The Symbolism of the Book - with
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- Опубліковано 16 лип 2024
- Seraphim Hamilton is an Orthodox theologian who is committed to helping others understand the deep and profound ways that the inspired Scriptures bear witness- in Old and New Testaments- of Jesus Christ as the center and culmination of the human story. He received a Master of Arts in Theology and Classics from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Theology from Duke University. He posts regular Scriptural reflections five days a week at his substack and addresses a variety of subjects on his UA-cam channel: / kabane
Substack: seraphimhamilton.substack.com/
In this discussion with Seraphim, we talk about the book as a symbol. We discuss the Book of Life in Revelation, Scripture itself, literacy in early Christendom, the use of the codex over the scroll, the sacraments and sacred objects, memory, supplementarity, and more. Enjoy!
Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
00:43 - Intro music
01:09 - Introduction
01:57 - The role of the book
04:02 - Early Christianity
05:42 - Judaism
07:38 - The Tabernacle and the temple
11:26 - The codex
18:33 - The liturgy and bread
26:59 - Why the book is bitter in Revelation
30:57 - Your name in the Book of Life
37:27 - Memory
40:51 - Supplementarity
43:37 - The duality of Theophany
46:00 - Rumination
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.
Thanks for having me, Jonathan! Very much enjoyed this conversation.
I think discussions with you and Seraphim should be a regular feature of your channel, just as you and Richard Rohlin have become a featured duo. Great discussion, thank you both.
Agreed!
I second the agreed 💯
I concur.
Absolutely
I consent.
My two most favorite Orthodox teachers and commentators.
Take their "teachings" as a grain of salt. Your Orthodox Bishop is your real teacher.
Went to see Jordan Peterson in Norfolk just so my wife and I could here Jonathan lol. Turns out we sat close to @Seraphim-Hamilton and my wife got to meet him and his family. Wonderfully nice people!
You guys have done so much for my family’s journey into the Orthodox Church. Thank you both and God bless you two!
"wonderfully nice people" Agreed. I know them pretty well
Serro is awesome.
@@christinahamilton5407 Relatives?
@@ALLHEART_mom
@@christinahamilton5407 ❤Hello Mrs. Hamilton! Your son is awesome. Love talking to him.
Love Seraphim. So glad to see you two talking. Illuminating
I love listening to Seraphim drop knowledge
So honored to be part of this ongoing symbolic movement
I converted to the Orthodox Church via the Greek Orthodox Church in 2022 at 66 years of age. My Greek Priest was taken a little taken aback that I wanted to have Seraphim of Sarov as my Patron Saint, and thus my Baptismal name. So I couldn't help but listen to this Podcast, and I'm so glad that I did! 8:39
Loved this discussion. I think too that there are some “high church” Protestants that can actually agree on pretty much everything you lay out here. (For example, I’m Lutheran and we believe in the real presence in the Eucharist.) I know in general it’s ortho/catholics vs everybody, but there’s some real meat in here that many Protestants would appreciate as well. Keep it up!!
Seraphim Hamilton is the man.
Always a pleasure, never a chore.
I love to hear Seraphim's Hebrew/Old Testament insights. I think the connection between it and our Christian faith is profound and generally underappreciated.
Jonathan, hello! Thank you for your conversations. I'd like to point out that there was an argument in the Russian Orthodox church before the communist revolution about the name of God. Have you ever read something about it? It may be a new aspect in which you can approach this question about the Book.
Having had a lot of opportunities to argue this question myself, I came to a conclusion that the easiest way to understand and to explain it to others is through reminding people that the names of God are the God's words about Himself. When you recall this you will be able to extend the orthodox teaching of the holy fathers about the word of God to the names of God. And what was that teaching?
The word of God (as the written or spoken revelation) was always viewed as not only the human's words, but as Logos incarnation into the human's words. Especially saint Maximus the Confessor stressed that point, but also all the fathers spoke about the word of God as which has two sides: humanly (that is created) and spiritual.
That is also clear when you remind yourself about the two energies in Incarnated Logos. When our Lord spoke, He didn't only pronounced human words, but also His godly energy enlightened the listeners minds - at least those who were willing to believe His word - or did miracles. The Apostles also spoke not their own human words but the God's word. And even we are speaking the God's word when we truly explains the Gospel according to the holy fathers teaching, because even in our such words the Lord is present and wishes to enlighten anyone who will listen by His energy, which is the spiritual side of the word of God.
The written or spoken revelation is when the word of God - the same almighty word with which God created the world - is being expressed in the human's words. So it has two sides, exactly as father Antony (Bulatovich) was explaining during the historical argument:
1. first side is spiritual - the almighty and enlightening energy of God, that is also the truth of God;
2. second side is humanly - our words by the means of which the Truth is being expressed in the human language as far as it is possible to do with the limited by the nature human words. This side is creational and can be viewed as the "wordly" icon (image in words).
Hope I was able to explain it clearly. I argued a lot about this question in Russian, but not in English. Correct me please, if something wrong.
I have managed to found the words of saint Maximus the Confessor in English from his theological chapters. Read how deep they are:
60. The Logos of God is called flesh not only in as much as He became incarnate, but in another sense as well. When He is contemplated in His true simplicity, in His principial state with God the Father (st. John 1:1-2), although He embraces the models of the truth of all things in a distinct and naked manner, He does not contain within Himself parables, symbols and stories needing allegorical interpretation. But when He draws near to men who cannot with the naked intellect come into contact with noetic realities in their naked state, He selects things which are familiar to them, combining together various stories, symbols, parables and dark sayings; and in this way He becomes flesh. Thus at the first encounter our intellect comes into contact not with the naked Logos but with the incarnate Logos, that is, with various sayings and stories. The incarnate Logos, though Logos by nature, is flesh in appearance. Hence most people think they see flesh and not the Logos, although in fact He is the Logos. The intellect - that is, the inner meaning - of Scripture is other than what it seems to most people. For the Logos becomes flesh in each of the recorded sayings.
61. The initial stages of learning about religious devotion are naturally related to the flesh. For in our first encounter with religion we come into contact with the letter and not the spirit. But as we get nearer to the spirit and refine the materiality of words with the more subtle forms of contemplation, we come to dwell - so far as this is possible for man purely in the pure Christ, so that we can say with St Paul, 'Though we have known Christ according to the flesh, now we no longer know Him in this manner' (2 Cor. 5:16). That is to say, we no longer know Him according to the flesh because, through the intellect's naked encounter with the Logos stripped of the veils covering Him, we have advanced from knowing Him according to the flesh to knowing His 'glory as of the only -begotten Son of the Father' (John 1:14).
(Maximus the Confessor: Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God/ Second century 60-61)
Love the fruits of conversation between you two.
You should collaborate more often. Thank you both for this ❤
Good talk guys. I like when you have Seraphim Hamilton on.
Seraphim Hamilton is one of my favorite Apologists.
Kabased
I’m glad Jonathan has such interesting people to interact with. Edit: but my favorite episodes will always be the ones with just Jonathan explaining some obscure pattern and showing how it relates to some current events or trends.
“When the embodiment is separated from the memory” is a perfect description of entropy.
I miss when puggy would interrupt Seraphim
Could you have Peter Johnsson the sword expert and talk about the symbology of the sword?
You are what you eat.
Woo! I've been waiting for another one of these
What does Seraphim Hamilton's haircut mean from a symbolic lense?
It means his barber has Parkinson’s. It’s a fractal pattern of reality where beauty finds its opposite.
Bro looks like an angry Lego man
Lolol
Ahhh, a refreshing rain in a hot, oppressive summer.
From Dante's Inferno, Canto XI, line 70: "But tell me: those who lie in the swamp's bowels, those the wind blows about, those the rain beats and those who meet and clash with such mad howls--why are they not punished in the rust-red city if God's wrath be upon them? And if it is not, why must they grieve through all eternity?" 😮
Research Stan Tenen and his book The Alphabet that Changed the World! I would love Jonathan's perspective on his research.
Thank God this knowledge has been kept from the pharases and the scribes.
On the drinking of vinegar: 4 cups in Passover and the 2nd is the Cup of Wrath. at the supper Jesus says "I won't drink wine again till in my kingdom" and sure enough at his coronation the next day he is drinking that wrath, that wrath that ties the seas to blood and the death of the 1st born (both remembered in communion)
First but not last.
2nd not first. But also not last.
@@symbolicmeta1942 1st is the worst. 2nd is the best. 3rd is the one with the hairy chest.
The last shall be first.
You’re always last if we sort by newest.
The Book of the New Sun
The Theotokos told St Romanos in a dream to eat a scroll, and we all know what happened after that… :)
[My interpretive story of Revelation, the mark of the beast & literary observations]
-
Categories the bible only counts with the “score” counting system & relative immortality.
(Six hundred three SCORE and six)
666
Score categories
1.)Man.
2.Time.
3.)Money.
4.)Plants.
5.)Animals.
6.)Locations.
7.)Length/Measurement.
[note] these seven categories are the first seven categories associated with Gods creation and also mans creation in Genesis…… and that category order in Genesis goes…
1.) Time. ( in the beginning..)
2.) Location. ( God hovering over the deep..)
3.) measurements. ( God divided the land the sea’s the heavens etc..)
4.) plants. ( earth produced seed after his kind…)
5.) animals. ( sea and earth produce animals after theyre kind)
6.) man ( let us go down and make in our image)
7.) money ( mans creation/ greed, this represents the greedy choice adam and eve made to take the fruit and eat thereof)
…………………………..
The Mark Of The Beast.
The mark of the beast is conveyed in the bible with the score counting system…
“Six hundred three score and six”
~its the number of a MAN~ category 1.(MAN)
[note] All of the categories that are mentioned above are exactly what the beast/Anti-Christ in Revelation comes to have complete control over.
The Mark of the beast is an >exchange
To ruminate is likened to chewing the cud.
Much love
This is so true! I only started reading after I became a Christian in my early twenties.
its a fine line between symbolism and schizo ramblings
From studying the bible, I realized divine wisdom had to be translated out of peasant wisdom. By the sweat of our brows we eat our earthly food, by ruminating on the scripture we eat our divine food.
Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk. The Dead House. Brothers Karamotsov...
Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album.
Gogol's Dead Souls.
@@ChaseyBearMagnanimity I have noted all of these, thank you. The only book I've read from Dostoyevsky is Crime and Punishment and while it's a favorite of mine, it's not a portrait of the peasants and labor people.
@@AlexLGagnon Actually, all of Dostoyevsky's works are reflections of the whole serf system. A failure in the upper classes and their immunity to the needs and despair of the serving classes is indicative of how the slavery system enslaves everyone...not just the peasants. C and P's main protagonist is indeed a model of so, so many aspects of our whole suffering reality. Having some background knowledge of orthodox culture really helps and is in many ways a prerequisite to understanding the deep symbolism behind Dostoyevsky's art. Hope that helps.
Kingdoms devour kingdoms all the way up. Jesus said he is the living Bread that comes down from Heaven, inviting us to eat God's Flesh and Blood. But how do you eat the golden Light of the Son/Sun? By photosynthesizing the Logos, absorbing its spiritual Radiation in the Void/Space of the empty mind (sunyata). Meditation is the way to approach this inner "Cloud of Unknowing", where the Abyss "gazes back." Meditation is Sun-bathing in the immaterial Voidness where the ego is enDarkened and the Soul in enLightened. We are still the "Green Man" (Pan, Osiris, Adam, Silvanus, the Alien, etc.) who photosynthesizes the Sun/Logos/Word by re-entering the wild woods of the unconscious. We eat our way back to God by digesting or understanding the mythic language emanating from the Logos, i.e. the tongue of elemental fire stolen by Prometheus. This fire distills the essence of the Green Man into eternal Life.
Christ holds a book, because the certain political and religious institutions and figures of king and priest, have only arisen through millenarian judgments of the Lord, established in relation to the rise of recorded history upon the since settled agriculture and urban life coming with the Neolithic, and from the once hunting and gathering societies and then purely oral ancestral remembrances or divine myths of prehistory, created also by him in the very Paleolithic foundation of the world, cosmologically in the calendar, or that is, in the ancestral remembrances and annual valorization of all human history and culture alone, since our very dawn as a species therein.
The book of Revelation is a book written within, nationally - (and as a then always certain new Nation, of itself, epically grown anew in another New World wilderness, like Rome before, or the US today, to become a then newly Universal Civilization and Empire, as well) - and on the back side, as a national region like the Bible Belt of the southeastern US today, going back to our colonial beginnings with Captain John Smith and the Jamestown Settlement - (and in the historic witness of its fulfillment therein, at such later universal heights or horizons, like John baptizing in the wilderness of Judea in immortalization of all such New World migrations, like Jacob and his sons following Joseph into Egypt, in concerns of the Hebrews ethnographically created by a later industrialization) - and sealed with seven seals, in relation to the newly urban advance also therein, out of whose assembled valorization in judgment, new kingdoms come through the certain Lordly and Apostolic creation of the Church and Scripture anew, and together, upon such historic events of each New World advance, as said; as well as upon such then once again wholly gathered culturally communistic communities like those of Acts 2, as they become the sociologically cellular or organic foundation implicit to the living God and assembled blood and body of Christ.
o wow...
Does water have meaning? What happens if someone drinks water?!?!?
This is a very important question for all of us. Living water is an existential symbol that is vital to us on so many, many levels. Just drinking the right type of water is so, so important and when infused with the breath of God, pure water heals and restores physically and spiritually.
@@ChaseyBearMagnanimity man, I wish someone had a channel about the symbolism of water and its relationship to human incarnation and the connection of heaven and earth, mind and body. Oh well.
@@Aquaticphilosophia Well, there is a ton of research out there and symbolism is a matter of bringing all the pieces together, so there's no reason why that can't be done. I started out learning about the many metaphysical aspects of water, then worked into some of the deeper aspects, like the fourth phase of water...and then you have tons of material to relate to Biblical themes, etc.
@@ChaseyBearMagnanimity I’m being extremely sarcastic. It’s my specialty
My God Jonathon, I admire your patience. This guy was obviously locked in the basement...
Seraphim is a great thinker.. shameful to slander him like that.
@@ericedwards6276 yeah, maybe he's a great thinker and maybe I'm shameful. And maybe I'm trying to point to something important.
@@MrMarccj Id be interested to know what that is
@@ericedwards6276 Our minds are only one tool given for us to understand reality. We also have body and heart. Looking at the universe through only the mind will obviously create distortions in our understanding.
@@MrMarccj what? I think jonathan loved listening to him as he's obviously extremely knowledgeable and thoughtful