← The Lord of Spirits
The Lord of Spirits
Who Stole the Soul?
What is a soul? Do you have one? Are you one? Do dogs and oak trees have them? Are they made of rubber? What happens to the soul when the body dies? Join Fr. Stephen and Fr. Andrew as they talk about the Biblical understanding of the soul.
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Transcript1,239 lines
- [00:00]
A
He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.
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B
Hey everybody. Welcome back. Good evening all of you giant killers and dragon slayers, but not werewolf hunters. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co Host, Father Stephen DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in the borough of Emmaus, Pennsylvania. If you're listening to us live, you can call at 855-A-F R A D I O 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudy is taking those calls tonight and we're gonna get to those in the second part of the show tonight, we're gonna be talking about the soul. What is it really?
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C
Yeah, what's up with that?
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B
Yeah, what is up with that?
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This is one of those words that gets used a lot by Christians all the time, but often without a clear sense of what it is or even how the way that we use the word has been deeply influenced by non Christian philosophies. So how is the soul actually understood in the scriptures? And how different is that from the common conception? So that's what we're going to be talking about tonight. I'm not sure if you're going to walk away feeling like your mind is more bent or a little bit clearer, but I guess we'll just see what happens.
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C
So, number one, bro, you didn't even. Christ is risen.
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B
Oh, that's true. Christ is risen. I was.
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C
Some kind of card revoked.
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B
Listening after the ascension.
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C
Some kind of card revoked.
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B
Christ is risen. He truly is risen.
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C
Anyway.
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I'm actually.
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B
And we're not even 30 seconds into the show.
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C
Yes. Yes.
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Yeah. In Terms of the title of the show, it was either this or how do you sell soul to a soulless nation that sold its soul and that has decidedly less pith.
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As sub references go.
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B
Yeah. Won't show on all displays so people can actually read it all.
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C
Yeah, people just get confused. We went with non confusing with the current title.
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Yes. So, yeah. And as you mentioned.
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Certain of this, certain episodes of this program can be slightly brain breaking.
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This is probably going to be one of them.
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B
Yeah.
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C
But back when we did the.
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Unctuous episode about the sacrament of unction, in the first of the three halves of the program, we talked a little bit about the soul. And.
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Some of the response we got was.
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B
Exactly like that, too. Like we got emails that just had.
- [04:00]
C
That one word, no, not yes, spelled the same way. Everyone who sent it too. That's what was really amazing.
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And so basically we're going to take all three halves of this episode to try to break, revisit that and break that down in some more detail, because we did. And this is sort of the. We'll call it the conclusion of a planned trilogy, even though we're stretching the definition of planned a little there.
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Anytime it's used regarding me, the definition of the word planned is stretched. But.
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With our episode on the noose and our episode on what is a spirit, this is sort of the what is a soul episode. And so if you found those other two I just mentioned, a little brain breaking, that's what we're talking about tonight.
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B
Right. And I'll add this, which is.
- [05:02]
You know, I like to look up etymology to see if possibly that sheds some kind of light on what we're discussing. But the truth is that the English word soul, it comes from Old English, it heads all the way back to a proto Indo European word that literally means exactly the same thing the whole time. Like, it is a persistent word that has always meant this, which is pretty rare, but as a result sheds no.
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C
Light on how the word is meant anything whatsoever. Yeah.
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B
Changed over time.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're even going to see that there's a. When we talk about, for example, the Hebrew and thereby the Semitic in general term for soul, because it's. I mean, it's the same trilateral root, it's the same consonants in Syriac, Arabic, everything.
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B
Yeah, right.
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C
And the Greek word have a huge amount of overlap in their.
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Respective lexical domains.
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B
And we'll talk about that.
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C
So there is just sort of. There is a word for this. Right. And this is it.
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Yeah. So we're going to start, as is our want, at the beginning of the book of Genesis.
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And this is part of where we started back in the aforementioned episode where we started talking about this a little.
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And this is with. Even though this isn't the first time the word.
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That'S translated, soul, appears, this is where we're going to start. And then we're going to back up almost immediately and pick up the previous one. But in Genesis 2, verse 7, we read about the creation of Adam. Right. The creation of man. He's formed from the dust of the earth. And then.
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And then it says, sorry, pregnant pause for dramatic effect.
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B
I know. It's like, wait, is he, like, stage managing me or. I don't know. And suddenly Genesis 2. 7. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. That's how the ESV does it.
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C
Yeah. And it's literally a living soul.
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B
Right.
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C
Nefesh chaya. Right. So.
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Notice the language here, though, right? The language is not what we might expect based on the way we typically talk about what a soul is in our culture, in that you have this body made of mud, dirt.
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B
Right.
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C
And then breath is breathed into his nostrils and he becomes.
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A living soul.
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B
Yeah. Rather than the idea of, okay, here's this soulless body and God makes a soul and puts it inside, which I think is the way that people tend to think of it.
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C
Right, Right. Or they might say, well, breath. Breath is spirit. Right? Breath, soul. Right. He's breathing the soul into the body.
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B
Right, Right.
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C
But again, that's not how it's phrased. Right. That's not how it's phrased. So the soul.
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B
Right.
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C
As we've said before, when we've just shorthand defined it, the soul is the life of a living being.
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So what's really being conveyed here in Genesis 2:7 is that once the breath of life is breathed into the body made of dirt, Right. It becomes alive, it becomes animated, which. The Latin word for anima.
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B
Yeah, Right.
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C
The Latin soul is anima. So it becomes ensouled, it becomes alive.
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B
Right.
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C
He becomes alive.
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So that means.
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That when we're talking about the soul, what we're doing is we're talking about we have some living entity, be it a human or something else that is alive. And we're talking about that life.
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B
Right?
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C
We're talking about the life. And while you say, right, you can't separate that out. You can't quantify that. Right. You can't. Despite many efforts in the late 19th and early 20th century, where they would weigh bodies of dying people to see if they could determine how much the soul weighed after.
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B
I know, I love that stuff.
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C
Right.
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That's not something you can separate and section off. Right. In a scientific way, but at the same time, right. If you've. If you've ever watched a person die, which in our modern society, a lot of people who aren't priests haven't.
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But if you've ever had to put a pet down, right. If you've ever watched something that was alive die, you know that there's a palpable difference.
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Between that being the moment before and the moment after.
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B
Yeah.
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C
A change has taken place, Right. The life that was there, that life is now gone.
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So even though we can't scientifically quantify it, we all know this experientially.
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Right? Experientially, we know that it is in some sense that the life, the soul.
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Is a thing, but not a thing in the sense we normally talk about it in material terms.
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So as we sort of briefly mentioned in passing, in terms of Genesis 2. 7, the Hebrew word for soul is nephesh.
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Those consonants, those three consonants are shared in every Semitic language I know of. That's as the word for soul.
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Vowels, of course, are different because words are vocalized differently in different Semitic languages, but the consonants are the same. And.
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The way it is used, because words, of course, have their meaning from usage, is when you survey sort of all the uses, that term available to us is that in addition to places where it's obviously talking about life and being alive, it is used to refer to desires and appetites.
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So that idea is deeply connected here at sort of the base level, from Akkadian on. In Switic languages, the idea of desiring, the idea of appetite and the idea of being alive.
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Right. So it may not be obvious how that applies to all kinds of creatures, Right. We've said before on the show everything alive has a soul, but there are different types of souls, right? So a tree has a soul, a dog has a soul, a human has a soul, but they're different kinds of souls.
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B
And.
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C
With a tree, right. It may not be obvious that a tree has appetites and desires, but of course, if you study.
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Plants, right. If you study them at all, you know that they do, right?
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B
Roots grow and. I mean, come on.
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C
Yeah. Roots grow toward water, Right, Right, right. And they've even done some crazy studies recently where if you play sounds of water on a tape, roots will grow.
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B
Toward it, which is weird. Like they don't have ears, but somehow.
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C
Yeah, yeah, Right. So roots grow toward water, leaves grow toward the sun to get sunlight.
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B
Right.
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C
So they do. Right. It's purely at the level of just nourishment, but it's there. Right. And animals, of course.
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Have those same kind of drives, plus some additional ones. Right. So, I mean, they're looking for nourishment, they're looking for food, they're looking for these things, but they're also looking to reproduce. And not only reproduce the way like plants reproduce themselves, but animals, especially as you get higher up, more, More advanced animals in terms of their socialization and social forms. They have social forms. Right. They will travel in packs, they will have hierarchies within those packs. They will mate for life, they will raise their young. Right. And so there are these other additional sort of desires and appetites as you move into the type of soul that an animal has. Right. And then, of course, when you get to a human, it becomes sort of all the more complex in terms of our desires and our. And our appetites and.
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How we relate to those. So it shouldn't totally shock us.
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If we learn a little Hebrew and we read Genesis 1, verse 20.
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And we.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. I mean, it uses the word souls to refer to things other than people.
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C
Yes. Specifically, God creates all the swarms of souls in the waters. It's referring to, like fish.
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B
Yeah. Is this the part where we say that birds don't have souls or.
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C
No, birds do have souls.
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B
Just kidding.
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C
Unless you think they aren't real.
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B
Yeah, there are people.
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C
Unless you think the CIA has killed them all and replaced them with drones.
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B
I think I have seen, like, theological arguments from Genesis 1:20 saying, you know, because it says. Right. It says this. And God said, let the water swarm with the swarms of living souls or creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. That they say. Well, see, it says water. The waters have souls in them, but the heavens don't. Doesn't say souls for birds. And there's a whole argument then saying that birds don't have souls, which. I don't know what the point of that is, but it's out there.
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I'm not kidding. I've seen this.
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C
No, I know, as David Hume said, there is no philosophy so absurd that someone has not held it.
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But yeah, yeah. And so when we're talking about a soul here, to an extent, we're talking about going beyond just the life of a living being. Here's another angle on it. We're talking about a kind of embodied desiring.
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B
Right.
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C
A kind of embodied desiring. And that embodied part is important because this isn't just body in the broad sense, the way we usually use it a lot on Northern spirits. This is body is in a biological body.
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Right. Biological body has a soul. So we don't talk about angelic beings having souls.
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B
Right, right, right.
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C
Angel souls. And if someone. I don't know who would do this, and I'm certainly not going to mention his name again because I've mentioned it enough. But if someone were to say that God is a tri. Personal, immaterial soul. Oh, wow, this would be a crazy person who should be a.
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I'll let people do their research on that one. But you can probably guess after last episode.
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B
So.
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C
Right. So that obviously doesn't make any sense. Christ has a human soul. But we'll get back to that later on, though not to the person.
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So we've also talked about.
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We did this briefly in the episode on Unction, how the way in which soul and spirit are sometimes distinguished and sometimes not.
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B
Yeah. Because like, for instance, sometimes even some of the church fathers describe humans as being body and soul. Some will describe them as being body, soul and spirit.
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C
Yes. And this has triggered in a lot of circles.
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And this is before the Internet is what's amazing to me, because usually this is the kind of argument that you only get on the Internet. But whether which one is right.
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B
Yes.
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C
Are humans bipartite or tripartite?
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Let's fight about it.
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And so that's kind of missing the point.
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B
Right.
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C
Because the truth is, humans are neither bipartite nor tripartite. Their holes. Right.
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And when we make these distinctions, we're doing exactly that. We're making distinctions in speech.
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Right. We're distinguishing, for example, the body from the soul. But as we just talked about back in Genesis 2:7, distinguishing Adam's soul from his body in the way in which those terms are used in that verse doesn't even make sense.
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B
Yeah. Because he becomes a living soul.
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C
Right.
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B
He doesn't get a soul is not added to him. You know, it's not included in him. He becomes a living soul.
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C
Right. And so we're distinguishing body and soul.
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In speech. And our primary basis for doing that is again, that experiential basis of us having encountered a dead body, which is a body without a soul.
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B
Yeah.
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C
A body without life in it.
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Right. And so we've labeled as soul that thing which is different between a living body and one which has died.
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But it's on that experiential basis that we make the distinction. Not that these are two separate things. Not that there's a ghost in the machine. Right. Or. Or, you know, your soul is in your skull and sort of piloting your body around using levers. Right.
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What was that, man? What was that Eddie Murphy movie? Was it Meet Dave?
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B
I never saw that one.
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C
Yeah, that was it. You shouldn't.
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B
Okay, good.
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C
Not only is it not Meet Dave, it's not even Herman's head, but anyway.
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B
Okay.
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So I did see Ghost in.
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C
The Cell though, the animated one.
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B
Yeah, yeah, okay.
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C
Okay. Yeah, I thought you meant the live action one. And I was like, seriously?
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B
Oh, yeah, that's. That's right, that did come out. I never know. Anyway, it was a disappointment, apparently.
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C
It was horrific.
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So. Yeah. So.
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Within that. Right. So that's the basis on which we distinguish between soul and body. Right. So what distinction is being made when someone distinguishes between soul and spirit?
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Right, right. Because a lot of times this seems to be used interchangeably. Right. Like at least in our speech, we'll say, you know, that someone's spirit has left their body when they die.
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Right. It just our common way of speaking. And so really what's going on when those are distinguished theologically, soul and spirit.
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Is. The soul is still being treated as the life of the body. But as we talked about in our episode about what a spirit is.
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A spirit is an organizing principle.
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Of a being or of a collective.
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B
Right.
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C
It is sort of the consciousness, that level that organizes it. And so distinguishing between soul and spirit is really distinguishing between these two aspects, which we could just refer to as the soul. Right. Or we could refer to a person's spirit being that organizing principle that is of course, Right. Not actually separable from their soul. But I mean, is it like speak of differently?
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B
Is it like soul functioning in a certain way? I mean, is that. I mean, of course we're. Again, these are just sort of like distinctions in the mind.
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C
Right, right. It's sort of a power of the soul.
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B
Okay, yeah, Right.
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C
So you've got life itself and then life as organizing principle.
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B
Gotcha.
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Right.
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C
And so.
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Yeah, and that element of the soul is also something that we know experientially.
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Because if you have seen a dead body of anything that was once alive.
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B
Right.
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C
It doesn't have to be a human body, an animal body. Right. Even a dead plant, what immediately happens, in addition to that change that we see where the life is gone. Right. That body also begins to break down and decay.
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B
Yeah, right, right.
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C
When Adam died, his body went back to the dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Right. Went back to the component parts because the life leaving also took away the organizing principle of the body.
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B
So it disintegrates then.
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C
Yes.
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B
And I think it'd be useful. Like, we might be tempted to try to analogize this to DNA, which is this encoding, of course, that tells everything in the body how to grow and all the other things. DNA does.
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C
But I thought Noah took DNA from all the species on Earth onto his space ark.
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B
That was Titan ae.
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C
Oh, sorry. Okay, never mind.
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B
That was another good animated film, actually. I really liked Titan ae. It had. It was a fun movie, but it also had really a really good soundtrack. So much more.
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C
Not as good as the Transformers movie, but it's true.
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B
The original one with Daredevil.
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C
Yes. You've got the touch, you've got the power.
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B
Weird Al. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, DNA, right. It's kind of a encoding, but it's not.
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It doesn't have any sort of agency or consciousness or, you know, it's. It's code.
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C
Well, and also ancient people didn't know it existed.
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B
Right, Exactly. Yeah. And then. And then they're not talking about it. Yeah. And. Well, then the other thing is like that the human soul as spirit.
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Among other things, is not in charge of just the stuff that's definable by. By your DNA, but also by the other organisms inside you that have different DNA, but nonetheless form part of your.
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C
Body, you as a collective organism.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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C
When you're standing there talking to someone, your gut flora is chemically communicating with the gut flora of the person you're talking to.
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B
You know, that doesn't feel any less gross than the first time you said that on this.
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C
Yeah, yeah. But just think about it next time you're standing out on the street in a big.
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B
Trying not to.
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Hey, what you talking about there, guys?
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But. Yeah, right. So, yeah, not DNA. Although certain analogy could be drawn, but it doesn't go very far.
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C
Yeah, yeah. And so when you have other places where that distinction between soul and spirit isn't made. Right. That distinction is just not being made.
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B
Right.
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C
It's like we could distinguish between. And sometimes the fathers will do this when they're using the sun as an analogy for the Trinity. And all analogies for the Holy Trinity are bad analogies de facto. Right. Because you're comparing the uncreated to a created being. But.
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They'Ll talk about.
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The. A sun ray, the light of that ray, and the heat of that ray. Yeah, right. We could talk about those separately, but those aren't like three separate things, like bundled together into a sunbeam.
- [26:47]
B
Right.
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C
Like, like that you could actually divide.
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B
Out, include the light.
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C
Yes.
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So.
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And don't come at me with this tinted windows thing. Right. Like that. You, you know, that's not what we're talking about anyway.
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So that, that's what's going on with that distinction. There's another distinction that we do need to make, right. Way back in the long ago time, in the before time when the grupps were here.
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We talked about the nous.
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And we talked about consciousness and we talked about.
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What that means. And so we need to distinguish that faculty of the nous from the soul. They're not the same thing.
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And in terms of the Hebrew Bible, in the second half, we're going to talk more about Greek. But in the Hebrew Bible there's not really a word for nous in Hebrew.
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B
Does that mean that Hebrews didn't have nooses?
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C
No, they had minds.
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But you find other words, often heart.
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In other words used to talk about the kind of thing.
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That is spoken of in Greek through.
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Nous.
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And so an example where you can see that is right back in Deuteronomy 11:13, it talks about loving the Lord with all your heart, soul and strength. Okay, People familiar with the New Testament probably already noticed something missing. Luke 10, verse 27 adds Dionia, which is what gets translated as mind. And the root word there with the ah as a preposition in front of it is nous.
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B
But Deuteronomy 11, it has no mind.
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C
So I guess you don't have to love God with all your mind, you could just do the other things.
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B
Hey, look.
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C
And your mind could wander.
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B
If you can make original series references, so could I.
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C
So.
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Brain, brain. What is brain anyway?
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So.
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Clearly, right? And no one like argues in Luke 10:27, nobody like argues with Christ. It's like, wait a minute, you added something, right?
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Because very clearly it's talking about loving the Lord your God with your whole person, right? And so using in Greek language, in Greek terminology, that is part of your person, right? And so that's why it gets included when the same idea is being expressed, right, in Greek. So if there isn't a word for it, how is this distinction expressed back in the Hebrew Bible? Well, there are all of these places in the Old Testament and plenty more in orthodox hypnography, but a lot of them in the Old Testament where you will see the soul being addressed, it will say, oh, my soul.
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So who's talking.
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B
Right, right.
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C
So clearly in this picture.
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The I who is addressing the soul is not the soul.
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B
Yeah.
- [30:50]
C
Because otherwise it would be like I said to myself, self.
- [30:53]
B
Right, right, exactly.
- [30:55]
C
Go in. Right.
- [30:58]
So that's not what's being addressed. Right. And sort of exhibit A of that, that if you go to an Orthodox church for matins, and you should go to matins best services, really, in the six Psalms at the beginning, One of the psalms we read is Psalm 103 or Psalm 102 in the Greek numbering, which begins, bless the Lord, O my soul.
- [31:24]
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Right.
- [31:28]
So this is the. The. This unidentified speaker. Right? Unidentified. At least in the. In the text. Right. Speaking to his own soul.
- [31:43]
And so for a little bit of Noose review, not to be confused with the New Zoo Review.
- [31:52]
When we talked about the noose, and you can go back and listen to that episode again, but we talked about how ultimately the noose is a sensory organ that the mind has a point of attention that it can direct various ways, and a person can directly that point of attention at their own soul.
- [32:17]
At the life of their body, at this embodied desiring that is within them.
- [32:24]
And speak to it.
- [32:28]
And we're coming off of great Lent and Holy Week in Pascha.
- [32:36]
If you were around for the Great Canon of St Andrew, all or any part of it, you heard a lot of this.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah. Like the Kentuckian especially, you know.
- [32:46]
C
Yeah. Oh, my soul. Oh, my soul. And talking to it specifically about its desires.
- [32:55]
B
Right.
- [32:55]
C
Its desires, its appetites.
- [32:59]
And what it was, what it was acting upon. Right. And so.
- [33:07]
As we talked about back in that episode.
- [33:12]
We'Re talking about new. So we're talking about our understanding of consciousness. There is this older understanding. And by older, I mean.
- [33:22]
In Western philosophy, shall we say, if that's Western, anything is kind of a bogus category, other than maybe Western Christianity. And even that's iffy. Western films, Westerns, definitely iffy.
- [33:42]
Yeah. Like, what is the line between country and western? Right. I mean, is that not a dotted line? Anyway.
- [33:49]
B
Here we got both kinds of music, country and Western.
- [33:52]
C
Yes. Soul, rock and roll. Coming like a rhino. Anyway.
- [33:59]
So there's this older view. I mean, even up to Hegel, who thought animals were basically like machines.
- [34:06]
That consciousness is like a light switch. Right. On, off, binary thing, have it or so humans, the lights are on. It's like something to be a human. Pretty much everything else, lights are off. It's not like anything. There's no awareness. There's no consciousness. There's no. Nothing.
- [34:26]
B
Right.
- [34:28]
C
And you even. You even see this reflected in man. We're having a heavy Star Trek night, Right. You go watch Measure of a Man, right? And it's, you know, is Data conscious?
- [34:46]
B
Yes. Right.
- [34:47]
C
That's like the whole debate.
- [34:49]
B
Yeah.
- [34:49]
C
Is he conscious? Is he said? What does that mean?
- [34:54]
Right. They're arguing whether the lights are on or the lights are off.
- [34:58]
B
Yeah.
- [34:58]
C
Right. Is it like something to be him? Well, obviously it is.
- [35:05]
Right. This is. This is one of the problems with all these arguments about AI everybody's having now. What happens when computers become aware? When they become conscious? That happened a long time ago. Your graphing calculator had a very low level of consciousness because as we talked about in that other episode.
- [35:26]
All consciousness is. Consciousness is on a continuum.
- [35:31]
And it arises within any ordered system through which information is transferred.
- [35:40]
B
Right.
- [35:40]
C
That doesn't mean it's all human consciousness.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah.
- [35:44]
C
We're back to what is it like to be a bat?
- [35:46]
B
We actually had someone in on YouTube, ask.
- [35:50]
Is AI a spirit? And becomes a soul? Maybe he means it the other way. If uploaded into a robot body.
- [36:00]
C
So unless it's in a biological body, it will never be a soul.
- [36:05]
B
There you go.
- [36:06]
C
Unless you found a way to create something that would serve as. Would serve to give life to a biological organism.
- [36:15]
Which. Right. Like, that's not even like a trajectory we're on.
- [36:20]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:22]
C
Right. Someone else, like, someone else creating a soul.
- [36:24]
B
Someone else asks. Is asking ChatGPT a question? The sin of divination?
- [36:31]
C
No.
- [36:32]
No. Because if it were, then typing a math problem into a calculator would be divination.
- [36:38]
B
Yeah. Or Googling.
- [36:40]
C
Yes.
- [36:42]
B
Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, there's. I don't think we have enough to do a whole episode on AI, But, I mean, there's been a whole lot.
- [36:49]
C
Or would I want to.
- [36:50]
B
We've been interacting with for a long time, everybody. Like, just because there's ChatGPT now doesn't mean suddenly there's AI.
- [36:57]
C
Yes. And your computer is conscious at a very low level.
- [37:01]
B
Right.
- [37:01]
C
The tectonic activity of the Earth is transferring information. The Earth itself has a very low level of consciousness. Atoms have a very low level of consciousness.
- [37:10]
B
I saw that in Avatar.
- [37:12]
C
It's not a human consciousness. Right. We're not saying they're human. That's what everybody jumps to. Right. Like, oh, well, you're saying, like, it's got a human personality in it. Edited it. Right. You don't know what it's like to be a bat, but it's like something.
- [37:27]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:28]
C
The lights are on somebody's home.
- [37:30]
B
Right.
- [37:30]
C
But that somebody isn't a human.
- [37:35]
B
Right.
- [37:35]
C
But it experiences the world. It processes information. It has memories, it forms plans. It communicates. Right.
- [37:45]
B
It's conscious.
- [37:46]
C
Right. There's a thing. And so artificial consciousness, as soon as we started making machines that could process information. See, we process information. They had some low level of consciousness.
- [38:03]
They're not biologically alive and they're not humans.
- [38:06]
B
And they don't have souls.
- [38:07]
C
And they don't have souls because they're not biological life forms.
- [38:13]
And don't come at me with this Picard Season 3 stuff, because that's a whole other.
- [38:17]
B
I still haven't watched.
- [38:19]
C
Yes. And I'm not spoiling everything for Father Andrew, so let's start with that.
- [38:23]
B
Yeah, thank you. I probably will watch it, but I mean, I am. My takeaway from this, though, is Data is conscious but does not have a soul.
- [38:31]
C
Yes.
- [38:32]
B
Okay, there's. Here we go, everybody.
- [38:35]
C
Yes. Because it's not biological. That's what we mean by soul. Yeah, Right.
- [38:42]
Technically, angels and demons are conscious and don't have souls.
- [38:46]
B
Soulless minions of. What is it?
- [38:51]
Soulless minions of something. I have to look.
- [38:53]
C
And that has to be. They're not intelligent. And it doesn't mean they don't have free will. Anyway.
- [39:00]
B
That'S soulless minions of orthodoxy, which is a Deep Space Nine reference.
- [39:07]
C
It is a Star Trek heavy night. Sorry, people.
- [39:09]
B
It's true. It's true. Completely unplanned. Like this wasn't in the script.
- [39:13]
C
Yes, no. And unprovoked and unwarranted. But it's happening.
- [39:20]
B
So.
- [39:21]
C
Yeah, so consciousness, awareness, are this spectrum.
- [39:25]
Right. So.
- [39:28]
And that means that effectively noasis, which is the property of the noose. Right. Is something that exists in other forms, in other forms of life besides humans, but again, not in the same way.
- [39:45]
So there is a unique connection and a unique type of soul. We're going to get into this more in the second half that a human has that is unique and different as we go on and get further and deeper into our definition of what a soul is. That is different than that of any other living thing in creation.
- [40:10]
And that is for a reason.
- [40:14]
Because remember, humanity is formed in the image of God. Humanity is created to continue the creative work of God, which is to put the creation in order and fill it with life.
- [40:30]
That includes other living things in creation. That includes animals. That includes plants.
- [40:38]
Plants and animals are linked. They also eat each other. But.
- [40:44]
That we put them in order and we Foster that life. This is why, as we've talked about before, the garden is sort of the perfect image of this. A garden is in order, right? It is in good order, but that good order has not produced sterility. Rather, that good order has allowed the life within the garden to flourish.
- [41:07]
So it's that perfect combination of the two. Right? And so when humanity is created and is sent to turn the world, originally to turn the world into a garden, into paradise, right? Part of that includes the world being humanized.
- [41:34]
The inhuman parts of the world being humanized by being put in order and being filled, filled with life. Plants being cultivated by humans, animals being domesticated by humans.
- [41:47]
And through those, they are transformed.
- [41:52]
We don't have time to go through all this here, but there are some good documentaries online about the history of wheat.
- [41:59]
B
Hmm.
- [42:00]
C
That may sound boring, but go find out what wild wheat looked like before human agriculture began on this planet.
- [42:09]
B
Well, even dogs like dogs. It's hard to believe that everything we call a dog is in fact the same species, but it sure is. I mean, Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas are.
- [42:22]
C
The same species and close to the same species as then they can interbreed with a wolf, Right?
- [42:29]
B
Right.
- [42:30]
C
Yeah, right. But they've been humanized.
- [42:33]
B
Yeah, right.
- [42:34]
C
Through. Through human intervention. And that's changed them and transformed them in ways that most of us consider positive.
- [42:44]
So.
- [42:46]
The rest of creation.
- [42:50]
Finds its fullest connection to God through humanity.
- [42:57]
Ideally. Right? But this is also why the fact that that's how creation can find its fulfillment is through humanity.
- [43:08]
And humanity finds its fulfillment in the humanity of Christ.
- [43:13]
That also means that when humans turn to sin and evil, right? As Adam found out, cursed is the ground because of you.
- [43:24]
That also has effects on the rest of creation.
- [43:29]
And can have the opposite effect of disorder, sterility. Right.
- [43:37]
On the rest of creation due to. Due to our sin. Because we form the rest of creation after ourselves.
- [43:46]
And if we're disconnected from God, then the rest of creation will be too, when we get done with it.
- [43:56]
So.
- [43:59]
If the soul is the life of a living being.
- [44:05]
And we've talked a little bit more about soul, but we have to also define the word life.
- [44:12]
B
Right?
- [44:14]
C
We've defined it in terms, in kind of negative experiential terms, right? Life is that thing that is gone when something dies. Right? But that's a negative definition, not a positive definition.
- [44:31]
It's sort of not being dead. It's the thing you lose when something dies.
- [44:38]
But we actually get from St. John in his Gospel a handy definition of what life is.
- [44:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is from Jesus prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.
- [44:54]
He says this in John 17:3. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
- [45:06]
C
Right.
- [45:08]
So there's your definition of life. Right. Life is knowing God the Father and knowing Jesus Christ.
- [45:20]
And you come to do the former through the latter. You come to know the Father by coming to know our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what life is. And so in the past, several times on Lord of Spirits, we've referred to St. John of Damascus's discussion of the difference between physical death and spiritual death. Right. So he says that physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. Right. The soul leaving the body, the life departs from the body, and spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God.
- [46:02]
B
Yeah. And that's way worse.
- [46:05]
C
Right? Way worse. But what we see in what Christ says here in St. John's Gospel is that then there is a corresponding distinction and connection between faith, physical life and spiritual life.
- [46:25]
So physical life is the connection. Right. The union of the soul with the body, a La Genesis 2, 7, where we started out.
- [46:35]
B
Right, right.
- [46:38]
C
That's physical life. And then that means that spiritual life is the connection of the soul to God.
- [46:50]
And as we've talked about when we talked about the distinction before.
- [46:55]
Spiritual death is the real death.
- [46:59]
Physical death is the result.
- [47:03]
Is the inevitable result of spiritual death.
- [47:06]
B
Yeah. And so if. Excuse me, if spiritual life is the connection of the soul with God, than, you know, what we see with God breathing into Adam and him becoming a living soul. What we're seeing there is Adam becoming alive and being connected with God kind of all at the same time.
- [47:26]
C
Right?
- [47:27]
B
Yeah.
- [47:28]
C
Right. It's the breath of God that's breathed into him.
- [47:32]
B
Yeah. Which is why, I mean, I've seen. I can't remember who now, but I've seen some, at least one father say, you know, man is body, soul and Holy Spirit to kind of express this idea about connection with God.
- [47:47]
C
Yes, yeah, yeah. And so.
- [47:52]
One of our definitions then here, if this is our definition of life, and if soul. If the soul of a living being is the life of the living being, then the soul represents the connection to God, of a living being through which it has physical, biological life. That means everything living is connected to God.
- [48:19]
Right. Not everything living is God is part of God. Right.
- [48:25]
B
It's not Avatar all over again, but.
- [48:28]
C
Is connected to God.
- [48:31]
And so this is why. This is why we see what we see about blood in the Bible.
- [48:42]
Starting in Genesis 9, right. So Genesis 9, the flood is over. Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives spill out of the ark, right? And God gives them permission to eat animals, to kill and eat animals for food. But immediately.
- [49:02]
Immediately.
- [49:05]
You can eat blood or drink blood.
- [49:07]
B
Yeah. He gives this proviso when he gives.
- [49:10]
C
It permission, because the blood of the thing is the life of the thing, and that life belongs to God.
- [49:17]
You can't consume it. You have to pour it out. You have to return it to God. The blood of sacrifices, Leviticus, poured out at the base of the altar. You can't consume it because it's the life. And then in that same context, in Genesis 9.
- [49:34]
Right there, at the same time that he's saying this.
- [49:38]
He says this applies in a unique and special way to human blood.
- [49:48]
Because humanity is made in the image of God. And because humanity is made in the image of God, he will demand an account for every drop of human blood spilled. And he goes so far as to say not only from every person who spills human blood, but from every animal that spills human blood, he's going to demand an account.
- [50:09]
B
Right.
- [50:09]
C
The lion that eats a guy is going to have to answer to God, for it is literally what the text says. And that's a way the scriptures use to kind of take something to an extreme.
- [50:20]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [50:21]
C
Here's how serious this is.
- [50:23]
B
So you start thinking, like, when will we get to see the animal judgment?
- [50:26]
C
Yeah.
- [50:28]
Not to be taken literally. Right. But it's that just like sort of at the end of Jonah. Right. Which we heard on Holy Saturday. Right. You know, there's all these people who don't know their right hand for their left. And many cattle. Think of the cows, Jonah.
- [50:45]
B
Not the livestock.
- [50:49]
C
That's this idea of going to, like, to the extreme right, Like.
- [50:54]
And so it's. It's the same thing here, right, that. That human life is right, is the. The connection to God. And so taking life right is a very serious matter. Right.
- [51:15]
B
Amen. All right, we're going to go ahead and take our first break, and we'll be right back with the next part of the Lord of spirits.
- [51:22]
A
Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.
- [51:41]
C
Hi, do you know me? I'm Fr. Stephen DeYoung. My new book, An Introduction to Extra Biblical Literature, is now available. A lot of Christians today divide ancient Jewish and Christian literature into two categories. What's in the Bible, what's not in the Bible? Christian east, however, has traditionally had a third category, a middle category, books that are read privately in the home. The Greek word for that is apocrypha. These texts from the centuries before and the centuries after the incarnation of Christ that go beyond even the larger canons of Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, reveal to us the religious world and theological framework of the apostles and early church fathers. In this book, Apocrypha, I survey these works which connect elements of liturgy, scripture, iconography, patristic writings. Familiarity with these works will enhance readers understanding of the breadth and depth of the Orthodox Christian faith. Buy your copy of An Introduction to Extra Biblical literature and@store.ancientfaith.com that's store.ancientfaith.com we're.
- [52:46]
A
Back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-23-7-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.
- [53:02]
C
Well, that was a lot.
- [53:03]
B
Wow.
- [53:05]
I had no idea that you had done an ad read for the book.
- [53:09]
C
I did that, like, late last night. That's how quick the turnaround was.
- [53:13]
B
Wow.
- [53:14]
C
And I basically just did. I did Telly Savalas Diners Club card commercial from 1987.
- [53:20]
B
Yeah, I recognize the intonation and the. Yeah.
- [53:25]
C
Who loves you, baby?
- [53:29]
B
Nice.
- [53:30]
C
Also, the voice of Steve. Cut you right off on the outro, did you?
- [53:33]
B
He did. And all you got was Steven DeYoung.
- [53:36]
C
Will be right back. Like, oh, I guess I invited. Yeah. And then he changed my pronouns to they. That was. That was odd. I'll have to dock his pay for this episode.
- [53:47]
B
That's right.
- [53:52]
All things will become Steve.
- [53:55]
C
Yeah, pretty much. They've already changed your name to Steven, so.
- [53:58]
B
I know, I know. I had someone at a speaking engagement give me a book and they inscribed it to Father Stephen.
- [54:11]
C
Is it something I'd like?
- [54:13]
B
I've considered sending these to you, actually. So.
- [54:17]
Like. Yeah, could you send this to him? No. Yeah. So this is the second half of the show, and we're ready to take your call. So you can call us at 855 AF Radio, 855-237-2346. And let's talk about souls.
- [54:35]
C
So you get a little readout when there's a call, right?
- [54:37]
B
Yeah, I do have a thing pops up on my screen that's like the topic calling and has their name often wherever their phone is from, which might not be where they're from. And then sometimes whatever it is that they're calling about.
- [54:54]
So that's all courtesy of Trudy.
- [54:57]
C
Yeah. So does Trudy know how to spell? Wha.
- [55:03]
Yeah.
- [55:04]
B
Yeah.
- [55:05]
C
Might be a skill she needs to develop in the immediate future.
- [55:09]
B
Right. Yeah, we actually do have. She just said to me she does know how to spell.
- [55:15]
C
Okay, okay.
- [55:16]
B
She didn't spell it out. She just told me she knows.
- [55:18]
C
Good. Does she use the Canadian spelling, though? I think there's a U. There's an extra U.
- [55:22]
B
It does have kind of a Canadian accent.
- [55:24]
C
Yeah, there's an extra U in there.
- [55:26]
B
With the spelling as well. But, yeah, we actually do have a call coming in. So we have Paul calling from Texas, who has a question about the spirit as an organizing principle and what the relationship of that is to consciousness. So, Paul in Texas, are you there?
- [55:41]
D
I am here, Father.
- [55:43]
B
Welcome, Paul from Texas to Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?
- [55:48]
D
Thank you very much. Okay, so I had a much more in depth question, but y' all basically just demolished it with the first half.
- [55:55]
B
Oh, okay.
- [55:56]
D
No, thank you. Thank you.
- [55:59]
C
I would prefer that we.
- [56:00]
D
Bad habits.
- [56:01]
C
I would prefer that we answered it rather than just demolishing it.
- [56:06]
D
Well, in doing so, you did answer it. Just demolished some preconceived conceptions I had.
- [56:11]
C
Does this mean we get to make.
- [56:12]
B
Demolition man references now? Because I am so ready for that word.
- [56:17]
C
I have spent, like, the last four or five weeks overlapping Posca trying to get all of the Zoomer members of my congregation to watch Demolition Man.
- [56:28]
B
It's such a fun movie.
- [56:30]
C
I successfully got them to watch they Live, which is an American classic. Now we're on to Demolition Man.
- [56:39]
D
Wonderful.
- [56:40]
B
You probably weren't expecting us to make Demolition. Have you seen that movie, Paul?
- [56:44]
D
I have not. I don't know if I'm too young or what. I don't know what the deal is.
- [56:47]
B
It's from the 90s. Yeah, it's great. Especially if you've ever read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
- [56:54]
D
I cannot say that I have, but I can add that to the list.
- [56:56]
B
So read that book first and then watch the movie, because the movie is way funnier if you've read that book.
- [57:01]
D
Roger that.
- [57:02]
C
It is muscular action heroes living in a soy future.
- [57:06]
D
Soy too.
- [57:08]
B
Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Leary, Wesley Snipes.
- [57:13]
C
Wesley Snipes, Yeah.
- [57:15]
B
I mean, what's not to love? It's so fun.
- [57:18]
C
Yes.
- [57:19]
B
Okay, so sorry, Paul.
- [57:21]
C
Now your actual question.
- [57:23]
D
Okay, so I've got. I've got kind of little chunks here. The first is you said. You said that consciousness is basically going to be a factor for any kind of organized system. And you discussed.
- [57:38]
Leaving aside the notion that you said the spirit is kind of like an aspect of the soul in the sense that the organizing principle of it. Since there can be spirits without souls, does that mean that since the spirits are organizing principles and consciousness is a fact there of all organized systems, that consciousness is going to be present in any form of spirit, depending on the level?
- [57:58]
C
Yes.
- [58:00]
D
Okay, wonderful. A classic. Classic. Father the Young.
- [58:04]
B
Yes.
- [58:05]
D
And secondarily.
- [58:11]
Whenever we talk about the fact that, you know, you also said that it's our job to organize basically the creation. That's the fact that the job that God gave us, in a manner of speaking, does that make us, by merit of Christ's relationship with us and how he unites us with God, the organizing principle for the rest of creation. And as a part of the reason that everything is a mess. Could that be said in light of what you're teaching us now as being, since we're, you know, at war, so to speak. Not so to speak. We are at war with the dark powers, that it's our weakness and submission willingly, unfortunately, too many times with the dark spirits, that it's that war of organizing principles that then causes the, you know, problems with reality as we know it.
- [58:57]
C
Yes. Yeah. That's what. When we talk about creation being subjected to futility through human sin, that's what we're talking about.
- [59:06]
B
Yeah. And also that the, you know, the creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God. Right. So it's really that, like, you could also put that as the creation's ready for its patron saints.
- [59:17]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [59:18]
D
Very nice.
- [59:19]
C
Not to jump too far ahead, but you are tracking with where we're going.
- [59:22]
B
Yeah.
- [59:22]
D
Okay. Now, Matt, be committed. One final little question.
- [59:26]
C
Okay.
- [59:26]
B
Yes.
- [59:27]
D
Okay. Thank you.
- [59:29]
C
That was it. That was. No, that was the question.
- [59:32]
D
Like the D and D movie.
- [59:34]
C
Yeah.
- [59:37]
D
You also had made mention, I think it was in the spirit episode, that we're not, you know, our spirit, so to speak, we're our bodies. I definitely understand that since, you know, even our awarenesses ourselves, our aggregation of memories and everything comes from the body. We wouldn't have it without it. But what. What. What do you. Could you elaborate on that in light of the fact that getting rid of the timey wimey wibbly wobbly, or however that order goes? I don't watch Doctor who.
- [60:02]
Leaving that aside, the saints are hypothetically at the throne of God without their bodies until we unite with them and we all get resurrected together. So how do they maintain their sense of selves without their bodies? If we are our bodies? By necessity. Am I just assuming too much of what you said? By assuming that that means at all.
- [60:20]
C
Times you have given us a perfect segue to our second half.
- [60:24]
B
There you go. So just keep listening.
- [60:26]
C
Paul from Texas, you're tracking with us. You're tracking with us. This is good.
- [60:31]
D
Yeah, I definitely want to. After y', all, you know, played havoc with the Tetris set of what I had thought of before, I definitely wanted to make sure I was following along.
- [60:40]
C
Well, yeah, we will just grab your Etch A Sketch and shake it. Violently.
- [60:45]
B
I was gonna say you do. This is a joke you'll get later. But you do need to learn how to use the three seashells.
- [60:52]
D
Three seashells. Okay. Okay, I'll hold on to that one.
- [60:55]
B
Yeah. Make sure you watch the movie we suggested.
- [60:59]
D
I'll read the book first. I got you. I gotcha.
- [61:01]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Paul. Okay, so we also have Nathan calling from the great state of Kentucky. So, Nathan, are you there?
- [61:10]
D
Yes, Father.
- [61:11]
B
All right. Welcome, Nathan, Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?
- [61:18]
D
Well, this talk about, you know, this came to me with your unctions episode, that we are our bodies and that there's. If there's not really, like, a separate self, it made me wonder, well, then if you have a loved one who is hit with, like, dementia or Alzheimer's, I mean, does that mean, like, the person you knew and lost is. Is gone? Like a hard drive just being wiped out?
- [61:44]
B
I mean, I. Number one, I would not say that they're. It's interesting. We talked about them as sort of not being all there. Right. Like, that's the language that we use. But, yeah, I mean, it's. It's. Number one, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a doctor or anything like that, but my understanding of the condition is that it's. It is an impairment of the way that the. The mind within, you know, the mind functions as it manifests itself to us. Right. So that doesn't mean that they're. That they're gone or that they're lost, you know, because still there's life in the body, right? So there's still that organizing principle, even if it's functioning at what might appear to us to be kind of a lower level of consciousness at the moment, but there. There's still themselves, you know, even if there's all kinds of wacky behavior going on or maybe sometimes almost no behavior going on. Right. Because there's all kinds of levels of dementia. Like there's the kind where you just forget stuff and then there's all the way to the point where you're just lying there, you know?
- [62:51]
D
Or would they behave like a completely different person? Yeah.
- [62:54]
B
Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, I've known people like, I've done pastoral work with people where their dementia advances and they become very violent, for instance.
- [63:04]
You know, and just. Or they start cussing a lot, whereas they would never would have. You know, those kinds of restraints would have been in place before. They wouldn't have done that stuff. They would not have obeyed those impulses, you know. But I would definitely not say that.
- [63:21]
Their soul is gone because the body is still alive. I don't know, Father, you want to add or correct or adjust to me.
- [63:28]
C
The identification of a person with their living body does the opposite. Right. If you are your soul and your soul is some kind of psychological self or something, then it would seem to me that that's where you're kind of losing a person. And that's also where you get arguments like Peter Singer back in the day that unborn children and even infants aren't human. Yeah, right, right.
- [64:03]
If you are.
- [64:07]
Embodied, desiring, if you are a living soul, you are.
- [64:14]
A body that is animated. That is what you are as a person. Then a fetus in the womb, a six month old, a three year old, a 20 year old, a 30 year old, a 75 year old, an 85 year old with dementia is still that person.
- [64:37]
Regardless of their ability to interact, regardless of their facility with language, regardless of how their memory is, regardless of what they're able to articulate, what math they can do, what abstract concepts they can comprehend, there's still a human person and they're still the same human person.
- [64:58]
Just at different stages in their life.
- [65:03]
But they're still the person. So to me.
- [65:08]
This is an important distinction to make. For that reason, if the body's just a husk and the real you is this nebulous thing within, if you lose contact with that nebulous thing within, you might be inclined to think that the person is gone, even though the person is standing right there in front of you.
- [65:29]
B
That makes sense to you, Nathan?
- [65:33]
D
Not entirely, but I'll keep thinking on it. I appreciate it.
- [65:36]
B
Okay, sure. Chew on it a while. See what you can do. Yeah, it's a tough. It's a mind bending thing because it's not how we're used to thinking. We don't tend to think of ourselves as being bodies. You know, we tend to say, I have a body. Right. Not that I am a body.
- [65:54]
But. But you are. You are. You're. You're a souled body. You're a soul man.
- [66:01]
If I may, that was what I wanted to call the episode, by the way.
- [66:04]
C
But, yes, he wanted to name this episode after one of the most racially offensive movies of the 1980s.
- [66:10]
B
No, not the movie. The song. The song.
- [66:14]
C
Song. Man.
- [66:16]
B
I never even saw the movie. Typical. I know. But.
- [66:21]
Soul Man. Yeah, it's a great song. Anyway. All right.
- [66:24]
C
I'm protecting you from yourself.
- [66:26]
B
Thank you so much. All right, so. All right. Thank you very much, Nathan, for calling in.
- [66:33]
All right, rolling on. Okay, yes, so book has been plugged. Callers have been talked with.
- [66:40]
C
Yes. Apologies to fans of C. Thomas Howell, though. If you're a fan of C. Thomas Howell, like, who even are you? Like what? Anyway, okay.
- [66:53]
Yes, so now we're going to continue talking about souls. Now we're moving on to Greek.
- [67:00]
B
Greek souls. It's like Greek Easter.
- [67:04]
C
Yes. With lemon. Yeah.
- [67:07]
They'Re all named spiro. So.
- [67:12]
The Greek word for soul famously, is psyche.
- [67:19]
Sometimes pronounced in English, psyche. It's where we get psychology, etc.
- [67:27]
Psychic. But.
- [67:30]
It literally etymologically refers to not just breath, but breath in terms of the act of breathing.
- [67:41]
Right. And so again, if we're defining the soul experientially.
- [67:48]
B
Right.
- [67:48]
C
As that thing which is gone when something that was alive dies. One of the most obvious features if you're dealing with humans and animals is they stop breathing.
- [68:01]
B
Yeah. Which is why then we have the common expressions of someone breathing his last. All that kind of stuff.
- [68:09]
C
Right, right.
- [68:13]
And so.
- [68:16]
That seems an obvious connection, right, in terms of why this word, this Greek word, but the Greek word sikhi also includes the idea of will and desire. Right. Just like we talked about the Hebrew term including kind of desire and appetite. That idea is included. Also the idea of will. Now, this is the concept of the natural will.
- [68:46]
Not the way we commonly use will when we talk about free will, like making choices.
- [68:53]
We won't go down the whole Saint Maximus the Confessor rabbit hole right now on that. But the natural will is something which every living being has, which is sort of the internal push, the internal motor that directs them to continue living and to grow and to thrive. Right. So the. The acorn has the same nature as the oak tree.
- [69:24]
B
Right.
- [69:25]
C
But there is this internal force connected to its life, connected to its soul that causes it to sprout and Bud and grow and stretch out the roots and stretch out the branches. Right. That's what we're talking about with the natural will, Right. Like I will live, I will grow, I will thrive. Right, yeah, that kind of thing. Whereas the choose the will in terms of decision making. In terms of making choices is Right. I'm going to have Apple Jacks instead of golden Grahams this morning for breakfast. Right.
- [70:07]
Which is usually a good choice. But if you get the original recipe, golden grams with the honey in the recipe. Yeah, that might win.
- [70:20]
So you don't want them newfangled golden grahams.
- [70:22]
B
I had pancakes for breakfast.
- [70:26]
C
So. Yeah, so it's that kind of will that we're talking about in the soul, that the soul has this sort of.
- [70:34]
Internal drive. And so in Greek thought.
- [70:40]
So when you talk about Greek thought, we're talking about Greek philosophy, right? Basically.
- [70:46]
In Greek thought, there are these different powers of the soul. And not everything that has a soul has all of these powers. In fact, which powers of the soul a given living creature possesses is going to determine kind of what kind of creature it is.
- [71:04]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [71:06]
C
So at the base level, everything that has a soul, everything that's animate, everything that's alive, has what's sometimes called the vegetative or the nutritive power of the soul, which is basically eat, stay alive, grow, reproduce. Right.
- [71:25]
So, and that's. So plants, animals, humans.
- [71:28]
B
Right.
- [71:28]
C
All of them have this.
- [71:30]
Then there is the desiring part. Usually in Greek, this is epithymia, which.
- [71:41]
B
Is.
- [71:46]
C
Shared by animals and humans. This is more the animal level that includes some of those things we talked about in the first half, like mating for life, caring for offspring, these more advanced things. But also includes, for example, animals will eat more than they need to eat to survive.
- [72:05]
Right. They have other kinds of desires, they have social desires, other kinds of desires that they want to seek to be fulfilled beyond just eating the minimum to survive, procreating, surviving, the elements. Right. There are sort of more advanced desires than that.
- [72:26]
And then humans only in Greek thought have the noetic power of the soul, right? So in Greek thought, the nous is seen as a power of the soul. It is reduced to and made part of essentially the soul.
- [72:45]
And of course, as we mentioned, only humans have it in Greek thought. Everything else is not conscious. Everything else lights off. Right.
- [72:57]
In this ancient Greek thought. But because. Right. Notice the nous is folded into the soul.
- [73:07]
B
Right?
- [73:08]
C
Which is this separate capacity.
- [73:12]
In sort of Jewish and Christian thought.
- [73:17]
Is folded in Greek thought into. Right into the soul. And so that means the Soul becomes now self contained.
- [73:29]
The soul contains all the powers.
- [73:34]
Of the human.
- [73:37]
Right. And therefore the soul, being so self contained, can be understood as being the whole self.
- [73:48]
And so you see this reflected especially in Plato.
- [73:51]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [73:52]
C
If you read the Timaeus.
- [73:57]
The parts of it that aren't corrupt.
- [74:01]
If you read the Timaeus. Right. Plato said. Now, now, Plato is here.
- [74:08]
Because this is going to sound totally ridiculous, and it is kind of ridiculous, but I want to be fair to Plato. Right. Even as I criticize him. Plato. The Timaeus contains Plato's creation myth, essentially. Right. His. What passes for a creation story for him at least. But he presents it as he usually does, with such things as the likely story.
- [74:35]
B
Yeah, right, right, right.
- [74:37]
C
So he is not intending us to take this totally literally.
- [74:43]
B
Okay.
- [74:43]
C
So let me say that as a proviso before I say what he said, that he is not intending us to take this totally literally. I don't think. Right.
- [74:54]
So in the Timaeus, he says that when humans first come into existence, they were just heads.
- [75:03]
Spherical heads.
- [75:04]
B
Just a fun, fun image.
- [75:06]
C
Spherical heads with the soul inside. Right. And the head was basically there. So you'd have a skull to protect yourself and keep you from dying.
- [75:18]
B
Right. Like elders.
- [75:21]
C
Yes. Without all the eyestalks.
- [75:24]
B
Yes, right.
- [75:25]
C
And unable to float. Because. Because he says the big problem with humans just being heads is that as they were rolling around, they would roll into ditches.
- [75:38]
And get stuck places. Again, he's not intending us to necessarily take this literally. And therefore they needed to develop bodies by necessity to sort of carry the head around.
- [75:53]
And feed themselves and interact with things in order to keep the head alive. To keep the soul in the head. Right.
- [76:05]
But beyond, you know, the story sounding kind of goofy. Right. The point he's conveying, and it goes all through Plato's writings and is the earmark possibly of the Platonic tradition. Right. Is this kind of dualism where the body is a vehicle that transports the soul around.
- [76:26]
B
Yeah. Which I mean, this is basically our modern conception.
- [76:30]
C
Yes.
- [76:31]
B
You know, effectively. I mean, it's not a. Like, we. I'm sure we owe a bunch to Descartes as well, but it's still. I mean, it's basically Plato. It's. That's. That's the way most people think about souls and bodies.
- [76:43]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so.
- [76:49]
This is embedded even in our language in ways we don't realize. So, for example, the Greek word organon.
- [76:59]
Literally means a tool or an instrument.
- [77:07]
So your bodily organs or your body is an organ or an organism. It's your tool, it's your instrument.
- [77:17]
That you're using.
- [77:19]
B
Right.
- [77:24]
So.
- [77:28]
C
Yeah, so this is. This is Plato's view. This gets widely endorsed in the West. It's not all St. Augustine's fault. It's partially St. Augustine's fault. Beefy is way more so.
- [77:45]
Looking at you, Consolation of Philosophy Anselm. Even more so.
- [77:52]
So.
- [77:54]
This view carries through. And this isn't a view that gets rejected later in Western Christianity. In fact, famously, John Calvin agreeingly quotes Plato that the body is the prison house of the soul.
- [78:09]
B
Yeah, right.
- [78:12]
C
The body is the prison house of the soul. So this carries through. It is deeply in Western culture. And in fact, we're even used to talking about. And sometimes even our liturgical translations unhelpfully use this language that talk about the immortal soul.
- [78:35]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [78:37]
C
Right. So they'll say like.
- [78:41]
That a saint attended to, did not attend to the body, which is mortal, but attended to the immortal soul.
- [78:47]
B
Yeah, the Apolitikian, I think, for female monastics.
- [78:52]
C
Yeah. And that's not a good translation.
- [78:57]
It says it's literally did not attend to the body which dies, but to the soul, which is undying, which is not the same thing as immortal.
- [79:07]
B
Right.
- [79:07]
C
Yes.
- [79:12]
So because. Because immortal means does not have the property of mortality.
- [79:22]
B
Right.
- [79:22]
C
And thereby implies that, unlike what we clearly see in Genesis 3 and the distinction we were talking about with spiritual death and physical death, that the soul is innately immortal.
- [79:37]
And that the body is innately mortal, neither of which is true in Genesis 3.
- [79:43]
B
Yeah, right.
- [79:44]
C
In Genesis 2, Adam is created immortal because his soul is connected to God, which gives life to his soul, which gives life to his body.
- [79:58]
When he is expelled from paradise, he becomes mortal in that his soul.
- [80:06]
Is cut off from God and therefore.
- [80:10]
His body begins to die.
- [80:15]
So our soul is just as mortal as our body.
- [80:21]
But what it means for a soul to die, spiritual death and what it means for a body to die, while parallel, is not identical.
- [80:30]
B
Yeah, right.
- [80:32]
C
So Plato, on the other hand, the soul is immortal.
- [80:36]
B
Right.
- [80:37]
C
No matter what.
- [80:38]
B
And pre existent too. Right?
- [80:40]
C
Yes, pre existent and will continue to exist. It's not dependent on God's sustenance. It's not dependent on. Of course, he doesn't have the Jewish or Christian God. Right. It's not dependent on anything. It is immortal. Therefore he has reincarnation.
- [80:57]
B
Yeah, Right.
- [80:59]
C
So the soul gets born in one body, another body, another body, another body. Right. Because it's immortal.
- [81:06]
And so for him, you know, learning is just remembering stuff.
- [81:12]
Because in between.
- [81:14]
B
I was going to say the big Math problem I always had with reincarnation is that there's more people now than there have ever been.
- [81:24]
So are there new souls being created or. Souls.
- [81:28]
C
There are different answers if you ask people who believe in reincarnation.
- [81:32]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [81:33]
C
Some of them think they split.
- [81:35]
B
They split. Yeah. Which could explain how so many people can all claim to have been.
- [81:41]
C
Yeah.
- [81:41]
B
You know, because like a lot of people, when they talk about their past lives or whatever, it's interesting how many people all claim to have been the same one past person. So I guess if you. If you have the split idea, then that kind of works out.
- [81:52]
C
Right. Right.
- [81:53]
B
The.
- [81:56]
C
The thing here is that this is the identical soul just inhabiting another body for Plato.
- [82:02]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [82:04]
C
And in between.
- [82:07]
One body dies. Right. Soul goes off to the heavens, to the world of forms. The eternal world beholds all of these things, gets dunked in the Acherusian lake call back to an old episode for all you old heads out there in Lord of Spirits land. And because that dip in the lake forgets everything.
- [82:30]
B
How long till my soul gets it right?
- [82:35]
C
You're born again, right, in a new body. And over the course, you remember things. And of course, Plato had an experiment to prove this where he took a slave boy and drew some geometric shapes in the sand and said, look, he can understand it. He's a slave. They're idiots.
- [82:52]
So clearly his soul lived before.
- [82:56]
That's a TLDR version, but I'm not misrepresenting it. That is what basically says.
- [83:04]
B
Right.
- [83:04]
C
And so, yes, whereas the soul doesn't. Like, Adam's soul, as we saw, did not pre exist.
- [83:10]
B
No, the body existed before his soulfulness.
- [83:14]
C
Souls do not pre exist. They don't exist as spheres like Origin thought. They don't exist as rough spheres the way Plato thought. They don't pre exist in a divine decree somewhere like John Calvin thought.
- [83:29]
Right. They can't. They're the life of a biological.
- [83:37]
Creature. Right.
- [83:41]
When.
- [83:43]
At conception.
- [83:47]
A person becomes alive, there's a soul there because that being, that creature, is connected to God.
- [83:57]
B
Yeah. Because.
- [83:58]
C
And they're alive, giving it life.
- [84:01]
B
Yeah.
- [84:02]
C
He, she, life. Right. That'll be assigned later, I guess.
- [84:09]
That was a joke.
- [84:12]
B
It's okay.
- [84:14]
C
Just clarifying.
- [84:17]
B
Right.
- [84:18]
C
So. So it is this. This connection. So this means, as we talked about in the unctuous episode, that our life in this world is not sort of the unfolding of the identity of our soul that already exists.
- [84:35]
B
Right. There's no Freaky Friday, right?
- [84:39]
C
Yeah, Switch, you know, and there's no, like, I need to go out and discover who I really am.
- [84:46]
B
Right, yeah.
- [84:48]
C
Or, you know, this stuff is sort of set eternally, and then. And then it just plays out a la Calvin. Or this stuff is sort of set eternally, but I discover it about myself.
- [85:03]
B
Yeah, right. I mean, and one of the big problems with this model is it basically.
- [85:07]
C
Precludes the possibility of repentance, of change of any kind.
- [85:11]
B
Yeah.
- [85:12]
C
But, yeah, repentance being the worst problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [85:19]
B
It's just who I am. Well, we'll change who you are. You can change. That's the good news. You could change who you are.
- [85:26]
C
Yes, yes, yes. Because as long as you are alive. Yeah.
- [85:32]
Yeah, yeah. And so as. As we said in the Unctuous episode, if you weren't you, you wouldn't be you.
- [85:42]
Right. So if I had been born in 11th century France, I would not be Father Stephen DeYoung, but in 11th century France, I would be a completely different person.
- [85:57]
There would not be.
- [85:59]
B
Just kidding.
- [86:00]
C
Right? Like, there would not be. There would be no commonalities.
- [86:03]
B
Yeah. It'd be totally.
- [86:05]
C
For you to be able to say that that was me.
- [86:07]
B
Right, right, right.
- [86:10]
C
That would be a nonsensical statement that that was me. How would it be me? Yeah, right. That's another person. Right.
- [86:21]
And so the time you live, the place you live, the experiences you have, the relationships you have with other people, all of this is what makes you you.
- [86:35]
The decisions you make. Right. This makes you you.
- [86:41]
The soul is not like this independently existing thing that could have been dropped anywhere.
- [86:49]
Right. Could have been dropped into another place at another time, and that would have meaningfully been you at that time and place.
- [86:58]
And so, as our callers both kind of mentioned, your body is far more related to your identity than your soul is.
- [87:10]
Souls are more alike than bodies.
- [87:13]
If they're human souls.
- [87:16]
Difference between my soul and Father Andrew's soul.
- [87:21]
If we could even talk about this, if you could extract this in some way and observe it in some way and compare the two. Right. They're both human souls.
- [87:36]
B
Right.
- [87:39]
C
And there's not a lot of difference. And.
- [87:46]
This goes against, I mean, not to name names, but Apollinarianism, Right. Which, of course, was the ancient heresy.
- [87:58]
Still cropping up today, unfortunately, among certain folks, that Christ did not have a human soul.
- [88:04]
B
Right. That he, the Logos, inhabits his body and functions in the way that a soul would function.
- [88:11]
C
Right, right. So his body is essentially inanimate. His body is just a body that's animated by the second person of the Holy Trinity coming and animating it or puppeting it, or using it as an instrument like Mac a la Plato.
- [88:28]
And so.
- [88:31]
This is as opposed to.
- [88:34]
The orthodox belief, which is that Christ has a human soul. He has a perfect human soul which represents the perfect unity. If, as we're saying, this human soul is the connection between the human and God. Right. Then Christ has a perfect human soul which represents the perfect unity of humanity with God.
- [88:58]
And that's the whole basis for our understanding of salvation. This is why St. Gregory the Theologian says that if you believe Apollinarianism, salvation as Christians understand it is impossible.
- [89:13]
B
Right. Because the human soul has not been deified then.
- [89:17]
C
Right, Right. We have not. The humanity has not been connected to God in Christ.
- [89:26]
God just showed up in a human suit.
- [89:29]
B
Yeah.
- [89:30]
C
Which doesn't transform humanity, doesn't transform human nature.
- [89:36]
Right. And so this.
- [89:41]
Again, I won't name names. So there are some. But now I get to be a little self critical. Now I get to talk about some orthodox people who don't know what they're talking about.
- [89:52]
B
Yay.
- [89:56]
C
In our modern age. And I'm sure there are non orthodox people saying the same things. So I don't think we've cornered the market on this. It has just crept into certain folks in the orthodox world.
- [90:07]
In our current world of confusion about sex, gender at all, Right. Where a lot of folks seem to not even know the difference between the two.
- [90:19]
Occasionally you will see even these orthodox people, and I'm sure plenty of others talk about how, oh.
- [90:25]
The soul doesn't have gender.
- [90:30]
The soul doesn't have biological, sexual.
- [90:34]
B
Right.
- [90:36]
C
And try to use this as some kind of argument for something.
- [90:40]
In terms of gender theory. It's not even real gender theory. It's like this weird watered down cultural thing.
- [90:47]
B
Yeah, it's kind of correct. An error with another error.
- [90:51]
C
Right. But here's the thing, the answer to that is, yeah.
- [90:57]
Human souls are kind of human souls.
- [90:59]
B
Right. Because in as much as that human body is a human body, its soul, yes, is the life of that body, not some other body.
- [91:10]
C
Part and parcel of what Genesis 1 teaches us is that because male humans and female humans are both humans, they both have human souls.
- [91:26]
This is not a big revelation.
- [91:28]
B
Right.
- [91:29]
C
Again, it's your body that differentiates you.
- [91:37]
It's not that every person in the world, how ridiculous would it be for someone to come and say.
- [91:43]
Everyone in the world has the same body but a completely different soul?
- [91:48]
B
Yeah, well, right.
- [91:51]
C
That would be absurd.
- [91:54]
But that's just one step beyond the absurdity of Platonism, broadly constructed, which is.
- [92:05]
Souls Are all completely. Every soul is unique and different, but bodies are interchangeable.
- [92:15]
B
Yeah. Which, I mean, that's what we're watching work out in the culture in general now is that bodies are just so much parts, they're like Legos.
- [92:26]
C
Right. And so, yes, human souls are all the same. And your biological body.
- [92:34]
Is either if you're a human.
- [92:37]
B
Right.
- [92:38]
C
Not an anemone, if you're a human is either biologically male, biologically female, or intersexed.
- [92:47]
And then beyond that, gender is the social construct of. In our culture. Here is how men dress, act, present themselves. Here's how women dress, act, present themselves.
- [93:02]
And that changes over time. The biology doesn't. Reproduction works the same way. You don't know where babies come from. That's not my job. But.
- [93:14]
That hasn't changed. That is a trans historical human constant. Where babies come from.
- [93:21]
Biologically. Right.
- [93:22]
B
Yep.
- [93:25]
The sheer. Was the sheer facticity.
- [93:28]
C
Brute facticity. Brute facticity.
- [93:30]
B
Yeah.
- [93:33]
C
So. Right. Our identity is not this internal thing that's eternal that we're born with and that we later discover.
- [93:46]
Our identity is something that is formed over the course of our life through our choices, our experiences, our relationships externally with other people.
- [93:58]
What we do, who we love.
- [94:02]
The family structures, the community structures we become a part of, and how we operate within them. That's what forms our identity.
- [94:12]
And so the big problem with identity in our culture is that everyone is so isolated and alienated from everyone else that they're sitting in front of their computer and they don't know who they are because they don't have any of these relationships or community structures or family or social structures.
- [94:31]
And Aristotle made this plan a long time ago. If you live alone, you can't be human.
- [94:39]
If you live alone, you're either a beast or a God.
- [94:44]
Animals can live alone. He thought the gods could hypothetically live alone, but humans can't.
- [94:53]
So you're either gonna have to become superhuman.
- [94:57]
Like, say, St. Anthony, who became like God out the desert, or you're going to become subhuman.
- [95:05]
And unfortunately, our culture and society is trying to grind us all down into sub humanity.
- [95:10]
B
Yeah, right.
- [95:11]
C
By isolating and alienating us.
- [95:15]
Right. But the way to fight back against that, the way to understand who you are, the way to become the person God created you to be, is to go and find it outside. In relationship with other people, in love, shared with other people.
- [95:32]
So your animate body is an object of the world, and it's the subject in all of these relationships.
- [95:44]
Nobody interacts with someone else's Soul. You may tell your girlfriend as you gaze into her eyes that you're staring into her soul.
- [95:54]
But, like, look, you know, I could.
- [95:55]
B
See it in there. I see it. It's right here behind the left.
- [95:58]
C
Wait, we're not going to hate the player, but we will hate the game on that one. Okay, that's, you know, it's nonsense. Right.
- [96:07]
Right.
- [96:09]
And as you progress through Western philosophy, you go even beyond Plato, where. Where. Right. The soul becomes sort of the thing in itself.
- [96:20]
B
Right.
- [96:21]
C
So rather than seeing the soul as the connection, the active connection and relationship between a created living thing and God, the soul is just seen as itself, sort of an object.
- [96:38]
The sort of. You. Right.
- [96:42]
And.
- [96:45]
This then affects and distorts how we understand. And our first caller was already sort of leading into this, that.
- [96:55]
The unique nature of the human soul and the unique relationship between humanity and God. Right. So the language that we started using from the beginning of this show, Right. Where we talk about the spiritual world and the material world.
- [97:13]
And one of the things we tried to hammer home, especially in the early episodes, is that these are not like two separate things.
- [97:20]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [97:21]
C
Right. But that these are overlaid. Right. These are really one thing together. Right. Differently perceived.
- [97:29]
B
Right. That's. That's why I like the word unseen and seen, because it's, you know, there's. Right. It just. It's very. It's very good shorthand for describing the fact that there is this one world.
- [97:42]
C
Yes. Yeah, yeah. And there are seen elements and unseen elements. Creation, visible and invisible, as the creed.
- [97:47]
B
Says, which is literally a dogma of our faith.
- [97:51]
C
Yeah. One creation. There's visible and invisible parts. Right.
- [97:56]
And so sometimes when people hear the orthodox language of, well, humans. Right.
- [98:04]
It's. And it's said in different ways that are kind of sloppy. It's not that they're wrong. It's just they give the wrong impression based on all of this cultural baggage. Right. They'll say that, well, well, humans have a material part and an immaterial part. And so they're sort of the bridge between the spiritual world and the physical world.
- [98:23]
And what. That kind of makes it sound like, if you've got a bad case of Plato, brain from growing up in our culture is, well, my soul is like, living in the spiritual world, or at least potentially could, and my body is here living in the material world. And so you go and do DMT or something to enter the spiritual world or try different meditative practices to enter the spiritual world and leave the material world behind.
- [98:57]
And all of this. This is a Fundamental misconstrual of what all that means.
- [99:02]
B
Right? No astral projection, everybody.
- [99:06]
C
Yes, yes. Not once.
- [99:13]
But what we're talking about when we talk about humans being that bridge, it's precisely having this unique connection to God in Christ. Right? Because remember, life is not only knowing God the Father, but also knowing Jesus Christ, whom he sent.
- [99:31]
It's through Christ that this connection, right, this special human connection.
- [99:38]
Comes into being. And so it is that we are connected to God and to what God is doing in the world, both the visible and invisible creation.
- [99:47]
That allows us to serve that bridge. And why the transfiguration, the redemption of the world happens through its humanization.
- [99:58]
Because in Christ, humanization becomes divinization. But we'll talk about that more in the third half. Yeah, but last, last note here. Right. This is why, as we mentioned before in the unction episode, bodily resurrection is so critically important.
- [100:17]
To Christianity.
- [100:21]
B
Right.
- [100:23]
C
And why when St. Paul brought up resurrection like bodily resurrection in Athens, they all laughed at him and told him to buzz off.
- [100:30]
B
Yeah, it was. It's a complete joke in the pagan.
- [100:33]
C
World, other than Saint Dionysius and Saint Hierotheos, but other than them.
- [100:37]
B
Right. We will hear you. We will hear you again.
- [100:41]
C
Yeah, right. Because that was absurd to them.
- [100:45]
B
Yeah.
- [100:47]
C
Right. Because what does it imply?
- [100:51]
It implies that my body is an intrinsic part of my identity which flies against everything they believed about the soul.
- [100:58]
B
Yeah, yeah. Why would you want that back?
- [101:01]
C
Right. Because this Jewish conception, this Israelite conception, this Hebrew conception, right. Second Temple Jewish Christian conception is totally different than the Greek conception. Philosophical perspective of what the soul is as a self contained. The whole self, the person themselves and the body is just interchangeable. Whatever.
- [101:23]
B
Yeah.
- [101:24]
C
Yep.
- [101:24]
B
Yep. All right. Well, that wraps up the second half of this episode, Lord of Spirits. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back.
- [101:33]
A
Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio.
- [101:55]
E
Hi, I'm author Sarah Byrne Martelli, and I'm thrilled to announce the release of my new book, Memory Living with Grief. As Orthodox Christians, losing someone we love is never easy, but the Orthodox Church provides a wealth of resources that help us to bear it. I draw on these theological, scriptural and liturgical resources, as well as the collected experience of a variety of people undergoing grief and loss to provide a kind of roadmap to the grieving process. I also include an eight week bereavement curriculum that can be used in a group or on one's own. As Orthodox Christians, we do not seek to get over grief, but to carry the memory of our loved ones eternally in our hearts. Memory Eternal is now available in paperback, ebook and audiobook@store.ancient faith.com that's store.ancientfaith.com we're.
- [102:56]
A
Back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio.
- [103:13]
B
Thanks. Voice of Steve got it right this time.
- [103:15]
C
I appreciate that he threw you a bone.
- [103:21]
B
Indeed. We do have a caller. But before we take you caller, I just want to mention that we are still selling tickets for the Lord of Spirits Conference to be held at the end of October at the Antiochian village in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. You can go to store.ancientfaith.com events and get your tickets. There's only, I think, I don't know, a couple dozen spots left. Like we're looking at close to 250 people coming. It's pretty great. And there are now there are cabins because we've sold out the Antiochian Village Conference center completely. But now you can actually get cabins at the camp which is right next to the conference center. And you can fit eight people in each one of those cabins. It's much cheaper, but it's not quite the level of amenities that you would get down at the conference center or some other hotel or whatever. But it is a very cheap option for lodging. So again, it's stored@ancientfaith.com events. It's gonna be a whole, whole lot of fun. Come the end of October, I fully expect to see at least one person in a bat costume. I'm not telling anybody to do that, but pretty sure it's going to happen.
- [104:31]
C
Let me just say if you do get one of these last tickets and you decide to stay in one of the cabins and when you get to the cabin you find like a really weird, gross looking leather bound book at a reel to reel tape recorder. Do not play the tape.
- [104:49]
B
Good advice for life.
- [104:51]
C
I'm just saying is all, I'm Father Steven DeYoung, don't play the tape. We will have a lot of clergy on site for exorcisms, but still we want this to just be a fun, cool weekend.
- [105:03]
B
Don't play it forward. Definitely don't play it backwards.
- [105:05]
C
Yeah, we don't need all that hassle.
- [105:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. All right, so we do have a caller. So we've got our friend Samuel from Virginia.
- [105:16]
God's chosen country calling in. So, Samuel, are you there?
- [105:21]
D
Yeah, I'm there, Father.
- [105:23]
B
Welcome back to the Lord of Spirits podcast. Samuel from Virginia, what is on your mind?
- [105:28]
D
Well, when I was hearing you talk about the human soul being a unique thing, I was wondering how that relates to man being created in the image of God.
- [105:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. So, like.
- [105:46]
I think one particular element of. Is, as we've talked about the image of God many times before on the podcast, is that we are imagers of God. Right. And so the. The human soul is that connection to God. I mean, everything that has a soul is connected to God, but we're connected to God in a unique way in. In a human way. And we image God in the world in a way that everything else doesn't. Right. So that is at least the connection that I would immediately make. Pun fully intended, Father. I don't know. What would you add to that or expand outwards?
- [106:19]
C
Yeah. Well, and that, of course, is grounded ultimately in Christ. Right. And in the union of.
- [106:31]
Our shared humanity.
- [106:35]
With God in Christ and what that means for humanity. Right. Christ did not become incarnate as any other kind of creature, angel or otherwise.
- [106:46]
B
Right.
- [106:49]
C
And so.
- [106:52]
We tend to. This is the thing from an ecumenical council that I find we talk about the least.
- [107:02]
Chalcedon said that.
- [107:05]
Christ is, according to his divine nature, consubstantial with the Father and the Spirit, and according to his humanity, consubstantial with us.
- [107:17]
B
Right.
- [107:19]
C
And even though.
- [107:22]
Our Christology is very clear about this, there still tends to be a mode of thinking.
- [107:30]
When it comes to the incarnation, that God became a man.
- [107:38]
Right. With our concept of individual and individual human person. And not that Christ represents the union of humanity that we share with him with God. And especially when we're talking about the human soul and also when we're talking about the image of God. Because this is where the wibbly, wobbly timey wimey stuff comes in. Right. If you look at an icon of the creation of Adam, the way him being created in the image of God is expressed in our iconography is that you have Christ there shaping his body, and he looks like Jesus.
- [108:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [108:19]
C
That's sort of our iconographic way of expressing that. Right. And so from the get go, there's this unique connection.
- [108:30]
And therefore a uniqueness to the human soul and connection To God beyond other living creature that is part and parcel of that imaging.
- [108:42]
B
Does that make sense, Samuel?
- [108:44]
D
And that makes sense.
- [108:46]
B
All right. Well, thank you very much for calling, and we'll probably talk to you again in the future, I'm sure, because you are a repeat caller.
- [108:54]
C
Yep.
- [108:55]
D
Christ is risen.
- [108:56]
B
He truly is risen.
- [108:58]
C
I don't care what you say. I'm going to say, indeed, he is risen.
- [109:01]
B
You can say indeed. It's fine. It's not the most euphonious way of saying it in English, but it's okay. It's all right. I'm not going to correct anybody.
- [109:11]
But we actually.
- [109:15]
Well, yeah, and speaking of repeat callers, we actually have Paul from Texas calling back.
- [109:23]
With another. Yeah, it's you again, Paul, is it?
- [109:27]
D
Yes, it is, and God bless you. And I believe it was Trudy for letting me back on.
- [109:31]
B
You are, I think, the only person who is called twice in a single episode.
- [109:36]
D
Look at me making landmark.
- [109:38]
C
Did you put out a hat and sunglasses before you called?
- [109:43]
D
Coincidentally, perhaps.
- [109:45]
C
Okay.
- [109:46]
B
Little plastic mustache.
- [109:48]
D
Yeah.
- [109:50]
You just. You guys moved on to a new topic. And then I was like, oh, no. A new question and I'd try my luck.
- [109:56]
B
Okay. Have you watched Demolition man since we talked to you last?
- [110:00]
D
I have not found the time. I apologize, Father.
- [110:03]
B
All right, well, okay.
- [110:05]
D
I promise.
- [110:07]
Okay, so my question is that you got into detail, talking about the idea of the will, and especially kind of detailing the difference between, like, the very, very basic life form kind of will that even bacteria might have for, you know, eating and whatnot, propagating, and then the difference between the higher version of the will, which, granted, is not necessarily a loan to us, but, of course, ours of a much higher magnitude.
- [110:32]
Now, I was hoping that this is probably because I still have a very rudimentary understanding of the argument, but I was hoping you might elaborate at least a little bit. As long as it doesn't get too off from the show of how that relates to the dispute between the Orientals and the Orthodox. Orthodox about Christ having one will, both divine and man, or two wills, one divine and one man.
- [110:59]
C
Right. That's going to really endear you to them. Referring to them as the Orientals and us as the Orthodox. Orthodox. But you may not be worried about that.
- [111:12]
B
Your Armenian friend will not be buying you a beer next week.
- [111:15]
C
Yeah.
- [111:18]
D
I'm sorry, all of you out there.
- [111:20]
B
Yeah, well, okay. I don't know. Correct me if I get this wrong, Father, but I think you might be mixing up terms a little bit from what we were talking about. So we Were talking about.
- [111:32]
C
He's not.
- [111:32]
B
Oh, he's not. Okay. We were. We were talking about different kinds of souls, but there's also will, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [111:39]
C
And it's not totally off topic.
- [111:41]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's. Yeah. I mean, will is the.
- [111:47]
C
Sorry to preemptively. Actually, you like.
- [111:49]
B
No, it's okay. I mean, will is a thing becoming what it is, you know.
- [111:54]
C
Right. The internal. Right. And so this is understanding the natural will. This is why it comes up in Saint Maximus the Confessor, right. Is. Is because he's dealing with what the issues surrounding what's going to be the sixth ecumenical council, which is going to establish that Christ has two wills and why he's talking about the natural will, the gnomic will. We won't go again all the way down that rabbit hole. But so sort of the paradigmatic point in Scripture for this is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, right? When he says to his Father, not my will, but yours be done, right? If it be your will, take this cup from me. But not my will, but your will be done. What's going on there? Right? And the natural will that we were talking about, this quality of the soul, this drive is exactly why we say Christ had two wills, right? So Christianity, human soul, which is a faculty of his human nature.
- [112:55]
Has a human natural will, which human natural will is the drive to live, right? To survive, right? To not die.
- [113:06]
B
Right.
- [113:07]
C
Especially not die a horrible death.
- [113:10]
B
Right.
- [113:10]
C
And that's not bad.
- [113:14]
That's not evil. Right. That's a good thing.
- [113:17]
B
That's normal. That's how you know he's human.
- [113:20]
C
Right?
- [113:20]
B
One of the ways.
- [113:21]
C
And so this is taken as evidence Christ has a human natural will. He does not like desire. He has this intro to live, to not die. Right? But right. While he has that right, he also shares the divine will with the Father, which was to die.
- [113:44]
B
Right?
- [113:45]
C
And so this is not. We do not mean. Sometimes people think when we say that Christ has two wills, we're saying like he had two different minds or two different consciousnesses, like a human one and a divine one. Right? And that's not what we're saying, right? The Holy Trinity shares one will because they share one nature.
- [114:11]
It's. It's. What we're saying is that there is within him as a human having a human soul, a human will which caused him to grow to adulthood physically. Right? To human physical adulthood and to eat and these other things, right?
- [114:31]
And that's not bad. But that when the time Came where? Right. That natural, good human will to do that needed to be subjected to the divine will, which was to lay down his life voluntarily. Then that is what he did.
- [114:52]
D
Gotcha. Which is, you know, a perfect example of obedience as a son. But it's reminiscent of am I. Maybe I'm misstepping here above the Feotokos, when she first said, let it be said unto me, as you said.
- [115:07]
C
Right. Because like we talked about in the first half, your noose can talk to your will or to your soul, I mean, and will is a power of the soul, Right. So you can look at your soul, you can look at the things that your soul is desiring.
- [115:22]
B
Right.
- [115:23]
C
The fact that it's a natural will doesn't mean you're a slave to it.
- [115:28]
B
Right.
- [115:28]
C
You could talk to it, you can restrain it, you can control it, you can guide it. Right.
- [115:33]
B
Which is part of the. What morality is.
- [115:37]
D
And this kind of feeds into the notion of us growing as a race and as individuals. Kind of like when Paul talks about both the law and as the angels. Correct. How they kind of. They're over us as teachers until we reach a certain point.
- [115:53]
C
Right? Right. So you can sit there and your natural will is saying, eat the whole tray of brownies. Right. But your higher function says, no, your wife baked these brownies. She wants some of the brownies.
- [116:08]
And so you restrain yourself.
- [116:11]
You eat only most of the brownies.
- [116:16]
D
Kindness, truly.
- [116:19]
Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Fathers. And as a newly orthodox, forgive me for forgetting this, but Christ has risen.
- [116:27]
C
Eddie has risen.
- [116:28]
D
God bless you. Thank you.
- [116:29]
B
All right. Okay, we're going to take one more caller. We have a guy named Steven from California calling in, and I think he's got a bit of a mind twister, so. Stephen, are you there?
- [116:44]
C
Yes, can we call you Bruce so it doesn't get confusing?
- [116:49]
D
Yes, I'm sorry. Hi, Steven.
- [116:57]
Anyways, my question is in regards to.
- [117:02]
The body soul dynamic that you're talking about. So once you're dead and you've been in the ground for long enough, your body kind of goes away and.
- [117:17]
Becomes like some other thing. Like maybe it's eaten by.
- [117:23]
It becomes like grass and then the full circle of life thing.
- [117:30]
So after everybody's resurrected.
- [117:36]
How would that resurrected body be you if it's not the same stuff that makes up the you that is currently you? If that makes sense.
- [117:47]
B
Yeah. I mean, I'm tempted to just say, listen to the body episodes from way, way back.
- [117:53]
But I mean, just briefly, right? A body is not the stuff. Right. It's not reducible to the stuff. And the reason why that's the case is because, for instance, that most of the stuff that currently constitutes your body is not the same stuff that has always been there, right? You've traded out a lot of stuff over time and yet you're still you, right? So it's not about the parts, it's not about the atoms, the molecules, whatever. A body is the collection of all of these things together, right. It's not. You are not the sum of your materiality, right? So it doesn't matter that your atoms and molecules are going to get traded out. It doesn't matter that a king can make a progress to the guts of a beggar. That stuff doesn't matter. What matters is that you as your body are more than that, right? There's something going on there that's. And that's part of what the soul is, right? It's the life of all of that together.
- [118:58]
So, yeah, you don't lose consciousness by your, you know, your corpse decaying and you don't become a completely other person in the resurrection, you're still you, although you are a different person in the sense that your body's been transformed. You know, it's like St. Paul says that the resurrected body is almost, you know, relationship of a plant to a seed, you know, sown in corruption, raised in incorruption. So there's going to be a big difference. We don't know exactly what the difference is going to look like. Although it's going to be maybe sort of angelic on some level. But.
- [119:39]
You know, it's still you. You're still you, right? There's a persistent you in the midst of all of that. I don't know if Father, you want to add or anything to that or correct.
- [119:49]
C
Whatever. Well, yeah, I think it's like every seven years, right, that all the matter in your body changes out or a lot of it.
- [119:55]
B
I'm not sure that all of it does, but a lot of it for sure, right?
- [119:58]
C
Almost all. Whatever, right. Like sloughs and shifts and like. Yeah. I mean, when I see Madonna shamble out on stage recently, right. Like, I still believe it's Madonna, God bless her. It doesn't look like her and I don't think there's any original parts, but.
- [120:16]
Still her. Yeah, I think she's the modern day ship of Theseus, that's where.
- [120:24]
B
So howstuffworks.com says that the body replaces cell types every 7 to 10 years with the exception of neurons in the cerebral cortex. Which stay from birth to death, apparently. So a tiny little bit that you're carrying around the whole time, but the.
- [120:39]
C
Whole rest of you.
- [120:40]
B
Most of it's not. Yeah, most of it's not.
- [120:44]
So does that help Steven and Bruce. Sorry, Bruce.
- [120:51]
D
A little bit. So does that mean that there's an immaterial version of your body that's like. That stays behind even after the material stuff is gone? Or does your soul record the aspects of your body that makes you. You after your physical body is gone?
- [121:15]
C
Hello. That's the sound of Father Andrew punting on that.
- [121:18]
B
Yeah, I don't know how to answer that one. I don't know.
- [121:21]
C
That's.
- [121:23]
B
I mean, you have. So, I mean, you, you, you like the saints are embodied.
- [121:31]
Right?
- [121:31]
C
Yeah. And we're going to get into that. This half.
- [121:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [121:36]
C
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're tracking your track. But. But the other element to this is that in terms of what our resurrection body is like, right. Our touch point is Christ's body.
- [121:53]
And this sort of helps and doesn't help at the same time. Right. It helps in the sense that we can make certain points. Right. Like St. Thomas could touch him. The wounds are still there. Right. St. Thomas can says, handle me and see, spirit has not flesh and blood or flesh and bones. Sorry. As you see, that I have. From which some people conclude Jesus had no blood, which is just amazing to me. But anyway.
- [122:15]
I know it'll be flesh and bones, as you see, that I have. Right. So he was. There's some kind of materiality and tactile thing there at the same time. He could sort of appear with the doors being shut and locked in the midst of his disciples.
- [122:33]
B
Yeah. So there's something different going on there, but we don't know exactly how.
- [122:38]
C
And his body can be everywhere on Sunday morning. Right. So, I mean, that's why I say it helps that it doesn't help. It's.
- [122:48]
So we could see that there are ways in which the way we normally think about particle physics don't apply to the resurrection body. But we could also see that it's not utterly immaterial. Right. That there's distinction there.
- [123:04]
B
Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, I hope that helps, Bruce.
- [123:12]
C
We are going to get into that more as we go through this half.
- [123:15]
D
All right. Well, I'll be looking forward to it. Thank you.
- [123:18]
B
All right. All right. It's always nice to hear from the philosophy department of the University of Wallomaloo.
- [123:23]
C
Yes.
- [123:24]
B
Okay.
- [123:27]
All right. Part three.
- [123:31]
The third half, because it's a show and A half, everybody. So all of that said, what is eternal life?
- [123:38]
C
Yes.
- [123:39]
B
Aside from what Jesus said to know the evil.
- [123:41]
C
Yes. Back to where we started. Yeah, yeah.
- [123:45]
With St. John's gospel. Right.
- [123:49]
So we need to kind of change our thinking about.
- [123:55]
What eternal life means. And here's what I mean. Right. Because.
- [124:03]
Scripture speaks about it very differently. The Fathers understand it very differently than we typically do, because for us, we typically understand eternal life in a quantitative way rather than in a qualitative way. Meaning going to live forever.
- [124:20]
B
Who wants to live forever?
- [124:22]
C
Right. We think that eternal life means there's sort of this endless succession of moments into the future, and they're all going to be pleasant.
- [124:33]
Sort of. Right. And that time and space and everything will basically be exactly. Experience exactly the way it is now, just without all the bad stuff, and it'll never stop. Right.
- [124:47]
Whereas.
- [124:49]
In Scripture and in the Father's eternal life is a qualitative issue. It's a kind of life.
- [124:57]
Right. It's a kind of life, not just an extent.
- [125:04]
And.
- [125:07]
For those of you who may have watched the Good Place now back in the day, it's now been off the air for a while.
- [125:17]
So this is.
- [125:19]
Without finding the correct Christian answer. The show kind of found the flaw in this kind of cultural view of eternal life.
- [125:28]
B
Yeah.
- [125:29]
C
Endless succession.
- [125:30]
B
The way it depicts it, even for people who kind of get to quote, unquote, go to heaven, is that it's just this endless series of pleasing experiences. You can do whatever you want.
- [125:41]
And eventually what happens at the end of the show is the main characters all get bored of it, basically, and they step through a hole into oblivion. So it is.
- [125:54]
C
Well, maybe oblivion. Nobody knows what's on the other side.
- [125:57]
B
Yeah, It's. Yeah. They're just. They're gone. Yeah.
- [126:00]
C
So I have a. I have a film theory about the whole show. Oh, by the way, really, my film theory about the whole show is they are never in the bad place or the good place. They're in purgatory the whole time.
- [126:10]
B
Oh, okay.
- [126:12]
C
Rewatch it and think, all right.
- [126:19]
B
Everybody pull out your Dante.
- [126:21]
C
It's when they're done in Purgatory, they go through the. They go through the gateway, and that's when they actually go to heaven. But. But. Yeah, that reveals the flaw, because it would.
- [126:33]
Yeah. Right. Like, I mean, if your view is I just get to eat ice cream for every meal, my favorite flavor.
- [126:43]
Endlessly. Right.
- [126:45]
B
Yeah.
- [126:50]
C
Right.
- [126:52]
That's not eternal life. That's not what we're.
- [126:56]
That's not what we're talking about. Right.
- [127:01]
And so it's a qualitative issue.
- [127:05]
B
Right.
- [127:05]
C
We don't know how.
- [127:07]
B
Right.
- [127:08]
C
We've talked about this before. Of course, time and space don't exist. Right. What we call time and space, those are factors of our human experience.
- [127:17]
Right. Of our current embodied human experience. Right. Because we're just talking about the example with Christ's resurrection. Body clearly kind of experiences space differently now. He's God, so, I mean, we can't even fathom it. But even from the perspective of his human body.
- [127:36]
He is able to go from one place to another without traversing the space in between.
- [127:43]
Which includes locked doors.
- [127:46]
B
Yeah.
- [127:49]
C
And it doesn't take him time to do that.
- [127:55]
So.
- [127:57]
Whatever our experience of time and space is going to be like in the life of the world to come. Or even if we're just talking about the intermediate state in between. Right.
- [128:10]
Again with the intermediate state, which is what we call that period of time between when we die physically and the bodily resurrection of the whole creation.
- [128:21]
Are we going to experience time? We tend to have this cultural view that, like, you're in heaven or in hell or in Hades, kind of like waiting. Like, it's like the waiting room, and you're either in the good waiting room or the bad waiting room.
- [128:35]
B
Yeah.
- [128:38]
C
I can tell you for sure it ain't like that. Right. We don't know exactly what it's going to be like. Right. But.
- [128:45]
How exactly does that work? Right. We don't know. But.
- [128:51]
There'S a very important verse, couple of verses actually.
- [128:55]
In terms of this, in terms of what eternal life is in St. John's gospel that we read back on Lazarus Saturday morning.
- [129:07]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is two weeks ago.
- [129:12]
It's a really intriguing little exchange between the Lord and Martha, you know, where he says to her, your brother Lazarus will live again. And, you know. But yeah, he goes on to say this. This is John, chapter 11, verses 25 and 26. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?
- [129:47]
So, yeah, there's a little parsing we can do to kind of.
- [129:50]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [129:51]
B
Because a lot of less of a.
- [129:53]
C
Riddle, and especially when we're reading big chunks of St. John's gospel, like the first gospel reading at the 12 Passion Gospels at Holy Week. Right. Like, it's easy to just see this as, like, okay, a thousand deep theological riddles just whisked past me. Right. Like, because there's so much of this That's. So.
- [130:15]
You have to break it down so much. Right.
- [130:19]
So, yeah, yeah. Martha had come out to see Jesus. Jesus asks her, you know, you know, that tells her, you know, that. That Lazarus will rise from the dead. Right. He'll. He'll be part of the resurrection. And Martha says, yes, he'll be raised up on the last day. Right. So she believes in like the bodily resurrection at the end of time. Right.
- [130:42]
But this is then Jesus response to her, right, is that he's not talking about the end of days. He's not talking about the last judgment and that final resurrection, right?
- [130:55]
B
Yeah. He's talking about the first resurrection.
- [130:57]
A
Yeah.
- [130:57]
C
He says, I am the resurrection. Jesus is the resurrection. And of course, it's translated, believes in. This is more like is faithful to. Right. Whoever is faithful to me.
- [131:10]
And it says, though he die, yet shall he live. We'll pause, just leave that for a second. Then he immediately says, and everyone who lives and believes in or is faithful to me shall never die. So that just sounds like he contradicted himself, right?
- [131:28]
B
Yeah. Though he die, yet shall he live. Whoever lives in me shall never die.
- [131:33]
C
Yeah, he just said, well, wait, though he die, he won't die. What? What? Right. And so this is a place where that, that understanding of the difference between physical and spiritual death becomes critically important.
- [131:47]
B
Right.
- [131:48]
C
Because what Christ is saying here is that whoever is faithful to me, though he physically die, yet shall he live spiritually?
- [131:59]
And everyone who lives and is faithful to me.
- [132:03]
Shall never die spiritually.
- [132:06]
B
Yes. So in other words, whoever is faithful to him, even though his soul is going to separate from his body, yet his soul will remain connected to God and not be separated from God in Christ. Yeah.
- [132:23]
C
Yes. And that's why he says that he is the resurrection and the life, because it is through him, it is in Christ that that person's soul remains connected to God.
- [132:36]
Though it be separated from his body.
- [132:40]
And so.
- [132:43]
We have to come back to an ancient understanding of the term magnanimity, being magnanimous. This means something totally different now.
- [132:54]
B
Yeah. Now it means you're basically generous.
- [132:58]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [133:01]
But if you break down the Latin again, animus soul, magna anima magnus, big.
- [133:11]
Magna anima, being great souled, having a big soul.
- [133:18]
Right. And this is part of our understanding of the saints in this life.
- [133:27]
A
That.
- [133:27]
C
In this life already, they're already experiencing eternal life because their connection to God.
- [133:38]
Is already great. It's already big, is already deep.
- [133:42]
B
Right.
- [133:42]
C
Whatever adjective we want to use to describe it, however you want to picture.
- [133:46]
E
It.
- [133:49]
C
And that means this is the connection, this is the conduit. This is through which right, God gives life to them, including their body, because again, that's who they are. Right. Soul gives life to the body. The connection to God gives life to the body. And so this is why their sainthood in this life is expressed not only through. It is expressed through what we might call now moral behavior. Right. Through the fruits of the spirit being manifest. Right. Life being manifest and fruit being manifest abundantly. And that includes the moral aspect. But also.
- [134:33]
Read some time how long these non martyred saints lived in the Synaxarion.
- [134:38]
B
Yeah, A lot of them.
- [134:41]
A lot lived to over 100.
- [134:43]
C
Yeah. Great. Old age. This is also why we have incorrupt relics of saints.
- [134:50]
And saints whose relics give off fragrances of plants and flowers and life.
- [134:57]
Even though they're relics. It's a dead body.
- [135:02]
But the body still has this go back to our relics episode. And so that connection to God.
- [135:13]
Is not broken by physical death.
- [135:18]
When that saint eventually does physically die.
- [135:22]
That does not have a negative effect. That does not cut him off or her off from God.
- [135:29]
Or from us.
- [135:30]
B
Right.
- [135:30]
C
Through Christ. Yes. They are in Christ.
- [135:34]
B
Yeah. If we're all in Christ, why is death a problem?
- [135:39]
C
Right. This is why Christ says regarding Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And he says that as a proof of the resurrection.
- [135:50]
B
Yeah, Right, Right.
- [135:53]
C
To the Sadducees. The Sadducees, the resurrection the Sadducees denied is the one that Martha believed in.
- [136:02]
But when Christ wants to demonstrate the reality of the resurrection, he talks about somebody who died 2,000 years before.
- [136:08]
B
Right.
- [136:11]
C
As still being living. Why? Still connected to God. Right. And also. Right. And that may poke at some of our Protestant friends a little bit.
- [136:25]
Who object to us.
- [136:30]
Singing the prayers of saints, etc. Because they say they're dead. Right. Which of course they're not.
- [136:37]
Now we have to poke a little at our, our Roman Catholic friends with the beatific vision and all that connection is also not broken or negatively affected by the eventual bodily resurrection. In fact, it's deepened by the bodily resurrection.
- [136:58]
The bodily resurrection will be greeted as a good and beautiful and wonderful thing to be in the body. Again, sorry, Plato. Right.
- [137:09]
That is superior. The communion with God in the body is superior to that experienced in the intermediate state.
- [137:18]
B
Yeah. The post death, pre resurrection state.
- [137:23]
C
Yeah. Right.
- [137:26]
Now the negative side of this, this also tells us that everything we've just said about eternal life.
- [137:35]
Also reveals to us something about what is meant by the imagery used in the Scriptures regarding eternal death.
- [137:44]
B
Yeah. Of which there's a bunch of different imagery, you know.
- [137:50]
But.
- [137:50]
C
Yeah, yeah. And this is one piece of it. And you sometimes get folks who the theological term for this is annihilationism, where they say, well, okay, so where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go to heaven where the angels fly.
- [138:09]
They say, they just. Well, see, look, it says eternal death. So that means they just die. They just cease to exist. And then they, you know, that's it, they're gone.
- [138:18]
B
Yeah, but they're annihilated. That's not what death is. Death is not non existent.
- [138:23]
C
Right, right. That's not. That's not what happens to you when you die. You don't cease to exist.
- [138:31]
When you physically die. Your soul is separated from your body. So eternal death, like eternal life. Eternal life is talking about the quality of spiritual life, the deepness and richness of the connection to God. Eternal death, therefore, unfortunately, is an image of being cut off from the source of life, being cut off from God.
- [138:53]
B
It's a subhuman state.
- [138:55]
C
Right. Because just as. And the fathers use this language, just as.
- [139:01]
This quality of eternal life, this quality of the human soul is unique to humans. Right. For that to be fully realized is to become truly human. To become fully human, therefore the opposite being cut off from God as the source of life.
- [139:16]
B
Right.
- [139:17]
C
Is to cease in some sense to be human for humanity to be diminished.
- [139:25]
And may this happen to no one. But the scriptures hold it forth as a possibility.
- [139:34]
To be avoided and a horrible one.
- [139:38]
So that was the first half of our third half. Now we have a second half of the third half.
- [139:44]
B
It's a lot of halves.
- [139:46]
C
There's a bunch of people whose brains aren't breaking over the soul stuff, but this half language is just triggering them. Unbelievable.
- [139:53]
B
I know.
- [139:55]
It's evergreen too. People come back, like, how come they say there's three halves?
- [140:01]
It's just great. Welcome, new listener.
- [140:03]
C
Yeah.
- [140:05]
So now we are going to talk about what it means to become a spirit.
- [140:11]
B
Yeah. You get this language in Psalm 104, which then gets echoed in Hebrews 1 where it says about God, he makes his angels spirits.
- [140:24]
Yes.
- [140:24]
C
Which he makes his angel spirits, which is interesting language, right?
- [140:27]
B
Yeah. It's not that he. It's not the language of he created them as spirits, you know, or he created spirits and he called them angels, you know, which. Those, Those things are true. Right. But there's something more happening there, right?
- [140:41]
C
So, yeah, we think angelic beings. Well, wait, they are spirits.
- [140:46]
B
Yeah.
- [140:47]
C
How could he make them to be spirits, right? Well.
- [140:54]
In the first place, angelic beings are finite beings, right? They're vast cosmic intelligences, but they're not infinite, right?
- [141:06]
B
They're finite in a way, different from our finitude, but still finite. Right.
- [141:11]
C
Because they're created beings, right? Unlike God.
- [141:16]
B
God is the only infinite, right?
- [141:19]
C
And so it's a different kind of finitude, right? And St. John of Damascus says that God alone knows their limitations, right? They aren't obvious to us because right now, at least, we're below them, right? So we compare them to our own limitations, and they seem virtually limitless. But from God's perspective, they're limited, right? And he understands their limits because he put them there when he created them.
- [141:45]
But as we talked about in our episodes about episode about what a spirit is, spirits are these organizing principles of larger collective, created realities.
- [142:00]
We talked about this, that a spirit is this organizing principle.
- [142:06]
At a higher level of consciousness than an individual being, this organizing principle for a collective.
- [142:14]
And it's not immediately obvious how a finite being can do that.
- [142:23]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [142:26]
C
Like, I mean, we could think about like, you know, a general or a king, right? Who is, of course, a finite being. And he gives orders to other beings, right? But the general is not like the consciousness of his army, right?
- [142:47]
And the king does not represent in himself the consciousness of all his people.
- [142:53]
So it seems counterintuitive that a finite being could be that.
- [142:59]
Unless, of course, as the psalm in Hebrews says, God makes.
- [143:05]
That finite being to be.
- [143:10]
The consciousness, the organizing principle of a larger reality.
- [143:13]
B
Yeah. He's sharing his ministry with that being, right?
- [143:19]
C
His governance of creation. Right. He is sharing it, and that is how he is sharing it. Right. He's not making him like the viceroy where God gives him orders and then he gives, passes those orders on, right? That's external. This is different than that, right. Well, in the same way, if we understand this with angels, a human person is likewise a finite being.
- [143:44]
Right? With a soul as the organizing principle of himself. Right? The soul functions as the spirit as the organizing principle of the human person.
- [143:58]
That soul is connected to God in Christ, who is the Logos, right? And as the Logos is the organizing principle of everything, right. The whole creation.
- [144:10]
And so, as we quoted in St. John's Gospel, knowing God involves knowing Jesus Christ whom he sent.
- [144:19]
And so, in a parallel way to the angels.
- [144:24]
Through this connection of their soul to God in Christ.
- [144:29]
The saints are made organizing principles for larger collective realities through being in Christ.
- [144:38]
And so this is what lies behind the language of the saints in glory Being equal to the angels.
- [144:46]
Of their governing. It's not this external governing. Right. And equal to the angels is not just status.
- [144:54]
It'S a role and a function in activity.
- [144:59]
B
Right.
- [145:00]
C
And so in a sense, the saints.
- [145:04]
Have a body that's a greater body. Right. Than the material human body. Right. Which they will have again.
- [145:13]
At the resurrection.
- [145:16]
But this is also what's behind. And this is probably the. I mean, I was going to say it's the best place to understand this. This is a brain breaking part that's hard to wrap our heads around. Right. Because we're finite humans. But a place to see this, a way at this at least is the idea of heavenly patronage, both of individual people and collectively.
- [145:37]
B
Yeah.
- [145:38]
C
Right. So think about St. John the Forerunner and the way in which the prophet Elijah's life became the ordering principle for his life.
- [145:51]
And why St. Luke says he came in the spirit and power of Elijah.
- [146:00]
B
Right? Yeah. It's not just a metaphor, right?
- [146:02]
C
It's not just a metaphor. It's not just external imitation.
- [146:08]
B
Right.
- [146:09]
C
There's an actual direct relationship there.
- [146:13]
B
Right.
- [146:13]
C
That is formative.
- [146:16]
And what's true there with an individual, with a patron saint is also true with churches, nations, organizations, any other collective group, group that takes.
- [146:27]
A spiritual patron.
- [146:32]
That spiritual patron that they take.
- [146:35]
Is going to then be transformative and become the organizing principle for the life of that collective group or unit.
- [146:51]
And this is also then of course, sine qua non of this is the Holy Spirit, who when he comes into us. Right. Unless we're grieving, the Holy Spirit will become the organizing principle for our life, the ultimate one. Right. As we become like God.
- [147:09]
B
Yeah.
- [147:12]
Yeah. So to wrap up, you know, one of the questions that comes up a lot just in Christian life and parish life. And I think this is a question that maybe kids ask more than adults, but I wish adults would ask it a little bit more. And that's this question of what, what is heaven like? Right. What does it mean to be.
- [147:37]
Saved ultimately? Right. Ultimately there's the same question. And.
- [147:44]
You know, our minds, I think, because especially for those of us who grew up here in the United States.
- [147:51]
Things we see on tv, our image of what heaven is like probably defaults in many cases the kind of cartoonish thing with people sitting around on clouds and playing harps.
- [148:05]
And of course that's. That's not it. Right. But then also we might get a little bit higher and sort of see this kind of ethereal, again, cloud world with golden gates standing there and you know, all that kind of stuff.
- [148:25]
And I mean, I've had people tell me that they think that heaven sounds boring, that it sounds really, really dull. And. And it's usually because the imagination of it is something even less than what we saw in the Good Place, even less complex than that, less interesting than that.
- [148:44]
And one of my favorite.
- [148:48]
Expressions for.
- [148:54]
What exactly it'll be like, which, again, we don't totally know. We know some things that we can.
- [149:06]
We can talk about some things that have been said in Scripture, things that have been said by the saints and so forth. But one of my favorites, of course, comes from one of my favorite writers, and that's, you know, J.R. tolkien, where in one of his letters to one of his sons, he has this to say. He says, there is a place called heaven where the good here unfinished, is completed and where the stories unwritten and the hopes unfulfilled are continued. We may laugh together yet, he says, and while I don't think that that encapsulates. And it's not a sort of a. I would not describe it as a dogmatic definition of what the life of the age to come is like. I like it a lot because.
- [149:51]
What it does is it helps us to see that the beauty and the good and.
- [150:00]
All of those things that we love in this life that seem to be unfulfilled because of the imperfections of this life, because of the reality of what life in this world is actually about, that that is going to be fulfilled, completed, and especially, I like the word continued. He talks about stories unwritten are continued. And.
- [150:24]
One of the reasons why I think that that's so beautiful, aside from just giving us an anchor from our own experience that we have now in order to try to imagine what it's going to be like, is that also it's an image that the life of the age to come is a creative life, that it is not simply this static thing right now. Time is going to work differently for us. We're going to experience it differently than we do now, for sure. So we don't. What will motion without time look like? I don't know, or whatever, you know.
- [151:03]
I don't know. But nonetheless, the idea that the life, the age to come is going to be a creative life and a constructive life, however that can be construed, I think is a very beautiful and hopeful thing.
- [151:17]
I heard someone one time react to some of the stuff we've said on this show and say, like, life, the age to come is basically becoming middle management. Like, well, no, because it's not like an earthly bureaucracy Right. Where all of that is really just super dull. It's not like that at all. It's. Instead, it's a.
- [151:38]
An invigorating, energizing, creative, interesting.
- [151:46]
Existence. And again, we don't know exactly what it will look like. I probably said that 10 times now. But we do know that the saints who are experiencing it as a foretaste now, or depending how you understand time, they're fully experiencing it fully now, that they are joyful, you know, they're not showing up in dull suits and saying, oh, yes, I had to check 27,000 files just this morning. You know, that's not their experience. And it's also not showing up with robes and harps and stuff, although, you know, a harp can be a beautiful image of creativity and all kinds of wonderful things. But.
- [152:30]
Yeah, so I, you know, as we, as we conceive of the soul and try to get our heads around it as much as we can, I think that seeing the destiny in Christ of the soul, of the life of the body, as being a truly lively life, that it is truly a. An energizing, energized, creative life.
- [152:55]
Puts a frame around what we're trying to accomplish as Christians that I think is really beautiful and hopeful and.
- [153:05]
Gives us a lot to fix our eyes on and strive towards, you know, that in Christ that this is where we're going, that we can become all love, you know, what an amazing even just thought to have, even if we don't quite understand the reality yet. Father Stephen.
- [153:31]
C
Be careful there. You don't want to pick tick off the harpists. I know Harpers, they're almost as bad as the flautus. They'll really eat your lunch if they come after you.
- [153:45]
So.
- [153:47]
Yeah, you mentioned this middle management thing.
- [153:52]
And the sort of externality with which we view this idea of.
- [153:59]
God's dominion over creation ultimately. And then, you know, the angelic beings and the saints.
- [154:07]
Who are going to participate in that. But it's as we talked about tonight, it's much more.
- [154:14]
Intimate and direct and deep than that.
- [154:22]
And as we've said a lot on the show, there's not sort of neutral ground to stand on.
- [154:34]
We talked about also in the second half, identity.
- [154:41]
And.
- [154:42]
Part of the problem.
- [154:45]
With taking this kind of quasi Platonic approach of identity being something innate in me that I discern.
- [154:58]
Is that when people go to seek their identity.
- [155:04]
And they don't realize that this identity is something that's going to be found outside themselves in relationships not just with other humans, but with other spiritual powers, be it, the Holy Spirit being it, some other spirit, is that they are very quickly led into certain traps. Because just like material nature, spiritual nature abhors a vacuum.
- [155:33]
There are plenty of powers and principalities out there that would love to get their hooks in you and form you and become the organizing principle of your life.
- [155:46]
Probably the biggest one.
- [155:49]
In our culture here in the US and I imagine in most of the Anglophone world that would be listening to us is mammon.
- [155:58]
The pursuit of. And mammon, the Aramaic word, includes not just money, right? It includes that wealth, but it also includes the concept of reputation.
- [156:11]
And that may be in our very contemporary world, the world of social media, the world of instant and weird celebrity where people are just famous. Not famous for doing anything, just famous.
- [156:27]
That desire for clout, for influence, for celebrity, maybe even the more powerful of the drives connected to mammon, even more powerful than the drive to get money, though that's certainly around too.
- [156:43]
And these competing things will very quickly seize hold of us, reorganize our life, reorganize our very identity, our sense of ourself, our sense of who we are.
- [156:57]
And begin to transform us, as we said in this life already, into something less than human, into something less than what God created us as and created us to be.
- [157:11]
And that is a progressive thing. It is a progressive thing.
- [157:18]
And if we aren't deliberate about.
- [157:23]
Becoming the person who God created us to be, then we will 100% fall into that. It takes work.
- [157:36]
It takes work to be a Christian.
- [157:41]
It takes hard effort. It takes determination.
- [157:46]
I tell people all the time, if you're trying to decide what to do, figure out what the easy thing is to do. Take that off the table. It's always wrong 100%.
- [158:00]
We're going to have to do very hard things. We're going to have to do things that don't feel good because they don't gratify our desires. We're going to have to do things that go against the grain and that are difficult for us. And part of the reason they're going to be difficult for us is that we've been formed by these other things.
- [158:21]
Because we're literally going to be trying to become a different person. And that's not easy. Not pretend to be a different person, but actually become a different person.
- [158:33]
To actually have things be true of us that maybe aren't true of us today, but we want them to be true of us in the future. And we're going to have to work and fight to get to that truth. And we're gonna have to wean ourselves off of a lot of the things that have become comfortable and pleasurable and have become crutches for us, right? Life in our world, as we've talked about before, our current world is constructed in an inhuman way.
- [159:03]
There is not a way to operate and function successfully in our world as it's structured today and be sane.
- [159:11]
Right? And so some of the things we develop, we're developing as crutches just to try to survive in an insane world.
- [159:20]
But some of those crutches are alcohol, drugs, pornography.
- [159:28]
Mindless, mindless entertainment patterns of self destruction, right? That we know. While they may be helping me get from today to tomorrow, they're not helping me become the person I was created to be. They're not helping me be a human being. They're not helping me find an experience and give and receive love. They're not producing joy in my life. They're not giving me a sense of peace. They're not bringing peace to the world around me. They're not solving the problems that are causing me to run to them in the first place.
- [160:06]
So my takeaway tonight is that each of us needs to become very deliberate about the person who we want to be in Christ.
- [160:21]
And we need to start with every decision we make, no matter how big or small, asking ourselves, is this going to bring me closer to that person who I was created to be in Christ, or is this going to take me farther away?
- [160:43]
This could be with decisions that seem minor.
- [160:47]
As minor as what am I going to have for lunch, Is it a fast day or not?
- [160:55]
Or this can be as major as who should I be dating, who should I marry, what kind of job should I work at, what kind of career should I pursue? Should I pursue a career.
- [161:09]
On down the line?
- [161:13]
Because if we aren't doing that thinking right, if we aren't focusing right, focusing ourselves and our attention on where we want to go, we will get pulled to all kinds of other places that we don't want to go.
- [161:31]
But there's always hope.
- [161:34]
As long as you're alive, right? As long as you're alive, you can start making those decisions and start moving in that direction. No matter how far gone you've gone.
- [161:45]
You can start to head in that direction.
- [161:49]
But we have to start to act. Rather than just being acted upon.
- [161:55]
We need to start choosing who and what kind of spirit is going to be the organizing principle of our life. Not just falling into whatever one is nearby and seems attractive at the moment or wants to get its hooks in us.
- [162:10]
And if we do that it will not be easy. There will not be a point where it gets easier.
- [162:17]
There will not be a point where we've arrived and it's like, okay, now I can coast.
- [162:22]
That's why Christ said if you want to follow him, you have to pick up your cross and follow Him.
- [162:28]
The walk you take with a cross ends with you being you dying upon it.
- [162:37]
But that is the road that leads through the cross to the resurrection.
- [162:43]
That leads to eternal life, which is something we begin to experience in this world and then continues into the next and ultimately into the life of the world to come.
- [162:55]
B
Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight, everyone. Thank you very much for listening and tuning in. If you didn't get through to us live, we'd stay still. Like to hear from you. You can email us@lordofspiritsandientfaith.com you can message us at our Facebook page, or you can leave us a voicemail@speakpipe.com LordOfSpirits and.
- [163:14]
C
Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. But you won't hear them if you're watching Channel zero.
- [163:23]
B
If you're on Facebook, you can follow our page and join our discussion group. You can leave reviews and ratings everywhere applicable. But most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to love it or maybe hate it or be irritated by it. You know, never know.
- [163:38]
C
And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com support and help make sure we and lots of AFR podcasters stay on the air so you can listen to all of these podcasts in your 98 olds, which is of course bulletproof.
- [163:49]
B
Thank you, good night and may God bless you. And Christ is risen indeed, he is risen.
- [164:05]
A
You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio and I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.