Arise O God - A Cosmic Vision of the Gospel | with Fr. Andrew Damick

hello everybody i am uh here with father andrew damick who doesn't need much of an introduction but for those who don't know he is uh he is a head of ancient faith publishing content and he just published a new book called arise oh god the gospel of christ defeat of demons sins and death and i just finished the book it's a very interesting and succinct introduction to all the amazing stuff that uh that he's been talking about with father stephen on the lord of lord of spirits podcast and just kind of introducing people to a a more cosmic and a more story version of the salvation that christ brings and so i'm really happy to be able to uh to talk about that with him right now [Music] this is jonathan pedro welcome to the symbolic world [Music] thank you very much for having me on jonathan it's it's always a joy to be with you so tell us a little bit about the kind of the impetus for writing this new book of yours right so i i i most of my writing comes from a sense of frustration actually which i don't know if that's the best way to do it but it's it's what i've got and my frustration in this particular case was that i wanted a book that summarized the gospel from a truly orthodox christian point of view that i could use for uh evangelistic and catechetical purposes and just trying to relate what the orthodox christian faith is to people you know for whatever reason they might be interested in it and um there as far as i know at least in english there there isn't such a book um that does that and um so i had the idea of um particularly framing it in terms of a lot of the things that we talk about in the lord of the spirits podcast because not just to kind of you know promote the podcast or whatever but because that's what i actually believe the gospel is about right and so you know the the basic frame is that there is a cosmic war on and we are caught up in the midst of it we're kind of in the crossfire and uh the gospel is what happens to us really in response to that war it's what god does in the midst of that war that has something to do with us as human beings and um so so that's that's the the genesis behind the book um i'm very very interested in um an evangelistic work and in you know education and so forth and so i'm always looking for new ways to uh convey this kind of thing to people yeah one of the great parts of the book let's say especially in in let's say protestant catholic north america especially kind of protestant culture in north america this idea that the gospel is you know this how you're going to be saved basically it's framed as what the individual it's a frame that's kind of the let's say the advantage to the individual and how you're going to go to heaven and you need to believe these things and kind of have faith in a broad sense and this atonement this kind of substitutionary version of of christ's sacrifice and that way you go to heaven but you present something which is far more cosmic and is more about the gospel being this proclamation of what's happening right this is what's happening in the cosmos now how are you going to participate in this transformation right yeah you know i i was raised as the son of evangelical protestant missionaries and so uh what is the gospel how do you communicate the gospel that's was on my mind from a very very early age and one of the things that i found is the way that most people in the english-speaking world think of what the gospel is is they think it's about what christ can do for them right and and i mean i could i could express that in very cynical terms like you know how can jesus make my life better or or or you know much better terms like okay the gospel is about how you are saved from from hell how you are saved from from sin and death you know and um while it's true that the gospel is related to those things um if we put it in those terms right that it's essentially about something that that uh fixes a problem in my life let's say um if if that's what i understand the gospel is then that means that communicating the gospel to people is essentially a kind of sales pitch right because you know if someone's selling something to you they come to you and say okay you have a problem or you have a lack in your life you know that there's something there's a problem that you need to be fixed and i i i have the answer i i'm here to give this to you right and you know so so again looking at it not cynically saying well i'm here to give you the answer for free you know you just have to get on board with whatever version of get on board that means right um but looking at it cynically it comes across as a kind of sales pitch and um a lot of times especially people who are not not believers in christianity they experience it that way and uh they take it very cynically like well you just want me to join your thing so you can get money out of me or you just want me to join your your thing because you know you you want to just you know it's affirming for you of how many converts you can make or that kind of thing and you know that's the problem with understanding the gospel as being how i get saved because then it's completely about what is the problem of the person in front of me how can i sort of sell them you know my solution i mean i i might really believe in it and not be profiting from it in any way but still it's essentially a kind of sales pitch you have a problem i have the solution right whereas um the gospel as it's expressed in the bible is not that there is no point in which any apostle ever comes up to someone says let me tell you about what jesus can do for your life like there's no point in which they say you look you have a problem and i have the solution to your problem like that's that never happens in scripture right what happens is when the gospel begins being preached they pick this word for it uh evangelion is the greek word right which most the time you see that word explicated by people that say it means good news and that is literally what the word means if you pull it apart etymologically good and news right but in the ancient world that's not how the word was used the word was actually used in the ancient world to refer to something that was about to happen the announcement of something that was happening and that really you didn't have much choice about actually it was something that was about to happen to you in fact right um and i'll explain why i'm not a calvinist in just a second but uh it was about like the idea of a victory of an emperor the victory or the emperor is coming everybody be ready this is this is it isn't a way for them the way they were presenting was it's good news it's like you know caesar has vanquished our foes you know now we will have this these riches will have this and he's accumulating glory for rome and so there's this kind of sense of this uh this the the this this vanquishing of foes and this kind of heroic gesture yeah and the the evangelion they usually expressed in plural was when a herald would ride into the city and he would open up his scroll or whatever and say three things this is the lord whom i serve let's say he serves caesar you know augustus whoever this is who he is uh you know maybe listing off all his amazing titles this is what he's accomplished listing off all of his victories in battle and you know and he's bringing this along with him and now this is what he expects of all of you yeah right he's coming to take over the city and so you can either get on board with his rule or you can be put outside the rule which in the roman world largely meant that you were going to be slaughtered uh you know the idea of moving somewhere else to find a new government just was not a thing yeah right and so when you know when the apostles choose this word evangelion saying by the way this is the gospel they are saying the same thing they are identifying who their lord is jesus christ they're saying what he's done he's defeated his enemies and they're saying what he expects of you uh if you know if you're going to be part of his kingdom part of his rule yeah right and so that's what the gospel is it's actually a declaration of victory really on an offer no exactly it can help you understand a lot even of the way that the orthodox represent for example the crucifixion we always have nica in the crucifixion in the sense that there is this in the story of christ there is this almost kind of incomprehensible joining of opposites in which his death vanquishes death in which you know his humiliation turns into glory but it is nonetheless participating in the most surprising way in this idea of the king who takes his throne of the emperor who vanquishes not just his enemies but basically the enemy of all which is death itself right yeah you know there's a lot of people who have heard of this model they call it christus victor right the idea that christ is victorious and um which is good right but sometimes the the circle is not extended out very far it's only extended into christ is victorious over the problems of my life right um so i mean that that is true but it's really a narrow narrow understanding um we have to understand that like i said there was a war you know if it's if it's an announcement a victory over enemies then you have to know who those enemies are and people in the ancient world who were living in under idolatry they had an actual day-to-day experience of interacting with demonic beings and in many cases relying on them or thinking they can rely on them right so so it's it's a victory not just over sort of metaphysical problems or a victory over the problems of my life it's a victory over actual spiritual enemies who are being defeated actual fallen angels and actual demonized uh human souls who have participated with those fallen angels right so so we're being rescued not just from a kind of internal problem we're actually being rescued rescued from the domination of dark powers yeah and it i mean there is an analogy between the two that is it like he's what we're saying it doesn't mean that christ won't if you participate in his life you participated in the sacraments if you live the life that christ uh directed for us like that you won't solve your problems you will solve your problems but that's not that's not the limit of what christ does right right the connection between these principalities which have been ruling over the world which have kind of led the world into degeneracy and into violence into all these these kind of dark places uh that these are real and that christ defeated them both in you that is the passion that has a cosmic virgin in these demons but then also in the world we are we've yet to see it fully realized but we have these burgeoning images of that in the saints in the in the communion of saints and in the communion that we all participate in the church itself right right exactly you know that there's there's a macro and a micro level to all of this and the reason why that's important right is not just so that we have the big picture it actually affects the way people live their lives if they understand that they're part of something bigger you know i'll just give you a really good example a very small example but one that actually affects people all the time so as a priest you know i hear confessions and a lot of times people talk about the the evil thoughts that they have and sometimes where they act on those evil thoughts i mean this is an experience we all have yeah right and most of the time they will say something like i don't know what's wrong with me or i can't make those thoughts go away right or something like that you know is is is am i just not really a christian or you know something like that right so there's this this sense of a closed system that they're experiencing and they they uh you know because for their from their point of view christianity is about fixing what's going on in that closed system but if you understand that christ's defeat of demons his defeat of cosmic enemies of god right that that that you know mediates all the way down to us on our individual level then you'll begin to understand that evil thoughts actually come from outside and so the fact that you keep having an evil thought doesn't mean that you have a fatal flaw it means that the enemy continues to attack you right that the enemies of god are not me or people doing bad things in the world the enemies of god are actual spiritual beings right and so it you know if we reduce the gospel to how can god solve my problems uh even understood in the best possible way then then the temptation to despair is very easy right uh and you know it's interesting if you read especially the writings of some of the modern uh holy elders of the orthodox church they talk about demons all the time all the time you know it it's constant because they understand very clearly that the the intrusive evil thoughts that we have are temptations coming from outside right and the fact that we keep having them doesn't mean i'm you know a spiritual loser right it just means that the enemy continues to shoot his darts at me yeah well you read the story of saints who you know after 30 years of fasting and doing all they're still struggling they sell these thoughts to kind of intrude on them and sometimes like you said it's true that even when i read those texts i am tempted to despair because i'm thinking okay man this like i'm not even you know like a tent on the road of this amazing aesthetic but but it's like it seems like this this problem is something that is that is going to kind of uh follow us you know until we're fully glorified let's say it's true i mean like there's that beautiful amazing icon of saint anthony in the desert being attacked by demons like physically attacked by demons and here's a man who is super advanced spiritually right and yet he's experiencing these attacks and i'm sure he didn't say unless some demon whispered this idea to him he didn't say to himself i guess i just have a fatal flaw you know exactly right you know and and you know part so part of what the book does is it sets up the battlefield like why is it that this we are having this experience of demonic attack you know it's because of the the sort of the three problems of mankind that mankind experiences right so the introduction initially of of death right which that comes through the influence of a demon talking to eve and then adam gets on board with that and then the introduction of sin which comes as a result of demonic attack on cain because death kind of opened the door for sin to be released into the world as this evil influence and then and then eventually especially after the tower of babel you get the domination of the nations kind of by direct rule of demons right and so yeah this is something which people don't know a lot about because it doesn't say that in the story of the tower of babel says it later i think it's in deuteronomy uh where the idea that god said upon the world these angels that we're supposed to manage that were kind of that were these principalities that were supposed to manage the world it also helps us in our like both you and i we we have this argument against monotheism in the silly sense like in the simplistic sense like there's just god no god functions through all these principalities and intelligences that come all the way down to us um but that at the tower babel these principalities were set upon the world and then they started to accept worship and so there's a fragmentation and the fragmentation that we see almost in the story of the tower of babel seems to reflect that fragmentation itself where people started to just worship their own thing or have their incomprehensible language that was self-contained and so they they worship these these demons um and so this this version the book really does take you on the cosmic story very kind of nice and tight version of this cosmic story of the fall of the relationship between these cosmic intelligences and the individual how we move all the way into christ that's kind of solving the puzzle and so like i said at the beginning it's for people that like a lot of people when i tell them go into lord of spirits they look at the amount of podcasts and like the three-hour podcast one after the other and they think oh my you know and even even father stephen's book really jim the apostle which is great but it's a little like for some people it might be a little much to chew on at the outset so your book really is a very nice type uh narrative version of this whole kind of cosmic story yeah yeah like one of the things that some people have said so i've got a copy of it right here there you go some people have said they're like this book is really small yes uh and it's i think it's about like 26 or 7 000 words total um but that's actually super deliberate because it's focused specifically on what is the gospel and you know it starts out by saying like what's not the gospel right so it's not the offer it's not a sales pitch now people do have a choice to get on board when caesar rides into town you can either get on board with caesar or you can resist him and then suffer the consequences of that right so you do have a choice again i'm not a calvinist uh but then i explain also like why wha what's the need for a gospel right so i talked about you know the these three problems of mankind that all have to do with demons death sin and direct domination by demons and then i flip i show i flip it then and so okay so here's the announcement here's who christ is here's what he accomplished which he fixed those three problems in essentially the reverse order so he begins by um you know he releases us from domination by demons by exorcism he releases us from slavery to sin by forgiveness and then he destroys the power of death by resurrecting right and uh and then and then having shown what the announcement to the gospel is then i ask the question well how do you how do you respond right so you see this in the bible all the times someone an apostle preaches the gospel to someone and then and then they say what must i do to be saved right they don't they don't say oh you just told me what i have to do to be saved now what must i do to be saved right because if if the gospel was what must i do to be saved then why would they say that or they ask that exactly yeah it's the announcement oh wait someone's coming he's coming to judge the living and the dead what do i have to do to get on board with this right and then and then and then you know very succinctly i also then talk about what happens when you do get on board with it you know how is how does this actually change you and your your destiny and and what does that have to do with so if demons are connected with all of our problems then actually angels are connected with all the solutions yeah as as a matter of fact and we then become like them right yeah that's something which i think i think you really illuminated for so many people the idea that in understanding the divine counsel and understanding god sitting in his divine counsel as you know all these managing principalities that that's that kind of sit over the cosmos with god as their king or god as the infinite source of these these smaller powers then all of a sudden the idea of becoming like gods or or you know or you know becoming like angels is not just a little metaphor that we can kind of understand as becoming more spiritual or something like that but it is really this idea of this this possibility of human beings becoming real principalities in the world and becoming managers and pillars by which reality actually man you know shows itself and little examples of that of course are in the idea of patron saints for different aspects of reality but also patrons of of places and patrons of churches patrons of communities as this this little seed or this burgeoning image of how we will ultimately reign with christ and and become like angels yeah right you know most orthodox people and a lot of other people who have studied um early christianity they probably know this phrase from saint athanasius the great in on the incarnation where he says uh and you could translate this several different ways but god became human that man might become divine or sometimes god became man that man might become god with a small g or a big g depending although in ancient greek you don't have it's just all big big uh actually it's a big theta it's not a g um you know um but what's interesting so then a lot of people see that like okay wow so you know through the incarnation of christ if we participate in that we can become like god we become divine in some sense right um what's really fascinating is uh saint athanasius actually puts all of this in the framework of adoption adoption as sons right and and and again a lot of times people then they'll see that and say oh we're the children of god but you actually have to plug in that phrase sons of god into an existing framework in scripture right which that phrase sons of god actually refers to a very high rank of angels so you know christ himself mentions this in luke 20 36 which when i was an evangelical i don't think i ever heard a sermon about this verse but christ says that the sons of the resurrection becomes sons of god and equal to the angels you go look it up yourself it's luke 20 36 you know so so he says that those who are in christ those who who are who you know rise in christ and rise to life everlasting they are sons of god again that's a rank of angels and he says to kind of bear down on the idea equal to the angels which means that this process of theosis is very intimately connected with our angelology yeah right now we don't become we don't take on angel nature i don't you know we can't do that we remain human but we become equal to the angels right which means that we then we begin to do their works because their works are to do the works of god and so if we do the works of god then we are functioning the way that the angels do and as you said you know we see this in in the idea of patron saints who they function exactly like angels i mean look at what saints do in the history of the church they do all the things that angels do in scripture they appear to people they take care of people they they hear their pleas and with god's power not their own with god's power they they help them uh you know they they protect them they do battle against uh evil spiritual beings um they they guide people into into knowledge of god like all of these things are angelic functions you know they bear messages from god these are all things that the saints do so they are becoming the sons of god yeah right yeah and so and this kind of narrative more cosmological version of the transformation of the person in no way has to stand in competition or go against the more mystical transformation that we see in the the field khalia and the notion of this kind of transformation of the person you know being free from the sins you know becoming more in the image of god in a in in a proper sense that is really being transformed as a being into light into you know being united with this uncreated light that this kind of more mystical vision which in some way has been more popular maybe in the in the 19th 20th century because of just because we're materialists and we struggle with the more mythological image of that that no we need those two versions of it one which is almost like a more technical or more uh theological description of the transformation of the person and the other one which is more of this kind of participation in a cosmic story which is there in scripture the whole time and moves into the eschaton you know and the images of of the last judgment and all these wonderful images that we see you know in in in the i like iconography that this is part of what this transformation reveals to us let's say right yeah that you know those those visions are completely integrated within orthodox tradition and in the scriptures the the reason why we tend to disintegrate them is because of individualism because of of modernism and individualisms right so you know theosis becomes about my journey in christ you know like which is like it's not wrong but it's super incomplete and actually can distort what we're doing right and you know this is this is everywhere for instance in uh orthodox hypnography like there's there's one hymn that i i heard for years and years which talked about you know christ going after the lost sheep and then adding it to the heavenly hosts yeah wow like literally it says that he goes after the lost sheep and then makes it one of the you know part of the angelic coasts and i heard that's that's him for years and i i i just let it kind of fly by and until i really realized like wait this is what sons of god means that we become part of the hosts of heaven then now i mean this stuff is now popping everywhere yeah i was thinking little dots of light are starting to connect into a pattern right right and and and honestly it's very uh inspiring and and exciting you know it's not just okay i'm on the sort of solitary journey to greatness um but rather i'm i you know by god's grace i'm headed deeper and deeper into this this vast host of of uh uh divine beings yeah right and theologically we we understand it more easily right in the sense that as we kind of rise towards god's our prayers and our love of others is kind of bringing others into god with us we kind of understand it when we say it abstractly but when we really understand it cosmologically then it actually appears like you said as patron saints who appear to people who who make who do miracles who you know who so it it's not just a it's not just a like an abstract thing it's something which actually uh let's say binds communities together with with visions and transformations and miracles and all this stuff at the same time yeah yeah there are so many kind of apologetical problems that we create by accepting individualism you know if we can set that aside and and recover this cosmic sort of mythic understanding of what's going on in scripture then all of these things kind of fall into place much more easily like if you understand who the sons of god are then you kind of don't really need to give an apologetic for the intercession of the saints because it's already there or like someone would say well why do you have saints you know i see angels like well actually this the angels are the original saints like the word is being used for them in scripture the holy ones of god saints and holy ones are literally just different english you know expressions from two different parts of our inheritance that mean exactly the same thing yeah you know that's our angels are the original saints yeah and we're just saying that people are being added into that and it's such a beautiful image of this movement you know into the fall and then into the the new jerusalem for example as this this glorification in christ of man all of this it just makes so much sense once you see the grand story of scripture that this will be part of the the transformation and so i wanted to as we're talking about this kind of mythical understanding of christianity something we're both very excited about i wanted to ask you a little bit about something else that you're working on i know maybe some people don't know that father andrew is actually now in the universe despite all the crazy things that he's doing all the podcasts all the books managing ancient faith content he's also back in school uh studying i think it's is it anglo-saxon northern mythology exactly what are you studying so okay so i'm studying at signum university which is a fully online master's degree program and um the degree is language and literature and i have two concentrations within that so on the one hand there's a concentration that's called uh classical literature or something like that but i'm basically steering it towards mythology right and then the other concentration is tolkien studies and the cool thing is there's a lot of overlap between those two and right so it's it's i'm taking one class a semester so that's three classes a year uh the first class i took was called tolkien and tradition and it's literally these two things together looking at mythological sources alongside what tolkien did with some of them um and then this the second class i took was introduction to old english so just straight you know learning a language and translating and stuff and now i'm doing beowulf in old english and so we're translating about 300 lines of beowulf a week which is super labor-intensive um i mean it's it's a little crazy yeah but but it's you know beowulf is interesting because i think a lot of times especially before tolkien started getting hold of it and really talking about it publicly in the middle of the 20th century um a lot of a lot of people looked at beowulf as just being sort of a monster story you know i like and well you know amongst our various pieces of mythology this is not really the best of them you know beowulf doesn't go on to found some great civilization or something like this uh tolkien complains about this in an essay that he wrote called beowulf the monsters and the critics um but but beowulf is indeed a monster story but the whole point of it actually is this this uh collision between a christian world and a world that frankly is about monsters and dealing with monsters so like beowulf is this sort of demonic giant-ish you know being who lives in a kind of grotto uh underneath a lake in the mountains in this sort of bog area right and uh you know he has this he hates the the festivity and the the i mean grendel i was like you you're not babe with himself that's it yeah did i say bail it's fine i just don't want to give you right i kind of got grendel is the monster yeah yeah beowulf is the hero um but you know and it's interesting like just to give you the interesting thing one of the interesting things about beowulf is it's set within a christianity that understands this mythic unders mythic view of the world and and like there isn't another one to even compare it to like this is simply the world they live in to give you one little example so beowulf kills grendel first by ripping his arm off yeah uh and then and then you know grendel you know runs away and and dies down in his cave uh but then his mother comes and begins to uh to do the same evil to the high hall that that her son had been doing as kind of her revenge for him so beowulf has to go down and deal with the mother as well when he goes down there he finds all these weapons down in the cave and um and it doesn't say this in there but you know again this is a kind of bog monster so there is this suggestion if you know something about bog sacrifices that perhaps these are things that had been shoved down in there by pagans who were making offerings to these demonic beings now this is not written in the poem but but that is part of what this world includes yeah right so beowulf finds all these weapons down there and he gets the sword this mighty sword and he uses it to slay grendel's mother and then he while he's at it he decides to cut the head off of grendel who's already dead and then the the blade melts away because of the sort of the toxicity of the blood of these monsters but then on the hilt there's some kind of depiction or writing there about the giants and their war with god and about how god sent a flood to deal with the giants so like this this this uh conflict the giganto maki right the war against giants is embedded into the story with this short little reference that everyone who listens to the poem in the 8th century is going to know yeah right this this is there and there's there's there's stuff like this all throughout yeah i think grendel is even he's even suggested or it's presented that grando is a kind of descendant of kane oh yeah that he's the descendant of kane and so i i remember reading i remember reading scholars talking about bagels saying how all of this was just a kind of cheap add-on to to the story you know like these christian references were just kind of added on to make it acceptable to christian audience but i think it's those scholars that didn't understand just how integrated this vision of the world these this this idea of the monstrous races and the giants and how it that's actually really part of the of the christian story from the beginning right you know you've been doing uh you've had some videos with richard rowland talking about this question of universal history and um the truth is is that pretty much every ancient mythology has a number of elements to it that are that that they all share right so like a great example is almost all of them have some kind of flood story yeah and a lot of people know that oh like there's all you know maybe there was some kind of big flood you know and so they all talk about this but a lot of people don't realize is that connected with the flood story is usually also a story of giganto maki a war against giants um it's it's it's in almost every mythology that's out there right you know even not just european ones either you get it you know even in native american stuff there's giants and then a flood comes and wipes out the giants right this this happens over and over again um you know in norse mythology when odin and his brothers decide to kill the big sort of primordial giant emir uh his his toe begins bleeding and the the blood floods the entire earth and kills mostly giants you know like it this is this is everywhere or you know in in the epic gilgamesh you know and kedu is basically like noah i mean there's a noah figure in the norse story too although weirdly noah is a giant in the norse version um and uh you know like this kind of thing is everywhere and so like the reason that i'm studying mythology occasionally i get people asking me like why are you studying all this pagan literature you know uh why would you want to read that right and number one people should understand actually that most pagan literature that we have did not come directly from pagans almost all of it came through christian scribes yeah exactly who preserved it and copied i mean you know making books before the advent of printing was a super slow and expensive process and uh christians for centuries upon centuries decided to spend a lot of their resources on retaining pagan literature yeah right and and it's not because they were syncretists it's because they saw this literature as representing something true about their world that they were part of now you know uh they weren't saying you know you should just simply accept everything that's in here and like go ahead and worship these gods and you know whatever they're not saying that uh but rather like so saint bazel the great actually has this text called uh it's usually called something like um an address on the uses of greek literature to young men or something like that so he's talking about education and he actually says the crazy wild thing that you should read and master homer before you ever read the bible he actually says now i do not teach that uh you know but he actually says this in the fourth century why so why would he say that i think part of it is that um the scripture is so much responding to what's happening in paganism that we have to understand that in order to understand the scripture correctly yeah right now in in basil's time paganism was really on its way out there were still some pockets of it in the roman empire but not too many right by the time you get to the late fourth century um but so it's not like basil is saying like you know we need to fight against those pagans right he's not really saying that i mean there are pagans around but not a lot um but he is saying that this body of knowledge this body of story is part of our story yeah right and you get for instance like there's a lot of ways that that gets sort of dealt with um you know one of my favorite examples is comes from i think a 13th century church in norway where if you were to walk up to the front of the church you know to the front doors you would see these beautiful wooden carvings on either side of the door that clearly are depicting scenes from a story well it's the story of sigurd killing the dragon fafnir which is a story from norse mythology yeah right and you're like well what's going on here and i've had people suggest me oh they're trying to sort of trick pagans to come in and like i'm like well how stupid are pagans seriously like there's a cross up on top of this church you know like they're not that and like as soon as they get through the door they're gonna see jesus everywhere it's not like they're gonna be like oh well i came here thinking i was gonna go ahead and worship thor but you know i might as well stay for jesus like that's not what's going on rather these are christians who are saying this is in a sense part of our story you know and especially on the outer door it's like it's it's almost in the way that saint basil said you almost have to kind of have these stories this network of stories before you enter into the church but just like we have in the narthex and many monasteries you know the greek philosophers and and this kind of idea that the pre-christian world has something something bubbling in it which can then be kind of pointed uh pointed towards christ and right now it seems that like when i when i heard that you were studying mythology you know for me it made so much sense because as we kind of in a way not knowing these ancient stories and not knowing mythology was a leisure of a christian world like it was the leisure of a of a world that was so fully christian that we could almost forget the cosmic story around which in which christianity uh was born but now in this as the christianity is kind of evacuating public space as it's fragmenting into all this this kind of nonsense then all of a sudden the relevance of these ancient stories and of the pagan stories become important again in my opinion because we need to be able to kind of represent in the secular world this cosmic vision and how all these stories ultimately do point to christ because people are tempted by them people and all these neil pagans and all these people looking at in other cultures and looking at buddhist stories and vedantic stories and you know all these other myths and if as christians we're not able to see the bubbling in those stories the kind of kind of frothing that is pointing towards christ and we're missing an opportunity to uh to kind of find the lights in the darkness let's say yeah yeah one of the things i earnestly believe is that demons are coming back oh yeah now i i don't think that they went anywhere right you know they haven't they haven't they have not actually all been cast into the abyss although fortunately for us most of them have but there are still enough to cause massive problems and they cause bigger problems when we engage with them in a cooperative way and i think that as you as you said you know as christianity continues to recede from public life that more and more people are cooperating with demonic powers and so i think it's especially important that we understand exactly who those demonic powers are and what they do and that is also part of why i'm reading mythology is you know it's it's not necessarily that there is a demon called uh thor who who does thor things and and i need to find him and point him out or whatever but rather if i understand the stories about thor then i can see interactions that people actually are having with demons in the ancient world because you know like we have this idea that pagans made up stories of gods in order to explain natural phenomena they didn't understand but that is never the way they said it yeah right that is that is we're imposing that narrative on top of them when we say that they all talked about actually meeting spiritual beings and interacting with them so now we can decide okay i don't believe you i don't believe you every single culture or throughout the history of the world for thousands of years i don't believe that any of you actually had these experiences yeah or maybe but i think it's harder to it's harder to justify that right now with the return of psychedelics and all these it's getting harder and harder getting involved in in these these kind of returning to to hallucinogens than having experiences which are objective across individuals you realize that okay no no there's something going on right now in the world there's some kind of there are these cracks that are forming and there's there are these things seeping in and the and we find a relationship between the enochian story of downfall with the the turn to magic and technology into hybrids into chimera and we can see the very same obsessions that are popping up right now and it's and the fact that it's actually related to people taking these substances and then encountering these beings it's like nah i think it's harder even for atheists and materials to argue with what's going on right and you know in the ancient world um taking substances in order to directly connect with your gods was something that was totally normal yeah so like some of my ancient baltic ancestors for instance uh i don't know if they had access to psychedelics or not but there was actually a saying that unless you drink enough beer that god can't hear you right so there's this notion that drunkenness was kind of required for prayer of a certain kind right and you know the other way that ancient people actually directly interacted with gods was by offering sacrifices to them and eating them um and there are people now doing that again right there food being offered in front of idols of gods and people are eating them so that actually puts you directly into communion with that god it's it's it's the eucharist it's the pagan eucharist essentially yeah right you know the reason why the eucharist works is the same reason why that works uh but the big difference is who you're doing it with are you doing it with the god who made you and loves you and has sacrificed himself for you or are you doing it with this lesser spiritual being who actually just wants to drag you down into the abyss with him yeah and he's going to make all kinds of false promises to you along the way yeah and there's even it almost seems like there's even like the way that it's happening now the way it's manifesting itself and kind of these new age movements and new pagan movements it's almost even more chaotic than what you see in like a regular pagan cult it's like it's completely unhinged and chaotic and improvised and there's it's almost like people are just it's as if the pagans even though they were dealing with demons they they maybe they had found a way to maybe like hold the fire in a box or something they were kind of had a way to tame it somehow like not really but at least a little bit but now it feels like people are just with running around with matches in the in in houses filled with explosives and they're like oh look at this effect look at what happens here oh this actually works this blows up like it's like they just have spiritual experiences and they think that that's enough to justify their behavior right and you know the difference between us now and ancient peoples with their paganism is you know ancient peoples were doing this in community right they saw that the worship of the god bound them together the god became part of their community they became part of that god's community right and they had notions of gods that they worshipped that were supposedly going to do good for the good things for them and they also knew that they were there were got you know gods who were going to harm them and so they did things to ward them off right so you're the modern person engaging with these spirits does not have even that pagan wisdom no discernment zero discernment yeah yeah it's individualistic because this is this is through the blends of modernism now so it's individualistic it's it's my personal journey what's happened is this is paganism through the lens of individualistic distorted christian gospel selling right so it's it's now it instead of let me tell you what jesus can do for your life it's let me tell you what this angel that i met you know through doing drugs can do for your life right so what we've done is we now have this this reformation reduced gospel and we're now using it in a pagan way right and and so i mean it's just it's utterly frightening and horrifying right because because even even the community kinds of safeguards that pagans put in place you know that's not even there this is just people in their in their own homes doing these things separately and um you know because we live in a time where everything is contested and contestable even where communities do form of of neopagans and and or people doing these doing drugs together and so forth it's still all very fluid yeah because they're not for instance bound together by place right you know most of these networks exist on the internet um if they are bound together by place there's almost nothing preventing them from moving somewhere else you know like you know an ancient person did not tend to move very often unless he was spurred by necessity somehow yeah you know now it's like oh well i i just want to move to this place i'm going to move there or or you know i got a job in another state i'm going to go there and i'm going to go to another country um so all of the all of the kind of limitations that the ancient world provided people are no longer there and so it's just this utter explosion of spiritual engagements and um it's very a lot of it is very very dangerous very very dangerous and he gives you insight into the flood like it it gives you insight into how this type of behavior and these types of practices can lead to such a fragmentation you know or the tower of babel like you know where everybody ends up it's even worse than the tower of babel it's like every individual just ends up speaking their own idiosyncratic spiritual language and there's no relationship between anybody else i mean this is what it says in scripture every man did what was right in his own eyes yeah exactly i mean that that's like that you know in the modern world that's not a bug that's a feature but it really is a bug you know that's that's what it's that is the damning thing that is said about the immediate pre-flood civilization every man did what was right in his own eyes yeah it's amazing yeah it's amazing to realize just how just how much it's it's like what we're going through now gives us insight into what is in the scripture and vice versa but it's not necessarily pleasant to have that insight it's actually quite frightening to kind of feel on the edge of the precipice and to to see kind of everything toppling over right and and you know there is even a distorted version of this that's hitting christianity too right because so christianity is a universal message and call it's absolutely universal it involves nothing less than the whole cosmos yeah right but now there is also this idea of well i should have my version of christianity maybe my nationalistic version maybe my ideological version my whatever version right and and i'll have my little sect and you know the more positive versions of that just say well this is this is for these people who live in this place you know we're going to keep those other people at arm's length but this is you know and but then the the dark version where it inevitably goes it becomes about conflict and it becomes about conquest this is literally the narrative of paganism playing out under christian guys you know the the these sort of nationalisms and um all of this is a very you know identitarianism of every kind whether it's interesting to see whatever that there that like you said they're versions of it on both sides of the political spectrum right there's there's the kind of weird nationalism and this this holding on to these these national identities versus others and then then there's the the kind of consumer version of that where i want i shop around for a church that meets my needs and you know whatever has the best like uh the the best babysitting there's like that's the church i'm gonna go to like whichever church fills my needs the most is the one and so you have virgins both on the right and the left you could say of these types so and and one there where it's like i'm going to go to church that everybody agrees with me politically that everybody agrees with my ideology uh it's just some general phenomena of this kind of this breakdown yeah and you know you can see so the opposite of that is the way that for instance the orthodox church talks about saints of particular places right now some people see that and say oh look at these russian orthodox saints or these greek or whatever whatever adjective you want to put on but actually the way that the church talks about scenes in particular places it says the saints who have shown forth in this land right it's not that they are that that land defines them because they belong to the heavenly hosts who are a cosmic reality yeah so it's closer to the idea of the universal history as we're presenting it it's like it's actually a way for these particular places to kind of be joined up into the story of christ and into the life and body right and you know and that's what gives those places there in their particular beauty right it's only as they refer to the cosmic narrative that they actually can shine forth when it becomes when the gaze gets turned back down towards created things that's when it becomes idolatrous that's when it becomes essentially pagan you know any kind of anything that draws a spiritual border between me and another person it becomes a dark distorted thing that actually doesn't have anything to do with christ but when we were both looking to christ then our then our particulars shine forth in their specific beautiful way exactly and that's really the the whole cosmic mystery that see in saint maximus you know that's what we see in all these these saints that show us how multiplicity you know when it's turned towards god when it's turned towards christ and it starts to to shine but when it turns towards itself just like when adam took the apple you know just all the sins of pride that we see in the in the bible then you sink down in the mire and you you know you lose that that that that brightness yeah you know the the it's it's hard because like we we this problem of the universal in particular has always been sort of with us right and and a lot of times when people see totalitarian approaches to things right then then they resist the idea of any kind of universal but the problem with the totalitarianism is not that it's universal it's that it's universal in the wrong way yeah right it's about universal power or something like that or you know making everyone think exactly the same but but christianity is truly universal and the way that it's universal brings out the light of everyone that's within it yeah you know um that's that's hard for us you know because uh like we hear the call of the universal call to for instance to love all of mankind and that can then take us we can become totalitarian if we don't refer that to god you know but but if we we react against that which i think is you know reacting against totalitarianism is a totally normal and utterly appropriate thing to do um but the we the way we need to react against it is not to say i'm gonna draw my little fortress here and and i'm gonna invite the people i want into it and everyone else is not welcome um you know what however they want to define that the right way is to say you know what the kingdom of god is the kingdom you know and in my father's house there are many mansions right that's that's the way that it actually works it's only with that king that you can actually have a universal society you know it's not no other king will suffice you know and and any other king that exists needs to refer his throne back to the throne of god or else it's going to become a very dark and and distorting kind of kingdom yeah yeah and it's it's a warning to all of us to not draw our to not draw our life from politics you know and to not not discount it it's important it exists we have to deal with it but to not feel like that this is where our life comes from because it's not yeah all that stuff has to be relative to the kingdom of god yeah yeah well father i think this is a great it's a great place to end you know this is a i think that this call is is right and everybody get you know get the book let god arise it's just came out it's fresh off the of the presses and uh we'll definitely check in with father andrew again you know as he kind of discovers this the the mythological worldview more and more we'll definitely find places to uh to connect again so thank you father andrew thank you very much

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 3,684

Rating: 4.9698491 out of 5

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: 6U7c_89FeWM

Length: 53min 23sec (3203 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021