February 2019 Q&A (Dzk6UE6UudQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Dzk6UE6UudQ

All right. I had to reload this. I think it works. Can you guys see me now? Should be able to see me. Oh, microphone is not working. All right. I think now we have everything we need. All right. We got, yes, we got sound and image. I think those two things need to go together. All right. Great. All right. Let’s see. We got a few people in here. It’s good to see everybody. Okay. I’ve got quite a few questions, a lot of questions that are kind of development questions. Before I get to the questions, I’m going to give you some information. I have all these announcements that I’m supposed to make all the time. I always forget to make them. I’m going to make them here. Hopefully, those that actually follow me will see the Q&A. As some of you know, every year I give a few icon carving classes. This year, there are two icon carving classes planned. One is from June 9th to June 15th, and it’s in West Hartford, Connecticut. The other one is from September 1 to September 7th, and it’s in Salem, South Carolina. The icon carving classes, they’re week long, and we carve all day. For those of you that have actually done them, they’re actually also a great opportunity to just spend a lot of time talking. I usually give the whole day. I’m there from about eight, nine in the morning, and then I will stay up until late at night until people are tired and want to go to bed. Usually, it starts with carving, and it usually ends with sitting around drinking a beer and talking about all kinds of stuff. If you’re interested in that, I will post the link in the description once this is finished being live. It’s called Hexameron School of Iconography. It seems I’m going to be in Paris March 26th and 27th for an event called Iconographers Without Borders. I was just asked this a few days ago, and I’m going to go. It seems like it’s 95% sure that it’s going to happen. It’s at the Russian Cultural Center, and I’ll post all the information on my website and then in the description as well. If you’re French, if you’re French, and you want to hear me speak French, you have to come to Paris. Then also, I’m going to be in Seattle on May 17th and the 18th. There are a few people organizing a conference called Growing in the Lightness of God, Eastern Spirituality in the Modern World. I’m also going to post details to that. If you’re in the area and you want to come see this, it’s going to be with Father Stephen Freeman and a few other people that are going to be giving talks. I think it’s going to be a full day of conferences and stuff, and I’m going to be one of the speakers. It would be great to meet some of you in Seattle or in Paris or in Connecticut or in South Carolina. Come if you can. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is I got a lot of questions in the last videos about the newly fangled, very special art that I put up. Like I said, I’m not totally done with the background. I’m probably going to paint actual colors because now it’s okay, but it’s still not good. I’m going to go through the different art pieces that I have behind me. Hopefully, that will be interesting to you. If you look over here, this is a drawing of St. Mamas. It’s a preparatory drawing for a huge icon. It’s the actual size of the final icon. It was done by Father Silouan Justiniano. As some of you know, I have this project where I draw different things. Monthly, I make some drawings. I traded one of my drawings with Father Silouan for the drawing of St. Mamas. One of the reasons why I put it up, first of all, I think it’s an amazing drawing. Father Silouan is, in my opinion, one of the best iconographers in North America. One of the reasons why I like this drawing is because I feel like it really represents us. It represents what we’re trying to do, represents what I’m trying to do in this moment, let’s say, this historical moment. St. Mamas, there are different traditions about why he’s represented that way. One of the main traditions is that as he was going towards, I think he was going to Caesarea, he was going to a town, and he encountered a lion that was about to eat a lamb. He saved the lamb, and then he got on the back of the lion and rode the lion into town. He rode into town on the back of a lion, and he had a lamb. There are different traditions. Some of them talk about how he tamed this lion because he was thrown to the lions to be eaten, but then he tamed the lion. There are other traditions that he became friends with the lions in the fields. But the image, what’s interesting about the image is really this idea of holding, so you see St. Mamas is holding in the center this precious animal, this pure animal. He’s kind of holding it on himself, and let’s say in the center, you could say. But then he’s also sitting on this wild beast, and so he’s taming this wild beast carrying this precious, innocent animal. I feel like that’s really what we need to be doing today is not be naive about the situation of the world, understand the shapes of culture, understand what is happening, but use that, tame that in order to be able to carry this precious, hidden thing, the hidden mystery, the heart, all that stuff. So that’s what I feel, and I feel like also trying to interpret popular culture, but then also trying to point the aspects of popular culture, which can actually point towards the logos is what I want to do. And obviously the lamb, of course, represents, eschatologically also represents the logos itself. So I love that drawing. I think it’s great, so I’m really happy to finally put it up. Okay, so behind me, you can see, so okay, right here. So this is a little icon of St. Michael, which was painted by Anna Guriev. Anna Guriev is one of the teachers at the Hexameron School, the school that I told you about earlier in terms of where I teach my carving. She’s a wonderful iconographer. She works in a very pristine manner, you know, very simple, very beautiful. Let me bring it down for you guys. Sorry. I always have a chair there. Sorry about that. All right, so this is a beautiful little icon of St. Michael. I really love it. And so, yeah, I’m not going to bring back all the stuff that’s back there, but yeah, so that icon of St. Michael. Then right here is an Ethiopian cross that I bought when I visited Ethiopia in, what is it, 2009, I guess, 2010. You can also see right here is a little Celtic cross that I, one of the first carvings that I made. Down here is also an icon of St. Christopher that I designed, but I actually didn’t carve this one. I designed it a very long time ago when I was in Africa and I had an African carver carve the basic thing. And then I finished, I did some detail work later on it. Actually, just a few years ago, I redid it and redid some detail work, painted it and then added the gilding. Down here is a little Ethiopian icon of St. George killing the dragon and the mother of God holding Christ in her lap. So all of that, you know, the Ethiopian cross, St. Christopher, and then the Ethiopian icon. I really, really am fascinated by Ethiopian Christianity. As some of you know, I’ve written some articles about it because it really does understand its role as the ark. And it uses a lot of Marian symbolism. And so it has this notion of this container and in a way it understands itself as the periphery, but the periphery really in the positive sense of the periphery. You know, so Ethiopian Christianity is somehow kind of on the edge of the world and it represents this edge in the positive sense. And so a lot of their traditions have something to do with that. For example, they have this whole system of churches that are underground. They, you know, they have this, of course, they have this tradition that they have the Ark of the Covenant. And so there’s this whole powerful tradition about Ethiopia. There’s an interesting image in one of the churches where there’s a portrait, there’s an icon of the mother of God, but the shape of her body is the shape of Ethiopia. And so really is this notion of the earth or the land as this mother. And so all of that is something that I really appreciate in Ethiopian Christianity. So, yeah, I’ve got a few of my Ethiopian things. Of course, of course, up here you have my brother’s book. You don’t see it so well in this, but usually in my videos I try to show it a little more. Of course, as you all know, Mathieu’s book, Mathieu has been a huge influence on me all through my life. You know, his, I feel like his thought, you know, although I can talk about symbolism when I talk around it, my theory is always shooting arrows. You know, he’s got a knife and he slices through his writing is so, is very concise and very precise. So if you haven’t gotten Mathieu’s book yet, seriously, what are you doing? You need to get his book. You need to read his book. So, yeah, and so then up here is an image of Adam and Eve around the tree. You can see the tree and then there’s a serpent coming down the tree with the fruit in its mouth. And then Adam and Eve are holding a fruit also in their hand. And that actually comes from Haiti. I traveled to Haiti twice in the early, I think it was 2012, 2013 to do some humanitarian type work there. And so I got that there. And then finally is my little God’s dog poster. And a few people ask about like, what is God’s dog? I know some of you who watch all my videos have heard me talk about this before. So God’s dog is a graphic novel. Mathieu, my brother and I, we wrote an epic story a long time ago. We wrote it, we finished writing it in 2009, I think around 2009, early 2010. And it really is this epic story about about St. Christopher, the dog headed saint. And so St. Christopher is this dog headed monster, like like in the icon over here. And in this story, it has all the symbolism that I’m telling you guys about is there in story form. And so there’s the garments of skin. There’s St. George, there are dragons, there are giants. There are pretty much every single character from Genesis is in that story. So we wrote it, we wrote it as we actually wrote it as a screenplay. And we were very naive about how how movies work. And so and so we wrote it as a screenplay, obviously that didn’t go anywhere. But now just recently, the last I think we started about a year ago, we started to transform the story into a series of graphic novels. And and so the story is all fleshed out the entire thing, the whole mythology, the whole world is all is all fleshed out. And so now we’re putting it down in a book. The artist’s name is Kord Nielsen, and he’s a very talented artist. We’re going for a very kind of simple, simple style, kind of cartoonish, but with some detail as well. Something like Jeff Smith did in bone or, you know, in that style. So that’s kind of what we’re aiming for. And the first book has already been completely thumbnail. The whole story is set. And so now we’re going to start. We’re already starting. We already started to do the actual pencil work. Kord is working on that. And so he’s working on the pencil work right now. And so you have to pay attention in the next few weeks. Maybe I don’t know exactly how long we’re going to wait until we do this. We’re going to set up a crowdfunding for the for the graphic novel. It’s going to be we want to do. I think we want to do it independently just because we want to be independent and because we are we are playing with some ideas, which although they’re they shouldn’t be problematic, they might be problematic for some because we live in such a crazy world right now. And so so so pay attention to that. God’s dog. You’ll hear some news from me on that pretty soon. All right. So I think we covered all those basics. Is there something about the art that I didn’t say that any of you have noticed and want to know about? All right. So if not, then wait, I’m not seeing all your messages. This is annoying. All right. OK. All right. OK. So here we go. So I’m going to start with the questions from the Web site. OK, so Jacob. I imagine that’s Jacob Russell asks in your conversation with Jean-Philippe Marceau, you drop the kind of bomb on the very analytic conversation when you brought up love being the key to everything. So many are afraid to go this to go to this topic or they usually just brush it off to its chemical hormone makeup within our biology. The day before you gave us that preview, I happened upon like stories of all video about interstellar in it. He talks about perhaps the underlying theme of the movie and the one no one is talking about is love and can be seen around the narrative of Dr. Brand saying, quote, Love isn’t something that we invented. It’s observable, powerful. It has to mean something. Maybe it means more something more, something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Something else that transcends time and space is memory. And when I think about memory, I think about do this in remembrance of me or remember me when you come into your kingdom. There are many other examples that link remembrance and love throughout scripture, especially Psalms. Do you have any insights on this linkage and or are there any church fathers who speak on this? Or am I seriously going insane? That’s what she has warned. All right. Sorry. I keep asking these questions. I was going to ask what your favorite color is. Huh. As I tell my daughters, I usually grownups don’t have favorite colors pretty much. I don’t I don’t have favorite anything anymore. I just yeah. It’s like if people ask me about that for movies and stuff, what’s your favorite movie? I don’t I don’t think of things in those terms anymore. I have a favorite sweater. You’ve seen me wear it. It’s that like really thick wool sweater sweater that someone always criticizes in the comments when I wear it. So all right. OK, so let’s get to the question. So there is a link between love and memory. This is the way that I understand it. I don’t know if the church fathers have talked about this specifically, but love is is definitely more than, you know, the chemical whatever you have to you have to understand. I think this is the best way to understand love. Love is the capacity for unity within diversity or the capacity for diversity within unity. That’s what love is. Love is the capacity for things to come together and be one be together without one thing being destroyed or absorbed by the other. OK, you know, we have this image, for example, in in Brahmanic Hinduism of, you know, the returning like a drop of water into the ocean. Like, that’s the ultimate. That’s the ultimate enlightenment, you could say. But for Christians, that definitely is not the case for Christians. The unity being made one with God, being being united to God does never negate your particularity. Rather, it is it makes your particularity shine with the grace of God. It makes you make your your your personhood, you know, become a form of glory of God. And so it that’s the transformation that occurs. But we are not absorbed into God. And so that’s what we that that that type of relationship is what we mean when we talk about God. And the life of the Trinity is exactly that. That is, the father, the son and the spirit are three distinct persons, three distinct hypotheses that are completely and utterly one. And so it’s an aporia. But at the same time, it is also the key to understanding how reality lays itself out in an in an absolute way. It’s an absolute representation of what we experience relatively in the world. That is, this notion that that we can both experience unity in something and multiplicity at the same time. Whereas in God, those two things are not not even in a hierarchical relationship. The one and the many, you know, are are are total, you could say they’re total. So that’s a good way to see it. Now, now memory is this is the way that I understand memory. Memory is unity with something. Within distance. And so memory is the capacity to be united to something, to identify with something, despite you being far away from it. OK, and so. I mean, just in a general sense, to remember something is to recall. And so you when you recall something, you are bringing back your participating to a certain extent to something which is no longer there, which something which happened a long time ago. And the same thing with someone who would be far away from you. You don’t have them in your presence, but then you can remember them even if they’re far away from you. Now, once once that type of memory is brought, you know, to a higher level, you could say is brought into God or is brought to a higher level, then it becomes it becomes a kind of. It becomes the possibility of participation in God. And so. When we say, you know, when we when Christ says does this in remembrance of me, when we talk about about the idea, let’s say of God remembering Noah, for example, or Jonah remembering God when he was down in the the the fish, it’s like Jonah and Noah were were at the ends of the world. They were in the water. They were in the chaos. In the chaos. And then despite the fact that they were so far and they were so much in the darkness, then the memory connects them to God, even though that even no matter how far they are, it connects them to God. So you can imagine memory as the hierarchy, as a hierarchy which connects all the different levels together. And so no matter where you are on the hierarchy of being, you could say. If you remember God, then you are connected to God, right? And that’s the way to start, let’s say, the ascent. And so hierarchy is a form of memory as well. So the imagine it, you can imagine it like I always use the military, the military hierarchy, because it’s so easy. It’s such a clear hierarchy. You know, it’s like the the the the soldier who’s digging the trench is acting, you could say, in memory to the the commander who gave the order to to, you know, to take this field or whatever. And so he’s acting and he’s far away from that main that main order. But as he’s doing this particular thing, he’s doing it in memory of what he of what he received. He’s doing it. He’s doing it being connected to the source of the multiplicity of his actions. And so that is to me. So that that is related to love, because love in a certain manner is also is similar because it is the capacity for things to be, you know, one in many at the same time. Whereas memory is really, really is the sense of this, that which covers the distance, you could call it between between you and your origin or you and your goal or you and your, you know, all that. So hopefully that hopefully that answers the question. All right. So, Corde Nielsen just appears in the chat. And so everybody to hide a cord, he is the artist of our of God’s dog, our comic book. So so hopefully you’ll get to know him a little more in the next few months. I’m hoping to have a to have a video where I’m interviewing him and we’re going to talk about the comic soon. All right. OK, here we go. All right. So next question. So Connor Magger, I don’t know. I don’t know who these people are. Connor Magger, it would be good to use your real name sometimes. Is it OK, Connor Magger, let’s see. So thanks for doing this, Jonathan. As a dare I say, orthodox Catholic, I’m struggling with a pull towards orthodoxy. How would you recommend towing the line without overt conversion? How would you recommend towing the line without overt conversion? Unless that’s necessary to leave the Catholic Church almost feels like abandonment and an easy way out, given the depth of the rock. But it appears as if the hierarchy is almost entirely corrupted and state backed. I don’t expect orthodoxy to be without its issues. I am blessed to currently attend a wonderful T.L.M. and Eastern Catholic churches feel the area, but they are the periphery and are sure to face hostility. I’m sure other Catholics are in the same position. I trust so that this gift of purifying fire will bring the traditions back in harmony with one another. God bless. So this is this is what I this is what I think. I. I would say that I’m not I’m not a Nick and I’m not an ecumenist. And I think it’s important to understand that I’m not an ecumenist in the sense that I don’t think that that it’s all the same. Right. I think I’ve said this before. I do believe that there is a hierarchy, you know, within Christianity. I don’t go so far as saying that people aren’t Christian who aren’t orthodox. Of course not. But I do believe that there’s that there’s a kind of hierarchy in in in Christianity. And it has to do with being connected to the the spirit, you know, the front Emma as as the orthodox say that the mind of the church, the mind of the fathers. And so I do believe that orthodoxy has preserved the most of that. And like you said in your question, orthodoxy definitely has some has some serious problems as well. But I do believe that it is the place where the connection is is the is the most is the you know, is the most real you could say. And so at the same time, this is the this is the problem. You know, the the problem, this is actually a pretty good a pretty good way. If you want to understand the the role of hybridity, you know, we’ve talked about saying Christopher, I’ve talked to you about the. I’ve talked to you about about monsters on the edge. Hybridity does play a role and the Eastern Catholic churches, I think in the in the long story will play a role. Because hybrids are also bridges and we’ve talked about that as well for good and for bad, you know. And that’s why if you look at the the the situation of Eastern Catholics for many orthodox, they’re seen as a major problem because because they are this in between thing and because they risk or they risk. They feel like they’re a way to pull orthodox away from orthodoxy. You could say. You could see it that way, but you could also see the the same thing the Eastern Eastern Eastern Catholics as a way to also spread some of the front of my which the orthodox have kept to be able to spread seeds of that within the Catholic Church in the hopes of transforming the Catholic Church. See the the the the hybrid has that strange role, just like any transition, it can be seen as it can be seen as a way to leave what’s inside, but it can also be seen as a way to spread what what’s inside to spread it towards the outside and vice versa. Right. And so for the orthodox, let’s say for the Catholics, the Eastern Church can appear as a dangerous throwback to orthodoxy and a kind of in a dangerous situation that we have to make regular, but it can also see for the Catholics. It can also be. Oh, this is a way for us to bring the the the the the orthodox into the Catholic Church. And so that’s the situation with hybridity. You know, it has positive and it has negative and it’s important to understand both sides. And so having said that, I mean, you know, I think that it has a role and you know, people, some people will be angry with me for saying that, but I do believe the Eastern churches have will have a role to play. And if there is ever a true reunion of the Catholic Church with the Orthodox Church, I’m not talking about a political one just for expedient reasons. I’m talking about an actual theological reunification between the two the two the two churches. The Eastern Catholic Church is going to play a major role in that. And so that’s that’s that’s the thing. And this this event that I’m doing in Seattle with Father Stephen is going to be organized by Eastern Catholics and they’re going to be orthodox speakers and Eastern Catholic speakers at the same conference. And so although I will not be taking communion there and I like I said, I don’t I don’t believe in that type of ecumenism. I do think that that’s the space where the discussion is going to have. So if you want to have the discussion, that’s the place to go into that’s the place to go speak. So so I’m going to be I don’t I’m not afraid of speaking there in that in that space of transition. So hopefully that answers your question. I think there was another question later about similar things. So hopefully I’ll have hopefully that’ll answer both at the same time. Connor Magger that actually is your name, Connor Magger. Sorry, because it just the way it was written in my thing, they were all together. It was like just Connor Magger. So now I can see that’s your actual name in the YouTube YouTube comments. All right. OK. So David Flores asks, I’ve been thinking about the symbolism of walking on water versus going below. This has been coming back with David for for a few months. As far as I can see symbolically, one ends in a transformation of space journey to a new place and the other a transformation of self like be reborn through baptism. Is this good interpretation? And how does one know when to walk or dive? I think that your interpretation is very interesting. And actually, I think that I think you’re really getting to the key of the difference because. The walking on water seems to represent the capacity to master the the potentiality, right? Kind of like sitting on the line, right? That’s that’s what’s going on when you’re walking on water. It’s like you’re you’re a master of this potentiality or taming the water. Whereas when you go down into the waters, it is a shedding of your your your ex externals, a shedding of the the dry wood or the stuff that needs to go. And so I think that definitely your I think definitely interpretation is good. And so is this good interpretation? And how does one know when we want to walk or dive? I think that I think that when you went to you, once you phrase it this way, it actually becomes pretty clear because. Let’s say walking on water. Would be something like mastering your desires. So, you know, if you if you I don’t know if whatever desire, whatever excessive desire you have, usually those are kind of like the desires of the flesh. You know, if you eat too much, if you if you have sexual too many sexual thoughts, if you’re you know, if you’re you know, if you’re looking watching pornography or whatever, like those type of things, if you drink too much, if you’re taking drugs, if you’re if you’re if you’re hooked on, you know, on some kind of opioids or whatever, walking on water would be, you know, finding the capacity to to. To. To manage that chaos, right? Cleaning your room, you know, so cleaning your room like the Jordan Peterson cleaning your room is different from diving in and shedding your extra your extra layers. You shed your extra layers when you when you realize that you that you’ve accumulated. Too many of these of these these periphery, but it’s funny because when I say that, then I think in a way that it could look similar. Just taking it from a different perspective because you know when you’re the things that you shed when you dive in are the things that you would also master that you could represent as mastering when you walk on the water. So I’m afraid I just keep I just keep turning you into in circles. Sorry, David. Sorry, David. I’m not giving you clear answers. People are going to people are going to accuse me very soon of being a charlatan because I’m not giving clear answers to your questions. Vox Dei will write a book on me about I’m a charlatan. All right. Okay. So Luke Fleischmann asks. All right. So hey, Jonathan. I first want to say thank you for all the work you’re doing. It’s meant a great deal to me and many others over the past year and half or so. I have two subjects. I was wondering about. So do you have any updates on God’s dog as a lover of comic books? This is probably the most excited I’ve been for a comic in years. I’m curious as to what the writer writing process was like. Did you methodically plan out the symbolic language of the story or did it naturally lay itself out? I gave you a little bit of a peek into God’s dog. But in terms of how we wrote it, you know, Matt, you and I, we we often we kind of share a brain in a certain way. He has a he has a real certain take on symbolism. And then so do I. So we really understand each other. It was a kind of a mix of both. I had the original idea was kind of mine in terms of St. George and St. Christopher. And then Matt’s here. He had very good ideas of structure. So sometimes we would structure out a scene, you know, numerically with different characters representing different aspects of reality that would talk to each other. And so seems to become extremely complicated, you know, very almost like geometric patterns. And then usually we would end up scaling down in order to focus because it would get too too complicated. And so Matthew would work really hard and like scale down the symbolism to to to some structures. And so there’s a mix of everything. There’s a lot of stuff in there. There are some ciphers there. There are there’s like there’s a hidden language, you know, and there’s there’s a lot of stuff. It’s a yeah, I’m really I’m looking forward to to getting this into your into your hands because I think everybody is going to get to really enjoy it. All right. In the story of St. Christopher, I was wondering, this is still a very interesting story. This is still Luke in the story of St. Christopher. I was wondering what the significance of him coming across specifically that of the Christ child is. I recently came across in Anthony of Padua and see that he too had a unique relationship with the Christ child. What is the difference of one coming into contact with the Christ child compared to one coming into contact with Christ the man? Well, OK, so in the story of St. Christopher, the story of St. Christopher is an amazing story. It is it is extremely dense. It looks so simple, but it’s extremely dense. One of the things that is happening in the story of St. Christopher is that St. Christopher is a trickster figure as well. I’ve talked about this before. St. Christopher is a trickster figure. He’s looking to serve the most powerful being in the world. And so he finds this powerful king. He serves the king. And then when he finds out that there’s another character more powerful than the king, he’ll he’ll trick the king. You’ll say something like, tell me about this other powerful character. And the king will say, no, I don’t want to tell you, because if I tell you, you’ll leave. And then Christopher will say, well, if you don’t tell me, I leave. So if you tell me if you don’t tell me, then I will leave you. So the king is forced to to reveal the secret of this more powerful character. And then St. Christopher leaves. And so he tricks the king. He says, if you don’t tell me, I’ll leave. Then he tells him and he leaves. That’s a trick. So he does that a few times. And then he comes to the devil, who’s the most powerful, the most powerful in the in the world. And he he sees that the devil is afraid of the cross, afraid of Christ. And so he does the same deal with the devil. And then the devil tells him about about Christ. And so St. Christopher leaves the devil. And then St. Christopher is looking for Christ, but he can’t find Christ. One of the reasons why he can’t find Christ because he’s not looking for the right thing. And so then he remeets this monk. The monk tells him to go on to the river and to cross people over the river. So he’s taking up his role as a peripheral character. First of all, that’s important to understand. He’s saying, go to the edge of the world, stand on the edge of the world. You’re a monster. You’re you’re a dog-headed man. You’re a giant, depending on the tradition. Go stand on the edge. That’s your role. And then your role is to cross people over. And then he encounters the Christ child. So it’s important to understand is that Christ is going to trick Christopher. There are so many things happening in that trick. The first part is that Christ will trick Christopher in serving him because he tells Christopher to take him across the river. So Christ tells him, says, take me across the river. Christopher takes the Christ child across the river, not realizing that he’s already there where he wanted to be. What he wanted was to serve the most powerful being in the world. And so here is Christ tricking him not only in serving the most powerful being in the world, but serving the weakest being in the world at the same time or what looks like the weakest being in the world. So in Christopher, in serving the weakest possible being, you can imagine a baby, a child. He ends up being tricked. But then the trick flips back because that child ends up being the divine logos himself. And then he finally accomplishes what he wanted, which was to serve the most powerful man. Second of all, he also plays his role, you could say, as an ark. And the purpose of the ark is to preserve the seed, to preserve the logos, and take it across a difficult moment, take it across the difficulty of the world. So it’s a shell, right? I’ve talked to you about the garments of skin, about this whole idea of the shell. So Christopher acts as this garment of skin, the shell, which carries the hidden logos across the waters, across chaos. So that’s another aspect. Now, this is really the secret. And I guess it’s something that I probably will make a video on soon, directly on this subject, which is that the hierarchy of Christianity is different from the hierarchy of the world. I’ve hinted at this several times. But once you realize that the reason of things is the source of things, the purpose of things, the logos, the meaning, that without this spiritual aspect, then the world doesn’t exist, that phenomena organizes around these logi, around these purposes. And then you realize that the hierarchy looks very different because the logi, the purposes are hidden. They’re hidden in the world. And so all of a sudden, the summit of the hierarchy, the real summit, let’s say, the one which is even above the king, becomes an image of something which hides its power, you could say, which doesn’t show its power. Because if you look at the way the world is, if you’re materialist, if you look at just how matter lays itself out, you’re incapable of seeing those hidden gems, the hidden purposes of things. But once you perceive the hidden purposes, then the image of that logos can be actually, can actually be the weakest thing. And then once you understand that, you’ll understand everything that Christ says. You’ll understand everything that Christ says about the pearl hidden in the field, about blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek. All this imagery about speaking of the littlest one as secretly being the highest in the hierarchy. Now, it doesn’t mean that being poor in itself has value. You can be a poor, wretched, drunkard, drunken idiot. You have to be careful. And it doesn’t mean that, let’s say, that’s the best example, especially when we talk about when Christ talks about blessed be the poor. The idea is that, like I said, the spiritual principle is hidden. And so those and so that’s why you have aesthetics. You have aesthetics who want to remove all those externals in order to gather into the heart, remove all the externals, remove those garments of skin, and then move into that hidden place. And those aesthetics will lose the trappings of the hierarchy. They will not look like the successful businessman. They will look like the miserable poor, but they won’t be the miserable poor. They’re the secret gems. They’re the secret hidden pillars of the world. The monks, the aesthetics, the holy people, they will not look like those who are the most successful in the world. They will have a different aspect. And so that’s really the whole idea of the Christ child. The Christ child always represents the logos hidden in the world. That’s why you see Christ sitting on his mother. And so it’s like his mother is this covering and here’s this hidden seed in the middle. So every time you hear about every time you see icons or images that show the Christ child, that’s what it’s talking about, this hidden seed. Whereas let’s say Christ on the cross or Christ as the image of Christ also as the emperor is also totally justified. Because here’s the unity of the hierarchy manifested externally completely. So the external total manifestation of the hierarchy will look like something like the emperor sitting on his throne with a crown, with a glory around him, all of that also makes sense. But the source of that, the source of even of that emperor is that hidden, that Christ child who’s born in the cave, who’s hidden in the cave. I hope that makes sense. I hope that makes sense. All right. OK. OK. So all right. So we’re done with the website. I’m moving on to the subscribe star questions. So Batman 23. Hi, Jonathan. My question is, have you ever read Neil Gaiman Sandman comics or any of his other work? He seems to have an uncanny eye for symbolism and understand the ideas of principality. Example, the character of a city, even though he is not a religious person. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I think that I think I agree. I think that Neil Gaiman’s understanding of principalities is very good. I would say that he is a he’s a pagan in every sense. Well, I say that, you know, it’s weird because I say that, you know, there. I’m not sure that he’s a pagan. He seems to he seemed to want to wallow in the lower spheres, you could say. That’s maybe the best way to explain what he does. For example, there’s one there’s the one Sandman comic, which is based on the the the hierarchy of of of of Milton in Paradise Lost. And then there’s the the Lucifer character who’s in hell. But there’s this sense of this hierarchy of of all. And so all the gods exist, right? All the all the pagan gods all exist. And then there’s this hierarchy of angels. And then there’s God. But God is is completely transcendent. You don’t hear you don’t hear about it. You know, he just referred to. And so it’s an interesting it’s an interesting idea. You know, he has that right in that in that story. But what he seems to be interested in is just wallowing in this in this kind of, you know, in the competing gods. That’s where that’s where he finds his interest. The question is whether he does it, you know, whether he has some weird kind of magical ability to to understand these these structures and if he’s just doing it to tell stories and to make money or whether he has a deeper understanding of the one strange thing is that he almost never talks about Christ. If he does, I mean, I haven’t read all of his books, but I I did read American Gods and I did read the Sandman comics and a few I read a few other of his books. And he almost never mentions Christ. And so I really that’s one of the things that I would ask him if I if I had him in front of me was would be why why he he doesn’t mention Christ. Maybe he just doesn’t want the political backlash. It’s possible. But who knows? All right. So second question by Batman 23. Has there been a noticeable rise in convergence orthodoxy? I’m here makes analysis that there may be more conversions, but the church isn’t growing. What are your thoughts? Also, why is it mostly Protestants that do convert as opposed to Catholics? The reason why there are more conversions, but the church isn’t growing is because a lot of the ethnic churches are not capable are not don’t seem capable of holding their second generation. And so the ethnic, you know, the ethnic Greeks or the ethnic Russians or the ethnic Serbs, they they come to America and they they they somehow think that magically they will that their children will continue to be orthodox, will continue to be Greek, will continue to be Russian, you know, generation after generation. Obviously, if you come to you come to this land, you your children will assimilate at some point. It’s inevitable. And so they haven’t totally figured out how to to keep those other generations, maybe because they’re presenting orthodoxy mostly in in an ethnic as an ethnic relationship, you could say. But I don’t know. I don’t know. But for sure, the growth from Orthodox churches in in North America comes either from immigration or from converts. So why is it mostly Protestants that do convert as opposed to Catholics? Well, I don’t know if it’s Protestants that converts more Protestants that convert. It might be true. It might be true. First of all, because North America is mostly Protestant. It might be true also because once Protestants. You could say bottom out, you could say they reach that, you know, when they read the rock and roll, you know, coffee house church, it’s like, where do you go from there? You don’t know where to go. And so if you’re going to the only place to go is to go back, go back to liturgical. And once you start asking those questions, then yeah. Yeah. And also because I think there’s a reveal that happens, you know, when you’re Protestant, not all Protestants in my when I grew up, let’s say in the evangelical church, there was such a lack of history. It was basically like there are Christians for about one century, two centuries. But then it also already starts getting weird. And for sure, by the time of Constantine there, you know, it was all it was all to hell. And so it’s like, you know, if you start to study church history, then all of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute. Well, then all the things you believe come from the fourth century pretty much not everything, but a lot of the definitions that we use come from the fourth century. And so those are the same people that are supposed to be the heretics. I did a debate with a pastor a few months ago, and it’s like from one side of his mouth, he was he was he was criticizing St. Athanasius for his comments about deification. And then the other on the other side of his mouth, he was using, you know, the the Christological definitions of the Council of Nicea. And so it’s like you just you can’t do both of those things at the same time. You know, you have to understand, you know, yeah, you have to take things together. So all right. All right. So John B. asks, Hi, Jonathan, how would you describe any changes between now and two and three years ago when all of this began? Well, yeah, my life has definitely, definitely changed. I would say I mean, at the same time, definitely for the better. I’m it’s really been excited. It’s really been exciting to have all these opportunities. You know, I was really surprised. It kind of started, you know, everybody knows it kind of started with Jordan Peterson kind of take me along for some reason. And, you know, we had we had known each other for about a year before. At first, we had people organize some events with us together. And so that kind of gave some attention to what I was doing. And then it just kind of took a life of its own. And so it’s really exciting. Like I’ve told some of you before, I never talk about symbolism. I would never talk about symbolism before. So now I had this chance to talk to you guys, to read all your comments on YouTube and to to find, you know, this little community. Like I told you about the symbolic world Facebook group where you have a few hundred people that are there and you have, you know, an intense group of, you know, maybe just about 20, 25 people that are really intensely discussing. But that’s amazing. That’s awesome. You know, to just to just encounter people that are really rediscovering the symbolism. And it’s like it’s a dream come true for me to see this happening and also to see. To see so many people going back to to church, going back to their own traditions or becoming Orthodox. You know, we’re talking about hundreds of people that have written me saying, you know, that that. That somehow, you know, this is reconnected them to to Christianity. And so it’s like, I just thank God for that. And I thank God every single day that I have this chance, this opportunity. And so hopefully I don’t mess it up. And the same for, you know, for for the speaking events. I’m I used to be pretty lonely. I would carve all day just in my workshop all day. And so now I get to meet amazing people. I’m traveling. I meet people that are excited about symbolism, excited about Christian art, excited about that. And so it’s I have to say, it’s been it’s been awesome. And and a lot of it is is really thanks to you guys who are who are engaging with me, who are writing me, who are, you know, engaging with the YouTube comments and and also obviously people who are supporting me financially. It’s like it’s just yeah, my life is just not not the same, not the same person as I was two years ago. That’s for sure. So John B also asks, do you do any teaching at your church, either symbolism or iconography? Do you make icons for your church? So I try to be honest. I try to be more low key in my parish, let’s say. For a few years, I was on the parish council. You know, I did that. And I think that a lot of people took them took them a while, like a year to even understand that I was doing this, that I was giving these talks and that I was was doing these types of conferences. And so so by now, I once in a while, like we organized a few talks in Montreal. I did teach give a talk at my parish. We’re planning another talk pretty soon. And so and I do have one at my parish. I do have one icon, which is part of a piece of furniture that I carved as a gift for the church. But but at least for now, that’s about it. But I would be very open, happy to speak in my church. But I would always I always want I would always wanted to be to not I wouldn’t want it to happen too often because, you know, I’m not a priest. And so I don’t I don’t want. Yeah, I’m not a priest. Let’s just say that. All right. And so all right. We’re moving on to Patreon. All right. So Gavin Doty asks John Reveke talks about the need for synoptic integration. And for him, he seems to do this through cognitive science while you do so through Christianity. Reveke also says he’s not an eclectic, though I’m not sure exactly how at least some of what he’s advocating isn’t a kind of mythological eclecticism. What does a non eclectic assimilation look like to you? The dying and rebirth you talk about. And do you think Buddhism, Taoism and company will have to do to be better assimilated by Christianity going forward in order to confront the unwise AI future Reveke worries about? Well, yeah, I. I do think I do agree that I think that John’s approach in the end is eclectic. I know he won’t agree with me. I do think that it is. I think that the difference that we have is one of the things that I feel like I’ve understood very clearly is that you have to exist inside a story. And so science is not a story. We are in this Christian story. You can’t help it. We are in 2019 after the birth of Christ. That’s the story we’re in. And so there are some things which are not for us to decide. And so if you decide that you will not be in that story in the West, you will not be in that story. In the West, you can do that. But you will be a you will be a vehicle of of subversion. There’s no way around it. You will be a vehicle of subversion. Now, I’m not saying that sometimes subversion isn’t needed. Sometimes subversion is needed because we’ve talked about this before, because you know, because Christianity can become corrupt. Christianity can become pharisaic and can become hypocritical, can become sentimental, can become all these things. And so I do sometimes it might need to be poked at from the outside. I agree. But it’s important to understand that if you if you think that you can be a Taoist in Wisconsin, you know, you let’s say that the place that you have is going to be a marginal place. You will have a marginal place. And and and and I say that you have to understand that I say that it’s not totally a criticism because I myself I became Orthodox. Orthodoxy is not totally from here. Orthodoxy has a hint of the eccentric. It has a hint of the foreign in terms of of our terms of the Western Christianity. And I think but of course, I think that it has just enough hint of the foreign to be a renewing agent for for for the West. You know, that’s my that’s my impression that I mean, I don’t know how things are going to play themselves out. But that’s one of the reasons, let’s say, why I moved in that direction. Now, I don’t think that it’s I don’t think that we can’t learn from other traditions. I have no problem with people reading Taoist text, reading Buddhist text, reading, reading Sufi texts, you know, but I think especially considering that so much of let’s say the mystical language of Christianity has been lost, has been corrupted, has been, you know, has been trampled on by materialism. So I don’t have a problem with with trying to using let’s say using things that you find outside to kind of help you. But the hope is that then it’ll point you towards the inside. They don’t help you re understand the metaphysics of Christianity, re understand the mystical reality of Christianity. That to me is the is the hope. And in terms of the story, this is where something has to happen. There is something that we can’t decide as individuals. We can’t decide. None of us as individuals decides when, you know, when the story changes. There’s something has to happen like, you know, like like the arrival of a prophet, like the return of Christ, like the like the you know, like a disaster, like whatever. There’s there’s some things which, you know, like a plague, like a war, like there are all these things which change the story. But we don’t at least very, very, very, very, very, very few of us have any say in what the story is going to the way the story is going to go. And so I think that it’s best to it’s best to to be part of the Christian story. That’s that’s what I think. As a you know, as a Western as a Western person, I think that that’s the that’s the story. That’s the best story. I mean, I do I think it’s the best story in general, of course. You know, I’m a Christian. But yeah. And so I think that it’s so let’s say and do you think Buddhism, Daoism and company will have to better to be better assimilated by Christianity going forward in order to be confronted to confront the unwise AI? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I don’t know. I think that I mean, it’s horrible that I had to say this, but I think that there’s some things that are going to happen. It’s not going to be it’s not going to be pretty. It’s not going to be totally peaceful the way things are going to play out. There’s going to be upheavals. I don’t see. I don’t see it happening in any other way. Hopefully, hopefully, if if that happens, we’ll have enough people with a heart to, you know, to carry the seed. So sorry if I sound a bit negative, guys. All right. Red Arnold asks, while trying to wrap my head around the book of Job, I came across Jung’s answer to Job. For those unfamiliar with the work, it is well summarized by Jungian scholar Mary Stein in Jung’s interpretation. Job is completely innocent. He is scrupulously pious man who follows all the religious conventions. And for most of his life, he is blessed with good fortune. This is the expected outcome for a just man in a rationally ordered universe. But then God allows saying to work on him, bringing misfortune and misery, being overwhelmed with questions and images of divine magic and power. Job is then silence. He realizes inferior position because of the Almighty. But he also retains his personal integrity. And this so impresses God that he is forced to take stock of himself. Perhaps he is not so righteous after all. Yeah, it’s a bit shady. As Mark Fonda observes, God’s omniscience precludes self-awareness. Being omniscient, God has no concentrated self. To speak of being a part of everything, God has no opportunity to distinguish self from non-self. However, as God knows the thoughts of humans, though the thoughts of… How long is this quote here? The thoughts of his creation, he can experience what self-awareness is. And out of his astonishing self-reflection induced in God by Job’s stubborn righteousness, he, the Almighty, is pushed into a process of transformation that leads eventually to his incarnation as Jesus. Hmm. God develops empathy and love through his confrontation with Job. And out of it, a new relationship between God and humankind is born. Unquote. That’s a long quote. This is controversial to say the least, but at least very interesting idea to play with. Any thoughts? I don’t… Yeah, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy… I don’t buy that at all. I don’t buy that. I think maybe Jung doesn’t know anything about the Trinity. Maybe that’s why he says something like that. God is… God is… The whole idea of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is exactly to speak of that… That… That… That distance and connection… The… The… The… The knowing… The logos knowing the Father through love and the Holy Spirit. You know, the Trinity is a form of self-knowing. So anyways, I just think this is… This is not… I don’t know. I’m not impressed by this. Alright. Sorry. Okay. So… So… What… Is there something else I can say about this? Let’s see if there’s something else I can say about this. Okay. So in… In… In the… In… In terms of the incarnation of Christ, in the Orthodox tradition, and I think in the medieval… In the medieval tradition, the higher aspects of the medieval tradition, let’s say, the incarnation to a certain extent was always the purpose of creation. That is, the purpose of creation was to… For God to self… Also to know his creation. To… To kind of, you know… To create something that he could love and unite to himself, you know, without… Without destroying it. And so that’s… The life of God is love, and the creation participates in that life of love. So the incarnation was the purpose from the beginning. It’s only that the… You know, Adam had to… Depending on how you see it, either you can see it as Adam was unable and fell, and then there’s a detour, or even in St. Irenaeus, you get the sense that Adam and Eve were rather like children, and that to a certain extent the fall is a form of… Of… Was all… Not that the fall was necessary, but that the fall participates in this bigger story. And that Adam and Eve, to a certain extent, you know, because they were innocent children, they had to fall, and then to come and bring about the actual incarnation, which was the summit and the maturing of the human person. Maybe that helps a little more. So sorry Red. I told you guys before that I’m not a young… I’m just not a young fan. Everybody tell me you need to read young, read more young. So maybe one day I will, but at least for now. I don’t know. All right. All right. So Drew McMahon asked, I can’t remember if it was a Twitter post or a video clip where you said that death is hell. Can you expand on what you mean by that? We’re all in the process of dying, so are we in hell? I’ve always thought death was natural and a necessary part of life, but I recently heard some orthodox thinkers claiming death is not natural. Is this the case? I need a total mind shift on how to look at the world. Well, hell means death. Hell is death. It’s just the same. We have a confusion. We have this weird confusion about death. We somehow think when we think of hell, usually we think of this idea of the eternal fire. But the eternal fire is not hell. Hell really is death. It’s fine if you use the word hell for the eternal fire, that’s fine. But death, hell, the goddess of hell is a god, like a northern god of death, like Hades basically. So Hades is death. It’s the shale death. So yes, it is in Christian theology, in all Christian theology, death is viewed as not natural. It is viewed as a consequence of the fall. It is viewed as something, a forgetting of your source, a forgetting of your origin. And you have to understand it like this. You have to understand death as a form of decomposition. It’s probably the best way to understand death. It’s when things break apart and are no longer held together by logos. And so death is a consequence of a forgetting. It’s a consequence of a forgetting. But it holds also a mystery. There’s a mystery in death, which is that multiplicity can also be a form of glory. And I’ve talked about this before. So there’s also this idea that we can transcend death through death. And so that this entering into multiplicity, if there’s memory, can be a form of glory. I don’t know how else to say it. And so it is true that death is not natural, but the process of death also hides something else, hides a way to flip it, to flip it so that it becomes resurrection, it becomes glory, it becomes all that. So I hope that answers. I can’t tell you totally, I can’t reveal to you the extent of this because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the extent of this. I can get hints of it. Sometimes I get these hints of what that is. Then when you read the story of the saints and you see these saints that are transfigured, or if you have stories of this notion of Elijah or Enoch that ascend, or that Moses’ body was taken up into heaven. I don’t totally understand what that means. I can intuitively get a sense of it. And I can also see that it’s true at little levels. But I don’t understand the fullness of it. But I understand enough about it to trust the pattern and to trust the story and to know that the pattern is manifesting something real. All right, I hope that answers. All right. Okay, so where are we? All right, so Michael Parsons asks, are human hands, hands with thumbs and consciousness a form of technology? They increase our positive and negative capacity, but the categorical lines are blurred because they are proper to the human body. You cannot wield a sword without a hand and you cannot create a sword without conscious mind. To me it is interesting also considering that the mind and hand are on the extremities of the human body, the periphery, as opposed to the center. But the heart is in the center. What are your thoughts on hands and mind consciousness as forms of technology? Also, what do you think about the idea that love is the center? Okay, so let’s answer this question first. Okay, so I mean, I think we have to be careful not to confuse some things. I certainly wouldn’t say that consciousness is a form of technology. I would say that there is a form of knowledge which leads to technology. And we usually say it’s art or technē, technical knowledge. Okay, so for example, in the Greek thinkers, technē was opposed to episteme. So there’s this notion of looking towards the principles, looking towards the source of things, looking towards the logi. You could say that contemplating the reasons for things that exist. So that’s kind of the meditative, the prayer, the gathering yourself into yourself towards those higher principles. And then there’s the technē, which is using the principles you understand to affect the world, power. So it’s not that power or technē or the capacity to act on the world and the will to act on the world. That’s what will bring about technology. And there’s a connection between the two. But to say that hands, okay, so you could say you could actually see that your body, your physical body is all in that process. Your physical body is the garments of skin. It is your capacity to act in the world. And so it’s not just hands that are technē or that are akin to technē, akin to power to act in the world, but your whole body has that as well. And so I’m not sure that consciousness, I mean, consciousness is more like the center, right? It’s more like, I mean, then from consciousness, you could look down or look up, look towards the world or then contemplate the principles. So it is more like the heart, you could say. So that’s where I guess it brings me to the other question then. Which is, yeah, which is that hands, the mind and hand are on the extremities of the human body, the periphery as opposed to the center. Yeah, the thing about the head is that the head is the summit. So there’s a relationship between the head and the summit or the top, the top of a mountain or the top of a, you know, there’s all the symbols even in the Bible about the head, you know, the head of the household, the head of the, there’s a hierarchical element that makes the head akin, something somehow akin to the heart. But the heart is more the center in the sense that that’s where everything comes together. The heart is where even physically like this place here, right here in the middle, that’s where you experience, let’s say the unity of yourself, where you experience the, that’s where you experience your emotions, that’s where you experience, you know, your calm, your, you know, the basic pattern of your life. You know, you kind of experience it here. And so that relates also to the heart in a more metaphysical sense, the place where, you know, your mind and your body come together, the place where the top and the bottom come together would be, you know, in this kind of central space. All right. Okay, so what do you think about the idea that love is the center metaphysically as the thing that we should circumambulate around through Christ as well as physically in the body with the human heart? I mean, love is the mode of being. Love is not the logos. Love is, you say God is love in the sense that love is the mode of being of the infinite, the mode of being of God. So, I mean, you could say God is love, but it’s not so obvious to say that love is God. I don’t think that that’s a good way to see it. The mode of being of God is love. And so love is the manner in which you can even circumambulate because you are joining yourself and, you know, you are coming to that center. You’re seeing it as the center. You’re also seeing your distance from it. And so you’re kind of circumambulating is related to love. All right. All right. Secondary report from an evolutionary perspective, the mind consciousness is an advancement in technology as an increase in animal capacity. From a higher evolutionary biblical perspective, it could seem that the acquisition of these technologies are a type of fall or movement into death. But again, the heart existed long before thumbs in the conscious mind and seems to give more credibility to the idea that love should be at the center. This makes me think more about what the Imago Dei actually is. Personally, I believe it is something like our capacity to create through love. Like you, I believe evolution happened, but do not believe in it. I do believe that Christ is that image of God and that it is only through Christ that we can access this kind of creation by binding us into a cohesive moral community. Amongst other things, I could say more, but I think this is long enough already. I would love to hear your thoughts on if these ideas and if you are in conflict with an orthodontic Christian perspective. Yeah, I think it’s I think it’s scary, you know. Okay, so I don’t know, but I think it’s scary to mix the mix some of these things together, like to take to take kind of scientific thinking and then to have your story thinking and to mix them together. You know, I say that I mean, Doran Peterson does it all the time, but sometimes sometimes he freaks me out with some with that too. But I have to be kind of careful to kind of confuse different different ways of speaking about the world. But for sure, like let me say this, let me say this. Okay, for sure. The idea. Okay, so. Okay, so you can. If you’re attentive to yourself. Okay, if you’re attentive to yourself. And if you’re attentive to other people, you can perceive where their being is in their body. And I would suggest that you do that sometimes walk on the street and you can you look at people and you can see where they’re where they tend to position their their being, you know, and there are some people who exist. In their hands. There are some people that exist in their head. You see, you see that they’re up here. Some people are in their shoulders, see guys, you know, their shoulders. Some people are in their hips. Some people in other places. And so. In the, in the, in the philokalia and the mystical tradition of the, the Orthodox Church. It does talk about this idea of entering into the heart and withdrawing from the outer senses. So the hands, you know, and the other like your sexual senses and then you know your, your, you know, your other sense even your eyes and your your ears and everything. They’re kind of like this, these portals to the outside world, and they’re also. They’re also the place in which you come into contact with that, the things that alive that wake up your passions, let’s say, okay. You know, you see something you’re jealous of it. You want to take it. You, you know, you all of that. It happens out here. And so there is there is a sense in in the Orthodox tradition where you need to retreat from your senses. You have to enter into the heart. So there’s obviously a spiritual aspect to that, which is to kind of to withdraw from your thoughts to kind of eliminate the extra extraneous thoughts. To focus on prayer, focus on the Jesus prayer, we call it. But then there’s also an actual kind of physical sense that you have to retreat from your senses and and and exist in kind of come into the center of yourself as well. Right. You you can experience it somewhat physically in the sense that you are that you’re going to focused in on yourself. It’s hard to explain this stuff. And you kind of have to start to explain this stuff. But there’s an analogy. There is an analogy between where you are, where you kind of exist in your your body as you you go through your day and let’s say. The spiritual centerness of yourself, you know, there’s an analogy between the two. The body isn’t totally devoid of participation in this process. So I feel like I feel like none of this of what I’m saying here is clear. Hopefully it is. I probably shouldn’t be talking about this stuff, especially the mystical stuff, and it should be talking about that stuff. All right. All right. OK, here we go. So, and you’re Terpstra in your reading list on Patreon, you recommended to read my sir. Now, I already have read some sermons from a small paper I’ve written on his hermeneutics. In my experience, however, I found it quite difficult to really grasp what he is saying. And also his interpretation struck me as somewhat speculative. Nonetheless, I think he’s an interesting figure. So I was wondering what it is that you find so compelling about Eckhart. Why did you put him on your reading list? And what do you think about his idea that God is becoming? Besides that, I would like to ask if Eckhart is less problematic from an Orthodox perspective since he was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church. Well, first of all, Eckhart was not condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church. That’s really important to understand the way that the Catholic Church works. If he some of Eckhart’s statements were condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church, a lot of thinkers there have had their some of their phrases condemned by the Catholic Church. We don’t even know which phrases that Eckhart said which were condemned. The reason why I like Eckhart is because I wanted to be fair in my reading list and I wanted to suggest some Western authors, because a lot of the authors or a lot of the subjects that I was I was pointing to were mostly Eastern mystics. And so I wanted to point to a Western mystic who who seems to have believed in some form of theosis, that is, in some form of capacity to be fully and truly united with God. And so that’s something that I that I found in Eckhart. Now, when you say that his idea that God is becoming, I’m not sure that that’s the reading that I got from Eckhart. If what you mean is that God is is dynamic, then I think that you’re right there in in in Eastern Christianity. Eastern Christianity does not believe that God is a form is a is stasis is a form of stasis, but rather that that the love between the love which exists in the Trinity is a is a dynamic whole. And so there is a dynamism in God within the Eastern tradition. So I don’t know if that’s what you mean. And so I don’t know. I know. I don’t know what a lot of Orthodox people think about Eckhart. I actually did find I found his sermons to be quite illuminating for a Western person to see the extent of of mysticism, which existed in the West, I think is it’s good for us to be aware of that. All right, here we go. OK, so Nolan Watson asked, Is there a way to explain the church’s rejection of same sex marriage in symbolic terms? All right. So Nolan, I think I think that it’s interesting because I think that your your your your question is phrased in an odd manner. And I think that it’s good to it’s good to notice that. And it’s good to think for everybody to think about that, about the manner in which the question is framed. And a lot of the problem related to to to same sex attraction and same sex questions is often about a. It often about a problem of how we phrase the questions, the idea that the church rejects same sex marriage. It’s very interesting because it’s it’s it’s it’s interesting that it’s phrased that way rather than phrase the other way, which is how did our society today come to reject the. The eternal, you know, the all cultural, all all historical definition, definite. There are some definitions, but a basic definition of of marriage. And so that’s how I would phrase that question, not the other way around. But I think that we can definitely see it. Let’s say the question of. Sexuality definitely has symbolic terms. I talk about this in a in a YouTube discussion called the resurrection of logos, which I with Jordan Peterson, I did an event at University of Toronto. But. Symbolism is really the bringing together of things of different elements, gathering them together in order for there to be a coherent for you to perceive and to engage in a coherent pattern. OK, and so in the in the notions of say, Maximus, you know, the logos, the purpose, the reason, the essence of something gathers its particularities together into a coherent whole. And so sexuality does that to a very large degree. And so. Sexuality has many elements. It has it has many aspects to it. And one one of the one of the major aspects is that it unite. It’s a uniting of opposites. It’s the uniting. It’s analogically the uniting of heaven and earth together, the masculine and the feminine. You know, the yin, the yang. It’s this union of these two complementary opposites together. And when that union of complementary opposites happens, then there is a fruit. There’s fruitfulness to that. And that is the child. OK, and so. That’s why the the image of the union of the of the man and the woman in sexual union becomes the image of the of the church and Christ becomes the image of God and the soul. And so this image of sexuality becomes the very manner in which the image of the very manner in which we are united with with God. OK, and the different elements of of of sexuality have to kind of exist in in the pattern. You know, I always I always say I always like to use the example of food in turn, you know, in order for us to understand. It’s like food has different aspects to it. In food, there is a nutritional aspect, which is to preserve and continue life. In food, there is an aspect which is a social aspect, which is to bring us together. We eat together. It creates a bond for a building of community. And food also has an aspect which is to bring you pleasure. And so if you emphasize only one of those, then you’re missing the full pattern. If you emphasize if you emphasize only the nutritional aspect, then you’re going to miss on a great aspect of what food is for the human person. If you focus only on the pleasure, then then you also will miss the nutrition. You’ll become fat. You’ll become diabetic. You know, all of that is going to happen. And if you and the same for the social aspect. And so all of those have to have to come together in order to be a coherent pattern. Now, the thing is that it doesn’t mean that everything you eat has to, for example, be totally nutritional. Doesn’t mean that everything you eat has to be something which brings the community together. But this all of this has to exist within a pattern. So that’s one of the problems when when people talk about sexuality. It’s like there’s an excess, I believe, even within Christianity, which is this idea that almost it’s almost like every time you have a sexual encounter, you should have a child. It’s like, I don’t think that that’s the proper way to see it. But then there’s also this notion that somehow the sole purpose of sexuality is for it to be a playground, you know, to to to to to explore your desires and your pleasure. And then there’s another aspect, which is that, you know, it doesn’t matter who it is. It doesn’t matter what what people as long as it brings you together and creates this this couple, you know. But the truth is that the Christian vision of sexuality is that all of those have to come together and it becomes an image of reality itself. It becomes and it becomes an image. It becomes a participation in reality because it that’s what it makes. It perpetuates society. It perpetuates it physically. It perpetuates it by creating families, which are the core of society and and and the love of the man and the woman in the couple is going to also perpetuate the cohesion of society. And then those families join together and are our communities. And so that’s that’s that’s the positive vision of sexuality for for Christian. And that’s the vision of marriage, I think, for many, many cultures. There are some exceptions, of course, with polygamy. But but the basic pattern is still the the same in terms of, you know, how things work in order for society to to to be functional. And so, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say about that. I always see it in terms of a positive. I don’t see it in terms of a negative. I see it as an understanding, a beautiful, powerful understanding of what the logos of sexuality is, what the purpose is and understanding that we all fall short of that. You know, understanding that we all all we. You know, that in our thoughts and in our actions that we we don’t we all fall short of it, but. Still understanding that that’s the ideal and that’s the that’s the logos and that’s what we should be striving towards in terms of how we how we live our sexuality. So, yeah, hope that answers your question, guys. All right. So Laura Jill asks as a Catholic with a deep interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, do you have an opinion about Eastern right Catholics? All right. I think I and that’s that’s the other question. I hope that my my first answer gave you gave you an answer to that. Says in particular, she see she feels strongly she would like to see increased dialogue between ancient churches. And I agree. I I totally agree. I think that that we need to continue to to talk and to speak to each other and to to understand the differences and to work to resolve them in a real way, not in a not in like I said, not in a political way, not in a not in a just pretending they don’t exist, but really. You know, continue to dive into it and and hopefully by the grace of God, one day we will have actual true communion between the churches. So so Jessica Gabe asks in Orthodox iconography, what is the significance of what appears to be ribbons emanating from the necks of angels? Also, why are the angels depicted with feminine characteristics? OK, so the the ribbons emanating from the necks of angels are not emanating from their necks. They are emanating from a guy. So I have it here. Here’s my icon. It’s a Michael. They are emanating from the headband. OK, so the angel has a headband which holds the hair and then it’s tied in the back. And then the ribbons are are floating floating out. And so why do they look like that? You’ll hear crazy, crazy, you’ll hear crazy theories about that. But I think that my theory is quite sound. It is simply to show that they’re floating. It is simply to show the floating when you see floating cloth, it is often to suggest a form of of spirituality. It’s like there’s wind blowing or they’re floating. Obviously, we don’t have to we don’t want to understand it in materialistic terms. It’s an imagery to show this notion of of of spirituality, of lightness, of of something which is floating. And so you see these floating ribbons that are kind of floating as if there’s you know that the the you know the the archangel is kind of floating up in the air. OK, you see that the archangel is kind of floating up in the air. OK, so you see that the archangel is kind of floating up in the air. OK, you see that often in when you see Christ at the at the resurrection at the resurrection icon, you see his you see his vestments have this floatiness to it. You know, and you see that here like right here. See, for example, you see same mom is here has this floaty floaty cloth. And so it’s it really is to show this this floating, floating cloth. And so it’s it really is to show this this kind of spiritual lightness that the that the character has. That’s the way I understand it as well. And why are angels depicted with feminine characteristics? They’re not they’re they’re not supposed to be depicted with feminine characteristics. They’re supposed to be represented with androgynous characteristics because they are not sexed. They they are neither male nor female. And so that’s why they’re represented. Usually the way that the way that it’s kind of understood is that they they have something what you would call kind of boyish, you know, kind of like a young, young man or like a or a young woman, you know, where where the man hasn’t doesn’t have a lot of beard yet or, you know, the kind of neutral kind of neutral, kind of neutral. So it is an androgynous aspect. All right. All right, guys, so I have gone through the question of how do angels and their Let me let me scroll down the the YouTube questions and see see if we have something interesting here. So H.R. Callum asks, Is it beneficial for Christians to really get to know our dark sinful side or evil tendencies by studying atrocities or evil deeds of people, for instance, because the Bible call us to understand evil. I would say that it’s probably better to study your own evil and atrocities rather than study other people’s evil and atrocities. Confession is really good for that. Just compunction in general, seeing all those side thoughts, you know, all that every time you judge someone, every time you you are angry every time you have weird power fantasies or, you know, whatever it is. That you find in yourself. I would say that that’s probably a much more useful way to go than to study atrocities in the world. I mean, we need to be aware of atrocities, but there is also and we need to understand that we have seen it happen. But there is, I think. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think there is a there could be a perverse pleasure in that. And I mean, I felt it myself. You know, when I at some point I listen to podcasts, I listen to different podcasts, they always show you like on the app, they always show you all these true crime podcasts. And I’m like, OK, I’ll check that out. I started listening to the true crime podcast and not sure. Not sure it was it was it’s helpful. Not sure it’s helpful, you know, because there’s a kind of weird dark fascination that we have with the same fascination that makes you watch horror movies or that makes you watch that kind of stuff. So, yeah, not sure. OK. All right. So land, land, Bort asks, Hey, Jonathan, I have an icon question for you. How was the general style of iconography developed and how do we know these images best reflect the divine? The best way to understand how the style of iconography developed is to understand it as an ascetic practice. That is, there was Roman art, which was very extremely central and extremely flamboyant. And the church basically removed all the excess and, you know, remove the extra curves, remove the central bodies and kept most of Roman art. But but let’s say strained it out, you know. And so that was the work that the church that the church did. And that’s why iconography looks the way that it does. And I think that the reason why it is the best style, I don’t know if we would say that it reflects the divine, but to the extent that something can reflect the divine, I think that this ascetic concentration and the capacity to concentrate the form is is probably a good a good answer to that. All right. All right, David Patterson asks, I would be interested in picking up again on the symbolism of water and the Old Testament and New Testament, especially the contrast between Jonah and the fish and Paul Shipwreck. Did we talk about that? Was it you, David, who asked that? I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m going to go back into that right now because it’s getting late. Maybe you could ask a more specific question next time and then I can either think about it and do a video about it or something. Could you say that the logos so Luke Fleischmann asked, could you say that the logos is the most natural thing there is? So the logos would be found even in that which is unnatural. I don’t know what the word unnatural means. Something which becomes unnatural is something which is not in its proper place. That’s what makes something unnatural. Everything is good when it’s in its proper place. And so that’s what that’s what makes something unnatural. And that’s why I talk about hierarchy. I talk about monsters. I talk about all that because I want you to understand that in the whole picture, there’s also that, you know, and so and so I don’t so I don’t think that things become unnatural when they are rebellious, you could say, or when they want more for themselves or when they want to isolate themselves from the whole. When they want to think that they’re that they have the fullness of reality within them. And so that’s that’s the problem with technology. Technology is a problem only to the extent that people see technology almost as a as a means, you know, as an end in itself. And they or they see it as a means to fill their own perverse desires. But technology in its technology as a as a thing would not necessarily be was unnecessarily bad. There’s a story that someone asked me several people asked me actually, why is it that in the in the in Tolkien story, Tom Bombadil is not affected by the Ring of Power. And it’s exactly that is that for the innocent, for those that are truly in the heart, for those that that are not are not tripped on their own on all their desires and all their externalities, those externalities are not dangerous to them. They are not. And so the ring has cannot have an effect on someone who is is in his heart and who has an innocence like a boy. It’s an innocent buoyancy, you could say, not naive, not naïve, but a capacity to not be seduced by the call of the of the of the kind of external things. All right. All right, guys, I think I think we’re done. We went a lot longer than not a lot longer, about 10 minutes longer than usual. So so yeah. So thanks for everybody. Thanks for for coming on. We got got a lot of interesting questions. I think I’m going to make the Q&A public this month because because I because I said I was going to answer the questions about art and everything. But we’ll see because I feel like I said a lot of weird stuff tonight to see if I’m going to make it public or not. But but yeah, so thanks for coming coming by, everybody. And I will see you see you guys next month.