Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church

00:00:00.000 | When we're beyond good and evil, you know,

00:00:01.800 | and all that's left is the will to power,

00:00:03.900 | then why are we surprised that the powerful rise

00:00:07.880 | and that they use the powerless for their purposes?

00:00:10.900 | When we forget ideas like equality and rights,

00:00:13.780 | which are grounded in God,

00:00:15.040 | why are we surprised that death camps follow?

00:00:18.060 | - The following is a conversation

00:00:22.080 | with Bishop Robert Barron,

00:00:24.080 | founder of Word on Fire

00:00:26.120 | and one of the greatest educators in the world

00:00:29.240 | on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism,

00:00:32.080 | Christianity and religious faith in general.

00:00:35.640 | This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

00:00:37.760 | To support it,

00:00:38.600 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:00:41.160 | And now dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron.

00:00:44.600 | Let's start with the big question.

00:00:47.600 | Who is God?

00:00:50.000 | According to Christianity, according to Catholicism,

00:00:52.440 | who's God?

00:00:53.400 | - I'll give you Thomas Aquinas' definition.

00:00:55.340 | God is ipsum esse subsistens.

00:00:57.880 | God is the subsistent act of to be itself.

00:01:01.440 | Another way to state that in Aquinas

00:01:03.160 | is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique,

00:01:06.920 | in which essence and existence coincide.

00:01:09.800 | To be God is to be to be.

00:01:12.300 | Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God.

00:01:15.520 | They are kind of nomic and that's on purpose.

00:01:18.580 | There's almost a Zen Koan kind of quality

00:01:20.420 | about the way we talk about God.

00:01:22.680 | I'm saying something that's substantive,

00:01:25.840 | but it's more in like a via negativa mode.

00:01:28.080 | It's more like what God is not

00:01:29.360 | because there's nothing in the world

00:01:31.600 | that would correspond to those descriptions.

00:01:33.880 | So anything in the world would be a being of some type

00:01:36.840 | or an event of some type,

00:01:38.640 | some particular mode of existence.

00:01:41.240 | And God is not an entity in the world.

00:01:45.040 | I would say that's the fundamental mistake

00:01:46.800 | that atheists old and new make all the time

00:01:49.480 | is they think of God as a big being.

00:01:53.920 | When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus,

00:01:57.480 | even the genus of being,

00:01:59.160 | it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition,

00:02:01.280 | but it's really interesting.

00:02:02.620 | So you say, well, at the very least,

00:02:03.840 | God must be a being, right?

00:02:05.160 | And Aquinas' answer is no, he's not in the genus of being.

00:02:09.080 | So we talk about God being beyond being and so on.

00:02:12.480 | To say in God essence and existence coincide

00:02:15.320 | is to say God's very nature is to be.

00:02:18.440 | And that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world.

00:02:21.740 | So what I'm doing there is I'm gesturing

00:02:23.660 | the way the tradition does toward God

00:02:26.120 | using language that's at the same time

00:02:29.360 | philosophically precise and gnomic.

00:02:32.320 | It's both accurate, it's true.

00:02:34.400 | God, essence and existence coincide.

00:02:36.720 | What God is is the same as God's active to be.

00:02:40.800 | But now what does that mean?

00:02:42.320 | I'm not quite sure because nothing

00:02:43.760 | in our ordinary experience corresponds to that.

00:02:46.800 | Everything in our experience is a being of some type.

00:02:50.280 | So it's existence received according

00:02:52.980 | to the mode of some essence.

00:02:55.240 | That's not true of God.

00:02:57.460 | Which is why he can't be found in the world.

00:03:00.180 | And that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is,

00:03:04.200 | oh, I guess theists are those that believe

00:03:05.780 | there's this being alongside the other beings

00:03:08.580 | in the universe.

00:03:09.420 | And then atheists say, oh no, there is no such being.

00:03:12.320 | And that's precisely wrong.

00:03:13.780 | That's just a category error.

00:03:16.760 | Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell

00:03:20.240 | to the effect that proving the nonexistence of God

00:03:22.760 | is a bit like proving the nonexistence

00:03:24.660 | of a China teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars.

00:03:28.600 | No, that's precisely what God is not,

00:03:31.480 | some entity that's sort of hidden

00:03:34.080 | among the other entities of the universe.

00:03:36.920 | God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all.

00:03:41.120 | That's the way to put it.

00:03:42.560 | In more theological language,

00:03:43.800 | God's the creator of all things.

00:03:45.840 | So if God is outside of our world,

00:03:48.880 | is it possible for us to visualize,

00:03:51.600 | to comprehend, to know God?

00:03:54.420 | - Not utterly, of course.

00:03:55.780 | And I would say our knowledge begins always in this world,

00:03:58.780 | begins in ordinary experience.

00:04:00.420 | But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis,

00:04:03.180 | through philosophical reasoning,

00:04:05.100 | can come to some knowledge of a reality

00:04:08.340 | which is transcendent to our experience.

00:04:10.560 | So we gesture toward it.

00:04:12.580 | I always like Aquinas, who says the language about God

00:04:15.140 | that we use is analogical.

00:04:17.140 | So it's not univocal, meaning what I say about that can

00:04:21.340 | or about this bottle, I can say about God.

00:04:23.580 | No, that makes God an entity.

00:04:25.540 | At the same time, it's not simply equivocal.

00:04:28.380 | So if I say, well, that thing is, and God is,

00:04:31.580 | I mean totally different things.

00:04:33.380 | No, no, I mean something analogous.

00:04:35.980 | So to be God is to be to be.

00:04:38.260 | So the real meaning of being is the being of God.

00:04:42.100 | The being of that thing or this thing,

00:04:44.380 | or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles

00:04:47.620 | would be analogous to God's manner of being.

00:04:50.540 | So on that basis, I can make some statements.

00:04:53.500 | I can theorize.

00:04:56.220 | And even at the limit, as you suggest, I can visualize.

00:04:59.280 | So we have metaphors for God.

00:05:01.140 | And the Bible is replete with those, right?

00:05:04.300 | God is a rock.

00:05:05.500 | God's like a lion.

00:05:07.420 | God's like this and that.

00:05:09.100 | The Bible will sometimes imagine God

00:05:11.180 | as a human being walking around.

00:05:13.980 | Now only the crudest fundamentalism would say,

00:05:15.940 | well, that's a univocal, accurate description of God.

00:05:20.140 | It's an image that's catching something

00:05:22.420 | of God's manner of being.

00:05:23.860 | - Then what does it mean to believe in God?

00:05:30.140 | So there's a word, and we'll have to limit ourselves

00:05:34.420 | to human interpretable words today.

00:05:37.260 | There's a word called faith.

00:05:39.380 | What does faith mean?

00:05:40.900 | So if we can't really directly know God,

00:05:44.740 | we kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.

00:05:50.020 | - Better, he sneaks up on us.

00:05:51.900 | 'Cause I like the language of grace.

00:05:53.700 | God's action comes first.

00:05:55.840 | So if I stay perfectly within the realm of I'm seeking

00:06:00.500 | with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind,

00:06:04.620 | I'm not gonna find God that way.

00:06:06.140 | I might find a path that opens up.

00:06:09.700 | But I would say finally God finds me,

00:06:12.100 | and I think then the language of faith

00:06:13.980 | begins to make more sense.

00:06:15.280 | I'm with Paul Tillich, though,

00:06:17.620 | the Protestant theologian, said the most misunderstood word

00:06:20.620 | in the religious vocabulary is faith.

00:06:22.860 | Because he said the way we take it, usually,

00:06:24.860 | is something subrational.

00:06:26.740 | You know, I have proof of this.

00:06:29.300 | I really know this, and I only kind of believe that.

00:06:32.880 | That's just a personal opinion or impression.

00:06:35.900 | But that's to identify faith

00:06:38.420 | with the kind of infrarational.

00:06:40.180 | And that's not it.

00:06:41.740 | I mean, I don't want something infrarational.

00:06:43.500 | I don't want superstition or childish credulity.

00:06:47.300 | So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason

00:06:51.500 | and the far side of reason.

00:06:52.860 | It's suprarational, not infrarational.

00:06:55.820 | And that's a very important move.

00:06:58.060 | At the limit of what I can know,

00:06:59.940 | at the limit of my striving and my vision,

00:07:02.500 | there's this horizon that opens up.

00:07:04.900 | And I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing.

00:07:08.100 | There's kind of a horizon that lures us

00:07:10.020 | beyond what I've got.

00:07:11.580 | Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness,

00:07:14.340 | rather than a darkness prior to reason.

00:07:16.900 | - The darkness beyond the horizon, prior to reason.

00:07:21.980 | First of all, the poetry of your language is incredible.

00:07:24.380 | To be, to be.

00:07:25.900 | I have a million questions.

00:07:27.260 | - Yeah, go ahead.

00:07:28.500 | I do too.

00:07:30.140 | - So first of all, let me just jump around.

00:07:32.380 | You mentioned to be, to be a few times.

00:07:34.760 | What does that mean?

00:07:36.300 | - Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?

00:07:39.620 | To be this is to be a table.

00:07:40.740 | To be this is to be a microphone.

00:07:41.660 | So it's, I'll use Aquinas' language.

00:07:43.940 | It's the act of being poured, if you want,

00:07:47.400 | into the receptacle of some essential principle.

00:07:50.140 | So it's got a ontological structure.

00:07:52.380 | It's an existent, it's a thing that exists,

00:07:56.620 | but it's existing in a limited way

00:07:59.300 | according to an essential principle.

00:08:01.100 | God, what's God?

00:08:04.900 | What's God's name?

00:08:05.740 | What kind of being is he?

00:08:06.900 | We'll go back to Moses now.

00:08:09.660 | When the Israelites ask me, what's your name?

00:08:13.140 | What shall I tell them?

00:08:14.220 | And he says, famously, I am who I am.

00:08:17.160 | But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark.

00:08:20.660 | So Moses is wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods,

00:08:24.080 | and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities.

00:08:25.740 | Which one are you?

00:08:26.580 | You gotta be one of them, so tell me your name.

00:08:29.260 | In philosophical language, give me the essence

00:08:31.260 | that receives your act of existing, right?

00:08:34.460 | And God's answer blows the mind of Moses

00:08:37.300 | and the whole tradition.

00:08:38.140 | I am who I am.

00:08:40.000 | To be God is to be.

00:08:41.800 | So I'm not this or that.

00:08:44.500 | I'm not up or down.

00:08:45.340 | I'm not here or there.

00:08:46.700 | God is that whose center is everywhere

00:08:48.420 | and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it.

00:08:51.640 | Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that?

00:08:54.480 | No, and in a way, that's the whole point.

00:08:56.780 | If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind.

00:09:00.100 | So to be God is to be to be, is to,

00:09:02.500 | and that's, you know, Moses, take off your sandals.

00:09:04.740 | You're on holy ground.

00:09:06.060 | So I'm gonna go over confidently

00:09:07.380 | and find out what this thing is, this burning bush.

00:09:09.820 | I'm gonna find out.

00:09:11.520 | No, no, no.

00:09:12.940 | Take off your shoes.

00:09:13.780 | You're on holy ground, 'cause you're not in charge here.

00:09:16.380 | You're not in command, 'cause if you got shoes on,

00:09:19.960 | you can walk wherever you want.

00:09:21.220 | You can walk with confidence, but you take your shoes off,

00:09:23.940 | you're much more vulnerable.

00:09:26.020 | And that's appropriate when you're talking about God.

00:09:28.720 | But here's another interesting,

00:09:30.740 | I didn't think about the burning bush

00:09:31.900 | in this connection before,

00:09:33.580 | but it's a bush that's on fire but not consumed.

00:09:37.760 | Beings are competitive with each other.

00:09:41.500 | And so these can't be in the same place at the same time,

00:09:43.940 | these two beings.

00:09:44.780 | They're mutually exclusive if you want.

00:09:46.700 | But as God comes close to a creature,

00:09:52.820 | he doesn't destroy it or consume it,

00:09:55.780 | but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant.

00:09:59.740 | And see, compare it to the classical gods and goddesses.

00:10:02.860 | When they come bursting into life and experience,

00:10:06.620 | things are incinerated and people give way

00:10:09.180 | and they're overwhelmed.

00:10:10.740 | Then there's this biblical idea of God comes close

00:10:13.700 | and sets things on fire but doesn't burn them up.

00:10:17.080 | And that's because he's not a competitive being

00:10:19.180 | in the world.

00:10:20.180 | If he were a big being, then he'd be in this,

00:10:23.100 | he'd be competing for space, so to speak,

00:10:25.700 | on the same ontological grid.

00:10:27.980 | But he's not like that.

00:10:30.200 | So God can come close and we come more fully alive.

00:10:34.840 | Now we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation,

00:10:37.280 | I mean the central Christian doctrine,

00:10:38.840 | that God can actually become a human

00:10:42.400 | without overwhelming the human he becomes.

00:10:45.100 | So I mean, that's kind of the next step.

00:10:48.000 | But the basic idea of God is non-competitively

00:10:51.800 | transcendent to the world.

00:10:53.380 | That's another way to get at it.

00:10:54.920 | - Non-competitively transcendent to the world,

00:10:57.920 | so it's beyond being, is the source of being.

00:11:01.720 | - Right.

00:11:02.960 | Let me make it maybe more imagistic.

00:11:06.080 | I think a really good analogy would be author to book.

00:11:09.920 | Like Tolkien or someone that writes

00:11:13.120 | one of these big, sprawling novels.

00:11:16.240 | And Tolkien's good too 'cause he creates a whole world.

00:11:18.540 | He creates a new nature, a new language,

00:11:20.400 | new history, all that.

00:11:21.480 | Think of the thousands of characters

00:11:23.280 | and the plots and subplots and all of it.

00:11:26.280 | Tolkien is utterly responsible

00:11:28.560 | for every bit of that story, right?

00:11:31.480 | Every character, every plot, every subplot,

00:11:34.120 | every description, he's completely responsible.

00:11:36.720 | He's involved in every nook and cranny of it.

00:11:39.520 | But he's not in the story.

00:11:41.720 | He's not in the book.

00:11:43.060 | You're not gonna find him as a character in the book.

00:11:45.680 | So that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way,

00:11:48.360 | is I'm looking for God,

00:11:49.520 | he's a character in this story somewhere.

00:11:51.840 | No, he's the author of the story.

00:11:54.560 | Mysteriously present to every aspect of the story,

00:11:58.480 | but not a character in it.

00:12:00.720 | - Right, he is deeply in the story somehow.

00:12:03.880 | He's present, but he's not,

00:12:05.580 | even if he is a character, he's not really,

00:12:09.920 | the full embodiment is not a character.

00:12:13.040 | And people inside the book

00:12:16.440 | can't really know about the author.

00:12:18.480 | - Right, no, right.

00:12:20.520 | Well, see, Augustine says God is simultaneously

00:12:23.760 | intimior intimo meo et superior sumo meo.

00:12:26.800 | He's closer to me than I am to myself,

00:12:30.240 | and he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine

00:12:33.320 | at the same time.

00:12:34.360 | But see, once you get the insight

00:12:36.420 | that God is the sheer act of to be,

00:12:38.880 | well, of course that's true.

00:12:40.200 | So right now, God is sustaining us in existence, true.

00:12:45.200 | Aquinas says God is in all things

00:12:49.380 | by essence, presence, and power, and most intimately so.

00:12:53.400 | And he's nowhere in this room.

00:12:56.720 | Okay, well, where's God?

00:12:58.080 | He's nowhere in this room.

00:12:59.640 | He's totaliter aliter, we say.

00:13:02.080 | He's totally other, same time.

00:13:04.920 | But once you crack that code, though,

00:13:06.800 | I think you see it, of why that would be true.

00:13:09.440 | And see, now I'm getting from more philosophical language

00:13:12.160 | to more mystical language,

00:13:13.200 | 'cause all the mystics talk that way

00:13:15.200 | in these high paradoxes about God's availability

00:13:18.720 | and unavailability.

00:13:20.640 | I've often thought in the Bible,

00:13:23.020 | story after story, God can neither be grasped

00:13:27.400 | nor hidden from.

00:13:28.400 | So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God's.

00:13:32.920 | I've got him, I understand him, I can manipulate him.

00:13:36.280 | No, no, no, story after story is told you can't do that.

00:13:39.660 | Well, then the other extreme of the sinner,

00:13:41.400 | all right, then I'm gonna run from God.

00:13:43.440 | I'm gonna avoid God.

00:13:44.840 | Jonah and the whale, you know,

00:13:47.400 | so he has the call from God,

00:13:49.960 | and he said, no, no, I'm gonna refuse that.

00:13:51.720 | I'm gonna run as far away.

00:13:53.340 | I'm gonna go to Tarshish,

00:13:54.360 | which meant like Timbuktu for them,

00:13:55.900 | at the end of the world.

00:13:57.100 | God's got the whale, swallows him up,

00:13:59.860 | and brings him right back where God wants him.

00:14:01.820 | It's a poetic way of saying

00:14:03.540 | you can't escape the press of God.

00:14:05.840 | At the same time, Tower of Babel,

00:14:07.460 | I'm gonna build a tower up to God.

00:14:08.980 | I'm gonna grab hold of God.

00:14:11.100 | No, no, no, you can't do that either.

00:14:12.880 | So live in the space in between those two things,

00:14:15.400 | which would be the space of friendship with God,

00:14:18.180 | falling in love with God,

00:14:20.720 | is neither grasping nor hiding from God.

00:14:22.840 | - You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things.

00:14:28.660 | You mentioned grace.

00:14:30.340 | - Yeah.

00:14:31.180 | - You mentioned sin.

00:14:32.300 | You mentioned incarnation.

00:14:34.180 | Is there a philosophical, pragmatic way

00:14:37.500 | to start talking about the pillars of Christianity?

00:14:40.700 | What are the defining things that make Christianity to you,

00:14:46.060 | and broadly speaking, to those that follow the religion?

00:14:51.060 | - In a way, what we've done so far

00:14:53.320 | is a necessary propedutic,

00:14:55.120 | because we're talking about God.

00:14:56.880 | What makes Christianity distinctive, of course,

00:15:00.080 | is the claim of the incarnation.

00:15:01.840 | So we come up out of Judaism.

00:15:03.320 | We come up out of this great monotheistic tradition.

00:15:06.080 | And the Bible itself, and all the great commentators

00:15:09.060 | within Judaism, I think, would agree

00:15:11.360 | with this basic theistic stuff that I've been talking about,

00:15:15.440 | take Moses Maimonides, for example.

00:15:17.400 | Now, what makes Christianity distinct?

00:15:20.860 | This supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us.

00:15:25.760 | God becomes a creature, but without ceasing to be God,

00:15:30.520 | and without overwhelming the integrity

00:15:32.000 | of the creature he becomes.

00:15:33.480 | What we see in the burning bush,

00:15:35.280 | that principle which obtains across the board.

00:15:37.900 | So the closer God comes to me,

00:15:39.400 | the more radiant I become, right?

00:15:42.100 | But take that now to the nth degree,

00:15:44.580 | would be what we mean by the incarnation, the incarnation,

00:15:47.820 | of the Son of God becoming a creature

00:15:51.440 | in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful.

00:15:56.220 | That's the pillar of Christianity.

00:15:58.800 | It's the incarnation.

00:16:00.300 | And what follows from that is the redemption

00:16:04.000 | of all of reality.

00:16:05.200 | So not just of human beings, but in becoming a creature,

00:16:10.200 | God divinizes the world.

00:16:14.440 | The Greek fathers always said God became human,

00:16:17.500 | that humans might become God.

00:16:19.400 | And that's a good way to sum up, I think,

00:16:21.460 | the essence of Christianity.

00:16:23.180 | - Why is this such an important thing?

00:16:25.020 | So it's a distinctive thing,

00:16:26.780 | but why is it so important philosophically

00:16:29.940 | to what it means to be a Christian?

00:16:31.900 | What impact did that have on our world,

00:16:36.940 | on human civilization, on human nature,

00:16:39.420 | on our morals of why live, what to live for,

00:16:43.260 | and the meaning of it all?

00:16:44.440 | Why is incarnation so important?

00:16:46.400 | - Well, I think it's massively important

00:16:48.000 | because it's the divinization principle,

00:16:49.860 | that God wants to divinize his creation

00:16:52.280 | and sort of in this concentrated point of Jesus of Nazareth.

00:16:56.180 | But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus,

00:16:58.440 | so that goes right back to Paul.

00:17:00.160 | As we're grafted onto Christ,

00:17:02.120 | we talk about that as the church,

00:17:04.320 | we become like cells and molecules in an organism.

00:17:08.360 | That's the church, it's not an organization.

00:17:10.400 | That's a deformation of ecclesiology.

00:17:13.940 | The church is this organism that begins with Jesus,

00:17:17.000 | and then he's drawing all of humanity,

00:17:20.720 | but ultimately all of nature, all of creation to himself.

00:17:25.720 | When the Son of Man is lifted up,

00:17:27.540 | he will draw all things to himself,

00:17:29.380 | that idea of the gathering in of a scattered creation.

00:17:34.380 | So in that way, it's at the heart of it.

00:17:36.300 | Then there's all kinds of things.

00:17:37.580 | If God becomes human,

00:17:39.620 | that means there's a dignity to humanity

00:17:41.380 | which goes beyond anything any humanist

00:17:43.880 | of any stripe has ever said, right?

00:17:46.400 | Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary.

00:17:49.160 | Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable.

00:17:53.000 | God became one of us in order to divinize us.

00:17:56.740 | The goal of my life is not just to be a good person,

00:17:59.380 | not just to be materially successful,

00:18:02.660 | not just to be a member of society.

00:18:05.380 | The goal of my life is to become a participant

00:18:08.120 | in the divine nature.

00:18:09.340 | And so I don't think there is a humanism

00:18:11.580 | greater than that, even conceivably.

00:18:13.920 | So that's where I think humanism

00:18:16.580 | is profoundly influenced by the incarnation.

00:18:19.300 | And just our notion of God as non-competitive to us.

00:18:25.100 | That's so important 'cause I think it's so many systems

00:18:27.580 | from mythology onward,

00:18:29.460 | you have these competitive understandings of God.

00:18:31.900 | When Jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies,

00:18:35.620 | I no longer call you servants but friends,

00:18:38.180 | that's an extraordinary moment.

00:18:40.260 | Because every God who's ever been served,

00:18:43.620 | well that's the best we can hope for,

00:18:45.580 | is that we'll be the servant of God.

00:18:47.700 | I've tried to obey you, Lord, I'll try to do what you want.

00:18:51.540 | But when Jesus says, I no longer call you servants

00:18:54.860 | or slaves, he would have said in the Greek there.

00:18:57.260 | But friends, I don't know,

00:19:01.460 | I can't imagine anything greater than that,

00:19:03.380 | becoming God's friend.

00:19:04.860 | - That's a call to become one with God.

00:19:08.620 | It's possible to become one with God.

00:19:12.140 | Now I should mention, you're one of the greatest

00:19:14.660 | religious communicators I've ever experienced.

00:19:16.940 | A lot of, a huge number of people are fans of yours.

00:19:19.900 | You've done a lot of great conversations,

00:19:23.260 | you've done Reddit AMAs, which is a very unique,

00:19:26.900 | bold, brave thing.

00:19:29.800 | And on one of them, somebody asked,

00:19:34.060 | what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins?

00:19:37.100 | So first, what are the seven deadly sins?

00:19:41.060 | What do they have to do with Christianity?

00:19:43.620 | How essential, how crucial they are to the religion?

00:19:47.780 | And what's the most challenging in our modern day?

00:19:51.580 | - Yeah, to name 'em, pride, envy, anger, sloth,

00:19:56.580 | avarice, gluttony, and lust are the seven deadly sins.

00:20:01.220 | We're called capital sins sometimes, from Copeland.

00:20:03.940 | They're the head sins from which things tend to flow.

00:20:07.380 | The most fundamental is pride.

00:20:09.760 | Probably most people today, if you talk about vice,

00:20:13.420 | or you talk about a deadly sin, they would think about lust.

00:20:16.820 | But the classical authors, including Dante,

00:20:19.020 | who does this pictorially, that's the least

00:20:22.580 | of the deadly sins, is lust, 'cause it's the one

00:20:24.180 | that's most sort of dependent upon the body

00:20:26.540 | and its passions and so on.

00:20:29.140 | The most important is pride.

00:20:30.620 | Pride is the deadliest of deadly sins.

00:20:33.000 | And it's very simple to see why.

00:20:34.920 | Pride is the, Augustine calls it, in curvatus in se.

00:20:38.340 | I'm caved in around myself.

00:20:40.900 | Like a black hole, right, to get into the scientific.

00:20:44.300 | But the black hole to me is a great symbol.

00:20:46.660 | You know, that it's so heavy that it draws everything,

00:20:50.100 | including light, nothing can escape from it.

00:20:52.700 | See, that's the sinner, we're all sinners.

00:20:55.700 | We're like black holes, that we draw

00:20:57.700 | everything into ourselves.

00:21:00.340 | So as a sinner, and you know, I'll confess I'm a sinner,

00:21:04.800 | the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment,

00:21:08.240 | and I'm drawing you now into my world and so on.

00:21:12.380 | What that does is it kills us off, and it darkens life,

00:21:18.920 | and it makes it small and heavy and awful, right?

00:21:23.420 | It's like, but see, compared to the contrasting thing,

00:21:28.360 | is when you're lost in a moment,

00:21:31.380 | you're not concerned about the impression I'm making,

00:21:33.800 | you're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself,

00:21:35.920 | you're not concerned about this monkey on my back

00:21:38.220 | that's always telling me, you know,

00:21:39.600 | look good and sound right.

00:21:41.600 | But you're lost in something.

00:21:44.080 | You're just talking, you know, to a friend,

00:21:46.320 | and the two of you together are discovering something true

00:21:49.000 | or beautiful, or you're lost in a movie,

00:21:51.440 | or you're lost in a book.

00:21:53.020 | Those are the best moments in life.

00:21:54.860 | Those are the best,

00:21:55.700 | those are the least prideful moments, right?

00:21:58.420 | That's when the light comes out.

00:22:00.700 | I become radiant because I'm overcoming this tendency

00:22:05.220 | to fall in on myself.

00:22:06.620 | Dante is so good because the way he pictures Satan

00:22:12.780 | in Divine Comedy, and you know,

00:22:14.240 | he's at the center of the earth,

00:22:15.700 | so like a black hole that way,

00:22:17.260 | he's at the center of gravity, he's at the heaviest place.

00:22:21.060 | And there's not fire where he is, but ice,

00:22:23.940 | it's a much, much better image

00:22:26.180 | that you're frozen in place and you're stuck.

00:22:29.060 | And he's got wings, right?

00:22:31.420 | And they used to be angel wings 'cause he's an angel,

00:22:33.680 | but now they're like bat wings for Dante.

00:22:35.460 | And they're flapping.

00:22:37.380 | And all they're doing is making the world around him colder

00:22:40.500 | because he's ice, he's stuck in his own iciness.

00:22:43.300 | And then he's beating his wings over the ice

00:22:45.620 | and making everyone else colder.

00:22:46.900 | It's a great image.

00:22:48.820 | And then he has, this is cool too,

00:22:50.260 | he has three faces, Satan,

00:22:53.020 | because he's the simulacrum of the Trinity.

00:22:55.100 | So every sinner thinks he's God.

00:22:57.100 | So I pretend I'm God.

00:22:58.460 | So he's got the three faces.

00:23:00.380 | And from all six eyes, he weeps.

00:23:02.400 | Also from all three mouths, he's chewing a sinner.

00:23:07.180 | He's got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the three mouths,

00:23:11.260 | you know, the three traitors.

00:23:12.980 | But I thought, it's just a great image

00:23:16.380 | of all of us sinners is we're stuck,

00:23:19.440 | it's heavy, it's cold,

00:23:22.180 | we're chewing on our past resentments,

00:23:25.020 | we're weeping in our sadness,

00:23:27.100 | and we're making the world around us colder.

00:23:29.220 | It's beautiful, it's great.

00:23:30.340 | So that's pride.

00:23:31.540 | See, that's an image of pride

00:23:33.140 | 'cause Satan, that's his great sin, pride,

00:23:35.500 | which is why he needed Michael, right, Mikael,

00:23:38.220 | who's like God.

00:23:39.380 | So the great challenge to him,

00:23:40.980 | which we need all the time,

00:23:43.460 | is someone to say, wait a minute, wait a minute,

00:23:45.380 | you're not God.

00:23:46.940 | But the minute we say, I'm God,

00:23:49.880 | black hole, I now cave in on myself.

00:23:52.640 | I suck everything into myself,

00:23:54.900 | and I turn into Dante's Satan.

00:23:57.580 | So that's a great image.

00:23:58.880 | That's pride.

00:23:59.720 | That's the most fundamental.

00:24:01.620 | That's the uber capital sin.

00:24:03.840 | It's all the other ones flow from that, in a way.

00:24:06.200 | - So in general, empathy, humility, compassion,

00:24:10.160 | love thy neighbor is the way to fight the sin of pride.

00:24:14.680 | - Right, which is why the masters tend to say,

00:24:16.960 | this was Bernard, Saint Bernard,

00:24:18.640 | was asked, what are the three most important virtues?

00:24:21.120 | And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas,

00:24:24.640 | because it's the opposite of pride.

00:24:26.400 | But they're bringing Aquinas in again,

00:24:29.800 | 'cause we think, humility, I'm no good.

00:24:32.200 | That's not what it means at all.

00:24:33.380 | It means what I was describing before,

00:24:35.480 | when you're just lost in something.

00:24:37.760 | You're just lost in it.

00:24:39.000 | My image, I live out in Santa Barbara,

00:24:41.920 | and I like to walk on the beach out there,

00:24:44.200 | and there's a section of the beach

00:24:45.620 | where they let the dogs run free without leashes.

00:24:48.520 | And when you see a dog, and he's well cared for,

00:24:52.640 | and his master's right there,

00:24:53.840 | and the master's throwing the tennis ball into the surf,

00:24:56.120 | and the dog goes galloping out into the surf,

00:24:58.000 | and he gets it with a big smile, and comes running back,

00:25:00.960 | that's humility, that's an image of heaven,

00:25:03.440 | because he's just lost in that moment.

00:25:05.920 | He doesn't care about impressing anybody,

00:25:07.880 | he doesn't care about what people think of him.

00:25:10.640 | He's just lost in it.

00:25:13.400 | That's it, that's heaven, right?

00:25:16.440 | And those moments in our life, when we get that,

00:25:18.840 | it's a little hint of paradise.

00:25:21.120 | But the trouble is, most of us live, frankly,

00:25:23.880 | most of the time, in various levels of hell,

00:25:27.880 | and we're dealing with these deadly sins.

00:25:29.920 | Like, envy flows from pride, because if I'm prideful,

00:25:32.520 | I'm a black hole, I'm in Kravatov's Sensei,

00:25:34.480 | I'm collapsed in, what am I really

00:25:36.520 | gonna be concerned about?

00:25:37.800 | That guy's getting more attention than I am.

00:25:39.160 | That guy's richer than I am.

00:25:41.320 | That lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do,

00:25:43.520 | and why don't I have that?

00:25:46.320 | So envy is a very close daughter of pride.

00:25:49.240 | Anger flows from there.

00:25:52.000 | Why do I get angry?

00:25:53.520 | The dog isn't getting angry on the beach

00:25:55.000 | when he's running after the tennis ball.

00:25:56.720 | But I get angry all the time, sputter with anger

00:25:58.680 | when things aren't going my way,

00:26:00.000 | and you're insulting me, and you're not doing what I want,

00:26:02.640 | and I'm being hurt, my reputation.

00:26:04.680 | So anger flows from pride.

00:26:06.720 | All of them do, all of the deadly sins do.

00:26:10.280 | - So, you said, "I'm a sinner."

00:26:13.840 | So we're all sinners.

00:26:15.360 | - Yeah.

00:26:16.200 | - And you mentioned Satan.

00:26:19.240 | Where's the, so there's heaven and hell,

00:26:22.720 | there's God and Satan.

00:26:24.440 | Where's the line between what it means to be good

00:26:29.880 | and not good enough?

00:26:34.440 | Or, I hesitate to use the word sort of evil,

00:26:38.200 | but maybe overwhelmingly sinful.

00:26:43.040 | Where's the line between hell and heaven?

00:26:45.520 | - Think of them as limit concepts, maybe.

00:26:47.120 | They're like heuristic devices.

00:26:49.040 | So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God.

00:26:53.600 | So think of the dog on the beach,

00:26:54.720 | who is just, he's fallen in love with his environment,

00:26:58.120 | with his master, with the surf.

00:26:59.680 | He's just lost in it, right?

00:27:01.280 | He's forgotten himself, he's transcended himself,

00:27:04.400 | and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place.

00:27:08.720 | Now, imagine the limit of that is the friendship with God

00:27:13.480 | that we talked about, that I become the friend of God.

00:27:16.160 | I become so forgetful of myself,

00:27:19.080 | so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God

00:27:22.240 | that I found beatitudo, right?

00:27:25.960 | I found joy, the beatific vision, we call it.

00:27:29.200 | That's the limit case, that's where we're tending,

00:27:32.400 | that's where God wants us to go.

00:27:34.200 | Think of hell as a limit case in the opposite direction.

00:27:36.160 | That's curvatus in se, that's the black hole.

00:27:39.480 | And we're all sinners,

00:27:40.780 | meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum.

00:27:42.920 | We have good days and bad days,

00:27:45.200 | and we have good moments and bad moments,

00:27:46.760 | and I can be drawn toward sin.

00:27:49.980 | What's God's purpose, and Christianity's reading,

00:27:54.280 | is to bring us out of that.

00:27:56.440 | Now, where did he go?

00:27:57.640 | He went all the way into it to get us out of it.

00:28:00.360 | It's like pulling a sock back out.

00:28:02.800 | Sock's inside out, you have to go all the way in

00:28:04.240 | and pull it back out.

00:28:05.280 | And so God had to go all the way down.

00:28:07.860 | And there's the trajectory of the incarnation.

00:28:12.160 | Though he was in the form of God, and this is St. Paul,

00:28:16.840 | Jesus did not deem equality with God

00:28:18.360 | a thing to be grasped at, but rather emptied himself

00:28:20.080 | and took the form of a slave,

00:28:21.520 | being born in the likeness of men.

00:28:23.360 | But then he was known to be of human estate,

00:28:25.940 | and he accepted even death, death on a cross.

00:28:30.360 | And so Paul imagines that the incarnation

00:28:32.480 | is this downward journey.

00:28:34.480 | In order to get all of us, all of us who were stuck,

00:28:38.920 | were stuck in our sin.

00:28:40.760 | And so again, Paul says he became sin on the cross.

00:28:44.160 | It's a really, really powerful idea.

00:28:46.560 | He wasn't a sinner, 'cause then he'd need to be saved too.

00:28:49.360 | He's not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction

00:28:53.320 | in order to pull us back out of it.

00:28:55.620 | - So that's a really powerful message, an embodiment,

00:29:02.080 | sort of educating the world about sin.

00:29:05.020 | That said, day to day, there's like oscillations

00:29:11.000 | in terms of how much each human sins,

00:29:15.540 | and there's a struggle against that.

00:29:17.920 | So that dog that loses himself on the beach

00:29:22.920 | may have had a lot of sex with other dogs

00:29:26.000 | leading up to that.

00:29:29.080 | May have been not the best dog he could be

00:29:31.480 | leading up to that.

00:29:32.560 | So how, if it's a math equation,

00:29:35.600 | what does the final calculation look like

00:29:38.800 | in terms of ending up in heaven?

00:29:40.960 | What does it mean to live a good life in the end?

00:29:44.600 | Is it the average amount of sin you do is low?

00:29:49.600 | Are you allowed to make mistakes?

00:29:52.400 | - Yeah, the metric is love, right?

00:29:56.880 | And love is not a feeling.

00:29:58.360 | It's an act of the will.

00:29:59.840 | To will the good of the other.

00:30:01.540 | That's Aquinas again.

00:30:02.480 | To will the good of the other as other.

00:30:04.800 | You see, that's the anti-black hole principle.

00:30:07.480 | When I--

00:30:08.320 | - Will the good of the other as other.

00:30:11.240 | - See, 'cause if I'm willing your good

00:30:13.360 | because it's good for me,

00:30:14.980 | so it's good for you that I'm on this program, I guess.

00:30:18.200 | I'm willing your good,

00:30:19.100 | but that's 'cause it's gonna be down to my benefit.

00:30:21.660 | That's just an indirect egotism.

00:30:23.920 | That's why I see love is really rare and strange,

00:30:26.480 | that I really want what's good for you as other.

00:30:31.480 | So not connected to the black hole tendency

00:30:34.840 | of my own prideful ego.

00:30:36.720 | When I've broken that, I've forgotten self,

00:30:39.920 | and I've moved into the space of your own good.

00:30:43.000 | That's what love is.

00:30:44.200 | Now, God wants us to be,

00:30:46.680 | by this they will know that you're my disciples,

00:30:48.760 | that you love one another, Jesus says.

00:30:50.480 | So that's it.

00:30:52.200 | Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth,

00:30:56.160 | and we're better or worse at that.

00:30:57.960 | The point of a church is to graft us onto Christ,

00:31:02.480 | that we might become more and more conformed to love.

00:31:05.120 | But the final calculus, I'll leave that to God.

00:31:07.280 | But use love as the metric.

00:31:09.800 | At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience,

00:31:12.640 | did I will the good of the other today?

00:31:14.880 | How effective was I at that?

00:31:17.360 | And be, just like Ignatius of Loyola, be brutally honest.

00:31:21.200 | Or was I just willing someone's good

00:31:22.620 | because it was good for me?

00:31:25.480 | Where were those moments

00:31:26.320 | where I was like the dog on the beach?

00:31:28.240 | And then see, play it the way,

00:31:30.680 | not so much God the lawgiver surveying,

00:31:33.480 | and you did three of those and four.

00:31:35.660 | It's God wants us to be fully alive.

00:31:39.120 | Saint Irenaeus is one of my great heroes,

00:31:41.020 | ancient, patristic figure.

00:31:43.080 | And his famous line is, "Gloria Dei Homo Vivens."

00:31:46.340 | The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

00:31:50.760 | See, and that gets us over this sort of obsession

00:31:53.580 | with the legalism and did I do enough?

00:31:55.820 | And is that, that's a big enough sin?

00:31:58.120 | God wants us fully alive.

00:32:00.240 | The key to that is willing the good of the other.

00:32:02.680 | He died that we might come

00:32:05.900 | to a richer appropriation of that.

00:32:08.720 | - So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world,

00:32:13.720 | or to love the world deeply.

00:32:17.940 | And what love means is the other.

00:32:20.880 | Is-- - Get out of yourself.

00:32:22.160 | - Right. - It's the humility,

00:32:24.680 | yeah, getting out of yourself.

00:32:26.080 | - Let go. - But that somehow is not,

00:32:28.600 | that's not even selfless,

00:32:31.360 | because the word selfless requires there to be a self.

00:32:35.480 | It's almost like just letting go.

00:32:38.160 | - Yeah, I might talk about like a gift of self,

00:32:40.040 | that you're self-aware, but you give a gift of yourself.

00:32:43.900 | Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself,

00:32:46.720 | but it becomes a radiant source of life for others.

00:32:49.720 | I think Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense

00:32:51.440 | of herself, it seems to me,

00:32:52.680 | but it was to light other people up

00:32:57.000 | so that they might be radiant.

00:32:59.800 | You know, that's the game.

00:33:00.880 | So you probably articulate it that way too.

00:33:03.960 | - Yeah, I love love.

00:33:06.520 | It's such an interesting thing.

00:33:08.360 | - But we have to be hard-nosed about it.

00:33:09.600 | Like your friend Dostoevsky,

00:33:11.400 | love is a harsh and dreadful thing.

00:33:13.720 | It's not a feeling.

00:33:15.000 | And our culture is so sentimentalized love,

00:33:17.080 | that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want.

00:33:19.980 | And that's not it at all.

00:33:20.820 | Love is always correlated to the order of the good.

00:33:24.480 | 'Cause if I'm willing the good of the other,

00:33:26.360 | I have to know what that good is.

00:33:28.620 | So a parent that says, "Oh, I'll give the kid

00:33:30.240 | "whatever she wants," well, that's not love.

00:33:32.280 | That's indulgence or that's sentimentality.

00:33:35.480 | But I have to know what the goods really are

00:33:37.880 | if I'm gonna will them for you.

00:33:39.880 | - Yeah, in some sense, you're absolutely right.

00:33:42.960 | A component of love is the struggle to know the other.

00:33:47.360 | It's the struggle to understand.

00:33:49.600 | I mean, that's what I mean by empathy.

00:33:52.100 | It's not Valentine's Day romantic gifts.

00:33:57.100 | It's a struggle.

00:33:59.660 | It's like trying to understand,

00:34:02.520 | trying to perturb your own mind

00:34:04.420 | and that of another human being

00:34:06.840 | to try to figure out who they are, what they want,

00:34:10.500 | what makes them happy, what are they afraid of,

00:34:14.540 | what are they hoping for?

00:34:16.300 | And it's like a dance, a dance of conversation.

00:34:19.580 | A dance of just shared experiences

00:34:23.660 | and all that kind of stuff.

00:34:24.580 | And all of that requires for you to be,

00:34:26.540 | I guess, yeah, empathize.

00:34:31.260 | Imagine yourself in their place

00:34:35.860 | and then love that person

00:34:38.180 | when you're living inside that person.

00:34:40.860 | - Yeah.

00:34:41.740 | Several minutes ago about the pillars of Christianity.

00:34:43.720 | So we talked about God, we talked about incarnation,

00:34:45.500 | but you're getting now to a third key one,

00:34:48.560 | namely the Trinity, because we're monotheists, right?

00:34:52.500 | But we don't think God is monolithically one.

00:34:54.860 | We think God is a play of persons.

00:34:57.340 | And the father from all eternity

00:35:01.740 | by a great mental act forms his interior word,

00:35:07.180 | as Aquinas puts it.

00:35:08.780 | And that's the logos, right?

00:35:10.020 | That's the verbum, that's the word

00:35:11.980 | by which the father knows himself.

00:35:13.340 | And we call it the son.

00:35:14.740 | So the imago, it's the image of the father.

00:35:17.060 | But then see, the great thing is that imago

00:35:19.480 | is not like just a dead image on a mirror

00:35:21.880 | or a dead image at a pond or something.

00:35:24.160 | It's a full reflection of the father's being.

00:35:29.160 | He's one in being with the father.

00:35:31.920 | Therefore, the son has everything the father has

00:35:34.280 | except being the father.

00:35:35.800 | But that means that the two of them look at each other

00:35:39.160 | and they're just crazy in love with each other

00:35:41.880 | because the father's the fullness of being,

00:35:45.320 | the son is the fullness of being.

00:35:47.100 | And they're so crazy in love with each other

00:35:49.100 | that they, this is Fulton Sheen put it this way,

00:35:52.460 | that there's this (sighs)

00:35:54.900 | they just, they love each other with this sigh.

00:35:58.500 | And we call that the spiritus sanctus.

00:36:00.180 | That's the holy breath, right?

00:36:01.460 | The holy sigh of love between the father and the son.

00:36:06.100 | And that's one being, one essence we say of God.

00:36:10.540 | But in these three persons, but all your language

00:36:13.220 | about like dance and play and community,

00:36:16.800 | the Greek fathers talked about perichoresis,

00:36:18.740 | which means God, the three persons

00:36:20.440 | kind of sit in a choir together.

00:36:23.140 | So they sing together, you know?

00:36:27.780 | And that's why see, Christianity is unique in this claim

00:36:32.240 | that God is love.

00:36:34.800 | So every religion will say God loves in some way.

00:36:38.040 | Love is an attribute of God.

00:36:40.360 | God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes.

00:36:43.160 | But Christianity is unique in all the religions

00:36:45.260 | in saying that God is love.

00:36:47.700 | - And somehow the Holy Trinity embodies that idea.

00:36:52.020 | I mean, that philosophically has always been confusing to me

00:36:56.660 | what it means to be three things

00:37:00.940 | and at the same time be one God,

00:37:04.680 | the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

00:37:07.820 | What is this dance between these three?

00:37:10.540 | What exactly, like how do you visualize,

00:37:13.500 | how do you understand this?

00:37:14.980 | - Yeah.

00:37:15.820 | - This very fascinating, essential thing for Christianity.

00:37:20.140 | - The first thing I'd say is what we already

00:37:21.500 | have been sort of talking about,

00:37:22.460 | is if you say God is love, and most people probably say,

00:37:25.180 | yeah, I like that, that's a good idea, God is love.

00:37:27.260 | But it's very peculiar because if he is love,

00:37:30.960 | there has to be in his unity a lover,

00:37:35.260 | a beloved, and the love that they share.

00:37:37.620 | Otherwise he isn't love by his very essence.

00:37:40.340 | He would love, it would be an attribute of God

00:37:43.940 | or an action of God, but if it's his very nature,

00:37:46.780 | there has to be lover, beloved, and love shared.

00:37:49.780 | And the tradition eventually came to see that.

00:37:52.540 | The image I was using before of the Father,

00:37:55.220 | his imago, the Son, well that's born of God's infinite mind.

00:38:00.220 | So of course God has an image of himself.

00:38:02.260 | Heck, I've got an image of myself.

00:38:04.100 | That's something I can pull off as a puny little creature.

00:38:07.100 | God in his infinity has a perfect imago of himself.

00:38:11.460 | And they have to fall in love with each other.

00:38:13.520 | What else can they do?

00:38:14.900 | Because they're in the presence of infinite good.

00:38:17.860 | And so it has to follow that you then have

00:38:20.800 | the shared love that connects them.

00:38:22.840 | And that's how we generate, if you want,

00:38:24.460 | this idea of the three persons in God.

00:38:26.900 | - Let me ask you about the church.

00:38:30.740 | - Yeah.

00:38:31.580 | - One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism

00:38:34.020 | is the Catholic church.

00:38:36.980 | - Yeah.

00:38:37.980 | - What is the Catholic church?

00:38:39.740 | - I would say it's the mystical body of Jesus.

00:38:43.020 | So as I said before, it's not an organization.

00:38:45.320 | If we do it that way, we're gonna miss it.

00:38:46.780 | It's got organizational elements to it.

00:38:48.860 | So I'm a bishop, I'm a office holder within the church.

00:38:52.940 | But the church is an organism, not an organization.

00:38:56.900 | So it's a organism of interconnected cells, as I said,

00:39:01.300 | namely all of the baptized, gathered around Christ

00:39:04.880 | in a mystical union.

00:39:06.580 | That's the church.

00:39:07.900 | - But there's buildings, there's titles.

00:39:10.380 | - Sure.

00:39:11.220 | Because it manifests itself institutionally then.

00:39:14.180 | - So are the sort of heavy things about that

00:39:18.140 | all have to do with pride?

00:39:19.860 | - Yeah, sure.

00:39:20.700 | - The sexiness of the buildings.

00:39:22.500 | - Yeah, no, whatever's corrupt in the church,

00:39:24.260 | of course it comes from pride, from sin.

00:39:26.620 | And one thing I like about, you know,

00:39:27.900 | the New Testament is so clear on that.

00:39:29.620 | I mean, Paul is in his little tiny communities.

00:39:32.220 | So before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything,

00:39:35.020 | Paul is in his little tiny communities.

00:39:36.460 | So Christians like in Corinth and Ephesus, you know.

00:39:39.860 | What's the one thing we know about them?

00:39:41.020 | Is they fought with each other.

00:39:42.740 | 'Cause Paul's always upbraiding them and telling them,

00:39:45.300 | "Come on, would you people get it together?

00:39:47.260 | "And who's bewitched you?"

00:39:49.340 | And so from the beginning, we've been fighting

00:39:52.180 | with each other because we're made up of sinners.

00:39:54.060 | And, you know, so one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology

00:39:59.020 | is the official name for the study of the church

00:40:00.980 | is to talk about the treasure and earthen vessels.

00:40:04.680 | Paul's language again.

00:40:05.880 | The treasure is Christ.

00:40:07.020 | The treasure is the love he's bequeathed to the world.

00:40:11.100 | That's the treasure that we have.

00:40:12.780 | But it's always held in these really fragile vessels,

00:40:15.420 | namely us.

00:40:16.740 | And so it's gonna be marked by corruption and stupidity

00:40:19.060 | and pride and everything else.

00:40:21.260 | - Well, nevertheless, there's a hierarchy.

00:40:23.900 | There's titles and so on.

00:40:25.760 | If we remove pride from the picture,

00:40:28.920 | so the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy

00:40:31.940 | that makes up this one organism, this living organism,

00:40:36.280 | what's the role of the pope, for example?

00:40:39.840 | What is the role of a bishop, for example?

00:40:44.280 | Like, what is the role of the hierarchy

00:40:46.200 | in terms of the broader vision of Christianity,

00:40:49.920 | Catholicism as a religion?

00:40:51.560 | - I'm a devotee of this guy named Johann Adolf Mueller,

00:40:54.920 | who was a theologian early part of the 19th century.

00:40:57.600 | And he was part of the kind of romantic movement.

00:41:00.440 | And he said the purpose of the pope

00:41:03.460 | is to symbolize and embody and draw together

00:41:07.900 | the unity of the entire church.

00:41:10.740 | So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church.

00:41:14.060 | Who's a bishop?

00:41:15.080 | The bishop is the personal symbol

00:41:17.280 | of the unity of a diocese.

00:41:19.500 | Who's a pastor of a parish?

00:41:20.940 | He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish.

00:41:24.440 | So he understood it not so much organizationally

00:41:27.380 | as organically, again.

00:41:28.540 | It was like, what, that around which

00:41:31.600 | the pattern organizes itself.

00:41:34.360 | And if you don't have that unifying figure,

00:41:37.400 | the community will kind of separate.

00:41:39.320 | And you see that all the time.

00:41:40.480 | Without headship, we would say.

00:41:43.080 | So it's more symbolic and organic

00:41:45.160 | than it is organizational.

00:41:47.480 | - So symbols for community.

00:41:49.020 | But there's such fascinating peculiarities

00:41:52.960 | to each individual symbol.

00:41:55.360 | There's different characteristics

00:41:56.680 | that make up the different people.

00:41:58.780 | They have different ways of communicating.

00:42:01.320 | They have different hopes and fears

00:42:02.740 | and all that kind of stuff.

00:42:04.080 | What, if they're all symbols,

00:42:08.240 | what's the role of the different peculiarities

00:42:13.580 | of those symbols?

00:42:14.860 | Of being an inspiring uniter

00:42:18.120 | versus maybe a stronger type of

00:42:23.920 | more judgmental kind of communicator,

00:42:26.840 | all that kind of stuff.

00:42:27.880 | Can you maybe speak to the human part

00:42:31.400 | of these symbols?

00:42:34.160 | - Yeah, well, I might just shift

00:42:35.920 | to another image of shepherd.

00:42:38.180 | So that's a classic biblical image.

00:42:40.040 | And as a bishop, I walk around

00:42:41.400 | with this thing called a crozier,

00:42:42.440 | which is a shepherd's staff.

00:42:44.040 | So it's the symbol of the bishop's office.

00:42:46.880 | And the crozier, though, is a kind of

00:42:50.400 | in-your-face thing in a way.

00:42:51.760 | 'Cause it's got, the end of it

00:42:54.560 | was meant to hold off wild animals.

00:42:57.040 | And then the crook part of it

00:42:58.440 | was meant to bring sheep back to the fold.

00:43:01.360 | So I walk in with that,

00:43:02.200 | "Oh, this is nice, look at the bishop coming in."

00:43:04.120 | But that's a kind of in-your-face symbol

00:43:06.840 | that I'm here to defend the church against predators,

00:43:10.960 | and I'm also here to draw people in

00:43:13.080 | who are wandering too far away.

00:43:14.900 | So that's okay.

00:43:15.800 | I mean, that's part of the role

00:43:17.400 | of the hierarchy and the pope

00:43:18.800 | and bishops and pastors.

00:43:21.280 | Pastor just means shepherd, right?

00:43:22.880 | So I'm the shepherd of a parish.

00:43:25.120 | So that's okay.

00:43:25.960 | It's not like just all sunshine and light

00:43:27.920 | and what a pretty image.

00:43:29.840 | The one who embodies the unity of the community

00:43:32.320 | is also the shepherd.

00:43:33.520 | - Okay, but again, leaning on the human thing.

00:43:37.960 | The church is an institution.

00:43:41.000 | And I don't know if you've heard,

00:43:44.040 | but there is an element of power that corrupts.

00:43:47.920 | And absolute power corrupts absolutely,

00:43:50.240 | as the old saying goes. - More than that goes.

00:43:53.520 | - Let me ask you something else

00:43:54.920 | that came up on the Reddit AMA.

00:43:57.280 | - Yeah.

00:43:58.120 | - Mega churches and the prosperity gospel.

00:44:00.480 | - Yeah. - And you've mentioned

00:44:01.640 | that you may not be a fan.

00:44:04.840 | What are your views on this?

00:44:06.120 | And what are your views in general of money and power

00:44:09.200 | corrupting the heads of these institutions?

00:44:11.880 | - I don't like the prosperity gospel

00:44:14.840 | because the gospel is about Jesus' journey

00:44:18.440 | into radical self-forgetfulness on the cross.

00:44:22.320 | And he never makes a promise of earthly well-being.

00:44:27.320 | - Can you explain what the prosperity gospel is?

00:44:29.800 | - Yeah, the view that if I follow Jesus

00:44:31.760 | and I follow God with great trust

00:44:33.520 | that I will be rewarded with wealth

00:44:35.840 | and position and status in this world.

00:44:39.080 | It might be God's will that I get that.

00:44:41.040 | But Aquinas said this,

00:44:42.560 | if I look at a very sinful person,

00:44:44.160 | I say, "God, he's got a great house

00:44:45.520 | "and he's richer than I am and all that."

00:44:47.680 | Aquinas says, "Yeah, but maybe that's a punishment

00:44:50.960 | "'cause maybe all that is leading him away from God.

00:44:53.320 | "And actually that's God's way of punishing him.

00:44:55.240 | "And the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house

00:44:57.480 | "is actually a great gift to you

00:44:59.080 | "because now it frees you for doing God's will."

00:45:02.440 | So we can't read God's favor in worldly terms.

00:45:07.440 | I would say God's favor is, am I awakened to deeper love?

00:45:13.120 | Then I know that I'm finding God's favor.

00:45:15.360 | Now God might decide,

00:45:16.680 | "Sure, I want you to have this and that.

00:45:18.520 | "I wanna provide this to you."

00:45:20.080 | Fine.

00:45:20.920 | Then I say, "Thank you, Lord.

00:45:21.820 | "How can I use it as an instrument of love?"

00:45:24.280 | All the masters talk about detachment.

00:45:27.800 | And that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel

00:45:29.680 | is though I'm getting attached now

00:45:31.680 | to all these material advantages.

00:45:34.040 | And I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor.

00:45:37.280 | Let go of all that.

00:45:38.360 | You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love.

00:45:41.040 | So if you're rich, the right question is,

00:45:43.280 | "Okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich?

00:45:46.180 | "So that what can I do?

00:45:47.580 | "How can my riches be an expression of love?

00:45:49.940 | "If I'm popular, if I'm healthy,

00:45:52.300 | "okay, why am I popular?

00:45:53.580 | "Why am I healthy?

00:45:54.420 | "How can I use that for your good?

00:45:56.560 | "I'm sick, in bed, I'm suffering.

00:45:59.840 | "Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love?"

00:46:03.480 | So I'd rather measure it that way

00:46:05.460 | than through worldly success.

00:46:07.540 | That's why I'm against the prosperity gospel.

00:46:10.020 | - Okay.

00:46:10.860 | So there is a don't seek worldly possessions,

00:46:15.580 | but whatever happens to you, good or bad,

00:46:19.260 | seek how that could be used

00:46:21.860 | to increase the amount of love in the world.

00:46:23.940 | - Right.

00:46:24.780 | The image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune,

00:46:27.340 | which is a device in a lot of the Gothic cathedrals.

00:46:29.860 | And it's this great circle, right, this wheel.

00:46:32.420 | At the top of it is a king, and then it turns this way,

00:46:35.220 | and the king has lost his crown.

00:46:36.540 | And the bottom is a pauper.

00:46:38.020 | And then over here is a guy climbing up to power, right?

00:46:42.500 | And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ.

00:46:45.740 | And the idea is very simple but very profound,

00:46:47.700 | that the wheel is life, you know?

00:46:49.420 | It's sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down.

00:46:51.900 | Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige.

00:46:55.160 | Other times you're losing it, you're going down.

00:46:56.740 | Other times you've got none of it.

00:46:57.940 | Other times you're coming back up.

00:46:59.460 | Okay, don't live on the rim of the wheel.

00:47:01.820 | It'll make you crazy.

00:47:02.820 | Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety.

00:47:06.240 | Where you should live is the center of the wheel,

00:47:08.260 | where Christ is, right?

00:47:10.020 | 'Cause that's the link now to the eternity of God.

00:47:13.300 | That's the point of love,

00:47:15.620 | where love can flow through you to the world.

00:47:17.580 | And then you can look at the wheel.

00:47:19.940 | You're a Beatles fan, right?

00:47:21.220 | I think I discovered that.

00:47:22.060 | I love the Beatles.

00:47:23.320 | And the song that always comes to my mind

00:47:25.500 | when I think of that image is John Lennon

00:47:27.740 | at the end of his life.

00:47:29.700 | So a guy that, I mean, rode the wheel of fortune like crazy.

00:47:32.940 | You know, he was at the top of the world in every way.

00:47:36.480 | And then Beatles break up and he kind of loses it.

00:47:39.060 | And then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s

00:47:41.360 | at the very bottom.

00:47:42.600 | When he died, he was just kind of coming back up again.

00:47:45.300 | But the song I always think of is watching the wheels,

00:47:48.280 | right, I'm just sitting here watching the wheels

00:47:49.720 | go round and round.

00:47:50.560 | I really love to watch them roll

00:47:51.800 | 'cause I'm no longer riding on the merry-go-round.

00:47:54.420 | That's right out of the medieval mystics,

00:47:56.000 | that he's not riding on the wheel.

00:47:59.280 | He's just watching it go round and round.

00:48:01.340 | That's the point of, the Greeks call it apatheia,

00:48:04.520 | and the Latins call it indifference.

00:48:07.920 | Not like I'm blasé, it just means I'm detached

00:48:12.620 | from success, failure, less success, more success.

00:48:16.880 | I'm detached from that.

00:48:18.160 | I'm sitting here watching the wheels go round and round

00:48:20.660 | 'cause I'm not riding on it anymore.

00:48:22.600 | The mystics have always made that transition.

00:48:25.620 | - Let me ask you a difficult question

00:48:27.840 | about the darker side of human nature,

00:48:29.940 | of human power, of institutions.

00:48:34.400 | What's your view on the long history

00:48:36.080 | and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children

00:48:39.660 | by Catholic priests?

00:48:40.800 | So this is a difficult topic,

00:48:42.960 | but maybe an important one to shine a light on.

00:48:45.460 | - Yeah, it's awful.

00:48:47.280 | And it's been a problem, go back to Peter Damian,

00:48:50.000 | back in the 11th century was talking about it.

00:48:52.280 | So it's been a problem.

00:48:53.260 | And whenever really sinful human beings

00:48:55.620 | have been in close proximity to children,

00:48:57.420 | we find this issue.

00:48:59.360 | Has it been around the church?

00:49:00.520 | Yes.

00:49:01.360 | Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way

00:49:05.980 | in the last 30 years?

00:49:07.000 | Absolutely.

00:49:07.900 | I'm glad the church has made important strides, and it has.

00:49:14.040 | Back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas Accords

00:49:16.800 | where the bishops of America put a lot of these protocols

00:49:19.960 | in place that really have been effective

00:49:22.580 | at ameliorating this problem.

00:49:24.740 | The numbers spiked in the '70s and '80s,

00:49:27.360 | and that's been demonstrated over and over again.

00:49:29.320 | And then they fell dramatically after that.

00:49:31.400 | So that's not to excuse anything,

00:49:33.720 | but it's to say I think progress has been made with it.

00:49:36.320 | - What's the impulse to secrecy?

00:49:38.880 | - Yeah, well, to protect institutions.

00:49:40.920 | That's always, that's a sinful instinct.

00:49:43.480 | I mean, not altogether.

00:49:44.320 | I mean, sure, an institution is worth protecting,

00:49:46.240 | but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent

00:49:48.040 | to people's well-being, then you're in trouble.

00:49:52.160 | - So institutions' role should be transparent

00:49:56.840 | and honest with the sins of its members and of itself.

00:50:01.280 | - Sure, yeah.

00:50:02.280 | - So maybe you can speak to the fact,

00:50:07.320 | as a priest, a bishop, as part of Catholicism,

00:50:12.000 | you're not allowed to marry, you're not allowed to have sex,

00:50:17.520 | you're sworn to celibacy.

00:50:21.240 | What is behind that idea?

00:50:25.080 | What is the sort of, we've talked about some broad stroke

00:50:28.080 | ideas of love, what's behind the idea of celibacy?

00:50:33.480 | - And that's a good way to get at it.

00:50:34.520 | It's a path of love.

00:50:35.760 | So the church is always in favor of inculcating love.

00:50:39.320 | Marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy.

00:50:42.360 | St. Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied

00:50:46.480 | with the things of this world and family,

00:50:48.640 | and those who are free from that

00:50:50.720 | are freer for doing the work of God.

00:50:53.440 | So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy.

00:50:56.320 | And we still, I think, take that seriously.

00:50:59.120 | Look at my own life, I mean, celibacy has enabled me

00:51:01.640 | to do all kinds of things and go places

00:51:03.960 | and minister in a way that I could not

00:51:07.960 | if I had been married.

00:51:09.360 | So I get it, I get the pragmatic side.

00:51:11.280 | But I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it.

00:51:14.560 | Remember Jesus was challenged about the person

00:51:18.960 | who had a whole series of husbands

00:51:21.360 | and then they all died, and so in heaven,

00:51:23.280 | which one will, which husband will the wife have?

00:51:26.760 | And his answer is, in heaven, people don't marry

00:51:30.440 | and they're not given in marriage.

00:51:31.920 | There's a higher way of love.

00:51:34.360 | It's a more radical way of love.

00:51:35.760 | It's not tied to a particular,

00:51:37.560 | but I think through God is tied to everybody.

00:51:40.040 | The celibate, and this has been

00:51:42.400 | from the beginning of the church, not as a law,

00:51:45.080 | but there were celibates from the very beginning

00:51:47.240 | of the church, including Jesus, of course, and Paul.

00:51:52.240 | They sense something, that that way of living

00:51:54.840 | mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven.

00:51:58.760 | It's a sign even now within this world

00:52:02.520 | of how we will all love in heaven.

00:52:04.760 | So in that way, it's a bit like pacifists.

00:52:08.620 | I'm glad there are pacifists in the church.

00:52:12.360 | And I've known some very powerful witnesses to pacifism.

00:52:17.360 | I'm glad there are pacifists

00:52:20.240 | because they witness even now to how we will be in heaven

00:52:23.880 | when every tear is wiped away

00:52:25.320 | and we beat our swords into plowshares

00:52:26.920 | and heaven's a place of radical peace.

00:52:29.960 | But some people even now live it.

00:52:32.080 | At the same time, I'm glad not everyone's a pacifist

00:52:35.080 | 'cause I would hold with the church to just war theory

00:52:38.240 | that there's sometimes all we can do in this finite world

00:52:42.120 | is to fight manifest wickedness.

00:52:45.560 | - And just in the same way there's just sex.

00:52:48.800 | (laughing)

00:52:49.640 | - Well, no, right, I'm glad there are celibates,

00:52:51.760 | but I'm glad not everyone's a celibate.

00:52:53.600 | I wouldn't want that.

00:52:55.080 | Because married love is a marvelous expression

00:52:58.880 | of the divine love.

00:52:59.760 | So that's why it's good there are some.

00:53:02.000 | And it's always been a small number.

00:53:03.740 | - The actual experience of it, would you,

00:53:06.480 | the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fasting?

00:53:10.800 | So I've been enjoying fasting recently,

00:53:13.720 | so not eating for several days, that kind of stuff.

00:53:18.880 | And that somehow brings you even deeper,

00:53:21.800 | I'm in general in love with everything,

00:53:24.040 | with nature and everything, I see the beauty in the world.

00:53:26.720 | But there's a greater intensity to that

00:53:29.680 | when you're fasting, for example.

00:53:31.640 | - Yeah, I might use the language of sublimation

00:53:34.240 | or redirection of energy and all that.

00:53:36.080 | I think that's true.

00:53:38.680 | There's a certain sublimation of energies

00:53:40.760 | into prayer, into mysticism, into ministry,

00:53:48.400 | a redirection of energies.

00:53:50.720 | So it's meant to be life-enhancing.

00:53:52.920 | The same way fasting is, it's meant ultimately

00:53:54.760 | to be life-enhancing and make you healthier and happier.

00:53:57.520 | So celibacy is a path of love.

00:54:00.240 | And I think it does involve a certain

00:54:01.560 | redirection of energies, I'd say that.

00:54:03.640 | - Don't you think, do you think,

00:54:07.280 | it's a heavy burden for some humans to bear?

00:54:11.280 | - Sure. - For some priests to bear?

00:54:12.400 | Is that the thing, given the sexual abuse scandal

00:54:18.240 | is that the thing that breaks humans?

00:54:22.200 | - No, I wouldn't tie that to celibacy.

00:54:24.200 | And that's been demonstrated over and over again.

00:54:27.360 | There's a priest named Andrew Greeley

00:54:28.720 | who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago.

00:54:30.800 | And Andy did a lot of research,

00:54:32.920 | he was a sociologist of religion,

00:54:34.200 | did a lot of research into that very question.

00:54:36.080 | And there really is not a correlation

00:54:37.720 | between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse

00:54:40.920 | of children or of anybody.

00:54:42.720 | So I wouldn't make that correlation.

00:54:44.400 | - So bad people, sinful people are going

00:54:46.920 | to do what they're going to do.

00:54:48.520 | - I think people who have a tendency

00:54:50.880 | toward abusing children sexually are drawn

00:54:54.880 | to situations where they get ready access

00:54:57.680 | to kids and they get institutional cover.

00:55:00.680 | So that's, I can go through the list

00:55:03.160 | from sports and Boy Scouts, et cetera.

00:55:06.000 | And that's been proven again and again.

00:55:07.960 | So I would tie it more to that.

00:55:09.600 | I wouldn't tie it to celibacy.

00:55:11.080 | - So the challenge, of course, is all kinds of,

00:55:13.400 | you said institutional cover.

00:55:15.280 | There's all kinds of institutions that cover

00:55:17.800 | for people that do evil onto the world,

00:55:22.720 | that do sinful things onto the world.

00:55:25.500 | But there's something about the church,

00:55:27.120 | which is, as an organism, is supposed

00:55:31.560 | to be an embodiment of good in this world,

00:55:34.320 | of love in this world.

00:55:35.760 | And it breaks people's hearts to see this kind of,

00:55:39.240 | even a small amount, this kind of thing happen

00:55:42.880 | within the church.

00:55:44.240 | It wakes you up to the cruelty,

00:55:46.080 | the absurdity of the world sometimes.

00:55:48.320 | Like, it's back to the question

00:55:52.960 | of why do bad things happen to good people?

00:55:56.720 | Why does God allow this kind of thing to happen?

00:56:00.040 | And sort of maybe an unanswerable question.

00:56:02.520 | Do you have an answer to that question?

00:56:04.180 | - I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language,

00:56:07.960 | which is true enough, it's completely

00:56:10.840 | emotionally unsatisfying.

00:56:12.800 | But it's naming it truthfully enough.

00:56:15.360 | And it goes back to Augustine, which is,

00:56:18.120 | God permits evil to bring about a greater good.

00:56:23.120 | Now again, I know how unsatisfying

00:56:25.840 | that sort of spare, austere language can sound.

00:56:29.120 | But it gets us off the horns of a dilemma.

00:56:32.320 | Aquinas, when he lays out a question,

00:56:34.840 | he always has the objections first.

00:56:36.960 | So is there a God?

00:56:38.340 | Well, objection one, objection two, objection three.

00:56:40.800 | And he's really, talk about steel manning

00:56:43.040 | and argument, Aquinas is great at that.

00:56:45.000 | One of the really steel manned arguments,

00:56:49.280 | is that the right grammatical form?

00:56:51.400 | One of the, what's the past participle of the steel man?

00:56:54.960 | But one of the best arguments, he formulates it this way.

00:56:58.860 | If one of two contraries be infinite,

00:57:03.320 | the other would be altogether destroyed.

00:57:05.320 | And as an example from his medieval physics,

00:57:08.400 | he goes, if there were infinite heat,

00:57:09.720 | there'd be no cold, right?

00:57:11.480 | But God is described as infinitely good.

00:57:14.620 | Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil.

00:57:18.560 | But there is evil, therefore God does not exist.

00:57:22.000 | That's a darn good argument.

00:57:23.400 | That's a really persuasive argument.

00:57:25.080 | And I think, I've done this for a long time

00:57:27.880 | in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy,

00:57:31.720 | that's the best argument against God.

00:57:33.620 | But here's something, before I press ahead with it,

00:57:37.160 | something I find really interesting.

00:57:38.680 | I think the three best arguments against God

00:57:41.560 | all come from within the religious tradition.

00:57:44.380 | Namely, the book of Job.

00:57:46.000 | So Job, he's great.

00:57:49.720 | I mean, he's a great guy.

00:57:51.160 | He does everything right.

00:57:52.400 | He's God's great servant,

00:57:54.360 | and he's punished in every possible way.

00:57:58.200 | You know, he has every possible suffering.

00:58:00.600 | Aquinas' argument from the Summa,

00:58:02.700 | and then to your friend and mine, Dostoevsky.

00:58:06.040 | I think in the Brothers Karamazov,

00:58:09.160 | Ivan's argument when he's trying to

00:58:10.800 | wreck the faith of Alyosha.

00:58:13.160 | And it's these examples drawn, they think,

00:58:17.280 | from Dostoevsky, from the headlines of his own time,

00:58:20.540 | of the most abject cruelty to children.

00:58:24.460 | Like an innocent child being made to suffer.

00:58:27.900 | How in God's name could that happen

00:58:32.040 | if God exists and he's all good?

00:58:34.380 | So I get it, but see, the book of Job,

00:58:36.880 | Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky,

00:58:38.320 | these are all profoundly believing people.

00:58:41.000 | Like when I hear Stephen Fry,

00:58:42.920 | you know, the famously atheist writer,

00:58:46.360 | he will bring out this argument with great authority.

00:58:50.160 | He does.

00:58:51.280 | Of, you know, children with bone cancer

00:58:53.440 | and worms that go into the eyes of children

00:58:55.620 | and blind them before they kill them.

00:58:58.320 | But he's been preceded by the author of Job,

00:59:01.640 | Thomas Aquinas, and Dostoevsky,

00:59:03.200 | who stood right, think of Job, in the whirlwind.

00:59:08.200 | He stands there in the whirlwind, you know?

00:59:12.040 | So you can't blame the Christian tradition

00:59:15.280 | for not dealing with this problem.

00:59:17.040 | You know, for like brushing it under the carpet.

00:59:20.160 | I mean, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.

00:59:23.480 | - It's still a difficult problem to deal with,

00:59:25.480 | that there's all this cruelty of the world.

00:59:27.920 | There's a lot of example through history, just--

00:59:33.120 | - Yeah.

00:59:33.960 | - In my own family history with the Soviet Union,

00:59:36.760 | with Stalin, the atrocities that Stalin has brought onto

00:59:41.760 | the people of the Soviet Union throughout the 20th century

00:59:48.200 | is nearly immeasurable.

00:59:51.000 | - Yeah.

00:59:51.840 | - And yet, when you look at the entirety of human history,

00:59:57.080 | you will see progress, not just the Soviet Union,

00:59:59.840 | but the entirety of the civilization

01:00:01.440 | throughout the 20th century.

01:00:02.920 | And Stalin has a role to play.

01:00:04.840 | There's a dark aspect to somehow evil

01:00:10.760 | helps us make progress.

01:00:14.720 | And I don't know how to put that in the calculation.

01:00:17.820 | On a local scale, I want to alleviate suffering.

01:00:23.680 | I'm probably a heavily lean pacifist.

01:00:28.680 | Not out of weakness, but out of strength.

01:00:31.380 | But man, it does seem that history is sprinkled with evil,

01:00:36.380 | and that evil does somehow nudge us towards good.

01:00:41.320 | - Yes, sometimes we can see it.

01:00:44.160 | And that's where the idea comes from,

01:00:46.580 | that evil's permitted to bring about some greater good.

01:00:49.840 | And we can sometimes really see it.

01:00:52.340 | Can we always see it?

01:00:54.880 | No, in fact, typically we don't see it.

01:00:57.340 | But now you bring another factor into this,

01:00:59.160 | which is the difference between our minds and God's mind.

01:01:02.880 | So our minds, I mean, look,

01:01:04.200 | even they're remarkably capacious,

01:01:06.120 | but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time.

01:01:11.120 | And even like our eyes can only take in

01:01:13.880 | so much of the light spectrum,

01:01:15.000 | and these little ape sensorium that we have

01:01:18.120 | that can just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really.

01:01:22.600 | How are we ever in a position to say,

01:01:25.560 | oh no, there's no possible good

01:01:26.720 | that would ever come from that?

01:01:28.160 | Even the greatest evil that, you know,

01:01:30.080 | every Dostoevsky and can conjure up and Stephen Fry,

01:01:33.620 | still, how could we have the arrogance to say,

01:01:39.280 | I know there's no good that could ever come from that.

01:01:42.520 | I know there's no morally justifiable reason

01:01:45.680 | why God would ever permit that.

01:01:47.320 | 'Cause I think that's hubris to the nth degree,

01:01:50.160 | for us to say that.

01:01:51.800 | And that's the assumption behind this claim,

01:01:54.240 | that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good.

01:01:57.640 | Now God understands it.

01:02:00.080 | But we're like little kids, you know,

01:02:03.480 | like a four year old, and their parents make a decision,

01:02:06.240 | and we say, what in the, why in the world

01:02:08.360 | would you do this to me?

01:02:09.600 | This is my pastoral experience.

01:02:12.240 | Years ago, there was a young father,

01:02:14.320 | and his son was like three or something.

01:02:16.480 | And he was in the hospital for something,

01:02:18.600 | I forgot what it was, but he had to undergo surgery, right?

01:02:21.400 | So after the surgery, he's in great pain,

01:02:23.680 | this poor kid, this three year old kid.

01:02:25.600 | And the dad was there with him, you know,

01:02:28.000 | holding his hand, and the son,

01:02:30.560 | this is what the father told me,

01:02:31.680 | he said, he's looking at me like, what gives here?

01:02:35.600 | I mean, why would you, you love me,

01:02:37.800 | I've always assumed that,

01:02:40.160 | and yet you're presiding over this somehow,

01:02:42.120 | you're approving of this,

01:02:43.760 | and doing nothing to get me out of it, right?

01:02:46.600 | And he said the kid couldn't articulate that,

01:02:48.400 | but his eyes did.

01:02:49.800 | And the father said, it was just killing me,

01:02:52.600 | because I knew I couldn't explain it to him.

01:02:55.680 | And it's true, I mean, he could vaguely gesture toward,

01:02:58.200 | but the kid didn't understand surgery,

01:03:00.040 | and cutting his body, and taking things out of it,

01:03:02.160 | and that this was gonna, you know,

01:03:03.760 | make him much better in the long run.

01:03:06.000 | But I remember thinking, that's a great metaphor

01:03:07.600 | for us vis-a-vis God, is here's God,

01:03:10.040 | infinitely loving God, who's with us all the time,

01:03:12.400 | and we say, what are you doing?

01:03:14.720 | Why aren't you taking this away from me?

01:03:17.160 | And the answer, I mean, ultimately, is trust.

01:03:20.040 | Trust me, trust me.

01:03:22.520 | Surrender to me.

01:03:24.040 | - And when we don't, that's,

01:03:25.440 | we get in trouble with the old pride,

01:03:29.040 | and the hubris, and all that kind of stuff.

01:03:31.320 | - Yeah, no, but, and trust me when I tell you,

01:03:33.440 | I mean, I completely get it in my own life,

01:03:36.160 | and as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time,

01:03:39.040 | with people in pain all the time.

01:03:41.440 | I remember as a young priest,

01:03:43.400 | there was a policeman in our parish,

01:03:47.120 | so he had a gun, and inexplicably,

01:03:50.440 | no one had any clue, he got up one night,

01:03:54.080 | shot his son to death, and then shot himself.

01:03:57.120 | This is my parish.

01:03:58.280 | So I went to the wake, I remember, I show up,

01:04:01.320 | and I'm this young 27-year-old goofball priest,

01:04:04.760 | and I roll my collar around, and I walk in,

01:04:07.120 | and there were two coffins.

01:04:09.000 | There were two coffins in the room,

01:04:10.040 | you know, there's the son and the father.

01:04:11.720 | And the mother was there, and she,

01:04:15.120 | she went like this to me, like,

01:04:17.480 | she saw me, like, okay, you're the religious guy here,

01:04:20.240 | - Yeah. - what?

01:04:21.720 | And just by instinct, I went like that too.

01:04:26.040 | I went like, I don't, I don't know what to tell you.

01:04:29.160 | I can't, I don't have an answer for you.

01:04:31.400 | But I was there, and I'm not saying

01:04:34.960 | to pat myself on the back, it's just,

01:04:36.640 | that's where the church goes, because Jesus went there.

01:04:41.000 | See, now we're gesturing toward a more theological response.

01:04:44.880 | The first one's more austerely philosophical,

01:04:47.040 | you know, God permits evil to bring about a good,

01:04:49.480 | but the theological response is,

01:04:50.920 | that's where Christ went, is he went all the way down.

01:04:54.000 | He went all the way down into our suffering.

01:04:56.680 | And see the cross as the limit case of evil,

01:05:01.680 | humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice

01:05:08.080 | and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering

01:05:11.160 | and death, it's all there,

01:05:13.760 | and that's where the Son of God went.

01:05:16.000 | And I would say that's why, as a priest, I went there.

01:05:19.360 | That's my job, is to go to those places, you know.

01:05:22.120 | So that's the ultimate answer to the problem.

01:05:26.160 | - So there is, we can't comprehend it,

01:05:30.840 | but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice.

01:05:34.040 | - We trust it because we know on other grounds

01:05:37.320 | of God's existence.

01:05:38.160 | See, I would resist the claim that,

01:05:39.720 | well, this is such a knockdown argument,

01:05:42.440 | so now we know there is no God.

01:05:43.720 | I would say, no, there are all kinds

01:05:45.360 | of other rational warrants for God,

01:05:46.960 | and so I know that God exists.

01:05:49.680 | I know that God is infinite love,

01:05:51.360 | and now I gotta square that with this experience.

01:05:54.200 | And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence

01:05:58.160 | that God knows what he's about, you know.

01:06:01.160 | Again, I know how inadequate that always seems

01:06:03.600 | to anyone who's suffering, including myself,

01:06:05.680 | when I'm in great suffering,

01:06:07.640 | but I think that's the best that we've done

01:06:09.920 | in the great tradition.

01:06:11.280 | - So if you were to steel man the case against God

01:06:16.120 | or the existence of God,

01:06:17.720 | you find the most convincing argument

01:06:20.920 | is there's evil in the world, therefore there's no God.

01:06:24.560 | - There's too much of it.

01:06:25.640 | If I were to steel man that argument,

01:06:27.000 | I'd do what Stephen Fry does.

01:06:28.280 | I would do what Dostoevsky's Ivan does.

01:06:30.160 | I would do exactly that.

01:06:31.440 | I would say there's just too much.

01:06:34.200 | And then if you wanna keep pressing it, animal suffering.

01:06:37.240 | So we talk about human suffering,

01:06:38.960 | but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on,

01:06:43.980 | isn't there just too much suffering

01:06:46.540 | to be reconciled with an infinitely good God?

01:06:49.300 | And that's, again, Thomas Aquinas.

01:06:50.980 | I've just used his very steel-manned argument.

01:06:55.020 | - You mentioned that, again, on Reddit,

01:06:57.220 | somebody asked who your favorite communicator

01:07:02.020 | of atheist ideas was, and you mentioned Christopher Hitchens.

01:07:06.820 | Are there other ideas for atheism

01:07:12.180 | that you find particularly challenging?

01:07:15.020 | - Well, that's the one, is the problem of evil.

01:07:18.020 | The other objection in Aquinas,

01:07:19.740 | which has a lot of contemporary resonance,

01:07:22.380 | is can't we just explain everything through natural causes?

01:07:26.340 | Why would you have to invoke a cause

01:07:27.980 | beyond the causes in the world?

01:07:30.420 | So as I'm trying to explain, let's say for Aquinas,

01:07:33.660 | motion, causality, finality,

01:07:37.020 | can't I just do that with natural causes?

01:07:39.180 | Wouldn't that suffice to explain it?

01:07:41.440 | So I get like when naturalists are speaking,

01:07:44.780 | or people that are pure materialists,

01:07:46.420 | they'll just say, no, that's perfectly adequate.

01:07:48.860 | A scientific account of reality

01:07:50.940 | is utterly adequate to our experience.

01:07:54.220 | So I would steel-man that and say,

01:07:56.820 | well, show me why we need something more.

01:07:59.660 | And to do that, you gotta get out of Plato's cave,

01:08:02.620 | it seems to me.

01:08:03.700 | Because my objection to naturalism

01:08:08.360 | is it's staying within the realm

01:08:12.140 | of the immediately empirically observable,

01:08:15.900 | and making the mistake of saying

01:08:17.380 | that's all there is to being.

01:08:19.700 | That's all there is that needs to be explained.

01:08:22.820 | And long before we get to religion, just stay with Plato.

01:08:27.380 | The first step out of the cave,

01:08:28.820 | if you combine it now with the parable of the line,

01:08:31.060 | is mathematical objects.

01:08:33.100 | And I'm with those, the many people that would say,

01:08:36.500 | mathematics is an experience of the immaterial.

01:08:39.720 | I've stepped out of a merely empirical,

01:08:42.840 | physical, naturalistic world.

01:08:45.000 | The minute I understand a pure number,

01:08:48.280 | or a pure equation, or a pure mathematical relationship,

01:08:52.080 | which would obtain in any possible world,

01:08:55.380 | which are not tied to space and time,

01:08:57.840 | that's a first step out of the cave.

01:09:01.360 | And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections.

01:09:05.560 | For example, on the nature of being.

01:09:07.020 | I mean, so I could talk about this thing

01:09:08.860 | as a physical object, and I can analyze it

01:09:10.660 | at all kinds of levels, and follow all the scientists

01:09:13.760 | up and down through this thing, and fine, fine.

01:09:16.540 | But I'm still in Plato's cave.

01:09:17.920 | I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall.

01:09:20.680 | But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm,

01:09:24.160 | I have entered a different realm of being, seems to me.

01:09:27.960 | - Do you think it's possible for the cave to expand

01:09:30.340 | so large that it encompasses the whole world?

01:09:32.860 | Meaning, is it possible that we're just clueless right now

01:09:37.860 | in terms of, scientifically speaking,

01:09:41.560 | with most of the world we haven't figured out yet.

01:09:45.220 | But do you think it's possible through science

01:09:47.680 | to know God, to look outside the world?

01:09:50.500 | So it's fundamentally the limit of the empirical

01:09:53.440 | scientific method is that we can't know

01:09:55.580 | some of these very big questions.

01:09:57.840 | - No, I love the, I'm not a scientist,

01:10:00.080 | and I was never all that good at science.

01:10:02.240 | I was more humanities guy.

01:10:03.600 | But I love and respect the sciences, but I hate scientism.

01:10:06.640 | And scientism is rampant today,

01:10:08.760 | with especially young people.

01:10:10.440 | The reduction of all knowledge to the scientific

01:10:12.480 | form of knowledge, and I'm a vehement opponent of that.

01:10:16.560 | There are dimensions of being that are not capturable

01:10:18.800 | through a scientific method of mere observation,

01:10:21.440 | hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera.

01:10:24.180 | As great as that is, as wonderful as that is,

01:10:26.860 | but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave.

01:10:29.380 | And that's not to say it's not real.

01:10:31.020 | It's just at a relatively low level of reality.

01:10:34.160 | You step out of Plato's cave when you go

01:10:35.820 | into the pure mathematics.

01:10:37.920 | That's why, you know that article,

01:10:38.920 | I just came across it recently,

01:10:40.320 | and discovered this whole literature around it,

01:10:42.560 | is Eugene Wigner's article in 1960,

01:10:44.720 | called the Unreasonable Applicability of Mathematics

01:10:49.500 | to the Physical Sciences.

01:10:50.560 | I think that's the title of it.

01:10:51.500 | - Or Effectiveness or something like that, yeah.

01:10:53.880 | - But what's so cool is, you know,

01:10:54.920 | he's not a religious man.

01:10:56.040 | He was kind of a secular Jew.

01:10:57.920 | But yet he uses the word miracle

01:10:59.680 | like eight times in that article.

01:11:01.620 | 'Cause he just is so impressed by the fact

01:11:03.580 | that high, complex mathematics

01:11:06.700 | describes so accurately the physical world,

01:11:09.600 | and can be used to create things and to manipulate.

01:11:13.180 | And why should that be true?

01:11:15.360 | There's something very weirdly mysterious

01:11:18.500 | about that relationship, you know?

01:11:20.060 | And I would say it's because you've stepped

01:11:21.780 | into a higher order of being,

01:11:23.780 | which is inclusive of a lower level of being.

01:11:26.240 | That's the Platonic approach, is that as you move,

01:11:29.140 | now I'm going to a different metaphor,

01:11:30.220 | you move to higher levels,

01:11:31.340 | they're inclusive of the lower levels.

01:11:33.340 | - Yeah, there's some magic there

01:11:35.540 | that seems to, at least in our current understanding

01:11:38.220 | of science, to be not quite capturable.

01:11:42.300 | Even consciousness, the idea of consciousness.

01:11:45.220 | - Can I ask you, where do you think

01:11:46.740 | the laws of nature come from?

01:11:48.020 | So, I mean, sort of the Wigner question,

01:11:49.900 | where does the deep,

01:11:52.460 | the deep mathematical structure of things come from?

01:11:56.240 | How do you explain that?

01:11:57.320 | - The mathematical structure,

01:11:59.640 | or the fact that the structure

01:12:01.900 | is somehow pleasing and beautiful?

01:12:04.300 | 'Cause those are different.

01:12:05.960 | Those are two different--

01:12:06.800 | - No, but do the first one first.

01:12:08.060 | I'm just curious, where do you think it comes from?

01:12:11.020 | - I tend to believe, even in terms of physics,

01:12:13.260 | we don't really know what's going on.

01:12:15.200 | There's so, so, so much more to be discovered.

01:12:18.620 | We're walking around in the dark

01:12:21.060 | trying to figure out little puzzles here and there,

01:12:23.620 | and we're patting ourselves on the back

01:12:25.620 | and how many puzzles we've discovered so far.

01:12:28.060 | Even Gato's incompleteness theorem,

01:12:30.140 | what are the limits of mathematics, axiomatic systems?

01:12:33.040 | I don't know what is the purpose of mathematics,

01:12:37.260 | what is the power of mathematics?

01:12:38.860 | Is it just a useful tool to study the world around us,

01:12:43.860 | or is it something deeper that we're just discovering?

01:12:49.240 | All I know, from my emotional perspective,

01:12:53.460 | now I am an engineer, I'm a robotics AI person,

01:12:56.980 | from an emotional perspective,

01:12:58.180 | I just find the whole thing beautiful.

01:12:59.940 | - Yeah, but that's really cool to me.

01:13:01.700 | That's a very interesting clue.

01:13:03.820 | See, one of the arguments for God

01:13:05.400 | is based on the intelligibility of the world.

01:13:07.700 | It's like Wigner, it's a very peculiar fact,

01:13:10.460 | it seems to me, that the world is so radically intelligible.

01:13:13.180 | Why should that be true?

01:13:14.460 | Why should it be the case

01:13:15.900 | that being has this intelligible structure to it?

01:13:18.820 | So it corresponds to an inquiring mind.

01:13:21.580 | So Aquinas can say that the intelligible in act

01:13:25.460 | is the intellect in act,

01:13:27.260 | meaning there's some deep correspondence

01:13:29.580 | between this and that.

01:13:32.460 | I'm with Wigner, that's, I think, really weird

01:13:36.540 | and unreasonable and strange.

01:13:38.980 | Now, my answer is, because the creator of the universe

01:13:43.980 | is a great mind, and has stamped the world

01:13:48.540 | with intelligibility.

01:13:50.520 | In the beginning was the word, right?

01:13:52.300 | And the word was with God,

01:13:53.300 | and all things came to be through the word.

01:13:55.500 | We shouldn't picture that so much.

01:13:58.540 | It's gesturing in this very powerful direction.

01:14:00.920 | There's an intelligence

01:14:03.540 | that has imbued the world with intelligibility.

01:14:05.900 | And we discover that, you know?

01:14:09.980 | - There's something about the simplicity

01:14:11.380 | of the way the world works,

01:14:12.860 | that's where the beauty comes from.

01:14:15.580 | And yes, there is something profound to the mechanism,

01:14:18.620 | whatever that is.

01:14:20.400 | God that brought that to be.

01:14:23.240 | - That thought it into being.

01:14:25.000 | That the world has been,

01:14:26.440 | when the Bible says that God said,

01:14:28.640 | "Let there be light," and there was light,

01:14:29.880 | God said, well, again, we don't literalize the poetry,

01:14:32.560 | but it's very rich that God spoke the world into being.

01:14:37.040 | So that means it's been imbued with intelligibility

01:14:40.540 | from the beginning.

01:14:41.520 | They say that, you know, the condition for the possibility

01:14:44.680 | of the Western physical sciences

01:14:46.800 | was a basically Christian idea,

01:14:49.000 | namely that the world is not God,

01:14:51.460 | therefore I can analyze it, experiment upon it,

01:14:54.100 | I don't divinize it,

01:14:55.660 | I don't have a mystical relation to the world,

01:14:57.740 | it's not God.

01:14:58.980 | But secondly, that it's absolutely,

01:15:01.160 | in every nook and cranny, intelligible.

01:15:03.360 | And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation.

01:15:06.740 | So it's been created, it's not God, it's other than God,

01:15:09.780 | but yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind.

01:15:13.580 | And when those two things are in place,

01:15:15.460 | the sciences get underway.

01:15:17.460 | I don't worship the world anymore,

01:15:19.620 | but I'm also utterly confident I can come to know it.

01:15:22.420 | And those are theological ideas.

01:15:24.580 | - Well, we live in this world,

01:15:27.180 | so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world

01:15:30.640 | by making the assumption

01:15:32.020 | that this world is fully understandable.

01:15:34.740 | And we don't need to worry about what's outside the world

01:15:36.880 | in some sense in order to build bridges and rockets

01:15:41.460 | and computers and all that kind of stuff.

01:15:43.660 | It's only when we get to the questions that are deeper

01:15:47.180 | about why we're here at all,

01:15:49.380 | what does it mean to be good,

01:15:51.060 | all those kinds of things

01:15:52.060 | do we need to reach outside of this world.

01:15:54.500 | - Well, can I introduce another one?

01:15:55.940 | So I talked about mathematics,

01:15:57.340 | I think it's stepping out of the cave,

01:15:58.700 | it's stepping out of just the purely empirical world.

01:16:02.720 | But the very fact that we use a word like universe

01:16:05.100 | to me is very interesting.

01:16:06.300 | Even if you say multiple universes,

01:16:07.480 | to me it's like, well, they're,

01:16:09.020 | whatever the whole is, the totality.

01:16:13.460 | Universum, turn toward the one.

01:16:16.400 | Why would we call it that?

01:16:18.720 | Why wouldn't we just call it an aggregate?

01:16:20.560 | It's just an aggregate of stuff,

01:16:22.000 | it's an aggregate of all,

01:16:23.200 | but we call it a universe.

01:16:24.880 | And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition is,

01:16:28.760 | it's the intuition of being.

01:16:30.340 | So I immediately experienced things here,

01:16:32.680 | the color and shape, and I can measure them.

01:16:35.080 | But when I've really stepped out of the cave

01:16:37.240 | and I've now engaged beyond mathematics even,

01:16:39.480 | I'm now into metaphysical reflection.

01:16:41.640 | I'm interested not just in this thing as an object

01:16:44.780 | and how it's colored and shaped

01:16:46.240 | and what its atoms and quarks and all that are.

01:16:48.520 | That's fine.

01:16:49.560 | But I'm interested now in,

01:16:51.480 | what does it mean to say this thing is real?

01:16:53.600 | So what makes this a being?

01:16:56.160 | And then what are the characteristics of being?

01:16:58.380 | So now from Aristotle to Heidegger,

01:17:00.080 | this question of the nature of being.

01:17:02.680 | But see, I would say we call it a universe

01:17:04.920 | because it's turned toward the one of being.

01:17:08.000 | It's this intuition that whatever,

01:17:09.600 | from quarks to galaxies to whatever,

01:17:12.560 | give me a billion other universes,

01:17:15.360 | it would still be existence.

01:17:17.520 | It's turned toward the one.

01:17:19.260 | That being unites our experience.

01:17:22.460 | And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis.

01:17:24.700 | I've taken another step out of the cave.

01:17:27.180 | In Plato's language, I'm at the formal level now,

01:17:29.400 | beyond mathematics, the level of forms.

01:17:31.540 | And the formal is inclusive of the mathematical,

01:17:34.160 | which is inclusive of the physical.

01:17:36.260 | And I think that's Eugene Wigner,

01:17:37.580 | is that the mathematical includes the physical.

01:17:39.740 | It is metaphysically prior to it.

01:17:42.500 | - But here we are sitting in the physical

01:17:45.420 | trying to make sense of why the unreasonable effectiveness

01:17:48.460 | of the thing that's beyond, which is the mathematics.

01:17:51.900 | - My answer is God.

01:17:52.960 | And I don't know a better answer.

01:17:54.700 | And as I read Wigner, he wasn't ready to say that.

01:17:58.700 | But I think the language is gesturing.

01:18:00.700 | I was reading someone recently,

01:18:02.860 | some very well-known physicist,

01:18:04.780 | who said his answer to Wigner's question is

01:18:08.580 | that whoever is responsible for the universe

01:18:11.260 | must be a mathematician.

01:18:13.400 | And I thought, yeah, that's right.

01:18:15.180 | - Let me ask you about Jordan Peterson.

01:18:18.100 | You had a great conversation with him.

01:18:20.740 | He has a complicated and nuanced view of faith,

01:18:24.220 | or faith period.

01:18:25.920 | He has said that he believes in Jesus,

01:18:28.700 | the person and the myth,

01:18:30.340 | and some of the full richness and complexity

01:18:33.660 | that you've talked about.

01:18:35.860 | But he's surprised by his faith.

01:18:37.520 | He's not sure what to make of it.

01:18:39.440 | He's almost like meta-struggling

01:18:41.460 | with what the heck is faith means.

01:18:43.940 | He's a super powerful intellect that can't compute

01:18:47.500 | the faith that he's experiencing.

01:18:49.180 | So what are some interesting differences

01:18:52.400 | between the two of you, or commonalities,

01:18:56.220 | in terms of your understanding of faith?

01:18:59.420 | - He's a very interesting guy.

01:19:00.580 | I've had a couple conversations with him.

01:19:02.120 | And I do think he's moving in the direction of faith.

01:19:06.020 | And his lectures in the Bible are very fine, I think.

01:19:09.120 | He reminds me of the church fathers,

01:19:10.540 | because the church fathers would have looked at the,

01:19:13.000 | they call it the moral sense of the scripture.

01:19:15.500 | Peterson would probably call it the psychological meaning.

01:19:18.060 | But I think he's doing a lot of that.

01:19:19.900 | He, as I read him and talk to him,

01:19:22.580 | I think he's kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus.

01:19:25.860 | What I mean there is, for Kant,

01:19:28.480 | Jesus is, it's not so much the historical Jesus,

01:19:30.780 | this figure from long ago.

01:19:31.900 | It's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life.

01:19:35.780 | You know, he says he's the image of the person

01:19:37.820 | perfectly pleasing to God.

01:19:39.620 | And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination

01:19:43.180 | as a heuristic, as a goal that we're tending toward.

01:19:48.100 | But the historical person of Jesus for Kant,

01:19:51.580 | well, let's not fuss about that so much.

01:19:52.980 | It's this figure.

01:19:54.740 | And as I read Peterson, especially, and talk to him,

01:19:56.960 | I think he's kind of there with the archetype of Jesus.

01:20:01.020 | And even language of like, live as though God exists.

01:20:04.860 | That's the (speaking in foreign language)

01:20:06.820 | the kind of as if attitude.

01:20:09.940 | And where I sort of press him when we talk

01:20:12.040 | is in the direction of, no, that's not Christianity yet.

01:20:14.540 | I mean, that's enlightenment moral philosophy.

01:20:18.040 | But Christianity is very interested

01:20:20.540 | in this historical figure,

01:20:22.180 | and very interested that God really became one of us.

01:20:26.460 | And he's not just an archetype of the moral life.

01:20:29.620 | He's someone, he's a person, who's invaded our world

01:20:34.000 | and gone all the way to the bottom of sin

01:20:35.740 | and thereby saved us.

01:20:37.220 | So the facticity of Jesus and then the resurrection.

01:20:40.780 | So Peterson will talk about the resurrection

01:20:43.300 | as a myth and all that,

01:20:45.140 | and you can find that in different cultures, et cetera.

01:20:47.560 | But Christianity is saying something else.

01:20:51.380 | - So in Christianity, when we're talking about who is Jesus,

01:20:54.880 | it's not just an archetype.

01:20:56.540 | It's not just a myth.

01:20:57.900 | It's a historical figure and the very grounded fact

01:21:01.880 | that God became one of us is fundamental to this idea

01:21:06.260 | of what Christianity is, what it means to be a Christian.

01:21:09.340 | It's the sin and the love that came here down to earth.

01:21:14.340 | That means we can be one with God.

01:21:17.780 | So that's essential.

01:21:18.700 | It's not just an archetype.

01:21:19.980 | - That's right.

01:21:20.920 | You know, it always strikes me,

01:21:23.060 | the difference between, let's say,

01:21:24.940 | mythic expressions and the New Testament is,

01:21:28.740 | read someone like Carl Jung

01:21:30.620 | and then Joseph Campbell, whom he influenced,

01:21:33.060 | and then now Jordan Peterson, who's very Jungian,

01:21:35.500 | and this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures.

01:21:37.860 | And great, I mean, I think it's very interesting

01:21:39.940 | and there's a lot going on there.

01:21:42.280 | There's a sort of calmness, though, about it.

01:21:44.320 | Like, yeah, interesting, and that's in this culture

01:21:46.780 | and that culture, and it's the form of the moral life,

01:21:49.340 | and mm-hmm, I understand all that.

01:21:51.400 | Then you read the New Testament.

01:21:53.200 | Whatever those people are talking about, it's not that.

01:21:57.180 | They are grabbing you by the shoulders

01:22:00.900 | and shaking you to get your attention,

01:22:03.020 | to tell you about something that happened to them, right?

01:22:06.900 | Like the resurrection, the myth of the dying and rising God

01:22:10.660 | and how powerful it is in shaping our consciousness,

01:22:13.540 | mm-hmm, that's fascinating.

01:22:15.000 | That's not the New Testament.

01:22:16.340 | The New Testament is, did you hear?

01:22:18.460 | Did you, Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death,

01:22:22.100 | God raised him from the dead, and he was seen by 500,

01:22:25.060 | and he was seen by Peter, and then lastly, I saw him.

01:22:29.700 | That's how Paul talks.

01:22:31.260 | It's not the detached, you know,

01:22:34.900 | psychologist musing on archetypal things,

01:22:37.980 | and I think that makes a huge difference

01:22:40.580 | when it comes to Christianity.

01:22:41.660 | - The intensity of the historical details

01:22:44.940 | are essential here, so if you look at Hitler and Nazi Germany

01:22:49.940 | it's not enough to say, well, power corrupts,

01:22:53.380 | and sometimes, so looking at the archetype of Hitler,

01:22:57.020 | it's much, much more important, much more powerful

01:22:59.740 | to look at the details of how he came to power,

01:23:03.700 | what are the ways he did evil onto the world,

01:23:06.580 | and then you can get really intense about your struggle

01:23:11.020 | with some of the complexities of human nature and power

01:23:13.620 | on institutions and all that kind of stuff.

01:23:15.820 | So the historical nature of the Bible,

01:23:18.380 | - We're an historical religion.

01:23:19.940 | And we've been-- - Is important.

01:23:21.340 | - We generate philosophical reflection,

01:23:23.980 | we can find common ground with archetypal thinking

01:23:26.660 | and all that, we can.

01:23:28.060 | And the church fathers used Greek philosophy,

01:23:30.780 | and Aquinas uses Aristotle, and all that's great,

01:23:33.420 | but we're an historical religion,

01:23:35.340 | and that matters immensely.

01:23:37.500 | - Is the Bible the literal word of God?

01:23:40.740 | How do you make sense of the words that make up the Bible?

01:23:44.420 | - I think the best way to get at the Bible

01:23:46.060 | is to think of it as a library, not a book.

01:23:48.380 | So it's a collection of books, right,

01:23:50.180 | from a wide variety of periods, different authors,

01:23:53.500 | different audiences, and different genre.

01:23:56.460 | So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song,

01:23:59.420 | you find something like history, not in our sense,

01:24:02.140 | but something like history.

01:24:03.600 | You find gospel, which is its own genre,

01:24:05.740 | you find epistolary literature like Paul,

01:24:08.780 | you find apocalyptic, there's all this in the Bible.

01:24:13.000 | So is the Bible literally the word of God?

01:24:15.540 | It's like saying, is the library literally true?

01:24:18.620 | It depends on what section you're in, right?

01:24:20.900 | So parts of like 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings,

01:24:25.900 | number places in the Old Testament.

01:24:27.300 | Are there elements of the historical in there?

01:24:29.260 | Sure, but it's theologically interpreted history.

01:24:31.980 | It's not like our sense of history of,

01:24:33.940 | give me 10,000 footnotes, and I'm gonna look

01:24:37.940 | at all the source material I can possibly find.

01:24:40.180 | It's more like ancient history,

01:24:42.140 | like Herodotus, people like that.

01:24:44.440 | But then there's poetry, and there's myth,

01:24:46.220 | and there's legend, and there's song,

01:24:47.800 | and all that stuff in the Bible.

01:24:48.820 | So God breathes through all of it, I would say.

01:24:53.820 | He inspired all of it, right?

01:24:57.380 | Inspirare, he's breathing through all of it.

01:25:00.400 | God is speaking through all of it.

01:25:02.780 | But he speaks in different voices.

01:25:05.020 | He uses different human instruments,

01:25:06.900 | and he uses different genre and different types of language.

01:25:09.700 | So we have to be sensitive to that

01:25:10.940 | when we're interpreting the Bible.

01:25:12.220 | - So the different instruments are more or less,

01:25:16.020 | some are more perfect than others in terms of--

01:25:18.080 | - No, I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say more perfect.

01:25:19.700 | I'd say they're just different.

01:25:20.800 | It's like a symphony, and God's like a conductor,

01:25:23.320 | and there's all kinds of different instruments

01:25:24.640 | in the orchestra, and he loves

01:25:26.400 | just to breathe through the Psalms.

01:25:27.800 | I prayed the Psalms this morning.

01:25:29.120 | I do every day in my office.

01:25:31.560 | Those are songs.

01:25:32.720 | They probably were literally sung,

01:25:34.080 | most of them, at one point.

01:25:35.640 | He breathes through apocalyptic.

01:25:38.440 | We're reading the book of Revelation now

01:25:39.840 | in the Easter season, and it's this wild and wooly book.

01:25:43.400 | It should be filmed by Spielberg or somebody today.

01:25:47.780 | And he speaks through the Gospels.

01:25:49.700 | The Gospels correspond in genre

01:25:51.900 | to what I call ancient biography.

01:25:54.140 | That's the genre of the Gospels.

01:25:56.140 | It's wrong to call them mythic or simply literary.

01:25:59.300 | They're like ancient biographies.

01:26:01.100 | You have the Pauline letters, which are about

01:26:05.740 | particular cities that Paul was visiting

01:26:07.660 | and particular people he knew.

01:26:09.340 | So you just gotta be sensitive to the genre all the time.

01:26:12.340 | Let's return back to human institutions

01:26:14.540 | and talk about history of human civilization and politics.

01:26:19.220 | So one question to ask is, was America founded

01:26:23.300 | as a Christian nation, in your view?

01:26:25.420 | If we look at the Declaration of Independence,

01:26:28.740 | what did the words mean?

01:26:30.700 | We hold these truths to be self-evident,

01:26:32.780 | that all men are created equal,

01:26:34.800 | that they are endowed by their Creator

01:26:36.860 | with certain inalienable rights,

01:26:39.200 | that among these are life, liberty,

01:26:41.800 | and the pursuit of happiness.

01:26:43.840 | It seems like God is breathing through those words, too.

01:26:47.520 | - Yeah, I think so.

01:26:49.200 | The founders, it would be some kind of combination of deism.

01:26:53.220 | Certainly Christianity is coming up through them.

01:26:56.920 | Enlightenment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix.

01:27:01.040 | So you're not gonna find in our founding fathers

01:27:03.280 | simply a Thomas Aquinas or like a purely

01:27:06.680 | classically Christian understanding.

01:27:08.200 | It's Christianity in those various expressions.

01:27:11.680 | 'Cause actually, I would see the Enlightenment

01:27:13.560 | as a sort of child of Christianity.

01:27:16.760 | We could talk about that.

01:27:17.600 | But having said all that, yes,

01:27:20.560 | I think they are expressing at least the residue

01:27:24.600 | of a once deeply integrated Christian sense of things,

01:27:28.480 | that our rights are not created by the government.

01:27:32.800 | They're not doled out by the government.

01:27:36.020 | They come from God.

01:27:37.400 | And the other thing I find really interesting

01:27:38.840 | is equality, because look in classical philosophy,

01:27:42.800 | political philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero.

01:27:45.320 | It's not equality.

01:27:47.200 | For them, it's our inequality that's really interesting.

01:27:50.120 | So Plato divides us into these three classes.

01:27:52.400 | And Aristotle says only a tiny little coterie

01:27:55.040 | of property males of sufficient education

01:27:58.040 | should be in the political life.

01:27:59.280 | The rest should all be in private life.

01:28:01.200 | And then some are suited for slavery.

01:28:03.120 | So he divides us dramatically.

01:28:05.720 | Same with Cicero and so on.

01:28:07.120 | Where does this come from, this weird idea

01:28:10.240 | that we're all equal?

01:28:12.020 | I mean, how?

01:28:12.860 | We're not equal in beauty, not equal in strength,

01:28:14.080 | we're not equal in moral attainment,

01:28:16.080 | we're not equal in intelligence.

01:28:18.400 | So what is it?

01:28:20.140 | And I think the residue especially comes through

01:28:22.480 | in that little word, that all men are created equal.

01:28:27.480 | That's our equality, that we're all equally

01:28:29.960 | children of God.

01:28:31.440 | So take God out of the picture,

01:28:32.840 | I think we are gonna slide rapidly

01:28:35.880 | into an embrace of inequality.

01:28:38.480 | Now, in the classical world, yes,

01:28:40.720 | but heck, look at the 20th century.

01:28:42.520 | I mean, when God is excluded in a very systematic way,

01:28:45.920 | I think you saw the suspension of rights

01:28:48.160 | and the suspension of equality like mad.

01:28:51.720 | So no, I think it's very important

01:28:54.440 | that God is in the picture

01:28:55.920 | and that we're a nation under God.

01:28:57.480 | It matters enormously.

01:28:58.440 | That's not pious boilerplate.

01:29:00.280 | That's at the rational foundations of our democracy.

01:29:03.440 | - So do you think Nietzsche was onto something

01:29:05.520 | with the idea, looking into the 20th century,

01:29:09.320 | that God is dead?

01:29:10.540 | That there is a cultural distancing

01:29:16.240 | from a belief in God?

01:29:18.140 | - Yeah, I'd be somewhat sympathetic

01:29:20.680 | to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there.

01:29:23.460 | Namely, it's not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop,

01:29:26.400 | "Hey, God is dead."

01:29:28.600 | It's more of a lament.

01:29:30.120 | God is dead and we've killed him.

01:29:32.120 | And what will happen in the wake of that?

01:29:35.460 | And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism

01:29:38.360 | of the 20th century follows from that questioning of God

01:29:43.360 | and the dismissal of God from public life.

01:29:46.960 | So I would be sympathetic with that.

01:29:48.760 | When we're beyond good and evil,

01:29:52.000 | and all that's left is the will to power,

01:29:54.400 | and then why are we surprised that the powerful rise

01:29:58.040 | and that they use the power less for their purposes?

01:30:01.120 | When we forget ideas like equality and rights,

01:30:04.000 | which are grounded in God,

01:30:05.260 | why are we surprised that death camps follow?

01:30:08.920 | So I think there's a correlation there for sure.

01:30:11.440 | - I don't know, I believe that there's a capacity

01:30:13.600 | to do good in all of us, and a capacity to do evil,

01:30:17.680 | and there's something that tends towards good.

01:30:20.440 | Whatever that is.

01:30:22.040 | I tend to think that if that community,

01:30:24.920 | that love that we talked about, they find each other,

01:30:27.680 | they find the good.

01:30:30.740 | If you don't constrain the resources,

01:30:32.240 | if you don't push them,

01:30:33.160 | if you don't artificially create conflict

01:30:37.440 | through power centers and evil charismatic leaders,

01:30:41.280 | then people will be good to each other.

01:30:43.000 | And whether that's God or some other source

01:30:47.080 | of deep moral meaning,

01:30:52.080 | that seems to be essential for a functioning civilization.

01:30:55.520 | - Yeah.

01:30:56.360 | - And it's hard, I mean, that's what humans are.

01:30:58.280 | We're searching for what that God is, what that means.

01:31:01.440 | - You know what that triggers in my mind?

01:31:02.800 | I wonder if you agree with this,

01:31:04.000 | that the modern sciences drew their strength

01:31:06.240 | from their narrowness.

01:31:07.520 | What I mean there is they almost completely bracketed

01:31:10.720 | formal and final causality in the Aristotelian sense,

01:31:13.080 | and they focused on efficient and material causality.

01:31:16.160 | And that gave, as I say, great strength,

01:31:18.160 | but from the narrowness of focus.

01:31:20.120 | But for Aristotle, the more important causes

01:31:22.620 | are the final and the formal causes.

01:31:24.840 | And so final causality there, what's drawing us?

01:31:28.360 | So for Aristotle, he'd look at someone like me and say,

01:31:30.360 | okay, you have a intelligible structure,

01:31:34.920 | and that leads you to seek certain things

01:31:37.520 | for the perfection of that structure.

01:31:40.040 | And fair enough, I think that's right.

01:31:41.720 | So I seek the good.

01:31:42.640 | Right now, I'm seeking the good of being with you.

01:31:44.720 | I said, yeah, I'll sit down with Lex Friedman

01:31:47.000 | and we'll talk about deep and important things.

01:31:49.480 | That's the good I sought this morning when I woke up.

01:31:52.280 | Now, why am I seeking that?

01:31:54.320 | Well, for a higher reason, a higher good.

01:31:56.920 | 'Cause it's part of my work, my ministry,

01:31:59.740 | is to the church reaching out beyond itself

01:32:03.680 | to the wider culture.

01:32:04.680 | And okay, well, why do you want that?

01:32:08.120 | Well, 'cause I wanna bring more and more people

01:32:10.040 | into what I think is beautiful and true

01:32:12.640 | and good in the church.

01:32:13.840 | Well, how come you want that?

01:32:15.600 | Well, because a long time ago,

01:32:17.460 | I was kind of myself brought into that realm

01:32:19.780 | and find it very compelling.

01:32:21.320 | Yeah, but then why do you want that?

01:32:22.600 | Well, 'cause ultimately, I wanna be friends with God.

01:32:25.360 | Now, I've given you one example there,

01:32:27.000 | but any act of the will, it seems to me,

01:32:30.680 | has to be analyzed that way.

01:32:32.760 | The will seeks something.

01:32:34.160 | It seeks the good, right, by definition.

01:32:36.420 | But the good always nests like a Russian doll

01:32:38.920 | in a higher good, right, which then nests

01:32:41.440 | in a still higher good.

01:32:43.080 | Until you come, this is Aquinas, to some,

01:32:47.020 | in this sense, uncaused cause, an uncaused final cause,

01:32:51.280 | there has to be some summum bonum, right,

01:32:53.480 | some supreme good that you're looking for.

01:32:56.500 | And that's God, by the way.

01:32:59.800 | That's another, I think, rational path to God

01:33:01.760 | is every single moment of every day,

01:33:04.600 | we are implicitly seeking God.

01:33:07.000 | - So with your Word on Fire ministries

01:33:10.840 | and the website and the communication efforts,

01:33:13.160 | what is the thing you're seeking?

01:33:15.200 | Just you, if we can pause and for a brief moment,

01:33:19.880 | allow you to be prideful. (laughs)

01:33:22.440 | Or, and I'm of course just joking,

01:33:24.800 | but what is your local efforts,

01:33:27.280 | your small little pocket of the world

01:33:29.320 | with small in quotes, with Word on Fire?

01:33:34.320 | - Yeah, it's just using the media,

01:33:37.760 | especially the new media, the social media,

01:33:39.440 | to get the gospel out.

01:33:41.200 | So I started, what, 20-some years ago,

01:33:43.800 | just on a radio show in Chicago, 5.15 on Sunday morning.

01:33:47.600 | I had a 15-minute sermon show.

01:33:50.000 | And I asked the people in this parish I was at,

01:33:51.680 | I said, "I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes

01:33:55.320 | "at 5.15 on Sunday morning."

01:33:56.920 | And they all laughed when I proposed that,

01:33:58.800 | but they gave me the money.

01:34:00.080 | So that's how I got started,

01:34:01.000 | just doing a sermon on the radio.

01:34:02.760 | And then it branched off into video stuff and TV.

01:34:06.320 | And then I did a documentary.

01:34:08.360 | I went all over the world

01:34:09.280 | and kind of told the story of Catholicism.

01:34:11.800 | So that's how we started,

01:34:12.960 | and now I'm using all the new media and social media.

01:34:15.840 | - But what I really love, what we're doing today,

01:34:18.080 | is something I really like,

01:34:19.200 | which is having a conversation

01:34:20.960 | outside of just the narrow Catholic world,

01:34:23.120 | or even the narrow Christian world,

01:34:24.480 | but to look out to the wider culture.

01:34:26.720 | And who's talking about interesting things,

01:34:29.080 | and how can the church engage there?

01:34:31.280 | So that's the purpose of Word on Fire.

01:34:34.120 | - Is it overwhelming to face so many different

01:34:38.640 | atheists than complex thinkers like Jordan Peterson

01:34:44.560 | and some of the more political-style thinkers

01:34:47.520 | that you've spoken with?

01:34:49.160 | Is that, what is it, Dave Rubin,

01:34:52.680 | who's also has a way different world view as well.

01:34:57.680 | Is that terrifying?

01:35:00.040 | Is that exciting to you?

01:35:01.600 | - Yeah.

01:35:02.440 | - Is it challenging?

01:35:03.640 | - Yeah, maybe all of the above, but more exciting.

01:35:06.480 | I would say I like doing that.

01:35:07.920 | I was a teacher for a long time.

01:35:09.280 | I taught in a seminary for like 20 years.

01:35:10.840 | And so I've been engaging these questions for a long time.

01:35:13.240 | I'm a writer, I've written about 20-some books.

01:35:15.520 | And I write some at a popular level,

01:35:17.800 | I write some at a high academic level,

01:35:19.440 | and I like doing all that.

01:35:21.400 | So I love those ideas, I love those questions,

01:35:25.000 | love engaging people.

01:35:26.280 | And I find, my own experience,

01:35:28.680 | you do run into, of course, a lot of the vitriol

01:35:32.200 | and kind of just stupidity and all that online,

01:35:34.760 | and I get it.

01:35:35.600 | And religion is such a magnet for people's hostility

01:35:39.200 | for different reasons, so I get that.

01:35:40.880 | Like Reddit, we talked about it.

01:35:42.680 | You have to wade through swamps of obscenity and everything.

01:35:47.680 | But I do it, and I like it, and it's worthwhile.

01:35:51.280 | Because in that Reddit experience,

01:35:53.120 | so many of the issues that preoccupy young people,

01:35:56.080 | I can name them for you, exactly what they are.

01:35:58.640 | Comes to religion.

01:35:59.600 | How do you know there's a God?

01:36:00.960 | So the God question.

01:36:01.960 | Secondly, why is there so much suffering in the world?

01:36:05.520 | A third question, why do you think your religion

01:36:07.680 | is the right religion?

01:36:08.920 | Fourth, why are you so mean to gay people?

01:36:11.280 | So those are the four things that I, again and again,

01:36:14.720 | come up when dealing with young people.

01:36:16.560 | I've told my brother bishops and priests about that.

01:36:19.160 | I said, structure your adult education programs,

01:36:22.160 | or structure your youth outreach

01:36:24.080 | around those four questions.

01:36:25.480 | - Well, let me ask you about gay marriage.

01:36:28.360 | How do we make sense of the love between a man and a man,

01:36:33.360 | and a woman and a woman, and the institution of marriage?

01:36:36.600 | - We love friendship, and friendship

01:36:40.120 | is at the heart of things.

01:36:41.200 | And so nothing wrong with friendship

01:36:42.560 | between a man and a man, a woman and a woman.

01:36:45.560 | But go back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas,

01:36:48.360 | about natural finalities and intelligible forms,

01:36:51.280 | that there's a certain form to human being,

01:36:54.440 | which includes the physical and includes the sexual.

01:36:56.800 | It has a proper finality, and so we'd recognize

01:36:59.520 | that finality is twofold, both unitive and procreative.

01:37:03.080 | And so those two we recognize as the appropriate expression

01:37:06.680 | of human sexuality.

01:37:08.120 | So that's why the church holds to sex

01:37:11.560 | between a man and a woman within the context of marriage

01:37:14.240 | is the right expression.

01:37:16.680 | We reach out to everybody in love, and in respect,

01:37:22.720 | and deep understanding, and seeking to understand

01:37:26.440 | their lives from the inside.

01:37:28.400 | So I mean, all of that, I agree with the bridge building

01:37:31.480 | that we need to do to people like in the gay community,

01:37:34.120 | and people in gay marriage, and so on.

01:37:36.600 | So the church holds to the intelligible structure,

01:37:40.440 | if you want, of human sexuality,

01:37:42.520 | and it reaches out to real human beings

01:37:44.640 | always in an attitude of invitation and love, and so on.

01:37:47.880 | So it's somewhere in there

01:37:49.360 | that the church takes its stance.

01:37:51.240 | - And so there's probably variation

01:37:56.000 | in the stances that it takes.

01:37:58.280 | So you're saying the institution of marriage

01:38:00.000 | is about the unitive, which is like the friendship,

01:38:03.280 | the deep connection between two humans,

01:38:06.840 | and the procreative, so being able to have children,

01:38:10.840 | all that kind of stuff.

01:38:12.000 | It's interesting.

01:38:14.640 | So is our gay couple seen as sinful?

01:38:19.640 | So does the church acknowledge the love,

01:38:24.000 | that's the deep love that's possible between a man and a man?

01:38:26.400 | - I think so, which is why the church says

01:38:28.360 | in its official teaching, it's the physical expression,

01:38:31.600 | let's say, of sexual passion between two men

01:38:35.400 | that is problematic.

01:38:36.760 | Not their friendship, not their love for each other.

01:38:39.440 | So I think, yeah, we confirm the first.

01:38:43.480 | - Well, let me ask you another difficult topic

01:38:45.600 | that's just happened. - Unlike the other ones

01:38:47.320 | we've talked about. - Unlike the other ones

01:38:48.160 | we've talked about, that's going on in the news now.

01:38:51.520 | As we sit here today, the Supreme Court has voted

01:38:54.080 | to overturn abortion rights in a draft majority opinion,

01:38:58.920 | striking down the landmark Roe versus Wade decision.

01:39:01.960 | What are your thoughts on this?

01:39:04.080 | First of all, the human institution of the Supreme Court

01:39:06.840 | making these decisions throughout its history,

01:39:10.000 | and second of all, just the idea,

01:39:12.480 | the really powerful, the controversial,

01:39:15.880 | the difficult idea of abortion.

01:39:18.320 | - Yeah, I mean, I'm against abortion.

01:39:22.760 | I'm pro-life.

01:39:25.120 | The church recognizes from the moment of conception

01:39:27.320 | we're dealing with a human life

01:39:28.920 | that's worthy of respect and protection,

01:39:32.600 | especially as you see the unfolding of that person

01:39:36.680 | across a pregnancy.

01:39:38.240 | But at every stage, we recognize the beauty

01:39:41.480 | and the dignity of that human being.

01:39:44.400 | And so we stand opposed to this,

01:39:47.760 | the outright killing of the innocent.

01:39:49.640 | So that's the church's view.

01:39:51.240 | Again, reaching out always in love and understanding

01:39:56.120 | and compassion to those who are dealing,

01:39:58.040 | and believe me, every single pastor,

01:39:59.920 | every single priest understands that

01:40:02.040 | 'cause we deal with people all the time

01:40:03.320 | who are in these painful situations.

01:40:05.640 | But that's the moral side of it.

01:40:08.880 | The legal side, I think Roe v. Wade was terribly decided.

01:40:11.680 | I think one of the worst expressions of American law

01:40:14.280 | since the Dred Scott decision.

01:40:15.960 | So I stand in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey.

01:40:19.800 | I think they were terrible.

01:40:21.080 | The Casey decision is instructive to me.

01:40:25.080 | It belongs to the nature of freedom, that decision says,

01:40:28.040 | to determine the meaning of one's own life.

01:40:30.520 | And I don't get the language exactly right,

01:40:32.520 | but and of the universe.

01:40:34.680 | Like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom

01:40:38.560 | that we can determine the meaning.

01:40:40.280 | See, but that's repugnant

01:40:41.320 | to everything we've just talked about,

01:40:43.400 | that I'm inventing the meaning of my life

01:40:46.920 | and of the universe.

01:40:48.080 | And so Casey, though, was instructive in a way

01:40:51.240 | because it tips its hat toward the problem culturally.

01:40:55.480 | Is that I think in my freedom, I can determine everything.

01:40:59.560 | My choice is all that matters.

01:41:01.520 | And I would say, no, your choice should be correlated

01:41:04.960 | to the order of the good.

01:41:06.600 | It's not sovereign.

01:41:08.120 | It doesn't reign sovereignly over being

01:41:10.520 | and it makes its own decisions.

01:41:12.760 | So I think Casey was terrible law

01:41:15.080 | and it was backing up Roe v. Wade, which is terrible law.

01:41:18.720 | So I'm in favor of the overturning of those.

01:41:20.880 | I've spoken out that many times.

01:41:22.560 | Now it'll return it to the individual states.

01:41:24.600 | It's not gonna solve the problem.

01:41:27.760 | The individual states will have to decide.

01:41:29.800 | I just heard yesterday, we were up in Sacramento,

01:41:32.320 | the bishops having our annual meeting.

01:41:35.160 | And so we got the word from the governor and the legislators

01:41:38.920 | that they're gonna push for a constitutional amendment

01:41:41.120 | in California.

01:41:41.960 | So basically to make any attempt to limit abortion

01:41:44.760 | in any way, just illegal.

01:41:46.680 | I think that's barbaric.

01:41:49.120 | So I stand radically opposed to that.

01:41:51.920 | - It's such an interesting line

01:41:54.120 | because if you believe that there's a,

01:41:57.680 | it's a line that struggles with the question

01:42:00.720 | of what does it mean to be a living being

01:42:04.720 | or to give life to something.

01:42:07.220 | Because if you believe that at the moment of conception,

01:42:12.520 | you're basically creating a human life,

01:42:15.760 | then abortion is murder.

01:42:19.360 | And then if you don't,

01:42:21.880 | then it's a sort of basic biological choice

01:42:26.160 | that's not taking away of a life.

01:42:30.360 | And the gap between those two beliefs is so vast

01:42:34.240 | that it's hard and yet so fundamental

01:42:36.760 | to the question of what it means to be alive

01:42:39.980 | and the fundamental question about the respect

01:42:43.360 | for human life and human dignity.

01:42:45.840 | It's interesting to see.

01:42:47.340 | And also about freedom too.

01:42:51.160 | All of those things are mixed in there.

01:42:53.880 | It's a beautiful struggle.

01:42:55.360 | - Maybe the freedom is the most important.

01:42:57.320 | The sort of freedom run amuck.

01:42:58.960 | In classical philosophy and theology,

01:43:03.600 | freedom is not self-determination.

01:43:07.660 | Freedom is the disciplining of desire

01:43:12.760 | so as to make the achievement of the good

01:43:15.820 | first possible and then effortless.

01:43:19.480 | You know what I'm saying?

01:43:20.320 | So modern freedom, and the roots of that

01:43:22.560 | are people like William of Ockham in the late Middle Ages.

01:43:26.140 | Freedom means I hover above the yes and the no.

01:43:28.320 | Do I do yes or no?

01:43:29.240 | And I'm the sovereign subject of that choice.

01:43:31.840 | And on no basis I will say yes or no.

01:43:35.420 | I'm like Louis XIV, or I'm like Stalin or something.

01:43:39.480 | But Aquinas wouldn't have recognized that as freedom.

01:43:42.760 | For him, it's I got this desire in me.

01:43:45.960 | I've got this will.

01:43:47.720 | And it's pushing toward the good.

01:43:49.360 | But the trouble is I got so many attachments

01:43:51.240 | and I'm so stupid and I'm so conditioned by my sin

01:43:54.720 | that I can't achieve it.

01:43:56.240 | So I need to be disciplined in my desire

01:43:59.480 | so as to make that achievement possible

01:44:01.840 | and then effortless.

01:44:03.360 | So right now, I'm freely speaking English to you.

01:44:07.920 | And you had the experience, and I've had it too,

01:44:10.320 | of learning a foreign language.

01:44:11.760 | And don't you feel unfree?

01:44:15.080 | Like when you're struggling with a language.

01:44:17.720 | When I was over in Paris doing my doctoral work,

01:44:19.560 | and I was okay with French.

01:44:21.480 | But my first time in a seminar,

01:44:23.640 | and there's all these intelligent francophones

01:44:27.080 | around the table, and they're all just,

01:44:28.440 | and I'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward French.

01:44:32.160 | And I felt unfree, 'cause my desire wasn't,

01:44:38.000 | it wasn't directed.

01:44:40.040 | But then over time, I became freer and freer

01:44:43.040 | speaker of French.

01:44:44.480 | I was ordered more to the good.

01:44:47.000 | That's a better understanding of freedom

01:44:48.640 | than sort of sovereign self-determination.

01:44:51.560 | But our country is now, I think,

01:44:53.720 | really in the grip of that.

01:44:55.920 | I decide.

01:44:56.760 | And that's where the Nietzschean thing comes to my mind,

01:44:58.920 | the will to power.

01:45:00.280 | I'm beyond good and evil.

01:45:01.920 | It's just up to me to decide.

01:45:03.960 | God help us.

01:45:05.360 | No, it's the values that we intuit around us,

01:45:08.120 | intellectual, moral, and aesthetic, the values.

01:45:11.000 | Think of the dog on the beach again.

01:45:12.680 | And that you get ordered to those by your education,

01:45:16.380 | by your family, by your religion.

01:45:18.660 | And that's beautiful.

01:45:19.560 | That makes you free.

01:45:20.680 | Now I can freely enter into this.

01:45:23.160 | So this sovereign self-determination business,

01:45:26.160 | that's not my game.

01:45:27.140 | - The values come in part from the tradition

01:45:31.520 | carried through the generations.

01:45:33.600 | Let me ask you to put on your wise hat

01:45:36.720 | and give advice to young folks.

01:45:38.400 | So high school and college,

01:45:40.320 | thinking about what to do with their life, career.

01:45:45.480 | There's so many options out there.

01:45:48.600 | How can they have a career they can be proud of,

01:45:52.000 | or even just a life they can be proud of?

01:45:54.500 | - I think I'd say find something you're good at,

01:46:00.440 | because that's from God.

01:46:01.620 | It's a gift that God's given you.

01:46:03.720 | And then dedicate it to love.

01:46:06.120 | You know what I'm saying?

01:46:06.960 | So you're good at science or math or sports or whatever.

01:46:11.200 | Okay, I'm gonna use that now for my aggrandizement,

01:46:13.880 | for my wealth, for my privileges, and to become famous.

01:46:17.560 | No, no, no, don't.

01:46:19.000 | Find what you're good at,

01:46:20.400 | but now dedicate it to willing the good of the other.

01:46:23.800 | So use your science and use your mathematics

01:46:26.060 | and use your sports and use your musicianship

01:46:29.080 | to benefit the world, you know?

01:46:31.260 | That's what I'd say to them.

01:46:33.880 | So find what you're good at.

01:46:35.080 | That's from God. - Well, that's a tricky one,

01:46:37.400 | finding what you're good at,

01:46:39.040 | because it's not just raw skill.

01:46:41.440 | It's also what you connect with.

01:46:43.560 | And it's also this iterative process of,

01:46:48.240 | if you wanna add love to the world,

01:46:50.500 | you have to see how can you be effective at doing that.

01:46:55.640 | So it's not just the things you're good at.

01:46:57.120 | There's like, I'm good at building bridges out of toothpicks.

01:47:02.120 | I'm not exactly sure that's going to be useful for the world.

01:47:05.920 | Then again, to push back on that,

01:47:07.840 | the joy brings me, maybe somehow the joy radiates out.

01:47:11.360 | - Yeah, but you're good at what you're doing right now,

01:47:13.200 | and you've dedicated that to bringing more light

01:47:16.240 | and illumination and joy to the world.

01:47:19.440 | (Lex laughs)

01:47:20.280 | - But it's true.

01:47:21.120 | - But that was a searching, that's a process

01:47:24.360 | of trying stuff and figuring it out.

01:47:26.720 | - Right.

01:47:27.560 | - And ultimately, yes, asking the question,

01:47:30.760 | how is this making the world at all better

01:47:32.640 | at every step of the way,

01:47:34.680 | as opposed to enriching yourself

01:47:36.000 | and all those kinds of things.

01:47:37.120 | - Right, I think that's the name of the game.

01:47:39.200 | But it's tricky, and if we don't have moral mentors

01:47:42.160 | and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard.

01:47:44.560 | And if you tell a kid, that's deadly to me,

01:47:47.280 | just decide for yourself, just off you go,

01:47:50.240 | and you make your own choices.

01:47:52.760 | Now, your choice has to be disciplined.

01:47:55.440 | Your desire's gotta be directed.

01:47:57.520 | Then you'll find your creative path.

01:47:59.680 | Everyone does it in his own way.

01:48:01.600 | But it's a guided choice.

01:48:03.840 | Your freedom is not sovereign, it's a guided freedom.

01:48:08.040 | - So in the struggle and the suffering

01:48:10.440 | you've seen in the world,

01:48:11.680 | let me ask you the question of death.

01:48:16.940 | How often do you think about your own mortality?

01:48:22.720 | - Every day.

01:48:23.920 | - And one, are you afraid of it, the uncertainty of it?

01:48:28.920 | And what do you think happens after you die?

01:48:32.440 | - Sure, I'm afraid of it,

01:48:33.280 | I mean, 'cause I don't know what's next.

01:48:37.920 | I mean, I can't know it the way I know you,

01:48:39.880 | so of course I'm afraid of it.

01:48:41.560 | And I think of it every day.

01:48:43.480 | That's true.

01:48:44.320 | My prayer life compels me.

01:48:48.200 | You know, we have this, the Hail Mary prayer.

01:48:51.000 | You know, so you pray the rosary.

01:48:52.520 | Now and at the hour of our death, amen.

01:48:54.280 | Now and at the hour of our death, amen.

01:48:56.720 | Now at the hour of our death, amen.

01:48:58.040 | You pray the whole rosary, 50 times.

01:49:00.840 | You've reminded yourself of your own death.

01:49:03.400 | But I do, I think about it,

01:49:05.160 | because it's the ultimate limit.

01:49:06.400 | It's why it's beguiled every artist and writer

01:49:08.920 | and philosopher, it's the ultimate limit question.

01:49:12.560 | But yeah, sure, I'm afraid of it, 'cause it's the unknown.

01:49:16.760 | What do I think happens?

01:49:20.780 | I think I'm drawn into the deeper embrace of God's love.

01:49:25.140 | You know, and that's stating it

01:49:28.060 | kind of in a more poetic way.

01:49:30.020 | Do you know John Polkinghorne's work?

01:49:32.620 | Do you know that name?

01:49:33.740 | John Polkinghorne was a very interesting,

01:49:34.940 | he just died recently.

01:49:36.380 | He was a Cambridge University particle physicist, right?

01:49:39.820 | High, high-level scientist,

01:49:41.860 | who at midlife became an Anglican priest.

01:49:45.260 | He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary

01:49:47.660 | and became an Anglican priest, right?

01:49:49.460 | And then wrote, I think, some of the best stuff

01:49:51.420 | on science and religion, 'cause he really knew the science

01:49:53.740 | from the inside.

01:49:54.900 | Here's Polkinghorne's account

01:49:56.100 | that I've always found persuasive.

01:49:58.740 | He said, "What survives after we die?"

01:50:03.220 | So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground

01:50:06.700 | or it's burned up or it goes away, right?

01:50:09.140 | "But what's preserved?"

01:50:10.140 | And he says, what Aristotle would have called the form,

01:50:13.460 | Polkinghorne calls it the pattern.

01:50:15.220 | So the pattern that's organized,

01:50:18.500 | the matter that's made me up over all these years,

01:50:20.980 | that's obviously not the same as it was,

01:50:23.380 | even, I mean, you would know, how often does it all change,

01:50:25.700 | all your atoms and cells and, you know.

01:50:28.340 | There was the little Bobby Barron

01:50:31.260 | who was growing up in Birmingham, Michigan,

01:50:33.700 | I can have a picture of him, and then there's me.

01:50:35.940 | And I say, oh, that's the same person.

01:50:37.340 | Well, I mean, clearly not, materially speaking,

01:50:39.260 | not at all, completely different.

01:50:41.740 | But there's a unity to whatever that pattern is

01:50:44.580 | by which all of that materiality's been kind of organized.

01:50:48.580 | So Polkinghorne says,

01:50:49.900 | I think that pattern is remembered by God.

01:50:54.180 | And remember's the wrong word, it's like derivative.

01:50:57.020 | I mean, it's known by God.

01:50:59.620 | And so God can therefore re-embody me,

01:51:03.460 | according to that pattern, at a higher pitch,

01:51:06.460 | what we call the resurrected body.

01:51:08.180 | So Paul talks about a spiritual body.

01:51:12.260 | Body, for sure, because he believes

01:51:14.020 | in the resurrection of Jesus.

01:51:16.740 | But it's not a body like ours from this world.

01:51:19.500 | It's a body at a higher pitch.

01:51:22.060 | - So something, some pattern that's there persists.

01:51:26.140 | - Pattern persists in the mind of God

01:51:28.620 | and then is used as the ground of the re-embodiment of me.

01:51:32.420 | So it's not like I've just become a platonic form.

01:51:35.540 | I'm gonna be re-embodied,

01:51:36.740 | because the Christian hope is not for platonic escape

01:51:41.080 | of soul from matter.

01:51:42.280 | That's never the Christian hope.

01:51:43.860 | It's for the resurrection of the body, we say.

01:51:46.900 | And you say, what a fantastic idea.

01:51:48.940 | Well, I don't know.

01:51:49.900 | I mean, this body is being reconstituted all the time,

01:51:53.500 | according to this pattern, right?

01:51:55.460 | It's not the same matter.

01:51:57.140 | And so might there be another sort of higher material

01:52:02.140 | that is organized according to the same pattern,

01:52:04.920 | which has been remembered by God?

01:52:06.620 | So therefore we can hang on to the language

01:52:08.300 | of body and soul, if you want, or matter and form.

01:52:11.860 | But it's the form remembered by God

01:52:14.560 | and then reconstituted in an embodied way by God

01:52:18.060 | that we call heaven, the heavenly state.

01:52:21.340 | That's what I hope for.

01:52:22.660 | That's my Christian faith, my Christian hope.

01:52:25.960 | - Let me ask you about the big question of meaning.

01:52:29.780 | We've talked about it in different directions,

01:52:32.320 | from different perspectives.

01:52:33.740 | What's the meaning of our existence here on earth?

01:52:36.860 | What's the meaning of life?

01:52:39.320 | - Love.

01:52:40.500 | God is love.

01:52:42.220 | And the purpose of my life is to become God's friend.

01:52:45.000 | And that means I'm more conformed to love.

01:52:47.260 | And so my life finds meaning in the measure

01:52:49.580 | that I become more on fire with the divine love.

01:52:52.940 | I'm like the burning bush.

01:52:54.060 | It's to become more and more radiant

01:52:55.900 | with the presence of God.

01:52:57.580 | That's what gives life meaning.

01:52:59.700 | Meaning is to live in a purposive relationship

01:53:01.900 | to a value, I would say.

01:53:03.120 | So there's all kinds of values.

01:53:04.860 | As I say, moral, aesthetic, intellectual values.

01:53:07.700 | And when I have a purposive relationship,

01:53:09.220 | I'm like, so right now you and I,

01:53:10.700 | we have a purposive relationship to the value of,

01:53:12.740 | let's say, finding out the truth of things,

01:53:15.460 | and we're speaking together to seek that.

01:53:18.020 | Well, good.

01:53:19.140 | What's the ultimate value?

01:53:20.340 | The value of values is God.

01:53:22.300 | The supreme good, right?

01:53:23.720 | The supremely knowable, the supremely intelligible is God.

01:53:27.900 | And so to be conformed to God

01:53:30.100 | is to have a fully meaningful life.

01:53:32.460 | And who's God?

01:53:33.780 | God is love.

01:53:34.900 | So that's where I would fit the package together that way.

01:53:38.020 | - You're adding a lot of love to this world,

01:53:41.180 | and which is something I deeply appreciate,

01:53:43.260 | and that you would sit down with me,

01:53:45.780 | given how valuable your time is, is a huge honor.

01:53:48.100 | Thank you so much for talking to me.

01:53:48.940 | - Well, my great pleasure.

01:53:49.760 | I loved it, Lex, thank you.

01:53:51.540 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:53:53.060 | with Bishop Robert Barron.

01:53:54.620 | To support this podcast,

01:53:55.860 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

01:53:58.540 | And now, let me leave you with some words

01:54:00.780 | from Bishop Robert Barron himself,

01:54:03.060 | which reminds me of the Dostoevsky line

01:54:05.540 | spoken through Prince Mishkin,

01:54:07.540 | that quote, "Beauty will save the world."

01:54:10.780 | Robert says, "Begin with the beautiful,

01:54:14.660 | "which leads to the good, which leads you to truth."

01:54:19.660 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

01:54:22.940 | (upbeat music)

01:54:25.520 | (upbeat music)

01:54:28.100 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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