Women & Leftist Hobo Mysticism, Trent Horn & Delusions, Debates & BAD MOVIES
The case, and the answer to it
What he argues. Jay Dyer's case, put at its strongest and in his own terms, is this: the internet religious marketplace is saturated with counterfeit holiness — a homeless "prophet" collecting a million views, a young convert who claims Latin words appear to him in dreams and takes this as warrant to "become Catholic immediately," and a class of professional Roman Catholic apologists (Trent Horn chief among them) who have built a public persona of "charity" and moral superiority while (a) never admitting a factual error, (b) excusing grave, ongoing institutional scandals (German diocesan sex-ed material, decades of clerical abuse, communion given to publicly scandalous Catholic politicians) as merely regrettable, and (c) clipping opponents out of context to manufacture outrage over "meanness" that they themselves practice. Genuine discernment, he argues, requires testing claims of vision, prophecy, and moral authority against the Church's own tradition, history, and a spiritual father rather than accepting them on their own charismatic say-so — and by that standard, both the homeless mystic and the Latin-dream convert are textbook cases of unrefined delusion, while Trent Horn's brand of pious moral policing is a fragile, narcissistic performance that collapses the moment it is pressed on its own factual errors (e.g., insisting "triad" is an Arian term against his own liturgy) or on its own house's failures. Along the way he also volunteers, in his own voice as an Orthodox teacher, some incidental doctrine: that Saint Basil called the papacy "worthless" in the Meletian affair, and that the angels fell in "a created timeless aeon," envious specifically of man's appointed stewardship and priesthood over the cosmos.
How Eastern Orthodoxy answers. Eastern Orthodoxy has little quarrel with the shape of Dyer's central diagnosis and a good deal to correct in its incidental patristic furniture. On the main point, he is in fact using Orthodoxy's own settled vocabulary correctly: unverified visions, dream-warrants for immediate religious action, and confidence untested by a spiritual father or the mind of the Church are precisely what the ascetic tradition calls prelest, and his mockery of the Latin-dream convert tracks that teaching closely — this should be granted, not contested. But two of the doctrinal claims he tosses off in passing do not survive contact with the sources he invokes: nothing in Saint Basil's letters calls the papacy "worthless," and his account of when and why the angels fell compresses several open, non-conciliar patristic opinions into a settled scheme no single Father states as he gives it. On his running dispute with Trent Horn over the word "triad," he is simply right, and Orthodoxy's own liturgical and patristic use of "Trias" bears him out. And on the deeper question implicit in his defense of "blood sport" rhetoric as spiritually neutral because "that's just what the internet is" — the ascetic tradition he claims does not grant that any medium, including comedy, is exempt from the discipline of the tongue.
What it comes down to. The disagreement turns on authority and verification: Dyer treats his own recollection of a Father's supposed words, or his own theological system-building, as sufficient warrant in the moment it is spoken, whereas Orthodoxy's standard — as with the homeless prophet's dream, or the Latin-dream convert's — is that nothing binds, teaches, or excuses simply because it is said with confidence; it must be checked against what the Fathers actually wrote and against the discernment of a spiritual father, the very discipline he rightly invokes against others but does not always apply to himself.
3misquotedthe words are not in the source at all
1:38:11 Jay Dyer
"The papacy is not only worthless as Saint Basil said in his day during the Meletian schism. It is actually a promoter of evil"
load-bearingSt. Basil the Great (tradition) No such statement is in Basil's corpus. In the letters that actually bear on the Meletian schism and Rome's involvement, Basil's complaint is that Damasus and the Western bishops were arrogant, ignorant of Eastern conditions, and slow to help — not that the papacy as such was "worthless" or "a promoter of evil." Basil was writing decades before any developed Roman claim to universal jurisdiction existed for him to reject in those terms; putting those words in his mouth reads a later controversy back into a fourth-century pastoral quarrel he never framed that way.
St. Basil, Letters 92, 214, 239 (to Eusebius of Samosata and on the Western bishops)
2selectivethe source is quoted against its own sense by leaving out what stands beside it
2:30:33 Jay Dyer
did your patriarchs not sign off on Chalcedon? Did they sign off on post in Leo's tome and his letters?
load-bearingFr. John Meyendorff (conciliarist) Yes, and Orthodoxy has never denied it: the bishops at Chalcedon did accept Leo's Tome, and Jay Dyer is right to say so against an opponent trying to make something else of it. But the Acts show why they accepted it, and it is not what a claim of standing Roman authority needs: a committee under Patriarch Anatolius tested the Tome clause by clause against Cyril's Twelve Anathemas before it was ever put to the council, and the famous acclamation was not "Leo has spoken" alone but "Piously and truly did Leo teach, so taught Cyril... Leo and Cyril taught the same thing" - reception by consonance with the received faith, not by the authority of the speaker. The same session that received the Tome passed Canon 28 giving Constantinople equal privileges to Rome, which Leo himself refused to ratify, annulling it "by the authority of the blessed Apostle Peter" as contrary to Nicaea - so if Chalcedon proves Roman jurisdiction over the East, it proves it selectively, since Rome's own bishop could not make his refusal of that same council's canon stick.
1contestedreported fairly, and the standpoint denies it, with its reason
2:57:42 Jay Dyer
"I've never understood the idea that you need to project piety and holiness on the Internet. That makes no sense... The Internet was always naked women and shit talking from the earliest days."
load-bearingSt. John Climacus (ascetic) Orthodoxy denies the premise buried here, that mockery, cursing, and "shit talking" belong to a neutral zone the ascetic discipline of the tongue doesn't reach because it's "just the internet" or "just comedy." The Ladder of Divine Ascent treats slander, buffoonery, and talkativeness as passions of the tongue to be watched everywhere, not suspended wherever an audience is expected to laugh; St. John Climacus does not carve out an exception for jest at a stranger's or a rival's expense before an audience of strangers online. Dyer half-concedes this himself elsewhere in the same breath ("I'm not saying it's morally good"), which is closer to the tradition's actual position than the claim that piety online "makes no sense."
St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, on slander, talkativeness and buffoonery
0grantedthe objection lands, and the standpoint concedes it
1:25:37 Jay Dyer
"No discernment. No spiritual father. No checking it against church history and divine revelation... This is pure unrefined prelest."
load-bearingSt. Ignatius Brianchaninov (discipline) This is exactly right, and Orthodoxy claims it as its own diagnosis before Dyer ever made it comedy. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov's The Arena warns at length that dreams, visions, and inner voices that demand immediate, dramatic action, unweighed by Scripture, the Fathers, and above all a spiritual father, are the very signature of prelest — self-deception mistaken for revelation, most dangerous precisely when it feels most certain. A convert acting on a dream in a language he does not know, with no one to test it, is the textbook case the tradition warns against, not an edge case.
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, The Arena, chapters on prelest; On the Prayer of Jesus
1:30:04 Jay Dyer
It's like that quote from Saint Anthony. In the last days, I don't know from the last days, but in the last days, everyone will go mad and then we'll grab a sane person and say, why are you not mad like us?
St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite (compiler) The attribution stands as given, even hedged: it is Saying 25 among the sayings of St. Anthony the Great in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which the Church has received as authentic monastic memory of the man who founded the anchoritic life. Nicodemus the Hagiorite, who sifted a thousand years of ascetic writing to decide what belonged in the Philokalia, drew on this very body of sayings as trustworthy testimony to the mind of the desert; the saying's point, that a world gone collectively mad will call the sane man mad, is exactly the discernment such compilers meant to hand down, and it lands on the homeless "prophet" and the Latin-dream convert being mocked in this same stream at least as well as it lands anywhere else.
1:45:52 Jay Dyer
"that the term triad is an Arian term, which he still to this day believes, even though his own Eastern Rite liturgy... uses that term for the Trinity"
load-bearingSt. Gregory the Theologian (theologian) On this specific point Dyer is simply correct, and Orthodoxy stands behind him against his opponent. "Trias" is not an Arian coinage; it predates Arius by over a century, and St. Gregory the Theologian uses it repeatedly for the consubstantial Godhead in the Theological Orations, as does St. Basil in On the Holy Spirit. It remains the ordinary Greek liturgical word for the Holy Trinity — "Agia Trias" — sung in every Divine Liturgy. An apologist who calls the word itself Arian while attending a liturgy that uses it has simply gotten his patristics wrong, and this should be granted plainly.
St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Five Theological Orations (27-31); St. Basil, On the Holy Spirit
0unsettledthe standpoint has not settled this among its own, and the answer names who holds what
3:05:33 Jay Dyer
"I said the angels sinned in the created timeless aeon... Because angels were not put in the position of being the steward of the universe. Man was. And that's why the angels were envious of man."
St. John of Damascus (expositor) This dresses up as settled doctrine what the Fathers actually leave open. St. John of Damascus places the creation and fall of the angels close to but not identical with Dyer's scheme, and the exact timing of the angelic fall relative to the six days is a question the Fathers answer variously rather than in one voice. That the devil envied man is attested, but the specific claim that this envy targeted man's cosmic "stewardship" or "priesthood," as opposed to his honor, incorruption, or the divine image, is Dyer's own systematizing, not a single Father's settled teaching — a theologoumenon, not a dogma.
St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book 2, chapters 3-4