January Q&A

Subscriber Q&A

Before we jump in just a reminder that I’m producing The East-West Series, a comprehensive 25-lecture exploration of the theological differences between Eastern and Western Christianity. We’re crowdfunding to complete production. Pre-order for the lowest price this series will ever be. Learn more at theeastwestseries.com.

Question 1

00:04:00 - The Secular vs. Sacred Distinction - I have been wrestling with the term “the secular” or the notion of the secular in recent years. I’ve thought of it as kind of incoherent—that there was no really true secular because all things are interconnected with your worldview. However, I’m reading Timothy Ware’s introduction to Eastern Christianity, and one thing that was interesting to me is he used the term “secular” pretty definitively, or at least he used it to make some points as he was talking about Byzantium and things like that. So I wondered if you could give any insight to just the notion of secular and how it may have evolved, especially in our modern age where secular is supposedly completely distinct from religion?

Question 2

00:28:44 - Ugliness and Evil in Art - My question is about aesthetics. Since you’re an artist and a philosopher and a filmmaker, I think it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what is the role of the portrayal of ugliness and evil in art? Because I think it definitely seems evident that there is a role. On the one hand, you have stories like Oedipus or King Lear—tragedy. And then another style of that is something like Dracula, which is really horrifying and grotesque, but that’s also a very deeply Christian novel. But obviously, I think we can also agree that there’s a kind of portrayal of ugliness that is quite poor. I would think of maybe David Lynch or in a very different style, like Quentin Tarantino. I think there’s a way in which ugliness can be damaging to the soul and a way in which it can be beneficial to the soul. How do you discern between good and bad in this respect?

Question 3

00:52:33 - What Grounds Epistemology? - My question is related to epistemology. As I’m encountering your content and discovering this world of realism and how it connects with Christianity and orthodoxy, and as I’m encountering even with the book club and in the recent podcast, you talked about how the ancients understood things—not in terms of “it’s Plato’s idea” or “this person’s idea,” but they were concerned with whether it’s true or not. I’m coming into this place of feeling like I have some way of measuring things and getting to the truth. But I think in a lot of my conversations I’m sidestepping something that I don’t really know. Do you have any suggestions or thoughts on what grounds epistemology?

Question 4

01:12:32 - Augustine’s Trinitarian Framework - My question is related to your East-West series. I know you’ve talked a little bit about Augustine, and you’ve talked a lot about Augustine being kind of the fountainhead of Western theology. My question is specifically about his Trinitarian framework. I know that Augustine is determined to try and create a Nicene Trinitarianism, but my question is exactly how successful is he? Because obviously we know he admits that he doesn’t know Greek, and at one point in De Trinitate he says, “You know, the Greeks make this distinction between ousia and hypostasis, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I’m just wondering, because I have a gut sense that it’s different than Nicaea, but I can’t effectively articulate how it’s different.

Question 5

01:27:38 - God’s Ideas and Particulars - In the idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers, it is the hypostasis that exists in themselves and gives concrete existence to the form. And then we have God’s ideas, and God has ideas because both are things that he makes, and the ideas are archetypes of what he intends to create. So do we have the same relation in God’s ideas with the particulars giving ground to the universal like we do in the images?

Question 6

01:34:07 - Overcoming Skepticism as a Christian - Are you familiar with Dr. Zachary Porky? He has this great little book called Journey to Reality. He does the catechism stuff at Trenum’s church in Riverside, California. The book is on the difference between a secular and sacramental worldview, and it has been just mind-blowing. He talks about the secular being marked by a separation between the material and the spiritual. Hearing you talk about all the realism and nominalism has been another eye-opening thing for me. I do think I can trust my faculties. So I’m a recovering nominalist, but one of the things I’m still struggling with is just the skepticism. I’m coming to understand that the Christian life is not primarily intellectual with a focus on the merely observable, which is what I’ve been taught my whole life, but that it’s participatory and that the physical participates in the spiritual through the sacraments and through embodied life in the church. That has been so freeing to me. But now I’m kind of going, okay, how do I shed the skepticism that comes from being formed in a secular materialist culture? Besides participating in the church and the sacraments, I just kind of feel right now like skepticism is the bouncer at the door of the church that won’t let me into the fullness of the faith, if you will. So besides those things I’ve mentioned, I’m just curious your wisdom and counsel on how to shed so much of this stuff.

Question 7

01:48:21 - Astrology, Planets, and the Apostles - My question is about image and likeness. I know you wrote an article on this recently in relation to iconography. When it comes to likeness and the name being a likeness, I’m thinking of the pagan gods and their association with the planets and the days of the week, and the fact that we continue to use them in the context of both the planets and the days of the week. I’m not going to call myself a recovering astrologer—I’ve ceased practicing astrology as I’ve joined the Orthodox Church—but I’m continuing to weed through a host of concerns in this respect. I’m quite familiar with a lot of the polemics against astrology, and one of the primary points being determinism or fate relative to free will. I’m about to be taking a class with a guy named Joshua Sturgill, who’s offering a class on the symbolic world. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts. One thing that I’ve been investigating is the association of the 12 apostles with the 12 signs of the Zodiac. It’s most evident in the four gospel writers and their association with the four beasts of the apocalypse, which are associated with the four fixed signs of the Zodiac. There is a tradition—it tends to be more on the Gnostic side of Christianity—where the apostles replace the signs of the Zodiac. I’m curious if you have a more general sense of Eastern fathers or more contemporary writers who can address some of these questions that I have.

Question 8

02:04:07 - Evolution and Orthodox Christianity - My question was about evolution. I became a Christian only a couple of years ago, and before that I was very much into scientism and the scientific world. One of the people that convinced me to start thinking about faith and Christianity was Ian McGilchrist. One of the things he spoke about was Henri Bergson and his idea of creative evolution—the idea that over time, evolution wasn’t a random process but was rather toward a telos or purpose, which was the production of humanity. That kind of opened my eyes and convinced me of the Christian faith and the idea of being made in the image of God, all the way to the incarnation and Christ. So I was going to an Anglican church, and then I came across some of your work and people like Father John Barron and other philosophers talking about monarchical Trinitarianism, and I thought I should become Orthodox. So I went over to the Orthodox Church—a Greek parish—and the first thing they asked me was, “Do you believe in evolution?” I think there was something Father Seraphim Rose wrote about death and how it came in. I found this quote from Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary on Genesis where he seems to be saying that if you go along the great chain of being, these things are instantiated temporally, progressively. So what are your thoughts on this?

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