https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bsPQnFZWZM8
So welcome everyone. I’m really excited to be here for another Voices with Verveki. I’ve had several off-camera conversations with Bishop Maximus and I’ve found them deeply rich conversations and I was moved to invite the bishop to come on and do a Voices with Verveki with me. So welcome Bishop Maximus. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you reached out to me and so forth? Well thank you very much John for having me on your podcast. It’s really an honor and a pleasure and I’ve been engaging with your work and enjoying your work for maybe a year now. So my name is Bishop Maximus. I’m a traditionalist Greek Orthodox bishop. I was born in the United States but I’m responsible for some Orthodox missions in Latin America and also in Africa. I live in Guatemala in the hermitage of Saint Ignatius. It’s a small Orthodox monastery in the mountains and it’s a Spanish-speaking monastery. I also teach a couple of philosophy courses in the Orthodox Seminary named SPOTS. That’s Saint Fortius Orthodox Theological Seminary. That’s in Etna, California. The classes that I teach there have I think a little bit of relationship to what your work is John. One of them is called Science and Religion and it’s about the relationship between the two both historically and philosophically. The other, in spite of having the boring name of philosophy too, is actually about the way that ancient Greek philosophy was engaged with by the Christian Church specifically on the one hand by the Eastern Fathers in one fashion and on the other hand in the West the way it developed in scholasticism. So these are a couple of courses that I teach which I think have some connection with your work. Like many people I think if I’m not mistaken, I discovered you through your podcast with Jordan Peterson when you had the year or so ago. When I saw it, I was very impressed with what you were saying and so I decided to look you up and I found quite a few lectures. So I went through your whole flagship lecture of the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I found it very useful. I found that some of your categories and ways of conceiving ideas were useful even within the orthodox Christian context and so I have tried to integrate those into the way that I think. So for example your four different types of knowledge that you outline or the idea of relevant realization which maybe I’ve conceived of in some other terms in an inchoate fashion but I think you’ve done some good work in unpacking it and putting it on a sound psychological and even scientific basis which I think is really useful. So I think that your work is very good. Obviously there’s some points that I don’t agree on and some of those might be obvious to you obviously the questions that are specifically Christian although maybe there’s some other points that would be a little bit less obvious and also I think that what’s important about your work is not only the ideas that you present and the research that you do but the good spirit that you have to engage with other people and to try to bring a spirit of peace and reconciliation and engagement especially in our days where we are so polarized and so divided and if we want to avoid some catastrophe I really think that we need to approach each other in this ceramic spirit and so in a sense that’s that part of your work which is very much part of your public engagement in a sense that’s as important as the actual content itself. So I want to thank you for both of those aspects and I very much appreciate your willingness to speak with me and I’m very happy to be here. Well thank you so much Bishop. I’m encouraged by what you say. The manner of my interactions is as important to me as the material that I’m discussing or developing so thank you for recognizing that. I aspire for that to always be the case which is why I felt our conversations have carried that spirit very well and I’d really be grateful for you to enter into it in that way. Now in that spirit I want you to pick up on that point you made about neo-Platonism being picked up differently in Eastern and Western Christianity and what that might mean first just sort of generally philosophically but then more specifically what might it mean in terms of the resources available to address the meaning crisis? Are there things that for example I’ve read a couple of people who have argued and I’m not saying I agree I’m just presenting it as an opportunity for you to use as a foil but because Eastern Christianity didn’t go through the same kind of history as Western Christianity it might have resources for addressing the meaning crisis that are not so readily available in Western Christianity or something to that effect so that’s sort of the context but could you expand it as you see fit on the different ways in which neo-Platonism was taken up into Western and Eastern Christianity? Well that idea that Eastern Christianity or even Eastern Orthodoxy has some resources that are less readily available in the Western traditions to help us get through the meaning crisis I think that’s almost a common place within modern Orthodox thinking. There’s quite a bit of literature about that by modern Orthodox theologians some of it is pretty polemical but I think there’s a lot of talk about that in the modern Orthodox world. So if we go back to the neo-Platonism Christianity grew within the context of the Greco-Roman world. It started out of course on a simple and practical level but it was inevitable that sooner or later it had to engage with ancient Greek philosophy because that was the intellectual framework which existed at that time. It was an incredibly powerful intellectual tradition which has validity and utility even to this day. It’s not outdated I would not say and so as time went on it became more and more apparent that there was a need to engage with it and of course there were different attitudes towards ancient Greek philosophy within the early Christian church. Tertullian said famously what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? That was very much on one side of the equation but there were others who had a more positive attitude and by late antiquity the ancient Greek philosophical tradition had in a sense coalesced into neo-Platonism. So neo-Platonism had this is a simplification but I think it’s a useful simplification. It had borrowed the ethics of Stoicism, it had borrowed the logic and the physics of Aristotle and then it had encapsulated it within a metaphysical framework of Platonism. And so neo-Platonism was in a sense the fulfillment or the ultimate last step of of ancient Greek philosophy and so inevitably that was primarily what the church was going to be engaging in. And the Eastern Fathers of the church who of course spoke Greek and were able to access the complete corpus of neo-Platonic thought in contradistinction to what was available in the West where only a tiny portion of ancient Greek philosophy had been translated into Latin and there were some summaries and simplifications by Cicero for example. The fact that in late antiquity which was really the formative period both for neo-Platonism and for Christian theology, the place where the most intense engagement was occurring was really the East because that was the richer part of the empire, it was more heavily populated, the educational level was much higher and there were universities of philosophy in a number of cities in the East and none of this existed in the West because the West was collapsing. And as you also said there’s the shared language, Greek, and there’s more full access to a lot of the documents than there were in the West. So there’s a considerable difference between the East and the West’s capacity to engage with neo-Platonism. Yes and inevitably that meant that the Western engagement was going to be at least to some extent truncated, at least until the scholastic period. Then once you get into the Middle Ages, the 12th century and the 13th century, you have a great deal of ancient Greek philosophy being translated into Latin, first in the 12th century from Arabic and then in the 13th century direct translations from Greek. So the Eastern fathers engaged with neo-Platonism in a way which I would characterize it and I understand that it’s a somewhat pretentious word but I would characterize it as a transfiguration of neo-Platonism. Now when I say that and I want to bracket anything that I’m going to say negatively about scholasticism with the fact that I think that if the Eastern father has transfigured neo-Platonism or ancient Greek philosophy, I think we could say fairly that the scholastics perfected ancient Greek philosophy within its own terms. They smoothed out a lot of wrinkles and they developed a lot of ideas further. So I have a lot of respect on a philosophical level for the scholastics. It’s hard not to be impressed by the works of Thomas Aquinas. I think that even in the modern context, it’s very useful to study scholasticism. I think scholasticism can form a very good basis for understanding philosophy. It’s a good starting point and I would like to see more people studying scholasticism in some manner and it’s certainly a lot better than a lot of the philosophy programs that are going on in different schools which tend towards postmodernism or it’s not really clear what they’re doing with the philosophy. There’s a lot of modern Roman Catholic scholars who are you could say neo-scholastics that have written really excellent books like Peter Kreese for example. Peter Kreese, I’ve read people like Clark with the one in the mini and explorations of metaphysics and Sebastian Morello who argues that Aquinas should be better understood as a neo-platinist than an Aristotelian. Which I agree with by the way. Yes and Clark. In Gilson for example. Yes. There’s a lot of very good, very serious philosophers, modern philosophers in the scholastic or neo-scholastic tradition and I have tremendous respect for them and I think their work is very useful in spite of the fact that there are a number of core differences that distinguish the eastern patristic tradition from the western scholastic tradition. So let’s pick up the two qualifiers you used. You see the western Christianity perhaps typified in Aquinas as perfecting neo-platinism and I think there’s great merit to the idea that the Christian neo-platinism is in some sense superior to pagan neo-platinism and then you’ve got eastern Christianity like perhaps typified by somebody like Maximus. Maximus and Dionysius. Yeah, yeah. Maximus and Dionysius, yes for sure and then you said that was that transfigured. So now could you tease out what the difference between those are? Perfection, I get it that you’re, I want to just be clear for because people who don’t know much how much Greek philosophical background might hear something weird in the word perfection. The sense you used here is more the sense of completion. Exactly. Right, right. It’s not, he’s not claiming, at least I don’t think you are bishop, that the neo-platinism within western Christianity is beyond question, is free, absolutely free of error or any other way you might hear the word perfection. I don’t think you’re saying that. I think you’re saying, yeah right, you’re saying it’s, it brought it to a kind of completion in important ways and then so I think that’s fairly, you can unpack that a bit, but that’s at least intuitively once we get clear about how you’re using perfection that makes sense but of course transfiguration is a much different idea and you’re alluding to I guess in the Gospels where Jesus is transfigured before the disciples as sort of a template for understanding what transfiguration means to you or am I imposing something on you? Well, the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Dabor is a core event and a core idea within Orthodox spiritual, within the Orthodox spiritual tradition, specifically, hesychasm and the debates of the 14th century which centered on precisely the question that we’re talking about right now. The hesychastic debates of the 14th century were a kind of confrontation between the Orthodox, the Orthodox approach of God being beyond everything, beyond being, and yet we can participate in him in a real way through his energies as opposed to the Roman Catholic idea or the scholastic idea which was being proposed by, well specifically there was the monk Balam and then there was others such as Akini Nosen and others who were promoting this idea. It was not directly with Roman Catholics, these were people within the Orthodox Church who had been influenced by scholastic ideas. The idea of God being entirely simple, the idea of the absolute simplicity of God or what Thomas Aquinas calls the actus purus, the identity of all qualities and everything that can be said about God with the essence of God itself which leads to a propositional understanding of God as opposed to a participatory understanding of God and that was the core of the argument. Sorry for interrupting but that’s really I think that’s really perspicacious and really pregnant. Can we slow down and really unpack that because of course you’re also using language that I’ve been using to try and understand different kinds of knowing, you know, propositional versus participatory. So that’s so rich and I know you want to go on because you have thoughts leading from that but I’m sorry to interrupt but I just could you unpack that, just that really like because that to me is a profound, let me make a fairly bold statement. If you can make a good case for that I could then see why Eastern Christianity has more resources for addressing the meaning crisis than Western Christianity because part of the meaning crisis is the propositional tyranny and the lack of connection with participatory and perspectival knowing. So this is why I’m slowing you down Bishop. Like this is a pivot point if you can make a really good case for this then I think you’ve laid a really powerful foundation for other issues. So I’m sorry for interrupting but if you could like what you just said there was so pregnant. All right well I’ll try to address this although I also want to go backwards to the initial engagement because it was the initial engagement of these. Sure take your time. Take your time. Yeah. All right well if you allow me to take the slow route. Yes please. Let me go back first to the initial engagement and what that transfiguration was and then try to lead into the second part of the the propositional versus the participatory. Right. So I think that maybe we can break this down into three parts. Excellent. In other words the transfiguration of Neoplatanism to three parts. The first part is something like a rejection of rationalism and from the Orthodox point of view ancient Greek philosophy including Neoplatanism are rationalist endeavors and also from the Orthodox point of view Roman Catholic scholasticism is a rationalist endeavor. It’s a form of rationalism and what that means is that in these in these two traditions of Neoplatanism and scholasticism there is the idea that that by use of the human reason we can genuinely attain to truths ultimately propositional truths about about God however you want to understand God. Now that leads I think to the second issue which is that because these endeavors are intellectual in nature inevitably they restrict the access to those to the contemplation of God or through the participation in God. In other words if you look at Neoplatanism it’s an intellectual endeavor. It’s it’s a form of rationalism and from the Orthodox point of view it’s a form of rationalism. It’s an intellectual endeavor. It’s basically an elitist endeavor. The people who are you know the famous Neoplatanist philosophers are all heavy intellectuals. Their mode of union with the one was yes part of it was purification of the soul particularly with the idea of the rejection of matter which is a key difference between Neoplatanism and Christianity because Christianity explicitly values matter. The other part was the was the idea of the contemplation and so if you compare for example what was going on with Neoplatanism in you know the second to the sixth centuries when it was flourishing and what was happening simultaneously with Christianity. Christianity offers a vision of or a union with God which is accessible to everybody not just to a small number of intellectuals. That was not the case in Neoplatanism. There was no popular Neoplatanism. Popular Neoplatanism was simply you know traditional paganism. There was a huge disconnect between the two in Neoplatanism which did not exist at all in Christianity because Christianity was and is a popular religion. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how educated you are you can be a good Christian. There are certainly many more Christian saints most of whom are not particularly intellectual than there are Neoplatonic sages and the reason for that is because of the difference in approach. The Christian approach is participatory and non-rational because we believe precisely that these things are beyond the reach of human reason. Now that doesn’t mean that human reason is useless. It doesn’t mean that it serves no purpose. It certainly does serve a purpose and there is always the option within Christianity for those people who are who are intellectually inclined to use that inclination as a tool towards ascending to God. So in no way do we deny that aspect of the faith but fundamentally it’s participatory and insofar as it’s participatory it’s accessible to everyone. So this is another key difference and the third would be the transformation of metaphysics and ontology or theology. In Neoplatonism there is the idea of emanation but there are a lot of metaphysical difficulties with the question of emanation and there’s also metaphysical difficulties with the question with the Neoplatonist union with the One and how exactly that takes place and what is the relationship of that with the contemplation. Those were not clarified in in Neoplatonism. You had one idea that was the Platinian contemplation and Porfirio says that during the time that they lived together Plotinus was wrapped into union with the One six times I think he says. Four I believe but it’s okay. All right well whatever number it was it’s you know it’s some number. The Christian view restructured the metaphysics first of all with the Trinity and so there was there was a temptation within Christianity to transpose the Neoplatonist metaphysics onto the Christian terminology. That temptation was Arianism because it’s very easy it’s an easy mental shift to identify the One with God the Father, the Nus or intellect with God the Son and the world soul with the Holy Spirit. It’s an easy connection and that connection was being made by a lot of people in late antiquity because it was a kind of bridge a natural easy bridge between Neoplatonism and Christianity. But of course the church condemned that the church didn’t accept that. It said that we have a totally different understanding and it is a non-rational or super supernatural approach which is the the Holy Trinity. You know if you think about the Holy Trinity in rational terms it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You can’t wrap your head around it well I certainly can’t wrap my head around it in rational terms but if you accept that there is a non-rational approach to it then it starts making a lot of sense and specifically with respect to the Trinity for example the question of the one and the many. Yes. Of course the question of the one and many is a perennial conundrum within philosophy and you know you see some philosophers and the immortals the idea of the one putting more weight on that others was the many others trying to reconcile them in some way. The Trinity is the Christian answer to the to the problem of the one and the many. In other words that both the one and the many are present in God. Not side by side in any kind of logical conjunction that’s what I hear you saying right? Right. There’s no way to make the logical conjunction that you can’t make it fit logically it has to fit in some other way. Can I ask you that I get it that this sort of defies you know our conceptual logic but I don’t think you’re saying that that doesn’t mean we can’t come into some kind of contact with it or else it could not be a truth for us. So is the contact is this is where you’re invoking the sense of participation is the is the participation where we can come into some kind of contact with the Trinity so it can be true for us even though we can’t access it or articulate it through any kind of propositional maneuvers. Am I getting you right? Because I don’t think you’re evoking a kind of complete skepticism about the Trinity or anything like that right? So am I on the right track or am I far from? No you’re on the right track so the this is where we get into a little bit of this essence energy distinction and so that was another and this is a key difference between the Eastern Fathers and the and the scholastics or actually going back to Augustine. The question of how do we participate in God and what when we use language about God what are we actually saying? So Augustine and the scholastics stated that God is a being he is a you know the greatest being that there is and that we can understand him partly the phrase that Augustine used was we can we can understand him but not comprehend him in other words understand him partly. Aquinas then developed that more clearly with the idea of the analogia entis the the analogy of being right but that’s intellectual all of that is intellectual yes and where so then when you ask how do we how would we participate in God in this in this set of concepts the the connection or the participation that we have in God and inevitably ends up being superficial. So the Eastern Fathers distinguished between the essence of God and the energies of God in the western tradition starting with Augustine and then unpacked in greater detail by by Aquinas and and others God’s essence and his energy are identical so there’s only two things that exist there is God and there’s creation the or rather let me rephrase that the there is the essence of God and then there is creation so Augustine said that the that any sort of vision of God or manifestation of God in the world was a created being it was a created effect if it was created that means that the participation was not truly in God it was in some created intermediary where ultimately where that Latin scholasticism is with the idea of the beatific vision yes right in the beatific vision you’re not participating in the essence of God that would be something like pantheism rather you are viewing the the perfection the the perfect the perfection of God which in this concept is completely static because all qualities of God are assimilated to his essence so that they are identical in the the eastern tradition the Eastern Fathers made a distinction between the the essence of God and the energy of God the essence of God being what God is the energies of God being what God does but with the crucial understanding that the energies of God are in fact God himself interacting with the world so what that means is that a person can participate in God in an actual concrete way that is not an intellectual contemplation of propositional truths nor is it a mere interaction with some created mediary intermediary between God and man nor is it simply staring at the perfection of God rather it is an actual participation in the life of God such that the Eastern Fathers so for example Saint Maximos confessor said say that we become by grace what God is by nature now we understand grace to be the energies the energies of God so what’s the relationship then so I don’t know how to phrase this correctly but something like how do you preserve the monotheism if the if the energies are not part of the essence of God because then I you know I could hear philosopher easily saying well doesn’t that make the energies like accidental to God non-essential to God right and therefore accidents are not taken if I only participate in your accidents I’m actually not really participating in you so obviously you there’s a distinction here can you and you and you may just at some point and it’s legitimate for you to do so you may say no no this is ultimately something we can’t get a conceptual grasp of but I at least want to pose the question to you like so the traditional distinction right is between essence and accidents and there’s a new distinction being introduced here if I understand you correctly because the energies are not accidents but they’re also not the essence so how are they neither the accidents nor the essence but nevertheless preserve an identity relationship with with God did that make sense as a question well not not only does it make sense as a question but it was explicitly addressed by by Saint Gregory Palamas who was the the saint in the 14th century who most thoroughly unpacked this whole issue so he he does state explicitly that the energies of God are neither essence nor are they accidents right right they are they are a different category altogether and so so there there’s there’s a difference here between God and man or God and creation in in which the the because of the absolute transcendence of God in which God is not a being he is not an essence even though we use the word essence yes but this is a that goes back to the linguistic question which I’ll try to return to and and I apologize because I’m really gargling a lot no no no no no no no no no no I don’t feel this at all Bishop I think I feel that this is going step by step very very carefully and you’re not making any I mean I try to intervene where I I mean I try to intervene where I think there might have been too big of a jump and you’re not sort of relying on a tremendous amount of theological jargon and so I think you’re doing it very very carefully very very step by step so I don’t I’m finding this is flowing in a very linear fashion in as much as it possibly could so please continue okay so the so so the I guess the back to to reframe it the the patristic the the patristic the eastern patristic uh conception concept of God is both more transcendent and more imminent right right that’s what I hear you saying right so the so the of course the idea that God is transcendent and God is imminent uh that’s a commonplace in most religions um the but then the question is well you know what’s the mechanism for that what does what does that mean when you try to break it down metaphysically yeah yeah um and practically yeah so so in the patristic tradition God is both more transcendent in the sense that he is absolutely beyond being beyond everything beyond thought St Gregory uh the theologian says that um it is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive of him this sounds this sounds like if you’ll forgive the pun uh because it’s not intended this sounds like orthodox neo-platinism that the one is beyond thought and even beyond being yes well actually I mean Plato himself said that the one was being or that the goal is being yeah but but uh St Gregory the theologian um the thousand years before St Gregory Palamas yeah he actually took a phrase of Plato um which played I don’t remember the exact phrase but it was something like it is it is difficult to speak about God yes yes and then he raised it up a level right so all right so so God is absolutely beyond everything that’s right that’s that’s utter transcendence we would say that um now that that idea is expressed you know everywhere in the the eastern fathers um saint um and and there are justifications for which are given in some of the fathers you know like saints bigger of neeson saying bigger the theologian they’ll say things like um we can’t we can’t even understand the creative world how on earth do we understand God which is you know beyond the creative world and then it’s specific examples of that and there’s also arguments that you know understanding is to uh you know you know to integrate things together and attribute them to their unifying cause and that structure makes no sense to what must be ultimate reality because it is not there is nothing beyond it in terms of which all right it it uh it can be explained and there it isn’t divided against from it from some other that it has to be integrated with so you know you have those very powerful arguments that the the the fundamental structure of understanding can’t apply to to this the source of intelligibility can’t itself be in any sense intelligible that i mean these are these are arguments even in the neo-platonic tradition the question i want to ask you was like and and the ground the grounding of reality can’t just be more reality yes yes yes it’s not yes i get it it’s not a quantitative extension it has to be some significant qualitative difference but what i just this just before i want to make sure if i’m getting the mapping right so i understand why that doesn’t actually technically fall under essence because essence is a specification of properties that necessitate something being what it is but is that are you using the word essence to point to the absolute transcendent aspect of God when you are using the distinction essence and energy is is that is that is that what we’re trying to do with that term is it trying to point to that the the the the trans conceptual right that we’re talking about right right so this is this is where the difference in language comes in right um the the scholastic tradition develops language in such a way so that language is actually describing God himself yes yes it may be describing him by analogy it may be describing him in a limited way but there’s genuine content to the propositions such that it is legitimate to say the proposition is true because of that content even though it’s analogical right and that’s what and that’s what’s getting locked into the propositional is that your point right okay keep going okay so so in in the west in the west once you’ve identified the propositional with talk about God and you and you state that this is true and this is false that leads precisely to the propositional tyranny that we’re talking about yeah and and in the orthodox church we would argue um i don’t think we can prove it but i think we can indicate it and it’s plausible um that that propositional tyranny led to some of what we would consider to be the distortions in the west such as the crusades and inquisitions and so forth right right and okay yeah i’ll take it i’ll take it on trust that there’s at least a plausible account of that that you could make and and and i would say you know if you give me the sort of an origin there’s a bad pun in there too if you can be the origin of propositional tyranny it would also coalesce with a lot of the argument the historical argument i gave an awakening from the meaning crisis uh so so so um i in the eastern tradition the question since god is absolute since he is ineffable um ineffable means you can’t speak about it the what that means is that the language that we use about god is not ultimately propositional right it is maybe something more like what you would call procedural right uh in other words the language that we use and we use multiple levels of language which saint Dionysius uh lays out very clearly in his mystical theology um the language that we use um the language that we use about god is more a way of orienting ourselves right so i wanted i wanted to ask you about that uh because you know a place where you can see language denuded of the propositional and just purely procedural perspectival is something like demonstrative reference uh so when i when i when i say this or this that this doesn’t carry any propositional content because it’s just the act of properly orienting you towards something so that you come into some kind of perspectival contact with it right and of course and and then the argument uh within kogsai is uh that’s a linguistic term demonstrative reference but there has to be something analogous to that that’s primordial to attention because attention has to be able to first of all tag things this and this before it can bring them together and then see if they have properties in common and make categories and concepts so it’s preconceptual right and it’s pre-propositional therefore and but what it is it’s a it’s a purely procedural orienting of your perspectival knowing that sort of being here now with being here now with that’s at the core and i know it and i’m not trying to press you into saying yes that’s exactly what it is but is it language use that’s like like kind of for attentional demonstrative reference it’s designed to orient you and put you into a perspectival contact with i’m reaching here bishop because i’m trying to i’m trying to bridge from where i am to where you’re talking and i and i acknowledge that it won’t probably fully land but is it is it close is it is it is it yes no no you’re you’re very much on the right track right that that that is how we how we understand these things now i want to um because if that’s true just hold your thought if that’s true it already gets me deeper understanding of because when you do that the procedural for the sake of the perspectival you’re very you’re very close to for the sake of the participatory right and that’s where that’s where it’s all supposed to lead yeah right right right okay so yeah so so we are we are we use it as um as a map this is a i don’t know if that’s a good term but it’s a but it’s an image that’s maybe useful um to to orient our lives towards god to to conceive of god in some way that is useful toward for that orientation um and and and also useful for the way that we uh can can structure our thoughts about the world about reality so that proper orientation if we can continue the metaphor but it’s not it’s not that much of a metaphor given for ecog side that orientation affords navigation precisely yes absolutely um with the the purpose there’s a there’s a purpose behind it which is participation the participation in god which in and of itself occurs on multiple different levels and um you know say denisius explains uh some of the these levels or there’s a we can say that the denisian framework has become the classical framework in in orthodoxy and and to be fair it’s used quite a bit in roman catholicism if you have purification illumination and aquinas is deeply influenced by dinesis he cites dinesis more than he cites aristotle but you know see he aquinas fundamentally misunderstood one of dinesis’s core ideas please dinesis talks about god as iperucios which is translated into latin as super essential um but aquinas understood iperucios super essential as being something like super duper essence you know whereas dinesis the the eastern fathers understood iperucios as being entirely beyond the concept of essence so you you see the difference um and it’s a there’s a linguistic misunderstanding there which ultimately becomes a conceptual misunderstanding so when you when you’re invoking your essence energies distinction i have to understand essence in that demonstrative reference sense it’s orienting me to something that is actually super essential is that correct am i yes yes correct and then and then and then what is conveyed by the energies in in the distinction and why are they not accidents okay so so so we understand that god being um super essential the and absolutely transcendent beyond everything there uh there has to be uh at least according to christian doctrine a a means of of connecting with god of right right of participating in god and so the question naturally would be raised is if god is so absolutely beyond everything right on earth could you have any connection with him at all exactly which a question was question that arose within neoplatonism it it did arise within neoplatonism i think it was not very adequately answered um but what i’m saying is the question i think the question does naturally arise the way you say it does so so the so the the orthodox answer the patristic answer was was that we we interact with god through his his energies and when we say energies of course we understand this also on multiple levels and you know sometimes there’s word games um or there’s semantic semantic confusion about the way that we use energy about whether it’s referring to a to a created effect of the energy um but there is there is fundamentally a a category of god which is participle participable or this yeah right participative participative all right we use participative um and and that is himself god in his god in his his actions or or god in his grace and the fathers talk about that on a couple of different levels if we talk about grace for example um we we can use the word grace and it refers to an effect in other words it can refer to an emotive state um if a person is in church and they feel compunction or contrition or they have tears um they might say i experienced grace um but but ultimately that’s created effects with it’s it’s an emotion within the human person the and i would say that a lot of um the scholastic or roman catholic talk about grace is precisely on that level so like a gift that is transferred kind of thing to the person right but it but it’s but it’s an effect the created effect i mean tears are a physical you know a physical object so so it’s more something like the sense of gratitude for the gift if i can because i’m trying to play with the notion of grace as gift right it can it can be i mean it can be all sorts of things any any sort of let’s say positive emotion in a religious context can be understood as grace we can use the word grace to refer to it in fact most christians do use the word grace to refer to something like that but i hear that you want to say there’s that there’s a deeper sense there is a deeper sense um which which cannot be accessed by the scholastic definition of grace um precisely because they have excluded any further um because they only have the two categories essence and creation right there’s nothing wait let me i’m getting this this is all clearly coherent for you it’s just coming to me so i just want so i’m going back to your earlier argument they have a hard distinction between essence and creation and so the grace has to be understood basically just as the creative effect but you have a notion of energy that is neither just right uh the the effects nor the essence but the participatory aspect of god i know aspect’s the wrong word but no word is right right and then that puts us into a deeper understanding of grace because we have a category that’s not just the created effect but also is am i getting it am i following yes no you’re definitely getting it okay yeah you’re definitely getting it so okay so this is if we if we view this on the let’s say the in the dinesian framework purification illumination deification there’s grace on all three of those levels or we can say there’s there’s interaction with the energies of god in all three of those levels but they’re very different if we’re talking about on the level of purification which hopefully all christians are trying to purify themselves the most likely the way that we’re going to experience grace is by those created effects right now which are good in and of themselves i’m not saying that to downplay the you know their their importance in christian life of course we we need to have um these emotional experiences um i’m not saying that we should constantly be in a in a stressed emotional state you know or you know that’s that’s unbearable but but um you know there has to be an emotional component or religious life otherwise it doesn’t become um authentic i mean it’s not authentic you know it’s dry yeah so all right but then if we go to the level of of illumination um and you know this is this this can intersect with your work on a number of different levels yeah um you know we use the word illumination and there there is a little bit of let’s say i don’t want to say overlap let’s say commonality um with the eastern word enlightenment um it’s it’s not identical i don’t want to say that those two are identical but there is a little bit of um commonality they do they they do share uh commonalities and they seem to come not from the domain of action or inference but more from something like what happens to us in insight uh where we where we participate in a process by which reality is disclosed to us because we’ve moved beyond a way in which we’ve been framing i mean this is playdoh’s ascent out of the cave kind of the anagoga uh thing yes and it connects with what you what you say about flow yes exactly exactly yeah exactly the so when when a person is in a state of illumination they receive divine grace um which is which is active within them and it is god himself within them it’s not a created intermediary nor is it a an emotional effect which can be at least partly reduced to you know chemicals and synapses within the brain um not that i’m saying that that’s the totality of human emotions but no no that aspect exists which is created and physical it’s something it’s something else it’s a it’s a it’s a level of grace which which um comes down to us and in which we participate um saint pegri palamas says that it since the word grace means means gift that that um that advent of god within us is such that the gift of grace that god gives to us becomes our own it becomes it becomes part of us and in fact we believe that this is what we were created for um which is a a distinction from the from the scholastic view of grace as the donum super additum yeah that aquinas talks about um of this being i can say of nature and grace being uh distinct and and grace being something that’s super added onto the onto the nature for us the nature the the true proper state of of human nature is precisely to be imbued with grace and to be living in in grace so it becomes a proper part of us but i also heard you say that energy that energy affording that that transcendence that that sense of what i’m doing with my hands right right um but you also said that is god that’s not just an effect of god yes it is god so so you know some people use the phrase the presence of god um which is true although vague and insufficient yeah um the the word that the fathers use is synergy right right right right which means that there is the there is the human element which is our own person experience and and the fathers do state that this is primarily mediated through the nous yeah that part of us that the no the no the noesis that part of us that can move to different ontological levels through kind of a systemic insight that that that i mean that’s what it means in greek um right and and you know it’s very important in in the fathers is the distinction between logos and nous these are two key ideas saint maximus uh deliberately juxtaposes them and he deliberately talks explicitly talks about them as as how the two could be unified um and in patristic thinking the model of unity or the model of um unity of all dualities is precisely the um the union of the two natures in christ right um which is a whole another yeah i don’t want to get off on the incarnation yeah i don’t want to i just want to make a note uh so you the use the word used is synergy and then i know erasmus and luther erasmus is trying to propose a kind of synergy in you know in in sanctification salvation and luther explicitly rejects it he explicitly rejects that so i imagine you see protestantism is very very far from the position you’re arguing for then uh because of that uh that that that’s so there there couldn’t be unfortunately unfortunately right right right right um because they’re well they’re missing out on some of the best things the uh you know and that’s connected with the the protestant idea of uh vicarious justification or vicarious vicarious righteousness uh that the righteousness of christ is imputed to us vicariously um that that’s a really horrible idea from an orthodox point of view because we don’t want to be vicariously righteous we want to be actually righteous i get it and i don’t want to launch into a protest a criticism protestantism yeah no not but but i just i just want to make clear uh because you know i see i see you know i’m not saying luther was a nominalist but you know you’ve got you’ve got the nominalists and right coming in and then you you get luther’s rejections of sinister synergism and and all of those things are really enhancing propositional tyranny in the west i would argue i would argue you know sola scriptura and you know and it takes precedence over sacrament even um is an indication of that now again i’m not here i’m really not here and i know you’re not because you’ve said this to me we’re not here to sort of say that christ the protestants aren’t true christians or whatever i’m not i don’t want to get into that uh i’m not going to do that i’m not telling you what you should do but i don’t want to do that i just i’m just trying to understand and the reason why i brought up protestantism is because it became the dominant form of christianity in the two great superpowers england and the united states so it has a kind of world grasping providence and therefore i that’s why i was bringing it up to try and say you know the fact that that gets projected onto the world by these two superpowers may in fact be part of what i call the meeting crisis that’s just that was the only reason why i wanted to make that connection i’m not here to try and you know uh you know whip protestantism in any way i just wanted to get that point out if that’s okay with you and we would entirely agree with that um i mean the orthodox would entirely agree with that so so the the state of illumination is a state of participation in god um not simply on the created emotional level no but there’s actual synergy there’s actual interpenetration of some kind i know all these words are heretical but i’m just using them to try and get those are not heretical words those are the words that we use okay so now i’m wondering here um again and if this doesn’t land that’s fine and i’ve got to go in about five minutes so right now before i forget i’m inviting you we’ll we’ll bring it to a sort of a logical pause and and then you’re going to come on again please and we’re going to continue this because i think this is really really i’m i’m really getting the argument of how eastern orthodoxy has resources for addressing the meaning crisis that are not available in in sort of the the western legacy of christianity if i can put it that way i’m this argument is i’m getting this argument you seem to you seem to be telling me that i’m getting it and i feel like i’m getting it no you are you are getting it so i want i just want to know i just want to try and map and so this is where it may verge on being heretical so we’ve got synergy we’ve got interpenetration but i’m trying to think phenomenologically so when i when when i sort of get an understanding of transcendence i talk about this sense of moreness that there’s always there’s more in a sense beyond whatever framing i have of there’s more and the ultimate moreness would be you know that which makes any kind of intelligibility itself possible and it’s ineffable because of that because of its super it’s super transcendence but i also talk about suchness and this is influenced from the buddhist tradition which is something that is so radically imminent that it’s not categorizable right it’s not it’s not it does it’s not a property of a class it’s it’s unique and specific so for you there is but ultimately for any object but it’s good to do it with people because they get a sense of that there is something that is unique about you there’s a unique suchness there’s an aspect of you that is non-categorical that is you you you and that’s all i can do i can just i can just keep pointing at it with those words and emphasizing it and it’s kind of the the way in which you are radically imminent in yourself and i’m wondering is that the place where the synergy occurs like if the synergy what i’m trying to say and i i hope this is consistent with the argument if the synergy is just in your categorical properties right that that strikes me as i don’t know what i want to say it it it doesn’t seem to be something that would put me back into a state of an orientation to something that’s finally ineffable but like there’s the ineffability of right there’s different kinds of ineffability there’s an ineffability in that i can’t i can’t get right it’s so beyond my conceptual abilities because it transcends them like you said super essential but there’s also in there like there’s the deep ineffability of what vanilla ice cream tastes like to you right i can’t yeah well there’s the qualia yeah but i’m not just i’m just the qualia i’m not identifying it with the qualia but i’m identifying it with right there there there is something that you unique that you uniquely point to and this is also so like just like i did a demonstrative reference this i can do a demonstrative reference i and my eye and your eye are not can’t be the same because then i’m not using the word i correctly is that where this like is that where the like is that where the the the synergy penetrates to well there is there is both aspects i think there is um you know we the the fathers talk about this distinction between person and nature yes okay and so so and and we use the word hypostasis yeah and so so when we’re talking about christ we talk about the n-hypostatic union in in christ oh i see and and of course the price is our model right um now the distinction between our union with god and christ’s union with god is that is that for christ it was an essential union because he is by nature by essence both god and man right now for for us we we don’t become by essence god we become by grace god or by energy god and so the the union is is on a personal level it is a it is a it is on the hypostatic level but but it is but the the energy is is i guess there’s both there’s both the person and and the nature but but i’m and i’ve got to go in literally two minutes but i’m trying to get this idea like when people talk about these experiences of deep participation they often use metaphors that have different directionalities one will be an out and up and beyond beyond right and then there’s uh within beneath like the depths of my soul kind of thing where is where they and i’m trying to i’m trying to map that onto what you’re talking about here because i’m trying to like so is it are the energy is sort of experiencing the radical imminence of god in fact in the most with the most imminent aspect of who we are to ourselves we are experiencing the imminence of god is that the energy yes because because we become the person that we’re supposed to be ah right right right right right right i get it right okay so yeah so it it is it is sort of your superlative suchness that’s in relation to this is it right see the so the fathers use both both of those terminologies they say you know this is they say explicitly that you you are becoming one with yourself you are uniting with yourself yes um and there’s the whole idea of of the the integration of the fragmentation of the human personality which is also a problem right um this is a core idea in in the hesychast for example so so there’s a there’s a synergy within the psyche if you’ll allow me that and then that that psyche is also in a synergistic relationship with god is that but those two synergies are like one with each other in some important ways they’re they’re they’re one with each other because because that is what we are supposed to be so so so if we if we say that god’s grace is is active within us we are both saying that we are in a relationship with god with the transcendent and we’re saying that we are we are becoming or experiences experiencing what is really what is truly our proper nature that’s what i was asking for so and the two are identical right right right right right okay bishop we’ve got to stop right there that’s a nice that’s a nice crescendo at least to stop on it’s nowhere near completion i’m inviting you to come back fairly soon and we’ll get another one of these we’ll just pick up this conversation right where we’re at and keep going i i feel there’s a lot more you want to say you you you didn’t properly get into theosis yet and i wanted to hear what that is and how that that was the next yeah and how that difference from the western the western christian conception of salvation obviously there’s significant overlaps or you wouldn’t both consider yourself christian but what are the significant differences and again every time you make one of these moves in addition to getting it i’m trying to see its relevance to the potential for responding to the meeting crisis so i invite you to come back and we’ll keep doing that together but i well i think i thank you very much for having me on and it was a great conversation i apologize for jumping all over the place no no and not presenting these ideas in an orderly fashion and part of the reason for that is that everything is related to i get it i get it i get it and that’s the same in my thinking too with it like i making it making making i write this dynamical system into a linear algebra is often you you can feel how it’s misrepresenting things in some important way i get it i get it i really appreciate that i i really thank you for this conversation and i i look forward to you coming back and we talking again all right thank you thank you john got me with you and well thank you so much i really appreciate this a lot are you really helping me to understand a lot and there’s ways in which um i’ve been ignorant i mean i’m reading a lot of this stuff i’m reading dianesis i’m reading maximus i’m reading uh because i’m trying to understand this and you’re helping tremendously thank you very much well you’re helping me too and it’s a it’s a mutual benefit and a mutual blessing excellent that’s what we want