https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TAbRnkzo3Oo

I wanted to go back to what we started to say about the movement through the temple space, the liturgical movement, because if the goal of everything is the vision of God, which is, you know, sort of unity with God, then, you know, whatever stands in the way of that vision needs to be addressed, which is why so many of the church fathers spend their time talking about the passions and other kinds of obstacles to the vision, not because they’re fixated on the negative aspects of human existence, but they want people to be well so they can have this relationship with God. But if you’re saddled with all kinds of, we would call them things like addictions and self-destructive behaviors and so forth, you’re not going to, you know, get very far down the road toward the vision of God. I mean, there’s the quote, the beatitude, right? So, before we sit around like fools talking about the vision of God, we need to talk about, right? What’s obstructing that, that vision, right? How do we attain purity of heart? Because that seems to be the proximate goal that will get us to the vision of God. And so, I think, you know, we need to talk about the vision of God. And so, I think, you know, that seems to be the proximate goal that will get us to the ultimate goal that we’ve been called to arrive at. And this is, I think, a big part of Maximus’s approach to, it’s not all sort of beatific visions. There’s a labor that has to take place. There’s a kind of agony of birth that consciousness has to go through. So, our disordered desires, he would say, are kind of misinterpreting the world to us. We’re seeing the world through the lenses or the filters of our disordered desires, of our passions, as he would call them. These places in life where you’ve gotten stuck or fixated on certain things. And the passions are interested in pleasure, not the truth. So, they’ll never get us to the truth of what’s out there, what’s in the world. So, there has to be this reformation, in a sense, of consciousness, of awareness, which they call, you know, purification and other kinds of terms like that. And the way that I think of it is to And the way that I think of it is to a helpful kind of phrase, in which we could say that every depth has a surface, but not every surface has a depth. So, that’s why we need to attend to the depth of things and not just to the surfaces. And I think this is a particular challenge for us in our day and age, because we are obsessed with surfaces, fascinated with surfaces, and have a very hard time seeing past them, because all of reality has somehow been absorbed into these surfaces. And we take the surface of the phenomenon as the kind of ultimate object of a desire. But once you’re able to see through, once the surface of creation becomes transparent, and I’m not just seeing what I’m projecting onto it, based on what my own libido wants to do, once I’m able to see through the transparent, once the world becomes transparent to me, then I’m able to begin to see what Maximus calls these intelligible principles or structures of creation, which is the presence of God in the world. It’s the presence of God, too, the special way that God makes himself present to that world. And once the saints or the artist grasps that or intuits in some way that intelligible structure, then he or she is able to begin to transform the world on the basis of, I mean, that again, that principle of divinity that is kind of informing the form that we see. And one of the things that’s important is these patterns or these structures, they’re not just the way we think of scientific rules or these kind of abstract patterns, but they call us, right? They are modes of being, modes of engaging with the world. These are not the laws of nature, right? And they’re not even subatomic elements. They’re spiritual principles. It’s actually, I mean, he calls them the lohi, which is the plural for the logos. So it’s the particular way that the logos makes itself present to a thing, which is to say that the logos is not present to a rock in the same way that it’s present to a tree, in the same way that it’s present to a human being, in the same way that it has a particular mode of presence that is analogous to or in proportion to particular beings. And to take it a step further, that mode of the logos is present to particular things makes them what they are. It’s that act of creation in a sense, right? So he calls them the lohi. And so through the created form, one has the possibility to see the logos particularized, right? The uniform logos made multiform in the plurality of the world. And from there to proceed to a more direct or immediate understanding or relationship with the logos itself. And ultimately, one of the secrets is that these lohi, if you pierce them enough, they’re ultimately the logos himself, that ultimately behind the multiplicity of the lohi, you find the one divine logos. Right. He says quite clearly that the many lohi or the one logos and the one logos is the many lohi. And so one of the things that surprises a lot of modern Christians that I’ve noticed is they have this idea that the incarnation is a reaction to the fall, right? The incarnation is there, God, we sinned, we did all these bad things, God descend into the world to take our place, all of that type of language. But in St. Maximus, and not just him, but definitely in St. Maximus, it appears very clearly that the incarnation of the God-man is not only a reaction to the fall, but is actually the very purpose of creation. And so how can Christ and the incarnation and the as the culmination of all things help us make sense of our purpose, our lives and our ultimate destiny? Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, without reducing caricature, I think the Western Christian tradition has concentrated on this narrative of redemption. In other words, on the story of the fall, and then the redemption of the fall through Christ and through his suffering, suffering crucifixion. That seems to be the kind of major narrative of somewhat traditional Western Christianity. But from the perspective of a writer like St. Maximus, the confessor, and I think you could say more generally from the perspective of the Orthodox theological tradition, that story, fall and redemption, is actually a smaller story within a larger story, sort of a smaller arc, if you will, that comes under this much larger arc. And the larger arc is really, it’s not fall and redemption, but creation and deification. So God creates the world, what brings beings into existence, for no other reason than to ultimately unite them to himself. That’s God’s purpose in creation. If you read St. Basil’s Hexiameron, his commentary on the opening verses of Genesis, he says, well, he comments on the verse here when God saw that it was good. And then he asked, well, what exactly is God looking at that he thinks is so good? And then he has this beautiful sort of kind of romantic passage about is God seeing purple mountains of majesty and red sunsets and these kinds of things? He says, no, he goes, that’s what we would think might be beautiful. But that’s not what God is seeing at all. God is seeing, he says, the purpose for which he brought things into being. And that purpose is union with himself in Christ. And that’s what he sees. And that’s what he says is beautiful. So that’s the divine plan for the pre-eternal divine plan is for creation and deification. This is interrupted, there’s a parentheses that opens up the smaller arc, as I’m calling it, of transgression and redemption. And St. Maximus says that, okay, the manner or the mode of God’s plan had to change, but the purpose never changed. The goal always remained the same. God never took his eye in a sense off that aim, even though he had to get at it from a slightly different way because of the contingency, let’s say, of the fall. So it was modified by human free choice and sin, but not done away with in its sort of larger form or features. And there’s a way in which we also, he goes very far, St. Maximus, because it’s not just us. People might tend to accept that humans are meant to be deified or meant to participate in God, but there’s a sense in his writings that it’s everything. Like all of creation, somehow at the level at which that’s possible, is meant to be united and be part of the life of God, participate in the life of God. Right. I mean, this is kind of a common idea among the Greek fathers that the human person who was created last in the biblical account is kind of the sum or the summation of the creative effort because it’s in the human person that creation attains consciousness, that matter attains consciousness in the human person. So the human person now becomes the agent within creation that has the ability to recapitulate, let’s say, within itself the whole of the created order. This is, I think, really important for people today because one of the problems we have is this tendency in in scientism to try to view things and view meanings as apart from man. But what St. Maxas offers, and it’s actually an interesting solution to the problem of emergence and the problem of all these phenomena, is the notion that no, man is like a funnel where all of this meaning gathers into and there’s no way to see the meaning of the world and there’s no way to see the purposes of things in creation without going first through man. And that can really change a lot of the way in which people, it brings us back to the more ancient way of thinking. We can reconnect with some of the things that Aristotle talked about in terms of final causes if we see them as coming into man as this fulcrum which joins the two, the invisible and visible together. Yeah, absolutely, and I think we can give this another twist because it’s not simply the human person that’s the key or the linchpin here or one of the words he uses is the workshop, all of these things sort of are kind of, maybe it’s an artisanal or an artistic metaphor, but it’s the human person in Christ because we failed to attain the goal that was established for our nature, which is why Christ came and did it for us in a sense or and showed us the way and made that way available to us. So it’s not just a human thing, it’s a human divine kind of work.