https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_1XZdM5pROE
You mentioned in your lecture that St. Gregor of Nyssa said that Christ was the serpent. Could you talk more about this? So he’s talking about the lecture that I did in Shreveport. I have noticed that in some crucifixion images he does look a bit serpentine. So first of all, the idea would be that I wrote an article about that. The article is called The Serpents of Orthodoxy. Let me actually put it down in the chat so you guys can check it out later. I wrote this quite a while ago in 2013. So that’s a while ago now. So this is the link. So the idea is that St. Gregor of Nyssa doesn’t say that Christ is the serpent. He says Christ became the serpent. So Christ became the serpent for us. It’s similar to the notion that Christ became sin, that Christ trampled down death by death. I always tell you guys that on the one hand it’s fine to see Christ as the center or the top of the hierarchy, as the center of the wheel. All those images are fine. But we also need to understand that Christ is also the totality of the hierarchy. He also covers the entire thing from the highest to the lowest. So that’s very different. It’s very different because you finally realize that in fact that’s what the center ends up being. Ultimately everything is contained in the center. But sometimes it’s hard to see it. Whereas Christ, we really see in his story that he travels from the highest to the lowest and he actually joins them together, especially in the notion of the cross. The cross is so hard to think about because it’s both at the top of a hill, it’s this vertical that meets the horizontal, so it’s this joining of heaven and earth. But then it’s also humiliation. It’s also a form of death. It’s also a form of torture. It’s also how we treat criminals, how we treat outsiders. And Christ is said that he is outside the city of Jerusalem on the Mount of Skulls. But then you’ll see traditions that say that this Mount of Skulls is the Garden of Eden, that this Hill of the Skull is also the place where Adam was buried, or sometimes literally talking how it’s the place of Eden, and so joining all those extremes together. Now, in terms of the serpent, I think David, you’re totally right. Your intuition that Christ looks like a serpent on crosses, I think is completely right. And I think that that is done very intuitively. I’m not sure it’s done on purpose, or was done on purpose, but I think it was just a natural intuitive way that it manifested itself. One has to do with the very, very, you know, if you look at a vertical line with a swerve around it, you know, like a dollar sign or an image of the medical image, you know, the pharmaceutical image, those images of a vertical with a snake that goes up, like you see the serpent in the Garden of Eden. I think that, honestly, I think that that geometric pattern is really, really written on our consciousness. I think that it is probably one of the most basic patterns that we have in us that we notice, you know, like we notice faces, like we notice crosses, like we notice there are certain structures that we see, you know, and they’re very satisfying to us because they’re very primordial. And I think that that image of a vertical with a serpent is extremely primordial because I think it is a way to represent everything, is that image. You know, because it’s basically a vertical with a swerving. So it’s a straight and a crooked, and it shows you what the crooked does, that it goes out, but it comes back. So if you see the serpent going like that, you know, it’s also a cycle. You just don’t really, you have to realize that the fact that it goes out and it comes back, you can understand it as a cycle. So if you imagine the serpent going around the tree, then you understand that it’s a cycle, that it’s like a ladder, but it’s also a cycle. So it’s like this ascending cycle or descending cycle. So I think that that’s really probably one of the most primordial images. In terms of Christ becoming the serpent, if you read the article, you’ll see many examples where I pointed that. But it’s also it mostly, you know, has to do with these images in the Old Testament, like the image of the rod, which becomes a serpent in the case of Moses, the fact that when Moses lets go of his rod, it becomes a serpent. And then when he holds on to it, it becomes a rod again. Then it’s also the image of the bronze serpent where you have poisonous snakes which are biting below and then taking the image of those snakes and putting it above deliberately becomes a healing mechanism. And so Christ even says that he is like a bronze serpent. He actually uses that analogy to talk to to talk about himself. And so hopefully that answers. But if you’re interested, here’s a guy, check out that article. I don’t write articles anymore. I don’t have time, but I used to write a lot. If you guys want to get more symbolism, especially more Christian symbolism, I have a whole I have dozens and dozens of articles that I wrote, you know, between 2012 and 2016, I would say, or 2015, that you can find. In the last Q&A, you mentioned that Christ on the cross looks like a serpent and that this symbol is embedded in our consciousness. An idea that I had in relation to this image is that when we choose to follow Christ due to our fallen nature, we will not be perfect and sin. The curves outside the cross are the moments when we sin and when we get back to the center, we are coming back to God, this path for us. You also mentioned that it is like a circle, a cycle. So maybe the cycle gets narrower as you get closer to perfection. And as it gets wider, you are getting farther from perfection. I was also thinking Christ-shaped snake-like shape could be a reflection of sins of those that crucified him apart from the actual crucifixion itself, of course. I read your article, Servants of Orthodoxy, and most probably need to read it more fully to understand this. Thank you for reading and tolerating my strange question. It’s not a strange question. If anybody has not read my article called the Servants of Orthodoxy, I would suggest you read it. I think that some of your ideas are quite good in terms of this idea that you have the axis, then you have this cycle. You can imagine the snake is going like this. You can also imagine it as a spiral that’s going up or down. So you have this spiral which comes to the center and kind of moves away from the center, something like that. Or like a wave that goes back to the center and then moves away. And so on the one hand, you can understand it exactly as you said, as this death is moving away from the tree and coming back to the tree is this kind of cycle of the cycle of death, right? The cycle of the passions, you could say. But you don’t necessarily have to see it that way. You can also see it in a positive light, which is that it is the love of God which goes out and comes back to God. And so the spiritual influence of the center of the tree, of the logos, goes out into the world and then brings the world back into God. And so it all depends on memory. It all depends on whether or not that which is outside the center remembers that which is inside. And so although you can, as you said, imagine it as these smaller and smaller cycles that move into the heart. You know, the Church Fathers talk about this moving into the heart. You can imagine that these circles, they get smaller and smaller as you get closer and closer to the center, to the core, to the heart. You can see it that way as well. But then these, St. Ephraim the Syrian again has this beautiful image, or even St. Dionysius the Areopagite. He talks about the three movements of the soul. So he talks about the circular movement of the soul, which is the soul which is contemplating, which is in the heart, you could say, and contemplating God. And so it’s kind of turning around God in that sense. Then he talks about linear movement, which is this moving away from God. So the linear movement is kind of like this forgetting and moving away. But then he talks about the spiral. And he talks about the spiral as the joining of the two together. As this moving out and moving back in. You know, St. Ephraim the Syrian talks about, he talks about how the children of light, they descend the slopes of the Garden of Eden and they can walk on the waters of the flood, you know. And then they come back. And so it’s not about how far you are from the center. It’s really about, ultimately it’s about if you remember. If you can go very far if you remember the center. Once you forget, that’s when things start to break apart. That’s when things start to fragment, okay? I hope this makes sense. You can watch the last talk I gave in Seattle, the talk I gave in Seattle, the one called, I think it’s called, it’s called something about mysticism, like the anthropology of mysticism. If you can watch that, you can get a sense of it. And my next, one of the videos I’m going to put out in the next few weeks on St. Ephraim the Syrian, I really talk about, I’m going to show you this beautiful image of Paradise and how he creates his cosmology in his text more fully. Because I know a lot of people have asked me, a lot of people have been asking me, it’s like, oh I read St. Ephraim the Syrian’s book that you recommended, but I’m just not getting what you’re saying out of it. So I’m going to, so I’ve already recorded it. I’m going to take you guys on a trip, on that trip. Hopefully you’ll appreciate that.