Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church | Lex Fridman Podcast #304
when we're beyond good and evil you know and all that's left is the will to power then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes when we forget ideas like equality and rights which are grounded in god why are we surprised that death camps follow the following is a conversation with bishop robert barron founder of ward on fire and one of the greatest educators in the world on the beauty and wisdom within catholicism christianity and religious faith in general this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's bishop robert baron let's start with the big question who is god according to christianity according to catholicism who's god i'll give you thomas aquinas definition uh god is ipsum essay subsistence god is the subsistent act of to be itself another way to state that in aquinas is god is that reality unique absolutely unique in which essence and existence coincide to be god is to be to be those are all ways of talking about what we mean by god they are kind of gnomic and that's on purpose there's almost a zen koan kind of quality about the way we talk about god i'm saying something that's substantive but it's more in like a via negative mode it's more like what god is not because there's nothing in the world that would correspond to those descriptions so anything in the world would be a being of some type or an event of some type some particular mode of existence and god is not an entity in the world in fact i would say that's the fundamental mistake that atheists old and new make all the time is they think of god as a big being when aquinas says that god is not in any genus even the genus of being it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition but it's really interesting so you say well at the very least god must be a being right and aquinas's answer is no he's not in the genus of being so we talk about god being beyond being and so on to say in god essence and existence coincide is to say god's very nature is to be and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world so what i'm doing there is i'm i'm gesturing the way the tradition does toward god using language that's at the same time philosophically precise and gnomic you know it's both accurate it's true god essence and existence coincide what god is is the same as god's uh active to be but now what does that mean i'm not quite sure because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that everything in our experience is is a being of some type so it's existence received according to the mode of some essence that's not true of god which is why you can't be found in the world and and that's as i say the fundamental mistake is uh well i guess theists are those that believe there's this being alongside the other beings in the universe and then atheists say oh no there is no such being um and that's precisely wrong that's just a category error dawkins i think cites bertrand russell to the effect that proving the non-existence of god is a bit like proving the non-existence of a china teapot orbiting between earth and mars no that's precisely what god is not some entity that's sort of hidden among the other entities of the universe god is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all this is the way to put it in more theological language god's the creator of all things so if god is outside of our world is it possible for us to visualize to comprehend to know god not utterly of course and i would say our knowledge begins always in this world begins in ordinary experience but i think we can through metaphysical analysis through philosophical reasoning can come to some knowledge of a reality which is transcendent to our experience so we gesture toward it i always like aquinas who says the language about god that we use is analogical so it's not it's not univocal meaning what i say about that you know can or about this bottle i can say about god no that makes god an entity at the same time it's not simply equivocal so if i say well that thing is and god is i mean totally different things no no i mean something analogous so to be god is to be to be so the real meaning of being is the being of god the being of that thing or this thing or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles would be analogous to god's manner of being so on that basis i can make some statements i can i can theorize and even at the limit as you suggest i can visualize so we have metaphors for god and the bible is replete with those rights god is a rock uh you know god's like a lion god's like this and that or the bible will sometimes imagine god as a as a human being walking around you know now only the crude fundamentalism would say well that's a universal accurate description of god it's an image that's catching something of god's manner of being then what does it mean to believe in god so there's a word and we have to limit ourselves to human interpretable words today there's a word called faith what does faith mean so if we can't really directly know god you kind of sneak up to the idea of god with metaphors better he sneaks up on us because i like the language of grace god's action comes first so if i stay perfectly within the realm of i'm seeking with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind i'm not going to find god that way i i might find a path that opens up but i would say finally god finds me and i think then the language of faith begins to make more sense i'm with paul tillich though the protestant theologian said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary's faith because he said the way we take it usually is something sub-rational you know i have i have uh proof of this i i really know this and i only kind of believe that like that's just a personal opinion or impression but that's to identify faith with the kind of infrarational and and that's not it i mean i don't want something in for irrational i don't want superstition or or childish credulity so authentic faith is is the darkness beyond reason and on the far side of reason it's it's super irrational not infrarational and that's a very important move at the limit of what i can know at the limit of my striving and my vision there's this horizon that opens up and i think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing there's a kind of a horizon that lures us beyond what i've got faith has to do more with that kind of darkness rather than a darkness prior to reason the darkness beyond the horizon prior to reason first of all the poetry language is incredible to be to be you have a million questions yeah go ahead i do too uh so first of all let me just jump around uh you mentioned to be to be a few times yeah what does that mean well to be me is to be a human being right to be this to be a table this would be a microphone so it's i'll use aquinas's language it's the act of being poured if you want into the receptacle of some essential principle so it's got a ontological structure it's it's an existent it's a thing that exists but it's it's existing in a limited way according to an essential principle uh god said well who what's god what's god's name what kind of being is he we'll go back to moses now um when the israelites ask me you know what's your name what shall i tell them and he says you know famously i am who i am but see aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark so moses is wondering okay there's a lot of gods and there's a lot of things a lot of entities which one are you you got to be one of them so tell me your name in philosophical language give me the essence that receives your act of existing right and god's answer blows the mind of moses and the whole tradition i am who i am to be god is to be so i'm not this or that i'm not up or down i'm not here or there god is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere as as the mystics put it now can i get a clear and distinct idea of that no and in a way that's the whole point if i could i'd be talking about a being of some kind so to be god is to be to be is to and that's you know moses take off your sandals you're on holy ground so i'm going to go over confidently and find out what this thing is this burning bush i'm going to find out no no take off your shoes you're on holy ground because you're not in charge here you're not in command because if you've got shoes on you can walk wherever you want you can walk with confidence but you take your shoes off you're much more vulnerable and that's appropriate when you're talking about god you know here's another interesting thing i didn't think about the burning bush in this connection before but it's a bush that's on fire but not consumed is beings are competitive with each other and so i these can't be in the same place at the same time these two beings they're mutually exclusive if you want but as god comes close to a creature he doesn't destroy it or consume it but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant right but and see compare it to the to the classical gods and goddesses when when they come bursting into life and experience things are incinerated and people give way and they're overwhelmed then there's this biblical idea of god comes close and sets things on fire but doesn't burn them up and that's because he's not a competitive being in the world if he were a big being then he'd be in this he'd be competing for space so to speak on the same ontological grid but he's not like that so god can come close and we come more fully alive now we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation i mean the central christian doctrine that god can actually become a human without overwhelming the human he becomes right so i mean that's that's kind of the next step but the basic idea of god is non-competitively transcendent to the world that's another way to get at it non-competitively transcendent to the world so it's beyond being as the source of being right let me make it maybe more more um imagistic i think a really good analogy would be author to book right so uh like tolkien or someone that writes one of these big sprawling novels and tolkien is good too because he creates a whole world he creates a new nature a new language new history all that think of you know the thousands of characters and the plots and subplots and all of it tolkien is utterly responsible for every bit of that story right every character every plot every subplot every description he's completely responsible he's involved in every nook and cranny of it but he's not in the story he's not in the book you're not going to find him as a character in the book so that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way is i'm looking for god he's a character in this story somewhere no he's the author of the story mysteriously present to every aspect of the story but not a character in it right he is deeply in the story somehow he's present but he's not um even if he is a character he's not really the full embodiment is not a character and people inside the book can't really know about the author right no right well see augustine says god is simultaneously in timier intima mayo at superior sumo mayo he's closer to me than i am to myself and he's higher than anything i could possibly imagine at the same time because he once you get the the insight that god is is the sheer active to be well of course that's true so right now god is sustaining us in existence true aquinas says god is in all things by essence presence and power and most intimately so and and he's nowhere in this room okay where's god he's nowhere in this room he's totally terribly terror we say he's totally other same time but once you crack that code though i think you see it of like why that would be true i see now i'm getting from more philosophical language to more mystical language because all the mystics talk that way in these high paradoxes about god's availability and unavailability i i've often thought in the bible story after story god can neither be grasped nor hidden from so the first sinful instinct is to grasp at god's i've got him i've i understand him i can i can manipulate him no no no story after story is told you can't do that well then the other extreme of the sinner all right then i'm gonna i'm gonna run from god i'm gonna avoid god jonah and the whale you know so he he has the call from god and he said no no i'm gonna refuse that i'm gonna run as far away i'm gonna go to tarshish which meant like timbuktu for them at the end of the world god's got that whale swallow them up and brings them right back where god wants them it's a you know poetic way of saying you can't escape the press of god at the same time tower of babel i'm going to build a tower up to god i'm going to i'm going to grab hold of god no no you can't do either so live in the space in between those two things which would be the space of friendship with god uh falling in love with god is neither grasping nor hiding from god you mentioned again a lot of beautiful poetic things you mentioned grace yeah you mentioned sin you mentioned reincarnation is there a philosophical pragmatic way to start talking about the pillars of christianity what are the defining things that make christianity to you and and broadly speaking uh to those that follow the religion you know in a way what we're doing so far is is a necessary proper duty because we're talking about god um what makes christianity distinctive of course is the claim of the incarnation so we come up out of judaism we come up out of this great monotheistic tradition and you know the bible itself and all the great commentators within judaism i think would agree with this basic theistic stuff that i've been talking about taking moses maimonides for example now what makes christianity distinct this supremely weird claim that god becomes one of us god becomes a creature but without ceasing to be god and without overwhelming the integrity of the creature he becomes what we see in the burning bush that principle which obtains across the board so the closer god comes to me the more radiant i become right but take that now to the nth degree would be what we mean by the incarnation the incarnation of the son of god becoming a creature in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful that's the pillar of christianity it's the incarnation you know um and what follows from that is the redemption of of all of reality so not just of human beings but in becoming a creature god divinizes the world you know the greek fathers always said god became human that humans might become god and that's a good way to sum up i think the essence of christianity why is this such an important thing so it's a distinctive thing yeah but why is it so important philosophically to what it means to be a christian like what impact did that have on our world on human civilization on human nature on our morals of why live what to live for the meaning of it all like why is incarnation so important well i think it's it's massively important because it's it's the divinization principle that god wants to demonize his creation and and sort of in this concentrated point of jesus of nazareth but then we talk about the mystical body of jesus so that goes right back to paul as we're grafted on to christ we talk about that as the church we become like cells and molecules in an organism that's the church it's not an organization that's a that's a deformation of ecclesiology the church is this organism that begins with jesus and then he's drawing all of humanity but ultimately all of nature all of all of creation to himself when the son of man is lifted up he will draw all things to himself that idea of the gathering in of a of a scattered creation so in that way it's at the heart of it then there's all kinds of things if god becomes human that means there's a dignity to humanity which goes beyond anything any humanist of any stripe has ever said right ancient medieval modern contemporary christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable god became one of us in order to demonize us the the goal of my life is not just to be a good person not just to be you know materially successful not just to be um a member of society the goal of my life is to become a participant in the divine nature and so there i don't think there is a humanism greater than that even conceivably so that's where i think humanism is profoundly influenced by the incarnation uh and just our notion of god as non-competitive to us that's so important because i think it's so many systems from mythology onward you have these competitive understandings of god when jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies i no longer call you servants but friends it's an extraordinary moment because every god right who's ever been served well that's that's the best we can hope for is the servant of god you know i i try to obey you lord i'll try to do what you want but when jesus says i no longer call you servants or slaves you would have said in the greek there you know um but friends i don't know i can't imagine anything greater than that becoming god's friend that's a call to become one with with god it's possible to become uh become one with god now i should mention you're one of the greatest religious communicators i've ever experienced a lot of a huge number of people are fans of yours you've done a lot of great conversations you've done reddit amas which is a very unique bold brave thing and uh on one of them somebody asked um what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins so first what are the seven deadly sins what do they have to do with christianity how essential how crucial they are to uh the religion and what's the most challenging in our modern day yeah to name them uh pride envy anger sloth avarice gluttony and lust are the seven deadly sins or quote capital sin sometimes uh from couplet they're the head sins from which things tend to flow the most fundamental is pride uh probably most people today if you talk about like vice or you talk about you know deadly sin they would think about lust but the classical authors including dante who does this pictorially there that's the least of the deadly sense is lust because it's the one that's most sort of dependent upon the body and it's and it's passions and so on the most important is pride pride is the deadliest of deadly sins and it's very simple to see why pride is the augustine calls it incravats and say i'm caved in around myself like a black hole right to get into the scientific but the black hole to me is a great symbol you know that it it's so heavy that draws everything including light nothing can escape from it see that's the center this we're all sinners uh we're like black holes that we draw everything into ourselves so as a sinner and you know i'll confess i'm a sinner um the temptation is okay this is the bishop baron moment and i'm gonna i'm drawing you now into my you know world and so on what that does is it kills us off and it make it it darkens life and it makes it small and and heavy and awful right it's like but see compared to the to the contrasting thing is when you're lost in a moment you're not concerned about the impression i'm making you're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself you're not concerned about this monkey on my back that's always telling me you know look good and sound right but you're you're lost in something you're just you're just talking you know to a friend and the two of you together are discovering something true or or beautiful or you're lost in a movie or you're lost in a book those are the best moments in life those are the best because the least prideful moments right that's when i the light comes out i i become radiant because i i'm overcoming this tendency to fall in on myself um dante is so good because the way he pictures um satan in divine comedy and you know he's at the center of the earth so like a black hole that way like he's at the center of gravity he's at the heaviest place and he there's not fire where he is but ice it's a much much better image that you're frozen in place and you're stuck and he's got wings right and they used to be angel wings because he's an angel but now they're like bat wings for dante and they're flapping and all they're doing is making the world around him colder because he's ice he's stuck in his own iciness and then he's he's beating his wings over the ice and making everyone else colder it's a great image and then he has this is cool too he has three faces uh satan because he's a simulacrum of the trinity so every sinner thinks he's god so i pretend i'm god so he's got the three faces and from all six eyes he weeps also from all three mouths he's chewing a sinner he's got cassius brutus and judas in the three miles you know the three traitors but i thought it it's just a great image of all of us sinners is we're stuck it's heavy it's cold we're chewing on our past resentments we're weeping in our sadness and we're making the world around us colder it's beautiful it's a great so that's pride see that's an image of pride because satan that's his great sin pride which is why he needed michael right mikael who's like god so that the great challenge to him which we need all the time is someone to say wait a minute wait a minute you're not god but the minute we say i'm god black hole i now cave in on myself i suck everything into myself and i turn into dante satan so that's a great image that's pride that's the most fundamental that's the uber capital sin it's all the other ones flow from that in a way so in general empathy humility compassion love thy neighbor always the way to fight this the sin of pride right which is why the masters tend to say this was bernard saint bernard was asked what are the three most important virtues and he said humility tasks humility tests and humility because it's the opposite of pride yeah so but you know they're bringing aquinas in again uh because we think i'm humility i'm no good that's not what it means at all it means what i was describing before when you're you're just lost in something you're just lost in it um my image i live out in santa barbara and uh i like to walk on the beach out there and there's a section of the beach where they let the dogs you know run free without leashes and uh when you see a dog and he's well cared for and his master's right there and and the master's throwing the tennis ball out and the surf and the dog goes galloping out into the surf and he gets it with a big smile and comes running back that's that's humility that's an image of heaven because he's just lost in that moment he doesn't care about impressing anybody don't care about what people think of him he's just lost in it that's it that's heaven right and those moments in our life when we when we get that it's a little hint of of paradise but but the trouble is most of us live frankly most of the time in various levels of hell you know and we're and we're dealing with these deadly sins like envy flows from pride because if i'm prideful i'm a black hole i'm in curvature sensei i'm collapsed in what am i really going to be concerned about that guy's got more attention than i am that guy's richer than i am that that lady she's got a bigger reputation than i do and why why don't i have that right so envy is a very close daughter of pride um anger flows from why do i get angry the dog isn't getting angry on the beach when he's running after the tennis ball but i get angry all the time sputter with anger when things aren't going my way and and you're insulting me and you're not doing what i want and i'm being hurt my reputation so anger flows from pride you know all of them do all the deadly sins do so you said i'm a sinner so we're all sinners yeah um you mentioned satan where's the so there's heaven and hell there's god and satan where's the line between what it means to be good and uh not good enough or i i hesitate to use the word sort of uh evil but uh yeah maybe overwhelmingly sinful where's the line between hell and heaven think of them as limit concepts maybe they're like heuristic devices yes so heaven would name this ultimate friendship with god so think of the dog on the beach who is just he's fallen in love with his environment with his master with the serf he's just lost in it right he's forgotten himself he's transcended himself and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place now imagine the limit of that is the is the friendship with god that we talked about that i become the friend of god i become so forgetful of myself so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of god that i'm i've i found beatitude right i found joy the beatific vision we call it uh that's the limit case that's that's where we're tending that's where god wants us to go think of hell as the limit case in the opposite direction that's curvature sensei that's the black hole and we're all sinners meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum you know we we have good days and bad days and we have good moments and bad moments and i can be drawn toward sin what's god's purpose and christianity's reading is to bring us out of that you know now where did he go he went all the way into it to get us out of it it's like pulling the sock back out socks inside out you have to go all the way in and pull it back out and so god had to go all the way down you know and there there's the trajectory of the incarnation though he was in the form of god and this is saint paul jesus did not deem equality with god a thing to be grasped that but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave being born in the likeness of men but then he was known to be of human estate and he accepted even death death on a cross and so paul imagines that the incarnation is this downward journey in order to get all of us right all of us who were stuck were stuck in our sin and so again paul says he became sin on the cross it's a really really powerful idea he wasn't a sinner because then he'd need to be saved too he's not a sinner but he entered into our dysfunction in order to pull us back out of it so that's a really powerful message an embodiment uh uh sort of educating the world about sin that said day to day there's like uh oscillations in terms of how much um each human sends and there's a struggle against that so you know that dog that loses himself on the beach may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that that was uh maybe not the best dog he could be leading up to that so how you know if it's a math equation what does the final calculation look like in terms of ending up in heaven what does it mean to live a good life in the end is it um the average modest thing you do is is low can you are you allowed to make mistakes yeah uh you know the the the metric is love right and love is not a feeling it's an act of the will to will the good of the other that's aquinas again to will the good of the other as other and see that's the anti-black hole principle when i i don't wield the good of the other as others because if i'm willing you're good because it's good for me so uh again you know it's good for you that i'm on this program i guess i'm willing you're good but that's cause it's gonna be down to my benefit right that's just an indirect egotism that's why i see love is really rare and strange that i really want what's good for you as other so not connected to the black hole tendency of my own prideful ego when i've broken that i've forgotten self and i've moved into the space of your own good that's what love is now god wants us to be you know by this they will know that you're my disciples that you love one another jesus says so that's it now i mean life is ups and downs and back and forth and we're better or worse at that the point of the church is to graft us onto christ that we might become more and more conformed to love but you know the final calculus i'll leave that to god i mean like but but use love as the metric at the end of the day when you examine your conscience did i will the good of the other today how how effective was i at that and be just like ignatia loyola be brutally honest or was i just willing someone's good because it was good for me uh what where where were those moments where i was like the dog on the beach yeah see see and and see play at the what not so much god the lawgiver surveying and you did you know three of those and four it's god wants us to be fully alive saint irenaeus is one of my great heroes ancient you know patristic figure and his famous line is gloria day homo vivens right the glory of god is a human being fully alive see and that gets us over this sort of obsession with illegalism and did i do enough and is that that's a big enough sin and god wants us fully alive the key to that is willing the good of the other he he died that we might come to a richer appropriation of that so to be fully alive is to be in love with the world or to love the world deeply and what love means is the other is get out of yourself right it's it's it's the humility yeah getting out of yourself that's somehow is not uh that's not even selfless because uh the word selfless requires her to be a self uh it's it's almost like just letting go yeah it might talk about like a gift of self that you you're self aware but you you give a gift of yourself yourself becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself but it becomes a radiant source of life for others like mother teresa would have had a keen sense of herself it seems to me but it was um to light other people uh up so that they might be uh radiant you know that's the game so i think you probably articulate it that way too yeah i love love it's such an interesting thing but we have to be hard-nosed about it like you know your friend dostoevsky love is a harsh and dreadful thing yeah right it's not a feeling and our culture is so sentimentalized love that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want and that's not it at all love is always correlated to the order of the good because if i'm willing the good of the other i have to know what that good is right yeah so a parent that says oh give the kid whatever she wants well that's not love that's that's indulgence or that's sentimentality but i have to know what the goods really are if i'm going to will them for you right yeah i in some sense you're you're absolutely right a component of love is the struggle to know the other right it's to struggle to understand i mean that's um that's what i mean by empathy it's the yeah it's not it's yeah it's not valentine's day romantic gifts it's uh it's a struggle it's like uh trying to understand trying to perturb your own mind and that of another human being to try to figure out who they are what they want what makes them uh happy what are they afraid of what are they hoping for and it's like a dance right dance of conversation a dance of uh just shared experiences and all that kind of stuff and all of that requires for you to be i guess um yeah empathize and imagine yourself in their place and then love that person when you're living inside that person yeah several minutes ago about the pillars of christianity so we talked about god talk about incarnation but you're getting now to a third key one namely the trinity because we're monotheists right but we don't think god is monolithically one we think god is a play of persons and the father from from all eternity uh by a great mental act forms his interior word as aquinas puts it and that's the law gauss right that's the verb that's the word by which the father knows himself and we call that the sun so the imago it's the image of the father but then see the great thing is that imago is not like just a dead image on a mirror or a dead image in a pond or something it's it's a full reflection of the father's being he's one in being with the father therefore the son has everything the father has except being the father but that means that the two of them look at each other and they're just crazy in love with each other because the father is the fullness of being the son is the fullness of being and they're so crazy in love with each other that they this is um fulton she put it this way that there's this they just they love each other with this sigh and we call that the spiritual sanctus that's the holy breath right the holy sigh of love between the father and the son and that's there's one being one essence we say of god but in these three persons but all your language about like dance and play and community the greek fathers talked about perry coraces which means god the three persons kind of sit in a choir together so they they um they sing together you know and and that's why see christianity is unique in this claim that god is love so every religion will say god loves you know in some way love is an attribute of god god is or love is a thing that god does sometimes but christianity is unique in all the religions in saying that god is love and somehow the holy trinity embodies that idea i mean that yes philosophically has always been confusing to me what it means to be three things and at the same time be one god the father son and the holy spirit what what is this dance between these three what what exactly like how how do you visualize how do you understand this yeah this this very this very fascinating essential thing for christianity the first thing i'd say is what we already have been sort of talking about is if you say god is love and most people probably say yeah i like that it's a good idea god is love but it's very peculiar because if he is love there has to be in his unity a lover a beloved and the love that they share otherwise he isn't loved by his very essence he would love it would be an attribute of god or an action of god but if it's his very nature there has to be lover beloved and love shared and the tradition eventually came to see that the image i was using before of of the father his imago the son well that's born of god's infinite mind so of of course god has an image of himself heck i've got an image of myself that's something i can pull off as a as a puny little creature god in his infinity has a perfect image of himself and they have to fall in love with each other what else can they do because they're in the presence of infinite good and so it has to follow that you then have the shared love that connects them and that's how we generate if you want this idea of the three persons in god let me ask you about the church yeah one of the defining characteristics of catholicism is the catholic church yeah what is the catholic church i would say it's the mystical body of jesus so as i said before it's not an organization if we do it that way we're going to miss it it's got organizational elements to it you know so i'm a bishop i'm a i'm a office holder within the church but the church is an organism not a not an organization so it's a organism of interconnected cells as i said namely all of the baptized gathered around christ missed in a mystical union that's the church but there's buildings yeah there's titles sure uh because it manifests itself institutionally then but so are the sort of heavy things about that all have to do with pride yeah sure whatever sexiness of the buildings yeah no whatever is corrupt in the church of course it comes from pride from sin and one thing i like about you know the new testament is so clear on that i mean paul is in his little tiny communities so before there was a vatican or dioceses or anything apologies little tiny communities of christians like in corinth and ephesus you know what's the one thing we know about them is they fought with each other because paul's always upgrading them and you know telling them come on would you people get it together and you know who's bewitched you and so from the beginning we've been fighting with each other because we're made up of sinners and uh you know so but one thing we do in in catholic ecclesiology is the official name for the study of the church is to talk about the treasure and earthen vessels paul's language again the treasure is christ the treasure is is is the love he's bequeathed to the world that's the treasure that we have but it's always held in these really fragile vessels namely us and so it's gonna be marked by corruption and stupidity and pride and everything else well nevertheless there's a hierarchy there's titles and so on if we remove pride from the picture so the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy that makes up this one organism this living organism what's the what's the role of the pope for example what is the role of uh a bishop for example like what is the role of the hierarchy in terms of the broader vision of christianity catholicism as a religion i'm a devotee of this guy named johan adam mueller who was a theologian early part of the 19th century and he was part of the kind of romantic movement and he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church so he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church who's a bishop the bishop is the personal symbol of the unity of a diocese who's a pastor of a parish he's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish so he understood it not so much organizationally as organically again it was like what that around which the pattern organizes itself and if you don't have that that unifying figure the community will kind of facilitate and you see that all the time without headship we would say so it's more symbolic and organic than it is um organizational so symbols for community but there's such uh fascinating peculiarities to each individual symbol see there's different characteristics that make up the different people they have different ways of communicating they have different hopes and fears and all that kind of stuff what uh if if they're all symbols what's the role of the different peculiarities of those symbols of being an inspiring uniter versus maybe a stronger type of um more judgmental kind of communicator all that kind of stuff i mean can you maybe speak to the human part of this of these symbols yeah well i i might just shift to another image um of shepherd so that's a classic biblical image and as a bishop i walk around with this thing called the crosier which is a shepherd's staff right so it's the symbol of the bishop's office and the crusher though is a kind of um it's a kind of in-your-face thing in a way because it's got the the end of it was meant to hold off wild animals and then the the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back to the fold right so i walk in with that oh this is nice look at the bishop coming in but that's a kind of in-your-face symbol that i'm here to defend the church against predators and i'm also here to draw people in who are wandering too far away so that's okay and that's part of of the role of the hierarchy and the pope and bishops and and pastors pastor just means shepherd right then the shepherd of a parish so that's okay it's not like just all you know sunshine and light and what a pretty image uh the the one who embodies the unity of the community is also the shepherd okay but again leaning on the human thing yeah the church is an institution and i don't know if you've heard but there is an element to power that corrupts yeah and absolute power corrupts absolutely as the old saying goes um let me ask you something else that came up on the reddit uh ama yeah mega churches and the prosperity gospel and yeah you've mentioned that you may not be a fan what are your views on this and what are your views in general of money and power corrupting the heads of these institutions uh i don't like the prosperity gospel because uh the gospel is about jesus journey into radical self-forgetfulness on the cross and he never makes a promise of earthly well-being can you explain what the prosperity gospel is yeah the view that you know if i follow jesus and i follow god with great trust that i will be rewarded with wealth and and position and status in this world it might be god's will but i got that but you know aquinas said this that let's say i look at a very sinful person i said kind of he's got a great house and he's richer than i am and all that aquinas says yeah but what maybe that's a punishment because maybe all that is leading him away from god and actually that's god's way of punishing him and the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house is actually a great gift to you because now it frees you for doing god's will so we we can't read you know god's favor in worldly terms i would say god's favor is am i awakened to deeper love then i know that i'm finding god's favor now god might decide sure i want you to have this and that i want i want to provide this to you fine then i say thank you lord how can i use it as an instrument of love see all the masters talk about detachment and that's another reason i don't like the prosperity gospel is though i'm i'm getting attached now to all these material advantages and i'm even seeing them as a sign of god's favor let go of all that you let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love so if you're rich the right question is okay lord why did you allow me to become rich so that what can i do how can my riches be an expression of love if i'm popular if i'm healthy okay why am i popular why am i healthy how can i use that for your good i'm sick in bed i'm suffering okay lord how can i use that as an expression of love so i'd rather measure it that way than through worldly success that's why i'm against the prosperity gospel okay so there's uh don't seek worldly possessions but whatever happens to you good or bad seek how that could be used to increase the amount of love in the world right the image i i love for this is the wheel of fortune which is a device on a lot of the gothic cathedrals and it's it's this great circle right this wheel and the top of his is a king and then it turns this way and the king has lost his crown and the bottom is a pauper and then over here is a king he's a guy climbing up to power right and then in the middle is a depiction of christ and the idea is very simple but very profound that the wheel is life you know it's sometimes you're up sometimes you're down sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige other times you're losing it you're going down other times you've got none of it other times you're coming back up okay don't live on the rim of the wheel it'll make you crazy every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety where you should live is the center of the wheel where christ is right because that's the link now to the eternity of god that's the point of of love where love can flow through you to the world and then you can look at the wheel you're a beatles fan right i think i discovered that i love the beatles and the song that always comes to my mind when i when i think of that image is john lennon at the end of his life so a guy that i mean rode the wheel of fortune like crazy you know he was at the top of the world in every way and then beatles break up and he kind of loses it and then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s it's the very bottom when he died he was just kind of coming back up again but the song i always think of is watching the wheels right i'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round around i really love to watch them roll because i'm no longer riding on the merry-go-round that's right out of the medieval mystics that he's not riding on the on the wheel he's just watching it go round and round that's the point of uh the greece called apathea and the latins called it uh uh in indifference you know not like i'm blase it just means i'm i'm detached from success failure less success more success i'm detached from that i'm sitting here watching the wheels go round and round because i'm not writing on it anymore the mystics have always made that transition let me ask you a difficult question about the darker side of human nature of human power of institutions what's your view on the long history and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children by a catholic priest so this is a a difficult topic but may be an important one to shine a light on yeah it's awful you know and it's it's been a problem go back to peter damien back in the 11th century was talking about it so it's been a problem and whenever really sinful human beings have been in close proximity to children we've we find this issue has it been around the church yes um has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years absolutely um i'm glad the church has made important strides and it has back in 2002 there was a thing called the dallas accords where the bishops of america put a lot of these protocols in place that really have been effective at ameliorating this problem the numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s and that's been demonstrated over and over again and then they fell dramatically after that so that's not to excuse anything but to say i think progress has been made with it what's the impulse to secrecy yeah well to protect institutions you know that's always that's a sinful instinct uh i'm not all together i mean sure an institution is worth protecting but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent to people's uh well-being then you're in trouble so institutions role should be transparent and honest with the sins of its members and as itself sure yeah so maybe you can speak to the fact uh as a priest the bishop as part of catholicism you're not allowed to marry you're not allowed to have sex uh you're you're sworn to celibacy what is what is behind that idea what is the sort of we talked about some broad stroke yeah ideas of love you know what's behind the idea of celibacy and that's a good way to get at it it's a path of love so it the church is always in favor of inculcating love marriage is a path of love but so is celibacy um saint paul talks about someone who is preoccupied with the things of of this world and family and those who are free from that are free or for doing the work of god so that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy and we still i think take that seriously look at my own life i mean celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things and go places and and and minister in a way that i could not if i had been married so i get it i get the pragmatic side but i i'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it um remember jesus was challenged about the person who had a whole series of husbands and and then they all died and so in heaven which one will will uh you know which which husband will the wife have and his answers is in heaven people don't marry and they're not given in marriage there's a there's a higher way of love it's a more radical way of love it's not tied to a particular but i think through god is tied to everybody the celibate and this has been to the beginning of the church not as a law but there were there were celibates from the very beginning of the church including jesus of course and paul um they sense something that that way of living mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven it's a sign even now within this world of how we will all love in heaven so in that way it's a bit like pacifists um i'm glad there are pacifists in the church and i i've known some you know some very powerful witnesses to pacifism i'm glad they're pacifists because they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares and you know heaven's a place of radical peace that some people even now live it at the same time i'm glad not everyone's a pacifist because i i would hold with the church to just war theory that there's sometimes all we can do in this finite world is to is to fight you know uh manifest wickedness so and just in the same way there's just sex well no right i'm glad there are celibates but i'm glad not everyone's a celebrity i wouldn't want that i mean because because uh married love is a marvelous expression of the divine love so that's why it's good there are some and it's always been a small number the actual experience of it would you uh the spiritual nature of it is it similar to fasting so i've been enjoying fasting uh recently so not eating yeah uh for several days that kind of stuff and that somehow brings you even deeper i'm in general in love with everything and with nature and everything i see the beauty in the world but there's a greater intensity to that when you're fasting for example yeah i i might use the language of you know sublimation or redirection of energy and all that um i i think that's true there's a certain sublimation of energies into um prayer into mysticism into ministry um a redirection of energies so it's meant to be life enhancing the same way fasting is it's meant ultimately to be life enhancing and make you healthier and happier so celibacy is a is a path of love and i think it does involve you a certain redirection of energies i'd say that don't you think do you think it's a heavy burden for some humans to bear some priests to bear is that sure is that the thing given this the the the sexual abuse scandal um is that the thing that breaks no i i wouldn't tie that to celibacy and that's been uh demonstrated over and over again there's a priest named andrew greeley who was a priest from my home diocese of chicago and andy did a lot of research sociologists of religion did a lot of research into that very question and there really is not a correlation between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse of children or of anybody so i wouldn't make that correlation so bad people sinful people are going to do what they're going to do i think people who have a tendency toward uh abusing children sexually are drawn to situations where they get ready access to kids and they get institutional cover so that's the only thing go through the list of you know from sports and and boy scouts etc um and that's been proven again and again so i would tie it more to that i wouldn't tie it to celibacy so the the challenge of course is all kinds of you said institutional cover there's all kinds of institutions that cover for people that don't that do uh evil onto the world to do uh sinful things on the world but there's something about the church which is um the as an organism is supposed to be an embodiment of good in this world right of love in this world and it breaks people's hearts yeah see this kind of even a small amount yeah uh this kind of thing happened within the church it it wakes you up to the cruelty the absurdity of the world sometimes like it's it's uh it's back to the the question of why do bad things happen to good people yeah why does god allow this kind of thing to happen and uh sort of maybe unanswerable do you have an answer to that question i can gesture toward it using rather abstract language which is true enough it's completely emotionally unsatisfying but it's naming it truthfully enough and it goes back to augustine which is god permits evil to bring about a greater good now again i know how unsatisfying that sort of spare austere language can sound but it gets us off the horn of the horns of a dilemma you know a queen is you know when he lays out a question he always has the objections first so is there a god well objection one objection to objection three and he's really talk about steel manning an argument aquinas is great at that um one of the really steel manned arguments is that the right grammatical form one of the what's the past participle about the steel man um but one of the best arguments he formulates it this way um if one of two contraries be infinite the other would be altogether destroyed and as example from his medieval physics he goes if there were infinite heat there'd be no cold right but god is described as infinitely good therefore if god exists there should be no evil but there is evil therefore god does not exist that's a darn good argument that's a really persuasive argument and and i think i've done this for a long time in apologetics and then in sort of higher philosophy um that's the best argument against god um but here's something before i press head with it something i find really interesting i think the three best arguments against god all come from within the religious tradition namely the book of job so job he's great i mean he's a great guy he does everything right he's he's god's great servant and he and he's punished in every possible way you know he has every possible suffering aquinas's argument from the summa and then to your friend and mine uh dostoevsky i think in the brothers karamazov uh yvonne's argument when he's trying to wreck the faith of alyosha and it's um these examples drawn they think from dostoyevsky from the headlines of his own time of the most abject cruelty to children like an innocent child being made to suffer how in god's name could that happen if god exists and he's all good so i get it but see the book of job thomas the coin is dusty these are all profoundly believing people it's like when i hear um stephen fry you know the uh famously atheist writer he he will bring out this argument with great authority he does of you know children with bone cancer and worms that go into the eyes of children and blind them before they kill them and but he's been preceded by the author of job thomas aquinas and dostoevsky who who stood right think of job in the in the whirlwind he stands there in the in the whirlwind you know so you can't blame the christian tradition for not dealing with this problem you know for like uh brushing it under the carpet i mean it has it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem it's still a difficult problem to deal with that there's all this cruelty of the world it's uh there's a lot of example to history just yeah in my own family history with the soviet union with stalin yeah the atrocities that stalin has brought onto its the people of the soviet union throughout the 20th century is nearly immeasurable yeah and yet when you look at the entirety of human history you will see progress not just the soviet union but the entirety of the civilization throughout the 20th century and stalin has a role to play there's a there's a dark aspect to somehow evil helps us make progress and i don't know how to put that in the calculation it's uh i don't you know on the local scale i want to alleviate suffering i'm right probably lean heavily lean pacifist not out of weakness but out of strength but man it does seem that uh history sprinkled with evil and that evil does somehow nudge us towards good yes sometimes we can see it and that's where the that's where the idea comes from that evil's permitted to bring about some greater good and we can sometimes really see it um can we always see it no in fact typically we don't see it but now you bring another factor into this which is the difference between our minds and god's mind so our minds i mean look even they're remarkably capacious but they take in a tiny tiny tiny swath of of space and time and even like our eyes can only take in so much of the light spectrum and these little these little ape sensorium that we have that could just take in a a little tiny bit of reality really how are we ever in a position to say oh no there's no possible good that would ever come from that even the greatest evil that you know every dostoevsky and that can conjure up and stephen fry still how could we have the arrogance to say i know there's no good that could ever come from that i know there's no morally justifiable reason why god would ever permit that because i think that's hubris to the nth degree for us to say that and that's the assumption behind this claim that god can permit evil to bring about a greater good now god understands it but we're like we're like little kids you know like a four-year-old and their parents make a decision and we said what why in the world would you do this to me um this is my pastoral experience years ago there was a young father and his son was like three or something and he was in the hospital for something i forgot what it was but he had to undergo surgery right so after the surgery he's in great pain this poor kid this three-year-old kid and the dad was there with him you know holding his hand and you know and the son this is what the father told me he said he's looking at me like what gives here i mean why would you you love me i i've always assumed that and yet you're presiding over this somehow you're approving of this and doing nothing to get me out of it right and he said the kid couldn't articulate that but his eyes did and his eye and the father said it was just killing me because i knew i couldn't explain it to him and it's true he could vaguely gesture toward but the kid didn't understand surgery and cutting his body and taking things out of it and that this was gonna you know make him much better in the long run but i remember thinking it's a great metaphor for us vis-a-vis god is here's god infinitely loving god who's with us all the time and we say what are you doing why aren't you taking this away from me and the answer i mean ultimately is trust trust me trust me surrender to me and when we don't that's uh get we get in trouble with the old pride and the hubris and all that kind of stuff yeah no but trust me what i tell you i mean i completely get it in my own life and as a priest you're dealing with suffering all the time with people in pain all the time i remember as a young priest there was a there was a policeman in our parish so he had a gun and inexplicably no one had any clue he got up one night shot his son to death and then shot himself is in my parish so i went to the uh the wake i remember i show up and i'm this young 27 year old goofball priest and i might roll my collar on and i i walk in and there were two coffins the two coffins in the room you know there's the son and the father and the mother was there and she she went like this to me like like she saw me okay you're the you're the religious guy here yeah what and just by instinct i i went like that too i'm like i i don't i don't know what to tell i i can't i don't have an answer for you but but i was there i'm not saying to pat myself on the back it's just that's where the church goes because jesus went there see now we're gesturing toward a more theological response the first one is more austerely philosophical god permits evil to bring about a good but the theological response is that's where christ went is he went all the way down he went all the way down into our suffering and see the cross as the limit case of of of evil um humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering and death it's all there and that's where the son of god went and i would say that's why as a priest i i went there that's my job is to go to those places you know so that's the ultimate answer to the problem so there is uh we can't comprehend it but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice we trusted because we know on other grounds of god's existence yeah i i would resist the claim that well this is such a such a knock-down argument so now we know there is no god i would say no there's all kinds of other rational warrants for god and so i i know that god exists i know that god is infinite love and now i got to square that with this experience and the way i do that is by a trusting confidence that god knows what he's about you know again i know how how inadequate that always seems to anyone who's suffering including myself when i'm in great suffering but i think that's the best that we've done in the great tradition so if you were to steal man that case against god or the existence of god you find the most convincing argument is there's evil in the world yeah therefore there's no god there's too much of it yeah if i were to steal man that argument i do what stephen fry does i would do what dostoevsky's yvonne does i i would do exactly that i would say there's just too much and then if you want to keep pressing it um animal suffering so we talk about human suffering but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on um isn't there just too much suffering to be reconciled with an infinitely good god and that's again thomas aquinas i've just used his very steel manned argument you mentioned that uh again on reddit somebody asked who your favorite um communicator of atheist ideas was and you mentioned christopher hitchens yeah are there other ideas for atheism that you find particularly challenging well that's the one it's probably evil the other objection in aquinas which has a lot of contemporary uh resonance is can we just explain everything through natural causes why would you have to invoke a cause beyond the causes in the world so as i'm trying to explain let's say for aquinas motion causality you know finality can i just do that with natural causes wouldn't that suffice to explain it so i i get like when naturalists are speaking or people that are pure materialists they'll just say no that's perfectly adequate a scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience um so i would steal man that and say well show me why we need something more and to do that you got to get out of plato's cave it seems to me because that my objection to naturalism is it it's staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable and making the mistake of saying that's all there is to being that's all there is that needs to be explained and long before we get to religion just stay with plato the first step out of the cave if you combine it now with the parable of the line is mathematical objects and and i'm with those the many people that would say mathematics is an experience of the immaterial i've stepped out of a merely empirical physical naturalistic world the minute i understand a pure number or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship which would obtain in any possible world which are not tied to space and time that's the first step out of the cave and then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections for example on the nature being i mean so i could i could talk about this thing as a physical object and i can analyze it at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists you know up and down through this thing and fine fine but i'm still in plato's cave i'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall but when i step out of that into the mathematical realm i have entered a different realm of being seems to me do you think it's possible for the cave to expand so large that it encompasses the whole world meaning is it possible to is it possible that we're just clueless right now in terms of uh scientifically speaking with most of the world we haven't figured out yet but do you think it's possible through science to know god just to look outside the world so it's fundamentally the limit of the empirical scientific method is that we can't know some of these very big questions no i i can i love this i'm not a scientist and i was never all that good at science you know i was more humanities guy but i love and respect the sciences but i hate scientism and scientism is rampant today with especially young people the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge and i i'm a vehement opponent of that there are dimensions of being that are not capturable through a scientific method of mere observation hypothesis formation experimentation etc as great as that is as wonderful as that is but it's still i think within plato's cave and that's not to say it's not real it's just at a relatively low level of reality um you step out of plato's cave when you go into the pure mathematics that's right you know that article i just came across it recently and discovered this whole literature around it is eugene vigner's article in 1960 called the unreasonable applicability of mathematics to the physical sciences i think that's the title of it or effectiveness or something like that yeah but what's so cool is you know he's not a religious man he was a kind of a secular jew but yet he uses the word miracle like eight times in that article and because he just is so impressed by the fact that high complex mathematics describes so accurately the physical world and can be used to to create things and to manipulate and why should that be true that there's something very weirdly mysterious about that relationship you know and i would say it's because you you stepped into a higher order of being which is inclusive of a lower level of being that's the platonic approach is that as you move now i'm going to different metaphor you move to higher levels they're inclusive of the lower levels yeah there's some magic there that seems to at least in our current understanding of science uh to be not quite capturable even consciousness the idea of consciousness can i ask you where do you think the laws of nature come from so i mean sort of the vigner question where does the deep the deep mathematical structure of things come from how do you explain that the mathematical structure or the fact that the structures is somehow pleasing and beautiful because those yeah that's right yes those are two different we'll do the first one for i'm just curious where do you think it comes from i tend to believe even in terms of physics we don't really know what's going on there's so so so much more to be discovered we're walking around in the dark trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there and we're patting ourselves on the back and how many puzzles we've discovered so far even ghettos and completeness theorem what are the limits of mathematics eczematic systems i don't i don't know what is the purpose of mathematics what is the power of mathematics is it just a useful tool to um study the world around us or is it something deeper that we're just discovering all i know from my emotional perspective now i am an engineer i'm a robotics ai person from an emotional perspective i just find the whole thing beautiful yeah but that's really cool to me that's a very interesting clue see one of the arguments for god is based on the intelligibility of the world this very it's like vigner it's very peculiar fact it seems to me that the world is so radically intelligible why should that be true why should it be the case that being has this intelligible structure to it so it corresponds to an acquiring mind so aquinas can say that the the intelligible enact is the intellect and act meaning there's some there's some deep correspondence between this and that and it's i'm with vigner that's i think really weird and unreasonable and strange now my answer is because the the creator of the universe is a great mind and uh has stamped the world with intelligibility uh in the beginning was the word right and the word was with god and all things came to be through the word don't we shouldn't picture that so much it's a it's gesturing in this very powerful direction there's an intelligence that has imbued the world with intelligibility and and we discover that you know there's something about the simplicity of the way the world works that that's where the beauty comes from and yes there's something profound to the mechanism whatever that is um god that brought that to be the thought it into being that the world has been said when the bible says that god god said let there be light and there was like god said again we don't literalize the poetry but it's it's very rich that god spoke the world into being so that means it's it's been it's been imbued with intelligibility from the beginning they say that you know the condition for the possibility of the of the western physical sciences was a basically christian idea namely that the world is not god therefore i can i can analyze it experiment upon it i can i don't divinize it i don't have a mystical relationship to the world it's not god but secondly that it's it's absolutely in every nook and cranny intelligible and those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation so it's been created it's not god's other than god but yet it's touched in every dimension by god's mind and when those two things are in place the sciences get underway you know i don't worship the world anymore but i'm also utterly confident i can come to know it and those are theological ideas well we live in this world so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world by making the assumption that this world is fully understandable and we don't need to worry about what's outside the world in some sense in order to build bridges and rockets and computers and all that kind of stuff it's only when we get to the questions that are deeper about why we're here at all what does it mean to be good all those kinds of things do we need to reach outside of this world can i introduce another one so i talked about mathematics i think it's stepping out of a cave it's stepping out of just the purely empirical you know world but the very fact we use a word like universe to me is very interesting even if you say multiple universes to me that it's like well they're they're whatever this the whole is the totality universem turned toward the one um why would we call it that why would why wouldn't we just call it an aggregate it's just an aggregate of stuff it's an aggregate of all but we call it a universe and my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition is it's the intuition of being so i immediately experience things here the color and shape and i can measure them but when i've really stepped out of the cave and i've now engaged beyond mathematics even i'm now into metaphysical reflection i'm interested not just in this thing as an object and how it's colored and shaped and what it's atoms and quarks and all that are that's fine but i'm interested now and what does it mean to say this thing is real so what makes this a being and then what are the characteristics of being so not from aristotle to heidegger you know this question of the nature of being but see i would say we call it a universe because it's turned toward the one of being it's this intuition that whatever from quarks to galaxies to whatever give me a billion other universes they it would still be existence right it's turned toward the one that being unites our experience and so now i'm at the metaphysical level of analysis i've taken another step out of the cave in plato's language i'm at the formal level now beyond mathematics level forms and and the formal is inclusive of the mathematical which is inclusive of the physical and i think that's eugene vigner is that the mathematical includes the physical it it is metaphysically prior to it but here we are sitting in the physical trying to make sense of why the unreasonable effectiveness of the thing that's uh beyond which is the mathematics my answer is god and i i don't know a better answer and i as i read vigner he wasn't ready to say that but i think the language is gesturing who i've read someone recently some very well-known physicist who said his answer to vigner's question is that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician and i thought yeah that's right uh let me ask you about jordan peterson you had a great conversation with him yeah um he has a complicated and nuanced view of faith or faith period um he has said that he believes in jesus the person and the myth and some of the the full richness and complexity that you've talked about but he's surprised by his faith he's not sure what to make of it he's it's almost like meta struggling with what the heck is faith means he's a super powerful intellect that can't compute the faith that he's experiencing so uh what are some interesting differences between the two of you or some commonalities uh in terms of your understanding of faith he's a very interesting guy and i've had a couple conversations with him and i i do think he's he's moving in the direction of of faith and his lectures in the bible are very fine i think he reminds me of the church fathers because the church fathers would have looked at the they call it the moral sense of the scripture peterson probably called it the psychological meaning but i think he's doing a lot of that he as i read him and talk to him i think he's kind of at a kantian level in regard to jesus what i mean there is for kant jesus it's not so much the historical jesus this figure from long ago it's jesus as an archetype of the moral life you know he says he's the image of the person perfectly pleasing to god and so jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination as a as a heuristic as a as a a goal that we're tending toward but the historical person of jesus for conflict well let's not fuss about that so much it's this figure and as i read peterson especially and talk to him i think he's kind of there with the archetype of jesus and even language of like live as though god exists that's the outs all above kant you know the kind of as if um attitude and where i oppress him when we talk is in the direction of no that's not christianity yet i mean that's enlightenment moral philosophy but christianity is very interested in this historical figure and very interested that god really became one of us and he's not just an archetype of the moral life he's someone he's a person who's invaded our world and gone all the way to the bottom of sin and thereby saved us you know so the facticity of jesus and the resurrection so like peterson will talk about the resurrection as a as a myth and all that and you can find that in different cultures et cetera but i i christianity um is saying something else so in christianity when we're talking about who is jesus it's not just an archetype right it's not just a myth it's a historical figure and the very grounded fact that god became one of us right is fundamental to this idea what christianity is what it means to be a christian it's the uh the sin and the love that came here down to earth that means we can be one with god so that's essential it's not just that's right you know it always strikes me the difference between let's say mythic expressions and the new testament is it read someone like you know carl jung and then joseph campbell whom he influenced and now jordan peterson was very union and this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures and great i mean i think it's very interesting and there's a lot going on there there's a sort of calmness though about it like yeah the interesting and that's in this culture and that culture and it's the form of the moral life and i understand all that then you read the new testament uh whatever those people are talking about it's not that they are grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you to get your attention to tell you about something that happened to them right like the resurrection the myth of the dying and rising god and how powerful that is and shaping our consciousness that's fascinating that's not the new testament the testament is did you hear did you jesus of nazareth whom they put to death god raised him from the dead and he was seen by 500 and he was seen by by peter and and and then lastly i saw him that's how paul talks it's not the detached you know um psychologist amusing on archetypal things and i think that makes a huge difference when it comes to christianity the intensity of the historical details are essential here so if you you know if you look at hitler and nazi germany it's not enough to say well power corrupts and sometimes so looking at the archetype of hitler it's much much more important much more powerful to look at the details of how he came to power yeah what are the ways he did evil onto the world and then then you can get really intense about your struggle with some of the complexities of human nature and power on institutions and all that kind of stuff so the historical nature of the bible we're in historical religion and we've been it's important we generate philosophical reflection we can find common ground with archetypal thinking and all that we can and the the church fathers use the greek philosophy and aquinas uses aristotle and all that's great but we're in historical religion and that matters immensely is the bible the literal word of god how do you make sense of the words that make up the bible i think the best way to get at the bible is to think of it as a library not a book so it's a collection of books right from a wide variety of periods different authors different audiences and different genre so in the bible you find poetry you find song you find something like history not in our sense but something like history you find gospel it's his own genre you find uh epistolary literature like paul you find apocalyptic there's all this in the bible so is the bible literally the word of god it's like saying is the library uh literally true it depends on what section you're in right so parts of like one and two samuel one and two kings uh number places the old testament are there elements of the historical in there sure but it's theologically interpreted history it's not like our sense of history of you know give me ten thousand footnotes and you know i'm gonna i'm gonna um look at all the source material i can possibly find it's more like ancient history uh like herodotus people like that um but then there's poetry and there's myth and there's legend and there's song and all that stuff in the bible so god breathes through all of it i would say he inspired all of it right inspira he's he's breathing through all of it god is speaking through all of it but he speaks in different voices uh he uses different human instruments and he uses different genre in different types of language so we have to be sensitive to that when we're interpreting the bible so the different instruments are more or less uh some are more perfect than others no i wouldn't say that i would say more perfect i'd say they're just different it's like a symphony and god's like a conductor and there's all kinds of different instruments in the orchestra and he loves us to breathe through the psalms i prayed the psalms this morning i do every day in my in my office you know that's those are songs they probably were literally sung most of them at one point he breathes through um apocalyptic like we're reading the book of revelation now in the easter season and it's this wild and woolly book it should be filmed by you know uh spielberg or somebody today and he speaks through the gospels the gospels which correspond in genre to what i call ancient biography that's the genre of the gospels it's wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary they're like ancient biographies you have the pauline letters which are about in all particular cities that paul was visiting and particular people he knew so you just got to be sensitive to the genre all the time let's return back to human institutions and talk about history of human civilization and politics so one question to ask is was america founded as a christian nation in your view what if we look at the declaration of independence what are the words mean we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness it seems like god is breathing through those words too yeah i think so you know the founders would be some kind of combination of deism um certainly christianity is is coming up through them enlightenment rationalism all in kind of a mix you know so you're not going to find in our founding fathers simply thomas aquinas or like a purely you know classically christian understanding it's christianity in in those various expressions because actually i would see the enlightenment as a sort of um child of christianity we could talk about that but having said all that yes i think they are expressing at least the residue of a once deeply integrated christian sense of things that uh our rights are not created by the government they're not uh doled out by the government they come from god and and the other thing i find really interesting is equality because um look in classical philosophy political philosophy plato aristotle cicero it's not equality for them it's our inequality that's really interesting so plato divides us into these three classes and aristotle says only a tiny little coterie of property males of sufficient education should be in the political life the rest should all be in private life you know and then some are suited for slavery so i mean he divides us dramatically same with cicero and so on um where does this come from this weird idea that we're all equal i mean how we're not equal in beauty not equal in strength we're not equal in moral attainment we're not equal in intelligence so what is it and i think the residue especially comes through in that little word that all men are created equal that's our equality that we're all equally children of god so take god out of the picture i think we are going to slide rapidly into an embrace of inequality now in the classical world yes but heck look at the 20th century i mean when god is excluded in a very systematic way i think you saw the suspension of rights and the suspension of equality like mad so i think it's very important that god is in the picture and that we're a nation under god it matters enormously that's not pious boilerplate that's at the at the rational foundations of our democracy so do you think nietzsche was on to something with the idea looking into the 20th century that god is dead that there is uh a cultural distancing from a belief in god yeah you know i'd be so much sympathetic to jordan peterson's reading of of nietzsche there namely it's not nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop hey god is dead you know it's more of a lament you know god's dead and we've killed him and uh what will happen in the wake of that and i think yeah much of the totalitarianism of the 20th century follows from that um that questioning of god and the dismissal of god from from public life so i i would be sympathetic with that um when we're beyond good and evil you know and all that's left is the will to power and then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes when we forget ideas like equality and rights which are grounded in god why are we surprised that that death camps follow so i think there's a correlation there for sure i don't know i believe that there's a capacity to do good in all of us and a capacity to do evil and there's something that tends towards good whatever that is i tend to think that if that community that love that we talked about they find each other they find the good if you don't constrain the resources if you don't push them if you uh don't artificially create conflict through power centers and evil uh charismatic leaders then people will be good to each other and whether that's god or some other source of deep um moral meaning that seems to be essential for a functioning civilization yeah and it's hard i mean that's what humans are we're searching for what that god is what that means you know what that triggers in my mind i wonder if you agree with this that the modern sciences drew their strength from their narrowness and what i mean there is is they almost completely bracketed formal and final causality in the aristotelian sense and they focused on efficient and material causality and that gave as i say great strength but from the narrowness of focus but for aristotle the more important causes are the final and the formal causes and so final causality there what's drawing us so for aristotle he'd look at someone like me and say okay you're you have a intelligible structure and that leads you to seek certain things for the perfection of that structure you know and fair enough that's right so i seek the good right now i'm seeking the good of being with you i said yeah i'll sit down with lex friedman and we'll talk about deep and important things that's the good i saw it this morning when i woke up now why am i seeking that well for a higher reason a higher good you know because i it's part of my work my ministry is to you know the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture and okay well why do you want that well because i want to bring more and more people into into the what i think is beautiful and true and good in the church well how come you want that well because a long time ago i was kind of myself brought into that realm and find it very compelling yeah but then why do you want that well because ultimately i want to be i want to be friends with god now i've given you one example there but but any act of the will it seems to me has to be analyzed that way the will seeks something it seeks the good right by definition but the good always nest like a russian doll in in a higher good right which then nests and is still higher good until you come this is aquinas to some in this sense uncaused cause an uncaused final cause there has to be some sumumbonum right some supreme good that you're looking for and that's god by the way that's another i think rational path to god is is every single moment every day we are implicitly seeking god so with your um word on fire ministries and and the website and the communication efforts what what what is the thing you're seeking just you if we can pause and uh for a brief moment allow you to be prideful or i'm of course just joking but what what is your local efforts just a small little pocket of the world with smalling quotes um with word on fire yeah it's just using the you know media especially the new media social media to get the gospel out so i started what 20 some years ago just on a radio show in chicago 5 15 on sunday morning i had a 15 minute sermon show and i asked the people in this parish i was at i said i need 50 000 to get on for 15 minutes at 5 15 on sunday morning and they all laughed when i proposed that but they gave me the money so that's how i got started just doing a sermon on the radio and then it branched off into into video stuff and tv and then i did a documentary i went all over the world and kind of told the story of catholicism so that's how we started and now i'm using all the new media and social media but what i really love what we're doing today is something i really like which is having a conversation outside of just the narrow catholic world or even the narrow christian world but to look out to the wider culture and you know who's talking about interesting things and how can the church engage there and you know so that's the purpose of word on fire is uh overwhelming to face so many different sort of atheists than complex thinkers like uh jordan peterson and some of the more political style thinkers that you've spoken with is that uh what is it dave rubin who's also um has a way different world view as well how is that terrifying is that exciting to you yeah is it challenging yeah maybe all the above but more exciting you know i would say i like doing that i was a teacher for a long time and taught in the seminary for like 20 years and so you know i've been engaging these questions for a long time i'm a writer i've written about 20 some books so and i i write some at a popular level i write some at a high academic level and i i like doing all that so i i love those ideas i love those questions uh love engaging people and i i find my own experience you do run into of course a lot of the you know vitriol and kind of just stupidity and all that online and i get it and religion is such a magnet for people's hostility for different reasons so i get that like you read it we talked about it you have to wade through you know swamps of of obscenity and everything but but i do it i like it and it's worthwhile because in that reddit experience so many of the issues that preoccupy young people i can name them for you exactly what they are when it comes to religion how do you know there's a god so the god question secondly why is there so much suffering in the world third question why do you think your religion is the right religion fourth why are you so mean to gay people so those are the four things that i i again and again come up when dealing with young people i i've told my brother bishops and priests about that i said structure your adult education programs or structure your youth outreach around those four questions uh well let me ask you about gay marriage how do we make sense of the love between a man and a man and the woman and the woman and the institution of marriage we love friendship and friendship is at the heart of things and so nothing wrong with friendship between you know a man and a man a woman and a woman but go back to aristotle thomas aquinas about natural finalities and intelligible forms that there's a certain form to human being which includes the physical and includes the sexual it has a proper finality and so we'd recognize that finality is twofold both unitive and procreative and so those two we recognize as the appropriate expression of human sexuality so that's why the church holds to sex between a man and a woman within the context of marriage is the is the right expression uh we reach out to everybody in love and in respect and deep understanding and seeking to understand their lives from the inside so i mean all of that i agree with the the bridge building that we need to do to people like in the gay community and people in in gay marriage and so on so the church holds to the the intelligible structure if you want of human sexuality and it reaches out to real human beings always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on so it's somewhere in there that the church takes its stance and then uh so there's probably variation in the stances that it it takes so you're saying the institution of marriage is about the unitive which is like the friendship the deep connection yeah between two humans and the procreative so being able to have children all that kind of stuff it's interesting so i is is uh are gay couples seen as sinful so does the church acknowledge the love yeah that's the deep love that's possible between them i think so yeah which is why the church says in its official teaching it's the physical expression let's say of of sexual passion between two men that is problematic not their friendship not their love for each other um so i think yeah we confirm the first well let me ask you another difficult topic that's just unlike the other one like the other ones we talked about uh that's going on in the news now as we sit here today the supreme court has voted to overturn abortion rights in a draft majority opinion striking down the landmark row versus wade decision what are your thoughts uh on this first of all the human institution of the supreme court making these decisions throughout its history and second of all just the idea uh the really powerful the controversial the difficult idea of abortion yeah i mean i'm against abortion i i'm i'm pro-life uh the church recognizes from the moment of conception we're dealing with a human life that's worthy of of respect and protection especially as you see the unfolding event of that person you know across a pregnancy but at every stage we recognize the beauty and the dignity of of that human being and so we stand opposed to this um the outright killing of the innocent so that's the church's view um again reaching out always in love and understanding and compassion to those who are dealing and believe me every single pastor every single priest understands that because we deal with people all the time who are in these painful situations but um that's the moral you know side of it the legal side i think roe v wade was terribly decided i think one of the worst expressions of of american law since the dred scott decision so i stand in favor while returning roe v wade and casey i think they were terrible the casey decision is is instructive to me that it belongs to the nature of freedom that that decision says to determine the meaning of one's own life and even i don't get the language exactly right but end of the universe like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom that we can determine the meaning see but that's repugnant to everything we've just talked about that i'm inventing the meaning of my life and of the universe and so casey though was instructive in a way because it it it tips its hat toward the problem culturally is that i think in my freedom i can determine everything my choice is all that matters and i would say no your choice should be correlated to the order of the good it's not sovereign it doesn't reign sovereignly over being and it makes its own decisions so i think casey was terrible law and and it was backing up roe v wade which is terrible law so i i'm in favor of the overturning of those i've spoken out that many times now it'll return it to the individual states it's not gonna you know solve the problem uh the individual states will have to decide i just heard yesterday we were up in sacramento the bishops having our annual meeting and so we got the word you know from the governor and the legislators that they're going to push for a constitutional amendment in california so basically to make any attempt to limit abortion in any way just illegal you know i think that's barbaric you know so i i stand radically opposed to that it's such an interesting line because if if you believe that there's a it's a line that struggles with the question of what is does it mean to be a living being or to give life to something um because if you believe that at the moment of conception you're you're basically creating a human life then abortion is murder and then if you don't then it's a sort of basic biological choice that's not uh taking away of a life and the gap between those two beliefs is so vast yeah it's hard and yet so fundamental to the question of what it means to be alive and the the fundamental question about the respect for human life and human dignity it's interesting to see um and also about freedom right you know all of those things are mixed in there right it's a beautiful struggle maybe the freedom is the most important you know this sort of freedom run amok or see you know in in classical philosophy and theology freedom is not self-determination freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless you know what i'm saying so modern freedom and the roots of that are people like william mavacam in the late middle ages freedom means i hover above the yes and the no do i do yes or no and i'm the sovereign subject of that choice and i will on no basis i will say yes or no i'm like louis xiv you know where i'm like stalin or something you know but the aquinas wouldn't have recognized that as freedom for him it's i got this desire you know in me i've got this will and it's pushing toward the good but the trouble is i got so many attachments and and i'm so stupid and i'm so conditioned by my sin that i can't achieve it so i need to be disciplined in my desire so as to make that achievement possible and then effortless so right now i'm freely speaking english to you and you know we you had the experience and i've had it too of learning a foreign language and don't you feel unfree you know like when you're you're struggling with a language when i was over in paris doing my doctoral work and you know i i was okay with french but you know my first time in a seminar there's all these like you know intelligent francophones around the table they're all just and i'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward french and i felt unfree because i i my desire wasn't wasn't um directed you know but then over time i became freer and freer speaker of french i was ordered more to the good that's a better understanding of freedom than sort of sovereign self-determination but our country is now i think really in the grip of that i decide and that's why the nietzschean thing comes to my mind of you know the will to power there's i'm beyond good and evil uh it's just up to me to decide god help us no it's the values that we intuit around us intellectual moral and aesthetic the values think of the dog on the beach again and that you get ordered to those by your education by your family by your religion and that's beautiful that makes you free now i can freely enter into this so this sovereign self-determination business that's not my game the values come in part from the tradition carried through the generations let me ask you to put on your wise hat and give advice to young folks so high school and college yeah thinking about uh you know what to do with their life career there's so many uh options out there how can they have a career they can be proud of or even just a life they can be proud of i think i say find something you're good at because that's from god it's a gift that god's given you and then dedicate it to love you know what i'm saying so you're good at science or math or sports or whatever okay i'm gonna use that now for my aggrandizement for my wealth for my privileges and to become famous no no find what you're good at but now dedicate it to willing the good of the other so use your science and use your mathematics and use your sports and use your musicianship to to benefit the world you know um that's why i would say them so find what you're good at that's that's from that's a tricky one finding what you're good at what because it's not just raw skill it's also what you connect with yeah and it's also um like this iterative process of if you want to add love to the world you have to see how can you be effective at doing that so it's not just the things you're good at there's like there's you know i'm good at building bridges out of toothpicks i'm not exactly sure that's going to be useful for the world then again to push back on that the joy brings me maybe somehow the joy radiates out yeah well you're good at what you're doing right now and and you've dedicated that to bringing more light and illumination and and joy to the world true that was a that was a searching that's the process of yeah trying stuff and figuring it out right and ultimately yes asking the question how is this making the world at all better at every step of the way yeah as opposed to enriching yourself and all those kinds of things right i think that's the name of the game you know but it's tricky and if we don't have moral mentors and intellectual mentors it becomes hard and if you tell a kid that's deadly to me just decide for yourself just you know just off you go and and you make your own choices now you gotta you your choice has to be disciplined your desire has got to be directed you know then you'll find your creative path everyone does it in its own way but it's it's a guided choice your freedom is not sovereign it's a it's a guided freedom so in the in the struggle and the suffering you've seen in the world let me ask you the the question of death have you how often do you think about your own mortality every day and one are you afraid of it the uncertainty of it and what do you think happens after you die sure i'm afraid of it i mean because it's uh i don't i don't know what's next i mean i i can't know what the way i know you so of course i'm afraid of it and i think of it every day um that's true uh my prayer life uh compels me you know we have this the um the hail mary prayer you know so you pray the rosary uh now and at the hour of our death amen now and at the hour of our death amen now at the hour of our death amen you pray the whole rosary if this 50 times you remind yourself of your own death but i do i think about it because it's the ultimate limit it's why it's it's beguiled every artist and writer and philosopher it's the ultimate limit you know question but yeah i'm sure i'm afraid of it because it's the unknown uh what do i think happens i think i'm drawn into the deeper embrace of god's love you know and that's stating it kind of in a in a more poetic way um do you know john polkinghorn's work do you know that name john paulken was a very interesting he just died recently he was a cambridge university particle physicist right high high level scientist who at midlife became an anglican priest he left his job at cambridge and went to the seminary became an anglican priest right and then wrote i think some of the best stuff on science and religion because he really knew the science from the inside here's paulkinghorn's account that i've always found persuasive he said what what survives after we die so this body clearly dies and goes into the ground or it's burned up or it goes away right but what's preserved and he says what aristotle would have called the form pokemon calls it the pattern so the the pattern that's organized the the matter that's made me up over all these years that's obviously not the same as it was even i mean you would know how often does it all change all your atoms and cells and you know there was a the little you know bobby baron who was growing up in birmingham michigan there i could have a picture of him and then there's me and i said oh this is that same person well i mean clearly not materially speaking not at all completely different but there's there's a unity to whatever that pattern is by which all of that materiality's been kind of organized you know so paul karen says i think that pattern is remembered by god and remembers the wrong word as though it's like derivative i mean it's known by god and so god can therefore re-embody me according to that pattern at a higher pitch what we call the resurrected body uh so paul talks about a spiritual body his body for sure because he believes in the resurrection of jesus um but it's not a body like ours from this world it's a it's a body at a higher pitch so something some pattern that's there persists pattern persists in the mind of god and then is used as the ground of the re-embodiment of me so it's not like i've just become a platonic form i'm gonna be re-embodied because the christian hope is not for platonic escape of soul from matter that's never the christian hope it's for the resurrection of the body we say and he said what a fantastic idea well i don't know i mean this body is being reconstituted all the time according to this pattern right it's not the same matter and so might there be an another sort of higher material that is organized according to the same pattern which has been remembered by god so therefore we can hang on to the language of body and soul if you want or matter and form but it's the form remembered by god and then it in an embodied way by god that we call heaven the heavenly state that's what i hope for that's my christian faith my christian hope let me ask you about the big question of of meaning we've talked about in different directions uh from different perspectives what's the meaning of our existence here on earth what's the the meaning of life love god is love and the purpose of my life is to become god's friend and that means i'm more conformed to love and so my life finds meaning in the measure that i become more on fire with the divine love i'm like the burning bush is to become more and more radiant with the presence of god that's what gives life meaning meaning is to live in a purpose of relationship to a value i would say so there's all kinds of values as i say moral aesthetic intellectual values and when i have a purposive relationship so right now you and i we have a purposive relationship to the value of let's say you know finding out the truth of things and we're speaking together to seek that well good what's the ultimate value the value of values is god the supreme good right the supremely knowable the supremely intelligible is god and so to be conformed to god is to have a fully meaningful life and who's god god is love so that's why i would fit the package together that way you're adding a lot of love to this world and which is something i deeply appreciate and that you would sit down with me uh given how valley boogie time is is a huge honor thank you so much my great pleasure i loved it lex thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with bishop robert baron to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from bishop robert baron himself which reminds me of the dostoevsky line spoken through prince mishkin that quote beauty will save the world robert says begin with the beautiful which leads to the good which leads you to truth thank you for listening and hope to see you next time