Bishop Barron Presents Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen: Conversations at the Crossroads

[Music] welcome to bishop baron presents i'm jared zimmer the senior director of the word on fire institute and in this episode bishop baron sits down with dr jennifer rodner rosenhagen to discuss her two books and particularly the history of ideas that shaped american culture i hope you enjoy the conversation all right jennifer wonderful to have you here with us and bishop baron as always to discuss your wonderful books american ichi and the ideas that made america i thoroughly enjoyed these reads and for all of our viewers i definitely recommend them and i'm really looking forward to this conversation so thank you i thought maybe one of the first questions that i'd like to ask is why is it so important for us to really understand the the history of ideas sort of how did we get to where we are today um that is the favorite question you could possibly ask an intellectual historian um so my area of specialty is american intellectual history so the history of ideas the history of intellectual movements and what drew me to it was really the ideas first and foremost um uh whatever i i loved getting my mind you know into those thorny theoretical issues but at a certain point in my late i guess was it as a teenager as a college student my mind started to ask well why then and why there you know why did that person think that and what my mind was doing i didn't know was asking a historical question right so in order to understand an idea an argument a thesis a book what is it about that context that is either conditioning the possibilities for that thinker to think the way he or she is thinking what are the pressures on him or her at that moment to to come up with those ideas how are those ideas a reflection of that moment and so that's what that's that's how i think about what it is i do i mean it's fundamentally it can be a philosophical pursuit a theological pursuit but it's what makes it historical is the always asking that question of the you know why then and why there so that the context is as important as the idea itself yeah that's fascinating and also don't lose the thinker himself or herself along the way as well so the biographical information gets uh you understand the influences exactly and so that um that's that's also so important sometimes ideas become isms yes names become you know adjectives so marxian or marxist right but what is it to go back to the original source of an idea really grounded in a human being grounded in their lived experience and so that's that's one of the fundamental habits of mind if you will of of how i do what i do what intellectual history the other thing and this is the part that i say to my students when i'm trying to you know convince them to stick stay with me when they look at the syllabus and they see the reading list and they think oh no no no no is that there is not a single debate in american life today that doesn't have a history none of this is coming ex nihilo none of it just parachuted down during the trump presidency or during this or during you know none of this whether it's a debate about morality about religion about economics about our politics about our identity as americans these are questions conversations debates sometimes really bitter fights that have really really really really long histories and so what intellectual history does or what i try to do in these books is to help us break out of our blinkered perspective you know we're so caught in our moment what happens when we start to think about our now as along now and sometimes really really long now and so that's another thing that that's another thing that i i try to bring out in in my work and in my teaching the cool thing is is that it lets you keep company with people from the past right so if you're dealing today with whatever the issue is the hot button issue and you feel like oh you know we're in it and it's so hard you're not in it alone yeah because there were a lot of really really really smart and um sometimes not so smart you know sometimes um beautiful minds and sometimes not so beautiful minds but there's a long conversation and you can bring them in to your own inner conversation too so so i think about intellectual history as a way of keeping company with the past and confronting whatever moral political economic issue of our moment with this incredible these resources you know from other people who wrestled with the same an earlier iteration of the same problem yeah i always think about the language that more my other gave it the the great conversation to partake in that bishop same question especially in regards to to your work ideas have consequences i think is is so fundamental but a lot of people don't believe that they think there's this sort of high academic conversation what are bandied about in classrooms and university lecture halls and parisian coffee houses has nothing to do you know with the real world in real life there is nothing falser than that in my experience all these ideas have a way of trickling down to all parts of the culture i gave a sermon gosh maybe 20 years ago now where i said i think the most influential 19th century philosopher is not karl marx it's friedrich nietzsche i said that 20 years ago and i still believe that which is why when i saw your book on the shelf in dallas i said yep american nietzsche that nietzsche has really influenced our culture but those who say oh nietzsche you know all this highfalutin academic stuff no way it finds its way through all kinds of avenues into the ordinary conversation and ordinary behavior because i would argue let me get into this i think a lot of nietzsche's views are the default position of many teenagers in america today when i deal with people on on youtube and i'm making a video about religion you'll hear nietzsche they might not know it but they've gotten a nichian influence so and actually i find this in a very negative way in the church sometimes you know it's all all this theological and philosophical you know we're concerned with caring for the people well great the church is always about caring for the people but that highfalutin philosophical level has a huge impact on how a culture is shaped how it unfolds how people behave so i think it's massively important the kind of work you do that we understand where these things come from and how the culture gets shaped yeah and so often it leaves academy and goes into pop culture you find it in movies and music and so people are being formed in these ideas regardless of knowing who it is so to your point knowing the history it gives even more of a perspective whenever you're watching films or you're listening to music or attending a talk you you know about the process that got us to that point yeah or at least it alerts me to a question sometimes i don't know the answer but at least it raises the question how did that come to be you know why is that i liked something that you said about the ideas that have consequences um so um one way that i put it in my writing and in my teaching is that um thinking is where the historical action is at um not quite the same thing but in that same territory right so not that ideas are just here in some other realm right you know for other whether it's an elite conversation or it's remote airy fairy otherworldly but then there's the real world right the real no no no no no and that's the also that habit of mind that i think i bring to to my own work and is common for intellectual historians is to say no that never is that it's never the case it's never the case whether the ideas are highly articulate or they're more diffused they're there and they're not there simply as a rationalization for the real work of politics or the real work of economic right that they're there as agents in history as well and we talked about this you know my job is to evangelize the culture that's how we see the role of word on fire and you can't evangelize the culture unless you know it and so the american culture what shaped it to say oh i'm not interested in ideas i want to get down there and do my ministry well you can't do one without the other you know no one that is interested in actually addressing our culture who doesn't understand all these sources is going to fail at it one of my mentors is cardinal george of chicago who died about five years ago and that was his great theme and of course he was influenced by saint pope john paul ii evangelize the culture therefore the church has got to get in the intellectual game which we have been from the beginning our great people from the church fathers on but i'll be honest with you in my lifetime there's been a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in the church and that's done as enormous harm that'd be a topic for another day maybe but i think it has done its enormous harm in a number of levels but this is one of them we don't understand the culture we're trying to evangelize we'll do a lousy job evangelizing yeah yeah and to understand american culture i thought that your book the ideas that made it made america really portrays kind of the process along the way for us to get to where we are right now and i thought maybe one of the first questions i'd love to to kind of start off with of american culture in particular is what was the role of religion when in regard to the american founding how did it shape people's way of thinking about law and culture and um all of that um so uh there's the answer is a lot um it comes as a surprise to some some readers and others are intimately familiar with this but it it is not a stretch to say that the american revolution was also a religious movement as well um what do i mean by that it is to say that many of the ideas about liberty um um freedom um self-sovereignty was actually espoused from ministers at their pulpits so one of the great ways in which enlightenment ideas made its way into american culture was by way of the learned clergy so there wasn't there wasn't as sacred and secular you know there wasn't this this imagined firewall between these two realms at all um if we just back up a little when we think about why most europeans made their way to america in the first place it was seeking religious i mean not all some were seeking um uh wealth earthly well so i shouldn't i got gussy at all up but if you know a good portion of early immigrants to america are coming for religious freedom so i don't think it's too much a stretch to say that religion um having religion central in one's life was already sort of baked into the dna leading up to the revolution um oh there's so much to say here i mean i think the the go-to text for me on this and it's a text that i discuss in the book it's an obvious one is thomas paine's common sense and so common sense uses very much biblical imagery the stories from the bible perhaps in ways that might raise eyebrows to some readers but it's and and there's still a long-standing debate was thomas paine just using biblical language to try to appeal to what he knew was a religious population right to get them to see themselves to see their struggle with england in a sort of biblical frame or was he himself a genuine person of faith that's still up for debate i'm inclined to say that actually he was a person of faith but the language there's it's a deeply religious text and uses religious language to help embolden uh colonists to throw off the yoke of british imperialism so again it's right there central to the story yeah it's such a complicated question you're right and it's fascinating to me that you might see two great strains in america one is a strong rationalist enlightenment strain another astronomy religious for all the reasons you say but then even within the enlightenment strain you've got a religious element if you want you know so the kind of deist more rationalized form religion in jefferson nevertheless something like religion so there it is from the beginning also your point about uh freedom the fact that martin luther writes a text called the freedom of a christian i think is extraordinarily important as that tradition comes up from religion into society and the integrity of the individual over and against a you know oppressive institution a lot of that more protestant way of thinking about individual in relation to institution i think certainly affects the american mentality but i see those two strains to the present day there's a rationalistic strain for sure within america and a deeply religious one and and they keep asserting themselves intertwining in interesting ways sometimes at odds sometimes you know each one complementing the other so in some ways that's the story of america culturally i think are those how do you read those two things together right the inter oh my apologies i was going to say the interview you mentioned jefferson yeah um and the intertwining um things always get interesting in the intertwining yeah so i think of jefferson's bible yeah as a prime example of intertwining so um the american revolution if we think about this as an um part of the enlightenment project if you will right like the you don't get the american revolution in my view without in the enlightenment ideas i mean as john adams said a change had to happen in the heads and hearts of americans for them to even want to you know throw off the you know to even embark on a revolution right so that the the first shift had to be a mental and a moral one for a change of heart um the difference between the the american enlightenment so not necessarily as we see it manifested in the revolution but just in in its wider consequences was that it was never as hostile to religion as the enlightenment was we've come to know it in france right which and the pathway as i'm sure your listeners all know you know goes by way of the french revolution that is that's a very very different game right right so that was never our revolution right right it was it did not have any anything like that degree of anticlaricism and it at that hostility to religion and here's where you get the intertwining so our enlightenment was always infused whether you want to say it was pantheist or deistic or you know a burgeoning form of liberal protestantism or whatever whatever you want to call it there was a religious or spiritual dimension even to the thinkers that we've come to think of as stoutly secular thinkers so i'm pointing to you because you mentioned thomas jefferson jefferson comes up with his own bible yeah uh in the early 19th century like this is a classic enlightenment of anything supernatural right right so i mean again he really gerrymanders his way through the bible but that is an american enlightenment mind at work it's right religion comes down to ethics right and so he anticipates khan many ways that we're saying the new testament's all about ethics let's get rid of miracles and about jesus being divine etcetera so right it's an enlightenment so i mean it's a gerrymandering it's a gerrymandered bible for sure but that's jefferson's effort to say the certainly the ethical infrastructure that comes to him by way of the bible is crucial yeah so how is it i can just rework some of this to get rid of the stuff that can no longer stand at the bar of the enlightenment mind so again i just think that that's such a classic example of the peculiarity of the american enlightenment and how important whether you want to call it it's certainly not um in in jefferson's sense a kind of um standard institutional religious faith right but it's something it's something um can i ask you something because i mentioned cardinal george already and uh maybe our listeners maybe this cartoon's been gone so long but remember calvin and hobbes he used to say america is shaped by calvin and hobbes and his point being by a very protestant approach to religion calvin and a very hobbesian approach to political philosophy the individual the war of all against all social contract and so on so to understand america just think calvin and hops you know which he raises the issue of catholicism because to say calvin is to say a protestant influence which is certainly there and he said about freedom and the individual and so on and the catholic social theory is different you know it's much more communitarian yeah and much more institutional if you want to put it that way and then hobbes hobbes is not thomas aquinas you know for thomas politics is natural to us it's not just a social contract we're not by nature antagonistic to each other we're by nature political and so hobbes represents a divorce from that view as calvin represents a divorce from a catholic theological understanding so i just find that interesting calvin and hobbes i think are influential so where does it leave catholics in america uh to me it's just a very interesting question yeah that's kind of my next question is what was the role of catholicism in particular i mean did it play a major role in in the shaping of the founding of america um yes because catholics were here and also fighting the same the same fight i think where that gets where things get tricky of course is when this is already there you know at the founding where protestants and catholics are looking at each other with suspicion right so they have a shared fight they've shared internal enemies um so worried about native americans concerned about um slave slaves as you know enemies in their midst they've got a common enemy abroad but they also historically so um cathal and then of course this just really if you i will um becomes even more intense over the course of the 19th century as we have more and more immigrants from catholicism um so catholics have a big stake in this history and it's partly fighting off the the the criticism of protestants that you can't be you cannot be a democrat and have be faithful you know to a pope abroad right like you can't you cannot do that and catholics saying over and over again well no just watch us you know like let us show you how to do it so um that's a i mean that's a sort of high-flying answer but it is to say that though all of these contestations catholics are in this conversation sometimes they're the specter you know this is what american freedom is up against but oftentimes they're the not they're not only interlocutors but they're setting the agenda by saying both things are possible right being faithful to this place and um being catholic yeah to that point i think of um two american uh archbishops namely john carroll and as we record these words it's the 200th anniversary this summer of the establishment of the baltimore basilica and when john carroll laid the foundation stone for that carol who was a friend of george washington and benjamin franklin and he said this is a monument to religious liberty and so he saw it's a monument to catholics belong here then go forward a little bit from him and one of his successors cardinal gibbons of baltimore who upon becoming cardinal goes over and gives a speech in rome it's santa maria and trustevery and sings the praises of the american political arrangement you know it was not the classically catholic way to think about it but to say look we're flourishing in this country you know so there's a very strong strain you're right of catholics saying no no we we belong here we're at home here other catholics of course both 19th century and today would say well no there's a more awkward relationship between classical catholicism and the american arrangement that too i think is an interesting intertwining catholics who say yes to it and catholics who are more suspicious of the american arrangement um read vatican 2 now under that rubric as vatica 2 makes a strong statement for religious liberty but read the debates around that so i find that interesting too is how do we how do we adjudicate those complex issues yeah and so often too we focus in on the kind of colonial realities of the founding but there was also in the southwest over to california a lot of catholicism that was flourishing and growing communities and influencing america in a major way just on a different different coast different area of the united states where we are right now exactly so we're at this mission in santa barbara right here at the time of thomas jefferson and george washington right in the 1770s that's when junipero serra is establishing all these missions and there's a flourishing catholic culture in what's now america but we hardly ever think about that we we focus on the colonial side of the equation yeah something interesting as well and you mentioned thomas paine this this kind of culture of self-invention that that bishop aaron's used that language a few times that we now have i found that in pain uh as well this idea of i can become who i want to be but where did that come from was that more of an enlightenment reality or religious freedom was it a mixture of the two what what where's that coming from so um i'm going to frustrate you by um not dodging it but answering it in in a way that's authentic to me this is a question that is debated over and over again so i can't stick the landing on that um there are but i'm interested in that as an ongoing conversation where did this come from so i'll tell you some candidates are luther i'm not i'm not endorsing this view but luther you know where you find this commentary where did this quest for the authentic self you know where is the quest for the aggrandized self where is the the self-reliant self luther um others will i mean there's just a lot of i mean you could say with with descartes i mean they're they're um i think they're therefore i am so i don't have a i don't have a handy answer to you other than to say this is a question that has um engaged intrigued vexed commentators mostly when they're concerned about it you know so that this is a problem that we need to solve who who got it going right um if you're a little bit more provincial in your reading well if you don't have to be provincial you could if you're reading you know european romantic uh texts then you might say good i'm mean not starting from nowhere but go to is the figure who really you know brings this into our language but i was going to say if you take a slightly more provincial view or you want to look for american homegrown emerson so i don't mean to be wishy-washy in the answer but to be um genuine that it's a very very good question it's the one that's freighted with a lot and it depends on what how you conceptualize what that self i mean you know what what is that um notion of the self that you're trying to suss out will tell you how you're gonna do this genealogy right um so will it lead you back through religious channels will leave you to lead you to europe will it lead you to the enlightenment that how you're going to do that depends on what you're thinking the problem is sure right i think of a couple of things there because i think you're right it's the question in some ways uh part of it is the breakdown in the metaphysical visions there was kind of a unified vision of objective truth and value and so we share that and the individual finds him or herself in relation to that world if that falls apart if people lose confidence in it well then what do you do well then there's kind of a self-invention but i also think something almost topographical geographical america the the land of novelty and new possibility and these people on hugging the coast and look at this giant continent before us so we'll be a self-inventing people in a way that europeans never could be i mean because they're they were given something paul tillich talks about freedom and destiny uh europe in some ways was a place of great destiny it was something given to you america for all these reasons you've said but also our geography invited we're a land of freedom and possibility and novelty yeah new beginnings new beginnings right a new frontier or even jfk you know that's a very american kind of idea but the breakdown i mean i would say and i say this you know in a sort of mourning spirit uh the breakdown of an integrated metaphysical vision of god of moral value of truth when that falls apart and then we can go back to luther and many other figures too in the philosophical world and also sociological reasons for that something in my judgment very bad happened to the human spirit and the limit case then is the is the self-inventing subject or the subject that invents value and truth but we get into that but but i think there are there's all kinds of interesting reasons why this now dominant idea is is afoot another major thinker that's uh in this book as well is darwin and what was his influence in the way americans thought uh about each other um thought about nature all of that okay that's um a lot that was darwin's hugely hugely influential and american thought i mean i can't um there are many there are a handful of first movers and he's always kind of the first cause darwin's up there um so what what was interesting to me when i started working more on thinking about the influence of darwinism or darwin's idea was that it upset the the story that i had in my mind which was darwin wright's origin of species 1859 and you know it comes across the atlantic and people open up the book and just their entire religious faith explodes right nothing could be further from the truth so when darwin's ideas first make their way in the united states um they're read they're actually read and accommodated by many many religious commentators religious thinkers um and and across the whole spectrum um so there were more liberal protestants who could read darwinism and say well that actually kind of looks like our universe right a vision of progress you know a sort of um an ever improving universe we we you know we we can do that um there were some more um more of cal if you will calvinistic um uh protestants and then also catholic commentators who just said well no he's wrong but it was it was easy to swat away because at the time it still was it still seemed like a ludicrous proposition right so just like and and they had so much cultural authority so there wasn't a huge explosive breakup or anything it was just no you know he's wrong yeah um so darwin's ideas really it takes a long time for darwinism to become um seen as a real threat to established religion darwin himself was a man of faith um so and so again i think it's always important to separate what what darwin argued versus darwinism you know when whenever the name becomes an ism the other thing that happens in the united states that's very i wouldn't say particular to the united states i think it also happens in england but in the united states everything seems to happen with a little bit more gusto is that there was a lot of slippage between um herbert spencer's ideas and darwin and herbert spencer so when we talk about darwinism and tooth and claw that's not really darwin that's more spencer right so the spencer is the one who says well if this is the law of the universe then it's the law of human societies we want laissez faire you know get the government off our back you know um the the talented and the brightest survivor survival of the fitness tooth and claw and there's nothing in darwin that endorses that view at all so that's that is the view that becomes popular certainly in the gilded age you know after reconstruction and the gilded age in the 19th century during industrial america so that's seen as darwinism or social darwinism is absolutely crucial to understanding the intellectual landscape but it's not you're hard-pressed to find this in darwin's own writings it's his readers who then retool it and repurpose it in the way that a herbert spencer does or let me talk about my book william graham sumner who was a big proponent of this pardon me in the united states you know i got from both your books with darwin i think you're right he's a massively important figure is the way it was received anyway was okay if species aren't fixed species unfold well then i guess nothing is really all that fixed you know the the moral values intellectual values everything seems to be in flux and so that kind of relativistic view of things but the guy that came to my mind a lot was a contemporary of darwin and emerson all these people namely john henry newman who's kind of intellectual hero of mine newman as you say took in all of this kind of laban's philosophy with a very blithe spirit newman of course intensely religious man but he accepted evolution at the level of ideas ideas develop they unfold over time you know and for newman that never meant that now truth is relative it just meant in the order of discovery uh ideas take time to unfold and you see it from an angle i see it from an angle now we talk yeah you see it from a third angle now i listened to what augustine said about it way back and now i i throw all that to someone else and in that play of lively minds newman said the idea unfolds the way a river deepens and broadens over time the way a tree grows and what i always like about that is it doesn't fall prey to the either or of okay i guess our old world of fixed epistemic and moral values that's all gone everything evolved therefore relativism or subjectivism i said no therefore a keener sense of the complex process by which an inter-subjective conversation uncovers objective truth and value you know so i wonder if that's kind of like a middle ground we don't have to succumb to okay everything's up for grabs it's no no we're just in a more interesting conversation another disciple of newman's whom i love is bernard lonergan and lonergan said you know the the fault of a classical view is that knowledge is like taking a look oh it's a form let's take a look oh there it is well it's hardly ever like that i mean there are objective epistemic and moral values but i don't just take a look but together we look and argue and converse and throw ideas back and forth and in the evolution of that the full objectivity of that idea emerges hence newman's famous line a real idea is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects that's a very 19th century it's a very laban's philosophy approach but it's not a relativism or subjectivism yeah anyway end of sermon on that but that's why i think darwin and newman are very interesting to read together that way there's probably i mean you're i'm i'm so glad that you drew on them because they're it just shows the range of serious thinkers you know committed to take living in a moral universe and contributing to that moral universe trying to reckon with the implications of darwin's ideas even if it's not straight from you know is even if it's coming by way of um other interpreters or what have you yeah a dif another path and this is the one that i think brushes up against what you're calling relativism would be the way of the pragmatists so american pragmatism um hugely important late 19th early 20th century carries on throughout the 20th century but it's taking shape in the at the turn of the last century one of the real american if you will contributions to global philosophy i mean it's sort of nothing's homegrown because they're drawing also on foreign influences but if you think of an american philosophy in the same way that transcendentalism almost a century earlier was and the way that john dewey puts it so john dewey william james charles sanders purse i mean this is the whole um the early classic pragmatists who are giving it shape dewey says has a wonderful piece from i believe it's 1910 but it might be a little bit earlier on darwin's influence on philosophy and so what dewey says in this and is unmistakable is darwinism gives rise to pragmatism which is or at least aspired to be a kind of middle ground between you know absolute unified objective truth transcendent truth and everything just in massive flux and utter chaos leashed upon the world so this was pragmatism was an effort to try to bridge if you will these two viewpoints as william james puts it quite explicitly it was for him a way to bridge a scientific view of the world and a religious view of the world and for him these were warring you know warring world views in his own lived experience you know poor the poor guy he had a couple i mean he's one of our i think our most magnificent philosophers but really suffered from this inner civil war between the claims of science and the claims of religious faith from his father's mysticism yeah exactly um uh so um so so darwinism gives rise to pragmatism in the united states and the way that dewey puts it in a wonderful piece and again if readers or your viewers are all interest i'm sure you can just do a google search and it'll the full text will come up but it is to say if we take from darwin a notion of the world ever becoming ever in in um ever variable without a telos shouldn't that have an implication for the way that we think about ourselves the way that we think about our moral world so it has to have an implication for epistemology if you will cosmology ontology he takes it in a different direction of course um but that's where pragmatism comes from it says if we recognize that there is no unified truth again a different point of departure than your um uh uh catholic theologians how do we still build the moral life you know how do we still know how to live together so pragmatism is i mean sorry darwin there's not a domain of american thought that's not eventually affected by it but what's so fascinating is to see the incredible range of responses i've always loved james really i've read them with great profit over the years and isn't it in one of your books you use that that little term ambulando right by walking i've always thought there's a link between james and the phenomenologists so yeah not long after him he dies 1910 and usual was writing well he russell was writing by 1905 you know and what you have there and his role you know zeus and zach and zebst i mean back to the things themselves he didn't want the kantian divide between neumann and phenomenon he thought we could get access but there's lonergan and he didn't think it was oh by taking a look oh there it is there's the form there's the essence yeah no by this patient process ambulando yeah walking around looking at the various profiles of a phenomenon even james you know the phenomenology of religion uh i think and that's very numinesce as well there's the idea unfolding and developing and i do think that's a helpful middle ground between you know maybe certain naive classicism and there's like a rarity that you know it's just the mirror of nature there's nature i got a mirror and then it appears and that's the taking a look thing which is naive but then not lurching to the other extreme saying well there is nothing like even let's say an asymptotically approached ideal will you say the truth that's what i want lonergan the mind wants to know everything about everything the mind wants the truth but knowing it's approached asymptotically in this life i'm never going to like get it end of argument newman would say whatever i achieved now there's more to be achieved you know that more phenomenological laban's philosophy approach i think is a good path you know and i've always liked that in the pragmatism i appreciated that without going to the extreme of it you know which i think is somewhat dangerous well you know james saw pragmatism his pragmatism was to as he put it wide in the field for the search for god yeah yeah that's right so you know whether um one can you know quibble with him yeah you know or with the implications but that was the spirit of what he was trying to do was he wanted to come up with a philosophy that would not allow let's say science you know right and he actually has a list of the tough-minded versus tender minded so he has a the the science is the tough the tough-minded and he has these wonderful adjectives to shout down the longings of the the the seeking soul or the you know the religious spirit so what he wanted was how how can i how can i come up with a philosophy that allows for both of these to be true in my self you know the part of me that's an empiricist that wants to see things really played out an experience that wants evidence and the part of me that um has this kind of longing for transcendence and doesn't want my mind to shout down my heart and he the phrase he uses is that the pragmatism was to widen the field for the search for god again not that he assumed everyone who's going to read it is going to become a person of faith but to try to keep open a space and a modernizing america in a modernizing world that being a person of faith has legitimacy um has and can continue to have some some sort of intellectual integrity so it's just to say that's do you agree with this guy i think that's absolutely right about james what you're saying but i wonder in his disciple john dewey something has been lost that by dewey you get more of an antagonism toward religion which awaken for example nebor in his opposition to dewey you know they they locked horns because by dewey's time it seems to me it's more of a you know a strict kind of rationalism and it's it's more suspicious of religion but i think right and william james you've got a great openness to it which i've always appreciated another major kind of shift as we see the enlightenment influencing america is also this shift towards romanticism and i thought especially something in the american niche book that really stuck out to me was actually the influence of emerson on on nietzsche what was so powerful about emerson um well uh have you you're gonna i'm gonna be a little cheeky here have you ever read them i mean that's my feeling on them like you just all you have to do is open it up and that's not totally true some of my students just say they don't get this guy they don't understand it but what i wanted to say is like just open up yeah the harvard divinity school address open up self-reliance open up circles open up experience you know these are titles of some of his essays and um the power of the writing the power of that mind um uh so anyway but what did nietzsche in particular discover in emerson so so i guess for starters the thing to note here is what seems like the impossibility you know how is it that emerson the quintessential american philosopher you know the he wasn't the poet of democracy he said that walt whitman was but that was why you know that he could even see that right so emerson is someone who's deeply rooted to this place america you know um and so much in the service of a democratic project how is it possible that friedrich nietzsche the 19 you know born later in the 19th century german philosopher who is seen as and not not inaccurately as the prelude to fascism and totalitarianism you know like what how is it possible but the answer is that's why we study history because it's always much more interesting than the conventional tropes so um uh you didn't you weren't necessarily pulling towards towards nietzsche but i wanted to maybe maybe get to that so emerson um a hugely important early 19th century american thinker who is one of the transcendentalists so a group a loose group of writers and poets and philosophers and theologians i mean lots and lots of theologians and there's preachers in this mix in the early 19th century who were the way that i like to put it is that they recognized that america had had a political break with england from the revolution but not really a cultural one so that americans in the early 19th century were still oriented on europe for their ideas and their their culture and what the transcendentalists wanted to do was to come up with an organic american ideas organic american identity and that's where emerson gets really gets his start and he started as a unitarian minister but then becomes a freelance philosopher and and writer all with this project um in mind so they're romantic in the sense you could say it's like it's a response to the the the rational aspects of the enlightenment so the romanticism was a kind of as as the word says a kind of bringing back of heart a feeling um uh a sense of belonging um others see it as just an extension of the enlightenment project i mean that's a sort of intramural debate i think among intellectuals and not a very very interesting one so emers ever since that the only one walt whitman henry david thoreau is in this orbit margaret fuller some i mean theodore parker one of the most important abolitionists um uh they're all in this um in this circle of uh american romanticism and really helping to launch lots of intellectual movements seeking for some sort of organic american identity organic american culture what in particular was it that nietzsche you really kind of grabbed on to that influenced him that's the that's the connection so emerson was pretty much a um a rock star internationally so he wasn't just famous in the united states he had a very big following abroad like ben franklin yeah exactly um so emerson his essays were in german translation and a 16 year old friedrich nietzsche when he was at prep school and now i'm bored germany reads emerson um in the yeah mid no sort of my dates are going to be a little bit off but mid to late 19th century whenever he was 16 reads emerson in translation and nietzsche is on his path to becoming nietzsche um as a result of that um yeah but but before i i carry on maybe i'll let you uh yeah ask a question that you think might be interesting maybe i mean self-reliance and the whole you know kind of throwing off of traditions and finding your path and asserting your you know i think all of that it was the single thing i found most interesting in your nietzsche book as i read it it's full of interesting things but i mean i've read nietzsche and read at nietzsche for many years i never knew that connection that he himself had embraced emerson so enthusiastically yeah and i find that fascinating you know as you say prototypically american sort of thinker and yet influences uh nietzsche and nietzsche's scene is so german yeah you know right i mean so other so foreign that especially becomes ingrained in the nature reception during world war one and world war ii yeah so nietzsche's otherness has always been part of his reception here and so that i think is the part that is so curious and shocking and interesting is that nietzsche found his own philosophical voice by reading an american philosopher yes so and i've always been intrigued by the transcendentalists i think they are hugely influential look at much of the new age today would be very much indebted i think to the transcendentalist insights i would say now speaking as a catholic theologian when the authentically supernatural is sort of uh marginalized you get this sort of i would say ersatz version call it transcendence or emerson's oversoul or which always reminds me a bit of schleiermacher's sense of religion the sense and taste for the infant and so on it was an attempt yes it's kind of a romantic thing but also to present religion in a more kind of rationally acceptable way and so is this sort of a universal experience we all have of the infinite or you know um the feeling of absolute dependency in the later schleiermacher always reminds me a bit of of emerson the transcendentalist but what happens when a supernatural vision of life has broken down and you get a version of religion and so that famous speech right that uh emerson gives at harvard when you know he kind of breaks ties even with unitarianism so already a pretty de-supernaturalized and even from that he breaks you know um something's happened in the american spirit there and in the religious spirit which i think still has ramifications today i mean i would see that rather negatively you know what happens when a vibrantly supernatural and now go back to jefferson let's cut out all the supernatural elements so jefferson is more austerely kantian i would say it's more religious ethics with emerson you get a kind of mysticism but a sort of rationalized mysticism a de-supernaturalized mysticism those elements religion as ethics religion has de-supernaturalized mysticism they're all over the place today yeah all over the place and so to announce a supernatural christianity that's tricky you know in in that cultural framework but anyway i find that connection fascinating you know i always think about the uh the quote from alan bloom that says nietzsche is us americans yeah so for us to better understand nietzsche's influence in regard to american culture especially today if there was maybe one or two of his ideas that have really held on what would those be so i will give you one um uh channeling my inner unitarian as opposed to my trinitarian or whatever um oh but only because it's the foundat if you will the foundation for all the influences yeah so that nietzsche's influence and i don't think i'm being hyperbolic here at all spent many many years of my life and and hopefully i'm persuasive in the book there's not a register in american thought where nietzsche's influence is not felt religion politics culture yeah you know gender identity i mean just you name it the environment i mean nietzsche's influence um and those are not all the same nature right so and they're different ideas so so if you want to limit it to a particular domain so why in the environmental movement was nietzsche important or why in feminism was nature important or why in black power was nietzsche important a very different nietzsche shows up in all of those so it's just he's so multi is so wide-ranging um that there's there's a very very very long answer to that question but if you pull all of them back to the one idea or the one claim was that and this will be familiar to any of your listeners um watchers who you know know something of nietzsche was that nietzsche fundamentally challenged fundamentals or the foundation of nietzsche's philosophy is what we would call anti-foundationalism that is to say that there is no foundation to human experience there are no absolutes no ah priorities no universals no objective truth no god yeah so what nietzsche does and this is this is i think you know obviously there are forerunners of nature there's emerson who doesn't make this radical a claim but you can sort of like oh it's sort of pointing in that direction so nietzsche part of what makes nietzsche nietzsche is just the force and his rhetoric you know the lettering and um and just the comprehensiveness so again it's not that nietzsche x nihilo is making these claims where there's um you know prior thinkers but in nietzsche they come together with such a kind of force and clarity and a kind of he's also making sociological claims too so he works in a lot of registers is the idea that um that there is no universal truth and if human and human beings need to get over you know kind of i mean but it better than that the way that he puts it that is very famous and very arresting but it's only one is his the god his phrase that god is dead and we've killed him and we have killed him you and i yeah so that's you know when how do we then i can tell you how we get to an allen bloom saying in 1987 nietzsche is us nate these ideas have made their way so much into american framework that you can't think about american thinking without thinking about you ask you a question about that because this on my mind jordan peterson has famously said that when nietzsche makes that remark it's not and it scores in also sprockets there's two so it's a character in egypt but it's not a cry of exaltation god is dead we killed him it's a cry almost of despair it's a it's a like acknowledgement of now what yeah or what's the next step god is dead we we killed him now what yeah you know i've always felt that's that's more right than wrong the way peterson reads that it's it's way more right yeah but it's it's red often as this sort of exultant cry right now i'm ready to find my freedom where it's more like oh my god now now what do i do in this blasted ground that i'm on where there is no god there is no objective moral and epistemic value now what do i do and as i read you know this thought goes on the existential is finally saying well look it's existence precedes essence my freedom comes first you mentioned richard wright you know in your book and it's my project now of of self-invention i determine my values start you know i i determine what makes my life authentic and so on now for me i'll speak as a catholic priest and theologian that's a pathetic alternative in my judgment that's a pathetic to me that's a suffocating space to live in i i with dante and company it's this great adventure as you intuit the great epistemic moral values and yes indeed you don't just take a look and there they are you you move into them in a complex process of conversation and moral adventure and so on but to me i've always found as i say it's a blasted earth to me of nothing it's it's gone there's no objectivity and i i have to invent it i gotta help me what i have to invent um anyway i i do think that's the neuralgic point that's true there's oh there's so much that you say that that is so resonant for me so um and i think it is really interesting so a couple of things is even in the way that you're you've said it god is dead so there's a version where you can say god is dead right and there's another one that is filled with terror yeah and yearning and worry and that's really the i mean so so it's you need to read the the actual text nature so the first statement and then you understand each i think also differently um too so the kind of googly-eyed jester nietzsche you know who's who's taking joy and the death of god that's not right what shows up in his text i think that's right yeah so um and so so the the statement about god is dead comes up actually prior to also schrock sarathustra in the gay science so the first time the god is dead reference comes up is in a parable that nietzsche tells in his gay science of i believe it's 1882. and it's a parable of the madman comes down to the city square and says to everybody god is dead god is dead we have killed him you and i we have his blood stains on our hands that's from the gay science it's not from that's from science and then everybody laughs at him it's like who's this lunatic and he says oh i've come too early i've come too early so he leaves and um and what nietzsche is starting to experiment with their what he's what he's saying there i think is a challenge to to christians and he anybody recognize that they're not yet ready for it which is to say that he looked around him in a modernizing german or oppression if you will society and said you know we have so many people going to church but they're they're starting to pray to a god that they don't really believe in anymore because they're intellectually um forces have either challenged it or undermined and so what need there's a way to read it um where nietzsche is actually asking challenging christians to really think about their commitments and not but not be half-hearted about it right you know like i'm just going to go to church on sunday and keep right you know keep the the the structure of christianity even though actually it's been debased of its real fame or that faint real real focus and that's why i think so many theologians and um you know very committed christians have read nietzsche and said nietzsche is a and i'm now using a quote service to christianity yes i'm not insisting on you no no but like nietzsche helps i quite agree with you on that and i'll give you i want to get your reaction i got two examples one is is jung jung who like nietzsche was born in a you know parsonage and grown up in a very uh christian setting and found the version of christianity he was getting to be suffocating but it didn't lead him toward a sort of surgery and you know existentialism it led him toward this exploration of this other world mythology and archetypal psychology and he thought that it opened up the christian thing in a new way there's that the second example is paul tillich who was very influenced by nietzsche went through world war one and all of its horrors and all of its rigors and ends up by recovering meister eckhart and that's where he gets the the got uber got it yeah the god beyond god and so god is dead we killed him in a way fair enough you know if there's a there's a false view of god there's an idolatrous view of god we ought to kill him yeah and that's frightening in the beginning but finally liberating because it opens you to the got uber god the true god so until it uses the language of you know zion's god is being itself he is trying to overcome idolatrous uh misconceptions of god so that's where i quite agree with you that nietzsche maybe despite himself um was opening up you know certain paths the same way i mean you can read marx that way too mark's descended from a long line of rabbis and marx who filled with a you know passion for social justice and also wants to get rid of a really false view of religion yeah you know if religion functions as the opium of the masses well then we should get rid of it that's a dysfunctional religion um so anyway i think yeah i quite agree with you i think nietzsche opens up paths for a deeper reflection but i mean there are also other paths people can take but that it is to say that's the curious thing about nietzsche's nietzsche is us in terms of religious readers um many serious-minded religious readers come to a deeper understanding and and if you will james refers to this as being twice born yeah right you know coming back coming to the faith by way of nietzsche because nietzsche in their reading helps them see the shortcomings in the way and the way that they understood their inherited faith yeah i'm with them so there is a version of nietzsche which leads to paul tilly right absolutely i mean there's a version of nietzsche even earlier someone i talk about in my book uh who i think is super fascinating as a baptist uh minister by the name of george berman foster who in the early 20th century was the first reader um he was i think he's really the first death of god theologian you know what happens if we take this seriously but for foster again it was a way of kind of reconstituting and thinking of his faith so there is a version of that thomas merton refers to nietzsche as a prophet and he doesn't like everything he has to say but he says nietzsche helps us improve our christianity you know and martin would have known those great mystical sources absolutely exactly he's also in that orbit however as you i think you have signaled there is a version of that that then leads to um the uber you know just the self you know just the self there's no god over god it's just me and myself me myself and i right um what tom wolf called um the me generation you know the third great awakening um what robert bella in habits of the heart referred to as sheila um which was a woman um unfortunately i think not very flattering portrait but as someone who you know was sort of self-actualized and you know doing a sort of pastiche religion but who and then the question that she was asked in the 80s is who do you worship and she said me i i do her name is sheila i do shilism so there is a path right yeah that just leads to a really a fully secularized aggrandized ego with no higher structures of meaning no sense of belonging no sense of the beloved community yeah and unfortunately i think unfortunately um in my humble opinion it's unfortunate um that much of this uh is not america is is the america is us which which bloom is also lamenting uh but it's not the um i think it's some of the sources of our great problems of our day and it's it's a great obstacle to uh evangel evangelization so in my work i come up against that all the time versions of sheilaism and who are you to tell me what to believe i got my own religion or who you tell me there's something objective at the epistemic or or moral level so i'm up against that all the time i'm sure so i think that what we're saying here is is interesting of finding a path from nietzsche that is much more agreeable to religion i think you can find that and avoid the ones that that lead us to trouble in terms of evangelizing the culture what's incredible we only have a few minutes left uh conversation this has been a fantastic conversation um but one question i i did want to ask um you know in our work and of course bishop has been doing it now for for over you know 15 16 years um is evangelizing the culture and kind of we started off this conversation talking about why knowing the history of ideas is so important um and i wanted to ask you you know as some as you know bishop baron's been an evangelist for for 15 years and with the institute we're trying to train people on how to spread the gospel what maybe advice might you know i'd love to hear that this this um i'm interested in this conversation we need another hour and i don't have answers but i've but this intrigues me and i'll um i'm probably not the right person to ask this question and i'll tell you why because i have to be very careful not to evangelize in my classroom yeah um but what do i mean by that in terms of what my politics are my views of things even me allowing myself to wipe my finger at sheilaism is something that i it's not that i don't do it in the classroom but i have to be really mindful in a classroom i've got students from all over with all different types of faith traditions no faith tradition um you know their politics point in every direction and i can't do anything to undermine i mean i don't want to do anything where they feel disrespected or they don't feel like it's a space for them to think through ideas and if they think i'm in any way idiot an ideologue you know they or or or or have that indoctrinated yeah so i i it's funny i i'm often on the search for rooting out in myself when i hear something that i you know really want to tell them but here's what i do let myself tell them and i think we need more time than we have but but that's fine we can also just go with this and think about it is that i think that my job like this is definitely part of the job description is to just awaken them to the absolute pleasures of the mind yeah you know the absolute pleasures of the intellectual life um and again wherever it may be found so again i'm not it's this canon or it has to be that but the coming into contact as you do all the time with ideas with formidable theories with contradicting viewpoints and you wrestle with it there's a there's an agon in there right i mean it's it's intense but there's also an incredible joy through it too absolutely and so that's something that i allow my myself to do in the class which is i don't want to land too hard on verdicts about certain kinds of things that could alienate students but this one i'll land on you know the joys of the joy the joys and the pleasures and the necessity of the examined life and so um and so here's where i think maybe we're not so far apart actually is that i think so what what i find in that situation is the vast majority of my students come yearning for something they might not know what it is right they often don't why should they they're 18 they're 19. you know i'm at middle age and i'm still trying to figure it out right but there's a yearning for for some larger structure of meaning some sense of orientation some we you know and if i if my job can say history is a way to to get there yeah um being involved in this then you know i joke dainu like my jaw i feel like my uh my my job has been done but where that the similarity is for you is you're also in amidst people with yearnings with longing with uncertainty and so if so it's so i guess there's a couple of things that i would say one is showing catholicism as a deeply meaningful intellectual tradition like you want to get your needs met you can come here and a lot of people don't know that no i think that's they don't know which the intellectual tradition and it's and in that so that's like the like intellectually there's a there's a lot of place here what a lot of understatement to really get your needs met um and to come alive and to let your moral imagination unfurl so there's one bad and then two just recognizing that people are as i think you do um the com they're coming with with so much yearning and so if you're able to show just the grounding work of what you do you know the life-affirming soul nourishing work of what you do it's you you can't help but to evangelize yeah right no that's good you know what's funny this occurred to me in the course of our conversation the weird connections so we talked about uh emerson let's say influencing nietzsche we talk about emerson maybe indebted to 19th century you know liberal protestantism emerson a de-supernaturalized view all that i think is true emerson influences massively walt whitman this great american poet right and you look at whitman's religion or spirituality and you find it maybe a lot of those same elements and you know good and bad but limited um but there's this young englishman late 19th century who's coming of age in a very nihilistic university culture and it was even on the verge of suicide and he reads the poetry of walt whitman and it opens him to a fresh and invigorating view of the world it eventually led him to a reconsideration of christianity and eventually he becomes a catholic and that young man's name was gk chesterton yeah who becomes i mean one of the great catholic apologists of the 20th century influencing cs lewis influencing tolkien now there's a new generation of chestertonians but it was walt whitman no kidding it was walt whitman who opened him up to this perspective i don't know really what my point is except to say the history of ideas is really weird and interesting and the cross-pollination is really intriguing of who influences whom and why and so the more we know about that the more we're open to it the more possibilities there are you know so um heck i can easily imagine actually friedrich nietzsche opening someone to a deeper perception of the faith i really could if they go that got up a god sort of route or they see something in nietzsche's critique of religion that yeah that's right and there's got to be something better you know so who knows who knows now speak as a theologian how the holy spirit's gonna work what the holy spirit will use to move people to faith you know so i think the more we know about that world uh the more fun it is the more intriguing it is you know thank you well thank you again uh for being with us and this was just a fantastic conversation wonderful so much uh insight in this conversation thank you bishop it's great to be with you as always i'm dr anthony pagliarini i'm a technology university i'm christopher kaiser professor and i'm stacie trisankos todd well a very special greeting to all the members of the word on fire institute good to be back with you [Music] today we're going to be talking about imaginative apologetics now imagine to apologize is the name of our course overall in the coming lessons we'll be looking at what i call the four integral features of the catholic narrative [Music] because this whole series is about how we are to evangelize the culture and it's that jesus wants us to go out and not be afraid to do just that newman enumerates the principles of christianity principle of dogma we've seen i teach the literature of the mystical tradition at the angelicum university [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Keywords: Bishop Barron, Catholic, Presents, Nietzsche, History, word on fire, catholic philosophy, catholic academic, catholic lecture, catholic history, catholic lecture series, american culture, catholic culture, bishop robert barron, bishop barron lecture, christianity, catholicism in america, christianity in america

Id: rNDo0ZnSWX0

Length: 69min 0sec (4140 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021