https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Lyzfuo5byhk
The topic that we will explore today is in many ways one of trying to figure out some of the deepest implications of what it means to be a human being. When we first formed the OCF Ortho-Architecture Fellowship last year, one of the very first discussions we had at our weekly meeting was one that dealt with how we see ourselves today, how we in our society, and especially as students, have lost something very sacred about ourselves. In many currents of thought, and certainly in our hyper-rationalized, deconstructed, post-modern world, one loses sight of the meaning of not only those things which are external to us, but in the process we fail to understand the very core of our being. Many of you will know that recently Dr. Jordan Peterson has faced an immense set of controversy precisely for questioning the dogmas of our age. And yet, he has also stressed the importance of the divine individual and the Christian concept of the logos, which I will allow our speakers to elaborate upon today. A dear friend had told me once that what fundamentally divides orthodoxy from any other kind of ideology is precisely this, the dignity of the divine individual and what this means for us as spiritual and physical beings. And so I am immensely excited to hear what our panelists have to say tonight. And so I’d like to introduce each of our panelists, starting with Father Theodore Peroskevopoulos, who is adjunct faculty at the Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College. Last semester he taught a course on the human person in orthodox theology and orthodox tradition. And in many ways this is something that touches upon or introduces the very core of what’s being discussed today. What is the individual? What does it mean to be human? And he is also quite a positive presence at our Orthodox Christian Fellowship and we certainly look forward to hearing his perspectives tonight. Jonathan Pageot is a very well-known icon carver from Quebec, as well as an editor for the Orthodox Arts Journal. Many of us were familiar with Jonathan and his work prior to this, and so it’s a great pleasure to have him here tonight. And indeed, it is entirely appropriate. Just this past Sunday, the Orthodox Church celebrated, in the spirit of unity, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the celebration of our triumph over iconoclasm. The tradition of iconography in the Orthodox tradition is one of deep theology, and I’m very pleased that an expert on the matter is with us here today. And many of you may be interested to hear Jonathan’s online discussion with Dr. Peterson, the most recent one being concerned with one of the most controversial political symbols of his day. The metaphysics of Pepe. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology here at the University of Toronto, and I think it goes without saying that the activism of Dr. Peterson has inspired many in the room today. Many who would have previously perhaps not even considered looking into the type of concepts which are going to be discussed today. Myself and many others have been deeply moved by not only Dr. Peterson’s insight on matters of a political nature, but also in his insight in human nature. The title of this discussion was influenced by Dr. Peterson’s usage of the Christian concept of logos, and what that means for us as individuals. I’d like to thank Dr. Peterson for joining us, and we are greatly looking forward to hearing more of your insight on this matter. Last but not least, Father Jeffrey Reddy, who is a co-director of the Orthodox School of Theology, the chaplain of our Orthodox Christian fellowship, and the parish priest at the Holy Merbera’s Orthodox Mission located at Trinity Chapel. From the very creation of our OCF last year, Father Jeffrey has continuously blown our minds and enhanced our understanding not only of our Orthodox spiritual life, but of ourselves as human beings. Apart from his remarkable pastoral qualities, his wealth of knowledge and perspective has made it only natural that we would offer his perspective on this panel tonight. I’d like to thank Father Jeffrey for his work, and greatly look forward to hearing his perspectives tonight. So the format for the discussion today will be basically that each of our panelists will speak for a time, and this will be followed by a question and answer period. Each of you will have received a cue card, and each row has about two pens. So for the duration of the discussion, you can write down your questions and pass them up at the front, and then we’ll try to get through as many of them as possible by the end of the night. And with that, I’d like to welcome Father Theodore Peroskevopoulos to the podium to begin our discussion. Thank you. Okay, so there’s not going to be any mind blowing. Okay, let’s reserve for Father Jeffrey. Thank you to the OCF and U of T for asking me to come and to be up here on the stage with people that I kind of feel outclassed, definitely. But I appreciate the invitation. So I was told to speak for like 10 to 15 minutes about what it means to be a human person in the Orthodox tradition. So I don’t know how possible that is. But Vlad just mentioned that in the past two days, on Sunday, we celebrated in the Orthodox tradition the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which is the first Sunday in Lent. For those of you who don’t know what that is or don’t know what we celebrate on that day, we celebrate the return of the holy icons into the church. Now, a lot of people who have been to Orthodox churches know that the church is full of icons and they wonder, well, when was there a return and why was there a return considering, you know, to be every not half of them? Of course, Christians have had images in their churches and in their places of worship from the very beginning. But there was a time that there was an oppression of the idea of using images as it was considered to be idolatry within the church. And there was a faction within the church that fought against this. And for almost 100 years, icons were burned, destroyed, and taken out of churches. It was only with the Seventh Ecumenical Council that they were returned. Of course, why do we celebrate this on Sunday of Orthodoxy and why do we call it Sunday of Orthodoxy? Is because those who were the proponents of icons and of course, all modern Orthodox Christians knew that the attack on the depiction of Christ was an attack on the incarnation itself. The idea that Christ is an actual human being, actually existed, actually lived and lives. He was an actual historical figure who lived at a certain time and not a figment of our imagination as some people today would say. And this means that when we speak about God and when we speak about the Trinity, when we speak about the second person of the Trinity, who is the Son, the Logos, as we were speaking about tonight, we are speaking about a very specific person. And that is in contrast to many of the discussions that we see today, both in the public forum, online, at symposia like this, where many people would like to think of God as an abstract. For Orthodox Christians, and I would say for, you know, historical ancient Christianity, God is not an abstract. But rather God is an actual person. There is an objective reality there. Christ is an objective person. He thinks a certain way, speaks a certain way, acts a certain way, even looked a certain way. And so we can depict him in icons. Now the reason why I start with this and I kind of, you know, begin my thoughts is because there is a little bit of a contrast between many religions and Orthodoxy. This is not, this is generalization, but as generalizations go, in many religions, whether they be Christian or not, the concept of God or the concept of the divine usually centers around the idea of the word of God or the concept of God made text. There are usually writings about this, and writings that are usually very ancient, they are passed down, and the text is usually what is focused on. Even amongst many Christian denominations, it’s all about the text. However, in the Orthodox tradition, it is not about the word becoming text, but rather about the word becoming flesh, becoming a human being. And so our faith is not based on a text, but rather on a deep mystical experience of the risen Lord throughout time. Now you’re going to say, well we read the Bible too, right? We use the Bible, we venerate the Bible, we have it in very high regard. For ancient Christianity, I love that because I like Star Trek too. There you go. When we speak about Christ, when we speak about God, we speak about a living tradition. Christ didn’t found a book, neither did he found a philosophy, but rather he found a very real community, a living community. And the Orthodox Church, for the last 2,000 years, is this living community that has never stopped, it has never ceased to exist, it was never a time where it did not exist. We have no beginning, we have no reformer, we have no founder, we have no school of thought, but rather we exist from the very beginning. So, the reason why I say this is because our concept of God, and our concept of our relationship to him, is a very intimate one, and one that has been living for the last 2,000 years. So, going back to the idea of incarnational theology and of icons, if we are to say that God is real, if he actually exists, if we don’t believe in that, well then this talk does only matter. But if we believe that God exists and that God is an actual person, is a mind, is a personality, and that Christ is God in human form, then the reality is that there is an objective reality to who God is, and by that we can say that there is an objective truth that we can speak about, and there is an objective good that we can speak about, and there is an objective understanding of the human being, that it is not subjective, but rather objective. And for us, as Orthodox Christians, we tend to follow the motto that was coined by St. Athanasius the Great, famous 4th century father of the Church and great theologian who said that God became man so that we may become God, not that we may become real gods, but like God. So, for us, the goal of the Christian life is to emulate Christ, to become Christ-like. It’s not about what I think of myself, it’s not about what I want to be, or what I would like to create in my mind of what I would like to be or what I think I am, but rather that there is Christ and Christ is the perfect human being, and I try to discover what that is. And I know that is diametrically opposed to the society that we live in today, for the most part, for the most part, that we live in a society that is a society of subjectivity, not objectivity, and we live in a society that when it speaks about religion, it speaks about spirituality, when it speaks about theology, it usually refers to the subjective understanding of God, the subjective understanding of the human person, as Professor Peterson has been dealing with in the last few months. So, when we talk about human identity, it is something that is to be discovered, not to be kind of created or self-created. So, you know, there’s a writing at a very early second century writing in the church called the didahi, which means the teaching. One of the earliest writings of the church, I guess we could say, is one of the earliest manuals of how to be a Christian or the basics of the Christian faith, I guess you could say. And in the didahi, it says, the first line says, there are two ways, one of life, one of death, and there’s a great difference between the two, the opening lines. And really, when it comes to, you know, the understanding of the human person from an Orthodox point of view, we would say the same thing, that there are really two ways to understand. There is either the revelation from God and how we emulate that, or rather there’s the movement towards the self, towards self-revelation, self-understanding, and really, we would say, self-idolization. And so, of course, we as human beings are free to do whatever we want to do, and we have free will, but how we use that and what we do with it and what we choose to become really depends on where we’re looking towards, what we want to do, and who we want to be. So I would say that the modern existential crisis of our time can really be remedied by the simple statement that if there is a God, there’s a God, I’m not him. So the understanding that if there’s a God and I’m not him would mean that I need to discover who that God is and what he expects of me, and why am I here, and what am I supposed to do with my life? And that’s diametrically opposed to the subjective understanding of that God is whatever I want him to be, or what I would rather him to be, and go from there. So in pre-modern Western civilization, society was predominantly, you know, a society of these kind of values, these kind of objective truths. It was kind of like the social glue that provided stability for the family and social institutions and religion and even business ethics, like people believe that there was a good, there was a truth out there that we needed to discover, there was a God that we needed to somehow figure out who that God was. And the humility that was required to accept that we are not gods was what held all that together in the social and psychological fabric of society. So without it, and this is where I think Professor Peterson would also agree and has said many times, without this kind of understanding of an objective reality, there is an endless movement towards the individual, towards subjectivity, towards what is relative, and ultimately towards nihilism, because if there is no objective meaning in life, and there is no objective truth in life, then, and everything is whatever I make it, and everybody is right, then really everybody is wrong, and then really what do you have to live for? There’s no real ultimate meaning in life. And so this is the problem, you know, and there’s a movement towards you know, and there’s a movement towards the delusion that everyone is their own God, and everyone is free to create themselves in their own image. And this breeds endless fragmentation, as Professor Peterson has said, of both so-called individual truths and also individual identities. So if there is no God, as we said, this conversation doesn’t really matter. However, if there is a God, and he is a personal God, as the Christians claim, then we cannot go on ignoring him without suffering a serious identity crisis. I believe that this crisis has arrived, and the question is, how do we as Christians continue to see the world, see the Word of God, the divine logos, in those who refuse to see it in themselves? Like, how do we speak to that? How do we speak to a world that doesn’t even acknowledge that there is such a logos, that there is such a truth in the first place? This is the conundrum that we find ourselves in, the difficulty. How do we witness to a world that is not speaking the same language anymore? And I think that is something that, you know, discussions like this are extremely important to attend the first steps, because here we are attempting, and I applaud the OCF for doing this, attempting to find points of convergence between a Christian tradition, the Orthodox Christian tradition, and also the secular approach, psychology, sociology, history, biology, places where these things converge, and they tell us and they preach the same truth. And this is why I was so enthused about coming and speaking today, because watching a lot of Professor Peterson’s videos online, I saw that there are a lot of points that he makes that not only are congruent with Orthodox theology and Orthodox anthropology, but speak common sense to the world, you know, a world that is completely fragmented, a world that is completely disengaged from the idea that there can be a truth outside of ourselves, and that there needs to be some type of seeking, some type of understanding of what that truth may be. The main difference between philosophy and theology, I always tell my students, is that philosophy comes from us. It is us trying to understand the world, trying to understand the metaphysical, trying to understand God, trying to understand anything. You can philosophize about anything. But the source is the human being. We have this wonderful thing called the mind that is so powerful, that can do so many things. But that’s philosophy. Theology deals with revelation, deals with what has been revealed from outside the human being, from someone else. And that’s what the church has to deal with. That’s what Christianity has to deal with, the idea of what God has revealed in himself by becoming a real human being, becoming one of us. And we can’t negate that as much as we try. And to do so would mean to negate an important part of ourselves, because we believe, as ortho-christians like to say all the time, and as we like to quote Genesis, where God says in the very beginning, Genesis 1.26, that God makes man in his image and his likeness. He gives us this great ability to choose, this great ability to reason, and to figure things out for ourselves, and to decide whether we want to be like him, or whether we want to be more like something else. And so this is the great dilemma. It’s not just a theological dilemma. It’s not just a spiritual dilemma, but it’s an existential dilemma. And it’s becoming a social dilemma, becoming a political dilemma, a biological dilemma, and a whole lot of other dilemmas. So I will end there. I will let my colleague Jonathan take it from here. But I think this is a general introduction to at least the way we see it as ortho-christians, that God becomes man so that man can become God. Also, the words of Apostle Paul, there’s not I who live, but Christ who lives within me. And this is our ultimate goal. Thank you very much. Thank you. Father Ted, thanks. We appreciate it. I appreciate being here. I appreciate being in Toronto. It’s a great town.