Transcript for #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church

I'll give you time as a claim as definition. 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, absolute 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 nomic, and that's not in purpose. There's almost as then co-on 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 emotion. 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. I would say that's the fundamental mistake that atheists all the new make all the time is they think of God as a big being. What 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' answer is no. He's not in the genus of being. So what 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 justuring the way the tradition does toward God, using language that's at the same time, philosophically precise and nomic. It's both accurate. It's true. God, essence and existence coincide. What God is, is the same as God's active to be. But now what does that mean? I'm not quite sure because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that. Everything in our experience is a being of some type. So it's existence received according to the mode of some essence. That's not true of God. which is why you can't be found in the world. And that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is, oh, I guess, theists are those that believe there's this being alongside the other beings in the universe. And the atheists say, oh, no, there is no such being. And that's precisely wrong. That's just a category error. Dawkins, I think, sights, Bertrand Russell. To the effect that proving the non-existence of God is a bit like proving the non-existence of a China tea pot orbiting between earth and Mars. You know, no, that's precisely what God is not. Some entity that sort of hidden among the other entities of the universe. God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all. That's the way to put it. a more theological language, God's the creator of all things.

Not utterly, of course. And I would say, our knowledge begins always in this world, begins in ordinary experience. But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis, through philosophical reasoning, can come to some knowledge of a reality which is transcendent to our experience. So we gesture toward it. I always like Aquinas who says the language about God that we use as anological. 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 theorize, and even at the limit as you suggest, I can visualize. So we have metaphors for God. And the Bible is replete with those, right? So God is a rock. God's like a lion, God's like this and that. Or the Bible will sometimes imagine God as a human being walking around. Now only the greatest fundamentalism would say well that's a unifical, accurate description of God. It's an image that's catching something of God's manner of being.

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 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 Tillick though, the President of theologians said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary is faith. Because he said the way we take it usually is something subrational. You know, I have proof of this. I really know this and I only kind of believe that. Like that's just a personal opinion or impression. But that's to identify faith with the kind of inspirational. And that's not it. I mean, I don't want something inspirational. I don't want superstition or childish credulity. So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason. And the far side of reason, it's super irrational, not inspirational. 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 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.

Well, to be me is to be a human being, right? To be this is to be a table, this is to be a microphone. So it's, I'll use a cleanest is language. It's the act of being. poured if you want into the receptacle of some essential principle. So it's got an ontological structure. It's an existent. It's a thing that exists. But it's existing in a limited way, according to essential principle. God. What's God? What's God's name? What kind of being is he? We'll go back to Moses now. When the Israelites ask me, you know, what's your name? What should I tell them? And he says, you know, famously, I am who I am. But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark. 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 active existing. 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 there. God is that who centers everywhere, who's who comforts is nowhere as the mystics put it. Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that? No. And in a way, that's the whole point. If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind. So to be God is to be to be is to, and that's, you know, Moses take off your sandals. You're on Holy Ground. So I'm going to go over confidently and find out what this thing is. This burning bush. I'm going to find out. No, no, no. Take off your shoes. You're on Holy Ground because you're not in charge here. You're not in command. Because if you 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. Here's another interesting thing, but I didn't think about the burning bush in this connection before. But it's a bush that's on fire, but not consumed. Being's are competitive with each other. These can't be in the same place at the same time. These two beings. They're mutually exclusive if you want. But as God comes close to a creature, he doesn't destroy it or consume it. But the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant, right? And see, compare it to the classical gods and goddesses when they come bursting into life and experience, things are incinerated and people give way and they're overwhelmed. Then there's this biblical idea of God comes close and sets things on fire, but doesn't burn them up. And that's because he's not a competitive being in the world. If he were a big being, then he'd be in this, he'd be competing for space, sort of 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, okay, 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.

Right. Let me make it maybe more forum, imagistic. I think a really good analogy. would be author to book, right? So like Tolkien or someone that writes one of these big sprawling novels. And Tolkien's good too, because he creates a whole world. He creates a new nature, new language, new history. I think of the thousands of characters in the plots and so plots 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 no-concranium. 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 the story somewhere. No, he's the author of the story. mysteriously present to every aspect of the story, but not a character in it.

Right. No, right. What the Augustine says, God is simultaneously intimure intimomeo, et superior sumomeo. 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 insight that God is the sheer act of to be. Well, of course that's true. So right now, God is sustaining us in existence. True. Aquinas has God is in all things by essence, presence, and power, and most intimately so. And he's nowhere in this room. Okay, where's God? that he's nowhere in this room. He's totalitarian, we say, he's totally other. Same time. But once you crack that code though, I think you see it, of like why that would be true. As you know, I'm getting from more philosophical language to more mystical language, because all the mystics talk that way in these high paradoxes about God's availability and unavailability. I've often thought, in the Bible, story after story, God can neither be grasped nor hidden from. So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God's. I've got him. I understand him. I can manipulate him. No, no, no. It's story of stories told you can't do that. Well, then the other extreme of the sinner, all right, then I'm going to run from God. I'm going to avoid God. Jonah and the whale, you know, so he has the call from God. And it's, no, no, I'm going to refuse that. I'm going to run his far away. I'm going to go to Tarsheesh, which meant like Timbuk II for them at the end of the world. God's going to whale, swallowing up, and bring some right back where God wants them. It's a 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 grab hold of God. So live in the space in between those two things, which would be the space of friendship with God. Falling in love with God is neither grasping nor hiding from God.

You know, in a way, what we're doing so far is a necessary pro-produetic because we're talking about God. What makes Christianity distinctive, of course, is the claim of the incarnation. So we come up out of Judaism, we come up out of this great, monotheistic tradition. And, you know, the Bible itself and all the great commentators within Judaism, I think, would agree with this basic, theistic stuff that I've been talking about. Take a most of my monodies, 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 out of the end to greed, 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. And what follows from that is the redemption of all the reality. So not just of human beings, but in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world. The Greek Father's 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.

I think it's massively important because it's the divinization principle that God wants to divinize his creation and sort of in this concentrated point of Jesus of Nazareth. But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus. So that goes right back to Paul. As we're grafted on to Christ, we talk about that as the church. We become like cells and molecules in an organism. That's the church. It's not an organization. That's a deformation of ecclesiology. The church is this organism that begins with Jesus, and then he's drawing all of humanity, but ultimately all of nature, all of all of creation to himself. When the son of man has lifted up people draw all things to himself, that idea of the gathering in of a scattered creation. So in that way, it's at the heart of it. Then there's all kinds of things. If God becomes human, That means there's a dignity to humanity which goes beyond anything any humanist of any stripe has ever said, right? Ancient medieval modern contemporary. Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable. God became one of us in order to divinize us. The goal of my life is not just to be a good person, not just to be, you know, materially successful, not just to be a member of society. The goal of my life is to become a participant in the divine nature. And so there is a humanism greater than that, even conceivably. So that's where I think humanism is profoundly influenced by the incarnation. And just our notion of God is 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 that I for he dies, I no longer call you servants but friends. It's an extraordinary moment. Because every God who's ever been served, well, that's a best we can hope for is because the servant of God, you know, I have to 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, he would have said in the Greek there, you know. But friends, I don't know. I can't imagine anything greater than that, becoming God's friend.

Yeah, the name of pride, envy, anger, sloth, Everest, gluttony, and lust are the seven deadly sins. We're called capital sins sometimes from the head sins from which things tend to flow. The most fundamental is pride. Probably most people today, if you talk about advice, you talk about deadly sin, they would think about lust. But the classical authors, including Dante, who does this pictorially, that's the least of the deadly sins, is lust, because it's the one that's most sort of dependent upon the body, and 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, Incavotters and say, I'm caved in around myself. like a black hole to get into the scientific. The black hole to me is a great symbol. It's so heavy that draws everything, including light, nothing can escape from it. See, that's the center. We're all sinners. We're like black holes that we draw everything into ourselves. So as a sinner, I'll confess I'm a sinner. The temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Baron moment and I'm drawing you now into my, you know, world and so on. What that does is it kills us off and it makes it darkens life and it makes it small and heavy and awful. It's like But see compared to the contrasting thing, is when you're lost in a moment, you're not concerned about the impression I'm making, you're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself, you're not concerned about the smokey on my back that's always telling me, you know, look good and sound right, but you're lost in something. You're just talking, you know, to a friend and the two of you together are discovering something true or beautiful. You're lost in a movie or you're lost in a book. Those are the best moments in life. Those are the best pieces of the least prideful moments, right? That's when the light comes out. I become radiant because I'm overcoming this tendency to fall in on myself. Dante is so good because the way he pictures Satan in divine comedy and you know he's at the center of the earth so like a black hole that way he's at the center of gravity is at the heaviest place and there's not fire where he is but ice which is 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 iceiness. And then he's beating his wings over the ice, making everyone else colder. It's a great image. And then he has this is cool too. He has three faces, Satan, because he's the simulacrum of the Trinity. So every sinner thinks he's God. So I pretend I'm God. So he's got the three faces. And from all six eyes, he weeps. Also from all three miles, he's chewing a sinner. He's got caches, broodus, and Judas in the three miles, you know, the three traders. But I think 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 as 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.

Right, which is why the masters tend to say, this was Bernard. St. Bernard was asked, what are the three most important virtues? And he said, humility toss, humility toss, and humility toss. because it's the opposite of pride. But, you know, they're bringing a cleanism again, because we think, oh, humility, I'm no good. That's not what it means at all. It means what I was describing before, when you're just lost in something, you're just lost in it. My image, I live out in Santa Barbara and I like to walk on the beach out there. And there's a section of the beach where they let the dogs run free without leashes. And when you see a dog and he's well cared for and his master's right there and the master's thrown the tennis ball and the surf and the dog was galloping out into the surf and he gets it with a big smile and comes running back. That's humility. That's an image of heaven because he's just lost in that moment. He doesn't care about impressing anybody and care about what people think of him. He's just lost in it. That's it. That's heaven, right? And those moments in our life when we get that, it's a little hint of paradise. But the trouble is most of us live, frankly, most of the time, in various levels of hell. 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 Kervantes and say, I'm collapsed in. What am I really going to be concerned about? That guy's getting more attention than I am. That guy's richer than I am. That lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do, and why don't I have that, right? So envy is a very close daughter of pride. Anger flows from me. Why do I get angry? The dog isn't getting angry on the beach when he's running after the tennis ball. But I get angry all the time. Sputter with anger when things aren't going my way and you're insulting me and you're not doing what I want and I'm being hurt my reputation. So anger flows from pride, you know. All of them do. All of the deadly sins do.

I think when his limit concepts may be, they're like he restrict devices. So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God. So think of the dog on the beach. He's fallen in love with his environment, with his master, with the surf. He's just lost in it, right? He's forgotten himself. He's transcended himself and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place. Now, imagine the limit of that is the friendship with God that we talked about. That I become the friend of God. I become so, I forgetful of myself. So lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God that I'm I found Biatitud, right? I found joy. The beatific vision we call it. That's the limit case. That's what we're attending. That's where God wants us to go. Think of hell as a limit case in the opposite direction. That's Kervatu's in say. 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. Now, where did He go? He went all the way into it to get us out of it. It's like pulling it 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. There's the trajectory of the incarnation. Though he was in the form of God in the same Paul, Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but rather emptied himself and took the form of the slave being born the likeness of men. But then he was known to be a human estate. and he accepted even death, death on a cross. And so Paul imagines that incarnations is downward journey in order to get all of us, all of us who 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.

Yeah, you know, the metric is love, right? And love is not a feeling. It's an act of the will to will the good of the other. That's the coin us again to will the good of the other as other. You see, that's the anti black hole principle. When I I don't will the good of the other as other because if I'm willing, you're good because it's good for me. So I get, you know, it's good for you that I'm on this program, I guess. I'm willing you're good, but that's because it's going to be down to my benefit. That's just an indirect egotism. That's why 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 broke in that. I've forgotten self and I've moved into the space of your own good. That's what love is. Now, God wants us to be, you know, by this, they will know that you're my disciples, that you love one another, Jesus says. So that's it. Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth and we're better or worse at that. The point of a church is to graft us on to Christ that we might become more and more conform to love. But, you know, the final calculus, I'll leave that to God. I mean, I, but, but used 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, and be, this like, Ignatial, I owe that be brutally honest, or was I just willing some as good because it was good for me? Well, we're, we're, we're those moments where I was like the dog on the beach. See, see, play it the way not so much God the law giver surveying and you did three of those and four. It's God wants us to be fully alive. St. Eronaus is one of my great heroes, ancient, you know, petristic figure. And his famous line is Gloria Day home of events, right? The glory of God is a human being fully alive. And that gets us over this sort of obsession with the legalism, and that I do enough, and that's a big enough sin, and God wants us fully alive. The key to that is willing to go to the other. He died that we might come to a richer appropriation of that.

Yeah, it might talk about like a gift of self that you yourself aware, but you give a gift of yourself. Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself, but it becomes a radiant source of life for others. I mean, Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense of herself. It seems to me, but it was to light other people up so that they might be a radiant, you know, that's the game. So you probably articulated that way too.

But we have to be hard-nosed about it. Like, you know, your friend, Dostoevsky, that love is a harsh and dreadful thing, right? It's not a feeling. And our culture is so sentimentalized love that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want. And that's not it at all. Love is always correlated to the order of the good. Because if I'm willing the good of the other, I have to know what that good is, right? So a parent says, oh, give the kid whatever she wants. Well, that's not love. That's indulgence or that's sentimentality. But I have to know what the goods really are if I'm going to will them for you, right?

Several minutes ago about the pillars of Christianity, so we talked about God's talk about incarnation, but you're getting out to a third key one, namely the Trinity, because it were monotheous, right? But we don't think God is monolithically one. We think God is a play of persons, and the father from, from ball eternity, by a great mental act forms his interior word as Aquinas puts it. And that's the law goes, right? That's the fair boom. That's the word by which the father knows himself. And we call it the son. So the imago, it's the image of the father. But that's the great thing is that imago is not like just a dead image on a mirror or a dead image of a pond or something. It's a full reflection of the father's being. He's one in being with the father. Therefore, the sun 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 and love with each other because the Father is the fullness of being. The sun is the fullness of being. And they're so crazy in love with each other that they, this is a fault and she put it this way that there's this. They just love each other with this sigh, and we call that the Spirit to Sunktos. That's the holy breath, the holy sigh of love between the Father and the Son. And that's one being, one essence we say of God, but in these three persons, but all your language are like dance and play and community. The Greek Father's talked about Perry Corracis, which means God, the three persons kind of sit in a choir together. So they sing together. And that's why see Christianity is unique in this claim that God is love. So every religion will say God loves in some way. It loves an attribute of God. God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes. But Christianity is unique in all the religions, insane that God is love.

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 price it. Yeah, I like that. That's 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 very nature, there has to be lover, beloved, and love, share. And the tradition eventually came to see that. The image I was using before of the father, his immago, the son. Well, that's born of God's infinite mind. So of course God has an image of himself. Heck, I've got an image of myself. That's something I can pull off as a puny little creature. God in his infinity has a perfect immago himself. And they have to fall in love with each other. What else can they do? Because they're in the presence of infinite good. And so it has to follow that you then have the shared love that connects them. And that's how we generate, if you want, the idea of the three persons in God.

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 an office holder within the church. But the church is an organism, not an organization. So it's say organism of interconnected cells, as I said, namely all of the baptites gathered around Christ in a mystical union. That's the church, but there's buildings.

Sure.

Yeah. No, whatever is corrupted the church, of course, it comes from pride, from sin. And let me, I like the new testament is so clear on that. Paul is in his little tiny communities. So before there was a Vatican or a diocese or anything, Paul is his 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 operating them and telling them, come on, would you people get it together and who's be with you? And so from the beginning, we've been fighting with each other because we're made up of sinners. You know, so one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology is the official name for the study of the church is to talk about the treasure and earth and vessels, Paul's language again. The treasure is Christ. The treasure is is the love he's bequeath to the world. That's the treasure that we have. But it's always held in these really fragile vessels, namely us. And so it's going to be marked by corruption and stupidity and pride and everything else.

I'm a devotee of this guy named Yohan Adomular, who was a theologian early part of the 19th century, and he was part of the kind of romantic movement. And he said the purpose of the Pope is to symbolize and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church. So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church. Who's a bishop? The bishop is the personal symbol of the unity of the diocese. who's a pastor of parish, he's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish. So he understood it not so much organisationally as organically again. It was like that around which the pattern organized itself. And if you don't have that unifying figure, the community will kind of separate. And you see it all the time without headship, we would say. So it's more symbolic and organic than it is organizational.

Yeah, well, I might just shift to another image of shepherd. So that's a classic biblical image. And as a bishop, I walk around what this thing called a closure, which is a shepherd's staff, right? So it's the symbol of the bishop's office. And the closure, 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 while animals. And then the the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back to the fold, right? So I walk in with them. Oh, that's nice. The bishop coming in. But that's a kind of in your face symbol that I'm here to defend the church against predators. And I'm also here to draw people in who are wandering too far away. So that's okay. I mean, that's part of the role of the hierarchy and the pope and bishops and pastors. Poster just means shepherd, right? And the shepherd of a parish. So that's okay. It's not like just all, you know, sunshine and light and what a pretty image. The one who embodies the unity of the community is also the shepherd.

I Don't like the prosperity gospel because the gospel is about Jesus journey into Radical self forgetfulness on the cross and he never makes a promise of earthly Well being can you explain what the prosperity gospel is? Yeah, the view that, you know, if I follow Jesus and I follow God with great trust that I will be rewarded with wealth and and position and status in this world, I might be God's will and I got that. But you know, Aquinas said this that if they look at a very sinful person, I say, kind of he's got a great house and he's richer than I am and all that. Aquinas says, you have a 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 can't read you know God's favor in worldly terms I would say God's favor is, am I awakened to deeper love? Then I know that I'm finding God's favor. Now, God might decide, sure, I want you to have this and that. I want to provide this to you. Fine. Then I say, thank you, Lord, how can I use it as an instrument of love? See, all the masters talk about detachment. And that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel. So I'm getting attached now to all these material advantages. And I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor. Let go of all that. You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love. So if you're rich, the right question is, okay Lord, why did you allow me to become rich? So what can I do? How can my rich is being expression of love? If I am popular, if I am healthy, okay, why am I popular? Why am I healthy? How can I use that for your good? I'm sick in bed. I'm suffering. Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love? So I'd rather measure it that way than through worldly success. That's why I'm against the prosperity cost.

Right, the image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune, which is a device and a lot of the Gothic cathedrals. And it's this great circle, right, this wheel. And the top of this is a king. and then it turns this way and the king has lost his crown and the bottom is a popper and then over here is a king is a guy climbing up to power right and then in the middle is a depiction of Christ and the idea is very simple but very profound that the wheel is life you know it's sometimes you're up sometimes you're down sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige other times you're losing it you're going down other times you got none of it other times you're coming back up okay Don't live on the rim of the wheel. It'll make you crazy. Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety. Where you should live is the center of the wheel. Where Christ is, right? Because that's the link now to the eternity of God. That's the point of love. We're 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 mind when I think of that image is John Lennon and 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 loss weekend and the 70s is 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 wheel go around around. I really love to watch them roll because I'm no longer writing on the merry-go-round. That's right out of the medieval mystics that he's not writing on the wheel. He's just watching it go around the round. That's the point of the Greece call it, Apothea and the Latin's call it in difference. You know, not like I'm blazing, it just means I'm detached from success, failure, less success, more success, detached from that. I'm sitting here watching the wheel go round and round, because I'm not writing on it anymore. The mystics have always made that transition.

Yeah, it's awful, you know, and it's been a problem. Go back to Peter Damien back in the 11th century with talking about it. So it's been a problem and whenever really sinful human beings have been in close proximity to children, we find this issue. Has it been around the church? Yes. has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years? Absolutely. I'm glad the church has made important strides and it has. Back in 2002 there was a thing called the Dallas Accords with the bishops of America put a lot of these protocols in place that really have been effective. and emulating 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, and that's always as a sinful instinct. 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 well-being, then you're in trouble.

And that's a good way to get out. It's a path of love. So the church is always in favor of inculcating love. Marriage is a path of love. But so is celibacy. St. Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied with the things of this world and family and those who are free from that are free or for doing the work of God. So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy and we still, I think, take that seriously. I think in my own life, I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things and go places and minister in a way that I could not if I had been married. So I get it. I get the pragmatic side. But I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it. Ever Jesus was challenged about the person who had, you know, a whole series of husbands and then they all died. And so in heaven, which one will, you know, which husband will the wife have. And his 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 celibates from the very beginning of the church, including Jesus, of course, and Paul, they sent 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 pacifist, I'm glad there are pacifists in the church, and I've known 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 tears wipe away and we beat our swords into plow shares and you know it happens 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 a manifest wickedness so

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

Yeah, I might use a language of sublimation or redirection of energy and all that. I think that's true. There's certain sublimation of energies into prayer, into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies. So it's meant to be life enhancing. The same way fasting is. It's meant ultimately to be life enhancing and make you healthier and happier. So celibacy is a path of love, and I think it doesn't involve you a certain redirection of energies. Let's say that.

Yeah. I wouldn't tie that to celibacy. And that's been demonstrated over and over again. There's a pre-same Andrew Greely who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago. And Andy did a lot of research, he was sociologist of religion, 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.

I think people who have a tendency toward abusing children sexually are drawn to situations where they get ready access to kids and they get institutional cover. So that's the thing I'm going to go through the list of, you know, from sports and boy scouts, et cetera. And that's been proven again and again. So I would tie it more to that. I wouldn't tie it to celibacy.

I can just your 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 Augustin, which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good. Now again, I know how unsatisfying that sort of spare austere language can sound, but it gets us off the horns of a dilemma. You know, a coin is, you know, when he lays out a question, he always has the objections first. So is there a god? Well, objection will on objection to objection three. And he's really talking about steel, manning, and argument, a coin is great at that. One of the really steel man arguments, is that the right grammatical format to, one of the, what's the past participle to steel man? But one of the best arguments he formulated this way. If one of two countries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. An example from his medieval physics he goes, if there were an infinite heat, there'd be no cold, right? But God has described as infinitely good. Therefore, God exists. There should be no evil. But there is evil. Therefore, God does not exist. That's a darn good argument. That's a really persuasive argument. And I think it's done this for a long time in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy. That's the best argument against God. Um, but you're used to me for a press head with it. I mean, I find really interesting. I think the three best arguments against God all come from within the religious tradition, namely the book of Job. So Job, he's great. I mean, he's a great guy. He does everything right. He's God's great servant. And he's punished in every possible way. You know, he has every possible suffering. Aquinas is argument from the summa. And then to your friend in mind, Doste Avsky, I think in the brothers Karamazloff, Ivans argument when he's trying to wreck the faith of Aliyoshah. And it's, um, These examples drawn, they think, from Dostegovs, from the headlines of his own time, of the most object cruelty to children, like an innocent child being made to suffer. How, in God's name, could that happen if God exists? And he's all good. So I get it, but see, the book of Job, Thomas Aquinas, Dusty Evesk, and these are all profoundly believing people. It's like when I hear Stephen Fry, you know, the famously atheist writer, 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 stood right, he think of Job in the whirlwind. He stands there in the whirlwind, you know? So you can't blame the Christian tradition for not dealing with this problem, you know, for like, brushing it under the carpet. I mean, it is stood in the whirlwind of this problem.

Yes, sometimes we can see it and that's where the idea comes from that evil permitted to bring about some greater good and we can sometimes really see it. Can we always see it? No, in fact, typically we don't see it, but now you bring another factor into this, which is the difference between our minds and God's mind. So our minds, I mean, look, even they're remarkably capacious, but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time and even like our eyes can 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 it. I know there's no morally justifiable reason why God would ever permit that because I think that's hubris to the end of the degree for us to say that. And that's the assumption behind this claim that God can permit evil to bring about a great 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 thought, why in the world would you do this to me? This is my pastoral experience. Here's a go. There was a young father and his son was like three or something and he was in the hospital or 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 is three year old kid and the dad was there with him. You know, holding his hand and, you know, and the son, this is what the father told me. He said, he's looking at me. Like, what gives here? I mean, why would you, you love me? I've always assumed that. And yet you're presiding over this somehow. You're approving of this and doing nothing to get me out of it, right? And he said he kid couldn't articulate that, but his eyes did. And his, and the father said, it was just killing me because I knew I couldn't explain it to him. And it's true. I mean, you could vaguely gesture toward, but the kid didn't understand surgery and cutting his body and taking things out of it. And that this was going to, you know, make him much better in the long run. But I remember thinking, this is 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.

Yeah. You know, but trust me when I tell you, I mean, I completely get it in my own life and as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time with people in pain all the time. I remember as a young priest, there was a, uh, there was a policeman in our parish, you know, 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. This is my parish. So I went to the the wake. I remember I show up and I'm this young young 27-year-old goofball priest. I'm like, where am I? I walk in and there were two coffins. There's two coffins in the room. And there's the sun in the fire. And the mother was there. And she went like this to me. She saw on me, okay, you're the religious guy here. Yeah. What? And just by instinct, I went like that too. I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. I can't. I don't have an answer for you. 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. And now we're gesturing toward a more theological response. The first ones more are 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 evil. humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering and death, it's all there. And that's where the Son of God went. And I would say that's why as a priest, I went there. That's my job as to go to those places. So that's the ultimate answer to the problem.

We trusted because we know on other grounds of God's existence. I would resist the claim that, well, this is such a knockdown argument. Now we know there is no God. I would say, no, all kinds of other rational warrants for God. I know that God exists. I know that God is infinite love. Now I got to square that with this experience. The way I do that is by a trusting confidence that God knows what He's about. I know 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.

There's too much of it. If I were to steal man that argument, I do what Stephen Fried does. I would do what Dostoevsky's Yvonne does. I would do exactly that. I would say there's just too much. And then if you want to keep pressing it, animal suffering. So we talk about human suffering. but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on. Isn't there just too much suffering to be reconciled with an infinitely good God? And that's again Thomas Aquinas. I've just used his very steel maned argument.

Well, that's the one. It's probably evil. The other objection in Aquinas, which has a lot of contemporary 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 a coinist motion, causality, you know, finality, can I just do that with natural causes? Wouldn't that suffice to explain it? So, I get, like, when naturalists are speaking, or people that are pure materialists, I'll just say, no, that's perfectly adequate, a scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience. So I would steal man that and say, well, show me why we need something more. And to do that, you got to get out of Plato's cave, it seems to me. Because that might, my objection to naturalism. is it's staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable and making the state of saying, that's all there is to being, that's all there is that needs to be explained. And law me for we get to religion, just stay with Plato. The first step out of the cave, if you combine it out with the parable of the line, is mathematical objects. And I'm with those, the many people, it would say, Mathematics isn't experienced in 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, in the nature of being. I mean, so I could talk about this thing as a physical object and I can analyze it at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists up and down through this thing 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.

No, I can I love the I'm not a scientist and I was never all that good at science, you know, I was more humanity's 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'm a vehement opponent of that. There are dimensions of being that are not capturable through a scientific method of mirror observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera. As great as that is, as wonderful as it is, but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave. And that's not to say it's not real. It's just at a relatively low level of reality. You step out of Plato's cave when you go into the pure mathematics. That's why 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 effect in this or something like that. Yeah. But so cool. 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 create things and to manipulate. And why should that be true? There's something very weirdly mysterious about that relationship, you know, and I would say is because you stepped into a higher order of being, which is inclusive of a lower level of being. That's the platonic approach is that as you move, now I'm going to different metaphor, you move to higher levels, they're inclusive of the lower levels.

Can I ask you, where do you think the laws of nature come from? So I mean, sort of the Victor question, where does the deep The deep mathematical structure of things come from. How do you explain that?

But we do the first one for it. I'm curious. It's really where do you think it comes from?

Yeah, but that's really cool to me. That's very interesting clue. See, one of the arguments for God is based on the intelligibility of the world. It's very peculiar. 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 a client is can say that the intelligible in act is the intellect in act. Meaning there's some deep correspondence between this and that. And it's, I'm with Vignard. 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 has stamped the world with intelligibility. In the beginning was the word, right? And the word was with God and all things came to be through the word. We shouldn't picture that so much. It's justoring in this very powerful direction. There's an intelligence that has imbued the world with intelligibility.

The thought it into being, that the world has been said that when the Bible says that God said, let there be light, and there was light, God said, again, we don't literalize the poetry, but it's very rich that God spoke the world into being. So that means it's been, it's been in blood with intelligibility from the beginning. They say that the condition for the possibility of the Western physical sciences was a basically Christian idea, namely that the world is not God. Therefore, I can analyze and experiment upon it. I don't divinize it. I don't have a mystical relation to the world. It's not God. But secondly, that it's absolutely in every no-concranity intelligible. And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation. So it's been created. It's not God. It's other than God. But yet it's touched and every dimension by God's mind. And when those two things are in place, the science is good 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, okay. Interest in other ones. So I talked about mathematics. I think it's stepping out of the cave. It's stepping out of just the purely empirical world. but they're in fact we use a word like universe to me's very interesting even if they multiple universes to me that it's like well they're whatever this the whole is the mentality only very some turn toward the one Why would we call it that? Why would we just call it an aggregate? It's 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, is the intuition of being. So I immediately experienced 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's it mean to say this thing is real. So what makes this a being? And then one of the characteristics of being, so now from Aristotle, the 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, get me a billion other universes, it would still be existence. But 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 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 is metaphysically prior to it.

My answer is God. And I don't know a better answer. And as I read Victor, he wasn't ready to say that. But I think the language is gesturing. who I read someone recently, some very well-known physicists, who said his answer to Victor's question is that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician.

He's a very interesting guy. I've had a couple conversations with him, and I do think he's moving in the direction of faith, and his lecture 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. Petersen, probably called 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 is, it's not so much the historical Jesus that's figured from long ago. It's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life. He says these, the image of the person perfectly pleasing to God. And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination as a, as a, as a, as a goal that we're tending toward. But the historical person of Jesus for kind of like, well, let's not fuss about that so much. It's this figure. And as I read Peter's, especially in 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 else all of the kind of as if. attitude and where I for a person when we talk is in the direction of no that's not Christianity yet I mean that's enlightenment a 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. So the facticity of Jesus and the resurrection. So like, Peter's and we'll talk about the resurrection as a myth and all they have is you can find that in different cultures, etc. But Christianity, it's saying something else.

That's right. You know, it always strikes me the difference between let's say mythic expressions and the New Testament. Read someone like Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell, whom he influenced and now Jordan Peterson, who's very Jungian. And this sort of archetypal reading of the Scriptures. And great. I think it's very interesting. And there's a lot going on there. There's a sort of calmness though about it. Like, yeah, interesting. And that's in this culture and that culture and it's the form of the moral life and I understand all that. Then you read the New Testament. Whatever those people are talking about, it's not that. They are grabbing you by the shoulders. and shaking you to get your attention to tell you about something that happened to them, right? Like the resurrection, thinking of the myth of the dying and rising God and how powerful it is in shaping our consciousness. That's fascinating. That's not the New Testament. The Testament is, did you hear? Did Jesus of Nazareth whom they put to death God raised him from the dead and he was seen by 500 and he was seen by Peter and then lastly, I saw him. That's how Paul talks. It's not the detached, you know, psychologists, amusing on archetypal things. And I think that makes a huge difference.

We're in historical religion. And we've been important. We generate philosophical reflection. We can find common ground with archetypal thinking and all that. We can. And the church fathers used the Greek philosophy and Aquinas uses Aristotle and all that's great. But we're in historical religion. And that matters immensely.

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 to zone genre. You find a pistolary literature like Paul. You find apocalyptic. There's all this in the Bible. So is the Bible literally the word of God? It's like saying is the library literally true. It depends on what section you're in, right? Parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two kings, a number placed at 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 10,000 footnotes. And, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at all the source material I can possibly find. It's more like ancient history, a carotidist, people like that. But then there's poetry and there's myth and there's legend and there's song and all that stuff in the Bible. God breathes through all of it, I would say. He inspired all of it, right, in Spirara. He's breathing through all of it. God is speaking through all of it. But he speaks in different voices. He uses different human instruments and he uses different genre and different types of language. So we have to be sensitive to that when we're interpreting the Bible.

I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say more perfect. I'd say they're just different. It's like a symphony. And God's like a conductor and there's all kinds of different instruments in the orchestra. And he loves to debris through the Psalms. I prayed the Psalms this morning. I do every day in my office. You know, that those are songs. They probably were literally sung most of them at one point. He breathed through apocalyptic. We're reading the book a revelation now in the Easter season. And this is why I'll then woo a book. It should be filmed by, you know, Spielberg or somebody today. And he speaks to the Gospels. The Gospels was correspond in genres, 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.

Yeah, I think so. You know, the founders will be some kind of combination of deism, certainly Christianity is coming up through them in lightment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix. You know, so you're not going to find in our founding fathers simply a Thomas Aquinas or like a purely, you know, classically Christian understanding. It's Christianity in those various expressions. Because actually, I would see the Enlightenment as a sort of child of Christianity. We could talk about that. But having said all that, yes, I think they are expressing at least the residue of a one steeply integrated Christian sense of things that Our rights are not created by the government. They're not doled out by the government. They come from God. And the other thing I find really interesting is that equality, because looking classical philosophy, political philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. It's not equality for them. It's our inequality. That's really interesting. So Plato divides us into the three classes. And Aristotle says only a tiny little code of property males of sufficient education should be in the political life. The rest should all be in private life. And then some are suited for slavery. So I mean, he divides us dramatically, same with Cicero and so on. We're just 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 gonna slide rapidly into an embrace of inequality. Now in the classical world, yes, but hack, 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 now 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 pie is boilerplate. That's at the rational foundations of our democracy.

Yeah, you know, I'd be somewhat sympathetic to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there. Namely, it's not Nietzsche growing from the mountain top. Hey, God is dead. You know, it's more of a lament. You know, God is dead and we've killed them. And what will happen in the wake of that? And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism of the 20th century follows from that. that questioning of God and the dismissal of God from public life. So I would be sympathetic with that. When we're beyond good needful, and all this left is the will to power. And then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes? When we forget ideas like equality and rights, which are grounded in God, why are we surprised that death camps follow? So I think there's a correlation there for sure.

You know, if that triggers my mind, I wonder if you agree with this, that the modern science is drew their strength from their narrowness. And what I mean there is, is they almost completely bracketed a formal and final causality in the Aristotelian sense, and they focused on efficient and material causality. And that gave us, 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 a final causality there, what's drawing us? So for Aristotle, he'd look at something like me and say, okay, you have a intelligible structure. and that leads you to seek certain things for the perfection of that structure, you know, and fair enough, and 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 Freedman and we'll talk about deep and important things. That's the good I saw this morning when I woke up. Now, why am I seeking that? Well, for a higher reason, a higher good, you know, because I, as part of my work, my ministry is to, you know, the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture Okay, well, why do you want that? Well, because I want to bring more and more people into into 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 my self brought into that realm and find it very compelling. Yeah, but then why do you want that? Well, because ultimately, I want to be friends with God. Now, I've given you one example there, but, but any act of the will seems to me has to be analyzed that way. The will seek something. It seeks the good, right, by definition. But the good always nests like a Russian doll 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 Sumum Bonham, 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 every single moment every day we are implicitly seeking God.

Yeah, it's just using the media, especially the new media, the social media, to get the gospel out. So I started, what 20 some years ago, just on a radio show in Chicago, a 515 on Sunday morning. I had a 15 minute sermon show. And I asked the people in this paradise that I said, I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes at 515 on Sunday morning. And they all laugh when I propose 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 video stuff and TV. And then I did a documentary. I went all over the world and it 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, 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.

Maybe I'll be above. But I'm more exciting. You know, I would say I like doing that. I was a teacher for a long time 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 write some in a popular level, I write some in a high academic level, and I like doing all that. So I love those ideas, I love those questions, love engaging people, and I find my own experience, you do run into a 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 obscenity and everything. But I do it, I like it. And I's worthwhile because in that Reddit experience, so many of the issues that preoccupied young people I can name them for you. Exactly what they are. 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 do you so mean to gay people? So those are the four things that I, again and again come up with 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.

We love friendship and friendship is that the heart of things and so nothing wrong with friendship between you know man and man and woman and 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 too fold, both unitive and procreative. And so those two we recognize as the appropriate expression of human sexuality. So that's why the church holds two sex between a man and a woman within the context of marriage is the right expression. 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 bridge building that we need to do to people like in the gay community and people 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 an attitude of invitation and love and so on. So it's somewhere in there that the church takes its stance.

I think so. Yeah, which is why the church says, it's the official teaching, it's the physical expression, let's say, of sexual passion between two men that is problematic, not their friendship, not their love for each other. So I think yeah, we confirm the first.

Yeah, I mean, I'm against abortion. I'm pro-life. The church recognizes from the moment of conception we're dealing with a human life that's worthy of respect and protection, especially as you see that unfolding of that person across a pregnancy. But at every stage, we recognize the beauty and the dignity of that human being. And so we stand opposed to this the outright killing of the innocent. So that's the church's view. 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 that's the moral side of it. The legal side, I think Rovy Way was terribly decided. I think one of the worst expressions of American law since the Dred Scott decision. So I stand in favor of what returning Rovy Way and Casey, I think they were terrible. The Casey decision is instructive to me. That it belongs to the nature of freedom that that system says to determine the meaning of one's own life and it even I don't get the language exactly right but and of the universe like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom that we can determine the meaning see what 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 the case that was instructive in a way because it it tips its hand 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 overbearing, and it makes its own decisions. So I think Casey was terrible law, and it was backing up Rovi Way, which is terrible law. So I'm in favor of the overturning of those. I've spoken out that many times. Now, it will return it to the individual states. It's not going to, you know, solve the problem. 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 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. I think that's barbaric, you know. So I stand radically post to that.

It's a huge struggle. Maybe the freedom is the most important. You know, this is a freedom run-a-muck or, you know, in classical philosophy and theology, freedom is not self-determination. Freedom is the disciplining of desire, so is 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 McOccam 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 know basis, I will say yes or no. I'm like Louis XIV. You know, I'm like Stalin or something, you know. But the clientists 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 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 it's to make that achievement possible and then effortless so Right now, I'm freely speaking English to you, and you had the experience, and I've had a two of learning a foreign language, and don't you feel unfree? When you're struggling with the language, when I was over in Paris doing my doctoral work, and I was okay with French, but my first time in a seminar, and it's all these intelligent francophones around the table, and they're all just, and I'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward French, And I felt unfree, because my desire wasn't directed. 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 where the Nietzschean think dumps in my mind of, you know, the will to power this. I'm beyond good and evil. 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.

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 dedicated to love. You know what I'm saying? So you're good at science or math or sports or whatever. Okay, I'm going to use that now for my aggrandizement, for my wealth, for my privileges and to become famous. Fine what you're good at, but now dedicated to willing the good of the other. So use your science and use your mathematics and use your sports and use your musicianship to benefit the world, you know? That's how to them. So find what you're good at.

Yeah, well, you're good at what you're doing right now. And you've dedicated that to bringing more light and illumination and joy to the world.

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 think I'm just off you go and and you make your own choices. Your choice has to be disciplined, your desire has got to be directed. Then you'll find your creative path. Everyone does it in its own way. But it's a guided choice. Your freedom is not sovereign. It's a guided freedom.

Sure, I'm afraid of it. Because I don't know what's next. I mean, 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. That's true. My prayer life compels me. You know, we have this, the the Hail Mary prayer. You know, you pray the rosary. Now on at the hour of our death, amen. Now on at the hour of our death, amen. Now on at the hour of our death, amen. You pray the whole rosary. You've this 50 times. You've reminded 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 begile 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, it's the unknown. 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 more poetic way. Do you know John Polking Horn's work? Do you know that name? John Polking Horn was a very interesting. It 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 and 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 Paul King wants to count, but I've always found persuasive. He said, 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 call the form. Polking recalls that the pattern, so the pattern that's organized The matter that's made me up over all these years, that's obviously not the same as it was, even, you would know how often it all changed, all your atoms and cells. There was a little Bobby Barron who was growing up and Birmingham, Michigan. I can have a picture of him, and then there's me, and I say, well, that's the same person. Clearly not materially speaking, not at all. Completely different. But there's a unity to whatever that pattern is by which all of that materiality's been kind of organized. So Polk Irons says, I think that pattern is remembered by God and remembers the wrong word. 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. So Paul talks about a spiritual body. It's body for sure because he believes in the resurrection of Jesus. But it's not a body like ours from this world. It's a body to higher pitch.

Pattern persists in the mind of God. And then is used as the ground of the reembodiment of me. So it's not like I've just become a platonic form. I'm going to be reembodied 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 you 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 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 reconstitute 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.

love. God is love and the person my life has to become God's friend and that means I'm more conform 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 purpose of relationship, like, so right now you and I, we have a purpose of 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 noable. 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 where I would fit the Packers together that way.

My great pleasure. I love it.