https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6ziyIpcDlEQ
Yeah. You know, one of the things that also occurred to me, like when you mentioned especially the story of St. Moses the Black, is that he accepted abuse, right? He accepted injustice. And this is a tradition within the Orthodox tradition in particular, but of course, it’s simply in the Bible, but I think sometimes in ways that are not obvious. So it’s obvious the Lord accepts abuse. So he’s the archetype of doing that, right? He is put to death unjustly, right? Which, you know, that is very offensive to a modern person, you know, for someone to accept injustice, right? But it’s interesting. There’s another side to it that I think sometimes doesn’t get mentioned, which is, for instance, St. Paul, in one of his epistles to Corinthians, I can’t remember which one it was. He talks about this messenger of Satan sent to buffet him lest he be exalted above his measure or something like that, right? And this idea that a demon, so I mean, it says messenger of Satan, you know, and it’s not a metaphor. It’s a demon. It’s a demon. It’s a demon. Yeah. You know, yeah. What does the thorn in the flesh symbolize? Actually, so the thorn is a symbol of a demon. It says it’s this messenger of Satan sent to buffet him so that his humility can be served, right? And so obviously that’s not happening outside of the will of God. He doesn’t read it as happening outside the will of God because he sees it as for a positive purpose, right? And there is this passage in St. Gregory the Great or Gregory the Dialogist who, when he’s talking about Job, I think it’s in Moralia on Job, where he talks about the left and right hand of God. And I loved this. We actually did use this on Lord of Spirits because we were talking about, well, we talk about demons a lot. You know, the right hand of God, he says, is the obedient angels, you know, the heavenly hosts who do his will and bring messages and protect us and all these kind of things. But he says in the left hand of God is the demons. And because it’s brought up, there’s this passage right before Ahab finally meets his end, right? And God stands up in the council and basically says, so who is going to go let Ahab have it, right? And several angelic beings step forward and say, well, we could do this. And then finally a demon steps forward and says, you know, I’m going to go and make his prophets speak lies to tell him that he’s going to succeed in this battle. And God’s like, okay, go do that, right? So Saint Gregory makes the point, he says, that even though the demons have their own will and they act according to their own will, they have their own agenda, which is to destroy, to throw things apart, all this kind of stuff, that they still end up doing the will of God against their will because of his providence, right? And I think that that’s the frame at least in which we can understand injustice. Like if we understand that people who commit injustice are fundamentally cooperating with demons when they do that, then number one, we can actually be compassionate toward them. Like you’re enslaved, okay, maybe not say that to them, they may not be ready to receive that. Like, okay, the only reason why you’re treating me like this is because you’re in cahoots with the devil. But no, but we can be compassionate toward them, but then we can also accept it as actually from the Lord, not that the Lord himself is afflicting us, but that he’s allowing it to happen so that we can increase in humility, right? Like this is what the four whips from the apocalypse are, is they’re demons that have been set loose in the world to bring people to repentance. Yeah. Well, it’s a tough thing. That’s hard, right? It’s hard, but it’s funny. I always tell people, because everybody loves talking about non-duality and talk about non-duality and think that it’s great. And I’m like, Christianity is a real non-dual religion if you want to know, but that has implications. If you want to understand what it means that God is actually calling us to be and that God transforms evil, that evil ultimately will in the end serve a purpose which is going to bring us into God. It’s like that has a price because there’s some difficult things in the world. And so how do we reconcile that with, and Christ, that’s what Christ does. Christ shows us how to reconcile it. I mean, I don’t like it. I don’t want it. When I read monastic text and I read, you know, it’s unbearable because who can live that way really? But I understand it. I can understand how this is actually how reality works and this is how you can be transformed. Yeah. Well, I was just going to say, you know, St. Paul just didn’t know who he was in Christ. All he had to do was just rebuke that demon. Rebuke that. You see, this is his word of faith background coming out. He’s just going to have enough faith. Father Andrew, I wanted to, when I heard you talk about that on the Lord of Spirits podcast about the two sides and the left hand, the right hand, I wanted to bring up that St. Gregory of Nyssa talks about that as well, but at an individual level, he says that each person is given a guardian angel and a demon. And that the guardian angel is meant to kind of encourage us into reason and up into God. And that the demon is meant to test us and to be the one pulling us down. And so, you know that image you see in the, I’m going to cause controversy here. The cartoons. But yeah, in the cartoons with the angel and the demon on each side, or like I said, it’s going to be controversial, but the image you see in the toll houses with the angel and the demon on each side, St. Gregory of Nyssa actually talks about that as being the structure of our own being that we have these two beings as well that are kind of pulling us in each direction.