https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GQgOYkzj0ek
because there are these sort of elements of seduction in the conversation between the serpent and Eve. Yeah, but the Bible functions like that. The Bible also will not say something like the serpent slept with Eve, but because of the structure of the conversation, you understand that she is submitting herself to him, like she would to her husband, in a way that suggests a kind of sexual union without necessarily having to go into the idea that they actually united sexually. By the way, this happens all the way through Bible and in positive ways too, where for example, Christ, when he meets a Samaritan woman, the entire structure of the conversation is one of Christ taking her as a wife, but we know that he didn’t marry her and he didn’t sleep with her, but it’s to signify the meaning of the relationship. So we have to be careful not to fall into the same kind of materialism that we’re criticizing when we read these stories, but rather be attentive mostly to what they’re trying to help us understand of what’s going on and let’s say the structure of meaning, rather than just wondering like, okay, so did Eve really sleep with the snakes? That’s not what it says in the scripture, but you can understand that that’s what’s going on in terms of a relationship. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello everyone. I am here with Father Stephen de Young, who I know needs no introduction to the people who are watching my channel. Father Stephen is a priest in the Antiochian Church, but he is also the host of the Lord of Spirit podcast, of which we’re all huge fans of. He’s also written several books and he is key in helping people re-understand the ancient way of thinking, kind of coming back and bringing back an integrated cosmic view. And so we really appreciate Father Stephen coming to talk to us. A few things to say, Father Stephen is going to be speaking at the Symbolic World Summit in February. We are so excited that he is coming. It’ll be great to everybody. I think there’ll be so much buzz in the room with Father Stephen there and then everybody there. It’s going to be quite crazy. And he’s also submitted an article for the Symbolic World Journal, which we will be publishing very soon. And that is partly what we’re going to talk about today. So Father Stephen, thanks for coming back. Yeah, it’s good to be back again. Everything is, you know, you have the Lord of Spirits conference coming. You publish your recent book, Apocrypha. Things are just steamrolling ahead with your project. Yeah, there’s, I mean, I don’t want to give the impression I’m churning things out, but that’s, you know, there’s, I mean, a period of my life where I’m blessed to be able to be very productive. So I’m trying to steward that well, because I’m sure there will come times in my life later where I won’t be able to be as productive as I am right now. And so before we start the actual conversation, I’d like, I want to hear from you what you think if you’ve seen, because now Lord of Spirits has been going on for a while, what, like two years or a year and a half? Three years. Three years, man. Time just flies like crazy. And have you seen a difference, let’s say, in people’s perceptions? Like have you kind of seen a marked change in the way that people perceive the world, also perceive scripture, perceive their place in the tradition since you started the podcast? I think so. The thing I’ve always liked most, right, to be the most flattering thing has always been, like in my ministry as a pastor, has always been when I see someone saying something I said and not crediting me for it. And the reason it’s important that they don’t credit me for it is that they’re saying it just from their own heart and mind, right? Meaning it’s sunk in and they’ve sort of made it their own. And so with Lord of Spirits, the thing, again, that makes me most happy is not when people sort of fawn over Lord of Spirits or, you know, but when I see people talking about Orthodox Christianity, talking about religion, and you could tell that it’s been shaped by sort of the topics we’ve been talking about, you pick up phrases, but they’ve internalized it in a way, you know, that they don’t need to give me a footnote. It’s really becoming, it’s kind of becoming their own worldview and that’s what you’re hoping. Yeah, yeah. Well, Lord of Spirits said this, right? But that, you know, they say this is what’s really going on, you know. So that’s heartening to me because that’s nothing I do, and I’m sure Father Andrew feels this way too, has ever been about me trying to raise my own profile or get fans for me or impress people with how clever I am. It’s always been about trying to recover, you know, in English speaking, Anglophone Orthodoxy is so impoverished in terms of how much of the Orthodox tradition isn’t available to us in our language. And so it’s always been about trying to recover those things that aren’t really lost. We’re still kind of in the mission field stage of Orthodoxy and trying to bring those things out. And it’s great, you know, a lot of the keys that you’ve been offering, you know, all these kind of cosmological keys that you’ve been offering have been really helpful to people. And I’m seeing it, you know, Richard Rowland and I, we just started this course on Beowulf, and just reading the first lines, like the early lines, just when they set up Grendel as the monster, like right in the first part, you know, it’s like you can just see the world that the Anglo-Saxons were living in. And it was really, they lived in this kind of cosmic vision of the world. And obviously, Grendel is a descendant of Cain. He’s a monster. He’s a giant. And the whole book, like actually, Beowulf is in a larger book, which has where the manuscript was, was in a larger book, which had all these monster stories in them. And it was like, you know, the letter of Alexander to Aristotle, there was a legend of St. Christopher. And that was that it’s in that book. And so you could just see that it’s making us notice things that people didn’t notice before and realizing, oh, like this vision is the one that the ancient had, whether you lived in Constantinople or if you lived in England, you know, it was the cosmic world they lived in. Yeah, yeah. And this is a place where we are sort of impoverished by modernity, where there’s been this reduction, right, which didn’t have to be the case. The cosmic understanding could have been additive, right? It could have been, we have this that we already understand. Now we have this additional deeper level of understanding of this part of, right, the universe and reality. But instead, it was accompanied with this rejection, an idea of replacement that we can replace this spiritual wisdom accumulated over millennia with scientific insight newly gained. Yeah. You know? Yeah. But that time is over. I mean, it’s over, but a lot of people don’t realize it. I think it, you know, we’re still running on the fumes of the 19th century. It seems like very thin fumes, but still we still are. But we’re, you know, we’re on people that are talking about the things that you’re talking about, or I do think that I’m talking about in some ways are on the strange leading edge, even in terms of, you know, I don’t know if you followed some of the conversations I’ve had, but I’m in a point now where I can talk to secular, you know, cognitive psychologists or secular scientists and talking about demons and angels and talking about worship and talk about God even. And they just kind of nod along because they realize that these, the question of agency, you know, of transpersonal agency, for example, has become inevitable to deal with. Like we, it’s actually, even from a materialist point of view, the idea that agency exists only at the human level and doesn’t, if it scales down into animals, but doesn’t scale up into higher organizations, it’s like it doesn’t even, their own system actually, it’s like there’s this weird superstitious thing in their thinking that may prevent them from wanting to see agency kind of coming down from above. And so you’re in the situation where, you know, even like I said, even people who wouldn’t call to say they’re believer, wouldn’t even believe in God are like, yeah, well, we kind of have to acknowledge that there are these intelligences that are acting on us. Yeah, I think there’s always been a sort of intuitive knowledge of it and then sort of a denial of it. Yeah. Right? You act as if, but then you ask me if you believe it, like, no, no, I don’t believe that. But it’s like, strangely enough, you still act as if that was true in a lot of these actions. You still act as if these things coming from above are real. Yeah, I’ve never, I’ve never read, I mean, I’ve read plenty of history books by outright Marxists who are, insist they’re doing completely material history. But it always reads like a story. Yeah. It always, you know, and if you ask them, they’d say, well, yes, to some extent, you know, my book is a false construct, right? Because they have to like deny their own understanding, right? They see there are things that work here that there’s a pattern and they’re bringing it out through their work. What they know based on their views, there shouldn’t be. Yeah, so they’re in this performative contradiction. The very, the very like decrying of the pattern, like this revolutionary trope is itself a story that’s as old as, you know, the cosmogony. And so the idea that because they’re introducing this revolutionary kind of, that’s a destructuring trope in their thing that it’s not a story. It’s like, well, it’s just, it’s another myth. You know, it’s like, you know, Saturn castrating his father, that’s what you’re doing. It’s not, it’s not a big, it’s not a big surprise. Like, that’s something, you know, and so you’re stuck, they’re stuck in the religious world. Ultimately, you just don’t realize it. Yeah, yeah. And it’s just sort of known and denied rather than unknown. All right. So the thing I want to talk about today is something, you know, you keep handing me these amazing golden keys in my own work. I mentioned before that one of the keys that you handed me was for years, I wanted to mention traditions that were kind of Enokian traditions, but I knew that the fathers had put that aside, but I also knew that there were some aspects of it that were really useful. And I knew that the problem was like the demon and angel, the demon and women problem. And then when you handed me the ritual part of it, where you said, you know, these are just rituals. It’s, it is, it is true. It is actually happening, but it’s happening through ritual proxy. And that is how these things get embedded in the world. I was like, oh my goodness, you just handed me the best key even for my own work. And since then, I’ve been like willing to talk about these things more openly. But now you’ve handed me another like key, which is that. Okay, so, so, so I want you actually, you, I want you to lay out your theory because it has to do with a very difficult, not difficult, but a weird passage in the book of Genesis, and then after the flood, you know, Ham discovers his father’s nakedness and, and I want you to lay it out and then we can talk about it because for me it’s like a massive key. Yeah, yeah. So there is, and it is weird, right? It’s this episode that comes after, after the flood story is basically over. And it seems in certain ways at odds with the preceding story, because the emphasis, of course, in the most of the flood narrative in Genesis six through nine is that Noah is this one righteous person from his generation. And then after the flood, you have this whole story with him becoming drunk and, and these other things unfolding. And part of the reason it’s so weird is that it’s kind of both theorized in all the English translations. So we weren’t getting sort of the direct, and because most English readers aren’t as familiar with the rest of the Torah, as maybe we should be. So Genesis really is the prologue to the rest of the Torah. Yeah. And that’s one of the very basic keys to interpreting and understanding Genesis. If you don’t keep that in mind when you’re reading Genesis, that this is leading up to Exodus, right? This is leading up to the rest of what’s in the Torah, then you’ll sort of end up misinterpreting it. And so there’s, there’s a theme here. This is the place where I go to kind of lay it out because this is a place where it’s most complete, but it’s a pattern that repeats in Genesis and the patriarchal narratives that make up chapters 12 through 50 of Genesis. So what’s described, if you just read it in English, is Noah plants a vineyard. He gets drunk in the vineyard and his son Ham sees his father’s nakedness. His father’s nakedness is uncovered and goes and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, Shem and Japheth go and cover their father’s nakedness. And then when Noah sort of recovers from his inebriated state, he curses Canaan, the son the fourth son of his third son, and disinherits him. So he disinherits the fourth son of his third son. So definitely already there’s a massive narrative problem and it’s a narrative problem that we gloss over. And I’ve done it myself. We gloss over it by saying that Ham is the cursed one, but that’s not what’s written in the text. Right. There are a few kinds of bizarre and even racist theories about the curse of Ham and Ham is not cursed in the narrative. That’s right. Yeah. So in order to kind of figure out what’s going on here, we have to understand sort of what uncovering the father’s nakedness means. And if you go to Leviticus chapter 18, Leviticus chapter 17 through people cut it off in different places 22 or 23 is what’s called the holiness code and has regulations covering holiness. Leviticus 18 is discussing sexual immorality. So that’s where the commandments are about sexual morality. And that takes the form because we’re in a patriarchal society that takes the form of telling men primarily who they’re not allowed to sleep with because they of course were the ones making the decisions regarding that culturally. And one of those commandments is you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife for this is your father’s nakedness. And something similar is actually said about your father’s daughter. Right. This is. It’s like all the incest laws are portrayed as uncovering your father’s nakedness. I think it’s even like your aunt and like, you know, your father’s sister. Yeah. Yeah. And so this phrase of uncovering the nakedness, right, is this reference to sexual relations, particularly that are forbidden. Right. And you can see why that would be right. The idea is that the father, the patriarch, right, within the family is is the one who is charged with safeguarding in the case of the daughter, in the case of the sister. Right. And even his own wife safeguarding and sort of protecting them from sexual exploitation from right. And so it belongs to him and it’s his job to cover it. Right. It’s his job to sort of protect it. So once you have that in mind, right, and we go back to this story in Genesis, what Ham is doing here sort of makes sense. Right. So we can now understand when it says he, you know, went into his father’s tent, right, this is talking and uncovers the nakedness of his father. This is him having relations with his mother. And then when this comes to the attention of Noah, we see him disinheriting Ham’s youngest son. And why would he need to do that? Well, Canaan, Ham’s youngest son, is the son he bore, who his mother bore him. Yeah. So it’s the child conceived through those illicit sexual relations. And the covering of the nakedness is talking about protecting that again. So the other brothers, once they find out this is going on, move to stop it, right, move to protect their mother from their brother, Ham. And so the question then becomes sort of why would Ham do this, right, aside from just maybe perversion, right? Why would he do this? This is actually, I don’t want to call it an institution or a practice, but because it was not well looked at, right, in the ancient world, but in the ancient world and in other places in the scriptures, we see what’s called family usurpation. The idea here is that what Ham is trying to do is he’s trying to bear a son with his father’s wife. To replace his father, basically. Right, to replace his father, and then that son would become the heir. So he would be effectively taking over the family structure. Yeah, it’s a kind of revolutionary, it’s a revolutionary move where he’s trying to take, replace his father in terms of authority, take his body, like take his wife, and then also take the inheritance and take everything away from his father while his father is still alive. Right, right. And this becomes especially clear when you know how inheritance in the rite of prima genitor worked. Right, in ancient societies, which was firstborn son inherits everything. And then can choose whether or not to share that with the other brothers. Yeah, the others become dependent on him, like they become subsidiary to the older brother when his father died. Right. And he takes his father’s place when his father passes away and they have a place in the extended family only insofar as they’re connected to him and maintain relationships with him. And this is true throughout the ancient period. So even in the gospels, we find someone comes to Christ and says, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. Right. And Christ says, you know, you know what, don’t worry about the inheritance, come follow me, right. Don’t worry about the money. But even there you see how there could be problems when firstborn son just says, no, I’m just going to keep all this and you guys can buzz off. But so Ham would not have inherited anything unless he maintained this relationship and remained subsidiary to his older brother. He then enacts this plan to try to displace his father and take over. And that’s why then Noah has to disinherit this child and reject it. And maybe you can tell people because obviously it’s like, OK, Father Stephen, just pulling this out of his hat here. You know, in Genesis itself and then later in the Bible, there are examples of that exactly happening again. And so there are places where this type of behavior is repeated. Right. And this is just sort of a clear case of it. But there are other clear cases. I mean, later in Genesis, Ruben is going to sleep with one of his father’s concubines to attempt to do this. And that’s sort of an especially shocking case because Ruben actually was the firstborn son. Yeah. So he’s sort of trying to usurp Jacob while he’s still alive. Yeah. And Ruben was disinherited because of that. He lost that firstborn status because of that. It ends up passing to Judah. Because there’s also there’s also Absalom. Yeah. Absalom does this with David’s wives and concubines during the period where he is usurped David’s power. But Absalom actually did this publicly. He made a public display of it to signal to everyone. I’m the head. I’m the head. That he had now taken over. This is something that was then attempted. One of the first places where we see the office of Queen Mother in the Old Testament is with Solomon has his mother Bathsheba enthroned in his right hand. And the first person to come to her and make a request to the king through her is trying to do this. He requests now that David is gone that he be given one of David’s concubines as a wife. And Solomon said, I know where this is going. So this is happening. So this is this directly as a pattern in the sense of other people doing this in the context of a family usurpation. You also see that pattern in other places less literally. Yeah. Right. So one of the biggest examples is in Genesis three. Now there’s this stuff in Protestant circles. It’s called the serpent seed doctrine. But there have been Gnostic sects that thought this and stuff to the thought that Cain was like literally the son of the son of the devil. That’s not what it says in the Bible, though. Right. Right. But that’s not based on nothing because there are these sort of elements of seduction in the conversation between the serpent and Eve. Yeah. Yeah. But the Bible functions like that. Like the Bible also will not say something like the serpent slept with Eve. But because of the structure of the conversation, you understand that she is submitting herself to him like she would to her husband in a way that suggests a kind of sexual union without necessarily having to like go into the idea that they actually united sexually. By the way, this happens all the way through Bible and in positive ways, too, where, for example, Christ, when he meets a Samaritan woman, the entire structure of the conversation is one of Christ taking her as a wife. But we know that he didn’t marry her and he didn’t have he didn’t sleep with her. It’s to signify the meaning of the of the relationship. So we have to be careful not to fall into the same kind of materialism that we’re criticizing when we read these stories, but rather be attentive mostly to what they’re trying to help us understand of what’s going on and the structure of meaning rather than just wondering, like, OK, so did Eve really sleep with the snakes? That’s not what it says in the scripture. But you can understand that that’s what’s going on in terms of a relationship. Right. Right. And so that is this sort of seductive element. And that, after all, is what the serpent is trying to do. It’s it’s an act of usurpation. Yeah. And in that case, it’s because he can’t create. And so this this idea of usurpation, whether it’s directly in this family context or outside of it, right, is over again, sort of the opposite of it. And so he’s trying to do his creation. Mm hmm. Creating something, putting something in which is putting something in order and filling it with life. Right. So you look at Abraham, right, he builds this family unit. Right. Which has structures. People have roles right within this extended family, which includes not just biological his servants, his herdsmen, his right, this whole unit that he’s built and he’s filled it with life in the terms of I mean, most directly in terms of reproduction. Right. But also it’s sort of the prospering. Right. Of of everyone and everything involved and sort of the shortcut of that is, no, I’m not going to build something of my own. I’m not going to participate in continuing to build this up and fill it with life and keep it in order. I’m going to try and take it over. I’m going to try and make this thing that someone else created mine. Yeah. And that, of course, is what the devil is doing right from the beginning. God is the one who created it. Your insight is perfect. So you can understand that the image of usurpation itself or the image of the pride of Satan who wants to, you know, even like whatever version of the fall of the devil you you take and whether it’s a kind of Miltonian or version or the more ancient one of the fall happening at the creation of Adam. But in some ways, the idea is that the devil wants to become our God, you know, like the devil wants to be for us what is God and then take over, take over creation. And that becomes in some ways, trying to make creation his wife. It’s like that’s what the devil is, is always trying to do. And that’s what every single temptation that you face is trying to do for you. Right. So it’s like every sin that tempts you is trying to make you its wife. You know, it’s trying to is trying to come up above and master everything underneath and and use it as its body in order to be able to to grow and to have more power in the world. So it’s like a diffractible thing that happens at every level of reality. This idea of something which wants to come up, usurp and then take the body for itself. Yeah. Yeah. And and it’s important then to also have the positive side. Right. Of we’re called upon to create. Right. To build, to put in order. Right. To fill with life. And it’s interesting in in sort of the the popular zeitgeist. Like you look at HBO shows, you have Game of Thrones, and then as soon as it ends, you have succession. Which is all about children trying to usurp. And it sees some kind of power, something that was created by sort of a previous distant father and all kinds of chaos and mayhem and murder and destruction taking place in that context. Rather than anyone trying to build anything, create anything, bring life to anything. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I so then the next step, and this is the one that I don’t know what you think about this yet. I kind of wrote you an email proposed a little bit because one of the reasons why this story in particular had my my fascination was also because I noticed a pattern in scripture which has to do with the beginning of something. And it seems like when something begins, we always find in some ways a we could call a pattern of incest that is there at the beginning. It seems like in some ways there’s the it’s like the sin of the beginning seems to be incest and the sin of the end seems to be something like confusion or going to the strange woman or that. So you have these two extremes you could say it’s like you know Solomon saying don’t go to the strange woman because basically you’ll lose everything like everything will kind of give be given to the stranger. But then if you look at this the pattern you see this weird pattern of incest as the scandal of the beginning. So and that’s why when I was looking at this story I was like that seems to be what it’s referring to. But I always thought that it was that it was like a like a homosexual relationship between Ham and Noah. But I was like I don’t want to talk about that because it’s just like I and the reason why I see it is because I want to give people the examples. It’s like in Genesis after Sodom and Gomorrah you have Lot who sleeps with his daughters. Then you have at the when God reveals himself to Abraham you find that Abraham also is married to his sister like his half sister which is which would be which would be a sin like which would be something that would be prohibited in the in the law later. And then when you when you so you so you have Noah you have Lot then you have Abraham right right there in Genesis these three iterations of the beginnings of worlds where there seems to be this this this trope. And then when you bring it into Genesis then you have it right at the beginning. And now it’s like obviously it’s not it’s not a sin at this point but you have the idea that you know Eve is taken from Adam and is his own is his own body basically is like is him that is that is taken out of out of him. And so and so now when you when you say when you bring when you mention you said no it’s it’s really based on the law what you see in the law which is that there’s a relationship with Noah’s mother Noah’s wife and then the descendants of that occurs I’m like yeah then that it fits it even better with the way that I saw it it kind of kind of makes this a pattern that repeats all over all over Genesis. So I don’t know if you noticed that or what you think about my perception. Yeah so part of there’s also another corresponding trope on the other side and that is so if incest is too close yeah right it’s sort of joining the same with the same right yeah then you also have the trope with Esau right where they go and you know Abraham is very concerned with Isaac that he not marry one of the people of the land. Yeah right because right yeah because even in even in Abraham you have the same thing where he wants to find the right distance so for his sons he wants his sons to marry like a cousin or like a second cousin or something yeah it’s like if it’s too far then it will it will basically take all your strength away into the stranger if it’s too close then it creates this weird internal loop that it will that will cause absolute chaos. Yeah that brings about this sort of chaos and destruction and so both of those right you see set out as these as these polarities yeah and that really goes back to Adam and Eve right and the whole idea when Eve is created as in Hebrew the eight-star Conegdo and Conegdo really it means fits together like puzzle pieces right and there’s a literal very literal material biological sense that it fits together like puzzle pieces but it goes beyond that right it’s not limited to that and so the idea that yes she is not she is bone of Adam’s bone and flesh of his flesh but at the same time right she is full in the places he’s empty right and and so that is the place where there is this sort of the sort of perfect connection right that then is able to sort of produce life and produce a good order yeah right so the incestuous relationship can produce life but but not order yeah it’s a new because it actually creates confusion and this is technically it’s technically true like it because the world has an order of manifestation right it’s like a father with a mother and then children and then you know the father has relationships like sisters and brothers at this level and then the children come down but if a child has a relationship with someone that is you know at the same level as their father either their father or their mother or son or like an uncle or whatever then then the the relationships become actually confused the identity of the people become confused because what is the child the child is the child my brother is he my son is he my is he my uncle like what is this child it’s it’s it’s now creating confusion in the the order of reality itself it’s like it’s it’s literally doing that when you when you when you break the normal order of causality of the world right and and you end up destroying what you’re trying to usurp exactly that’s what you’re trying to gain control of yeah which is the very pattern of revolution itself you see that that’s what that’s what happens like in the in the cosmogony you have a very powerful image of it which is that you know it’s like you know Saturn castrates his father but then he has to eat his children because he’s created now a confusion of order that makes it that he’s now afraid of his own children because it’s like they are they are not in the right relationship with with him they’re going to come to get him and he doesn’t know what to do and so you have this you have this this confusion that that yeah that self basically like that self destroys at some ultimate yeah yeah and it becomes again rather than producing life it becomes parasitic yeah it drains it away yeah so so and and it’s interesting because my my brother mentioned this in his interview with jordan peterson like how he said all the scripture is about that like all the scripture is about finding the right distance like the right wife you could say like between that which is too close and that which is too far right the the the stranger that loves you ultimately you could say which is not a not a stranger that’s so far that they’ll kind of swallow you up and if you take that trope now that we mentioned and we see that it’s there this idea of you don’t want to go to the strange woman because she’ll bring her gods in and then you’ll be usurped also in that way but you also don’t want to be too close because you create this confusion of identity in christ you have this weird transcendence of all these things you have this way in which it all kind of gets expanded and collapsed at the same time first of all the samaritan woman i think seems to be a direct uh reference to this question because one of the things christ does is first of all he talks about the well and the the fountain which is the image that solomon uses when he talks about the strange woman he he he says like keep your fountain to yourself don’t let it run into the streets and and he uses this images of wells and and the fountains to talk about not going towards the strange woman and then christ basically is the only one who can marry the strange woman but not be taken over by her right he can go to the ends of the world he can go all the way to the edge but he’s never subsumed by the strange woman well that’s and i think the reason for that is the incarnation part of the theme when you read the prophets and they’re describing the relationship between god and israel and why that doesn’t work is that they’re too different they’re too far apart and you look at the analogies there the way israel is described it’s always a sort of this foreigner you know who god finds in the desert you know and marys right but it’s it’s too far apart but this is why calcetan is so important right christ is is consubstantial with the father according to his divinity and consubstantial with us yeah you can see that in some ways it’s it’s because one of the things that i’ve noticed we did this whole seminar in exodus and in the seminar at exodus you can see the problem constantly of mediation like god is constantly conceding mediations but he like it’s almost like he knows that this is going to cause problems in the long run it’s like oh you know you know you want aaron but then aaron makes the golden calf you know okay so now you have all these laws and it’s complicated and then you see you know and then later in samuel he’s like oh you don’t want a king like why would you want if you want a king all this mediation is gonna is gonna turn against you but in some ways god’s constantly conceding it because he knows that it’s inevitable because of this problem of distance and then ultimately christ ends up being the the key to the whole problem from the beginning of mediation right and so and so christ can make that marriage work yeah and so that’s why so pentacost is like so so when the prophets say you know one day the spirit of god will be poured out on all flesh it’s like you can imagine how weird that sounds even to people who now have been told to not marry the strange woman to not go to the stranger to not but they it’s like they know that ultimately at some point you know this marriage will be a universal marriage will be a marriage with all of humanity but then how is that possible considering this problem of of distance you could say yeah yeah and so humanity has to become bone of god’s bone and flesh of god’s flesh yeah like eve was to adam and so then this is this is to me because this is something that i’ve seen a few like writers try to take on because when we look at the symbolism of the mother of god in in in christianity we have this weird thing going on right which is exactly the symbolism that i’m a that i’m talking about which is that she’s represented both as christ’s mother and as christ’s bride so you have this sense in which it’s suggesting a weird like incestual thing and but then when you realize what is actually happening even if you use the image of the samaritan woman as the example you realize that christ is in some ways he’s beyond that like he he doesn’t have that problem he’s kind of he’s kind of transforming the whole question you know and of course i’m not suggesting in any way that there was something inappropriate between jesus and and mary what i’m saying is that the symbolism that is being kind of expanded is that ultimately those two you know in in in christ are kind of that problem is is transcended somehow yeah and part of part of the problem with that frankly is the modern western American and maybe broader western sort of obsession with sexual relations like proper in the material sense yeah well you know that’s why we can’t see the the pattern if it’s not like that’s why people struggle to say well the serpent is trying to seduce even it’s like i’m not suggesting the serpent slept with even some weird material way but i’m just showing you that this these patterns they have different iterations you know yeah but this is and this is the problem with the Augustinian treatment frankly of human sexuality is that it fails to see physical sexuality as the material signifier of a spiritual reality that remains regardless of the presence of that material signifier so what i mean by that is that i’ve said this to people in marriage counseling a lot right if you have a a you know 23 year old couple who just got married and you have an 83 year old couple that’s been married for 60 years right the 23 year old couple is having a lot hotter sex right that’s a lot more often probably yes but the 83 year old couple right has a relationship at a deeper level that goes far beyond that yeah right far far far beyond that yeah in some ways and also kind of in in that physical aspect of it let’s say kind of uh fading away they capture the pearl like they’re moving into the deeper part of what it is that they were moving towards in the first place and those two are not unrelated exactly they’re directly related yeah right but the one is this sort of material signifier yeah right of the of the deeper reality and so but every time we think about any of these concepts our contemporary minds move immediately to just the material signifier right to just you know titillation and you know oh you’re you’re talking about things like no we’re talking about the reality behind that right yeah and so in some ways what it requires of us is really a complete reversal of the way we think of what is real you know and it’s not a because we tend to we tend to and you see it most people today even you know they tend to like oppose oppose normally the spiritual and the material they oppose it and so either they fall into one or the other either they want to to to kind of uh you know poo poo the the the material practice in the material world and want to live just in the spirit you know like people who say i’m spiritual but not religious that kind of that kind of that kind of nonsense uh and then on the other hand you know we have people who think that that you know this material world is so real like that’s what we need to chase after but both of those are are a mistake you know ultimately to see it in this scale of hierarchy where the physical materiality is the bottom part and the most the most let’s say immediate but ultimately has to move us into what it’s hiding or what it’s not hiding in the bad sense but what it what it holds in its center like what’s holding it together what what lies behind it yeah yeah and again what lies behind it is there even if you want to try to deny it like people who live very promiscuously that does things to your heart and to your soul over time yeah because you can’t be intimate with people physically and not also have develop intimate connections in other ways yeah like leave some part of your soul like with that person yeah um so because they’re so intricately bound together yeah and and you know and i think that it’s not the the way that the church represents our union you know is not arbitrary and the way the the reason why we insist on marriage is not just some kind of moral finger wagging right it is it is and you can see like people who live with promise with a lot of promiscuity in their life and especially people that that you know obviously don’t come to repentance they don’t come to kind of a transformation you know they they they end with bitterness like it’s hard not for that not not to happen yeah and repentance again is not like feeling bad and and whipping yourself repentance is being healed yeah from the damage that’s been done you know and and yeah so there there there sort of is there is hope for that yeah and and part of that part of the problem with the way we talk about marriage now is that we’ve got this very modern idea of the nuclear family behind it yeah and that conception of marriage and family leaves a lot of people out and has caused us a lot of problems so i’m a big advocate as people who listen to lord of spirits at all i describe it as arguing for the abolition of the nuclear family just to get everybody freaked out but that we need to come back to within our church communities and things a more robust idea of family like the kind of families we see in genesis of extended family you know that includes a lot that is is able to include a lot of people it’s able to include an adult who for whatever reason has not gotten married yeah right but it doesn’t mean like i i understand what you’re saying but the the the the the nuclear family should i would see it this way i’d rather see it as like the nuclear family should be just expanded into this right for an expanded family to exist you need someone to have been a strong nuclear family and then be able to like expand that like breathe out and to include the uncle that like you said didn’t get married or like whatever someone who got divorced or some you know someone who died and the child gets up ends up kind of going to their brother or whatever like that has to be something that has to in order for us to to be able to live in that more expanded way definitely yeah i think the older the much older what what family meant for most of human history yeah has just been ground down to the nuclear family definitely you know and and i think right now so much effort is put into trying to preserve that little bit that’s left that we really need to redirect into rebuilding not just trying to preserve what the culture and society has left left us but build out build back and build out from there again so i i have another question that just to get back to the to the noah story and everything do you think there’s do you think or do you see a relationship between the way that also you’re interpreting first of all the story of noah then also the the the story the way that we talk about the fall of the the idea of the nephilim and all these questions that when saint paul talks about the covering you know that weird that weird sentence when saint paul says you know that that women should wear coverings for the sake of the angels do you think that there’s a relationship between this idea of uncovering and and the the union let’s say in that sense yes can you help us work that out a little bit yeah because we all have that intuition but it’s fuzzy like it’s a fuzzy it’s a fuzzy so yeah we’re going to get into all the really wild stuff here in this one video um so there’s a phrase that saint paul uses in that context that’s often translated in english symbol of authority um so uh the word there i’ll go ahead and say it the word there is the greek word for scrotum that’s yeah i didn’t know that so um and so part of what’s going on there is uh saint paul seems to be referencing uh greco-roman medical text so the um understanding in roman medicine uh and you see this if you read how saint john crsostom deals with this path the larger passage you can see it reflected in what he says too but if you would go and read like the hippocratic corpus uh they believe that hair hair uh served as sort of a receptacle for male seat that it was sort of drawn up into the body by by hair okay and therefore so a woman who wore her hair long uh exposed was presenting herself as sexually available and likewise a man who wore his hair long culturally was considered to be presenting himself as sexually available to other men and that’s why say paul says having long hair is a shame right to a man and you’re going well wait a minute what about nasa rights and stuff right he’s not referring to that he’s talking about this thing in this context right and so uh because of that essentially a woman’s long hair was seen as a genital structure that’s why he can use that word right to to refer to it and so to have that exposed in worship right would be presenting oneself as sort of sexually available within the context of worship he’s writing this to corinth where to be super blunt most of the religious festivals of the religious festivals were accompanied by orgies right and saying there is there is no place for that within right the christian worship context and then is referencing in terms of the because of the angels is referencing back to the idea of the nephilim yeah right which proceeded as you mentioned earlier out of this ritual context yeah which is happening which is a ritual context in the worship like they are in a ritual context there and so there’s like a confusion placing yourself as available to receive the influence of higher states but not being properly covered so that you could become like a you could become like a receptacle for the wrong like for for the let’s say for the yeah for for for the intermediary beings you could say it that way maybe right this is and this is the ability to bring life into the world is a power that women possess yeah that needs to be protected because of how powerful it is yeah and so i mean it makes it’s it’s complex because it’s working it’s working on it’s working on all these multiple levels at the same time which is in some ways we can understand it something like if you were going to be very boring about it we could say something like if the woman is uncovered in in this in the in the in the context of worship in a religious ritual she is opening herself to influences that are that would be kind of these free-floating intermediary influences you know that aren’t right god himself that are kind of like this kind of intermediary world that’s messy and and full of mixture of angels and demons or whatever and that and that in some ways that would be dangerous for her dangerous for the church dangerous for yeah right and and noah’s sin then in the case is not just oh he got drunk and embarrassed himself somehow he got drunk and did something embarrassing which you know you shouldn’t do but in terms of like severe sins right not probably top of most people’s list his his sin is being drunk and inebriated right on on the good things of this world and failing to protect right the the his nakedness right yeah attacked yeah well the theme is there in large because lot gets drunk before he before before right he passes out and yeah before his daughters and so there’s like a there’s definitely a narrative relationship between the two and and i think that it’s because iconographically like we represent it straightforwardly and so if you if you have an iconographic representation of the scene you will see you will see like a vine you’ll see noah drunk asleep and then you’ll see ham like pointing at his nakedness usually and then you’ll see like the two the two sons walking backwards you know with like a a shoe something and i think that it’s it’s completely appropriate to kind of take it at the first level especially if we’re going to represent it visually but if you want to understand how it relates to the rest of the bible and how it relates you know to all these these moments of beginnings and all these moments of transgression all the way into christ and we have to see that it’s more than just it’s kind of like this kind of weird thing because if you think about it like you know it it’s like anything right you you you think okay so all of canaan is cursed like the whole not just the son but like the whole descendants of canaan is cursed because his father saw his own father naked it’s like man that’s rough that’s a that’s a rough thing but that’s also see that’s a so the the father son thing yeah in scripture is always talking about repeating the pattern yeah right so the canaanites had come and laid claim to this land that belonged to god and that was not their inheritance it was someone else’s inheritance that’s right yeah so it repeats it in the in the context of the two peoples right and so that that that pattern repeats yeah in the lot case the idea of him failing to protect his daughters is really brought out leading up to that because if you read closely the story he had betrothed both of them to men of sodom that’s right yeah and he basically he proposed to basically like just throw them out there man right to give them to the mob right and and so yeah that final episode right is of it says it’s really it’s a reversal of outgrowth of sin like it’s like it’s almost like it’s a pendulum where he was willing to give his daughters up to these these destructive men and that was like the sin of the too far you could say and also this this and then finally turns back on him and then he becomes the father of his own grandchildren right right yeah abraham is so concerned he wants to find isaac away from his own people whereas lot is just like oh a couple of the guys here in town you guys could marry them that’s why that’s fine yeah yeah well and especially in that sense because you also see in the in the they’re already in genesis you have this image where the was it how more who wants to marry into the jacob’s family and says if we marry their daughters then we’ll basically take them over like it’ll take a while but you know at some point we’ll just take whatever they have because we’ll just keep taking their daughters and then we’ll overwhelm them and then they’ll they’ll basically disappear and stop sort of assimilate them yeah exactly you know and so it’s like that’s the image that solomon tries to bring about when he talks about marrying the strange women or the idea of the strange gods like you have to find that balance so that you’re not swallowed up by the by the outside yeah i don’t want to sound like i’m making this tripe but you can apply this at every level of structure that we’re involved with like i say you you have any kind of team you know it’s like and you’re doing something like if you just constantly circulate within yourself like you know it’s like you just constantly everybody is always within inside the team in a way that at some point you know just becomes circular you’re going to break down like if you do that for a while it’s going to break down at some point you won’t be able to but if you just like go on the street and just hire anybody just go out and like oh you you you’re not doing anything why don’t you come work on our team then you run the risk of becoming you have to find that balance between you know what we’re doing and innovation or new or new blood and and so you have to kind of find you’re always trying to find that balance between that which will invigorate the team but won’t you know basically take its identity away in the long term yeah well i think it’s even i think it’s even true at the level of the human soul we’re very much now able with the internet for example to put ourselves into an echo chamber yeah where we only ever talk to people who endorse everything we ever say do and think you know who agree with us about everything right right now that’s exactly right you know and the solution to that is not the opposite is not to just expose yourself to everything and be completely credulous and believe anything anyone tells you and sort of sell everything out but there’s again the the middle distance yeah right yeah and you can see when you don’t do that what happens like there’s a this is a weird example but it’s the one that comes to my mind which is that there’s an interesting debate online a monk debate between uh it’s like matt taibbi and i forget i forget his name and like malcolm gladwell right and yeah i’ve actually heard it you see that it’s about media capture and you can tell that the malcolm gladwell side was so much in their echo chamber yeah that they didn’t even understand the arguments of the of their opponents and so they kind of they were just in this illusion of their coherent world and then their world just got shattered on stage like smashed into pieces and they lost the debate by the the biggest margin anybody’s ever lost a monk debate and they don’t they still don’t understand why that happened because it’s like they’re so into their own like and so you can actually see it it’s like it’s actually even as a christian let’s say and if you just have these weird like internal things like that you’re just talking to other orthodox christians and all you talk about are like divine energies like all day and then and then you haven’t ever you never encountered anybody from the outside you haven’t discussed with with with anybody outside then at some point when you when you’re challenged you’ll just you’ll shatter yeah and there’s no there’s no creative power in that yeah that’s never going to go anywhere produce anything new right give life to anything yeah anything living yeah yeah exactly all right this is this was wonderful i mean we really went right to the edge there yeah i’m pretty sure you weren’t going to try and monetize this so that’s probably good okay it’s like i i i didn’t expect you to use you to use the word scrotum in our discussion but there you go that’s that’s how it goes and so i and so thank you for your time thank you also for everything you do and and everybody i am also you know and i’m really excited to have you talk to us at the symbolic world summit it’s going to be it’s going to be amazing and don’t forget people also to look out for the symbolic world journal which will have his father stephen’s exposition about this very question in printed in the journal so so a lot of great things coming on the horizon is there something you’re working on that you want to give us a peek on um well lord lord willing the next book i’ve been doing this big project on st paul so sort of from an orthodox perspective so that’s probably the next thing in print you’ll see coming all right that sounds so that’ll probably be sometime next year wonderful all right thank you father stephen it’s great to talk to you