Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education and The Stones Cry Out! Reflections on the Myths We Live By. Together they discuss the significance of Orthodox Christianity and the appeal of monasticism. David shares his journey from various Christian denominations to the Orthodox faith, highlighting the current growth of the tradition, as well as the importance of community and tradition. They also explore the intersection of faith and science, reflecting on common narratives in our culture and their impact on our understanding of faith and morality.
Take note: David Hicks uses the term myth to describe the narratives that undergird both religious and non-religious traditions. As Case points out, the term myth does not imply fiction or falsehood. As part of the Reformed and evangelical Christian traditions, The Collaborative affirms the inerrancy of the Bible as foundational for our faith and practice as Christians. At the same time, we acknowledge that various interpretive approaches to Scripture exist as secondary theological issues, which may differ among Christian denominations.
Episode Resources:
St. Peter’s Monastery – https://www.stpetersmonastery.com/
Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination – https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195152646
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://wecolabor.com/
Get to know Case: https://wecolabor.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Imagine walking through a lively public square in the old country. Eastern Europe, Greece perhaps or elsewhere. You’re surrounded by the hum of commerce, conversations and the rhythm of modern life. And in the midst of it all stands an Orthodox Church. It’s timeless architecture. The quiet prayers being lifted by faithful adherents. The flickering of candles. What a stark contrast it provides to the hustle and bustle outside. While Orthodox architecture and art are a favorite of mine, sacred space for these brothers and sisters in Christ is so very different from my particular Protestant world. For the Orthodox Christian, the sanctuary is like a portal where the reality of heaven has opened in the sky above and transferred itself here on earth. Icons are not paintings and icons are not painted, but icons rather are written, written as a spiritual formative experience and they serve as windows, windows into which one looks and sees the events of heaven and of God’s work in the past.
Well, more importantly than a mere building, Orthodox faith, and my guest today, is a beacon of spiritual presence who bears witness to faith’s enduring relevance in shaping the culture and moral fabric of society. I’m pleased to have David Hicks, who has built stone upon stone to bear witness to the power of Christ in this world. And he’s literally building stone upon stone for an emerging monastery in the wilds of Montana. And figuratively, he’s done the same through a lifetime of writing, speaking, thinking, and teaching on the glories of the church and the impact of the gospel. So David Hicks, welcome. Thank you for being here.
David Hicks
Thank you, Case. Thank you for having me.
Case Thorp
Well, it’s a chilly day here in Orlando. Tell me, you’re there in Montana. What do you see out your window?
David Hicks
All I see, well actually, I’m looking out my window at my church, which has little lights over the icons on the walls. But other than that, all I see is snow. Completely white, and the temperature this morning, we walked the dog, it’s in single digits.
Case Thorp
Snow snow snow.
Well, to our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and as always, please like, subscribe, share this program. It really helps us to spread the word. Well, let me tell you a bit about our guest. So David Hicks is a Rhodes Scholar, Princeton graduate and accomplished educator with a master’s in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford and additional studies at the University of Moscow. He’s had a dynamic career spanning decades. David served for 30 years in independent education, leading prestigious schools like St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Jackson, Mississippi, St. Mark’s School of Texas and Dallas, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. In 2015, he retired as chief academic officer for Maritas, a global network of K-12 schools. David also served as an officer in the US Navy and taught at the Naval War College, the youngest faculty member in its history. In 1981 his book Norms and Nobility won the American Library Association’s Outstanding Book Award for Education. And he’s co-authored books like The Emperor’s Handbook, which has sold almost half a million copies, and Plutarch’s Lives. Upcoming publications include The Stone’s Cry Out, which I was able to review for this conversation, and Orthodox Christianity and Classical Education.
Now living off the grid on a Montana ranch with his wife, Mary Elizabeth, David stays involved with the church, his church, St. Anthony, the great Orthodox church in Bozeman and continues to write, do translation work and serve on various educational and nonprofit boards. You have four grown children and six beautiful grandchildren. So David, what else did I miss? What would you like people to know?
David Hicks
I think that’s more than enough, Case. That’s great. Yeah, that’s very nice. I just read a novel by a friend of mine who is actually even a little older than I am. I wrote him back and I said, it’s a wonderful novel. I enjoyed it. And I was especially glad to see that someone else who’s living on stoppage time who still thinks there are goals to be scored.
Case Thorp
Well, David, I have you here today to talk to us about your latest work, The Stones Cry Out, and particularly your insights on the narratives in which we live, what for the Christian is the biblical narrative or storyline that competes with some of the ways in which culture tells us our purpose and what matters. But first, tell us a bit about yourself, notably your theological journey. I understand you began as a Presbyterian, right? Is that what Peter told me?
David Hicks
Yes, well actually I began…my father, wow, at the very beginning he was Baptist. But before even I was born or at about the point I was being born or a child, he morphed into an evangelical denomination called the Christian and Missionary Alliance. And he stayed with the CMA for quite a few years until he took a mission parish on a reservation here in Montana, and then became a non-denominational, I think, evangelical. My parents sent me off to a school that was fairly Presbyterian, the Stony Brook School, Long Island. And our headmaster, Dr. Gabeland, was one of the editors of the Scofield Bible and had a lot of Presbyterian bona fides. And then while I was in England in graduate school, I worshipped with the Anglicans. And I was in a very, I think what you’d call a very orthodox or evangelical St. Ebbe’s in Oxford. You know the old saying about Anglicans or Episcopalians, what do you get if you scratch one? The answer is almost anything. I mean, my experience with the Episcopal Church when I came home is that, you know, there are many wonderful, in my view, you know, believing Episcopalians, but there are a lot of Episcopalians which are really, who are really Unitarians, but they’re hanging out in the Episcopal Church. So anyway, that eventually led me to…I wasn’t really comfortable with that. And so I started looking around. I was married to a beautiful woman who was raised as a devout Catholic. And she was having her issues with the post-Vatican II church and of course the scandals going on in the church. So started looking for a church where we would be more comfortable with the theology and the worship and the other aspects of religious life that Christians want to pursue. And we found this small Orthodox church here in Bozeman and it was love at first sight. We love the worship, we love the theology, we love the people. It was a very close-knit group. And our little church has experienced really explosive growth in the last years. We even had this past summer, we built a church, a new church, nine years ago, 10 years ago, to accommodate about 100 people. That was the legal limit for the church because our church at the time had about 30 or 40 people. Well, now we have pretty regularly over 200 attending liturgy and we have in the summers, we even have people standing out in front who can’t really comfortably get into the church. So we’re now building another church. And it’s a beautiful thing to see. Many of these, we’re amazed at how many young men have joined the church. It’s like, our priest now is a converted Lutheran youth pastor. So he just has a wonderful way of speaking to young people. And I like that as an old man. I loved it…a priest who speaks to me as if I’m a young man.
Case Thorp
I’m beginning to understand that more and more.
David Hicks
Okay, anyway, that’s enough of that, but that’s sort of…that’s a part of my journey.
Case Thorp
Well, in my journey the Orthodox faith has meant quite a bit. In seminary I worshipped for about a year and half at a little Russian Orthodox congregation with some friends and have really stayed in touch through the years with various expressions of Orthodox faith.
I have some thoughts on why you think there’s such wonderful growth, particularly amongst young men, even in this cultural moment. But I’d love to hear from you. What do you think is the draw?
David Hicks
Well, as you’re aware, the Orthodox, they’re not finished worshipping until they share a meal together after the liturgy. And so it’s an opportunity to interact with those young guys and find out what’s going on, why they decided to take a walk on the wild side, as my wife likes to say. And some of them have never been in a church before. Most of them are totally new to Orthodoxy, which is…
Case Thorp
So new converts.
David Hicks
Yeah, they’re brand new to the faith. And typically, I think the answer we get, and it’s not always the same, typically, we’re in a cultural moment where everything is in flux. And even the mainline churches, many of them are fiddling with the faith, making adjustments to make it more, whether it’s introducing guitars or it’s deciding that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is just a metaphor, or from our point of view, the Orthodox point of view, or it’s putting women in leading pastoral roles. That’s new to the Church, historically, these things. And it’s kind of ignoring the whole..so many of the ancient traditions of worship. We’re not really worshiping and thinking like the early Christians were, the apostles, the church fathers, et cetera. And I think what appeals to the young men is here’s something in this very changing protean world that has always been what it is today. For 2,000 years, this is the way Christians have worshiped.
The music may seem a little strange to the ear. The icons are, you know, as you indicated, it’s not good art and it’s certainly not contemporary. And of course, often they come into the church with this kind of silly notion that, you know, when we kiss an icon or we bow before it, we’re worshiping the icon, which of course is, yeah, we’re venerating it. It’s just…
Case Thorp
You’re venerating.
David Hicks
We’re doing what…I always use the example. It’s, if I carry it, as I carry the pictures of my wife or my children in my wallet, if I kiss that, what am I saying? I’m not worshipping my wife, but I’m saying to her, I’m missing her and I love her and I just want to express my love for her in that way. So anyway, that’s, I think most of the young men are…they’re just looking for something to hold on to. And it has many sides. Some people describe it as the feminization of our culture that they’re feeling kind of, they don’t have a role anymore. They’re kind of lost in it. But that’s not universal. They have other reasons too. They’re just, they’re lost. And they’re looking for something like Odysseus who, you know, the ship was wrecked. He grabbed onto a mast and just held onto it and floated through the seas. I mean, they want something and so in some ways I think for them the Orthodox Church is that mast.
Case Thorp
You mentioned the wonderful church growth you’ve seen in Bozeman. I want our folks to know that you’re also working on building a monastery. So that was my reference in the introduction to literally building stone upon stone. And this is on your, your ranch, your own property there in, Montana. Give us a sense of what it looks like, what your aims are there and what the experience has been like so far.
David Hicks
Well, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And someone who really has an interest in what it looks like and all of that, they should visit the monastery’s website, which is stpetersmonastery.com.
Case Thorp
We’ll put that in our show notes.
David Hicks
Right. But the aim of the monastery, for Orthodox Christians, whatever their ethnic… Well, let me back up a bit. I think some people, when they think of Orthodoxy, they think of Roman Catholicism. You know, we love Catholics, but we’re not like the Catholics. We don’t believe the same things. There a lot of the things that happened after the great schism of the 12th century, changes that were made like the celibacy of the priests, purgatory, immaculate conception, the authority of the pope, those things all were added to the church after the schism. They never played a role in the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church, they regard themselves as sort of the product of the seven ecumenical councils that happened before. Sorry, that’s as much theology as I’ll get into.
Case Thorp
Well, and so folks understand we as Presbyterians and Protestants subscribe as well to those seven original ecumenical councils.
David Hicks
And the Nicene Creed. I mean, yes, we all say the same creed. As do the Catholics, although they, again, they change that creed very slightly. The change is meaningless to most lay people, but to the Orthodox, it’s a big deal. Anyway, so, but the point I wanted to make is that monasticism in all of those cultural manifestations, whether Serbian, Russian, Antiochian, Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, et cetera. Monasticism has always been a very important part of those traditions. And I won’t get into all the reasons why that’s so, but one of the reasons, one thing that really appeals to me is monastics are people who have decided to go all in.
It’s very hard to go all in if you’re living in the secular world. My career, even if I’d wanted to go all in, I would have had to become a monk. I couldn’t have done it in my career, in my life. Of course, I was married, I was raising a family, I was heading schools that were, some of them were putatively Christian. But they were, you know, they were essentially secular schools with Christian names. And, the beauty of monasticism, if anyone has read the novels, for example, of Dostoevsky, monastics always play a role in those novels because the monastics were someone usually just outside the village, someone to look to as these are people who are exemplars of my faith, of how to live my faith every single day, every hour, just to stay in. And so, it wasn’t as if everyone had to become a monk, but these examples lived all around them and inspired me.
Case Thorp
Much more integrated into the culture than we know.
David Hicks
Yeah, and we don’t have a culture that respects monasticism. When a child is born in this culture, or when they’re growing up, they’re not thinking, well, do I want to be a fireman or a monk? That doesn’t occur to them. And I think for monastic, Orthodoxy has made an early start in North America, but it’s had a very slow start for reasons we could get into.
But I think if it’s really going to grow and share its richness with the population generally, you’ve been, Case, exposed to some of it because you went to seminary and you just, and it doesn’t mean you have to become Orthodox, but it does enrich your faith to have been exposed to those who are Orthodox. I know you visited Mount Athos as well, which is a whole other thing. You experience the monastic tradition within the Orthodox Church. And I personally, and my wife would love for that opportunity to be made available to more Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, whatever in our country.
Case Thorp
It matters. It matters. And so that is a great segue into the book that you have that soon to come out called The Stones Cry Out that monks live all in with a different narrative with a different aim and purpose in life. And while we may not all pursue monasticism as Christ followers, there’s a better and a bigger narrative than what our culture tells us. I want to read a passage of yours that you write in the preface and have you unpack it a bit more for us. So you write, readers may simply be curious to know in this secular age, a well-educated, seemingly intelligent person clings to the vain hope of an ancient faith, when most of his world, certainly its leading voices and institutions, have moved on, believing in modern myths now so widely accepted that they are the basis for laws, theories, social policies, medical practices, and personal opinions that don’t even bother naming the myths they’re built on.
This is a conviction of mine, David, in the pastoral work that I do in discipleship. One small illustration is a mentor of mine who told his girls growing up when they would complain, we got to go to church or we as Christians can’t do this or do that. And he goes, yeah, we’re different. We’re different. And so embracing that difference, I think, is hard and maybe a journey. Unpack that passage for us.
David Hicks
Well, as you are familiar, Case, there are so many ways to do that. But one of the ways I might do it for your listeners is to say that a lot of us have lived through massive cultural changes in our society, in our country. And those of us who think about that a lot, especially from a Christian perspective, are bound to ask our question, are bound to ask, what happened? Why was the very devout Christian family I grew up in in the 50s in rural Minnesota, I grew up thinking the whole world was a Christian place, space. And here I am, you know, 50, 60 years later, 70 years later, realizing, no, I’m very…
I’m really very much as an Orthodox Christian alone in this space. There are others who share my beliefs, but I can’t walk into the public square and expect to find many there. And as that statement that you read indicates, our leading institutes, so much of the policy we have in our leading institutions and our new laws and everything else don’t reflect Christian norms, Christian values. They reflect a very secular, different view of reality. So the book is my effort to answer what happened. The broad answer is, what happened is we have changed our view culturally of what is real.
We once began, and then I go to the three proto myths in the Bible, most people, whether they were religious or not, accepted the presuppositions, the assumptions that you find in those three early myths in the Bible.
Case Thorp
Let me help our listeners. When you say myth, you don’t mean faults or fiction. Help us understand that term.
David Hicks
No. No.
Okay, well first, the listener, we need to understand that myth is from the Greek mythos, which is a term that’s thousands of years old. We didn’t invent the word myth. And from a, I don’t want to say academic, but mythos, first it doesn’t describe something that actually happened historically. It’s not a piece of history per se.
Nor is it something that’s not true. There are modern myths, secular myths, which I talk about in the book, that very well-educated, brilliant people subscribe to. And so it’s a narrative, which a myth in the, well, I’ll put it here, and the book goes into little more detail about what I mean by myth or what I think is generally meant by myth historically, not in our current society.
But a myth is a narrative. It’s a story that attempts to tell in poetic language or metaphorical language or symbolic language what is real. It answers that question: What is real in the world? And of course, our proto myths begin with a very simple sentence. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. I unpack that sentence in the first three chapters of the book or in the book that the chapters that deal with the creation mythos, the garden mythos, and the murder mythos. Those are the three initial stories in the whole biblical narrative, as you know and everyone else who has read the Bible knows.
Case Thorp
Okay, so the proto myths you’re speaking of in scripture, the creation, did you say the garden and then the murder and by murder the fall into sin or Cain and Abel? Okay, I want to come back to those, but help the listener. I hear that I live in the midst of modern day narratives and myths. Give an example of one that a banker who loves Jesus, but might be living into and unaware.
David Hicks
Okay, well, probably the two, if we start with the myth of reason. The myth of reason really, the enlightened myth of enlightenment, really began with Descartes, which most philosophers would accept. And most, even most bankers probably are aware of Descartes’ Gojito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Okay, now.
I try to literally look at that phrase less from a philosophical perspective, although I do, I’m afraid, get into a little philosophy, but more from just a common understanding. If I say to you, I think, therefore I am, Descartes arrived at that statement by saying, I want to find the one thing I cannot doubt. I’m going to doubt everything, but I’m going to get everything boiled down to one thing I cannot doubt and then build my view of reality from that one indubitable fact that no one can doubt. And what he did by doubting everything is came to the conclusion that the only thing I cannot doubt without self-contradiction is the fact that I’m doubting. And this is where the cogito comes from. I think, therefore, I am. The problem with that statement, to me, there are many problems with it. But one of the conclusions to be drawn from that is I am the source of my being. It’s because I think that I am. I, in effect, am self-created.
Case Thorp
I am the main event here.
David Hicks
It’s about me. Now, the problem with that statement logically is, of course, the conclusion is already found in the premise. As soon as you say, I think, you’re already concluding that you are. You haven’t discovered anything. And so what you have is an example of circular reasoning that from a logical perspective is just sheer nonsense. But the whole modern enterprise, the whole modern secular world is built upon this idea that reason is actually a sound, can actually reason our way into an understanding of what is real.
Case Thorp
And in that circular reasoning, there’s no place for God.
David Hicks
Absolutely not. It’s me.
Case Thorp
It’s all about me and boy, we see that in our sexual scandals and our movies and our music. Whereas you’re pointing us back to the, the bigger stories and narratives of scripture that no, have a God who creates and that creation is important. And then there’s the garden, you would mean purity and then murder. I think of other modern narratives like the big bang.
Science tells us, you came from a pool of enzymes that were somehow just popped into existence. And then we go to church and we hear the story of the days of creation and in the Garden of Eden in our minds sometimes I find people will get a bit of a brain crunch as they’re trying to reconcile the two.
David Hicks
Well, you’re right. I mean, you’re now moving on to my next chapter, which was the science myth. There I use, C.S. Lewis did a great job when he spoke to the Oxford Socratic Club after World War II. He described the science myth, and he described it as a myth, by the way, as one of the most brilliant and imaginative myths we have created. And he tells the whole myth, and I recount it in my book. It is what any scientist would read and say, yes, that’s what I believe. But Lewis tells us, of course, as he likes to do with a little bit of tongue in cheek, he says, this happened by some astronomical improbable event. But in the science myth, my basic argument I think is the science myth is: Science is a study of matter. And as soon as you make the assumption of the science myth, it is that matter is all there is. And that everything that doesn’t look like matter will eventually be explained through matter. The classic example of that is the brain and the mind. The mind is ultimately going to turn out to be just the neurological events and electrical events going on in the brain that will explain our feelings of love our feelings of devotion and our feelings of beauty, our feeling any inner feelings we have or any decisions we make and of course the other aspect of the material myth the science myth is that everything is determined because if we’re totally a part of nature, nature is all determined and…
Case Thorp
Determined by these particular chemical reactions or cellular behaviors.
David Hicks
Exactly. And so we’ve had these people, even recently I read an article in the Guardian by some scientist in Los Angeles who was making the case that we all think we have freedom, free will, but we have none of it. Ultimately, you’ll be able to predict what I’m going to ask for, what I’m going to want for breakfast this morning. Well, to me, that is just poppycock.
Case Thorp
Sounds like a Calvinist.
David Hicks
And yet people accept that and deny their own common sense. Are you familiar with the sociologist Philip Reese, who was a, he taught at Penn in the 60s when I was an undergraduate?
Case Thorp
No, I’m not.
David Hicks
Reese is a really interesting guy. He’s, I use him several times in the book. I find him interesting because he’s an agnostic.
He’s a Jewish descendant of Holocaust victims and survivors, a very clear thinker who was basically banned at Penn. I mean, he stayed at Penn, but his views were so controversial. He was at the time the leading Freudian scholar in the world, probably. But one of the controversial things he said is that there has never been a secular order that was not related to a sacred order that has survived in history. You need the two. And I like that because the first sentence, of course, immediately says, God created the heavens. There has to be a sacred order that relates to the secular order. And then his examples were, and it’s interesting, he said, think of the attempts, First Republic France, Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Pol Pot, and Cambodia. These efforts to serve, or any Marx effort to say, it’s only dialectical materialism, it’s only material world, we don’t have a sacred order, get rid of it. That’s what’s messing us up, right? And all of those attempts devolved very rapidly or over time into just cesspits of blood. I mean, they were violent and horrible historical events.
And here we are only a century later from living through all of that and our universities were making the same attempt. How can we define reality and deal with it only in material terms with the science myth?
Case Thorp
Sure, sure.
One of the best examples I like to tell folks, I’ve gleaned from Tim Keller, the reformed Presbyterian pastor in New York City, is the secular world we think we’re living into would not support dignity and human rights.
Where does that concern or cause come from? From our Christian past that said, God made you as a unique individual in his image and therefore you matter. It’s sort of a, I think, Charles Taylor talks about the echoes of Christian convictions and categories in our culture today. You also write this, although most believers in any of these myths may deny it.
They are free to believe the myth of their choice, whether ancient or modern, fabulous or flawed, and it is their believing that will make the myth believable. This is the power of faith. It is as true for the scientist and philosopher as it is for the monk in his cloister. David, take me to that manager at a bank, that plumber, that house parent or stay at home parent.
How do we make sure we lean into the biblical storyline for our purpose?
David Hicks
You know, again, historically, in terms of our faith, the people who made really the best arguments, in my view anyway, were St. Augustine on this question and St. Anselm centuries later. They said, you know, in order to understand reality, first you have to, from a Christian or biblical perspective, first you have to believe. It’s belief that leads to understanding.
And what I try to say in the book is, that’s true for all the myths, secular as well as sacred. It’s the scientist who believes, and I’m putting too broad a, it’s the material scientist who believes that there’s only a material realm, that everything is going to be explained through some kind of cause effect matter. It’s his belief in that, that fuels his whole life, that his investigation, the lens he’s wearing, sees everything. And as I say in the book, he’s looking at a glass half full. He just refuses to look at that other half. And that’s kind of easy because when we look at a glass of water, what are we looking at? Looking at the water in the glass. We’re not looking at the part that we can’t, there’s nothing there. And so the…I kind of lost my train of thought, the point is that we all find believable what we believe. And it’s what we believe, and then we get back into the myth. It’s the myth, it’s the narrative that we believe that is causing us to see the world as we see it.
Case Thorp
That’s an explicit move. Someone has to choose to step into that. It’s not, that’s not necessarily the revelatory part of God’s work and move in our lives. That’s a claim you take upon yourself and you lean into it.
David Hicks
One of the controversial things I think will be controversial to some Christians that I say in the book is Christianity is much more empirical in science. Because the Lord says, and see that the Lord is good. What could be more empirical than that? But again, it’s commit yourself to the mythos. Believe that Jesus Christ, that God became born of a baby, became born as a baby in the incarnation, lived on earth, taught on earth, died and was resurrected and conquered death by death. Believe that. That’s what Orthodox Christians believe. If you believe that, all start, as Lewis says in his statement, things all start to click into place.
It’s like, these things. The fact that we live in a moral universe? Science rejects that. Nietzsche rejected that. He said, God’s dead. The universe is only moral if there’s a God. And of course, in the very first proto myth, the creation myth, God says, what does he do at the end of every phase of creation? This is good. Well, where does that idea come from?
Case Thorp
Yeah, why would it be good?
David Hicks
Yeah, why is it good? And of course, the rabbis gathered in the second century BC in Alexandria to translate the Hebrew into the Greek, they call that tonkos, kalos. What does kalos mean? It means it’s nice that I love that word in Greek because it’s kind of confusing. You can translate it as either good or beautiful.
What I started my book is saying in this first myth, what we learn is that the universe, God created it both good and beautiful. And we all have an intimation that those two terms are somehow related. Some relationship there. Keats, of course, recognized that in his poetry, the whole notion that we live in a, Nietzsche, of course, when he said, God, he just reckoned God is dead. There is no God. And therefore, we can live beyond good and evil. There is no moral universe. A scientist has to, science, not a scientist, has to buy into that. There’s no morality in science. It’s just matter. And what is taught now in the universities is that these ideas of right and wrong are human constructs. We constructed those ideas in our societies in order to get along or get on or whatever.
Case Thorp
For better survival, the anthropologist will say.
David Hicks
Yeah, everything is a human construct. Now, if we have the lens of science on, we have to, that’s a conclusion we draw.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Where does altruism come from? The anthropologist says, it comes from your ability to survive. You’ve spoken into the proto myth of creation hit for us. The other two we see in scripture of garden and murder.
David Hicks
Okay, well, there’s so much there and everyone should read this book. But what I try to do is I try, as a lay person who thinks about this a lot, I try to understand these myths and what they’re telling us about reality. And what’s interesting to me, there are a lot of differences, but in the creation myth, the first myth, it’s God who chooses.
God makes things. God is the agent. He makes things happen. He chooses and He chooses to make man and a woman. In the Garden Myth, which begins right after it, it assumes you know the creation of myth, but the agents have completely changed. Now man is choosing or given the right to choose. To me, that’s one of the key elements of the change here, why this story is told.
The garden myth is a huge affirmation of man’s freedom because God in the creation myth, remember, God creates in the…we Orthodox Christians are kind of fanatical on this point, but God created man in his own image and likeness. He put himself into man. And what is the characteristic of God? Well, one of the…
If we only had the first myth, the creation myth, there would be several characteristics that would be part of the DNA of man. One is, he’s creative. God creates. So man is not only made, he makes. Secondly, he has a sense of goodness and beauty, morality and aesthetics.
And thirdly, He’s free. God is free to do, He can make what He wants to make. He can do what He wants to be. And He puts that freedom into man. So the Garden Myth is, all right, now we’re starting off with a man. Okay, he was created in the Creation Myth. Well, what’s he gonna do, this guy? What’s he gonna be like? And the reality is, he’s going to be given choice. He’s got choices to make, which is fundamental to our view of reality. All of us have choices to make. And we come back to the issue of faith. I have a little fun with the cosmologist or astronomer, Dr. Tyson, who gave a long lecture. I unpack his lecture, and I’m afraid I kind of make fun of him because he’s assuming that his belief has nothing to do with his convictions about science.
And I try to show in his own words, in his own lecture, how it’s all about belief. And he has some pretty naive views of that belief, which if a person would just use their everyday common sense and intelligence, would immediately recognize this guy is, he’s a believer. I mean, he’s believing things that are crazy, but it’s true for him.
Case Thorp
Yeah, even less tangible. And so then I would presume on the murder myth, it’s that we have taken our choice and used it for evil.
David Hicks
Exactly. The murder myth follows up the garden myth because in the garden myth, the choice has already been made. Man has agency in the garden myth. Man can choose. And he chose. He chose to disobey. He chose the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which of course is a metaphor. He chose that instead of dependence upon God and obedience to God. And then the murder myth is, well, now what happens? Now that man has made his choice, what’s it going to be like? Well, and the beautiful thing about Cain and the way he’s represented, he’s so much us. He’s just so human. And all of those little reactions, a ll the things, know, am I my brother’s keeper? Hiding from God, reasoning with God. I mean, I beat up reason. You know, I reason myself all the time. I love reason. I think we all have to do it, but the reality is, it’s not dependable. Of course, I say, reason is somewhat dependable when we’re looking outside of ourselves, but when we’re looking into ourselves, we call it rationalizing. We rationalize our own behavior, our own stuff, because we use reason to get off the hook, just as Adam tries to do, and certainly as Cain tries to do. But the beautiful thing at the end of Cain, of that mythos, first people who are fundamentalist friends who want to read these myths as literal facts, I mean, they have to read these proto myths and be twisted into pretzels trying to figure out, you know, because of course, there’s no one born in the quote unquote garden of Eden at all. No one’s born until after the expulsion from the garden. And what is at the end of the Cain myth, what happens? Cain goes off to the land of Nod, where there are many other human beings, right? And he found cities. And what I’m saying is he is the father of our civilizations. That proto myth says this is the guy who we all came from.
Case Thorp
Well, and you know, as you began in the evangelical world, I do come from a tradition that leans into the historical conviction of these events in Scripture. And while the greater Christian world can disagree on those sorts of things, those are Adiaphora secondary, I can still pull from the events, the major themes and the work of God and then see them repeated again and again in the rest of Scripture. So I think then, David, this is so helpful about the teacher you having an education background. I think of, like, I mentioned the managers out there, those who are doing faithful work at Disney World, right? My neighbor here. A Christian in that environment can look for the different narratives that are there and be reminded themselves, yes, I come from a God who chooses me. He gives me choice. And in that choice, I can live out the love of Christ or not. And yet also recognize in the murder myth, my tendency is to do evil. My tendency is to be selfish, but yet through the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit, I’m going to resist that. Would you say that’s a good way to apply this concept?
David Hicks
Yeah, I think we all have to recognize Cain in ourselves. Of course, in my view, my Orthodox view, uppercase O, Augustine, there’s always a tendency in our beliefs to go to the extreme, to move to the extreme. And Augustine, in my view, like Calvin, moved to an extreme.
They got focused on one thing and that was, in Guston’s case, the depravity of man, the sinfulness of man, the cane in man. And that trumped the image of goodness and likeness that God put in man. And the Patristic Fathers, the Orthodox view is, yes, there’s Cain in man, but there’s also God in man.
And man continues to have choices to make. It’s not like all of his choices now are going to be corrupted. Because if you take the Augustinian view or the Calvinistic view, in my opinion and in the opinion of the fathers, you remove man from responsibility. Now God becomes like he is in the creation myth. He chooses some but doesn’t choose others. And too bad if you’ve not chosen.
But that’s never the, in my view, was never the orthodox view of, it was always that effort. It is the effort to keep these two things working together, like the lobes of the lungs. You can’t breathe without both lobes in this sense. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of Cain in me, but there’s a lot of God’s image in me.
And from an Orthodox point of view, we should be making choices. We should draw near to God in prayer, in aesthetic practice, doing whatever we can because yes, grace is a gift from God, but it’s a gift that we have to cooperate with. We’re free still to reject it.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, common grace is a big reformed concept that helps us think through these very issues.
David Hicks
Yeah, I mean, these are kind of topics, what I love about this, where I have come out, is I like the balance of it and the mystery of it. It’s a hard thing to explain, and yet when you live it, you realize it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It’s not like I have this wonderful, powerful faith.
It’s more that I can’t imagine the world without my faith. Nothing would make sense to me. And we were talking about all the young men who are sort of moving into the church these days. And I think that’s what they are. Things are no longer really make sense. The stuff they’re hearing at the universities, the stuff they’re reading in the news, whatever. This stuff is just, it’s not really coming together. It doesn’t really convince.
But of course, also what I’ve said in the book, is probably wrong theologically, I say, you know, all the Christian, all the faith has been, it’s very empirical. It says, taste and see that the Lord is good. Try it out. Even in Christ’s parables, he recognizes that that test is gonna fail in some cases. Some seed is gonna fall into thorns, some seed is going to fall upon stony ground and die out. And to me, that’s such an honest parable, of course, because a lot of what are a lot of those, a lot of that faith choice that we make depends on how we continue to comport our life. Are we going to continue to associate with friends who don’t believe or make a mockery of belief? Are we really going to commit ourselves to daily prayer and study and growing in our faith? Or are we just going to say, raise our hand and say, yeah, I believe, and then go on with our secular lives? And back to your point about your Disney parishioners, it won’t work that way. That seed is going to fall on stony ground. It’s going to die. And the Lord recognizes that. By the way, while we’re speaking of Disney, do you know of Vigen Guroian’s book, Tending the Heart? Are you familiar with that at all?
Case Thorp
I am not, no.
David Hicks
Anyway, I like Viggen’s stuff a lot. He was a UVA professor. He’s now retired. A strong, Orthodox Christian man. But he wrote a book which really, among other things, is a sustained attack on what the Disney world has done to the myths of Hans Christian Anderson. And that book, it’s beautifully written. It’s called Tending the Heart. And I would encourage anyone who’s looking for Disney and wants to bring their faith into their life, their work, to read Vigen’s book. It’s a beautiful book. Oxford University Press just reissued it. It’s really wonderful.
Case Thorp
Okay, we will put that in our notes.
David Hicks
Parents of young children should also read it because his basic view is, he says, Hans Christian Andersen and those early fairy tales, they were profoundly Christian. They had real strong Christian elements and meaning in them because men who wrote them were strong Christians. And those have been leached out of them by our secular reproductions of those myths. Anyway, it’s very, it would be a challenging read for…
Case Thorp
Okay. Well, I’ll put that in our notes. David, thank you so much. You’ve just helped us really get a sense of what we’re up against, what’s out there, but also the hope of the gospel in what we do. I appreciate it.
David Hicks
Thank you and the Lord bless anything I’ve said that is stupid and erroneous be forgiven and forgotten and may whatever is good be retained.
Case Thorp
Well, I’m going to try to get up there with Peter Vande Brake, our mutual friend and experience the monastery. Well, friends, you should come along with us. But if you’d like more of David’s work, encourage you to look for his books, Norms and Nobility, the Emperor’s Handbook, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Stone’s Cry Out will be coming out soon. David, when should that hit the press?
David Hicks
You’re welcome. Later this winter or early in the spring, I’m told. The published world is a uncertain world these days.
Case Thorp
Okay, 2025.
Well, friends, thank you for joining us again. Please like and share so that we can help to get the word out. Leave a review wherever you get your podcast. You can visit collaborativeorlando.com for all sorts of content. If you’ll drop us your email, we’ll send you for free a 31 day faith and work prompt journal, a way to work through the insights and theology of faith and work, apply it to your life and grow more into Christ. You can also follow us across the social media platforms. Don’t forget we also drop formed for faithfulness, a weekly 10 minute devotional podcast for the working Christian that follows along the liturgical calendar. I want to thank our sponsor for today, the Stein foundation. I’m Case Thorp and God’s blessings on you.
