A Return to Cosmic Christianity | with Bishop Barron

so hello everybody i am very excited to be here with bishop barron most of you will not need uh an introduction to him he is the catholic bishop of california he is also the right of many books he runs word on fire which has many publishing recently a publishing on jordan peterson and i've been with him with jordan peterson on his channel recently with john viveki to talk about christianity its place in the modern world so we thought it would be a good idea to continue the conversation just both of us to talk about the bible about beauty about art and about how christianity can exist in uh in the contemporary culture [Music] this is jonathan pedro welcome to the symbolic world [Music] so bishop baron thank you for coming here jonathan thank you good to see you and good to be on with you thanks for the invitation oh it's it's wonderful uh i wanted to maybe we can start off and maybe after the fact after our discussion what was your impression with jordan and with john of how that went and and what what kind of place this type of discussion could have in the in the present state yeah i love the conversation i thought it was really interesting and you know different perspectives you and i explicitly uh christian uh john vervicky i don't really know his background that well i know he's cognitive scientist professor at university of toronto i found his musings on kind of western intellectual history really interesting um and of course jordan peterson uh you know someone that's i think deeply interested in spiritual matters not explicitly a christian but very interested in it so it was just throwing light from different angles on this thing which i thought was intriguing but we all come together in being concerned about meaning or better the lack thereof in our culture and the crisis it's it's causing in young people especially i mean i see it every day in my pastoral work and the work on on the internet so i loved that i think that was really fruitful thing for us all to be talking about i think one of the interesting things that seems to be happening and jordan does also seem to be someone who opened the this door or kind of participated in opening the door you'd participate in this as well which is we had this kind of last new atheist moment you know with sam harris and dawkins and all of these people and uh it seems like that moment has broken it's broken and there's something about the zeitgeist which makes it possible for i'm seeing it a lot of atheists who perceive even what it is we're talking about because this has been difficult for me until maybe five six years ago is that when we talk about the stories we talk about the bible and how it's it's a world view rather than something that you kind of analyze from above we can enter into these stories and participate it's something which until recently i felt like people weren't even able to to grasp but now that door has been opened you know there's a lot there i remember a teacher mine saying years ago that sometimes a block in the spiritual life can simply be an intellectual conundrum or it's a question or it's something i'm just stuck and until i get unstuck i can't move any deeper into the spiritual truth and i think for a lot of young people and the new atheists spoke to this there were intellectual blocks you know isn't christianity just a pre-modern nonsense it's opposed to science it's a bunch of old superstition it's a projection of our of our idealized self-understanding you know all the usual things and young people got stuck they probably heard a lot of that in their college and university uh classrooms they thought yeah okay religion is just a lot of nonsense the new atheists they geared all that up again you know well here's the thing in a way that does great service because it allows us to deal with some of these problems that young people have and thereby to eliminate false understandings of religion i like the cleansing quality of of atheists from goldman foyerbach all the way to to sam harris they they do something they they cleanse idolatrous understandings of religion they um they raise and therefore allow us to address some of the intellectual blocks once that's over then as you say i think quite rightly people can begin to move into the spiritual power of these great texts and these great symbols and these great doctrines but in a way i'm i'm happy that the new atheists led to a renaissance in uh christian apologetics in christian philosophy uh we we had to pick up our game because to tell you the truth we were god-awful when the new atheists came by we i mean the whole christian world we didn't we didn't know how to address them which was stupid because we have extraordinary resources in our intellectual tradition but but you know that's a long story we threw down our arms to a large extent because we were so concerned about dialoguing with the culture and reaching out to the culture we we lost our edge apologetically but that's dangerous because when the atheist critique comes and it always comes in some form we got to be able to meet it or young people especially will get stuck and then they won't be able to move into the wider world i think as i read jordan peterson there's something i've always found kind of this lovely innocence about him like he just discovers certain things and then begins to talk about them and what he discovered was the spiritual power of the bible and we again i'm speaking broadly we christians we were kind of lousy at that too we weren't very good at opening up our own spiritual riches and so peterson he said hey look hey look young people look at all this stuff and they responded like crazy to it which doesn't surprise me at all so that's how i read the moment um the new atheist critique was cleansing in a way and peterson has been like as i was kidding saying like a gateway drug for many people into the real spiritual stuff and so you know thank god for him yeah that and one of the surprising things to me has been to even realize that post-modernism with all its with all its damage that it's done it's actually opened an interesting door as well which is that and we can see it actually as we watch the breakdown of our social narrative and we see as we see it fragment all of a sudden even the most materialist person has to pay attention to story has to pay attention to the fact that we're actually living inside competing stories and so once that becomes clear even sadly in terms of politics then you can also use that to help people say well that's exactly these stories in scripture are more like a story that you live in then a description of of kind of facts in the way that uh chemists will describe facts or you know a physicist will describe facts and it opens up the door to say yeah we have to wait before i analyze the world i have to string string a bunch of facts together in a narrative in order to be able to even make my way through the world yeah you know post-modernism does have a nihilistic side to it or like a purely kind of deconstructive side but there's the aspect i like to call the nostalgic post-modernism that looks behind what the enlightenment occluded so modernity or the enlightenment with all its rationalism and scientism tended to occlude great parts of our tradition and we talked about that with with jordan a few weeks ago is this whole wisdom tradition got occluded many ways by the hyper rationalism of the enlightenment so one side of post-modernism is to kind of break that up is to break through that occluding wall so that we can again revisit these sources so in that way it's been liberating post-modernism i wrote a book a couple years ago called the priority of christ toward a post-liberal catholicism and that's what i meant was post-liberal beyond the the enlightenment tinged reading of christianity which i would have gotten as a young guy that was very much in vogue after vatican ii was a very enlightenment reading of christianity well i think we have to break through that but as a break back to something that had been occluded and i that's what peterson's doing in my judgment standing up in front of people and he's giving a patriotistic reading of the of the bible in many ways he's doing what i think what the father's called the tropological sense or the the moral sense of the bible he'd probably say peterson probably say the psychological meaning yeah but okay the the i call it the moral meaning of the bible great great he's doing that he's finding a tradition going back to origin of alexandria you know going back to philo he's recovering a very ancient tradition that was very much occluded by the hyper-rationalistic approach to the bible i don't know about your own training but certainly mine was almost exclusively in historical criticism which means you know in a very rationalistic way we look at the biblical texts as ancient near eastern literature we try to understand the what the author's intention was what his environing culture looked like what were his concerns in like late 8th century bc judea et cetera well i mean fine oh that's fine but what it didn't allow is what peterson is exploring and what the church fathers explored what does this text tell me about god and my relationship to god and my relationship to the deepest meaning of my life a lot of that got set aside by a very rationalistic enlightenment tinged approach to the bible what i hear you doing what i hear peterson doing is opening up older wisdom sources yeah definitely i i think that's true from myself it's very strange because i mean i studied art and then i studied theology after but i came to theology let's say from an iconological perspective that is that i was interested in the way in which images spoke to each other and created these patterns of meaning and so for me you know when i would get i took some theology classes in colleges even before i i studied more more intense intensely and i just remember being annoyed right away just annoyed because i was like what is this what are where are the stories where where are the images um and it really is through the psychological approach that i discovered typology and then when i read san gregor vanessa i read stand up from the syrian i was like this is home right right and then i started to see that how the new testament is just basically quoting the old testament constantly and referring back to all these images and so it it took right created a like a like a token world building you could say you know like that that there's this world building in scripture that you can inhabit and that it's a series of analogies and a series of references that you can live in and uh so i was never too i was always annoyed with the with the critical historical from the beginning there's so much there can i ask you something right away it just came to my mind go all the way back to what 7th century 8th century the iconoclast controversy in john of damascus right this i think pivotal moment in the history of christianity when you've got a somewhat puritanical you know against graven imagery somewhat islamic influenced view that would say you don't do this you know but then john of damascus who said no because god made an icon of himself the icon of the invisible god is the humanity of jesus and so that becomes the ground for iconography and for christian art you know i've argued no john of damascus no sistine chapel no shark cathedral i mean in a way the whole visual tradition comes from this incarnational sensibility so there's that that old old old battle against the iconoclasts but then come up to the 16th century and a big part of the reformation was an iconoclastic instinct you know you go to churches in europe and you can see it you can see these places that were that were wrecked i mean literally windows broken and statues knocked down well i'll tell you a third example of it is in my own lifetime look at the churches built catholic churches built in like the 60s 70s 80s when i was coming of age bon valtezar one of my favorite theologians called them the great barns of the reformation and what he meant was it was a new iconoclasm it was denuding these buildings of symbolism imagery color the great big brick empty kind of bauhaus modernist buildings well you know i went to europe to study to get my doctorate i went to paris and um chart and notre dame and the san chapelle and the hulong cathedral and and france and here's this poor kid growing up in 1970s america where church buildings were meant to be oh no stark brick no no get rid of the pictures get rid of it it's a it was it was a very rationalistic way to build church buildings but then you go to europe and these buildings are just they're crawling with symbolism and iconography and color and narrativity and so on uh and i remember realizing very consciously i'm a what 29 year old guy i'm in paris thinking man something went wrong something went wrong with the cr with the catholic spirit so that's a long-ranting speech about from the iconoclast controversy up to the reformation to my own time there are these outbreaks of iconoclasm that are rationalistic anti-imagistic anti-narrative anti-symbolic and that wreaks havoc because the soul feeds you know that and the soul feeds on all that stuff that's what what nourishes us you peterson others i think are saying hey hey look at this world that's on the far side of an iconoclasm yeah they yeah i'm in quebec right and so quebec used to be the place in the world and so you can see it you can because we have so many churches and so you can you can see the decline and how in the 50s and 60s it was starting and then it accelerated to these monstrous things these monstrous just horrible buildings that so you agree with me no one cares about no one likes them everybody hates them and and there's something even more even not just the images but the actual transformation of the space from a traditional hierarchical space yeah right this desire to eliminate this three-part structure of the church which is the same as the temple the temple right one of the oldest structures in you know it's just all even pagan temples are made this way you know the sense of entering into the mystery and flattening everything so the flattening of the symbolism ended up being the same flattening of culture that happened all around we democratized it and i mean that is a very strong criticism you know that i remember the years when the priest and see here's the mistake people made oh the priest you think bob barron is this such an important guy that he belongs up in that chair in front of everybody come on it's not bob barron it's it's the priest who's has this symbolic role acting in persona christi uh it's christ presiding at the liturgy you know and and the priest garbed so as to mask his own kind of grubby identity it's not robert baron it's this symbolic figure now in persona christie and then we did it across the board with the architecture with the liturgy with our style we flattened it democratized it and we robbed it of all that that evocative business do you know the book eve kongar one of the great pre-conciliar theologians wrote a book called the mystery trump the mystery of the temple and it was it's now it's like it was a seed that was planted long time ago but it's come up all the catholic theologians now are reading that book they're rereading it to say yes the temple and as you know i mean the temple hearkens back to the garden i mean it's this great symbol from the very beginning but when we denude the temple of all of its cosmic and psychological and spiritual symbolism then it becomes as indeed many thought it should become just a gathering space you know i remember hearing that as a young guy oh no the church is just you know it's where the it's the pilgrim people on the way and we put the tent up for a while and we stay there well that's turning the temple back into the tabernacle from the book of exodus the temple is meant to be um it's the access mundi right i mean it's the place where we connect to the deepest value and christian the christian temple is also eschatological the the structure of the church is based i always tell even i remember when protestants would tell me that why are we going back to this old testament stuff well it's actually mostly based on revelation because the altar in the temple was not in the holy of holies the altar was in the court and the reason why the altar is in the holy of holies is because of the cross and it's because of what we division in revelation of the lamb on the altar as the as the kind of fulcrum of of the worship and so we're actually it's and you can see it in early roman churches you you've seen these these early roman churches that the entire decoration of the church is eschatological it's all the 24 elders and you know the singing angels and the new jerusalem this is the imagery that actually propuls iconography was this first this emit this church as a as a place where the the let's say the return of christ is already happening we're already participating in the kingdom it had this kind of glorious aspect to it you're absolutely right but can i say this i i'd be willing to bet if you talk to 95 of catholics they wouldn't understand that because they we weren't taught that uh gathering place where we come together as a community around the table of the lord we heard all that language and again may i say and you know i'm i'm a great reader and admirer of many protestant theologians and so on but it's a totally protestantized understanding of of the church and the liturgy it's where the people out of their free will decide to gather as a community around the table of the lord with no decoration only the word being proclaimed etc but what you're talking about which is classic stuff it's deeply rooted in the bible comes roaring up into the great tradition but trust me when i tell you within catholicism a lot of that was forgotten about and it wasn't taught that when you step into the church you're stepping into an icon of heaven and that the uh language of may our voices join with the voices of the angels i don't if most catholics if they even hear that language would say oh it's nice little pious decoration no that we we mean it the the heavenly worship is is being participated in and represented iconically by our worship here below no that's i'd say most catholics would miss all that yeah there are some people right now in the church that are really trying to revive that tradition yeah and i think balthazar you mentioned him before yeah really poked at this and was able to kind of awaken some some little flame i think for myself in the orthodox tradition there's a lot that has been preserved a lot more of that kind of cosmic uh vision i think it was also in the 19th 20th century you can feel it slipping away but it seems like because it had been kept for so long that there was enough to revive it today and i'm pretty happy i'm pretty excited that the things that i'm presenting um some people are surprised by what i'm presenting and then a lot of my hierarchy has been recognizing it and saying no this is this is actually you know this is what san gregory says saying this is what assainefram is saying i'm just presenting it maybe a little differently for the modern people to understand well tell me i don't know the answer to this tell me would most people in let's say the various orthodox traditions would they understand their own liturgical richness or or have they suffered too from some of this rationalization and flattening out i think i think individually i think that's happened you know definitely you can see it on the verge of communism and on the verge of all the chaos of the 20th century you can feel the meaning slipping you know and it slips in different directions it doesn't just slip towards materialism it also slips towards the kind of weird esotericism you see that in the russian church especially all these strange icons start to appear um but i i feel like today there is enough there and the emphasis on say maximus which has been happening since the 50s you know with balthazar he's a goose catholic but this emphasis on maximus has been a lifesaver and has helped people come back towards this this cosmic vision of the liturgy and but and around me i when i talk to people everybody is people maybe don't necessarily understand the specifics of it but they at least understand the basic notion of it and and aren't of scared by they don't find it pagan or strange the way that peop in our tradition was ratzinger um you know who's on other joseph rossigno in his texts on liturgy and he's grounded in people like guardini going further back in the 20th century but the cosmic dimension ratzinger felt had really been forgotten and i can i can testify as someone that was that came of age during that time absolutely no one thought of the liturgy cosmically we thought of it as the place where the community gathers for mutual support and to revive our interest in kind of making the world a better place yeah i would say that's how we understood it and that we were strengthened at the table of the lord to do the work of building the kingdom now again there's place for all that language there is place for it but the as you say the eschatological the cosmic the transcendental all of that was under-emphasized and ratzinger was trying to recover it then he becomes pope and that's why he put such a stress on the liturgy but recovering in a fresh way now as you know their liturgy war is going on all the time and they've been revived in the catholic church over the latin you know versus vernacular issue but see the deeper thing rotsinger wasn't say boy oh boy let's go back to latin he was saying boy oh boy let's go back to exactly what you're talking about let's go back if you want to this cosmic and richly symbolic eschatological understanding of liturgy and i think that's still very much what we need to do definitely but it's tough because you can see how ratzinger was attacked yeah yeah even for trying to be connected back to you know their own tradition you know taking out an old cross and bringing it out in procession all of a sudden everybody's saying look at the ridge vatican that's a museum piece what are you gonna do you're gonna dismantle it and sell it it's been in the church for you know 400 years or 500 years and so there's there he was just constantly attacked for his vestments for for the the processions for the the the desire to kind of bring back this this vision of the kingdom let's say in terms of in terms of the material use of it and so it's difficult because there is also uh there is also a fight there is like you said there's a liturgy war there are people who see that as as a kind of ostentation or as just a yeah but do you agree with this uh i mean that goes right back to the apostles and judas you know i mean couldn't this have been sold in the money exactly and then jesus though with this wonderfully extravagant sense of you know what she's done and and and he explains what she's done in this beautiful i mean ultimately cosmic sort of perspective about his death and his resurrection and so on um but see that attitude which i would i'd bring it from judas if you all the way to immanuel kant 18th century would say well religion is fundamentally about ethics right so liturgy and sacraments and prayer and all that stuff is kind of extraneous what really matters about religion is ethics well see i think we're all conscience now in a way how often people today would say something like oh you know it doesn't really matter what you believe as long as you're a good person or you know you're a social justice warrior for all the right causes that's what matters and all the other stuff is kind of fufu or if it helps you god bless you but the really important thing is that you're ethically committed well that's right out of the kant playbook that's right out of couldn't this have been sold given to the poor where in fact religion is that indeed as an implication there's ethical implications and and social implications of course but it's grounded in something much stranger and weirder and wonderful and sacramental and eschatological but that all got bracketed i think in the kantian manner as extraneous to the ethical core that's done a lot of damage yeah but you talked to most catholics i think would probably subscribe they don't know it's kant but to a kantian view as long as i'm a good person that's all that matters but as you say like bringing a gorgeous cross out of the vatican museum someplace well it's it's not just boy how much is that worth and we give it to the poor it's it's splendid and it it opens a a window in the soul and you know it accomplishes all these things that go beyond the merely ethical yeah exactly i mean nobody it's funny because nobody complained when you know they build these monstrous uh buildings like the like the guggenheim uh bilbao or whatever this massive huge nobody complaining when you build this massive multi-million dollar uh temple to modern to modern thinking but if it's if it's to be if it's given to god then no it all has to go to the poor the image of judas you use i've used this several times to kind of talk about hierarchy right that it begins with worship and this is something which is people are now starting to understand almost technically that the first thing that's important is what you're focusing on it's the right the talos or the the reason is is there before all the rest and so when christ says the first you give up to god and then you care for the poor those are not opposites right they don't contradict each other actually one leads to the other because if you just create a kind of social justice mesh this kind of social justice thing it becomes totally open to corruption if you don't have the highest ideal first then the other thing becomes a system and i've seen it i worked in in africa and kind of charity work for several years and some of it was just monstrous and just because you give money doesn't mean that it does what you think it does if it's not orient if all your attention isn't oriented to something which is actually judging you people hate to hear that but judging you in the sense that it's the ultimate good to which you're looking then the rest will fall apart at some point well that's why i i learned this from the church fathers both east and west if there is a master theme of the entire bible and it's always dangerous to say but if there's a great master theme in the entire bible i would say it's orthodoxy by which i simply mean right worship write praise so we're made to lead all of creation in a chorus of praise to the true god that's how the fathers tended to read the genesis account i interpret it in a sort of catholic way as this stately liturgical procession of all the things coming forth from god you know one after the other in a beautiful ordered harmonic procession at the end of which comes the leader of the praise that's the person the bishop or priest that comes at the end of the procession is now to lead the praise so now we know what human beings are for they're for right praise and not just for themselves but on behalf of all creation and there as you say eden itself is a temple an elevated place because the rivers run out from it so it's an elevated place and human beings are meant there to be priests kings as well and all that but priests leading creation in the course of praise so what goes wrong bad praise it's always the problem of the bible i don't know an exception really yeah whether you're looking in exodus or the first book of kings or anywhere you're looking the problem is bad praise and from bad praise follows everything else bad the disintegration of the self and that's what you know i think peterson and company are really good the psychologists they can talk about that what it's like when that when i disintegrate on the inside and that comes from bad praise i start praising money or fame or power or whatever you know i'm like the priest of bao i'm hopping around the wrong altar and i'm slashing they they're bleeding well that's that's people today i think that's people in addictive patterns today hopping around the altars of baal and they're and they're harming themselves so elijah does what the biblical figures always do which is he calls it back to right praise you know and that's the only way that the fire is going to fall if we're properly aligned to god so i i think that's the whole story of the bible in many ways then jesus how do we read him but the new adam he's the new david he's the new temple he's the he's the one divinity humanity come together in him he's the point of right praise he's humanity giving right praise to god you know so if anything i put my finger on that as the master motif of the bible and see here it's what we need to tell the world i'll speak as a catholic we lost confidence in ourselves our game became so much let's make ourselves pleasing to the culture you know when i was a young guy it's reaching out to the culture making sure the culture understands and let's use the culture's language we lost confidence in ourselves and honestly the culture wasn't that interested in us you know what i'm saying they weren't reaching back to us with enormo they were like oh yeah great as we move on where the church ought to say no in season and out no matter where the stupid culture is we proclaim christ and we proclaim right praise which brings us back into right order and so on and in the meantime this you know culture that we're all trying to to uh to mollify it's the priest of baal and there there are 450 of them right i mean they always outnumber us there's one in elijah but by god he was the right prophet but there are 450 priests about they're all over the place in the culture why why are we pandering to that culture as our primary move we should be declaring the way elijah did anyway end of rant i mean that's a harmony no but you're you're very right and i think that i i think i think that even just 10 years ago saying that would have just gone over people's heads people would not have understood why worship is important and i think so we in a way we can absolve some of our the people before us because there's something that happened this kind of materialism this kind of physicalism which made people forget that the world is primarily made by through attention that is from the very beginning of genesis when god declares and sees and judges as good you realize that this is actually how the world comes together and the things to which you attend will flow downstream and will create fruits and so if you worship money if you worship other things and that the pattern of addiction is a liturgical pattern yeah it's just a satanic liturgy and anybody who's gone through addictions will notice that because it has an order and you and it always happens the same way it's like you fall in these sins and you just keep repeating them over and over and the same person can find it stupid that that a christian will repeat his daily prayers every day but then they'll still reach for that cigarette and not realize that that they're doing the same thing but their pattern is destroying them and eating them up and enslaving them rather than bringing them higher towards higher patterns no absolutely um the way it works i and i read this in the in the father's but also in more contemporary people because i mean what the fathers would have called an aquinas maybe concupiscence we might translate today as addiction because you start worshiping something other than god well you get a buzz from it because you're you're in a impassioned way around some worldly good and it really is a worldly good whether it's pleasure it's honor it's power whatever so okay i get a buzz from that but the buzz will have to wear off because we're not meant for that the hearts wrestles to rest in god and so it wears off all right i better go back to that source again and so i strive and strive this drive or i hop around the altar again and again and again and then i get it so it's more wealth and more honor more power and i get a buzz but every addict knows that it's less this intense the second time so now i start to really panic and i go back now with a with a kind of insistence and i'm hopping like mad around that altar now now i'm drawing blood now i'm wounding myself because i'm so addicted and then before you know it you are in this little awful cycle and it's the same you the woman at the well is the same thing you know you come to this well every day and you drink but you still get thirsty i want to give you water welling up in you to eternal life i want to break you from that addictive pattern because i want to hook you on to the supreme good which turns out to be love by the way which is why it keeps overflowing but uh the churches need to keep telling the story the society needs it like mad talk addiction might be the way to name the fundamental problem today spiritually and psychologically and we got the answer the answer is grace the grace that breaks you out of these addictive patterns and it's right praise it's you know paul tillich said that tillich said all you need to know about someone you can learn by asking one question what do you worship that's right i've always thought that's dead right uh what is of highest value to you once i know that i know everything about you you just said about the the streams flowing yeah i'll know everything i need to know about you when you tell me what's highest value to you is money or even your family your culture your society those are all good things but they shouldn't be worshipped and they're going to lead to addictive patterns yeah and you can see if you want to know where our society is you're also you can also look at what are the things that we're encouraged to worship and what are the things that we're allowed to worship right and so and it's clear like there are certain values which like you said like let's say for example in the environmental question there's it's a good question it's it has it's a good but it's when it becomes when we're we're shown that this is what you need to worship and any everything has to submit to the worship of this whether it be that or the idea of inclusivity there are different values which have become the supreme values and then all other values have to kind of fit under them but if it's not the right value if it's not love right if it's not the infinite uh source of the world then it's an idol and it will have it'll have bad fruits down the road at some point it's the oldest story in the world and it's still the best story and the one that we need to keep telling and our job is not to make the culture like us our job is to proclaim this story um because it's the story of of christ i mean aquinas says if you want to be happy love what christ loved on the cross and despise what he despised on the cross it's a very cool little formula and what he despised on the cross wealth pleasure honor power you know to look at the crucified jesus and say how much wealth did he have how much pleasure is he having how much power does he have how much honor as they as they spit at him and they mock him it's like he's taking all the worldly values and he's crucified to the world what does he love on the cross but the will of his father which allows grace now to pour into the whole world and so you want to be happy thomas says and that's why he thought the cross was where the beatitudes appeared so the beatitudes are they're moral guides in a way but they're christological descriptions you know the poor in spirit and so on and and those who have eschewed wealth um look at the cross and so we need to do what paul did you know i hold up christ and him crucified we do this we have to do the same thing because the culture needs christ as much as it's ever needed christ it seems to me yeah and there's something and there's a mystery in that which is this is something people struggle to understand in terms of christian asceticism or the christian desire to eschew the the desires of the world or the the pleasures of the world is that as you do that you actually discover the ground of those pleasures as well right you discover the reason why they exist in the first place and then they become rightly ordered in your life and also in the society if you're able to actually sacrifice them to the highest good do you know that it's from chesterton because he he early in his life was kind of agnostic and and he said when i was convinced that only the goods the world would make me happy i was so unhappy but once i became a christian i realized oh they're not meant to make me happy then i really started enjoying them that's exactly the point you're making so chesterton drinking and eating and you know he loved life and full of humor and all that great great what liberates you for that is precisely a liberation from those things as objects of worship once i'm free of that i can really enjoy them as they're meant to be enjoyed but when i start worshiping them they become a source of torture and everyone knows that right that the thing i worship it tortures me because it's never going to make me happy and it keeps drawing me obsessively to itself um and the church is that's our job is to keep announcing it and what you do i think artists do it by showing these great images you know that embody these spiritual truths um but we got to pick up our game i think the culture's a problem for sure but we got to pick up our game yeah you know i think the young it's like i look at the people that follow what i'm doing you know and it's not it's not a massive amount of people but let's say there's a certain amount but they're mostly young yeah they're mostly like 20 to 30 35 and so what it feels like is that it is also seed being planted and that even like let's say 10 years ago when i started icon carving i was working with an architect named andrew gould and we realized that even in america the orthodox church didn't have a culture of beauty and so we set out we started a journal and we started writing articles and putting out beautiful images and now 10 years later we can see the seminarians that were there 10 years ago now they're the priests and we can feel the changing culture and i think the same with you i look around what you're doing and i see the same thing a bunch of young men like in their 20s who have this energy and so and so it seems like there's no other because the other stuff is gonna die it's already dying this kind of lame christianity this materialist christianity this kind of ex supercritical christianity which leads to atheists becoming you know heads of theology departments and all this kind of nonsense it's just going to vanish it's it's and so what's going to be left are those that have this cosmic understanding and are able to participate in it absolutely and the self-loathing of christians is always a source of frustration to me did you notice it was a couple weeks ago when um harvard university chose as like head of chaplains a guy who's an atheist well i i wrote this article about it just and my my point was not so it wasn't against him i'm sure he's a nice guy i'm nothing against him but i said it's the self-loathing of of the christians at harvard who have such a low regard for their own thing that they'd say oh yeah i'm fine an atheist someone who denies the existence of god can represent the chaplains you know i i mean it's like you've just surrendered to the priests of baal and i mean i'm individually the priest of baal might have been lovely people i'm saying if if elijah just said well you know yeah they're great you know sure let's have one of them in charge of the temple and come on i mean why why have we surrendered we've got the words of of eternal life and it's not arrogant to say that it's what all the great saints knew and all their humility the great saints knew that and so i i hate the self-loathing of christians i think yeah and but there's an it there's really an interesting there's a transformation happening like i'm perceiving it in secret you could say where i had this crazy experience where i i you know there are priests giving these catechumenate classes online now because they can't they couldn't meet during the the kobe dance so one asked me if i could come to this class who's given to catechumen so with all these young people these 20 year olds and one of the guys expressed he said he said i'm not sure i'm doing this for the right reason and he he said because i feel like i'm i'm here doing this because this is the place to be this is the coolest place like this is the future and that it's like it's it's like uh in these fantasy stories where people are rediscovering this ancient mystery that has been lost this is the this is the edge that we have is that people don't know about the entire mystical tradition of the church they don't know about the entire symbolic tradition of the church they have this silly superstitious vision of what it is and very superficial and so if it doesn't take a lot to just poke at that and show them this powerful mystery that is there which is true and so you can actually shock people into realizing what religion is about because they think it's nothing and then they'll inhabit the moral space much more efficaciously and much more powerfully when it's fed by these mystical sources but when you cut off the mystical sources as superstitious and then he said we're going to just hang on to these great social justice principles well then we become an echo of the culture then who cares and if our buildings look like they could be banks or they could be you know a purely secular spaces who's going to be interested but when you've got a shark cathedral that looks like it's landed from another world which indeed it has right um i love the fact that uh kenneth clark one of my great heroes did civilization many years ago you know the great art historian and he he was at chart and he said keep in mind this was all painted and vivid colors he said how much even more fiercely tibent tibetan it would have looked and it's always struck me that i imagine chart not just sort of blank but alive with color it landed from another world yeah and you're meant to be drawn into this this world transforming vision of everything if our churches and our our behavior and our self-understanding is just a vague echo of the culture everyone's gonna get bored and of course young people will stay away in droves but they will be attracted i'm glad you mentioned the word on fire gang because i do have all these extraordinary young people super smart very artistic um hyper motivated they won't be turned down i i called it beige catholicism years ago when i first got back from my doctoral studies i began writing and i wrote a little essay about beige catholicism we've allowed our colors to bleed into this bland beige well no one's going to be interested i wanted something fiercely tibetan about our catholicism i want it to be edgy and colorful and challenging um we're lucky in montreal we have have you been to notre dame basilica in montreal yeah sure as they it's like it's as if you feel that you are in shock in the middle ages they have the ceilings painted with gold stars and you know all the pillars are are ornamented and everything and you think like wow i can project this into space and know what it would have been like to stand in these medieval cathedrals you know we forgot though this is a story i've told before i don't know if i did it with with peterson but uh with a classmate of mine many many years ago i was a student in paris and i took him down to chard to show him and we went all through charlotte and i explained everything to him and and then he said um yeah it's great it's just so liturgically off and because he had been trained the way i was with you know the liturgy should be in a circle and we all see each other and it's all leveled out and adm style but like here's this chart which as you say goes right back to the temple uh it's like the most liturgically correct place i can imagine but the way we were trained that that was the right response it was yeah it's too bad you know it's old it's old-fashioned it's not liturgically correct that means something's gone wrong with the human spirit um so we are we're recovering it there is better church architecture today within catholicism there's a better sense of the cosmic point of the liturgy the temple all that yeah i think so i i've seen several i mean there are several liturgical movements that are kind of popping up and also there's something in the thinning which will produce that same thing because as the social justice type person that only wants the moral aspect of christianity finally realizes that there's no reason to go to church anymore it's getting it's kind then the people that are left are going to be the people that love the tradition that love the you know to be connected to what our ancestors kind of gave us to have this this really grounded sense that we are in a this this story like we're participating in the story you know that story in scripture this is still your story yeah and you're in it and all of this this this whole you know we've been doing a series in uh on my channel called universal history where we're going back into all the legends all the things that the historians threw out all of it we're just saying we're gonna re-explore this you know even the things that they told us was completely stupid like professor john and all of these traditions no we're gonna we're gonna explore it and look at what it means and what it's helped what it helps us understand about you know what it means to be a society what it means to worship and how this all kind of comes together if you want to this ethical thing in mind i want to see what you think as i think about this go back to the civil rights movement 50s and 60s right in our country that were led by for the most part very religious people so king the most obvious example but the many others religious people that led this movement and you read the sermons of martin luther king i mean he's grounded in in the hebrew prophets he's grounded in the great biblical tradition he's grounded in jesus etc and so his social justice activism had a deeply i'd say mystical and spiritual source the fact that today this sort of revived social justice movement is not being led by religious people in fact there's a great hostility to religion i think has given this present moment a much darker hue it's it's a much it's a much less edifying spectacle because the leadership is not grounded in the mystical and the biblical and the prophetic and so it will turn in short order into simply a us against them deeply violent or king i mean look at king's language it's judged not by the color of the skin but the content of their character and he said i want i want to draw white people into the beautiful community i don't want to expel them from it etc but well that's coming up out of a isaiah sort of vision of things the loss of the mystical the prophetic and the biblical we can see it today can't we that's my theory and in the social justice movement it has it's it's a much it's a much more dire prospect today than it was 50 years ago and it looks it it like you said it's very dark because what it ends up looking like and it it's sad because i don't think people are going to be able to perceive it until it's too late is that it it ends up looking more like a pogrom or a mob like a mob justice thing you know it's it's not yet bloody or not very much it's still in words and in and in you know online and everything but that pattern you know of finding the victim you know destroying their life and getting rid of them is something which that definite will inevitably start to bleed out into into culture i mean people do lose their jobs and there's all of this happening so we can see that the very the very pattern of desiring justice and desiring supposedly out of love and compassion is turning into the very thing that they hate absolutely the gerardian dynamics you're relating to there the scapegoating stuff is for sure and i always go back to you know isaiah chapter 2 this this beautiful image again it's evocative of the temple and of eden and everything else mount sinai is the tribes of the lord go up the sacred mountain well they go up the sacred mountain because the temple is there at the top of it and it's all the tribes not just of israel but then all the tribes of the world that's the vision but what unites them it's not a some social justice uh conviction it's not some kantian ethical imperative it's the worship of the true god they come up the mountain together to worship the true god that's what draws us together without right worship attempts at togetherness are going to fail and they're going to fall into something like dissension and scapegoating and us against them so again that's the answer is what's on top of the sacred mountain is the place of right worship that's the only force that we see in revelation too it says that jerusalem gathers the glories of all the people into it as the as the lamb is at the center of this whole pattern absolutely you know that's why i remember in our conversation with jordan peterson and he was i think john was as well talking about the kind of psychedelic drug stuff and was that influencing the author of revelation and i mean again who knows what the author of revelation was taking i don't know but you and i both said some version of no no that stuff is grounded in ezekiel and in daniel and you know it you don't need in other words psychedelic drugs to come up with those images they're they're from the literary and spiritual tradition of of the old testament um yeah and by the way thank you it was nice to have another christian with me because i've been having this psychedelic discussion with so many people it's like it's in the culture so it was nice to have you there to kind of maybe a little push back against that that that that tendency in culture i don't think it's i don't think it's leading us in the right direction and as you said i mean i've never taken psychedelics but it's like i know the iconographical and typological language of scripture and so when i see revelation and i've read daniel and ezekiel and i've seen the frescoes and this whole the the space of the church and the way it's laid out in terms of iconography it all makes sense to me it doesn't absolutely can i ask you a question you know i my academic area of specialization is aquinas and people i say aquinas and augusta and aquinas aristotle and so on but i've always been struck by how eastern thomas is because you've got pseudo-dionysius the ariappa guide is a huge influence on him but also chris system is a huge influence gregory of nis is a huge influence john of damascus he quotes he calls him dominos he quotes him all the time um gregory i mentioned gregory vanessa uh who's your go-to guy among the eastern figures like of those i mentioned do you have someone that really has anchored things for you well for me it for me it's really uh let's say in terms of symbolism it's saying gregor of nissa and in terms of in terms of uh let's say the full vision it's saying maximus the confessor maximus yeah his v his understanding that his theory of the logoe you know and how it all comes together and unites which is grounded in dionysus of course to me is not only what grounds me but i i feel like it's something that i can use to reground christianity for the contemporary world because because it has something to do with meaning and the capacity for man as the locus of meaning all of this makes so much sense and can be explained to people today so he's really he's definitely the person i go to yeah you know when i was a doctoral student in paris i went to my first seminar with michelle corban who's still alive he's a jesuit a priest there and he turned out to be my my doctoral director i didn't know that at the time but he introduced himself to us all and he said um i now either say i'm now i'm i'm 50. he said when i was a young man i read hey girl i read heidegger i read uh you know everyone that we were supposed to read and he said now that i'm 50 i find i jolie gregoire denise now i read gregory nissa and it was maybe the first time i'd really heard gregory of nissa i was about 28 at the time i guess um but i always think of corban when you mention gregor of nissa that he he just found him to be such a go-to guy at that point in his life and corbin was in fact very influenced by the greek fathers and that sort of got me into that world a bit when i was doing my doctoral work yeah the the the life of moses you know i've got some kind of deep analyses of the life of moses and that that structure the way the whole narrative like the the way that he sets everything up and he the way he he he creates this pattern of the mountain and then opposes different things is it's the key i've done a talk where i draw the mountain and put up all the elements and they show icons so people can see that the pattern that sangrego is sangro is calling to is the the underlying pattern of the architecture of the church and of all the icons it really is he really his vision was so was so powerful i mean it's so short the text is so short you have to be careful not to miss things you know because they're all so condensed together yeah yeah and santa from the syrian too is my friend the hymns on paradise i think are really useful for people today like he does typological reading like nobody does because he does it in a poem where he moves from the old testament to the new testament and he gives us the keys basically as he's doing it it's very powerful how about gregory palomas do you follow him a lot it's just too hard to read for me yeah i find it so difficult to read and so i leave that to others he's often called the aquinas of the east you know he has that kind of scholastic and i i taught at one point in our program i had to teach that era and so i read some of the texts of gregory and um the whole thing about the transfiguration and the energies versus the essence all that business um anyway it's interesting for the thomas to engage him well definitely i how can i say this i can see i can understand basically the essence energy distinction and i can understand that with that distinction it what it gives it gives a possibility a clear possibility of the man which god can be completely imminent now you know and also at the same time absolutely transcendent and how there's no confusion in that but beyond that i struggled with a lot of the really pointed the distinction people make and i just leave that to the theologians at some point you know i think with with pseudo-dionysius uh the very young aquinas goes with albert the great to cologne as like his uh assistant and albert the great we know was teaching the divine names of the pseudo-dionysius and the young aquinas we actually have a manuscript in his young hand a little bit shaky and unsure where he's copying out albert's lectures so the very young aquinas took in dionysius in a deep way and it's all through his theology all through it so it's not just some kind of rationalistic aristotelian uh a product it's deeply influenced by the east and all the mysticism but it's it's just it's the same with origen and many of the fathers what happens is that people read back into the influences then they read back the younger developments yeah so people will view you know like late thomism and then they'll put that back into saint thomas and the same thing with origin and a lot of the a lot of these so it's it's it becomes a lot of i i really try to stay away from that as much as possible i'm i'm luckily i'm an artist and i can just show images and so i never get into i rarely get into theological arguments because i'm just i'm just showing you these images of of how these patterns are there and typological just you know relationships between the old and the new it's it's not as it's not as frustrating let's say for me i love it that way well bishop aaron i i would say i think we we've gone quite a bit i would say thank you for for your time thank you for your your attention and thanks for engaging jordan i not that many christians at the outset were willing to really kind of jump in and try to grab you know to kind of grasp what he was saying to to be able to criticize him for the things that he's going nuts about but then also really see the how it's pulling in people towards the church and we've seen it and so thank you for that that uh courage let's call it i'll just say one quick thing about that um a couple years ago now i was chair of the bishops committee on evangelization i had to give a talk on uh what they call the nuns right the n-o-n-e-s all the young people leaving so i gave all the stats and said here's i think why they're leaving and then i said here are some signs of hope and i went through a number of things and my last one was i said the jordan peterson phenomenon and i said look i'm not saying i'm endorsing here by everything he's ever said i don't even know if he believes in god this was a couple years ago you know i said but he's this smart guy in a non-flashy way talking about the bible to armies of young people in person and and even bigger armies online and i said i think yeah i said i think that's hopeful for us well i think a lot of the business took it in for the bishops were fine but catholic social media afterwards i mean blows up because again everything's got to be read politically and so jordan peterson he's not totally on board with all the identity politics stuff so he's a bad guy bishop baron is recommending this bad guy and i'm like no no bracket all that i don't care about all that forget all that i'm just saying smart guy talking the bible is turning on these young people that's a sign of hope yeah and i still think that's true and and like you said even at the outset even helping people to see the wisdom part of it or see yeah how it how it represents psychological patterns which is something the father's completely agreed with you know and so it's it's it's bringing people it's making people want to read scripture it's like yeah absolutely that's wonderful so absolutely yeah so i still you know hold to that and um we'll see what happens next yes exactly and so thank you and so i'm looking forward to everybody to see you know go in in the comments you know to to to to ask questions and everything and so maybe one day we'll have a shaver and on again if he's interested but thank you for your time i'd love that thanks jonathan

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 131,402

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: BR3br53d2x0

Length: 59min 18sec (3558 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Complex_Temporary_66]

Much hope in dark times.

[u/Careful_Bicycle8737]

This was such a great, uplifting discussion. I hope they have many more to come.

[u/76th]

Can't wait to watch this. In the process of watching this one where Jonathan is involved as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCvQsqSCWjA

[u/SSPXarecatholic]

Two of my favorite internet Christian personalities. Bishop Barron was instrumental in my conversion from Protestantism to begin thinking in an apostolic Christian way

[u/SpydersWebbing]

When both traditions have a bit of spit polish applied we manage to look pretty good.