Speaker 1: And it seems like what's going on is a new
one world religion, and in fact they're openly wanting to
build structures promoting this concept.
Speaker 2: In Hinduism, people explore the divine mystery and express it.
They seek release from the trials of the present day
and the aesthetical practices profound meditation, and they have recourse
to God. Capital g Adica is literally saying that Capital
g the God of Hinduism, is the God that we
all worship.
Speaker 1: The hell, before we even get into the evils that
we want to address, you want to, you know, give
insights to people of what we're not saying that we
do recognize the unification of the original Church, that we
do recognize quote unquote Catholic saints, certain ones aligned with Orthodoxy,
And just before we even dive into any of the topics, what.
Speaker 2: You want to.
Speaker 1: Share with people, like where we're going, where we're not going.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great idea. I think that, you know,
a lot of the debates, a lot of the apologetics
in the last few years has got a little nasty
because Roman Catholics are angry at a lot of the
stuff that we do. You know, we've seen so many
people convert from Rome Catholicism to Orthodoxy. So so there's
some sour grapes, some lemons there in terms of attitudes.
But you know, from my vantage point, I don't have
any personal hatred towards Roman Catholicism. I don't hate the
Roman Catholic Church or anything like that. I opposed the
system and particularly you know, the head of that system
and how he is steering that that entity. And so
really it does come from a position of concern and
love and care for Roman Catholics. We want them to
be united with us, but we can't have a false union.
And so the only path to real union and restoration
I think has to come through truth. Right, you can't
have unity without truth, and you can't have truth without unity.
They kind of go together, so they're not either ores.
And you know that, as you said, we do share
commonality the first thousand years of the church, roughly speaking,
where certainly we would acknowledge many holy popes of Rome,
many saints that are popes of Rome. You know, Saint Leo,
the great defender of the you know, to natures in
Christ with his tone at Chalcedon, and of course many
other saints of Rome, so there's nothing inherently wrong with
apostolic succession or the Apostolic See of Rome or anything
like that. But obviously, as everybody knows, I think in
this audience, the divergence comes after about a first you know,
forst thousand years, and there's already seeds of the split
between the East and the West prior to you know,
ten fifty four, but the beginning of the split is
really in the late eight hundreds nine hundreds, and then
it kind of comes to full fruition in my view,
in twelve seventy four the Council of Lions and then
successively later at the Council of Florence, because after the
Council of Lions in twelve twenty four in the West
you have the full on acceptance of the Phillyoaquay in
the sense of a double hypostatic procession, and then you
get the response of the Orthodox, which are the Palomite Synods,
to explicitly reject that. And those have been received universally
throughout the whole world of Orthodoxy. They're part of the
Lenton Liturgy we affirmed, and the teaching and affirmation of
the Palomite Synods and Saint Gregory Palomas. So we know
that we can't accept the philly Oquid doctrine given the
fact that the Palomite Synods reject it, and they reject
it very clearly, say Grey Palmas has a whole work
that Father heres has recently translated into English English called
the Apedictic Treatise on the Holy Spirit, which really quells
gets rid of any notions of there being a reconciliation
in the sense of, oh, it was just a dispute
over words, and we all mean the same thing. No,
we don't, I mean. And Saint Gregor Palm has been
a very clear in the Apdictive Treatise on the Holy
Spirit that the Latin Church is following Satan. There they're Satanic,
and he was saying that all the way back then.
And he also said similar things to Barleum in the
Triads and in the debate with the barleym might I
can dinos that if you follow this course, you will
lead your church and your group into atheism. And that's
precisely what we've seen the West do ideologically, is go
down the course of the track of atheism. So long
story short, you know, there's nothing we're not saying everything
that you believe is false or that you're evil because
you're Roman Catholic, that the system is wrong, and that's
what you know, I really like to get into and
focus on is the systematics and how the systems don't work.
And when you have bad systems, what happens is that
they produce bad results, and they can produce civilizationally catastrophic results.
And that's what's happened in the West.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and as Orthodox, I mean, we can point to
my favorite church father, Saint Maximus the Confessor and how
he had to appeal to Rome during the time that
he was living because of the controversies of what was
going on in the East, and it was actually the
West that aided.
Speaker 2: But again, this is pre schism.
Speaker 1: This is before the establishment of the papacy, and where
we really see the split of the One Holy Orthodox
Catholic Church into the papacy again, unleavened bred Eucharist, the
Holy Roman Empire, the alliance with Charlemagne, all this different
stuff where it seems like the things get way more
political than theological as history goes on. So thank you
for beginning there. Now, privately we kind of went back
and forth and you shared with me a news clip
about Pope Francis's new alliance with the Islamic world and
this in this new what Abrahamic religious center, and it
seems like with what's going on post Koufid is a
new one world religion, and in fact they're openly wanting
to build structures promoting this concept. I would love for
you because I feel like this is really a central
point when we look at the evils of the Vatican,
because we're going to go through a lot of them,
but the new one World religion hints at a lot
of the preference for unity over multiplicity, ecumenicism, globalism, alliance
with what it seems to be the sort of technological
one world government that the Pope Francis seems totally in
step with. And so can you dive into the Vatican
the Pope, how long has this process actually been moving
in this this attempt for the Vatican and to really
be the sort of figurehead. It seems like it seems
like the Pope the new religious leader of the new
one world religion.
Speaker 2: I think that's definitely where it could go. And I
think that there seemed to be some pretty clear indications
that Etis would certainly like to be in that role
we saw. I mean in terms of I think clear
indicators of this idea in the dogmatic decrees and definitions
of Vatican two, and they are dogmatic, despite however many
Roman Catholics want to say they don't have to accept
Batican two. It was affirm with full papal authority, it's
from the chair, and it deals with faith and morals.
That's really all that's needed to be under the status
of dogmatic declaration for a Roman Catholic. And in fact,
I have a whole video where I go through four
separate documents from the papacy actually affirming and making it
very clear that Vatican two is dogmatic. You do have
to accept. There's not an optional council for Roman Catholic
and there's there's at least four places in other Roman
Catholic dogmatic papal statements that affirm that. So we get
if we get that out of the way, then we
can come to documents like Atata. I don't know if
you're familiar with this, but this is one of the
more famous Vatican two documents, and it's the October twenty eighth,
nineteen sixty five document. It's about five pages, six pages.
It's not that long. Are you familiar with this?
Speaker 1: No? I'm not too familiar, can you? You know?
Speaker 2: So everybody should be familiar with this, and everybody should
read it because it's not very long. And I think
what you'll notice is kind of the point that we're
getting at here, which is that this idea of generic theism,
that there's a generic, universal idea of just some God
that everybody agrees on, and that therefore we can find
paths to unity from that is really what undergirds the
very thing that we're looking at with this House of
the Faith of Abraham or whatever it is. And I
sent you a link there. There's another there's another proposed
version of this over in Germany. Somebody is saying too
that there's a there's proposed versions of this over in
the United Arab Emirates. And the idea is that, well,
we're going to just get together under a common banner,
not of the accidents, but the essentials. Right, So this
applying the Resitilian distinction of essence and accidents to this
idea that well, don't we all believe in one God?
And if we all believe in one God, that we're
all on the same page, at least as far as
that goes. And then we can just consider the other
stuff like Jesus and Trinity and resurrec virgin birth. Maybe
those are all just kind of like add ons, and
they're not the essentials. And this lowest common denominator fallacy
just keeps getting whittled down right to where ironically, at
Vatican two and Nostra Tat it says, I'm going to
read it. It says, throughout the long history to the
present day, there's found amongst different peoples a certain awareness
of some hidden power which lies behind the course of
nature and the events of human life. At times there
is present even a recognition of a supreme being, perhaps
a father. This awareness and recognition results in a way
of life that is imbued with a deep religious sense.
The religions that are found in more advanced civilizations endeavor
by a way by way of well defined concepts and
exact language to answer these questions. Thus Hinduism Hinduism. In Hinduism,
people explore the divine mystery and express it in limitless
niches ahime me riches of myth, and the accurately defined
insights of philosophy. They seek release from the trials of
the present day and the ascetical practices profound meditation, and
they have recourse to God capital G in confidence and love.
So they're literally said, is literally saying that G, the
God of Hinduism, is the God that we all worship.
Because they're believing in a god, there's some supreme God,
a supreme being. And so the iron here is that
so this is equivalent to me equating as long as
I say it's a supreme being, which in linguistic philosophy
we call that a non rigid designator. There's a paper
that Father Diacon and I covered by a doctor Garibee,
which is actually critiquing this notion of generic theism, or
the idea that just because all the monotheistic religions affirm
a God, that they're affirming the same God. Well, that's
actually a fallacy, and it's it's known as the quantification
shift fallacy. And the reason it's a fallacy is because
it should be obvious that because we're all affirming one,
it doesn't equate to the fact that it's the identical
one that we're all affirming. Right, I mean, I could
say there's one God. Another guy down the road could say, oh,
there is one God. I agree with you, but he
means Satan, right, I'm certain. Maybe maybe he attends that
the the temple of set Church or or the sat
what's the new thing that's they've got the abortion ritual
that they're talking about. The Oh is it the church
Satanic Satanic Temple? Yeah, the Satanic Temple, that's it. Yeah.
Maybe he believes that it's Lucifer, that's the one God.
But does it follow from the fact that we all
believe in one God that it's the same God. No, No,
And that's what's known as the quantifier shift fallacy. Other
examples of this and logic would be situations where we
say something like every woman, uh, every girl loves a boy,
therefore every girl loves the same boy. Right, Right, everyone
is born of a woman, therefore everyone is born of
the same woman. Right. They're obvious fallacies. All of these
religions believe in one God, therefore they believe in the
same God. Now, when we come to, you know, something
like the New Testament, what's perhaps an example of a
religion that's very close to you know, some of the
things that we we would affirm. Maybe they even have
a lot of the books shared with us. Let's say Judaism.
Judaism affirms that Father. Does Jesus say that just affirming
the Father is enough? No? No, he says that no
one comes to the Father but through me. Because the
word father. If God's eternally a father, according to Saint Anthonatius,
he's eternally the father of an eternal son. So the
word father necessitates and implies the son. So I'm no
more joined with that religion than I am with an
Arian or Joba's witness right, I mean, Jee's witnesses said
there's one God, So are we all on the same team? Well,
the same Basil didn't think so. I mean, he wrote
gigantic treatises and like spent his whole life combating the
idea that we're all of the same faith. Right, And
in fact, if you look at the Niceno constant Apology Creed,
it designates the One God as the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, and that implies, by necessary implication, the
Son and the Spirit. As the Cappadocians famously said, I
can no longer think of the One being the essence
of God or the person of the Father, as I
am quickly bound over to think of the three, and
I can no longer think of the three without quickly
being referred back to the one. So there's an equal
ultimacy of the one and the many in the trinity.
So there's no such thing as kind of picking out
because of there being commonalities that there's therefore one lowest
common denominator religion. And if you read the Garibie paper,
he points out that if there's a lowest common denominator
religion that is just the commonalities in these various so
called monotheistic faiths or Abrahamic faiths, then that's actually a
third other religion, right, that's not the other three you see,
And that's all you can. You can prove that logically
by a conjunct where you put, for example, in parentheses
and logic you could say, we're gonna list, let's say,
the beliefs of Orthodox Christianity that make Orthodoxy Orthodoxy, right,
so that would be A would be the Trinity, B,
Virgin Birth, C, you know, incarnation, D, Resurrection. Right, Let's
say all of the beliefs that are necessary components of
Orthodox Christianity. They're in these parentheses A, A, B, C,
D Z. Right, if we take out Oh but wait
a minute, one of those beliefs is that God's on mission,
so maybe that's you know, G. Well, Jews and Muscles
believe that God's on thisce, so they believe G. Right.
But is G the same as the set that's up
here in the parentheses. No, no, it's not. And even
if I take elements out commonalities, it's not this set
because this set is everything in totality. It's a total set.
It's in the parentheses. And this is just logic showing
that there's no such thing as a core religion that
is the core of these three monotheistic abrahemit face. It's
it's a simple it's a simple way in logic, in
linguistic philosophy to show that this set is not this
set merely because there's common things. Another point, too, is
that he makes in the Garby paper and makes some
really great examples or analogies to a card games. If
I'm playing poker and then I'm playing, you know, crazy eights,
does the fact that Poker and Crazy Eights use cards
mean they're playing a same game the same game? No?
Does the fact that there's cards and rules involved, mean
that there's actually a common core game that's neither poker
nor Crazy Eights. No, of course not, it's this nonsense, right.
So in other words, the set of beliefs is going
to determine the reference in the set. And that's why
it's a holistic it's a whole systemic thing. And so
the word God is in linguistic philosophy, it's known as
a non rigid designator. And what we mean by that
is that it's not a a personal pronoun. It doesn't
pick out anything specific. Even in scripture, the word God
just little case God. It could refer to the person
of the Father. It could refer to the whole Trinity.
It could refer to divine actions or attributes with the
divine essence. It can refer to angels. Angels are called gods, Elohim,
sons of God. It could refer to humans. I will
make you as a god to Pharaoh, right, God says
to Moses. And it could refer to us in deification.
It could refer to demons, right, the gods of the nations.
So the point here is that it's abatance witch the
fact that the other religions use the word God or
the word monotheism, or the word you know, whatever that's
in common. We believe in an omniscient God. You believe
in omnient God. So it's the same God. No, it's not,
because the rest of the set of beliefs about our
God is just as necessary as any single member of
the set right. The Father is just as necessary as
Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is just as necessary as son,
as as omniscience. You can't start just subtracting from them.
And there's no argument to be made for some of
God's attributes being more self evident than the others. They
all go together. It's holistic. You don't like, learn the
essence of God and then down the road like Tomism says,
we'll tack on trinity, we'll tack on virgin birth. No,
it all goes together, right, it's a set right.
Speaker 1: Just based on what you said, this idea, the sort
of manipulation or the word concept fallacy, it almost feels
like there's magical cannontations underneath this. Like I've spoken before
that magic is all about the manipulation of language and meaning,
which then alters people's perceptions of reality. And I can't
help but think when we start looking at Catholic history,
or you know, perennialism itself, this idea of the Abrahamic
religions really all sort of saying the exact same thing.
We can point back to the Iberian Peninsula in Spain
with the Moorish occupation, where they allowed for all these
mystical traditions to study each other and even smoke hashiesh
coming out of Northern Africa. And then right after that
we start looking at the fifteenth century, the fourteen hundreds.
We get the Italian Renaissance, we get the translation of
the Hermetic Corpus, we get Marcillo, Ficino, Giovanni, Picadella, Marindola,
and we see magic, Chaldean oracles, Sufism, Kabbala, and Christian
mysticism all come together in this sort of new understanding
of what man is, of what religion is. And this
is where the perennialism itself, if you're going to trace
that idea really gets going, is the thirteenth century Spain,
and Catholicism has really been associated with this concept ever since.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to bring up the Renaissance origins
of Ahumanism. Actually because this is a more accurate thesis
on the real origins of Ecumenisma way prior to Bodikan two. So,
for example, if you read a Cult Renaissance Church of Rome,
Hoffman shows in that book that the real origins of
the ideas of a common root of the religions, a
skeletal root religion that is neither Christianity nor Orthodo, nor
Islam nor you know, Judaism, is itself a religious presupposition
that comes out of philosophical schools. So it's kind of
a neoplatonic approach, and it's an approach as you said
that it gets adopted eventually by the perennial schools, which
are really just borrowing from Neoplatonism to try to find
the grand ultimate skeletal backbone of what the world religions are,
which are just kind of masks. So the perennialist idea,
which again is not new, it was already had and
seed form by Neoplatonists, and then it's regurgitated by the
neo platonic schools that really influence the people in the
Italian Renaissance. It's just regurgitating things that had already been
rejected in the first seven count So actually, if you read,
for example, Myandor's book Business Ideology, there's a whole chapter
on the rejection of Neoplatonism. And this is why you get,
for example, the visiting Emperor Saint Justinian is the one
who started closing down the Platonic Academy and these schools,
because what happens is in the sonoticicon there's an explicit
rejection of Platonism, Neoplatonism in this end, this idea which
manifests in the chapter that he wrote called the It's
about the humanists, the monastics and humanists, and so this
eventually manifests is a warfare between neoplatonism. And this even
gets into iconography because the iconoclass are actually rejecting iconography
on neoplatonic grounds. They all have neoplatonic arguments. This comes
up in St. Theodore the STUDEI. It's repeated in the
Alspinsky Treatise with Theology the icon in the chapter on
Gregory Palomos, because palam is them is what undergirds the
affirmation of iconography. The energy's doctrine is crucial and fundamental
to why we do iconography. It's the apologetic argument that
they use. At the Seven Council. St. Theodore and Sat.
John Damascus talk about the energies being the reason why
iconography is useful, correct, important, pedagogical, and also mystical. I mean,
this is why the Saints have a golden halo. It's
because that's signifying the uncreated light. Icons themselves are teaching
the essence energy doctrine. And so when we get to
the Renaissance period, there's a rejection of that idea of
icons and iconography having a specific liturgical setting and meaning
and significance, and there's rubrics for how you do it.
You don't do Chinese Jesus because Jesus wasn't Chinese. But
we specifically see at the time of Charlemagne and after
that's when the Western Church departs right in many ways
from the liturgical norms and from the Seventh Council. The
Romancalloy Church never has really accepted the actual teaching of
the Seventh Ecumenical Council. They afferm it in principle, but
for them, oh, that just means we can do Jesus
art right, and you can do anything, so you can
have God the Father as an old man. No, actually,
the Seventh machemenical council says you cannot paint God the
Father as an old man, and it says that's a
heretical and idolatrous notion. No man has seen the Father
at any time, Jesus says, and never will because the
only icon of the Father is the person of the Son.
The hypostasis of the son is the only icon of
the Father. And so there can be symbolic representations of
the Father in the sense of the three angels in
the you know the famous a Braamic Rublev icon. There's
a symbols that represent the Trinity. But we make it
very clear if you read the later icon councils in Moscow,
they they explicitly know that those icons are not portraying
the person of the Father, right any more than the
number three is like portraying the person of the Father.
It's represents a symbolic it's what's called the idos of
the icon, but it's not the hypostasis of the Father.
And that's made very clear for a reason. Anyway, long
story short is just that iconography Orthodox theology is very clear,
very precise on these topics, and it is always stressed
that as the nice in Crete says, the one God
is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit principally right,
when we begin our trinitary theology, it's the person of
the Father. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, right,
And then yes, I also affirm God from God like
from Light, the Son, and the Spirit. Right. So one
God can pick out different things. It can mean the person,
the Father, it can mean the entire triad, It can
mean the divine essence that they share. It can even
pick out the attributes or energies that God has, because
God is fully present in every energy. Sure, but the
point is just that if we understood even just iconography itself. Right,
And this is another point I'm gonna it's gonna come up,
I'm sure in the debate in a few days with Trent,
because we'll be debating this very topic. Is that you know,
God for us has a specific reference and it means trinity. Right.
It's it's the persons of the Trinity. There's no such
thing as generic theism. Just even by linguistic philosophy, God
is a non rigid designator doesn't tell you. So you're
absolutely right that it's a kind of abate and switch.
I don't know how self conscious the authors of the
Vatican Two documents actually were, because some of this is
really dumb and it's really low level argumentation, Like because
they pray and because they you know, seek out things
in their idolatriust religion, that therefore it's the same god
as us. I mean, that's just not just non sequitors,
that it's that it's our God.
Speaker 1: And do you think this emphasis on the like you said,
the neoplatonic presupposition of the sort of skeletal schematical framework
of all world religions and noise comes back to this
unknown or transcendent one again relates to the ancient Greek
problem of the one in the many, and this historical
prevalence to privilege unity over multiplicity. And you see this
in Tomism, you see this in absolute divine simplicity, in
which you've talked about, uh, you know, at nauseum on
yours on your channel. But Orthodoxy doesn't have this dialectical
tension between multiplicity and unity, and therefore you actually find
a balance, You actually find a harmony at an intellectual
and an intellectrical intellectual, you know, theological level. There's a
balance there. Do you think that this has any ties
back to absolute divine simplicity.
Speaker 2: What absolutely does, and that's not anything that I came
up with. In fact, countless Orthodox saints and theologians have
been saying this for a long time. In fact, in
the little book that's kind of the good if you
want an introduction to this topic and what we're talking
about here. I don't I don't affirm everything that that
this author writes, but this book is really good, and
it's called Church Papacy Schism by Philip Chrard, And really
the whole thesis of this book is that the imbalance
and the one the many is kind of what undergirds
the Roman Catholic system. So papalism itself never could have
really arisen if the pope didn't kind of arrogate himself
to the office and roll of what the Holy Spirit does.
So it's not accidental that the rise of the papal
monarchy in the early Middle Ages is at the same
time as a direct correlation, direct provable connection between that
and the imbalance that occurs in the philioquy doctrine. The
philioquy doctrine creates a diad And again I would just
say read Saint Photius's mystigogy, because he says improves in
about eighty pages that if you give the power in
particular property of the person the father to the son,
now you have a father son. Now you have a
diad right, and that diad of father's son, which produces
the third person, the father son. There that diad actually
has a power of producing a person that the spirit lacks.
So now, in this silly effort to try to prove
the deity of the Christ against arianism, which is kind
of the motivations of why the Philioque was rolled out
to begin with, which is all kind of a mistake
and a misunderstanding anyway, it really has the opposite effect
of subordinating the spirit. So if the Holy Spirit is
subordinated in the life of this institution, which is precisely
what all of our saints and theologians said that the
philioak we would do again, just read the mystagogy of
Saint Photius. He said it would do that. And then
what happens is that now we need a humanistic role
for the Holy Spirit embodied in the person of the pope.
Now the Pope is the voice of the Holy Spirit.
The voice of God on Earth is no longer the immediate, innate,
direct presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of
the Church. It's now an extra juridical office that speaks
in this way. And so the pope really becomes the
bridge of the Philly okay now or the Holy Spirit
comes into the church, he kind of replaces Christ in
the economia. And that's the argumentation that that Charard makes,
which I've always thought was a really really powerful argument,
and it's and he makes the argument that it's on
the basis of absolute divine simplicity that this even happened.
I mean, Photius himself even says this that the simplicity
doctrine that the Cappadocians and the Church adopted is not
the simplicity doctrine that the West adopted. And so they
even noticed that at the time. That's what undergirds the
whole debate of the Phillyoquay, at the time of Photius
and at the time of the Council Alliance, and when
you read the Tomos of the Palomite Synods and the
Palmite theology of that time, and the oppredicted treat use
of Saint Gregory against the Latins. It's all saying what
I'm saying. It's none of this stuff is like me
making it so, it's just in these documents, very clear,
very lucid logical presentation, by the way, which should show
people that there's nothing antithetical to palamism and apologetics and logic.
I mean, he's using Ariscotan logic. That's what the apedictic
treatise means, right,