Aidan Hart, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church living in Britain, has been a full-time liturgical artist for over thirty-five years. His passion is to create works and church interiors that reflect something of the beauty of life in Christ, and help people experience that union of heaven and earth that is the ultimate purpose of liturgical art.https://www.aidanharticons.com↓ ↓ ↓
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Psalm 19. This is the Book of Common Prayer version, translated by Miles Coverdale.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
One day telleth another, and one night certifieth another.
There is neither speech nor language, but their voices are heard among them.
Their sound is gone out into all lands, and their words into the ends of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.
It goeth forth from the uttermost part of the heaven, and runneth about unto the end of it again, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
The law of the Lord is an undefiled law, converting the soul.
The testimony of the Lord is sure and giveth wisdom unto the simple.
The statutes of the Lord are right and rejoice the heart.
The commandment of the Lord is pure and giveth light unto the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean and endureth forever.
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is thy servant taught, and in keeping of them there is great reward.
Who can tell how oft he offendeth?
O cleanse thou me from my secret faults!
Keep thy servant also from presumptuous sins, lest they get the dominion over me.
So shall I be undefiled and innocent from the great offence.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dallipo.
And I know I always say I'm excited about my special Psalms guest, but I really am looking forward to talking to Aidan Hart, who is a liturgical artist.
In fact, Aidan, I am seriously excited about this chat, because you've done lots of things which I kind of envy you having done, and some I have done.
I've been to Mount Athos, for example, and it has a special place in my heart.
And actually a special place on my journey towards Christianity.
So maybe we can...
In fact, let's talk about that.
Before we...
I'm really glad also that you've chosen, randomly, but brilliantly, one of my favourite psalms.
Psalm 19. I just think it's fantastic.
I think it's one of the weirdest psalms and one of the coolest psalms.
And so we can talk about that later on.
But tell me about yourself.
I've just been feasting on your portfolio at your website.
When I get very, very rich, when this podcast becomes hugely successful, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a special chapel in my house, which is going to be decorated with Aidan Hart frescoes, if you don't mind.
I'd be quite happy to do that.
I think they're fantastic.
So tell me how you became a liturgical artist.
Yeah, thank you.
I became a conscious Christian when I was about 15. Apparently randomly, though of course nothing's random than God, through a man who came to our high school and preached about how he had become a Christian.
I grew up in an arty family, so it was sort of natural, I suppose, to express my love for God through art.
But I did a degree in English literature at that time, thinking I was going to be a teacher.
I don't know why that entered my head, but anyway.
I never really dreamt of being a professional artist, so I just honoured my love for literature.
I trained as a teacher, and then I thought, no, what I really want to do is to be an artist.
So I left that teaching profession after nine months and became a sculptor.
And I was able, after about a year and a half, to be full-time in that.
And in my sculpture, though I had some church commissions, I was much more interested at that stage in being a Christian artist in the world, but above all, expressing something of the...
The image of God and man, the inner spiritual life of the human person.
So I was experimenting with different ways of expressing the invisible, the spiritual, but uniting it with the outer, the physical, and coming to certain conclusions about this.
A friend of mine who knew I was trying to do this said, oh, you must visit these two Orthodox monks.
I know.
I was raised in New Zealand and these two monks were in New Zealand.
So I visited these monks and immediately saw that the icon did what I'd been trying to do in my sculpture.
And they sort of overlap a lot of the conclusions I'd come to independently of already in the icon tradition.
And anyway, that meeting led me to become a member of the Orthodox Church.
I was also very interested in exploring a monastic life.
So that sort of led me to be more involved in liturgical art, in other words, church art.
To be an artist out in galleries wasn't appropriate if you're interested in the monastic life.
A really good thing to do, but obviously you need to be out in the world more.
So that's why I ended up getting into liturgical art, becoming Orthodox, and then wanting to explore the monastic life.
There's so much I want to ask you already.
Just rewinding a second.
Who was the guy who came to your school and what was it he said?
Because I imagine there were loads of boys there who were just unmoved by the experience.
Or did loads convert?
Was he amazing?
Well, it was strange because I was 15 at the time and I heard these drums at lunchtime in the distance.
I thought, what's that?
So I went to the hall where this man was playing the drums and I wasn't into hibby rock or anything, but he was bashing away in his drums.
Then he finished and then began to speak about...
His conversion, apparently he'd been a drug addict.
I'd never been into drugs in my life, but he'd been a drug addict and I think a drug dealer.
And he spoke about how he had visited a Christian community and he'd met someone there who had a radiance about them and a love about them.
And as this guy was speaking, had like a vision of this radiant face.
Interestingly enough, there are people behind this person as well.
So they were seeing this radiant face.
This person wasn't alone.
There was a community behind him.
And I said to myself, that's what I want.
You know, I want that same light.
So I just, as an individual, gave myself to God that evening.
I think there must have been a lead up to that, because I remember, I might have been the same year, I don't remember.
For some reason, during an English lesson, the guy beside me turned to me and he said, Do you believe in God?
And I think I said yes, but I don't know if Jesus is God or not.
Somehow I knew that that was an important question.
Was Jesus God?
So I must have been thinking about these things.
So yeah, so that sort of came out of the blue in a way.
I must have been searching to be so open to that.
So I went from quite a difficult period after that, not knowing any Christians.
I got books out of the Bible on...
Christianity, and some of them are lives of saints, and they all seem to fast.
So I started to fast and got really, really skinny.
And my maths teacher noticed I was getting so skinny.
And anyway, he asked if I was doing it for religious purposes, and I said I was.
So he invited me to his Baptist church.
And Baptists, as you know, are really into the Bible.
So I really devoured the Bible there and memorized vast amounts of it.
And though I've got three years, I found it a bit...
I'm satisfying, in a way, for various reasons.
So then I went to a high Anglican church, which is much more affirming of the material world, having come from an artistic background, an artistic family.
I thought the material world was really important.
Yes, it's true that the high church Anglican is almost more Catholic than the Catholics, isn't it?
Yes, it is now, certainly.
Smells and bells.
Quite camp priests, it might be said.
But yeah, I think my Haingekin church in New Zealand was very unusual.
It was this inner city one, and it was quite charismatic at the same time.
So there's really a wonderful combination of a sort of living relationship with God as expressed through the charismatic movement, but all the smells and bowels.
So it was quite a sort of...
Robust.
It wasn't camp.
It was very interesting.
It was actually a big step for me to become orthodox, actually, because it united this intense spiritual life with the smells and bowels, as you say.
So it overcame this sort of Baptist idea, this conflict between ritual and a living relationship with God.
Because Baptists tend to think that, you know, you've either got your ritual or you've got a personal relationship with God.
You can't know both.
But I experienced, as a Anglican, the two affirming one another.
That's interesting, because I'm always...
Behold how good and joyous a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity, says Psalm 133. And I know I'm a Christian, but...
I look around and I see the Catholics and I see the Baptists and I see the Orthodox and I see the Evangelicals.
And I see in each of them, they've got something special going for them.
They've got something that they're really good at.
So I wouldn't want to diss any of the different, and the Calvinists.
I mean they've got their certainty and their rigour and they love the Psalms.
So every part of the world has its merits, what is it about orthodoxy that grabs you particularly? what is it about orthodoxy that grabs you particularly?
You broke up a bit there.
Were you asking what grabs me about orthodoxy?
Yeah, yeah.
As a Baptist, I remember Studying the Bible, and often we were asking in our discussions, what was the early church like?
So that was always really important to me.
You know, I felt that I didn't want to obviously imitate the early Christians in every element, but I thought, well, that was sort of close to Christ.
So that was in my mind.
And interestingly, when I visited this Orthodox monastery, I arrived quite late in the night, I think, so there wasn't much time to talk.
I went up to my, they showed me my room, went up to my room, and early in the morning, there was a knock on the door to wake me for prayers, and the monk said, Christ is risen.
And I'd known from my Baptist times that early Christians said to one another, Christ is risen, and the reply was, he's risen indeed.
So anyway, we went to the church service, about a two-hour long one, and then at breakfast, Father Nicholas, who knocked to my door, said, how did you know how to reply?
And I said, did I say the right thing?
He said, yeah.
And I thought, perhaps I've found the early church.
They haven't stopped doing it.
So I had lots of questions about the Orthodox Church, and it struck me that it had continued unchanged in its essence.
Obviously, it had adjusted the language of the countries used.
They didn't use the latter, they used the language of the country.
But I realised, actually, that the faith had remained the same, and the Bible wasn't some sort of book over the top of them.
They had written the Bible and it was church councils that decided I realised what to put in the Bible and what to leave out.
And that was always a Christian to me as well.
I mean, it's an evangelical you're told, you've got to be obedient to the Bible.
And I thought, well, who decided what was in the Bible and who wasn't?
It was Christian.
So obviously the church existed before the Bible.
So just a lot of common sense replies came to me and all the raised questions I sent to Father Embrace.
Yeah.
And also profound spiritual life.
I think I'd really been seeking deeper prayer.
I really wanted like an alternate survey map of the soul.
I didn't want just a general map to pray.
I wanted much more detail about the inner life.
And they introduced me to the Philokalia, a collection of writings from the 3rd century to about, I think, the 15th century on the inner life, written by people, as it were, who had explored that country in detail.
You knew that they were writing about things they knew from experience.
So, yeah, they've got that deep, profound inner spiritual life, this historical continuity.
They really know about matter.
I remember the priest showing me the church, because he knew it was the first time I'd been to an Orthodox church, and he's showing me all these different things in the altar.
And he said, oh, I love things.
I love matter.
I was a bit sort of scandalised.
Here's this holy monk saying he loves things, he loves matter.
But I realised that he was saying that these things, the chalice and the pattern and things, God came to him through this material stuff.
So all these sort of lights were going off in my head.
I thought, yeah, this is so rooted in the earth, but at the same time, this profound life of, I don't know, I don't want to do mysticism, but let's use the word mysticism, that in the life of prayer.
That all just seemed to come together, really.
Yeah.
What you say really strikes a chord with me in as much as since I became a proper Christian, I would say, rather than a kind of cultural Christian.
I was baptised into the Church of England and I got confirmed and stuff.
Same with me, from that background.
All that.
But since becoming a proper Christian, I've been on a quest to find The real deal.
Pure Christianity.
And one of the things I've done is I've sort of, maybe this is wrong with me, but I judge scriptural texts on how close they are to Christ, to the time of Christ.
So the earlier, the better for me.
And like you, I don't want to get eaten by a lion, but...
But there is something very appealing about the early Christians, because early Christians did not experience Christianity as we do now, with all these excrescences which have been added over time, sometimes for political reasons.
You mentioned the Council of Nicaea, for example.
Politics quickly gets in the way of religion, doesn't it?
You get sectarianism and so forth.
I agree.
Old seems to be pure and authentic.
Yes and no.
I mean, if the Church is the body of Christ, it's not going to sort of get diluted with time.
And I haven't experienced it as dilution, obviously, because we're humans and the body of Christ is humans married to God.
The bridegroom doesn't mess it up, the bride does.
So the Council of Nasea, I don't see that as a bad thing at all.
I think it's the church responding to heresy, of course, in this case, Arianism, the belief that Christ was just a man and not God.
So the church responded to that.
It wasn't a political thing.
No, the emperor obviously wanted peace in his empire, so he called the council, but he left it up to bishops to decide.
He didn't tell the bishops, right, I'm paying for this, so you've got to do what I want you to do.
He paid for them to come together.
He called it, but it's the bishops.
And some of them were confessors.
That means they had the scars.
They'd actually been tortured.
I mean, these were Christians.
They weren't just politicians.
Is that what confessors mean?
Hands chopped off.
I mean, these were real Christians.
Is that what confessor means?
Yeah, confessor is someone who suffered but didn't actually die.
So they'd been tortured.
Interesting.
The fact that what we call now confession, you know, going to a priest to have confession.
Confession started because some of the early Christians under the persecution would deny Christ.
And the only people, it was thought, who could, as it were, declare them forgiven if they wanted to come back into the church, were confessors.
In other words, those who had suffered the same temptations as the people who had denied Christ.
So only they had the right to say, yeah, I mean, I've been tempted like you, I've been tortured even, but I didn't renounce Christ.
So only those people had the right to forgive, as it were, those people who denied Christ but wanted to repent and return to the church.
But then later on it became a thing.
All of us are denying Christ by our bad actions.
So then priests then became confessors.
But originally it was those who were confessors.
Right.
So in the...
When was the split between the Orthodox Church and what's called the Catholic Church?
Well, some say 1054 when some emissaries of the Pope went to Constantinople and they were being sort of excommunicated.
But I think it probably is more 1204 when the Crusaders sat Constantinople.
That was sort of a sin against the Church.
I mean, it's a gradual thing, but some say 1054, but I would say more the Sacre Constantinople.
So, yeah, it was sort of a limp.
11th, 12th century, really.
I can see why that might have caused a rift, having your capital sacked by these people, supposedly representing the true church.
Yeah, yeah.
So still there are a lot of things in common.
And it's very, one should never sort of generalize, but I suppose what happened in the west, because of the fall of the secular ruler, the emperor, you know, basically the secular Roman Empire collapsed with the Barberian invasions, the Episcopal here, i.e.
the Pope, ended up having to do a lot of the work of a secular leader as well, whereas in the Eastern Roman Empire, you know, you had a good strong secular ruler, so the Christian.
The bishops didn't have to sort of take over that role.
So there is a distinction between the two.
Obviously, they overlap sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
So I think that's one of the things that perhaps led the Western Church to, I don't know, become too authoritarian, perhaps.
From an Orthodox point of view, we think often it's all a bit too heavily organised, a bit too cerebral, a bit too legal in its language to express what the gospel is, what salvation is, what sin is.
Kennedy's too rather legal language than we're happy with.
But anyway, that's another story.
Do you feel that if you're not orthodox, you're not really doing it right?
I wouldn't say that.
I would certainly say that orthodoxy, I think, has the fullness of the faith.
But then there are a lot of people who think they're orthodox, who don't live like orthodox, and a lot of people who...
Go out to Orthodox, but live and believe like Orthodox.
But certainly in terms of the teaching, I would say that Orthodoxy has retained that original fullness.
Just the Creed itself, for example, one of the things that sort of helped create that schism was that...
Unilaterally, the Western Church introduced what's called the Filioque to the Creed, I believe, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Filioque is Latin for and the Son.
So that, regardless of what one says about the truth or not of that, it's just a unilateral changing of, let's call it the constitution of the Church of the Constitution, it's sort of invaluable, so to change that.
Unilaterally, it was like a sin against the church, as well as we would say is not actually correct doctrine.
So an idiot can understand me being the idiot.
What's the difference?
Yeah, so the filioque seems to have been introduced, as it were, to bolster the divinity of Christ, because Arianism was quite strong at the time it began to be introduced in Spain.
To sort of bolster the unity of Christ, they said that the Holy Spirit, the original creed said, I believe in the Holy Spirit, proceeds from the Father.
The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
They added from the Father and from the Son to try to emphasize that Christ is God because the Holy Spirit proceeds from them.
Oh, I see.
Yes, I get you.
Now, that was introduced in Spain, and there were actually Roman bishops who said, no, that's wrong.
And there was a brass plaque brought up in Rome, I think 800, saying this is the creed.
And going back to the original Nicene Creed, saying the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
So there's actually initially opposition to it in the West, but gradually got introduced.
And that's why all Western Christians would say the creed with the filioque.
Yes, I mean, it's a tiny detail, but I can see why it'd be very annoying if you were.
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of Orthodox revision about, I don't like to go into this too much myself, but some Orthodox theologians, to say, did actually, as it were, upset the balance of how we understand the Holy Trinity.
Yeah.
So I don't want to go into that now, but it's interesting that in the East, the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church is much more spoken of and written about.
It tended to get lost in the West, really.
Of course, every Catholic would say the Holy Spirit is God and all that.
And sometimes I'm a bit estranged to Catholics.
I'm not putting down them as individual followers of Christ.
But the fact is that, as it were, the charismatic, in the original sense of the term, charismatic element of the Church was much more dynamic and alive in Orthodoxy.
And a part of that, I think, is to do with filioque.
But also the more legal language that was preferred on the West to talk about doctrine and Christianity for various reasons we could go into.
I get that feeling from orthodoxy that I'm writing a book at the moment called White Pilled about my sort of journey through Christianity.
And I talk about just have a digression about the different Versions of Christianity and the Catholics and so on.
And I think from my limited experience of orthodoxy, it's more intensely spiritual and closer to the numinous than any of the other churches.
It is about that, because it's kind of inner spiritual life, which I think in other branches of the church, you might get monks having a similar level.
But in the Orthodox Church, it seems to be everyone is encouraged to have that, which I like.
And things like the Jesus Prayer, particularly after a wonderful book called The Way of the Pilgrim.
I'm just reading it now.
The Jesus Prayer had always been there, but that really sort of relaunched it, as it were, in the mind of Christians.
I know.
I haven't yet risen to the challenge of saying it 6,000 times.
It's an encouraging book, but you've got to be very careful because, yeah, I mean, he gained advance pay quite quickly.
So that's why one wants to practice it intentionally.
You really need a spiritual director.
You know, people can try to imitate what the pilgrim did.
Oh, I see.
Yes, I can see it could be quite dangerous.
You get this book and you think, oh, this is cool.
So what might happen if you kind of said the Jesus prayer 6,000 times without following the proper instructions?
Yeah.
Our spirits are created by God, and they are light.
Now, the higher level of deception, let's call it, called planning in Greek, just from a soulish human point of view, when we calm ourselves...
And try to sort of gather in our floating thoughts and, as it were, draw our thoughts back into our body.
If we think of our body as like a molastic cell, instead of wandering around outside, we draw our thoughts through the Jesus Prayer back into our body.
It's going to be natural that we feel a certain peace because we're overcoming that scatteredness, which is one of the results of the fall.
And then we begin to feel a bit of warmth in our heart and a...
An unwise, unexperienced person will begin to think, oh, the Holy Spirit is upon me, you know, I'm becoming a saint, you know.
Or they might even see a light.
But this could just be the light of your own spirit.
It's not a bad thing.
It's a natural thing.
When we come back to ourselves, we'll begin to experience that created light.
But it is created light.
Some people latch on to that.
They, oh, I've seen what's called uncreated light, the light of God himself.
So those sorts of natural things will happen.
But an inexperienced person could begin to think that they're now supernatural, as it were.
Or you might think you're more superior.
All sorts of things could happen.
I don't want to over-egg the dangers because most of us just use it in a very simple way.
But I have known people who've done it individualistically and overdone it.
And it can lead to problems.
But generally, just to say it, five, ten minutes a day.
But I think the most useful form of it for us people living in the world is what I call guerrilla warfare.
You're only just waiting for the bus or you're walking.
Say the Jesus prayer then, otherwise we might find our mind just floating around the place and not using our spare time profitably.
So I found that that's a very powerful use of it, just snatching that time to direct our mind to God.
So now people come to me and say they want to practice the Jesus prayer rather than suggesting 6,000 times a day.
I just suggest five minutes a day, but catch it, catch that time, you know, when you've got a free time during the day.
Yes, and I imagine it sort of clears away demons as well as you forges a path through them, which is helpful to other people as well because it disperses there as you walk down the high street.
The demons, they're clearing away from the other people as well.
That's right, yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
You must tell me about which monastery were you at in Mount Athos?
Iverdon Monastery.
I became a novice monk in Wales with a Welsh monk.
I was with him about three and a half years.
But Father Barnabas always found it difficult to have people living with him.
He wanted them.
To join him, but he was quite old at the time, and older people often find it difficult to make those changes.
He was Orthodox?
Yes, that's right, yes.
Quite an apostle, really.
A lot of people became Orthodox through him.
He was a wonderful man.
But anyway, to cut a long story short, our land was bought for me to live as a hermit, but my Archbishop sent me to Mount Athos for training in a more established monastery first.
So I was never going to stay at the Vietnam at Mount Athos.
It was like an apprenticeship, as it were.
So I was there about a year and a half, two years, and then went to Liverser Hermes in the hills in Shropshire.
But every year, we'd go back for about a month to keep that contact up with the Vietnam.
So what's the daily life like?
At Mount Athos?
Yeah.
So on an average day, if you're a good monk, you'd get up about...
Three in the morning and do roughly an hour prayer in your cell, the Jesus prayer and prostrations.
And then, depending on your monastery, about four o'clock, you would do all the midnight services and matins and the liturgy, finishing six or seven, something like that.
So three hours, roughly.
And then most of the Greek monks would have a nap there.
I never could.
So then the main meal of the day would be about 10 o'clock.
Nine o'clock, something like that.
And then you do your obedience.
Beginning of each year, you'd be given an obedience, which was your task, as it were.
I was in the kitchen for a few months and then operating a sawmill.
Then later on was the monastery artist, for example.
And then roughly at five, six, depending what time of year, because the clock adjusted according to the sunrise.
You'd have vespas, which is about an hour.
Then you might have a second meal then.
On fast days, you'd have one set meal on non-fast days too.
And then there'd be an evening, short evening service.
So most of the prayer was in the morning and then about an hour and a half in the end of the day.
So you basically know services on the whole between seven in the morning and five or in the afternoon, something like that.
And, I mean, is it on any level enjoyable?
Is it...
How do you describe it?
It's warfare.
You know, if you want to retreat, don't go to monastery because it's front line battle.
Is it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All sorts of things.
So first of all, when you want to draw an ear to God, the first being you meet is yourself.
And it's not very nice.
In the world, we can distract ourselves by turning the television on, popping off to visit someone, doing whatever we want, basically.
But in the monastic life, you're deliberately stripping away distractions so you can meet yourself first in all one's virtues and vices.
So the initial stage is quite difficult.
It's as though you're the prodigal son and you're sort of coming to realize, actually, I really messed it up.
You know, I've squandered my soul and I'm living a really low base life.
So it's a journey back.
To the father.
So sometimes we think we're doing all right, but then we've got to realize actually we're not doing very well.
And then when we realize we've got to go back home, there's still that long journey back.
You're beaten up by people on the way.
The demons are getting a bit upset that we're going back to the father's home.
So it's a spiritual battle.
You know, it's joyous, but it's a battle.
How does the...
Okay, so you experience a form of self-disgust.
Do you notice your flaws, your frailties, your...
Yeah, I mean, it depends on each individual person.
Yeah, but I wouldn't say self-discussed, but yeah, it might be that.
But the whole monastic life and the whole Christian life is looking at the beauty of God, and repentance is becoming beautiful again.
So in orthodoxy, we're not into guilt much.
Now, guilt's quite a destructive thing.
The word doxa is very interesting, orthodoxy.
Doxa means dogma, so it's teaching.
But also Voxer's glory and therefore has associations with beauty.
We think of glorious.
We say someone's glorious, we mean that they're radiant, they're very beautiful.
So orthodoxy is really just becoming beautiful again because we're believing in truth, Voxer's truth, but also this turning to truth makes us beautiful.
So guilt itself is still quite self-centered.
You know, if I do something...
Wrong.
Let's just say if I visit you and I steal things from you, I feel guilty, but guilt completely useless, isn't it?
If I really repent, I'm going to go back to you, James, and say, look, I stole money from you.
Here it is, and I'll give you more than I stole from you because I know I've inconvenienced you.
That's repentance.
It's not me feeling miserable and beating my breast.
You know, it's like I've done something really ugly here.
You know, James has invited me and given me a meal, and I've stolen something from him.
That's a really ugly thing to do.
Not anymore, Aidan.
Now I know you're a thief.
So beauty is really important to us, you know.
So the Monaster Club has been beautiful, but it's hard work, as it were, having all the blue deluxe paint taken off the Mona Lisa, you know, restoring icons if it's been covered with muck.
It's a really slow, hard process.
So repentance is just removing all the mutt to reveal the beautiful real Aidan behind the mutt.
Do you come under demonic assault when you go into a monastery?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And what form does it take?
I wouldn't say it's any more, though, than someone who's trying to live a devout life in the world.
It'll be a different type.
The demons everywhere.
I just listened to some of your podcasts, James, and you were talking quite rightly about...
You know, the demons are sort of trying to wreck Western culture, and that's right.
But I think we're doing such a good job of it ourselves, the demons can just sit back and watch us and our cyclists and do it ourselves.
Well, do the demons not influence us?
Absolutely, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know quite, I don't, because there aren't many books you can read about how demons work.
Maybe you've got them in your library, but I... I can't identify them.
I just know they're around.
But they do seem to influence individual behavior, particularly among the powerful people who run the world, it seems to me.
They're particularly under demonic influence.
They're almost controlled, aren't they?
Control is a strong thing, but yes, we have free will.
So we can give control to the demons by saying yes and yes and yes when we have a temptation.
In orthodox theology, we have a word called the passion.
So a passion is I do something bad so often that it becomes almost second nature to me.
It's a bit like drugs, I suppose.
Someone might just take one drug and then you can stop it and it doesn't control you.
But if you keep taking that drug, even if it's caffeine or alcohol or whatever.
You actually begin to be controlled by that.
It becomes a passion.
And the word passion in Greek means to suffer.
So we begin to suffer under this thing.
It takes control of us, but only because I've given it control.
So in fact, this book, The Philokilia, I mentioned, which interestingly means the love of the beautiful.
Philo means love.
Kalos means beautiful.
So this five, in English, five-volume set of The Philokilia, The Love of the Beautiful, is all about how to become beautiful again.
And a lot of that is about how to deal with demonic temptation.
It's sort of that ordnance survey map of the soul I mentioned, the way the demons try to trick us.
But in our age, I think the demons work by concealing themselves.
Immediately you know that there are demons.
You've won half the battle because you know who your enemies are.
At the moment, they sort of work behind the scenes and people talk about, I don't know, bad behavior and all that.
They forget that it's the demons who sort of tempt us to act badly.
So I'm meant to understand that you don't drink tea or coffee or smoke or drink or anything.
No, no, I don't smoke.
But I do have coffee and I do have the odd bit of alcohol.
But all these things are good in measure.
But, you know, if I had 20 cups of coffee a day...
But how do you know what the right measure is?
Well, that's interesting.
In the Orthodox Church, we have a...
A tradition of fasting, rhythmic fasting.
And the fasting is not so much how much you eat, because the labourer is going to have to eat more than someone sitting at a typewriter, but it's what we eat.
So on a normal week, Wednesday and Friday would be vegan days.
And in Great Lent, it's vegan the whole of that time.
And the 40 days before Nativity, Christmas, that's a 40-day vegan fast.
So we're sort of trained To control our eating.
It's not sort of, you know, if you've got to eat, if you go to someone's house and they give you meat, you know, you would give thanks to God and eat it.
So it's not a legalistic thing.
But little things like that, the services, you try to stand during the service.
It's just sort of trained to have control over your body.
So it, I don't know, just gives you a sense of what's in excess.
Interestingly enough, you'd like this.
The last thing.
Left off the fasting with the different hierarchies.
Meat is the first thing you'd stop.
The last thing you'd stop is wine and oil.
The last thing you'd give up is the wine.
Really?
Yeah.
Because that's joy, you know.
That's joy.
Even in monasteries, they would on the non-fast day.
You'd have a glass of wine there.
You don't have to drink it.
So you're sort of trained to have things in moderation.
I was just thinking of a...
Isn't there a famous picture called The Temptations of St. Anthony?
Yeah.
Where he's assaulted by these demons.
How do I know that picture?
Where's that from?
Is it just a classic trick?
Yeah, it's a classic one.
I can't recall who painted it, but yes.
But in his life, certainly, he's really assaulted by them.
But you've never had it on that level?
Well, the demons are always at me.
There's nothing evil in itself.
It's only the misdirecting of it.
And even the devil himself, he's a fallen angel.
He was a good angel who fell.
I've always been interested in what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is.
And I haven't been that happy with most explanations.
But the best I come across is, I think, Ephraim, the Syrians.
He was saying that the knowledge of good and evil is the created world, which God created.
It's beautiful.
It's good.
Now, if you receive that with thanksgiving, Then it's knowledge of good because I see that as an expression of God's love for me.
If I just grab it, no matter what it is, you know, a lovely apple or beautiful face or whatever, if I just grab that, turn my back on the giver and just enjoy that fruit by itself, then it becomes knowledge of evil, becomes bad, not because the apple is bad.
I remember as a child, it was my birthday, and we had a two-story house, and you could look down on the driveway.
And I saw one of my friends coming, and he was holding a present for me.
And I ran outside, and mum was watching all this.
I ran outside, took the present from him, and ran inside.
And my mother saw this and really told me off.
It really stuck in my mind.
I grabbed the present from the giver, turned my back on him.
And that gift then became dead for me.
It became knowledge of evil because I hadn't received it with thanksgiving.
It's the gift of his love for me.
So all temptation is something good which is deprived of its personness, as it were.
You know, like sex without love is something really beautiful being used without love, without the face, without the person.
You know, wine, getting really drunk with wine means using a good thing, whatever.
It's always rooted in how we see things.
I could see you as someone to compete with, or I could see you as someone who has wonderful ideas and I can learn from you.
You're the same person.
The way I see you can turn you into a blessing for me or a curse just because of the way I perceive you.
Yeah, I wouldn't want you to see me as a competitor.
We're equals.
We're God's children.
Now, am I right in thinking that the Psalms are quite important in Orthodox Church?
Certainly, yeah.
The services are just soaked with them.
In fact, a monk will, every week, pray the whole Psalter, read the whole Psalter, and in Lent, twice a week.
And as a hermit, I would do that.
So the psalms are just part of your whole life, really.
Excellent.
So do you have them by heart?
I think I have almost like 40 of them by heart, yeah.
I think, not being a monastic, no, I don't read them every day in the same volume that I did.
But also, apart from what's called the kithysmat here, where you're just reading the psalms, all the services are just soaked with the psalms.
So even if a person wasn't a monk, they would be exposed to a lot of them.
The hours, for example, the first hour, third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour, they have three psalms in them.
Which translation do you use?
Does the Orthodox Church use the Septuagint?
Technically, yes.
We tend to use the Septuagint because that's the Bible that the apostles used.
The apostles used the Greek Septuagint.
Oh, I think it's the most authentic.
Yeah, I think just because the translation that most of our Western Bibles, the Masoretic Hebrew text, that's actually from about the 7th to 9th century.
So a lot of changes were made.
So, yeah, it might just say it's the freak of history that it just happened to be the Septuagint that the apostles are using, so we tended to use that.
So in terms of what English translation you use, it's up to individuals, really.
There's no...
Canonical English translation.
Different people use different translations.
Oh, that's interesting.
So if I were to become an Orthodox, I could still use the...
The Coverdale.
Coverdale.
Yeah.
In fact, the first translation of the main church services, I've got it here, I think.
This here was translated by Isabel Hapgood.
All the psalms in this are from the Coverdale, I understand.
So all my sort of early exposure was to the Coverdale.
Okay, that's interesting.
I was going to say, I think you're my first Orthodox.
No, I've had a previous Orthodox person, and I'd always imagine that the psalm I would do would be Psalm 118, because that's...
One of your classics, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
And that's another of my favourites.
But you've chosen Psalm 19, which I absolutely love.
The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament showeth his handiwork.
And you're probably aware that this was the psalm that Werner von Braun chose to have on his gravestone.
Do you know about this?
No, I didn't know that.
The German rocket scientist, where he worked for the Nazis in Germany initially and then later in America when he was recruited by the Americans.
And he, on his gravestone, I think he uses the first line from Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
And there are those in conspiracy circles or whatever you want to call the circles I move in.
That see this as a clue.
What Werner von Braun is telling us is that the version of events that we were sold by organisations like NASA, of which obviously he was a part, are suspect, are fictitious.
And if you want to go to the truth, you go to Psalm 19. What do you reckon?
I'm not really into these conspiracy theories, but I took this opportunity before we began our talk this morning to look at Psalm 19. I chose that because Vernisha, your assistant, sort of mentioned all the psalms that you haven't covered in this series.
Yeah.
And I thought, well...
Being a specialist in making beautiful things, hopefully beautiful, I wanted to choose one that related to that, and that's the one that I decided, having gone through all the psalms that you mentioned.
So it's a great excuse for me to really look at this psalm for about an hour this morning.
So I just did a few things down.
Oh, I'd love to.
Do you want to do it line by line, and then we can talk about it generally?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so this isn't the first verse, it's verse 4, but this verse here, their voice has gone out into all the earth and their words to the ends of the world, actually refers to the created world.
That verse is used in the Orthodox Church when you're commemorating an evangelist, one of the four evangelists who wrote the Gospels.
Okay.
So if you go back, as it were, saying that this basically is saying that God's creation is a proto-evangelist.
It's preparing for the gospel.
It's telling us, declaring the glory of God.
And in fact, I was using the Septuagint, I know a bit of Greek, so I was looking at the original Greek Septuagint.
I'll just bring it up.
And the word, here we are, the word used for declaring is sort of the Evangelion, as it were, the good news.
So that really struck me that the whole of at least the first seven verses is creation declaring God's glory and preparing us for the coming of Christ.
It's like St. John the Baptist who prepared the way.
So I think the first thing you've got to believe in God's existence and then you get down to the detail later to the incarnation and how to draw near to God.
That's interesting that the Orthodox Church uses that verse.
In relation to the four evangelists who wrote the Gospels.
Have you worked out what the second line means?
One day certifyeth another.
Yeah.
One day telleth another, and one night certifyeth another.
What does that mean?
Yeah.
Day-to-day utter speech and night-to-night proclaims knowledge.
That's one.
I guess in your translation, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, that was very interesting, that.
And speech, there's Rima in the original.
So Rima is what we use for the living spoken word.
You've got the written word, but Rima is the spoken word.
So in traditional theology, you've got...
We experience God in two ways.
One is called cataphatic theology.
Kato means to descend.
So God descends to our weakness as created beings.
So we can say that God is light.
God loves us, or God is merciful, and we understand what these things mean.
So God descends to express himself in ways we can comprehend.
But this apathetic theology, apa means to rise up, where we say God is God and we're created beings, and though we can know God and we do know God personally, we've got to remind ourselves that he's beyond all being.
So apophatic theology is saying what God is not.
So that's a way of darkness.
So it's interesting, day to day after speech, so that's like cataphatic theology.
I've got to know you a little bit, James, in this time.
Yes, I know James.
I've met him.
But at the same time, James is...
Utter mystery at the same time.
And immediately I think I know all of James.
I don't know James.
So I've got to keep these two things.
James will be an eternal mystery because you're made in God's image and therefore there's something eternal about you.
Not eternal back in time, but eternal forward.
So it's very interesting that night to night proclaims knowledge.
And you could say the monastic life is like a way of night.
You strip everything away and And you get to know the angels and the saints, because I remember one night in Mount Athos, I was with a hermit, and it was night.
His cell was right on the cliff face, so it was really clear, and you could see the stars.
And it suddenly struck me that when you strip yourself of all the things you see in the day, only then can you see the stars.
The stars are always there, but it's only when the sun disappears can you see the stars.
So sometimes when you're alone, when it's night, that's when you begin to experience the angels, the demons and the communion of the saints.
So that's what that particular verse meant to me.
This is why I love doing this series, because I say these psalms in my head every day, but it takes a conversation with somebody else sometimes to appreciate.
You've cast a completely new light on it.
Well, I mean, literally, in the case of...
Day versus night.
And it's interesting, in the original week there, which can be translated blurts out.
So day-to-day utter speech, it sort of blurts things out, speaks.
Remorse has been speaks.
So that's manifestation.
Whereas night-to-night proclaims knowledge.
Gnosis, that's knowing.
So sometimes, I remember once with my father, it was always my father, so I just thought it was my father.
One day I looked at my father, Max Hart, and I thought, he's a man in his own right, apart from being my father.
And it's a complete revelation to me.
I realised that he was something other than just being my father.
So that sense of his otherness allowed me to get closer to him.
No, I was always close to him, but you see what I mean?
Yes, yeah, no, I do.
I wish my son would...
How old is he?
How old is he?
26. Well, yeah, that's about when I was 26. Actually, I've got my older son.
He gets it more because he's older.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So...
Their sound is gone out into all lands, their words into the ends of the world.
I mean, is this the kind of the logos?
Is this the...
Yeah, there are three stages in the spiritual life that are both affirmed in Western Christianity as Eastern.
And the first is purification, pratiky theologiae in Greek.
That's sort of doing things to be purified.
The second, which relates to your question...
It's called Physiki Theologiae, natural theology.
And the essence of that is, as it says in Hebrews 3.1, I think, is it?
He upholds all things by the word of his power.
So God not only creates, yeah, he creates an oak tree.
He says, oak tree, and the oak tree comes into existence.
That word that God speaks is living and keeps animating, keeps everything alive and directing it towards a culmination.
The second stage in the spiritual life, the illumination, as it's sometimes called, or natural theology, is to hear the words of God in each thing.
So when I meet James, I'm looking for the image of God in James.
That word, James, that name, is unique.
James Dellingpole is an endangered species.
Once you go, that word of God won't be known on Earth anyway.
So before we see the Logos himself clearly, we've got to, as it were, see the footsteps of the Logos in the created world.
And then our eyes adjust to the Logoi, plural, so we can come face to face with the Logos himself.
We can't look straight at the Logos, we'd be blinded.
So we adjust, as it were, through reflected light, bouncing off creation, adjust our eyes until we see the sun directly.
Right, right.
Oh, what's the next line?
Yeah.
Well, anyway, the one just before that, humans declare the glory of God.
Yeah.
And essentially it's in the Greek there for declare is sort of narrate.
So I think the whole creation is like a story.
God's telling us a story about himself.
You know, when you write a story, you're really revealing yourself to people.
So it's like a precursor to meeting Christ.
And it's interesting that in some of the churches in Mount Athos, the Ixonathics, the Ixonathics is sort of the first room you go through.
Then you go to the narthics and the nave and then the altar.
In the Ixonathics, they often have painted the last three Psalms of the Bible.
Praise Him, sun and moon.
Praise Him, all you stars and light.
So before you go into the holiest of holies, you first got to encounter creation, realizing that the world of creation is praising God.
So I thought, oh, if the sun is praising God, I'd better get back together.
You know, the inanimate sun is praising God.
The trees are praising God.
I'd better start praising God.
So I think the heavens are clearing the glory of God as sort of like...
It's continually worshipping, so I've just got to participate in what creation is always doing.
Are we on the line yet where about the bridegroom?
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber.
I love that.
It's like something out of Shakespeare, out of the sonnets, but much earlier, obviously.
Yeah, I was thinking about that, that the Bible, Ends, of course, in the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.
And our church is orientated toward the east, toward the rising sun.
And going back to this discussion about the Logoi, the Logoi don't just create things, it directs them toward the culmination.
So it's like the moving of the sun is like reminding us all the time that Christ is going to come again, there is going to be the new Jerusalem.
Everything in this life is moving toward the culmination.
St. Paul says that the Fathers united all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.
St. Irenaeus, a great Greek saint who lived in God in the 2nd and 3rd century, he used the word recapitulation, like putting the head back on everything.
Christ sort of put the head back on creation.
We decapitated creation by ruining it.
So Christ, the new man, who's also God, sort of puts the head back on creation and pulls everything together, everything that had been fragmented.
So the whole creation, like the rising sun, is sort of heading toward this recapitulation of all things in Christ.
And I've suddenly realized this is prophetic, isn't it, in the sense that the bridegroom, this prefigures Christ, presumably.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The whole of the old Psalms, in fact, are a prophecy of Christ.
Like, what does Christ say on the cross?
Why have you forsaken me?
Yeah, that's the psalm.
Psalm 22, yeah.
Yeah, he's quoting the psalms, yeah.
Yes, I know.
I got irritated the other day by, oh, that's right.
I think it was this, he's a Jesuit.
I don't trust the Jesuits.
Father something Martin.
He's dodgy.
He was saying, look, even Christ had doubts.
When he was on the cross, he said, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And I was thinking, no.
Christ was quoting Psalm 22. And you're probably aware that there's a tradition that Christ would have understood that if you say the first line of the psalm, that's the equivalent of saying the whole psalm.
Oh, right.
You pick up these interesting things when you do podcasts like this.
It's like an abstract of a larger...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
So it wasn't really Christ going, oh, yeah.
So you've got to read the rest of the psalm to know what he was actually saying.
Yeah, exactly.
So he was expressing the fulfilment of the psalm.
He was aware of what was going on, even as he was suffering.
And he wasn't thinking, oh, God's abandoned me.
It wasn't like that.
And of course, his words, it is finished in the Greek.
It's completed.
Everything's completed.
I've run the race.
I've done what I came to do.
I'd be defeated.
The father's for safety.
I'm defeated.
It's finished.
It's the opposite.
I missed out the next bit, which is it rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.
Yeah, it's very wonderful.
That's great.
And of course, they knew that giants existed, the mighty men.
They didn't think they were fantasy things like we do now.
They didn't think they were just Jack and the Beanstalk characters.
They knew because they'd seen them.
But what's interesting about the whole of the Bible and the Hebrew way of thinking, nothing is depersonalized.
Because God created everything as an expression of love, they use all these sort of human terms to describe inanimate things.
And I think that's really profound, that.
As I said earlier, I think it's Ephraim who said that the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the created world, which, if received with thanksgiving...
In other words, personalised, you see God's face in it.
It's not just a thing, as beautiful as it is.
It's person.
It's a revelation of person.
It's not just like this ring here.
It's just gold.
But in fact, it's an expression of my wife's love for me.
So I can see that ring as just gold to mount down and get a bit of money, or it's an expression of love.
So all these psalms here, it's sort of acknowledging that creation isn't obviously A person in its own right, but because it's created by the living God, you can use all these poetic terms, and it's not just poetic, it actually manifests something quite profoundly true.
Yes, yes.
Well, thank you for helping me to understand these concepts better.
I mean, it's very exciting, isn't it?
The journey one goes on of expanding one's understanding.
Yeah.
Of Scripture and the mysteries of...
I mean, it's a never-ending journey.
And even in heaven, St. Gregor of Nyssa used the term from glory to glory.
Well, that's St. Paul's term.
Saying that even in the age to come, after you've died and hopefully are in heaven, we'll still be growing there, going from glory to glory.
On this area, we'll go from bad to good, but there we'll go from good to good to good.
So this growth into ever deeper into God will carry on into eternity.
Can I just get your take on what happens when we die?
Because I hear different versions from different experts.
Well, I haven't been there myself.
I mean, some people say that, as it were, we fall asleep waiting for the resurrection.
But when you're in deep sleep, you can be asleep for two days and you wake up.
And if it's a deep sleep, it's to say you haven't been asleep.
So one score of thought says that we are asleep in Hades, as it were, waiting for the resurrection.
But in ourselves, because we won't remember it, it'll be as though we're resurrected straight away.
But others say that the righteous are taken to heaven, and that's why we have icons of saints.
I'm an iconographer.
We paint icons of Christ, of course, but also of the saints, so that when we're worshipping on earth, we're actually participating in the ceaseless worship in heaven.
So we have all these icons of saints around because they're alive with Christ in heaven now.
There's only one church.
There's not one church on earth and another one separate in heaven.
There's one church.
So Christ has, again, overcome that.
Division between heaven and earth.
So all that would suggest that the righteous, when they die, that they go to be with Christ.
Do you have to become a saint?
Do you have to be martyred?
No, no.
The word martyr means to witness.
So if someone witnesses to Christ, or sees Christ in this life, through their life of repentance and humility and crying upon God, then they're already a martyr because they behold Christ and people.
Behold Christ in his creation.
Behold Christ in the heart.
So that's the essence of martyrdom.
It's not actually dying.
It's seeing Christ.
Okay.
Yes.
I'm just thinking, gather my saints together unto me, those that have made a covenant with me with sacrifice.
That's Psalm 50. I just wonder when I read these psalms, what exactly is meant by a saint and will I get to be one?
What have I got to do?
The Greek word for saint is adios, which means something set aside.
So none of us are perfect, even the saints have imperfections.
So I think none of us are worthy to be in heaven.
That's one reason why the Jesus Prayer is so powerful.
But that word mercy, for those who don't know it, the Jesus Prayer is Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.
That word mercy, we tend to think of, In the West as, I've done something wrong.
Don't punish me.
Don't put me in prison.
Forgive my wrongdoing.
But in fact, in the Greek, it's better translated as mercy is giving out of your abundance.
The Greek word for an almsgiver, somebody who gives alms, who gives of a bounty, is elemosini, means to be merciful.
So really, when we say...
Have mercy upon me.
We're asking God to give us the Holy Spirit, to give us of his abundance, obviously also forgive our sins.
So all our life we're asking God to forgive us because we're not worthy to receive the Holy Spirit.
On the other hand, we're asking for the Holy Spirit because Christ has promised to give it to us if we follow him.
So there's this whole funny thing.
On the one hand, we know we're not worthy.
On the other hand, we're thirsty for God because we're made in God's image.
We want him.
So this is what I found, the paradox of the Christian life.
I can't stop calling out to God for what I'm not worthy of receiving.
So I've got to ask forgiveness and please give me of your wealth at the same time.
I'm not worthy of it, but please give it to me.
It goeth forth from the uttermost parts of heaven and runneth about unto the end of it again, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
Well, that's just the sun doing its thing again.
What's interesting is that the first seven verses are all to do with meeting God in creation.
And then from verse seven onwards, it's all to do with the law and the word.
So verse seven, the law of the Lord is perfect, converting souls.
The testimony of the Lord is faithful, instructing babes.
The ordinances of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
The commandment of the Lord is bright, enlightening the eyes.
Everything else is like that in the rest of the summer.
I said, well, why is that?
But suddenly it's like a switch.
And I think it's because having beheld the glory of God in creation, we want to know, well, how do I find the source of all this beauty?
I'm not happy just with the gifts.
I want to meet the giver.
The Song of Solomon is all to do with being so enraptured by the beautiful fragrance, the beauty.
The wealth and all these things of the Beloved.
I want to be with the Beloved.
So verse 7 Ominous is telling us how we can meet the Beloved.
It's knowing His will and doing His will.
So we think of the law now as sort of something that restricts us.
But the law in this context is, I love the Beloved, so I want to know what the Beloved wants.
I want to please the Beloved.
Yes, yes.
And if you want more of that, you go to Psalm 119. You get what?
22?
That's a tough one.
Can you imagine when somebody picks Psalm 119 and I've got to go through?
How many weeks do you need?
I've been trying to, because my intention is to learn the whole Psalter, and I don't want Psalm 119. 119 to be left at the end as the one I didn't tackle because it was too long.
My trick is to, between each psalm that I want to learn, you know, fun ones, I'm going to do Psalm 33 next, I learn one of the segments of Psalm 119 so that I'll have it under my belt by the time I... Because otherwise...
That card is going to give you a long, long life like Saint Simeon so you can remember the whole of the Psalter.
Once you remember the last psalm, he'll take you.
Don't think that thought hasn't crossed my mind.
Really?
Oh, totally.
Yeah, I mean, I think one does think about...
Do you not think we're living in end times?
Oh, yeah, I think all the times are end times and each individual person is going to die.
So we're living in end time.
But yeah, I think I don't consume myself too much with, you know, is it actually the end times?
Because I think we've got to live every day.
So it is the end time.
And this is actually one of the mottos in the monastic life.
If you live as though you're dying, when you die, you won't die.
Like if I realise tomorrow I might die, tonight I might die.
I'm not going to hold on to things.
But she can't take with me anyway.
So this remembrance of death, it's called.
It's actually incredibly releasing because it helps me to keep priorities right.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I suppose I'm more interested in reminding myself that I'm living my own in times and I could die any day.
It's not a morose thought.
It's the opposite.
No, I can see that that's consoling.
Is healthy the right word?
I think it's a good thing.
Yeah.
So let me just try and get this segment.
The law of the Lord is an undefiled law converting the soul.
The testimony of the Lord is pure and giveth wisdom unto the simple.
Statutes of the Lord are right and rejoice the heart.
The commandment of the Lord is pure and giveth light unto the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean and endureth forever.
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
And then it goes, more to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
I suppose that's the logos, isn't it?
As I was saying earlier, the second stage in the spiritual life is the actual theology.
Not to see things opaquely.
I just love trees, oak trees particularly.
But they're declared to me the beauty of God.
So there, that's why the Creator is more sweet to me even than an oak tree because there's not a conflict.
There's not either God or the oak tree.
But what I love in an oak tree is the beauty of God, the strength of God.
So that's why he's more desirable than gold or precious stone because...
He made gold.
The maker is always greater than the thing made.
I'm with you there, Aidan.
And I tell you, I find it mystifying how people say, well, how do you know?
How do you believe in God?
Why do you believe in God?
And I say, well, just look outside.
Look at the creation.
And it is creation.
It didn't just emerge from a big bang and creatures crawling out of the primordial slime.
That's just a kind of myth invented in the 19th century.
And up until the 19th century, everyone knew this.
Everyone knew it was God's creation.
I met once a Serbian lady doing a doctorate on child education and religion.
And she said something to me that was so common sense, but it really struck me that...
If people don't know they're created, all the talk of sin and salvation mean nothing.
And I think the secular world has told us that we just live in a soup of chance.
And so everything falls apart then.
Everything falls apart.
If everything around us, the beauty of creation, is just sort of the result of chance, then there's no love in it.
Therefore, my life...
I just read a little identity.
I can create it, but there's no real reason for love if there's no God.
I mean, saving means to fall apart gradually.
And I think you'll probably agree with me that we're living off the benefits of the morality that comes from Christianity.
The fact that we respect people, that actually comes from the fact that people are in the image of God.
Even a slave is made in God's image.
So you ought to respect a slave.
Not to have slaves, but...
That's one reason why slavery was overcome, because they say, well, no, these people are made in God's image.
They're not a beast.
Just remind me, where does it say we're made in God's image?
Which part of the Bible?
In the opening chapter, let us make man in our image.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty unequivocal, isn't it?
Yeah.
Icon.
The escepticon is Ikona.
We're icons of God, living icons of God.
Oh, you must love that.
Being an icon painter.
So, what a servant keeps to the law and the keeping of them is great reward.
Who will understand his transgressions, purge thou me for my secret sins.
I think repentance, this desire to be purged of our transgressions, only comes when we see God's beauty.
I really believe that we act as we see, and if someone is acting badly, it's because they're seeing badly.
And it's interesting going back to how the devil tempted Eve, the first thing he had to do was create a caricature of God.
So what he says is, God doesn't want you to be like him.
That's why he told you not to eat of that fruit.
But in fact, that's precisely why God made us to be like him.
God created us to be deified, to be partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter said.
So immediately, the serpent has convinced Eve that God's actually a bit of a meanie.
Then he's won the battle.
He will do whatever he wants them to do.
And that's why they then run away from God afterwards.
They think, well, God's angry.
God's a bit of a meanie.
We've got to run away from that.
So one cow could cheer, feeds another.
It's worse and worse and worse.
So I think it's only after he's seen the beauty of God that he says, purge thou for me for my secret sins.
Okay, so wherever by them is thy servant.
Yes, I want to read from the cover.
I got the cover down.
It's slightly confusing because I'm trying to pick...
Yes, when you say different lines...
Yeah, so...
Yeah.
the dominion over me So shall I be undefiled and innocent in the great offence.
What is the great offence?
Personally, I think it's thanklessness.
What's the central act of the Christian?
It's the Eucharist.
It's to give thanks.
And the Eucharist is the reversal of the fall, if we go back to what Ephraim said.
The essence of Adam and Eve's sin was to take without thanksgiving.
So the reverse of that is to give thanks.
But when I lift the hermitage, I ask God for a rule of life.
And the verses from Thessalonians were given to me.
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the word of God, for you in Christ Jesus.
So to give thanks in all circumstances, to pray without ceasing, that Jesus prays your life.
Rejoice always.
One of the monks at Mount Alpha kept saying to me, the thing we think is bad often is the best for us.
The thing we think is good is often not good for us.
I might win the lottery and win five million pounds.
Marriages get broken up by winning the lottery.
Yeah, yeah.
You said when you left the hermitage, you prayed for the rule of life.
Yeah.
And those verses were given to me.
I wanted a verse.
I wanted a way of life that was manageable in the world.
I wasn't going to do four hours prayers a day like I did to Sir Herman.
It wasn't going to be possible.
And those words were given to me.
And of course, Paul was writing to people who lived in the city.
I've lived in Thessaloniki for a year studying modern Greek.
So he's writing to people in the city.
He wasn't writing to a molested conference.
So when he says to the city dwellers, pray without ceasing, it must be possible.
If he says rejoice always, it must have been possible.
He wouldn't have told them to do anything that was impossible for people, married people, people with kids, people making fur or whatever they had for the occupation.
So you spent your four years in the hermitage.
Seven years.
Seven years.
And then it came to you that you wanted to live in the world.
Yeah.
But true to what you learned.
Yeah.
And then it came to you.
You found your wife.
Yeah.
That's great.
I mean, in some ways, I'm sitting in my monastic cell, I think of it as.
That's my icon studio.
Ironically, I live a more monastic life now than at the Hermitage.
And so many people visit me at the Hermitage.
It's exhausting.
So in fact, I have eight hours praying with paint, with the saints, painting saints, painting Christ, painting the angels.
So ironically for me, in a sense, to continue that, I like that adjective, eremitical.
So the final couplet, the words of my mouth, the imagination of my heart, be always acceptable in thy sight, a law of my strength and my redeemerism.
That's right.
Do you remember that Boney M song?
By the rivers of Babylon?
Which was basically Psalm 137. But they transplanted the end of this psalm onto the...
Right.
The words of my mouth and the imagination of my...
That's right.
I rather tacked it on.
I didn't realise that.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
You see, this is what you get when you do the Welcome to the Psalms podcast.
You learn crazy stuff.
I could talk to you all day, and it's been fantastic.
My wife is wondering where I'm going.
That is brilliant.
My wife has just got back from work, and she's wondering why I'm not cooking supper, so I better not.
Can I ask you a question about icons and their role?
I saw them once described as a kind of portal that takes you from this world to the kind of spiritual world.
Is that inaccurate?
Yeah, I would describe them as doors.
Some people describe them as windows, but doors are better because you go through a door to meet the person on the other side, a window, you just look at them.
So yeah, it's a means of communion.
So always think of three.
The viewer, the praying viewer, the icon, but behind it, as it were, the good who's speaking, is the saint.
So it's not art in the modern sense.
It's just me and the painting.
It's sacramental.
It's not a sacrament, but it's sacramental in the sense that the saint is on the other side of the icon, and I meet the saint, meet Christ through the icon.
I can meet the saint without the icon, but we're maximalists in orthodoxy.
And if you give me a photograph of your wife and I screw it up and throw it away, it's insulting you and insulting your wife.
So there's a connection between image and prototype.
So if I frame the picture of your wife, I'm honouring your wife.
Veneration, yes, with a lovely frame.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And the Bible, of course, is an icon.
I mean, the Bible is just ink on paper.
That's all it is.
But, of course, it's more than that.
So an icon, you get to say, well, it's just...
Paint on bits of wood, but it's more than that because it's an image of the one it depicts.
And we all of us know the connection between an image and prototype.
That's why in this revolution they topple statues of the dictator.
They sort of take it out on the statue.
Yes.
Yes.
And iconoclasm.
Exactly.
Aidan, I've so loved talking to you.
It's been a real joy, Jones.
It really has.
You've illuminated me and educated me and delighted me.
And I can tell you, all the viewers and listeners as well.
I hope so.
So thank you.
I hope I get to meet you.
Yeah, it'll be lovely.
It'll be really good.
I do like Shropshire.
Oh, it's wonderful.
It's good hunt country.
It is, it is.
So let's try and make it happen.
I'd love to do that, too.
Tell us where we can, if we want our special room in our house decorated by your frescoes, or we just want to see your work, tell us about where we can find it.
Yeah, so if you go to my website, aidanhearticons.com, Aidan is spelled A-I-D-A-N, not Ian, and you can see what I've done there, and the email will be there as well.
I have other websites, AidanHeartMosaics as well, and then AidanHeart.co, which is my furnishing one, but most of what I've done you can see on AidanHearticons.com.
By the way, I must say a quick word of thanks to Father Spuridan Bailey, who turned me on to you.
Thank you.
And I was thinking, well, why is he, yeah, because I wanted to get Father Spuridan Bailey, and he said, look.
I'm becoming too much of a celebrity and it's not doing my, you know, my religious side any good.
I paraphrase.
He said, but talk to Aiden Hart.
Why are you fobbing me off with this?
How do I know this guy's any good?
But you've been, you've more than delivered.
So thank you very much.
And if you've enjoyed watching this podcast.
Yeah, I'll put links up.
Yeah.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
And anyone else, if you want to support me, you can support me on Substack and on Locals, support my sponsors, but mainly I want you to spread the word, because I think there's lots of people out there who like the Psalms podcast, especially when they're as good as this one.
You're doing great work on promoting the Psalms, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Love you to meet you.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
By the way, you've still got more psalms.
And that's not a competition, but I think you've got more psalms under your belt than I have.
I think I'm in the early 30s and you've got 40. I've never sort of counted them, but something like that.
Yeah, probably.
Well, I know that a lot of them aren't from the top of my memory now.
I'd have to refresh them.
But yeah, when you read the psalms.
All of us altar once a week, despite Moses, a lot of them soak in.
Of course they do, yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously one learns the best ones first, the ones that are most appealing.
Some of them are a bit...
The ones that just recount the stories of the Old Testament, I find them a bit dull.
Psalm 50 would be the first one that most Orthodox would...
Is that right?
Psalm 50, yeah, have mercy upon me.
Is that 14 or 51 in the Hebrew Bible?
Have mercy upon me after my great goodness.
Psalm 51, is it, in your numbering?
Yes, because I've just done Psalm 50, which is the Lord, even the most mighty God, hath spoken for the world.
Yes, Psalm 51 is fantastic, because it's the one about purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean, wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
