Bishop Barron on Woody Allen's Bleak Vision

well I was not entirely surprised though I was chagrined when I read Woody Allen's most recent ruminations on ultimate things basically Woody Allen could not be more of a bleak nihilist he believes that there was no God there's no purpose our universe came into being for no apparent reason it'll exist for a certain time then it simply expands and cools down and eventually goes out of existence human beings have an equally meaningless status he said every you know let's say roughly hundred years another group of human beings is is flushed away and a new one comes along they too will be flushed away in a hundred years in the grand scheme of things every great work of art everything from Leonardo and Michelangelo to the best movies it'll all disappear when the earth is incinerated so there's no purpose to any of it no meaning why does he make movies a movie roughly every year and he said very frankly well it's to produce diversions it's good to have diversions from this terrible nihilistic truth and so we have artists and filmmakers but then he's just something I found interesting he said really popular entertainers are probably more valuable because they divert more people then artsy types like himself who make you know highbrow movies every every year pretty pretty bleak pretty negative there seems to be nothing meaningful about anything after deliver himself of this by the way he said to the reporters well everyone have a nice afternoon that's all he's got to offer you instruct me when I read that was it's a it's a limit case of what Charles Taylor the great philosopher referred to as the buffered self so modernity is marked by what he calls his buffer itself meaning a self that is protected from any connection to the transcendent it's utterly closed in on it self it lives simply in the world of ordinary experience and no link to the transcendent the contrast is to classical medieval thought which had the poorest self that means a self that was open to transcendence it was accessible to a higher dimension see and there's the great battle in some ways Woody Allen if you want is the limit case of the modern buffer itself over and against this this more spiritually open understanding of the self you know classical people Aristotle Plato up to Thomas acquaintance they knew the truth of what Woody Allen is talking about I mean they knew that you know eventually all human beings die eventually all our great works of art fade away Thomas Aquinas referred to the whole universe is made up of contingent things that means things that come into being and pass away so he knew all that but but he felt there were clues within the contingent world of a higher world there were indications of a transcendent dimension I'll give you two that you find in classical thought and I think deep down you find in Woody Allen's movies but I'll get there here's the first one beauty go back way back now to want to play those great dialogues called the symposium and there's a speech given in the symposium by a woman philosopher named do tema and she gives a speech that has had a huge impact on Western culture she says that the experience of a beautiful thing or object or person or face does not end with that experience rather the beautiful thing object person phase opens the perceiver to grandeur horizons of beauty so think of she says that the beautiful person reminds you of all beautiful persons they in turn remind you of all the beautiful objects and things you've ever seen which in turn opens you to the transcendent source of beauty which is the beautiful self she famously says it's like looking out into the ocean you look into the ocean of the beautiful itself if you want a modern recapitulation event look in James Joyce's great portrait of the artist as a young man when he has that wonderful scene along the Strand the beach outside of Dublin and the young man it's Joyce himself at looking out and he sees this beautiful girl this beautiful woman and then she turns and gazes back at him and she gazes out he says to the open sea well it's a recapitulation of the do tema speech from that beautiful girl Joyce has given an intuition of the beautiful itself we know this because of the end of that experience the character in the book says Oh heavenly God see and that's the that's the porous self if you want using the beautiful as a route of access to the transcendent it's precisely with john paul ii argues it is great letter to artists that wonderful treatise he writes for artists making exactly this classic point that your production of beautiful things is not simply a diversion or distraction for people but it's a sacrament it's a sacrament of a higher world here's the second classic route of access through morality now I want you think about this for a second I'm going to argue it's impossible on Woody Allen ground on pure nihilistic grounds to defend morality what I mean is look there's no god there's no purpose there's no meaning the universe is just going to fade away every hundred years another generations flushed away if that's all there is why finally should I bother why should it bother me that there are people being oppressed right now in the Middle East why should it bother me that people are dying of diseases what why should the suffering of anyone make a moral demand on me if there is no ultimate ground to morality why don't I just say tough luck glad that I'm doing well we're both just going to be flushed away in a few years who cares and the universe looks on with utter indifference see on those grounds I don't see why more reality should matter here's the truth of it and it's witnessed - by the great Souls and thinkers and minds over many many centuries in point of fact the demand of morality is a link to the eternal think of some like Immanuel loving us the great Jewish philosopher whose family was was destroyed in the Shoah levena says that the face of one suffering person is not just that person suffering and making a moral demand rather through the face of that one person comes the face of God as he's operating out of a biblical perspective isn't he where the suffering of one person cries out to heaven literally the suffering of one person makes an unconditioned demand on us which links us to the eternal ground of morality on purely nihilistic a reading I why would you bother but the very fact I'll flip the argument around the very fact that we do feel this extraordinary moral obligation think here of a Christopher Hitchens I've said this before Hitchens had extraordinary moral indignation and I say it to his credit is certain certainly sense of moral obligation that is a link in fact to the eternal if you follow it all the way just as do tema looks out to the ocean of the beautiful itself so the moral demand compels us to look out to the ocean of the unconditioned good who is gone after Simon Woody Allen that I find interesting if he's being consistent then there are two of his movies that are really disturbing and there are two good movies by the way movies I really like what is called crimes and misdemeanors I think from the 1990s maybe 80s the other one is more recent match-point in both those movies you've got a privileged person with a lot of money and social status who commits a terrible crime it's really the same crime in both cases a woman who's become problematic to them and a terrible crimes committed both characters feel a certain remorse but then they get over they managed to outmaneuver the police and the police forget about it and life goes on and the movies end with no justice no retribution no price being pay that is a disturbing face of this moral nihilism you know commit a terrible crime because it benefits me please don't catch me no one finds out about it great great that is morality on purely nihilistic grounds now means close with us cuz you know Woody Allen obviously I radically disagree with this vision of things that he lays out at the same time though I think his movies themselves many which are very fine many which I very much admire I think have hints of both the beautiful and the moral as connections to the transcendent in some ways I'd say don't listen to the ootah watch the work that the work might be telling a deeper truth and the author himself is telling but this is a battle of meta-narratives the nihilistic buffered self versus the porous self which is open to transcendence it's one of the great fault lines in our culture today you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 26 2014