When we're beyond good and evil, you know,

and all that's left is the will to power,

then why are we surprised that the powerful rise

and that they use the powerless for their purposes?

When we forget ideas like equality and rights,

which are grounded in God,

why are we surprised that death camps follow?

The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron,

founder of Word on Fire

and one of the greatest educators in the world

on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism,

Christianity, and religious faith in general.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron.

Let's start with the big question.

Who is God?

According to Christianity, according to Catholicism,

who's God?

I'll give you time as acquaintance definition.

God is Ipsum Essay subsistence.

God is the subsistent act of to be itself.

Another way to state that in acquaintance

is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique,

in which essence and existence coincide.

To be God is to be to be.

Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God.

They are kind of gnomic, and that's on purpose.

There's almost a Zen koan kind of quality

about the way we talk about God.

I'm saying something that's substantive,

but it's more in like a via negativa mode.

It's more like what God is not,

because there's nothing in the world

that would correspond to those descriptions.

So anything in the world would be a being of some type,

or an event of some type, some particular mode of existence.

And God is not an entity in the world.

If I would say that's the fundamental mistake

that atheists all the new make all the time,

is they think of God as a big being.

When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus,

even the genus of being.

That's one of the strangest remarks

in the whole tradition, but it's really interesting.

So you say, well, at the very least,

God must be a being, right?

And Aquinas's answer is no, he's not in the genus of being.

So we talk about God being beyond being and so on.

To say in God, essence and existence coincide,

is to say, God's very nature is to be.

And that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world.

So what I'm doing there is I'm gesturing

the way the tradition does toward God,

using language that's at the same time,

philosophically precise and gnomic.

It's both accurate, it's true in God,

essence and existence coincide.

What God is is the same as God's active to be.

But now what does that mean?

I'm not quite sure because nothing

in our ordinary experience corresponds to that.

Everything in our experience is a being of some type.

So it's existence received according

to the mode of some essence.

That's not true of God.

Which is why you can't be found in the world.

And that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is,

oh, I guess theists are those that believe

there's this being alongside the other beings

in the universe.

And then atheists say, oh no, there is no such being.

And that's precisely wrong, that's just a category error.

Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell.

To the effect that proving the nonexistence of God

is a bit like proving the nonexistence

of a China teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars.

No, that's precisely what God is not.

Some entity that's sort of hidden

among the other entities of the universe.

God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all.

That's the way to put it.

In more theological language,

God's the creator of all things.

So if God is outside of our world, is it possible

for us to visualize, to comprehend, to know God?

Not utterly, of course.

And I would say our knowledge begins always in this world,

begins in ordinary experience.

But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis,

through philosophical reasoning,

can come to some knowledge of a reality

which is transcendent to our experience.

So we gesture toward it.

I always like Aquinas who says the language about God

that we use as analogical.

So it's not univocal, meaning what I say about that can

or about this bottle I can say about God.

No, that makes God an entity.

At the same time, it's not simply equivocal.

So if I say, well, that thing is and God is,

I mean totally different things.

No, no, I mean something analogous.

So to be God is to be to be.

So the real meaning of being is the being of God.

The being of that thing or this thing

or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles

would be analogous to God's manner of being.

So on that basis, I can make some statements.

I can theorize and even at the limit as you suggest,

I can visualize.

So we have metaphors for God

and the Bible is replete with those, right?

So God is a rock, God's like a lion,

God's like this and that.

The Bible will sometimes imagine God

as a human being walking around.

Now only the crudest fundamentalism would say,

well, that's a univocal, accurate description of God.

It's an image that's catching something

of God's manner of being.

Then what does it mean to believe in God?

So there's a word and we'll have to limit ourselves

to human interpretable words today.

There's a word called faith.

What does faith mean?

So if we can't really directly know God,

you kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.

Better, he sneaks up on us.

Cause I like the language of grace.

God's action comes first.

So if I stay perfectly within the realm of I'm seeking

with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind,

I'm not gonna find God that way.

I might find a path that opens up,

but I would say finally God finds me.

And I think then the language of faith

begins to make more sense.

I'm with Paul Tillich though, the Protestant theologian

said the most misunderstood word

in the religious vocabulary is faith.

Because he said the way we take it usually

is something subrational.

I have proof of this.

I really know this and I only kind of believe that.

Like that's just a personal opinion or impression.

But that's to identify faith with the kind of infrarational.

And that's not it.

I mean, I don't want something infrarational.

I don't want superstition or childish credulity.

So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason.

And on the far side of reason, it's super irrational,

not infrarational.

And that's a very important move.

At the limit of what I can know,

at the limit of my striving and my vision,

there's this horizon that opens up.

And I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing.

There's a kind of a horizon that lures us

beyond what I've got.

Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness

rather than a darkness prior to reason.

The darkness beyond the horizon, prior to reason.

First of all, the poetry or your language is incredible.

To be to be, I have a million questions.

Yeah, go ahead.

I do too on this.

So first of all, let me just jump around.

You mentioned to be to be a few times.

What does that mean?

Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?

To be this to be a table, to be this to be a microphone.

So I'll use Aquinas's language.

It's the act of being poured, if you want,

into the receptacle of some essential principle.

So it's got a ontological structure.

It's an existent, it's a thing that exists,

but it's existing in a limited way

according to essential principle.

God, what's God?

What's God's name?

What kind of being is he?

We'll go back to Moses now.

When the Israelites ask me, what's your name?

What should I tell them?

And he says, famously, I am who I am.

But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark.

So Moses is wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods

and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities.

Which one are you?

You gotta be one of them.

So tell me your name.

In philosophical language, give me the essence

that receives your act of existing, right?

And God's answer blows the mind of Moses

and the whole tradition, I am who I am.

To be God is to be.

So I'm not this or that.

I'm not up or down.

I'm not here or there.

God is that who centers everywhere

and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it.

Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that?

No, and in a way, that's the whole point.

If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind.

So to be God is to be, to be is to,

and that's, you know, Moses,

take off your sandals, you're on holy ground.

So I'm gonna go over confidently

and find out what this thing is, this burning bush.

I'm gonna find out.

No, no, no.

Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground

because you're not in charge here.

You're not in command.

Because if you've got shoes on,

you can walk wherever you want.

You can walk with confidence,

but you take your shoes off, you're much more vulnerable.

And that's appropriate when you're talking about God, you know?

But here's another interesting thing,

I didn't think about the burning bush

in this connection before,

but it's a bush that's on fire, but not consumed.

Is beings are competitive with each other.

And so these can't be in the same place at the same time,

these two beings.

They're mutually exclusive if you want.

But as God comes close to a creature,

He doesn't destroy it or consume it,

but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant, right?

And so you compare it to the classical gods and goddesses.

When they come bursting into life and experience,

things are incinerated and people give way

and they're overwhelmed.

Then there's this biblical idea of God comes close

and sets things on fire, but doesn't burn them up.

And that's because he's not a competitive being in the world.

If he were a big being, then he'd be competing

for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid.

But he's not like that.

So God can come close and we come more fully alive.

Now we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation.

I mean, the central Christian doctrine

that God can actually become a human

without overwhelming the human he becomes, right?

So I mean, that's kind of the next step.

But the basic idea of God is noncompetitively

transcendent to the world.

That's another way to get at it.

Noncompetitively transcendent to the world.

So it's beyond being, it's the source of being.

Right.

Let me make it maybe more imagistic.

I think a really good analogy would be author to book, right?

So like Tolkien or someone that writes

one of these big sprawling novels.

And Tolkien's good too, because he creates a whole world.

He creates a new nature, a new language, new history,

all that, thinking of the thousands of characters

and the plots and subplots and all of it.

Tolkien is utterly responsible for every bit

of that story, right?

Every character, every plot, every subplot,

every description, he's completely responsible.

He's involved in every nook and cranny of it.

But he's not in the story.

He's not in the book.

You're not gonna find him as a character in the book.

So that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way

is I'm looking for God, he's a character

in the story somewhere.

No, he's the author of the story.

Mysteriously present to every aspect of the story,

but not a character in it.

Right, he is deeply in the story somehow.

He's present, but he's not, even if he is a character,

he's not really, the full embodiment is not a character.

And people inside the book can't really know about the author.

Right.

No, right.

Well, see, Augustine says God is simultaneously

intimier intimo male at superior sumo male.

He's closer to me than I am to myself.

And he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine

at the same time.

But once you get the insight that God is the sheer act

of to be, well, of course that's true.

So right now, God is sustaining us in existence, true.

Aquinas says God is in all things by essence, presence,

and power, and most intimately so.

And, and he's nowhere in this room.

Okay, well, where's God that he's nowhere in this room.

He's totalitarian, we say he's totally other.

Same time, but once you crack that code though,

I think you see it of like why that would be true.

As he now I'm getting from more philosophical language

to more mystical language,

because all the mystics talk that way.

In these high paradoxes about God's availability

and unavailability.

I've often thought in the Bible, story after story,

God can neither be grasped nor hidden from.

So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God's.

I've got him, I understand him, I can manipulate him.

No, no, no, story after story is told, you can't do that.

Well, then the other extreme of the center, all right,

then I'm gonna run from God.

I'm gonna avoid God.

Jonah and the whale, you know, so he has the call from God.

And it's a, no, no, I'm gonna refuse that.

I'm gonna run as far away.

I'm gonna go to Tarshish, which meant like Timbuktu for them

at the end of the world.

God's gonna, the whale swallows him up

and brings him right back where God wants him.

It's a, you know, poetic way of saying

you can't escape the press of God.

At the same time, Tower of Babel,

I'm gonna build a tower up to God.

I'm gonna grab hold of God.

I don't know, you can't do that either.

So live in the space in between those two things,

which would be the space of friendship with God,

falling in love with God,

is neither grasping nor hiding from God.

You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things.

You mentioned grace.

Yeah.

You mentioned sin.

You mentioned incarnation.

Is there a philosophical, pragmatic way

to start talking about the pillars of Christianity?

What are the defining things

that make Christianity to you

and broadly speaking,

to those that follow the religion?

You know, in a way, what we're doing so far

is a necessary propodotic,

because we're talking about God.

What makes Christianity distinctive, of course,

is the claim of the incarnation.

So we come up out of Judaism.

We come up out of this great monotheistic tradition.

And, you know, the Bible itself

and all the great commentaries within Judaism,

I think, would agree with this basic,

theistic stuff that I've been talking about.

Take most of my mononies, for example.

Now, what makes Christianity distinct?

This supremely weird claim

that God becomes one of us.

God becomes a creature,

but without ceasing to be God

and without overwhelming the integrity of the creature he becomes.

What we see in the burning bush,

which obtains across the board.

So the closer God comes to me,

the more radiant I become, right?

But take that now to the nth degree,

would be what we mean by the incarnation,

the incarnation of the Son of God

becoming a creature

in such a way as to make humanity

radiant and beautiful.

That's the pillar of Christianity.

It's the incarnation, you know.

And what follows from that

is the redemption of all of reality.

So not just of human beings,

but in becoming a creature.

God divinizes the world, you know.

The Greek fathers always said,

God became human that humans might become God.

And that's a good way to sum up,

I think, the essence of Christianity.

Why is this such an important thing?

So it's a distinctive thing.

But why is it so important philosophically

to what it means to be a Christian?

What impact did that have on our world,

on human civilization, on human nature,

on our morals, of why live,

what to live for, the meaning of it all?

Like, why is incarnation so important?

Well, I think it's massively important

because it's the divinization principle

that God wants to divinize His creation

and sort of in this concentrated point

of Jesus of Nazareth.

But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus.

So that goes right back to Paul.

As we're grafted on to Christ,

we talk about that as the church.

We become like cells and molecules in an organism.

That's the church, it's not an organization.

That's a deformation of ecclesiology.

The church is this organism that begins with Jesus

and then He's drawing all of humanity,

but ultimately all of nature,

all of creation to Himself.

When the Son of Man is lifted up,

He will draw all things to Himself.

That's the gathering in of a scattered creation.

So in that way, it's at the heart of it.

Then there's all kinds of things.

If God becomes human,

that means there's a dignity to humanity

which goes beyond anything any humanist

of any stripe has ever said, right?

Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary.

Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable.

God became one of us in order to divinize us.

The goal of my life is not just to be a good person,

not just to be materially successful,

not just to be a member of society.

The goal of my life is to become a participant in the divine nature.

I don't think there is a humanism greater than that,

even conceivably.

That's where I think humanism is profoundly influenced

by the incarnation.

Just our notion of God is noncompetitive to us.

This is so important because I think in so many systems from mythology onward,

you have these competitive understandings of God.

When Jesus says to his disciples, the night before he dies,

I no longer call you servants but friends.

It's an extraordinary moment.

Because every God who's ever been served,

well, that's the best we can hope for is that we'll be his servant of God.

You know, I try to obey you, Lord.

I'll try to do what you want.

He says, I no longer call you servants or slaves.

He would have said in the Greek there, you know.

But friends, I don't know.

I can't imagine anything greater than that, becoming God's friend.

That's a call to become one with God.

It's possible to become one with God.

Now, I should mention, you're one of the greatest religious communicators

I've ever experienced that a huge number of people are fans of yours.

You've done a lot of great conversations.

You've done Reddit AMAs, which is a very unique, bold, brave thing.

And on one of them, somebody asked,

what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins?

So first, what are the seven deadly sins?

What do they have to do with Christianity?

How essential, how crucial they are to the religion?

And what's the most challenging in our modern day?

Yeah, to name them, pride, envy, anger,

sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust are the seven deadly sins.

We're called capital sins sometimes.

They're the head sins from which things tend to flow.

The most fundamental is pride.

Probably most people today, if you talk about vice,

or you talk about deadly sin, they would think about lust.

But the classical authors, including Dante, who does this pictorially,

that's the least of the deadly sins is lust,

because it's the one that's most sort of dependent upon the body

and its passions and so on.

The most important is pride.

Pride is the deadliest of the deadly sins.

And it's very simple to see why.

Pride is the, Augustine calls it,

in crevatis and sei, I'm caved in around myself,

like a black hole, right, to get into the scientific.

But the black hole to me is a great symbol,

that it's so heavy that it draws everything, including light,

nothing can escape from it.

See, that's the sinner.

We're all sinners.

We're like black holes, that we draw everything into ourselves.

So as a sinner, and I'll confess I'm a sinner,

the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment,

and I'm drawing you now into my world and so on.

What that does is it kills us off, and it darkens life,

and it makes it small and heavy and awful, right?

It's like, but see, compared to the contrasting thing,

is when you're lost in a moment,

you're not concerned about the impression I'm making,

you're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself,

you're not concerned about the smoky on my back

that's always telling me, you know, look good and sound right,

but you're lost in something.

You're just talking to a friend and the two of you together

are discovering something true or beautiful.

You're lost in a movie or you're lost in a book.

Those are the best moments in life.

Those are the best because they're the least prideful moments, right?

That's when the light comes out.

I become radiant because I'm overcoming this tendency

to fall in on myself.

Dante is so good because the way he pictures Satan

in Divine Comedy, and he's at the center of the earth,

like a black hole that way, he's at the center of gravity,

he's at the heaviest place, and there's not fire where he is,

but ice, it's a much, much better image

that you're frozen in place and you're stuck,

and he's got wings, right?

They used to be angel wings because he's an angel,

but now they're like bat wings for Dante,

and they're flapping, and all they're doing

is making the world around him colder

because he's ice, he's stuck in his own iciness,

and then he's beating his wings over the ice,

making everyone else colder.

It's a great image.

And then he has, this is cool too, he has three faces, Satan,

because he's the simulacrum of the Trinity.

So every sinner thinks he's God, so I pretend I'm God.

So he's got the three faces, and from all six eyes he weeps.

Also from all three mouths, he's chewing a sinner.

He's got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the three mouths,

you know, the three traders.

But I thought it's just a great image of all of us sinners

is we're stuck, it's heavy, it's cold,

we're chewing on our past resentments,

we're weeping in our sadness,

and we're making the world around us colder.

It's beautiful, it's a great, so that's pride.

See, that's an image of pride,

because Satan, that's his great sin, pride,

which is why he needed Michael, right, Michael, who's like God,

so that the great challenge to him, which we need all the time,

is someone to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're not God.

But the minute we say I'm God, black hole,

I now cave in on myself, I suck everything into myself,

and I turn into Dante's Satan.

So that's a great image, that's pride,

that's the most fundamental,

that's the uber capital sin,

all the other ones flow from that in a way.

So in general, empathy, humility, compassion,

love thy neighbor is the way to fight the sin of pride.

Right, which is why the masters tend to say,

this was Bernard, Saint Bernard was asked,

what are the three most important virtues?

And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas,

because it's the opposite of pride.

But they're bringing Aquinas in again,

because we think, humility, I'm no good.

That's not what it means at all.

It means what I was describing before,

when you're just lost in something, you're just lost in it.

My image, I live out in Santa Barbara,

and I like to walk on the beach out there,

and there's a section of the beach where they let the dogs run free without leashes.

And when you see a dog, and he's well cared for,

and his master's right there,

and the master's throwing the tennis ball, and the surf,

and the dog was galloping out into the surf,

and he gets it with a big smile, and comes running back.

That's humility.

That's an image of heaven, because he's just lost in that moment.

He doesn't care about impressing anybody,

he doesn't care about what people think of him.

He's just lost in it.

That's it.

That's heaven, right?

And those moments in our life, when we get that,

it's a little hint of paradise.

But the troubles most of us live, frankly, most of the time,

in various levels of hell, you know,

and we're dealing with these deadly sins.

Like, envy flows from pride, because if I'm prideful,

I'm a black hole, I'm in corvatus and se, I'm collapsed in.

What am I really going to be concerned about?

That guy's getting more attention than I am.

That guy's richer than I am.

That lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do,

and why don't I have that, right?

So, envy is a very close daughter of pride.

Anger flows from me.

Why do I get angry?

The dog isn't getting angry on the beach

when he's running after the tennis ball.

But I get angry all the time.

I sputter with anger when things aren't going my way

and you're insulting me and you're not doing what I want

and I'm being hurt, my reputation.

So, anger flows from pride, you know?

All of them do.

All of the deadly sins do.

So, you said, I'm a sinner.

So, we're all sinners.

Yeah.

And you mentioned Satan.

So, there's heaven and hell.

There's God and Satan.

Where's the line between what it means to be good

and not good enough?

Or, I hesitate to use the word sort of evil,

but maybe overwhelmingly sinful.

Where's the line between hell and heaven?

Think of it as limit concepts maybe.

They're like heuristic devices.

Yes.

So, heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God.

So, think of the dog on the beach who is just,

he's fallen in love with his environment,

with his master, with the surf.

He's just lost in it, right?

He's forgotten himself.

He's transcended himself and is now lost in the wonder

of the beauty of that place.

Now, imagine the limit of that is the friendship with God

that we talked about.

That I become the friend of God.

I become so, I forgetful of myself,

so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God

that I found Beatitudo, right?

I found joy, the beatific vision, we call it.

That's the limit case.

That's where we're tending.

That's where God wants us to go.

Think of hell as the limit case in the opposite direction.

That's Carvatus and Se, that's the black hole.

And we're all sinners, meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum.

You know, we have good days and bad days,

and we have good moments and bad moments.

And I can be drawn toward sin.

What's God's purpose on Christianity's reading

is to bring us out of that, you know?

Now, where did he go?

He went all the way into it to get us out of it.

It's like pulling the sock back out.

Socks inside out.

You have to go all the way in and pull it back out.

And so God had to go all the way down, you know?

And there's the trajectory of the incarnation.

Though he was in the form of God, you know, this is St. Paul,

Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped at,

but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave,

being born the likeness of men.

But then he was known to be of human estate,

and he accepted even death, death on a cross.

And so Paul imagines that the incarnation is downward journey

in order to get all of us, right?

All of us who were stuck, were stuck in our sin.

And so again, Paul says he became sin on the cross.

It's a really, really powerful idea.

He wasn't a sinner, then he'd need to be saved too.

He's not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction

in order to pull us back out of it.

So that's a really powerful message and embodiment,

sort of educating the world about sin.

That said, day to day, there's like oscillations

in terms of how much each human sins,

and there's a struggle against that.

So, you know, that dog that loses himself on the beach,

may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that.

That was, may have been not the best dog

he could be leading up to that.

So how, you know, if it's a math equation,

what does the final calculation look like

in terms of ending up in heaven?

What does it mean to live a good life in the end?

Is it the average amount of sin you do is low?

Are you allowed to make mistakes?

Yeah, you know, the metric is love, right?

And love is not a feeling, it's an act of the will.

To will the good of the other.

That's Aquinas again.

To will the good of the other as other.

You see, that's the anti black hole principle.

When I, I don't...

Will the good of the other as other.

See, because if I'm willing, you're good

because it's good for me.

So, again, you know, it's good for you

that I'm on this program, I guess.

I'm willing you're good,

but that's because it's going to be down to my benefit.

That's just an indirect egotism.

That's why see, love is really rare and strange

that I really want what's good for you as other.

So not connected to the black hole tendency

of my own prideful ego.

When I've broken that, I've forgotten self

and I've moved into the space of your own good.

That's what love is.

Now, God wants us to be, you know, by this,

they will know that you're my disciples,

that you love one another, Jesus says.

So that's it.

Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth

and we're better or worse at that.

The point of a church is to graft us onto Christ

that we might become more and more conformed to love.

But, you know, the final calculus, I'll leave that to God.

I mean, like, but use love as the metric.

At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience,

did I will the good of the other today?

How effective was I at that?

And be just like Ignatius of Loyola,

be brutally honest.

Or was I just willing someone's good because it was good for me?

Where were those moments where I was like the dog on the beach?

See, and as you play at the what,

not so much God, the lawgiver surveying

and you did, you know, three of those and four,

it's God wants us to be fully alive.

St. Irenaeus is one of my great heroes,

ancient, you know, patristic figure.

And his famous line is Gloria de Homo Vivens, right?

The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

See, and that gets us over this sort of obsession

with the legalism and did I do enough?

And is that that's a big enough sin?

And God wants us fully alive.

The key to that is willing the good of the other.

He died that we might come to a richer appropriation of that.

So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world

or to love the world deeply.

And what love means is the other.

Get out of yourself, right?

It's the humility, yeah, getting out of yourself.

But that somehow is not, that's not even selfless

because the word selfless requires her to be a self.

It's almost like just letting go.

Yeah, I might talk about like a gift of self

that you yourself aware, but you give a gift of yourself.

Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself,

but it becomes a radiant source of life for others.

Like Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense of herself,

it seems to me, but it was to light other people

up so that they might be radiant.

That's the game.

So you probably articulated that way too.

Yeah, I love love.

It's such an interesting thing.

But we have to be hard nosed about it.

Like your friend Dostoevsky,

love is a harsh and dreadful thing, right?

It's not a feeling.

And our culture is so sentimentalized love

that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want.

And that's not it at all.

Love is always correlated to the order of the good

because if I'm willing the good of the other,

I have to know what that good is, right?

So a parent says,

I'll give the kid whatever she wants.

Well, that's not love.

That's indulgence or that's sentimentality.

But I have to know what the goods really are

if I'm going to will them for you, right?

Yeah, in some sense, you're absolutely right.

A component of love is the struggle to know the other.

It's the struggle to understand.

I mean, that's something to me by empathy.

It's not, yeah, it's not Valentine's Day romantic gifts.

It's a struggle.

It's like trying to understand,

trying to perturb your own mind

and that of another human being

to try to figure out who they are,

what they want,

what makes them happy,

what are they afraid of,

what are they hoping for?

And it's like a dance,

a dance of conversation,

a dance of just shared experiences

and all that kind of stuff.

And all of that requires for you to be,

I guess, yeah, empathize.

Imagine yourself in their place

and then love that person

when you're living inside that person.

Several minutes ago about the Pillars of Christianity.

So we talked about God,

we talked about incarnation,

but you're getting now to a third key one,

namely the Trinity,

because we're monotheists, right?

But we don't think God is monolithically one.

We think God is a play of persons

and the Father from all eternity

by a great mental act

forms his interior word as Aquinas puts it.

And that's the Logos, right?

That's the Verbum,

that's the word by which the Father knows himself

and we call it the Son.

So the Imago, it's the image of the Father.

See, the great thing is that Imago

is not like just a dead image on a mirror

or a dead image at a pond or something.

It's a full reflection of the Father's being.

He's one in being with the Father.

Therefore, the Son has everything the Father has

except being the Father.

But that means that the two of them look at each other

and they're just crazy in love with each other

because the Father is the fullness of being.

The Son is the fullness of being.

And they're so crazy in love with each other

that they, this is Fulton, she put it this way,

that there's this...

They just, they love each other with this sigh

and we call that the Spiritus Sanctus.

That's the Holy Breath, right?

The Holy sigh of love between the Father and the Son.

And that's one being, one essence we say of God.

But in these three persons,

but all your language of like dance and play and community,

the Greek Father's talked about perichoracis,

which means God, the three persons kind of sit

in a choir together.

So they sing together, you know?

And that's why, see, Christianity is unique in this claim

that God is love.

So every religion will say God loves, you know, in some way.

Love is an attribute of God.

God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes.

But Christianity is unique in all the religions

in saying that God is love.

And somehow the Holy Trinity embodies that idea.

I mean, that philosophically has always been confusing to me.

What it means to be three things

and at the same time be one God,

the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

What is this dance between these three?

What exact, like how do you visualize,

how do you understand this?

Yeah.

This very fascinating, essential thing for Christianity.

The first thing I'd say is what we already have been

sort of talking about is if you say God is love,

and most people probably say, yeah, I like that.

That's a good idea.

God is love.

But it's very peculiar because if he is love,

there has to be in his unity a lover, a beloved,

and the love that they share.

Otherwise, he isn't love by his very essence.

He would love, it would be an attribute of God

or an action of God.

But if it's his very nature,

there has to be lover, beloved, and love, share.

And the tradition eventually came to see that.

The image I was using before of the Father,

his Imago, the Son,

well, that's born of God's infinite mind.

So of course God has an image of himself.

Heck, I've got an image of myself.

That's something I can pull off as a puny little creature.

God, in his infinity, has a perfect Imago of himself.

And they have to fall in love with each other.

What else can they do?

Because they're in the presence of infinite good.

And so it has to follow that you then have the shared love

that connects them.

And that's how we generate, if you want,

the idea of the three persons in God.

Let me ask you about the church.

One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism

is the Catholic church.

What is the Catholic church?

I would say it's the mystical body of Jesus.

So as I said before, it's not an organization.

If we do it that way, we're going to miss it.

It's got organizational elements to it.

So I'm a bishop.

I'm an office holder within the church.

But the church is an organism, not an organization.

So it's a organism of interconnected cells,

but namely all of the baptized gathered around Christ

in a mystical union.

That's the church.

But there's buildings, there's titles.

Sure.

Because it manifests itself institutionally then.

So are the sort of heavy things about that

all have to do with pride?

Yeah, sure.

Whatever is corrupt in the church.

Whatever is corrupt in the church,

of course it comes from pride, from sin.

And one thing I like about, you know,

the New Testament is so clear on that.

It's in his little tiny communities.

So before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything.

Apologies, little tiny communities of Christians

like in Corinth and Ephesus, you know.

What's the one thing we know about them?

Is they fought with each other.

Because Paul's always upgrading them and telling them,

come on, would you people get it together?

And, you know, who's bewitched you?

And so from the beginning we've been fighting with each other

because we're made up of sinners.

And, you know, so one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology

is the official name for the study of the church,

is to talk about the treasure in earthen vessels.

Paul's language again.

The treasure is Christ.

The treasure is the love he's bequeathed to the world.

That's the treasure that we have.

But it's always held in these really fragile vessels,

namely us.

And so it's going to be marked by corruption and stupidity

and pride and everything else.

Well, nevertheless, there's a hierarchy.

There's titles and so on.

If we remove pride from the picture,

so the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy

that makes up this one organism, this living organism,

what's the role of the pope, for example?

What is the role of a bishop, for example?

Like what is the role of the hierarchy

in terms of the broader vision of Christianity,

Catholicism as a religion?

I'm a devoutee of this guy named Johann Adam Müller

who was a theologian early part of the 19th century.

And he was part of the kind of romantic movement.

And he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize

and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church.

So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church.

Who's a bishop?

The bishop is the personal symbol of the unity of the diocese.

Who's a pastor of a parish?

He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish.

So he understood it not so much organizationally

as organically again.

It was like that around which the pattern organizes itself.

And if you don't have that unifying figure,

the community will kind of precipitate.

And you see that all the time without headship, we would say.

So it's more symbolic and organic than it is organizational.

So symbols for community, but there's such fascinating

peculiarities to each individual symbol.

There's different characteristics that make up the different people.

They have different ways of communicating.

They have different hopes and fears and all that kind of stuff.

If they're all symbols, what's the role of the different

peculiarities of those symbols of being an inspiring uniter

versus maybe a stronger type of more judgmental kind of

communicator, all that kind of stuff.

Can you maybe speak to the human part of these symbols?

Yeah.

Well, I might just shift to another image of shepherd.

So that's a classic biblical image.

As a bishop, I walk around with this thing called a crozier,

which is a shepherd's staff.

So it's the symbol of the bishop's office.

And the crozier, though, is a kind of in your face thing in a way

because it's got the end of it was meant to hold off wild animals

and then the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back to the fold.

So I walk in with them, oh, this is nice.

Look at the bishop coming in.

But that's a kind of in your face symbol that I'm here to defend

the church against predators.

And I'm also here to draw people in who are wandering too far away.

So that's okay.

I mean, that's part of the role of the hierarchy and the pope

and bishops and pastors.

Pastor just means shepherd, right?

So I'm the shepherd of a parish.

So that's okay.

It's not like just all, you know, sunshine and light

and what a pretty image.

The one who embodies the unity of the community is also the shepherd.

Okay, but again, leaning on the human thing, the church is an institution.

And I don't know if you've heard, but there is an element to power that corrupts.

An absolute power corrupts, absolutely, as the old saying goes.

Let me ask you something else that came up on the reddit AMA,

mega churches and the prosperity gospel.

And you've mentioned that you may not be a fan.

What are your views on this?

And what are your views in general of money and power

corrupting the heads of these institutions?

I don't like the prosperity gospel because the gospel is about Jesus journey

into radical self forgetfulness on the cross.

And he never makes a promise of earthly well being.

Can you explain what the prosperity gospel is?

Yeah, the view that, you know, if I follow Jesus and I follow God with great trust

that I will be rewarded with wealth and position and status in this world.

It might be God's will that I get that.

But, you know, Aquinas said this, if I look at a very sinful person,

I say, God, he's got a great house and he's richer than I am and all that.

Aquinas says, yeah, but maybe that's a punishment

because maybe all that is leading him away from God.

And actually that's God's way of punishing him.

And the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house

is actually a great gift to you because now it frees you for doing God's will.

So we can't read, you know, God's favor in worldly terms.

I would say God's favor is, am I awakened to deeper love?

Then I know that I'm finding God's favor.

Now God might decide, sure, I want you to have this and that.

I want to provide this to you.

Fine. Then I say, thank you, Lord.

How can I use it as an instrument of love?

All the masters talk about detachment.

And that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel

is though I'm getting attached now to all these material advantages.

And I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor.

Let go of all that.

You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love.

So if you're rich, the right question is, okay, Lord,

why did you allow me to become rich?

So what can I do?

How can my riches be an expression of love?

If I am popular, if I am healthy, okay, why am I popular?

Why am I healthy? How can I use that for your good?

I'm sick in bed.

I'm suffering.

Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love?

So I'd rather measure it that way than through worldly success.

That's why I'm against the prosperity gospel.

Okay.

So there is, don't seek worldly possessions,

but whatever happens to you, good or bad,

seek how that could be used to increase the amount of love in the world.

Right.

The image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune,

which is a device on a lot of the Gothic cathedrals,

and it's this great circle, right, this wheel.

At the top of it is a king,

and then it turns this way, and as the king has lost his crown,

and the bottom is a pauper,

and then over here is a king, is a guy climbing up to power, right?

And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ.

And the idea is very simple, but very profound, that the wheel is life, you know?

It's sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down.

Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige.

Other times you're losing it, you're going down.

Other times you've got none of it.

Other times you're coming back up.

Okay.

Don't live on the rim of the wheel.

It'll make you crazy.

Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety.

Where you should live is the center of the wheel, where Christ is, right?

Because that's the link now to the eternity of God.

That's the point of love, where love can flow through you to the world.

And then you can look at the wheel.

You're a Beatles fan, right?

I think I discovered that.

I love the Beatles.

And the song that always comes to my mind when I think of that image is John Lennon,

the end of his life.

So a guy that, I mean, rode the Wheel of Fortune like crazy, you know?

He was at the top of the world in every way.

And then Beatles break up, and he kind of loses it,

and then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s at the very bottom.

When he died, he was just kind of coming back up again.

But the song I always think of is watching the wheels, right?

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.

I really love to watch them roll, because I'm no longer riding on the merry go round.

That's right out of the medieval mystics, that he's not riding on the wheel.

He's just watching it go round and round.

That's the point of the Greeks call it apothea, and the Latins call it indifference, you know?

Not like I'm blasé, it just means I'm detached from success, failure, less success, more success.

I'm detached from that.

I'm sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, because I'm not riding on it anymore.

The mystics have always made that transition.

Let me ask you a difficult question about the darker side of human nature, of human power, of institutions.

What's your view on the long history and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children by a Catholic priest?

So this is a difficult topic, but maybe an important one to shine the light on.

Yeah, it's awful, you know?

And it's been a problem, go back to Peter Damian, back in the 11th century, who was talking about it.

So it's been a problem, and whenever really sinful human beings have been in close proximity to children, we find this issue.

Has it been around the church?

Yes. Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years? Absolutely.

I'm glad the church has made important strides, and it has.

Back in 2002, there was, I think, all the Dallas Accords where the bishops of America put a lot of these protocols in place that really have been effective at ameliorating this problem.

The numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s, and that's been demonstrated over and over again.

And then they fell dramatically after that.

So that's not to excuse anything, but it's to say I think progress has been made with it.

What's the impulse to secrecy?

Yeah, well, to protect institutions, you know, and that's always, that's a sinful instinct.

I'm not altogether, I mean, sure, an institution is worth protecting, but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent to people's well being, then you're in trouble.

So institutions role should be transparent and honest with the sins of its members and of itself.

Sure. Yeah.

So maybe you can speak to the fact as a priest, a bishop, as part of Catholicism, you're not allowed to marry, you're not allowed to have sex, you're sworn to celibacy.

What is behind that idea? What is the sort of, we talked about some broad stroke ideas of love, what's behind the idea of celibacy?

And that's a good way to get at it. It's a path of love.

So the church is always in favor of inculcating love. Marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy.

St. Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied with the things of this world and family and those who are free from that are free or for doing the work of God.

So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy. And we still, I think, take that seriously.

Look at my own life. I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things and go places and minister in a way that I could not if I had been married.

So I get it. I get the pragmatic side, but I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it.

Ever Jesus was challenged about the person who had, you know, a whole series of husbands and then they all died.

And so in heaven, which one will, you know, which husband will the wife have?

And his answer is in heaven, people don't marry and they're not given in marriage.

There's a higher way of love. It's a more radical way of love. It's not tied to a particular.

But I think through God is tied to everybody.

The celibate, and this has been to the beginning of the church, not as a law, but there were, there were celibates from the very beginning of the church, including Jesus, of course, and Paul.

They sense something that that way of living mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven.

It's a sign even now within this world of how we will all love in heaven.

So in that way, it's a bit like pacifists.

I'm glad there are pacifists in the church, and I've known some, you know, some very powerful witnesses to pacifism.

I'm glad there are pacifists because they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares and, you know, heaven's a place of radical peace, that some people even now live it.

At the same time, I'm glad not everyone's a pacifist because I would hold with the church to just war theory that there's sometimes all we can do in this finite world is to fight, you know, manifest wickedness.

And just in the same way there's just sex?

Well, no, right. I'm glad there are celibates, but I'm glad not everyone's a celibate. I wouldn't want that.

I mean, because married love is a marvelous expression of the divine love. So that's why it's good there are some. And it's always been a small number.

The actual experience of it, would you, the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fasting? So I've been enjoying fasting recently, so not eating for several days, that kind of stuff.

And that somehow brings you even deeper. I'm in general in love with everything and with nature and everything. I see the beauty in the world.

But there's a greater intensity to that when you're fasting, for example.

Yeah, I might use the language of, you know, sublimation or redirection of energy and all that.

I think that's true. There's a certain sublimation of energies into prayer, into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies.

So it's meant to be life enhancing. The same way fasting is, it's meant ultimately to be life enhancing and make you healthier and happier.

So celibacy is a path of love. And I think it does involve you a certain redirection of energies.

Don't you think, do you think it's a heavy burden for some humans to bear, for some priests to bear?

Is that the thing, given the sexual abuse scandal, is that the thing that breaks?

No, I wouldn't tie that to celibacy. And that's been demonstrated over and over again.

There's a priest named Andrew Greeley, who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago. And Andy did a lot of research, he was a sociologist of religion.

He did a lot of research into that very question. And there really is not a correlation between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse of children or of anybody.

So I wouldn't make that correlation.

So bad people, sinful people are going to do what they're going to do.

I think people who have a tendency toward abusing children sexually are drawn to situations where they get ready access to kids and they get institutional cover.

So that's the thing I'm going to go through the list of, you know, from sports and boy scouts, et cetera. And that's been proven again and again.

So I would tie it more to that. I wouldn't tie it to celibacy.

So the challenge, of course, there's all kinds of, you said institutional cover, there's all kinds of institutions that cover for people that don't, that do evil onto the world to do sinful things onto the world.

But there's something about the church, which is the, as an organism is supposed to be an embodiment of good in this world, of love in this world, and it breaks people's hearts to see this kind of even a small amount.

This kind of thing happened within the church. It wakes you up to the cruelty, the absurdity of the world sometimes.

It's back to the question of why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow this kind of thing to happen?

And sort of maybe unanswerable question. Do you have an answer to that question?

I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language, which is true enough. It's completely emotionally unsatisfying, but it's naming it truthfully enough.

And it goes back to Augustine, which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good.

Now, again, I know how unsatisfying that sort of spare austere language can sound, but it gets us off the horns of a dilemma.

Aquinas, you know, when he lays out a question, he always has the objections first. So is there a God?

Well, objection one, objection two, objection three. And he's really talk about steel manning and argument. Aquinas is great at that.

One of the really steel manned arguments. Is that the right grammatical form?

One of the, what's the past participle of the steel man?

But one of the best arguments, he formulates it this way.

If one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed.

And as example from his medieval physics, he goes, if there were an infinite heat, there'd be no cold, right?

But God is described as infinitely good. Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil.

But there is evil. Therefore, God does not exist. That's a darn good argument. That's a really persuasive argument.

And I think, I've done this for a long time in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy.

That's the best argument against God. But here's something, I press head with it.

Something I find really interesting. I think the three best arguments against God all come from within the religious tradition.

Namely, the book of Job. So Job, he's great. I mean, he's a great guy. He does everything right.

He's God's great servant. And he's punished in every possible way. He has every possible suffering.

Aquinas is argument from the summa. And then, to your friend and mine, Dostoevsky.

I think in the brothers Karamazov, Ivan's argument when he's trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha.

And it's these examples drawn, they think, from Dostoevsky, from the headlines of his own time of the most abject cruelty to children.

Like an innocent child being made to suffer. How in God's name could that happen if God exists and he's all good?

So I get it. But see, the book of Job, Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky, these are all profoundly believing people.

And I hear Stephen Fry, the famously atheist writer, he will bring out this argument with great authority.

He does. Children with bone cancer and worms that go into the eyes of children and blind them before they kill them.

But he's been preceded by the author of Job, Thomas Aquinas and Dostoevsky, who stood right.

And think of Job in the whirlwind. He stands there in the whirlwind.

So you can't blame the Christian tradition for not dealing with this problem, for like brushing it under the carpet.

I mean, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.

It's still a difficult problem to deal with that there's all this cruelty of the world.

There's a lot of example through history, just in my own family history with the Soviet Union, with Stalin.

The atrocities that Stalin has brought onto the people of the Soviet Union throughout the 20th century is nearly immeasurable.

And yet, when you look at the entirety of human history, you'll see progress, not just the Soviet Union, but the entirety of the civilization throughout the 20th century.

And Stalin has a role to play.

There's a dark aspect to somehow evil that helps us make progress.

And I don't know how to put that in the calculation.

On the local scale, I want to alleviate suffering.

I'm probably heavily lean pacifist, not out of weakness, but out of strength.

But man, it does seem that history sprinkled with evil and that evil does somehow nudges towards good.

Yes, sometimes we can see it.

And that's where the idea comes from, that evil is permitted to bring about some greater good, and we can sometimes really see it.

Can we always see it? No.

In fact, typically we don't see it.

But now you bring another factor into this, which is the difference between our minds and God's mind.

So our minds, I mean, look, even they're remarkably capacious, but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time.

And even our eyes can take in so much of the light spectrum and these little ape sensorium that we have that can just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really.

How are we ever in a position to say, oh no, there's no possible good that would ever come from that?

Even the greatest evil that Dostoevsky can conjure up and Stephen Frye.

Still, how could we have the arrogance to say, I know there's no good that could ever come from that.

I know there's no morally justifiable reason why God would ever permit that.

Because I think that's hubris to the nth degree for us to say that.

And that's the assumption behind this claim that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good.

Now, God understands it, but we're like little kids, you know, like a four year old and their parents make a decision and we say, what, why in the world would you do this to me?

This is my pastoral experience.

Years ago, there was a young father and his son was like three or something and he was in the hospital for something.

I forgot what it was, but he had to undergo surgery, right?

So after the surgery, he's in great pain, this poor kid, this three year old kid, and the dad was there with him, you know, holding his hand and, you know, and the son, this is what the father told me.

He said, he's looking at me like, what gives here?

I mean, why would you, you love me?

I've always assumed that.

And yet you're presiding over this somehow, you're approving of this and doing nothing to get me out of it, right?

And he said the kid couldn't articulate that, but his eyes did and his, and the father said, it was just killing me because I knew I couldn't explain it to him.

And it's true.

I mean, he could vaguely gesture toward, but the kid didn't understand surgery and cutting his body and taking things out of it and that this was going to, you know, make him much better in the long run.

But I remember thinking, that's a great metaphor for us vis a vis God is, here's God, infinitely loving God who's with us all the time.

And we say, what are you doing? Why aren't you taking this away from me?

And the answer, I mean, ultimately is trust, trust me, trust me, surrender to me.

And when we don't, that's getting trouble with the old pride and the hubris and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

No, but trust me when I tell you, I mean, I completely get it in my own life.

And as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time with people in pain all the time.

I remember as a young priest, there was a, there was a policeman in our parish.

So he had a gun and inexplicably, no one had any clue.

He got up one night and shot his son to death and then shot himself.

This is my parish.

So I went to the, the wake.

I remember I show up and I'm this young, you have 27 year old goofball priest.

I'm like, we're on the collar and I, I walk in and there were two coffins, the two coffins in the room.

There's the son and the father and the mother was there and she, she went like this to me.

Like, like, she saw me.

Like, you're the, you're the religious guy here.

Yeah.

What?

And just by instinct, I, I went like that too.

I'm like, I don't, I don't know what to tell.

I can't, I don't have an answer for you.

But, but I was there and I'm not saying to pat myself on the back.

That's, that's where the church goes because Jesus went there.

And now we're gesturing toward a more theological response.

The first one's more austerely philosophical.

God permits evil to bring about a good.

But the theological response is that's where Christ went.

Is he went all the way down?

He went all the way down into our suffering and see the cross as the limit case of, of evil.

Humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering and death.

It's all there.

And that's where the son of God went.

And I would say that's why as, as a priest, I went there.

That's my job is to go to those places, you know.

So that's the ultimate answer to the problem.

So there is, we can't comprehend it, but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice.

We trust this.

We trust it because we know on other grounds of God's existence.

Yeah, I would resist the claim that, well, this is such a, such a knockdown argument.

So now we know there is no God.

I would say, no, there are all kinds of other rational warrants for God.

And so I, I know that God exists.

I know that God is infinite love.

And now I got to square that with this experience.

And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence that God knows what he's about.

You know, again, I know how, how inadequate that always seems to anyone who's suffering,

including myself, when I'm in great suffering.

But I think that's the best that we've done in the great tradition.

So if you were to steal man, the case against God or the existence of God,

you find the most convincing argument is there's evil in the world.

Yeah.

Therefore there's no God.

There's too much of it.

Yeah.

If I were to steal man, that argument, I do what Stephen Fry does.

I would do what Dostoevsky's Yvon does.

I would do exactly that.

I would say there's just too much.

And then if you want to keep pressing it, animal suffering.

So we talk about human suffering, but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on.

Isn't there just too much suffering to be reconciled with an infinitely good God?

And that's, again, Thomas Aquinas.

I've just used his very steal manned argument.

You mentioned that, again, on Reddit, somebody asked who your favorite communicator of atheist ideas was,

and you mentioned Christopher Hitchens.

Yeah.

Are there other ideas for atheism that you find particularly challenging?

Well, that's the one.

It's the problem of evil.

The other objection in Aquinas, which has a lot of contemporary resonance,

is can't we just explain everything through natural causes?

Why would you have to invoke a cause beyond the causes in the world?

So as I'm trying to explain, let's say for Aquinas, motion, causality, finality,

can I just do that with natural causes?

Wouldn't that suffice to explain it?

So I get like when naturalists are speaking or people that are pure materialists,

they'll just say, no, that's perfectly adequate, a scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience.

So I would steal man that and say, well, show me why we need something more.

And to do that, you got to get out of Plato's cave, it seems to me,

because my objection to naturalism is it's staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable

and making the mistake of saying, that's all there is to being.

That's all there is that needs to be explained.

And long before we get to religion, just stay with Plato.

The first step out of the cave, if you combine it now with the parable of the line, is mathematical objects.

And I'm with those, the many people that would say, mathematics is an experience of the immaterial.

I've stepped out of a merely empirical, physical, naturalistic world the minute I understand a pure number

or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship, which would obtain in any possible world,

which are not tied to space and time.

That's a first step out of the cave.

And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections.

For example, on the nature of being, so I could talk about this thing as a physical object

and I can analyze it at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists up and down through this thing.

Fine, fine, but I'm still in Plato's cave.

I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall.

But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm, I have entered a different realm of being, seems to me.

Do you think it's possible for the cave to expand so large that it encompasses the whole world?

Meaning, is it possible that we're just clueless right now in terms of scientifically speaking

with most of the world we haven't figured out yet?

But do you think it's possible through science to know God to look outside the world?

So it's fundamentally the limit of the empirical scientific method is that we can't know some of these very big questions.

No, I'm not a scientist and I was never all that good at science.

I was more of a humanities guy, but I love and respect the scientists, but I hate scientism.

And scientism is rampant today with especially young people, the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge.

And I'm a vehement opponent of that.

There are dimensions of being that are not capturable through a scientific method of mere observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, etc.

As great as that is, as wonderful as that is, but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave.

And that's not to say it's not real.

It's just at a relatively low level of reality.

You step out of Plato's cave when you go into the impure mathematics.

That's why you know that article, I just came across it recently and discovered this whole literature around it,

is Eugene Wigner's article in 1960 called the unreasonable applicability of mathematics to the physical sciences.

I think that's the title of it.

Or effectiveness or something like that.

Yeah.

But what's so cool is that he's not a religious man.

He was kind of a secular Jew, but yet he uses the word miracle like eight times in that article.

And because he just is so impressed by the fact that high complex mathematics describes so accurately the physical world and could be used to create things and to manipulate.

And why should that be true?

That there's something very weirdly mysterious about that relationship.

And I would say it's because you stepped into a higher order of being, which is inclusive of a lower level of being.

That's the Platonic approach is that as you move, now I'm going to different metaphor, you move to higher levels, they're inclusive of the lower levels.

Yeah, there's some magic there that seems to at least in our current understanding of science to be not quite capturable, even consciousness, the idea of consciousness.

Can I ask you, where do you think the laws of nature come from?

So I mean, sort of the Wigner question, where does the deep mathematical structure of things come from?

How do you explain that?

The mathematical structure or the fact that the structures is somehow pleasing and beautiful.

Because those are different.

Those are two different.

We'll do the first one.

I'm curious, where do you think it comes from?

I tend to believe even in terms of physics, we don't really know what's going on.

There's so, so, so much more to be discovered.

We're walking around in the dark trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there.

And we're patting ourselves in the back and how many puzzles we've discovered so far.

Even Gato's in completeness theorem.

What are the limits of mathematics, axiomatic systems?

I don't know what is the purpose of mathematics.

What is the power of mathematics? Is it just a useful tool to study the world around us?

Or is it something deeper that we're just discovering?

All I know from my emotional perspective, now I am an engineer.

I'm a robotics AI person.

From an emotional perspective, I just find the whole thing beautiful.

Yeah, but that's really cool to me.

That's a very interesting clue.

One of the arguments for God is based on the intelligibility of the world.

It's like Wigner. It's a very peculiar fact.

It seems to me that the world is so radically intelligible.

Why should that be true?

Why should it be the case that being has this intelligible structure to it?

So it corresponds to an inquiring mind.

So Aquinas can say that the intelligible enact is the intellect enact.

Meaning there's some deep correspondence between this and that.

And I'm with Wigner.

That's, I think, really weird and unreasonable and strange.

Now, my answer is because the creator of the universe is a great mind

and has stamped the world with intelligibility.

In the beginning was the word, right?

And the word was with God and all things came to be through the word.

We shouldn't picture that so much.

It's gesturing in this very powerful direction.

There's an intelligence that has imbued the world with intelligibility.

And we discover that, you know?

There's something about the simplicity of the way the world works.

That's where the beauty comes from.

And yes, there's something profound to the mechanism, whatever that is.

God that brought that to be.

That thought it into being.

That the world has been, when the Bible says that God said,

let there be light and there was light, God said, well, again,

we don't literalize the poetry, but it's very rich that God spoke the world into being.

So that means it's been imbued with intelligibility from the beginning.

They say that, you know, the condition for the possibility of the western physical sciences

was a basically Christian idea, namely that the world is not God.

Therefore, I can analyze it, experiment upon it.

I don't divinize it.

I don't have a mystical relation to the world.

It's not God.

But secondly, that it's absolutely and every nook and cranny intelligible.

And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation.

So it's been created.

It's not God.

It's other than God.

But yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind.

And when those two things are in place, the sciences get underway.

You know, I don't worship the world anymore,

but I'm also utterly confident I can come to know it.

And those are theological ideas.

Well, we live in this world, so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world

by making the assumption that this world is fully understandable.

And we don't need to worry about what's outside the world in some sense

in order to build bridges and rockets and computers and all that kind of stuff.

It's only when we get to the questions that are deeper about why we're here at all.

What does it mean to be good?

All those kinds of things do we need to reach outside of this world?

Well, can I interrupt another one?

So I talked about mathematics.

I think it's stepping out of the cave.

It's stepping out of just the purely empirical, you know, world.

But the very fact that we use a word like universe, to me, is very interesting.

Even if you say multiple universes, to me, it's like, well, whatever the whole is, the totality.

Universum, turn toward the one.

Why would we call it that?

Why would we just call it an aggregate?

You know, it's just an aggregate of stuff.

It's an aggregate of all kinds.

But we call it a universe.

And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition is, it's the intuition of being.

So I immediately experience things here, the color and shape, and I can measure them.

But when I've really stepped out of the cave and I've now engaged beyond mathematics even,

I'm now into metaphysical reflection.

I'm interested not just in this thing as an object and how it's colored and shaped

and what its atoms and quarks and all that are.

That's fine.

But I'm interested now in, what does it mean to say this thing is real?

So what makes this a being?

And then what are the characteristics of being?

So now from Aristotle to Heidegger, you know, this question of the nature of being.

I would say we call it a universe because it's turned toward the one of being.

It's this intuition that whatever, from quarks to galaxies to whatever,

give me a billion other universes, it would still be existence, right?

It's turned toward the one that being unites our experience.

And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis.

I've taken another step out of the cave.

In Plato's language, I'm at the formal level now beyond mathematics level of forms.

And the formal is inclusive of the mathematical, which is inclusive of the physical.

And I think that's Eugene Wigner, is that the mathematical includes the physical.

It is metaphysically prior to it.

But here we are sitting in the physical trying to make sense of why the unreasonable effectiveness

of the thing that's beyond, which is the mathematics.

My answer is God.

And I don't know a better answer.

And as I read Wigner, he wasn't ready to say that.

But I think the language is gesturing.

I was reading someone recently, some very well known physicist who said,

his answer to Wigner's question is that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician.

And I thought, yeah, that's right.

Let me ask you about Jordan Peterson.

You had a great conversation with him.

He has a complicated nuanced view of faith or faith period.

He has said that he believes in Jesus, the person and the myth and some of the full richness and complexity that you've talked about.

But he's surprised by his faith.

He's not sure what to make of it.

He's almost like meta struggling with what the heck is faith means.

He's a super powerful intellect that can't compute the faith that he's experiencing.

So what are some interesting differences between the two of you or some commonalities in terms of your understanding of faith?

He's a very interesting guy.

I've had a couple of conversations with him and I do think he's moving in the direction of faith and his lectures in the Bible are very fine, I think.

He reminds me of the church fathers because the church fathers would have looked at the moral sense of the scripture.

Peterson probably called it the psychological meaning.

But I think he's doing a lot of that.

As I read him and talk to him, I think he's kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus.

What I mean there is, for Kant, Jesus is not so much the historical Jesus, this figure from long ago.

It's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life.

He says he's the image of the person perfectly pleasing to God.

And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination as a heuristic, as a goal that we're tending toward.

But the historical person of Jesus for Kant is like, well, let's not fuss about that so much.

It's this figure.

And as I read Peterson especially and talk to him, I think he's kind of there with the archetype of Jesus.

And even language of, like, live as though God exists.

That's the alzob of Kant, you know, the kind of as if attitude.

And where I press him when we talk is in the direction of, no, that's not Christianity yet.

I mean, that's enlightenment, moral philosophy.

But Christianity is very interested in this historical figure and very interested that God really became one of us.

And he's not just an archetype of the moral life.

He's someone, he's a person who's invaded our world and gone all the way to the bottom of sin and thereby saved us, you know.

So the facticity of Jesus and the resurrection.

So like, Peterson will talk about the resurrection as a myth and all that.

And you can find that in different cultures, etc.

But Christianity is saying something else.

So in Christianity, when we're talking about who is Jesus, it's not just an archetype.

It's not just a myth, it's a historical figure and the very grounded fact that God became one of us is fundamental to this idea of what Christianity is.

What it means to be a Christian.

It's the sin and the love that came here down to earth.

It means we can be one with God.

So that's essential.

It's not just an archetype.

That's right.

You know, it always strikes me the difference between, let's say, mythic expressions and the New Testament.

It reads someone like, you know, Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell, whom he influenced and then now Jordan Peterson, who's very Jungian.

And this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures.

And great.

I mean, I think it's very interesting and there's a lot going on there.

There's a sort of calmness though about it.

Like, yeah, interesting.

And that's in this culture, in that culture.

And it's the form of the moral life and I understand all that.

Then you read the New Testament.

Whatever those people are talking about, it's not that.

They are grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you to get your attention to tell you about something that happened to them, right?

Like the resurrection, the myth of the dying and rising God and how powerful it is and shaping our consciousness.

That's fascinating.

That's not the New Testament.

The Testament is, did you hear?

Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death, God raised him from the dead and he was seen by 500 and he was seen by Peter.

And then lastly, I saw him.

That's how Paul talks.

It's not the detached, you know, psychologist musing on archetypal things.

And I think that makes a huge difference when it comes to Christianity.

The intensity of the historical details are essential here.

So if you look at Hitler in Nazi Germany, it's not enough to say, well, power corrupts and sometimes sort of looking at the archetype of Hitler.

It's much, much more important, much more powerful to look at the details of how he came to power.

What are the ways he did evil onto the world?

And then you can get really intense about your struggle with some of the complexities of human nature and power on institutions and all that kind of stuff.

So the historical nature of the Bible.

We're an historical religion.

It's important.

We generate philosophical reflection.

We can find common ground with archetypal thinking and all that.

We can.

And the church fathers used, you know, Greek philosophy and Aquinas uses Aristotle and all that's great.

But we're an historical religion.

And that matters immensely.

Is the Bible the literal word of God?

How do you make sense of the words that make up the Bible?

I think the best way to get at the Bible is to think of it as a library, not a book.

So it's a collection of books, right?

From a wide variety of periods, different authors, different audiences and different genre.

So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song, you find something like history, not in our sense, but something like history.

You find gospel, it's its own genre.

You find epistolary literature like Paul.

You find apocalyptic.

There's all this in the Bible.

So is the Bible literally the word of God?

It's like saying, is the library literally true?

It depends on what section you're in, right?

So parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two Kings, number plates in the Old Testament.

Are there elements of the historical in there?

Sure.

But it's theologically interpreted history.

It's like our sense of history of, you know, give me 10,000 foot notes and, you know, I'm going to look at all the source material I can possibly find.

It's more like ancient history, like Herodotus, people like that.

But then there's poetry and there's myth and there's legend and there's song and all that stuff in the Bible.

So God breathes through all of it, I would say.

He inspired all of it, right?

Inspirare.

He's breathing through all of it.

God is speaking through all of it.

But he speaks in different voices.

He uses different human instruments and he uses different genre and different types of language.

So we have to be sensitive to that when we're interpreting the Bible.

So the different instruments are more or less, some are more perfect than others.

No, I wouldn't say that.

I wouldn't say more perfect.

I'd say they're just different.

It's like a symphony and God's like a conductor and there's all kinds of different instruments in the orchestra.

And he loves his debris through the Psalms.

I prayed to Psalms this morning, I do every day in my office.

Those are songs.

They probably were literally sung, most of them at one point.

He breathes through Apocalyptic.

We're reading the book of Revelation now in the Easter season and it's this wild and wooly book.

It should be filmed by Spielberg or somebody today.

And he speaks through the Gospels.

The Gospels correspond in genre to what I call ancient biography.

That's the genre of the Gospels.

It's wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary.

They're like ancient biographies.

You have the Pauline letters, which are about in all particular cities that Paul was visiting and particular people he knew.

So you just got to be sensitive to the genre all the time.

Let's return back to human institutions and talk about history of human civilization and politics.

So one question to ask is, was America founded as a Christian nation in your view?

If we look at the Declaration of Independence, what did the words mean?

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,

that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It seems like God is breathing through those words too.

Yeah, I think so.

The founders would be some kind of combination of deism.

Certainly Christianity is coming up through them.

Enlightenment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix.

So you're not going to find in our founding fathers simply a Thomas Aquinas

or like a purely classically Christian understanding.

It's Christianity in those various expressions.

I would see the Enlightenment as a sort of child of Christianity, we could talk about that.

But having said all that, yes, I think they are expressing at least the residue

of a once deeply integrated Christian sense of things that our rights are not created by the government.

They're not doled out by the government.

They come from God.

And the other thing I find really interesting is equality because looking classical philosophy,

political philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, it's not equality.

For them, it's our inequality that's really interesting.

So Plato divides us into these three classes and Aristotle says only a tiny little coterie of property,

males of sufficient education should be in the political life.

The rest should all be in private life, you know, and then some are suited for slavery.

So I mean, he divides us dramatically, same with Cicero and so on.

Where does this come from, this weird idea that we're all equal?

I mean, how we're not equal in beauty, not equal in strength, we're not equal in moral attainment,

we're not equal in intelligence.

So what is it?

And I think the residue especially comes through in that little word that all men are created equal.

That's our equality that we're all equally children of God.

So take God out of the picture.

I think we are going to slide rapidly into an embrace of inequality.

Now, in the classical world, yes, but heck, look at the 20th century.

I mean, when God is excluded in a very systematic way, I think you saw the suspension of rights

and the suspension of equality like mad.

So no, I think it's very important that God is in the picture and that we're a nation under God.

It matters enormously.

That's not Pius Boilerplate.

That's at the rational foundations of our democracy.

So do you think Nietzsche was onto something with the idea, looking into the 20th century, that God is dead?

That there is a cultural distancing from a belief in God?

Yeah, I'd be somewhat sympathetic to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there.

Namely, it's not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop, hey, God is dead.

It's more of a lament, you know, God is dead and we've killed him.

And what will happen in the wake of that?

And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism of the 20th century follows from that questioning of God and the dismissal of God from public life.

So I would be sympathetic with that.

When we're beyond good and evil, you know, and all that's left is the will to power.

And then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes?

When we forget ideas like equality and rights, which are grounded in God, why are we surprised that death camps follow?

So I think there's a correlation there for sure.

I don't know.