https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=I-AxtZbth-I
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveke. I’m very excited to be here with my friend Bishop Maximus. We’ve had two amazing conversations while they’ve been more than conversations. I think at times they get into a dialogical flow. And we’re going to pick up this third conversation on ritual and theosis. But the bishop also recommended talking about my project in After Socrates, and I’ll use this as a venue to shamelessly plug for my series After Socrates, where I’m trying to reverse engineer a neoplatonic way of life, especially practices around dialectic into dialogos. And I’m going to propose to you, Bishop, that we start with that third thing, the reverse engineering neoplatonism. And I know you have thoughts on it, and I want to give you space and time to give me your reflections and your responses to that project of trying to reverse engineer a neoplatonic way of life. Well, thank you so much, John, for having me on again. It’s always a huge pleasure to speak with you. And we’ve had great conversations, and I believe that this conversation is going to be wonderful as well. So thank you very much for having me on, and I will try to plunge into the topic that we proposed. So I’ve been listening avidly to your new series, After Socrates, and you have in clearly a project in that series of reverse engineering neoplatonism. I think you state that explicitly. Yes, I do. Right. So and it’s a project that interests me because there was a sense in which I tried to do the same thing or something similar. Right. Although, of course, I reached ultimately reached somewhat different conclusions from you. Yes. Which, by the way, do not necessarily preclude everything that you’re saying by any means. So I think in order for me to explain where I’m coming from on this question, I’m going to have to go back in time a little bit and explain a little bit or something about my personal life, which is, I don’t know if it’s a little bit embarrassing, but it’s just human existence has its ups and downs, and we have to recognize the fact that this is our human life. So I’ll hold everything you say in respect and in the trust that we placed in each other. I know you do. I know you do, John. So I became a monk at a young age, and I really tried to live the monastic life as best as I could, according to the traditions of the Orthodox Church, according to the teachings of the Orthodox fathers, particularly those fathers who were writing specifically for monks and how to lead the monastic life, even though in the Orthodox Church we believe that those writings are ultimately applicable to everyone. And according to the guidance of my spiritual father, the abbot of the monastery, this is called Holy Ascension Monastery. It was in New York State where I lived for about 17 years. Now in the Orthodox Church, we have the spiritual father, particularly in a monastic context, we have a term that we use in English, would be elder. In Greek, it’s yerondas, yeron in ancient Greek, yerondas in modern Greek, and in Russian it’s called status. Now there’s actually a literary representation of Russian status in Dostoevsky, in the Brothers Kermasov, when they go to meet the elder, the status, Zosimas, if you remember that episode. It’s an attempt to represent what an elder is in the Orthodox Church. For reference to those who have never heard of this phenomenon in the Orthodox Church, you could think of it a little bit like a guru in Hinduism. Now obviously it’s not the same thing. I don’t want to make an identity claim at all. And maybe some other dogs will criticize me even for mentioning that idea. Or perhaps like a sifu within the martial art tradition, the master teacher leader that you sort of entrust yourself to. Right. Even though the word guru in Sanskrit just means teacher. So anyways, in Orthodox monasticism, every monk is supposed to have his elder be in obedience to his elder and receive spiritual guidance from his elder, which is passed down from one person to another. There is an unbroken succession in Orthodox monasticism. And to the best of my ability, I was trying to live the Orthodox monastic life according to the teachings of the fathers, the institutions of Orthodox monasticism, the guidance of my elder, my spiritual father, and so forth. And I was trying very hard. I mean, I was really putting my heart into it. And it worked. I was making spiritual progress, genuine spiritual progress. And everything that I was experiencing, both within and without, was completely in accordance with everything that I was reading in the writings of the holy fathers. And I felt very, very comfortable and very, let’s say, even optimistic about my spiritual life in that, let’s say, in that phase of my monasticism. What happened was I ran into a wall. I ran into a kind of dead end, spiritually, where I found that I just that doing the things that I was doing, I couldn’t advance spiritually anymore. And it wasn’t just that I wasn’t forcing myself enough. It was that there was actually some sort of psychological block. I use psychological for lack of a better term. You can call it a spiritual block, call it whatever you want. There was something in my mind and my soul that if I had pushed myself harder in that way, not only would I have not made progress, I actually would have damaged myself. And maybe to the point of going crazy. So it was a big issue for me because this was my life, right? So what am I going to do with my life if I don’t make any kind of progress? And so I was in this kind of crisis, which did not manifest itself too much externally. Externally, I was doing everything that I continued to perform the external aspects of the monastic life and the way that they’re normally done. But internally, there was a kind of a crisis, which lasted for some years. It was not something that just came and went. It was a serious re-examination of what’s going on here. And is the problem with me? Is the problem with… I’ll admit that the thought actually came to me. Is the problem with the teachings of the fathers? Are they missing out on something? It was a real problem. And it would be dishonest if I didn’t mention the various thoughts that went through my mind, which I don’t think they would sound unreasonable to anyone who would be going through something like this. I know that many other people have gone through their own spiritual crises and have obviously not the same thing, but all these kind of thoughts end up generating in my head. So I was left with the question, well, what do I do? I can either just accept that this is the way things are and basically resign myself to stagnation. That was not a very appealing option to me. Stagnation is something that I abhor. I guess you feel that way too? Yes, very deeply, very deeply. The only other option that I could see was, well, I need to find another way forward. If what I’m doing is not working, then… And if my beliefs and orthodoxy and orthodox monasticism are fundamentally true, which I believe and believed, then there has to be another way forward. So then I put myself to look for what that other way forward was. And now there was another factor that was influencing the way that this played out for me, which was that around the same time, or maybe a little bit earlier, maybe a year or so earlier, I had begun to study philosophy in a serious way, particularly ancient Greek philosophy. Not exclusively, I mean, I read widely, but particularly ancient Greek philosophy. And the reason for that was that I was reading the Fathers of the Church and I read practically everything that was available in English. And I was starting to read what had not been translated into English, what was still in Greek. And I realized that in order to really understand the Fathers of the Church, I had to have some sort of basic knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy. Of course. Because that was the thought world that they were living. Yes, yes. All of the Fathers of the Church, those who… In the Orthodox Church, we use the word Father to very broadly, basically, we could say any saint of the Church who leads behind writings and instruction, regardless of their, let’s say, philosophical or intellectual or theological level. But for the, let’s say, for the major fathers of the Church, who were talking about theological issues on a deeper level, there was a heavy philosophical element there that couldn’t be avoided. And for me to understand them, I had to study ancient Greek philosophy, because of course, that was the environment that they came from. So I set myself to basically to duplicate the ancient Greek curriculum, educational curriculum. That’s amazing. And basically so that I could build up in my head the same thought world that all of the Fathers of the Church or most of the Fathers of the Church had. So in other words, so that I could understand them on their own terms. And by late antiquity, the educational curriculum had basically been standardized. And it included things like, you know, you start out reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, you would read the Selection of the Playwrights, you would read some of the Orators, the Mostenese, you would read the some instructional manuals on Oratory, because rhetoric was in many ways the framework in which education was presented in late antiquity. So Hermogenes, for example, and his progymnasium, which are the rhetorical exercises that help prepare you to speak in a rhetorical manner. By rhetoric, you know, we think of modern and our modern world as, you know, just being kind of a florid, often excessive language. In ancient times, rhetoric was virtually indistinguishable from just clear thought and composition. And then, of course, the philosophers, Aristotle, first of all, his logical works and his, what we could call his physics and some of his scientific works. These were a basic part of the curriculum for everyone. And then on a higher level, a more advanced level, there would be the study of Plato. So, you know, I went through, I can’t say I read every single piece of ancient Greek literature, but, you know, I read a lot, and particularly with particular emphasis on the philosophers. And, well, I was presented with or confronted with a different way of looking at what we could call the spiritual life, or the structural reality, one which was extremely powerful and which made many of the same claims that we have in the Orthodox Church and Christianity. You know, this idea of the union with the one or with God, however you want to call it, this idea of the, you know, something like realism, however you want to conceive the question of the forms or anything like this, the contemplation of reality, the purification of the soul. So many ideas were similar to, parallel with what existed in the Orthodox Church. And of course, there was a lot of mutual borrowing, tremendous amounts of mutual borrowing. Yes. Yes. That I was, well, in a way, it was a new world that was being opened up to me. In another way, it was extremely familiar because much of it I was already doing. Yeah. Yeah. So since I was in this kind of spiritual dead end, and at the same time, I was discovering a similar but sufficiently distinct spiritual path, let’s call it method, to union with God. Obviously, it was a temptation for me. Right. Right. You know, it was a temptation, the neo-Platonism and its somewhat intellectual means of ascent towards God was a temptation to me. Right. Right. And it was something that I thought about very, very hard because of course, when you, when you’re looking for an answer and a possible answer is presented to you, you’re not going to throw the opportunity away. No. No. So, well, so what happened? Basically, I thought about it very, very, very hard. And in the context of my own person and my my own soul, this idea of basically a set intellect, which was more or less how I was understanding the Platonic method of dialectic and the contemplation of the forms. Now, I know you have your own version of that. Sure. But keep going. It’s good. This is really good. Maybe addresses some of the issues that I was thinking. But anyways, that’s where I was and how I was thinking. So, but I realized being honest with myself, if I pursued that path, and I wasn’t talking about abandoning the Orthodox Church or abandoning monasticism, anything else, I’ll be in the context of what I was already doing. Just kind of a reorientation of of my methods and my mind frame. The I realized that if I went down that route, I there would be no way that I could avoid getting it mixed up with a lot of egotism. Yeah. Ultimately, a form of intellectual pride, and some sort of elitism, you know, which put it put in its most simple form. It’s like, I’m smarter than you. Therefore, I’m better than you. Yes. And, you know, that that temptation exists within neo Platonism. Yes. You know, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I’m sure you recognize it. Or yes, I recognize that I recognize it in myself. I hope. I hope that recognition isn’t just some subterfuge of the very thing we’re talking about. I hope I profoundly hope that it’s authentic and genuine, the recognition. So I totally acknowledge that point. And we’ll take it up in the discussion, but please continue your narrative right now. Right. So I understood that if I wanted to lead a pure spiritual life that wasn’t on some fundamental level mixed up with my own pride, my own egotism, my own passions, that that was not going to work. That path was not going to work for me. That was one reason why I didn’t do it. There is a second reason, which is that at the core, I’m a Christian. I believe in the Gospels. I believe in all of the doctrines of the Orthodox Church. And, you know, when you read the Gospels, and then if you compare it to, let’s say, Platonic, dialectic, it’s clear there’s at the very least, there’s a difference in spirit at the very least. Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s not a way to reconcile the two on some level. And, and in fact, I believe that Christianity did reconcile them on on on some level. But, but if we were going to take, let’s say the pure unadulterated version of of neo- Neoplatonism, it was, it was a spirit that was alien enough to, let’s say, the pure mesh, the message of the Gospels that I just didn’t feel like I could, you know, at home there, you wouldn’t be at home in that other way, honestly, pursue it and still be more a Christian than a Neoplatonist. Right, right, right, right. And, you know, my, my soul wouldn’t allow me to do that. Okay. But I was still confronted with the question of, wow, this is a, this is powerful. Yeah. And it’s not, you know, it’s not something to be dismissed. So, so there was a question of what to do with it. Now, if we go on to, that was the, let’s say, what you would call the dialectical method, we can call the dialectical method, I don’t have a problem with that. That’s one aspect of Neoplatonic spirituality. It’s not the totality. There is other parts to it, as you acknowledge the, and I think are trying to integrate. There’s also spiritual practices, practical things, which are, many of which are borrowed from Stoicism, which really is, I think, criminally underrated in modern scholarship, or at least up until very recently. Although it’s a big deal now in the popular world, Stoicism is going through this huge revival. I think of Neoplatonism as the, the integrated, the integration and not just the adding together, but the integrating gestalt of sort of Platonic, anagogic spirituality, Aristotelian psychology and science, and Stoic ethics and existential practices. And so that’s, yeah. That’s exactly the way that I view it. Yes. Good. Good. Good. Please continue then. Right. So, you know, so there are all these Stoic practices that were integrated into Neoplatonism. And many of them were adopted into the Orthodox Church with, particularly as part of monastic practice. So things, for example, like the remembrance of death, there is the Stoic practice of the contemplation of future evils in order to prepare one’s soul. Pre-meditatio, yeah. Pre-meditatio. There was in particular very, perhaps the most important element in Stoicism, Stoic practices, the distinguishing between those things which are within our power and those things which are outside of our power and acquiring equanimity of soul or apatheia, the word that they actually use, which is not apathy. Yes. Yes. I see that very clearly. And in Greek, the things that are dependent on us, the things that are not dependent on us. And this was completely, 100% integrated into Orthodox monasticism. I just want to say that I did not find them present even in a reduced form in the Protestantism that I was brought up in. And I’m not sure, perhaps there’s versions of this in Catholic monastic practice. So I won’t speak to that. But I was like, I first, when I encountered them in Stoicism, they were completely novel to me. And so I just want to point that out. Because there’s probably a lot of people listening that are from other Christian denominations or none. And they might say, what are you talking about? But that’s interesting how much that is. Are there things like also the view from above practice that was taken up in Stoicism and also taken into Neoplatonism? I’ve done some work on that. Sure. And in fairness, practically all of this is in Roman Catholicism as well. Now, I mean, the problem in Roman Catholicism is not that it doesn’t exist, it most certainly exists. It’s just that the mainstream presentation of Roman Catholicism is so watered down that many people don’t see it. They have to dig a little bit. Which is, by the way, this is a tangent, but I’ll mention anyways, which is, by the way, one of several reasons why people who convert to Roman Catholicism usually convert to traditionalist forms of it. How do you define traditionalist? You know, very few people convert to the more, I don’t know, popular. I think modern is exactly the right adjective. Right. And then in Protestantism, well, of course, since Protestantism explicitly rejects tradition, that’s a really good way to cut yourself off from any of these kind of practices, not to mention the fact that if you have this idea of salvation by faith alone, well, then why do you need all this extra stuff? Now, that’s not totally fair to Protestants, because I know that Protestants make a distinction between justification and sanctification. Yeah. And there is certainly a mechanism within Protestantism whereby they could, could in theory reintegrate that. Yeah, I’ve had a very interesting conversation with Jordan Cooper around that. But let’s go back. Okay, going back to the main theme. All right. So basically you had within Neoplatonism a number of practices. Some of them, many of them were already present in Orthodoxy and particularly in Orthodox monasticism. So, well, I didn’t have to change anything there because I was already doing it. All of these had already been internalized very much into my spiritual life and still are. Now, there was another set of practices which were not accepted by the church historically. And these were primarily the practices that were connected explicitly with paganism. So most obviously the worship of idols. And by extension, the Neoplatonic attempt to just find the philosophical justification for this, which ended up being theology. Yes. Yes. So, you know, as I mentioned in a previous, in our previous conversation, it’s very difficult for me and historically it was difficult for the church to see theology as anything more than simply a kind of refined intellectual version of magic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now I know you have some thoughts on that, which may be leading in a slightly different direction. And I’m open to hearing your thoughts on those. But at least for myself, what I saw was that, of course, as a Christian, I wasn’t going to worship idols. No. Nor was I going to engage in any sort of, any sort of pagan rituals where I’m trying to animate statues or do any of these practices which were connected with theology. Rather, I saw that the elements of theology, which were actually true and actually valid. And of course, there were some present, were already present in orthodoxy, in the liturgy. Yes. The services that we perform. So, and from my point of view, in a much better way. So, I thought to myself, well, I’m not going to go down that route. And I have a better version of it, yeah. Anyways, so, you know, there’s no question there. Now, the third element, which we haven’t discussed, which we can get into, is, I don’t know if it’s the third element. Anyways, there is the question of dialectic, which you want to bring up. But anyways, the long and the short of it is that this was my spiritual experience. This was my confrontation with neo-Platonism. I learned a tremendous amount from it. Absolutely tremendous. I ended up rejecting the, let’s say, the more pure form of neo-Platonism. But I did come to a, I don’t want to say a compromise solution. The power, the truth, the nobility, the beauty of neo-Platonism forced me to take it seriously, very seriously, along with the fact that, you know, I was at a dead end with what I was doing before. And so, what that did was, since I was committed to being Orthodox, and that meant working within the framework of Orthodox tradition and the Fathers of the Church, what that motivated me to do was to then reread some of the Fathers of the Church in order to see if there was something that I was missing. Something that I was missing that addressed some of the same issues or approaches that existed in neo-Platonic dialectic. And where I found that was primarily in St. Maximus. And St. Maximus talks a lot about contemplation, theoria. Yeah, very much, very much. I’m reading Maximus right now. Right. Now, of course, he’s not the only Father. There are lots of Fathers of the Church that talk about this. But, you know, he was the one who most appealed to me and who, maybe who spoke the most extensively about it. And so, the conclusion that I reached, maybe on an intellectual, but also on a personal, practical, spiritual level, was that the way forward for me spiritually was, while not abandoning any of the practices that I was doing, which in fact still form the, you know, the most basic layer of my spiritual life, my monastic life, in which under no circumstances would I dismiss or deprecate or diminish. In order for me to live a more full spiritual life and to actually make some real progress spiritually when I had been stalled out, I had to take up a new practice. Let’s call it that. Which was contemplation. Right. Contemplation in the Maximum sense of the word. Yes. Which is not the same as the Neoplatonic version, but which nevertheless does share certain commonalities and which I would argue, how convincingly I don’t know, but which I at least which I conceive of as being another element in the transfiguration of So that’s where I am right now. And I’m really happy with it. I’m really happy. You know, and it both provides a way for me to have a fruitful, meaningful spiritual life and it certainly provides a bridge for me to speak with you know, with you and with many other people. Well, I have a bunch to say that was wonderful and beautiful and I’m honored to be able to just bear witness to this. So thank you so much. One thing is I might put it to you that you’ve taken up another practice and because I properly regard it as a practice, which is the teaching of philosophy. I view it as part of the same thing. Good. And for that matter, I view our conversations as part of the same thing. Yes. Great. Excellent. So you alluded to a question. I’m going to raise it more explicitly and thank you for that. As you said, I’m trying to reverse engineer and I think of sort of this triangle of things I’m trying to reverse engineer when I’m reverse engineering neoplatonism. One, which we’ve just ended on is, you know, the meditative contemplative whole. I use those terms slightly differently from each other, as you know, because they point in sort of different aspects of mindfulness reflective practices. Yes, like you, I reject most of what you would call the magic in theurgia. I’m not trying to bring back theurgia proper or anything like that. I’m not interested in worshipping idols or anything like that, but I do want to pick up on the use of the imaginal within ritual to enhance our ability to detect otherwise undetected subtle patterns, psycho-somatic, psycho-social, psycho-ontological patterns. I feel that very present, for example, when I in Tai Chi Chuan practice doing Tai Chi. And I think Struck’s book on divination and human nature, the ancients, they treat divination very differently. And the name is, of course, kind of important too. They treat it differently. They don’t write treatises about magic or sorcery, but they care about this ability. And Struck makes, I think, the very good point that the term we would use for what they’re talking about is intuition. And they’re trying to really understand this ability we have for insight, intuition. I think one way of thinking of it is a way of imaginally exercising the capacity for a new set of capacity. And so I’m interested, I’ll make a hybrid word for this whole ritual, liturgical whole. And then I’m interested in this third that properly depends on them, which I’ve been calling dialectic into dialogos, where dialectic is a practice and dialogos is a process that you can only participate in. You can’t do dialogos. If you’re trying to do dialogos, you’ve missed it. It’s like doing love. You have to participate in it. But it’s not something you can make happen. You can’t be the causal agent. Dialectic helps you cultivate a receptivity to getting into dialogos. And I think that dialogos is not being reducible to dialogue precisely because it has the, it seriously and deeply has these ritual liturgical aspects to it and these contemplative meditative aspects to it. And it’s seriously trying to work with something like the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And so for me, I hold that and I do the triangle deliberately. That for me, and this is Plotinus, he holds dialectic as being the greatest practice. And Socrates repeatedly says to engage in dialectic, right, into dialogos is the best way that a human being can live. And I know you don’t agree with that, but I’m just saying why I justify putting it at the top of the pyramid. And so my question that I want to raise to you, and I don’t know, I’m ignorant about orthodoxy, so I’m just going to state the ignorance. I don’t see these practices. I don’t see them like, so people are something like in a platonic dialogue and they’re getting into dialogos. And as Socrates says, he’s following the logos like you follow the wind. And there’s some resonance there with Jesus about comparing where does the spirit flow from and blow from, like the wind. And I don’t see those practices, those dialogical practices in the Protestantism that I’m familiar with or that I’ve examined. I’m not clear. I don’t see them in Roman Catholic churches. Perhaps they exist in Roman Catholic monasteries, so I’m open to hearing that. But my question is, for me, this is the core thing, because this is where we can encounter something like, and I’m saying this with respect, and I hope you take it that way, something like analogous. So not exactly like your encounter with the elder or exactly the Vedantist encounter with the guru or the Taoist encounter with the sifu, but at least in that family where the group actually acts like Socrates to the individual and provides in the process, in the practice, something that can overcome egocentrism. Significantly challenge a kind of intellectual pride. I’m not saying it’s a panacea, and I’m not saying it’s an algorithm for resisting those, but I think these practices like philosophical contemplation, philosophical fellowship around a philosophical text, lexio divina, and dialectic into dialogous. I know lexio is in the Catholic tradition. It’s the same thing in the U.S. Right. So I’m asking, is there anything like that in orthodoxy? And first of all, I want to make sure that that’s a fair question to ask. So it’s a very fair question. It’s an excellent question. Let me answer your first question first about ritual and the imaginal. Yes. So you’ve been talking a lot about the imaginal, which I guess you get from Corban. Corban and some other things. Yeah. Hillman and others. Yes. And Raff, yes. Those are the three biggest influences on me about the imaginal. All right. And I think I understand what you’re referring to when you talk about it. Of course, the imaginal is not part of common parlance. You know, people talk about the imagination. Yes. Or fantasy. You know, but what you’re referring to is something quite different. Yes, very much. And obviously, I think once I understood what you were referring to, it seems to be obviously true within at least within its own parameters. You know, you give the example of the Tai Chi, and you know, obviously it works. Yes. So all right. Now, if we apply that to ritual, so first of all, let’s try to define ritual, at least in orthodox terms. For the orthodox, a ritual is a kind of symbol. Yes. But specifically, it is an enacted symbol, or you could say a performed symbol. Yes. And that’s actually indicated in the Greek word for ritual, which is teleti, or the neo-blatant sometimes used word telestiki. And that’s telestiki. But it comes from the word telos, which means to finish, to complete, or, you know, just something or to perform. Right. You know, and those words in Greek that are related to like ekthelo, you know, to execute a task. So the idea in Greek of ritual is even by the word itself, which is obscured in English, connected to the idea of a physical practice. Yeah. Right. Now, I know you talk a lot about how we need in our ecology of practices, we need a physical practice as, you know, as included in that. And of course, in Christianity, the way that we have this, or at least part of the way that we have this, is through ritual. And so if we think of it as enacted symbolism, we, of course, a symbol is understood in the Orthodox Churches. If you’ll allow me the explanation, you know, we view concrete individual particulars within the world, we abstract them in order to come up with a general idea. And we can do that within a religious context. So we can think of obviously the good, the beautiful, the true. These are abstractions from specific examples of, you know, some beautiful thing or some true statement or whatever. But the problem is that human beings, we think more easily in concrete terms than we do in abstract terms. To think abstractly requires a certain mental effort. And it’s, well, it’s difficult for a lot of people and it’s difficult for everybody over, you know, a sustained period of time. So what a symbol does is it re-represents to us an abstraction in a concrete way, but in a way which contains within itself the totality of the abstraction and thus all of its particular examples. So, you know, we have we have all sorts of rituals in the Orthodox Church. Liturgically, this would be the primary mode. And of course, we have ritual statements, ritual gestures, we have movements, processions, we have the chanting, all of which goes according to a certain order. And so we have the structure of the music itself, which is according to a certain set of rules. You know, we don’t just use any music in church. The music itself is symbolic. And, you know, as St Athanasios the Great says, that music brings the soul into harmony with itself. And, you know, he didn’t come up with that idea. He previously stated by Pythagoras. So and what symbolism in the, especially in the context of the church, allows us to do is it makes these abstract ideas immediately accessible to us in a way that everybody can experience. And ultimately what that does is, you know, connecting again to your work. Although obviously it was thought of before, you know, a couple thousand years before you were around. You know, is that in, it allows us to experience the, what could be understood as a proposition, it allows us to experience it in a perspectival way. Well, first in a procedural way. I mean, chanting as a teacher, for example. Then in a perspectival way, because, you know, we, if we enter an Orthodox church, we see all the icons there. It immediately puts us in the mood to think about, you know, all of these, you know, think about God, the life of Jesus, the saints, and then in a participatory way. You know, we are very much participating in the liturgy. Obviously, if you’re listening to the chanting, for example, you’re with attention, you are participating in it. And if you’re actually doing the chanting, then you’re participating in an even more obvious manner. So basically the symbolism allows us to experience on a practical level, on the, on all of the levels of knowledge that you talk about, which I think are great categories, by the way, and which I frequently refer to. So thank you for your work there. You know, it allows us to experience those things which otherwise would be difficult to access. So it’s basically, and you know, all of the symbols of the church converge. We’re talking about, when we talk about abstractions, you know, we’re talking about the things which are ultimately the structure of reality. And so when we have, when we have symbols which are representing elements of the structure of reality, and of course we have many different symbols, they all mutually reinforce one another so that we can participate in the entire structure of reality by means of these symbols. All right. So could I just reply to that point before you move to the sure. Sure. Do you agree with that, by the way? I do. I do. I, but I want to extend it and see if you agree with the extent. First of all, that joining of the intelligible to the sensual, if I can put it that way, because I want to use Corban’s terms, that’s, that is the defining feature of the imaginal. That’s, it’s the symbol on, it actually is what brings the two together. You were calling it the abstract and the concrete, but that maps on exactly to what he’s talking about. And by the way, the fathers do use that terminology you just said, the intelligible and the sensual. Yeah. And yes, I think the imaginal is, like you said, it’s a way of engaging the non-propositional properly. And then I pick up on the work of Jennings and Schobrecht and others that what makes imaginal ritual is that it transfers that non-propositional knowing to non-ritualized contexts and informs those non-ritualized contexts such that people can more conform to a good life. Yes. Yes. Right. And so, and that’s, so I want to extend that horizontal dimension that I talk about. I think that’s properly, and you’re saying yes, so I think you agree with that. And then the other is, I want to talk about how it not only reaches up, it reaches down because the point is everybody, and you did say this, but every, all of the propositional is always deeply reliant on and embedded in the non-propositional. You and I are both gesturing when we’re trying to talk, we’re nodding, we’re playing with intonation, we’re flipping around perspectives with metaphor, we’re doing all of this. And it’s to say that, right, it’s not only so much that the symbol reaches up, and I’m going to, and I hope you’ll take this in the right way, but it reaches down, it reaches into the depths of our embodiment and of our cognition. So it’s deep calling to deep, if I can put it that way. Now that’s a beautiful scriptural reference, by the way. Yes, that’s one of my favorite passages from the Psalms. And so I, that’s, I just, I’m just, I think, and you seem to be nodding and saying, yes, I’m just trying to amplify it. What you said. I agree entirely. Okay, good. That’s what I’m trying to get out, right? That’s what I’m trying to get out. And that’s that, that, that one part, that one pole, I’m trying to get that out and bring that into a neoplatonic way of life. Now I’ll let you go to the next question. Wait, no, no, no, I, there’s one more thing I want to say about the first, about the ritual. Okay. And this is where we’re going to differ a little bit, I think. Yes. But it’s a really important point. Please. Which is that for us in, for Christians, in the ritual and in all of the symbolism which we use, you’re using the word imaginal for, to express our participation and our, and our, the way that we conceive and interact with, with the, with these symbols, the word that we would use in Christianity is faith. Yes. Because we are not conceiving these as some sort of provisional mental concepts that perhaps in theory could change. Rather, we are conceiving them as eternal truths, fundamental truths about reality, which we accept on faith. And obviously by faith, I’m not referring to a blind faith and something. Yeah. Which we accept on faith. And by faith, we both accept it in some absolute sense. In other words, that there’s some absolute core to what we’re believing or there’s, to put it differently, there’s some absolute basis, a grounding to reality, which has to be there. Otherwise, you’re just chasing your tail continually. And which really goes to what St. Paul says about faith. He says, faith is the substance of things for the evidence of things not seen in the translation in Hebrews. So regardless of who wrote Hebrews, that’s irrelevant. So when we say that faith is the substance of things, for the evidence of things not seen, what we’re doing, and some of the fathers of the church talk about this explicitly, and actually Clement of Alexandria talks about it very explicitly, St. Maximus does as well. With faith, with Christian faith, it’s not, we understand it in the Orthodox Church, not as mental assent to a series of propositions, by which if we assent, we therefore gain salvation as maybe the most extreme Protestant view would be. And I realize that many Protestants would not want to go that far with that simplification. But anyways, there’s enough truth in it to make it a useful reference point to contrast with. In the Orthodox Church, we’re viewing in these terms, it’s almost a definition that St. Paul is offering here, that faith is making present, actually present to us, both those things which we believe to be in the future, you know, eternal life and so forth, but also the whole life of the church, the whole structure of the interaction of God with reality, with us, with the human soul, and the way that we correspondingly interact with reality and with God, that all of this is being made present, actually present, in such a way so that it, I’ll use this phrase, but I don’t want it to be misinterpreted, so that it becomes real. But the thing is that the key difference here is that we are believing it as something real and something true and something absolute, not something provisional or something which in the back of our mind we know is, well, it’s not actually that way. I’m just using it as a useful convention. So I think from an Orthodox point of view, at least, this is one of the ways, it’s not the only way, where faith comes in in a very practical way. And so where you are describing all sorts of ritual and you’re describing all sorts of ways of having perspectival knowing, which are genuinely useful for us to grow and to find meaning in our lives, which I totally agree with, where you are using the word imaginal in many of those places, not all of them, because I recognize the place of the imaginal on its own terms. But in many of those places, we would use the word faith and we would think of it in something in terms that are somewhat more amplified than what you mean by the imaginal. Does that make sense? It does. And I want to respect that. So let me, I got to actually go in a couple minutes. And so I want to invite you maybe very soon if we could pick up this thread, because you still haven’t had a chance to answer the main question. But we normally would have gone longer, everyone, but we had a bunch of technical difficulties as we were trying to do a previous filming. And so we decided just to start all over, but that cut out some of our time. But well, it goes without saying that Bishop and I are going to talk again, hopefully soon, and we’ll have a forethought. And we’ll start with him answering maybe the main question that he’s still preparing a framework within which to answer. First of all, I want to acknowledge what you’re saying. I do think that there, I’m not going to claim its identity, but I’m wondering how far away it is. Because I do think of this as real realization, that we’re not just sort of, like, I don’t think of the imaginal as projection. I think of the imaginal as a way in which we cultivate a receptivity that discloses real patterns and real principles. So it’s a matter of realization in both senses of the word that I like to use. And it’s not a realization that’s grasped, as you said, propositional ascent. It’s a relation that is realized as religio, ratio religio, a proper connectedness, bindingness. And I go further. I think many of these, I’ll use your words for now, many of these enacted symbols are indispensable. I don’t think they’re replaceable. I do wonder because I see other symbols and other traditions also acting powerfully. I probably don’t have your exclusivity. But I do acknowledge indispensability. And I go even explicitly so in the theorizing. You know, it’s not just, it’s not just Jennings emphasizes the what you might call the innovative aspect of ritual. But Williams and Boyd emphasize what you might call the conformity. They say rituals are masterpieces that you, that you’re not trying to transform them, you’re trying to be transformed by them. They were doing some anthropology on Azor, Elastrian ritual. And so you’re faced with what’s sometimes called the ritual paradox, which is rituals are treated as if they’re unchanging masterpieces, and they should be, please hear the second thing, but is also clear that they have a history and they have evolved and changed over time. Right. And trying to get a proper framework that recognizes both of those is in the Orthodox Church, obviously, within the history of Christianity, there have been many different rituals. That’s right. What is important, of course, is the principle behind. Yes, yes. Rather than the specific manifestation of a ritual, which could be variable according to time and place, although in the Orthodox Church, we are extremely cautious about any sort of change in rituals. I think you should be. And I want to say that’s functional. I think you want to have a proper tone-off between sort of, you’ll allow me, seriously playing with the ritual so that it, you did it to some degree. You went into neoplatonism and you came back and you re-ritualized some of your rituals. Right. And that’s what I mean by this. You didn’t change the principle or the form, but you changed the perspectival and the framework within which you were undertaking them. And so there is that innovative aspect. And that’s important because we want to, the ritual should help us fit, if I can put it that way. But we also want to recognize that the ritual has a kind of perfection to it. And that goes back to the Greek word again. It’s like a masterpiece. You know what we’ll do? Let’s take Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and let’s change it. Let’s do this and this and that. No, we think no, no. And you’re trying to get that. And I think that tone-off is actually functional for rituals in a really, really important way. So I’m sorry, we do have to end. This was wonderful. I mean, and half of this, and wonderfully so, this is a gratitude, not a complaint, was you doing that really brave narrative, which I really appreciate. So thank you for doing that. So I want to, we are now poised, I think. I think we’re in agreement, we’re at least poised. We’re not in complete agreement about ritual. And I get that. But I think there’s lots of good connecting points. To go back to the main question about that apex in the neoplatonic triangle. Right? I know you really want to get to that. Yeah, I really want to get to that. Of course, because, you know, I mean, obviously that’s, or at least it seems to be where your work is focused right now. That’s right. You know, your new series of After Socrates. And I have, I think I have something of an answer. I think you have something of value to say, and I want to hear it. And I want us to continue doing this. I do need to jump. This has been, I really appreciate these discussions in all the meanings of the word appreciation. And let’s get out, let’s set up an email chain very quickly. And let’s get you on the books for something very soon. And so we can just jump into this and get the fourth one. And then we’ll have three and four to release. Two is going to be released. Well, it probably have been released by the time this video is out. But I’m just excited about continuing this conversation. So I hope you’ll come back. Now, well, of course, of course, I’ll come back if you’ll have me. Of course. You know, these conversations are so thrilling and so fulfilling. I really appreciate the opportunity that you’ve given me to be able to speak with you about these ideas, which are so really so important and so relevant, no pun intended to, you know, both, I think to ourselves personally, and, you know, to a lot of people in the world. So thank you so much for the conversation, John. And I’m really looking forward to continuing it. Great.