The Holy Is Radioactive

More literally than Joe Rogan and the rest of us are conditioned to believe

On occasion, and with very mixed feelings, as his constant profanity and still very leftist worldview wades me off, I find myself listening to Joe Rogan. It started during the COVID era with his interviews with narrative skeptics Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone. Yet I soon also listened and deeply enjoyed his conversations with other dissidents to our then regime’s¹ political orthodoxies such as Bret Weinstein, Mike Benz, and Tucker Carlson.

Joe is no Catholic or Christian, as his interview with Mel Gibson last month aptly demonstrated if you didn’t notice earlier. He’s also not a conservative either, even if his endorsement of Donald Trump the night before November’s election did a lot to help. But Rogan has interviewed thousands of interesting people with his platform as the world’s most popular podcast mainstreaming—for better or worse—many otherwise little-known stories, facts, and rumors. One thing he covered recently that piqued my interest was the claim that an Orthodox² church in northern Ethiopia has the literal Old Testament Ark of the Covenant in it.³

According to Rogan’s guest, Dan Richards, the Ark is kept hidden in a crypt of the Church of Our Lady, Mary of Zion, and guarded for life by an Orthodox priest with no one else allowed to see it. This guardian, however, cannot touch the ark itself, lest he instantly die, but suffers eye cataracts from proximity and usually, according to the accounts, succumbs to death quickly from the proximity, suffering symptoms suggesting that it is as if the Ark is a radioactive power source sending deadly invisible rays out in the same manner as a fission reactor. Rogan was skeptical of this story, as, other than the claims of the Ethiopian church, there is scant evidence or explanation for how it ended up there. Joe spent a bit of time querying Richards as to why a radioactive source strong enough to kill people isn’t visible to military satellites and other surveillance apparatuses. I’m skeptical too, as the second book of Maccabees last references the Ark as buried in a cave in Mount Nebo in today’s Jordan. But my main reason for skepticism is the assumptions to which Rogan and his guest, without realizing it, fall prey.

My beef isn’t with the historical and physical reality of the Ark. Nor is it with the idea that touching it could kill you or that it can have manifest and detrimental physical effects. They’re all clearly outlined in Scripture. I take issue, however, with Joe and his guest’s implicit physicalist assumptions. In Rogan’s worldview, the Ark of the Covenant, if real, is magical and powerful but only in a projecting-radiation-in-the-radioactive-heavy-elements-decaying-to-lower-ones-while-releasing-ionizing-high- energy-alpha-particles sense. And perhaps the Ark is radioactive in this sense. But I don’t like the implicit frame in which Joe Rogan and Dan Richards constrain the Ark, and, by extension, all other Holy objects, as if they can’t be anything more than a machine or technological artifact with mysterious but ultimately scientifically comprehensible powers. For Rogan and Richards, the Holy has to be some sort of advanced, but ultimately comprehensible technology. God, if He exists in this, or any similar worldview, is also thus merely a powerful being with advanced knowledge of and ability to manipulate nature.

It’s not their fault personally. We all think this way. The dissective approach to science, or asking what is going on according to the operation of the normal laws of nature is a valid—though incomplete—mode, for example, to look at the Shroud of Turin, the tilma of Juan Diego and its image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or various Eucharistic miracles. But it’s an incomplete way at the very least for thinking about the Holy—and God. It is a false presumption that has taken over Rogan, and at times, many of us, in thinking that a sacred object must fully conform to the normal laws of nature in its miraculous—or at least strange effects.

Why we do this is easily answered, the disenchantment of the cosmos explained by Charles Taylor, and the psychological changes imputed to us by our technology as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman explain. But the “why” begs the “how else.” How else should we think about sacred objects and spiritual realities that we encounter on a weekly—or hopefully—daily basis in the Eucharist, icons, other sacred images, Sacraments, and sacramentals? Of course, faithful Christians would say we encounter all these through the spiritual sense or a heart filled with charity, all of which are highly intellectual answers and disembodied perspectives on what is happening therein.

Many of us also stop at this level of analysis and over-spiritualize the Holy and the sacred, leaving a seemingly unbridged gap between “physical miracles” like Eucharistic Miracles with effects that we can dissect and “spiritual miracles” like the Eucharist itself and the effects of sacred objects upon us which we perceive as merely spiritual.

This is a result of the same false Cartesian presuppositions by which we think of ourselves as ghosts in a machine, souls occupying and directing a wholly separate body, rather than the embodied or incarnational, unified beings we are, where soul and body, remain distinct principles but form a single integrated whole. As such, there ought to be no unbridgeable gap regarding miracles and the sacred. Divine realities impact our soul most properly but affect us as a totality, body and soul.

It is important then to fix how we think about what is going on with the spiritual realities we encounter in the Eucharist, Sacraments, and icons. Most of us, it is true, don’t have an obvious and scientifically measurable daily reminder that the spiritual reality is there in the way that the Old Testament records the Ark having made Divine reality manifest to the Israelites who guarded it. The spiritual reality present does not reveal itself to us physically as measurable radiation, dissectable and chemically testable DNA, and obvious magnetic fields—at least most of the time. One interpretative paradigm I’ve pondered over the last few months to address this problem in myself came to me during Eucharistic Adoration. For a while, the best way to understand Adoration seems to be as if it is my presenting myself before a power source or radioactive block of energy. This has been my default mode there, as well as in praying with icons and sacramentals is treating them each as an “energy source’” ‘block of power”, or “radioactive something.”⁴

I pride myself in this metaphor, for, as seemingly irreverent and weird as it may sound, it is quite a traditional way of thinking about the Holy. Not only is it how the Israelites thought of the Ark, but it is also how people used to contemplate the Eucharist and all other holy things. To the Medieval man, or anyone in any age other than our own, Holy objects emitted energy, produced something like a force field around itself that impacted and affected you, and were something like what would now term “electrically charged.” The Holy was quite different from the quotidian but was not so different as to be thought merely intellectual or entirely disembodied. For the Medieval man, it was there before you in an obvious manner that you would quite literally feel the presence of.⁵

Of course, again I am not talking (necessarily) of a physical reality in the sense of alpha, betta, gamma radiation, or otherwise. But a Sacrament or Sacramental exists in this middle, blurry, or perhaps transfigured ground where metaphor meets experiential reality just as physical signs and spiritual transcendent reality also meet. For again, the Holy affects us each as a unitive whole.

There is one limit to this analogy. God is not univocal in His being with His creation but is distinct insofar as His being is His essence and our being, and all beings we encounter being created, even though all these are participations in His Divine reality in some way. Therefore we can’t consider Transubstantiation for the Eucharist, and grace for the other Sacraments and sacramentals as “energy deposits” or “radiation” in the same way as the physical natural energy and radiation we might encounter. But the situation is analogous and just as the Divine reality is not univocal to, but is instead more real, more truly “being” than any other being, so also is the “radiation” of the Divine more real than any “radiation” given us by uranium or plutonium decay. For it affects more real and more lasting beings than “ordinary radiation” ever does, ourselves as unitive wholes who are ultimately destined to live forever.

Any analogy that denies this is rooted in pride or occasionalism. Either it is a Pelagian argument, ascribing the increase in grace to us rather than to God’s actions through his prescribed visible, physical signs, or it is occasionalist, arguing that God produces graces in us when we are receiving Him in Holy Communion or in prayer before the Sacrament but not due to us being before Him in the Sacrament. In this type of argument, the Sacraments and icons would become weird ritual idolatry that God prescribes at the same time as His giving us grace, but not a real source of His Divine life emanating into us.

The analogy of radioactive energy is the only one that preserves Divine causality, and we must remind ourselves of this for more than just avoiding these two heresies. While the Holy does not usually have a measurable physical effect, its effects upon you are not merely in the invisible and insensible realm of grace on your soul. If your intentions are properly formed and oriented, receiving the Eucharist should affect how you physically and sensibly feel. You should feel—and expect to feel—God’s grace and peace present before you when you are in Eucharistic Adoration or receive Holy Communion. You are receiving or in front of, literally feet away from your Maker in Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. No, you do not have a perfect philosophical formula or metaphor to explain what is going on. Even transubstantiation as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas and professed by the Church leaves an aura of mystery. But you can say that it is there, you are here, and it is affecting you. Unless your heart is turned aside from lack of faith or charity, the Divine presence and your realization of it slowly, surely, and as long as you are attentive to its reality puts you at peace, fills your heart with greater fervor, your attentiveness with the perception of joy, and your love to ever more desire its own increase. There is a spiritual change—but also a psychological one of ever more saintly ordering of your passions and habits unto Divine love. Furthermore, these psychological changes being induced in you through the Holy Eucharist must also have a physical effect of at least some kind, meaning in the end, yes there is a physical effect that you can sometimes literally feel in yourself from the irradiated of grace—sometimes more so than others.

God is present to us through icons and sacramentals in a slightly lesser way. These are lesser theophanies than when Christ becomes physically incarnate. But the same metaphor of radiation is appropriate and variations of it are quite traditional, as with St. John of Damascus in the 8th Century speaking of grace as a fire suffused in icons and transferring or radiating through our use of them into us:

“Just as iron plunges in the fire does not become fire by nature, but by union and burning participation, so what is deified does not become God by nature, but by participation.”⁶

The distinction between the Divine source and the physical substrate, tool, or mediator in this fire/iron vs. sword metaphor is important to ensure one does not think of the physical icon as God or His energies in itself, and in so doing being idolatrous. Rather, one directs one’s attention through and also receives graces / Divine energies through the icon or image. Again, the analogy of radiation, or in the terminology available to St. John of Damascus, fire (and heat) helps us here to preserve the orthodoxy of our imagination against idolatrous intentions.

Furthermore, because we now, unlike the ancients and medievals, know about radioactive substances such as uranium, we are better able to understand the penetrating—and yet still mystical and beyond mere ordinary nature—realities of the Sacraments and icons. The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, for example, has the priest pray the words of Isaiah directly after Holy Communion: “This coal of fire has touched your lips, your iniquities have been taken away, your sins are purged.”⁷ The words evoke a surface-level image in the mind for everyone, regardless of age or culture. And when I go to Divine Liturgy myself these words are not only on my mind after receiving the Eucharist but also—to a degree feel felt throughout my entire body and being. But with our modern understanding of more types of radiation, including totally invisible ones, we are aided in comprehending and giving thanks for God’s grace to us in the Sacrament, and better understanding how an invisible, and yet supernatural reality can completely penetrate us, suffuse us, steep within us. As long as my intentions are well directed I certainly feel suffused after receiving holy Communion or when praying with an icon or a rosary, and am better reminded, thanks to the analogy of physical radiation how the grace (Divine energy for you Orthodox out there but it’s the same thing practically speaking) is not the physical object itself even though that object is in a very real sense, also suffused with Divine energy.

You don’t have to go to Ethiopia to encounter a charged, irradiating, energy-filled Holy object. Hopefully, you can go around the corner to have Christ Himself and have a lot of icons/images in your home, which, even if you can’t measure them, have a spiritual, psychological, and yes, even physical effect upon you from their Divine source.

Certainly, you would agree that receiving Holy Communion or even stopping for prayer for a few moments in an adoration chapel feels like having just been powered up, recharged, or refueled.

More provocatively, perhaps, but also you have to admit, manifest from your own experiences, how does leaving confession feel? You physically felt that, right? Admit it. You felt that.

1. The Blitzkrieg Through the Institutions

You are the regime now!

2. They are, like the Copts, Oriental Orthodox miaphysites (followers of Eutyches) due to their rejection of the Council of Chalcedon. However, even though they are thus manifest formal heretics to the rest of the Orthodox and to Catholics, I hold out hope that they are invincibly ignorant and not in material heresy, their rejection of two energies or natures in Jesus Christ being likely due to confusions in translation and fear of falling into Nestorianism pushing them into the stance they take.

Lutherans are also sort of like miaphysites in their (loose) Christology.

3. There is also an alternative theory that postulates that the Ark of the Covenant is in Trump’s Mar a Lago resort (castle?) in Florida.

4. Of course, we must not ignore the personal nature of the three Persons of God and treat God merely as a “force” or “power.” Reducing God to these alone is another fallacy. You need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Yes, you do. You should have a life of mental prayer. See my essay on why we pray here:

5. The effect depends on your proper predisposition and inclinations as to whether it’s for good or for ill for you.

6. St. John of Damascus, On the Divine Images.

7. Isaiah 6:6