https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9Omo5DDEmbc
And the Lord said, Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there’s a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock, and it shall come to pass that while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock and cover thee with my hand while I pass by, and I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen. And that ends Exodus 33, this mysterious end where God decides miraculously enough to reveal himself to Moses, but only veiled and partial in some sense. So I think that understanding why God shows himself this way is understanding the whole book is all about that. We’ve been talking about this since the beginning, in order for God to manifest himself in the world, it has to be mediated. And so these mediations appear in all kinds of forms. The law is a veil, the tabernacle is veils, and then when Moses comes back down, he will even himself, he will have his face veiled. And people sometimes try to see it a little too simply where they wonder, well, okay, so why is God bad? Why doesn’t God want to show his face? Like, what’s going on with God? But we have to understand it as really the way in which reality unfolds. And sometimes you can understand it if you apply it to a lower form of reality, you can kind of understand it. And you can use any purpose of something. And I always use sports because it’s easy to understand. So you can understand it, let’s say a basketball team are playing basketball, and basketball is the reason, right? It’s the telos, it’s the source of why we exist as a basketball team. But basketball itself has to be mediated into different actions. You learn to dribble, you learn to shoot, you learn to run. And all these things are veiled versions of the telos of basketball. They’re mediated, they are, the telos of basketball brought into a specific. And so without the reason, dribbling is a stupid thing. It’s a silly thing that has no purpose. But if it’s connected to the highest, then it becomes coherent. And it binds all these actions together towards this telos. But you could say something like, if the purpose of basketball, if I would ask you like, play basketball, and then I would not show you anything of how to play, none of the ways that you’re supposed to play, then you would be, obviously not completely, but you would be consumed by basketball. And it puts you on the court, like in a professional basketball team, and I go, all right, play basketball. And then you’re completely crushed because you don’t have the mediated, you don’t have the mediated veiled realities in which basketball participates. So it is actually the way that reality functions. I like the game metaphor too, because oddly enough, you might say, well, why would something complete only reveal itself partially? And the answer is, I think, to facilitate certain operations that can only be undertaken in partiality. And so I do believe that it’s the case that we do the same thing whenever we play a game. And when we play a game, this is particularly true of online games, it’s quite obvious, we make a micro universe. The game is a micro universe. It’s set up according to certain principles, and you veil yourself to play it. You limit yourself while you’re playing the game to the scope of the game. And so you parcel off a part of yourself that’s simpler than you are, because when you’re playing chess, it doesn’t encapsulate every bit of what you could conceivably do. Don’t talk about your date tonight. No, you don’t. And you don’t flip the chessboard over either, because you could bring an atomic weapon to the chess game, and you don’t. And so in order to engage in the game, you parcel off part of yourself, and weirdly enough, this is the thing that’s so strange, is by imposing that set of limits on yourself, you now open up a whole world of possibility that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t accept the limits. And I also think the veiling idea, the idea that God can only show himself partially, is also a necessary consequence of the inevitable complexity of the relationship between the infinite and the finite. It’s like human beings are clearly finite. You don’t have to be a religious thinker to know that. And there is something that’s infinite, whatever that is, and they’re not the same thing, the infinite and the finite, and it isn’t obvious that they can coexist, because the infinite would destroy the finite, obviously. But it’s also not obvious that the finite exists in detachment from the infinite, because we have a relationship with the infinite of one sort or another, and then the notion here is, well, it has to be veiled, it has to be partial. And it’s kind of like the idea of kenosis that the Catholics came up with with regard to Christ, because one of the conundrums that Christians wrestled with was, well, how could God and man be united in Christ? Why wouldn’t the form of Christ be torn asunder by the descent of God into that form? And the Catholic idea was kenosis, is that there was an emptying of God. And it’s like, the way I like to think about it as a modern person is that it’s like a low resolution representation of God. It’s a fractal representation, and the entirety isn’t there, but the pattern is there. It becomes more mysterious when you understand that veils are a form of death, and that’s tough for people to understand, but it’s there in the story of Genesis, where the first covering that God gives Adam and Eve is a covering of dead skins, dead animal skins. And so there’s a form of dying that happens at every level between the infinite and its manifestation. And that’s why ultimately the mystery, I guess, for Christians of the crucifixion is that ultimate mystery, where God manifests itself all the way to the edge, like fills the whole world, and what that looks like is the crucifixion. That’s what it looks like. Well, is that transforming of yourself into an avatar during a game, is that acceptance of limitation, is that an acceptance of a form of death at the same time? That, because it’s the death of a certain realm of possibility, right? But it opens up, it enables another, an entirely new realm of possibility. That’s the paradoxical thing with a game, right? Because you accept these incredibly particularized limitations. There’s almost nothing you can do on a chess game, but there’s an almost infinite number of potential chess games, and none of that, that whole infinity wouldn’t exist without that imposition of this principle, the set of principle limitations. It’s so strange. Well, there can’t be any eye, vow relationship without some rules to mediate, without some limitations to what I am. If I’m all encompassing, there’s no eye, vow relationship, and that’s really what Moses is asking for, is for that relationship that connects him to the Almighty.