Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church #304

Transcript

00:00:00 When we’re beyond good and evil, you know,

00:00:01 and all that’s left is the will to power,

00:00:04 then why are we surprised at the powerful rise

00:00:07 and that they use the powerless for their purposes?

00:00:10 When we forget ideas like equality and rights,

00:00:13 which are grounded in God,

00:00:15 why are we surprised that death camps follow?

00:00:20 The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron,

00:00:24 founder of Word on Fire and one of the greatest educators

00:00:28 in the world on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism,

00:00:32 Christianity, and religious faith in general.

00:00:35 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

00:00:37 To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:39 in the description.

00:00:41 And now, dear friends, here’s Bishop Robert Barron.

00:00:45 Let’s start with the big question.

00:00:47 Who is God?

00:00:49 According to Christianity, according to Catholicism,

00:00:52 who’s God?

00:00:53 I’ll give you Thomas Aquinas’s definition.

00:00:55 God is ipsum, essay, subsistence.

00:00:57 God is the subsistent act of to be itself.

00:01:01 Another way to state that in Aquinas

00:01:03 is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique,

00:01:06 in which essence and existence coincide.

00:01:09 To be God is to be to be.

00:01:12 Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God.

00:01:15 They are kind of nomic, and that’s on purpose.

00:01:18 There’s almost a Zen koan kind of quality

00:01:20 about the way we talk about God.

00:01:22 I’m saying something that’s substantive,

00:01:25 but it’s more in like a via negativa mode.

00:01:28 It’s more like what God is not,

00:01:29 because there’s nothing in the world

00:01:31 that would correspond to those descriptions.

00:01:33 So anything in the world would be a being of some type

00:01:36 or an event of some type,

00:01:38 some particular mode of existence.

00:01:41 And God is not an entity in the world.

00:01:45 I would say that’s the fundamental mistake

00:01:46 that atheists old and new make all the time,

00:01:49 is they think of God as a big being.

00:01:53 When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus,

00:01:57 even the genus of being,

00:01:59 it’s one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition,

00:02:01 but it’s really interesting.

00:02:02 So you say, well, at the very least,

00:02:03 God must be a being, right?

00:02:05 And Aquinas’s answer is no, he’s not in the genus of being.

00:02:09 So we talk about God being beyond being and so on.

00:02:12 To say in God essence and existence coincide

00:02:15 is to say God’s very nature is to be,

00:02:18 and that can’t be true of any contingent thing in the world.

00:02:21 So what I’m doing there is I’m gesturing

00:02:23 the way the tradition does toward God,

00:02:26 using language that’s at the same time

00:02:29 philosophically precise and gnomic.

00:02:32 It’s both accurate, it’s true.

00:02:34 God, essence and existence coincide.

00:02:36 What God is is the same as God’s active to be.

00:02:40 But now what does that mean?

00:02:42 I’m not quite sure,

00:02:43 because nothing in our ordinary experience

00:02:45 corresponds to that.

00:02:46 Everything in our experience is a being of some type.

00:02:50 So it’s existence received according to the mode

00:02:53 of some essence.

00:02:56 That’s not true of God,

00:02:58 which is why he can’t be found in the world.

00:03:00 And that’s, as I say, the fundamental mistake is,

00:03:04 oh, I guess theists are those that believe

00:03:05 there’s this being alongside the other beings

00:03:08 in the universe.

00:03:09 And then atheists say, oh no, there is no such being.

00:03:12 And that’s precisely wrong.

00:03:13 That’s just a category error.

00:03:16 Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell.

00:03:20 To the effect that proving the nonexistence of God

00:03:22 is a bit like proving the nonexistence of a China teapot

00:03:26 orbiting between Earth and Mars.

00:03:28 No, that’s precisely what God is not,

00:03:31 some entity that’s sort of hidden

00:03:34 among the other entities of the universe.

00:03:36 God is the reason why there’s a contingent realm at all,

00:03:41 is the way to put it.

00:03:42 In more theological language,

00:03:43 God’s the creator of all things.

00:03:45 So if God is outside of our world,

00:03:48 is it possible for us to visualize,

00:03:51 to comprehend, to know God?

00:03:54 Not utterly, of course.

00:03:55 And I would say our knowledge begins always in this world,

00:03:58 begins in ordinary experience.

00:04:00 But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis,

00:04:03 through philosophical reasoning,

00:04:05 can come to some knowledge of a reality

00:04:08 which is transcendent to our experience.

00:04:10 So we gesture toward it.

00:04:12 I always like Aquinas who says the language about God

00:04:15 that we use is analogical.

00:04:17 So it’s not univocal, meaning what I say about that can

00:04:21 or about this bottle, I can say about God.

00:04:23 No, that makes God an entity.

00:04:25 At the same time, it’s not simply equivocal.

00:04:28 So if I say, well, that thing is and God is,

00:04:31 I mean totally different things.

00:04:33 No, no, I mean something analogous.

00:04:36 So to be God is to be, to be.

00:04:38 So the real meaning of being is the being of God.

00:04:42 The being of that thing or this thing,

00:04:44 or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles

00:04:47 would be analogous to God’s manner of being.

00:04:50 So on that basis, I can make some statements.

00:04:53 I can, I can theorize.

00:04:56 And even at the limit, as you suggest, I can visualize.

00:04:59 So we have metaphors for God,

00:05:01 and the Bible is replete with those, right?

00:05:04 So God is a rock.

00:05:06 You know, God’s like a lion.

00:05:07 God’s like this and that.

00:05:08 Or the Bible will sometimes imagine God

00:05:11 as a human being walking around, you know.

00:05:14 Now, only the crudest fundamentalism would say,

00:05:15 well, that’s a univocal, accurate description of God.

00:05:20 It’s an image that’s catching something

00:05:22 of God’s manner of being.

00:05:25 Then what does it mean to believe in God?

00:05:31 So there’s a word, and we have to limit ourselves

00:05:34 to human interpretable words today.

00:05:37 There’s a word called faith.

00:05:39 What does faith mean?

00:05:40 So if we can’t really directly know God,

00:05:45 you kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.

00:05:50 Better he sneaks up on us.

00:05:51 Because I like the language of grace.

00:05:53 God’s action comes first.

00:05:55 So if I stay perfectly within the realm of I’m seeking

00:06:00 with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind,

00:06:04 I’m not gonna find God that way.

00:06:06 I might find a path that opens up.

00:06:09 But I would say finally God finds me,

00:06:12 and I think then the language of faith

00:06:14 begins to make more sense.

00:06:16 I’m with Paul Tillich, though, the Protestant theologian,

00:06:18 said the most misunderstood word

00:06:20 in the religious vocabulary is faith.

00:06:22 Because he said the way we take it usually

00:06:24 is something subrational.

00:06:26 You know, I have proof of this.

00:06:29 I really know this, and I only kind of believe that.

00:06:32 Like, that’s just a personal opinion or impression.

00:06:35 But that’s to identify faith with the kind of infrarational.

00:06:40 And that’s not it.

00:06:41 I mean, I don’t want something infrarational.

00:06:43 I don’t want superstition or childish credulity.

00:06:47 So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason

00:06:51 and on the far side of reason.

00:06:52 It’s super irrational, not infrarational.

00:06:55 And that’s a very important move.

00:06:58 At the limit of what I can know,

00:06:59 at the limit of my striving and my vision,

00:07:02 there’s this horizon that opens up.

00:07:04 And I think that’s true even in ordinary ways of knowing.

00:07:08 There’s a kind of a horizon

00:07:09 that lures us beyond what I’ve got.

00:07:11 Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness

00:07:14 rather than a darkness prior to reason.

00:07:18 The darkness beyond the horizon prior to reason,

00:07:22 first of all, the poetry of your language is incredible.

00:07:24 To be, to be, I have a million questions.

00:07:27 Yeah, go ahead.

00:07:28 I do too on this.

00:07:30 So first of all, let me just jump around.

00:07:32 You mentioned to be, to be a few times.

00:07:34 What does that mean?

00:07:36 Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?

00:07:39 To be this is to be a table,

00:07:40 to be this is to be a microphone.

00:07:41 So it’s, I’ll use Aquinas’s language.

00:07:44 It’s the act of being poured, if you want,

00:07:47 into the receptacle of some essential principle.

00:07:50 So it’s got an ontological structure.

00:07:52 It’s an existent, it’s a thing that exists,

00:07:56 but it’s existing in a limited way

00:07:59 according to an essential principle.

00:08:01 So God, so what’s God?

00:08:04 What’s God’s name?

00:08:05 What kind of being is he?

00:08:07 We’ll go back to Moses now.

00:08:10 When the Israelites asked me, you know, what’s your name?

00:08:13 What should I tell them?

00:08:14 And he says, you know, famously, I am who I am.

00:08:17 But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark.

00:08:20 So Moses is wondering, okay, there’s a lot of gods

00:08:24 and there’s a lot of things, a lot of entities.

00:08:25 Well, which one are you?

00:08:26 You gotta be one of them.

00:08:27 So tell me your name.

00:08:29 In philosophical language, give me the essence

00:08:31 that receives your act of existing, right?

00:08:34 And God’s answer blows the mind of Moses

00:08:37 and the whole tradition.

00:08:38 I am who I am.

00:08:40 To be God is to be.

00:08:43 So I’m not this or that.

00:08:44 I’m not up or down.

00:08:45 I’m not here or there.

00:08:46 God is that whose center is everywhere

00:08:48 and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it.

00:08:51 Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that?

00:08:54 No, and in a way, that’s the whole point.

00:08:56 If I could, I’d be talking about a being of some kind.

00:09:00 So to be God is to be.

00:09:01 To be is to, and that’s, you know,

00:09:03 Moses, take off your sandals, you’re on holy ground.

00:09:06 So I’m gonna go over confidently

00:09:07 and find out what this thing is, this burning bush.

00:09:09 I’m gonna find out.

00:09:11 No, no, no.

00:09:12 Take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground

00:09:14 because you’re not in charge here.

00:09:16 You’re not in command.

00:09:17 Because if you’ve got shoes on,

00:09:19 you can walk wherever you want.

00:09:21 You can walk with confidence.

00:09:22 But you take your shoes off, you’re much more vulnerable.

00:09:26 And that’s appropriate when you’re talking about God.

00:09:29 But here’s another interesting thing.

00:09:30 I didn’t think about the burning bush

00:09:31 in this connection before,

00:09:33 but it’s a bush that’s on fire but not consumed.

00:09:39 Beings are competitive with each other.

00:09:41 And so these can’t be in the same place at the same time,

00:09:43 these two beings.

00:09:44 They’re mutually exclusive if you want.

00:09:48 But as God comes close to a creature,

00:09:52 he doesn’t destroy it or consume it.

00:09:55 But the creature becomes more beautiful

00:09:57 and more radiant, right?

00:09:59 And see, compare it to the classical gods and goddesses.

00:10:03 When they come bursting into life and experience,

00:10:06 things are incinerated and people give way

00:10:09 and they’re overwhelmed.

00:10:10 Then there’s this biblical idea of God comes close

00:10:13 and sets things on fire but doesn’t burn them up.

00:10:17 And that’s because he’s not a competitive being

00:10:19 in the world.

00:10:20 If he were a big being, then he’d be competing for space,

00:10:25 so to speak, on the same ontological grid.

00:10:27 But he’s not like that.

00:10:30 So God can come close and we come more fully alive.

00:10:35 Now we’re starting to gesture toward the incarnation,

00:10:37 I mean, the central Christian doctrine,

00:10:38 that God can actually become a human

00:10:42 without overwhelming the human he becomes, right?

00:10:45 So I mean, that’s kind of the next step.

00:10:47 But the basic idea of God is noncompetitively

00:10:51 transcendent to the world.

00:10:53 That’s another way to get at it.

00:10:54 Noncompetitively transcendent to the world

00:10:57 so as beyond being as the source of being.

00:11:01 Right.

00:11:03 Let me make it maybe more imagistic.

00:11:06 I think a really good analogy would be author to book.

00:11:10 Right, so like Tolkien or someone that writes

00:11:13 one of these big sprawling novels.

00:11:16 And Tolkien’s good too because he creates a whole world.

00:11:18 He creates a new nature, a new language, new history,

00:11:21 all that, think of the thousands of characters

00:11:23 and the plots and subplots and all of it.

00:11:26 Tolkien is utterly responsible

00:11:28 for every bit of that story, right?

00:11:31 Every character, every plot, every subplot,

00:11:34 every description, he’s completely responsible.

00:11:36 He’s involved in every nook and cranny of it.

00:11:39 But he’s not in the story, he’s not in the book.

00:11:43 You’re not gonna find him as a character in the book.

00:11:45 So that’s the category mistake of the atheist in a way

00:11:48 is I’m looking for God, he’s a character

00:11:50 in this story somewhere.

00:11:51 No, he’s the author of the story.

00:11:54 Mysteriously present to every aspect of the story,

00:11:58 but not a character in it.

00:12:00 Right, he is deeply in the story somehow.

00:12:03 Right. He’s present,

00:12:04 but he’s not, even if he is a character,

00:12:08 he’s not really, the full embodiment is not a character.

00:12:13 And people inside the book

00:12:16 can’t really know about the author.

00:12:18 Right.

00:12:19 No, right. Well, see, Augustine says,

00:12:22 God is simultaneously intime or intimo meo

00:12:25 et superior sumo meo.

00:12:26 He’s closer to me than I am to myself,

00:12:30 and he’s higher than anything I could possibly imagine

00:12:33 at the same time.

00:12:34 But see, once you get the insight

00:12:36 that God is the sheer act of to be,

00:12:38 well, of course that’s true.

00:12:40 So right now, God is sustaining us in existence.

00:12:45 True.

00:12:46 Aquinas says, God is in all things by essence,

00:12:50 presence, and power, and most intimately so.

00:12:53 And he’s nowhere in this room.

00:12:56 Okay, well, where’s God?

00:12:58 He’s nowhere in this room.

00:12:59 He’s totaliter aliter, we say.

00:13:02 He’s totally other.

00:13:03 Same time.

00:13:05 But once you crack that code, though,

00:13:06 I think you see it of why that would be true.

00:13:09 And see, now I’m getting from more philosophical language

00:13:12 to more mystical language,

00:13:13 because all the mystics talk that way

00:13:15 in these high paradoxes about God’s availability

00:13:18 and unavailability.

00:13:20 I’ve often thought in the Bible, story after story,

00:13:24 God can neither be grasped nor hidden from.

00:13:30 So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God.

00:13:32 I’ve got him, I understand him, I can manipulate him.

00:13:36 No, no, no.

00:13:37 Story after story is told, you can’t do that.

00:13:39 Well, then the other extreme of the sinner,

00:13:41 all right, then I’m gonna run from God.

00:13:43 I’m gonna avoid God.

00:13:45 Jonah and the whale, so he has the call from God,

00:13:50 and he said, no, no, I’m gonna refuse that.

00:13:51 I’m gonna run as far away.

00:13:53 I’m gonna go to Tarshish, which meant Timbuktu for them,

00:13:55 at the end of the world.

00:13:58 God’s got the whale, swallows him up,

00:13:59 and brings him right back where God wants him.

00:14:01 It’s a poetic way of saying

00:14:03 you can’t escape the press of God.

00:14:05 At the same time, Tower of Babel.

00:14:07 I’m gonna build a tower up to God.

00:14:09 I’m gonna grab hold of God.

00:14:11 No, no, no, you can’t do that.

00:14:12 So, live in the space in between those two things,

00:14:15 which would be the space of friendship with God,

00:14:19 falling in love with God

00:14:20 is neither grasping nor hiding from God.

00:14:25 You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things.

00:14:28 You mentioned grace.

00:14:30 Yeah.

00:14:31 You mentioned sin.

00:14:32 You mentioned incarnation.

00:14:35 Is there a philosophical, pragmatic way

00:14:37 to start talking about the pillars of Christianity?

00:14:40 What are the defining things that make Christianity to you,

00:14:46 and broadly speaking, to those that follow the religion?

00:14:51 In a way, what we’re doing so far

00:14:53 is a necessary propaedeutic,

00:14:55 because we’re talking about God.

00:14:58 What makes Christianity distinctive, of course,

00:15:00 is the claim of the incarnation.

00:15:01 So, we come up out of Judaism.

00:15:03 We come up out of this great monotheistic tradition.

00:15:06 And the Bible itself and all the great commentaries

00:15:09 within Judaism, I think, would agree

00:15:11 with this basic theistic stuff that I’ve been talking about.

00:15:15 Take Moses Maimonides, for example.

00:15:18 Now, what makes Christianity distinct,

00:15:20 this supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us,

00:15:25 God becomes a creature, but without ceasing to be God

00:15:30 and without overwhelming the integrity

00:15:32 of the creature he becomes.

00:15:33 What we see in the burning bush,

00:15:35 that principle which obtains across the board,

00:15:37 so the closer God comes to me,

00:15:39 the more radiant I become, right?

00:15:42 But take that now to the nth degree,

00:15:44 would be what we mean by the incarnation,

00:15:46 the incarnation of the Son of God becoming a creature

00:15:51 in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful.

00:15:57 That’s the pillar of Christianity.

00:15:58 It’s the incarnation.

00:16:01 And what follows from that is the redemption

00:16:03 of all of reality, so not just of human beings,

00:16:07 but in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world.

00:16:14 The Greek fathers always said God became human,

00:16:17 that humans might become God.

00:16:19 And that’s a good way to sum up, I think,

00:16:21 the essence of Christianity.

00:16:23 Why is this such an important thing?

00:16:25 So it’s a distinctive thing,

00:16:26 but why is it so important philosophically

00:16:30 to what it means to be a Christian?

00:16:34 What impact did that have on our world,

00:16:36 on human civilization, on human nature,

00:16:39 on our morals of why live, what to live for,

00:16:43 and the meaning of it all?

00:16:44 Why is incarnation so important?

00:16:46 Well, I think it’s massively important

00:16:48 because it’s the divinization principle

00:16:49 that God wants to divinize his creation

00:16:52 and sort of in this concentrated point

00:16:54 of Jesus of Nazareth.

00:16:56 But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus,

00:16:58 so that goes right back to Paul.

00:17:00 As we’re grafted onto Christ,

00:17:02 we talk about that as the church,

00:17:04 we become like cells and molecules in an organism.

00:17:08 That’s the church, it’s not an organization,

00:17:10 that’s a deformation of ecclesiology.

00:17:13 The church is this organism that begins with Jesus

00:17:17 and then he’s drawing all of humanity,

00:17:20 but ultimately all of nature,

00:17:23 all of creation to himself.

00:17:26 When the Son of Man is lifted up,

00:17:27 he will draw all things to himself,

00:17:29 that idea of the gathering in of a scattered creation.

00:17:34 So in that way, it’s at the heart of it.

00:17:36 Then there’s all kinds of things.

00:17:37 If God becomes human,

00:17:39 that means there’s a dignity to humanity,

00:17:41 which goes beyond anything any humanist

00:17:43 of any stripe has ever said, right?

00:17:46 Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary.

00:17:50 Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable.

00:17:53 God became one of us in order to divinize us.

00:17:56 The goal of my life is not just to be a good person,

00:17:59 not just to be materially successful,

00:18:02 not just to be a member of society.

00:18:05 The goal of my life is to become

00:18:07 a participant in the divine nature.

00:18:09 And so I don’t think there is a humanism greater than that,

00:18:12 even conceivably.

00:18:13 So that’s where I think humanism

00:18:16 is profoundly influenced by the incarnation.

00:18:20 And just our notion of God is noncompetitive to us.

00:18:25 And it’s so important, because I think in so many systems

00:18:27 from mythology onward,

00:18:29 you have these competitive understandings of God.

00:18:32 When Jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies,

00:18:35 I no longer call you servants but friends,

00:18:38 it’s an extraordinary moment.

00:18:40 Because every God who’s ever been served,

00:18:43 well, that’s the best we can hope for

00:18:45 is that we’ll be as the servant of God.

00:18:48 You know, I’ll try to obey you, Lord.

00:18:50 I’ll try to do what you want.

00:18:51 But when Jesus says, I no longer call you servants

00:18:54 or slaves, he would have said in the Greek there, you know.

00:18:58 But friends, I don’t know,

00:19:01 I can’t imagine anything greater than that,

00:19:03 becoming God’s friend.

00:19:04 That’s a call to become one with God.

00:19:08 It’s possible to become one with God.

00:19:12 Now I should mention,

00:19:13 you’re one of the greatest religious communicators

00:19:15 I’ve ever experienced.

00:19:17 A huge number of people are fans of yours.

00:19:19 You’ve done a lot of great conversations.

00:19:23 You’ve done Reddit AMAs,

00:19:25 which is a very unique, bold, brave thing.

00:19:29 And on one of them, somebody asked,

00:19:34 what’s the most challenging of the seven deadly sins?

00:19:37 So first, what are the seven deadly sins?

00:19:41 What do they have to do with Christianity?

00:19:43 How essential, how crucial they are to the religion?

00:19:47 And what’s the most challenging in our modern day?

00:19:51 Yeah, to name them, pride, envy, anger,

00:19:55 sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust

00:19:59 are the seven deadly sins.

00:20:01 We’re called capital sins sometimes,

00:20:03 they’re the head sins from which things tend to flow.

00:20:07 The most fundamental is pride.

00:20:11 Probably most people today, if you talk about like vice,

00:20:13 or you talk about a deadly sin,

00:20:15 they would think about lust.

00:20:16 But the classical authors, including Dante,

00:20:19 who does this pictorially,

00:20:21 that’s the least of the deadly sins is lust,

00:20:23 because it’s the one that’s most sort of dependent

00:20:25 upon the body and its passions and so on.

00:20:29 The most important is pride.

00:20:30 Pride is the deadliest of deadly sins.

00:20:33 And it’s very simple to see why.

00:20:34 Pride is, Augustine calls it incurvatus in se.

00:20:38 I’m caved in around myself.

00:20:40 Like a black hole, right, to get into the scientific.

00:20:44 But the black hole to me is a great symbol,

00:20:46 you know, that it’s so heavy

00:20:48 that it draws everything, including light.

00:20:50 Nothing can escape from it.

00:20:52 See, that’s the sinner.

00:20:54 We’re all sinners.

00:20:55 We’re like black holes,

00:20:56 that we draw everything into ourselves.

00:21:00 So as a sinner, and I’ll confess I’m a sinner,

00:21:04 the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment,

00:21:08 and I’m drawing you now into my world and so on.

00:21:13 What that does is it kills us off,

00:21:16 and it darkens life, and it makes it small,

00:21:20 and heavy, and awful, right?

00:21:23 It’s like, but see, compared to the contrasting thing,

00:21:28 is when you’re lost in a moment,

00:21:31 you’re not concerned about the impression I’m making.

00:21:33 You’re not concerned about drawing the world into yourself.

00:21:35 You’re not concerned about this monkey on my back

00:21:38 that’s always telling me, you know,

00:21:39 look good and sound right.

00:21:41 But you’re lost in something.

00:21:44 You’re just talking, you know, to a friend,

00:21:46 and the two of you together

00:21:47 are discovering something true or beautiful.

00:21:50 You’re lost in a movie, or you’re lost in a book.

00:21:53 Those are the best moments in life.

00:21:54 Those are the best,

00:21:55 because they’re the least prideful moments, right?

00:21:58 That’s when the light comes out.

00:22:00 I become radiant, because I’m overcoming this tendency

00:22:05 to fall in on myself.

00:22:08 Dante is so good, because the way he pictures Satan

00:22:12 in Divine Comedy, and you know,

00:22:14 he’s at the center of the Earth.

00:22:15 So like a black hole that way,

00:22:17 like he’s at the center of gravity.

00:22:19 He’s at the heaviest place.

00:22:21 And there’s not fire where he is, but ice,

00:22:23 which is a much, much better image,

00:22:26 that you’re frozen in place, and you’re stuck.

00:22:29 And he’s got wings, right?

00:22:31 And they used to be angel wings, because he’s an angel,

00:22:33 but now they’re like bat wings for Dante,

00:22:35 and they’re flapping.

00:22:37 And all they’re doing is making the world around him colder,

00:22:40 because he’s ice, he’s stuck in his own iciness,

00:22:43 and then he’s beating his wings over the ice,

00:22:45 making everyone else colder.

00:22:46 It’s a great image.

00:22:48 And then he has, this is cool too,

00:22:50 he has three faces, Satan,

00:22:53 because he’s the simulacrum of the Trinity.

00:22:55 So every sinner thinks he’s God.

00:22:57 So I pretend I’m God.

00:22:58 So he’s got the three faces.

00:23:00 And from all six eyes, he weeps.

00:23:03 Also from all three mouths, he’s chewing a sinner.

00:23:07 He’s got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the three mouths,

00:23:11 you know, the three traitors.

00:23:13 But I thought, it’s just a great image

00:23:16 of all of us sinners, is we’re stuck,

00:23:19 it’s heavy, it’s cold,

00:23:22 we’re chewing on our past resentments,

00:23:25 we’re weeping in our sadness,

00:23:27 and we’re making the world around us colder.

00:23:29 It’s beautiful, it’s great.

00:23:30 So that’s pride.

00:23:31 See, that’s an image of pride,

00:23:33 because Satan, that’s his great sin, pride,

00:23:35 which is why he needed Michael, right, Mikael,

00:23:38 who’s like God, so that the great challenge to him,

00:23:41 which we need all the time,

00:23:43 is someone to say, wait a minute, wait a minute,

00:23:45 you’re not God.

00:23:46 But the minute we say, I’m God,

00:23:49 whew, black hole, I now cave in on myself,

00:23:52 I suck everything into myself,

00:23:54 and I turn into Dante Satan.

00:23:57 So that’s a great image, that’s pride.

00:23:59 That’s the most fundamental.

00:24:01 That’s the uber capital sin.

00:24:04 All the other ones flow from that, in a way.

00:24:06 So in general, empathy, humility, compassion,

00:24:10 love thy neighbor, is the way to fight the sin of pride.

00:24:14 Right, which is why the masters tend to say,

00:24:16 this was Bernard, St. Bernard was asked,

00:24:19 what are the three most important virtues?

00:24:21 And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas,

00:24:24 because it’s the opposite of pride.

00:24:26 So, but you know, they’re bringing Aquinas in again,

00:24:29 because we think, oh, humility, I’m no good.

00:24:32 That’s not what it means at all.

00:24:33 It means what I was describing before,

00:24:35 when you’re just lost in something,

00:24:37 you’re just lost in it.

00:24:39 My image, I live out in Santa Barbara,

00:24:41 and I like to walk on the beach out there,

00:24:44 and there’s a section of the beach

00:24:45 where they let the dogs run free without leashes.

00:24:48 And when you see a dog, and he’s well cared for,

00:24:52 and his master’s right there,

00:24:53 and the master’s throwing the tennis ball out into the surf,

00:24:56 and the dog goes galloping out into the surf,

00:24:57 and he gets it with a big smile, and comes running back.

00:25:00 That’s humility.

00:25:02 That’s an image of heaven,

00:25:03 because he’s just lost in that moment.

00:25:05 He doesn’t care about impressing anybody.

00:25:07 He doesn’t care about what people think of him.

00:25:10 He’s just lost in it.

00:25:13 That’s it, that’s heaven, right?

00:25:16 And those moments in our life, when we get that,

00:25:18 it’s a little hint of paradise.

00:25:21 But the trouble is most of us live, frankly, most of the time

00:25:24 in various levels of hell,

00:25:27 and we’re dealing with these deadly sins.

00:25:29 Like envy flows from pride, because if I’m prideful,

00:25:32 I’m a black hole, I’m in Curvatus In Se, I’m collapsed in,

00:25:35 what am I really gonna be concerned about?

00:25:37 That guy’s getting more attention than I am.

00:25:39 That guy’s richer than I am.

00:25:40 That lady, she’s got a bigger reputation than I do,

00:25:43 and why don’t I have that, right?

00:25:46 So envy is a very close daughter of pride.

00:25:50 Anger flows from it.

00:25:51 Why do I get angry?

00:25:53 The dog isn’t getting angry on the beach

00:25:54 when he’s running after the tennis ball.

00:25:56 But I get angry all the time,

00:25:57 I sputter with anger when things aren’t going my way,

00:25:59 and you’re insulting me, and you’re not doing what I want,

00:26:02 and I’m being hurt, my reputation.

00:26:04 So anger flows from pride, you know?

00:26:07 All of them do, all of the deadly sins do.

00:26:10 So you said, I’m a sinner.

00:26:13 So we’re all sinners.

00:26:15 Yeah.

00:26:17 And you mentioned Satan.

00:26:19 Where’s the, so there’s heaven and hell,

00:26:22 there’s God and Satan.

00:26:25 Where’s the line between what it means to be good

00:26:30 and not good enough?

00:26:34 Or I hesitate to use the word sort of evil,

00:26:38 but maybe overwhelmingly sinful.

00:26:43 Where’s the line between hell and heaven?

00:26:45 Think of them as limit concepts, maybe.

00:26:47 They’re like heuristic devices.

00:26:49 So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God.

00:26:53 So think of the dog on the beach,

00:26:54 who is just, he’s fallen in love with his environment,

00:26:58 with his master, with the surf.

00:26:59 He’s just lost in it, right?

00:27:01 He’s forgotten himself, he’s transcended himself,

00:27:04 and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place.

00:27:08 Now, imagine the limit of that

00:27:11 is the friendship with God that we talked about,

00:27:14 that I become the friend of God.

00:27:16 I become so forgetful of myself,

00:27:19 so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God

00:27:22 that I found beatitude, right?

00:27:25 I found joy, the beatific vision, we call it.

00:27:30 That’s the limit case.

00:27:31 That’s where we’re tending.

00:27:32 That’s where God wants us to go.

00:27:34 Think of hell as the limit case in the opposite direction.

00:27:36 That’s curvatus in se.

00:27:37 That’s the black hole.

00:27:39 And we’re all sinners,

00:27:40 meaning we’re somewhere on that spectrum.

00:27:42 We have good days and bad days,

00:27:45 and we have good moments and bad moments,

00:27:46 and I can be drawn toward sin.

00:27:51 What’s God’s purpose on Christianity’s reading

00:27:54 is to bring us out of that.

00:27:56 Now, where did he go?

00:27:57 He went all the way into it to get us out of it.

00:28:00 It’s like pulling a sock back out.

00:28:02 The sock’s inside out, you have to go all the way in

00:28:04 and pull it back out.

00:28:05 And so God had to go all the way down.

00:28:08 There’s the trajectory of the incarnation.

00:28:13 Though he was in the form of God,

00:28:15 and this is St. Paul,

00:28:16 Jesus did not deem equality with God

00:28:18 a thing to be grasped at,

00:28:19 but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave,

00:28:21 being born in the likeness of men.

00:28:23 But then he was known to be of human estate,

00:28:26 and he accepted even death, death on a cross.

00:28:30 And so Paul imagines the incarnation as this downward journey

00:28:34 in order to get all of us, right?

00:28:36 All of us who were stuck, were stuck in our sin.

00:28:40 And so again, Paul says he became sin on the cross.

00:28:44 It’s a really, really powerful idea.

00:28:46 He wasn’t a sinner, because then he’d need to be saved too.

00:28:49 He’s not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction

00:28:53 in order to pull us back out of it.

00:28:55 So that’s a really powerful message, an embodiment,

00:29:02 sort of educating the world about sin.

00:29:07 That said, day to day,

00:29:09 there’s oscillations in terms of how much each human sins,

00:29:15 and there’s a struggle against that.

00:29:17 So that dog that loses himself on the beach

00:29:22 may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that.

00:29:26 That was, may have been not the best dog

00:29:30 he could be leading up to that.

00:29:32 So how, if it’s a math equation,

00:29:35 what does the final calculation look like

00:29:38 in terms of ending up in heaven?

00:29:40 What does it mean to live a good life in the end?

00:29:44 Is it the average amount of sin you do is low?

00:29:50 Are you allowed to make mistakes?

00:29:52 Yeah, the metric is love, right?

00:29:56 And love is not a feeling, it’s an act of the will.

00:29:59 To will the good of the other.

00:30:01 That’s Aquinas again.

00:30:02 To will the good of the other as other.

00:30:04 You see, that’s the anti black hole principle.

00:30:07 When I, I don’t.

00:30:08 Will the good of the other.

00:30:10 As other.

00:30:11 See, because if I’m willing your good,

00:30:13 because it’s good for me.

00:30:15 So again, it’s good for you that I’m on this program,

00:30:17 I guess, I’m willing your good,

00:30:19 but that’s because it’s gonna be down to my benefit.

00:30:21 That’s just an indirect egotism.

00:30:23 That’s why I see love is really rare and strange,

00:30:26 that I really want what’s good for you as other.

00:30:32 So not connected to the black hole tendency

00:30:34 of my own prideful ego.

00:30:36 When I’ve broken that, I’ve forgotten self

00:30:39 and I’ve moved into the space of your own good.

00:30:43 That’s what love is.

00:30:44 Now, God wants us to be,

00:30:46 by this they will know that you’re my disciples,

00:30:48 that you love one another, Jesus says.

00:30:50 So that’s it.

00:30:52 Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth

00:30:56 and we’re better or worse at that.

00:30:59 The point of a church is to graft us onto Christ

00:31:02 that we might become more and more conformed to love.

00:31:05 But you know, the final calculus, I’ll leave that to God.

00:31:07 I mean, but use love as the metric.

00:31:09 At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience,

00:31:12 did I will the good of the other today?

00:31:14 How effective was I at that?

00:31:17 And be, just like Ignatius of Loyola, be brutally honest.

00:31:21 Or was I just willing someone’s good

00:31:22 because it was good for me?

00:31:25 Where were those moments where I was like the dog

00:31:27 on the beach, see?

00:31:29 And then see, play it the way,

00:31:30 not so much God the law giver surveying

00:31:33 and you did three of those and four.

00:31:35 It’s God wants us to be fully alive.

00:31:39 Saint Irenaeus is one of my great heroes,

00:31:41 ancient, you know, patristic figure.

00:31:43 And his famous line is gloria de homo vivens, right?

00:31:46 The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

00:31:50 See, and that gets us over this sort of obsession

00:31:53 with the illegalism and did I do enough?

00:31:55 And is that, that’s a big enough sin.

00:31:58 God wants us fully alive.

00:32:00 The key to that is willing the good of the other.

00:32:02 He died that we might come to a richer

00:32:07 appropriation of that.

00:32:08 So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world

00:32:13 or to love the world deeply.

00:32:17 And what love means is the other.

00:32:20 Is.

00:32:21 Get out of yourself, right.

00:32:22 It’s the humility, yeah, getting out of yourself.

00:32:26 Let go.

00:32:26 That somehow is not, that’s not even selfless

00:32:31 because the word selfless requires there to be a self.

00:32:35 It’s almost like just letting go.

00:32:38 Yeah, I might talk about like a gift of self

00:32:39 that you’re self aware but you give a gift of yourself.

00:32:43 Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself

00:32:46 but it becomes a radiant source of life for others.

00:32:49 I think Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense

00:32:51 of herself, it seems to me.

00:32:52 But it was to light other people up

00:32:57 so that they might be radiant.

00:33:00 That’s the game.

00:33:00 So you could probably articulate it that way too.

00:33:03 Yeah.

00:33:05 I love love.

00:33:06 It’s such an interesting thing.

00:33:08 But we have to be hard nosed about it.

00:33:09 Like your friend Dostoevsky,

00:33:11 love is a harsh and dreadful thing, right.

00:33:13 It’s not a feeling.

00:33:14 And our culture is so sentimentalized love

00:33:17 that it’s having warm feelings or doing what people want.

00:33:20 And that’s not it at all.

00:33:20 Love is always correlated to the order of the good.

00:33:24 Because if I’m willing the good of the other,

00:33:26 I have to know what that good is, right.

00:33:28 So a parent does this, oh, I’ll give the kid

00:33:30 whatever she wants.

00:33:31 Well, that’s not love, that’s indulgence

00:33:33 or that’s sentimentality.

00:33:35 But I have to know what the goods really are

00:33:37 if I’m gonna will them for you, right.

00:33:39 Yeah, in some sense, you’re absolutely right.

00:33:43 A component of love is the struggle to know the other.

00:33:47 Right.

00:33:48 It’s the struggle to understand.

00:33:49 I mean, that’s what I mean by empathy.

00:33:52 It’s the, yeah, it’s not Valentine’s Day romantic gifts.

00:33:57 It’s a struggle.

00:33:59 It’s like trying to understand,

00:34:02 trying to perturb your own mind

00:34:04 and that of another human being

00:34:06 to try to figure out who they are,

00:34:09 what they want, what makes them happy,

00:34:12 what are they afraid of, what are they hoping for.

00:34:16 And it’s like a dance, a dance of conversation,

00:34:19 a dance of just shared experiences

00:34:23 and all that kind of stuff.

00:34:24 And all of that requires for you to be,

00:34:27 I guess, yeah, empathize.

00:34:31 Imagine yourself in their place

00:34:35 and then love that person

00:34:38 when you’re living inside that person.

00:34:40 Yeah, several minutes ago

00:34:42 about the pillars of Christianity.

00:34:43 So we talked about God, talked about incarnation,

00:34:45 but you’re getting now to a third key one,

00:34:48 namely the Trinity.

00:34:50 Because we’re monotheists, right,

00:34:52 but we don’t think God is monolithically one.

00:34:54 We think God is a play of persons.

00:34:57 And the Father from all eternity

00:35:01 by a great mental act forms his interior word,

00:35:07 as Aquinas puts it.

00:35:08 And that’s the logos, right?

00:35:10 That’s the verbum, that’s the word

00:35:12 by which the Father knows himself.

00:35:13 And we call it the Son.

00:35:14 So the imago, it’s the image of the Father.

00:35:17 But then see, the great thing is

00:35:18 that imago is not like just a dead image on a mirror

00:35:21 or a dead image at a pond or something.

00:35:24 It’s a full reflection of the Father’s being.

00:35:29 He’s one in being with the Father.

00:35:31 Therefore, the Son has everything the Father has

00:35:33 except being the Father.

00:35:35 But that means that the two of them look at each other

00:35:38 and they’re just crazy in love with each other

00:35:41 because the Father’s the fullness of being,

00:35:44 the Son is the fullness of being.

00:35:46 And they’re so crazy in love with each other that they,

00:35:49 this is Fulton Sheen put it this way,

00:35:52 that there’s this, ah, they just,

00:35:54 they love each other with this sigh.

00:35:58 And we call that the Spiritus Sanctus.

00:36:00 That’s the holy breath, right?

00:36:01 The holy sigh of love between the Father and the Son.

00:36:06 And that’s one being, one essence we say of God.

00:36:10 But in these three persons,

00:36:12 but all your language about like dance

00:36:14 and play and community,

00:36:16 the Greek Fathers talked about perichoresis,

00:36:18 which means God, the three persons kind of sit

00:36:21 in a choir together.

00:36:23 So they sing together, you know?

00:36:27 And that’s why, see, Christianity is unique in this claim,

00:36:32 that God is love.

00:36:34 So every religion will say God loves,

00:36:37 you know, in some way.

00:36:38 Love is an attribute of God.

00:36:40 God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes.

00:36:43 But Christianity is unique in all the religions

00:36:45 in saying that God is love.

00:36:47 And somehow the Holy Trinity embodies that idea.

00:36:52 I mean, that philosophically has always been confusing to me,

00:36:56 what it means to be three things

00:37:00 and at the same time be one God,

00:37:04 the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

00:37:07 What is this dance between these three?

00:37:10 What exact, like how do you visualize,

00:37:13 how do you understand this?

00:37:15 Yeah.

00:37:15 This very fascinating, essential thing for Christianity.

00:37:20 The first thing I’d say is what we already

00:37:21 have been sort of talking about,

00:37:22 is if you say God is love,

00:37:24 and most people probably say, yeah, I like that.

00:37:25 It’s a good idea, God is love.

00:37:27 But it’s very peculiar because if he is love,

00:37:30 there has to be in his unity a lover, a beloved,

00:37:36 and the love that they share.

00:37:37 Otherwise he isn’t loved by his very essence.

00:37:40 He would love, it would be an attribute of God

00:37:43 or an action of God.

00:37:45 But if it’s his very nature,

00:37:46 there has to be lover, beloved, and love shared.

00:37:49 And the tradition eventually came to see that.

00:37:52 The image I was using before of the Father,

00:37:55 his imago, the Son, well that’s born of God’s infinite mind.

00:38:00 So of course God has an image of himself.

00:38:02 Heck, I’ve got an image of myself.

00:38:04 That’s something I can pull off as a puny little creature.

00:38:07 God in his infinity has a perfect imago of himself.

00:38:11 And they have to fall in love with each other.

00:38:13 What else can they do?

00:38:14 Because they’re in the presence of infinite good.

00:38:17 And so it has to follow that you then have

00:38:20 the shared love that connects them.

00:38:22 And that’s how we generate, if you want,

00:38:24 this idea of the three persons in God.

00:38:27 Let me ask you about the church.

00:38:30 One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism

00:38:35 is the Catholic church.

00:38:38 What is the Catholic church?

00:38:40 I would say it’s the mystical body of Jesus.

00:38:43 So as I said before, it’s not an organization.

00:38:45 If we do it that way, we’re gonna miss it.

00:38:46 It’s got organizational elements to it.

00:38:48 So I’m a bishop, I’m a office holder within the church.

00:38:52 But the church is an organism, not an organization.

00:38:56 So it’s a organism of interconnected cells, as I said,

00:39:01 namely all of the baptized,

00:39:02 gathered around Christ in a mystical union.

00:39:06 That’s the church.

00:39:07 But there’s buildings, there’s titles.

00:39:10 Sure, because it manifests itself institutionally then.

00:39:14 So are the sort of heavy things about that

00:39:18 all have to do with pride?

00:39:19 Yeah, sure.

00:39:20 The sexiness of the buildings?

00:39:22 Yeah, no, whatever is corrupt in the church,

00:39:24 of course, it comes from pride, from sin.

00:39:26 And one thing I like about the New Testament

00:39:28 is so clear on that.

00:39:29 Paul is, in his little tiny communities,

00:39:32 so before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything,

00:39:35 Paul had these little tiny communities of Christians

00:39:36 like in Corinth and Ephesus.

00:39:39 What’s the one thing we know about them?

00:39:41 Is they fought with each other.

00:39:42 Because Paul’s always uprating them

00:39:44 and telling them, come on, would you people get it together?

00:39:48 Who’s bewitched you?

00:39:49 So from the beginning, we’ve been fighting with each other

00:39:52 because we’re made up of sinners.

00:39:55 So one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology

00:39:59 is the official name for the study of the church,

00:40:00 is to talk about the treasure in earthen vessels.

00:40:04 Paul’s language again.

00:40:05 The treasure is Christ.

00:40:07 The treasure is the love he’s bequeathed to the world.

00:40:11 That’s the treasure that we have.

00:40:12 But it’s always held in these really fragile vessels,

00:40:15 namely us, and so it’s gonna be marked by corruption

00:40:18 and stupidity and pride and everything else.

00:40:21 Well, nevertheless, there’s a hierarchy.

00:40:23 There’s titles and so on.

00:40:26 If we remove pride from the picture,

00:40:28 so the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy

00:40:31 that makes up this one organism, this living organism,

00:40:36 what’s the role of the pope, for example?

00:40:39 What is the role of a bishop, for example?

00:40:44 What is the role of the hierarchy

00:40:46 in terms of the broader vision of Christianity,

00:40:49 Catholicism as a religion?

00:40:52 I’m a devotee of this guy named Johann Adam Müller,

00:40:54 who was a theologian early part of the 19th century,

00:40:57 and he was part of the kind of romantic movement.

00:41:00 And he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize

00:41:04 and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church.

00:41:10 So he’s the personal symbol of the unity of the church.

00:41:14 Who’s a bishop?

00:41:15 The bishop is the personal symbol

00:41:17 of the unity of a diocese.

00:41:19 Who’s a pastor of a parish?

00:41:20 He’s the personal symbol of the unity of that parish.

00:41:24 So he understood it not so much organizationally

00:41:27 as organically, again.

00:41:28 It was like, what, that around which the pattern

00:41:32 organizes itself.

00:41:34 And if you don’t have that unifying figure,

00:41:37 the community will kind of reciprocate.

00:41:39 And you see that all the time.

00:41:40 Without headship, we would say.

00:41:43 So it’s more symbolic and organic

00:41:45 than it is organizational.

00:41:47 So symbols for community.

00:41:49 But there’s such fascinating peculiarities

00:41:52 to each individual symbol.

00:41:55 There’s different characteristics

00:41:56 that make up the different people.

00:41:58 They have different ways of communicating.

00:42:01 They have different hopes and fears

00:42:02 and all that kind of stuff.

00:42:06 If they’re all symbols,

00:42:08 what’s the role of the different peculiarities

00:42:13 of those symbols?

00:42:14 Of being an inspiring uniter versus maybe a stronger type

00:42:20 of more judgmental kind of communicator,

00:42:26 all that kind of stuff.

00:42:27 Can you maybe speak to the human part of these symbols?

00:42:32 Yeah, well, I might just shift to another image of shepherd.

00:42:37 So that’s a classic biblical image.

00:42:38 And as a bishop, I walk around with this thing

00:42:40 called a crozier, which is a shepherd’s staff.

00:42:43 So it’s the symbol of the bishop’s office.

00:42:45 And the crozier, though, is a kind of in your face thing

00:42:50 in a way, because it’s got the end of it

00:42:53 was meant to hold off wild animals.

00:42:55 And then the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back

00:42:59 to the fold.

00:43:00 So I walk in with that, oh, this is nice.

00:43:01 Oh, look at the bishop coming in.

00:43:03 But that’s a kind of in your face symbol

00:43:05 that I’m here to defend the church against predators.

00:43:09 And I’m also here to draw people in

00:43:12 who are wandering too far away.

00:43:13 So that’s okay.

00:43:14 I mean, that’s part of the role of the hierarchy

00:43:17 and the Pope and bishops and pastors.

00:43:20 Pastor just means shepherd, right?

00:43:21 So I’m the shepherd of a parish.

00:43:24 So that’s okay.

00:43:25 It’s not like just all sunshine and light

00:43:26 and what a pretty image.

00:43:28 The one who embodies the unity of the community

00:43:30 is also the shepherd.

00:43:32 Okay, but again, leaning on the human thing.

00:43:36 Yeah.

00:43:37 The church is an institution.

00:43:40 And I don’t know if you’ve heard,

00:43:42 but there is an element of power that corrupts.

00:43:46 An absolute power corrupts absolutely,

00:43:48 as the old saying goes.

00:43:51 Let me ask you something else that came up

00:43:53 on the Reddit AMA.

00:43:56 Yeah, megachurches and the prosperity gospel.

00:43:59 And you’ve mentioned that you may not be a fan.

00:44:03 What are your views on this?

00:44:05 And what are your views in general of money and power

00:44:08 corrupting the heads of these institutions?

00:44:12 I don’t like the prosperity gospel

00:44:13 because the gospel is about Jesus journey

00:44:17 into radical self forgetfulness on the cross.

00:44:21 And he never makes a promise of earthly,

00:44:24 of earthly well being.

00:44:27 Can you explain what the prosperity gospel is?

00:44:29 Yeah, the view that if I follow Jesus

00:44:31 and I follow God with great trust

00:44:33 that I will be rewarded with wealth and position

00:44:37 and status in this world.

00:44:39 It might be God’s will when I get that.

00:44:41 But you know, Aquinas said this,

00:44:42 say I look at a very sinful person,

00:44:44 I say, kind of, he’s got a great house

00:44:45 and he’s richer than I am and all that.

00:44:47 Aquinas says, yeah, but maybe that’s a punishment.

00:44:51 Cause maybe all that is leading him away from God.

00:44:53 And actually that’s God’s way of punishing him.

00:44:55 And the fact that you don’t have wealth in a big house

00:44:57 is actually a great gift to you

00:44:59 because now it frees you for doing God’s will.

00:45:02 So we can’t read, you know, God’s favor in worldly terms.

00:45:08 I would say God’s favor is, am I awakened to deeper love?

00:45:13 Then I know that I’m finding God’s favor.

00:45:15 Now, God might decide, sure,

00:45:17 I want you to have this and that.

00:45:18 I want to provide this to you.

00:45:20 Fine.

00:45:20 Then I say, thank you, Lord.

00:45:21 How can I use it as an instrument of love?

00:45:25 All the masters talk about detachment.

00:45:27 And that’s another reason I don’t like the prosperity gospel

00:45:29 is though I’m getting attached now

00:45:31 to all these material advantages.

00:45:34 And I’m even seeing them as a sign of God’s favor.

00:45:37 Let go of all that.

00:45:38 You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love.

00:45:41 So if you’re rich, the right question is,

00:45:43 okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich?

00:45:46 So that, what can I do?

00:45:47 How can my riches be an expression of love?

00:45:50 If I’m popular, if I’m healthy,

00:45:52 okay, why am I popular?

00:45:53 Why am I healthy?

00:45:54 How can I use that for your good?

00:45:56 I’m sick, in bed, I’m suffering.

00:45:59 Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love?

00:46:03 So I’d rather measure it that way

00:46:05 than through worldly success.

00:46:07 That’s why I’m against the prosperity gospel.

00:46:10 Okay.

00:46:10 So there’s a, don’t seek worldly possessions,

00:46:15 but whatever happens to you, good or bad,

00:46:19 seek how that could be used

00:46:21 to increase the amount of love in the world.

00:46:23 Right.

00:46:24 The image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune,

00:46:27 which is a device on a lot of the Gothic cathedrals.

00:46:29 And it’s this great circle, right, this wheel.

00:46:32 At the top of it is a king.

00:46:34 And then it turns this way,

00:46:35 and the king has lost his crown.

00:46:36 And the bottom is a pauper.

00:46:37 And then over here is a king,

00:46:39 is a guy climbing up to power, right?

00:46:42 And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ.

00:46:45 And the idea is just very simple, but very profound,

00:46:47 that the wheel is life, you know?

00:46:49 It’s sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down.

00:46:51 Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige.

00:46:55 Other times you’re losing it, you’re going down.

00:46:56 Other times you got none of it.

00:46:57 Other times you’re coming back up.

00:46:59 Okay.

00:47:00 Don’t live on the rim of the wheel.

00:47:01 It’ll make you crazy.

00:47:02 Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety.

00:47:06 Where you should live is the center of the wheel,

00:47:08 where Christ is, right?

00:47:10 Because that’s the link now to the eternity of God.

00:47:13 That’s the point of love,

00:47:15 where love can flow through you to the world.

00:47:17 And then you can look at the wheel.

00:47:19 You’re a Beatles fan, right?

00:47:21 I think I discovered that.

00:47:22 I love the Beatles.

00:47:23 And the song that always comes to my mind

00:47:25 when I think of that image is John Lennon,

00:47:27 the end of his life.

00:47:29 So a guy that, I mean, rode the wheel of fortune like crazy.

00:47:32 You know, he was at the top of the world in every way.

00:47:36 And then Beatles break up and he kind of loses it.

00:47:39 And then he’s at the lost weekend in the 70s

00:47:41 at the very bottom.

00:47:42 When he died, he was just kind of coming back up again.

00:47:45 But the song I always think of is watching the wheels,

00:47:48 right?

00:47:49 I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.

00:47:50 I really love to watch them roll

00:47:51 because I’m no longer riding on the merry go round.

00:47:54 That’s right out of the medieval mystics,

00:47:56 that he’s not riding on the wheel.

00:47:59 He’s just watching it go round and round.

00:48:01 That’s the point of, the Greeks called it apotheia,

00:48:04 and the Latins called it indifference, you know?

00:48:08 Not like I’m blasé, it just means I’m detached

00:48:12 from success, failure, less success, more success.

00:48:16 I’m detached from that.

00:48:18 I’m sitting here watching the wheel go round and round

00:48:20 because I’m not riding on it anymore.

00:48:22 The mystics have always made that transition.

00:48:25 Let me ask you a difficult question

00:48:27 about the darker side of human nature,

00:48:29 of human power, of institutions.

00:48:34 What’s your view on the long history

00:48:36 and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children

00:48:39 by a Catholic priest?

00:48:40 So this is a difficult topic,

00:48:43 but maybe an important one to shine a light on.

00:48:45 Yeah, it’s awful, you know, and it’s been a problem.

00:48:48 Go back to Peter Damian back in the 11th century

00:48:51 was talking about it.

00:48:52 So it’s been a problem, and whenever really sinful

00:48:54 human beings have been in close proximity to children,

00:48:57 we find this issue.

00:48:59 Has it been around the church?

00:49:00 Yes.

00:49:03 Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way

00:49:06 in the last 30 years?

00:49:07 Absolutely.

00:49:07 So I’m glad the church has made important strides,

00:49:12 and it has.

00:49:13 Back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas Accords

00:49:16 where the bishops of America

00:49:18 put a lot of these protocols in place

00:49:20 that really have been effective

00:49:22 at ameliorating this problem.

00:49:24 The numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s,

00:49:27 and that’s been demonstrated over and over again.

00:49:29 And then they fell dramatically after that.

00:49:31 So that’s not to excuse anything,

00:49:33 but it’s to say I think progress has been made with it.

00:49:36 What’s the impulse to secrecy?

00:49:38 Yeah, well, to protect institutions.

00:49:40 That’s always, that’s a sinful instinct.

00:49:43 I’m not all together.

00:49:44 I mean, sure, an institution is worth protecting,

00:49:46 but if it reaches the point where you’re indifferent

00:49:48 to people’s wellbeing, then you’re in trouble.

00:49:52 So institutions role should be transparent and honest

00:49:57 with the sins of its members and of itself.

00:50:01 Sure, yeah.

00:50:02 So maybe you can speak to the fact as a priest, a bishop,

00:50:09 as part of Catholicism, you’re not allowed to marry,

00:50:15 not allowed to have sex, you’re sworn to celibacy.

00:50:22 What is behind that idea?

00:50:25 What is the sort of, we’ve talked about some broad stroke

00:50:28 ideas of love, what’s behind the idea of celibacy?

00:50:33 And that’s a good way to get at it.

00:50:34 It’s a path of love.

00:50:35 So the church is always in favor of inculcating love.

00:50:39 Marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy.

00:50:43 Saint Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied

00:50:46 with the things of this world and family

00:50:48 and those who are free from that

00:50:50 are freer for doing the work of God.

00:50:53 So that’s kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy.

00:50:56 And we still, I think, take that seriously.

00:50:59 I look at my own life.

00:50:59 I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things

00:51:03 and go places and minister in a way that I could not

00:51:07 if I had been married.

00:51:09 So I get it, I get the pragmatic side.

00:51:11 But I’m more interested in the sort of mystical side of it.

00:51:17 Remember Jesus was challenged about the person

00:51:18 who had a whole series of husbands and then they all died.

00:51:22 And so in heaven, which husband will the wife have?

00:51:26 And his answer is, in heaven, people don’t marry

00:51:30 and they’re not given in marriage.

00:51:31 There’s a higher way of love.

00:51:34 It’s a more radical way of love.

00:51:35 It’s not tied to a particular,

00:51:37 but I think through God is tied to everybody.

00:51:40 The celibate, and this has been

00:51:42 to the beginning of the church, not as a law,

00:51:45 but there were celibates

00:51:46 from the very beginning of the church,

00:51:48 including Jesus, of course, and Paul.

00:51:50 They sense something, that that way of living

00:51:55 mystically anticipates the way we’ll love in heaven.

00:51:58 It’s a sign even now within this world

00:52:02 of how we will all love in heaven.

00:52:04 So in that way, it’s a bit like pacifists.

00:52:10 I’m glad there are pacifists in the church.

00:52:12 And I’ve known some very powerful witnesses to pacifism.

00:52:17 I’m glad they’re pacifists because they witness even now

00:52:22 to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away

00:52:25 and we beat our swords into plowshares

00:52:26 and heaven’s a place of radical peace,

00:52:29 that some people even now live it.

00:52:32 At the same time, I’m glad not everyone’s a pacifist

00:52:35 because I would hold with the church to just war theory

00:52:38 that sometimes all we can do in this finite world

00:52:42 is to fight manifest wickedness.

00:52:45 So.

00:52:46 And just in the same way there’s just sex?

00:52:49 Well, no, right, I’m glad there are celibates,

00:52:51 but I’m glad not everyone’s a celibate.

00:52:53 I wouldn’t want that.

00:52:54 I mean, because married love is a marvelous expression

00:52:58 of the divine love.

00:52:59 So that’s why it’s good there are some.

00:53:01 And it’s always been a small number.

00:53:03 The actual experience of it, would you,

00:53:07 the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fasting?

00:53:10 So I’ve been enjoying fasting recently, so not eating.

00:53:15 Yeah.

00:53:16 For several days, that kind of stuff.

00:53:18 And that somehow brings you even deeper.

00:53:21 I’m in general in love with everything,

00:53:24 with nature and everything.

00:53:25 I see the beauty in the world.

00:53:26 But there’s a greater intensity to that

00:53:29 when you’re fasting, for example.

00:53:31 Yeah, I might use the language of sublimation

00:53:34 or redirection of energy and all that.

00:53:37 I think that’s true.

00:53:38 There’s a certain sublimation of energies into prayer,

00:53:43 into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies.

00:53:50 So it’s meant to be life enhancing.

00:53:52 The same way fasting is.

00:53:53 It’s meant ultimately to be life enhancing

00:53:55 and make you healthier and happier.

00:53:57 So celibacy is a path of love.

00:54:00 And I think it does involve a certain redirection

00:54:01 of energies, I’d say that.

00:54:03 Don’t you think, do you think it’s a heavy burden

00:54:08 for some humans to bear?

00:54:11 Sure.

00:54:11 For some priests to bear?

00:54:12 Sure.

00:54:13 I’m just saying, given the sexual abuse scandal,

00:54:19 is that the thing that breaks humans?

00:54:22 No, I wouldn’t tie that to celibacy.

00:54:24 And that’s been demonstrated over and over again.

00:54:27 There’s a priest named Andrew Greeley

00:54:28 who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago.

00:54:30 And Andy did a lot of research,

00:54:32 he was a sociologist of religion,

00:54:34 did a lot of research into that very question.

00:54:36 And there really is not a correlation

00:54:37 between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse

00:54:40 of children or of anybody.

00:54:42 So I wouldn’t make that correlation.

00:54:44 So bad people, sinful people are going to do

00:54:47 what they’re going to do.

00:54:48 I think people who have a tendency toward

00:54:52 abusing children sexually are drawn to situations

00:54:55 where they get ready access to kids

00:54:58 and they get institutional cover.

00:55:00 So that’s the only thing that can go through the list

00:55:03 from sports and Boy Scouts, et cetera.

00:55:06 And that’s been proven again and again.

00:55:08 So I would tie it more to that.

00:55:09 I wouldn’t tie it to celibacy.

00:55:11 So the challenge of course is all kinds of,

00:55:13 you said institutional cover,

00:55:15 there’s all kinds of institutions that cover

00:55:17 for people that do evil onto the world,

00:55:22 that do sinful things onto the world.

00:55:25 But there’s something about the church

00:55:27 which is, as an organism, is supposed to be an embodiment

00:55:32 of good in this world, of love in this world.

00:55:35 And it breaks people’s hearts to see this kind of,

00:55:39 even a small amount, this kind of thing happen

00:55:42 within the church.

00:55:43 It wakes you up to the cruelty, the absurdity

00:55:46 of the world sometimes.

00:55:48 Like it’s back to the question of why do bad things

00:55:54 happen to good people?

00:55:56 Why does God allow this kind of thing to happen?

00:56:00 And sort of maybe an unanswerable question.

00:56:02 Do you have an answer to that question?

00:56:04 I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language,

00:56:08 which is true enough,

00:56:10 it’s completely emotionally unsatisfying,

00:56:12 but it’s naming it truthfully enough.

00:56:15 And it goes back to Augustine,

00:56:16 which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good.

00:56:24 Now again, I know how unsatisfying

00:56:25 that sort of spare, austere language can sound,

00:56:29 but it gets us off the horns of a dilemma.

00:56:32 Aquinas, when he lays out a question,

00:56:34 he always has the objections first.

00:56:36 So is there a God?

00:56:38 Well, objection one, objection two, objection three.

00:56:40 And he’s really, you talk about steel manning

00:56:43 and argument, Aquinas is great at that.

00:56:46 One of the really steel manned arguments,

00:56:49 is that the right grammatical form?

00:56:51 What’s the past participle of the steel man?

00:56:55 But one of the best arguments, he formulates it this way.

00:57:00 If one of two contraries be infinite,

00:57:03 the other would be altogether destroyed.

00:57:05 And as an example from his medieval physics,

00:57:08 he goes, if there were an infinite heat,

00:57:09 there’d be no cold, right?

00:57:11 But God is described as infinitely good.

00:57:15 Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil.

00:57:18 But there is evil.

00:57:20 Therefore, God does not exist.

00:57:22 That’s a darn good argument.

00:57:23 That’s a really persuasive argument.

00:57:25 And I think, I’ve done this for a long time

00:57:27 in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy,

00:57:31 that’s the best argument against God.

00:57:33 But here’s something, before I press head with it,

00:57:36 something I find really interesting.

00:57:37 I think the three best arguments against God

00:57:40 all come from within the religious tradition.

00:57:43 Namely, the book of Job.

00:57:46 So Job, he’s great.

00:57:48 I mean, he’s a great guy.

00:57:50 He does everything right.

00:57:51 He’s God’s great servant,

00:57:53 and he’s punished in every possible way.

00:57:57 He has every possible suffering.

00:57:59 Aquinas’s argument from the Summa,

00:58:01 from the Summa, and then to your friend and mine, Dostoevsky.

00:58:06 I think in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan’s argument,

00:58:10 when he’s trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha.

00:58:13 And these examples drawn, they think, from Dostoevsky,

00:58:18 from the headlines of his own time,

00:58:20 of the most abject cruelty to children,

00:58:24 like an innocent child being made to suffer.

00:58:27 How in God’s name could that happen

00:58:32 if God exists and he’s all good?

00:58:34 So I get it, but see, the book of Job,

00:58:36 Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky,

00:58:38 these are all profoundly believing people.

00:58:41 It’s like when I hear Stephen Fry,

00:58:43 the famously atheist writer,

00:58:46 he will bring out this argument with great authority.

00:58:50 He does, of children with bone cancer

00:58:53 and worms that go into the eyes of children

00:58:55 and blind them before they kill them.

00:58:57 And, but he’s been preceded by the author of Job,

00:59:01 Thomas Aquinas and Dostoevsky, who stood right,

00:59:05 think of Job, in the whirlwind.

00:59:08 He stands there in the whirlwind, you know?

00:59:12 So you can’t blame the Christian tradition

00:59:15 for not dealing with this problem,

00:59:17 for brushing it under the carpet.

00:59:20 I mean, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.

00:59:23 It’s still a difficult problem to deal with,

00:59:25 that there’s all this cruelty of the world.

00:59:29 There’s a lot of example through history,

00:59:31 just in my own family history with the Soviet Union,

00:59:36 with Stalin, the atrocities that Stalin has brought onto

00:59:45 the people of the Soviet Union

00:59:47 throughout the 20th century is nearly immeasurable.

00:59:51 And yet, when you look at the entirety of human history,

00:59:57 you will see progress, not just the Soviet Union,

00:59:59 but the entirety of the civilization

01:00:01 throughout the 20th century,

01:00:02 and Stalin has a role to play.

01:00:05 There’s a dark aspect to,

01:00:08 somehow evil helps us make progress.

01:00:14 And I don’t know how to put that in the calculation.

01:00:18 It’s a, I don’t, you know, on the local scale,

01:00:21 I want to alleviate suffering.

01:00:23 I’m probably lean, heavily lean pacifist.

01:00:29 Not out of weakness, but out of strength,

01:00:31 but man, it does seem that history is sprinkled with evil,

01:00:37 and that evil does somehow nudge us towards good.

01:00:42 Yes, sometimes we can see it,

01:00:44 and that’s where the idea comes from,

01:00:46 that evil’s permitted to bring about some greater good,

01:00:49 and we can sometimes really see it.

01:00:53 Can we always see it?

01:00:54 No.

01:00:55 In fact, typically we don’t see it,

01:00:57 but now you bring another factor into this,

01:00:59 which is the difference between our minds and God’s mind.

01:01:02 So our minds, I mean, look, even,

01:01:04 they’re remarkably capacious,

01:01:06 but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time,

01:01:11 and even our eyes kind of take in

01:01:13 so much of the light spectrum,

01:01:15 and these little ape sensorium that we have

01:01:18 that could just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really.

01:01:22 How are we ever in a position to say,

01:01:25 oh no, there’s no possible good

01:01:26 that would ever come from that?

01:01:28 Even the greatest evil that Dostoevsky can conjure up,

01:01:32 and Stephen Fry, still, how could we have the arrogance

01:01:37 to say, I know there’s no good

01:01:41 that could ever come from that.

01:01:42 I know there’s no morally justifiable reason

01:01:45 why God would ever permit that,

01:01:47 because I think that’s hubris to the nth degree

01:01:50 for us to say that,

01:01:51 and that’s the assumption behind this claim

01:01:54 that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good.

01:01:57 Now, God understands it,

01:02:00 but we’re like little kids, like a four year old,

01:02:04 and their parents make a decision,

01:02:06 and we say, what in the, why in the world

01:02:08 would you do this to me?

01:02:10 This is my pastoral experience.

01:02:12 Years ago, there was a young father,

01:02:14 and his son was like three or something,

01:02:16 and he was in the hospital for something,

01:02:18 I forgot what it was,

01:02:19 but he had to undergo surgery, right?

01:02:21 So after the surgery, he’s in great pain,

01:02:23 this poor kid, this three year old kid,

01:02:25 and the dad was there with him, holding his hand,

01:02:28 and the son, this is what the father told me,

01:02:31 he said, he’s looking at me like, what gives here?

01:02:35 I mean, why would you, you love me,

01:02:37 I’ve always assumed that,

01:02:40 and yet you’re presiding over this somehow,

01:02:42 you’re approving of this,

01:02:43 and doing nothing to get me out of it, right?

01:02:46 And he said, the kid couldn’t articulate that,

01:02:48 but his eyes did, and the father said,

01:02:51 it was just killing me,

01:02:52 because I knew I couldn’t explain it to him.

01:02:55 And it’s true, I mean, he could vaguely gesture toward,

01:02:58 but the kid didn’t understand surgery,

01:03:00 and cutting his body, and taking things out of it,

01:03:02 and that this was gonna make him much better

01:03:04 in the long run, but I remember thinking,

01:03:06 that’s a great metaphor for us vis a vis God,

01:03:08 is here’s God, infinitely loving God,

01:03:11 who’s with us all the time, and we say,

01:03:13 what are you doing?

01:03:14 Why aren’t you taking this away from me?

01:03:17 And the answer, I mean, ultimately is trust,

01:03:20 trust me, trust me, surrender to me.

01:03:24 And when we don’t, that’s,

01:03:26 we get in trouble with the old pride,

01:03:29 and the hubris, and all that kind of stuff.

01:03:31 Yeah, no, but trust me when I tell you,

01:03:33 I mean, I completely get it in my own life,

01:03:36 and as a priest, you’re dealing with suffering all the time,

01:03:38 with people in pain all the time.

01:03:41 I remember as a young priest,

01:03:43 there was a policeman in our parish,

01:03:47 so he had a gun, and inexplicably,

01:03:50 no one had any clue.

01:03:52 He got up one night, shot his son to death,

01:03:55 and then shot himself.

01:03:57 This is my parish.

01:03:58 So I went to the wake, I remember, I show up,

01:04:01 and I’m this young, 27 year old goofball priest,

01:04:04 and I roll my collar around, and I walk in,

01:04:07 and there were two coffins,

01:04:09 the two coffins in the room,

01:04:10 there’s the son and the father.

01:04:11 And the mother was there, and she went like this to me.

01:04:17 She saw me, okay, you’re the religious guy here, what?

01:04:21 And just by instinct, I went like that too.

01:04:26 I went like, I don’t know what to tell, I can’t,

01:04:29 I don’t have an answer for you.

01:04:32 But I was there,

01:04:34 and I’m not saying to pat myself on the back,

01:04:36 this is, that’s where the church goes,

01:04:38 because Jesus went there.

01:04:41 Now we’re gesturing toward a more theological response.

01:04:44 The first one’s more austerely philosophical,

01:04:47 God permits evil to bring about a good.

01:04:49 But the theological response is, that’s where Christ went,

01:04:52 is he went all the way down.

01:04:54 He went all the way down into our suffering.

01:04:56 And see the cross as the limit case of evil,

01:05:01 humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice

01:05:08 and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering

01:05:11 and death, it’s all there.

01:05:13 And that’s where the Son of God went.

01:05:16 And I would say that’s why, as a priest, I went there.

01:05:19 That’s my job, is to go to those places.

01:05:22 So that’s the ultimate answer to the problem.

01:05:26 So there is, we can’t comprehend it,

01:05:30 but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice.

01:05:34 We trust it because we know on other grounds

01:05:37 of God’s existence.

01:05:38 See, I would resist the claim that,

01:05:39 well, this is such a knockdown argument,

01:05:42 so now we know there is no God.

01:05:43 I would say, no, there are all kinds

01:05:45 of other rational warrants for God.

01:05:46 And so I know that God exists.

01:05:49 I know that God is infinite love,

01:05:51 and now I gotta square that with this experience.

01:05:54 And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence

01:05:58 that God knows what he’s about.

01:06:01 Again, I know how inadequate that always seems

01:06:03 to anyone who’s suffering, including myself,

01:06:05 when I’m in great suffering.

01:06:07 But I think that’s the best that we’ve done

01:06:09 in the great tradition.

01:06:11 So if you were to steel man the case against God

01:06:16 or the existence of God, you find the most convincing

01:06:20 argument is there’s evil in the world,

01:06:23 therefore there’s no God.

01:06:24 There’s too much of it.

01:06:25 If I were to steel man that argument,

01:06:27 I’d do what Stephen Fry does.

01:06:28 I would do what Dostoevsky’s Ivan does.

01:06:30 I would do exactly that.

01:06:31 I would say there’s just too much.

01:06:34 And then if you wanna keep pressing it, animal suffering.

01:06:37 So we talk about human suffering,

01:06:39 but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on,

01:06:44 isn’t there just too much suffering

01:06:46 to be reconciled with an infinitely good God?

01:06:49 And that’s, again, Thomas Aquinas.

01:06:51 I’ve just used his very steel man argument.

01:06:55 You mentioned that, again, on Reddit,

01:06:57 somebody asked who your favorite communicator

01:07:02 of atheist ideas was, and you mentioned Christopher Hitchens.

01:07:06 Are there other ideas for atheism

01:07:12 that you find particularly challenging?

01:07:15 Well, that’s the one, is the problem of evil.

01:07:18 The other objection in Aquinas,

01:07:19 which has a lot of contemporary resonance,

01:07:22 is can’t we just explain everything through natural causes?

01:07:26 Why would you have to invoke a cause

01:07:28 beyond the causes in the world?

01:07:30 So as I’m trying to explain, let’s say for Aquinas,

01:07:33 motion, causality, finality,

01:07:37 can I just do that with natural causes?

01:07:39 Wouldn’t that suffice to explain it?

01:07:41 So I get like when naturalists are speaking

01:07:44 or people that are pure materialists,

01:07:46 they’ll just say, no, that’s perfectly adequate.

01:07:49 A scientific account of reality is utterly adequate

01:07:52 to our experience.

01:07:55 So I would steel man that and say,

01:07:56 well, show me why we need something more.

01:07:59 And to do that, you gotta get out of Plato’s cave,

01:08:02 it seems to me.

01:08:03 Because my objection to naturalism

01:08:08 is it’s staying within the realm

01:08:12 of the immediately empirically observable

01:08:15 and making the mistake of saying

01:08:17 that’s all there is to being.

01:08:19 That’s all there is that needs to be explained.

01:08:22 And long before we get to religion,

01:08:25 just stay with Plato.

01:08:27 The first step out of the cave,

01:08:28 if you combine it now with the parable of the line,

01:08:31 is mathematical objects.

01:08:33 And I’m with those, the many people that would say,

01:08:36 mathematics is an experience of the immaterial.

01:08:39 I’ve stepped out of a merely empirical,

01:08:42 physical, naturalistic world.

01:08:45 The minute I understand a pure number

01:08:48 or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship,

01:08:53 which would obtain in any possible world,

01:08:55 which are not tied to space and time,

01:08:58 that’s a first step out of the cave.

01:09:01 And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections.

01:09:05 For example, in the nature of being.

01:09:07 I mean, so I could talk about this thing

01:09:08 as a physical object and I can analyze it

01:09:10 at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists

01:09:13 up and down through this thing, and fine, fine.

01:09:16 But I’m still in Plato’s cave.

01:09:17 I’m still looking at the flickering images on the wall.

01:09:20 But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm,

01:09:24 I have entered a different realm of being, seems to me.

01:09:28 Do you think it’s possible for the cave to expand

01:09:30 so large that it encompasses the whole world?

01:09:32 Meaning, is it possible that we’re just clueless right now

01:09:38 in terms of, scientifically speaking,

01:09:41 with most of the world we haven’t figured out yet?

01:09:45 But do you think it’s possible through science to know God,

01:09:49 to look outside the world?

01:09:50 So it’s fundamentally the limit

01:09:52 of the empirical scientific method,

01:09:54 is that we can’t know some of these very big questions.

01:09:57 No, I’m not a scientist,

01:10:00 and I was never all that good at science.

01:10:02 I was more of a humanities guy.

01:10:03 But I love and respect the sciences, but I hate scientism.

01:10:06 And scientism is rampant today, with especially young people.

01:10:10 The reduction of all knowledge

01:10:11 to the scientific form of knowledge.

01:10:13 And I’m a vehement opponent of that.

01:10:16 There are dimensions of being that are not capturable

01:10:18 through a scientific method of mere observation,

01:10:21 hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera.

01:10:24 As great as that is, as wonderful as that is,

01:10:26 but it’s still, I think, within Plato’s cave.

01:10:29 And that’s not to say it’s not real.

01:10:31 It’s just at a relatively low level of reality.

01:10:34 You step out of Plato’s cave

01:10:35 when you go into pure mathematics.

01:10:37 That’s why, you know that article,

01:10:38 I just came across it recently,

01:10:40 and discovered this whole literature around it,

01:10:42 is Eugene Wigner’s article, 1960,

01:10:44 called the unreasonable applicability of mathematics

01:10:49 to the physical sciences.

01:10:50 I think that’s the title of it.

01:10:51 Or effectiveness or something like that, yeah.

01:10:53 But what’s so cool is that he’s not a religious man.

01:10:56 He was kind of a secular Jew.

01:10:57 But yet he uses the word miracle

01:10:59 like eight times in that article.

01:11:01 Because he just is so impressed by the fact

01:11:03 that high, complex mathematics describes so accurately

01:11:08 the physical world and can be used to create things

01:11:11 and to manipulate.

01:11:13 And why should that be true?

01:11:15 That there’s something very weirdly mysterious

01:11:18 about that relationship.

01:11:19 And I would say it’s because you stepped

01:11:21 into a higher order of being,

01:11:23 which is inclusive of a lower level being.

01:11:26 That’s the Platonic approach,

01:11:27 is that as you move, now I’m going to a different metaphor,

01:11:30 you move to higher levels,

01:11:31 they’re inclusive of the lower levels.

01:11:33 Yeah, there’s some magic there

01:11:35 that seems to, at least in our current understanding

01:11:38 of science, to be not quite capturable.

01:11:42 Even consciousness, the idea of consciousness.

01:11:45 Can I ask you, where do you think

01:11:46 the laws of nature come from?

01:11:48 So, I mean, sort of the Vigner question,

01:11:49 where does the deep mathematical structure

01:11:55 of things come from?

01:11:56 How do you explain that?

01:11:57 The mathematical structure or the fact

01:12:00 that the structure is somehow pleasing and beautiful.

01:12:04 Because those are two different.

01:12:07 Well, do the first one first.

01:12:08 I’m just curious to tell you,

01:12:09 where do you think it comes from?

01:12:11 I tend to believe, even in terms of physics,

01:12:13 we don’t really know what’s going on.

01:12:15 There’s so, so, so much more to be discovered.

01:12:18 We’re walking around in the dark

01:12:21 trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there,

01:12:23 and we’re patting ourselves on the back

01:12:25 and how many puzzles we’ve discovered so far.

01:12:28 Even Gadot’s incompleteness theorem,

01:12:30 what are the limits of mathematics,

01:12:32 axiomatic systems?

01:12:33 I don’t know what is the purpose of mathematics,

01:12:37 what is the power of mathematics?

01:12:38 Is it just a useful tool to study the world around us,

01:12:45 or is it something deeper that we’re just discovering?

01:12:50 All I know from my emotional perspective,

01:12:53 now I am an engineer, I’m a robotics AI person,

01:12:57 from an emotional perspective,

01:12:58 I just find the whole thing beautiful.

01:12:59 Yeah, but that’s really cool to me.

01:13:01 That’s a very interesting clue.

01:13:03 See, one of the arguments for God

01:13:05 is based on the intelligibility of the world.

01:13:08 It’s like Wigner, it’s a very peculiar fact,

01:13:10 it seems to me, that the world is so radically intelligible.

01:13:13 Why should that be true?

01:13:14 Why should it be the case

01:13:15 that being has this intelligible structure to it?

01:13:18 So it corresponds to an inquiring mind.

01:13:21 So Aquinas can say that the intelligible in act

01:13:25 is the intellect in act.

01:13:27 Meaning there’s some deep correspondence

01:13:29 between this and that.

01:13:32 And I’m with Wigner.

01:13:34 That’s, I think, really weird

01:13:36 and unreasonable and strange.

01:13:39 Now, my answer is, because the creator of the universe

01:13:44 is a great mind and has stamped the world

01:13:48 with intelligibility.

01:13:50 In the beginning was the Word, right?

01:13:52 And the Word was with God,

01:13:53 and all things came to be through the Word.

01:13:56 We shouldn’t picture that so much.

01:13:58 It’s gesturing in this very powerful direction.

01:14:01 There’s an intelligence that has imbued the world

01:14:04 with intelligibility.

01:14:07 And we discover that, you know?

01:14:09 There’s something about the simplicity

01:14:11 of the way the world works,

01:14:12 that’s where the beauty comes from.

01:14:15 And yes, there’s something profound to the mechanism,

01:14:18 whatever that is, God, that brought that to be.

01:14:23 That thought it into being.

01:14:25 That the world has been,

01:14:26 and the Bible says that God said,

01:14:28 “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

01:14:29 God said, well, again, we don’t literalize the poetry,

01:14:32 but it’s very rich that God spoke the world into being.

01:14:37 So that means it’s been imbued with intelligibility

01:14:40 from the beginning.

01:14:42 They say that the condition for the possibility

01:14:44 of the Western physical sciences

01:14:46 was a basically Christian idea,

01:14:49 namely that the world is not God.

01:14:51 Therefore, I can analyze it, experiment upon it.

01:14:54 I don’t divinize it.

01:14:55 I don’t have a mystical relation to the world.

01:14:57 It’s not God.

01:14:59 But secondly, that it’s absolutely

01:15:01 in every nook and cranny intelligible.

01:15:03 And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation.

01:15:06 So it’s been created, it’s not God, it’s other than God,

01:15:09 but yet it’s touched in every dimension by God’s mind.

01:15:13 And when those two things are in place,

01:15:15 the sciences get underway.

01:15:17 You know, I don’t worship the world anymore,

01:15:19 but I’m also utterly confident I can come to know it.

01:15:22 And those are theological ideas.

01:15:24 Well, we live in this world,

01:15:27 so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world

01:15:30 by making the assumption

01:15:32 that this world is fully understandable.

01:15:34 And we don’t need to worry about what’s outside the world

01:15:36 in some sense in order to build bridges and rockets

01:15:41 and computers and all that kind of stuff.

01:15:43 It’s only when we get to the questions that are deeper

01:15:47 about why we’re here at all,

01:15:49 what does it mean to be good,

01:15:51 all those kinds of things

01:15:52 do we need to reach outside of this world?

01:15:54 Can I introduce another one?

01:15:55 So I talked about mathematics.

01:15:57 I think it’s stepping out of the cave,

01:15:58 it’s stepping out of just the purely empirical world.

01:16:02 But the very fact that we use a word like universe

01:16:05 to me is very interesting.

01:16:06 Even if you say multiple universes,

01:16:07 to me it’s like, well, whatever the whole is, the totality.

01:16:13 Universum, turn toward the one.

01:16:17 Why would we call it that?

01:16:18 Why wouldn’t we just call it an aggregate?

01:16:20 You know, it’s just an aggregate of stuff.

01:16:22 It’s an aggregate of all kinds.

01:16:23 But we call it a universe.

01:16:24 And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition

01:16:28 is it’s the intuition of being.

01:16:30 So I immediately experience things here,

01:16:32 the color and shape, and I can measure them.

01:16:35 But when I’ve really stepped out of the cave

01:16:37 and I’ve now engaged beyond mathematics even,

01:16:39 I’m now into metaphysical reflection.

01:16:41 I’m interested not just in this thing as an object

01:16:44 and how it’s colored and shaped

01:16:46 and what its atoms and quarks and all that are.

01:16:48 That’s fine.

01:16:49 But I’m interested now in,

01:16:51 I don’t mean to say this thing is real.

01:16:53 So what makes this a being?

01:16:56 And then what are the characteristics of being?

01:16:58 So now from Aristotle to Heidegger,

01:17:00 this question of the nature of being.

01:17:02 But see, I would say we call it a universe

01:17:04 because it’s turned toward the one of being.

01:17:08 It’s this intuition that whatever,

01:17:09 from quarks to galaxies to whatever,

01:17:12 give me a billion other universes,

01:17:15 it would still be existence, right?

01:17:17 It’s turned toward the one.

01:17:19 That being unites our experience.

01:17:22 And so now I’m at the metaphysical level of analysis.

01:17:24 I’ve taken another step out of the cave.

01:17:27 In Plato’s language, I’m at the formal level now,

01:17:29 beyond mathematics, the level of forms.

01:17:31 And the formal is inclusive of the mathematical,

01:17:34 which is inclusive of the physical.

01:17:36 And I think that’s Eugene Wigner,

01:17:37 is that the mathematical includes the physical.

01:17:39 It is metaphysically prior to it.

01:17:43 But here we are sitting in the physical

01:17:45 trying to make sense of why

01:17:47 the unreasonable effectiveness

01:17:48 is the thing that’s beyond, which is the mathematics.

01:17:51 My answer is God.

01:17:53 And I don’t know a better answer.

01:17:54 And as I read Wigner, he wasn’t ready to say that.

01:17:58 But I think the language is gesturing.

01:18:01 I was reading someone recently,

01:18:02 some very well known physicist,

01:18:04 who said his answer to Wigner’s question

01:18:07 is that whoever is responsible for the universe

01:18:11 must be a mathematician.

01:18:13 And I thought, yeah, that’s right.

01:18:16 Let me ask you about Jordan Peterson.

01:18:18 We had a great conversation with him.

01:18:20 He has a complicated and nuanced view of faith,

01:18:24 or faith period.

01:18:26 He has said that he believes in Jesus,

01:18:28 the person and the myth,

01:18:30 and some of the full richness and complexity

01:18:33 that you’ve talked about.

01:18:35 But he’s surprised by his faith.

01:18:37 He’s not sure what to make of it.

01:18:39 He’s almost like meta struggling

01:18:41 with what the heck his faith means.

01:18:43 He’s a super powerful intellect

01:18:45 that can’t compute the faith that he’s experiencing.

01:18:49 So what are some interesting differences

01:18:52 between the two of you, or some commonalities

01:18:56 in terms of your understanding of faith?

01:18:59 He’s a very interesting guy.

01:19:00 I’ve had a couple of conversations with him.

01:19:02 And I do think he’s moving in the direction of faith.

01:19:06 And his lectures on the Bible are very fine, I think.

01:19:09 He reminds me of the church fathers,

01:19:10 because the church fathers would have looked at the,

01:19:12 they call it the moral sense of the scripture.

01:19:15 Peterson probably called it the psychological meaning.

01:19:18 But I think he’s doing a lot of that.

01:19:19 He, as I read him and talk to him,

01:19:22 I think he’s kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus.

01:19:25 What I mean there is, for Kant, Jesus is,

01:19:29 it’s not so much the historical Jesus,

01:19:30 this figure from long ago.

01:19:31 It’s Jesus as an archetype of the moral life.

01:19:35 You know, he says he’s the image of the person

01:19:37 perfectly pleasing to God.

01:19:39 And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination

01:19:43 as a heuristic, as a goal that we’re tending toward.

01:19:48 But the historical person of Jesus for Kant is like,

01:19:51 well, let’s not fuss about that so much.

01:19:52 It’s this figure.

01:19:54 And as I read Peterson, especially, and talk to him,

01:19:56 I think he’s kind of there with the archetype of Jesus.

01:20:01 And even language of like, live as though God exists.

01:20:04 That’s the als ob of Kant.

01:20:06 You know, the kind of as if attitude.

01:20:09 And where I repress him when we talk

01:20:12 is in the direction of, no, that’s not Christianity yet.

01:20:14 I mean, that’s enlightenment moral philosophy.

01:20:18 But Christianity is very interested

01:20:20 in this historical figure,

01:20:22 and very interested that God really became one of us.

01:20:26 And he’s not just an archetype of the moral life.

01:20:29 He’s someone, he’s a person who’s invaded our world

01:20:34 and gone all the way to the bottom of sin

01:20:35 and thereby saved us, you know.

01:20:37 So the facticity of Jesus ended up the resurrection.

01:20:40 So like, Peterson will talk about the resurrection

01:20:43 as a myth and all that.

01:20:45 And you can find that in different cultures, et cetera.

01:20:47 But Christianity is saying something else.

01:20:51 So in Christianity, when we’re talking about who is Jesus,

01:20:54 it’s not just an archetype.

01:20:56 It’s not just a myth.

01:20:57 It’s a historical figure.

01:20:59 And the very grounded fact that God became one of us

01:21:04 is fundamental to this idea of what Christianity is,

01:21:08 what it means to be a Christian.

01:21:09 It’s the sin and the love that came here down to earth.

01:21:16 It means we can be one with God.

01:21:17 So that’s essential.

01:21:18 It’s not just an archetype.

01:21:19 That’s right.

01:21:20 You know, it always strikes me,

01:21:23 the difference between, let’s say,

01:21:24 mythic expressions and the New Testament.

01:21:28 Read someone like Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell,

01:21:32 whom he influenced, and then now Jordan Peterson,

01:21:34 who’s very Jungian.

01:21:35 And this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures.

01:21:37 And great.

01:21:38 I mean, I think it’s very interesting,

01:21:39 and there’s a lot going on there.

01:21:42 There’s a sort of calmness, though, about it.

01:21:44 Like, yeah, interesting.

01:21:45 And that’s in this culture and that culture,

01:21:47 and it’s the form of the moral life,

01:21:49 and mm hmm, I understand all that.

01:21:51 Then you read the New Testament.

01:21:53 Whatever those people are talking about, it’s not that.

01:21:57 They are grabbing you by the shoulders

01:22:00 and shaking you to get your attention,

01:22:03 to tell you about something that happened to them, right?

01:22:06 Like the resurrection, you know,

01:22:08 the myth of the dying and rising God

01:22:10 and how powerful it is in shaping our consciousness.

01:22:13 Mm hmm, that’s fascinating.

01:22:15 That’s not the New Testament.

01:22:16 The New Testament is, did you hear?

01:22:18 Did you, Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death,

01:22:22 God raised him from the dead,

01:22:23 and he was seen by 500, and he was seen by Peter.

01:22:26 And then lastly, I saw him.

01:22:29 That’s how Paul talks.

01:22:31 It’s not the detached, you know,

01:22:34 psychologist musing on archetypal things.

01:22:37 And I think that makes a huge difference

01:22:40 when it comes to Christianity.

01:22:41 The intensity of the historical details are essential here.

01:22:46 So if you look at Hitler and Nazi Germany,

01:22:50 it’s not enough to say, well, power corrupts,

01:22:53 and sometimes, so looking at the archetype of Hitler,

01:22:57 it’s much, much more important,

01:22:58 much more powerful to look at the details

01:23:01 of how he came to power,

01:23:03 what are the ways he did evil onto the world,

01:23:06 and then you can get really intense

01:23:09 about your struggle with some of the complexities

01:23:12 of human nature and power on institutions

01:23:14 and all that kind of stuff.

01:23:15 So the historical nature of the Bible.

01:23:18 We’re an historical religion.

01:23:19 And we’ve been, it’s important.

01:23:21 We generate philosophical reflection.

01:23:23 We can find common ground with archetypal thinking

01:23:26 and all that, we can.

01:23:28 And the church fathers used Greek philosophy,

01:23:30 and Aquinas uses Aristotle, and all that’s great.

01:23:33 But we’re an historical religion,

01:23:35 and that matters immensely.

01:23:37 Is the Bible the literal word of God?

01:23:40 How do you make sense of the words that make up the Bible?

01:23:44 I think the best way to get at the Bible

01:23:46 is to think of it as a library, not a book.

01:23:48 So it’s a collection of books, right,

01:23:50 from a wide variety of periods, different authors,

01:23:53 different audiences, and different genre.

01:23:56 So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song,

01:23:59 you find something like history, not in our sense,

01:24:02 but something like history.

01:24:03 You find gospel, which is its own genre.

01:24:05 You find epistolary literature like Paul.

01:24:08 You find apocalyptic.

01:24:10 There’s all this in the Bible.

01:24:13 So is the Bible literally the word of God?

01:24:15 It’s like saying, is the library literally true?

01:24:18 It depends on what section you’re in, right?

01:24:20 So parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two Kings,

01:24:26 number of places in the Old Testament.

01:24:27 Are there elements of the historical in there?

01:24:29 Sure, but it’s theologically interpreted history.

01:24:31 It’s not like our sense of history of, you know,

01:24:33 give me 10,000 footnotes and I’m gonna look

01:24:37 at all the source material I can possibly find.

01:24:40 It’s more like ancient history, like Herodotus,

01:24:42 people like that.

01:24:44 But then there’s poetry and there’s myth

01:24:46 and there’s legend and there’s song

01:24:47 and all that stuff in the Bible.

01:24:48 So God breathes through all of it, I would say.

01:24:55 He inspired all of it, right, inspirare.

01:24:58 He’s breathing through all of it.

01:25:00 God is speaking through all of it.

01:25:02 But he speaks in different voices.

01:25:05 He uses different human instruments

01:25:06 and he uses different genre and different types of language.

01:25:09 So we have to be sensitive to that

01:25:10 when we’re interpreting the Bible.

01:25:12 So the different instruments are more or less,

01:25:16 some are more perfect than others in terms of music?

01:25:18 No, I wouldn’t say that.

01:25:18 I wouldn’t say more perfect.

01:25:19 I’d say they’re just different.

01:25:20 It’s like a symphony and God’s like a conductor

01:25:23 and there’s all kinds of different instruments

01:25:24 in the orchestra and he loves to breathe through the Psalms.

01:25:27 I prayed the Psalms this morning, I do every day.

01:25:29 In my office, you know, those are songs.

01:25:32 They probably were literally sung, most of them,

01:25:34 at one point.

01:25:35 He breathes through apocalyptic.

01:25:38 Like we’re reading the book of Revelation now

01:25:39 in the Easter season and it’s this wild and woolly book.

01:25:43 It should be filmed by Spielberg or somebody today.

01:25:47 And he speaks through the Gospels.

01:25:49 The Gospels correspond in genre

01:25:51 to what I call ancient biography.

01:25:54 That’s the genre of the Gospels.

01:25:56 It’s wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary.

01:25:59 They’re like ancient biographies.

01:26:02 You have the Pauline letters which are about

01:26:05 particular cities that Paul was visiting

01:26:07 and particular people he knew.

01:26:09 So you just gotta be sensitive to the genre all the time.

01:26:12 Let’s return back to human institutions

01:26:14 and talk about history of human civilization and politics.

01:26:19 So one question to ask is was America founded

01:26:23 as a Christian nation in your view?

01:26:26 If we look at the Declaration of Independence,

01:26:28 what did the words mean?

01:26:30 We hold these truths to be self evident

01:26:32 that all men are created equal,

01:26:34 that they are endowed by their creator

01:26:36 with certain inalienable rights

01:26:39 that among these are life, liberty,

01:26:41 and the pursuit of happiness.

01:26:43 It seems like God is breathing through those words too.

01:26:47 Yeah, I think so.

01:26:49 The founders would be some kind of combination of deism,

01:26:53 certainly Christianity is coming up through them,

01:26:56 enlightenment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix.

01:27:01 So you’re not gonna find in our founding fathers

01:27:03 simply a Thomas Aquinas or like a purely

01:27:06 classically Christian understanding.

01:27:08 It’s Christianity in those various expressions.

01:27:11 Because actually I would see the enlightenment

01:27:13 as a sort of child of Christianity.

01:27:16 We could talk about that.

01:27:17 But having said all that, yes,

01:27:20 I think they are expressing at least the residue

01:27:24 of a once deeply integrated Christian sense of things

01:27:28 that our rights are not created by the government.

01:27:32 They’re not doled out by the government.

01:27:36 They come from God.

01:27:37 And the other thing I find really interesting is equality

01:27:39 because look in classical philosophy, political philosophy,

01:27:43 Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, it’s not equality.

01:27:47 For them it’s our inequality that’s really interesting.

01:27:50 So Plato divides us into these three classes

01:27:52 and Aristotle says only a tiny little coterie

01:27:55 of property males of sufficient education

01:27:58 should be in the political life.

01:27:59 The rest should all be in private life.

01:28:01 And then some are suited for slavery.

01:28:03 So I mean he divides us dramatically.

01:28:05 Same with Cicero and so on.

01:28:08 Where does this come from, this weird idea

01:28:10 that we’re all equal?

01:28:12 I mean how?

01:28:12 We’re not equal in beauty, not equal in strength.

01:28:14 We’re not equal in moral attainment.

01:28:16 We’re not equal in intelligence.

01:28:18 So what is it?

01:28:20 And I think the residue especially comes through

01:28:22 in that little word that all men are created equal.

01:28:27 That’s our equality, that we’re all equally children of God.

01:28:31 So take God out of the picture.

01:28:32 I think we are gonna slide rapidly

01:28:35 into an embrace of inequality.

01:28:38 Now in the classical world, yes,

01:28:40 but heck, look at the 20th century.

01:28:42 I mean when God is excluded in a very systematic way,

01:28:45 I think you saw the suspension of rights

01:28:48 and the suspension of equality like mad.

01:28:51 So no, I think it’s very important

01:28:54 that God is in the picture and that we’re a nation under God.

01:28:57 It matters enormously.

01:28:58 That’s not pious boilerplate.

01:29:00 That’s at the rational foundations of our democracy.

01:29:03 So do you think Nietzsche was onto something

01:29:05 with the idea, looking into the 20th century,

01:29:09 that God is dead?

01:29:10 That there is a cultural distancing from a belief in God?

01:29:19 Yeah, I’d be somewhat sympathetic

01:29:20 to Jordan Peterson’s reading of Nietzsche there.

01:29:23 Namely, it’s not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop.

01:29:26 Hey, God is dead.

01:29:28 It’s more of a lament.

01:29:30 God is dead and we’ve killed him.

01:29:32 And what will happen in the wake of that?

01:29:35 And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism

01:29:38 of the 20th century follows from that questioning of God

01:29:44 and the dismissal of God from public life.

01:29:46 So I would be sympathetic with that.

01:29:50 When we’re beyond good and evil,

01:29:51 and all that’s left is the will to power,

01:29:54 and then why are we surprised at the powerful rise

01:29:58 and that they use the powerless for their purposes?

01:30:01 When we forget ideas like equality and rights,

01:30:04 which are grounded in God,

01:30:05 why are we surprised that death camps follow?

01:30:08 So I think there’s a correlation there for sure.

01:30:11 I don’t know, I believe that there’s a capacity

01:30:13 to do good in all of us and a capacity to do evil,

01:30:17 and there’s something that tends towards good,

01:30:20 whatever that is.

01:30:22 I tend to think that if that community,

01:30:24 that love that we talked about, they find each other,

01:30:27 they find the good.

01:30:30 If you don’t constrain the resources,

01:30:32 if you don’t push them,

01:30:33 if you don’t artificially create conflict

01:30:37 through power centers and evil charismatic leaders,

01:30:41 then people will be good to each other.

01:30:42 And whether that’s God or some other source

01:30:47 of deep moral meaning,

01:30:52 that seems to be essential for a functioning civilization.

01:30:56 And it’s hard, I mean, that’s what humans are.

01:30:58 We’re searching for what that God is, what that means.

01:31:01 You know what that triggers in my mind?

01:31:02 I wonder if you agree with this,

01:31:04 that the modern sciences drew their strength

01:31:06 from their narrowness.

01:31:07 And what I mean there is they almost completely bracketed

01:31:10 formal and final causality in the Aristotelian sense,

01:31:13 and they focused on efficient and material causality.

01:31:16 And that gave, as I say, great strength,

01:31:18 but from the narrowness of focus.

01:31:20 But for Aristotle, the more important causes

01:31:22 are the final and the formal causes.

01:31:24 And so final causality there, what’s drawing us?

01:31:28 So for Aristotle, he’d look at someone like me and say,

01:31:30 okay, you have a intelligible structure,

01:31:34 and that leads you to seek certain things

01:31:37 for the perfection of that structure, you know?

01:31:40 And fair enough, I think that’s right.

01:31:41 So I seek the good.

01:31:42 Right now, I’m seeking the good of being with you.

01:31:44 I said, yeah, I’ll sit down with Lex Friedman

01:31:47 and we’ll talk about deep and important things.

01:31:49 That’s the good I sought this morning when I woke up.

01:31:52 Now, why am I seeking that?

01:31:54 Well, for a higher reason, a higher good, you know?

01:31:56 Because it’s part of my work, my ministry is to, you know,

01:32:01 the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture,

01:32:04 and okay, well, why do you want that?

01:32:08 Well, because I want to bring more and more people

01:32:10 into what I think is beautiful and true and good

01:32:13 in the church.

01:32:13 Well, how come you want that?

01:32:15 Well, because a long time ago,

01:32:17 I was kind of myself brought into that realm

01:32:19 and find it very compelling.

01:32:21 Yeah, but then why do you want that?

01:32:22 Well, because ultimately, I want to be friends with God.

01:32:25 Now, I’ve given you one example there,

01:32:27 but any act of the will, it seems to me,

01:32:30 has to be analyzed that way.

01:32:32 The will seeks something.

01:32:34 It seeks the good, right, by definition.

01:32:36 But the good always nests like a Russian doll

01:32:38 in a higher good, right,

01:32:40 which then nests into still higher good.

01:32:43 Until you come, this is Aquinas,

01:32:45 to some, in this sense, uncaused cause,

01:32:49 an uncaused final cause,

01:32:51 there has to be some summum bonum, right,

01:32:53 some supreme good that you’re looking for.

01:32:57 And that’s God, by the way.

01:32:59 That’s another, I think, rational path to God,

01:33:01 is every single moment, every day,

01:33:04 we are implicitly seeking God.

01:33:07 So with your Word on Fire ministries

01:33:10 and the website and the communication efforts,

01:33:13 what is the thing you’re seeking?

01:33:15 Just you, if we can pause and for a brief moment,

01:33:19 allow you to be prideful.

01:33:21 Or, of course, just joking,

01:33:24 but what is your local efforts,

01:33:27 your small little pocket of the world

01:33:29 with small, in quotes, with Word on Fire?

01:33:35 Yeah, it’s just using the media,

01:33:37 especially the new media, the social media,

01:33:39 to get the gospel out.

01:33:41 So I started, what, 20 some years ago,

01:33:43 just on a radio show in Chicago, 515 on Sunday morning.

01:33:47 I had a 15 minute sermon show.

01:33:49 And I asked the people in this parish I was at,

01:33:51 I said, I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes

01:33:55 at 515 on Sunday morning.

01:33:56 And they all laughed when I proposed that,

01:33:58 but they gave me the money.

01:34:00 So that’s how I got started,

01:34:00 just doing a sermon on the radio.

01:34:02 And then it branched off into video stuff and TV.

01:34:06 And then I did a documentary.

01:34:08 I went all over the world

01:34:09 and kind of told the story of Catholicism.

01:34:11 So that’s how we started.

01:34:12 And now I’m using all the new media and social media.

01:34:15 But what I really love, what we’re doing today,

01:34:18 something I really like,

01:34:19 which is having a conversation

01:34:20 outside of just the narrow Catholic world

01:34:23 or even the narrow Christian world,

01:34:24 but to look out to the wider culture

01:34:26 and who’s talking about interesting things

01:34:29 and how can the church engage there?

01:34:31 And so that’s the purpose of Word on Fire.

01:34:34 Is it overwhelming to face so many different atheists

01:34:40 than complex thinkers like Jordan Peterson

01:34:44 and some of the more political style thinkers

01:34:47 that you’ve spoken with?

01:34:49 Is that, what is it, Dave Rubin,

01:34:52 who’s also has a way different worldview as well?

01:34:58 Is that terrifying?

01:35:00 Is that exciting to you?

01:35:01 Is it challenging?

01:35:03 Yeah, maybe all of the above, but more exciting.

01:35:06 I would say I like doing that.

01:35:08 I was a teacher for a long time.

01:35:09 I taught in the seminary for like 20 years.

01:35:10 And so I’ve been engaging these questions for a long time.

01:35:13 I’m a writer.

01:35:14 I’ve written about 20 some books.

01:35:15 And I write some at a popular level.

01:35:17 I write some at a high academic level.

01:35:19 And I like doing all that.

01:35:21 So I love those ideas.

01:35:23 I love those questions, love engaging people.

01:35:26 And I find my own experience,

01:35:28 you do run into, of course, a lot of the vitriol

01:35:32 and kind of just stupidity and all that online.

01:35:34 And I get it.

01:35:35 And religion is such a magnet for people’s hostility

01:35:39 for different reasons.

01:35:40 So I get that.

01:35:40 Like you read it, we talked about,

01:35:42 you have to wade through swamps of obscenity and everything.

01:35:47 But I do it.

01:35:49 I like it.

01:35:50 And it’s worthwhile.

01:35:51 Because in that Reddit experience,

01:35:53 so many of the issues that preoccupy young people,

01:35:56 I can name them for you.

01:35:57 Exactly what they are.

01:35:58 It comes to religion.

01:35:59 How do you know there’s a God?

01:36:01 So the God question.

01:36:02 Secondly, why is there so much suffering in the world?

01:36:05 Third question, why do you think your religion

01:36:07 is the right religion?

01:36:08 Fourth, why are you so mean to gay people?

01:36:11 So those are the four things that I, again and again,

01:36:14 come up when dealing with young people.

01:36:16 I’ve told my brother bishops and priests about that.

01:36:19 I said, structure your adult education programs

01:36:22 or structure your youth outreach

01:36:24 around those four questions.

01:36:26 Well, let me ask you about gay marriage.

01:36:28 How do we make sense of the love between a man and a man

01:36:33 and a woman and a woman and the institution of marriage?

01:36:37 We love friendship.

01:36:39 And friendship is at the heart of things.

01:36:41 And so nothing wrong with friendship

01:36:42 between a man and a man, a woman and a woman.

01:36:45 But go back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas

01:36:48 about natural finalities and intelligible forms,

01:36:51 that there’s a certain form to human being,

01:36:54 which includes the physical and includes the sexual.

01:36:56 It has a proper finality.

01:36:58 And so we’d recognize that finality is twofold,

01:37:01 both unitive and procreative.

01:37:03 And so those two we recognize

01:37:05 as the appropriate expression of human sexuality.

01:37:08 So that’s why the church holds to sex

01:37:11 between a man and a woman within the context of marriage

01:37:14 is the right expression.

01:37:18 We reach out to everybody in love and in respect

01:37:22 and deep understanding and seeking to understand

01:37:26 their lives from the inside.

01:37:28 So I mean, all of that,

01:37:29 I agree with the bridge building that we need to do

01:37:32 to people like in the gay community

01:37:34 and people in gay marriage and so on.

01:37:36 So the church holds to the intelligible structure,

01:37:40 if you want, of human sexuality

01:37:42 and it reaches out to real human beings

01:37:44 always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on.

01:37:47 So it’s somewhere in there

01:37:49 that the church takes its stance.

01:37:51 And so there’s probably variation

01:37:56 in the stances that it takes.

01:37:58 So you’re saying the institution of marriage

01:38:00 is about the unitive, which is like the friendship,

01:38:03 the deep connection between two humans and the procreative.

01:38:08 So being able to have children and all that kind of stuff.

01:38:13 It’s interesting.

01:38:14 So is our gay couples seen as sinful?

01:38:19 So does the church acknowledge the love?

01:38:23 Yeah.

01:38:24 That’s the deep love that’s possible between a man and a man.

01:38:26 I think so.

01:38:27 Yeah, which is why the church says in its official teaching,

01:38:29 it’s the physical expression, let’s say,

01:38:32 of sexual passion between two men that is problematic,

01:38:36 not their friendship, not their love for each other.

01:38:40 So I think, yeah, we confirm the first.

01:38:43 Well, let me ask you another difficult topic

01:38:45 that’s just happening.

01:38:46 Unlike the other ones we talked about.

01:38:49 That’s going on in the news now.

01:38:51 As we sit here today, the Supreme Court has voted

01:38:54 to overturn abortion rights in a draft majority opinion

01:38:58 striking down the landmark Roe versus Wade decision.

01:39:01 What are your thoughts on this?

01:39:04 First of all, the human institution of the Supreme Court

01:39:06 making these decisions throughout its history.

01:39:10 And second of all, just the idea, the really powerful,

01:39:14 the controversial, the difficult idea of abortion.

01:39:20 Yeah, I mean, I’m against abortion.

01:39:22 I’m pro life.

01:39:25 The church recognizes from the moment of conception,

01:39:27 we’re dealing with a human life

01:39:28 that’s worthy of respect and protection.

01:39:32 Especially as you see the unfolding of that person

01:39:36 across a pregnancy.

01:39:38 But at every stage, we recognize the beauty

01:39:41 and the dignity of that human being.

01:39:44 And so we stand opposed to this,

01:39:47 the outright killing of the innocent.

01:39:49 So that’s the church’s view.

01:39:52 Again, reaching out always in love and understanding

01:39:56 and compassion to those who are dealing.

01:39:58 And believe me, every single pastor, every single priest

01:40:01 understands that, because we deal with people all the time

01:40:03 who are in these painful situations.

01:40:05 But that’s the moral side of it.

01:40:08 The legal side, I think Roe v. Wade was terribly decided.

01:40:11 I think one of the worst expressions of American law

01:40:14 since the Dred Scott decision.

01:40:15 So I stand in favor of a returning Roe v. Wade and Casey.

01:40:19 I think they were terrible.

01:40:21 The Casey decision is instructive to me.

01:40:25 It belongs to the nature of freedom, that decision says,

01:40:28 to determine the meaning of one’s own life.

01:40:30 And I don’t get the language exactly right,

01:40:32 but end of the universe.

01:40:34 Like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom,

01:40:38 that we can determine the meaning.

01:40:40 See, but that’s repugnant to everything

01:40:42 we’ve just talked about.

01:40:43 That I’m inventing the meaning of my life

01:40:46 and of the universe.

01:40:48 And so Casey, though, was instructive in a way

01:40:51 because it tips its hat toward the problem culturally,

01:40:55 is that I think in my freedom, I can determine everything.

01:40:59 My choice is all that matters.

01:41:01 And I would say, no, your choice should be correlated

01:41:04 to the order of the good.

01:41:06 It’s not sovereign.

01:41:08 It doesn’t reign sovereignly over being

01:41:10 and it makes its own decisions.

01:41:12 So I think Casey was terrible law

01:41:15 and it was backing up Roe v. Wade, which is terrible law.

01:41:18 So I’m in favor of the overturning of those.

01:41:20 I’ve spoken out that many times.

01:41:22 Now it’ll return it to the individual states.

01:41:24 It’s not gonna solve the problem.

01:41:27 The individual states will have to decide.

01:41:29 I just heard yesterday, we were up in Sacramento,

01:41:32 the bishops having our annual meeting.

01:41:35 And so we got the word from the governor and the legislators

01:41:38 that they’re gonna push for a constitutional amendment

01:41:41 in California.

01:41:41 So basically to make any attempt to limit abortion

01:41:44 in any way just illegal.

01:41:47 I think that’s barbaric.

01:41:49 So I stand radically opposed to that.

01:41:51 It’s such an interesting line

01:41:54 because if you believe that there’s a,

01:41:57 it’s a line that struggles with the question

01:42:00 of what does it mean to be a living being

01:42:04 or to give life to something.

01:42:08 Because if you believe that at the moment of conception

01:42:12 you’re basically creating a human life,

01:42:16 then abortion is murder.

01:42:19 And then if you don’t,

01:42:21 then it’s a sort of basic biological choice

01:42:27 that’s not taking away of a life.

01:42:30 And the gap between those two beliefs is so vast

01:42:34 that it’s hard and yet so fundamental

01:42:36 to the question of what it means to be alive

01:42:39 and the fundamental question about the respect

01:42:43 for human life and human dignity.

01:42:45 It’s interesting to see.

01:42:49 And also about freedom too.

01:42:51 All of those things are mixed in there.

01:42:53 It’s a beautiful struggle.

01:42:55 Maybe the freedom is the most important,

01:42:57 this sort of freedom run amok.

01:42:58 Or in classical philosophy and theology,

01:43:03 freedom is not self determination.

01:43:07 Freedom is the disciplining of desire

01:43:12 so as to make the achievement of the good

01:43:15 first possible and then effortless.

01:43:19 You know what I’m saying?

01:43:20 So modern freedom and the roots of that

01:43:22 are people like William of Ockham in the late Middle Ages.

01:43:26 Freedom means I hover above the yes and the no.

01:43:28 Do I do yes or no?

01:43:29 And I’m the sovereign subject of that choice.

01:43:31 And on no basis I will say yes or no.

01:43:35 I’m like Louis XIV or I’m like Stalin or something.

01:43:39 But Aquinas wouldn’t have recognized that as freedom.

01:43:42 For him, I got this desire in me.

01:43:46 I’ve got this will and it’s pushing toward the good.

01:43:49 But the trouble is I got so many attachments

01:43:51 and I’m so stupid and I’m so conditioned by my sin

01:43:54 that I can’t achieve it.

01:43:56 So I need to be disciplined in my desire

01:43:59 so as to make that achievement possible

01:44:01 and then effortless so right now

01:44:05 I’m freely speaking English to you.

01:44:07 And you had the experience and I’ve had it too

01:44:10 of learning a foreign language.

01:44:11 And don’t you feel unfree?

01:44:14 You know, like when you’re struggling with a language.

01:44:17 When I was over in Paris doing my doctoral work

01:44:19 and I was okay with French,

01:44:21 but my first time in a seminar

01:44:23 and there’s all these intelligent francophones

01:44:27 around the table and they’re all just,

01:44:28 and I’m trying to say my little thing in my awkward French.

01:44:32 And I felt unfree because my desire wasn’t directed.

01:44:40 But then over time I became freer

01:44:42 and freer speaker of French.

01:44:44 I was ordered more to the good.

01:44:47 That’s a better understanding of freedom

01:44:48 than sort of sovereign self determination.

01:44:51 But our country is now I think really in the grip of that.

01:44:55 I decide and that’s where the Nietzschean thing

01:44:57 comes to my mind of the will to power.

01:45:00 I’m beyond good and evil.

01:45:01 It’s just up to me to decide.

01:45:04 God help us.

01:45:05 No, it’s the values that we intuit around us.

01:45:08 Intellectual, moral and aesthetic, the values.

01:45:11 Think of the dog on the beach again.

01:45:12 And that you get ordered to those

01:45:15 by your education, by your family, by your religion.

01:45:18 And that’s beautiful.

01:45:19 That makes you free.

01:45:20 Now I can freely enter into this.

01:45:23 So this sovereign self determination business,

01:45:26 that’s not my game.

01:45:28 The values come in part from the tradition

01:45:31 carried through the generations.

01:45:33 Let me ask you to put on your wise hat

01:45:36 and give advice to young folks.

01:45:38 So high school and college,

01:45:40 thinking about what to do with their life,

01:45:44 career, there’s so many options out there.

01:45:48 How can they have a career they can be proud of

01:45:52 or even just a life they can be proud of?

01:45:56 I think I’d say find something you’re good at

01:46:00 because that’s from God.

01:46:01 It’s a gift that God’s given you.

01:46:03 And then dedicate it to love.

01:46:06 You know what I’m saying?

01:46:06 You’re good at science or math or sports or whatever.

01:46:11 Okay, I’m gonna use that now for my aggrandizement,

01:46:13 for my wealth, for my privileges and to become famous.

01:46:17 No, no, no, don’t.

01:46:19 Find what you’re good at,

01:46:20 but now dedicate it to willing the good of the other.

01:46:23 So use your science and use your mathematics

01:46:26 and use your sports and use your musicianship

01:46:29 to benefit the world.

01:46:32 That’s how I’d say them.

01:46:33 So find what you’re good at.

01:46:35 That’s from God.

01:46:35 Well, that’s a tricky one.

01:46:37 Finding what you’re good at

01:46:39 because it’s not just raw skill.

01:46:41 It’s also what you connect with.

01:46:43 And it’s also like this iterative process

01:46:47 of if you wanna add love to the world,

01:46:52 you have to see how can you be effective at doing that.

01:46:55 So it’s not just the things you’re good at.

01:46:57 There’s like, I’m good at building bridges out of toothpicks.

01:47:02 I’m not exactly sure that’s going to be useful for the world.

01:47:05 Then again, to push back on that,

01:47:07 the joy brings me, maybe somehow the joy radiates out.

01:47:11 Yeah, well, you’re good at what you’re doing right now.

01:47:13 And you’ve dedicated that to bringing more light

01:47:16 and illumination and joy to the world.

01:47:19 That’s true.

01:47:21 That was a searching.

01:47:23 That’s a process of trying stuff and figuring it out.

01:47:27 And ultimately, yes, asking the question,

01:47:30 how is this making the world at all better

01:47:32 at every step of the way

01:47:34 as opposed to enriching yourself

01:47:36 and all those kinds of things?

01:47:37 Right, I think that’s the name of the game.

01:47:39 But it’s tricky.

01:47:40 And if we don’t have moral mentors

01:47:42 and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard.

01:47:44 And if you tell a kid, that’s deadly to me,

01:47:47 just decide for yourself, just off you go.

01:47:50 And you make your own choices.

01:47:52 I mean, your choice has to be disciplined.

01:47:55 Your desire has gotta be directed.

01:47:57 Then you’ll find your creative path.

01:47:59 Everyone does it in its own way.

01:48:01 But it’s a guided choice.

01:48:03 Your freedom is not sovereign.

01:48:05 It’s a guided freedom.

01:48:08 So in the struggle and the suffering

01:48:10 you’ve seen in the world,

01:48:14 let me ask you the question of death.

01:48:19 How often do you think about your own mortality?

01:48:22 Every day.

01:48:23 And one, are you afraid of it, the uncertainty of it?

01:48:30 And what do you think happens after you die?

01:48:32 Sure, I’m afraid of it.

01:48:33 I mean, because I don’t know what’s next.

01:48:37 I mean, I can’t know it the way I know you.

01:48:39 So of course I’m afraid of it.

01:48:41 And I think of it every day.

01:48:43 That’s true.

01:48:45 My prayer life compels me.

01:48:48 We have this, the Hail Mary prayer.

01:48:51 So you pray the rosary.

01:48:52 Now and at the hour of our death, amen.

01:48:54 Now and at the hour of our death, amen.

01:48:56 Now at the hour of our death, amen.

01:48:58 You pray the whole rosary.

01:48:59 50 times you’ve reminded yourself of your own death.

01:49:03 But I do.

01:49:04 I think about it because it’s the ultimate limit.

01:49:06 It’s why it’s beguiled every artist and writer

01:49:08 and philosopher.

01:49:09 It’s the ultimate limit question.

01:49:12 But yeah, sure.

01:49:14 I’m afraid of it because it’s the unknown.

01:49:17 What do I think happens?

01:49:20 I think I’m drawn into the deeper embrace of God’s love.

01:49:25 You know, that’s stating it kind of in a more poetic way.

01:49:30 Do you know John Polkinghorne’s work?

01:49:31 Do you know that name?

01:49:32 John Polkinghorne was a very interesting,

01:49:34 he just died recently.

01:49:35 He was a Cambridge University particle physicist, right?

01:49:38 High, high level scientist who at midlife

01:49:43 became an Anglican priest.

01:49:44 He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary

01:49:46 and became an Anglican priest, right?

01:49:48 And then wrote, I think some of the best stuff

01:49:50 on science and religion,

01:49:51 because he really knew the science from the inside.

01:49:54 Here’s Polkinghorne’s account

01:49:55 that I’ve always found persuasive.

01:49:58 He said, what survives after we die?

01:50:02 So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground

01:50:06 or it’s burned up or it goes away, right?

01:50:08 But what’s preserved?

01:50:09 And he says, what Aristotle would have called the form,

01:50:12 Polkinghorne calls it the pattern.

01:50:14 So the pattern that’s organized the matter

01:50:18 that’s made me up over all these years,

01:50:20 that’s obviously not the same as it was even,

01:50:23 I mean, you would know how often does it all change,

01:50:25 all your atoms and cells and, you know.

01:50:28 In other words, the little, you know,

01:50:30 Bobby Baron who was growing up in Birmingham, Michigan,

01:50:33 I can have a picture of him and then there’s me.

01:50:36 And I say, oh, that’s the same person.

01:50:37 Well, I mean, clearly not materially speaking, not at all.

01:50:40 Completely different.

01:50:41 But there’s a unity to whatever that pattern is

01:50:44 by which all of that materiality

01:50:46 has been kind of organized, you know?

01:50:48 So Polkinghorne says, I think that pattern is remembered

01:50:53 by God and remember it’s the wrong word,

01:50:56 as though it’s like derivative.

01:50:57 I mean, it’s known by God.

01:50:59 And so God can therefore reembody me

01:51:03 according to that pattern at a higher pitch,

01:51:06 what we call the resurrected body.

01:51:09 So Paul talks about a spiritual body,

01:51:12 body for sure, I mean,

01:51:13 because he believes in the resurrection of Jesus.

01:51:15 But it’s not a body like ours from this world.

01:51:19 It’s a body at a higher pitch.

01:51:22 So something, some pattern that’s there persists.

01:51:26 Pattern persists in the mind of God

01:51:28 and then is used as the ground of the reembodyment of me.

01:51:32 So it’s not like I’ve just become a platonic form.

01:51:35 I’m gonna be reembodyed because the Christian hope

01:51:38 is not for platonic escape of soul from matter.

01:51:42 That’s never the Christian hope.

01:51:43 It’s for the resurrection of the body,

01:51:45 we say.

01:51:46 And you say, what a fantastic idea.

01:51:48 Well, I don’t know.

01:51:49 I mean, this body is being reconstituted all the time

01:51:53 according to this pattern, right?

01:51:55 It’s not the same matter.

01:51:57 And so might there be another sort of higher material

01:52:02 that is organized according to the same pattern,

01:52:04 which has been remembered by God.

01:52:06 So therefore we can hang on to the language of body and soul

01:52:09 if you want, or matter and form.

01:52:11 But it’s the form remembered by God

01:52:14 and then reconstituted in an embodied way by God

01:52:18 that we call heaven, the heavenly state.

01:52:21 That’s what I hope for.

01:52:22 That’s my Christian faith, my Christian hope.

01:52:26 Let me ask you about the big question of meaning.

01:52:29 We’ve talked about it in different directions

01:52:32 from different perspectives.

01:52:33 What’s the meaning of our existence here on earth?

01:52:36 What’s the meaning of life?

01:52:39 Love.

01:52:40 God is love.

01:52:42 And the purpose of my life is to become God’s friend.

01:52:45 And that means I’m more conformed to love.

01:52:47 And so my life finds meaning in the measure

01:52:49 that I become more on fire with the divine love.

01:52:52 I’m like the burning bush,

01:52:54 is to become more and more radiant with the presence of God.

01:52:57 That’s what gives life meaning.

01:52:59 Meaning is to live in a purposive relationship

01:53:01 to a value, I would say.

01:53:03 So there’s all kinds of values,

01:53:04 as I say, moral, aesthetic, intellectual values.

01:53:07 And when I have a purposive relationship,

01:53:09 so right now you and I,

01:53:10 we have a purposive relationship to the value of,

01:53:12 let’s say, finding out the truth of things,

01:53:15 and we’re speaking together to seek that.

01:53:18 Well, good.

01:53:19 What’s the ultimate value?

01:53:20 The value of values is God.

01:53:22 The supreme good, the supremely knowable,

01:53:25 the supremely intelligible is God.

01:53:27 And so to be conformed to God

01:53:30 is to have a fully meaningful life.

01:53:32 And who’s God?

01:53:33 God is love.

01:53:34 So that’s where I would fit the package together that way.

01:53:38 You’re adding a lot of love to this world,

01:53:41 and which is something I deeply appreciate,

01:53:43 and that you would sit down with me,

01:53:45 given how valuable your time is,

01:53:47 is a huge honor.

01:53:48 Thank you so much for talking to me.

01:53:48 Well, my great pleasure.

01:53:49 I loved it.

01:53:50 Lex, thank you.

01:53:51 Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:53:53 with Bishop Robert Barron.

01:53:54 To support this podcast,

01:53:55 please check out our sponsors in the description.

01:53:58 And now, let me leave you with some words

01:54:00 from Bishop Robert Barron himself,

01:54:03 which reminds me of the Dostoevsky line

01:54:05 spoken through Prince Mishkin,

01:54:07 that quote, beauty will save the world.

01:54:10 Robert says, begin with the beautiful,

01:54:14 which leads to the good,

01:54:16 which leads you to truth.

01:54:20 Thank you for listening,

01:54:21 and hope to see you next time.