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Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church | Lex Fridman Podcast #304


small model | large model

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When we're beyond good and evil, you know,
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and all that's left is the will to power,
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then why are we surprised at the powerful rise
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and that they use the powerless for their purposes?
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When we forget ideas like equality and rights,
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which are grounded in God,
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why are we surprised that death camps follow?
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The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron,
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founder of Word on Fire and one of the greatest educators
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in the world on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism,
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Christianity, and religious faith in general.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron.
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Let's start with the big question.
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Who is God?
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According to Christianity, according to Catholicism,
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who's God?
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I'll give you Thomas Aquinas's definition.
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God is ipsum, essay, subsistence.
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God is the subsistent act of to be itself.
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Another way to state that in Aquinas
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is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique,
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in which essence and existence coincide.
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To be God is to be to be.
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Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God.
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They are kind of nomic, and that's on purpose.
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There's almost a Zen koan kind of quality
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about the way we talk about God.
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I'm saying something that's substantive,
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but it's more in like a via negativa mode.
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It's more like what God is not,
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because there's nothing in the world
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that would correspond to those descriptions.
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So anything in the world would be a being of some type
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or an event of some type,
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some particular mode of existence.
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And God is not an entity in the world.
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I would say that's the fundamental mistake
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that atheists old and new make all the time,
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is they think of God as a big being.
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When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus,
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even the genus of being,
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it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition,
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but it's really interesting.
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So you say, well, at the very least,
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God must be a being, right?
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And Aquinas's answer is no, he's not in the genus of being.
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So we talk about God being beyond being and so on.
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To say in God essence and existence coincide
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is to say God's very nature is to be,
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and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world.
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So what I'm doing there is I'm gesturing
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the way the tradition does toward God,
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using language that's at the same time
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philosophically precise and gnomic.
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It's both accurate, it's true.
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God, essence and existence coincide.
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What God is is the same as God's active to be.
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But now what does that mean?
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I'm not quite sure,
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because nothing in our ordinary experience
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corresponds to that.
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Everything in our experience is a being of some type.
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So it's existence received according to the mode
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of some essence.
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That's not true of God,
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which is why he can't be found in the world.
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And that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is,
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oh, I guess theists are those that believe
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there's this being alongside the other beings
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in the universe.
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And then atheists say, oh no, there is no such being.
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And that's precisely wrong.
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That's just a category error.
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Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell.
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To the effect that proving the nonexistence of God
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is a bit like proving the nonexistence of a China teapot
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orbiting between Earth and Mars.
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No, that's precisely what God is not,
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some entity that's sort of hidden
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among the other entities of the universe.
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God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all,
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is the way to put it.
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In more theological language,
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God's the creator of all things.
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So if God is outside of our world,
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is it possible for us to visualize,
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to comprehend, to know God?
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Not utterly, of course.
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And I would say our knowledge begins always in this world,
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begins in ordinary experience.
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But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis,
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through philosophical reasoning,
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can come to some knowledge of a reality
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which is transcendent to our experience.
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So we gesture toward it.
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I always like Aquinas who says the language about God
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that we use is analogical.
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So it's not univocal, meaning what I say about that can
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or about this bottle, I can say about God.
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No, that makes God an entity.
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At the same time, it's not simply equivocal.
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So if I say, well, that thing is and God is,
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I mean totally different things.
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No, no, I mean something analogous.
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So to be God is to be, to be.
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So the real meaning of being is the being of God.
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The being of that thing or this thing,
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or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles
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would be analogous to God's manner of being.
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So on that basis, I can make some statements.
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I can, I can theorize.
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And even at the limit, as you suggest, I can visualize.
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So we have metaphors for God,
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and the Bible is replete with those, right?
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So God is a rock.
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You know, God's like a lion.
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God's like this and that.
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Or the Bible will sometimes imagine God
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as a human being walking around, you know.
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Now, only the crudest fundamentalism would say,
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well, that's a univocal, accurate description of God.
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It's an image that's catching something
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of God's manner of being.
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Then what does it mean to believe in God?
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So there's a word, and we have to limit ourselves
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to human interpretable words today.
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There's a word called faith.
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What does faith mean?
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So if we can't really directly know God,
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you kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.
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Better he sneaks up on us.
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Because I like the language of grace.
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God's action comes first.
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So if I stay perfectly within the realm of I'm seeking
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with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind,
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I'm not gonna find God that way.
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I might find a path that opens up.
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But I would say finally God finds me,
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and I think then the language of faith
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begins to make more sense.
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I'm with Paul Tillich, though, the Protestant theologian,
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said the most misunderstood word
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in the religious vocabulary is faith.
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Because he said the way we take it usually
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is something subrational.
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You know, I have proof of this.
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I really know this, and I only kind of believe that.
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Like, that's just a personal opinion or impression.
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But that's to identify faith with the kind of infrarational.
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And that's not it.
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I mean, I don't want something infrarational.
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I don't want superstition or childish credulity.
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So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason
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and on the far side of reason.
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It's super irrational, not infrarational.
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And that's a very important move.
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At the limit of what I can know,
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at the limit of my striving and my vision,
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there's this horizon that opens up.
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And I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing.
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There's a kind of a horizon
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that lures us beyond what I've got.
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Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness
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rather than a darkness prior to reason.
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The darkness beyond the horizon prior to reason,
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first of all, the poetry of your language is incredible.
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To be, to be, I have a million questions.
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Yeah, go ahead.
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I do too on this.
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So first of all, let me just jump around.
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You mentioned to be, to be a few times.
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What does that mean?
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Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?
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To be this is to be a table,
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to be this is to be a microphone.
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So it's, I'll use Aquinas's language.
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It's the act of being poured, if you want,
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into the receptacle of some essential principle.
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So it's got an ontological structure.
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It's an existent, it's a thing that exists,
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but it's existing in a limited way
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according to an essential principle.
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So God, so what's God?
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What's God's name?
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What kind of being is he?
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We'll go back to Moses now.
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When the Israelites asked me, you know, what's your name?
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What should I tell them?
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And he says, you know, famously, I am who I am.
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But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark.
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So Moses is wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods
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and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities.
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Well, which one are you?
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You gotta be one of them.
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So tell me your name.
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In philosophical language, give me the essence
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that receives your act of existing, right?
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And God's answer blows the mind of Moses
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and the whole tradition.
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I am who I am.
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To be God is to be.
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So I'm not this or that.
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I'm not up or down.
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I'm not here or there.
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God is that whose center is everywhere
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and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it.
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Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that?
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No, and in a way, that's the whole point.
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If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind.
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So to be God is to be.
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To be is to, and that's, you know,
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Moses, take off your sandals, you're on holy ground.
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So I'm gonna go over confidently
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and find out what this thing is, this burning bush.
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I'm gonna find out.
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No, no, no.
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Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground
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because you're not in charge here.
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You're not in command.
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Because if you've got shoes on,
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you can walk wherever you want.
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You can walk with confidence.
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But you take your shoes off, you're much more vulnerable.
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And that's appropriate when you're talking about God.
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But here's another interesting thing.
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I didn't think about the burning bush
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in this connection before,
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but it's a bush that's on fire but not consumed.
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Beings are competitive with each other.
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And so these can't be in the same place at the same time,
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these two beings.
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They're mutually exclusive if you want.
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But as God comes close to a creature,
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he doesn't destroy it or consume it.
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But the creature becomes more beautiful
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and more radiant, right?
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And see, compare it to the classical gods and goddesses.
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When they come bursting into life and experience,
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things are incinerated and people give way
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and they're overwhelmed.
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Then there's this biblical idea of God comes close
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and sets things on fire but doesn't burn them up.
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And that's because he's not a competitive being
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in the world.
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If he were a big being, then he'd be competing for space,
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so to speak, on the same ontological grid.
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But he's not like that.
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So God can come close and we come more fully alive.
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Now we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation,
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I mean, the central Christian doctrine,
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that God can actually become a human
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without overwhelming the human he becomes, right?
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So I mean, that's kind of the next step.
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But the basic idea of God is noncompetitively
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transcendent to the world.
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That's another way to get at it.
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Noncompetitively transcendent to the world
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so as beyond being as the source of being.
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Right.
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Let me make it maybe more imagistic.
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I think a really good analogy would be author to book.
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Right, so like Tolkien or someone that writes
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one of these big sprawling novels.
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And Tolkien's good too because he creates a whole world.
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He creates a new nature, a new language, new history,
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all that, think of the thousands of characters
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and the plots and subplots and all of it.
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Tolkien is utterly responsible
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for every bit of that story, right?
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Every character, every plot, every subplot,
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every description, he's completely responsible.
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He's involved in every nook and cranny of it.
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But he's not in the story, he's not in the book.
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You're not gonna find him as a character in the book.
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So that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way
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is I'm looking for God, he's a character
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in this story somewhere.
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No, he's the author of the story.
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Mysteriously present to every aspect of the story,
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but not a character in it.
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Right, he is deeply in the story somehow.
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Right. He's present,
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but he's not, even if he is a character,
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he's not really, the full embodiment is not a character.
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And people inside the book
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can't really know about the author.
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Right.
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No, right. Well, see, Augustine says,
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God is simultaneously intime or intimo meo
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et superior sumo meo.
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He's closer to me than I am to myself,
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and he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine
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at the same time.
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But see, once you get the insight
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that God is the sheer act of to be,
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well, of course that's true.
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So right now, God is sustaining us in existence.
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True.
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Aquinas says, God is in all things by essence,
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presence, and power, and most intimately so.
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And he's nowhere in this room.
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Okay, well, where's God?
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He's nowhere in this room.
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He's totaliter aliter, we say.
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He's totally other.
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Same time.
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But once you crack that code, though,
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I think you see it of why that would be true.
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And see, now I'm getting from more philosophical language
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to more mystical language,
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because all the mystics talk that way
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in these high paradoxes about God's availability
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and unavailability.
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I've often thought in the Bible, story after story,
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God can neither be grasped nor hidden from.
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So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God.
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I've got him, I understand him, I can manipulate him.
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No, no, no.
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Story after story is told, you can't do that.
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Well, then the other extreme of the sinner,
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all right, then I'm gonna run from God.
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I'm gonna avoid God.
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Jonah and the whale, so he has the call from God,
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and he said, no, no, I'm gonna refuse that.
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I'm gonna run as far away.
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I'm gonna go to Tarshish, which meant Timbuktu for them,
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at the end of the world.
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God's got the whale, swallows him up,
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and brings him right back where God wants him.
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It's a poetic way of saying
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you can't escape the press of God.
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At the same time, Tower of Babel.
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I'm gonna build a tower up to God.
link |
00:14:09.020
I'm gonna grab hold of God.
link |
00:14:11.140
No, no, no, you can't do that.
link |
00:14:12.900
So, live in the space in between those two things,
link |
00:14:15.420
which would be the space of friendship with God,
link |
00:14:19.380
falling in love with God
link |
00:14:20.740
is neither grasping nor hiding from God.
link |
00:14:25.260
You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things.
link |
00:14:28.700
You mentioned grace.
link |
00:14:30.380
Yeah.
link |
00:14:31.220
You mentioned sin.
link |
00:14:32.320
You mentioned incarnation.
link |
00:14:35.140
Is there a philosophical, pragmatic way
link |
00:14:37.540
to start talking about the pillars of Christianity?
link |
00:14:40.740
What are the defining things that make Christianity to you,
link |
00:14:46.100
and broadly speaking, to those that follow the religion?
link |
00:14:51.660
In a way, what we're doing so far
link |
00:14:53.340
is a necessary propaedeutic,
link |
00:14:55.160
because we're talking about God.
link |
00:14:58.300
What makes Christianity distinctive, of course,
link |
00:15:00.100
is the claim of the incarnation.
link |
00:15:01.860
So, we come up out of Judaism.
link |
00:15:03.380
We come up out of this great monotheistic tradition.
link |
00:15:06.140
And the Bible itself and all the great commentaries
link |
00:15:09.100
within Judaism, I think, would agree
link |
00:15:11.380
with this basic theistic stuff that I've been talking about.
link |
00:15:15.500
Take Moses Maimonides, for example.
link |
00:15:18.420
Now, what makes Christianity distinct,
link |
00:15:20.900
this supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us,
link |
00:15:25.820
God becomes a creature, but without ceasing to be God
link |
00:15:30.540
and without overwhelming the integrity
link |
00:15:32.020
of the creature he becomes.
link |
00:15:33.540
What we see in the burning bush,
link |
00:15:35.300
that principle which obtains across the board,
link |
00:15:37.940
so the closer God comes to me,
link |
00:15:39.440
the more radiant I become, right?
link |
00:15:42.140
But take that now to the nth degree,
link |
00:15:44.620
would be what we mean by the incarnation,
link |
00:15:46.340
the incarnation of the Son of God becoming a creature
link |
00:15:51.460
in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful.
link |
00:15:57.340
That's the pillar of Christianity.
link |
00:15:58.860
It's the incarnation.
link |
00:16:01.780
And what follows from that is the redemption
link |
00:16:03.820
of all of reality, so not just of human beings,
link |
00:16:07.540
but in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world.
link |
00:16:14.460
The Greek fathers always said God became human,
link |
00:16:17.540
that humans might become God.
link |
00:16:19.460
And that's a good way to sum up, I think,
link |
00:16:21.500
the essence of Christianity.
link |
00:16:23.220
Why is this such an important thing?
link |
00:16:25.060
So it's a distinctive thing,
link |
00:16:26.820
but why is it so important philosophically
link |
00:16:30.020
to what it means to be a Christian?
link |
00:16:34.140
What impact did that have on our world,
link |
00:16:36.980
on human civilization, on human nature,
link |
00:16:39.460
on our morals of why live, what to live for,
link |
00:16:43.300
and the meaning of it all?
link |
00:16:44.500
Why is incarnation so important?
link |
00:16:46.460
Well, I think it's massively important
link |
00:16:48.060
because it's the divinization principle
link |
00:16:49.900
that God wants to divinize his creation
link |
00:16:52.300
and sort of in this concentrated point
link |
00:16:54.580
of Jesus of Nazareth.
link |
00:16:56.220
But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus,
link |
00:16:58.500
so that goes right back to Paul.
link |
00:17:00.220
As we're grafted onto Christ,
link |
00:17:02.180
we talk about that as the church,
link |
00:17:04.380
we become like cells and molecules in an organism.
link |
00:17:08.420
That's the church, it's not an organization,
link |
00:17:10.460
that's a deformation of ecclesiology.
link |
00:17:13.980
The church is this organism that begins with Jesus
link |
00:17:17.060
and then he's drawing all of humanity,
link |
00:17:20.780
but ultimately all of nature,
link |
00:17:23.180
all of creation to himself.
link |
00:17:26.380
When the Son of Man is lifted up,
link |
00:17:27.580
he will draw all things to himself,
link |
00:17:29.420
that idea of the gathering in of a scattered creation.
link |
00:17:34.420
So in that way, it's at the heart of it.
link |
00:17:36.340
Then there's all kinds of things.
link |
00:17:37.820
If God becomes human,
link |
00:17:39.660
that means there's a dignity to humanity,
link |
00:17:41.420
which goes beyond anything any humanist
link |
00:17:43.900
of any stripe has ever said, right?
link |
00:17:46.420
Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary.
link |
00:17:50.180
Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable.
link |
00:17:53.020
God became one of us in order to divinize us.
link |
00:17:56.740
The goal of my life is not just to be a good person,
link |
00:17:59.420
not just to be materially successful,
link |
00:18:02.700
not just to be a member of society.
link |
00:18:05.420
The goal of my life is to become
link |
00:18:07.460
a participant in the divine nature.
link |
00:18:09.380
And so I don't think there is a humanism greater than that,
link |
00:18:12.260
even conceivably.
link |
00:18:13.940
So that's where I think humanism
link |
00:18:16.620
is profoundly influenced by the incarnation.
link |
00:18:20.380
And just our notion of God is noncompetitive to us.
link |
00:18:25.140
And it's so important, because I think in so many systems
link |
00:18:27.580
from mythology onward,
link |
00:18:29.460
you have these competitive understandings of God.
link |
00:18:32.780
When Jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies,
link |
00:18:35.660
I no longer call you servants but friends,
link |
00:18:38.180
it's an extraordinary moment.
link |
00:18:40.260
Because every God who's ever been served,
link |
00:18:43.620
well, that's the best we can hope for
link |
00:18:45.580
is that we'll be as the servant of God.
link |
00:18:48.020
You know, I'll try to obey you, Lord.
link |
00:18:50.220
I'll try to do what you want.
link |
00:18:51.540
But when Jesus says, I no longer call you servants
link |
00:18:54.860
or slaves, he would have said in the Greek there, you know.
link |
00:18:58.300
But friends, I don't know,
link |
00:19:01.420
I can't imagine anything greater than that,
link |
00:19:03.380
becoming God's friend.
link |
00:19:04.860
That's a call to become one with God.
link |
00:19:08.620
It's possible to become one with God.
link |
00:19:12.140
Now I should mention,
link |
00:19:13.460
you're one of the greatest religious communicators
link |
00:19:15.920
I've ever experienced.
link |
00:19:17.580
A huge number of people are fans of yours.
link |
00:19:19.900
You've done a lot of great conversations.
link |
00:19:23.300
You've done Reddit AMAs,
link |
00:19:25.140
which is a very unique, bold, brave thing.
link |
00:19:29.800
And on one of them, somebody asked,
link |
00:19:34.080
what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins?
link |
00:19:37.140
So first, what are the seven deadly sins?
link |
00:19:41.060
What do they have to do with Christianity?
link |
00:19:43.660
How essential, how crucial they are to the religion?
link |
00:19:47.820
And what's the most challenging in our modern day?
link |
00:19:51.580
Yeah, to name them, pride, envy, anger,
link |
00:19:55.900
sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust
link |
00:19:59.340
are the seven deadly sins.
link |
00:20:01.220
We're called capital sins sometimes,
link |
00:20:03.460
they're the head sins from which things tend to flow.
link |
00:20:07.380
The most fundamental is pride.
link |
00:20:11.380
Probably most people today, if you talk about like vice,
link |
00:20:13.420
or you talk about a deadly sin,
link |
00:20:15.300
they would think about lust.
link |
00:20:16.820
But the classical authors, including Dante,
link |
00:20:19.020
who does this pictorially,
link |
00:20:21.540
that's the least of the deadly sins is lust,
link |
00:20:23.740
because it's the one that's most sort of dependent
link |
00:20:25.980
upon the body and its passions and so on.
link |
00:20:29.180
The most important is pride.
link |
00:20:30.660
Pride is the deadliest of deadly sins.
link |
00:20:33.040
And it's very simple to see why.
link |
00:20:34.980
Pride is, Augustine calls it incurvatus in se.
link |
00:20:38.380
I'm caved in around myself.
link |
00:20:40.940
Like a black hole, right, to get into the scientific.
link |
00:20:44.340
But the black hole to me is a great symbol,
link |
00:20:46.660
you know, that it's so heavy
link |
00:20:48.880
that it draws everything, including light.
link |
00:20:50.780
Nothing can escape from it.
link |
00:20:52.740
See, that's the sinner.
link |
00:20:54.140
We're all sinners.
link |
00:20:55.740
We're like black holes,
link |
00:20:56.800
that we draw everything into ourselves.
link |
00:21:00.360
So as a sinner, and I'll confess I'm a sinner,
link |
00:21:04.820
the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment,
link |
00:21:08.280
and I'm drawing you now into my world and so on.
link |
00:21:13.920
What that does is it kills us off,
link |
00:21:16.500
and it darkens life, and it makes it small,
link |
00:21:20.520
and heavy, and awful, right?
link |
00:21:23.460
It's like, but see, compared to the contrasting thing,
link |
00:21:28.380
is when you're lost in a moment,
link |
00:21:31.420
you're not concerned about the impression I'm making.
link |
00:21:33.840
You're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself.
link |
00:21:35.960
You're not concerned about this monkey on my back
link |
00:21:38.260
that's always telling me, you know,
link |
00:21:39.640
look good and sound right.
link |
00:21:41.660
But you're lost in something.
link |
00:21:44.140
You're just talking, you know, to a friend,
link |
00:21:46.360
and the two of you together
link |
00:21:47.620
are discovering something true or beautiful.
link |
00:21:50.300
You're lost in a movie, or you're lost in a book.
link |
00:21:53.040
Those are the best moments in life.
link |
00:21:54.880
Those are the best,
link |
00:21:55.720
because they're the least prideful moments, right?
link |
00:21:58.420
That's when the light comes out.
link |
00:22:00.700
I become radiant, because I'm overcoming this tendency
link |
00:22:05.380
to fall in on myself.
link |
00:22:08.300
Dante is so good, because the way he pictures Satan
link |
00:22:12.780
in Divine Comedy, and you know,
link |
00:22:14.260
he's at the center of the Earth.
link |
00:22:15.700
So like a black hole that way,
link |
00:22:17.220
like he's at the center of gravity.
link |
00:22:19.020
He's at the heaviest place.
link |
00:22:21.060
And there's not fire where he is, but ice,
link |
00:22:23.980
which is a much, much better image,
link |
00:22:26.220
that you're frozen in place, and you're stuck.
link |
00:22:29.100
And he's got wings, right?
link |
00:22:31.460
And they used to be angel wings, because he's an angel,
link |
00:22:33.720
but now they're like bat wings for Dante,
link |
00:22:35.500
and they're flapping.
link |
00:22:37.440
And all they're doing is making the world around him colder,
link |
00:22:40.540
because he's ice, he's stuck in his own iciness,
link |
00:22:43.320
and then he's beating his wings over the ice,
link |
00:22:45.660
making everyone else colder.
link |
00:22:46.940
It's a great image.
link |
00:22:48.860
And then he has, this is cool too,
link |
00:22:50.300
he has three faces, Satan,
link |
00:22:53.060
because he's the simulacrum of the Trinity.
link |
00:22:55.140
So every sinner thinks he's God.
link |
00:22:57.140
So I pretend I'm God.
link |
00:22:58.500
So he's got the three faces.
link |
00:23:00.380
And from all six eyes, he weeps.
link |
00:23:03.780
Also from all three mouths, he's chewing a sinner.
link |
00:23:07.220
He's got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the three mouths,
link |
00:23:11.280
you know, the three traitors.
link |
00:23:13.020
But I thought, it's just a great image
link |
00:23:16.420
of all of us sinners, is we're stuck,
link |
00:23:19.480
it's heavy, it's cold,
link |
00:23:22.220
we're chewing on our past resentments,
link |
00:23:25.060
we're weeping in our sadness,
link |
00:23:27.140
and we're making the world around us colder.
link |
00:23:29.280
It's beautiful, it's great.
link |
00:23:30.380
So that's pride.
link |
00:23:31.580
See, that's an image of pride,
link |
00:23:33.180
because Satan, that's his great sin, pride,
link |
00:23:35.540
which is why he needed Michael, right, Mikael,
link |
00:23:38.260
who's like God, so that the great challenge to him,
link |
00:23:41.040
which we need all the time,
link |
00:23:43.500
is someone to say, wait a minute, wait a minute,
link |
00:23:45.420
you're not God.
link |
00:23:46.960
But the minute we say, I'm God,
link |
00:23:49.220
whew, black hole, I now cave in on myself,
link |
00:23:52.660
I suck everything into myself,
link |
00:23:54.940
and I turn into Dante Satan.
link |
00:23:57.620
So that's a great image, that's pride.
link |
00:23:59.700
That's the most fundamental.
link |
00:24:01.660
That's the uber capital sin.
link |
00:24:04.180
All the other ones flow from that, in a way.
link |
00:24:06.260
So in general, empathy, humility, compassion,
link |
00:24:10.180
love thy neighbor, is the way to fight the sin of pride.
link |
00:24:14.700
Right, which is why the masters tend to say,
link |
00:24:16.980
this was Bernard, St. Bernard was asked,
link |
00:24:19.300
what are the three most important virtues?
link |
00:24:21.140
And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas,
link |
00:24:24.660
because it's the opposite of pride.
link |
00:24:26.500
So, but you know, they're bringing Aquinas in again,
link |
00:24:29.820
because we think, oh, humility, I'm no good.
link |
00:24:32.180
That's not what it means at all.
link |
00:24:33.380
It means what I was describing before,
link |
00:24:35.500
when you're just lost in something,
link |
00:24:37.780
you're just lost in it.
link |
00:24:39.860
My image, I live out in Santa Barbara,
link |
00:24:41.940
and I like to walk on the beach out there,
link |
00:24:44.180
and there's a section of the beach
link |
00:24:45.620
where they let the dogs run free without leashes.
link |
00:24:48.500
And when you see a dog, and he's well cared for,
link |
00:24:52.620
and his master's right there,
link |
00:24:53.780
and the master's throwing the tennis ball out into the surf,
link |
00:24:56.100
and the dog goes galloping out into the surf,
link |
00:24:57.940
and he gets it with a big smile, and comes running back.
link |
00:25:00.660
That's humility.
link |
00:25:02.420
That's an image of heaven,
link |
00:25:03.420
because he's just lost in that moment.
link |
00:25:05.900
He doesn't care about impressing anybody.
link |
00:25:07.860
He doesn't care about what people think of him.
link |
00:25:10.620
He's just lost in it.
link |
00:25:13.340
That's it, that's heaven, right?
link |
00:25:16.380
And those moments in our life, when we get that,
link |
00:25:18.820
it's a little hint of paradise.
link |
00:25:21.140
But the trouble is most of us live, frankly, most of the time
link |
00:25:24.620
in various levels of hell,
link |
00:25:27.860
and we're dealing with these deadly sins.
link |
00:25:29.940
Like envy flows from pride, because if I'm prideful,
link |
00:25:32.540
I'm a black hole, I'm in Curvatus In Se, I'm collapsed in,
link |
00:25:35.780
what am I really gonna be concerned about?
link |
00:25:37.780
That guy's getting more attention than I am.
link |
00:25:39.140
That guy's richer than I am.
link |
00:25:40.540
That lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do,
link |
00:25:43.500
and why don't I have that, right?
link |
00:25:46.260
So envy is a very close daughter of pride.
link |
00:25:50.460
Anger flows from it.
link |
00:25:51.940
Why do I get angry?
link |
00:25:53.460
The dog isn't getting angry on the beach
link |
00:25:54.980
when he's running after the tennis ball.
link |
00:25:56.700
But I get angry all the time,
link |
00:25:57.660
I sputter with anger when things aren't going my way,
link |
00:25:59.980
and you're insulting me, and you're not doing what I want,
link |
00:26:02.580
and I'm being hurt, my reputation.
link |
00:26:04.660
So anger flows from pride, you know?
link |
00:26:07.540
All of them do, all of the deadly sins do.
link |
00:26:10.260
So you said, I'm a sinner.
link |
00:26:13.820
So we're all sinners.
link |
00:26:15.340
Yeah.
link |
00:26:17.780
And you mentioned Satan.
link |
00:26:19.220
Where's the, so there's heaven and hell,
link |
00:26:22.660
there's God and Satan.
link |
00:26:25.380
Where's the line between what it means to be good
link |
00:26:30.940
and not good enough?
link |
00:26:34.420
Or I hesitate to use the word sort of evil,
link |
00:26:38.180
but maybe overwhelmingly sinful.
link |
00:26:43.020
Where's the line between hell and heaven?
link |
00:26:45.500
Think of them as limit concepts, maybe.
link |
00:26:47.100
They're like heuristic devices.
link |
00:26:49.020
So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God.
link |
00:26:53.580
So think of the dog on the beach,
link |
00:26:54.700
who is just, he's fallen in love with his environment,
link |
00:26:58.120
with his master, with the surf.
link |
00:26:59.660
He's just lost in it, right?
link |
00:27:01.260
He's forgotten himself, he's transcended himself,
link |
00:27:04.400
and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place.
link |
00:27:08.740
Now, imagine the limit of that
link |
00:27:11.540
is the friendship with God that we talked about,
link |
00:27:14.500
that I become the friend of God.
link |
00:27:16.140
I become so forgetful of myself,
link |
00:27:19.100
so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God
link |
00:27:22.260
that I found beatitude, right?
link |
00:27:25.980
I found joy, the beatific vision, we call it.
link |
00:27:30.220
That's the limit case.
link |
00:27:31.460
That's where we're tending.
link |
00:27:32.400
That's where God wants us to go.
link |
00:27:34.180
Think of hell as the limit case in the opposite direction.
link |
00:27:36.180
That's curvatus in se.
link |
00:27:37.980
That's the black hole.
link |
00:27:39.480
And we're all sinners,
link |
00:27:40.780
meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum.
link |
00:27:42.900
We have good days and bad days,
link |
00:27:45.180
and we have good moments and bad moments,
link |
00:27:46.740
and I can be drawn toward sin.
link |
00:27:51.060
What's God's purpose on Christianity's reading
link |
00:27:54.260
is to bring us out of that.
link |
00:27:56.420
Now, where did he go?
link |
00:27:57.620
He went all the way into it to get us out of it.
link |
00:28:00.380
It's like pulling a sock back out.
link |
00:28:02.780
The sock's inside out, you have to go all the way in
link |
00:28:04.300
and pull it back out.
link |
00:28:05.340
And so God had to go all the way down.
link |
00:28:08.860
There's the trajectory of the incarnation.
link |
00:28:13.860
Though he was in the form of God,
link |
00:28:15.820
and this is St. Paul,
link |
00:28:16.860
Jesus did not deem equality with God
link |
00:28:18.380
a thing to be grasped at,
link |
00:28:19.220
but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave,
link |
00:28:21.560
being born in the likeness of men.
link |
00:28:23.400
But then he was known to be of human estate,
link |
00:28:26.800
and he accepted even death, death on a cross.
link |
00:28:30.420
And so Paul imagines the incarnation as this downward journey
link |
00:28:34.540
in order to get all of us, right?
link |
00:28:36.820
All of us who were stuck, were stuck in our sin.
link |
00:28:40.820
And so again, Paul says he became sin on the cross.
link |
00:28:44.220
It's a really, really powerful idea.
link |
00:28:46.740
He wasn't a sinner, because then he'd need to be saved too.
link |
00:28:49.460
He's not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction
link |
00:28:53.380
in order to pull us back out of it.
link |
00:28:55.700
So that's a really powerful message, an embodiment,
link |
00:29:02.100
sort of educating the world about sin.
link |
00:29:07.020
That said, day to day,
link |
00:29:09.180
there's oscillations in terms of how much each human sins,
link |
00:29:15.580
and there's a struggle against that.
link |
00:29:17.980
So that dog that loses himself on the beach
link |
00:29:22.980
may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that.
link |
00:29:26.860
That was, may have been not the best dog
link |
00:29:30.580
he could be leading up to that.
link |
00:29:32.540
So how, if it's a math equation,
link |
00:29:35.540
what does the final calculation look like
link |
00:29:38.780
in terms of ending up in heaven?
link |
00:29:40.940
What does it mean to live a good life in the end?
link |
00:29:44.580
Is it the average amount of sin you do is low?
link |
00:29:50.100
Are you allowed to make mistakes?
link |
00:29:52.380
Yeah, the metric is love, right?
link |
00:29:56.900
And love is not a feeling, it's an act of the will.
link |
00:29:59.860
To will the good of the other.
link |
00:30:01.580
That's Aquinas again.
link |
00:30:02.540
To will the good of the other as other.
link |
00:30:04.860
You see, that's the anti black hole principle.
link |
00:30:07.540
When I, I don't.
link |
00:30:08.980
Will the good of the other.
link |
00:30:10.500
As other.
link |
00:30:11.340
See, because if I'm willing your good,
link |
00:30:13.380
because it's good for me.
link |
00:30:15.020
So again, it's good for you that I'm on this program,
link |
00:30:17.940
I guess, I'm willing your good,
link |
00:30:19.140
but that's because it's gonna be down to my benefit.
link |
00:30:21.700
That's just an indirect egotism.
link |
00:30:23.940
That's why I see love is really rare and strange,
link |
00:30:26.500
that I really want what's good for you as other.
link |
00:30:32.340
So not connected to the black hole tendency
link |
00:30:34.860
of my own prideful ego.
link |
00:30:36.700
When I've broken that, I've forgotten self
link |
00:30:39.940
and I've moved into the space of your own good.
link |
00:30:43.020
That's what love is.
link |
00:30:44.220
Now, God wants us to be,
link |
00:30:46.700
by this they will know that you're my disciples,
link |
00:30:48.780
that you love one another, Jesus says.
link |
00:30:50.460
So that's it.
link |
00:30:52.220
Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth
link |
00:30:56.140
and we're better or worse at that.
link |
00:30:59.820
The point of a church is to graft us onto Christ
link |
00:31:02.500
that we might become more and more conformed to love.
link |
00:31:05.100
But you know, the final calculus, I'll leave that to God.
link |
00:31:07.220
I mean, but use love as the metric.
link |
00:31:09.820
At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience,
link |
00:31:12.660
did I will the good of the other today?
link |
00:31:14.860
How effective was I at that?
link |
00:31:17.380
And be, just like Ignatius of Loyola, be brutally honest.
link |
00:31:21.220
Or was I just willing someone's good
link |
00:31:22.660
because it was good for me?
link |
00:31:25.500
Where were those moments where I was like the dog
link |
00:31:27.540
on the beach, see?
link |
00:31:29.380
And then see, play it the way,
link |
00:31:30.780
not so much God the law giver surveying
link |
00:31:33.580
and you did three of those and four.
link |
00:31:35.740
It's God wants us to be fully alive.
link |
00:31:39.220
Saint Irenaeus is one of my great heroes,
link |
00:31:41.100
ancient, you know, patristic figure.
link |
00:31:43.140
And his famous line is gloria de homo vivens, right?
link |
00:31:46.420
The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
link |
00:31:50.820
See, and that gets us over this sort of obsession
link |
00:31:53.620
with the illegalism and did I do enough?
link |
00:31:55.860
And is that, that's a big enough sin.
link |
00:31:58.140
God wants us fully alive.
link |
00:32:00.260
The key to that is willing the good of the other.
link |
00:32:02.700
He died that we might come to a richer
link |
00:32:07.260
appropriation of that.
link |
00:32:08.740
So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world
link |
00:32:13.740
or to love the world deeply.
link |
00:32:17.900
And what love means is the other.
link |
00:32:20.860
Is.
link |
00:32:21.700
Get out of yourself, right.
link |
00:32:22.540
It's the humility, yeah, getting out of yourself.
link |
00:32:26.020
Let go.
link |
00:32:26.860
That somehow is not, that's not even selfless
link |
00:32:31.340
because the word selfless requires there to be a self.
link |
00:32:35.460
It's almost like just letting go.
link |
00:32:38.140
Yeah, I might talk about like a gift of self
link |
00:32:39.980
that you're self aware but you give a gift of yourself.
link |
00:32:43.940
Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself
link |
00:32:46.780
but it becomes a radiant source of life for others.
link |
00:32:49.740
I think Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense
link |
00:32:51.460
of herself, it seems to me.
link |
00:32:52.700
But it was to light other people up
link |
00:32:57.020
so that they might be radiant.
link |
00:33:00.100
That's the game.
link |
00:33:00.940
So you could probably articulate it that way too.
link |
00:33:03.980
Yeah.
link |
00:33:05.460
I love love.
link |
00:33:06.540
It's such an interesting thing.
link |
00:33:08.380
But we have to be hard nosed about it.
link |
00:33:09.620
Like your friend Dostoevsky,
link |
00:33:11.460
love is a harsh and dreadful thing, right.
link |
00:33:13.780
It's not a feeling.
link |
00:33:14.940
And our culture is so sentimentalized love
link |
00:33:17.140
that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want.
link |
00:33:20.020
And that's not it at all.
link |
00:33:20.860
Love is always correlated to the order of the good.
link |
00:33:24.500
Because if I'm willing the good of the other,
link |
00:33:26.420
I have to know what that good is, right.
link |
00:33:28.660
So a parent does this, oh, I'll give the kid
link |
00:33:30.340
whatever she wants.
link |
00:33:31.540
Well, that's not love, that's indulgence
link |
00:33:33.380
or that's sentimentality.
link |
00:33:35.540
But I have to know what the goods really are
link |
00:33:37.920
if I'm gonna will them for you, right.
link |
00:33:39.940
Yeah, in some sense, you're absolutely right.
link |
00:33:43.020
A component of love is the struggle to know the other.
link |
00:33:47.220
Right.
link |
00:33:48.060
It's the struggle to understand.
link |
00:33:49.620
I mean, that's what I mean by empathy.
link |
00:33:52.020
It's the, yeah, it's not Valentine's Day romantic gifts.
link |
00:33:57.180
It's a struggle.
link |
00:33:59.700
It's like trying to understand,
link |
00:34:02.540
trying to perturb your own mind
link |
00:34:04.440
and that of another human being
link |
00:34:06.880
to try to figure out who they are,
link |
00:34:09.180
what they want, what makes them happy,
link |
00:34:12.820
what are they afraid of, what are they hoping for.
link |
00:34:16.340
And it's like a dance, a dance of conversation,
link |
00:34:19.620
a dance of just shared experiences
link |
00:34:23.700
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
00:34:24.620
And all of that requires for you to be,
link |
00:34:27.660
I guess, yeah, empathize.
link |
00:34:31.300
Imagine yourself in their place
link |
00:34:35.900
and then love that person
link |
00:34:38.220
when you're living inside that person.
link |
00:34:40.900
Yeah, several minutes ago
link |
00:34:42.460
about the pillars of Christianity.
link |
00:34:43.780
So we talked about God, talked about incarnation,
link |
00:34:45.540
but you're getting now to a third key one,
link |
00:34:48.580
namely the Trinity.
link |
00:34:50.060
Because we're monotheists, right,
link |
00:34:52.540
but we don't think God is monolithically one.
link |
00:34:54.900
We think God is a play of persons.
link |
00:34:57.380
And the Father from all eternity
link |
00:35:01.780
by a great mental act forms his interior word,
link |
00:35:07.220
as Aquinas puts it.
link |
00:35:08.820
And that's the logos, right?
link |
00:35:10.060
That's the verbum, that's the word
link |
00:35:12.020
by which the Father knows himself.
link |
00:35:13.420
And we call it the Son.
link |
00:35:14.780
So the imago, it's the image of the Father.
link |
00:35:17.100
But then see, the great thing is
link |
00:35:18.540
that imago is not like just a dead image on a mirror
link |
00:35:21.940
or a dead image at a pond or something.
link |
00:35:24.180
It's a full reflection of the Father's being.
link |
00:35:29.180
He's one in being with the Father.
link |
00:35:31.580
Therefore, the Son has everything the Father has
link |
00:35:33.900
except being the Father.
link |
00:35:35.420
But that means that the two of them look at each other
link |
00:35:38.820
and they're just crazy in love with each other
link |
00:35:41.540
because the Father's the fullness of being,
link |
00:35:44.980
the Son is the fullness of being.
link |
00:35:46.660
And they're so crazy in love with each other that they,
link |
00:35:49.260
this is Fulton Sheen put it this way,
link |
00:35:52.100
that there's this, ah, they just,
link |
00:35:54.980
they love each other with this sigh.
link |
00:35:58.140
And we call that the Spiritus Sanctus.
link |
00:36:00.220
That's the holy breath, right?
link |
00:36:01.500
The holy sigh of love between the Father and the Son.
link |
00:36:06.140
And that's one being, one essence we say of God.
link |
00:36:10.580
But in these three persons,
link |
00:36:12.540
but all your language about like dance
link |
00:36:14.220
and play and community,
link |
00:36:16.820
the Greek Fathers talked about perichoresis,
link |
00:36:18.780
which means God, the three persons kind of sit
link |
00:36:21.100
in a choir together.
link |
00:36:23.180
So they sing together, you know?
link |
00:36:27.820
And that's why, see, Christianity is unique in this claim,
link |
00:36:32.300
that God is love.
link |
00:36:34.860
So every religion will say God loves,
link |
00:36:37.140
you know, in some way.
link |
00:36:38.100
Love is an attribute of God.
link |
00:36:40.420
God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes.
link |
00:36:43.220
But Christianity is unique in all the religions
link |
00:36:45.300
in saying that God is love.
link |
00:36:47.740
And somehow the Holy Trinity embodies that idea.
link |
00:36:52.060
I mean, that philosophically has always been confusing to me,
link |
00:36:56.740
what it means to be three things
link |
00:37:00.980
and at the same time be one God,
link |
00:37:04.700
the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
link |
00:37:07.860
What is this dance between these three?
link |
00:37:10.580
What exact, like how do you visualize,
link |
00:37:13.500
how do you understand this?
link |
00:37:15.020
Yeah.
link |
00:37:15.860
This very fascinating, essential thing for Christianity.
link |
00:37:20.180
The first thing I'd say is what we already
link |
00:37:21.540
have been sort of talking about,
link |
00:37:22.500
is if you say God is love,
link |
00:37:24.140
and most people probably say, yeah, I like that.
link |
00:37:25.980
It's a good idea, God is love.
link |
00:37:27.300
But it's very peculiar because if he is love,
link |
00:37:30.980
there has to be in his unity a lover, a beloved,
link |
00:37:36.500
and the love that they share.
link |
00:37:37.660
Otherwise he isn't loved by his very essence.
link |
00:37:40.340
He would love, it would be an attribute of God
link |
00:37:43.980
or an action of God.
link |
00:37:45.020
But if it's his very nature,
link |
00:37:46.820
there has to be lover, beloved, and love shared.
link |
00:37:49.820
And the tradition eventually came to see that.
link |
00:37:52.580
The image I was using before of the Father,
link |
00:37:55.260
his imago, the Son, well that's born of God's infinite mind.
link |
00:38:00.260
So of course God has an image of himself.
link |
00:38:02.260
Heck, I've got an image of myself.
link |
00:38:04.100
That's something I can pull off as a puny little creature.
link |
00:38:07.140
God in his infinity has a perfect imago of himself.
link |
00:38:11.500
And they have to fall in love with each other.
link |
00:38:13.540
What else can they do?
link |
00:38:14.900
Because they're in the presence of infinite good.
link |
00:38:17.900
And so it has to follow that you then have
link |
00:38:20.820
the shared love that connects them.
link |
00:38:22.860
And that's how we generate, if you want,
link |
00:38:24.460
this idea of the three persons in God.
link |
00:38:27.980
Let me ask you about the church.
link |
00:38:30.940
One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism
link |
00:38:35.460
is the Catholic church.
link |
00:38:38.020
What is the Catholic church?
link |
00:38:40.700
I would say it's the mystical body of Jesus.
link |
00:38:43.060
So as I said before, it's not an organization.
link |
00:38:45.380
If we do it that way, we're gonna miss it.
link |
00:38:46.820
It's got organizational elements to it.
link |
00:38:48.900
So I'm a bishop, I'm a office holder within the church.
link |
00:38:52.980
But the church is an organism, not an organization.
link |
00:38:56.940
So it's a organism of interconnected cells, as I said,
link |
00:39:01.340
namely all of the baptized,
link |
00:39:02.660
gathered around Christ in a mystical union.
link |
00:39:06.620
That's the church.
link |
00:39:07.940
But there's buildings, there's titles.
link |
00:39:10.420
Sure, because it manifests itself institutionally then.
link |
00:39:14.180
So are the sort of heavy things about that
link |
00:39:18.180
all have to do with pride?
link |
00:39:19.900
Yeah, sure.
link |
00:39:20.740
The sexiness of the buildings?
link |
00:39:22.540
Yeah, no, whatever is corrupt in the church,
link |
00:39:24.300
of course, it comes from pride, from sin.
link |
00:39:26.660
And one thing I like about the New Testament
link |
00:39:28.620
is so clear on that.
link |
00:39:29.900
Paul is, in his little tiny communities,
link |
00:39:32.260
so before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything,
link |
00:39:35.060
Paul had these little tiny communities of Christians
link |
00:39:36.920
like in Corinth and Ephesus.
link |
00:39:39.860
What's the one thing we know about them?
link |
00:39:41.020
Is they fought with each other.
link |
00:39:42.620
Because Paul's always uprating them
link |
00:39:44.660
and telling them, come on, would you people get it together?
link |
00:39:48.300
Who's bewitched you?
link |
00:39:49.980
So from the beginning, we've been fighting with each other
link |
00:39:52.580
because we're made up of sinners.
link |
00:39:55.860
So one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology
link |
00:39:59.020
is the official name for the study of the church,
link |
00:40:00.980
is to talk about the treasure in earthen vessels.
link |
00:40:04.700
Paul's language again.
link |
00:40:05.880
The treasure is Christ.
link |
00:40:07.060
The treasure is the love he's bequeathed to the world.
link |
00:40:11.140
That's the treasure that we have.
link |
00:40:12.820
But it's always held in these really fragile vessels,
link |
00:40:15.440
namely us, and so it's gonna be marked by corruption
link |
00:40:18.300
and stupidity and pride and everything else.
link |
00:40:21.260
Well, nevertheless, there's a hierarchy.
link |
00:40:23.900
There's titles and so on.
link |
00:40:26.820
If we remove pride from the picture,
link |
00:40:28.920
so the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy
link |
00:40:31.940
that makes up this one organism, this living organism,
link |
00:40:36.300
what's the role of the pope, for example?
link |
00:40:39.860
What is the role of a bishop, for example?
link |
00:40:44.540
What is the role of the hierarchy
link |
00:40:46.220
in terms of the broader vision of Christianity,
link |
00:40:49.900
Catholicism as a religion?
link |
00:40:52.560
I'm a devotee of this guy named Johann Adam Müller,
link |
00:40:54.900
who was a theologian early part of the 19th century,
link |
00:40:57.600
and he was part of the kind of romantic movement.
link |
00:41:00.420
And he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize
link |
00:41:04.860
and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church.
link |
00:41:10.740
So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church.
link |
00:41:14.060
Who's a bishop?
link |
00:41:15.080
The bishop is the personal symbol
link |
00:41:17.280
of the unity of a diocese.
link |
00:41:19.500
Who's a pastor of a parish?
link |
00:41:20.940
He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish.
link |
00:41:24.440
So he understood it not so much organizationally
link |
00:41:27.380
as organically, again.
link |
00:41:28.540
It was like, what, that around which the pattern
link |
00:41:32.460
organizes itself.
link |
00:41:34.340
And if you don't have that unifying figure,
link |
00:41:37.380
the community will kind of reciprocate.
link |
00:41:39.300
And you see that all the time.
link |
00:41:40.480
Without headship, we would say.
link |
00:41:43.060
So it's more symbolic and organic
link |
00:41:45.160
than it is organizational.
link |
00:41:47.460
So symbols for community.
link |
00:41:49.020
But there's such fascinating peculiarities
link |
00:41:52.980
to each individual symbol.
link |
00:41:55.360
There's different characteristics
link |
00:41:56.700
that make up the different people.
link |
00:41:58.780
They have different ways of communicating.
link |
00:42:01.340
They have different hopes and fears
link |
00:42:02.740
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
00:42:06.500
If they're all symbols,
link |
00:42:08.220
what's the role of the different peculiarities
link |
00:42:13.580
of those symbols?
link |
00:42:14.860
Of being an inspiring uniter versus maybe a stronger type
link |
00:42:20.220
of more judgmental kind of communicator,
link |
00:42:26.860
all that kind of stuff.
link |
00:42:27.820
Can you maybe speak to the human part of these symbols?
link |
00:42:32.820
Yeah, well, I might just shift to another image of shepherd.
link |
00:42:37.160
So that's a classic biblical image.
link |
00:42:38.960
And as a bishop, I walk around with this thing
link |
00:42:40.760
called a crozier, which is a shepherd's staff.
link |
00:42:43.040
So it's the symbol of the bishop's office.
link |
00:42:45.680
And the crozier, though, is a kind of in your face thing
link |
00:42:50.360
in a way, because it's got the end of it
link |
00:42:53.520
was meant to hold off wild animals.
link |
00:42:55.960
And then the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back
link |
00:42:59.000
to the fold.
link |
00:43:00.320
So I walk in with that, oh, this is nice.
link |
00:43:01.760
Oh, look at the bishop coming in.
link |
00:43:03.120
But that's a kind of in your face symbol
link |
00:43:05.800
that I'm here to defend the church against predators.
link |
00:43:09.920
And I'm also here to draw people in
link |
00:43:12.000
who are wandering too far away.
link |
00:43:13.840
So that's okay.
link |
00:43:14.680
I mean, that's part of the role of the hierarchy
link |
00:43:17.120
and the Pope and bishops and pastors.
link |
00:43:20.320
Pastor just means shepherd, right?
link |
00:43:21.800
So I'm the shepherd of a parish.
link |
00:43:24.200
So that's okay.
link |
00:43:25.040
It's not like just all sunshine and light
link |
00:43:26.920
and what a pretty image.
link |
00:43:28.320
The one who embodies the unity of the community
link |
00:43:30.920
is also the shepherd.
link |
00:43:32.920
Okay, but again, leaning on the human thing.
link |
00:43:36.400
Yeah.
link |
00:43:37.560
The church is an institution.
link |
00:43:40.360
And I don't know if you've heard,
link |
00:43:42.360
but there is an element of power that corrupts.
link |
00:43:46.160
An absolute power corrupts absolutely,
link |
00:43:48.640
as the old saying goes.
link |
00:43:51.880
Let me ask you something else that came up
link |
00:43:53.680
on the Reddit AMA.
link |
00:43:56.080
Yeah, megachurches and the prosperity gospel.
link |
00:43:59.400
And you've mentioned that you may not be a fan.
link |
00:44:03.760
What are your views on this?
link |
00:44:05.000
And what are your views in general of money and power
link |
00:44:08.120
corrupting the heads of these institutions?
link |
00:44:12.000
I don't like the prosperity gospel
link |
00:44:13.760
because the gospel is about Jesus journey
link |
00:44:17.400
into radical self forgetfulness on the cross.
link |
00:44:21.240
And he never makes a promise of earthly,
link |
00:44:24.360
of earthly well being.
link |
00:44:27.640
Can you explain what the prosperity gospel is?
link |
00:44:29.840
Yeah, the view that if I follow Jesus
link |
00:44:31.800
and I follow God with great trust
link |
00:44:33.600
that I will be rewarded with wealth and position
link |
00:44:37.280
and status in this world.
link |
00:44:39.160
It might be God's will when I get that.
link |
00:44:41.120
But you know, Aquinas said this,
link |
00:44:42.640
say I look at a very sinful person,
link |
00:44:44.240
I say, kind of, he's got a great house
link |
00:44:45.680
and he's richer than I am and all that.
link |
00:44:47.720
Aquinas says, yeah, but maybe that's a punishment.
link |
00:44:51.120
Cause maybe all that is leading him away from God.
link |
00:44:53.480
And actually that's God's way of punishing him.
link |
00:44:55.320
And the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house
link |
00:44:57.560
is actually a great gift to you
link |
00:44:59.160
because now it frees you for doing God's will.
link |
00:45:02.440
So we can't read, you know, God's favor in worldly terms.
link |
00:45:08.480
I would say God's favor is, am I awakened to deeper love?
link |
00:45:13.120
Then I know that I'm finding God's favor.
link |
00:45:15.360
Now, God might decide, sure,
link |
00:45:17.080
I want you to have this and that.
link |
00:45:18.600
I want to provide this to you.
link |
00:45:20.120
Fine.
link |
00:45:20.960
Then I say, thank you, Lord.
link |
00:45:21.920
How can I use it as an instrument of love?
link |
00:45:25.840
All the masters talk about detachment.
link |
00:45:27.800
And that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel
link |
00:45:29.680
is though I'm getting attached now
link |
00:45:31.680
to all these material advantages.
link |
00:45:34.040
And I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor.
link |
00:45:37.280
Let go of all that.
link |
00:45:38.360
You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love.
link |
00:45:41.040
So if you're rich, the right question is,
link |
00:45:43.360
okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich?
link |
00:45:46.240
So that, what can I do?
link |
00:45:47.640
How can my riches be an expression of love?
link |
00:45:50.000
If I'm popular, if I'm healthy,
link |
00:45:52.360
okay, why am I popular?
link |
00:45:53.640
Why am I healthy?
link |
00:45:54.480
How can I use that for your good?
link |
00:45:56.640
I'm sick, in bed, I'm suffering.
link |
00:45:59.920
Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love?
link |
00:46:03.480
So I'd rather measure it that way
link |
00:46:05.480
than through worldly success.
link |
00:46:07.540
That's why I'm against the prosperity gospel.
link |
00:46:10.000
Okay.
link |
00:46:10.840
So there's a, don't seek worldly possessions,
link |
00:46:15.600
but whatever happens to you, good or bad,
link |
00:46:19.280
seek how that could be used
link |
00:46:21.860
to increase the amount of love in the world.
link |
00:46:23.940
Right.
link |
00:46:24.780
The image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune,
link |
00:46:27.320
which is a device on a lot of the Gothic cathedrals.
link |
00:46:29.840
And it's this great circle, right, this wheel.
link |
00:46:32.400
At the top of it is a king.
link |
00:46:34.280
And then it turns this way,
link |
00:46:35.200
and the king has lost his crown.
link |
00:46:36.520
And the bottom is a pauper.
link |
00:46:37.920
And then over here is a king,
link |
00:46:39.600
is a guy climbing up to power, right?
link |
00:46:42.520
And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ.
link |
00:46:45.740
And the idea is just very simple, but very profound,
link |
00:46:47.720
that the wheel is life, you know?
link |
00:46:49.400
It's sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down.
link |
00:46:51.880
Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige.
link |
00:46:55.160
Other times you're losing it, you're going down.
link |
00:46:56.760
Other times you got none of it.
link |
00:46:57.940
Other times you're coming back up.
link |
00:46:59.440
Okay.
link |
00:47:00.280
Don't live on the rim of the wheel.
link |
00:47:01.840
It'll make you crazy.
link |
00:47:02.840
Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety.
link |
00:47:06.240
Where you should live is the center of the wheel,
link |
00:47:08.240
where Christ is, right?
link |
00:47:10.040
Because that's the link now to the eternity of God.
link |
00:47:13.320
That's the point of love,
link |
00:47:15.640
where love can flow through you to the world.
link |
00:47:17.560
And then you can look at the wheel.
link |
00:47:19.920
You're a Beatles fan, right?
link |
00:47:21.220
I think I discovered that.
link |
00:47:22.060
I love the Beatles.
link |
00:47:23.320
And the song that always comes to my mind
link |
00:47:25.520
when I think of that image is John Lennon,
link |
00:47:27.800
the end of his life.
link |
00:47:29.680
So a guy that, I mean, rode the wheel of fortune like crazy.
link |
00:47:32.920
You know, he was at the top of the world in every way.
link |
00:47:36.480
And then Beatles break up and he kind of loses it.
link |
00:47:39.060
And then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s
link |
00:47:41.360
at the very bottom.
link |
00:47:42.600
When he died, he was just kind of coming back up again.
link |
00:47:45.300
But the song I always think of is watching the wheels,
link |
00:47:48.280
right?
link |
00:47:49.120
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
link |
00:47:50.280
I really love to watch them roll
link |
00:47:51.800
because I'm no longer riding on the merry go round.
link |
00:47:54.420
That's right out of the medieval mystics,
link |
00:47:56.020
that he's not riding on the wheel.
link |
00:47:59.280
He's just watching it go round and round.
link |
00:48:01.360
That's the point of, the Greeks called it apotheia,
link |
00:48:04.560
and the Latins called it indifference, you know?
link |
00:48:08.960
Not like I'm blasé, it just means I'm detached
link |
00:48:12.640
from success, failure, less success, more success.
link |
00:48:16.880
I'm detached from that.
link |
00:48:18.160
I'm sitting here watching the wheel go round and round
link |
00:48:20.660
because I'm not riding on it anymore.
link |
00:48:22.600
The mystics have always made that transition.
link |
00:48:25.640
Let me ask you a difficult question
link |
00:48:27.840
about the darker side of human nature,
link |
00:48:29.960
of human power, of institutions.
link |
00:48:34.440
What's your view on the long history
link |
00:48:36.120
and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children
link |
00:48:39.680
by a Catholic priest?
link |
00:48:40.840
So this is a difficult topic,
link |
00:48:43.000
but maybe an important one to shine a light on.
link |
00:48:45.480
Yeah, it's awful, you know, and it's been a problem.
link |
00:48:48.440
Go back to Peter Damian back in the 11th century
link |
00:48:51.200
was talking about it.
link |
00:48:52.320
So it's been a problem, and whenever really sinful
link |
00:48:54.980
human beings have been in close proximity to children,
link |
00:48:57.440
we find this issue.
link |
00:48:59.360
Has it been around the church?
link |
00:49:00.520
Yes.
link |
00:49:03.320
Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way
link |
00:49:06.000
in the last 30 years?
link |
00:49:07.000
Absolutely.
link |
00:49:07.900
So I'm glad the church has made important strides,
link |
00:49:12.560
and it has.
link |
00:49:13.880
Back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas Accords
link |
00:49:16.840
where the bishops of America
link |
00:49:18.400
put a lot of these protocols in place
link |
00:49:20.400
that really have been effective
link |
00:49:22.640
at ameliorating this problem.
link |
00:49:24.800
The numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s,
link |
00:49:27.360
and that's been demonstrated over and over again.
link |
00:49:29.360
And then they fell dramatically after that.
link |
00:49:31.440
So that's not to excuse anything,
link |
00:49:33.760
but it's to say I think progress has been made with it.
link |
00:49:36.360
What's the impulse to secrecy?
link |
00:49:38.920
Yeah, well, to protect institutions.
link |
00:49:40.960
That's always, that's a sinful instinct.
link |
00:49:43.520
I'm not all together.
link |
00:49:44.360
I mean, sure, an institution is worth protecting,
link |
00:49:46.280
but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent
link |
00:49:48.080
to people's wellbeing, then you're in trouble.
link |
00:49:52.240
So institutions role should be transparent and honest
link |
00:49:57.400
with the sins of its members and of itself.
link |
00:50:01.320
Sure, yeah.
link |
00:50:02.320
So maybe you can speak to the fact as a priest, a bishop,
link |
00:50:09.840
as part of Catholicism, you're not allowed to marry,
link |
00:50:15.360
not allowed to have sex, you're sworn to celibacy.
link |
00:50:22.360
What is behind that idea?
link |
00:50:25.080
What is the sort of, we've talked about some broad stroke
link |
00:50:28.080
ideas of love, what's behind the idea of celibacy?
link |
00:50:33.520
And that's a good way to get at it.
link |
00:50:34.520
It's a path of love.
link |
00:50:35.760
So the church is always in favor of inculcating love.
link |
00:50:39.320
Marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy.
link |
00:50:43.300
Saint Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied
link |
00:50:46.520
with the things of this world and family
link |
00:50:48.640
and those who are free from that
link |
00:50:50.720
are freer for doing the work of God.
link |
00:50:53.440
So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy.
link |
00:50:56.320
And we still, I think, take that seriously.
link |
00:50:59.120
I look at my own life.
link |
00:50:59.960
I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things
link |
00:51:03.040
and go places and minister in a way that I could not
link |
00:51:07.940
if I had been married.
link |
00:51:09.360
So I get it, I get the pragmatic side.
link |
00:51:11.260
But I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it.
link |
00:51:17.320
Remember Jesus was challenged about the person
link |
00:51:18.960
who had a whole series of husbands and then they all died.
link |
00:51:22.520
And so in heaven, which husband will the wife have?
link |
00:51:26.760
And his answer is, in heaven, people don't marry
link |
00:51:30.440
and they're not given in marriage.
link |
00:51:31.520
There's a higher way of love.
link |
00:51:34.360
It's a more radical way of love.
link |
00:51:35.780
It's not tied to a particular,
link |
00:51:37.560
but I think through God is tied to everybody.
link |
00:51:40.880
The celibate, and this has been
link |
00:51:42.400
to the beginning of the church, not as a law,
link |
00:51:45.080
but there were celibates
link |
00:51:46.600
from the very beginning of the church,
link |
00:51:48.080
including Jesus, of course, and Paul.
link |
00:51:50.480
They sense something, that that way of living
link |
00:51:55.760
mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven.
link |
00:51:58.780
It's a sign even now within this world
link |
00:52:02.560
of how we will all love in heaven.
link |
00:52:04.800
So in that way, it's a bit like pacifists.
link |
00:52:10.120
I'm glad there are pacifists in the church.
link |
00:52:12.400
And I've known some very powerful witnesses to pacifism.
link |
00:52:17.400
I'm glad they're pacifists because they witness even now
link |
00:52:22.420
to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away
link |
00:52:25.340
and we beat our swords into plowshares
link |
00:52:26.940
and heaven's a place of radical peace,
link |
00:52:29.980
that some people even now live it.
link |
00:52:32.060
At the same time, I'm glad not everyone's a pacifist
link |
00:52:35.100
because I would hold with the church to just war theory
link |
00:52:38.260
that sometimes all we can do in this finite world
link |
00:52:42.140
is to fight manifest wickedness.
link |
00:52:45.580
So.
link |
00:52:46.580
And just in the same way there's just sex?
link |
00:52:49.660
Well, no, right, I'm glad there are celibates,
link |
00:52:51.740
but I'm glad not everyone's a celibate.
link |
00:52:53.620
I wouldn't want that.
link |
00:52:54.440
I mean, because married love is a marvelous expression
link |
00:52:58.860
of the divine love.
link |
00:52:59.760
So that's why it's good there are some.
link |
00:53:01.980
And it's always been a small number.
link |
00:53:03.740
The actual experience of it, would you,
link |
00:53:07.540
the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fasting?
link |
00:53:10.780
So I've been enjoying fasting recently, so not eating.
link |
00:53:15.000
Yeah.
link |
00:53:16.120
For several days, that kind of stuff.
link |
00:53:18.860
And that somehow brings you even deeper.
link |
00:53:21.780
I'm in general in love with everything,
link |
00:53:24.060
with nature and everything.
link |
00:53:25.100
I see the beauty in the world.
link |
00:53:26.700
But there's a greater intensity to that
link |
00:53:29.660
when you're fasting, for example.
link |
00:53:31.640
Yeah, I might use the language of sublimation
link |
00:53:34.240
or redirection of energy and all that.
link |
00:53:37.100
I think that's true.
link |
00:53:38.700
There's a certain sublimation of energies into prayer,
link |
00:53:43.700
into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies.
link |
00:53:50.540
So it's meant to be life enhancing.
link |
00:53:52.740
The same way fasting is.
link |
00:53:53.860
It's meant ultimately to be life enhancing
link |
00:53:55.500
and make you healthier and happier.
link |
00:53:57.340
So celibacy is a path of love.
link |
00:54:00.060
And I think it does involve a certain redirection
link |
00:54:01.940
of energies, I'd say that.
link |
00:54:03.460
Don't you think, do you think it's a heavy burden
link |
00:54:08.900
for some humans to bear?
link |
00:54:11.100
Sure.
link |
00:54:11.940
For some priests to bear?
link |
00:54:12.760
Sure.
link |
00:54:13.600
I'm just saying, given the sexual abuse scandal,
link |
00:54:19.900
is that the thing that breaks humans?
link |
00:54:22.260
No, I wouldn't tie that to celibacy.
link |
00:54:24.260
And that's been demonstrated over and over again.
link |
00:54:27.380
There's a priest named Andrew Greeley
link |
00:54:28.740
who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago.
link |
00:54:30.820
And Andy did a lot of research,
link |
00:54:32.980
he was a sociologist of religion,
link |
00:54:34.220
did a lot of research into that very question.
link |
00:54:36.120
And there really is not a correlation
link |
00:54:37.780
between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse
link |
00:54:40.940
of children or of anybody.
link |
00:54:42.760
So I wouldn't make that correlation.
link |
00:54:44.460
So bad people, sinful people are going to do
link |
00:54:47.320
what they're going to do.
link |
00:54:48.540
I think people who have a tendency toward
link |
00:54:52.860
abusing children sexually are drawn to situations
link |
00:54:55.820
where they get ready access to kids
link |
00:54:58.540
and they get institutional cover.
link |
00:55:00.740
So that's the only thing that can go through the list
link |
00:55:03.220
from sports and Boy Scouts, et cetera.
link |
00:55:06.020
And that's been proven again and again.
link |
00:55:08.000
So I would tie it more to that.
link |
00:55:09.620
I wouldn't tie it to celibacy.
link |
00:55:11.140
So the challenge of course is all kinds of,
link |
00:55:13.420
you said institutional cover,
link |
00:55:15.300
there's all kinds of institutions that cover
link |
00:55:17.820
for people that do evil onto the world,
link |
00:55:22.740
that do sinful things onto the world.
link |
00:55:25.540
But there's something about the church
link |
00:55:27.180
which is, as an organism, is supposed to be an embodiment
link |
00:55:32.860
of good in this world, of love in this world.
link |
00:55:35.800
And it breaks people's hearts to see this kind of,
link |
00:55:39.300
even a small amount, this kind of thing happen
link |
00:55:42.940
within the church.
link |
00:55:43.780
It wakes you up to the cruelty, the absurdity
link |
00:55:46.940
of the world sometimes.
link |
00:55:48.340
Like it's back to the question of why do bad things
link |
00:55:54.620
happen to good people?
link |
00:55:56.740
Why does God allow this kind of thing to happen?
link |
00:56:00.060
And sort of maybe an unanswerable question.
link |
00:56:02.540
Do you have an answer to that question?
link |
00:56:04.220
I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language,
link |
00:56:08.000
which is true enough,
link |
00:56:10.140
it's completely emotionally unsatisfying,
link |
00:56:12.860
but it's naming it truthfully enough.
link |
00:56:15.420
And it goes back to Augustine,
link |
00:56:16.920
which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good.
link |
00:56:24.060
Now again, I know how unsatisfying
link |
00:56:25.860
that sort of spare, austere language can sound,
link |
00:56:29.140
but it gets us off the horns of a dilemma.
link |
00:56:32.340
Aquinas, when he lays out a question,
link |
00:56:34.860
he always has the objections first.
link |
00:56:36.980
So is there a God?
link |
00:56:38.380
Well, objection one, objection two, objection three.
link |
00:56:40.860
And he's really, you talk about steel manning
link |
00:56:43.100
and argument, Aquinas is great at that.
link |
00:56:46.300
One of the really steel manned arguments,
link |
00:56:49.340
is that the right grammatical form?
link |
00:56:51.460
What's the past participle of the steel man?
link |
00:56:55.020
But one of the best arguments, he formulates it this way.
link |
00:57:00.940
If one of two contraries be infinite,
link |
00:57:03.400
the other would be altogether destroyed.
link |
00:57:05.400
And as an example from his medieval physics,
link |
00:57:08.480
he goes, if there were an infinite heat,
link |
00:57:09.780
there'd be no cold, right?
link |
00:57:11.520
But God is described as infinitely good.
link |
00:57:15.820
Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil.
link |
00:57:18.600
But there is evil.
link |
00:57:20.040
Therefore, God does not exist.
link |
00:57:22.040
That's a darn good argument.
link |
00:57:23.440
That's a really persuasive argument.
link |
00:57:25.120
And I think, I've done this for a long time
link |
00:57:27.900
in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy,
link |
00:57:31.760
that's the best argument against God.
link |
00:57:33.600
But here's something, before I press head with it,
link |
00:57:36.200
something I find really interesting.
link |
00:57:37.720
I think the three best arguments against God
link |
00:57:40.600
all come from within the religious tradition.
link |
00:57:43.480
Namely, the book of Job.
link |
00:57:46.880
So Job, he's great.
link |
00:57:48.880
I mean, he's a great guy.
link |
00:57:50.240
He does everything right.
link |
00:57:51.560
He's God's great servant,
link |
00:57:53.560
and he's punished in every possible way.
link |
00:57:57.360
He has every possible suffering.
link |
00:57:59.720
Aquinas's argument from the Summa,
link |
00:58:01.840
from the Summa, and then to your friend and mine, Dostoevsky.
link |
00:58:06.080
I think in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's argument,
link |
00:58:10.160
when he's trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha.
link |
00:58:13.160
And these examples drawn, they think, from Dostoevsky,
link |
00:58:18.200
from the headlines of his own time,
link |
00:58:20.560
of the most abject cruelty to children,
link |
00:58:24.480
like an innocent child being made to suffer.
link |
00:58:27.920
How in God's name could that happen
link |
00:58:32.040
if God exists and he's all good?
link |
00:58:34.400
So I get it, but see, the book of Job,
link |
00:58:36.920
Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky,
link |
00:58:38.360
these are all profoundly believing people.
link |
00:58:41.000
It's like when I hear Stephen Fry,
link |
00:58:43.240
the famously atheist writer,
link |
00:58:46.400
he will bring out this argument with great authority.
link |
00:58:50.200
He does, of children with bone cancer
link |
00:58:53.480
and worms that go into the eyes of children
link |
00:58:55.680
and blind them before they kill them.
link |
00:58:57.240
And, but he's been preceded by the author of Job,
link |
00:59:01.720
Thomas Aquinas and Dostoevsky, who stood right,
link |
00:59:05.960
think of Job, in the whirlwind.
link |
00:59:08.880
He stands there in the whirlwind, you know?
link |
00:59:12.080
So you can't blame the Christian tradition
link |
00:59:15.360
for not dealing with this problem,
link |
00:59:17.440
for brushing it under the carpet.
link |
00:59:20.200
I mean, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.
link |
00:59:23.520
It's still a difficult problem to deal with,
link |
00:59:25.560
that there's all this cruelty of the world.
link |
00:59:29.760
There's a lot of example through history,
link |
00:59:31.920
just in my own family history with the Soviet Union,
link |
00:59:36.800
with Stalin, the atrocities that Stalin has brought onto
link |
00:59:45.480
the people of the Soviet Union
link |
00:59:47.000
throughout the 20th century is nearly immeasurable.
link |
00:59:51.040
And yet, when you look at the entirety of human history,
link |
00:59:57.120
you will see progress, not just the Soviet Union,
link |
00:59:59.840
but the entirety of the civilization
link |
01:00:01.440
throughout the 20th century,
link |
01:00:02.960
and Stalin has a role to play.
link |
01:00:05.760
There's a dark aspect to,
link |
01:00:08.880
somehow evil helps us make progress.
link |
01:00:14.720
And I don't know how to put that in the calculation.
link |
01:00:18.440
It's a, I don't, you know, on the local scale,
link |
01:00:21.800
I want to alleviate suffering.
link |
01:00:23.680
I'm probably lean, heavily lean pacifist.
link |
01:00:29.360
Not out of weakness, but out of strength,
link |
01:00:31.400
but man, it does seem that history is sprinkled with evil,
link |
01:00:37.400
and that evil does somehow nudge us towards good.
link |
01:00:42.280
Yes, sometimes we can see it,
link |
01:00:44.160
and that's where the idea comes from,
link |
01:00:46.560
that evil's permitted to bring about some greater good,
link |
01:00:49.840
and we can sometimes really see it.
link |
01:00:53.600
Can we always see it?
link |
01:00:54.880
No.
link |
01:00:55.720
In fact, typically we don't see it,
link |
01:00:57.320
but now you bring another factor into this,
link |
01:00:59.160
which is the difference between our minds and God's mind.
link |
01:01:02.840
So our minds, I mean, look, even,
link |
01:01:04.560
they're remarkably capacious,
link |
01:01:06.120
but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time,
link |
01:01:11.720
and even our eyes kind of take in
link |
01:01:13.880
so much of the light spectrum,
link |
01:01:15.000
and these little ape sensorium that we have
link |
01:01:18.120
that could just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really.
link |
01:01:22.600
How are we ever in a position to say,
link |
01:01:25.440
oh no, there's no possible good
link |
01:01:26.720
that would ever come from that?
link |
01:01:28.160
Even the greatest evil that Dostoevsky can conjure up,
link |
01:01:32.600
and Stephen Fry, still, how could we have the arrogance
link |
01:01:37.640
to say, I know there's no good
link |
01:01:41.280
that could ever come from that.
link |
01:01:42.480
I know there's no morally justifiable reason
link |
01:01:45.640
why God would ever permit that,
link |
01:01:47.280
because I think that's hubris to the nth degree
link |
01:01:50.120
for us to say that,
link |
01:01:51.760
and that's the assumption behind this claim
link |
01:01:54.200
that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good.
link |
01:01:57.600
Now, God understands it,
link |
01:02:00.040
but we're like little kids, like a four year old,
link |
01:02:04.720
and their parents make a decision,
link |
01:02:06.240
and we say, what in the, why in the world
link |
01:02:08.360
would you do this to me?
link |
01:02:10.760
This is my pastoral experience.
link |
01:02:12.240
Years ago, there was a young father,
link |
01:02:14.320
and his son was like three or something,
link |
01:02:16.440
and he was in the hospital for something,
link |
01:02:18.560
I forgot what it was,
link |
01:02:19.400
but he had to undergo surgery, right?
link |
01:02:21.400
So after the surgery, he's in great pain,
link |
01:02:23.640
this poor kid, this three year old kid,
link |
01:02:25.600
and the dad was there with him, holding his hand,
link |
01:02:28.800
and the son, this is what the father told me,
link |
01:02:31.680
he said, he's looking at me like, what gives here?
link |
01:02:35.600
I mean, why would you, you love me,
link |
01:02:37.800
I've always assumed that,
link |
01:02:40.160
and yet you're presiding over this somehow,
link |
01:02:42.120
you're approving of this,
link |
01:02:43.760
and doing nothing to get me out of it, right?
link |
01:02:46.480
And he said, the kid couldn't articulate that,
link |
01:02:48.400
but his eyes did, and the father said,
link |
01:02:51.560
it was just killing me,
link |
01:02:52.600
because I knew I couldn't explain it to him.
link |
01:02:55.680
And it's true, I mean, he could vaguely gesture toward,
link |
01:02:58.200
but the kid didn't understand surgery,
link |
01:03:00.040
and cutting his body, and taking things out of it,
link |
01:03:02.160
and that this was gonna make him much better
link |
01:03:04.680
in the long run, but I remember thinking,
link |
01:03:06.680
that's a great metaphor for us vis a vis God,
link |
01:03:08.880
is here's God, infinitely loving God,
link |
01:03:11.120
who's with us all the time, and we say,
link |
01:03:13.400
what are you doing?
link |
01:03:14.720
Why aren't you taking this away from me?
link |
01:03:17.160
And the answer, I mean, ultimately is trust,
link |
01:03:20.040
trust me, trust me, surrender to me.
link |
01:03:24.040
And when we don't, that's,
link |
01:03:26.840
we get in trouble with the old pride,
link |
01:03:29.080
and the hubris, and all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:03:31.320
Yeah, no, but trust me when I tell you,
link |
01:03:33.440
I mean, I completely get it in my own life,
link |
01:03:36.160
and as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time,
link |
01:03:38.960
with people in pain all the time.
link |
01:03:41.440
I remember as a young priest,
link |
01:03:43.400
there was a policeman in our parish,
link |
01:03:47.120
so he had a gun, and inexplicably,
link |
01:03:50.440
no one had any clue.
link |
01:03:52.800
He got up one night, shot his son to death,
link |
01:03:55.480
and then shot himself.
link |
01:03:57.080
This is my parish.
link |
01:03:58.240
So I went to the wake, I remember, I show up,
link |
01:04:01.280
and I'm this young, 27 year old goofball priest,
link |
01:04:04.720
and I roll my collar around, and I walk in,
link |
01:04:07.080
and there were two coffins,
link |
01:04:09.000
the two coffins in the room,
link |
01:04:10.200
there's the son and the father.
link |
01:04:11.760
And the mother was there, and she went like this to me.
link |
01:04:17.520
She saw me, okay, you're the religious guy here, what?
link |
01:04:21.760
And just by instinct, I went like that too.
link |
01:04:26.080
I went like, I don't know what to tell, I can't,
link |
01:04:29.920
I don't have an answer for you.
link |
01:04:32.240
But I was there,
link |
01:04:34.520
and I'm not saying to pat myself on the back,
link |
01:04:36.040
this is, that's where the church goes,
link |
01:04:38.800
because Jesus went there.
link |
01:04:41.760
Now we're gesturing toward a more theological response.
link |
01:04:44.920
The first one's more austerely philosophical,
link |
01:04:47.120
God permits evil to bring about a good.
link |
01:04:49.500
But the theological response is, that's where Christ went,
link |
01:04:52.480
is he went all the way down.
link |
01:04:54.040
He went all the way down into our suffering.
link |
01:04:56.720
And see the cross as the limit case of evil,
link |
01:05:01.720
humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice
link |
01:05:08.080
and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering
link |
01:05:11.160
and death, it's all there.
link |
01:05:13.760
And that's where the Son of God went.
link |
01:05:16.000
And I would say that's why, as a priest, I went there.
link |
01:05:19.360
That's my job, is to go to those places.
link |
01:05:22.100
So that's the ultimate answer to the problem.
link |
01:05:26.160
So there is, we can't comprehend it,
link |
01:05:30.840
but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice.
link |
01:05:34.040
We trust it because we know on other grounds
link |
01:05:37.320
of God's existence.
link |
01:05:38.160
See, I would resist the claim that,
link |
01:05:39.720
well, this is such a knockdown argument,
link |
01:05:42.440
so now we know there is no God.
link |
01:05:43.720
I would say, no, there are all kinds
link |
01:05:45.360
of other rational warrants for God.
link |
01:05:46.960
And so I know that God exists.
link |
01:05:49.680
I know that God is infinite love,
link |
01:05:51.360
and now I gotta square that with this experience.
link |
01:05:54.040
And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence
link |
01:05:58.160
that God knows what he's about.
link |
01:06:01.160
Again, I know how inadequate that always seems
link |
01:06:03.600
to anyone who's suffering, including myself,
link |
01:06:05.680
when I'm in great suffering.
link |
01:06:07.660
But I think that's the best that we've done
link |
01:06:09.940
in the great tradition.
link |
01:06:11.280
So if you were to steel man the case against God
link |
01:06:16.160
or the existence of God, you find the most convincing
link |
01:06:20.160
argument is there's evil in the world,
link |
01:06:23.400
therefore there's no God.
link |
01:06:24.560
There's too much of it.
link |
01:06:25.600
If I were to steel man that argument,
link |
01:06:27.000
I'd do what Stephen Fry does.
link |
01:06:28.320
I would do what Dostoevsky's Ivan does.
link |
01:06:30.180
I would do exactly that.
link |
01:06:31.500
I would say there's just too much.
link |
01:06:34.200
And then if you wanna keep pressing it, animal suffering.
link |
01:06:37.300
So we talk about human suffering,
link |
01:06:39.000
but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on,
link |
01:06:44.040
isn't there just too much suffering
link |
01:06:46.560
to be reconciled with an infinitely good God?
link |
01:06:49.320
And that's, again, Thomas Aquinas.
link |
01:06:51.000
I've just used his very steel man argument.
link |
01:06:55.040
You mentioned that, again, on Reddit,
link |
01:06:57.280
somebody asked who your favorite communicator
link |
01:07:02.080
of atheist ideas was, and you mentioned Christopher Hitchens.
link |
01:07:06.880
Are there other ideas for atheism
link |
01:07:12.200
that you find particularly challenging?
link |
01:07:15.040
Well, that's the one, is the problem of evil.
link |
01:07:18.080
The other objection in Aquinas,
link |
01:07:19.760
which has a lot of contemporary resonance,
link |
01:07:22.420
is can't we just explain everything through natural causes?
link |
01:07:26.400
Why would you have to invoke a cause
link |
01:07:28.040
beyond the causes in the world?
link |
01:07:30.480
So as I'm trying to explain, let's say for Aquinas,
link |
01:07:33.720
motion, causality, finality,
link |
01:07:37.080
can I just do that with natural causes?
link |
01:07:39.260
Wouldn't that suffice to explain it?
link |
01:07:41.520
So I get like when naturalists are speaking
link |
01:07:44.840
or people that are pure materialists,
link |
01:07:46.520
they'll just say, no, that's perfectly adequate.
link |
01:07:49.040
A scientific account of reality is utterly adequate
link |
01:07:52.440
to our experience.
link |
01:07:55.140
So I would steel man that and say,
link |
01:07:56.860
well, show me why we need something more.
link |
01:07:59.680
And to do that, you gotta get out of Plato's cave,
link |
01:08:02.680
it seems to me.
link |
01:08:03.720
Because my objection to naturalism
link |
01:08:08.400
is it's staying within the realm
link |
01:08:12.160
of the immediately empirically observable
link |
01:08:15.920
and making the mistake of saying
link |
01:08:17.400
that's all there is to being.
link |
01:08:19.760
That's all there is that needs to be explained.
link |
01:08:22.840
And long before we get to religion,
link |
01:08:25.640
just stay with Plato.
link |
01:08:27.400
The first step out of the cave,
link |
01:08:28.840
if you combine it now with the parable of the line,
link |
01:08:31.080
is mathematical objects.
link |
01:08:33.160
And I'm with those, the many people that would say,
link |
01:08:36.480
mathematics is an experience of the immaterial.
link |
01:08:39.760
I've stepped out of a merely empirical,
link |
01:08:42.860
physical, naturalistic world.
link |
01:08:45.020
The minute I understand a pure number
link |
01:08:48.320
or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship,
link |
01:08:53.080
which would obtain in any possible world,
link |
01:08:55.400
which are not tied to space and time,
link |
01:08:58.920
that's a first step out of the cave.
link |
01:09:01.400
And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections.
link |
01:09:05.560
For example, in the nature of being.
link |
01:09:07.040
I mean, so I could talk about this thing
link |
01:09:08.880
as a physical object and I can analyze it
link |
01:09:10.720
at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists
link |
01:09:13.800
up and down through this thing, and fine, fine.
link |
01:09:16.560
But I'm still in Plato's cave.
link |
01:09:17.960
I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall.
link |
01:09:20.720
But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm,
link |
01:09:24.200
I have entered a different realm of being, seems to me.
link |
01:09:28.000
Do you think it's possible for the cave to expand
link |
01:09:30.360
so large that it encompasses the whole world?
link |
01:09:32.900
Meaning, is it possible that we're just clueless right now
link |
01:09:38.480
in terms of, scientifically speaking,
link |
01:09:41.600
with most of the world we haven't figured out yet?
link |
01:09:45.240
But do you think it's possible through science to know God,
link |
01:09:49.080
to look outside the world?
link |
01:09:50.540
So it's fundamentally the limit
link |
01:09:52.080
of the empirical scientific method,
link |
01:09:54.520
is that we can't know some of these very big questions.
link |
01:09:57.880
No, I'm not a scientist,
link |
01:10:00.120
and I was never all that good at science.
link |
01:10:02.280
I was more of a humanities guy.
link |
01:10:03.640
But I love and respect the sciences, but I hate scientism.
link |
01:10:06.660
And scientism is rampant today, with especially young people.
link |
01:10:10.480
The reduction of all knowledge
link |
01:10:11.840
to the scientific form of knowledge.
link |
01:10:13.200
And I'm a vehement opponent of that.
link |
01:10:16.600
There are dimensions of being that are not capturable
link |
01:10:18.840
through a scientific method of mere observation,
link |
01:10:21.480
hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera.
link |
01:10:24.220
As great as that is, as wonderful as that is,
link |
01:10:26.880
but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave.
link |
01:10:29.400
And that's not to say it's not real.
link |
01:10:31.040
It's just at a relatively low level of reality.
link |
01:10:34.200
You step out of Plato's cave
link |
01:10:35.500
when you go into pure mathematics.
link |
01:10:37.960
That's why, you know that article,
link |
01:10:38.960
I just came across it recently,
link |
01:10:40.380
and discovered this whole literature around it,
link |
01:10:42.600
is Eugene Wigner's article, 1960,
link |
01:10:44.780
called the unreasonable applicability of mathematics
link |
01:10:49.540
to the physical sciences.
link |
01:10:50.600
I think that's the title of it.
link |
01:10:51.560
Or effectiveness or something like that, yeah.
link |
01:10:53.920
But what's so cool is that he's not a religious man.
link |
01:10:56.080
He was kind of a secular Jew.
link |
01:10:57.960
But yet he uses the word miracle
link |
01:10:59.720
like eight times in that article.
link |
01:11:01.680
Because he just is so impressed by the fact
link |
01:11:03.600
that high, complex mathematics describes so accurately
link |
01:11:08.600
the physical world and can be used to create things
link |
01:11:11.580
and to manipulate.
link |
01:11:13.020
And why should that be true?
link |
01:11:15.200
That there's something very weirdly mysterious
link |
01:11:18.320
about that relationship.
link |
01:11:19.900
And I would say it's because you stepped
link |
01:11:21.620
into a higher order of being,
link |
01:11:23.620
which is inclusive of a lower level being.
link |
01:11:26.060
That's the Platonic approach,
link |
01:11:27.740
is that as you move, now I'm going to a different metaphor,
link |
01:11:30.060
you move to higher levels,
link |
01:11:31.180
they're inclusive of the lower levels.
link |
01:11:33.180
Yeah, there's some magic there
link |
01:11:35.380
that seems to, at least in our current understanding
link |
01:11:38.020
of science, to be not quite capturable.
link |
01:11:42.340
Even consciousness, the idea of consciousness.
link |
01:11:45.260
Can I ask you, where do you think
link |
01:11:46.780
the laws of nature come from?
link |
01:11:48.060
So, I mean, sort of the Vigner question,
link |
01:11:49.900
where does the deep mathematical structure
link |
01:11:55.300
of things come from?
link |
01:11:56.280
How do you explain that?
link |
01:11:57.340
The mathematical structure or the fact
link |
01:12:00.740
that the structure is somehow pleasing and beautiful.
link |
01:12:04.340
Because those are two different.
link |
01:12:07.020
Well, do the first one first.
link |
01:12:08.060
I'm just curious to tell you,
link |
01:12:09.140
where do you think it comes from?
link |
01:12:11.020
I tend to believe, even in terms of physics,
link |
01:12:13.260
we don't really know what's going on.
link |
01:12:15.200
There's so, so, so much more to be discovered.
link |
01:12:18.620
We're walking around in the dark
link |
01:12:21.060
trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there,
link |
01:12:23.580
and we're patting ourselves on the back
link |
01:12:25.620
and how many puzzles we've discovered so far.
link |
01:12:28.080
Even Gadot's incompleteness theorem,
link |
01:12:30.180
what are the limits of mathematics,
link |
01:12:32.020
axiomatic systems?
link |
01:12:33.060
I don't know what is the purpose of mathematics,
link |
01:12:37.300
what is the power of mathematics?
link |
01:12:38.880
Is it just a useful tool to study the world around us,
link |
01:12:45.720
or is it something deeper that we're just discovering?
link |
01:12:50.700
All I know from my emotional perspective,
link |
01:12:53.500
now I am an engineer, I'm a robotics AI person,
link |
01:12:57.020
from an emotional perspective,
link |
01:12:58.220
I just find the whole thing beautiful.
link |
01:12:59.980
Yeah, but that's really cool to me.
link |
01:13:01.740
That's a very interesting clue.
link |
01:13:03.900
See, one of the arguments for God
link |
01:13:05.460
is based on the intelligibility of the world.
link |
01:13:08.420
It's like Wigner, it's a very peculiar fact,
link |
01:13:10.540
it seems to me, that the world is so radically intelligible.
link |
01:13:13.260
Why should that be true?
link |
01:13:14.500
Why should it be the case
link |
01:13:15.980
that being has this intelligible structure to it?
link |
01:13:18.900
So it corresponds to an inquiring mind.
link |
01:13:21.660
So Aquinas can say that the intelligible in act
link |
01:13:25.500
is the intellect in act.
link |
01:13:27.340
Meaning there's some deep correspondence
link |
01:13:29.660
between this and that.
link |
01:13:32.820
And I'm with Wigner.
link |
01:13:34.620
That's, I think, really weird
link |
01:13:36.620
and unreasonable and strange.
link |
01:13:39.060
Now, my answer is, because the creator of the universe
link |
01:13:44.280
is a great mind and has stamped the world
link |
01:13:48.580
with intelligibility.
link |
01:13:50.420
In the beginning was the Word, right?
link |
01:13:52.360
And the Word was with God,
link |
01:13:53.340
and all things came to be through the Word.
link |
01:13:56.500
We shouldn't picture that so much.
link |
01:13:58.580
It's gesturing in this very powerful direction.
link |
01:14:01.860
There's an intelligence that has imbued the world
link |
01:14:04.620
with intelligibility.
link |
01:14:07.500
And we discover that, you know?
link |
01:14:09.980
There's something about the simplicity
link |
01:14:11.420
of the way the world works,
link |
01:14:12.880
that's where the beauty comes from.
link |
01:14:15.580
And yes, there's something profound to the mechanism,
link |
01:14:18.620
whatever that is, God, that brought that to be.
link |
01:14:23.220
That thought it into being.
link |
01:14:25.000
That the world has been,
link |
01:14:26.460
and the Bible says that God said,
link |
01:14:28.640
"'Let there be light,' and there was light."
link |
01:14:29.900
God said, well, again, we don't literalize the poetry,
link |
01:14:32.620
but it's very rich that God spoke the world into being.
link |
01:14:37.060
So that means it's been imbued with intelligibility
link |
01:14:40.580
from the beginning.
link |
01:14:42.580
They say that the condition for the possibility
link |
01:14:44.700
of the Western physical sciences
link |
01:14:46.840
was a basically Christian idea,
link |
01:14:49.020
namely that the world is not God.
link |
01:14:51.500
Therefore, I can analyze it, experiment upon it.
link |
01:14:54.140
I don't divinize it.
link |
01:14:55.700
I don't have a mystical relation to the world.
link |
01:14:57.780
It's not God.
link |
01:14:59.020
But secondly, that it's absolutely
link |
01:15:01.200
in every nook and cranny intelligible.
link |
01:15:03.400
And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation.
link |
01:15:06.780
So it's been created, it's not God, it's other than God,
link |
01:15:09.820
but yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind.
link |
01:15:13.500
And when those two things are in place,
link |
01:15:15.500
the sciences get underway.
link |
01:15:17.240
You know, I don't worship the world anymore,
link |
01:15:19.660
but I'm also utterly confident I can come to know it.
link |
01:15:22.440
And those are theological ideas.
link |
01:15:24.620
Well, we live in this world,
link |
01:15:27.220
so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world
link |
01:15:30.680
by making the assumption
link |
01:15:32.060
that this world is fully understandable.
link |
01:15:34.780
And we don't need to worry about what's outside the world
link |
01:15:36.920
in some sense in order to build bridges and rockets
link |
01:15:41.480
and computers and all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:15:43.700
It's only when we get to the questions that are deeper
link |
01:15:47.220
about why we're here at all,
link |
01:15:49.420
what does it mean to be good,
link |
01:15:51.100
all those kinds of things
link |
01:15:52.080
do we need to reach outside of this world?
link |
01:15:54.620
Can I introduce another one?
link |
01:15:55.980
So I talked about mathematics.
link |
01:15:57.380
I think it's stepping out of the cave,
link |
01:15:58.740
it's stepping out of just the purely empirical world.
link |
01:16:02.760
But the very fact that we use a word like universe
link |
01:16:05.140
to me is very interesting.
link |
01:16:06.300
Even if you say multiple universes,
link |
01:16:07.520
to me it's like, well, whatever the whole is, the totality.
link |
01:16:13.500
Universum, turn toward the one.
link |
01:16:17.500
Why would we call it that?
link |
01:16:18.740
Why wouldn't we just call it an aggregate?
link |
01:16:20.580
You know, it's just an aggregate of stuff.
link |
01:16:22.020
It's an aggregate of all kinds.
link |
01:16:23.260
But we call it a universe.
link |
01:16:24.940
And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition
link |
01:16:28.140
is it's the intuition of being.
link |
01:16:30.380
So I immediately experience things here,
link |
01:16:32.700
the color and shape, and I can measure them.
link |
01:16:35.100
But when I've really stepped out of the cave
link |
01:16:37.260
and I've now engaged beyond mathematics even,
link |
01:16:39.540
I'm now into metaphysical reflection.
link |
01:16:41.700
I'm interested not just in this thing as an object
link |
01:16:44.820
and how it's colored and shaped
link |
01:16:46.300
and what its atoms and quarks and all that are.
link |
01:16:48.560
That's fine.
link |
01:16:49.620
But I'm interested now in,
link |
01:16:51.540
I don't mean to say this thing is real.
link |
01:16:53.660
So what makes this a being?
link |
01:16:56.100
And then what are the characteristics of being?
link |
01:16:58.460
So now from Aristotle to Heidegger,
link |
01:17:00.140
this question of the nature of being.
link |
01:17:02.740
But see, I would say we call it a universe
link |
01:17:04.980
because it's turned toward the one of being.
link |
01:17:08.060
It's this intuition that whatever,
link |
01:17:09.660
from quarks to galaxies to whatever,
link |
01:17:12.460
give me a billion other universes,
link |
01:17:15.420
it would still be existence, right?
link |
01:17:17.580
It's turned toward the one.
link |
01:17:19.340
That being unites our experience.
link |
01:17:22.500
And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis.
link |
01:17:24.740
I've taken another step out of the cave.
link |
01:17:27.220
In Plato's language, I'm at the formal level now,
link |
01:17:29.460
beyond mathematics, the level of forms.
link |
01:17:31.580
And the formal is inclusive of the mathematical,
link |
01:17:34.180
which is inclusive of the physical.
link |
01:17:36.300
And I think that's Eugene Wigner,
link |
01:17:37.620
is that the mathematical includes the physical.
link |
01:17:39.780
It is metaphysically prior to it.
link |
01:17:43.780
But here we are sitting in the physical
link |
01:17:45.460
trying to make sense of why
link |
01:17:47.060
the unreasonable effectiveness
link |
01:17:48.500
is the thing that's beyond, which is the mathematics.
link |
01:17:51.940
My answer is God.
link |
01:17:53.020
And I don't know a better answer.
link |
01:17:54.740
And as I read Wigner, he wasn't ready to say that.
link |
01:17:58.740
But I think the language is gesturing.
link |
01:18:01.820
I was reading someone recently,
link |
01:18:02.900
some very well known physicist,
link |
01:18:04.820
who said his answer to Wigner's question
link |
01:18:07.420
is that whoever is responsible for the universe
link |
01:18:11.300
must be a mathematician.
link |
01:18:13.460
And I thought, yeah, that's right.
link |
01:18:16.660
Let me ask you about Jordan Peterson.
link |
01:18:18.140
We had a great conversation with him.
link |
01:18:20.740
He has a complicated and nuanced view of faith,
link |
01:18:24.220
or faith period.
link |
01:18:26.960
He has said that he believes in Jesus,
link |
01:18:28.720
the person and the myth,
link |
01:18:30.340
and some of the full richness and complexity
link |
01:18:33.660
that you've talked about.
link |
01:18:35.860
But he's surprised by his faith.
link |
01:18:37.540
He's not sure what to make of it.
link |
01:18:39.420
He's almost like meta struggling
link |
01:18:41.440
with what the heck his faith means.
link |
01:18:43.940
He's a super powerful intellect
link |
01:18:45.940
that can't compute the faith that he's experiencing.
link |
01:18:49.180
So what are some interesting differences
link |
01:18:52.380
between the two of you, or some commonalities
link |
01:18:56.220
in terms of your understanding of faith?
link |
01:18:59.420
He's a very interesting guy.
link |
01:19:00.580
I've had a couple of conversations with him.
link |
01:19:02.120
And I do think he's moving in the direction of faith.
link |
01:19:06.020
And his lectures on the Bible are very fine, I think.
link |
01:19:09.140
He reminds me of the church fathers,
link |
01:19:10.540
because the church fathers would have looked at the,
link |
01:19:12.980
they call it the moral sense of the scripture.
link |
01:19:15.500
Peterson probably called it the psychological meaning.
link |
01:19:18.060
But I think he's doing a lot of that.
link |
01:19:19.860
He, as I read him and talk to him,
link |
01:19:22.580
I think he's kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus.
link |
01:19:25.860
What I mean there is, for Kant, Jesus is,
link |
01:19:29.140
it's not so much the historical Jesus,
link |
01:19:30.780
this figure from long ago.
link |
01:19:31.900
It's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life.
link |
01:19:35.780
You know, he says he's the image of the person
link |
01:19:37.820
perfectly pleasing to God.
link |
01:19:39.500
And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination
link |
01:19:43.180
as a heuristic, as a goal that we're tending toward.
link |
01:19:48.100
But the historical person of Jesus for Kant is like,
link |
01:19:51.560
well, let's not fuss about that so much.
link |
01:19:52.980
It's this figure.
link |
01:19:54.740
And as I read Peterson, especially, and talk to him,
link |
01:19:56.940
I think he's kind of there with the archetype of Jesus.
link |
01:20:01.020
And even language of like, live as though God exists.
link |
01:20:04.860
That's the als ob of Kant.
link |
01:20:06.460
You know, the kind of as if attitude.
link |
01:20:09.940
And where I repress him when we talk
link |
01:20:12.040
is in the direction of, no, that's not Christianity yet.
link |
01:20:14.580
I mean, that's enlightenment moral philosophy.
link |
01:20:18.080
But Christianity is very interested
link |
01:20:20.580
in this historical figure,
link |
01:20:22.220
and very interested that God really became one of us.
link |
01:20:26.500
And he's not just an archetype of the moral life.
link |
01:20:29.620
He's someone, he's a person who's invaded our world
link |
01:20:34.040
and gone all the way to the bottom of sin
link |
01:20:35.780
and thereby saved us, you know.
link |
01:20:37.260
So the facticity of Jesus ended up the resurrection.
link |
01:20:40.820
So like, Peterson will talk about the resurrection
link |
01:20:43.340
as a myth and all that.
link |
01:20:45.220
And you can find that in different cultures, et cetera.
link |
01:20:47.580
But Christianity is saying something else.
link |
01:20:51.420
So in Christianity, when we're talking about who is Jesus,
link |
01:20:54.900
it's not just an archetype.
link |
01:20:56.580
It's not just a myth.
link |
01:20:57.940
It's a historical figure.
link |
01:20:59.420
And the very grounded fact that God became one of us
link |
01:21:04.420
is fundamental to this idea of what Christianity is,
link |
01:21:08.180
what it means to be a Christian.
link |
01:21:09.380
It's the sin and the love that came here down to earth.
link |
01:21:16.380
It means we can be one with God.
link |
01:21:17.820
So that's essential.
link |
01:21:18.720
It's not just an archetype.
link |
01:21:19.980
That's right.
link |
01:21:20.940
You know, it always strikes me,
link |
01:21:23.100
the difference between, let's say,
link |
01:21:24.980
mythic expressions and the New Testament.
link |
01:21:28.820
Read someone like Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell,
link |
01:21:32.300
whom he influenced, and then now Jordan Peterson,
link |
01:21:34.220
who's very Jungian.
link |
01:21:35.380
And this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures.
link |
01:21:37.900
And great.
link |
01:21:38.740
I mean, I think it's very interesting,
link |
01:21:39.980
and there's a lot going on there.
link |
01:21:42.300
There's a sort of calmness, though, about it.
link |
01:21:44.360
Like, yeah, interesting.
link |
01:21:45.700
And that's in this culture and that culture,
link |
01:21:47.500
and it's the form of the moral life,
link |
01:21:49.380
and mm hmm, I understand all that.
link |
01:21:51.420
Then you read the New Testament.
link |
01:21:53.220
Whatever those people are talking about, it's not that.
link |
01:21:57.220
They are grabbing you by the shoulders
link |
01:22:00.920
and shaking you to get your attention,
link |
01:22:03.020
to tell you about something that happened to them, right?
link |
01:22:06.900
Like the resurrection, you know,
link |
01:22:08.860
the myth of the dying and rising God
link |
01:22:10.660
and how powerful it is in shaping our consciousness.
link |
01:22:13.540
Mm hmm, that's fascinating.
link |
01:22:15.000
That's not the New Testament.
link |
01:22:16.340
The New Testament is, did you hear?
link |
01:22:18.460
Did you, Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death,
link |
01:22:22.100
God raised him from the dead,
link |
01:22:23.620
and he was seen by 500, and he was seen by Peter.
link |
01:22:26.660
And then lastly, I saw him.
link |
01:22:29.720
That's how Paul talks.
link |
01:22:31.260
It's not the detached, you know,
link |
01:22:34.920
psychologist musing on archetypal things.
link |
01:22:37.980
And I think that makes a huge difference
link |
01:22:40.580
when it comes to Christianity.
link |
01:22:41.660
The intensity of the historical details are essential here.
link |
01:22:46.740
So if you look at Hitler and Nazi Germany,
link |
01:22:50.980
it's not enough to say, well, power corrupts,
link |
01:22:53.380
and sometimes, so looking at the archetype of Hitler,
link |
01:22:57.060
it's much, much more important,
link |
01:22:58.700
much more powerful to look at the details
link |
01:23:01.660
of how he came to power,
link |
01:23:03.720
what are the ways he did evil onto the world,
link |
01:23:06.540
and then you can get really intense
link |
01:23:09.020
about your struggle with some of the complexities
link |
01:23:12.220
of human nature and power on institutions
link |
01:23:14.740
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:23:15.860
So the historical nature of the Bible.
link |
01:23:18.420
We're an historical religion.
link |
01:23:19.980
And we've been, it's important.
link |
01:23:21.360
We generate philosophical reflection.
link |
01:23:23.980
We can find common ground with archetypal thinking
link |
01:23:26.660
and all that, we can.
link |
01:23:28.060
And the church fathers used Greek philosophy,
link |
01:23:30.820
and Aquinas uses Aristotle, and all that's great.
link |
01:23:33.460
But we're an historical religion,
link |
01:23:35.380
and that matters immensely.
link |
01:23:37.520
Is the Bible the literal word of God?
link |
01:23:40.740
How do you make sense of the words that make up the Bible?
link |
01:23:44.440
I think the best way to get at the Bible
link |
01:23:46.060
is to think of it as a library, not a book.
link |
01:23:48.380
So it's a collection of books, right,
link |
01:23:50.160
from a wide variety of periods, different authors,
link |
01:23:53.500
different audiences, and different genre.
link |
01:23:56.460
So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song,
link |
01:23:59.420
you find something like history, not in our sense,
link |
01:24:02.140
but something like history.
link |
01:24:03.580
You find gospel, which is its own genre.
link |
01:24:05.740
You find epistolary literature like Paul.
link |
01:24:08.780
You find apocalyptic.
link |
01:24:10.840
There's all this in the Bible.
link |
01:24:13.000
So is the Bible literally the word of God?
link |
01:24:15.540
It's like saying, is the library literally true?
link |
01:24:18.620
It depends on what section you're in, right?
link |
01:24:20.900
So parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two Kings,
link |
01:24:26.100
number of places in the Old Testament.
link |
01:24:27.300
Are there elements of the historical in there?
link |
01:24:29.260
Sure, but it's theologically interpreted history.
link |
01:24:31.980
It's not like our sense of history of, you know,
link |
01:24:33.940
give me 10,000 footnotes and I'm gonna look
link |
01:24:37.940
at all the source material I can possibly find.
link |
01:24:40.180
It's more like ancient history, like Herodotus,
link |
01:24:42.780
people like that.
link |
01:24:44.440
But then there's poetry and there's myth
link |
01:24:46.220
and there's legend and there's song
link |
01:24:47.800
and all that stuff in the Bible.
link |
01:24:48.880
So God breathes through all of it, I would say.
link |
01:24:55.820
He inspired all of it, right, inspirare.
link |
01:24:58.500
He's breathing through all of it.
link |
01:25:00.440
God is speaking through all of it.
link |
01:25:02.820
But he speaks in different voices.
link |
01:25:05.060
He uses different human instruments
link |
01:25:06.980
and he uses different genre and different types of language.
link |
01:25:09.760
So we have to be sensitive to that
link |
01:25:10.980
when we're interpreting the Bible.
link |
01:25:12.260
So the different instruments are more or less,
link |
01:25:16.060
some are more perfect than others in terms of music?
link |
01:25:18.140
No, I wouldn't say that.
link |
01:25:18.980
I wouldn't say more perfect.
link |
01:25:19.820
I'd say they're just different.
link |
01:25:20.820
It's like a symphony and God's like a conductor
link |
01:25:23.360
and there's all kinds of different instruments
link |
01:25:24.700
in the orchestra and he loves to breathe through the Psalms.
link |
01:25:27.840
I prayed the Psalms this morning, I do every day.
link |
01:25:29.860
In my office, you know, those are songs.
link |
01:25:32.760
They probably were literally sung, most of them,
link |
01:25:34.620
at one point.
link |
01:25:35.660
He breathes through apocalyptic.
link |
01:25:38.380
Like we're reading the book of Revelation now
link |
01:25:39.900
in the Easter season and it's this wild and woolly book.
link |
01:25:43.420
It should be filmed by Spielberg or somebody today.
link |
01:25:47.820
And he speaks through the Gospels.
link |
01:25:49.720
The Gospels correspond in genre
link |
01:25:51.900
to what I call ancient biography.
link |
01:25:54.180
That's the genre of the Gospels.
link |
01:25:56.180
It's wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary.
link |
01:25:59.340
They're like ancient biographies.
link |
01:26:02.780
You have the Pauline letters which are about
link |
01:26:05.780
particular cities that Paul was visiting
link |
01:26:07.700
and particular people he knew.
link |
01:26:09.400
So you just gotta be sensitive to the genre all the time.
link |
01:26:12.380
Let's return back to human institutions
link |
01:26:14.580
and talk about history of human civilization and politics.
link |
01:26:19.260
So one question to ask is was America founded
link |
01:26:23.340
as a Christian nation in your view?
link |
01:26:26.100
If we look at the Declaration of Independence,
link |
01:26:28.780
what did the words mean?
link |
01:26:30.720
We hold these truths to be self evident
link |
01:26:32.780
that all men are created equal,
link |
01:26:34.820
that they are endowed by their creator
link |
01:26:36.900
with certain inalienable rights
link |
01:26:39.220
that among these are life, liberty,
link |
01:26:41.820
and the pursuit of happiness.
link |
01:26:43.860
It seems like God is breathing through those words too.
link |
01:26:47.540
Yeah, I think so.
link |
01:26:49.260
The founders would be some kind of combination of deism,
link |
01:26:53.260
certainly Christianity is coming up through them,
link |
01:26:56.940
enlightenment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix.
link |
01:27:01.060
So you're not gonna find in our founding fathers
link |
01:27:03.300
simply a Thomas Aquinas or like a purely
link |
01:27:06.720
classically Christian understanding.
link |
01:27:08.220
It's Christianity in those various expressions.
link |
01:27:11.700
Because actually I would see the enlightenment
link |
01:27:13.560
as a sort of child of Christianity.
link |
01:27:16.780
We could talk about that.
link |
01:27:17.600
But having said all that, yes,
link |
01:27:20.560
I think they are expressing at least the residue
link |
01:27:24.620
of a once deeply integrated Christian sense of things
link |
01:27:28.500
that our rights are not created by the government.
link |
01:27:32.820
They're not doled out by the government.
link |
01:27:36.060
They come from God.
link |
01:27:37.420
And the other thing I find really interesting is equality
link |
01:27:39.780
because look in classical philosophy, political philosophy,
link |
01:27:43.700
Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, it's not equality.
link |
01:27:47.260
For them it's our inequality that's really interesting.
link |
01:27:50.180
So Plato divides us into these three classes
link |
01:27:52.440
and Aristotle says only a tiny little coterie
link |
01:27:55.100
of property males of sufficient education
link |
01:27:58.100
should be in the political life.
link |
01:27:59.300
The rest should all be in private life.
link |
01:28:01.220
And then some are suited for slavery.
link |
01:28:03.180
So I mean he divides us dramatically.
link |
01:28:05.740
Same with Cicero and so on.
link |
01:28:08.520
Where does this come from, this weird idea
link |
01:28:10.260
that we're all equal?
link |
01:28:12.040
I mean how?
link |
01:28:12.880
We're not equal in beauty, not equal in strength.
link |
01:28:14.100
We're not equal in moral attainment.
link |
01:28:16.120
We're not equal in intelligence.
link |
01:28:18.420
So what is it?
link |
01:28:20.180
And I think the residue especially comes through
link |
01:28:22.500
in that little word that all men are created equal.
link |
01:28:27.520
That's our equality, that we're all equally children of God.
link |
01:28:31.460
So take God out of the picture.
link |
01:28:32.860
I think we are gonna slide rapidly
link |
01:28:35.900
into an embrace of inequality.
link |
01:28:38.500
Now in the classical world, yes,
link |
01:28:40.740
but heck, look at the 20th century.
link |
01:28:42.560
I mean when God is excluded in a very systematic way,
link |
01:28:45.940
I think you saw the suspension of rights
link |
01:28:48.220
and the suspension of equality like mad.
link |
01:28:51.740
So no, I think it's very important
link |
01:28:54.480
that God is in the picture and that we're a nation under God.
link |
01:28:57.520
It matters enormously.
link |
01:28:58.460
That's not pious boilerplate.
link |
01:29:00.320
That's at the rational foundations of our democracy.
link |
01:29:03.500
So do you think Nietzsche was onto something
link |
01:29:05.580
with the idea, looking into the 20th century,
link |
01:29:09.340
that God is dead?
link |
01:29:10.580
That there is a cultural distancing from a belief in God?
link |
01:29:19.140
Yeah, I'd be somewhat sympathetic
link |
01:29:20.700
to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there.
link |
01:29:23.460
Namely, it's not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop.
link |
01:29:26.500
Hey, God is dead.
link |
01:29:28.580
It's more of a lament.
link |
01:29:30.100
God is dead and we've killed him.
link |
01:29:32.100
And what will happen in the wake of that?
link |
01:29:35.420
And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism
link |
01:29:38.340
of the 20th century follows from that questioning of God
link |
01:29:44.000
and the dismissal of God from public life.
link |
01:29:46.940
So I would be sympathetic with that.
link |
01:29:50.220
When we're beyond good and evil,
link |
01:29:51.980
and all that's left is the will to power,
link |
01:29:54.400
and then why are we surprised at the powerful rise
link |
01:29:58.040
and that they use the powerless for their purposes?
link |
01:30:01.180
When we forget ideas like equality and rights,
link |
01:30:04.060
which are grounded in God,
link |
01:30:05.300
why are we surprised that death camps follow?
link |
01:30:08.980
So I think there's a correlation there for sure.
link |
01:30:11.500
I don't know, I believe that there's a capacity
link |
01:30:13.660
to do good in all of us and a capacity to do evil,
link |
01:30:17.740
and there's something that tends towards good,
link |
01:30:20.480
whatever that is.
link |
01:30:22.060
I tend to think that if that community,
link |
01:30:24.940
that love that we talked about, they find each other,
link |
01:30:27.700
they find the good.
link |
01:30:30.780
If you don't constrain the resources,
link |
01:30:32.300
if you don't push them,
link |
01:30:33.220
if you don't artificially create conflict
link |
01:30:37.460
through power centers and evil charismatic leaders,
link |
01:30:41.300
then people will be good to each other.
link |
01:30:42.980
And whether that's God or some other source
link |
01:30:47.100
of deep moral meaning,
link |
01:30:52.180
that seems to be essential for a functioning civilization.
link |
01:30:56.380
And it's hard, I mean, that's what humans are.
link |
01:30:58.300
We're searching for what that God is, what that means.
link |
01:31:01.460
You know what that triggers in my mind?
link |
01:31:02.780
I wonder if you agree with this,
link |
01:31:04.060
that the modern sciences drew their strength
link |
01:31:06.260
from their narrowness.
link |
01:31:07.540
And what I mean there is they almost completely bracketed
link |
01:31:10.740
formal and final causality in the Aristotelian sense,
link |
01:31:13.100
and they focused on efficient and material causality.
link |
01:31:16.220
And that gave, as I say, great strength,
link |
01:31:18.220
but from the narrowness of focus.
link |
01:31:20.140
But for Aristotle, the more important causes
link |
01:31:22.660
are the final and the formal causes.
link |
01:31:24.900
And so final causality there, what's drawing us?
link |
01:31:28.400
So for Aristotle, he'd look at someone like me and say,
link |
01:31:30.440
okay, you have a intelligible structure,
link |
01:31:34.980
and that leads you to seek certain things
link |
01:31:37.580
for the perfection of that structure, you know?
link |
01:31:40.060
And fair enough, I think that's right.
link |
01:31:41.780
So I seek the good.
link |
01:31:42.700
Right now, I'm seeking the good of being with you.
link |
01:31:44.780
I said, yeah, I'll sit down with Lex Friedman
link |
01:31:47.060
and we'll talk about deep and important things.
link |
01:31:49.540
That's the good I sought this morning when I woke up.
link |
01:31:52.320
Now, why am I seeking that?
link |
01:31:54.360
Well, for a higher reason, a higher good, you know?
link |
01:31:56.980
Because it's part of my work, my ministry is to, you know,
link |
01:32:01.620
the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture,
link |
01:32:04.740
and okay, well, why do you want that?
link |
01:32:08.160
Well, because I want to bring more and more people
link |
01:32:10.100
into what I think is beautiful and true and good
link |
01:32:13.000
in the church.
link |
01:32:13.900
Well, how come you want that?
link |
01:32:15.660
Well, because a long time ago,
link |
01:32:17.500
I was kind of myself brought into that realm
link |
01:32:19.820
and find it very compelling.
link |
01:32:21.340
Yeah, but then why do you want that?
link |
01:32:22.560
Well, because ultimately, I want to be friends with God.
link |
01:32:25.380
Now, I've given you one example there,
link |
01:32:27.020
but any act of the will, it seems to me,
link |
01:32:30.700
has to be analyzed that way.
link |
01:32:32.780
The will seeks something.
link |
01:32:34.180
It seeks the good, right, by definition.
link |
01:32:36.440
But the good always nests like a Russian doll
link |
01:32:38.920
in a higher good, right,
link |
01:32:40.780
which then nests into still higher good.
link |
01:32:43.100
Until you come, this is Aquinas,
link |
01:32:45.520
to some, in this sense, uncaused cause,
link |
01:32:49.500
an uncaused final cause,
link |
01:32:51.300
there has to be some summum bonum, right,
link |
01:32:53.520
some supreme good that you're looking for.
link |
01:32:57.660
And that's God, by the way.
link |
01:32:59.820
That's another, I think, rational path to God,
link |
01:33:01.780
is every single moment, every day,
link |
01:33:04.620
we are implicitly seeking God.
link |
01:33:07.020
So with your Word on Fire ministries
link |
01:33:10.900
and the website and the communication efforts,
link |
01:33:13.180
what is the thing you're seeking?
link |
01:33:15.240
Just you, if we can pause and for a brief moment,
link |
01:33:19.900
allow you to be prideful.
link |
01:33:21.280
Or, of course, just joking,
link |
01:33:24.800
but what is your local efforts,
link |
01:33:27.280
your small little pocket of the world
link |
01:33:29.320
with small, in quotes, with Word on Fire?
link |
01:33:35.460
Yeah, it's just using the media,
link |
01:33:37.760
especially the new media, the social media,
link |
01:33:39.460
to get the gospel out.
link |
01:33:41.200
So I started, what, 20 some years ago,
link |
01:33:43.800
just on a radio show in Chicago, 515 on Sunday morning.
link |
01:33:47.600
I had a 15 minute sermon show.
link |
01:33:49.960
And I asked the people in this parish I was at,
link |
01:33:51.680
I said, I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes
link |
01:33:55.360
at 515 on Sunday morning.
link |
01:33:56.880
And they all laughed when I proposed that,
link |
01:33:58.800
but they gave me the money.
link |
01:34:00.040
So that's how I got started,
link |
01:34:00.980
just doing a sermon on the radio.
link |
01:34:02.720
And then it branched off into video stuff and TV.
link |
01:34:06.320
And then I did a documentary.
link |
01:34:08.320
I went all over the world
link |
01:34:09.280
and kind of told the story of Catholicism.
link |
01:34:11.800
So that's how we started.
link |
01:34:12.940
And now I'm using all the new media and social media.
link |
01:34:15.800
But what I really love, what we're doing today,
link |
01:34:18.080
something I really like,
link |
01:34:19.200
which is having a conversation
link |
01:34:20.960
outside of just the narrow Catholic world
link |
01:34:23.120
or even the narrow Christian world,
link |
01:34:24.480
but to look out to the wider culture
link |
01:34:26.700
and who's talking about interesting things
link |
01:34:29.060
and how can the church engage there?
link |
01:34:31.160
And so that's the purpose of Word on Fire.
link |
01:34:34.120
Is it overwhelming to face so many different atheists
link |
01:34:40.840
than complex thinkers like Jordan Peterson
link |
01:34:44.560
and some of the more political style thinkers
link |
01:34:47.500
that you've spoken with?
link |
01:34:49.160
Is that, what is it, Dave Rubin,
link |
01:34:52.640
who's also has a way different worldview as well?
link |
01:34:58.920
Is that terrifying?
link |
01:35:00.040
Is that exciting to you?
link |
01:35:01.640
Is it challenging?
link |
01:35:03.640
Yeah, maybe all of the above, but more exciting.
link |
01:35:06.520
I would say I like doing that.
link |
01:35:08.000
I was a teacher for a long time.
link |
01:35:09.280
I taught in the seminary for like 20 years.
link |
01:35:10.840
And so I've been engaging these questions for a long time.
link |
01:35:13.240
I'm a writer.
link |
01:35:14.080
I've written about 20 some books.
link |
01:35:15.520
And I write some at a popular level.
link |
01:35:17.800
I write some at a high academic level.
link |
01:35:19.480
And I like doing all that.
link |
01:35:21.440
So I love those ideas.
link |
01:35:23.280
I love those questions, love engaging people.
link |
01:35:26.340
And I find my own experience,
link |
01:35:28.720
you do run into, of course, a lot of the vitriol
link |
01:35:32.240
and kind of just stupidity and all that online.
link |
01:35:34.800
And I get it.
link |
01:35:35.640
And religion is such a magnet for people's hostility
link |
01:35:39.240
for different reasons.
link |
01:35:40.060
So I get that.
link |
01:35:40.920
Like you read it, we talked about,
link |
01:35:42.700
you have to wade through swamps of obscenity and everything.
link |
01:35:47.340
But I do it.
link |
01:35:49.240
I like it.
link |
01:35:50.080
And it's worthwhile.
link |
01:35:51.320
Because in that Reddit experience,
link |
01:35:53.160
so many of the issues that preoccupy young people,
link |
01:35:56.120
I can name them for you.
link |
01:35:57.120
Exactly what they are.
link |
01:35:58.680
It comes to religion.
link |
01:35:59.640
How do you know there's a God?
link |
01:36:01.000
So the God question.
link |
01:36:02.000
Secondly, why is there so much suffering in the world?
link |
01:36:05.720
Third question, why do you think your religion
link |
01:36:07.720
is the right religion?
link |
01:36:08.920
Fourth, why are you so mean to gay people?
link |
01:36:11.320
So those are the four things that I, again and again,
link |
01:36:14.780
come up when dealing with young people.
link |
01:36:16.600
I've told my brother bishops and priests about that.
link |
01:36:19.220
I said, structure your adult education programs
link |
01:36:22.200
or structure your youth outreach
link |
01:36:24.120
around those four questions.
link |
01:36:26.380
Well, let me ask you about gay marriage.
link |
01:36:28.400
How do we make sense of the love between a man and a man
link |
01:36:33.360
and a woman and a woman and the institution of marriage?
link |
01:36:37.880
We love friendship.
link |
01:36:39.400
And friendship is at the heart of things.
link |
01:36:41.240
And so nothing wrong with friendship
link |
01:36:42.560
between a man and a man, a woman and a woman.
link |
01:36:45.600
But go back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas
link |
01:36:48.360
about natural finalities and intelligible forms,
link |
01:36:51.320
that there's a certain form to human being,
link |
01:36:54.480
which includes the physical and includes the sexual.
link |
01:36:56.840
It has a proper finality.
link |
01:36:58.280
And so we'd recognize that finality is twofold,
link |
01:37:01.360
both unitive and procreative.
link |
01:37:03.100
And so those two we recognize
link |
01:37:05.240
as the appropriate expression of human sexuality.
link |
01:37:08.160
So that's why the church holds to sex
link |
01:37:11.600
between a man and a woman within the context of marriage
link |
01:37:14.280
is the right expression.
link |
01:37:18.160
We reach out to everybody in love and in respect
link |
01:37:22.780
and deep understanding and seeking to understand
link |
01:37:26.480
their lives from the inside.
link |
01:37:28.420
So I mean, all of that,
link |
01:37:29.440
I agree with the bridge building that we need to do
link |
01:37:32.760
to people like in the gay community
link |
01:37:34.160
and people in gay marriage and so on.
link |
01:37:36.640
So the church holds to the intelligible structure,
link |
01:37:40.480
if you want, of human sexuality
link |
01:37:42.560
and it reaches out to real human beings
link |
01:37:44.680
always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on.
link |
01:37:47.920
So it's somewhere in there
link |
01:37:49.400
that the church takes its stance.
link |
01:37:51.800
And so there's probably variation
link |
01:37:56.060
in the stances that it takes.
link |
01:37:58.320
So you're saying the institution of marriage
link |
01:38:00.040
is about the unitive, which is like the friendship,
link |
01:38:03.320
the deep connection between two humans and the procreative.
link |
01:38:08.320
So being able to have children and all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:38:13.820
It's interesting.
link |
01:38:14.660
So is our gay couples seen as sinful?
link |
01:38:19.680
So does the church acknowledge the love?
link |
01:38:23.560
Yeah.
link |
01:38:24.400
That's the deep love that's possible between a man and a man.
link |
01:38:26.400
I think so.
link |
01:38:27.240
Yeah, which is why the church says in its official teaching,
link |
01:38:29.380
it's the physical expression, let's say,
link |
01:38:32.120
of sexual passion between two men that is problematic,
link |
01:38:36.760
not their friendship, not their love for each other.
link |
01:38:40.400
So I think, yeah, we confirm the first.
link |
01:38:43.480
Well, let me ask you another difficult topic
link |
01:38:45.600
that's just happening.
link |
01:38:46.680
Unlike the other ones we talked about.
link |
01:38:49.600
That's going on in the news now.
link |
01:38:51.520
As we sit here today, the Supreme Court has voted
link |
01:38:54.080
to overturn abortion rights in a draft majority opinion
link |
01:38:58.920
striking down the landmark Roe versus Wade decision.
link |
01:39:01.960
What are your thoughts on this?
link |
01:39:04.080
First of all, the human institution of the Supreme Court
link |
01:39:06.840
making these decisions throughout its history.
link |
01:39:10.000
And second of all, just the idea, the really powerful,
link |
01:39:14.800
the controversial, the difficult idea of abortion.
link |
01:39:20.440
Yeah, I mean, I'm against abortion.
link |
01:39:22.760
I'm pro life.
link |
01:39:25.120
The church recognizes from the moment of conception,
link |
01:39:27.320
we're dealing with a human life
link |
01:39:28.900
that's worthy of respect and protection.
link |
01:39:32.580
Especially as you see the unfolding of that person
link |
01:39:36.680
across a pregnancy.
link |
01:39:38.240
But at every stage, we recognize the beauty
link |
01:39:41.480
and the dignity of that human being.
link |
01:39:44.400
And so we stand opposed to this,
link |
01:39:47.760
the outright killing of the innocent.
link |
01:39:49.640
So that's the church's view.
link |
01:39:52.520
Again, reaching out always in love and understanding
link |
01:39:56.120
and compassion to those who are dealing.
link |
01:39:58.040
And believe me, every single pastor, every single priest
link |
01:40:01.200
understands that, because we deal with people all the time
link |
01:40:03.320
who are in these painful situations.
link |
01:40:05.640
But that's the moral side of it.
link |
01:40:08.880
The legal side, I think Roe v. Wade was terribly decided.
link |
01:40:11.680
I think one of the worst expressions of American law
link |
01:40:14.280
since the Dred Scott decision.
link |
01:40:15.960
So I stand in favor of a returning Roe v. Wade and Casey.
link |
01:40:19.800
I think they were terrible.
link |
01:40:21.080
The Casey decision is instructive to me.
link |
01:40:25.080
It belongs to the nature of freedom, that decision says,
link |
01:40:28.040
to determine the meaning of one's own life.
link |
01:40:30.500
And I don't get the language exactly right,
link |
01:40:32.560
but end of the universe.
link |
01:40:34.720
Like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom,
link |
01:40:38.600
that we can determine the meaning.
link |
01:40:40.320
See, but that's repugnant to everything
link |
01:40:42.040
we've just talked about.
link |
01:40:43.420
That I'm inventing the meaning of my life
link |
01:40:46.960
and of the universe.
link |
01:40:48.120
And so Casey, though, was instructive in a way
link |
01:40:51.260
because it tips its hat toward the problem culturally,
link |
01:40:55.480
is that I think in my freedom, I can determine everything.
link |
01:40:59.560
My choice is all that matters.
link |
01:41:01.560
And I would say, no, your choice should be correlated
link |
01:41:04.960
to the order of the good.
link |
01:41:06.600
It's not sovereign.
link |
01:41:08.140
It doesn't reign sovereignly over being
link |
01:41:10.520
and it makes its own decisions.
link |
01:41:12.760
So I think Casey was terrible law
link |
01:41:15.060
and it was backing up Roe v. Wade, which is terrible law.
link |
01:41:18.720
So I'm in favor of the overturning of those.
link |
01:41:20.900
I've spoken out that many times.
link |
01:41:22.560
Now it'll return it to the individual states.
link |
01:41:24.620
It's not gonna solve the problem.
link |
01:41:27.760
The individual states will have to decide.
link |
01:41:29.800
I just heard yesterday, we were up in Sacramento,
link |
01:41:32.320
the bishops having our annual meeting.
link |
01:41:35.160
And so we got the word from the governor and the legislators
link |
01:41:38.920
that they're gonna push for a constitutional amendment
link |
01:41:41.120
in California.
link |
01:41:41.960
So basically to make any attempt to limit abortion
link |
01:41:44.800
in any way just illegal.
link |
01:41:47.560
I think that's barbaric.
link |
01:41:49.120
So I stand radically opposed to that.
link |
01:41:51.960
It's such an interesting line
link |
01:41:54.120
because if you believe that there's a,
link |
01:41:57.680
it's a line that struggles with the question
link |
01:42:00.740
of what does it mean to be a living being
link |
01:42:04.700
or to give life to something.
link |
01:42:08.880
Because if you believe that at the moment of conception
link |
01:42:12.480
you're basically creating a human life,
link |
01:42:16.760
then abortion is murder.
link |
01:42:19.520
And then if you don't,
link |
01:42:21.880
then it's a sort of basic biological choice
link |
01:42:27.280
that's not taking away of a life.
link |
01:42:30.360
And the gap between those two beliefs is so vast
link |
01:42:34.240
that it's hard and yet so fundamental
link |
01:42:36.760
to the question of what it means to be alive
link |
01:42:39.980
and the fundamental question about the respect
link |
01:42:43.360
for human life and human dignity.
link |
01:42:45.840
It's interesting to see.
link |
01:42:49.220
And also about freedom too.
link |
01:42:51.160
All of those things are mixed in there.
link |
01:42:53.920
It's a beautiful struggle.
link |
01:42:55.400
Maybe the freedom is the most important,
link |
01:42:57.360
this sort of freedom run amok.
link |
01:42:58.840
Or in classical philosophy and theology,
link |
01:43:03.640
freedom is not self determination.
link |
01:43:07.680
Freedom is the disciplining of desire
link |
01:43:12.800
so as to make the achievement of the good
link |
01:43:15.840
first possible and then effortless.
link |
01:43:19.520
You know what I'm saying?
link |
01:43:20.360
So modern freedom and the roots of that
link |
01:43:22.560
are people like William of Ockham in the late Middle Ages.
link |
01:43:26.160
Freedom means I hover above the yes and the no.
link |
01:43:28.340
Do I do yes or no?
link |
01:43:29.280
And I'm the sovereign subject of that choice.
link |
01:43:31.880
And on no basis I will say yes or no.
link |
01:43:35.460
I'm like Louis XIV or I'm like Stalin or something.
link |
01:43:39.560
But Aquinas wouldn't have recognized that as freedom.
link |
01:43:42.800
For him, I got this desire in me.
link |
01:43:46.000
I've got this will and it's pushing toward the good.
link |
01:43:49.420
But the trouble is I got so many attachments
link |
01:43:51.280
and I'm so stupid and I'm so conditioned by my sin
link |
01:43:54.760
that I can't achieve it.
link |
01:43:56.280
So I need to be disciplined in my desire
link |
01:43:59.520
so as to make that achievement possible
link |
01:44:01.880
and then effortless so right now
link |
01:44:05.440
I'm freely speaking English to you.
link |
01:44:07.960
And you had the experience and I've had it too
link |
01:44:10.400
of learning a foreign language.
link |
01:44:11.800
And don't you feel unfree?
link |
01:44:14.880
You know, like when you're struggling with a language.
link |
01:44:17.760
When I was over in Paris doing my doctoral work
link |
01:44:19.600
and I was okay with French,
link |
01:44:21.520
but my first time in a seminar
link |
01:44:23.720
and there's all these intelligent francophones
link |
01:44:27.080
around the table and they're all just,
link |
01:44:28.480
and I'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward French.
link |
01:44:32.200
And I felt unfree because my desire wasn't directed.
link |
01:44:40.080
But then over time I became freer
link |
01:44:42.680
and freer speaker of French.
link |
01:44:44.520
I was ordered more to the good.
link |
01:44:47.040
That's a better understanding of freedom
link |
01:44:48.660
than sort of sovereign self determination.
link |
01:44:51.560
But our country is now I think really in the grip of that.
link |
01:44:55.920
I decide and that's where the Nietzschean thing
link |
01:44:57.720
comes to my mind of the will to power.
link |
01:45:00.280
I'm beyond good and evil.
link |
01:45:01.920
It's just up to me to decide.
link |
01:45:04.000
God help us.
link |
01:45:05.360
No, it's the values that we intuit around us.
link |
01:45:08.120
Intellectual, moral and aesthetic, the values.
link |
01:45:11.000
Think of the dog on the beach again.
link |
01:45:12.360
And that you get ordered to those
link |
01:45:15.320
by your education, by your family, by your religion.
link |
01:45:18.680
And that's beautiful.
link |
01:45:19.560
That makes you free.
link |
01:45:20.680
Now I can freely enter into this.
link |
01:45:23.160
So this sovereign self determination business,
link |
01:45:26.160
that's not my game.
link |
01:45:28.240
The values come in part from the tradition
link |
01:45:31.560
carried through the generations.
link |
01:45:33.600
Let me ask you to put on your wise hat
link |
01:45:36.680
and give advice to young folks.
link |
01:45:38.400
So high school and college,
link |
01:45:40.280
thinking about what to do with their life,
link |
01:45:44.480
career, there's so many options out there.
link |
01:45:48.600
How can they have a career they can be proud of
link |
01:45:52.040
or even just a life they can be proud of?
link |
01:45:56.760
I think I'd say find something you're good at
link |
01:46:00.460
because that's from God.
link |
01:46:01.640
It's a gift that God's given you.
link |
01:46:03.760
And then dedicate it to love.
link |
01:46:06.140
You know what I'm saying?
link |
01:46:06.980
You're good at science or math or sports or whatever.
link |
01:46:11.200
Okay, I'm gonna use that now for my aggrandizement,
link |
01:46:13.880
for my wealth, for my privileges and to become famous.
link |
01:46:17.560
No, no, no, don't.
link |
01:46:19.000
Find what you're good at,
link |
01:46:20.380
but now dedicate it to willing the good of the other.
link |
01:46:23.780
So use your science and use your mathematics
link |
01:46:26.040
and use your sports and use your musicianship
link |
01:46:29.080
to benefit the world.
link |
01:46:32.840
That's how I'd say them.
link |
01:46:33.880
So find what you're good at.
link |
01:46:35.080
That's from God.
link |
01:46:35.920
Well, that's a tricky one.
link |
01:46:37.400
Finding what you're good at
link |
01:46:39.000
because it's not just raw skill.
link |
01:46:41.420
It's also what you connect with.
link |
01:46:43.560
And it's also like this iterative process
link |
01:46:47.000
of if you wanna add love to the world,
link |
01:46:52.000
you have to see how can you be effective at doing that.
link |
01:46:55.640
So it's not just the things you're good at.
link |
01:46:57.120
There's like, I'm good at building bridges out of toothpicks.
link |
01:47:02.720
I'm not exactly sure that's going to be useful for the world.
link |
01:47:05.640
Then again, to push back on that,
link |
01:47:07.840
the joy brings me, maybe somehow the joy radiates out.
link |
01:47:11.360
Yeah, well, you're good at what you're doing right now.
link |
01:47:13.200
And you've dedicated that to bringing more light
link |
01:47:16.240
and illumination and joy to the world.
link |
01:47:19.440
That's true.
link |
01:47:21.040
That was a searching.
link |
01:47:23.400
That's a process of trying stuff and figuring it out.
link |
01:47:27.360
And ultimately, yes, asking the question,
link |
01:47:30.760
how is this making the world at all better
link |
01:47:32.640
at every step of the way
link |
01:47:34.680
as opposed to enriching yourself
link |
01:47:36.040
and all those kinds of things?
link |
01:47:37.240
Right, I think that's the name of the game.
link |
01:47:39.240
But it's tricky.
link |
01:47:40.280
And if we don't have moral mentors
link |
01:47:42.200
and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard.
link |
01:47:44.600
And if you tell a kid, that's deadly to me,
link |
01:47:47.320
just decide for yourself, just off you go.
link |
01:47:50.720
And you make your own choices.
link |
01:47:52.800
I mean, your choice has to be disciplined.
link |
01:47:55.480
Your desire has gotta be directed.
link |
01:47:57.560
Then you'll find your creative path.
link |
01:47:59.720
Everyone does it in its own way.
link |
01:48:01.640
But it's a guided choice.
link |
01:48:03.880
Your freedom is not sovereign.
link |
01:48:05.880
It's a guided freedom.
link |
01:48:08.080
So in the struggle and the suffering
link |
01:48:10.480
you've seen in the world,
link |
01:48:14.240
let me ask you the question of death.
link |
01:48:19.360
How often do you think about your own mortality?
link |
01:48:22.760
Every day.
link |
01:48:23.960
And one, are you afraid of it, the uncertainty of it?
link |
01:48:30.200
And what do you think happens after you die?
link |
01:48:32.480
Sure, I'm afraid of it.
link |
01:48:33.320
I mean, because I don't know what's next.
link |
01:48:37.960
I mean, I can't know it the way I know you.
link |
01:48:39.920
So of course I'm afraid of it.
link |
01:48:41.600
And I think of it every day.
link |
01:48:43.520
That's true.
link |
01:48:45.440
My prayer life compels me.
link |
01:48:48.440
We have this, the Hail Mary prayer.
link |
01:48:51.360
So you pray the rosary.
link |
01:48:52.560
Now and at the hour of our death, amen.
link |
01:48:54.320
Now and at the hour of our death, amen.
link |
01:48:56.760
Now at the hour of our death, amen.
link |
01:48:58.080
You pray the whole rosary.
link |
01:48:59.800
50 times you've reminded yourself of your own death.
link |
01:49:03.440
But I do.
link |
01:49:04.280
I think about it because it's the ultimate limit.
link |
01:49:06.440
It's why it's beguiled every artist and writer
link |
01:49:08.960
and philosopher.
link |
01:49:09.800
It's the ultimate limit question.
link |
01:49:12.600
But yeah, sure.
link |
01:49:14.440
I'm afraid of it because it's the unknown.
link |
01:49:17.920
What do I think happens?
link |
01:49:20.800
I think I'm drawn into the deeper embrace of God's love.
link |
01:49:25.200
You know, that's stating it kind of in a more poetic way.
link |
01:49:30.080
Do you know John Polkinghorne's work?
link |
01:49:31.840
Do you know that name?
link |
01:49:32.960
John Polkinghorne was a very interesting,
link |
01:49:34.120
he just died recently.
link |
01:49:35.560
He was a Cambridge University particle physicist, right?
link |
01:49:38.960
High, high level scientist who at midlife
link |
01:49:43.120
became an Anglican priest.
link |
01:49:44.440
He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary
link |
01:49:46.800
and became an Anglican priest, right?
link |
01:49:48.640
And then wrote, I think some of the best stuff
link |
01:49:50.560
on science and religion,
link |
01:49:51.400
because he really knew the science from the inside.
link |
01:49:54.040
Here's Polkinghorne's account
link |
01:49:55.440
that I've always found persuasive.
link |
01:49:58.080
He said, what survives after we die?
link |
01:50:02.600
So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground
link |
01:50:06.040
or it's burned up or it goes away, right?
link |
01:50:08.520
But what's preserved?
link |
01:50:09.480
And he says, what Aristotle would have called the form,
link |
01:50:12.800
Polkinghorne calls it the pattern.
link |
01:50:14.560
So the pattern that's organized the matter
link |
01:50:18.560
that's made me up over all these years,
link |
01:50:20.320
that's obviously not the same as it was even,
link |
01:50:23.160
I mean, you would know how often does it all change,
link |
01:50:25.720
all your atoms and cells and, you know.
link |
01:50:28.360
In other words, the little, you know,
link |
01:50:30.560
Bobby Baron who was growing up in Birmingham, Michigan,
link |
01:50:33.720
I can have a picture of him and then there's me.
link |
01:50:36.000
And I say, oh, that's the same person.
link |
01:50:37.400
Well, I mean, clearly not materially speaking, not at all.
link |
01:50:40.200
Completely different.
link |
01:50:41.760
But there's a unity to whatever that pattern is
link |
01:50:44.640
by which all of that materiality
link |
01:50:46.880
has been kind of organized, you know?
link |
01:50:48.640
So Polkinghorne says, I think that pattern is remembered
link |
01:50:53.360
by God and remember it's the wrong word,
link |
01:50:56.160
as though it's like derivative.
link |
01:50:57.040
I mean, it's known by God.
link |
01:50:59.640
And so God can therefore reembody me
link |
01:51:03.480
according to that pattern at a higher pitch,
link |
01:51:06.440
what we call the resurrected body.
link |
01:51:09.320
So Paul talks about a spiritual body,
link |
01:51:12.280
body for sure, I mean,
link |
01:51:13.440
because he believes in the resurrection of Jesus.
link |
01:51:15.840
But it's not a body like ours from this world.
link |
01:51:19.520
It's a body at a higher pitch.
link |
01:51:22.120
So something, some pattern that's there persists.
link |
01:51:26.200
Pattern persists in the mind of God
link |
01:51:28.640
and then is used as the ground of the reembodyment of me.
link |
01:51:32.440
So it's not like I've just become a platonic form.
link |
01:51:35.560
I'm gonna be reembodyed because the Christian hope
link |
01:51:38.320
is not for platonic escape of soul from matter.
link |
01:51:42.320
That's never the Christian hope.
link |
01:51:43.840
It's for the resurrection of the body,
link |
01:51:45.760
we say.
link |
01:51:46.920
And you say, what a fantastic idea.
link |
01:51:48.960
Well, I don't know.
link |
01:51:49.940
I mean, this body is being reconstituted all the time
link |
01:51:53.520
according to this pattern, right?
link |
01:51:55.480
It's not the same matter.
link |
01:51:57.180
And so might there be another sort of higher material
link |
01:52:02.380
that is organized according to the same pattern,
link |
01:52:04.960
which has been remembered by God.
link |
01:52:06.680
So therefore we can hang on to the language of body and soul
link |
01:52:09.380
if you want, or matter and form.
link |
01:52:11.900
But it's the form remembered by God
link |
01:52:14.600
and then reconstituted in an embodied way by God
link |
01:52:18.080
that we call heaven, the heavenly state.
link |
01:52:21.360
That's what I hope for.
link |
01:52:22.680
That's my Christian faith, my Christian hope.
link |
01:52:26.000
Let me ask you about the big question of meaning.
link |
01:52:29.800
We've talked about it in different directions
link |
01:52:32.360
from different perspectives.
link |
01:52:33.800
What's the meaning of our existence here on earth?
link |
01:52:36.880
What's the meaning of life?
link |
01:52:39.360
Love.
link |
01:52:40.720
God is love.
link |
01:52:42.280
And the purpose of my life is to become God's friend.
link |
01:52:45.040
And that means I'm more conformed to love.
link |
01:52:47.320
And so my life finds meaning in the measure
link |
01:52:49.640
that I become more on fire with the divine love.
link |
01:52:52.980
I'm like the burning bush,
link |
01:52:54.080
is to become more and more radiant with the presence of God.
link |
01:52:57.640
That's what gives life meaning.
link |
01:52:59.760
Meaning is to live in a purposive relationship
link |
01:53:01.960
to a value, I would say.
link |
01:53:03.160
So there's all kinds of values,
link |
01:53:04.920
as I say, moral, aesthetic, intellectual values.
link |
01:53:07.720
And when I have a purposive relationship,
link |
01:53:09.400
so right now you and I,
link |
01:53:10.720
we have a purposive relationship to the value of,
link |
01:53:12.800
let's say, finding out the truth of things,
link |
01:53:15.500
and we're speaking together to seek that.
link |
01:53:18.060
Well, good.
link |
01:53:19.200
What's the ultimate value?
link |
01:53:20.400
The value of values is God.
link |
01:53:22.360
The supreme good, the supremely knowable,
link |
01:53:25.520
the supremely intelligible is God.
link |
01:53:27.960
And so to be conformed to God
link |
01:53:30.120
is to have a fully meaningful life.
link |
01:53:32.520
And who's God?
link |
01:53:33.820
God is love.
link |
01:53:34.940
So that's where I would fit the package together that way.
link |
01:53:38.040
You're adding a lot of love to this world,
link |
01:53:41.240
and which is something I deeply appreciate,
link |
01:53:43.320
and that you would sit down with me,
link |
01:53:45.800
given how valuable your time is,
link |
01:53:47.320
is a huge honor.
link |
01:53:48.160
Thank you so much for talking to me.
link |
01:53:48.980
Well, my great pleasure.
link |
01:53:49.820
I loved it.
link |
01:53:50.660
Lex, thank you.
link |
01:53:51.580
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
01:53:53.080
with Bishop Robert Barron.
link |
01:53:54.640
To support this podcast,
link |
01:53:55.880
please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
01:53:58.560
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
01:54:00.840
from Bishop Robert Barron himself,
link |
01:54:03.120
which reminds me of the Dostoevsky line
link |
01:54:05.560
spoken through Prince Mishkin,
link |
01:54:07.580
that quote, beauty will save the world.
link |
01:54:10.800
Robert says, begin with the beautiful,
link |
01:54:14.740
which leads to the good,
link |
01:54:16.960
which leads you to truth.
link |
01:54:20.000
Thank you for listening,
link |
01:54:21.100
and hope to see you next time.