https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=F81MoaGkFIw
Okay, so the church, we talked about this basic structure. I mentioned this basic structure of the scripture, the garden, and the church fathers, especially sent there from the Syrian, he separates the garden into different sections as well. And so the Garden of Eden has the Tree of Life, which is at the top of the mountain, and then there is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is at a lower sphere. And then there is the Fig Tree, which is lower. And then finally, at the bottom of the mountain, you have this wall with the angel protecting the garden, and then you have the thorns, which are on the outside. So you can kind of imagine this basic structure. And then this structure is then repeated in the temple itself. So you have the Holy of Holies, where the presence of God descends, which is equivalent to the Tree of Life. And then you have a holy place, which would be one step further back. And then finally you have the outer court, which would be even further down the mountain, if you will, further away from the garden. And then the outside is the Land of Thorns, outside of the temple itself, or outside of the Tabernacle. For example, in Herod’s temple, there was even a court for foreigners. So in very far out, there was a court where people who were not Jewish were allowed to come. But so you can, so it was always like, more and more restricted as you moved in towards the Holy of Holies. So the church has a very similar pattern. In this part, we are in the narthex. And the narthex is a transition part. So it’s a transition between the inside and the outside. And so when, for example, in the traditional Orthodox liturgy, nobody does it anymore, it seems. But traditionally, there is a point in the liturgy. The first part of the liturgy, it’s for everybody. People could just come. The catechumen could come. If you were not Orthodox, you could be there. Then at some point in the liturgy, they chase out the catechumens. After the sermon. So they read the gospel, they have the sermon, and then they say all the catechumen should leave, and all the catechumen would walk out and would come into the narthex. And traditionally, they would receive instruction. They wouldn’t go home. Like they would receive instruction. They would have some kind of teaching for them. But then at some point, they closed the doors of the church. They would actually close the doors of the church. And there would only be the communicants who would stay inside. Now, you really have to understand this structure. Help us understand how reality works. It’s to help us participate in the way that reality works itself. And so the narthex, although we don’t do that anymore, it still liturgically plays that role. So for example, if a child is going to be baptized, they start out here. They’re received at the door, and there are some prayers at the door of the church. Prayers of exorcism. And then the person has to spit to the west, to spit at the devil. And then they’re let into the church. So there’s this whole kind of drama of this entering into the church from the outside, moving in towards the inside of the church. Another aspect that you see in, for example, in Greek monasteries, you’ll see that a lot in more modern times as well, is that they have the Greek philosophers in the narthex. And so we have icons of the saints inside, but in the narthex, which is this transition space, it’s still a space to celebrate the intermediary forms, even of ancient culture. And so knowing that the Greek philosophers, although they’re not Christian, we can’t just put them inside, right? But they’re also, we use their language. We say, we use the word logos. We use all these words that were developed by these Greek philosophers and some ideas as well. And so we hold them in this intermediary place. And this is a concept, like if you’ve read Dante, you’ll see the same thing. Dante does the same thing with limbo. He has this intermediary space, and then he puts all the just pagans in this intermediary space. And it’s mostly to understand this thing. Remember I talked about this idea also, the foreign, which is outside. And so the church has this space, which is this transition towards the inside. And ultimately, we can understand it is also the place where the glory of God can also, it doesn’t stop at the door of the church, right? It continues to move out into the world from the narthex out into the world as well. It’s not just contained inside the church, although there is a hierarchy. It’s not contained inside the church. Does that make sense to everybody? All right. And so if you turn around, you’ll see the icons that are represented here. And so there are different traditions of what you represent in the narthex. Like I said, sometimes you represent warrior saints, or sometimes you represent transitional figures, like the political figures or that kind of stuff. And here we have the Annunciation, which is here, which is also, sorry, on my left, which is also the name of the church. And so you come into the church and you see right away the Annunciation. You see Gabriel announcing to the mother of God, and she is holding, can I? Here she is. She’s holding a spool of food. So usually, yeah, usually she’s holding a spool of thread in her hand, because she was mending the veil of the temple. She was participating in making the veil of the temple. So this is all part of our symbolism of the mother of God as being the holy of holy herself, that she is the holy of holies. She is the Ark of the Covenant. She’s all this imagery of the place where the theophany happens, of where God manifests himself. And then on my right, we have the Nativity icon. And so in the Nativity icon, you also see, you can see it’s similar. It’s almost as if they’re related to each other. If you look at the Annunciation icon, you’ll see there’s this ray of light coming down from above. There’s a glory above and there’s a ray of light. And in that ray, there’s a little bird most of the time. And so you can see the Holy Spirit coming down on the mother of God. And here you see again, this glory. And then you see this ray and the star, the Christmas star, which is above the cave where Christ is born. And that cave is also in a certain manner, the womb of the mother of God herself. It’s this holy place. It’s this place of the theophany. All these images play on each other in terms of understanding the idea of a place where God manifests himself. And in the Nativity icon, what’s important to understand is you have Christ, you have the logos represented as hidden in creation. And so he’s invisible, right? No one knows. And then you have these people who find out and then they’re drawn in towards this invisible place. And the drawing in is, if you look at the image, it’s a cosmic, the image of the Nativity is one of the most cosmic images that we have. You have the lower aspect of society, the shepherds who are coming in. You also have these wise figures who are coming, the wise men who are coming to see. And the wise men are also foreigners. So you have local people, you have foreigners, you have the lowest class, you have the highest class. And then you have above, you have all the angels which are participating in this event as well. So it’s really a cosmic event. Do you want to add something, Father? I’d like to add too, there is a tradition too where the narthex is dimly lit, whereas the church proper is brightly lit because we come from the darkness into the light. And this, as Jonathan mentioned, this idea of liminal entry into the church. It comes from the Latin word that means threshold and the yachad, the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran had a similar type of entry into their community and where the initiates in the community had to stay outside as well. For the practicing Christians, for the baptized Christians though, it’s also a place of preparation. You know, we don’t just, well some do but we shouldn’t. You know, just come in and throw yourself in the church, sit down in the pew and you know, like you’re watching a movie. There’s a point of preparation. So you see the beeswax candles here. Beeswax is important because it smells really nice, right? It’s all natural and there’s definitely an emphasis on natural, especially with lights, although we have electric lights here too about oil, water, lamps and things like that. We’ll talk about that later. But the idea is that you light a candle and there’s two, a practice of lighting two candles. Where you come and you light one candle, you’ll come to the left side and then you remember the names of the living. You’ll come to the right side and you’ll remember those of the dead. And in this way you’re preparing yourself, you’re praying for others outside of yourself and you’re preparing yourself to enter into the kingdom, into paradise as it were. Now you’ll see this, as an engineer, what appeals to me is this inner harmony, this inner logic to the services. So you see the living on the one side, the dead on the other. When the priest prepares the gifts, on the toliskadion, on the paten, the lamb of God is in the center and on the left, the bread. You know, it’s risen, the risen, not lamb lamb, that comes up after. At the home. But the lamb is, we use risen bread and the Eucharist. On the left side, particles are placed for the living, and on the right side, particles for the dead. If you see the icon of the transfiguration, Christ is in the center. On the left is the prophet Elias, Elijah, who never died. He went to heaven and a chariot of fire, he represented the living. On the right is the prophet Moses, who died on Mount Nebo and he died of natural death, so he represents the dead. So you see this kind of inner consistency and inner harmony. In terms of icons, also what’s very important is the benefactor who’s donating them. And so if they have a particular saint and the devotion of that saint is the patron saint, they’ll have that icon put there. So that will, in terms of, there are fixed icons and then there’s some flexibility to it. Just a last note, just to give an idea of what’s happening here, when you see, you’ll see it in the orthodox, in the script there, O adios, Iolanus, and several letters are said there. In his blessing, in his hand is a scroll that says, metanoita inicigari vasilletor nonon, repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand, is coming. Okay? All right, yeah, we can go into the church proper. So the traditional church has a few basic patterns. There’s the basilica, which is the one that in the west has become the most prominent, which has a longer space and then an apse at the end. And then there’s the church, which is the most prominent. So the church has a few basic patterns. So the church has a few basic patterns. A longer space and then an apse at the end. But the church structure that really took up prominence in the east is really this structure, which is a dome on a square cross. And so here we really do have like a basic, very, very simple version of that. Sometimes it becomes very complicated and when you’re in the church, you don’t necessarily see it right away. You kind of have to get it. Sometimes there are more domes, you can add domes, you can add all of this. There are different additions you can have, but the basic structure of this church is almost like a type, it’s almost like a classical type of that exact structure. So you can see the round dome and then you can see that on each side of the dome, there’s the extension of the cross. So the basic structure is really just heaven and earth. That’s the basic idea is you have the, the dome of heaven above, then you have the earth below. You have to think in a flat earth universe. You have to, not in a flat earth universe, you have to think in a phenomenological universe. You have to imagine that what you experience, that has reality to it. If you go outside and you look up, you see a dome. Try not to see a dome. I don’t know what you’re gonna see. That’s what you experience. We experienced this dome and it ends up having a symbolic import as well because it’s, you have this perfect shape of the circle and then below you have a stable shape, which is a square, and you have four corners. We still think that, we still say north, east, south, west. If you look at a map, it’s still organized that way. It still has the four directions. And so we have the same thing. And the four directions then also become the extension of the cross itself, which extends out into the world. So you have the dome, which is the invisible part, and then the visible part is this extension. You can understand it as in paradise, there was the top of the mountain, and then there were four rivers that came down the mountain. And there they are, those four rivers. It’s the same thing. You have four directions, you have four rivers that extend from the summit and fill up the world. Now, this is the first time that I see this setup in the church. Most churches now will have an image of Christ up in the dome. Now in this church, they put the image of Christ up at the top of the arch, but most churches will have an image of Christ up in the dome, and it’s Christ as the Pentecostal, it’s Christ as the great judge. It’s also Christ at the ascension. The first images of Christ up in the dome were images of the ascension. So you would see the disciples around, then you see Christ up in the center, because the angel said that he will return in the same manner that he left. And that’s it. You have the divine logos is right there above at the very top, the summit of everything. He’s above everything in the world, is manifested through his speaking, through his speaking creation, his judging the world. We always see judging as a bad thing, but judging is also just deciding what is what. Giving identities and judging is the same thing actually. Giving a name to something and judging it is the same act. And so we have this setup. And here you can see the four angels. In Hagia Sophia, this is how the pendatives are done. Sometimes there’s also the four evangelists are there. Sometimes it’s four angels, but with the different heads of the tetramorph. So you have the man, the lion, the bull, and the, why am I forgetting one? The lion, the eagle. It’s like, what? And you can imagine it as the, we talk about this in the liturgy. We talk about how Christ is carried by the hierarchy of angels down, carried down to us by this hierarchy of angels. And this is the thing I was talking about is that in the Christian world, the hierarchy is not, we were so ruined by the modern world because we always think that hierarchies are bad. Hierarchy is always bad because they oppress us or whatever. And sometimes it’s true, but in the Christian vision of the cosmos, the hierarchy is the way in which we are able to all participate together. And so the angels carry down the presence of God to us and we sing with the angels and we raise ourselves up into that song with the angels. We’re all participating in the thing. Yes, Father, you wanted to say something? The word hierarchy in Greek means holy order. Hiaros, right? Archi. Yeah. And the church fathers, and indeed in the early church, they prayed for order. They realized that the Roman state, the pagan Roman state that was putting them to death, that was persecuting them, they prayed for them because they realized the world without order was worse than the world even with the despotic order. And so order hierarchy was, and actually in according to Chris’s note, hierarchy was in position for the fall. It was required to keep order. Right, yeah, the fifth, and let’s say that- God is not subjugation, superior, inferior, it’s participation. It’s the way that we participate in the things above us. If you, one of the difficulties when you don’t have hierarchy and you see it all the time is that you say, it’s just me and God, right? You hear that a lot, Christians. It’s like, I don’t need all this other stuff. It’s just me and God. The problem that happens usually is that they think it’s me and God, but it’s actually me and God. Because there’s no hierarchy to show them how lofty and how infinite God is, they make God into just some guy like my buddy, my friend or whatever, not the infinite origin of all things. It’s just something that is extremely accessible in that sense. So hierarchy helps us to understand both the distance that separates us from God, but also how we are actually completely connected to God at the same time. And so, is there something else you wanna say about the dome and the square? I’d like to contrast the dome to the steeple because the steeple is man’s finger reaching up the gun, right? And the dome, as God has, as John has said, coming down to man. You see a distinction between the modes of theology, theological discourse, and orthodoxy in the Western world. Orthodox theology is characterized as apophatic. And we see that in the prayer of the first antiphon, the literature, where we use the words like ametetot, anoetot, etaletot, afetot, unspeakable, unimaginable, immeasurable. So God’s love is beyond compare, beyond expression. You won’t hear similes use, like God is like a waterfall, because a waterfall has a beginning and an end to it. And so, the idea of the dome, God coming down to the man, is really a contrast to the rationalism that exists, especially in the scholastic period in the West, where we’re trying to figure out, by asking questions of God, and kind of in a scientific way, trying to figure out who God is, which is an impossibility, because if God is infinite, go in your backyard and try to count to infinity, and say, oh, you’re not gonna get there. And so, as we said too, the pando crator, cratao means to hold, right? So the pando crator is the one who holds, that’s why he’s the authority, he holds all in his hand. The autocrator, he holds power in himself, democraia, demos, demos holds the power, people, democracy holds the power. And when you see him holding a book, you don’t get this all the time in the churches, he’s not holding the Bible, he’s holding the? The book of life. The gospel, you think so? This is gospel, right, in the book of life. And as Jonathan’s saying, you see this here, in some churches you see that there, we think of orthodoxy as full and rigid, but there’s a flexibility, there’s an elasticity, and an expressiveness, but it happens within a framework. So you won’t get Da Vinci saying, Da Vinci goes, well, I want to pick John the Baptist like this, this little chubby kid here, chubby Jesus crawling around the feet of Mary. You won’t get that, there has to be the form, because it expressed the icons, and I’m sure John will talk about this, it expressed the transfigured person, but the historical person. I was in a pizza shop, imagine a pizza shop in Vermont, and I looked at a little icon, that big, and this is, I said, who’s the Nazi? Who’s the Nazi? I said, he says, my father’s the Nazi, how do you know, because you’ve got Saint Athanasius there. He goes, no, it’s not Saint Nicholas, flip it over, print Saint Athanasius, and it said Saint Athanasius on it. And he says, how did you know that, because I know what my saints look like, I know what his beard looks like, I know what Nicholas’ beard looked like, and he doesn’t look like that. He doesn’t look like Nicholas. So it’s expressing an historical reality. Last comment on the dome, this is the envelope, all of it, right, all of it here, used to be there. Middle. In the middle, because there were this, under the dome, this western, no Orthodox, right under the dome, this carpet, no carpet. Outrage. No microphone. So you’re right under the dome, under the big dome, acoustics, so they can hear you. And the envelope is symbolic of the stone that sealed the tomb, right? So it’s lost on its map, but it’s totally here. Because in the center, it makes perfect sense, because the pulp that’s there, the envelope is there, and the center right under the dome, there’s the tomb. Right there, the stone that seals the tomb. And there’s one thing on the dome, it’s very biblical, this kind of architecture, because, well, the Bible doesn’t say the purpose of life is, well, to save your soul, go to heaven, on cloud nine and to play a harp. The only thing the Bible says is, we’re waiting for Christ to come. And so this is biblical, because you said that the whole thing ends in Revelation, where it’s the marriage of heaven and earth, it’s that heavenly city, and it’s also the imagery of the marriage, as well as the city, at the very end. So that’s what this is depicting. In other words, it’s as if the sky is falling on you. So when Hagia Sophia was first built, the first people who walked in it were afraid. It seemed as if that dome was gonna fall on their head. And it’s supposed to be, because it’s supposed to portray this idea of the coming of Christ. And that’s what the Bible is leading to. But we, in a very rationalistic and very individualistic way, we superimpose Western ideas that the whole purpose of life is to save my soul. Very individualistic. And we ignore the community, the communion, the church, the body of Christ. All those things have gone by the wayside. Jeff, you wanna ask? The dome also, I believe, is the original design for what carried over from Moscow. Yep. Yeah, the Hagia Sophia is the basis of all Islamic architecture. The other thing, Father, what you said really helped me to think of, there’s something that I forgot to explain, is that all of Christian art, iconography, architecture, the layout of the church and the way the icons are laid out is all eschatological. It is all a participation in the things to come. It’s all a kind of, the capacity we have to glimpse or to participate in the final state when all will be accomplished, when all will be revealed. In the early churches, it was very dramatic. The very early churches had the 24 elders and had all this stuff. A lot of people tell me, Christians, we don’t need this Old Testament stuff, right? Why do we have altars and the Holy of Holies and all that stuff? But there is no lamb on the altar and the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament. It’s not there. It comes from revelations. It all comes from revelations. It’s in revelations that everybody is turned towards the altar and there’s a lamb on the altar and that we’re all bowing towards the altar. It comes from the eschatological moment where everything is revealed. And so the church decoration and the icons and all this is all based on this capacity to participate in the eschaton. And you can imagine the icons, when you see the saints represented in this certain manner with the mark of their holiness, with a halo, with gold, and all of this is the same. It’s the peeking into the totality of their being in the eschaton. It’s the capacity we have already to be in that moment and to participate in it. We should probably talk a little bit about the solea too. This area, the solea, technically defined solea was from the altar to the pulpit in the center. That was the solea there. Over here we have the bishop’s throne. The bishop’s throne used to be over here. Whose throne was that? Emperor’s. The emperor’s throne. The emperor’s throne was over there. That’s right. Yeah, well, when the Ottoman Empire from Mehmed II conquered Constantinople 1453, May 29, to the people of Naples. Anyways. It was the millet system under Turkish rule, the millet system. The divide broke up based on religion. Now sometimes religion and ethnicity matched up together for Jews, for Armenians, but the Patriarch of Constantinople was responsible for the Orthodox Christians under his charge, communicating the ethnologies, the leader of his people, Christian people. And that’s when he assumed that position there. Over there is the psalm deity on the chant stand. The tradition is that there are two chant stands for the people of Constantinople. The two chant stands for what’s called the typical chant. So one chant is called the chant of the way the psalm is back and forth. And that is attributed to the nations’ Anthonomies, who was the late 1st, 2nd, 3rd century saint of the church. Regarding the bishop’s throne, the original throne was in the middle of the altar. The synthron was still back. Because that’s the image of the kingdom. Correct. Because the bishop would be his tipon gethokon, his stool, and he would also have all the presbyters with him. And it’s the place and type of Christ as the bishop. That’s Ignatius of Antioch in the 1st century. Worth, and this is, you know, some people might, as John was alluding to, some people wanna kinda all hang this on Constantine’s head. In 312, he defeats MacSentius, the million British who lives outside of Rome. 313, he defeats Milan. And then 325, the first council. But this all predates that. This is apostolic. Ignatius of Antioch was consecrated a bishop in 70 AD, if you wanna use that term anachronistically. And he was fed to the lions in 108. And he wrote to the church in Philadelphia, not in Pennsylvania. Right? Where the bishop is, there’s the church. Surrounded by his presbytery, his presbyters, his diachrony, his deacons presiding over the Eucharist, which is truly the body and blood of Christ. We have the ecclesiology of the church, the hierarchy of the church. And all the people gathered around Christ. And all the people. In one place. Correct. But Clement of Rome talks about this distinction that John was talking about. There is a place where the lady do not cross over for the place of the priest, for they are the ones who preside over the sacrifice. That’s 98 AD is what he done. Oh, is it true that a lot of Orthodox hierarchy, some people believe that Santa Nova will be retaken? Oh. There is. There is. We’re not trying to wrap it up. Yeah, we’re thinking. By tradition that Constantine Peleologos, Constantine XI, the last emperor, it was a Jeopardy question too, by the way. Constantine Peleologos. Alex Trebek, I’m gonna get on this one. Paolo, Paolo Begni. Constantine Peleologos was taken by an angel and marbleized. Yes. There’s a lot of crazy stories. He’ll be demarbleized. Yeah, there’s also a tradition that the last liturgy in Constantinople, when the Turks came, that all the people, the presbyters, they kind of like disappeared into the walls and that they’ll come out to celebrate their liturgy once again. So let’s all go back downstairs because we’re gonna run out of time, everybody. Hope you enjoyed this visit of an Orthodox church. The church was the cathedral of the Greek archdiocese in Boston. And the priest with me is Father Demetri Tonius, who is the dean at the cathedral there. If you enjoy these videos, please go ahead and share. It really helps to get the word out. If you appreciate what I’m doing, you can also support my efforts financially. You can go to my website, thesymbolicworld.com slash support. There you will find different ways to do that. Supporters, get an extra video a month, usually an interpretation of a story or some phenomena. There are also different tiers of access, ways to ask questions in advance for my Q&A monthly, and also ways to have different types of meetings, monthly meetings, yearly meetings with me one-on-one to talk about your questions or your own symbolic project. And so everybody, thanks for your support and I will see you very soon.