Speaker 1: It's Jay Dier, Jason Nelson's, Jay Iyer's Day, smell, Jade
ires Day's analysis, It's Jay diars Day's analysis. It's Jay
diars Day's analysis.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, you're listening to Jay's analysis. We are here. Yeah.
You can always separate the boomers from the younger tuners
by whether they know what synth wave and retro wave are.
Boomers are like this sound's eighties and everyone else is
in on the joke. If you're not in on any jokes,
you're a boomer. It's just a joke. By the way,
boomer posting is a joke. Please don't be offended. A
lot of people have gotten offended, not a lot handful
of people have gotten offended over boomer posting, boomer jokes.
It's just satire. It's not intended to divide the generations.
As one commenter was saying that I'm here, Yeah, my
whole ethos, I'm here to divide the generations. Now, we're
here to talk about real stuff today. And I decided
it would be it would make more sense to kind
of split up talks on the basis of topics. I
don't know, we'll try that out for a little while.
But you know, if you're talking about movie streams and
then people are asking about divine simplicity, you know what
I mean, it doesn't make any sense. So although in
a weird way, I guess you could argue about films
and absolute Doen simplicity.
Speaker 3: That would be a long.
Speaker 2: Stretch of an argument, but it would be interesting anyway.
I mean, if you can apply metaphysics to economics, which
I did and I think successfully in an article which
you should check out, Metaphysical Implications of Nominalist Economics, one
of the classic Jaysonnalysis pieces which I just shared I
think today or yesterday. If you have not read that,
please read that. Read that because it is a substantial
criticism of libertarianism and why we would say libertarianism is
problematic here at jays Analysis. And that was written a
while back, so let me.
Speaker 3: Pull that up for you. Yeah, I went through.
Speaker 2: The archives again, still fixing old essays in the jays
Nealysis archives here it is, so.
Speaker 3: I tried to repair.
Speaker 2: I repaired about twenty or thirty of the old essays
last night, which needed to be done. So a lot
of that is and a lot of people are new
to Jay's nelsis so they've not read the classics, you know,
the essays that have been there for five ten years.
This is one of them, which I wrote in I
think twenty fifteen, and we're not gonna be talking about
really libertarian economic theory. But the reason I'm saying you
should read this is number one because I fixed it,
because when I transferred everything to the new website, all
the links were broken and all the images were destroyed, and.
Speaker 3: The essays got lost.
Speaker 2: Not half thirty percent been lost. So I'm still repairing
all these because I wrote hundreds and hundreds of essays
over the last decade. So this one is a critique
of how libertarian economic theory is essentially bound up with
a specific metaphysical view out of the Enlightenment, and hardly
anybody knows that. But it's the same idea of whig
economics and and atomism that you probably heard E. Michael
Jones critique, which I came to my conclusions irrespective independent
of E. Michael Jones. So Michael Jones, of course, isn't
the first person's critique atomistic human beings as numerical interchangeable
units economic theory anyway, So we're going to talk about Yeah,
we're gonna talk about numbers.
Speaker 4: Prove God.
Speaker 2: We got a lot of these old essays again that
we need to talk about.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: We're going to do a lot of this because of
questions that come in. So people ask the same questions
over and over, and usually it gets to the point
where I realized, oh, this would actually make a good
talk because twenty different people have asked the same question,
how do you make sense of.
Speaker 3: Blah blah blah?
Speaker 2: What about blah blah blah? And so let's see what
I've got in my notes here. Now, somebody asked a
question before the streams started, and I've already forgotten what
but what the question was something to do with Frankish thesis.
I've already forgotten what it was, right, So yeah. Anominalism
is basically the view that there are no existing categories
or essences and things. When you speak about whiteness, when
you speak about human nature, when you speak about categories
like that, you're not describing real existing things in the world.
You're just describing something from human perspective, human vantage point.
There's no universals, right, That's what the whole debates centered on.
In the Middle Ages when this came about. If you
read William of Backham arguing against the realists, and this
is essentially just a rehash of the old Western dialectical
debate of one in many universals, in particulars Aristotle and Plato.
In a way. Now, Aristotle believed in the universals, but
he didn't believe in a separate transcendental realm of forms.
Aristotle identified the universals with the objects themselves. Somehow, universals
are in the objects in Aristotelianism. So when we if
we talk about nominalism, what we're talking about is the
idea that things don't have essences categories, like again, human nature,
that's not a real thing that an object has. So
nominalism is the predecessor to empiricism, the idea that all
we know is immediate sense data. All right, So nominalism
quite literally directly leads to empiricism. If you heard the
debate with white Pill Proll, that's exactly what we talked about.
And anybody who's studied philosophy will learn this. And this
is kind of like basic what history of Western philosophy,
It's not even debatable, and it leads to empiricism, not evempiricism, precisely,
because again it starts with the assumption that we don't
know anything about what we're talking about in terms of
the external world. We don't know that human nature is
something that humans actually possess across the board, because our
experi experience is limited. So you can only investigate a
limited number of human beings, and when you investigate them,
you're only investigating this object, this object, this object, this object.
That you are in a human creative capacity, calling a
class of things, calling a species, calling a universal category,
but it's not something that.
Speaker 3: The objects actually possess.
Speaker 2: Right, So this is one of the beginning breakdowns of
Western philosophy, is specifically with nominalism. Now we have to
be careful here because that does not mean that, somehow,
as a result of nominalism breaking down categories or universals,
that Plato was true and Platonism and realists are all correct.
Speaker 3: They are not.
Speaker 2: This is called dialectics in Western philosophy. The whole history
of all of it can be encapsulated in dialectics, from
the ancient Greeks and the Ionian philosophers and the pre
Socratics all the way up through Hegel to today, right,
marks dialectics, all of it, all of it is encompassed
under the presubposition of dialectical metaphysics, dialectical epistemology, dialectics now.
Speaker 3: Dialectics as a method of.
Speaker 2: Asking question and answer point counterpoint is fine, the elyinctic method.
That's different from assuming dialectics is a real metaphysical operation
going on in time and space and history. Okay, that's
like Hegel, Plato, Aristotle.
Speaker 4: Et cetera.
Speaker 2: They all believed in dialectics in some form or fashion, right,
So the two different things here. So a lot of
times people say, well, you're being if you're doing Q
and a point counterpoint, that's fine, there's nothing wrong with
That's just discourse. That's just socratic method discourse.
Speaker 3: But that's different from.
Speaker 2: When you make a metaphysical claim about there being nothing
but dialectics within history, right, like dialectical materialism of Marx. Okay,
that's one example of this, or the Hegelian process philosophy
of everything being thesis, antithesis, and synthesis working towards an
omega point. Okay, that's Hegelian version of dialectics. Western scholastic
theology is based on dialectics. Protestant theology is based on dialectics,
nature versus grace, grace versus the will of man, and
Luther or Calvin right. Dialectics is everywhere in the debates
of the Church fathers, for the first many, for the
for several councils, many centuries. We're dealing with dialectics. So
let's give one example of this, because this is a
question that has come up many times. I get emails
over this, whoa dude, huge? And this is one of
the starting points that we want to hammer as really
what's distinctive of Orthodox theology as opposed to everybody else. Okay,
if I can make this small enough, damn thing was huge?
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Now this is from the book God History and Dialectic
Volume one by doctor Farrell. This was written when Farrell
was still Orthodox, so I am not advocating the present
day Gnostic views of doctor Farrell, but this book is
pretty solid, as well as his book on Same Maximus.
So what we want to point out here is that
when we talk about the One and this is going
to be the starting point again for all of our
philosophy as well as our theology. Right, So we're going
to begin by avoiding dialectics. We're going to begin by
talking about who God is. The fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom, as Proverbs says, right Paul says,
God has made foolish the wisdom of this world. So
we're not going to begin with the assumption that autonomous
human reasoning is sufficient to explain the world, to understand
the world, to get to the to the meanings of things.
The logoy. We don't believe that it is. And we're
going to start with this with this key quote here.
Contrasting Jerusalem with Athens is a good way to put this,
because Athens is going to be predicated on the assumption
of human autonomy, atheism, mysticism, et cetera, et cetera, and
Jerusalem is going to be predicated on the assumption of revelation.
Right now, the fact that we believe in the starting
point being revelation does not mean that we exclude human
reasoning or philosophy. Philosophy is not evil, it's not bad.
In many of the church others promoted classical education, classical pedagogy.
Saint Basil talks about it, Saint Phosias talks about it,
there's nothing wrong with education.
Speaker 3: The problem is that tools.
Speaker 2: Man is a master at making the tools that he
has into idols. So just as reason and logic can
become idols as if they operated magically and mystically on
their own, in the same way philosophy can, logic can right,
the scientific method, a tool for understanding the natural world,
can become an idol where man thinks that it gives
him a grand narrative explanation of everything. Right with the
modern new atheists and scientism and so forth, So we
have a different starting point from all of those, And
that's because to be consistent within our system of belief,
we have to have a different starting point. We can't
start with the presubpositions of unbelief and later down the
road tack on the possible probable existence of God. To
do that is to be unfaithful from the outset to
one's worldview. Right because, in other words, in our theology,
does God say, does God tell us in revelation? In
tradition that He might exist? And that if you do
a bunch of philosophical wrangling and reasoning that at the
end of the day you might be able to tackle
on the probable existence of a generic.
Speaker 3: Deity, No, not at all.
Speaker 2: Does anybody do any of the apostles do that? No
they don't. Does Paul do that in Act seventeen, No
he does not. He preaches the resurrection. What does he
use five classical arguments of Aristotle when he preaches to
the Greeks in Acts seventeen?
Speaker 3: No he does not.
Speaker 2: He preaches the resurrection, and he says that your Greek
religion is foolishness.
Speaker 3: And yes he does.
Speaker 2: Quote a couple Greek poets, right, I think artists and
someone else. But so what, Plenty of church fathers can
quote Greeks to illustrate things and to make points and
to look at insights.
Speaker 3: I've quoted Plato. That's fine.
Speaker 2: The point is not about quote, since the point is
what do the words mean? And what is the system
that we believe in? What is our worldview? And are
we being faithful to it? So you're going to see
here that this paragraph is going to illustrate the separation
not only between Orthodox theology and other religions. We're going
to see that it illustrates the point of departure for
Roman Catholicism and the so called Christian sects because every
Christian sect in the West believes in absolute divine simplicity.
They do not believe in the essence energy distinction. They
do not believe in theosis by divine energies, and they
believe in the filioquay, which is a result of the
essence energy distinction denial. I feel o quay is a
direct result of absolute divine simplicity. It introduces dialectics and
essentialism into the Godhead. So we're going to see that
our theology is truly speaking unique. There is no theological
tradition that believes what we do. And when we go
down the line looking at all the distinctives of our views,
such as say creation ex nilo, right, that's an integral
part of our worldview again taught in the Creed. Right,
I believe in God the Father, a money maker of
heaven and earth. That is unique. That means that the
world is not eternal. The world is not something forever existing,
and we're caught in the Nietzsche eternal return, right, We're
not caught in.
Speaker 3: The nihilism of fatalism.
Speaker 2: And that because creation has a beginning point and an endpoint.
Think about the notion of creation itself. Matter in the
world out there exists for man. In our view, we
have an anthroposcentric view, because man is the steward of
creation under God. That is different from a anatemate imminentistic view,
where man is a kind of abortative product of natural
forces right deistic evolution, supposedly random chaotic evolution. Man is
meaningless in that universe other than the so called meaning
he invents for himself, which leads directly to nihilism. So,
in other words, to go back to the point about nominalism,
we're going to see that nominalism really is just a
late phase medieval corruption of dialectical problems that were already
present in the history of Western philosophy. That does not
mean that for our Eastern philosophy is good. We're not.
We're not going with any human devised philosophy. They're all faulty,
they're all heretical in the long scheme of things in
a roundabout way. Why because they all begin with deviations
on their starting point. So let's talk about that starting
point and we'll get to nominalism later. I'll fill this
out more and we'll talk about how it's just really
a rehash of old debates between platonism and a more
naturalistic approach which denies anything transcendent. This is where we get,
of course, on modern atheists, who all believe in not
even empiricism, psychologism, scientism, you know, everything, basically self destructive
of knowledge and logic, which they don't even understand. In
every debate that you have with them illustrates that perfectly.
So and we're going to talk to We're gonna talk
about how numbers prove God. We're going to address the
question which has come up many times.
Speaker 3: Okay, Jay, So.
Speaker 2: Maybe you make a good argument against an atheistic materialist.
Maybe there's some transcendental argument for the validity, use, and
existence of logical entities outside of the human mind. But
how do you get to God from that? That doesn't
prove God, dummy, there's no God there. It's just maybe
impersonal abstract forces. All right, Well, we're gonna get to that.
So we're gonna answer all these questions. We're gonna talk
about some of the good critiques of the philosophy of evolution,
which I've recommended in the past, but I think we've
got so many new listeners since stuff I recommend like
two years ago, nobody's even heard of it now, and
you know, the audience is like ten times bigger than
it was two years ago. So so we're gonna talk
about a lot of these points and principles today, going
to talk about how a bunch of different transcendentals essentially
can be bagged together in one giant transcendental argument, which
necessitates God. So we're going to go from abstraction to
higher level abstraction to highest level abstraction. By the way,
that doesn't mean God is pure abstraction. The unique aspect
of what we're going to talk about here is that
most of the metaphysically minded religions of the world Perennialism, traditionalism,
blah blah blah blah blah, Platonism, ancient.
Speaker 3: Vedic religions, or whatever they're.
Speaker 2: Absolute that they abstract up to is impersonal. The unique
aspect of the Christian worldview again unique in many ways,
like creation x nilo is unique. The other world religions
do not teach that Genesis teaches that. All the Orthodox
tradition church fathers all teach that by the way the
trollon is sino to condemns theistic evolution.
Speaker 3: By the way you are under canonical.
Speaker 2: Ban if you believe that death was a natural result
of I'm speaking to Orthodox here. If you believe that
death is a natural process and not the result of
Adam sin, you're actually under the canonical ban of the
Trollin Synod, which is later affirmed by Ecumenical Sonod. Now
let's see, so the beginning point here. This is so crucial,
and if we understand this, the rest of our theology
will flow consistently. We will be in harmony with everything
that the seven to eight Ecumenical Councils teach, with everything
that the medieval Orthodox councils teach. We will be in
harmony with the Sonoticon of Orthodoxy, which is read at
the Triumph of Orthodoxy liturgy. We will understand that we
cannot merge our system with Roman Catholicism, which is becoming
so popular amongst the Apostate, phony Orthodox, the Ecumenists, and
we will see that we have the answer, We actually
have the answer to these problems. So he says St. Basil,
Of course, Cappadocian Church Father. I've read I think almost
all Basil's writings, most of them at least is crucial
for uh, you know, the history of the doctrine of
the Trinity. You know, Saint Basil really solidified any remaining
doubts about aspects of the triad.
Speaker 3: So Basil's works on the Holy.
Speaker 2: Spirit, Basil against Eunomius. Uh, these are all, you know,
crucial aspects of Saint Basil. But what we'll see is
in the Patristic period, a lot of the debate was
still raging about the relationship between the revelation that's of
God in scripture and the religious heritage of Hellenism, the
religio philosophical heritage of Helenism. Okay, so we're not talking
about the Greek language here. This is a mistake that
some people make. They confuse every aspect of Hellenic culture
with the philosophical and religious presubsisitions of Hellenism. Say two
different things. Right, So the Bible being translated into the
septuagen is a positive aspect of Hellenic culture. The Old
Testament I'm speaking here, right, that's not an evil Hellenic
thing that we need to oppose.
Speaker 3: The idea that the one right God, the.
Speaker 2: One the Monad, is an impersonal force is Hellenism that
we need to oppose. The idea that God is in
dialectical tension. This one is in dialectical tension with the
rest of the created order or the many blah blah blah.
That is Hellenism that we need to oppose. The idea
that in Christ there is one will, because if he
had two wills, they would be in dialectical tension is
the teaching of the Monolthlites, and that's a dialectical Hellenism
that we need to oppose. The idea that all predicates
of God are absolutely identified with an absolutely simple essence
is the teaching of Origin and the teaching of Eunomius,
and the teaching of all the absolute divine simplicity adherents,
and that is a Hellenism that we need to oppose.
So you're going to notice that what Plotinus says here
that Saint Basil is going to contrast his view with
is going to set the tone for why we don't
believe in the generic Greek theism of the Pagans and
the philosophers, and why our view is perfectly in harmony
with Moses. When Moses says in Exodus three fourteen, I
am that I am a yeah as sure aa.
Speaker 3: That is not a.
Speaker 2: Statement about God being the equivalent to the Greek monad.
In fact, it is a rejection of the Greek view.
Speaker 3: Now it is true.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets confusing, because when a philosopher,
for example, says, all things have to be in some
way related to the one, a great, universal, absolute, and
in some way encompasses and links all things. We as
an Orthodox could look at that and say, you are correct, sir,
but you don't know the one that you are talking
you're speaking of because you think that that one is
an unknowable, impersonal force. This is why in Acts seventeen,
when Paul goes to the Areopagus and talks to all
the Greeks, and he says that there's a statue for
the unknown God, just in case. The Greeks had all
these statues to all the gods, and they put one
up to the unknown God, just in case they forgot one.
Quite literally, Paul says, that's the true one, the unknown one.
He says, because you don't believe that he is a
single creator God, that you can have a relationship with
the Covenental personal God. So all Greek philosophy, unfortunately, for
all of its insights, it still begins with the erroneous
presupposition or starting point that all reality can be encapsulated
under impersonal absolutes or some force, some number, right, some principle.
So you get in the presocratics, the idea of Heraclitis
or an Aximander, or these different guys. Oh, everything is permanence,
everything is fire, everything is flux, everything is water. So
they're searching for a unifying absolute principle, unifying metaphysical principle,
a concrete absolute. These are different terms and history philosophy
that are just intended to signify what these Greeks were
looking for. Now the same idea, right is, we don't
have a problem talking about the one, but the distinction
is very is very crucial here that we begin by
saying that our one is not a.
Speaker 3: He's not a number. He's the Father.
Speaker 2: We don't begin by saying that there's one essence of
God and that's the one true God. We say the
Father is the one true God who has one essence. Right,
So let's read this basil in addition to employing the
term simplicity. Right, So we absolutely affirm, as do all
the church fathers, that God is simple, He's not composed
of parts. He also uses the term the one in
reference to God. Correct, there is only one God, but
here he does in a unique sense that confounds any
attempt at a neoplatonic analysis. In the Greek, the one
is in Platonius's system, referred to in the Neuter to on,
as evidenced by his pronoun it.
Speaker 3: Right. Do you see this?
Speaker 2: In Platonis's system, God is an it.
Speaker 3: It's a thing.
Speaker 2: It's a thing like everything else out in the world,
except it's the highest level thing. It's at the top
of the thing chain of being. For Platonis, the one
is also that which exists. That, it's a that, this
is why words matter by that, or it's just simply being.
Speaker 3: Again, in the Neutra hold on.
Speaker 2: But for Saint Basil, God is never referred to, but
in the masculine the one is for him referred to
as him. Likewise, the one is he who exists hou On.
This seemingly minor point will assume crucial significance when we
turn to the application of dogma in the art of
iconography for the First and Second Europes, and even more
significant when we discover how the Second Europe he's speaking
of Frankish papal Europe as opposed to the first thousand
years of the Church, through a process of application of
the gnostic technique of assigning new meanings to old terms,
and will come under the It will come to understand
the test tra grammaton of Exodus. I am who I am,
not in the personal sense of Saint Basil, but in
the abstract and personal essentialism of Latinus. Now, if you
doubt that, you need to look no further than Ettiangilson's
book on Tomism. The famous tomis Etiangio Soon, and when
he quotes Exodus there he says that this means I.
Speaker 3: Am subsistent being.
Speaker 2: Now, at times some of the church fathers do say
that God is supreme being. There's nothing inherently wrong with
that phrase or that term, But the problem is the
baggage and connotations that come along with that term. Because
for us in the orthodoxeology, even when we say of
God that he possesses existence or that he possesses oneness
in Orthodox theology is maybe surprising as it may sound
if you're new to this, those are also energies.
Speaker 3: Even when we speak.
Speaker 2: Of the oneness of God, they are revealed to us energetically.
We do not know what it is in God to
be oneness. We do not know what the oneness of
God is, because it is a oneness of nature, and
the nature of God is absolutely unknowable, because it is
absolutely unlike anything in the world. But we do know
God in terms of what he reveals to us, which
is his personal energies. So we have to also avoid
the mistake of assuming that the divine energies are somehow
impersonal forces.
Speaker 3: They are not.
Speaker 2: They're not new age zap beams that come down from
on high. No, they are in hypostatized, which means just
simply that they are personal. All of the manifestations of
God's attributes to us, or his energies, or his works
or his operations are to us completely and fully personal.
So when we speak of the omniscience of God, or
when we speak of the love of God, and when
we speak of the being of God, those are all
energetic manifestations or revelations of His being that.
Speaker 3: We are called to participate.
Speaker 2: That's what grace is, is the participation in those powers
and works of God. In fact, Paul makes us very
clear in Corinthians when he talks about the spiritual gifts.
That's specifically where he uses inner Gaia now uses it
many times, but he says that the gifts of the spirit,
the energies of the Spirit, are distributed in the body
of the Church, that is, the works of the Holy
Spirit that we participate in. You do not become or
partake of the person of the Holy Spirit. Even the
Roman Catholics eventually condemned this position because of their absolute dims, simplicity,
and their confusion over many centuries as to what it
means to receive grace and what it means to participate
in the life of God. They had all manner of
disputes and debates about what exactly that meant. So at
the time of Trent and after they eventually condemned the
idea that what you get in grace is the person
of the Holy Spirit, because if you truly participate in God,
then you would be melding with the person of the
whole Spirit. So that's why they had to continue to
come up with the confused notion of created grace, that
what you're participating in is just another created form. But
if we're just participating in another creative form, then the
incarnation and deification was not necessary, right Christ's incarnation and
his deification of his human nature, which Ephicis talks about.
Constantineble One talks about the two Ecumenical councils that discuss
Christ taking on human nature and deifying it in his
incarnation and resurrection. None of that was necessary if all
we needed was just another created form. Again, this is
the classic Orthodox rejoinder to created grace. And you would
only believe in created grace if you believe in absolute
divine simplicity. So what you're going to see then, The
point here is that all these doctrines are linked. Every
Roman Catholic doctrine on every major issue is conditioned by
absolute divine simplicity. Why well, absolute divine simplicity necessitates some
other thing coming in between God and this world right,
or there's problems in the incarnation in that view. So
what's what's communicated to Christ humanity when he assumed it.
If it's a divine energy, which Saint John Aamascus on
the six Secum Medical Council says it was, then that
energy can't be created because it's an uncreated energy. And
all those Fathers teach that, those councils teach.
Speaker 3: That point being is that that.
Speaker 2: If you think about Christ, you have to understand that
he is a single divine person. Okay, He's not an
addition formula.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This is how Roman Catholics eventually ended up reading the
Chalcedonian creed.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: They ended up saying that it means that who is Jesus,
He's human nature plus divine nature equals Jesus. No, Jesus
is not an addition for himla, because he was forever
a divine person and he assumed an impersonal human nature.
This is what Ephesis teaches, is what Saint Cyril teaches,
and this is.
Speaker 3: What the sixth Council reaffirmed.
Speaker 2: So that means that you have to read Chalcidon in
a Kirillian Cyrillian neo Cyrillian.
Speaker 3: Way, which is what Orthodoxy does.
Speaker 2: This is why, by the way, after the Fifth Council
and six well after the fourth Council Chalcidon, you had
debates over monothelitism and monargism, the idea that there's one
will and one energy in Christ, or monophysitism. Right, So
all of those systems conceived of him as a basically
an addition formula. It's some sort of fused new being.
But he's not he retains his humanity in its proper
mode and form at all times.
Speaker 3: He never loses his.
Speaker 2: Humanity, full humanity, but it is an impersonal human nature.
His humanity does not possess its own hypostasis. That is
the teaching of Nestorias. Thestorius taught that there were two Jesuses,
a human guy named Jesus of Nazareth and the son
of God who came upon this human god, Jesus of Nazareth.
Most of the world believes Nestorianism. When they talk about Jesus,
they think, oh, that was that cool guy prophet who
like you know, became God or whatever, and it was
like apotheosis. No no, no, no. No. Orthodox teaching, teaching of all
the church fathers who are Orthodox for the first millennium
is that Jesus is an eternal person and he assumed
human nature, which is impersonal. He has all the faculties
of a human but the only person, the sole subject
that Saint Cyril used to say, of all the actions
of Christ is the Logos, the eternal Logos, Son of God.
And this is why our theology is completely different from
all the Protestant theologies, which are essentially an astorian This
is why, for example, Calvinists and the Classical Reformation tradition
teaches that Jesus was damned.
Speaker 3: Right, this is blasphemous.
Speaker 2: Not only is it blasphemous, it requires you to either
be an historian and believe that there were two people
in Christ, a human person who could be damned, or
you have to believe that the Father damned the eternal Son,
which splits and rends the Trinity, which is preposterous. So
God the Father is not punishing God the Son. And
that's the chief blasphemy of all the traditional reformers. And
in order to make sense of that, they had to
go in either two routes. They either had to go
with arianism or they had to go with some kind
of Nestorianism. And really Astorianism is just another version of arianism.
So the point of all that was just to say
that what is so insightful about God history and dialectic
is his correct thesis that all of the councils and
their apologetic debates from the time of Marcion. Again, Marcianism
is predicated on the same assumptions here Greek Hellenic gnostic
views all the way up through to the Seventh and
Eighth Council which dealt with icons, and then later with
the Philioquay and the Eighth Council for the East. You
have the same battle of what Basil is talking about here,
the same battle of the idea of the continuity of
our God with the revelation to Moses, the life of Moses. Right,
here's what Saint Gregory and Nissa Life of Moses. Right,
we believe that our theology is completely in continuity with
the Revelation all the way back to Moses. How else
could San gregoressa riot Life of Moses if we didn't
believe that Moses is the model for seeing the face
of God as we read in Exodus. So again, what
you're going to see when you die, and many of
you will not probably, but if you do go into
years and years of study of the early Church fathers.
I put about thirteen or fourteen years into it, what
you'll start to notice is that the battles of the
councils and the Orthodox Fathers against the heretics is consistently
one of battling philosophic presubsitions and assumptions out of Hellenism. Now,
there were some other heresies like the Judaizers, and yes,
those views get condemned, but that was a small minority.
The world had been prepped right through the thought of
the Greeks and the Romans, and the Judaizing error was
basically dealt with in the first century, and then there
were some hangers on in the second third century. And yes,
in a way, some of the Church fathers do say
that Marcion, well, Marcian is not a Judaizer because he
specifically rejects the Old Testament. But some of the other
gnostics you could maybe link to Judaizing because they wanted
to question the divinity of Christ basically. So, but here's
the key here is that to understand all, whether you're
a Judaizer, or whether you would be one of the
eventual Kabbalistic Talmutic proponents.
Speaker 3: Or whether you are one of the Greeks, or.
Speaker 2: Yet whether you're one of the early Church heretics like
Marcion or the Dulcatists or the Adoptionists, or you're one
of the Nestorians or one of the Monophysites of the Monothelites,
you all have a problem with dialectics. And this is
the pattern that is there in all of them. Now,
where do we see this first. We see it first
when Origin specifically makes an argument about who God the
Father is, and he's trying to argue with Celsus the Platonists,
and he essentially says, and this is called the Origins problematic,
he essentially says that anything that we say about God
is absolutely identical to the super essential essence of God.
And the essence of God is so simple that everything
in it kind of equalizes out, it all blends into
the same thing. So if we call God the Father,
that's absolutely identical.
Speaker 3: To the divine essence. If we call God just.
Speaker 2: That's also absolutely identical to the divine essence. Now, the
problem with this is that if we do that, then
there's no difference between God being just and God being
Father or God being eternal. So, in other words, fatherhood
is absolutely the same thing as eternality, is absolutely the
same thing as any other thing that you say about God.
And this reduced this to absurdity, and it's rejected by
the Church fathers. This is why we don't believe in
absolute divine simplicity. This is why Origin came to believe
in the eternality of the world. Now, how do you
think he might have gotten to that conclusion. Well, let's
think about it. Origin reasoned against again platonists. He said, look,
I can agree with you, all right, I'll take the bait.
I'll say, yes, God the Father is the same thing
as eternality. It's also the same thing as providence. So
if providence and being eternal and being a father are
all equated with the divine essence, then God had to
eternally have a creation to be father over. I mean
that seems to logically follow, doesn't it. Well, in the
assumptions of absolute done simplicity, it follows. And of course,
because Origin was very influenced by Platonism, he also reasoned
that everything that exists in Platonic fashion was created as
a reflection, a necessary reflection of what was in this
divine essence. Right, all the forms, all the ideas, the
exemplars of things are also in this divine essence.
Speaker 3: They're also synonymous.
Speaker 2: With the eternality of God, the fatherhood of God.
Speaker 3: So they had to exist.
Speaker 2: So you see, creation is not a free action in
this view. Creation is a necessary entailment. It's a necessary product.
It's an emanation. As the Platonist would say, from God,
because it wasn't an act of will, it was a
necessary instantiation and eternal reflection of what was always in
the divine essence. Right, So whatever happens within history, by
the way, seems to lead to determinism. So Origin has
this elaborate system where he tries to get around some
of these problems and argue for free will and all
this stuff. And because he thought of good and evil
in dialectical fashion, he reasoned that, well, since we always
retain free will, and free will is defined by the
choice of good or evil, it therefore follows that you
can always fall in the eternal state, you can fall again,
and Christ can become incarnate again and restore everybody again.
So it's an absurd gnostic system. This is why organism
is condemned. It's not just condemned because of a pocket
gastasis and his view of the pocket statius and universalism.
Speaker 3: That's not the only reason. He's condemned for multiple.
Speaker 2: Reasons, and it's all.
Speaker 3: The reasons I'm telling you right now.
Speaker 2: But you don't know that, if you haven't really delved
into this, and if you don't know what the Originist
problem is. So so again, when we consider that Origin's
view of creation is that it's a necessary emanation in
the platonic sense, it's not.
Speaker 3: An act of God's free will.
Speaker 2: And when we consider that creation is a reflection of
all the forms upon which the creative forms are based, right,
it's just straight Platonism here. Then we see also that
it was not a free, freely created thing. And we
see that creation becomes eternal because if God is father,
and if he's provident, and if he's eternal, and if
all those things are synonymous, then he had to eternally
be a father over provident, eternal creation. Now this is
all stupid, why because of the assumption of absolute muntiplicity.
Speaker 3: That's why.
Speaker 2: I mean, is that dumb?
Speaker 3: Is that simple? What's the problem here?
Speaker 2: Assuming that the one the monad is absolutely simple?
Speaker 3: Now, why did he do that?
Speaker 2: Well, because the Greeks did this, the Platonists and Aristotle,
when they talked about what it is to be one
or to have oneness, they said, well, that just means
that it's absolutely indivisible, absolutely simple, has no parts and
has no composites.
Speaker 3: And if you.
Speaker 2: Talked about differentiation, right, if you talked about distinctions, then
that necessarily in their mind, it necessarily entailed division or composition.
But it doesn't.
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't. That's the assumption.
Speaker 2: So at this point it's good to read, for example,
David Bradshaw's book Aristotle East and West, because that entire
book covers this very question. Why did the Greeks assume
that division always entails or excuse me, uh, distinction always
entails division? Why? Well, they assumed that because of philosophical
baggage presuppositions that they were not equipped or willing to question,
because they placed human reasoning above revelation and divine truth,
which they thought might give them the upper hand, but
actually leads to absurdity. It leads to all the stupidity
of what I just talked about with the origin, And
if you read Aristol East and West, Bradshaw will cover
this at length, in detail and all of its context
for how this kind of about, how to understand it.
Speaker 5: So I want to show off something that we're all
proud of. I've got a browser here. This is Jay Dyers,
much vaunted, much sought after philosophy one oh one. Now
he just got this page up. We are just testing
it out. You guys are some of the first people
in the world to see it. I want to say,
for my part, it's not philosophy one oh one. I
think this is as mistitling. I really think is as
like philosophy unleashed, because a philosophy want on one course,
they give you kind of some useless information that you
can't make sense of. Jay actually lays out over twelve weeks,
dozens and dozens of hours put into just the presentation
of this, let alone the hundreds and thousands of hours
of research that it takes to have a coherent evolution
and history of the origins of philosophy, the uses of philosophy,
the different ways to look at it over time, and
how that has been brought about to what we have today,
which is almost an absence of philosophy on the objective,
logic and reason side, in an overabundance of woke philosophy
that is irrational and is made up day by day
as people are like I think we should bring racism back,
and then here's a justification, and then it gets wokeified
and spread out, and then all of a sudden you
have a bunch of communist socialist ideas where you become
the property in action you need to be able to
stay on your own ground. It helps to have a
foundation in philosophy because it's a method to fine truth
when you get down to it. Philosophy is there because
you love truth enough to go and learn how to
find it, because it's valuable. So if you're interested in
things like that. There is the landing page. We'll link
it up into notes. It is a longer once, so
we'll get a shorter URL for this. I'm sure Jay
has a link on his page. I just wanted to
show it off. Now you know it exists, you can
go look for it and see why this is not
your father's philosophy. Right, So well done. I'm proud of
everyone who helped to produce and edit the course, and
of course Jay did a flawless job in presenting the
course over those twelve weeks. And he's a juggernaut. He's
another guy just like John Bush, in action all the time,
doing something productive, like very little wasted time in his week,
those one hundred and sixty eight hours of being harnessed
very well.
Speaker 2: The crux here is to understand that the Orthodox doction
of some implicity.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So, for example, if you read any standard Orthodox dogmatic Manuel.
If you read Saint John Damascus's defense of the Orthodox
Faith the classic right, I always recommend Catholics especially read that,
because you'll see that Saint John consistently argues for all
the Orthodox arguments, and you don't see him, you don't
see her Oman Catholics making these arguments. And in fact,
when Aquinas rejects the essence energy distinction, he specifically cites
Saint John Damascus as to why he rejects it. And
when he rejects it on de veritate, the work is
called on truth. He cites Moses mimon IDEs against John Damascus.
You can't make this up. I've covered it in probably
twenty articles. I've rehashed at twenty times. I'm not going
to rehash it again. If you can't go read articles,
then forget it. But he cites mim and IDEs, and
he says mimon IDEs uh does not accept the distinction
between essence and energy because it would mean that God
has parts.
Speaker 3: Now let's take thisssumption and show how still it is.
Speaker 2: If we agree with the Greek philosophers and the Platonists
that all distinction implies composition and division, then you can't
believe that the Father is distinct from the Sun, or
that the Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son,
because that would entail composition and division. Duh, it's dumb.
So what's the key here, dropping the philosophical baggage assumptions.
Speaker 3: It's that simple.
Speaker 2: This right here has caused the giant, entire division between
the East and the West for two thousand years in
the church. Now again, when you read Saint John Damascus,
who will tell you about divine simplicity, He'll say God's simple.
Speaker 3: When you read Saint Basil, he'll say God's simple.
Speaker 2: But they also say that God also is distinct and diverse.
He's also many, He's not just one, and distinction does
not entail division. Now why do the philosophers say that, Well,
because in the world, things that are distinct to do
oftentimes entail division. If I can make a distinction between
you know, the top of a thing and the bottom
of a thing, I can split it in half and
I could say here's the top, there's the bottom. Right,
So they reasoned, if God is different from all the
things in the world, then there's not a way to
divide him or split him up. And so they reasoned,
we can't believe in any distinctions. But now, wait a minute.
The Old Testament itself had already taught that there were
distinctions in God, namely by the fact that he freely
created the world, which means that his will and his
actions are not the same as his essence. And also
because of the fact of the Theophanes, the Angel of
the Lord that appears. Now, how could the Angel of
the Lord appear if God is absolutely simple? Now Augustine says, well,
they're holograms. They must be holograms because the Trinity can't
appear within time and space.
Speaker 3: Now wait a minute.
Speaker 2: If the Trinity can't appear within time is space, then
how did the Son become incarnate? Because the Sun appears
within time and space. And not only that, the Trinity
didn't become incarnate. That would be theomachy, the death of
the entire Godhead. That's stupid. No, only one hypostasis of
the Trinity took on human nature. So not only are
the persons distinct, one person of the Godhead can actually
enter into a mode of being in which the others
do not. The Father did not become incarnate, and guess what.
Only orthodoxeology discusses this and makes sense of it. Why,
because we don't believe in absolute divine sublicity. Absolute divine
simplicity would negate the possibility of free creation by God's
free will, because it would equate the divine will with
the divine essence. Divine essence is not something that can
will to be changed. Therefore it's determined. Therefore creation is determined.
God's essence cannot become other than it is. And if
you equate the act of creating the world with God's essence,
which Platonism and absolute divineslicity it does, then you get
a determined, necessary creation. You don't get a creation freely done. Now,
the only way out of this is to believe in
the essence energy distinction, which the Orthodox Church is always taught.
This is why we believe creation was a free action.
It was not determined, It was not a platonic emanation.
Blah blah blah. So the key to all of this
is just simply giving up the philosophic assumption that distinction
entails division, that distinction entails composition. And every Roman Catholic
already agrees with us, and Protestant too, because Protestants teach
the exact same doctrine of absolute dens. All the Puritans,
all the Reformers, they all teach philioquay. They all teach
absolute divine simplicity. So this is why I don't often
argue about the philio oquay, because philioquay is confusing and
it's difficult, and people get lost in trying to dig
up Church for other quotes. And it's not even ultimately
about the philioquay. It's about absolute divine simplicity, because that's.
Speaker 3: What condition as the philioak. You wouldn't even need the filioquay.
Speaker 2: As a bad theological argument like the Roman Catholics tried
to use it for.
Speaker 3: It wouldn't even be there.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't even be a problem if you had just
believed in the essence energy distinction and followed through with
the more profound doctrine of the trinity that you get
in Eastern theology. For example, Saint John Damascus, we'll discuss
the distinction between hyposthetic origin and the eternal manifestation. This
is explained at linked in Saint Greory Palomas. Roman Catholics
have no idea what you're talking about when you discuss
these things. They don't know what that is, they have
no idea why that matters? Where we get that? Who
came up with it? What are you talking about? Saint
Basil talked about it, Sat John Demascus talks about it,
and Saint Grey Palomas filled it out more perfectly precisely
because it's necessary once you understand the essence energy distinction.
That aspect of understanding God is necessary because it shows
is that there's a distinction between energies that relate to
eternal manifestation of God's glory and energies that relate to creation.
That's very important because if you don't make that distinction,
then there's no difference between God generating the sun and
God creating the world. So some of God's attributes, such
as the glory of God, the love of God, those
are eternal. They would have always been manifesting from the Father,
through the Son and in the Spirit.
Speaker 3: Whether there have been creation or not.
Speaker 2: However, when we think about operations of God that relate
to time and space providence, right, those are different. But
in absolute divine simplicity, you have a smashing together of
those two different aspects or layers, you could say, in
a just in an analogical way, layers. God doesn't actually
have layers, but just for the sake of discussion and description.
When you smash those two things together, you have all
the problems that I detailed in many essays, like the
fact that the Holy Spirit is equated with the will
of the Father and the Son, which is retarded. It's
the same argument that the Arians used as to why
Jesus wasn't divine, is because he's the will of the Father, right,
He's a production of the will of the Father. And
then Roman Catholics make oftentimes this dumb argument about the
Holy Spirit being the production of the will of the
Father and the Son, which is completely stupid. That is
an example of not understanding the distinction between the attributes
or energies of God that relate to all eternity, right,
the eternal procession, eternal manifestation of energies, which is discussed
at the Council of Blackernee against John Becos, who wanted
to unite with Rome on the Philioquay, he's condemned the
tumos against John Becos. He's condemned precisely because Roman Catholics
don't understand this distinction.
Speaker 3: So if you read.
Speaker 2: Saint Gregor Palamas. He will go at length into discussing this.
He's every Roman Catholic confuses God's hypostatic origin with eternal manifestation.
So they think that For example, if you point out
to a Roman Catholic, say a Roman calic, will say
something like, look, you Orthodox split Jesus from the Holy Spirit,
but if the persons endwell one another, then Jesus could
never be divided from the production of the Holy Spirit. Well,
the response that we have is that we don't split
Jesus from the eternal procession of the Spirit. We say
that he absolutely proceeds through the Son, that is in
our dogma, but he is not the hypostatic origin of
the spirit.
Speaker 3: And this is precisely why.
Speaker 2: And by the way, the fact that the person's endwell
one another also doesn't prove that one of them because
the Father endwells the Son, does that mean Jesus is
the origin of the No, That's ridiculous. So again this
is because in dwelling of the persons, it's fine to
talk about the indwelling of the person's circumsession, right, but
that is not equated with trying to argue hypostatic origin.
And it's only Orthodox theology that holds to hypostetic origin
as the way to distinguish the persons. Any other position
or attempt will confuse them. Now, why do they even
do that? They only do it because of absolute my simplicity,
even if they don't know it when they go in
they mind the church follows for quotes about the procession
of the sun or excuse me of the spirit, which
for example, they'll they'll try to use the quote where
Saint John Damascus is talking about eternal manifestation and say,
see see the Spirit proceeds through the sun in John Jamascus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what we teach.
Speaker 2: But John Damascus doesn't see teach that there's a double
hyposthetic origin.
Speaker 3: Of the spirit.
Speaker 2: He specifically does not teach the filioquay, and in fact
he rejects it if you read on the Orthodox faith.
Speaker 3: Now, why would he do that?
Speaker 2: But he does it because of all the reasons I'm
telling you, And he doesn't believe in absolute divine simplicity,
because he didn't have the assumption of the Greeks that
composition and distinction always entails division. There's no dialectics in
this philosophy. So this may seem abtuoe. But I'm telling you,
I put at least ten years into this very question,
and I'm telling you this.
Speaker 3: Is why it's such a big deal.
Speaker 2: This is why it matters because all systems and I'm
not trying to be overly spurgey here, but it is
true that the starting point will condition a system.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is why we do presubsistional apologetics and analysis of
If I start with the assumption of a materialism, that
leads to other conclusions that the atheist is not immediately
aware of. So, for example, in atheism or materialism, there
is an assumption about metaphysics, an assumption about knowledge, and
assumption about ethics. And it's not difficult to tease out
how confused and garbled and nonsensical it is because they
immediately box themselves in to a nonsense position from the outset.
It's contradictory because the position is stupid. It's contradictory. So,
for example, they can't explain logic, they can't explain numbers,
they can't explain consciousness, they can't explain the past, they
can't explain identity over time. There's all of these really fundamental,
stupid philosophical questions that they destroy themselves over when they
start with those presubpositions.
Speaker 3: But they're not aware of it.
Speaker 2: But when you make them aware of it, that's when
you start to see the collapse of those systems. Now,
not every system is immediately collapsible this quick, because in
history things work out over centuries and over time and
over generations. So it wasn't always immediately apparent to everybody.
You know how Dialectics and Hellenism was undergirding all of
these disputes, except for guess what, in later councils they
started noticing this, The church fathers that later council started realizing, hey,
they're just rehashing the errors of the Greeks. So by
the time of the Sonoticon, right where in the liturgy
you have the triumph of Orthodoxy celebrated, the Sonoticon contains
this giant list of condemnations, and in some churches they
still read the full Sonoticon of Orthodoxy, which condemns the polateness,
which condemns the originists, which condemns on and on on all.
Speaker 3: This Greek gobledegook.
Speaker 2: And guess what it says that very point, it says
the Church has battled the Greeks for the last eight centuries,
and we have emerged victorious. The iconic class, which is
another version of the heretics, the heresies, another inversion of
the same stuff. We have emerged victorious. We condemn Plato's forms,
we condemn Aristitilian heresies, we condemn originism and origins gobbledegook.
And yes, the Six Council condemns.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: The Six Council bases its argument for orthodox Christology on
the essence energy distinction. Again I've made there is no
argument against this. There is literally no argument against us.
If you read the debate with Pearis, this is what
Maximus says. Maximus says, all you clowns are masters of dialectics.
Speaker 3: Do you see this book?
Speaker 2: Do you understand that this book is the basis for
the six Ecumenical Council. This is an acumenical council that
all Roman Caelics accept. This entire book, which is not
that long, like one hundred and fifty pages, is based
on the essence energy distinction. It's based on a rejection
of dialectical tension. In Christ there's no dialectical tension between
man's will and grace. Grace is natural to man, Saint
Maximus says, Now, if the whole damn Council is based
on this argument, and if the Pope's dogmatic letter to
the Council, Pope Agatho.
Speaker 3: Grounds the whole argument.
Speaker 2: On this book and the essen Centergy distinction, how on
earth are Roman Catholics is going to deny the essence
Entergy distinction. And what do you get from the Roman Catholics, Well,
you get two replies.
Speaker 3: You get one group that says.
Speaker 2: The essence Centergy distinction is Neoplatonism. They don't know what
the hell they're talking about. No, well, you teach neoplatonism
by teaching absolute divine simplicity, which is directly from Plotonis.
The origin borrowed it directly from Plotonis. Eunomius teaches absolute
divine simplicity, and he rejects, yes, his intergudistinction precisely because
of absolute divines. Gregor Nissa has a giant, thousand page
book against Eunomius, and Eunomia says all the exact same
thing that Roman Celics say. But Eunomius is more consistent
because he says, look, if all distinction entails division, then
the Father's not different from the Son, or the Father
is a higher being and the Son is a subordinate being.
If absolute divine simplicity is true and the Father is
distinct from the Son, and you want to avoid composition
in God, then the Son has to be a lesser being.
They argued, this is why Roman Catholicism leads to perennialism.
There is no argument against this, there's not I've argued
this for a decade now with Roman Catholics.
Speaker 3: What can you say. I mean, if you read this book,
it's abundantly clear.
Speaker 2: And then you get two sides of Roman Catholics that
they'll say, oh, you're a neo Platonist. If you believe
in the essense and energy distinction, you believe.
Speaker 3: God has parts.
Speaker 2: Well, that's absurd, because Pope Saint Agatha wrote a letter
to the sixth Council based on disputations with Paris, and
he affirms the essence energy stinction in the person of Christ.
Christ has two wells and two energies. That's in the
dogmatic letter. And then the other half of the Roman
Catholics say, oh, well, no, no, no, you see essence
synergy stinction is perfectly, perfectly meldible with Orthodox theology? Oh
oh is it? Why is it that there are multiple
dogmatic statements in Denzinger that you have to accept absolute
divine simplicity and that the attributes of God are not
in any way distinct from his essence. And again I
have a whole essay on that. So anyway, let's pull
that essay up so that areboy understands and the Roman
Catholic has nowhere to retreat. By the way, isn't that
funny that they have two responses on this. One half
of them says it's neoplatonism and one half of them says,
which I'm not faulting if that just confused, But just
go read this letter or this essay I wrote ream
with cathlic absolute deviance spilitory because I just all I
did was go through the dogmatic statements in Rome that
you have to adhere to if you're a only Catholic
about what absolute domind siplicity is. So now you've heard
me talk about this, why do I keep talking about it?
I keep talking about it because this is the point
of departure. This is the issue. This is why you
can't meld Orthodoxy with Rome, because it's two different schemes,
two different systems, and anybody who spent any time and
neither one knows that like they're obviously it's different. And
by the way, absolute deminds simplicity.
Speaker 3: Guess what it gave rise to the papacy? Did you
know that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're going to get into some of that here
in a little bit. But this is why we come
back then full circle to this crucial point for apologetics.
Speaker 3: That the one is not a statement.
Speaker 2: Of impersonalism and essentialism. When Saint Basils says he.
Speaker 3: We are.
Speaker 2: Affirming that God is personal and not abstract or essential.
He's not manifestation of essentialism. I'm saying He's a personal God. Now,
I've been wanting to cover that for a long time,
but I'm going to go to some of these super
chats because we we've been going for a little while.
Speaker 4: Here in it.
Speaker 3: But this needed to be covered.
Speaker 2: This needed to be discussed because so many people have
brought this very issue up. And if you go through
all the stuff I've been telling you about, if you
read the stuff I've been telling you about, you're going to.
Speaker 3: See him, right.
Speaker 2: I know what I'm talking about on this, but I
assure you read these books. These are the books that
I've read over the years. This is how I came
to these views and just make them up.
Speaker 3: So you don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Read on the Orthodox Faith you'll find St. John Demascus
making all of these same arguments. Let's see watch this
now the Roman Catholics think, oh, we believe exactly what
Saint John Damascus teaches.
Speaker 3: We believe all the exact same things as he does.
Speaker 2: Oh really, what about the sections about the energies in Christ. Well,
it's neil platonism, neo platonism.
Speaker 3: Really, let's see that.
Speaker 2: Actually, I'm gonna go to the New Advent version of
it just because I want them to see that it's
not it's not made up. All right, Let's start with
this section. This is on the Orthodox Faith Book three.
If any of these Roman Catholics would just read Saint
John Damascus from start to finish, it's all really clear
concerning the properties of the two natures. Confessing then the
same Jesus Christ our Lord, to be the Son of
God in perfect man. We hold that the same, all
the same, but all the attributes as the Father being
in generate, and all the attributes of Adam save only
for his sin, these attributes being body, intelligence, rational soul.
This is what I was telling you earlier about Jesus
has a fully human nature. He has corresponding to these
two natures, two sets of natural qualities belonging to these
two natures, two natural volitions or wills, one divine and
one human. Two natural energies, one divine and one human.
Two natural free wills, one divine and one human. He
wills and energizes freely as God because of being the
same essence with God. He wills and energizes freely as man,
because he has our human nature.
Speaker 3: Do you see that?
Speaker 2: Do you understand that that's what the six Ecumenical Council teaches,
That's what Saint Maximus teaches. Do you understand that every
Roman Catholic thinks that they have a perfect unity of
faith with John of Damascus? Do you do you really
they think he is a doctor of the Church. Therefore,
in the case of the Father and the Son the Spirit,
we recognize from their sameness of will and energy, there's
one will in God, sameness of energy in God. By
the way, this is also something that Taylor Marshall, for example,
we had a debate about this ten years ago. He
goes to one section in Saint Johnamascus at the beginning
where Saint John Damascus says that God has one energy
because of one nature, and then he acts like that
proves that energy and essence are basically the same in God.
Speaker 3: No he doesn't.
Speaker 2: He goes on to say that God's energy is both
one and many, again just ripping stuff out of context with,
of course, what rome clics always do. But he goes
on to make, of course, plenty of statements about the energies.
In fact, in book three there are thirty six statements
I'm looking at right now, thirty six discussions of the
energies in Christ. For just to be noted that willing
and the manner willing are not the same thing to
will as the faculty of nature, just as seeing is
for all men. Did here we go, I went sorry
this wrong section. It does not introduce in division in God. See,
making these distinctions is not introduced division, but God merely
the fact that the differences between them are safeguard and
preserved in the union of the incarnation. For we hold
that wills and energies are faculties that belong to nature,
not person. Subsistence means person there right, So if will
and energy were properties of persons, and there would be
one will and energy in Christ, and we would be
monophesites and monolty lies. But we're not. I mean those
faculties of will and energy about which He wills and
energizes and does so. For if we allow that they
belong to subsistence, which means person hypostasis, we will be
forced to say that there are that the three persons
of the Holy Trinity have different wills and different energies. Correct,
because will is a property of nature and energy. Energy
is an effect of nature. It's an outworking and production
of nature. Now where do we get this idea of
energies in Christ? The incarnation, by the way, proves the
essence energy sinction.
Speaker 3: Very clearly.
Speaker 2: No debate. What is this concerning the energies in Christ?
Speaker 3: What is this?
Speaker 2: What is this talking about?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 3: Who does he go to? Is he make it up?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: He goes back to Saint Gregory. If energy exists, it
must manifestly be energized, and will not energize. As soon
as it has been energized, it will cease. So Saint
Gregory talks about Essen's energy. We hold further that there
are two energies in our energies a Christ, for he
possesses one as God and being of luck with the Father,
the divine energy, and likewise he possesses became man of
like essence and energy property human nature, on and on
and on. I mean, this is the entirety of Book
three is about the divine economy and the incarnation. So
you could read the entirety of book three and you
will get orthodox doctrine. Of course, lazies are not going
to actually read this, will they know they won't thirty
six sections thirty six sections here discussing essence energy, and
know the fact that he says that because there's one nature,
there's one energy. He also says there are many energies.
So don't fall into.
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Speaker 2: The dooping the light of doctor Taylor or Marshall, which,
by the way, if he just read these he would
know that too. He would know he's being dishonest in
that regard, or he's ignorant. By the way, it's also
obviously preposterous to say that all of the attribute even
if you said that, because John Damascus says in one
place that there's one energy, even though he says elsewhere
there's many energies. Even if you tried to argue that,
it also leads to absurdity because if you said that
all the attributes are essentially just one energy in God,
I'm sorry, but love is not the same thing as foreknowledge.
Speaker 3: Fore knowledge is not.
Speaker 2: The same things as justice. Okay, they're obviously different. By
the way, that would also mean that there's no distinction
between the eternal attributes of God, the eternal energies, and
the energies that relate to time and space. So rewind
to all the critiques that have made an hour ago
about originism, same problem results. But they don't know any
of this because they don't study this, and they won't.
They are hard headed all right, So I'm gonna read
some super chats when I get back. I got to
use the potty potty time. I'll be right back and
we will talk more. We're gonna get back into some
stuff to do with numbers, as I said I originally promised.
We're gonna talk about transcendent arguments numbers in nature. We're
going to talk about some books on the philosophy of evolution.
We're gonna talk about form in nature. Were going to
talk about aesthetics and the good how that relates also
to epistemology. We're going to talk about the one and
the many problem as it relates to philosop We've already
covered some of the one in the issue. We're gonna
talk about ultimate irrational and rational tensions in the unbelievers worldview.
We're going to talk about coherence theory, and we're gonna
get back into more about nominalism and realism, and we'll
have more super chat questions as well. But I am
a human being with human nature and property. I have
faculties proper to my human nature which require me to
go T T. So I'm gonna go T T in
the moment I come back.
Speaker 4: It's a Jay di Er, Jason Elison, m HM.
Speaker 1: J dires Day Smells, Jade Irens Days Analysis.
Speaker 4: It's jayder to Jay's analysis.
Speaker 2: All right, welcome back, and let's touch on some of
these superjet questions before we move on in the discussion. Now,
I know that we've hit on these issues before, but
what I want to stress is the connection between issues
like absolute devide, simplicity, the one the monad Basil talks about,
how God is he not an it? This is all
very crucial and all of these things relate. So people
are asking questions in the chat, for example, about Buddhism
and that kind of stuff. Yes, this all relates to
the same issues because all of the far Eastern religions,
just as we said earlier with Plato and Platonism, the Greeks,
the ancient Greeks, right, if you look at the pre Socratics,
the Ionians, they were looking for an all encompassing principle
to make sense of everything. Okay, so there were some
interesting ideas that they had about, hey, maybe everything relates
to one another in some way. How can we find
something that can relate meaning things meaningfully to another thing?
Like what does the chair in China have to do
with Bill Cosby in America. Well, nothing, okay, but they
are all existing things, right, Yes, so existence is something
that we would assume or predicate in some sense to
both of those things.
Speaker 3: Yes, how is that possible?
Speaker 2: Or how can we make sense of that given the
fact that our minds, our experience is limited in finite right.
So the Greeks would try to look for ways, these
early Greeks.
Speaker 3: In philosophy, to link everything.
Speaker 2: Maybe everything is connected in some way, linked in some
way in a meaningful way. If I predicate scherness or
existence or equality of Bill Cosby and the ancient emperor
of China. Right, they are human beings, and I'm saying
that they possess a common nature that in some way
links them over time and space. That assumes a whole
bunch of different metaphysical realities and categories and principles that
are not immediately empirical empirically verifiable. However, it's assumed in
the process of talking about them meaningfully and making sense
of them. This is why Nietzsche says, for example, we
have not yet got rid of God because we still
have faith. In Grammar Twilight of Idols, Why is neats
you say that because Nietzsche is against the stuff I'm
talking about. Nietzsche, for all of his insights, does not
believe in truth. Nietzsche believes that truth is a power relation.
It's just imposed upon you by you know, your overlords
are used against you or whatever. But what we're going
to see is that all kinds of things like numbers, language, logic, geometry, concepts,
logical forms relating to one another, these things require more
than just bare materialism. Okay, this is kind of the
heart of the transcendental argument.
Speaker 3: And when we watch the atheist.
Speaker 2: Or the unbeliever or the non believe, when they when
we watch them try to utilize things like logic, like language,
like concepts like meaning, they will argue against meaning. Right,
They'll say, meaning is a human invention. For you know
that you make up you make up your own meaning
as a social construct. And that's utterly self refuting. They
undermine themselves their own argumentation every time they talk, because
they assume rational, meaningful discourse from one mind to another,
which is impossible on their system. Okay, it's like I remember,
I always tell the story because it's the most illustrative,
hilarious example. I went to a debate many many years ago,
when I was eighteen between a presubpositionalist. No, I was nineteen,
excuse me, between a presubsitionalist and an atheist a long
time ago.
Speaker 3: I don't even remember where.
Speaker 2: It was, somewhere on the east coast Pennsylvania, somewhere. It
was a small venue, like maybe one hundred people for
this debate, and the one guy was like a head
of the Free Thinking Society or some bullshit. Anyway, So
after the debate that it was me and the guy
who was debating I think it was Michael Butler. He
was a student of Bonson if you've ever heard of him. Uh,
and the atheist I think Michael Butler left. It was
me and two of my buddies talking to the atheists
and his goons, and we said, he said, look, you know,
I don't I just don't get your transdental argument. It
doesn't make any sense. You know. You you make these
arguments all the time, you're talking about you know, all
these categories you're talking about, meaning you're talking about transcedental concept.
He's like, look, that's all just stuff that humans cook up.
And he said something to the effect of the real,
the real thing that you guys are scared of is
that you are afraid to admit that it's all meaningless.
I said, no, wait a minute, are you saying that
the universe is meaningless? He says, yes, the big scope universe.
Speaker 3: It's all meaningless. And that's what you're afraid of.
Speaker 2: He says, I said, okay, well, we're gonna use sexy
sax Men for this guy. Okay, this is this this
atheist guy's and he's the intellectual equivalent of sexy sax
Men to the music world. He says, everything's meaningless and
that's what you're pasted. Okay, So look, first of all,
that's an appeal to emotion, which is a fallacy. In
other words, you're saying that our position is false because
we're afraid. All right, so Christianity exists. This is the
argument you hear from Jesse Ventura. You know, people only
believe Christianity because because they need a crutch.
Speaker 3: They're afraid. Now that's a fallacy.
Speaker 2: Bertrand Russell in his famous essay, which is terrible, by
the way, full of fallacies, Why I'm not a Christian?
He begins it by talking about emotional appeals. He's like,
the only people who believe this are weaklings. Well that's
an emotional appeal, that's not an argument anyway. So this
atheist guy says, it's all mean I said.
Speaker 3: No, wait a minute.
Speaker 2: So if everything is meaningless, then you're you're fine with
also saying that your life is meaningless. And he says, yeah,
I don't have a problem with that because I'm bold dog.
I got giant atheist balls. I got giant atheist gonads
that are not afraid to bite the bullet and say
that my life is meanless and so is yours. You
dun't theist.
Speaker 3: I said, well, no, wait a minute.
Speaker 2: So if if your life is meaningless, then that means
today was meaningless, right this big debate that you just
participate in. He says, yes, yes, I'll bite the bullet.
My atheist gonads are so huge to your tiny, little
peace sized theis gonads. I will bite the bullet and
say that today was meaning I says, okay, so if
today was meaningless, then is everything that you're saying now
the sentence is also meaningless in our conversation. And he
stopped for a minute and he said, uh, now wait now,
wait a minute, No, wait a minute. Now you're playing
word games here, the eternal fallback of the atheist. Now
you're playing you're playing some word games here. Now you're
getting shady on me, slim shady on me, with your
with your your theist logics, your word game logics. That
is a very simple explication of the transcendental argument, just
on a very simple and all I did was let
that guy hang himself by his stupid arguments and arrogance
as it pertained to the concept of meaning. Now I
just bring that up is because I've never people at times,
oh you're you're transit argument. This is very confusing, this
is complex, and now it's not. That guy just exemplified
it in the most beautiful exemplary way that I will
probably never see done that clearly again, the free thinking
society debater.
Speaker 3: Now we're going to.
Speaker 2: Talk about meaning right here in a little bit too.
I want to add that too, because this is actually
something that is a concept that is very presubsitional, it's
very circular. This is going to show how classical foundationalism
and what oftentimes is the normy classical apologetics is weak
as f weak af Okay, it's weak sauce classical apologetics
or weak sauce. Now have classical apologetic arguments converted people,
Yes they have. Well, just because something converted people or
had a good effect doesn't mean we should keep using
bad arguments. And by the way, all of the classical proofs,
whether they are the teleological, cosmological, ontological argument, they can
all be reformulated and restated as transcendental arguments to make them.
Speaker 3: Plausible and powerful.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm not saying that they can't be salvage.
Speaker 3: They can be.
Speaker 2: By the way, I have a complete essay critiquing the
ontological argument, which is a little better than some of
these dumb classical arguments.
Speaker 3: Right, we talked about this.
Speaker 2: The ontological argument is at least a little It's a
step in the right direction away from you know, like
basic bitch tier bad arguments, like you know, like Lee
Strobal level stuff like look at the Apostles.
Speaker 3: The apostles were.
Speaker 2: A fraidy cat, cowardly weaklings, and then Jesus was resurrected
and it turned them into empowered, bold people willing to
die for their faith. Therefore Jesus exists in That's the dumbest,
weakest argument of all time. Don't ever use that argument
every atheist will rip you to shreds. Who knows anything
about basic Philosphian logic on that dumb argument, that is
a testimony that can inspire your faith. I'm not saying
it can't have an inspirational effect.
Speaker 3: But that's not a good argument. Why is that not
a good argument?
Speaker 2: Because there are many people in history who have died
for all kinds of things, Buddhism, atheism, Satanism. Does that
prove that it's true? No, of course, not terrible, terrible,
dumb argument. Also, you can argue till your face is
blue against an atheist, and even if you were to
eventually get them to admit that the resurrection maybe happened,
So what So what if a resurrection happened, an atheist
will just say, there's weird things that happen in history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's anomaly.
Speaker 2: So what the fact that some guy you know, passed
out or came back or something like that, maybe he
was you know, near death experience. Maybe that doesn't prove
that the rest of this Christianity stuff. Yeah, because you're
using a dumb argument.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I said earlier that Paul went to critique or to
debate the Greeks, and he preats a resurrection. Now you
might say you're contradicting yourself, Jay, because earlier you said
in Acts seventeen, Paul didn't engage in advanced philosophic argumentation
with the Greeks.
Speaker 3: He just preachs a resurrection. No, No, he.
Speaker 2: Did do apologetics. Paul does pre suppositional apologetics. Paul says
the wisdom of this world is foolishness, because it is.
Paul says that your God is no God. Paul says
that you must repent. This is what we tell the atheists,
the atheists.
Speaker 3: Must change his mind.
Speaker 2: He must change his worldview because, as Saint Peter says,
Christ has given us a certainty of his resurrection. It's
not in doubt. It's not probabilistic. There's not an eighty
eight percent chance that Christianity's true and Jesus rose from
the day.
Speaker 3: Does that? Is that the way God speaks in scripture?
Speaker 2: No, God says my word is certain, everything I say
is one true, and the word of man is what's
in doubt. So we have to reorient our starting points.
Our assumptions are presubsitions, and that's what we're going to
talk about.
Speaker 3: Revelation revealed.
Speaker 2: We're not the Book of Revelation, but the concept of
revelation revealed authority as our starting point as theists, as
Orthodox and when we do that, then we begin to
understand that creation, that.
Speaker 3: Those are revealed doctrines.
Speaker 2: You see, it's no, it's not by accident. That it's
not chance that atheists and pagans and all the other
creepo weirdos out there, it's not. It's not accidental that
they'd never come to believe in creation. No, they always
deny it. Why is that because they believe in philosophic
schemes and systems or pagan religious schemes and systems, and
so they don't believe in the concept of special revealed revelation.
That's one another one of the key factors of our worldview.
We do believe that, so in our conception, creation is
a unique revealed doctrine. Did you catch me there? See,
we're not Tomass. We don't believe that you reason back
to a generic first cause. You can talk about a
first cause and you can say that it's God.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's fine.
Speaker 2: Church fathers do that at times, but they don't teach
that you can reason back and come to the conclusion
that there was just some special creative act that God
created ex nilo. That's revealed. That's why Hebrews says, by
faith we believe that the worlds were created by the
command of God. Now, when he says that, and when
Hebrews eleven talks about the chapter faith in Abraham, by
faith went out, a lot of people have this mistaken
view that that means that it was all done against reason. Okay,
this is the Pietist error, the Pietist heresy. The Church
fathers do not teach Pietism. Now some of them do,
but guess what. Tertullian is not a saint, He's not Orthodox.
Tertullian taught that there is a vast divide between faith
and reason, and never the twain shall meet.
Speaker 3: For Tertullian, Jerusalem.
Speaker 2: Represents faith, Greece represents reason. They are eternal enemies. Tertullian's
a heretic. Okay, Now he's useful in his early Patristic testimony.
But we don't go to Tertullian to try to devise
what the proper conception of you know, philosophy and science
and worldview is. Okay, but many people who mean, well,
you know, will come to to believe that. Well, science
and reason, logic, that's the domain over there of the unbeliever.
That's what they do.
Speaker 3: They do that stuff. We believe.
Speaker 2: Faith we have we got we got our faith over here.
Speaker 3: We just take a leap.
Speaker 2: Now, what's the problem with this, Well, first of all,
the tens of thousands of pages of the writings of
the Church Fathers presuppose that the usage of logic and
argumentation is sufficient to refute heretics, to show them to
be inconsistent. The entire discourse of a thousand years of
Church Fathers presupposes that it is possible to refute heresies
so that people can know which which ones are false,
in which ones to avoid. Why would Saint Gregor I
Nissa write a thousand page book going into the nth
degree dissecting Unomius if it was not possible to utilize
logic and logical principles to refute heretics. This is obvious,
This is basic. I shouldn't have to explain this to
other Christians and Orthodox people.
Speaker 3: It should be obvious to you.
Speaker 2: How can Paul write epistles that use logic and argumentation?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: When Paul talks about heresies.
Speaker 2: When Paul talks about the errors of the Judaizers, When
Paul talks about the errors of the Greeks, he's using
logical principles to point out contradictions, to point out mistakes,
to point out how you shouldn't believe that.
Speaker 3: That's all part and parcel of logic. Logic is a
tool being used. There.
Speaker 2: Even Saint Gregory Palomas himself, who has basically little to
no use for Greek philosophy, which is fine because he
says it's mostly demonic. He says, but even still, when
I argue my theological positions, I'm still using a logical process. Obviously,
come on, this is not even debatable. So the kind
of throwaway lines that maybe sincere people have or use, like, well,
we believe in faith, we don't believe in reason. Oh,
you're using logic that this is what pietists. If you
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This is what spiritual virtue signalers do, and this is
what sometimes well meaning people do.
Speaker 3: But they're wrong.
Speaker 2: They're all wrong.
Speaker 3: They're completely wrong. They are.
Speaker 2: Completely against everything in.
Speaker 3: The Church Fathers.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you read on the Orthodox Faith, Saint
John Damascus and his Fount of Knowledge, he goes through Plato,
he goes through Aristotle, he goes through the writings to
the Church Fathers prior to him, because he's writing in
the eighth century, and it's a vast trove of good
and bad in the Classics and the Fathers in logic
and he uses a transcendental argument at the beginning of
found knowledge. Okay, that's why I'm doing this right, because
I know that I'm not the only person to do this.
Speaker 3: He does it. I know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: So you're doing yourself a disservice. Here is the point
when you approach apologetics from the vantage point of, on
the one hand, the era of Pietism, that you shouldn't
do it.
Speaker 3: Don't. Oh well, now wait a minute, church fathers do it.
They argue with atheists.
Speaker 2: I mean, we just did a talk on sant Anthonatius
against the Heathen. He critiques Heathenism there as atheistic. He
does a presuppositional critique of Heathenism, and he shows how
many Gods is self refuting and contradictory. That's a presubositional
system wide coherence theory critique. And against the Heathen I
did a whole talk on it. You see what I
am doing is what they do. I'm doing the exact
same things that they did. And when the people say
you don't need to do that, don't do apologetics. That's
what protests do, That's what Catholics do. They're wrong, they're
completely wrong.
Speaker 3: Most of the time.
Speaker 2: They're acumenus anyway, Let's say that, and they're counting on
you being ignorant and you not looking to see what
the church brothers actually teach. Let's read some of these
super chats before we move into the more philosophical section
out of the theology into stuff that I was talking
about before.
Speaker 3: Would you ever debate Walter Block?
Speaker 2: Dan Man? Two dollars?
Speaker 3: Thank you Dan for that.
Speaker 2: Of course, I'll debate anybody who has a significant name,
but there's no way that do whatever. Debate me again?
The people who always talk about the big name people.
Why want you debate Sam Harris? Why I want you
to debate Stefan muling you. I will debate any of them.
They will not debate me. First of all, they probably
haven't heard of it. I know Steffan Mollin who's heard
of me, but he's not going.
Speaker 3: To debate me because there's no incentive.
Speaker 2: No popular person is going to debate a lesser known person.
There's no incentive. Why would they. They have everything to
lose by doing the debate and nothing to gain. What
are they gained by debating some guy with you know,
thirty thousand followers?
Speaker 3: On YouTube in a book on Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Right from their advantage point, it's like, what, you know, what,
why would I debate this guy when I can go
debate you know, Jordan Peterson or whoever and get a
million people watching it.
Speaker 3: There's no incentive to debate me.
Speaker 2: Now, maybe in ten years if I grow my channel
to you know, if I'm not you know, destroyed from
Internet or something, if at the Internet and all this
is still around or whatever, the world hasn't collapsed into
mad Max or something, maybe then big name people would debate.
Probably not by the way, but of course I would
debate any these people, but they're not going to debate me.
But okay, So Sylvia, Sylvain Duran. What happened to Pharrell?
Doctor Farrell we all know? Of course, at one time
wrote some pretty powerful Orthodox books such as Free Choice
in Maximus Confessor Great Book and God Who's from Drialectic
Great four part series, and eventually decided that he no
longer believed orthodoxy. So he decided that the conception of
God in the Old Testament does not comport with the
God of the New Testament. That's in his book on Yahweh.
With that, Scott de Han guy, and I take it
doctor Farrell believes in some aspect of Platonism or something
to that effect. So that is what doctor Ferrel believes. However,
we still think his Orthodox books are good because they
are Eric Jule five dollars any comments on the Eastern Dow.
I know Father Rose covers us.
Speaker 4: You know what.
Speaker 3: I was at.
Speaker 2: An Orthodox book store the other day and I was like,
almost gonna buy it, and then I thought, you know what,
I'm not going to. This bookstore was under the Greeks,
so I was like, I'm not going to give them
any money. So yeah, I will eventually get to that book, Eric,
I promise you it will also finish Genesis, Creation and
Early Man by Father Rose. But yeah, it's just so
much stuff going and haven't got it. Haven't got today yet.
By the way, I did get a message from the
publisher and the printer the book will be I'm supposed
to get my book by the twelfth or thirteenth, fourteenth
maybe so hopefully by December thirteenth or fourteenth, be able
to start selling and shipping out as Kirk Calaywood two.
But as it refers to the two basically, yes, the
idea what I was talking about earlier with looking for
all encompassing principles.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's what the.
Speaker 2: Religions are seeking for the world. Religions, they're all doing
the same thing. They're all oftentimes not always, but at
points starting to realize, you know, by philosophic reflection, how
do we relate all things to one another? How do
we make sensible connection between, for example, things in the
past and things in the present and things in the future.
What meaningful connector connects those things? In other words, we
assume that events that happened in our past inform our
understanding of the presence, and we assume that that will
continue into the future. But on what basis do we
actually know that there is such a meaningful connection between
meaning in the past and the present in the future.
This is a philosophic question, right, It's a question of
epistemology and metaphysics. It's a question that we presuppose when
we dialogue and debate and reason about the world. We
just assume that our past impressions and reflections and experiences
were meaningful and that they connect meaningfully to our present understanding.
But we cannot empirically justify that.
Speaker 3: Of course, we can't. How could you?
Speaker 2: By its very nature, it's not empirically verifiable, And no
recording the past does not solve the dilemma, just moves
the problem back a stead This is what the naive
empiricists will always just say, Well, just watch a tape recorder,
No dummy, that's that just moves a problem back astute.
Speaker 3: But yes, so.
Speaker 2: The Eastern philosophies when they talk about the dow are
essentially looking for the logos. They're looking for the meaningful connector,
the logic behind things, the meaning behind things, the logoi
of the world, the logic of things, the meaning of things,
the essence of things, the archetypes of things, the patterns
of things. And that's not Carl Jung's archetypes totally different.
So no Jordan Peterson here, no Jonathan Pago here.
Speaker 3: Uh, where are we at? Lawrence Valen nag five dollars?
Speaker 2: How can one told between having a personal raceship with
God and having delusion delusion about it? Ooh, that's a
good question. Yes, now that's a great question. Now I
would say two things on this. The first is, yes,
there is such a thing. As I just pulled up
this article, let me find it again here. I think
I shared it on Twitter. I can just pull it
off there. So you know, if you get into orthodox
you'll hear this concept of prelst right. So essentially you're
asking a question that relates to prelst, which is the
idea of.
Speaker 3: How do I know?
Speaker 2: I'll put this in the the description below here, I'll
put this in the links so you can link this
from Orthodox England.
Speaker 3: How do you know that you know?
Speaker 2: How do you know? I'm just adding the link here
real quick. I think if I don't add the links
while i'm doing it, I'll forget. So let's do the
pre last link. So preless is just delusion. It's illusion, right,
spiritual delusion. And most of the time it relates to
people who convert or come to Christ, come to Orthodoxy, whatever,
But it could apply outside of Orthodoxy because people convert
sincerely and they don't know about Orthodoxy, right. I didn't
know about Orthodoxy for a long time, but I sincerely
believed in Christ and I believed the Bible, but I
didn't know what Orthodoxy was. So that is a good
little basic essay on that question of just kind of
like how people have a tendency to become prideful, and
they'll get very super spiritual and self righteous. And it's
something that everybody goes through. Every new goes through this.
Everybody does this, and it's just something that you have to.
Speaker 3: Live through.
Speaker 2: Right now, we shouldn't ever lose our zeal, but everybody
does go through, you know, stages of pride and arrogance
and being humbled. This is part of the Christian experience.
This is why Paul says, don't ordain a new convert
because they're puffed up, right. Paul tells Timothy this, and
this is why many.
Speaker 3: People make the mistake. I would have made the mistake.
Speaker 2: If I had become Orthodox ten years ago. Or they
start trying to teach stuff as a new convert. They
don't know what they're talking about. And they'll talk about
logoi and stuff and archetypes and Carl Young and they
don't know what they're talking about. But you have to,
especially if you're coming from a like a Protestant Church
or Roman Catholicism. It takes a long time to have
a lot of the Western legal assumptions kind of filtered
out of you. You have to kind of grow out
of that stuff, and a lot of people said that
a long time ago, and I was like, I don't know,
what are you talking about?
Speaker 3: Like what's wrong with you?
Speaker 6: Know?
Speaker 2: But it's just a process that we all go through
and it is real. So part of what you're asking
in this question Lawrence is personal and mystical. So I
can't fully give you like a perfect explanation of how
you will know whether or not you are in a
relationship with God or whether or not you're under prelest
or delusion, but you will know. Also, the Fathers tell
us that we don't go by This is another mistake
that people make early on, and it's described many times
in the Philocalia under prelst as well, which is being
falling into the trap of following dreams and mystical experiences. Now,
they're can be dreams of mystical experiences from God. But
the reason most of the Fathers warn about that stuff
is because it can easily lead to prelist and delusion.
You will think that you are something you're not. So
if we're following mystical feelings and following around what we
think are miracles and miraculous experiences, I'm not saying there
aren't miracles I'm just saying you have to beware of
not falling for the experience itself at the expense of
the you know, continual seeking and worshping of God. So
there's all kinds of mistakes like this that we all
will We all will make these mistakes, but we just
have to quit doing it right. So it's a lifelong battle.
In other words, it's not something that you're going to
like suddenly cure overnight or something. But another reason that
we know, way that we know is to know to
know the dogmas right. So there's you can err on
the side of Pietism and think that, oh, I don't
do dogmas because that's like you know what Pharisees do,
and I'm just going to be a Pietist. That's an error,
that's a delusion. There's a reason for dogma, but there's
also a reason for piety and worship. You gotta have both.
Speaker 3: You gotta have.
Speaker 2: Uh, you gotta have the lamp and the flame and
the oil, right, like Jesus says in the Parallel of
the Virgins, Like if you just have the lamp, right, like, oh,
I've got the doctrines here, but you don't have the
love and the zeal.
Speaker 3: And you don't have the oil, right, you.
Speaker 2: Can't have the zeal without knowledge, like Pulses Paul says,
when I was at Pharisee, I had zeal without knowledge.
I didn't know what I was doing. I was an idiot,
but I was zealous. So it requires both. We want
to strive both for uh correct doctrine and for correct living,
correct zeal. This is why we have dogmas. Right, Dogmas
let us know the limits and the boundaries. Dogmas don't
define God per se, like God is an experiment or
a chemical reaction formula or something. But they do give
us boundaries and guidelines. So God is not enclosed within
the niceing creed. Right, He's not bound by being trapped
in some creed or something, but rather the niceing Creed
is a list of boundaries and a scope by which
we can understand the basics of the Church. So, on
one hand, I can't answer for you specifically, because you
are you, and your experience of God is existential, It
is personal, and if you go down the route of
truly seeking God, Jesus says, I know mine and mine, mine,
mine are the line and mine know me. Right, my
sheep know me, and they hear my voice, you will
be led into truth. Right, Jesus promises the spirit to
lead us into truth. Then, obviously, in the context of
the church, is not like a Protestant type thing where
it's like, well, it's just me and the.
Speaker 3: Spirit and I come up with whatever I want.
Speaker 2: So anyway, that's the best I could answer on that question,
because I cannot speak of.
Speaker 3: Your personal experience.
Speaker 2: But I would say that most of the time, and
what many of the Fathers would say is that if
you have delusion, delusion leads to error and arrogance. Right,
So most of the time, real spiritual experiences are distinguished
from fake ones by whether they produce humility or not. So,
for example, if somebody claims that they're having all these
maybe spiritual experiences or something, and then they come away
from these experiences like super prideful, like for example, a
lot of people who trip acid, they will think that
they've solved the world and that they've seen insight into
all this, and they just rehash ancient paganism. Those are delusions,
Those are demonic delusion experiences. They are not achieving real enlightenment.
They might see some aspect of you know, metaphysics or
the spiritual realm. But so what the demons know the
spiritual realm? Right? So it's like James says, the demons
no doctrines, but they don't have love. They don't love God.
So what does it matter if you know all the
doctrines but you don't love God? Right, Same with pharisees.
Speaker 3: So in the same.
Speaker 2: Way, true spiritual experiences produce a change and they produce humility.
False ones produce delusion and arrogance. A one, two, three, B, four,
five six. What is the relationship between dogmen and reason?
Great question, that's kind of what we've we've been sort
of sketching out on the outlines here. There's not a
real simple question to this because, on the one hand,
reason is the domain of human discourse, human differentiation. It's
a human faculty. This is another reason why we can't
say reason is evil. The reason is the gift of God. Logic, reason,
these are tools that God gave. They're not inherently bad,
they're not inherently evil, they're not something that we should
cast away. At the same time, we can't exalt reason
to being a goddess like the French revolutionaries did, right
they've viewed reason as a goddess. So when we understand
putting reason and logic in their proper place. Right in
the Orthodox view, reason is fine about reasoning about the world,
reasoning about math, logic. We all engage in a reason.
When we read scripture, we're utilizing reason. I was just
making the argument a minute ago about that when the
church fathers argue with heretics, they're utilizing logic and reason
throughout the process. It's presupposed, it's assumed. It's assumed. Right,
when you're arguing that the heretics contradict themselves, you're assuming
that you shouldn't contradict.
Speaker 3: It's just obvious.
Speaker 2: So reason is everywhere in this process. However, we don't
say that the dogmas of the faith are irrational, right,
That would be kind of foolish. We say they are
supra rational. So, for example, we wouldn't say that we're
a platonist because we don't collapse logic and number theory
into God to the extent that we think that God
is logic. Right, this is what some Protestant apologists do.
They will try to equate logos and logic. By the way,
I kind of think e Michael Jones does this too,
like he equates human logic with the logos Jesus.
Speaker 3: That's not the same thing. They don't