https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=W7I2nhPdNFM
And I will be with thy mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people, and he shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God.” And so now we have this building of an intermediary structure. Jonathan, you’ve maybe got some things to say about that. I think that this is the beginning of this idea of the importance of the intermediary structure, but not just importance, but also the manner in which God will fill the world is through something like that. And so it’s really radical what he’s actually saying. He’s saying, he’s like, I’m going to set up a structure in which you’re going to be God to Aaron, and I’m going to be God to you. And so it’s going to be like this, exactly, this hierarchy of sub-gods. And you will see this, so this is just the first example of it. But then as the text continues, there’ll be all these different iterations of this intermediary structure, whether it is the structure of authority that his wife’s father is suggesting, and then whether it be the law itself. The law is these mediations. Jonathan, why do you think that that first mediation or the first appointed sub-god has to do with him being, because it’s just as easy for God to say, I will make thee speak clearly. Yeah. Why is the first choice somebody who speaks, who can speak from, is it that proximity to God requires a sort of inarticulateness, that the closeness to God means it can’t be conveyed as clearly, and that’s the need for… That’s a really, I never thought about that. That’s actually a very interesting idea. Because Moses is someone who, by the nature of his experience, can be inspired by God, but he can’t translate it into language. Wait a minute, if you speak articulately, you’re not close to God? Well, I think it’s… Well, yeah, I think it’s a first step. Well, well, well, well, well, in light of that. But isn’t there something very striking here that we’re told that he says, I’m not eloquent. And yet, at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, we read that, and there arose not a prophet since in Israel, like Hunter Moses, whom God knew face to face. Now, so this idea that Moses is the prophet par excellence, and yet, we’re told, he says, I’m not good with words. What means you can be good without being able to think verbally? That’s part of it. Clearly, he grew. Well, there’s the scene face to face, of course. That’s interesting. There’s a narrative trope of the blind prophet. There’s many narrative tropes like that, where you have someone who’s deficient in the prophet who doesn’t see, but actually sees spiritually. And the need for the story telling intermediary. He sees God face to face. I just mentioned Deuteronomy. He sees him face to face, but he’s a mumbler. He’s a stumbler. I really appreciated the point that you made yesterday, Jonathan. I think that this idea that Moses is without logos, and I’m not sure how it’s translated in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the third century BC of the Hebrew scriptures, that Moses is stumbling. He’s without speech, but logos, of course, he’s without reason. And as it were, he’s the perfect vehicle for the divine logos. That’s what you were trying to say, I think, right? And he’s being prepared not just for divine revelation, but for the specific revelation in the Decalogue. And it’s important to understand the mediation. The difficulty with mediation is that as you go down the mountain, as you come down, then there’s the problem that things can start going off key right away, because that’s the problem with mediation. So on the one hand, it offers the identity down into the particulars, but also then it starts to get wonky. Sure. If you’re up on the mountain, someone might make a golden calf while they’re down at the bottom. That’s exactly, but it’s Aaron who makes the golden calf. It’s the one that God establishes as the second tier. That’s right. That’s right. Maybe there’s a… Okay, so what we have here is… But the danger of the mediation is starting to appear. The Luciferian intellect is supposed to be subordinate to the process that has the divine revelation. That’s what it means. That’s what it means. And that’s what Ian McGilchrist has said about how the brain should function properly, right? Is that the left hemisphere is the arrogant intellect in the fundamental sense of the word, and it likes to think that what it knows is everything, and properly it should be subordinate to the right, which is inarticulate, but which has the ability to look up fundamentally. So, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who I’ve mentioned a few times in terms of his commentary on this, he goes exactly towards McGilchrist. I don’t know if McGilchrist is aware of him, but… So he says that Aaron is the helper, and he presents him as the guardian angel. He says, Aaron is like the guardian angel, and each person, like in the cartoons, they have an angel on their right shoulder and a devil on their left shoulder, and both of those are something like Aaron. The two possibilities of Aaron. So it’s like an influence which can pull you in one direction or the other, and you have to be able to see the good helper and be careful of the day of the bad helper. If you’re orienting yourself properly in the world, I would say in relationship to your own intelligence and your own verbal acuity, you want to keep that Luciferian intellect subordinate to the ability to see the burning bush when it manifests itself, and that’s why attention should be subordinate to verbal acuity, because you want to be open to the revelation of the divine, because that’s what keeps your Luciferian intellect in check, and I would say that’s partly why it’s reasonable for someone like Dostoevsky and then Solzhenitsyn to say, beauty will save the world, because you have a revelation of the divine in the apprehension of beauty, and that’s not… That has to be translated into the verbal before it’s… Yeah, so attention, definition. Attention first, definition second. Well, and I would say the heavenly hierarchy, most fundamentally, is the hierarchy of attention. That is what it is.