https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=21Y8cj9QRjQ
Yeah, this is a kind of a basic problem that we always address on this channel because a lot of the evangelical crowd, they get upset about that kind of stuff. And if you use this or that symbol, oh, then symbols only have one meaning and they always mean this occult thing. No, no. Symbols have a lot of different meaning. And the example we always give is look, Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah. Okay. Satan is the lion who goes about seeking human made devour. So a lion can have different reference in different senses, different contexts. And so in the same way, a lot of symbols actually work this way. So we can’t have like a, you know, isomorphic single sense to which symbols always only mean this thing. Another good example of this that you touched on a minute ago is the microcosm macrocosm element. This is something that it’s probably debated, I would say, as to the actual origins of this, because on the one hand, we could say, well, now, wait a minute, this is an esoteric alchemical neoplatonic thing. Well, yeah, the neoplatonists talk about man as a microcosm of the macrocosm, but Paul speaks of Christ as the microcosm of the macrocosm. So it really doesn’t matter who’s using the argument or where it comes from. If it’s true, it doesn’t matter. Right. And so we can appropriate those things we can. And in fact, some scholars even argue that that idea was actually in Jewish theology prior to Paul. It was already there that, you know, Israel is a kind of a body of God. There’s a whole tradition in Jewish theology of Israel being the bride and body of God and this kind of stuff. So there’s fluidity in these these ideas that we don’t have to have this rigid notion that if a pagan philosopher says this, then it must have come from him and it must have come from demons. That’s a silly kind of idea approach to these things, because again, even St. Paul, right in his epistles, he calls Christ the new Adam. And by being the new Adam, he encapsulates as a divine hypostasis with the human nature. He encapsulates not just all of human nature, but according to Romans eight, cosmic scope of all reality. And so St. Maximus can go so far as to say that Christ not only reconciles all of dispersed, discrete human nature that was fragmented from the fall, but he says all of cosmic reality is restored in the incarnation. Yeah. And St. Maximus goes, St. Maximus, like people really just have to read him because, I mean, he really talks about how the entire cosmos is meant to be divinized. Like through man, yes, but ultimately all of creation is headed toward divinization. That’s the reason why I was created in the first place, basically. And so I totally agree with you. And I think that that’s to me. And I think, like you said, I think what it is, it’s a weird thing, like, because you see it in Orthodox circles too. It’s like Orthodox people, they kind of converted from Protestantism and were very anti-Catholic. And so saw a lot of like weird or interpreted a lot of Catholic things as weirdly esoteric. Then they become Orthodox and they keep doing that. But it’s like you have a lot of stuff that if you keep doing that, you’re going to run into major problems. Like when you see your bishop with the staff that has two snakes on it, you’re going to run into a major problem, my friend, because it’s like, it’s like you have to drop that type of thinking and rather see the image for what it is in its context and how, you know, how it can be, how it can be, even if it was taken from some pagan source, it can be reoriented because Christ redeems, but it has to be reoriented, obviously. Like you’re not going to have heavy metal music playing in an Orthodox church because it just, you know, it’s not, it’s not reoriented in the proper way or in the proper hierarchy. But some things have been and that’s completely fine. Like the image of, let’s say, a domed building, you know, that came from Roman architecture. But it’s, but like who, why would you deny that? It’s an amazing image. It’s a powerful image that is completely coherent with biblical symbolism and the biblical way of describing reality. And so it’s like, why would you, why would you throw it away if you can now reorient it towards Christ? Yeah, I would be like saying Muslims had steeples aka minarets before Protestants. And so if you’re a Protestant, you’re getting your steeple from a Muslim. Just joking, but yeah, I mean, you play the genetic fallacy there where it has nothing to do with whether it’s true or false. But so let’s see, you did bring up something there I wanted to ask you about. Oh, so I remember one of the first things I read from you and I don’t think I realized at the time when I read it that that was you. And it was, I believe an essay that you had done. It was an excellent essay, by the way, on that very thing, the double headed snake on the staff. Could you maybe go into that because I actually get not a lot, but every now and then I get, you know, Protestants who say, what is this? This looks esoteric, looks occultic. And it’s like, no, no, you have to understand the context, the symbolism. I mean, do you think that the bronze serpent on a pole was occultic? No, it’s in numbers. It’s in John three. So could you go into some of that because your essay was really good on that? Yeah, well, it has to do with revealing. It reveals very much a mystery of Christ, very much so. That is, it’s not just about even understanding the staff of the Bishop of the two servants. It’s understanding, first of all, the serpentine shape that Christ has on the cross itself, you know, and that you can understand it superficially as saying, okay, he’s the bronze serpent, you know, but this is, there’s an even deeper mystery to that, which is the snake in the garden. You know, there are different ways of understanding the snake in the garden. Obviously, you know, you can say it’s Satan, you can say, but a good way, I think, of understanding it, which makes sense in kind of orthodox anthropology is to understand the snake as the purveyor of death, the one who’s bringing death, you know, because he’s lying about the nature of reality and he’s going to bring humans into fragmentation and dispersion. And so it’s death, it’s change as well, right? Change in the negative sense, change in the sense that here you’re in the proper state. And now we’re going to change you back into the lower state. But what Christ does is he reverses that process, right? He uses death against death, right? He dies to restore life. And so because of that, the idea that Christ becomes the serpent on the staff, Moses already did that. Moses already took the debt, these things that are bringing death at the bottom of the world. So you have all these slithering things that are the passion, that are all of these, these fragmentation of the world at the bottom that are stinging you. And you’re dying because of that. And so Moses takes that like medicine, right? Medicine is made out of the poison, or is made out of the disease, made out of the cure. Cure is made out of the poison, right? So he takes one, he lifts it up on the stick, like on the, he puts it up on the top of the hierarchy. And if you look to that, then all of a sudden that ends up curing your death. And it’s like an image of Christ, what Christ is going to do. Christ is going to do exactly that. He’s going to turn death against itself. And he’s going to, so when you look at the image of the staff of the bishop, that’s what you’re getting. It’s actually really related to the image of Asclepius, right? It is related to that in terms of meaning. That is, you have, there’s a tradition according to which the Asclepius, what he did is that he cut the gorgon in half. He would take blood from the right side of the gorgon in order to heal people, implying that blood from the left side of the gorgon would be poisonous. So you have, from one side you have the raising up and then one side you have the pushing down. And so that’s the way to kind of understand these two snakes on the side of the bishop staff, which is the good thief, the bad thief. The one that goes up, the one that goes down. The two possibilities of change, you could say. One which is using change to bring you up towards God and one which is the manifestation of change, which brings you down into death. And so it’s actually very, it’s very much coherent with, so another way it was represented in medieval art was that you would have Christ on the cross kind of S-shaped. Then you have the serpent at the bottom of the cross coming up to bite him on the, like coming to bite his heel. And so you would have the two snakes on the cross as being these two aspects of death, one which is bringing you towards life and one which is trying to pull you down towards death itself. And so those two serpents end up being a similar version of that same structure, let’s say.