https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=snfKu88iVmM
You know, when you start to have a kind of, let’s say, intellectual awakening in your 20s often, you meet all these kinds of people who, even if they can believe in God, they have this idea, okay, I believe in God, but I believe God is more like an abstract force, is more like something that’s, like you said, something that’s abstract, something that’s an idea. But that is just not our experience of reality, because we are, we view the world through our own consciousness, our own human consciousness. We don’t know of any other world besides the one that we can view through this human consciousness. And we encounter, you know, the highest thing we encounter is always other people. You know, the more, the richest thing, the most, the thing that can transform us the most, that can make us, like you said, more human are always other people. And so I always find it strange when people think that the highest aspect, let’s say the highest ontological aspect, that, you know, the image of the infinite would be something that’s abstract. Like, no, the image of the infinite has to be connected to our experience of the world, which is a personal experience, which is an experience that is through consciousness. So the idea of it, when you start to see it that way, the notion of the divine mind or that God is, you know, the best image of God is Christ, then it makes so much sense in that, you know, it doesn’t seem so strange at all anymore. Well, something I think that’s important is the distinction between the general and the particular. The truth is, is you can’t ever, ever, ever know anything in general. We only encounter anything in a particular. And so, for instance, in the fathers in teaching about icons, they said you cannot paint an icon of, say, the divine nature. Right. What would that look like? Instead, it’s like, why can we paint an icon of Christ? Because he became a man, not man, because you can’t just sort of paint man. You have to paint a man, a woman, you know, a particular thing. And there’s actually been a drive in certain aspects of modern art to, in fact, try, when we talk about abstraction, to somehow or another capture or express the generalized. And in a way, the more we do that, the people begin to have this sort of cognitive dissonance in which they’re all standing at, staring at something that no one knows what it is. And they’re thinking even to themselves, is that art? And what can be things about it? I mean, my youngest daughter is an artist. I appreciate that you can have, you know, I mean, of course, on the other hand, I mean, Picasso can draw a line and it just has genius about it. And you’d have to look at it and figure out why that is so his lines are better than my lines. But on the other hand, you finally abstraction just fades away into nothing. It is the strange act of communion is that we discover in the particular, something that unites us with that which is beyond it. I like a term that I’ve used in referring to God is calling him the transcendent particular. I mean, he’s actually the ultimate particular because there’s only one of him. There’s not two, there can’t be general God because there’s only a God, one God. And so he’s utterly, he’s so utterly and transcendent particular. And so he makes himself known to us in the God man, Jesus Christ. And in a way, that’s also a revelation to me. I am not humanity. I’m just Stephen. And, you know, and this is how we encounter each other. And I mean, there’s the old saying, I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you mean that? Oh, you encounter that all the time. It’s like, I love the poor. Yeah. Well, I hear this. I mean, people are going to attack some group that are going to attack black blacks are going to attack old privileged white men, whatever like that. I’m thinking, well, which one of them? I mean, when we reduce each other to abstractions, that’s actually, first off, you have to generalize anybody in order to kill them. We find it very difficult to kill particular people, because particular people are always not quite what you imagine, I have to actually sort of stigmatize you and paint you as something broader that I can just paste my hate on, make you stand as a false symbol for all that’s wrong with your, you know, your race, your nation, or whatever that way. This is always a ticket to violence. We find love in the particular, we find forgiveness in the particular, we find union and communion with the particular, the other, but you think about Christ and his interactions, there were, you know, in some ways, Israel at the time was a highly politicized thing, you had your groups, you had your Pharisees and Sadducees and other groups. And then you had the, you know, those who were religious and those who were considered the unrighteous, you know, prostitutes and tax collectors and things that way. And he, he not only, you know, they talk about him meeting and eating with prostitutes and tax collectors and these other ne’er-do-wells, but more amazing than that, I think about it, we know some of their names. I mean, for instance, there’s a short little man in the town of Jericho named Zacchaeus, who was a tax collector and hated by everybody in the town. But the amazing thing is, I mean, how obscure is that? 2000 years ago, some dude named Zacchaeus, and we know his name. Why? Because Jesus called his name out and said, I’m going to go home and eat with you today. He didn’t just sort of say, you know, some general invitation to all local tax collectors come and we’ll have a meal. He goes, and it’s interesting, Jesus is walking along, sees this guy in a tree, and he knows his name. And he says, Zacchaeus, come down, not you and the tree, come down, but Zacchaeus, you come down. And we have this consistently, these encounters that are highly personal and which he sees the person not for their sin, not for their brokenness, not even for their larger commitments like Pharisee or whatever else. He just sees them. We know the name of a Pharisee, Simon, whose house he ate in and a woman washed Jesus’ feet. We know the name of the Pharisee, Nicodemus, and of others. We know them by name because this was personal encounters. In the book of Revelation, talk about art. In the book of Revelation, one of the sweetest things in it of the vision of heaven is I will write a new name on you. Sort of like I will reveal to you the truth of who you really are. I will tell you your name. And when you hear it, I think the sense would be of at last, the complete revelation of the truth of your being would be made known in the name God speaks to you. That is utterly who you are. And I mean a name is in that sense uniquely personal. You walk into the room, you say, Steven, you have my attention. And so there’s this particular. But the particular isn’t to reduce things. It’s actually the only way we ever have communion with anything. It has to be. You see it. One of my favorite quotes from St. Maximus the Confessor is he says, even a person who is discovering the spiritual essences of something, and he sees these spiritual essences separate from the particulars, he sees that no, there’s no contradiction. They’re not opposed to each other. They’re actually made to be together. That’s the whole key of the incarnation is that we’re not called to this abstract world, but we’re called to encounter the world as an embodied reality. It’s very mysterious when you think of it in terms of the totality. We talked about revelation. We think of it in terms of this kind of final revelation when everything comes together. It’s difficult to fathom how this particularity is all going to come together. But in our experience, like we’ve been talking about, that’s how we experience it. That’s how we experience the world. You can say that to a degree the great revolution intellectually, in Christianity, was already in Plato, there is a discussion of the transcendentals, that is goodness, truth, and beauty. There’s a recognition that this is important. This is what we should be talking about. What happens in Christianity is that language gets taken up, but there is a recognition that the transcendentals are in fact to be encountered in the particular. That becomes the revolution in which, for instance, the word person, as we know it today, is a Christian invention. Yeah, it used to mean mask. You had a thing. You were a hellot. You were a slave. You were something. Suddenly, you become a name of every person of equal value. We couldn’t say that all men are created equal without that revolution having occurred. It gave infinite value to the particular, whereas prior to that, there was only infinite value to the infinite. In a way, you can’t get it in your hands. In the incarnation and what that sets in motion in the life of understanding is a drive towards—I mean, when God becomes man, the infinite enters the particular, and the particular is revealed to have infinite value. That’s a complete change, but nothing is just dispensable. Everything has infinite value. That’s really the drive of Christian ethics, is understanding that a human life is a uniquely particular thing, unrepeatable, with infinite value, and worth sacrificing for, loving, doing all of that. Without that, I’m only speaking vague generalities. It’s only in the particular that we encounter goodness, truth, and beauty. That’s really the root of incarnation for us. I think that it’s almost as if we haven’t completely understood the ramifications of that until today. It seems when you think about it, it creates such a jam in your mind to think about it that way. But intuitively, there’s also something very deeply intuitive that makes it that it has become the core of our ethical thinking. We talk about this all the time, that even now the secular ethics are based in this incarnational thinking, even almost without knowing it. This notion of the value in the particular and the value of the individual is something which has come through the incarnation. But now, in the modern project, we’ve seen also how it has slipped aside. When Christianity is completely knocked out of the arena, then all of a sudden that has to go too. Then this crazy collectivism just appears and takes over. Then human beings become numbers. They become fodder for whatever ideology you have. GK Chesterton said that when the tradition gets jettisoned, like the Christian tradition, the consensus of earlier times gets jettisoned. He said it’s not that virtue disappears from the world, but what you get is the virtues gone mad. Most of the people out there are actually basing whatever they’re thinking on some version of the traditional Christian virtues. They’ve lost their connection to one another and their grounding in the particular and these things of life. They run wild and drive us crazy. You have competing virtues. You have the love of tribe versus other kinds of things. It makes us crazy.