https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ExLGqstjNrc
I think this idea of creating a divine protector brings up another interesting issue, and that’s the issue of identity, right? And the association of identity to the concept of guardian angels, right? So like, creating a divine protector is kind of like putting something in place of the divine protector that’s already assigned to entities by God, right? Which is their guardian angel. And ostensibly, it’s the guardian angel which gives that entity kind of its identity, or it’s like a sort of ontological foundation, you might say. And so then that brings up the interesting question of like, well, which entities have a divine protector already? Does Facebook? What is Facebook supposed to be, I guess is the question. What is its telos? What is its archetype? In order for it to have being at all, there’s got to be something at its foundation. And so ostensibly, it has a guardian angel of some sort, but the guardian angel is definitely not what’s making it Facebook, right? This is where I think that it gets complicated in the sense that it gets complicated because we have to, this is going to be difficult, I think, to explain. But the way I think to understand it is that, how can I say this? It’s like, ultimately, all the logi are the incarnation. Like ultimately, everything is bound up into Christ. And so when we try to find explicit principalities, sometimes it can get a little messy because it’s not a system. It really is. It only makes sense if we see it as being bound into Christ. And so there’s like a cascading from above down into the world. But it’s like, if we’re trying to re-find the theory of the forms in this type of thinking, I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it works if it has unity in Christ. And then there’s like this multiplicity which unfolds, and its multiplicity is somewhat indefinite, let’s say, at every level of being. So the idea is, for example, so this is a question that I guess Bernardo Castro asked me. It’s like, does the angel of China exist, pre-exist, and does it continue to exist once it’s gone? And the answer is, that’s not. But I don’t think that’s the right way to see it. I think the right way to see it is that there is, for example, the notion of nation, like the idea of transpersonal beings, of people that are bound together. And there are different levels of that. And those different levels go from something as stable as the Roman Empire to something as unstable as having coffee with two friends. So all of these levels have a certain amount of existence. But they only have existence to the extent that they exist in each other facing the incarnation, facing their ground. And so that’s what I mean when I think St. Gregory nails it, when he’s like, if we try to try to find too much being at the different levels, then we get messed up. But if we’re always noticing, for example, that the angel of China, to what extent it exists, it exists to the extent that it exists in Christ. That is the manner in which all these things kind of move into the incarnation. And this is like your answer to why I imagine your answer would be to one of the big, like awkward questions that I had, which is to ask you about your own principality, this principality. And like so ideally, the answer would be that your principality, the symbolic world, dissolves into Christ ideally. I see it for sure. Like that doesn’t dissolve, but it is like say it is brought into like it is gathered into Christ. And to the extent that it has being is to the extent that it participates in that. And then to the extent that it tries to have its own little attention, because it does, I mean, it’s like I’m not perfect. I have my sins, you know, it’s like to the extent that I or whatever we’re participating to kind of get attention for itself and do that, then it has a kind of demonic aspect. It has an egregore aspect. It starts to be unstable or parasitic, let’s say. So I think that all things we can recognize in the world as having agency, I think there’s a possibility for those things to, there’s an aspect of them which hopefully is moving up and there’s an or it’s a whole being held up together by into Christ. And there are aspects of it which are which tend towards parasitic being and tends towards their own prideful existence. And so I think that if we see it that way, then then then it’s not that we don’t have to find two elaborate systems of beings, because you can see it like think about like Daoist. I don’t know if you know a little bit about the Taoist ontology. And I mean, they have these insane amounts of gods, like all these bureaucracies and everything of gods. And you see that happening in pagan worlds as well, which is that, you know, it’s like you have the god of the door and then you have the god of the handle and the god of the hinge and the god of the pin of the hinge. And it’s like, OK, dude, that’s a lot of gods. I mean, it’s like I’m not saying that there isn’t like some glimmer of a perception of how all these things are have some purpose. And so I can see agency in them. But I think it’s dangerous to to pay attention too much to these little to these little beings where really what we want to do is to have them all kind of fit into Christ. So I think that that’s what Christianity brings, actually. It brings the possibility of not being too worried about atoning for all these little beings and rather understanding that, OK, it’s not that they don’t exist. It’s that they exist to the extent that they’re captured in the divine logos. And so we we need our attention to be always moving up and participating in and, let’s say, celebrating beings that show us Christ. And so our hierarchy of beings ends up being saints. So it’s like these saints, the reason why we celebrate them is because they reveal to us their participation in in Christ. And that’s why we tend to celebrate them. I think this brings up the tension that exists between sort of like two different projects. There’s there’s kind of the project of the elucidation of phenomena that come about from or that comes about from propositional knowing. Right. I’m invoking Verbeckis four P’s here. And then there’s kind of the ultimate process of understanding that we should always be focused on, which is that participatory knowing. Right. But when we’re like we have to be able to to some degree, you know, occupy that that propositional space in order to have these kinds of conversations, in order to have discussions on YouTube. You know, when we’re talking like this in a conversation, we’re necessarily constrained by a kind of like dialectic procedure. And we were not just like we’re not just like, you know, going through the steps of liturgy, right in a conversation. Right. So there’s some utility to being able to discuss these things analytically. And I get the point that we shouldn’t get trapped in that. Right. But then there’s this there’s, you know, like it brings up the sort of like age old attempt, two thousand year old attempts to kind of map the realm of the Platonic ideas, like on to the Christian angel ology. Right. And so like, yeah, to what extent is there any utility to kind of like building this systematic, the systematic description of of of the angels and the way that they map to the to the to the ideas and the mind of God and all the very all the all the minutia that come along with that. Right. Like like what’s to what degree is that helpful? And to what degree like is that we I think. No, but I think you’re I understand what you’re saying. I think it’s helpful to the extent that it’s helpful. That is that it’s I don’t think you’ll be able to find like a line where you say, well, this is but I think it’s it’s you can see it like if it when it’s only about morbid curiosity and it’s just about two things when it’s just about this kind of weird morbid curiosity. And then the other is whether it’s about increasing power. So that’s when it becomes a problem. So the example that you use in the article, which is the occultist example and the magician’s example, I think is a good example to help people understand. Be let’s be attentive to the danger of these types of existences, like these types of beings, which is that there is a manner in which that’s what demonology did in the late Middle Ages. And that’s what occultists were doing. They have a sense in which they can control these beings. They can weaponize them. So when you said that there is no golem in Christian in Christian, the Christian world, not exactly. But the idea of demonology is there in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance and up until modern occultism, which is the idea of people who would have said they were Christian, but who believe that you could, let’s say, you could be a Christian. You could, let’s say you could capture a principality and then make it your servant, basically, and then use it in order to to act upon the world. Right. And so the idea of basically enslaving one of these these principalities as a way to accomplish your will. And you can and you can see it’s like you can understand that to a certain extent, everybody does that a little bit. Right. Every time you you you recognize a pattern and you use it in order to increase your your your scope, that is a little bit what you’re doing. But the extent to which the occultists are doing, they’re really doing it in a way that is ritualized, that is naming or that is invoking these agentic beings and wanting to. And so so you can understand that at the outset, maybe they were they thought they were invoking them. And then later they thought they were creating them, which is which is even in a little area. And you can hear in the article in the quotes that we give that it just backfires backfires every time. Yeah. Backfires horribly on them. And this book, AgriPause, is really good because the writer isn’t a cultist, but he he’s enough of a good scholar, Mark Stavish, to like 90 percent of his examples are really negative. And he’s like communicating to the reader that these are really dangerous things. And, you know, he’s not he’s not Christian, but he’s not a Christian. But he’s he’s clear enough to be able to see the terrible danger because it has happened to him and it’s happened to his friends and it’s very dark. Yeah. And so, again, you have the same idea of the genie. And I think that in Islamic ontology, you have this idea, this general category of the jinn, right? So basically they just have like a big category, which maybe sometimes I feel like that’s the problem with our with we don’t have a category like that. We end up having it and we call it fairies and we have, you know, Christians end up having but it’s not part of it’s not officially part of the way of thinking. But in Islamic thinking, they have this basic category, which are jinn, which are just these all these intermediary being basically it’s like all these intermediary kind of vague, random, ambiguous beings that we don’t totally talk about. We don’t know where they’re from. And then and then all these interactions with them, which usually, like you said, will end up backfiring on the person who is invoking them. It’s like we’ve it’s like we’ve minimized them. It’s like we’ve made them into almost less than they are. Or maybe in the Christian world, they became these little diminutive, powerless things when we live in a Christian society. And now now the Christianity is breaking a little bit. And so we’re in a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very And now the Christianity is breaking a little bit, then maybe they’re getting their old power back. That’s definitely what it feels like. It definitely feels like and it’s funny because I mean, it’s funny. It’s not funny at all, but it’s it’s just it’s just hilarious to see the old gods and all these things reappear, you know, and seeing people possessed by these things, you know, to the extent that they’re willing to, you know, modify their the way they act, modify their body, modify, you know, in order to just manifest these these little monsters, you know, that are kind of seeping back into reality. It’s pretty nuts. I mean, it’s it’s I guess it’s inevitable, but it’s just funny to see it happening right in front of us. Yeah.