https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IlYY1JQXF6I
John Bejo is re-teaching us the language of symbolism and showing us just how life-giving the Bible is if we have ears to see, if we have ears to hear, if we have eyes to see. Everyone at Boston Fellows knows just how excited I’ve been to have Jonathan come. It’s not really fair to him, I suppose, to have such high expectations. But please do listen to this man, and please welcome him today. This is Jonathan Bejo. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So I want to thank you, Kelly, thank you for inviting me and the Boston Fellows as well. And thank you, Father, for having us here. It’s really wonderful to be in Boston and to see a lot of people. And the crowd is what I was expecting, you know, in the 20s, early 30s. That’s my image of Boston, I guess. And yesterday I was walking around Boston and I was pretty confirmed in my image. There’s just all these young people walking around. And so what I want to talk to you about today is I want to give you a story of art. It’s going to be a story of art that’s going to be maybe a little different from the one you’re used to hearing. I want to try to trace the story of art in Scripture and how it relates to our life today or what it means for us today. And when I’m going to talk about the story of art, it’s actually going to end up being more than just art in the very narrow way that we understand art today. It’s going to end up being the story of art as the entirety of human making, the entirety of human activity. How can we trace this line in Scripture and how does it relate to us today in the church? And also as we see Christianity erode in our culture, what does that also mean for human making? What does that look like in terms of human making? In the Orthodox tradition, for those of you who are Orthodox, there’s an interesting little issue. There is a kind of duality in terms of human making or in terms of let’s say liturgical art or beautiful things, beautiful architecture. On the one hand, we have an ascetic tradition. And in this ascetic tradition, here we have an image of St. Simeon the Stylite who stood on a pillar for most of his life and just stood there for day and night, you know, living this extreme ascetic life. And the image of the Desert Fathers and the image of the life of the monk and the ascetic is the lifeblood of the Orthodox tradition. It is what infuses the saints that we venerate, the stories that we tell of the early Desert Fathers. That is the lifeblood. And the mystical tradition of the church as well, the hesychastic tradition, has these very extreme pronouncements about human activity, about images, about image making, which is that the purpose of the mystic is to attain pure prayer without any images, without any language, without any exteriority whatsoever, but to enter into the divine darkness and experience oneness with God without any form at all. So how do we connect that to something like this? And how does that match? How can we have a tradition that also celebrates this plethora of image making? That we have this exuberance in terms of our art, in terms of ornamentation, gold, all of this. All of this, when we go up into the church later, you’ll see it’s gold mosaic and there is a carved marble and all of this kind of exuberance. How do we connect those two together? And we see tension even in the Christian church, even in the Orthodox tradition. We’ll see tension appear once in a while in that issue. We’ll find a very sober priest who will quote to you a homily of St. John Chrysostom which says that we should be careful, we shouldn’t have gold, we shouldn’t use gold for make churches, we should help the poor. And so you have this idea that we have to help the poor, we have to be ascetic, we have to be this. And then you also have the other side where we have Hagia Sophia, which became the model for all the churches in the world and all the mosques in the world actually, and became the cornerstone of architecture for the West for centuries. So we have these two things. What I want to do is I want to go into the story and look at why these two types of, these two traditions, how do they come together in Christianity? One of my main, the main people I go to is St. Gregory of Nyssa because his understanding of Christian symbolism is, no one beats him in his understanding. If you read the life of Moses, you get a very powerful vision of the Old Testament and this vision of the mystical union with God in the Old Testament. But if you read St. Gregory of Nyssa, it seems like he’s really on the side of the, let’s say on the side of the ascetic. Let me just read you a quote from St. Gregory in his text on virginity. So St. Gregory says that we need to renounce marriage, right? We need to renounce all these things and renounce toil, the work that was given to Adam. We need to renounce even to reject the deception that is given to us, even to taste and sight itself. And he talks about to be with God alone and enjoy this delight continuously and without interruption and no longer to mingle with this repose, nothing which draws us in the opposite direction. And so he talks about being snatched up into the divine presence. And St. Gregory uses this story of Moses ascending the mountain. If you look at the story of Moses ascending the mountain, that’s exactly the structure that is given by St. Gregory of Nyssa. As Moses ascends the mountain, he is returning to paradise. The mountain of Sinai is also the mountain of paradise. If you look at this image, you can see Moses atop and you see this glory of God. I don’t know if you can see this little glory of God at the top of the mountain. So he’s going up and he’s entering into the divine presence. And to do that, he has to get rid of all the external coverings. He has to remove his sandals. He has to also shed the people that were with him. There’s this image in the Old Testament in Exodus where as Moses ascended the mountain, he was able to get rid of all the external coverings. And in Exodus where as Moses goes up the mountain, at first he leaves all the people below. And then as he’s going up, he’s going up with all the elders. He leaves the elders. Then he goes up with Joshua. Then he leaves Joshua. Then he finds himself alone at the top of the mountain. So this is really the image of the shedding of all the externals and moving into the oneness of God. And in that you really do find this image of hesychasm, this image of the mystical vision of orthodoxy, which is this pure oneness with God. And you can see the image of the mountain is exactly that, right? Because you move from many things. You move from a large base. And as you go up, it gets smaller and smaller. And as you reach the top, then you can imagine it almost like a pyramid at the very top. There’s room for only one point. There’s just one point at the top. And that’s the oneness. And when you’re up there, then you look at the world, then you can see you have this overview of everything because you’ve reached the top and you have joined with heaven. So the very image is that. So then we can also understand the opposite as being related to this fall from oneness into the many. And that is what we see in the story of the Garden of Eden. The story of Moses is this going up into the oneness of God, into the top where heaven meets earth. And the fall of the garden is the opposite. It’s this moving away from the oneness up at the top of a mountain and then moving out into the many, into all the things that are outside, the distractions of the outside. So the imagery that’s used in scripture is that. And that’s also the image that St. Gregory of Nice uses as well. So imagine now Adam and Eve are in the garden. At first, Adam is not even separated into two. He’s one. And this is actually an important thing that we see in the Church Fathers, the tradition in the Church Fathers, which is that even the separation of Adam into two people, to make this androgynous being into two, was already looking forward to the fall. So the separation into male and female. Then finally, Adam and Eve are seduced by the serpent and they have to leave the garden. And leaving the garden is this going down into the world. When they were in the garden, they were naked. And we need to understand this nakedness in the context of this image of the mountain. Keep this image of the one and the many. Just keep that image in your mind. They’re going to keep coming back to it all the time. In the garden, they were naked. They didn’t need anything from the outside. They had everything they needed within that communion with God. They didn’t need to add something from the outside to build something from the outside. All they needed was the communion. And as soon as they fall, then this nakedness, the Church Fathers talk about how this nakedness was actually they were clothed in glory. It wasn’t that it was naked the way we think of it, but it was rather that they didn’t need external things. They were emanating light. You can imagine it that way. They were emanating glory. They didn’t need to cover themselves. As soon as they fall, then they have to they become ashamed. They look up, you know, they understand that God is there. And all of a sudden they feel like they have to hide themselves from God. So what do they do? They take leaves. They try to cover themselves. That is the very first human act. Act in the sense of the first human making. The first thing the human made was clothing. First human art. Let’s talk about it that way. So you’ll see where I’m going right away. The first human art is clothing. And what’s its purpose? It’s to cover. It’s to protect. It’s to hide. OK. And so you can also understand it as you’re moving down from the mountain. So imagine now again the sun above the world. The sun is shining down. Right. And at some point the sun becomes a threat to you. Just like for them, God actually became to them. In their perception, God became a threat to them. And so they wanted to cover themselves. They wanted some shade from this, from something that was above them. And that is what art is. And that is why art in the Old Testament is actually pretty negative. It has a very negative connotation. And I’m going to show you. I’m going to bring you through it. But you’re going to see that actually human activity, human making is actually a very negative aspect. And it’s not just even in the Bible. But even let’s say in Hellenistic culture, it was the same idea. They had this notion that true knowledge was episteme. True knowledge was the knowledge of the principles. The knowledge of the higher things. And techne or craft or art, it was, you know, it’s like applied knowledge. And there’s something about that that’s almost like degrading of knowledge down into the world. Think of Plato and his idea of the shadows of the pure forms and then the shadows in the world. And so it’s not just, we don’t only see it in the Bible. We see it in other cultures as well where this idea that the higher things, when you make, when you cover yourself, you’re hiding yourself from the higher things. It becomes a veil. It becomes a separation. Right. So now using the word veil is probably a very good word for you to understand what it’s referring to. The veils in the temple, the veils in the tabernacle. It was all about that. It was all about hiding, you know, protecting ourselves from the glory of God, but also protecting the glory of God from being desecrated from the outside. OK. So that’s the clothing. And then as they fall, God gives them garments of skin. And the garments of skin are the best image to understand this clothing, to understand this addition to our nature, this adding that we put on top. Because the garments of skin are made of dead animals. They’re made of death. It’s using death to protect us from death. Taking something dead, making it as a covering so that you protect yourself from death outside. So why did they wear the garments of skin? What were they protecting themselves from? In the scripture, from the thorns. God says, you go down the mountain, you come down and then you encounter the hostility of the world. You know, being naked up in a garden in the glory of God is all fine, but being naked out in the woods is not fine because you get, you step on thorns, you, you know, you… And that’s why they wear these garments. St. Gregory of Nice is amazing because he says that Moses’ sandals are the garments of skin. It’s a perfect image because these skin sandals on the bottom of your feet to protect yourself from the thorns and the spikes and the hostility of the ground is a very beautiful image to help you understand, to understand this. Now, what’s important is that we need to understand this covering. Now, not just as clothing, you know, clothing is the image. It really ends up being everything that humans do in the world of the fall, basically. Our whole state of death, our whole state of living death, you could say, you know, of fighting death, of being in a world of death, of constantly having to deal with the reality of the hostility of the outside. So, if you want to read more about this, this idea of the garments of skin, there’s a wonderful classic orthodox book called Deification in Christ by Paniotis Nellis. I’m going to quote something from his where he talks about St. John Chrysostom. And Nellis says, And not only these things, but everything else, the whole throng of remaining necessities. And death entered with all these, dragging all of them in along with itself. So, there’s a play between death and these protections from death. There’s a game happening between the two, right? As you go further out into the world, you need to build stronger and stronger things. And the classic example is, let’s say I’m from Montreal. You know, when my ancestors, maybe a very long time ago, lived in warmer climates, didn’t need much, but now if I go outside without a winter coat and a hat and boots, I’m going to die. So, to live further out in the world of death, we need more and more covering, more and more civilization, more and more structures, an army, weapons, a wall around the city, etc. etc. We need buildings to protect ourselves from the elements, to protect ourselves from attacks, to protect ourselves from the people spying on us or whatever it is that we do. That’s why we need buildings, right? And now in the story of scripture, and now, oh, and medicine is the same, by the way. And medicine is exactly the same structure. It’s a human activity which uses death to put death away. Because all medicine is poison. All the medicine, it’s all poison. It’s all something that can kill you. We use something that can kill you in order to stop something that’s killing you. So we play this game and we have to be careful. It’s a fine line between, you know, you have cancer, you go take chemotherapy, and the chemotherapy is killing you, but you’re trying to heal your cancer. So it’s like this line that you’re always playing. You take a vaccine, you get injected with a disease in order to fight off a disease. This is the process of the garments of skin. Now in order to accentuate that this is really what you see in scripture, you have to read the genealogies in the Bible. No one likes to read the genealogies, but there’s great stuff in the genealogies in the Bible. Every single human activity in scripture, the basic human activities, are developed by the children of Cain. Cain who killed his brother, Cain who was chased out. So think of the garden again as this mountain. Sanephram the Syrian, he talks about the Garden of Eden as the entire cosmos. He says that the Garden of Eden is a mountain whose summit reaches above all summits and whose base reaches across the ocean. So he talks about this image, this structure, this mountain, as basically being the entire cosmos is this mountain. So Adam and Eve fall, they go down, they’re chased down the mountain. As they go down the mountain, they’re further from the oneness of the top. They’re going towards more many, more quantity as they’re moving away from the top. And then Cain kills his brother and he gets chased further down the mountain. So the children of Seth are above the mountain, higher up on the mountain, and the children of Cain are lower down in the mountain. They’re closer to the hostility. In scripture it says that he’s chased out into the land of Nod, into this land that is like a wilderness. And so because of that, Cain himself founds the first city. Does anybody else know, does anybody know another story of someone who founded a city after he killed his brother? Rome, yes, remember that, remember that, okay. Rome is also founded by someone who tried to kill his brother. Okay, and as Cain goes down the mountain, as his descendants go down the mountain, we have this idea that the children of Cain become the ultimate outsider. The ultimate foreigner, you would say, the ultimate thing that you don’t know what it is. And this is a tradition that spans in very strange ways all across storytelling. You even find it in the story of Beowulf, where in the story of Beowulf, Grendel and his mother are actually descendants of Cain. These like primordial monsters that live in the swamp and in the forest are actually descendants of Cain. But you can imagine it like this, you can imagine that on the top of the mountain, we are these humans in the image of God, and as we get further and further down the mountain, we resemble God less, we resemble the animals more, we wear animal skins on us, and as we go down, then we start to become monstrous as we get further and further out. But it’s not just Cain who founded the city, his descendants also did other things. So Cain had children. And then in his line, you have these, Lamek has these different kids. One is named Jabal, who is the father of those who dwell in tents. His brother’s name is Jubal, and he was the one who created the musical instruments. And then finally, one of his children is Tubal Cain, and Tubal Cain is the instructor of every craftsman in bronze and iron. So we have Cain founds the first city, so he founds sedentary lifestyle. Cain’s children are the first nomads who live in tents and carry livestock. His children are the first artists. They are the first musicians. They create musical instruments. And his children are the first artists. They are the first craftsmen. They are the ones who use metallurgy to make things. And so you can see that all civilizations comes from the bad side. It comes from the dark side, you could say. And I’m sorry everybody’s like all discouraged, don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. Everything’s gonna be okay, but for now we need to understand this first. If we want to understand the salvation that Christ brings, we have to understand the dark part first. And in the tradition, other traditions, it’s a extra biblical tradition, it goes even further than what I’m telling you here. In the extra biblical traditions, for example in the traditions around the book of Enoch, it’s the demons who teach human beings their skills. So it’s not just that Cain develops these skills, but it’s actually fallen angels who are teaching the skills. And think about it in terms of what I’ve been telling you. We get all hung up about the images of fallen angels and all this, but think about the image I had about the mountain, of coming down the mountain, how applied knowledge is moving, is taking something above and bringing it below. And so it’s not that strange to imagine that these angels, these principalities, these higher beings are falling, and they’re the ones who are teaching the skills to human beings. Whether you think it’s a legitimate tradition or not, just try to understand it. It can help you understand the story and why in the time of Christ these traditions were very prominent. So in the book of Enoch, it talks about different demons. One major demon is Azazel. And it says that Azazel taught men to make swords and knives and shields and breastplates, and may know to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them. Now think of the metal part is really important, very important, because metal is digging in the ground. Remember the mountain, remember this pyramid, right? Metallurgy is digging in the ground, taking stuff from underground, bringing it up, and then using that. It’s a very dark thing. And all the imagery around metallurgy in every culture is very dark. You have the image of Hephaestus, this deformed god in Greek and Roman myth that lives in Hades, that lives in this dark, fiery place and is pounding and making. Think of a blacksmith in any fantastic story that you get, living in this soot and banging on metal and taking this ore out of the ground. It’s a very dark imagery. So Azazel teaches people to make weapons, but he doesn’t only teach them to make weapons. He also teaches them to make bracelets and ornaments and to use antimony. Now antimony is very strange, but the reason it seems to me why he says to use antimony is because in the ancient times antimony was a metal that was used to decorate the eyelids. So he’s connecting metallurgy and weapon making with ornaments, with decorating. And so he says, they use antimony and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones and all coloring and tinctures. And there arose much godliness and they committed fornication. They were led astray and became corrupt in all their ways. So why is ornamentation connected with this? Making something beautiful. Why wouldn’t we want to make something beautiful? Now ornamentation is the ultimate garment of skin. It’s the ultimate thing that you add. You can think about it this way, and I tried to explain it. Think of someone, why would someone need to wear makeup? Sorry to all the ladies. Why do you wear makeup? Do you wear makeup in order to enhance your beauty? So you add something in order to enhance your beauty. Now if you push that a little further, you add something, and you put on more makeup. Where’s the line between enhancing your beauty and hiding what’s there? That’s the line that I’m talking about. This idea of adding something in order to enhance, but then you’re also hiding, you’re camouflaging what is there. You’re supplementing in order to hide as well. That’s the line that is going on in this whole game. And that’s why the ornamentation that the demons teach ornamentation is related to making cities and making walls and weapons. Because why do we use, why would you want a sword? You want a sword to enhance your strength, right? That’s the same thing. Every technology has the same function. Every single technology has the same function. It’s to enhance something, but it also can be used to enhance your strength. It also can be a way to hide that which is lacking. The example I like to use is always a book of matches. I can, my ancestors had a lot of pain to start fires. Like they suffered to start fires. I don’t suffer. Just take out my book of matches. There you go, I’ve got fire. But what do I do if I don’t have that book of matches? Can I start a fire? I don’t know how to start a fire. My ancestors knew how to start a fire. If they didn’t have a book of matches, they could still start a fire. It’s the same for everything around us. We have cars, we can go very far. And now our whole society shifts. And now if you don’t have a car, what do you do? If you live in the suburbs, you can’t live without a car. Because the grocery store is too far away from your house. You would actually die of hunger if you didn’t have a car. Trying to help you to think that way. To help you understand the problem of supplementarity. And the problem of craft. And so there is a relationship between death and glory. Those two are very connected. Because that’s what an ornament is that as well. We ornament something to help you see that you can’t have it. We ornament something to help you see that it is special. Why would you ornament something? Usually it’s because you want people to think it’s special. You have a plane chair. You have the special chair. You have the chair you use to eat. And then you have the chair for the king. And the chair for the king has got to be fancier than the chair that you just sit in for dinner. So you ornament the chair of the king in order for you to know that it is special. To reveal the glory. To manifest the glory. But the game is still there. Because you can also fake it. Okay. So hopefully I’ve got you thinking in the right direction. So sadly art is related to the fall. It is related to this problem of the world of death. And all human activity in this world of death is a problem. But now we come to this moment where God starts to reveal himself to the people in scripture. And we start to see what God does with the fall. This is where the good part of the story starts to appear. We see how God is constantly changing. If we in the fall change our glory into death, God is constantly taking that death and changing it back into glory. And this is the story of salvation. This is the story of salvation all the way to Christ, all the way to the end of scripture and revelations. And so I told you that in the story of Moses who ascends the mountain, and really in the version that St. Gregory of Nyssa gives you is the best version. Because he really captures this ascetic movement, this removing now. In order to enter into the presence of God, he has to remove all the veils. The veils of the heart he talks about. We have to remove them. He has to remove his sandals, he has to remove all these people. And he moves up and up and up into the unity, into the oneness of God. And there he has shed all of this exteriority. All of the outside. And St. Gregory of Nyssa uses crazy imagery to help you understand what he’s referring to. He talks about the idea of the Egyptian, for example. The Egyptian has this foreign power which is not connected to the God of revelation. And so the Egyptians who die in the flood are being shed away. He’s shedding away this foreign thing. And the Egyptian who died in the flood is being shed away. And so he’s shedding away this foreign thing. The shedding of the foreign is also circumcision. The shedding of this extra skin. Shedding the extra skin, shedding the foreigner. All of this imagery. And then moving up the mountain, entering into the divine darkness. And it’s amazing. So you think that’s it. Everything we do is useless. Everything we do is pointless. All of this human activity is all pointless. And to a certain extent that’s true. We always have to remember that to a certain extent that’s true. But then something happens up when Moses reaches up there in the divine darkness. Something happens which flips it. What does God give Moses? He gives him two things really. He gives him the law. He also gives him something else. What does he give him? Does anybody can guess? He gives him the plan for the tabernacle. And St. Gregory says he gives him the archetype of the tabernacle. And he says that the archetype of the tabernacle is Christ himself. He gives Moses a vision of Christ in this plan of the tabernacle. And in the tabernacle So here’s the tent of the tabernacle. So now in the tabernacle what do we have? We have the same structure that I gave you. He’s giving him a little version of the whole structure that I told you about. The tabernacle has different courts. In the outer court, outside of the tabernacle the foreigners can be there. Only Israelites are allowed to enter into the actual inner court of the tabernacle. And then from that only the priestly caste is allowed to enter into the holy place. There’s a veil and a veil and then in the inner inner inner part only one person, the high priest is allowed to enter once a year in the very high place in order to come into the presence and the glory of God. So the tabernacle is a mountain. It’s a mountain in the sense that there’s many on the outside and there’s fewer and fewer and fewer and there are these levels, these veils. And when you go into the holy of holies you’re going back into the Garden of Eden too. There’s a reason why there are, on the outside of the Garden of Eden there’s a cherub which protects the Garden and why there’s a cherub on the veil of the Temple. Because entering into the Temple is also entering into the Garden and it’s also going up the mountain. All these things are all the same image. But what’s fascinating is that God is giving Moses this pattern, this whole pattern. He’s telling him this is how you make the veils. This is how you make the courts. And even on the outside of the tent there are these animal skins which are dyed red. So the garment, the tabernacle has garments of skins. Understand that the same garments of skin that Adam had when he left the Garden. So this is the wildest, this is the craziest thing. Moses spends all this time stripping away all these externals and then when he gets into the presence of God, what does God give him? He gives them all back to him. The whole thing. Even the garments of skin. He gives them back. And in St. Gregory of Nyssa you read, you can read in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s words when he’s talking about this almost this scandal like he has to tell us don’t worry when you see the garments of skin in the tabernacle. Like don’t worry about it. Don’t get freaked out because you think that you wouldn’t see that, this dead thing in the pattern of the tabernacle. But he says don’t worry. And then he says that it’s the sacrifice of Christ. We’ll get to that a bit later. And what’s interesting is that God tells Moses that he tells him who’s going to build the tabernacle. He names them. He gives Moses the name of the people that are going to build the tabernacle. And the two names are Bezalel and Oholiab. The name Bezalel means the shadow of God. And the name Oholiab means the father’s tent. Can you see that those two things are the same? That they’re the same image. The shadow, the tent, the covering. And so the names of the people that are building the tabernacle are related to this very pattern. They have it in their name. And one of them, Oholiab, says that he’s from the tribe of Dan. Which is, if you know what the tribe of Dan is, you’ll understand how wild that is. Because the prophecy about the tribe of Dan, when Jacob prophesies on his sons, is he says, let Dan be a serpent by the roadside, a horned viper by the path, that bites the horse’s heel so that the rider tumbles backwards. So Dan is related to the fall itself. He’s the serpent. He is that which makes you fall. Oholiab, his descendant is also very strange. He is a descendant of Calib. Calib means dog. And Calib is ambiguously also a foreigner. He seems like he’s a Kenazite. And he takes the margin of the country. So there’s this whole thing going on where God is actually taking the very imagery of the fall itself. He’s taking the very imagery of these animals on the periphery. And he’s flipping it. He’s saying, okay, I’m going to use this. And I’m actually going to turn it into glory. And that’s where you see the beginning of the Incarnational Principle. The one which will culminate in Christ, we already see it. What do we say that Christ did when he descended into Hades? When Christ was on the cross, we say, he trampled death by death. That it is his death which trampled death. And by doing that, Christ’s death is his glory. Thank you. When you see Christ on the cross, you are seeing the highest thing. When you see Christ on the cross, you are seeing the most glorious thing that you’ve ever seen. And that is this flip that happens, this Incarnational Principle. And it goes on. You’ll see like it goes on. Because, you know, I tried to show you how the craft is related also to something that is outside. Something that you need to add from the outside in order to protect yourself. And so that’s why it’s also related to this idea of something which is foreign. Like the foreigner is related to craft making. Can you kind of see how that makes sense? Which is why Bezalel is from a Kenazite descendant, is from this kind of foreign group. Because you have to kind of take that which is from the outside in order to make the wall. You know, that’s always what you’re doing when you’re protecting yourself from the outside. You’re gathering something in and you’re making a wall out of it in order to protect yourself from the outside. You see that the story of humanity is, there are so many examples of that where you hire a barbarian tribe to fight off the barbarians. The Romans do it all the time. You take something from the outside and you turn it against the outside. That’s what medicine is. All of that is the same. And that’s also what ornamentation is. If you look at ornaments, they are very spiky. They’re made out of foliage. They’re made out of labyrinths. They’re made out of all this imagery of knots. All of this is related to this idea of taking something, bringing it together and holding out the outside. You know when everybody has this idea, we talk about how ornaments used to be protection. They’re magical. People would put ornaments on things in order to protect themselves. You put ornaments on buildings, people kind of joke about it. You put a key on a building to stop the evil spirits from coming in. You put a labyrinth outside to stop the evil influences from coming in. We think, ha ha ha, it’s all superstitious, it’s all silly, it’s all nonsense. Once you start to understand this process, you can understand that that’s what we do all the time. If you don’t like the ritual version of it, if you don’t like that, then you have to understand that when you make an army or if you hire mercenaries from the outside or if you do all this kind of things, then you’re actually participating in the same pattern, even if you’re not doing it ritually. The ancients just did things ritually as well in order to manifest the pattern in a very proper way. Alright, so as the story keeps going in scripture, the same pattern just repeats itself over and over and over and over. That’s what scripture is. It’s like I want to beat you over the head with this pattern so that you can see it because people don’t seem to see it. So when they, now from the tabernacle they build the temple. King David gets the plan of the temple. But does King David build the temple? Who builds the temple? Solomon. But not really Solomon. Solomon manages it, manages it kind of, but he’s not the one who actually builds it. You know who builds it? The Phoenicians build it. The king of Tyre. It’s foreigners. Foreigners build the temple. The same story over and over. And if you read that text where it talks about Solomon building the temple, it’s very fascinating because the biblical authors are just so amazing. There’s this strange relationship between Solomon building the temple, but him also being visited by the Queen of Sheba. So in the same text, it talks about how Solomon is associating himself with the king of Tyre in order to build the temple, but then he’s also being visited by this queen, this ultimate foreigner in a way. The queen, the Ethiopian queen who comes from the ends of the earth who’s coming to now interact with Solomon. So these two things are actually related together. And then in the story of Solomon, you actually see the downside of that because he goes too far. If you go too far in that, what you end up happening, you end up having foreign gods. If you go too far out and you’re not careful of that line, then you pick up things from the outside which are not don’t connect to you, then you end up having these, serving these foreign gods. And that will make you fall. And you have to think about it. Think about it already now in terms of our own Christian tradition. It’s always been this tension as Christianity develops its forms, it was taking things from the cultures that it lands in. Taking things from Roman culture, taking things from Greek culture, taking things from Ethiopian, from Armenian, from Georgian, from all these cultures. It’s gathering these things in and then it’s developing its craft, its art, its beauty, its ornaments, all based on these foreign things that they’re bringing in. And there’s always this line, this tension. Sometimes maybe they go a little bit too far, sometimes they, you know, so it’s like you can see a play that’s happening. Alright, now then we come to Christ. Christ has everything. Every strain in the Bible culminates into Him. Every symbolic strain that you find from Genesis, it all culminates into Christ and so does this one. Christ is called what? Right? Right? Christ is called the carpenter. And it’s interesting because in the scripture you actually see in the moment where Christ is being called the carpenter, you see this pattern that I’m telling you about. Because when the Pharisees say that Christ is the carpenter, are they doing it to His glory? No, they’re doing it to demean Him. They’re doing it to mock Him. They’re saying, isn’t He the carpenter? Because being a carpenter is a very low thing. Compared to what Christ is supposed to be, you know, in the idea that He would be the Messiah, or He would be the chosen one, that He would be the anointed, that He would be the prophet, that He would be all these high things. Like, oh no, He’s just a craftsman. Of course the Pharisees did not understand what Christ was going to do, which is that He was going to enter into all the dark places, that He was going to go down into death, that He was going to fill death with light, that He was going to fill death with glory. And that is one of the things that Christ is doing by being called the carpenter, even if it is in a mocking manner. He is filling that aspect of the world with divinity. He is infusing it. He’s transforming it. And the transformation was already happening before. We can see it in the Tabernacle, we can see it in the Temple, we can see it in all these moments where God uses these externals, all these garments, all these additions, all these human acts, and flips them, changes them, turns them into glory. Now, the story doesn’t stop there, right? The same thing happens with Christianity, the same thing happens with Christianity even more so, even more so than what’s in the Old Testament. Is it the Jews that developed the arts of the Christian Church? No? What’s that? Who is it? It’s the Romans. It’s the Romans who developed the Christian arts. And a lot of people, they say that to criticize it. They say that to mock the Christian tradition as if this was a scandalous moment in our Church where all of a sudden Christianity took on these Roman forms. But no, no, no, this is the story. This is the story. We have to understand that Christ is, one of the things that Christ is doing, Christ is not all He’s doing, Christ is doing everything, but one of the things Christ is doing is saving Cain. He’s redeeming Cain. He is the firstborn. Do you ever notice that in Scripture it’s always the second born after Cain? Cain’s the firstborn and then everybody else who’s important in Scripture is always the second or the last. Right? And then Christ appears and Christ is the firstborn. And not only is He the firstborn, but He is He converts the Romans. He converts the ones who killed Him. He converts the ones who killed their brother and founded the city. So the story of the conversion of Rome is one of the most important aspects of understanding what Christianity is. What Christ is doing. And so what’s important when we think of art, we have to keep in mind the two images of Christ. There are many images of Christ, but basically really there’s really two images of Christ. The two basic images of Christ is Christ in glory and Christ crucified. Christ dressed as a Roman emperor, a Roman senator holding a book, making a Roman gesture of a dress and Christ on the cross being killed by the Romans. Those two images solve the problem. They solve the problem. As you go up into paradise, as you move, as Moses goes up into the top of the mountain, as Christ entered into the Holy of Holies when the veil was ripped while He was on the cross, He was entering into the garden, as that happened, He was also going down into the bottom of the mountain, all the way to the edge of the world, all the way to the edge of death. He was doing both at the same time while He was being crucified. He was spanning the entire cosmos. That’s why when we have Christ with His hands stretched out and we have the sun and the moon on the side, Christ filled the world when He died on the cross. He was doing both. And so we have now as Christians we have those two traditions and they’re fine together. We have an ascetic tradition of those who go up the mountain and remove the garments and these monks who lived in caves and have nothing and eat almost nothing and pray without ceasing. We have that tradition and we have the glory of a church covered in gold mosaic and resplendent filling the world with this light and using ornamentation. If you look at Hagia Sophia, a friend of mine pointed out that all the ornamentation in Hagia Sophia is Persian. It’s not even Roman. It’s going even further. It’s taking Persian ornamentation and bringing it into the Roman church and manifesting through its ornamentation the radiance of the Kingdom of God. And the final image of that, the ultimate image of that is in Revelations. How does the world end? Does the world end in a garden? The final image is not a garden. The final image is a city. Right? New Jerusalem. That’s the final image. The garden is in the middle, the tree of life in the middle, the water of life in the middle and around it this glorious city of gold and jewels and that’s the ultimate image. Everything has been filled. All of human activity has been sanctified, has been glorified, has been changed into glory. That’s the final image. So that is the first part of my talk. I wanted to give you kind of a story of art. Help you understand the problem and how Christ and the Christian church bring a solution to that problem. So this afternoon I’m going to try to talk about how we can do that in terms of artists or people making things in the world and how to deal with that. So this is going to be the end of my first part. What time is it father? 11.15. I don’t know if people have some questions that they would like to ask. Yes father. Thank you very much. Very stimulating and I’m so glad that you honored us by coming to Boston. I’ve heard many of your YouTube and I really enjoyed them and I recommend to my class I’m teaching liturgics at Holy Cross that they should all come see this talk. In fact we were talking about Symbol yesterday. I’m very glad you’re here because I always wanted to ask you this question. It seems that you’re giving a negative stance to creativity and art and it all makes sense sort of schema that you’re giving us. However it seems to me that part of being in the image and likeness of God is creativity because the greatest artist is God and God obviously he creates and he has no givens to limit him. But we have givens because we’re created and therefore we kind of bump into these givens that’s kind of like the annoyance of an artist like Michelangelo because he’s a block of marble but he says I wish I could get rid of this marble and you can see something in there. It seems to me that that which makes the human made in the image and likeness of God is that sense of creativity and the fact that human being always wants to transcend the givens because we have a seed of this total freedom of God who has no givens therefore we have these givens and what we do is if you have a dog let’s say you bring him in this beautiful hall after three months it’ll look worse. If we put a human being here that human being will put his or her personal stamp onto his room with art and so on. So it seems to me that part of being human is art and yet you seem to be connecting it with the fall. Now even before the fall because you’re not talking obviously in the scientific way, we’re talking symbolically human being was told to be creative and transform the givens. In other words the gift that was given he was not told to just sit there and be inert because that’s an animal. An animal would do nothing or make it worse but we put our personal stamp onto whatever is given us and we can say that’s before the fall and it seems to me that’s inherent in what it means to be human being. In other words this idea of transforming, putting our personal stamp, making cities is another example. It’s art and that seems to me it’s connected with being human human yet you’re connecting it specifically with the fall. Now the human being is supposed to in Genesis transform the garden and give it back to God so God in history can give it back to us as a community. One more thing I want to say is basically that’s what we do in our liturgy. We don’t bring in wheat and grapes but we bring in bread and wine. Animals can’t do that and so the human being is not the image of God because we’re smart because animals are smart too but we are created. We are artists and the God is the great artist and we’re made in his image so it seems to me if they could connect that with the fall. Let me just say one more thing to make you happy because stone carvings. We like to say in Western Europe carpenter, the word in Greek is tecton. He was actually a stone which probably has the connotation. They didn’t have wood in the end. Have you ever been to the Middle East? There’s no wood. They’re not going to waste wood. So perhaps he could have been a stone carver. Tecton really means he was an artisan. It’s like he could have been like an artisan. It’s a general term to talk about artisans. One more thing that fits in perfectly with what you said, this whole idea of the foreigner, one of the greatest types of Christ in the Old Testament is Melchizedek and he didn’t know where he was from and he was a foreigner yet he was giving a blessing to Abraham. So again it fits in with this beautiful scheme. I love the way you do this and I think it’s a great service to everyone. I thank you for your podcasts and your YouTubes but I always wanted to ask you this question because it always bothers me. Well I think there are a few things going on here. Did anybody hear the question? Yes? Most? I’ll let me repeat it. So Father was mentioning the difficulty that he sees in what I’m saying because he says it seems like God creating Adam, creating the human being in the image and likeness of God, that creation, creating, would be part of that. And that Adam in the garden was creative in the sense that he tended the garden. There are other aspects as well. So he’s wondering why is it that I want to relate it to the fall so much rather than relate it to this idea that in creation itself as God created man then man is also a creator. And so I think Father I agree with you. I agree with you. I think that you’re kind of eating into my second talk. The way to understand it, but there are some things that you said that I would probably wonder about that would make me think, is that I’m not sure so for example Adam names the animals and that’s a great example of him acting as a small creator. And so God creates the animals and then Adam names them. And naming something is part of participating in its existence. You point at it and you give it a name and so you actually pull it out of the world in a similar way that God pulls creation out of primordial earth let’s say. But I think that I think that when for for that to be true it has to be us acting in the image of God. Which is that the stamp that we put on the world has to be God shaped. That it’s not so much that we’re putting our personal individual stamp. Because we face with so many ideas of expressing yourself. You know everybody has heard that so many times. Like that we have to express ourselves. I think that that’s, I think that we need to express God. That’s what I think we need to express. I think that we need to be the vehicles to manifest God out in the world. And that of course is going to be beauty. That of course is going to be certain patterns which are true. And since we do participate in God let’s say radiating out into the world through our actions. But that’s when that flip happens. That’s when we’re not that’s when we take something which was through we do live in the world of the fall. Right? And so but what ultimately happens I think is that the new Jerusalem is higher than the garden. That God, that this whole story, this big big big story, although we can’t say that God wanted the fall to happen. But we can nonetheless say that what’s going to come out of it is going to be higher than what was there before. And that the state that we will be in at the end of this big story is going to be higher than the state that Adam was in at the beginning. And so this whole process of the fall and this redemption is also part of making human making into something which is closer to what God wants. Closer to revealing God in the world. So hopefully that helps a little bit. No, I don’t think that that’s how the way to see it. I think that everything we do is a, everything that Christ does is a form of redeeming. And so we have to have the fall as part of the story. Like the fall is part of the story and then there’s this lifting up. And so it’s not that it’s good or bad. It’s that the Christianity changes that which was fallen into something even higher than what was before. I don’t know if that makes sense. Yeah? Would you make a distinction between a pre and post-Lapsarian paradigm? To say what Father is saying, that in a pre-Lapsarian, pre-fall environment, Adam is made according to the image and the likeness and the state of becoming. But that creative aspect existed. After the fall, that becomes corrupted. It’s the same thing you mentioned before. Chris Stone talks about before the fall, the relationship between Adam and Eve is made as an image of God. It’s a Nicene image, a Trinitarian image that they’re co-equal, the persons of the tree are co-equal. And the third party is Christ that makes them an image of God. So that in Eden before the fall, that God-like impulse, that creative God-like impulse existed but then becomes corrupted and that Christ redeems that and restores that. Because for Chris Stone, there’s the pre-Lapsarian paradigm, post-Lapsarian, and then the eschatological, which restores what existed, and you’re saying beautifully, in an even higher level, because of Christ, but that restores that to its rightful place. And I think you’re right. It’s clear in the story in Genesis that creation, that the man acts as a small creator, that is there, because that’s what naming the animals is. And also the idea of tending the garden, that is for sure there. And like you said, I think that that’s the story. The story is that we have something before, it falls, but then that fall ends up being the vehicle by which God fills the world. And God fills the world through even the scandal of the fall. In Egypt, which is one of the oldest cultures, and set the narrative for Greek art and for art just for most of the world now, the whole idea was to avoid death as much as possible, and the whole construction of Egypt was a giant machine to sort of keep yourself alive as much as possible and to keep your possessing with you as much as possible, like the whole mummification process. I die, and when I die I’m going to take all my stuff with me, I’m going to put it in a nice little jars, it’s going to be alive, with me and my little tomb for all eternity. But if I do it outside of Egypt, out of this thing I’ve created, I know I’m going to die forever and be dead forever. But when Christ comes in, he doesn’t avoid death, he embraces death, and by embracing death he actually nullifies the effect of death that the Egyptians were worried about, which Egypt also set an artistic tone for the whole world too, by doing that as well. Yeah, so I would agree, I think that, like I tried to explain, I think that the intuition that the Egyptians had was right on, like it was a right on intuition, because everything we do is to avoid death. I mean everything we do, all human activity is to avoid death. And so I think that that is, their intuition was right, and most of it is still true today, but like you said, I think that Christ gives us a new possibility, and that the church architecture and the icon and the tradition that the Christian church developed is a way to show the alternate possibility, which is this filling up of the world with the glory of God. And so we’ll talk a bit about that later today, but that’s the way that the church is made, even the architecture, if we do go toward the church, we can talk about it, that it’s really made to kind of connect things together, and to show us how everything fits and everything is directed towards this glory of God, which is manifesting itself in the altar. I’m curious about the concept of leaving something from outside and turning it against the outside. How does that work alongside all these depictions in scriptures of the Israelites destroying things around them? Like going into cities and stuff. Yeah, I told you, it’s a tension. There’s a tension in scripture, and there’s a constant tension between this problem. If you go too far on the outside, you lose yourself. That’s just true, just go out into the woods, go walking around in the woods, you lose yourself. If you go too far outside of yourself, but you also need to take that, if you’re going to add something to you, you can’t take it from you. That’s the whole point of adding something to yourself. You have to take it from the outside. Your clothes isn’t made from your body. This house isn’t made from your body. All of this was taken from the outside. That’s the whole problem of the supplement. That’s the whole issue. If you look at scripture, you’ll see the Israelites didn’t come up with cherubs. There’s cherubs, there’s sphinxes in Egypt. If you go to the MFA here, you’ll see Babylonian cherubs. You’ll see these types of bull creatures with wings and human heads, or different types of animals with wings. This is all something that was there before the Israelites built the tabernacle. The idea of a tripartite structure in a temple is in every single culture in the world. There’s nothing made up in the… The question is how much? Where’s the line? In scripture there’s this play between the inside and the outside. It’s far more marked in the Old Testament. In the New Testament we have this idea of Pentecost. We have this idea that the fire of the Holy Spirit can fill up the whole world, fill up the entire cosmos. It changes. It doesn’t mean that it’s still there to a certain extent, but the nature of it and the extent of it changes with Christ. I have a question. As much as I’m enjoying the content of what you’re saying, also thinking about what you’re doing in a room full of 20 and 30 year olds present person not included in that group. There’s an assumption of biblical knowledge in what you’re saying. I love your exegesis of Genesis. I’m wondering if you have a specific word of exhortation and invitation to the modern evangelical church. You mean in terms of scripture? I think everybody should know their Bible. If you’re a Christian you should know your Bible. I don’t care what denomination you are. You should know the Bible. If you don’t know the Bible you’re in trouble because for centuries I can understand. For centuries people could surf on the common culture and the fact that the experts really knew the Bible and we trusted them. It was fine. It was okay. But we’re not in that world anymore. We are living in the world of thorns. We are surrounded by hostility. We have to know our Bible. I would say that know your Bible. That’s my exhortation to the Orthodox in the room. Understand the Bible. That’s my exhortation to the evangelicals. The church fathers have given us amazing insight into scripture. Like I said the best reading of the Old Testament that has ever been done that I know of is St. Gregory of Nyssa’s life of Moses. There is so much packed into that. We’ll read St. Ephraim’s hymns on paradise. There is so much in those texts to help you understand the threads in scripture. That scripture isn’t just these isolated bits of stories that don’t connect but that there are massive symbolic threads which go all the way through scripture and connect to Christ. I think that if we’re going to be Christians today we really need that because we’re going to… We won’t know what to answer to the world because the world is bashing at our door with a massive hammer. We have to be able to answer at it. So I’m just trying to follow the pattern that you’re giving us. So I see the idea that you’re talking about Adam or mankind being plunged into chaos. You can see that also in God’s call on Adam’s life to move out of the chaos of the garden. And bring it into some sort of harmony. And I see in this pattern Christ as a second Adam using the use of what he stretches out his arms to all of creation. He’s kind of going into the trade of that garden and bringing all things into harmony. In the past that was initially cast as a first Adam. Now Christ is a new one. Maybe this is more theological. What is the… So the idea that Christ was a land slain before the foundation of the world comes into being. If Christ did this stuff before chaos really ever ensued, how much of this is kind of a mental construct versus sorry, I’m not being creative. Like so if Christ has already brought all things into harmony with death and resurrection, why don’t we experience that? Because we’re free, that’s one part. The way that I understand it is you can see it as these loops that are getting bigger or something like that. Where Christ plants the seed and Christ is like the seed for the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is gathering all of us also into that kingdom. So it has to have a cosmic…there has to be a cosmic version of what Christ did. And we’re playing that out. We have to participate in that. In our freedom. And so some people totally experience that completely, absolutely. We call them saints. They completely enter our deified, enter into the life of God. Become one with God, or become pure glory. We read the stories of people not that long ago who seem to have gone through that. And so we can. But we have to…it has to be real. We actually have to participate. We have to participate in this process for it to happen. There’s something that Bishop Robert Barron talks about which is participating in the Theodrama. We have a choice to participate in the drama of God the narrative that is unfolding. Which is the coming of the kingdom. The continual coming of the kingdom. You have to understand that’s one of the things that…one of the diseases of the modern age and modern biblical understanding is that we’ve made the Bible out there and now we are here and we are interpreting this thing that’s out there and it’s something that’s outside of us. And so it’s like a scientific…it’s like a phenomena that we have to analyze. But that’s not right. That’s not Christianity. We are in the same story. That Bible, at the end of that Bible, that story keeps going. We’re part of the same story that’s there. That’s our story. We’re in that story. It’s not something outside of us. When the Israelites went to the temple, it was the dwell in the Shekinah, the presence of God. That idea of communion with God. And the Christian liturgical space, that same idea of kinoni of communion. When we look, to speak to the point before, even in the Western mystics, the early Catholic Western mystics, experienced that kind of ecstatic experience right after communion. So how does that, the liturgical space as heaven on earth, that type of idea, that idea of coming into the presence of God. Now for the Israelites, it was in Hamakon. It was one place. They had to be on the Temple Mount, that specific place. And the Holy of Holies was where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. How does that relate to the Christian liturgical…and the whole artistic…I’m probably stepping on part two. No, no, yeah, yeah, but it’s okay. No, the church structure is based on the Old Testament. But it’s not completely. There’s some flips in there that are interesting. And so one of the things that, like Father was saying, the Old Testament, there was the temple, and then if you wanted to experience the presence of God, you had to actually go into the temple. But you never really could experience the presence of God, because only the priest, only the high priest could actually enter into the Holy of Holies. And so in the Christian tradition, what we’ve done is without confusion, because this is one of the problems that we actually see in the modern world today, is that without confusion, without annulling the distinction between us and God, without annulling the distinction between that which is profane and that which is holy, we’ve created a way to participate all of us in that process. And so it’s not that we destroy hierarchy, which is something that certain modern Christians think is the result of Christ. It’s not that we destroy hierarchy, it’s that the hierarchy is this permeate thing of love coming from above and of us participating from below. All of this is this organic relationship happening. And one of the things that Christ does is he joins opposites together. Like I hope that you’ve seen it just in this image, that’s what Christ does. One of the crazy things about the Christian church, I don’t know why people don’t talk about this, in the Old Testament the temple and the tabernacle was flipped from us. It was the other way around, which is that the Holy of Holies was in the west, and the entrance of the tabernacle was in the east. So you can understand it as the presence of God rising up in the east and landing onto the… onto the… yes, the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, that’s what I was looking for, sorry. So rising up in the east and landing onto the Ark of the Covenant. And the altar was in the outer court. So there was this flip between the Ark, which was inside the Holy of Holies, and the altar, which was on the outside where the sacrifice occurred. So there’s this relationship to the outside and the inside, the sacrifice, the glory, from east to west. Now, in the Christian tradition, the very first churches that we have are actually in that direction. The first churches in Rome all have the holy place in the west. But soon, very soon, it flipped where the holy place got put in the east. But what’s in our holy place? We have an altar in the Holy of Holies. That wasn’t the tabernacle. The tabernacle, the altar was outside. And the Ark of the Covenant was inside. And we have actually joined the inside and the outside together. We’ve taken the altar. We’ve brought it into the Holy of Holies. But it’s still the Ark of the Covenant as well. So on the altar you find the menorah. You know, often you’ll have a menorah on the altar. You’ll have certain tropes that are there for you to remember that this is also the Ark of the Covenant. And that, if you want to understand what Christ does, that’s what Christ does. All the time, He joins the opposites together into one. And so what we’ve done is we still have a hierarchy. So we still have a veil. We still have a separation between the Holy of Holies and the nave. But that veil will open and the holy thing will come out into the world and we will participate completely in that holy thing. None of that was in the temple. There was none of that. We are actually participating in the holiest thing when we engage in the liturgy. Does that make sense? There’s a lot of stuff we can talk about. There’s so much to talk about in terms of the difference and the relationship between the Christian temple and the Jewish temple. Yes, Father. You said even in the Port of the Humane and the Holy Council the definition of Christ, the two natures, the divine and the human, join indivisibly and unconfused. Exactly what you said. Exactly. And that’s the key to Christianity is to understand unity without confusion. If you want to understand everything about Christianity is unity without confusion. If you want to understand what love is, love is unity without confusion. That’s what love is. Because when you love someone you are completely united with them but you don’t fuse into them. You don’t swallow someone. You don’t completely annul their individuality when you love them. No. You respect their separateness from you. But you are in complete communion. The image of the Trinity is exactly that. Three distinct, completely, absolutely distinct persons without confusion but completely one without division. It seems like a neporia but it’s the key to understanding how reality works actually. It’s the key to understanding how everything exists. So yeah, in Christianity that’s what it does. As we watch Christianity break apart we see the confusion set in. And we see elements of Christianity which are then taken on their own. You know the word heresy? The word heresy means like a choice. It means to choose something. That seems to be what most heresies are. Which is that you take one aspect and then you just take that one aspect. And you don’t keep it. So it’s true but it’s not true alone. It’s true when it’s related to everything else. And so there is an aspect for example that we participate in the glory of God and that we have access to the glory of God and that the glory of God comes down to us. But in the Christian tradition there’s never been this idea that there’s no hierarchy at all. Just not there. It’s a modern idea that there’s absolutely no hierarchy. That we’re all the same. That’s not true. And so it’s the same with there’s so many things like that where we’ve taken one aspect out of Christianity. We want to make it only about that. We want to make Christ just the really nice guy who helps and loves people and takes care of the widow and the orphan. And he does that. He definitely does that. But he’s also the one with the whip who goes in and whips the money changers. And he’s also the one who’s constantly rebuking his disciples and telling them that they don’t understand anything. So Christ is everything boiled into one. Alright. I think we’ve got enough questions.