be made out of uncut
stone and so are kind of pure, but are also
not worked right, so they lack refinement. So I was like, yeah,
that's interesting. I don't see evil in itself now, I
don't know, like I you know, obviously, you know, as
as as these kind of western esoteric branches started joining
with Freemasonry, then then you know, all these weird images
started to become or be twisted or whatever that is.
But I think people just have to be careful when
they look at these images and understand, like I said,
that a lot of them come from Christianity first, and
then we're twisted later exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean. Another example often bring up is
there's such a thing as the Gnostic cross, and I'm
sure people have seen this, but this is like it
looks like a like a like a what you would
put in in the sights to shoot a gun. It
looks like it's a circle with a cross, and it's
known as the Gnostic cross. And where do you think
that they got that? They took it from the church's cross.
I mean it's just borrowing. I mean the Celtic cross
looks like a Gnostic cross, right. So anyway, I'm glad
that we hit on that that that that stuff comes
up all the time. We got I don't know, I mean,
you're well, I'm having a great chat with you, but
I also don't want to take too long. If you
had other things you want to.
Speaker 1: Do, fine, like it as long as you wanted. I
think it great.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and we do have some super chats, are
you Are you okay with taking okay? And remember everybody,
when you send your super chat that it needs to
be within the guidelines. I'm not going to read any degenerate,
disgusting comments, so please keep them within the bounds of
you know, what's appropriate for the topic. Tonight. What about
liturgical abuse? Uh? And I bring that up because when
it comes to mostly the Roman Catholic world mostly maybe
I guess you could say the Protestant world to a degree,
they don't really have a liturgy. Some of them have liturgy.
But do you see how can I phrase this? We
both have talked you and I both in different shows podcasts.
We've talked about inversion a lot and how that's it
seems to be a pattern that we see in dark
spiritual forces to take things that are good. We see
this with symbolism and invert it. Right. If you think
of the pentacle or the pentagram, that's a classic symbol
of man, and then the inverted pentagram is like the
inversion of man. It's like man pointing down, Man die, man,
go down? Right? So do you see that in the
abuses of liturgy that seemed to be really prominent in
the last say fifty years in different traditions and even
in the Orthodox Church to a degree, and maybe not
as bad as the Romancalthy and Protestant worlds, But is
do you see that inversion and an attack on the
liturgy as something that is as a demonic spirit basically?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, I think yeah, I think that that some
of these have become so egregious that they're nothing less
than just just satanic. Some of these are. And I
mean I'm not saying that the people who do them
are Satanists or anything like that, but I think they're animated.
They're animated by a spirit of inversion. You know. One
of the craziest examples, I at, you saw that that
they in in England. In England, they're losing their minds.
They put up this like carnival slide in the nave.
You saw this, right, and the bishop like went up there,
did his homily and then slid.
Speaker 2: Down this flood.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, could you get like it's like snake,
It's like snakes and ladders, right, He's basically like going
down the snake as he's in church and it's a carnival.
And I'm thinking, like, so, I think that a lot
of these have become so egregious that they're actually they're
actually so some times worth paying attention to to kind
of understand what the upside down looks like, because you know,
you could have had warnings of saints, you know, a
few hundred years ago about about the Antichrist are about
you know what you know, and it was vague, But
now there's nothing of it is vague because you can
actually see you know, things become you know, like these
clown masses that are that that the that the Catholic
Church not all I means that some weird Catholic churches
are engaging in and uh, you know this also just
the desire to make everything as informal as possible. Yeah,
and then in the liturgical space, that's also a kind
of breakdown of of meeting. It's just an image of this,
this kind of breakdown the disco masses. I mean, there's
so many, there are so many that we could that
we could that we could say and obvious obviously now
the big one that's going to take up space and
is already doing it in kind of liberal Enpiscopalian type
churches is the celebration of of of the LGBT agenda
as becoming let's say, like for them like an actual
image of sanctity, like an image of what is holy.
That inclusivity is that is the image of holiness itself,
and that openness and inclusivity and variability is the very
image of of of God. And so it ends up
being really the the upside down of what is true,
which is that God is calling us towards one, calling
us towards transcending our our our idiosyncrasies and our divisions
and our tribalism. Doesn't mean that those can't exist. That
is right, We do exist in particulars, but that crisis
calling us to move into Him as much as possible
and move beyond these these these uh, these idiosyncrasies. But
now they're using this kind of weird inclusivity as an
image of that. Like the thing that inclusivity is an
image is kind of inclusivity without judgment. I don't know
if you have you seen the the dancing freeze of Saints.
Have you ever seen this? Oh, man, you'll have. You
need to look at this. You have a blast. It's
church in calcul and it's as compared. It's actually it's
actually saying Gregor meets the church, which is sad, but
it's a there have a frieze of saints up in
the up in the middle of the church, and it's
all these saints during the can can they're all dancing, uh,
and and they're legitimate saints in there, you know, Let's
say there's Augustine and there's the same bas or whatever.
But there's also you know, like Eli Fitzgerald and Harvey
Milk and and like John Coltrane and and uh and
I Albert Einstein and so they're all and they're dancing
during the can can and so you can really see
this kind of just complete breakdown of hierarchy. It this
complete breakdown a meaning, you know, what it means to
be a saint, when it means to be holy. You know,
it just ends up, but it ends up looking upside
down because they're actually celebrating them, right, they're actually putting
them up in the church as images to look at,
you know, while you're worshiping God.
Speaker 2: It's like, man, it reminds me when I was eighteen
and I had just began reading the Bible. At the time,
I didn't really know much of anything. It's kind of
getting a little bit of a sense of good and
evil because I been just totally a wild party, degenerate
guy in high school. And I took a senior trip
to New York and we toured a bunch of big
cathedrals and churches there, and I want to say, I
don't remember. I want to say, this was a Methodist church,
and I didn't know anything about the Bible at the time.
I just started reading like maybe the Beatitudes, you know,
the Gospel of Matthew or something. And I remember we
went in this I think it was a Methodist cathedral
and they literally had had just installed a stained glass
window that had the apostles riding around in a corvette.
And I'm not joking. I was like, what and so
we we did, you know, the Saint John, the Divine Cathedral,
the big Episcopal cathedral there too, And I remember thinking
how weird and kind of new agey it was, and
what do you mean, what do you make of the weirdness?
I mean, I get like the inversion in the sense
of like the really satanic stuff, but I don't understand
the weirdness. What's with the apostles in our corvette? I
don't get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it has it really has to do with, uh,
the end. It has to do with the end. I'm
sorry to say. So if you if you kind of understand,
you know what we talked about, the idea that I
talked about the medieval manuscript, you know, and how you
have the image in the center and then on the
border you'll have the ornamentation and then you also have idiosyncrasy,
idiosyncrasy and monstrosity. You'll have little little monsters, little little
weird figures in the in the borders. And if you
look at the first cycle, let's say in scripture, from
the Fall to the flood, you get that same image. Right,
you have this movement down the mountain, a mountain of paradise,
moving out into the into the chaos. And then what
happens is you have mixture, you have giants, you have monsters, basically,
and so that's the weirdness. Weirdness is just a breakdown
of me and so it's a breakdown of hierarchy. It's
coming to the edge of an of an identity and
now experimenting the idiosyncrasy of of that identity. It's like,
you know, you have the central, the central, the central
image of the garden, and then at the edge of
that you have the monster. Think of like the Pliny's
map is like that, right, you have the uenvelopes in
the middle, and then on the edge you have all
these monsters racing. That's where we are. We're where that's
where were We're at the edge of the world with
all the monsters coming out, and it's manifesting itself in
all kinds, like something as silly as Sesame Street, where
all these monsters are your friends, you know, this ideal
monstrosity as as I you know, the idea of like
how to train your dragon, where ultimately the dragons end
up being better than us. Right, all of this imagery,
it's in the zeitgeist, like it's in the it's in
the air because we are at the end of something,
like we're reaching the end of something. And so because
of that, you know, that's why the seventy genders and
you know, all this breakdown of identity into idiosyncrasy. That's
the image. And so the weirdness is it's like a
it really is like this modern pulse, like this modern
in like a thrust to go against the meaning, yeah,
and to manifest idiosyncrasy because because we think it's cool,
because we think it's because we think it's edgy. You know,
even think about that word agg.
Speaker 2: Over the edge into the abyss.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, and so I think that that's what
it is. And so that's why there's this this celebration
of weirdness as almost like a value in itself. And
it has to do with the celebration of mixture, and
it has to do with the celebration of vidiosyncrasy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it makes me think of like the like
like Hieronymous Bosh paintings right where you've got these like
you know, weird creatures with like that are supposed to
signify the demonic. You know, it's like a fish head
with like a man's body and like a giant butt,
you know, coming out of his chest literally like like
like butt monsters walking around and and and Bosh was
doing that too, I think make your point, right, to
signify that the closer that you get to the abyss
and to the to the realm of the demonic, it
gets into the madness, right, the madness of the demonic
and the chaos and and things don't make sense. You know,
you've got talking butt creatures to be frank I.
Speaker 1: Agridity is an image of the edge, right, That's what
it is. It's an image where so that's why Look,
if you look at the image of Saint George killing
the dragon, the traditional dragon in orthodox iconography is always
a hybrid. He's always right, he's a he's a lizard
with with bird wings and with with mammal feet, and
so he's a he's a category that doesn't exist. He's
a he's a breakdown of categories, right, this experience of
the strange, you know. And so that's what it is
like when you experience something strange, when you experience something
that you don't have a category for, it's going to
present itself at first as a monster to you as
something which is a mixture of two categories.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So you can imagine the first the first time Greeks
saw hippopotamus, right, they don't have a category for it.
So they're like, oh, it's a river horse. But it's
obviously not genetically a river horse. But it's because I
don't have a category for it. So I have to
take I see it's in a river and it looks
like a horse. I'm gonna give it some name because
it just doesn't fit in my in my word.
Speaker 2: It's an only funt, mister, it's an only funt.
Speaker 1: So so that's what's going on, and that's where we
are now, Like we are in the world, like you said,
like a great and it is. It's upside down and
it's hybrid and it's inverted. You know those images you
probably watched Monty Python and the Holy grail, right, you
know that image of like the guys blowing blowing trumpets
out of their butts, Like that's an actual medieval image.
They didn't make that up. Like those exist in medieval manuscripts,
and they represent that edge, that upside down where instead
of air coming out of your mouth and being meaningful,
you have air coming from accidental, air coming from behind,
where it's uncontrolled and it's funny and it's and it
makes noise instead of meaning and so it's like and
so that's where we are today. We have noise, accident
and hybridity and mixture and all of these these images
of the edge.
Speaker 2: I remember when I was in high school, I liked
a lot of really weird music and you know, just
being People might not know, but I was actually an
artsy person in high school and I almost went to
art school, and all my buddies were you know, artsy
type guys, and I remember, you know, we sort of
celebrated that weirdness and we thought it was cool. And
I remember one time when I started going to church
back then, it was a prosiscent church. But there was
a guy I remember, I don't remember his name, but
he was a pretty philosophically astute guy. And I was
just getting into a philosophy and and he was looking
through you know, like my CD collection or something like that,
and he's like, oh, you got back, You've got they
might be giants. He's like, you have a lot of
nonsense music in here, and I was like, what do
you mean nonsense music? He's like, it's all postmodern, and
I was like, I was like, But then I realized
the more that I learned, you know, got into into philosophy,
later on, I thought that that guy was actually right,
like the music. And I'm not saying that it's always
wrong to listen to secular music or to enjoy you know,
absurdity and comedy and that kind of stuff, but I
did eventually come to realize, no, he actually had a
point that in those kinds of musical trends, even though
we can to a degree I think I appreciate them,
there is the notion of the breakdown of meaning, and
it is postmodern music because most of those songs are
actually intentionally absurd and meaningless.
Speaker 1: Exactly. You know, you're right, a good way to understand
it traditionally, Like you said, it's not that it's wrong
in itself. It's all about place. It's all about things
being in their proper place. So traditional societies always had
their carnival, right. You know, we had Marty Graw, we
had meat fair. You know, the Jews have Poorim, which
is even freight out of the Bible, where you have
a festival where meeting breaks down right and pour them.
For example, the Jews dress up, they wear weird costumes,
and it said that they have to drink and turn
on themselves until they fall down right. So that's a
great example like getting drunk, losing meaning everything kind of
falling down. And so you see that in the West,
for example, they had the Feast of Fools, which was
around the New Year's where they would you know, elect
someone to like a child to be a bishop, or
they would they would have a mock king and then
everybody would would kind of that he's the king and
it would be this upside down that. They had even
a crazier liturgical practice in the West in the Middle Ages,
which was the Feast of the ass they would bring
a donkey into the church all the way up to
the altar, and then at the end of the Mass,
instead of saying Amen, they would actually break, people would break,
but it was just this one time, right, And so
it was these festivals of inversion. And then it's like
it's that moment at the end of the world, at
the end of the cycle, at the end of the
year where meaning breaks down and then there's a resurrection
and then things kind of come back up. And so
there has always been a there was always been a
little bit of room for that. Like if you think about,
like in the Orthodox tradition, for example, the meat fair
the day before the carnival. That's what carnival means, right,
Carnival means meat fair. Meatfair is on the same day
as the last judgment. We celebrate the lad judgment and
meet fair on the same day, which has to do
with this idea of the end. Right, it's like the end,
the breakdown of meeting, then the judgment, and then the
world starts. It's up again, you could say. And so
that's the pattern everything. So now you can understand it
that we're basically in a NonStop carnival, Like our whole
world is just a carnival that's been going on for like,
you know, since World War two, just be kind of
increasing since World War two. It's like massive carnival. Uh
and and it's getting insane. It's getting more and more
insane and more and more apparent that it's a it's
a kind of a crazy carnival, and then it turns
into like a you know, like those like horror carnivals.
Like that's what it's becoming, right, this kind of imagery
of the horror carnival when you all where it all
goes wrong and then the kind of zombie clowns come
out to devour us all. You know. That's that's pretty
much where we are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what you're saying is basically, there's a time
and a place for when you're gonna release your mumble
rap CD. Right, that's what that's right, there's a place
for mumble rap, and it's a certain year, a.
Speaker 1: Certain once once a year, and then we then we
go back to use it. But now it's non stop mumbling.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's been like that since the nineteen sixties at least.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't. I don't spend a whole lot of
time in the notion of the prophetic or in the
sense of the like when the saints have visions in
this kind of So I'm not saying there's not a
place for it. It's just that we don't talk about
that a lot here because it's very speculative. But one
of the visions of the saints that did strike me
as pretty prophetic over the years was the dream that
Saint John Across had had where he saw this what
sounds like a clown mass. And it's amazing because this is,
you know, eighteen eighties nineties when he had this vision,
so far, it was even before you know, the socialists
in Russia, it was before you know, the liturgical revolution
about it in two and he talks about people dancing
around the altar. It sounds like a liturgical dance. You
know that this kind of weird stuff. Have you ever
looked at that kind of of an analysis or.
Speaker 1: Well, I've never heard of that vision, So so I'm
pretty impressed by he said he saw like a clown mass.
Speaker 2: Right literally. I mean, some people will say the vision
is just predicting, like the Bolshevik or the socialist revolutions
in Russia, but it actually sounds it sounds like it
does connostantly, but it sounds like more than that. It
sounds like because he doesn't say that the enemies of
the church, like coming to the church and they defile
the church. He says, the church adopts, Yeah, this liturgical
dance clown and he says, they're painted like clowns and
they're doing that. They're doing a dance liturgy. That's amazing.
That that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: And so the best way that for me to kind
of understand it, it's it's also like I always I'm
always careful, Like I i'd like to tell people that
we're at the end of something. I'm not saying it's
like the end of the world necessarily.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Only God knows, but I think that we can recognize
the end of patterns and what they look like like
the edge of the world has an objective reality to it.
It looks like something and and and it looks like
a breakdown of meeting, looks all the things, the carnival,
all the things we're talking about, and so you can
see like for example, like in Weimar, for example, that's
what happened, Like Weimar was a version of that moved
into this kind of chaotic, this chaotic space, and then
it went too far and then it brought a beast.
Let's say it brought about a beast. That's like you
could say something like the beast killed the whore, right rule,
the horror was riding the beast, and then at some
point the beast kills the whore and the beast takes over.
And so you can kind of see that that, Like
you get a sense that that's what's going on now,
Like you get a sense that we're at the end
of the carnival and the beast is coming to devour
the horror, and we have these systems of control which
are looming in our face. Uh, and you know, this
system of identification and control which are kind of looming
on us. And look like this moment which is described
in Revelation as this flip between the moment of the
horror and the beast. And so I think that these patterns,
like I think these are the patterns of reality and
so and so I think they have little manifestations and
we can recognize them as they as they happen and
without and you don't have to say, like, okay, at
the end denies the end of the world. Everything is
like you know, Christ is returning tomorrow, Like I don't
know any of that, but I do know, like and
recognize that moment, let's say that moment where the beast
is about to kill the horror. I can see it coming,
and it's like it's coming very fast.
Speaker 2: A little bit off topic, but I just remember that
I wanted to mention this, maybe about twenty minutes ago,
when we were talking about sort of the cycles of
birth and death and the liturgical cycle, A movie comes
to mind. I don't know if you've seen it. Did
you ever, by chance see the original Wickerman?
Speaker 1: No? I didn't see that.
Speaker 2: Now, it is a pretty relatively intense horror movie, so
I'm not I don't typically recommend it. Everybody go out
watch a bunch horror movies. However, this one is interesting
because you have this character who is the police chief
who represents law and order, and he's actually a Christian,
and he is tasked with going to this island off
the coast of Scotland somewhere, and it's like this island
that's kind of removed from the rest of civilization and
they're doing their own thing there. And as I won't
spoil the movie, but as it turns out, it's essentially
they're doing a kind of human cult sacrifice there and
they've kept the old ways of the old pagan religion.
But it's just odd that because they have this notion
that we owe a sacrifice, we owe this, this debt,
this sacrifice to the earth. We have to pay Mother
Earth the blood or else we won't get the harvest. Basically. Yeah,
and they also have this weird it's like old English
folk traditions and Scottish folk traditions that include all these
characters I've never even heard before, like John Barleycorn have
you heard of this this guy? So this is this
weird idea that you make a little bread man and
the bread man is like, he's a he's a a
if you can't do a human sacrifice, he's the best
thing that you do when you don't have a human sacrifice.
And he bake of this little bread man, you eat
the right. So it's just it's odd to me because
even in this goofy pagan you know, horror movie, it's
a famous horror movie. But by the way, if you're
a good laugh, watch the Nicholas Cage remake of it.
It's it's Nicholas Cage just goes.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was like, are we gonna have a conversation
where Nicolas Cage isn't even mentioned once.
Speaker 2: I guess never know that this is all I talk about.
I can't even get away from it. Like last night,
I was on a guy's podcast and we were and
then sure enough, when you're gonna do the Nicholas Cage
and person do I have to do it every time
I'm on somebody's park anyway, But I just want to
what do you think about maybe that kind of a thing, Like,
isn't interesting that even in sort of paying religions, we
have this notion that we we seem to sort of
even if they don't have a direct personal knowledge of God,
there's like this implicit sense that we kind of owe
something to something out there. We gotta we have to
pay this thing. And I'm not trying to reduce Christianity
to a payment debt model of personism, but you get
what I'm saying. And there's society that we have to
partake of this thing, we have to eat it, right,
this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: No, I think you're right. I think that you know,
I think that sacri is the let's say the world
is built on sacrifice. You know, the Lamb was slain
before the foundation of the world. It's something that's hard
to understand because we tend to understand sacrifice is just
a consequence of sin and all that. But I think
there's a deeper element according to which for reality to exist.
That we talked about this problem of multiplicity, right and
so and so this is a real problem. Like in
order for let's say, a team to exist. Let's say
if you wanted playing soccer, in order for a team
to exist, all the players in that team have to
sacrifice some idiosyncrasy of themselves in order to participate in
the team.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They have to stop thinking about the girlfriend, they have
to stop you know, they have to stop doing other
things in order to participate. So unity of a group
always involves sacrifice. This is a this is a necessary
aspect of it. And I think that it's also normal
that that would become ritualized to a certain extent, that
that would become that would ultimately become ritualized. I think
Renra is kind of right on. I think some of
the things that he talks about in terms of memetic
desire and this the problem of being together and then
and then also wanting what other people want, and then
this whole scapegoad mechanism that the kind of that sets
itself up. So I think that this is something which
is just like you said, it's inherent to being human
and to being intelligent and to having and to seeing
how these things come together and how there's a need
to to compress and to sacrifice things and uh. And
then ultimately that leads to to Christ as the final
solution to that and as a Christian as a self sacrifice. Right,
that's what ends up being the ultimate solution to the
problem of sacrifice, is that you don't sacrifice others, you
sacrifice yourself. That's how you solve this problem. But as
Christianity breaks down, sacrifice is gonna come back. There's no
way around it. You know, there's no way around it,
and it's gonna It can happen informally like like things
things like abortion. Like abortion is an obvious human sacrifice
because that's what it is. It's like someone says, I
want to have a certain life and here's this and
I'm gonna sacrifice my child to have that life. It's
just a it's just a basic trade off of what
a human sacrifice is. It's not it's not ritualized, but
it nonetheless participates in the same pattern as ritual sacrifice,
and so it seems inevitable that that these types of
images will will appear just more and more. You know,
Like the whole George Floyd thing was really about that.
Like it was all about a weird, a weird mimetic
sacrifice and and and like uh, watching someone die, you know,
killed by an authority and then having like a weird
ecstatic communion you know after that. It's very strange. It was.
It was a very strained religious influx of kind of
misunderstood religious religious patterns. But that's gonna happen more and more.
Right as Christianity wanes. People think they're just gonna hold
on to their nice little Christian morality and uh and
and that you know, without Christianity, we're still gonna be
nice and and have you know, the Sermon on the Mound.
But that's not that's not what's going to happen, you know.
Pagan is it going to come flooding back.
Speaker 2: Paganism will fill the void exactly, all right, So let's
get to some of these super chats. Remember, guys, Uh,
if you would keep them in you know, civil and clean, uh,
pallunteer for five dollars. Now, the way we usually do
it here, Jonathan is that I let the guests reply
and then I'll give a comment. So most of the
questions are are probably going to be for you, volunteer
five dollars. Can you comment on the idea that Christ
embodies reconciliation of opposites? For example, we read of Christ
as king and outcast, victim and victor critic and fulfillment
of the law. What is the orthodox understanding of this
pattern if we can trust it or excuse me, compare
it to Jung.
Speaker 1: I don't know much. People think that I know a
lot about Jung, but I don't. I'd be interesting. I find
Young very uninteresting. Uh, But I think that definitely that's
what Christ is doing. And you see, you see that
he he's really you know, Sam Maxwis talks about Man
as the as the laboratory, the mediator of extremes, you
could say. But then that culminates into Christ. And so
if you read his story, it's crazy, like there's so
many there's so much reconciliation happened in his story. And
it's also it also it's funny because scholars struggle to
kind of classify his story because they're like, how does
this work? You know, he's a he's a shepherd, but
he's also you know, uh, he's he's also a farmer,
like in terms of so it's like Cain and Abel,
he's a you know, he he's a he says, they say,
he's a priest, but he's also a king, and then
he's also like a technician, like a carpenter's son, and
then he's also So it's like he's just all these
things kind of brought in together into into one person.
And so I think that that's really what it's an
image of what it's an image of of what it
is to be called into God. That is, even in yourself.
That's what you end up having to do, is that
you know your you and yourself have these opposite that
are pulling you apart. Everybody experiences it, and it's experienced
as the passions you can hate and love somebody at
the same time. It's like, what is going on being
ripped apart by this? And and that's what Christ is
kind of calling us to do, is to bring all
this multiplicity into unity. It doesn't deny the duality, and
it doesn't deny the multiplicity, but it is nonetheless, it
kind of it ends up being more like a yeah,
like a feast. You know, all these images that Christ
uses like this is joined together of all these the
this multiplicity, the band of apostles that are joined together
in the boat or you know at the you know, uh,
when you see at the ascension, this band of apostles
or pentecost. That's what we're called to do. And I
think that we need to not shy away from that
understanding because you'll struggle to understand Christ's story if you
don't want to see him as reconciling everything in himself.
Because like I said, for modern literary critics, they just
see it as this weird, chaotic, like broken story. But
it's like, no, it's not. It's actually winning together all
the stories into one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One confusion too from a philosophical perspective that people
who are I'm not talking about you, I'm saying people
who ask this question perhaps the questioner is that they
will confuse the idea of the opposites in the sense
of metaphysical or existent opposites. For example, good and evil
are opposites, So in that sense, Christ doesn't reconcile good
and evil, because evil is not a thing to be reconciled.
To have a kind of unification requires that both things
have some notion of ontology being existence. Evil doesn't have
being evil as a privation of being in both Neoplatonism
and in Christianity. So there's no sense in which Jesus
like makes good and evil come together. Right, that would
be like Charles Manson theology. Okay, we're not doing Charles
Manson theology. And for I mean and for Carl Young,
you know Young as a kind of Platonist or as
a kind of gnostic. Ultimately, Carl Jung believes that that
evil and the opposite of evil actually have a real existence.
He has an essay called aon where he says that
Jesus and Satan are really just flip sides of the
same coin. So I would just say that it's two
different notions of what it means to reconcile opposites. So
what Jesus reconciles According to Saint Maximus, I think it's
ambigu ten and mbigua forty one or two. He says
that Jesus gathers together all of the things that the
fall kind of split and fractured into himself. That's not evil.
It's the things that have being that are split and
fractured against each other. So he takes you versus gentile,
fractured and split, brings them back. That's what it's talking about, too,
quote reconcile opposites as well as the things that Jonathan
talked about, right like these these sort of different types
of roles in Christ's life as humble poverty, you know,
carpenter versus you know, royal. Okay, so yes, he reconciles
those things. Eric, Wow, a hundred bucks. Eric, And as
we know, I will give Jonathan a portion of these
super chats. I give the guess a portion. John He says,
thank you, Jonathan and Jay. You guys are both pointing
people to the light exactly. Uh pallunteer five dollars with
the rollout of Okay, so I'm gonna have to talk
and code because you guys know, we can't talk about
all this stuff in here. So with the rollout of
tech things that are coming, are we beginning to enter
into a sort of global order or a six y
sixty six type of system as we see in Revelation.
So I think he's asking, is this something in revelation?
I would say, well, I'm gonna let Jonathan answer first.
Dum' that's his question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think so. I think that the
furtherm like, I've been very cautious about talking about this.
If you go on my channel, you'll find I did
a video called The Mark of Kin recently when which
starts to address this, and I've got a video coming
up called The Mark of the Beast, which I'm hesitating
to put out just because I don't want to put
pour all on the fire or anything. But there is
a sense in which the idea of the idea of identification,
just the idea of of of identification as a means
to participate in society, is moving us towards a serious problem,
you know, in terms of this six six six symbolism,
the idea of accounting for everything. You know, I talked
I did a video on six sixty six, and I
talked about this that six x six symbolism seems to
be about perfection, actually seems to be about the idea
of trying to account for for for all things. And
it's like it's actually like a perfect number in the
in the bad sense that it's it's it tries to
be all inclusive, and that seems to be what's what's
going on. You can see six six six symbolism in
the desire to include all these all these freak identities,
to name them right, to actually name them, and to
make them part of a system. And then ultimately that
comes to this problem of of tracking and identification as
means to participate in the world. So it's like it's
a desire to have perfect control over things. And I
think that we're definitely seeing that, whether it's thus six
sixty six, you know that's described in scripture, it's participating
in that pattern for sure, and it's something we need
to be very attended to and cautious about.
Speaker 2: I would agree. Uh, Jay Broad ten dollars, thank you
both for your work in the Church. Fathers. We sometimes
see the phrase nature as scripture or nature as a
witness to the Creator. Would you care to comment on
that and the patrictic view of creation and also would
you suggest any books on this topic.
Speaker 1: Glory to God, Yeah, for sure, I think I mean
although the you know, creation sings things to the Creator
and all of creation is full of His glory, and
it's it's actually dependent on us too in our own
process of sanctification to be able to perceive it. And
so for sure it's somewhat veiled for us because we
are because we're distracted, because we're sinners, because we're all
these things. But if you read, if you read the
testimony of the saints, and you read stories of some
of the saints that reach theosis, you really get a
sense in which you know they see the world as
as as bright, as blowing, as just as a theophany basically.
And so I think that that's definitely not only possible,
but that's ultimately one of the things we're supposed to
be aiming towards.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. Specifically to the guy that asked, I would say,
if you're looking for introduction to Saint Maximus, this little
blue book from Saint Vladimir's is what I would recommend.
The specific Ambiguou is Ambigua ten that goes into a
lot of detail about how he sees creation manifesting the
logie uh. And then there is a good book that
goes into the philosophy of the Cappadocians by Yarislav Pelicon.
It's called Christianity and Classical thinking the metamorphosis of natural theology,
but by Pelicon, which is really good on how the
Cappadocians viewed quote the theology of nature or natural theology.
And then doctor Bradshaw just put out this book which
I'm not done with but working through. If you're looking
for an inter dialogue between some Roman Catholics and Orthodox
theologians on natural theology, So thank you for that, Jay Broad.
Josh Anderson for five dollars. I love that I'm seeing this. Well,
we love you too, Josh, and we love that you're
seeing this and that you love us. We love that
you love us, and we love you. Joan Anon. Five dollars,
thank you, John, and no, he says silence, he says
nothing awesome, frage one dollar. Jay. I'm a fan. I trust,
I'm a trusted member in your discord Server. I've been
in the server for a year and I strive to
be to be a dire court policeman. For those that
don't know, we have instituted these new sort of police
officers due to some scandals that we've had in our discord.
Please keep making good videos and I will add more
donations well thank you for that, osiphrage osif rage for
five dollars. Jay. I heard you say that statuary was
banned in the Seventh Ecumenical Council. I don't remember saying that.
I remember saying that there were bans on quote, pagan art,
but I don't think it was intended to be this
across the board banning of all statues. I mean Orthodox
churches at times, I've had statuary, although I don't think
they're typically you know, like in the sanctuary. They might be,
but I don't I don't recall saying that the Seventh
Council specifically mentioned statuary.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to know where that comes from. In
the in the Ecamenical Council, it doesn't ban statuary, but
it comes from the rudder, Yeah, in the rudder. He
He interprets the canon of the Seventh Decamentical Council as
saying that the image represents something else whereas a statue,
because it's three dimensional, it's the thing in itself, and
so I don't know, like I find I find that
type of argumentation a little difficult. But in reality, statuary
never took on in the Orthodox tradition. It's just not
just not a part of the tradition, and so there's
no reason to go against the tradition, right, there's no
reason to innovate. To innovate, we just you know, once
in a while, there are idiosyncratic statues which have appeared,
it ain't even been venerated in the church, and we
can just let them be, and it's fine, we don't.
But we also don't have to make a church full
of statues. It would just be silly because it's just
not just not the way that the church ended up
manifesting it. And the difficulty with statues that you also
often have is that because of this the structure that
I talked about, like because the icon, let's say the
card icon, like two dimensional or a painted or mosaic icon,
you can have this whole pattern of the top of
the image with Heaven and the bottom of the with Earth,
and you can kind of lay out the image together
with all these elements coming, you know, kind of relating
to each other, whereas it's harder to do that with statuary.
You'd almost have to create like a diorama with like
all these statues. And when you see a statue from behind,
it's weird because you're not encountering the saints. So there's
all these problems in terms of the way that we
treat icons and the way that we venerate them and statuary.
So it's not I've made statues for Catholic patrons, like
I've accepted to do that, But if an Orthodox person
asked me to make a statue, I'd ask a lot
of questions, Like I'd ask a lot of questions before
I'd said yeah. They're like why do you want this?
Like what are you're trying to accomplish, Like what's the
point here?
Speaker 2: So there's by the way, there's also nuance on the
seventha Medical Council because, for example, the Sonatacon, it actually
gets things added to it over time. And I don't
even know if everybody, if anybody even knows exactly what
the original sonatacons list of things that were prohibited are.
I just recall that in my reading, there's the idea
that the Sonoticon had the intention of banning quote, pagan art,
but exactly what constitutes pagan art there's probably some flexibility there.
So I wasn't trying to be a rigorous on that Osifrage.
Speaker 1: For sure, like you wouldn't have you wouldn't have pagan
statues or pagan images inside the church. And the fact
that that maybe they said that shows you, you know,
maybe some of the some of the things that were
out of out of whack at the time. You know,
in Constantinople you had pagan art, it was there. You
would have pagan statues in the gardens, out in the streets.
There were statues of hercules of different heroes in that
were even remainders from Roman time. But they were always lower,
let's say, they're always lower than the churches, always lower,
and never in the churches, never, you know, So it
was more like a hierarchy of imagery. You remember the
the ancient past. We we you know, we have some
some sympathy for it and some affection for it, but
we also know what it's placed. It's in the court,
it's not in the church.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and osofrage you if you didn't see the interview
with Fallaer, Vladimir I would recommend that too, because we
go into that as well, and he makes the point
that Jonathan just made about how if you look at
Russian cities like Saint Petersburg, they kind of had the
same notion that there's there's certain art that's you know,
applicable to museums and palaces, and then certain things that
are only really appropriate in the church that wouldn't be
those things, all right. So so, uh.
Speaker 1: There was a statue of Justinian in Constantinople, a huge
statue on a pillar which was I don't know, like
his leg was the size of a man. There's this
massive statue of Justinian up on a pillar that was
there until the fall of Constantinople. And so it's like,
you know, Orthodox were used to seeing statues, just not
not too much in church.
Speaker 2: Also, Fradgigain says, Jay, I'm a fan of Preschism Western Orthodoxy.
I've never attacked it. I don't know where people somebody
said that I was against.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I went to a Western right liturgy literally two months ago,
So I'm not against Western right liturgy. What is your
view of the Western right being resurrected. I don't see
anything wrong with it. We one of my good friends
who was a uniate just came into the church and
he's in the Western Right. So shout out to to
to justin Third Eye News. So don't have any problem
with it. I don't think that certain devotions that are
like Jesuit Nestorian devotions which I see the Sacred Heart
as are appropriate. I don't think those things are appropriate
North right. So but my problem is not I don't
have any problems with the Western right. I don't know
if you have any comment on Western right.
Speaker 1: No, I really I don't. I mean I think that
it's I've seen some some do it successfully and others
go off, go off the rails. It's it's a little
harder because the hierarchy is not that it's like, it's
kind of like trying to implant something in a different hierarchy.
But if anybody pulls it off, then I, you know,
I'll be happy to see it.
Speaker 2: Jmail fifty dollars. Orthodox art and iconography all seems to
be the same style of art. Does it all go
back to the Byzantine Empire? And thank you for this
fantastic conversation.
Speaker 1: I think that there are two things going on here.
One is that we always see things that we don't
understand as being the same. Let's say, can I say that,
like when we're not used to looking at things, we
tend to see them as the same. So there's actually
quite a bit of variability in the style of images
in the Orthodox tradition from you know, from the early
centuries up until now. So there's actually quite a bit
of variability. But there's also a flavor. There's also something
which united together which makes you recognize it as as
Eastern art. And so so I think that that's the
way to see it is to understand that there is
and it's also about, you know, just how you kind
of interact with the Church, Like you don't want to
rock the boat, Like why would you want to create
something that will be recognized by the church as something
that they recognize, like it's something that they can participate
in and that they don't it doesn't jar them. So
because of that, it tends to kind of slowly change
and you know, get adapted to different Like Russian art
looks very different from Byzantine art, but you can see
that they that they have the same spirit, i'd say,
but visually they can be quite different.
Speaker 2: Muster Tiger thirty dollars. Thank you Jonathan and Jay. This
is incredible work that you're doing for Christ in this
turbulent time and history. You've been blessing Lord God. Thank
you very much Muster Tiger, appreciate that. J Mel again
ten dollars. I don't know this. I'll ask this, Jonathan,
what is the meaning of the mushroom in the Throne
of Peter.
Speaker 1: I never seen any I never seen that. The mushroom
and the Throne of Peter. There's a lot you have
to be careful with. How can I say it. You
have to be really careful with a lot of people
that look at things and see things in them, you know,
like they you have that stupid book about how how
you know Christianity the mushroom or whatever where it's like
all the cross oh yeah, yeah, and and so you
really have to be careful. And I saw I don't
know what image you're referring to, but you know, I
would be very surprised that there would be I mean,
unless it's like in the ornamentation that there's a much
room in the ornamentation, that's possible. But I do, like I.
Speaker 2: Did ask it one time, and I realize, like that's
what Ezekiel is seeing, Like yeah, you see, like Nectaria,
fifty dollars. Wow, thank you keep up the work for
the Kingdom of God. Thank you, Nectaria, much appreciated. Pano.
What's up, Pano? He says, for five dollars, Jay, Uh,
you forgot to link Jonathan's only fans in the description.
I'll add Jonathan's only fans later. He's just joking, Joseph,
five dollars, Jonathan. How do you navigate a largely heterodox audience?
Do you feel that you need to maybe at times
tone down your power level in order to help reach
your audience, to bring a proper relationship to Christ and
his church.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like if you watch if you watch
my video, Jols see that I kind of it's like
a difficult it is a difficult balancing I feel because
I would say, like half of the people watching my
content or are are atheists or kind of post Christian
and so so what I end up doing is I
end up separating it by videos. And so like some
videos you'll see, you know, like codings and Ephraim and
quotings and Gregory and I'm really or I'm just doing
an interpretation of a biblical text and then or I'm
talking about icons whatever, and then other videos will be
on more let's say, kind of more bridge subjects where
I'm talking about culture in general. I'm talking about political
phenomena or you know, explaining the symbolism in the movie.
And so that's how I tend to do it. And
so what I hope is that people can kind of
move from the more uh, you know, or I'll use
words that aren't from the Fathers. I could talk about consciousness,
which obviously the Fathers never talk about consciousness, but you
can use these words to kind of help people slowly
come closer to what the Fathers are talking about and
then move them, move them that way. So it is
it is sometimes I because sometimes some person who just
started watching my videos will watch a video where I
basically take for granted that, you know, what the life
of Moses is like, you know these things, you take
them for granted, and then they think I'm spouting gibberish.
So it's difficult, right, because you can't be always starting
from the beginning every time you talk to people. So
we do what we can, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we have similar challenges here as well, with
different audiences. But Pano says again, three dollars, Jonathan, do
you see any glimmer of hope in the culture for
a cosmic flip towards a proper view of hierarchy on
the horizon.
Speaker 1: I think that we can start actually start to see that.
I think there's a little there's some glimmer. I think
that the one of the things that I find interesting
is to notice, let's say something like like they say
this Jordan Peterson phenomena right that I've been kind of
associated with somehow. What you see in that is there's
a lot of error, and there's a lot of problems
with he says and how people receive it. But in
that there's definitely a bunch.
Speaker 4: Of people who never could have understood what God, nothing
about God, nothing about religion, nothing about liturgy, nothing about
anything religious, who all of a sudden have this capacity
to even understand what we're talking about, like when we
talk about potential, when we talk about LOGI, when we
talk about.
Speaker 1: These words that that people used to think is just
a bunch of gibberish, and now all of a sudden
they're like, wait a minute, he's actually talking about my experience.
He's actually talking about something which I experience every day.
And so I think that in this kind of strange moment,
I do see a glimmer of hope, and I think that,
you know, I think that Jay, you probably have a
similar experience where all of a sudden we're seeing in
the past few years, like you know, thousands of young men.
It's not a young men for some reason kind of
returning to Christianity, a lot of them converting to Orthodoxy
and so and so. In that, I do see a glimmer.
I don't necessarily see it as like the entire culture
is gonna flip. I see it more like maybe an
art that will kind of take us through the dark times.
I see a lot darker times ahead, but I do
see that in that there's going to be some kind
of seed or something that will be bright and we'll
be able to kind of carry us through the.
Speaker 2: Master for two dollars, do you have any thoughts on
Jordan Peterson converting to Orthodoxy.
Speaker 1: I can just I just I just decide. I mean,
at this point, I really just kind of said, you know, God,
this is your thing. Really like, this is what I've done.
I feel like I feel like I've talked to him
and I presented things to him, and he came really close,
you know, he he talked about baptism, We talked about
it privately, like he came very close. But in the end,
you know, it's his, it's his story, it's his journey,
and I can't I don't know what's going to happen.
All I can do is I can really thank God
that despite his no matter what his own personal journey
ends up bringing him towards, I can thank God that
in that I've seen a lot of people come to
Christ and come to the church, and so so to me,
I just try to remain grateful for that and pray
for his soul and pray for him and his and
his condition because he's obviously not still not doing very well.
So so yeah, so just pray for pray for Jordan Peterson,
you know, pray for those that follow him also, because
a lot of them have that first little glimpse where
they can maybe move closer to the church.
Speaker 2: I get when people ask me when is Alex Jones
going to become Orthodox? When is sam Hi going to
become Orthodox? And I feel like it's a similar situations, like, well,
hopefully soon, keep praying for them.
Speaker 1: Right, we've seen like we've seen some crazy stuff happened before, right,
and so like Rouge like who would have who would
have thought? Right, Like, you know, five years ago like,
who who could have predicted something like that? And so
like we have these we have these crazy surprises, and
so I think we'll see more of them on the horizon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Panos says three dollars Jonathan. Would you consider
Saint John Chris system Pascal homily as a kind of inversion?
I always feel always found his insistence on everyone stuffing
themselves with the fallen table as striking compared to the
usual stress on fasting.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a feast, what do you expect. The way
to understand Saint John Chris System's homily is actually to
read to first read the the the Holy Saturday homily,
the homiy that came the day before. Like if you
read the homily that came before, he talks about the
fire of health, and he talks about he just like
lays it out to you like this is this is
the hardest moment, Like this is talks about all the
punishment and all of this, Like he talks about that,
and then then he then he comes to Pasca and
then he opens the doors and says and so you
have to be able to see those two kind of
held intention as a as the mystery of salvation and
the mystery of because we don't know how all of
this is going to play out, or we don't totally
we get it. But we have these two these two images,
let's say, of one, which is this image of of
punishment and hell and of you know, of the fire,
and then this image of God being all in all
and feeling all of reality, and we don't totally understand
how it's going to play out. So I think that
that's how you have to see it. And when we
get to the Pascal hoamily, and when we get to
that moment where Chris system opens the doors and says
all come and eat of the feast, we have to
be able to be there and to rejoice in that
and to participate in that in the same way that
we were there when we saw Christ on the cross
and we wept, we and we participated in that. And
so but we always always have to see it in
the whole, the whole of the story. Let's say, we
can't just separate it and have just that moment and
think that that's all all there is.
Speaker 2: Made by Jim Bob fifty bucks, Thank you for that. Wow.
Is it possible that veganism is an unconscious response to carnivall,
making it metaphorically correct but not literally.
Speaker 1: There, I understand what you means. What he means is
that there is an intuition in us, and I think
it's a true intuition, which is that somehow we are
above the carnal world. Let's say, you know, and then
that's why that's why monks are vegetarian. Like monks are vegetarian,
they don't eat meat. And so I think that that's
the kind of intuition that people have. But I think
it's it's understood, and it's and it's wrong. There's nothing
wrong with eating meat. We should, you know, if you're
not a monk, you should eat meat. There's no there's
no issue. There's no issue about it. But but I
think that people have this kind of weird intuition and
then they turn it into a That's why they are
able to turn it into religion, because it feels like
it's some kind of spiritual purity that they're engaging with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right. But I would say remember too, Paul
says to Timothy that there will be false teachers that
will come along and will forbid the eating of flesh.
And I bring that up because Veganism, remember, guys, as
we've done many shows and podcasts with Tristan, vegans is
an ethical position which is that all animal products are
inherently wrong and evil to you. So it's not just
about your diet. In fact, the vegans will get on
to you if you try to be a vegan for
diet issues. Veganism is an ethical position distinct from vegetarianism,
so keep that in mind as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense. And the monks, they monks, they
do it out of contrition and astheticism, right, They're not
saying everybody should live like that. They're saying I'm actually
sacrificing something which I would like to be able to
kind of, you know, gather my body into prayer. And
that's different from, like you said, this kind of ethical
position where it's like, you know, this finger wagging veganism,
which always ends well.
Speaker 2: I mean if a monk has a leather sandal, that's
not vegan, that's right. Ex So go boy East Saw
twenty dollars. Thank you for all that you do, mister
Diar Hail Jesus, so thank you appreciate that. Jay Poopy
fifty dollars. I just want to thank you, you both
both of you, gentlemen, for your aid. I would if
it was not for you, guys, I would still be
an atheist. Oh that's great to hear.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: I've been going to an Orthodox church every week for
the last the last six months and will be getting
baptized soon, God willing. Wow, thank you, glad. I always
love hearing the atheists that that convert and shout out
to Seraphim, because we've even got people, uh that will
be in the clergy soon that were former atheists. So
it's amazing to hear that. Contu Yeah, roll stakes ten bucks.
How is the church? I'll let Jonathan answer this. How
how would you see the church as the body of
Christ but also the bride of Christ.
Speaker 1: I struggled to see how you find that difficult in
the sense that that's actually that's actually the that's actually
a very normal relationship. That is the See, if you
understand the body as this that say, the capacity to
kind of manifest in the world and to kind of
have extensions and to have that's what that's what happens
when you when you have children with a woman, it's
like your body gets bigger, you could say, So the
father is the head, and then the family kind of
extends out of the father, and the woman becomes the vessel.
She's the arc, she's the womb, and then and then
the fruits of that will kind of manifest in the world.
And so that's why the body and the bride are
completely related in terms of their their symbolism. It's like
heaven and earth. You know, it's that which is above,
that which is below that which is below, which takes
the seed and then manifests it, makes it fruitful and
makes it appear as you know, as body.
Speaker 2: So, oh yeah, great answer be stap five dollars. Do
you have any thoughts on the symbolic meaning? I think
this is a joke or a troll comment. Do you
have any thoughts on the symbolic meaning of the word
Nicholas cage since since Nicholas means victory of the people
and a cage means confining structure, I think that's got
to be a joke. But that's actually pretty funny. Rolf
Stakes five dollars. You guys should do a lot stream
on rockfin to discuss symbolism and iconography in terms of
the Kouf that we will definitely discuss that possibility since
a lot of things on here YouTube you can't talk about. Also,
perhaps you could discuss the stabs and how it relates
to the secular world, maybe like a secular sacrament could be.
Speaker 1: I think so. I think that's definitely something which is
because there is this idea of sacrifice. It's presented to
us as a sacrifice saying it's like you have to
it's like it's danger it is dangerous, you need to
sacrifice yourself to participate in the in the community. That's
how it's presented. And it's a yeah, and it's painful.
So it's a nice little image of kind of like
circumcision or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, So all of this, all of this makes it
completely completely coherent in terms of a kind of secular
sacrament exactly.
Speaker 2: Not Scotty twenty dollars. Will the two of you discuss
patriarch Bartholome You, Well, that's a controversial subject. I've done
multiple podcasts, multiple interviews with well known public figures Jim Johntras,
Metropolitan Jonah, So you can go listen to those interviews
to get my take on that. I don't know if
Jonathan has a take or position on pet pigrot Bartholomew.
That's up to him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've kind of decided early on that that I,
although I don't think that church politics are unimportant, I
think that that they're just not my venue to speak about.
And as I tried to concentrate on the things that
I talk about, so I try to kind of avoid
talking about the you know, the sad politics of the
of the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 2: John and Non five dollars. What is the Orthodox perspective
and symbolism concerning honoring your parents, elders, spiritual fathers, and
clergy And how does disparaging boomers relate to the invert
the divine order? Okay, it's a joke I've been doing.
It's like a shtick I do. I'm not literally disparaging boomers.
We have boomers come on the channel all the time.
Any boomers I respect. My godfather is a boomer, right,
I love my godfather, Dean, great guy, Metropolitan Jonah, we
love him, Doctor Bradshaw. So it's just a stick. I'm
not literally intending to subvert the divine order. But no,
do you have any perspective on honoring father, elder, spiritual
authorities and how that relates to the divine order.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean, it's definitely. It's very important because one
of the things that we have is especially a lot
of it that come from Protestantism. We have this idea
of this like pure relationship with God. Right, it's like
just me and God and I just need to honor God.
But that's not how it works. We want the world
to hold together. That Let's say there's a kind of
a hierarchy of honor that we offer, you know, to
those that came before us, to the saints, to our
to our authorities, to our fathers, and that that doesn't
take away from the worship we have of God. It
actually becomes a way in which that kind of lays
itself out in the world and holds reality together. But
in terms of making fun of boomers, I think that
I think that that there's a sense in which we
also have we also understand that the sixties were a
real thing, Like the sixties really were a break. I mean,
there were many breaks before, but that they really were
a break, and that in the same way that the
hippies made fun of the people who game before them,
there's like a funny kind of double inversion and making
fun of those that broke the system and showing how
kind of cringey that that ends up looking. I think
that it's kind of like Babylon B type humor, where
you know, you're basically making fun of the person that's
that's that's supposed to make fun and then you you
bring it back to just like normal, normal order. So
so I think that I kind of I totally get it,
and I think it's you know, I understand why it's
part of Jay's Sticklet's say say it that way.
Speaker 2: Well, by the way, I oftentimes we invite people to
make the best millennial and zenial. I think I'm on
the cusp of millennial and zenial or whatever whatever. I'm
on the cusp, But we invite people to bring those
jokes as well. I don't mind it. I think it's
actually funny. There's plenty of things in my generation to
make fun of. Wu de wu one dollar. How does
pure act reduce or limit the omnipotence of God?
Speaker 1: I'm gonna let you answer that.
Speaker 2: Jay, Well, just simply, I would say that it's not
really a limitation of omnipotence. It's more so a position
that kind of confines God to only being able to
do one thing at all times. And so in the
way that for example, Thomistic theology conceives of pure act,
omnipotence would literally be identical to pure act. So in
that sense it would limit the omnipotence, and so it
would prevent things like God freely creating or God the
Sun incarnating, et cetera. Jared sends five dollars and he
says nothing. Stoke it. Since ten many of my students
from Mexico are wearing a Saint Christopher necklace and icons
on their shirt, that's weird. Why is there a resurgence
in terms of devotion to Saint Christopher that I don't know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I talk about that a lot. Actually, I've
I've really kind of talk quite a bit about Saint
Christopher as something like the patron saint at the end
of the world, because Christopher is in both traditions, like
there's one tradition according to which he's a giant, he's
a Canaanite, and there's another tradition according to which he's
a he's a dog headed man, he's a cenocephally, and
so in that sense, Saint Christopher is that image of
ibridity on the edge, which is why he's the He's
the patron saint of travelers. He was represented on bridges,
on these, on these in between spaces, let's say, you know,
connecting spaces between two identities, and so he's actually something
of the craziness of the world right now. But that's
why I emphasize Saint Christopher, because he actually shows us
the way that that can be flipped and transformed into
carrying Christ. That is that the edge actually acts as
a possibility of bringing Christ further. Right in the legend
of Saint Christopher, he ends up carrying Christ across the river,
and so that I think that's one of the reasons
why I think Saint Christopher is important right now and
is popular, and why that's one of the reasons why
I emphasize his imagery is to balance out the negative
aspect of the edge and to try to point towards
something which is actually Christ carrying Interesting.
Speaker 2: I didn't know anything about that. That's cool. Conrad three dollars.
Have you read cosmocent Transcendence by Wolfgang Smith. This is
a great conversation. I hope to see more in the future.
Speaker 1: If I have no I haven't read much by Wolfgang Smith.
Speaker 2: I think Conrad is a he's from our discourse, so
he knows I like that book. So yes, it is
a good book. Hickory Dickory eighty six twenty bucks. Saint
John tells us that six six six is the number
of a man. Do you have any thoughts or opinions
about Romanesque iconography, John re J, I don't know, and yes,
he does say.
Speaker 1: Those are two questions. I imagine, like I guess it.
I think Romanesque iconography is wonderful. I think Romanesque means
it's like it's like the Western Medieval style. I think
it's I think it's wonderful. I think it's completely in
line with Byzantine tropes and Byzantine let's say so, I
think that for a Western version of Orthodoxy, I think
that it's appropriate to kind of bring in some of
that Romanesque style. You see that in England, people like
aiden Hart and many of the British iconographers are really
doing it very deliberately, but also very thoughtfully. Obviously not
just it's not just about copying, but it really is
about kind of thoughtfully integrating kind of Western Medieval tropes
into our iconography in order to be able to celebrate
that as well.
Speaker 2: Jpoopy again five dollars. Could it be argued symbolically that
the Reformation, emphasis on the individual understanding of God's commands
more closely follows the path in which Adam took, rather
than Jesus emphasis on following the guidelines of hierarchy that
he promised to leave us.
Speaker 1: I think I kind of understand what you mean. I
think that we I think that we really can understand
the Reformation as a revolution, you know it really I
always kind of say that. You know, all the time
that Luther was criticizing the church and was complaining about
the excesses of the church, I'm there, I'm with you, Luther,
like I'm fine with you. But then the day that
he named priests, I think that's the day when he
went completely off his off the rails, Like he had
no authority. He was a lay monk, he had no
authority to name priests, he had no authority to declare
himself the authority in the church. And so I think
that from that from there he just I mean, then
he started becoming completely mad in terms of even in
the way that he perceived the church and everything, and
so I think that I think that it is appropriate
to kind of understand the Reformation as a revolution and
as even one of the earliest revolutions that led to
the to the further revolutions that we see the secular
revolutions which came afterwards.
Speaker 2: I agree. I would say that there is a move
towards anatomized individual christian and an individual Christianity, even if
the classical reformers didn't intend that to be the case,
that's kind of where the logic led. So I think
that is true. Devotional Heart five dollars, she says nothing.
Thank you for Devotional Heart victory five dollars. Can I
make this happen now? I've been having problems before testing
it worked. Your five dollars, they come through and you
did get it read. So thank you for that, Jay
Brod five dollars. Saint Johnamascus says the whole earth is
a living icon of the face of God. Thank you
for answering my last question. I will read those books. Yes,
that's I think Jonathan was making that point earlier, that
the ideas that really the whole created order would be
a theo fanic manifestation fabio br three dollars. How do
you react to clergy who feel threatened that some people
would rather learn theology from you guys than from them.
I'll let you answer that and then I'll give response.
Speaker 1: Well, in my I think in my case, I don't.
I haven't had an issue with that, and myself, like
I've had a problem, you know, mostly because when especially
when people ask me questions that become too personal or
too much pastoral, I always tell them to go to
the priests, like I just say, go to your priest,
go to church, you know, And so I've been. And
also because I think that in a way, I also
don't talk about theology that much, like I try to
avoid theology. So I just haven't had I just myself
haven't had much of an issue with that.
Speaker 2: And I would say that, you know, that has been
mentioned in regard to me and the discord few times,
and I would say that, you know, we have clergy
in the discord. There's multiple priests, multiple multiple deacons, UH
and metro Falt and Jonah has done a year's worth
of lectures in the discord. So we always typically recommend
that people do the very same thing. Because I don't
want to be your spiritual father. I'm not a spiritual father.
I'm not a guru. I'm more than happy to to
tell people to go to their priest and their spiritual father.
And and when people convert, we always tell them to
find a canonical Orthodox church. So we're not trying to
be any kind of gurus. I don't see any more
super chats. Uh, this has been a great discussion, Jonathan,
Is anything you want to leave us with before we
close out?
Speaker 1: No, I would say thanks. I think it was really
it was actually very very productive and very uh it was.
It was a nice discussion and and uh and yeah,
so I'm looking, yeah, we'll see. It'd be nice to
do it again on other subjects. And I and I'm
and I'm really it's like, I'm really not surprised to
what extent we we actually agree on on this image
of how the world kind of how you know, how
we're lated to self out. I tend to not say
this theologically as you, but but I'm kind of happy
to see that it connects with the way that that
you talk about it and more kind of technically theological terms.
I tend to have more informal way of talking about it,
so I'm happy that it turned out that we did.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, well, everybody, be sure and follow Jonathan. His
links are in the show description. You see his channel there,
and then you can go to his carvings page and
then I think I forgot the symbolic world link, but
I'll put that in after this. And then you can
follow him on all of his socials as well. He's
on Twitter, he's on I think Insta. You're on Instagram too, right, yeah, yeah,
so you can follow him on all the socials and
thank you everybody. It was a great show, and be
sure and like and share, and you can follow and
subscribe to my website as well. So thank you Jonathan,
good night, all right for bye m