Episode 149 - Why The Bible Describes Many Heavenly Species

Heaven gets strange the moment we try to file it neatly. We start with a deceptively simple question: are all heavenly beings one species we casually call “angels”, or does Scripture describe a genuinely diverse ecology of celestial creatures? As we read the Bible’s own vocabulary, the differences become hard to ignore. Angels often appear human enough to be mistaken for men, while cherubim, seraphim, and ophanim carry imagery that feels more like Ezekiel’s overwhelming field notes than a single tidy category.

From there we trace how church history wrestles with this, and why some traditions end up flattening the whole spiritual realm. Neoplatonic dualism offers a comforting two-box universe, spiritual versus material, but it can also drain the detail out of Christian cosmology. When everything gets compressed into “God and creation”, agency collapses, ranks and roles fade, and the rich biblical tapestry of delegated powers starts to look like mere symbolism. We talk about what that does to theology, to interpretation, and to the confidence that reality might be bigger than our preferred definitions.

Then we turn to dragons and classification. John of Damascus offers a case study in what happens when there is no room for an in-between category: dragons must become animals, regardless of reports of intelligence. We contrast that with Albert the Great and a more open posture shaped by witness, tradition, and the strange edges of medieval natural philosophy. Subscribe, share, and leave a review, then tell us: where have we made the cosmos smaller than the Bible makes it?

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Welcome And The Classification Problem

Rev Dr PRB 0:30

Welcome to the Christ Center Cosmic Civilization as we continue our series looking at the problem of classification of animals and creatures, heavenly, earthly, fe, all of that. And I'll just begin again by way of introduction: the difficulty of classifying angels, heaven, the head, the what we can comfortably classify in a heavenly category as those creatures of the highest heaven who would normally live in or be sent from the highest heaven. There is one tradition would say, we'll ask PJ again from the Global Church History Project to help us with this, but there is a tradition that simply calls them groups them all within the same species and says they are all of the same species. So that'd be like saying that dog. There are many kinds of dog, but they're all dog. So one tradition does that, but there is another tradition that would say, no, there are many different species of angel. So then it'd be like dogs, cats, uh, eagles, bulls, you know, variety of species and different kinds within the species, so that way the heavenly creatures are just as diverse in species as say earthly creatures are diverse in species. And it seems like there's a there's a bit of difficulty, you know, in people going, uh, let's just call them all one species, or those that are saying, Well, hang on, like you can't be doing that. What what what would your perspective on what have been different approaches to that in church history? So it's had a bit of a resurgence. So that was very strong, sort of in very ancient times, and then it's had a resurgence. What was very strong in ancient times? The idea that they're all different, the the different species, many different species, right. And that's taken up a bit recently because a lot of people have noticed in the Bible the word angel only ever describes something like a human, sometimes like because Gabriel's just called a man, and he's only ever called an angel. In the old testament, he's just called a man. In the New Testament, then they clarify, oh, he's an angel. So an angel, using the word sort of biblically and specifically, refers to this very sort of humanoid, to the point where you could mistake an angel for a man, and we're told people do that in the New Testament, and we see it happen in Acts, you know, personally, but then we're always told, you know, always be hospitable because it could be an angel. So it's like a man who's just in spirit, like a spirit entirely composed of spirit, but otherwise just a man, and you can just mix them up. Whereas cherub, a cherubim, very different, and there's different kinds. You got the tetramorphs, you've got those four, and they have four faces. Yeah. They're very strange, very unique, but then either one of them has a face of a cherub, or each of them has one face of a cherub, it depends on translation. But whichever way it is, that means that all cherubim do not look like them. There's one that does that looks kind of regular for a cherub, which still Ezekiel finds incredibly strange, a strange sight. But then, you know, within that there's a subspecies that can look load like loads of different things, and each of the tetramorphs might be their own species. If you have it that they each have their own head, or if it, you know, they could be

One Angel Species Or Many

Rev Dr PRB 4:09

incredibly strange things. So that's something to keep in mind. And then seraphims seem to be totally different as well. They're entirely serpentine, they and fiery. Yeah, yeah. They might be, it might be that the devil was a seraph. There's a a lot, there's a big tradition of that, and I think the the way the Septuagint translates the story of the king of Tyre does make it sound like the in the Septuagint, it's that the devil appears to be a seraph who was ejected from the garden by a cherub. Ah, yes, yeah, makes sense. So it's a bit different wording in that from a lot of Bibles we're used to. But anyway, so that's just to say those are like three categories you can see in black and white. You also have the ophanym, yeah, you know, the wheels, you've got uh thrones, and you've got uh like maybe power means cherub, because the word cherub does kind of mean power. So when you get powers in the New Testament, maybe that means cherubim. It's hard to say, but you know, you can see the Bible never uses the same word for either one, it's very specific. Like an angel is this thing that looks quite regular, although sometimes you can catch an angel and it looks like it's made out of crystals and things like that, and so then that can be like, oh, right, this is quite a powerful person, but often they just look very mundane, is an angel, but actually, the archangels are able to see the the face of the father, which is like a very rare thing, and they must do so through the power of Christ, we know no one can do apart from Christ, so but that that means they're incredibly high ranking. So just because they or they're high ranking because they look like humans, you know. If we're in the image of God, it's that way around, and so people find them the least strange, and they're like, Oh, it's just an angel there. So, people often, when they try and think, Oh, what's the hierarchy of them? They're often but angels at the bottom. Whereas it's like actually maybe the other way, if they have the image of God, basically, they're allowed to take either take on this form or they just have this form, then actually maybe they're the most important of celestial beings. So sometimes you get the words like celestial used instead of angel, because it can be confusing that sometimes we've gotten used to the idea of all celestial beings we call angels, but then the Bible has like this specific species it calls angels. So sometimes people are much more sort of like, all right, let's call them celestials or denizens of the city of God, and you know, maybe sons of God refers to them, or maybe it only refers to angels, hard to say, especially if they look like God, maybe it is only the angels, hard to say. There's a lot of debates about it, but the point is historically, like very early on, it was that there appears to be the absolute multitude and people had these of species, and I think that's really important because I think the more I I've been obsessed with angels for at least 20 years or more, and the difficulty I find is that when I read particularly modern books, in the main, there's this kind of unwillingness to acknowledge the diversity of language in the Bible and descriptions, and it's almost as if modern, particularly Western people, are kind of a little bit scared by the category of angel, and so they'll just go, it's just angels, and they don't, but and you're like, Yeah, but why are there so many different kinds of descriptors and titles and things? It sounds very much like the way we talk about animals on earth, like lots of different kinds and types and capacities and sizes and all things like that. It sounds like that, and it's one thing if we say I don't understand what all those titles are referring to. I think Augustine sort of does that, and he's like, Oh, I can't figure out what they all refer to. Okay, that's a perfectly vi, you know, some people just feel I can't make any differentiations between them. Okay, right, fine. That's a perfectly good. But to say that there is no, there is no differentiation between them, that seems to me an extremely bold claim. I think it's the the minimum that we could do is to say, I don't, I'm not sure what they all refer to, all these titles and how they relate to each other and the taxonomy, the detailed taxonomy of the angels. I'm not sure how to do that, but I have to acknowledge it exists in the Bible that exists, and that to kind of refuse to acknowledge the variety and the apparent strong differentiation between all the different kinds of heavenly creatures. I don't think that's an acceptable thing to do if we're going to be driven by the Bible. But there is this other tradition. So you're saying in the early times people were willing to kind of say, wow, it does look like there's a very wide variety of species of heavenly beings, not and they're not all part of the same species, but then that changes,

Angels Cherubim Seraphim And Wheels

Rev Dr PRB 9:33

yeah, it does, as um particularly like if you got a platonic idea of dualism, so that you have you know, there's just physicality and then spirituality and mental stuff you just compress into one category. That's the platonic idea of dualism. The Bible does seem to be against that sort of thing, but because you'd have lots of Christians who were from Platonic backgrounds, as they converted, they kind of take that baggage with them and they just assume a dualism. When you have that, people then wanted to categorize angel quite simply so it fit into an easy nice, easy definition, and they would say it's basically a rational or sapient being that is spiritual and a human is one that's mundane. So if you just have the mundane and spiritual, there's everything's just fits into two categories, and all an angel is is that. So then they just compress all the various celestial beings into just angel, because they've decided that's the real one, or that's the most sort of um obvious example of this. So they're just like, oh, it just angel is all of them, and all the apparent diversity of celestial beings, they're just talking about angels, and sometimes an angel just looks like it's on fire sometimes, because they just don't comprehend it, because it actually only exists in the mind, so you know they just can make up stuff and it's like they're hallucinating or something. And that doesn't that again just totally does not represent what's in the Bible, but you can see that people who were coming from Platonism, and the idea of Platonism was that you're trying to get rid of all these myths and all these, you know, extra stuff to just have everything as simple as possible so that for everyone can just figure out everything about the divine and everything, just on their own. And the idea you've got like rolling tradition of you know, this is what the prophets say in all of this, it's like no, get rid of all that. We've got each person has to individually figure it all out on their own, so you just make arguments that start begin and end with yourself, really, for God and for other beings and so on. So, for that, it's all about just trying to get rid of loads of clouds, so you just have like oh that, and then you're like, Well, you could imagine then because if you just think of a person like we think and we do, so you don't really experience spirit if you're not concentrating on it, so then you can see why they compress spirit and mental capacity into just one thing, but that's obviously not biblical, but you can see that they do it, and you can see why, and then so you can just see why if you're just saying, I just want to figure everything out on my own, and then that comes back sort of in the enlightenment sort of thing, where where you got that guy, if all of London came out to see me and said they saw a miracle, I wouldn't believe it unless I saw it for myself, and that was that big enlightenment sort of thing. That sort of thing, it's just got a begin and end with you. You can see why people fall into dualism, because it's easy to just think and act, but you know, what does it mean to live in spirit and all of this stuff? That's harder to figure out, and then they just apply that, just their own, because they just look inside themselves, they just apply that to the world, and then they just compress everything mundane, then you're either rational or not, and then if you're not, you're an animal, if you're rational, you're a human, so that gets rid of all the phase sort of thing, and then on the celestial realm, that just has to be one species, and the sort of species we're aware of the most is angels. So it's it's uh what happens with the neo-platonism is it kind of this very like, let's say it's like a 4K high definition picture of the Christ center cosmic civilization is possible, but what Neoplatonism does is it reduces it down to very pixelated, almost like a Minecraft universe, so that all the detail and all the subtlety is drained out of it, and they'll say, no, no, no, we can have like we can have a spiritual category, and you're like, Yeah, but there's loads of different things inside that category. No, no, no, no. Something can be a spiritual, rational being, and that's it, that's all we can say about them, or and then there's physical things and things like that. So everything, all the kind of definition is lost, as there's this attempt to have something extremely simplified, like almost a completely pixelated view of the universe. And I think one of the reasons they choose the word angel, meaning you know, someone who's sent, they compress everything into that category of celestial being rather than call everything a cherub or something. Like, they why didn't they do that? I think one of the reasons is they don't see the purpose for the other one, so they're like, God must send someone to like look like it's doing some other job so that it sends a message. So that the only because they just have um God without delegating anything to any so no one can actually do anything, everything is already done as a pure act, and no one has any control, they can't do anything, everything just plays out as this pure act. So there's no need for actual sort of administrators like angels, no angels actually do anything if God does everything, like yeah. So you can't have a cherub as like a power or a strong one who is like a bodyguard or is an enforcer or something, because they're like, Well, God will just enforce it just by thinking about it, boom, it's enforced. And he already thought about it as just one thought forever, and that enforced it. So then they're like, So there's no need for cherubim, there's no need for seraphim, there's no need for thrones and wheels, and you know, because like God doesn't need the wheels to move, and he the cherubim don't need the wheels to move, so that's all just an image that some angels take on. So the idea is that the only point of anything in the celestial realm is just to be sent to humans to give a represent. Yeah, to represent something. So in in in true like what Neoplatonism, but then that entire sort of tradition, which comes out very, very strongly in the Enlightenment, doesn't just compromise the Fay category, like the everything, everything is reduced to either God, and by that word God, even the members of the Trinity are effectively lost. You know, it's so pixelated, you can have something called God, which is a like a divine essence

How Dualism Flattens The Cosmos

Rev Dr PRB 16:14

monad, God or creation, and that's it, because there is no need for any agency at all, because in that model, as you say, you've got a timeless God who wills everything timelessly and causes everything to happen himself, and that even if he incor you know the secondary agency built in, it's totally like it's mere decoration, like the there's only one agent, and it is God. Well, I say God, like not the actual God, but this concept, isn't it? So there's no there is no primary agents other than God, and there's only like this um sort of like embroidered sense of secondary agents and things that are only there for no actual reason, but merely to give the appearance that something's going on almost. So you end up with this incredibly truncated view of reality, which is impossible to square with the Bible. Because in the Bible, you just do have this rich tapestry and hierarchy of agencies and delegated responsibilities and powers, uh heavenly and earthly. There's an amazing story in the life of Saint Grigentius, he's a I think he's Slavine in the Age of Justinian and Saint Caleb in Ethiopia, and he was basically raised by a celestial being. He had parents and they survived. But he would go out into the woods and there was a celestial being, and he would like to teach him loads of stuff, teach him the gospel and all this stuff, and helped him in various times. He fell into a river at one point, and then at one point there was an invasion of barbarians, and he helped them out of that, and he teaches them all this stuff, and he just thinks of a friend, but he never knows his name. And anyway, he goes on these journeys and everything, and at one point the apostles have gone down to earth to welcome in these martyrs in Yemen, uh the martyrs of Najran, you might know about them. And then this guy he hasn't seen so Gragentius has gone on all these wonderful missionary journeys, and he hasn't seen this guy for quite a while. And so he asks Peter, who is this guy? And he says, I don't know. He he goes over my head, like I've been in heaven for like 500 years. I still don't know that he I'm still not that's above my pay grade. And he said, He's actually quite frightening. Don't don't try and find him again. Like it's he he can do terrible, frightening things, um like all for good, and he's all working for God, but he's just like, nah, honestly, if you don't see him again, it's probably a good thing, so don't worry, just focus on Jesus, you know, he's in charge of it all. He's uh you can go straight to the top, but just that there was an actual like an agent or something, like some celestial being who was like an agent, and he didn't fit into any cleanly any category of whether he was an angel or a cherub or whatever. He was just like, I and then he asked Peter and he's just like I don't know. There's like some of these agents that are sent out, I don't know, they're just like terribly powerful, and it's not for me to worry about. Yeah, that fits perfectly with the Bible, and in Daniel, where you've got this sense of praying for things, and then three weeks later, angels turn up and they've been involved in all sorts of rigmarole behind the scenes, and it's like what and it's not really explained, it's like you don't need to know, but anyway, you know. Um yeah, so we the reason we mention all that is that it's just again to highlight this problem of classification, and that classification of creatures is a big theological project, and it involves deep decisions about the fundamental nature of reality, how we go about knowing it, how confident we are about what what we think reality's like, whether it's worth even trying to classify creatures and so on. Now, John of Damascus, let's turn because we've been on the theme of dragons, and we've seen that quite um this I think when we think about the dragon rulers, to me it sounds like they're somewhat fay-like that there's something almost spiritual about them. They're not straightforwardly an earthly creature, if only because they're you know, they have great intelligence and speech and administrative skills. They do sound like somewhat celestial, I don't know. But John of Damascus, he's this he's like sometimes called the last of

Saints And The Hidden Chain Of Agency

Rev Dr PRB 20:58

the church fathers because he lives at the time. He's after he's like a hundred years after Islam, and he's in Damascus, John of Damascus that gives the clue, and he's in the court, his father works for the Islamic colonizers and the overlords, and then he he himself takes on such a role working in in the political administration and legal administration under the Islamic colonizers and of Ibn Malik, isn't it? And um so and so on. Uh that's right. Abdul Malik. Yeah, Abdul Malik. And he's part of that setup, and so he's debating with what are not at that time called Muslims. They're not even called that, and there is no apparently the he doesn't seem to be aware of a single book called the Quran, for example. He he's aware of different documents or different uh teachings and things that some of which correspond to aspects of what is today called the Quran, some of them not so much. He doesn't think he doesn't he never calls them Muslims that because at that stage they don't seem to have been formalized into this kind of separate religion. He s perceives them to be a Christian heresy, actually, and that there's some kind of Urian heresy who don't who have misunderstood the deity of Jesus and things like this. Anyway, that's him that locates him in this place. So, but one of the so he's written this thing called the Fount of Knowledge, which is a great Christian kind of comic. Of theology up

John Of Damascus And Dragon Taxonomy

Rev Dr PRB 22:58

to his own time, and he writes a thing where he lists all the heresies that ch churches had to deal with, and the hundredth one is this new one, which which we would call Islam, but at that time it doesn't seem to exist in that quite formalized way. Anyway, in his writings, he deals with dragons. And how does he classify dragons? So he but builds on that sort of Neoplatonist idea that there's just two categories and we have to just compress them all into two categories. So we've decided there's two intelligent species, one of which is humans, the other which the other of which will have to be angels. So we'll compress all celestial beings into angels, all mundane intelligent beings must be human, even if you know, like a doghead or something, it doesn't look human, it's like, well, it must be, you know, we just compress it all in together, and then there's no room for anything in the middle. He's just like we've decided there's these two things. Because to him, like if it's just about or not, not just to him, not just to pick on him, but it's like an idea that's going around. But if you've got neoplatonic just dualism, human beings are already beings that are mundane and think or mental, you know. Whereas it for him, like angels are just in they're just thinking and they don't have bodies. So there's no room for anything in the middle, because that's what we already are. And animals, he would say, are the ones that are just mundane. So the idea of something caught in the curtain, something in the middle, between mundane and steel, yeah. Yeah, there's no there's no room. So he's just like, there must not be, and he and there must just be two species, just because that like simplifies things, uh, and that's what they are: humans and angels. So he just says that. So when he gets onto dragons, he says they must just be animals, and all they must not really be able to think. They might maybe they're like parrots or something, but they can't think and speak, you know, in the way where they can't be rational just because he's decided the definition, or not him again. Um the it's again. He represents like his peer, and even he admits that what he's doing is compiling thought thought of his time and and passing on wisdom and so on. So, yeah, but he is very much in one sense defined by that neoplatonic outlook, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So then he does say that human, yeah, that humans are already that category, so there's no room for fate, and then dragons just must not be rational, no matter how many people report they've seen them acting rationally, they've seen them is just like they can't be, because they a dog head you could imagine just someday so someone gets born with the head of a dog, you you know, you can imagine that. Whereas how would you get to a dragon? Like you know, he just doesn't see it uh as possible. So and the idea that spiritual so when you've got in those early Acts of the Apostles we talked about before, not the biblical acts of the apostles, but early stories of what they did, where you've got the idea of descent where you've got a totally celestial dragon that then has fey children, and then the fe ones might have mundane children, so that things cross over if you've got like body-mind dualism, and that's your entire universe is just body-mind dualism. That can't make sense. You can't have a mind take on flesh, basically. Apart from he would say Jesus, he would say Jesus was just like a mind, and then he became flesh. But you know, then that's the miracle of it. It happened, it's this singular occasion. So the idea of things moving from celestial to mundane slowly, like draconic genealogies do. He has no room for that either. So he's just like the only way this makes sense is just to deny any intelligence in dragons, they must just be animals. So, in effect, he classifies them as kind of just a form of lizard. Yeah. So, in a way, he's very much like where a lot of modern Christians, I suppose, do that. Because sometimes when I read about Leviathan in Job, I mean, I've actually heard him that Leviathan classified as a hippo, not even a lizard, but um, it's a very weird thing, or be a moth perhaps they have as the hippo, and they they'll have uh Leviathan as a crocodile. So, and of course, a crocodile nowhere near fits the description of Leviathan in Job, but it's a similar thing, isn't it, where you're saying, well, the only it's like thing, it's like if only if the only tool I've got is a hammer, then everything is a nail. So I because I've got to do so. It's that kind of like if the only tool I've got is a lizard. So it doesn't matter what the descriptions are in the Bible or from church history or from any histories, uh, it has to be a lizard, right? So it's a lizard, and you go, but hang on, it doesn't fit a lizard, it's nothing like just an ordinary lizard, must be a lizard. So but John of Damascus, when he does that, and let's not pick on him too much because we do love him for and he's the great uh defender of icons, and as we were thinking, even that, like were he he kind of gr for something to have spiritual reality, has a visit must have a visible reality. That probably is all part of that wider way of thinking, but let's leave that for now. What about this guy Albert the Great? Who's he? Is he an interesting character? He is so well, we've thought in the past about how our chemical traditions were were something that got passed down from very ancient times all the way through to like Isaac Newton in the early modern period, and then all of our science is from his notes. So he he, you know, Newton thought of himself as primarily a theologian, secondarily an alchemist, and then thirdly a scientist. So his scientific notes were just little clarifications on his alchemical work, which are clarifications as theology work. So that sort of idea got passed through. So that that takes us to the 17th century and 18th, early 18th century. But like sort of in the middle of it, one of the people passing this sort of down is St. Albert the Great. And he so he's a he's a philosopher, often considered one of the greatest, but he's also an alchemist, and he's seen one of the things that um first of all. Let me just get his dates. He lives from 1200 to 1280 in

Albert The Great And Alchemical Openness

Rev Dr PRB 29:44

Germany, basically, isn't it? Yeah. And he's part of the Holy Roman Empire. So 1200 to 1280, he's he's able to handle many different spheres of life. Tell us a little bit about his alchemy first, because that's something we always love on uh the Christ centered cosmic civilization, and then we can't mention Albert Albertus Magnus, we cannot mention him without at least acknowledging something about his alchemy. So he's in the very least seen Philosopher's Stones being used to make people immortal, you know, cure them of any ailment and to turn lead to gold. He's seen that. So, you know, he always gets encounters people who would be like, oh no, it doesn't make sense because this is what mortality is, this is what the human body is, and you know, this doesn't fit. And he's like, Look, I've just seen it. Yeah, I've witnessed it with my own eyes, yeah. Yeah. So that is, and so when it comes to the Fae, he's more open to that because for alchemists at the time, a lot of them were using cockatrus gold to make their philosophy's stone. Oh man, that's like a bargain basement philosopher's stone, isn't it? Tell us just a quick bit about that. So there had been other earlier ingredients that could be used and everything, and maybe it'd have to be from a pure basilisk, whereas a cockatrus is like half basilisk, half chicken, and all of that. And would that still work? But then there was stuff even before basilisk that was like very tough to get. And then people just found, oh no, you can actually get it to work with just cockatrus gold. And then people start thinking, oh, I'll just get a cockatrus. So then you get actual manuals, you can read this. I think some of them have been digitized, but if not, there are if you go to the British Library and things like that, they must have some of these copies of alchemical manuals telling you how to capture a cockatrus, how to breed them, yeah, yeah, how to breed them, and then have them sort of you they they created these like copper, I think copper and maybe brass things where you could just quickly burn them so that they become ash and then you make cockatrus gold out of that without looking at it. So yeah, you can't if you look at them, you turn to stone, yeah. Yeah, so ways of they have incredibly complex technology, things like hermetic sealing we get from alchemists, like Hermes, Trismagestius, yeah, yeah. It's all named after him. So they had all this technology for capturing cockatresses and extracting cockatrus gold so they can make philosopher's stone. So that's the sort of um time Saint Albert is working in, where there's suddenly a new wave of lots of people who have philosopher's stone, and he just sees it. He just he's like, Wow, it actually works. So because he is driven in a way by he's got this radical openness to reality, he hasn't already decided what is the limits of reality in the way that the Neoplatonic tradition does, and the and you know that'll become a huge problem in the 17th century where reality becomes incredibly confined. But he's still living at a time where you have this tremendous confidence in Christ, that Christ rules over this obviously Christ-centered cosmic civilization, and that this it's an enormous, deep, high, rich reality, and that we really can only ever grasp a very small part of this, and that there are many, many things going on in the cosmic civilization that we may never know anything about at all, and the way that Bible writers, you know, I always think like Ezekiel when he's trying to describe his vision in chapter one, and he's just like, whoa, like it's a bit like this, which is a bit like that, and it was sort of this, and he knows he just can't grasp what he's witnessing, and he's doing his best. And then John simply says, you know, we have no idea what's gonna happen like once we get into the next stage of the story of human existence and all this. Just this way that in the Bible they have this radical openness to an enormous vision of reality. He's got that, and so he just encounters things and sort of takes them at face value and and and is he's able to, and he might say, I don't know exactly how this works, but I've seen this. Here's part of reality, and it's it must have been unbelievably exciting to meet someone like that who hadn't been indoctrinated so much into a very small view of reality. But in the in the process, he actually does try to classify dragons, and how does he do with that? We may not even be able to get through all his classification in this episode. I'll tell you what, let's not even start on here. Let's save that for straight away at the beginning of the next episode.