Bishop Barron Presents | Sohrab Ahmari - The Wisdom of Tradition

[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 has a conversation with mr so rob amari the op-ed editor at the new york post where they discuss his latest book the unbroken thread in this conversation they discuss the great ideas of numerous thinkers including thomas aquinas saint augustine and some you might not think of such as andrea dworkin and alexander sochnitsen they get into the story of maximilian kolbe the great martyr of the nazi regime so i hope you enjoy this conversation sit back and relax all right sarah bishop it's great to have you guys here and i'm so excited about this conversation about your newest book the unbroken thread and i thought that maybe to start the conversation we could i'd ask the question about the impetus of of the book and why why now sure it's a book that's born of my anxieties as a relatively young father i began writing it when my son maximilian was two years old he's now four um and i began to have anxieties that i never did when i was you know single unmarried in my 20s working as a journalist kind of traveling around the world but suddenly you know i now have this son and i began to think about what kind of a man our uh our world will chisel out of him our culture will chisel out of him um so his name is maximilian and he's named after saint maximilian kolbe and you know on the one hand i look at his patron saint and his life which i only learned about after being received into the church in 2016. that's a longer separate story and then i thought okay there's a gap between what my culture our culture will expect of my son how it will shape him and the culture that led a franciscan friar to lay down his life for a stranger at auschwitz and i want to bridge that gap using a thread if you will hence the thread in the title and that thread is broadly speaking tradition both tradition as the church understands it with the capital t but also um other traditions from which you can draw natural wisdom whether that's you know confucius or or someone like seneca so the book um i decided to write was a series of questions that our culture doesn't ask that i think are important for my son's being able to live a truly happy life and truly fulfilling himself as a human being and what he's made for really and each one because i'm not a philosopher i'm not a theologian i'm just a journalist i'm a storyteller each one of those questions is explored through the life of one great thinker so there's a kind of mini biography but the main impotence is is basically that um you know i'm worried about my son that's great and to have the inspiration of a saint to create that thread and such a beautiful story there i i love how you lay out the book where you start off with questions um particularly about you know their their own life but then also god in particular and the lead into questions about humanity and i think maybe to start off as well as to get into in the first chapter you get into the problem of scientism and you discuss cs lewis uh particularly his space trilogy um and i know that's a big question we're always talking about the problem of scientism so maybe provide a little bit of insight into what you write in that chapter sure so because this is a book where i want to shake my son and hopefully the reader out of some of the certainties that our age takes for granted i knew i had to start with a question of science because there's science is this incredible endeavor that's that has unlocked the mysteries of physical reality for us but there is this uh ideology built around science and a set of claims that are not themselves scientific claims uh their ideological claims are philosophical claims but because they carry the prestige of natural science a lot of people think well uh you know philosophy religion metaphysics those questions have all been either answered in a definitive way by scientific inquiry or supplanted where they're not even necessary um and so that creates i think a problem because it creates two kinds of um two kinds of ideas one which is facts which is definitive you can measure it you can sense it you can express it in mathematical language and then this other provisional category of ideas opinions myths uh emotions which are don't don't don't you can't you can base you can't base your judgment uh around them ultimately because they're not scientific so i had to try to break that barrier and the best critic i think in the in the 20th century at least of this kind of scientific mindset is no better than cs lewis yeah yeah bishop what do you kind of think about especially lewis being kind of a literary form of going after this kind of issue of scientism yeah well first of all i quite agree it's maybe obstacle one as i deal with um especially younger people and trying to evangelize it's just rampant in our culture that the only legitimate form of knowledge is scientific knowledge therefore what's outside of the sciences is fantasy or superstition or something that's been you know superseded and to open up other avenues that are rational that are truth-bearing but not scientific is a is a huge priority i think in our time and so someone like lewis who you know was a philosopher as a linguist he was a philologist etc was able to show that and that a story can be truth-bearing and can actually evangelize the imagination leading to religion which is a truth-bearing reality but are not scientific but it's very hard for people i can testify to that very hard for young people to see beyond the scientific worldview and you're quite right in saying that scientism is not scientific scientism is a philosophical perspective like naturalism or materialism they don't get that though very often they just it's just the air they breathe they take it so for granted of course all there is is matter in motion of course but why would you say of course to that hardly anyone in our great tradition you know would have agreed with that claim but it's taken just so for granted but that gets in the way of evangelization massively you know can i say one quick word about maximum colby too because i love the fact that you start with him you had sent the book to me and i had begun reading it and right after that i went to saint maximilian kobe parish which is in my pastoral region here for a confirmation and i often just sort of riff on the kids names the confirmation and they were having three in that parachute took the name maximilian and so i said you know you guys know the story of colby you know they did from that parish i said i'm just reading a book right now about a man who was so taken by the strangeness of that story trying to understand that phenomenon and i said that's really worth thinking about for all of us is how do you explain him how do you explain maximilian kobe he is an anomaly if you put it in purely in terms of liberal modernity you can't understand maximilian kolbe so he opens the window he opens a window and that's what what the saints do in whatever age they tend to open a window to the transcendent you know so i love the fact that you started with him i think it's very arresting and one of the questions you asked in the book as well that goes right into this kind of picture of kolbe is our understanding of freedom that kobe provides a very different understanding of that and so what um maybe was some some insight or some enlightenment that kobe brought to you in regards to how we understand modernity and freedom and all that versus what what he provided so let me just make a general note about the book is um each of the 12 questions you know how do you justify your life which is the c.s lewis question or why should you want to take a day why should god want you to take a day off uh which is explore through the life of abraham joshua heschel to the question what is freedom which is alexander solzhenitsyn in each of these there is a common thread and that is that tradition including religious tradition but the other traditions as well the pre-modern traditions seem to impose a limit on on choice and that limit at first looks restricting which is why uh you know the modern age has shirked or sought to overcome those barriers altogether but then we explore them and you see that what looks like a barrier what looks like a limit is limit liberating and that paradoxically that the demolition of that barrier makes us less free so with social nets and what's what's uh you know what is freedom for um i mean that chapter gets at this idea that freedom is only the uh i guess moral theologians would say it's the ability to um choose from among the widest range of contraries i can choose you know what kind of shoe i wear and the goal of society as a whole is to maximize individuals ability to choose regardless of what the content of the choice is are there is you know are there is there freedom to do evil things or is it is are acts that make you less free in fact uh that you can you can choose them willingly but you're you're not made free as a result um and we see that in the life of solzhenitsyn himself and the novels and kind of historiography he wrote about the gulag where in these conditions in which the amount of freedom the amount of choice people can make in a gulag right he was this great russian dissident himself went to the it was imprisoned in the gulag system is very narrow and yet within those narrow choices you can choose to elevate yourself you can choose to ennoble yourself and your fellow prisoners or you can make choices that actually degrade you and so we see that just the ability to choose itself from a wide range of options isn't uh isn't a satisfactory account of freedom it's a it's a narrow it's a too narrow account of freedom you know the soldier needs a chapter i found extremely interesting because i remembered that speech wasn't 1976 when he gave a speech at harvard 78 78 so i i would have been 18 at the time and so you're right after the bicentennial of our country right in 1976 and i remember solanitan giving that talk and there was a natural affection for him it's like here's this guy had been a prisoner for all these years and you know of course there's the great soldier needs him and he appears at harvard looking for all the world like a hebrew prophet i mean with the long beard and you know the grave manner and he's got that that it was like a wrinkle carved in his forehead you know and so people were oh how wonderful but then he gives this speech that was a sharply critical of of the west you know and i remember the negative reaction to it i remember in the in the press and who does this guy think he is you know we gave him freedom and then he gets up here and slaps us in the face and but that's what makes it so powerful isn't it is this very very clear critic of of communism obviously but then you know also a critic i'm not gonna say maybe in the same level but also a critic of of western liberalism that was proposing such an open-ended understanding of freedom uh that it loses its way and then it's it's someone like survey pink hairs you know that we study a lot about the the freedom of indifference versus the freedom for excellence and that's the distinction modernity following prompts from i'd say william of occam and then the great nominalist tradition opts for freedom of indifference you know so i got all these as you say all these choices and not just you know yes or no it's a whole range of options and here i am sovereignly hovering above them and i can say that's the one for me but that's not what classical people meant by freedom at all they would have meant freedom from my various attachments so i can be free for what's truly good i can be liberated from my own sinfulness my own limitations moral limitations so that i can be properly limited if you want i can i can find the right context for my life but we have lost a sense of that i think we have lost that in our culture and we're we're beguiled by the freedom of indifference and we want just to expand it as much as possible let's say more and more and more choices you know how often the language of choice right dominates our discourse it just damage our discourse increase my choice don't limit my choice but that's not classical freedom at all and sultan easton was indeed like a like a hebrew prophet or maybe maybe a russian orthodox you know prophet speaking that truth to our culture and when he you know the shocking line that really scandalized his western audience is if i were asked if i would propose your society such as it exists now for the liberation of my people meaning uh russians trapped behind the iron curtain i would have to say no if you imagine in 1978 i was not born then i'm uh i was born in 1985 but in that atmosphere how shocking it would be for you know someone who as he wrote i was expected to just come and sing the immigrants owed to the great atlantic fortress of liberty and then he says no i have some i have some criticisms um and it really unsettled his reception in the west ever after i mean he was he's a crank he's a theocrat yeah he's a would-be dictator so forth yeah oh yeah yeah it kind of displays an understanding of freedom in regard to hierarchy that there's a transcendent freedom of spiritual freedom that is much more important than even physical freedom that goes which back to kobe that he just says that very clearly with his life but speaking also of freedom and the intellectual life to to get back maybe to the second chapter when you talk about aquinas um i always think about when we're talking about freedom the the chesterton analogy when he talks about children that there's a fence uh that that the children are more free when the fence exists on the playground versus not then they're closer to the building so when i think about you know reason theology these things there's there's the limitations or the the refereeing that occurs there but i i appreciate how you take it from scientism into faith and reason to show how they actually correlate very well let's maybe extrapolate a little bit about that that chapter in particular yeah i sort of hesitate sitting next to a tone and here i am a tabloid editor but uh um no i mean i look uh that chapter uh is also there's there's a touch there which is in the footnotes but not um in the actual explicit in the text of the chapter which is um uh maybe the readers won't detect it but it's a big touch of um um uh pope benedict's uh uh regensburg address in that chapter which really um because i come from a uh from an islamic background i'm obviously my family was super secular and i was never really a deeply believing muslim but uh the regensburg address tried to address why is it that um you know islam christianity and the secular west are all both in tension with each other and and ultimately i mean he pointed to a god a god of the bible who is whose reason itself who is logos itself and um uh to me the the one son of the church above all who took that idea to its absolute fullness in explicating it is is uh is saint thomas boy there's a lot there it's very rich and i'm thinking the link between let's say solzhenitsyn at harvard 1978 and benedict the 16th in regensburg whatever year that was 20 year old 2006 six similar because you've also got a prophetic utterance there what he was drawing attention to was the tradition of volunteerism within islam so let's say a stress upon the divine will and divine power over the divine mind and then the christian the biblical tradition which stresses logos and reason and the coming together of logos and will and god right that was the point he was making and of course it got sidetracked by a lot of the other you know concerns but that was the argument he was making and so the same complaint he has against the nominalists and as they give rise to the reformers and therefore i would say to much of modernity because modernity is a reaction against god construed as sheer power sheer arbitrary will and so you're quite right the aquinas tradition that stresses logos and reason is a bulwark against volunteerism and i've said over the years maybe it's the greatest um bacillus that gets into the system is volunteerism the other thing about aquinas i think is so helpful is very beginning of the sumo when he he asked the question why do we need divine science beyond the philosophical sciences and the objector says you know very reasonably well look the philosophical sciences can tell us so much about god exists and all his attributes and so on but thomas's answer to that objection is yes but we have a desire for a good that goes beyond whatever reason can attain or the will can attain and so we are ordered if you will by nature to a supernatural end and so therefore it's only the god who addresses us out of the beguiling mystery beyond reason that can possibly satisfy the longing of the heart it's a very interesting argument because it's giving full weight to reason it's going all the way with reason but acknowledging at the limit of reason we're just getting started it's like that's when the human spirit goes yeah but now that what i want is the good and the truth beyond these limits that i've come to i think that's very rich stuff and needs to be recovered you know bishop speaking of aquinas um and surah mentions this briefly in that chapter is the the issue of nominalism you just mentioned volunteerism i find it really fascinating that a lot of the issues we're dealing with in modernity are theological issues that we've been dealing with for for centuries yes absolutely there was a breakdown of a vision that thomas would have taken for granted call it the analogical conception of being right that god is ipsum essay god is the sheer act of to be itself in and through which all creaturely existence abides that gives you a very different view of the world than god as a kind of detached supreme being than all the other beings of of creation they're now kind of competing for space on the same ontological playing field ipsum essay is not in competition with his creatures he can't be right the glory of god therefore is a human being fully alive what happens i think when with the nominalist view the breakdown of the ipsum essay analogical conception what you get is a is a competitive view of the relation between creatures and god and then one more step into the reformers who are very much shaped by nominalistic philosophy to give god all the glory i need to get no glory right if god gets everything i actually get nothing so it's you know it's by grace alone it's by god's revelation alone and so the idea of of our kind of cooperation with grace that that god wants us fully alive and all that that begins to break down now next step modernity reacting against that well i don't want that i don't want this god that's that's brooding over my freedom and god that's determining what i'm going to do and so i'm going to now assert myself over and against that competitive god now welcome to karl marx and ludwig feuerbach and so i mean that's how i tend to see the trajectory there from even late medieval nominalism right through the performers into modernity into the atheist movement now i'm speaking as atomists bring back thomas aquinas bring back that vision and we overcome a lot of these these obstacles it was one of the great insights of richard weaver that understood that in his book ideas have consequences that anomalism was the beginning of the problems of of modernity yes in many ways yeah and it's the breakdown of a particular metaphysical view see i mean metaphysics and you're good on this always haunts us i mean you can deny metaphysics all you want but everyone's got a metaphysical view you know it might be materialism but that's a metaphysical view and everything else flows from that everything's downstream from your metaphysics so when we change the the mystic um and i would bring that all the way back to augustine and irenaeus you change that metaphysics into the competitive metaphysics of the nominalists trouble um ensues yeah and one of the the losses that occurs that is actually in the next chapter as well or i think a little bit later in the book perhaps uh is the the loss of sabbath i really really appreciated the insights on that so maybe maybe provide a little bit of um what that chapter was about and um why that loss is such a not just a cultural loss but uh spiritual metaphysical numerous other aspects of the laws yeah sure i mean the question is why would god want you to take a day off and that's it's an especially pertinent question today because uh something like uh you know 20 percent of americans uh uh consider and a growing share of americans consider themselves to be nuns many of them might have religious inclinations or spiritual inclinations but they don't get things like sabbath restrictions so i begin with the fact that in 2019 north dakota became the state that abolished the last statewide blue law that had been around since the 19th century um and it is a good question i mean in our day we uh you know we were liberated by uh cell phones we're liberated by the nature of work has become a lot more fluid so why would we need this one day off where you spend time with family and spend time with god in a secular society and i tell the story of rabbi abraham joshua heschel great mid-century jewish intellectual um and an influence on on uh the church's uh nostradate declaration um he was born uh into the hasidic world in in in poland where uh the sabbath obviously was the centerpiece of life and he again to go back to this paradox that something that looks like a restriction is actually a source of liberation he always emphasized the sabbath as a source of interior freedom that for one day a week we set aside the acquisitiveness the clamor of commerce the competition with other human beings and we um leave what he called the realm of space which is where most of modernity takes place geopolitical contests economic competition and enter what he called the realm of time which you can find in the sabbath and it's the realm of time in the sense that it it is the place this place is a weird way to talk about it but where you are reminded of god the only non-contingent eternal being and you get to spend time with him um and i think that's that sabbath vision is still i mean uh important for for christians as well i mean see our the day we sanctify is shifted but the idea that um that you hallow the non-work of other human beings is not only good from a spiritual point of view but it also turns out to be good from a temporal point of view because the sabbathless world we've built especially for working-class people is is not a is not a good world it's i mean we destroyed the sabbath in the name of of a kind of liberty we squeezed out the sat liberty of the sabbath for the liberty of the market and you have situations in which the way large companies schedule work leaves no room for people to go to baseball games for people to spend the day with family and then we wonder why do we have such high divorce rates or such lower rates of family formation so in the chapter and in the book i argue that we should try to restore blue laws which is kind of maybe shocking and a lot of because i'm a man of the right and you know i'm in the kind of conservative world a lot of my conservative critics would say that's authoritarian or that's kind of it's a it's a it's a an undue imposition on on freedom but if you're thinking about it i mean we had we had these laws going back to the colonial era from protestant tradition that this country has as part of its dna in in colonial virginia even not just in puritanical new england but even in colonial virginia we had sabbatarianism in new amsterdam the dutch imposed sabbath laws and uh this idea was deeply engrained in the american spirit it was only the past three four generations that they began to chip away slowly at the freedom of the sabbath in the name of the freedom of the market that i think ultimately has not served us well yeah you know i'll say something about that jared because it happened in my lifetime what you're talking about i remember distinctly as a kid so go back to the 1960s society was all together different on sunday it was all together different uh my mother would say to my father like on saturday night oh johnny better go get the gas in the car now you know because we got to go somewhere and there's no gas station open stores weren't open uh theaters weren't open and there was something really valuable about that and we lost it in my lifetime i remember it happened gradually but then eventually it was like the berlin wall falling it just suddenly everything was open on sunday sunday was another saturday uh when i was a kid you'd never think of we didn't have games on sunday we didn't have practice on sunday sports um i remember when my nephew was a little guy maybe like 10 years old and uh he had a basketball game and it was on a sunday morning so i had mass i remember the parish and then he invited me i went to the game it was it was a catholic league and the coach was a catholic so after the game my nephew brought me up and i said coach thanks y'all enjoyed the game and i said but why do you have these boys playing on sunday morning and he looked at me like i don't know what you're talking about you know but that's not a healthy development in our culture and of course you see it with all the nuns right the no nes those who have just forgotten what religious practice looks like religion might be a little private hobby you have or a private conviction but the idea that you ground it in certain practices it would look like something would show up your body would be involved both space and time would be affected et cetera that's lost for a lot of people but once that's gone it's like pulling the plants out of the ground i mean they're just going to wither away and so all the great fruits of religion you know and morality and social cohesion and all that that begins to be compromised for sure and you're dead right especially about the sabbath and reclaiming the lord's day you know keep holy the sabbath is one of the most fundamental commandments of our biblical tradition that's not a trivial matter and that's a really key matter and i remember reading nashville the first time when i was a young guy and read this book on the prophets and his book on the sabbath and found that very powerful so i'm glad you're recovering him you know but it's much needed and reminded a lot of the work of joseph peeper yeah in regards to when you lose worship you the next step is often leisure and we think of leisure we tend to think well if it's not creating some kind of economic opportunity for me or if it's not increasing my income then what's the point whereas the the truly christian thing uh is within that area of worship you have the worship of god but then you also have active leisure of the the active mind growing and we tend not to value that very much in our commercial society the the freedom to worship and the freedom to to sanctify the sabbath prefigures political freedom cardinal then cardinal ratzinger um writes right in in the exodus account god doesn't ask pharaoh through through through moses let my people go so they can have their own country he says let my people go so they can serve me um and then comes the political liberation of of israel yeah and that's really interesting as well getting into um the understanding of ritual and then the need for that especially in regard to worship and in your chapter on can you be spiritual but not religious um i thought i'd you know really love to hear from you on that insight of the couple that went to africa and found out about this kind of ritual ideal that they found there so the couple are victor and edith turner um victor was a was an anthropologist a marxist the card-carrying communist in britain in the post-war era and he he married this woman and she was equally committed to the same things you know marxist uh nietzsche and and and generally uh very secular but he had an academic interest in anthropology initially and in in rites of passage as an anthropologist why is it that um traditional societies mark the transition from for example uh boyhood to manhood with these elaborate ceremonies often involving grueling kind of tests for the young young men um and whereas in in the west a you know boyhood just sort of bled into adulthood in the modern west so he goes to africa and he embeds for um two and a half years in total with a with a tribe called the dembu in central south africa and i mean it's to make a long story short he begins to see that things happen in traditional african ritual there are problems solved intractable conflicts resolved through their practice of ritual that you couldn't do anywhere and anyhow else and so by the time he comes back as edith turner put it you know we were we were looking for something of that trans sense of transcendence we found in tribal africa and we found it in the roman catholic church so they both converted uh as a result of their tribal experience which is a very fascinating story but what we know the turner's for is this theory of of liminality of what happens when people perform ritual and it means that we leave our traditional hierarchical roles in society and enter this mysterious space and in that mysterious space all sorts of interesting things happen so for example the chieftain among the nadembu before he becomes the chieftain becomes liminal and what that means is that the other villagers get to insult him they get to say the worst things about him mock him and he's supposed to take it and not hold it against them once he's installed as the chief so in the ritual he learns that although he's the leader he's really the servant of his community and explicitly the turner said that reminded me of the of the roman pontiff's role as a servant of the servants of god um and um there's nowhere else in our society where some of these things could happen so the loss of ritual religion has not only left us with i think kind of impoverished kind of spirituality because it's privatized well i can do dead sea salt baths and i can meditate in a general way but also we've lost this ability to connect with our human beings at a level of human kindness as the as the turners use the term yeah so it's so rich and that chapter i especially like because i didn't know that story about them but i resonate completely with your idea there about ritual a lot of my life as a as a priest and a bishop is about ritual and if you're a pure rationalist or you're let's say you're a commercialist you know your life is all about just it's commerce and organizing things rationally ritual seems silly you know so i get dressed up in these sort of fancy clothes and i perform these prescribed you know movements and gestures thomas merton said long ago uh when he was asked about the catholic mass is pre-conciliar he said it's like a ballet with certain prescribed gestures and and moves uh but it seems silly to a purely rational consciousness but when you're in touch with that beguiling mystery we talked about that lies beyond reason that's how people have always enacted their relationship to that mystery is by means of these repeated and usually communally shared but also hierarchically ordered gestures and movements um but a rationalism will just look at that as as a waste of time it's just silly you know but that you take an entire day you take a sabbath day for example and say at the heart of that sabbath day is this great enactment this this beautiful playful in the aristotelian sense this sort of useless of enactment but when that's lost the the culture loses its very heart you know and um that's also the the cut flowers thing you know if you take spirituality as people say today but you you pull it out of the ground of ritual pulled out of the ground of sabbath acknowledgement it's going to fade away and that's happening now we see it all the time it's happening in our culture is things like moral conviction things like social cohesiveness and so on will fade away because a lot of it does depend upon ritual consciousness so um it's an impoverished civilization that's forgotten about about ritual or they would see it as something you know primitive and that would probably be the condescending way a lot of their colleagues would have seen it like oh that nice go to this primitive culture and they're still doing these little funny things but that ain't primitive i mean that's that's as as psychologically and spiritually sophisticated as you can get is the enactment of ritual um so i quite agree that's part of that thread that we need to recover you know yeah one thing about ritual as well is that um it it fights this autonomy that we are currently dealing with today also it fights a radical egalitarianism but there still is a mode of hierarchical order um but at the same time it still appreciates the individual so in the work of leonard sachs who got into a lot of this same same theories uh he talks about young men coming into manhood and how it was about them finding out about themselves in order to serve the community um and so if we're looking for a humanitarian need as a community it seems to me that ritual would be one of the great ways to do it i quite agree with someone like richard rohr that says we have a whole country full of uninitiated especially young men so they they've lost that sense of as you're saying an initiation ritual or some process by which you move into relationship with your family with your wider community with nature ultimately with god that was the trajectory of those initiation rituals among primal peoples you got a whole nation filled with uninitiated boys then they remain boys they have the preoccupation of boys even though they're 35 or 40 years old and that's a major problem uh i think look around our country see lots of examples of that of uninitiated people who have not they've not been ritually drawn into a relationship with these higher realities and then they get the sense of service you know it's a humility before nature for example a humility before your own community and that your job is to contribute to their enhancement and then finally humility before god and that your life is lived in relation to god and god's will but you lose all that you don't have rituals for that you never enact any of that you get a lot of 45 year old boys running around and that's not good so to very briefly go back to my maximilian my maximilian the one for whom this book was written um that's the anxiety in other words i tell the story of maximilian kolbe his patron saint fully adult in in fully free in a christian sense and then i flash forward to my son imagining him as a you know just out of college and then a little later in his 40s and it's not like he's going to be i think you know knock on wood economically he'll be fine he'll probably go to an elite school but it's that permanent boyhood that i worry about in the introduction that he you know he's dating this young woman and they've been doing it for 10 years but he he can't be encumbered by her so he won't settle down you know and he uh his his idea of of of time uh spent in leisure is video games even as an adult you know that's that's worrisome for me and so um and and ritual does so much to say you are an adult now you are a man yes or a woman did you you know i might scandalize my my viewers here but i love the movie fight club because fight club is about a lot of this you know and uh that line it was it was brad pitt right who says we're we're a bunch of 30 year old boys and but what you see in that movie is what can happen to especially masculine energy when it's not properly directed but also their weird attempt to find ritual they were trying to find religion but in this odd dysfunctional way that movie's very prophetic it seems to me of what goes wrong especially with young men and the danger of it uh you're you're unleashing some some real furies when you don't initiate young men properly and rituals got a lot to do with it yeah i think with chris men and and women whenever they aren't properly initiated into a community there's an existential angst because they don't know who they are in regard to other human beings regarding themselves um and i think one of the uh insights also in this book that in regards to this it's also what we've done with with sax um and i thought in particular the the kind of surprising figure to me was was andrea deworkin yeah um and so maybe extrapolate a little bit about why her in particular and then what insight did she have and how we treat uh sex well i think because she was one of the first to notice that we live in a kind of sexually schizophrenic age and the schizophrenia since she i mean she she died a few years ago but that schizophrenia has has heightened ever since then yeah because on the one hand you know we are constantly told to think of sex as something totally private just enjoyable and you should uh you know seek your partner's consent and be healthy and use contraception but otherwise you could do whatever yeah right and it's a perfectly private thing with no wider social ramifications in other words what we do in the bedroom does not ripple out into how we structure our community on the other hand we also living in an age of me too where we see that uh that liberated ethic as it turned out has empowered a lot of caddish and horrible men you know harvey weinstein's and and and and so forth and so and we're caught between the two how what do we do with the second one well we can't rethink the sexual liberationism because that's sacred that's a fundamental liberal commitment so we have to we have to set up these drastic after the fact punishment mechanisms and if some men are even falsely accused then so be it um and so i think i think andrea d'orkin who was a radical feminist you know really important figure in the 1980s and uniquely in that time she was anti-pornography unlike a lot of the rest of the uh feminist movement she was anti-prostitution whereas the feminist movement defined herself in some ways against her by creating something called sex positive feminism where the idea was it doesn't matter if these things seem degrading as long as women take charge of it and she thought no the thing itself is degrading and so there's no way to to redeem something like pornography so she i think has insights that um you know people of tradition probably understood um should listen to the only problem is that what what armory she had against the degradations she denounced was lacking ultimately she came to conclude that you know men are irreformable and we're just going to live in a sexually horrible world and she dismissed natural law she dismissed traditional barriers that you know traditional communities created between men and women so at least try to regulate lust she didn't she didn't have any patience for all of that and saw it all as passe so that's her shortcoming but in her diagnosis i argue uh you know she in some ways she was much more like a saint augustine where he you know said augustine uh there's a famous bit in in city of god where he describes the uh roman um the night of a wedding of a roman bridegroom and all the gods have to be there to to hold down the woman essentially so that the groom can again uh have sex with her and and saint augustine recognizes the vulnerability and and the kind of challenge the woman that what she's going through there that there's something uncomfortable that and she he argues that that has wider public ramification that the lust for domination in that bedroom scene ripples out to the lust for domination of of the roman empire of pagan rome um so in that sense i argue after a great augustinian scholar john cavadini that that in some ways dorkan was a misunderstood augustinian it's a provocative claim but i think it's persuasive does she actually use that phrase libido dominant if she uses the augustinian because i found that fascinating i didn't know her well at all i knew the name maybe andre dworkin but i wasn't very intrigued by the chapter and uh because i remember during the me too movement i kept thinking yeah if people follow the church's teaching on sexuality we wouldn't have this problem what people are complaining about is precisely an abusive objectification of of another human being not uh coupling sex with with love and with commitment and devotion yeah it's called classical catholic sexual morality that's what we should be doing and the complaint was was arising from a culture that said what you just described you know no no sex is just for your your pleasure and and then someone like like harvey weinstein you know talking about libido dominant if you're in that position to dominate someone sure and then they it it ripples out from the particular to the universal because augustine would have said the roman gods and goddesses demonstrated the libido dominante and so you become what you worship if that's that's what you think is the highest value well then sure the roman emperor the roman imperium it's all about you know dominating those around you and if that's true well then it trickles down into the private realm so yeah putting your finger on that problem and then then you turn to the new testament and we have an image of a crucified man you know um you turn to maximilian colby it's not libido dominant it's the it's the desire to give oneself you know uh that's of enormous societal implication you know and so you are what you worship what's the central value of your culture and if she's putting her finger you know on this problem that sexuality is so central to us i think of you know sexual freedom i think for our culture today maybe that's the one great value don't limit my sexuality in any way i have complete liberty in that um but if if sexuality is is just a place where the libido dominant is expressed then it's fallen it's fallen and it'll have implications way beyond itself so i found that very intriguing too the way you played with that theme and one of the uh other chapters as well that gets into this understanding of freedom that also includes certain limitations or certain kind of referees if you will is newman's understanding of conscience and and authority and i thought that's really interesting especially in regards to this this problem of sexual freedom because in many ways the conscience was the thing that kind of regulated certain sexual activity and what we've done is removed that and replaced it with will and desire right um and so but at the same time newman still appreciates free thinking and and the conscience and the beauty of it um but uh why in particular maybe newman and and the idea of conscience well um we live in a world which was nascent when um st john henry newman was active but now is now taken for granted and it's a world in which conscience and authority are treated as enemies i want my conscience to be free to be able to exercise my conscience on the moral dilemmas that life throws my way and i shouldn't be encumbered or i shouldn't be imposed upon by external authorities and it's the worst thing not to be able to think for myself in that sense so in the 19th century um in britain this challenge was po this very idea was used against roman catholics in britain um and the occasion was the the declaration of the first vatican council defining the doctrine of papal infallibility and the reaction came in the form of of uh william gladstone the great liberal prime minister and he he accused catholics of essentially losing their mental freedom as a result of the papal declaration because the pope had said that when he speaks about faith and morals under certain strict conditions then his uh rulings or decrees are infallibly binding on the minds of of catholics and he said catholics are now british catholics are now subject to a kind of uh mental slavery john henry newman comes around and he says that the idea of conscience that you have mr gladstone is not what the 18th century prior 18th centuries prior to it thought of as conscience conscience was conscience insofar as it reflected an objective moral law so it was the sort of the the channel or the vessel for some objective norm that was embedded in him in the human heart and so if that's conscience in some ways true authority is its friend because that authority also reflects the same voice especially in this case papal authority so the pope wouldn't attack true freedom of conscience because if he did that he would be undercutting his own authority it's a brilliant argument and ultimately i mean i would argue in that exchange of polemics john henry newman who's the far better polemicist even though he's very gentle about how he does this um one out but i think in the world at large i think we live in the world that gladstone built in which conscience and authority are treated as though their enemies rather than allies and friends oh and that speaks of course to our uh different understanding of freedom so freedom of indifference then right conscience authority or the problem but freedom for excellence no conscience and authority are my friends they they guide my freedom but you know it always strikes me as as funny i want to say give me a break you know in the in the wider culture today oh i'm for freedom i just i do whatever i want i set the tone come on i mean look at a lot of young people in our culture they all dress alike they talk alike they follow the prompts of the pop stars they do exactly what's expected and demanded of them how many are really exhibiting like oh this you know heroic freedom come on most of them are are following an authority but it might just be from a pop star it might be from politicians or from the you know the voices of the of the culture or from their own friends so the claim that oh no we religious people are you know we're beholden to this external authority i mean everyone's got an authority everyone's freedom when you really get down to it is guided by something the question is well is it something good or something bad and if you're bound to a true authority that reflects the the voice of that interior um aware of your own interior awareness of a universal moral law then you're actually much less likely to be pulled around or swayed by this advertiser that fake news meme this demagogue you're actually you're someone who's grounded to authority or bound to an authority has a kind of steadiness i think and you could stand up to a nazi guard with a gun and say i'm i'm going to give my life for this i'll take him you can be maximilian kobe who's the freest man in europe you know in that day but no that's a that's a lesson worth teaching over and over again to our culture yeah and from there i think it's a very poignant uh ending to the book that you bring up seneca and the idea of death which is i mean especially in light of our reaction to covet we've we really don't want to think about it we want to avoid it at all at all costs so why in particular you know as this is advice to to your your son why in particular seneca's view so no one has in the history of i think western thought given more attention to the question of death than the roman philosopher seneca seneca the younger or just seneca and um to be very clear and people point this out about the book the traditions represented in the book in this book don't speak univocally in other words there are there are tensions we'll get to seneca's views uh in depth but clearly he and augustine would have disagreed about suicide seneca was far too quick to say well if you you know if you're in a tough situation be willing to just take your life in a way that obviously in the city of god augustine prescribes or condemns but nevertheless i think there's something we can learn from a seneca in terms of recognizing even as christians who view death as a as an unfortunate thing inscribed in human nature by our first ancestors sin nevertheless it's a reality and being able to accept it in the right place is is another good limit to submit to and the contrary view that you should try to hold on to life as much as possible uh in an irrational way including now by you know by technological means where you know we're trying to look at how uh altering genomes and so forth can extend the human lifespan seneca writing in the in the first century a.d he saw these things coming in some ways i mean he saw his fellow fellow romans just holding on to life i think at the price of any indignity and he said you're not actually living well because you live in such such fear of death um and he you know i mean he he had he had a respiratory illness that constantly choked him up and when it happened it felt like he was dying and this kind of made him comfortable with death in a way because he tested it daily or it tested him daily and it taught him to to think of death as you know in some situations as a source of liberation when you're faced with committing grave sins just to hold on to your life um better to better to not do that um and it gives you a kind of sense of solidarity with your fellow human beings and i mean as he was an advisor to nero he was a senator under caligula in all these situations he worked from the for the common good out of this sense that we're all in this march toward death together and it it's foolish for any one person to try to march the other way and insist that they can run away from from natural death remember the lion from uh a good man's hard to find when the misfit says about the grandmother whom he's just killed yeah she would have been a good woman there's just been someone to hold a gun against her head every moment of her life you know there's something about the knowledge of death and flannery o'connor the author of that story uh had lupus and she knew she was gonna die young which indeed she did she did have a gun against her head every moment of her life and that opens something up you know the only thing i thought of i'll tell you it's sorry i want to give the name but pretty well-known um tv person out here i was at a gathering here in santa barbara and there was this well-known figure and we found a conversation and he was doing just what you said he said you know the technology and i think i could live to be 125 you know and if i do this that i said oh my god why would you want to like that and he looked at me with complete incomprehension like what do you mean if i could of course i would and i said i don't know as though this life is it this is it and just to make this as long as we possibly can that can't be it there's something that stretches beyond this life and there's a higher but it was just it was opaque to him and it was just let's make this life as long as we possibly can hold off death as long as you possibly can and that's a different uh metaphysic isn't it well and seneca says and he's a beautiful line he says you know you've tasted wine you've tasted mead you know what oysters taste like you know what uh uh delicacies like mushrooms taste like and yet these are the things for the sake of which you hold on to life in a base and degraded manner and live fearfully how much more wine you know life gets it's boring and and like a good story it should have a beginning middle and an end and it's the possibility of an end that gives life to the it gives meaning to the part uh that's the life part um it's a possibility of a of a story without stakes is a boring story the story has to have a stake in in in it's in relation to death that the sacrifice of the maximilian colby really stands out if you don't have death as this end at least for natural life uh uh life gets boring it becomes plastic i think yeah that's one of the interesting insights of the martyrs that they they really one of the great fears of all human life is death yeah they embrace it like a friend they they they're not fearful of it which talking about freedom that's a whole another level of freedom that even death itself we're not fearful of um and we only have a few more minutes here but um and i always like to kind of end these on some understanding of maybe prescription what we what do we do we've talked a lot about some of the issues going on um maybe sorry but we'll start with you on what advice would you give for people who find themselves in a similar position or maybe some insight came from this conversation that they really want to either dive a little bit deeper and then also some understanding of as catholics as christians what do these insights offer in regard to evangelization i i would say first of all as catholics we can stand comfortably in relation to these other traditions you know c.s lewis was a protestant uh abraham heschel was a hasidic rabbi andrea d'orkin was a a radical left-wing feminist confucius confucius which we didn't talk about is is is kind of pagan chinese but that because our god is a is a reasonable god to go back to the aquinas question um we we have a lot of scope and natural reason to learn about the other about and from other traditions but for me ultimately i mean and i end the book with a letter to my son where at the end of the day i i say i hope that you consult in all your major life decisions sound authorities above all that of that of holy church that it's the church's teaching and its wisdom and its magisterium its capital t tradition um incorporates so much of this so in a way this is a story-driven way to find a lot of insights that you'll also find in the catechism of the catholic church the 1992 document which is a beautiful document and and um it's such a joy to read for the kind of document that it is so i you know i i guess it i hope as a as a as a writer as a father i hope that the book prompts people to dig into these traditions but ultimately within within the framework of the church which gives a much more systematic account and corrects for the errors of a seneca the church fathers largely praised seneca but still on the question of suicide for example we have to part ways with him and i want to be very clear about the book that there are points of tension between what we catholics believe and what some of the figures profiled in this book believed that's a good question jared i'm kind of trying to think it through um i'll first say this i can't think of anything more boring than sheer freedom you know so what's proposed as the great goal of everything to be free ho hum i mean i'm just sort of this aimless what do i do who am i i'll decide i mean i'll decide what do i know what's exciting is when you intuit objective values so at the at the epistemic level at the moral level at the aesthetic level when you you see these great values and you're introduced to them and now you go on this great adventure of exploring these values and that's what a book like yours does for i think for a lot of people open up these worlds of meaning and so on but then i'd add this it's never a dead traditionalism you know like okay i'm just gonna simply you know repeat what i've already heard no now is the invitation to real adventure so get past this boring pure freedom stuff and this nietzsche and self-invention bore me to death with that but having been introduced to the world of values now you got a role to play now you don't just you're not going to a museum looking around at oh look at these wonderful things now you become an artist with your own life you become a poet you become a spiritual adventurer you become your own version of maximilian kobe so it's not a dead traditionalism it's a exciting spiritual adventure you're on a high adventure in the spiritual life but it's grounded in the great tradition and it's not just this vapid boring freedom it's a it's the real freedom that the tradition opens up so that's the space i think to move into you know somewhere between boring modern freedom and then a dead traditionalism is this exciting it's like when a kid i'm learning baseball and i watched the great players of that time long before your time and you were in iran anyway you wouldn't have known the problem but you know i'm watching these great but then the fun of it was now i get to play i get to play and i'm not as good as people but who cares i i was able to play in my own way and so on and that's what the spiritual life is like in the moral life so that's my little exo i suppose oh that's wonderful this has been a terrific conversation and so rob thank you so much for joining us and bishop baron as always thank you so much and everyone watching at home i hope you enjoyed i'm dr anthony pagliarini i'm doctor university i'm christopher kaiser professor and i'm stacy trisankos todd warner author i'm an internal medicine father steven gadberry well a very special greeting to all the members of the 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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Id: t5iH47eB5fI

Length: 60min 43sec (3643 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I'm glad Bishop Barron likes doing his speaking engagements and all, but it sure would be nice to have him be a little more active here at home. You know, where he's supposed to be our Bishop and all.

[u/[deleted]]

Nice watching rn