back to indexBishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church | Lex Fridman Podcast #304
link |
When we're beyond good and evil, you know,
link |
and all that's left is the will to power,
link |
then why are we surprised at the powerful rise
link |
and that they use the powerless for their purposes?
link |
When we forget ideas like equality and rights,
link |
which are grounded in God,
link |
why are we surprised that death camps follow?
link |
The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron,
link |
founder of Word on Fire and one of the greatest educators
link |
in the world on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism,
link |
Christianity, and religious faith in general.
link |
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
link |
To support it, please check out our sponsors
link |
in the description.
link |
And now, dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron.
link |
Let's start with the big question.
link |
According to Christianity, according to Catholicism,
link |
I'll give you Thomas Aquinas's definition.
link |
God is ipsum, essay, subsistence.
link |
God is the subsistent act of to be itself.
link |
Another way to state that in Aquinas
link |
is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique,
link |
in which essence and existence coincide.
link |
To be God is to be to be.
link |
Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God.
link |
They are kind of nomic, and that's on purpose.
link |
There's almost a Zen koan kind of quality
link |
about the way we talk about God.
link |
I'm saying something that's substantive,
link |
but it's more in like a via negativa mode.
link |
It's more like what God is not,
link |
because there's nothing in the world
link |
that would correspond to those descriptions.
link |
So anything in the world would be a being of some type
link |
or an event of some type,
link |
some particular mode of existence.
link |
And God is not an entity in the world.
link |
I would say that's the fundamental mistake
link |
that atheists old and new make all the time,
link |
is they think of God as a big being.
link |
When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus,
link |
even the genus of being,
link |
it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition,
link |
but it's really interesting.
link |
So you say, well, at the very least,
link |
God must be a being, right?
link |
And Aquinas's answer is no, he's not in the genus of being.
link |
So we talk about God being beyond being and so on.
link |
To say in God essence and existence coincide
link |
is to say God's very nature is to be,
link |
and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world.
link |
So what I'm doing there is I'm gesturing
link |
the way the tradition does toward God,
link |
using language that's at the same time
link |
philosophically precise and gnomic.
link |
It's both accurate, it's true.
link |
God, essence and existence coincide.
link |
What God is is the same as God's active to be.
link |
But now what does that mean?
link |
I'm not quite sure,
link |
because nothing in our ordinary experience
link |
corresponds to that.
link |
Everything in our experience is a being of some type.
link |
So it's existence received according to the mode
link |
That's not true of God,
link |
which is why he can't be found in the world.
link |
And that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is,
link |
oh, I guess theists are those that believe
link |
there's this being alongside the other beings
link |
And then atheists say, oh no, there is no such being.
link |
And that's precisely wrong.
link |
That's just a category error.
link |
Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell.
link |
To the effect that proving the nonexistence of God
link |
is a bit like proving the nonexistence of a China teapot
link |
orbiting between Earth and Mars.
link |
No, that's precisely what God is not,
link |
some entity that's sort of hidden
link |
among the other entities of the universe.
link |
God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all,
link |
is the way to put it.
link |
In more theological language,
link |
God's the creator of all things.
link |
So if God is outside of our world,
link |
is it possible for us to visualize,
link |
to comprehend, to know God?
link |
Not utterly, of course.
link |
And I would say our knowledge begins always in this world,
link |
begins in ordinary experience.
link |
But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis,
link |
through philosophical reasoning,
link |
can come to some knowledge of a reality
link |
which is transcendent to our experience.
link |
So we gesture toward it.
link |
I always like Aquinas who says the language about God
link |
that we use is analogical.
link |
So it's not univocal, meaning what I say about that can
link |
or about this bottle, I can say about God.
link |
No, that makes God an entity.
link |
At the same time, it's not simply equivocal.
link |
So if I say, well, that thing is and God is,
link |
I mean totally different things.
link |
No, no, I mean something analogous.
link |
So to be God is to be, to be.
link |
So the real meaning of being is the being of God.
link |
The being of that thing or this thing,
link |
or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles
link |
would be analogous to God's manner of being.
link |
So on that basis, I can make some statements.
link |
I can, I can theorize.
link |
And even at the limit, as you suggest, I can visualize.
link |
So we have metaphors for God,
link |
and the Bible is replete with those, right?
link |
You know, God's like a lion.
link |
God's like this and that.
link |
Or the Bible will sometimes imagine God
link |
as a human being walking around, you know.
link |
Now, only the crudest fundamentalism would say,
link |
well, that's a univocal, accurate description of God.
link |
It's an image that's catching something
link |
of God's manner of being.
link |
Then what does it mean to believe in God?
link |
So there's a word, and we have to limit ourselves
link |
to human interpretable words today.
link |
There's a word called faith.
link |
What does faith mean?
link |
So if we can't really directly know God,
link |
you kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.
link |
Better he sneaks up on us.
link |
Because I like the language of grace.
link |
God's action comes first.
link |
So if I stay perfectly within the realm of I'm seeking
link |
with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind,
link |
I'm not gonna find God that way.
link |
I might find a path that opens up.
link |
But I would say finally God finds me,
link |
and I think then the language of faith
link |
begins to make more sense.
link |
I'm with Paul Tillich, though, the Protestant theologian,
link |
said the most misunderstood word
link |
in the religious vocabulary is faith.
link |
Because he said the way we take it usually
link |
is something subrational.
link |
You know, I have proof of this.
link |
I really know this, and I only kind of believe that.
link |
Like, that's just a personal opinion or impression.
link |
But that's to identify faith with the kind of infrarational.
link |
And that's not it.
link |
I mean, I don't want something infrarational.
link |
I don't want superstition or childish credulity.
link |
So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason
link |
and on the far side of reason.
link |
It's super irrational, not infrarational.
link |
And that's a very important move.
link |
At the limit of what I can know,
link |
at the limit of my striving and my vision,
link |
there's this horizon that opens up.
link |
And I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing.
link |
There's a kind of a horizon
link |
that lures us beyond what I've got.
link |
Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness
link |
rather than a darkness prior to reason.
link |
The darkness beyond the horizon prior to reason,
link |
first of all, the poetry of your language is incredible.
link |
To be, to be, I have a million questions.
link |
So first of all, let me just jump around.
link |
You mentioned to be, to be a few times.
link |
What does that mean?
link |
Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?
link |
To be this is to be a table,
link |
to be this is to be a microphone.
link |
So it's, I'll use Aquinas's language.
link |
It's the act of being poured, if you want,
link |
into the receptacle of some essential principle.
link |
So it's got an ontological structure.
link |
It's an existent, it's a thing that exists,
link |
but it's existing in a limited way
link |
according to an essential principle.
link |
So God, so what's God?
link |
What's God's name?
link |
What kind of being is he?
link |
We'll go back to Moses now.
link |
When the Israelites asked me, you know, what's your name?
link |
What should I tell them?
link |
And he says, you know, famously, I am who I am.
link |
But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark.
link |
So Moses is wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods
link |
and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities.
link |
Well, which one are you?
link |
You gotta be one of them.
link |
So tell me your name.
link |
In philosophical language, give me the essence
link |
that receives your act of existing, right?
link |
And God's answer blows the mind of Moses
link |
and the whole tradition.
link |
To be God is to be.
link |
So I'm not this or that.
link |
I'm not up or down.
link |
I'm not here or there.
link |
God is that whose center is everywhere
link |
and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it.
link |
Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that?
link |
No, and in a way, that's the whole point.
link |
If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind.
link |
So to be God is to be.
link |
To be is to, and that's, you know,
link |
Moses, take off your sandals, you're on holy ground.
link |
So I'm gonna go over confidently
link |
and find out what this thing is, this burning bush.
link |
I'm gonna find out.
link |
Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground
link |
because you're not in charge here.
link |
You're not in command.
link |
Because if you've got shoes on,
link |
you can walk wherever you want.
link |
You can walk with confidence.
link |
But you take your shoes off, you're much more vulnerable.
link |
And that's appropriate when you're talking about God.
link |
But here's another interesting thing.
link |
I didn't think about the burning bush
link |
in this connection before,
link |
but it's a bush that's on fire but not consumed.
link |
Beings are competitive with each other.
link |
And so these can't be in the same place at the same time,
link |
They're mutually exclusive if you want.
link |
But as God comes close to a creature,
link |
he doesn't destroy it or consume it.
link |
But the creature becomes more beautiful
link |
and more radiant, right?
link |
And see, compare it to the classical gods and goddesses.
link |
When they come bursting into life and experience,
link |
things are incinerated and people give way
link |
and they're overwhelmed.
link |
Then there's this biblical idea of God comes close
link |
and sets things on fire but doesn't burn them up.
link |
And that's because he's not a competitive being
link |
If he were a big being, then he'd be competing for space,
link |
so to speak, on the same ontological grid.
link |
But he's not like that.
link |
So God can come close and we come more fully alive.
link |
Now we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation,
link |
I mean, the central Christian doctrine,
link |
that God can actually become a human
link |
without overwhelming the human he becomes, right?
link |
So I mean, that's kind of the next step.
link |
But the basic idea of God is noncompetitively
link |
transcendent to the world.
link |
That's another way to get at it.
link |
Noncompetitively transcendent to the world
link |
so as beyond being as the source of being.
link |
Let me make it maybe more imagistic.
link |
I think a really good analogy would be author to book.
link |
Right, so like Tolkien or someone that writes
link |
one of these big sprawling novels.
link |
And Tolkien's good too because he creates a whole world.
link |
He creates a new nature, a new language, new history,
link |
all that, think of the thousands of characters
link |
and the plots and subplots and all of it.
link |
Tolkien is utterly responsible
link |
for every bit of that story, right?
link |
Every character, every plot, every subplot,
link |
every description, he's completely responsible.
link |
He's involved in every nook and cranny of it.
link |
But he's not in the story, he's not in the book.
link |
You're not gonna find him as a character in the book.
link |
So that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way
link |
is I'm looking for God, he's a character
link |
in this story somewhere.
link |
No, he's the author of the story.
link |
Mysteriously present to every aspect of the story,
link |
but not a character in it.
link |
Right, he is deeply in the story somehow.
link |
Right. He's present,
link |
but he's not, even if he is a character,
link |
he's not really, the full embodiment is not a character.
link |
And people inside the book
link |
can't really know about the author.
link |
No, right. Well, see, Augustine says,
link |
God is simultaneously intime or intimo meo
link |
et superior sumo meo.
link |
He's closer to me than I am to myself,
link |
and he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine
link |
But see, once you get the insight
link |
that God is the sheer act of to be,
link |
well, of course that's true.
link |
So right now, God is sustaining us in existence.
link |
Aquinas says, God is in all things by essence,
link |
presence, and power, and most intimately so.
link |
And he's nowhere in this room.
link |
Okay, well, where's God?
link |
He's nowhere in this room.
link |
He's totaliter aliter, we say.
link |
He's totally other.
link |
But once you crack that code, though,
link |
I think you see it of why that would be true.
link |
And see, now I'm getting from more philosophical language
link |
to more mystical language,
link |
because all the mystics talk that way
link |
in these high paradoxes about God's availability
link |
and unavailability.
link |
I've often thought in the Bible, story after story,
link |
God can neither be grasped nor hidden from.
link |
So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God.
link |
I've got him, I understand him, I can manipulate him.
link |
Story after story is told, you can't do that.
link |
Well, then the other extreme of the sinner,
link |
all right, then I'm gonna run from God.
link |
I'm gonna avoid God.
link |
Jonah and the whale, so he has the call from God,
link |
and he said, no, no, I'm gonna refuse that.
link |
I'm gonna run as far away.
link |
I'm gonna go to Tarshish, which meant Timbuktu for them,
link |
at the end of the world.
link |
God's got the whale, swallows him up,
link |
and brings him right back where God wants him.
link |
It's a poetic way of saying
link |
you can't escape the press of God.
link |
At the same time, Tower of Babel.
link |
I'm gonna build a tower up to God.
link |
I'm gonna grab hold of God.
link |
No, no, no, you can't do that.
link |
So, live in the space in between those two things,
link |
which would be the space of friendship with God,
link |
falling in love with God
link |
is neither grasping nor hiding from God.
link |
You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things.
link |
You mentioned grace.
link |
You mentioned sin.
link |
You mentioned incarnation.
link |
Is there a philosophical, pragmatic way
link |
to start talking about the pillars of Christianity?
link |
What are the defining things that make Christianity to you,
link |
and broadly speaking, to those that follow the religion?
link |
In a way, what we're doing so far
link |
is a necessary propaedeutic,
link |
because we're talking about God.
link |
What makes Christianity distinctive, of course,
link |
is the claim of the incarnation.
link |
So, we come up out of Judaism.
link |
We come up out of this great monotheistic tradition.
link |
And the Bible itself and all the great commentaries
link |
within Judaism, I think, would agree
link |
with this basic theistic stuff that I've been talking about.
link |
Take Moses Maimonides, for example.
link |
Now, what makes Christianity distinct,
link |
this supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us,
link |
God becomes a creature, but without ceasing to be God
link |
and without overwhelming the integrity
link |
of the creature he becomes.
link |
What we see in the burning bush,
link |
that principle which obtains across the board,
link |
so the closer God comes to me,
link |
the more radiant I become, right?
link |
But take that now to the nth degree,
link |
would be what we mean by the incarnation,
link |
the incarnation of the Son of God becoming a creature
link |
in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful.
link |
That's the pillar of Christianity.
link |
It's the incarnation.
link |
And what follows from that is the redemption
link |
of all of reality, so not just of human beings,
link |
but in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world.
link |
The Greek fathers always said God became human,
link |
that humans might become God.
link |
And that's a good way to sum up, I think,
link |
the essence of Christianity.
link |
Why is this such an important thing?
link |
So it's a distinctive thing,
link |
but why is it so important philosophically
link |
to what it means to be a Christian?
link |
What impact did that have on our world,
link |
on human civilization, on human nature,
link |
on our morals of why live, what to live for,
link |
and the meaning of it all?
link |
Why is incarnation so important?
link |
Well, I think it's massively important
link |
because it's the divinization principle
link |
that God wants to divinize his creation
link |
and sort of in this concentrated point
link |
of Jesus of Nazareth.
link |
But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus,
link |
so that goes right back to Paul.
link |
As we're grafted onto Christ,
link |
we talk about that as the church,
link |
we become like cells and molecules in an organism.
link |
That's the church, it's not an organization,
link |
that's a deformation of ecclesiology.
link |
The church is this organism that begins with Jesus
link |
and then he's drawing all of humanity,
link |
but ultimately all of nature,
link |
all of creation to himself.
link |
When the Son of Man is lifted up,
link |
he will draw all things to himself,
link |
that idea of the gathering in of a scattered creation.
link |
So in that way, it's at the heart of it.
link |
Then there's all kinds of things.
link |
If God becomes human,
link |
that means there's a dignity to humanity,
link |
which goes beyond anything any humanist
link |
of any stripe has ever said, right?
link |
Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary.
link |
Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable.
link |
God became one of us in order to divinize us.
link |
The goal of my life is not just to be a good person,
link |
not just to be materially successful,
link |
not just to be a member of society.
link |
The goal of my life is to become
link |
a participant in the divine nature.
link |
And so I don't think there is a humanism greater than that,
link |
So that's where I think humanism
link |
is profoundly influenced by the incarnation.
link |
And just our notion of God is noncompetitive to us.
link |
And it's so important, because I think in so many systems
link |
from mythology onward,
link |
you have these competitive understandings of God.
link |
When Jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies,
link |
I no longer call you servants but friends,
link |
it's an extraordinary moment.
link |
Because every God who's ever been served,
link |
well, that's the best we can hope for
link |
is that we'll be as the servant of God.
link |
You know, I'll try to obey you, Lord.
link |
I'll try to do what you want.
link |
But when Jesus says, I no longer call you servants
link |
or slaves, he would have said in the Greek there, you know.
link |
But friends, I don't know,
link |
I can't imagine anything greater than that,
link |
becoming God's friend.
link |
That's a call to become one with God.
link |
It's possible to become one with God.
link |
Now I should mention,
link |
you're one of the greatest religious communicators
link |
I've ever experienced.
link |
A huge number of people are fans of yours.
link |
You've done a lot of great conversations.
link |
You've done Reddit AMAs,
link |
which is a very unique, bold, brave thing.
link |
And on one of them, somebody asked,
link |
what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins?
link |
So first, what are the seven deadly sins?
link |
What do they have to do with Christianity?
link |
How essential, how crucial they are to the religion?
link |
And what's the most challenging in our modern day?
link |
Yeah, to name them, pride, envy, anger,
link |
sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust
link |
are the seven deadly sins.
link |
We're called capital sins sometimes,
link |
they're the head sins from which things tend to flow.
link |
The most fundamental is pride.
link |
Probably most people today, if you talk about like vice,
link |
or you talk about a deadly sin,
link |
they would think about lust.
link |
But the classical authors, including Dante,
link |
who does this pictorially,
link |
that's the least of the deadly sins is lust,
link |
because it's the one that's most sort of dependent
link |
upon the body and its passions and so on.
link |
The most important is pride.
link |
Pride is the deadliest of deadly sins.
link |
And it's very simple to see why.
link |
Pride is, Augustine calls it incurvatus in se.
link |
I'm caved in around myself.
link |
Like a black hole, right, to get into the scientific.
link |
But the black hole to me is a great symbol,
link |
you know, that it's so heavy
link |
that it draws everything, including light.
link |
Nothing can escape from it.
link |
See, that's the sinner.
link |
We're all sinners.
link |
We're like black holes,
link |
that we draw everything into ourselves.
link |
So as a sinner, and I'll confess I'm a sinner,
link |
the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment,
link |
and I'm drawing you now into my world and so on.
link |
What that does is it kills us off,
link |
and it darkens life, and it makes it small,
link |
and heavy, and awful, right?
link |
It's like, but see, compared to the contrasting thing,
link |
is when you're lost in a moment,
link |
you're not concerned about the impression I'm making.
link |
You're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself.
link |
You're not concerned about this monkey on my back
link |
that's always telling me, you know,
link |
look good and sound right.
link |
But you're lost in something.
link |
You're just talking, you know, to a friend,
link |
and the two of you together
link |
are discovering something true or beautiful.
link |
You're lost in a movie, or you're lost in a book.
link |
Those are the best moments in life.
link |
Those are the best,
link |
because they're the least prideful moments, right?
link |
That's when the light comes out.
link |
I become radiant, because I'm overcoming this tendency
link |
to fall in on myself.
link |
Dante is so good, because the way he pictures Satan
link |
in Divine Comedy, and you know,
link |
he's at the center of the Earth.
link |
So like a black hole that way,
link |
like he's at the center of gravity.
link |
He's at the heaviest place.
link |
And there's not fire where he is, but ice,
link |
which is a much, much better image,
link |
that you're frozen in place, and you're stuck.
link |
And he's got wings, right?
link |
And they used to be angel wings, because he's an angel,
link |
but now they're like bat wings for Dante,
link |
and they're flapping.
link |
And all they're doing is making the world around him colder,
link |
because he's ice, he's stuck in his own iciness,
link |
and then he's beating his wings over the ice,
link |
making everyone else colder.
link |
It's a great image.
link |
And then he has, this is cool too,
link |
he has three faces, Satan,
link |
because he's the simulacrum of the Trinity.
link |
So every sinner thinks he's God.
link |
So I pretend I'm God.
link |
So he's got the three faces.
link |
And from all six eyes, he weeps.
link |
Also from all three mouths, he's chewing a sinner.
link |
He's got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the three mouths,
link |
you know, the three traitors.
link |
But I thought, it's just a great image
link |
of all of us sinners, is we're stuck,
link |
it's heavy, it's cold,
link |
we're chewing on our past resentments,
link |
we're weeping in our sadness,
link |
and we're making the world around us colder.
link |
It's beautiful, it's great.
link |
See, that's an image of pride,
link |
because Satan, that's his great sin, pride,
link |
which is why he needed Michael, right, Mikael,
link |
who's like God, so that the great challenge to him,
link |
which we need all the time,
link |
is someone to say, wait a minute, wait a minute,
link |
But the minute we say, I'm God,
link |
whew, black hole, I now cave in on myself,
link |
I suck everything into myself,
link |
and I turn into Dante Satan.
link |
So that's a great image, that's pride.
link |
That's the most fundamental.
link |
That's the uber capital sin.
link |
All the other ones flow from that, in a way.
link |
So in general, empathy, humility, compassion,
link |
love thy neighbor, is the way to fight the sin of pride.
link |
Right, which is why the masters tend to say,
link |
this was Bernard, St. Bernard was asked,
link |
what are the three most important virtues?
link |
And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas,
link |
because it's the opposite of pride.
link |
So, but you know, they're bringing Aquinas in again,
link |
because we think, oh, humility, I'm no good.
link |
That's not what it means at all.
link |
It means what I was describing before,
link |
when you're just lost in something,
link |
you're just lost in it.
link |
My image, I live out in Santa Barbara,
link |
and I like to walk on the beach out there,
link |
and there's a section of the beach
link |
where they let the dogs run free without leashes.
link |
And when you see a dog, and he's well cared for,
link |
and his master's right there,
link |
and the master's throwing the tennis ball out into the surf,
link |
and the dog goes galloping out into the surf,
link |
and he gets it with a big smile, and comes running back.
link |
That's an image of heaven,
link |
because he's just lost in that moment.
link |
He doesn't care about impressing anybody.
link |
He doesn't care about what people think of him.
link |
He's just lost in it.
link |
That's it, that's heaven, right?
link |
And those moments in our life, when we get that,
link |
it's a little hint of paradise.
link |
But the trouble is most of us live, frankly, most of the time
link |
in various levels of hell,
link |
and we're dealing with these deadly sins.
link |
Like envy flows from pride, because if I'm prideful,
link |
I'm a black hole, I'm in Curvatus In Se, I'm collapsed in,
link |
what am I really gonna be concerned about?
link |
That guy's getting more attention than I am.
link |
That guy's richer than I am.
link |
That lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do,
link |
and why don't I have that, right?
link |
So envy is a very close daughter of pride.
link |
Anger flows from it.
link |
Why do I get angry?
link |
The dog isn't getting angry on the beach
link |
when he's running after the tennis ball.
link |
But I get angry all the time,
link |
I sputter with anger when things aren't going my way,
link |
and you're insulting me, and you're not doing what I want,
link |
and I'm being hurt, my reputation.
link |
So anger flows from pride, you know?
link |
All of them do, all of the deadly sins do.
link |
So you said, I'm a sinner.
link |
So we're all sinners.
link |
And you mentioned Satan.
link |
Where's the, so there's heaven and hell,
link |
there's God and Satan.
link |
Where's the line between what it means to be good
link |
and not good enough?
link |
Or I hesitate to use the word sort of evil,
link |
but maybe overwhelmingly sinful.
link |
Where's the line between hell and heaven?
link |
Think of them as limit concepts, maybe.
link |
They're like heuristic devices.
link |
So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God.
link |
So think of the dog on the beach,
link |
who is just, he's fallen in love with his environment,
link |
with his master, with the surf.
link |
He's just lost in it, right?
link |
He's forgotten himself, he's transcended himself,
link |
and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place.
link |
Now, imagine the limit of that
link |
is the friendship with God that we talked about,
link |
that I become the friend of God.
link |
I become so forgetful of myself,
link |
so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God
link |
that I found beatitude, right?
link |
I found joy, the beatific vision, we call it.
link |
That's the limit case.
link |
That's where we're tending.
link |
That's where God wants us to go.
link |
Think of hell as the limit case in the opposite direction.
link |
That's curvatus in se.
link |
That's the black hole.
link |
And we're all sinners,
link |
meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum.
link |
We have good days and bad days,
link |
and we have good moments and bad moments,
link |
and I can be drawn toward sin.
link |
What's God's purpose on Christianity's reading
link |
is to bring us out of that.
link |
Now, where did he go?
link |
He went all the way into it to get us out of it.
link |
It's like pulling a sock back out.
link |
The sock's inside out, you have to go all the way in
link |
and pull it back out.
link |
And so God had to go all the way down.
link |
There's the trajectory of the incarnation.
link |
Though he was in the form of God,
link |
and this is St. Paul,
link |
Jesus did not deem equality with God
link |
a thing to be grasped at,
link |
but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave,
link |
being born in the likeness of men.
link |
But then he was known to be of human estate,
link |
and he accepted even death, death on a cross.
link |
And so Paul imagines the incarnation as this downward journey
link |
in order to get all of us, right?
link |
All of us who were stuck, were stuck in our sin.
link |
And so again, Paul says he became sin on the cross.
link |
It's a really, really powerful idea.
link |
He wasn't a sinner, because then he'd need to be saved too.
link |
He's not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction
link |
in order to pull us back out of it.
link |
So that's a really powerful message, an embodiment,
link |
sort of educating the world about sin.
link |
That said, day to day,
link |
there's oscillations in terms of how much each human sins,
link |
and there's a struggle against that.
link |
So that dog that loses himself on the beach
link |
may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that.
link |
That was, may have been not the best dog
link |
he could be leading up to that.
link |
So how, if it's a math equation,
link |
what does the final calculation look like
link |
in terms of ending up in heaven?
link |
What does it mean to live a good life in the end?
link |
Is it the average amount of sin you do is low?
link |
Are you allowed to make mistakes?
link |
Yeah, the metric is love, right?
link |
And love is not a feeling, it's an act of the will.
link |
To will the good of the other.
link |
That's Aquinas again.
link |
To will the good of the other as other.
link |
You see, that's the anti black hole principle.
link |
Will the good of the other.
link |
See, because if I'm willing your good,
link |
because it's good for me.
link |
So again, it's good for you that I'm on this program,
link |
I guess, I'm willing your good,
link |
but that's because it's gonna be down to my benefit.
link |
That's just an indirect egotism.
link |
That's why I see love is really rare and strange,
link |
that I really want what's good for you as other.
link |
So not connected to the black hole tendency
link |
of my own prideful ego.
link |
When I've broken that, I've forgotten self
link |
and I've moved into the space of your own good.
link |
That's what love is.
link |
Now, God wants us to be,
link |
by this they will know that you're my disciples,
link |
that you love one another, Jesus says.
link |
Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth
link |
and we're better or worse at that.
link |
The point of a church is to graft us onto Christ
link |
that we might become more and more conformed to love.
link |
But you know, the final calculus, I'll leave that to God.
link |
I mean, but use love as the metric.
link |
At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience,
link |
did I will the good of the other today?
link |
How effective was I at that?
link |
And be, just like Ignatius of Loyola, be brutally honest.
link |
Or was I just willing someone's good
link |
because it was good for me?
link |
Where were those moments where I was like the dog
link |
on the beach, see?
link |
And then see, play it the way,
link |
not so much God the law giver surveying
link |
and you did three of those and four.
link |
It's God wants us to be fully alive.
link |
Saint Irenaeus is one of my great heroes,
link |
ancient, you know, patristic figure.
link |
And his famous line is gloria de homo vivens, right?
link |
The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
link |
See, and that gets us over this sort of obsession
link |
with the illegalism and did I do enough?
link |
And is that, that's a big enough sin.
link |
God wants us fully alive.
link |
The key to that is willing the good of the other.
link |
He died that we might come to a richer
link |
appropriation of that.
link |
So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world
link |
or to love the world deeply.
link |
And what love means is the other.
link |
Get out of yourself, right.
link |
It's the humility, yeah, getting out of yourself.
link |
That somehow is not, that's not even selfless
link |
because the word selfless requires there to be a self.
link |
It's almost like just letting go.
link |
Yeah, I might talk about like a gift of self
link |
that you're self aware but you give a gift of yourself.
link |
Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself
link |
but it becomes a radiant source of life for others.
link |
I think Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense
link |
of herself, it seems to me.
link |
But it was to light other people up
link |
so that they might be radiant.
link |
So you could probably articulate it that way too.
link |
It's such an interesting thing.
link |
But we have to be hard nosed about it.
link |
Like your friend Dostoevsky,
link |
love is a harsh and dreadful thing, right.
link |
It's not a feeling.
link |
And our culture is so sentimentalized love
link |
that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want.
link |
And that's not it at all.
link |
Love is always correlated to the order of the good.
link |
Because if I'm willing the good of the other,
link |
I have to know what that good is, right.
link |
So a parent does this, oh, I'll give the kid
link |
whatever she wants.
link |
Well, that's not love, that's indulgence
link |
or that's sentimentality.
link |
But I have to know what the goods really are
link |
if I'm gonna will them for you, right.
link |
Yeah, in some sense, you're absolutely right.
link |
A component of love is the struggle to know the other.
link |
It's the struggle to understand.
link |
I mean, that's what I mean by empathy.
link |
It's the, yeah, it's not Valentine's Day romantic gifts.
link |
It's like trying to understand,
link |
trying to perturb your own mind
link |
and that of another human being
link |
to try to figure out who they are,
link |
what they want, what makes them happy,
link |
what are they afraid of, what are they hoping for.
link |
And it's like a dance, a dance of conversation,
link |
a dance of just shared experiences
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
And all of that requires for you to be,
link |
I guess, yeah, empathize.
link |
Imagine yourself in their place
link |
and then love that person
link |
when you're living inside that person.
link |
Yeah, several minutes ago
link |
about the pillars of Christianity.
link |
So we talked about God, talked about incarnation,
link |
but you're getting now to a third key one,
link |
namely the Trinity.
link |
Because we're monotheists, right,
link |
but we don't think God is monolithically one.
link |
We think God is a play of persons.
link |
And the Father from all eternity
link |
by a great mental act forms his interior word,
link |
as Aquinas puts it.
link |
And that's the logos, right?
link |
That's the verbum, that's the word
link |
by which the Father knows himself.
link |
And we call it the Son.
link |
So the imago, it's the image of the Father.
link |
But then see, the great thing is
link |
that imago is not like just a dead image on a mirror
link |
or a dead image at a pond or something.
link |
It's a full reflection of the Father's being.
link |
He's one in being with the Father.
link |
Therefore, the Son has everything the Father has
link |
except being the Father.
link |
But that means that the two of them look at each other
link |
and they're just crazy in love with each other
link |
because the Father's the fullness of being,
link |
the Son is the fullness of being.
link |
And they're so crazy in love with each other that they,
link |
this is Fulton Sheen put it this way,
link |
that there's this, ah, they just,
link |
they love each other with this sigh.
link |
And we call that the Spiritus Sanctus.
link |
That's the holy breath, right?
link |
The holy sigh of love between the Father and the Son.
link |
And that's one being, one essence we say of God.
link |
But in these three persons,
link |
but all your language about like dance
link |
and play and community,
link |
the Greek Fathers talked about perichoresis,
link |
which means God, the three persons kind of sit
link |
in a choir together.
link |
So they sing together, you know?
link |
And that's why, see, Christianity is unique in this claim,
link |
So every religion will say God loves,
link |
you know, in some way.
link |
Love is an attribute of God.
link |
God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes.
link |
But Christianity is unique in all the religions
link |
in saying that God is love.
link |
And somehow the Holy Trinity embodies that idea.
link |
I mean, that philosophically has always been confusing to me,
link |
what it means to be three things
link |
and at the same time be one God,
link |
the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
link |
What is this dance between these three?
link |
What exact, like how do you visualize,
link |
how do you understand this?
link |
This very fascinating, essential thing for Christianity.
link |
The first thing I'd say is what we already
link |
have been sort of talking about,
link |
is if you say God is love,
link |
and most people probably say, yeah, I like that.
link |
It's a good idea, God is love.
link |
But it's very peculiar because if he is love,
link |
there has to be in his unity a lover, a beloved,
link |
and the love that they share.
link |
Otherwise he isn't loved by his very essence.
link |
He would love, it would be an attribute of God
link |
or an action of God.
link |
But if it's his very nature,
link |
there has to be lover, beloved, and love shared.
link |
And the tradition eventually came to see that.
link |
The image I was using before of the Father,
link |
his imago, the Son, well that's born of God's infinite mind.
link |
So of course God has an image of himself.
link |
Heck, I've got an image of myself.
link |
That's something I can pull off as a puny little creature.
link |
God in his infinity has a perfect imago of himself.
link |
And they have to fall in love with each other.
link |
What else can they do?
link |
Because they're in the presence of infinite good.
link |
And so it has to follow that you then have
link |
the shared love that connects them.
link |
And that's how we generate, if you want,
link |
this idea of the three persons in God.
link |
Let me ask you about the church.
link |
One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism
link |
is the Catholic church.
link |
What is the Catholic church?
link |
I would say it's the mystical body of Jesus.
link |
So as I said before, it's not an organization.
link |
If we do it that way, we're gonna miss it.
link |
It's got organizational elements to it.
link |
So I'm a bishop, I'm a office holder within the church.
link |
But the church is an organism, not an organization.
link |
So it's a organism of interconnected cells, as I said,
link |
namely all of the baptized,
link |
gathered around Christ in a mystical union.
link |
That's the church.
link |
But there's buildings, there's titles.
link |
Sure, because it manifests itself institutionally then.
link |
So are the sort of heavy things about that
link |
all have to do with pride?
link |
The sexiness of the buildings?
link |
Yeah, no, whatever is corrupt in the church,
link |
of course, it comes from pride, from sin.
link |
And one thing I like about the New Testament
link |
is so clear on that.
link |
Paul is, in his little tiny communities,
link |
so before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything,
link |
Paul had these little tiny communities of Christians
link |
like in Corinth and Ephesus.
link |
What's the one thing we know about them?
link |
Is they fought with each other.
link |
Because Paul's always uprating them
link |
and telling them, come on, would you people get it together?
link |
Who's bewitched you?
link |
So from the beginning, we've been fighting with each other
link |
because we're made up of sinners.
link |
So one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology
link |
is the official name for the study of the church,
link |
is to talk about the treasure in earthen vessels.
link |
Paul's language again.
link |
The treasure is Christ.
link |
The treasure is the love he's bequeathed to the world.
link |
That's the treasure that we have.
link |
But it's always held in these really fragile vessels,
link |
namely us, and so it's gonna be marked by corruption
link |
and stupidity and pride and everything else.
link |
Well, nevertheless, there's a hierarchy.
link |
There's titles and so on.
link |
If we remove pride from the picture,
link |
so the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy
link |
that makes up this one organism, this living organism,
link |
what's the role of the pope, for example?
link |
What is the role of a bishop, for example?
link |
What is the role of the hierarchy
link |
in terms of the broader vision of Christianity,
link |
Catholicism as a religion?
link |
I'm a devotee of this guy named Johann Adam Müller,
link |
who was a theologian early part of the 19th century,
link |
and he was part of the kind of romantic movement.
link |
And he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize
link |
and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church.
link |
So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church.
link |
The bishop is the personal symbol
link |
of the unity of a diocese.
link |
Who's a pastor of a parish?
link |
He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish.
link |
So he understood it not so much organizationally
link |
as organically, again.
link |
It was like, what, that around which the pattern
link |
And if you don't have that unifying figure,
link |
the community will kind of reciprocate.
link |
And you see that all the time.
link |
Without headship, we would say.
link |
So it's more symbolic and organic
link |
than it is organizational.
link |
So symbols for community.
link |
But there's such fascinating peculiarities
link |
to each individual symbol.
link |
There's different characteristics
link |
that make up the different people.
link |
They have different ways of communicating.
link |
They have different hopes and fears
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
If they're all symbols,
link |
what's the role of the different peculiarities
link |
Of being an inspiring uniter versus maybe a stronger type
link |
of more judgmental kind of communicator,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
Can you maybe speak to the human part of these symbols?
link |
Yeah, well, I might just shift to another image of shepherd.
link |
So that's a classic biblical image.
link |
And as a bishop, I walk around with this thing
link |
called a crozier, which is a shepherd's staff.
link |
So it's the symbol of the bishop's office.
link |
And the crozier, though, is a kind of in your face thing
link |
in a way, because it's got the end of it
link |
was meant to hold off wild animals.
link |
And then the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back
link |
So I walk in with that, oh, this is nice.
link |
Oh, look at the bishop coming in.
link |
But that's a kind of in your face symbol
link |
that I'm here to defend the church against predators.
link |
And I'm also here to draw people in
link |
who are wandering too far away.
link |
I mean, that's part of the role of the hierarchy
link |
and the Pope and bishops and pastors.
link |
Pastor just means shepherd, right?
link |
So I'm the shepherd of a parish.
link |
It's not like just all sunshine and light
link |
and what a pretty image.
link |
The one who embodies the unity of the community
link |
is also the shepherd.
link |
Okay, but again, leaning on the human thing.
link |
The church is an institution.
link |
And I don't know if you've heard,
link |
but there is an element of power that corrupts.
link |
An absolute power corrupts absolutely,
link |
as the old saying goes.
link |
Let me ask you something else that came up
link |
on the Reddit AMA.
link |
Yeah, megachurches and the prosperity gospel.
link |
And you've mentioned that you may not be a fan.
link |
What are your views on this?
link |
And what are your views in general of money and power
link |
corrupting the heads of these institutions?
link |
I don't like the prosperity gospel
link |
because the gospel is about Jesus journey
link |
into radical self forgetfulness on the cross.
link |
And he never makes a promise of earthly,
link |
of earthly well being.
link |
Can you explain what the prosperity gospel is?
link |
Yeah, the view that if I follow Jesus
link |
and I follow God with great trust
link |
that I will be rewarded with wealth and position
link |
and status in this world.
link |
It might be God's will when I get that.
link |
But you know, Aquinas said this,
link |
say I look at a very sinful person,
link |
I say, kind of, he's got a great house
link |
and he's richer than I am and all that.
link |
Aquinas says, yeah, but maybe that's a punishment.
link |
Cause maybe all that is leading him away from God.
link |
And actually that's God's way of punishing him.
link |
And the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house
link |
is actually a great gift to you
link |
because now it frees you for doing God's will.
link |
So we can't read, you know, God's favor in worldly terms.
link |
I would say God's favor is, am I awakened to deeper love?
link |
Then I know that I'm finding God's favor.
link |
Now, God might decide, sure,
link |
I want you to have this and that.
link |
I want to provide this to you.
link |
Then I say, thank you, Lord.
link |
How can I use it as an instrument of love?
link |
All the masters talk about detachment.
link |
And that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel
link |
is though I'm getting attached now
link |
to all these material advantages.
link |
And I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor.
link |
Let go of all that.
link |
You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love.
link |
So if you're rich, the right question is,
link |
okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich?
link |
So that, what can I do?
link |
How can my riches be an expression of love?
link |
If I'm popular, if I'm healthy,
link |
okay, why am I popular?
link |
How can I use that for your good?
link |
I'm sick, in bed, I'm suffering.
link |
Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love?
link |
So I'd rather measure it that way
link |
than through worldly success.
link |
That's why I'm against the prosperity gospel.
link |
So there's a, don't seek worldly possessions,
link |
but whatever happens to you, good or bad,
link |
seek how that could be used
link |
to increase the amount of love in the world.
link |
The image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune,
link |
which is a device on a lot of the Gothic cathedrals.
link |
And it's this great circle, right, this wheel.
link |
At the top of it is a king.
link |
And then it turns this way,
link |
and the king has lost his crown.
link |
And the bottom is a pauper.
link |
And then over here is a king,
link |
is a guy climbing up to power, right?
link |
And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ.
link |
And the idea is just very simple, but very profound,
link |
that the wheel is life, you know?
link |
It's sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down.
link |
Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige.
link |
Other times you're losing it, you're going down.
link |
Other times you got none of it.
link |
Other times you're coming back up.
link |
Don't live on the rim of the wheel.
link |
It'll make you crazy.
link |
Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety.
link |
Where you should live is the center of the wheel,
link |
where Christ is, right?
link |
Because that's the link now to the eternity of God.
link |
That's the point of love,
link |
where love can flow through you to the world.
link |
And then you can look at the wheel.
link |
You're a Beatles fan, right?
link |
I think I discovered that.
link |
I love the Beatles.
link |
And the song that always comes to my mind
link |
when I think of that image is John Lennon,
link |
the end of his life.
link |
So a guy that, I mean, rode the wheel of fortune like crazy.
link |
You know, he was at the top of the world in every way.
link |
And then Beatles break up and he kind of loses it.
link |
And then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s
link |
at the very bottom.
link |
When he died, he was just kind of coming back up again.
link |
But the song I always think of is watching the wheels,
link |
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
link |
I really love to watch them roll
link |
because I'm no longer riding on the merry go round.
link |
That's right out of the medieval mystics,
link |
that he's not riding on the wheel.
link |
He's just watching it go round and round.
link |
That's the point of, the Greeks called it apotheia,
link |
and the Latins called it indifference, you know?
link |
Not like I'm blasé, it just means I'm detached
link |
from success, failure, less success, more success.
link |
I'm detached from that.
link |
I'm sitting here watching the wheel go round and round
link |
because I'm not riding on it anymore.
link |
The mystics have always made that transition.
link |
Let me ask you a difficult question
link |
about the darker side of human nature,
link |
of human power, of institutions.
link |
What's your view on the long history
link |
and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children
link |
by a Catholic priest?
link |
So this is a difficult topic,
link |
but maybe an important one to shine a light on.
link |
Yeah, it's awful, you know, and it's been a problem.
link |
Go back to Peter Damian back in the 11th century
link |
was talking about it.
link |
So it's been a problem, and whenever really sinful
link |
human beings have been in close proximity to children,
link |
we find this issue.
link |
Has it been around the church?
link |
Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way
link |
in the last 30 years?
link |
So I'm glad the church has made important strides,
link |
Back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas Accords
link |
where the bishops of America
link |
put a lot of these protocols in place
link |
that really have been effective
link |
at ameliorating this problem.
link |
The numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s,
link |
and that's been demonstrated over and over again.
link |
And then they fell dramatically after that.
link |
So that's not to excuse anything,
link |
but it's to say I think progress has been made with it.
link |
What's the impulse to secrecy?
link |
Yeah, well, to protect institutions.
link |
That's always, that's a sinful instinct.
link |
I'm not all together.
link |
I mean, sure, an institution is worth protecting,
link |
but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent
link |
to people's wellbeing, then you're in trouble.
link |
So institutions role should be transparent and honest
link |
with the sins of its members and of itself.
link |
So maybe you can speak to the fact as a priest, a bishop,
link |
as part of Catholicism, you're not allowed to marry,
link |
not allowed to have sex, you're sworn to celibacy.
link |
What is behind that idea?
link |
What is the sort of, we've talked about some broad stroke
link |
ideas of love, what's behind the idea of celibacy?
link |
And that's a good way to get at it.
link |
It's a path of love.
link |
So the church is always in favor of inculcating love.
link |
Marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy.
link |
Saint Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied
link |
with the things of this world and family
link |
and those who are free from that
link |
are freer for doing the work of God.
link |
So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy.
link |
And we still, I think, take that seriously.
link |
I look at my own life.
link |
I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things
link |
and go places and minister in a way that I could not
link |
if I had been married.
link |
So I get it, I get the pragmatic side.
link |
But I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it.
link |
Remember Jesus was challenged about the person
link |
who had a whole series of husbands and then they all died.
link |
And so in heaven, which husband will the wife have?
link |
And his answer is, in heaven, people don't marry
link |
and they're not given in marriage.
link |
There's a higher way of love.
link |
It's a more radical way of love.
link |
It's not tied to a particular,
link |
but I think through God is tied to everybody.
link |
The celibate, and this has been
link |
to the beginning of the church, not as a law,
link |
but there were celibates
link |
from the very beginning of the church,
link |
including Jesus, of course, and Paul.
link |
They sense something, that that way of living
link |
mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven.
link |
It's a sign even now within this world
link |
of how we will all love in heaven.
link |
So in that way, it's a bit like pacifists.
link |
I'm glad there are pacifists in the church.
link |
And I've known some very powerful witnesses to pacifism.
link |
I'm glad they're pacifists because they witness even now
link |
to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away
link |
and we beat our swords into plowshares
link |
and heaven's a place of radical peace,
link |
that some people even now live it.
link |
At the same time, I'm glad not everyone's a pacifist
link |
because I would hold with the church to just war theory
link |
that sometimes all we can do in this finite world
link |
is to fight manifest wickedness.
link |
And just in the same way there's just sex?
link |
Well, no, right, I'm glad there are celibates,
link |
but I'm glad not everyone's a celibate.
link |
I wouldn't want that.
link |
I mean, because married love is a marvelous expression
link |
of the divine love.
link |
So that's why it's good there are some.
link |
And it's always been a small number.
link |
The actual experience of it, would you,
link |
the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fasting?
link |
So I've been enjoying fasting recently, so not eating.
link |
For several days, that kind of stuff.
link |
And that somehow brings you even deeper.
link |
I'm in general in love with everything,
link |
with nature and everything.
link |
I see the beauty in the world.
link |
But there's a greater intensity to that
link |
when you're fasting, for example.
link |
Yeah, I might use the language of sublimation
link |
or redirection of energy and all that.
link |
I think that's true.
link |
There's a certain sublimation of energies into prayer,
link |
into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies.
link |
So it's meant to be life enhancing.
link |
The same way fasting is.
link |
It's meant ultimately to be life enhancing
link |
and make you healthier and happier.
link |
So celibacy is a path of love.
link |
And I think it does involve a certain redirection
link |
of energies, I'd say that.
link |
Don't you think, do you think it's a heavy burden
link |
for some humans to bear?
link |
For some priests to bear?
link |
I'm just saying, given the sexual abuse scandal,
link |
is that the thing that breaks humans?
link |
No, I wouldn't tie that to celibacy.
link |
And that's been demonstrated over and over again.
link |
There's a priest named Andrew Greeley
link |
who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago.
link |
And Andy did a lot of research,
link |
he was a sociologist of religion,
link |
did a lot of research into that very question.
link |
And there really is not a correlation
link |
between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse
link |
of children or of anybody.
link |
So I wouldn't make that correlation.
link |
So bad people, sinful people are going to do
link |
what they're going to do.
link |
I think people who have a tendency toward
link |
abusing children sexually are drawn to situations
link |
where they get ready access to kids
link |
and they get institutional cover.
link |
So that's the only thing that can go through the list
link |
from sports and Boy Scouts, et cetera.
link |
And that's been proven again and again.
link |
So I would tie it more to that.
link |
I wouldn't tie it to celibacy.
link |
So the challenge of course is all kinds of,
link |
you said institutional cover,
link |
there's all kinds of institutions that cover
link |
for people that do evil onto the world,
link |
that do sinful things onto the world.
link |
But there's something about the church
link |
which is, as an organism, is supposed to be an embodiment
link |
of good in this world, of love in this world.
link |
And it breaks people's hearts to see this kind of,
link |
even a small amount, this kind of thing happen
link |
within the church.
link |
It wakes you up to the cruelty, the absurdity
link |
of the world sometimes.
link |
Like it's back to the question of why do bad things
link |
happen to good people?
link |
Why does God allow this kind of thing to happen?
link |
And sort of maybe an unanswerable question.
link |
Do you have an answer to that question?
link |
I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language,
link |
which is true enough,
link |
it's completely emotionally unsatisfying,
link |
but it's naming it truthfully enough.
link |
And it goes back to Augustine,
link |
which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good.
link |
Now again, I know how unsatisfying
link |
that sort of spare, austere language can sound,
link |
but it gets us off the horns of a dilemma.
link |
Aquinas, when he lays out a question,
link |
he always has the objections first.
link |
So is there a God?
link |
Well, objection one, objection two, objection three.
link |
And he's really, you talk about steel manning
link |
and argument, Aquinas is great at that.
link |
One of the really steel manned arguments,
link |
is that the right grammatical form?
link |
What's the past participle of the steel man?
link |
But one of the best arguments, he formulates it this way.
link |
If one of two contraries be infinite,
link |
the other would be altogether destroyed.
link |
And as an example from his medieval physics,
link |
he goes, if there were an infinite heat,
link |
there'd be no cold, right?
link |
But God is described as infinitely good.
link |
Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil.
link |
But there is evil.
link |
Therefore, God does not exist.
link |
That's a darn good argument.
link |
That's a really persuasive argument.
link |
And I think, I've done this for a long time
link |
in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy,
link |
that's the best argument against God.
link |
But here's something, before I press head with it,
link |
something I find really interesting.
link |
I think the three best arguments against God
link |
all come from within the religious tradition.
link |
Namely, the book of Job.
link |
So Job, he's great.
link |
I mean, he's a great guy.
link |
He does everything right.
link |
He's God's great servant,
link |
and he's punished in every possible way.
link |
He has every possible suffering.
link |
Aquinas's argument from the Summa,
link |
from the Summa, and then to your friend and mine, Dostoevsky.
link |
I think in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's argument,
link |
when he's trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha.
link |
And these examples drawn, they think, from Dostoevsky,
link |
from the headlines of his own time,
link |
of the most abject cruelty to children,
link |
like an innocent child being made to suffer.
link |
How in God's name could that happen
link |
if God exists and he's all good?
link |
So I get it, but see, the book of Job,
link |
Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky,
link |
these are all profoundly believing people.
link |
It's like when I hear Stephen Fry,
link |
the famously atheist writer,
link |
he will bring out this argument with great authority.
link |
He does, of children with bone cancer
link |
and worms that go into the eyes of children
link |
and blind them before they kill them.
link |
And, but he's been preceded by the author of Job,
link |
Thomas Aquinas and Dostoevsky, who stood right,
link |
think of Job, in the whirlwind.
link |
He stands there in the whirlwind, you know?
link |
So you can't blame the Christian tradition
link |
for not dealing with this problem,
link |
for brushing it under the carpet.
link |
I mean, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.
link |
It's still a difficult problem to deal with,
link |
that there's all this cruelty of the world.
link |
There's a lot of example through history,
link |
just in my own family history with the Soviet Union,
link |
with Stalin, the atrocities that Stalin has brought onto
link |
the people of the Soviet Union
link |
throughout the 20th century is nearly immeasurable.
link |
And yet, when you look at the entirety of human history,
link |
you will see progress, not just the Soviet Union,
link |
but the entirety of the civilization
link |
throughout the 20th century,
link |
and Stalin has a role to play.
link |
There's a dark aspect to,
link |
somehow evil helps us make progress.
link |
And I don't know how to put that in the calculation.
link |
It's a, I don't, you know, on the local scale,
link |
I want to alleviate suffering.
link |
I'm probably lean, heavily lean pacifist.
link |
Not out of weakness, but out of strength,
link |
but man, it does seem that history is sprinkled with evil,
link |
and that evil does somehow nudge us towards good.
link |
Yes, sometimes we can see it,
link |
and that's where the idea comes from,
link |
that evil's permitted to bring about some greater good,
link |
and we can sometimes really see it.
link |
Can we always see it?
link |
In fact, typically we don't see it,
link |
but now you bring another factor into this,
link |
which is the difference between our minds and God's mind.
link |
So our minds, I mean, look, even,
link |
they're remarkably capacious,
link |
but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time,
link |
and even our eyes kind of take in
link |
so much of the light spectrum,
link |
and these little ape sensorium that we have
link |
that could just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really.
link |
How are we ever in a position to say,
link |
oh no, there's no possible good
link |
that would ever come from that?
link |
Even the greatest evil that Dostoevsky can conjure up,
link |
and Stephen Fry, still, how could we have the arrogance
link |
to say, I know there's no good
link |
that could ever come from that.
link |
I know there's no morally justifiable reason
link |
why God would ever permit that,
link |
because I think that's hubris to the nth degree
link |
for us to say that,
link |
and that's the assumption behind this claim
link |
that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good.
link |
Now, God understands it,
link |
but we're like little kids, like a four year old,
link |
and their parents make a decision,
link |
and we say, what in the, why in the world
link |
would you do this to me?
link |
This is my pastoral experience.
link |
Years ago, there was a young father,
link |
and his son was like three or something,
link |
and he was in the hospital for something,
link |
I forgot what it was,
link |
but he had to undergo surgery, right?
link |
So after the surgery, he's in great pain,
link |
this poor kid, this three year old kid,
link |
and the dad was there with him, holding his hand,
link |
and the son, this is what the father told me,
link |
he said, he's looking at me like, what gives here?
link |
I mean, why would you, you love me,
link |
I've always assumed that,
link |
and yet you're presiding over this somehow,
link |
you're approving of this,
link |
and doing nothing to get me out of it, right?
link |
And he said, the kid couldn't articulate that,
link |
but his eyes did, and the father said,
link |
it was just killing me,
link |
because I knew I couldn't explain it to him.
link |
And it's true, I mean, he could vaguely gesture toward,
link |
but the kid didn't understand surgery,
link |
and cutting his body, and taking things out of it,
link |
and that this was gonna make him much better
link |
in the long run, but I remember thinking,
link |
that's a great metaphor for us vis a vis God,
link |
is here's God, infinitely loving God,
link |
who's with us all the time, and we say,
link |
what are you doing?
link |
Why aren't you taking this away from me?
link |
And the answer, I mean, ultimately is trust,
link |
trust me, trust me, surrender to me.
link |
And when we don't, that's,
link |
we get in trouble with the old pride,
link |
and the hubris, and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Yeah, no, but trust me when I tell you,
link |
I mean, I completely get it in my own life,
link |
and as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time,
link |
with people in pain all the time.
link |
I remember as a young priest,
link |
there was a policeman in our parish,
link |
so he had a gun, and inexplicably,
link |
no one had any clue.
link |
He got up one night, shot his son to death,
link |
and then shot himself.
link |
This is my parish.
link |
So I went to the wake, I remember, I show up,
link |
and I'm this young, 27 year old goofball priest,
link |
and I roll my collar around, and I walk in,
link |
and there were two coffins,
link |
the two coffins in the room,
link |
there's the son and the father.
link |
And the mother was there, and she went like this to me.
link |
She saw me, okay, you're the religious guy here, what?
link |
And just by instinct, I went like that too.
link |
I went like, I don't know what to tell, I can't,
link |
I don't have an answer for you.
link |
and I'm not saying to pat myself on the back,
link |
this is, that's where the church goes,
link |
because Jesus went there.
link |
Now we're gesturing toward a more theological response.
link |
The first one's more austerely philosophical,
link |
God permits evil to bring about a good.
link |
But the theological response is, that's where Christ went,
link |
is he went all the way down.
link |
He went all the way down into our suffering.
link |
And see the cross as the limit case of evil,
link |
humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice
link |
and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering
link |
and death, it's all there.
link |
And that's where the Son of God went.
link |
And I would say that's why, as a priest, I went there.
link |
That's my job, is to go to those places.
link |
So that's the ultimate answer to the problem.
link |
So there is, we can't comprehend it,
link |
but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice.
link |
We trust it because we know on other grounds
link |
of God's existence.
link |
See, I would resist the claim that,
link |
well, this is such a knockdown argument,
link |
so now we know there is no God.
link |
I would say, no, there are all kinds
link |
of other rational warrants for God.
link |
And so I know that God exists.
link |
I know that God is infinite love,
link |
and now I gotta square that with this experience.
link |
And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence
link |
that God knows what he's about.
link |
Again, I know how inadequate that always seems
link |
to anyone who's suffering, including myself,
link |
when I'm in great suffering.
link |
But I think that's the best that we've done
link |
in the great tradition.
link |
So if you were to steel man the case against God
link |
or the existence of God, you find the most convincing
link |
argument is there's evil in the world,
link |
therefore there's no God.
link |
There's too much of it.
link |
If I were to steel man that argument,
link |
I'd do what Stephen Fry does.
link |
I would do what Dostoevsky's Ivan does.
link |
I would do exactly that.
link |
I would say there's just too much.
link |
And then if you wanna keep pressing it, animal suffering.
link |
So we talk about human suffering,
link |
but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on,
link |
isn't there just too much suffering
link |
to be reconciled with an infinitely good God?
link |
And that's, again, Thomas Aquinas.
link |
I've just used his very steel man argument.
link |
You mentioned that, again, on Reddit,
link |
somebody asked who your favorite communicator
link |
of atheist ideas was, and you mentioned Christopher Hitchens.
link |
Are there other ideas for atheism
link |
that you find particularly challenging?
link |
Well, that's the one, is the problem of evil.
link |
The other objection in Aquinas,
link |
which has a lot of contemporary resonance,
link |
is can't we just explain everything through natural causes?
link |
Why would you have to invoke a cause
link |
beyond the causes in the world?
link |
So as I'm trying to explain, let's say for Aquinas,
link |
motion, causality, finality,
link |
can I just do that with natural causes?
link |
Wouldn't that suffice to explain it?
link |
So I get like when naturalists are speaking
link |
or people that are pure materialists,
link |
they'll just say, no, that's perfectly adequate.
link |
A scientific account of reality is utterly adequate
link |
to our experience.
link |
So I would steel man that and say,
link |
well, show me why we need something more.
link |
And to do that, you gotta get out of Plato's cave,
link |
Because my objection to naturalism
link |
is it's staying within the realm
link |
of the immediately empirically observable
link |
and making the mistake of saying
link |
that's all there is to being.
link |
That's all there is that needs to be explained.
link |
And long before we get to religion,
link |
just stay with Plato.
link |
The first step out of the cave,
link |
if you combine it now with the parable of the line,
link |
is mathematical objects.
link |
And I'm with those, the many people that would say,
link |
mathematics is an experience of the immaterial.
link |
I've stepped out of a merely empirical,
link |
physical, naturalistic world.
link |
The minute I understand a pure number
link |
or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship,
link |
which would obtain in any possible world,
link |
which are not tied to space and time,
link |
that's a first step out of the cave.
link |
And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections.
link |
For example, in the nature of being.
link |
I mean, so I could talk about this thing
link |
as a physical object and I can analyze it
link |
at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists
link |
up and down through this thing, and fine, fine.
link |
But I'm still in Plato's cave.
link |
I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall.
link |
But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm,
link |
I have entered a different realm of being, seems to me.
link |
Do you think it's possible for the cave to expand
link |
so large that it encompasses the whole world?
link |
Meaning, is it possible that we're just clueless right now
link |
in terms of, scientifically speaking,
link |
with most of the world we haven't figured out yet?
link |
But do you think it's possible through science to know God,
link |
to look outside the world?
link |
So it's fundamentally the limit
link |
of the empirical scientific method,
link |
is that we can't know some of these very big questions.
link |
No, I'm not a scientist,
link |
and I was never all that good at science.
link |
I was more of a humanities guy.
link |
But I love and respect the sciences, but I hate scientism.
link |
And scientism is rampant today, with especially young people.
link |
The reduction of all knowledge
link |
to the scientific form of knowledge.
link |
And I'm a vehement opponent of that.
link |
There are dimensions of being that are not capturable
link |
through a scientific method of mere observation,
link |
hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera.
link |
As great as that is, as wonderful as that is,
link |
but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave.
link |
And that's not to say it's not real.
link |
It's just at a relatively low level of reality.
link |
You step out of Plato's cave
link |
when you go into pure mathematics.
link |
That's why, you know that article,
link |
I just came across it recently,
link |
and discovered this whole literature around it,
link |
is Eugene Wigner's article, 1960,
link |
called the unreasonable applicability of mathematics
link |
to the physical sciences.
link |
I think that's the title of it.
link |
Or effectiveness or something like that, yeah.
link |
But what's so cool is that he's not a religious man.
link |
He was kind of a secular Jew.
link |
But yet he uses the word miracle
link |
like eight times in that article.
link |
Because he just is so impressed by the fact
link |
that high, complex mathematics describes so accurately
link |
the physical world and can be used to create things
link |
and to manipulate.
link |
And why should that be true?
link |
That there's something very weirdly mysterious
link |
about that relationship.
link |
And I would say it's because you stepped
link |
into a higher order of being,
link |
which is inclusive of a lower level being.
link |
That's the Platonic approach,
link |
is that as you move, now I'm going to a different metaphor,
link |
you move to higher levels,
link |
they're inclusive of the lower levels.
link |
Yeah, there's some magic there
link |
that seems to, at least in our current understanding
link |
of science, to be not quite capturable.
link |
Even consciousness, the idea of consciousness.
link |
Can I ask you, where do you think
link |
the laws of nature come from?
link |
So, I mean, sort of the Vigner question,
link |
where does the deep mathematical structure
link |
of things come from?
link |
How do you explain that?
link |
The mathematical structure or the fact
link |
that the structure is somehow pleasing and beautiful.
link |
Because those are two different.
link |
Well, do the first one first.
link |
I'm just curious to tell you,
link |
where do you think it comes from?
link |
I tend to believe, even in terms of physics,
link |
we don't really know what's going on.
link |
There's so, so, so much more to be discovered.
link |
We're walking around in the dark
link |
trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there,
link |
and we're patting ourselves on the back
link |
and how many puzzles we've discovered so far.
link |
Even Gadot's incompleteness theorem,
link |
what are the limits of mathematics,
link |
axiomatic systems?
link |
I don't know what is the purpose of mathematics,
link |
what is the power of mathematics?
link |
Is it just a useful tool to study the world around us,
link |
or is it something deeper that we're just discovering?
link |
All I know from my emotional perspective,
link |
now I am an engineer, I'm a robotics AI person,
link |
from an emotional perspective,
link |
I just find the whole thing beautiful.
link |
Yeah, but that's really cool to me.
link |
That's a very interesting clue.
link |
See, one of the arguments for God
link |
is based on the intelligibility of the world.
link |
It's like Wigner, it's a very peculiar fact,
link |
it seems to me, that the world is so radically intelligible.
link |
Why should that be true?
link |
Why should it be the case
link |
that being has this intelligible structure to it?
link |
So it corresponds to an inquiring mind.
link |
So Aquinas can say that the intelligible in act
link |
is the intellect in act.
link |
Meaning there's some deep correspondence
link |
between this and that.
link |
And I'm with Wigner.
link |
That's, I think, really weird
link |
and unreasonable and strange.
link |
Now, my answer is, because the creator of the universe
link |
is a great mind and has stamped the world
link |
with intelligibility.
link |
In the beginning was the Word, right?
link |
And the Word was with God,
link |
and all things came to be through the Word.
link |
We shouldn't picture that so much.
link |
It's gesturing in this very powerful direction.
link |
There's an intelligence that has imbued the world
link |
with intelligibility.
link |
And we discover that, you know?
link |
There's something about the simplicity
link |
of the way the world works,
link |
that's where the beauty comes from.
link |
And yes, there's something profound to the mechanism,
link |
whatever that is, God, that brought that to be.
link |
That thought it into being.
link |
That the world has been,
link |
and the Bible says that God said,
link |
"'Let there be light,' and there was light."
link |
God said, well, again, we don't literalize the poetry,
link |
but it's very rich that God spoke the world into being.
link |
So that means it's been imbued with intelligibility
link |
from the beginning.
link |
They say that the condition for the possibility
link |
of the Western physical sciences
link |
was a basically Christian idea,
link |
namely that the world is not God.
link |
Therefore, I can analyze it, experiment upon it.
link |
I don't divinize it.
link |
I don't have a mystical relation to the world.
link |
But secondly, that it's absolutely
link |
in every nook and cranny intelligible.
link |
And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation.
link |
So it's been created, it's not God, it's other than God,
link |
but yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind.
link |
And when those two things are in place,
link |
the sciences get underway.
link |
You know, I don't worship the world anymore,
link |
but I'm also utterly confident I can come to know it.
link |
And those are theological ideas.
link |
Well, we live in this world,
link |
so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world
link |
by making the assumption
link |
that this world is fully understandable.
link |
And we don't need to worry about what's outside the world
link |
in some sense in order to build bridges and rockets
link |
and computers and all that kind of stuff.
link |
It's only when we get to the questions that are deeper
link |
about why we're here at all,
link |
what does it mean to be good,
link |
all those kinds of things
link |
do we need to reach outside of this world?
link |
Can I introduce another one?
link |
So I talked about mathematics.
link |
I think it's stepping out of the cave,
link |
it's stepping out of just the purely empirical world.
link |
But the very fact that we use a word like universe
link |
to me is very interesting.
link |
Even if you say multiple universes,
link |
to me it's like, well, whatever the whole is, the totality.
link |
Universum, turn toward the one.
link |
Why would we call it that?
link |
Why wouldn't we just call it an aggregate?
link |
You know, it's just an aggregate of stuff.
link |
It's an aggregate of all kinds.
link |
But we call it a universe.
link |
And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition
link |
is it's the intuition of being.
link |
So I immediately experience things here,
link |
the color and shape, and I can measure them.
link |
But when I've really stepped out of the cave
link |
and I've now engaged beyond mathematics even,
link |
I'm now into metaphysical reflection.
link |
I'm interested not just in this thing as an object
link |
and how it's colored and shaped
link |
and what its atoms and quarks and all that are.
link |
But I'm interested now in,
link |
I don't mean to say this thing is real.
link |
So what makes this a being?
link |
And then what are the characteristics of being?
link |
So now from Aristotle to Heidegger,
link |
this question of the nature of being.
link |
But see, I would say we call it a universe
link |
because it's turned toward the one of being.
link |
It's this intuition that whatever,
link |
from quarks to galaxies to whatever,
link |
give me a billion other universes,
link |
it would still be existence, right?
link |
It's turned toward the one.
link |
That being unites our experience.
link |
And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis.
link |
I've taken another step out of the cave.
link |
In Plato's language, I'm at the formal level now,
link |
beyond mathematics, the level of forms.
link |
And the formal is inclusive of the mathematical,
link |
which is inclusive of the physical.
link |
And I think that's Eugene Wigner,
link |
is that the mathematical includes the physical.
link |
It is metaphysically prior to it.
link |
But here we are sitting in the physical
link |
trying to make sense of why
link |
the unreasonable effectiveness
link |
is the thing that's beyond, which is the mathematics.
link |
And I don't know a better answer.
link |
And as I read Wigner, he wasn't ready to say that.
link |
But I think the language is gesturing.
link |
I was reading someone recently,
link |
some very well known physicist,
link |
who said his answer to Wigner's question
link |
is that whoever is responsible for the universe
link |
must be a mathematician.
link |
And I thought, yeah, that's right.
link |
Let me ask you about Jordan Peterson.
link |
We had a great conversation with him.
link |
He has a complicated and nuanced view of faith,
link |
He has said that he believes in Jesus,
link |
the person and the myth,
link |
and some of the full richness and complexity
link |
that you've talked about.
link |
But he's surprised by his faith.
link |
He's not sure what to make of it.
link |
He's almost like meta struggling
link |
with what the heck his faith means.
link |
He's a super powerful intellect
link |
that can't compute the faith that he's experiencing.
link |
So what are some interesting differences
link |
between the two of you, or some commonalities
link |
in terms of your understanding of faith?
link |
He's a very interesting guy.
link |
I've had a couple of conversations with him.
link |
And I do think he's moving in the direction of faith.
link |
And his lectures on the Bible are very fine, I think.
link |
He reminds me of the church fathers,
link |
because the church fathers would have looked at the,
link |
they call it the moral sense of the scripture.
link |
Peterson probably called it the psychological meaning.
link |
But I think he's doing a lot of that.
link |
He, as I read him and talk to him,
link |
I think he's kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus.
link |
What I mean there is, for Kant, Jesus is,
link |
it's not so much the historical Jesus,
link |
this figure from long ago.
link |
It's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life.
link |
You know, he says he's the image of the person
link |
perfectly pleasing to God.
link |
And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination
link |
as a heuristic, as a goal that we're tending toward.
link |
But the historical person of Jesus for Kant is like,
link |
well, let's not fuss about that so much.
link |
And as I read Peterson, especially, and talk to him,
link |
I think he's kind of there with the archetype of Jesus.
link |
And even language of like, live as though God exists.
link |
That's the als ob of Kant.
link |
You know, the kind of as if attitude.
link |
And where I repress him when we talk
link |
is in the direction of, no, that's not Christianity yet.
link |
I mean, that's enlightenment moral philosophy.
link |
But Christianity is very interested
link |
in this historical figure,
link |
and very interested that God really became one of us.
link |
And he's not just an archetype of the moral life.
link |
He's someone, he's a person who's invaded our world
link |
and gone all the way to the bottom of sin
link |
and thereby saved us, you know.
link |
So the facticity of Jesus ended up the resurrection.
link |
So like, Peterson will talk about the resurrection
link |
as a myth and all that.
link |
And you can find that in different cultures, et cetera.
link |
But Christianity is saying something else.
link |
So in Christianity, when we're talking about who is Jesus,
link |
it's not just an archetype.
link |
It's not just a myth.
link |
It's a historical figure.
link |
And the very grounded fact that God became one of us
link |
is fundamental to this idea of what Christianity is,
link |
what it means to be a Christian.
link |
It's the sin and the love that came here down to earth.
link |
It means we can be one with God.
link |
So that's essential.
link |
It's not just an archetype.
link |
You know, it always strikes me,
link |
the difference between, let's say,
link |
mythic expressions and the New Testament.
link |
Read someone like Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell,
link |
whom he influenced, and then now Jordan Peterson,
link |
who's very Jungian.
link |
And this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures.
link |
I mean, I think it's very interesting,
link |
and there's a lot going on there.
link |
There's a sort of calmness, though, about it.
link |
Like, yeah, interesting.
link |
And that's in this culture and that culture,
link |
and it's the form of the moral life,
link |
and mm hmm, I understand all that.
link |
Then you read the New Testament.
link |
Whatever those people are talking about, it's not that.
link |
They are grabbing you by the shoulders
link |
and shaking you to get your attention,
link |
to tell you about something that happened to them, right?
link |
Like the resurrection, you know,
link |
the myth of the dying and rising God
link |
and how powerful it is in shaping our consciousness.
link |
Mm hmm, that's fascinating.
link |
That's not the New Testament.
link |
The New Testament is, did you hear?
link |
Did you, Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death,
link |
God raised him from the dead,
link |
and he was seen by 500, and he was seen by Peter.
link |
And then lastly, I saw him.
link |
That's how Paul talks.
link |
It's not the detached, you know,
link |
psychologist musing on archetypal things.
link |
And I think that makes a huge difference
link |
when it comes to Christianity.
link |
The intensity of the historical details are essential here.
link |
So if you look at Hitler and Nazi Germany,
link |
it's not enough to say, well, power corrupts,
link |
and sometimes, so looking at the archetype of Hitler,
link |
it's much, much more important,
link |
much more powerful to look at the details
link |
of how he came to power,
link |
what are the ways he did evil onto the world,
link |
and then you can get really intense
link |
about your struggle with some of the complexities
link |
of human nature and power on institutions
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
So the historical nature of the Bible.
link |
We're an historical religion.
link |
And we've been, it's important.
link |
We generate philosophical reflection.
link |
We can find common ground with archetypal thinking
link |
and all that, we can.
link |
And the church fathers used Greek philosophy,
link |
and Aquinas uses Aristotle, and all that's great.
link |
But we're an historical religion,
link |
and that matters immensely.
link |
Is the Bible the literal word of God?
link |
How do you make sense of the words that make up the Bible?
link |
I think the best way to get at the Bible
link |
is to think of it as a library, not a book.
link |
So it's a collection of books, right,
link |
from a wide variety of periods, different authors,
link |
different audiences, and different genre.
link |
So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song,
link |
you find something like history, not in our sense,
link |
but something like history.
link |
You find gospel, which is its own genre.
link |
You find epistolary literature like Paul.
link |
You find apocalyptic.
link |
There's all this in the Bible.
link |
So is the Bible literally the word of God?
link |
It's like saying, is the library literally true?
link |
It depends on what section you're in, right?
link |
So parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two Kings,
link |
number of places in the Old Testament.
link |
Are there elements of the historical in there?
link |
Sure, but it's theologically interpreted history.
link |
It's not like our sense of history of, you know,
link |
give me 10,000 footnotes and I'm gonna look
link |
at all the source material I can possibly find.
link |
It's more like ancient history, like Herodotus,
link |
But then there's poetry and there's myth
link |
and there's legend and there's song
link |
and all that stuff in the Bible.
link |
So God breathes through all of it, I would say.
link |
He inspired all of it, right, inspirare.
link |
He's breathing through all of it.
link |
God is speaking through all of it.
link |
But he speaks in different voices.
link |
He uses different human instruments
link |
and he uses different genre and different types of language.
link |
So we have to be sensitive to that
link |
when we're interpreting the Bible.
link |
So the different instruments are more or less,
link |
some are more perfect than others in terms of music?
link |
No, I wouldn't say that.
link |
I wouldn't say more perfect.
link |
I'd say they're just different.
link |
It's like a symphony and God's like a conductor
link |
and there's all kinds of different instruments
link |
in the orchestra and he loves to breathe through the Psalms.
link |
I prayed the Psalms this morning, I do every day.
link |
In my office, you know, those are songs.
link |
They probably were literally sung, most of them,
link |
He breathes through apocalyptic.
link |
Like we're reading the book of Revelation now
link |
in the Easter season and it's this wild and woolly book.
link |
It should be filmed by Spielberg or somebody today.
link |
And he speaks through the Gospels.
link |
The Gospels correspond in genre
link |
to what I call ancient biography.
link |
That's the genre of the Gospels.
link |
It's wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary.
link |
They're like ancient biographies.
link |
You have the Pauline letters which are about
link |
particular cities that Paul was visiting
link |
and particular people he knew.
link |
So you just gotta be sensitive to the genre all the time.
link |
Let's return back to human institutions
link |
and talk about history of human civilization and politics.
link |
So one question to ask is was America founded
link |
as a Christian nation in your view?
link |
If we look at the Declaration of Independence,
link |
what did the words mean?
link |
We hold these truths to be self evident
link |
that all men are created equal,
link |
that they are endowed by their creator
link |
with certain inalienable rights
link |
that among these are life, liberty,
link |
and the pursuit of happiness.
link |
It seems like God is breathing through those words too.
link |
The founders would be some kind of combination of deism,
link |
certainly Christianity is coming up through them,
link |
enlightenment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix.
link |
So you're not gonna find in our founding fathers
link |
simply a Thomas Aquinas or like a purely
link |
classically Christian understanding.
link |
It's Christianity in those various expressions.
link |
Because actually I would see the enlightenment
link |
as a sort of child of Christianity.
link |
We could talk about that.
link |
But having said all that, yes,
link |
I think they are expressing at least the residue
link |
of a once deeply integrated Christian sense of things
link |
that our rights are not created by the government.
link |
They're not doled out by the government.
link |
They come from God.
link |
And the other thing I find really interesting is equality
link |
because look in classical philosophy, political philosophy,
link |
Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, it's not equality.
link |
For them it's our inequality that's really interesting.
link |
So Plato divides us into these three classes
link |
and Aristotle says only a tiny little coterie
link |
of property males of sufficient education
link |
should be in the political life.
link |
The rest should all be in private life.
link |
And then some are suited for slavery.
link |
So I mean he divides us dramatically.
link |
Same with Cicero and so on.
link |
Where does this come from, this weird idea
link |
that we're all equal?
link |
We're not equal in beauty, not equal in strength.
link |
We're not equal in moral attainment.
link |
We're not equal in intelligence.
link |
And I think the residue especially comes through
link |
in that little word that all men are created equal.
link |
That's our equality, that we're all equally children of God.
link |
So take God out of the picture.
link |
I think we are gonna slide rapidly
link |
into an embrace of inequality.
link |
Now in the classical world, yes,
link |
but heck, look at the 20th century.
link |
I mean when God is excluded in a very systematic way,
link |
I think you saw the suspension of rights
link |
and the suspension of equality like mad.
link |
So no, I think it's very important
link |
that God is in the picture and that we're a nation under God.
link |
It matters enormously.
link |
That's not pious boilerplate.
link |
That's at the rational foundations of our democracy.
link |
So do you think Nietzsche was onto something
link |
with the idea, looking into the 20th century,
link |
That there is a cultural distancing from a belief in God?
link |
Yeah, I'd be somewhat sympathetic
link |
to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there.
link |
Namely, it's not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop.
link |
It's more of a lament.
link |
God is dead and we've killed him.
link |
And what will happen in the wake of that?
link |
And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism
link |
of the 20th century follows from that questioning of God
link |
and the dismissal of God from public life.
link |
So I would be sympathetic with that.
link |
When we're beyond good and evil,
link |
and all that's left is the will to power,
link |
and then why are we surprised at the powerful rise
link |
and that they use the powerless for their purposes?
link |
When we forget ideas like equality and rights,
link |
which are grounded in God,
link |
why are we surprised that death camps follow?
link |
So I think there's a correlation there for sure.
link |
I don't know, I believe that there's a capacity
link |
to do good in all of us and a capacity to do evil,
link |
and there's something that tends towards good,
link |
I tend to think that if that community,
link |
that love that we talked about, they find each other,
link |
they find the good.
link |
If you don't constrain the resources,
link |
if you don't push them,
link |
if you don't artificially create conflict
link |
through power centers and evil charismatic leaders,
link |
then people will be good to each other.
link |
And whether that's God or some other source
link |
of deep moral meaning,
link |
that seems to be essential for a functioning civilization.
link |
And it's hard, I mean, that's what humans are.
link |
We're searching for what that God is, what that means.
link |
You know what that triggers in my mind?
link |
I wonder if you agree with this,
link |
that the modern sciences drew their strength
link |
from their narrowness.
link |
And what I mean there is they almost completely bracketed
link |
formal and final causality in the Aristotelian sense,
link |
and they focused on efficient and material causality.
link |
And that gave, as I say, great strength,
link |
but from the narrowness of focus.
link |
But for Aristotle, the more important causes
link |
are the final and the formal causes.
link |
And so final causality there, what's drawing us?
link |
So for Aristotle, he'd look at someone like me and say,
link |
okay, you have a intelligible structure,
link |
and that leads you to seek certain things
link |
for the perfection of that structure, you know?
link |
And fair enough, I think that's right.
link |
So I seek the good.
link |
Right now, I'm seeking the good of being with you.
link |
I said, yeah, I'll sit down with Lex Friedman
link |
and we'll talk about deep and important things.
link |
That's the good I sought this morning when I woke up.
link |
Now, why am I seeking that?
link |
Well, for a higher reason, a higher good, you know?
link |
Because it's part of my work, my ministry is to, you know,
link |
the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture,
link |
and okay, well, why do you want that?
link |
Well, because I want to bring more and more people
link |
into what I think is beautiful and true and good
link |
Well, how come you want that?
link |
Well, because a long time ago,
link |
I was kind of myself brought into that realm
link |
and find it very compelling.
link |
Yeah, but then why do you want that?
link |
Well, because ultimately, I want to be friends with God.
link |
Now, I've given you one example there,
link |
but any act of the will, it seems to me,
link |
has to be analyzed that way.
link |
The will seeks something.
link |
It seeks the good, right, by definition.
link |
But the good always nests like a Russian doll
link |
in a higher good, right,
link |
which then nests into still higher good.
link |
Until you come, this is Aquinas,
link |
to some, in this sense, uncaused cause,
link |
an uncaused final cause,
link |
there has to be some summum bonum, right,
link |
some supreme good that you're looking for.
link |
And that's God, by the way.
link |
That's another, I think, rational path to God,
link |
is every single moment, every day,
link |
we are implicitly seeking God.
link |
So with your Word on Fire ministries
link |
and the website and the communication efforts,
link |
what is the thing you're seeking?
link |
Just you, if we can pause and for a brief moment,
link |
allow you to be prideful.
link |
Or, of course, just joking,
link |
but what is your local efforts,
link |
your small little pocket of the world
link |
with small, in quotes, with Word on Fire?
link |
Yeah, it's just using the media,
link |
especially the new media, the social media,
link |
to get the gospel out.
link |
So I started, what, 20 some years ago,
link |
just on a radio show in Chicago, 515 on Sunday morning.
link |
I had a 15 minute sermon show.
link |
And I asked the people in this parish I was at,
link |
I said, I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes
link |
at 515 on Sunday morning.
link |
And they all laughed when I proposed that,
link |
but they gave me the money.
link |
So that's how I got started,
link |
just doing a sermon on the radio.
link |
And then it branched off into video stuff and TV.
link |
And then I did a documentary.
link |
I went all over the world
link |
and kind of told the story of Catholicism.
link |
So that's how we started.
link |
And now I'm using all the new media and social media.
link |
But what I really love, what we're doing today,
link |
something I really like,
link |
which is having a conversation
link |
outside of just the narrow Catholic world
link |
or even the narrow Christian world,
link |
but to look out to the wider culture
link |
and who's talking about interesting things
link |
and how can the church engage there?
link |
And so that's the purpose of Word on Fire.
link |
Is it overwhelming to face so many different atheists
link |
than complex thinkers like Jordan Peterson
link |
and some of the more political style thinkers
link |
that you've spoken with?
link |
Is that, what is it, Dave Rubin,
link |
who's also has a way different worldview as well?
link |
Is that terrifying?
link |
Is that exciting to you?
link |
Is it challenging?
link |
Yeah, maybe all of the above, but more exciting.
link |
I would say I like doing that.
link |
I was a teacher for a long time.
link |
I taught in the seminary for like 20 years.
link |
And so I've been engaging these questions for a long time.
link |
I've written about 20 some books.
link |
And I write some at a popular level.
link |
I write some at a high academic level.
link |
And I like doing all that.
link |
So I love those ideas.
link |
I love those questions, love engaging people.
link |
And I find my own experience,
link |
you do run into, of course, a lot of the vitriol
link |
and kind of just stupidity and all that online.
link |
And religion is such a magnet for people's hostility
link |
for different reasons.
link |
Like you read it, we talked about,
link |
you have to wade through swamps of obscenity and everything.
link |
And it's worthwhile.
link |
Because in that Reddit experience,
link |
so many of the issues that preoccupy young people,
link |
I can name them for you.
link |
Exactly what they are.
link |
It comes to religion.
link |
How do you know there's a God?
link |
So the God question.
link |
Secondly, why is there so much suffering in the world?
link |
Third question, why do you think your religion
link |
is the right religion?
link |
Fourth, why are you so mean to gay people?
link |
So those are the four things that I, again and again,
link |
come up when dealing with young people.
link |
I've told my brother bishops and priests about that.
link |
I said, structure your adult education programs
link |
or structure your youth outreach
link |
around those four questions.
link |
Well, let me ask you about gay marriage.
link |
How do we make sense of the love between a man and a man
link |
and a woman and a woman and the institution of marriage?
link |
We love friendship.
link |
And friendship is at the heart of things.
link |
And so nothing wrong with friendship
link |
between a man and a man, a woman and a woman.
link |
But go back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas
link |
about natural finalities and intelligible forms,
link |
that there's a certain form to human being,
link |
which includes the physical and includes the sexual.
link |
It has a proper finality.
link |
And so we'd recognize that finality is twofold,
link |
both unitive and procreative.
link |
And so those two we recognize
link |
as the appropriate expression of human sexuality.
link |
So that's why the church holds to sex
link |
between a man and a woman within the context of marriage
link |
is the right expression.
link |
We reach out to everybody in love and in respect
link |
and deep understanding and seeking to understand
link |
their lives from the inside.
link |
So I mean, all of that,
link |
I agree with the bridge building that we need to do
link |
to people like in the gay community
link |
and people in gay marriage and so on.
link |
So the church holds to the intelligible structure,
link |
if you want, of human sexuality
link |
and it reaches out to real human beings
link |
always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on.
link |
So it's somewhere in there
link |
that the church takes its stance.
link |
And so there's probably variation
link |
in the stances that it takes.
link |
So you're saying the institution of marriage
link |
is about the unitive, which is like the friendship,
link |
the deep connection between two humans and the procreative.
link |
So being able to have children and all that kind of stuff.
link |
So is our gay couples seen as sinful?
link |
So does the church acknowledge the love?
link |
That's the deep love that's possible between a man and a man.
link |
Yeah, which is why the church says in its official teaching,
link |
it's the physical expression, let's say,
link |
of sexual passion between two men that is problematic,
link |
not their friendship, not their love for each other.
link |
So I think, yeah, we confirm the first.
link |
Well, let me ask you another difficult topic
link |
that's just happening.
link |
Unlike the other ones we talked about.
link |
That's going on in the news now.
link |
As we sit here today, the Supreme Court has voted
link |
to overturn abortion rights in a draft majority opinion
link |
striking down the landmark Roe versus Wade decision.
link |
What are your thoughts on this?
link |
First of all, the human institution of the Supreme Court
link |
making these decisions throughout its history.
link |
And second of all, just the idea, the really powerful,
link |
the controversial, the difficult idea of abortion.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I'm against abortion.
link |
The church recognizes from the moment of conception,
link |
we're dealing with a human life
link |
that's worthy of respect and protection.
link |
Especially as you see the unfolding of that person
link |
across a pregnancy.
link |
But at every stage, we recognize the beauty
link |
and the dignity of that human being.
link |
And so we stand opposed to this,
link |
the outright killing of the innocent.
link |
So that's the church's view.
link |
Again, reaching out always in love and understanding
link |
and compassion to those who are dealing.
link |
And believe me, every single pastor, every single priest
link |
understands that, because we deal with people all the time
link |
who are in these painful situations.
link |
But that's the moral side of it.
link |
The legal side, I think Roe v. Wade was terribly decided.
link |
I think one of the worst expressions of American law
link |
since the Dred Scott decision.
link |
So I stand in favor of a returning Roe v. Wade and Casey.
link |
I think they were terrible.
link |
The Casey decision is instructive to me.
link |
It belongs to the nature of freedom, that decision says,
link |
to determine the meaning of one's own life.
link |
And I don't get the language exactly right,
link |
but end of the universe.
link |
Like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom,
link |
that we can determine the meaning.
link |
See, but that's repugnant to everything
link |
we've just talked about.
link |
That I'm inventing the meaning of my life
link |
and of the universe.
link |
And so Casey, though, was instructive in a way
link |
because it tips its hat toward the problem culturally,
link |
is that I think in my freedom, I can determine everything.
link |
My choice is all that matters.
link |
And I would say, no, your choice should be correlated
link |
to the order of the good.
link |
It's not sovereign.
link |
It doesn't reign sovereignly over being
link |
and it makes its own decisions.
link |
So I think Casey was terrible law
link |
and it was backing up Roe v. Wade, which is terrible law.
link |
So I'm in favor of the overturning of those.
link |
I've spoken out that many times.
link |
Now it'll return it to the individual states.
link |
It's not gonna solve the problem.
link |
The individual states will have to decide.
link |
I just heard yesterday, we were up in Sacramento,
link |
the bishops having our annual meeting.
link |
And so we got the word from the governor and the legislators
link |
that they're gonna push for a constitutional amendment
link |
So basically to make any attempt to limit abortion
link |
in any way just illegal.
link |
I think that's barbaric.
link |
So I stand radically opposed to that.
link |
It's such an interesting line
link |
because if you believe that there's a,
link |
it's a line that struggles with the question
link |
of what does it mean to be a living being
link |
or to give life to something.
link |
Because if you believe that at the moment of conception
link |
you're basically creating a human life,
link |
then abortion is murder.
link |
And then if you don't,
link |
then it's a sort of basic biological choice
link |
that's not taking away of a life.
link |
And the gap between those two beliefs is so vast
link |
that it's hard and yet so fundamental
link |
to the question of what it means to be alive
link |
and the fundamental question about the respect
link |
for human life and human dignity.
link |
It's interesting to see.
link |
And also about freedom too.
link |
All of those things are mixed in there.
link |
It's a beautiful struggle.
link |
Maybe the freedom is the most important,
link |
this sort of freedom run amok.
link |
Or in classical philosophy and theology,
link |
freedom is not self determination.
link |
Freedom is the disciplining of desire
link |
so as to make the achievement of the good
link |
first possible and then effortless.
link |
You know what I'm saying?
link |
So modern freedom and the roots of that
link |
are people like William of Ockham in the late Middle Ages.
link |
Freedom means I hover above the yes and the no.
link |
Do I do yes or no?
link |
And I'm the sovereign subject of that choice.
link |
And on no basis I will say yes or no.
link |
I'm like Louis XIV or I'm like Stalin or something.
link |
But Aquinas wouldn't have recognized that as freedom.
link |
For him, I got this desire in me.
link |
I've got this will and it's pushing toward the good.
link |
But the trouble is I got so many attachments
link |
and I'm so stupid and I'm so conditioned by my sin
link |
that I can't achieve it.
link |
So I need to be disciplined in my desire
link |
so as to make that achievement possible
link |
and then effortless so right now
link |
I'm freely speaking English to you.
link |
And you had the experience and I've had it too
link |
of learning a foreign language.
link |
And don't you feel unfree?
link |
You know, like when you're struggling with a language.
link |
When I was over in Paris doing my doctoral work
link |
and I was okay with French,
link |
but my first time in a seminar
link |
and there's all these intelligent francophones
link |
around the table and they're all just,
link |
and I'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward French.
link |
And I felt unfree because my desire wasn't directed.
link |
But then over time I became freer
link |
and freer speaker of French.
link |
I was ordered more to the good.
link |
That's a better understanding of freedom
link |
than sort of sovereign self determination.
link |
But our country is now I think really in the grip of that.
link |
I decide and that's where the Nietzschean thing
link |
comes to my mind of the will to power.
link |
I'm beyond good and evil.
link |
It's just up to me to decide.
link |
No, it's the values that we intuit around us.
link |
Intellectual, moral and aesthetic, the values.
link |
Think of the dog on the beach again.
link |
And that you get ordered to those
link |
by your education, by your family, by your religion.
link |
And that's beautiful.
link |
That makes you free.
link |
Now I can freely enter into this.
link |
So this sovereign self determination business,
link |
that's not my game.
link |
The values come in part from the tradition
link |
carried through the generations.
link |
Let me ask you to put on your wise hat
link |
and give advice to young folks.
link |
So high school and college,
link |
thinking about what to do with their life,
link |
career, there's so many options out there.
link |
How can they have a career they can be proud of
link |
or even just a life they can be proud of?
link |
I think I'd say find something you're good at
link |
because that's from God.
link |
It's a gift that God's given you.
link |
And then dedicate it to love.
link |
You know what I'm saying?
link |
You're good at science or math or sports or whatever.
link |
Okay, I'm gonna use that now for my aggrandizement,
link |
for my wealth, for my privileges and to become famous.
link |
No, no, no, don't.
link |
Find what you're good at,
link |
but now dedicate it to willing the good of the other.
link |
So use your science and use your mathematics
link |
and use your sports and use your musicianship
link |
to benefit the world.
link |
That's how I'd say them.
link |
So find what you're good at.
link |
Well, that's a tricky one.
link |
Finding what you're good at
link |
because it's not just raw skill.
link |
It's also what you connect with.
link |
And it's also like this iterative process
link |
of if you wanna add love to the world,
link |
you have to see how can you be effective at doing that.
link |
So it's not just the things you're good at.
link |
There's like, I'm good at building bridges out of toothpicks.
link |
I'm not exactly sure that's going to be useful for the world.
link |
Then again, to push back on that,
link |
the joy brings me, maybe somehow the joy radiates out.
link |
Yeah, well, you're good at what you're doing right now.
link |
And you've dedicated that to bringing more light
link |
and illumination and joy to the world.
link |
That was a searching.
link |
That's a process of trying stuff and figuring it out.
link |
And ultimately, yes, asking the question,
link |
how is this making the world at all better
link |
at every step of the way
link |
as opposed to enriching yourself
link |
and all those kinds of things?
link |
Right, I think that's the name of the game.
link |
And if we don't have moral mentors
link |
and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard.
link |
And if you tell a kid, that's deadly to me,
link |
just decide for yourself, just off you go.
link |
And you make your own choices.
link |
I mean, your choice has to be disciplined.
link |
Your desire has gotta be directed.
link |
Then you'll find your creative path.
link |
Everyone does it in its own way.
link |
But it's a guided choice.
link |
Your freedom is not sovereign.
link |
It's a guided freedom.
link |
So in the struggle and the suffering
link |
you've seen in the world,
link |
let me ask you the question of death.
link |
How often do you think about your own mortality?
link |
And one, are you afraid of it, the uncertainty of it?
link |
And what do you think happens after you die?
link |
Sure, I'm afraid of it.
link |
I mean, because I don't know what's next.
link |
I mean, I can't know it the way I know you.
link |
So of course I'm afraid of it.
link |
And I think of it every day.
link |
My prayer life compels me.
link |
We have this, the Hail Mary prayer.
link |
So you pray the rosary.
link |
Now and at the hour of our death, amen.
link |
Now and at the hour of our death, amen.
link |
Now at the hour of our death, amen.
link |
You pray the whole rosary.
link |
50 times you've reminded yourself of your own death.
link |
I think about it because it's the ultimate limit.
link |
It's why it's beguiled every artist and writer
link |
It's the ultimate limit question.
link |
I'm afraid of it because it's the unknown.
link |
What do I think happens?
link |
I think I'm drawn into the deeper embrace of God's love.
link |
You know, that's stating it kind of in a more poetic way.
link |
Do you know John Polkinghorne's work?
link |
Do you know that name?
link |
John Polkinghorne was a very interesting,
link |
he just died recently.
link |
He was a Cambridge University particle physicist, right?
link |
High, high level scientist who at midlife
link |
became an Anglican priest.
link |
He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary
link |
and became an Anglican priest, right?
link |
And then wrote, I think some of the best stuff
link |
on science and religion,
link |
because he really knew the science from the inside.
link |
Here's Polkinghorne's account
link |
that I've always found persuasive.
link |
He said, what survives after we die?
link |
So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground
link |
or it's burned up or it goes away, right?
link |
But what's preserved?
link |
And he says, what Aristotle would have called the form,
link |
Polkinghorne calls it the pattern.
link |
So the pattern that's organized the matter
link |
that's made me up over all these years,
link |
that's obviously not the same as it was even,
link |
I mean, you would know how often does it all change,
link |
all your atoms and cells and, you know.
link |
In other words, the little, you know,
link |
Bobby Baron who was growing up in Birmingham, Michigan,
link |
I can have a picture of him and then there's me.
link |
And I say, oh, that's the same person.
link |
Well, I mean, clearly not materially speaking, not at all.
link |
Completely different.
link |
But there's a unity to whatever that pattern is
link |
by which all of that materiality
link |
has been kind of organized, you know?
link |
So Polkinghorne says, I think that pattern is remembered
link |
by God and remember it's the wrong word,
link |
as though it's like derivative.
link |
I mean, it's known by God.
link |
And so God can therefore reembody me
link |
according to that pattern at a higher pitch,
link |
what we call the resurrected body.
link |
So Paul talks about a spiritual body,
link |
body for sure, I mean,
link |
because he believes in the resurrection of Jesus.
link |
But it's not a body like ours from this world.
link |
It's a body at a higher pitch.
link |
So something, some pattern that's there persists.
link |
Pattern persists in the mind of God
link |
and then is used as the ground of the reembodyment of me.
link |
So it's not like I've just become a platonic form.
link |
I'm gonna be reembodyed because the Christian hope
link |
is not for platonic escape of soul from matter.
link |
That's never the Christian hope.
link |
It's for the resurrection of the body,
link |
And you say, what a fantastic idea.
link |
Well, I don't know.
link |
I mean, this body is being reconstituted all the time
link |
according to this pattern, right?
link |
It's not the same matter.
link |
And so might there be another sort of higher material
link |
that is organized according to the same pattern,
link |
which has been remembered by God.
link |
So therefore we can hang on to the language of body and soul
link |
if you want, or matter and form.
link |
But it's the form remembered by God
link |
and then reconstituted in an embodied way by God
link |
that we call heaven, the heavenly state.
link |
That's what I hope for.
link |
That's my Christian faith, my Christian hope.
link |
Let me ask you about the big question of meaning.
link |
We've talked about it in different directions
link |
from different perspectives.
link |
What's the meaning of our existence here on earth?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
And the purpose of my life is to become God's friend.
link |
And that means I'm more conformed to love.
link |
And so my life finds meaning in the measure
link |
that I become more on fire with the divine love.
link |
I'm like the burning bush,
link |
is to become more and more radiant with the presence of God.
link |
That's what gives life meaning.
link |
Meaning is to live in a purposive relationship
link |
to a value, I would say.
link |
So there's all kinds of values,
link |
as I say, moral, aesthetic, intellectual values.
link |
And when I have a purposive relationship,
link |
so right now you and I,
link |
we have a purposive relationship to the value of,
link |
let's say, finding out the truth of things,
link |
and we're speaking together to seek that.
link |
What's the ultimate value?
link |
The value of values is God.
link |
The supreme good, the supremely knowable,
link |
the supremely intelligible is God.
link |
And so to be conformed to God
link |
is to have a fully meaningful life.
link |
So that's where I would fit the package together that way.
link |
You're adding a lot of love to this world,
link |
and which is something I deeply appreciate,
link |
and that you would sit down with me,
link |
given how valuable your time is,
link |
Thank you so much for talking to me.
link |
Well, my great pleasure.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Bishop Robert Barron.
link |
To support this podcast,
link |
please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
from Bishop Robert Barron himself,
link |
which reminds me of the Dostoevsky line
link |
spoken through Prince Mishkin,
link |
that quote, beauty will save the world.
link |
Robert says, begin with the beautiful,
link |
which leads to the good,
link |
which leads you to truth.
link |
Thank you for listening,
link |
and hope to see you next time.