Christianity and the Modern World: Bishop Barron | Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

hello if you have found the ideas i discussed interesting and useful perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book beyond order 12 more rules for life available from penguin random house in print or audio format you could use the links we provide below or buy through amazon or at your local bookstore this new book beyond order provides what i hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical beyond order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that i developed in my previous books 12 rules for life and before that maps of meaning thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast [Music] hello everyone i have the pleasure today of speaking with bishop robert barron we've spoken before on youtube but felt that it was worthwhile doing so again it's been a long time and many people have reached out to both of us continually asking us to converse and so we felt that that would be um useful and something at least in principle of of public interest bishop baron is the founder of word on fire catholic ministries and auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of los angeles he's a number one amazon best-selling author and has published numerous books essays and articles on theology and the spiritual life he has been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of facebook google and amazon and is one of the most followed catholics in the world on social media thanks for agreeing to talk with me again and i'm looking forward to this conversation yeah my pleasure jordan great to see you too so why do you think that people have written to you and to me suggesting that we converse what's your take on this it's surprising to me in some sense because it's it's not really my bailiwick you know although obviously i've been putting my nose in there anyways i think for a number of reasons people see the work you do as at least opening a door to the religious dimension of life for a deeper dimension of life i'll tell you a story i got up in front of the bishops of the united states because i was chairman of our committee on evangelization and i talked about why we're losing a lot of young people i went through some of the statistics and then reasons why we're losing them and then i gave various signs of hope and one of the signs of hope i gave was i called it the jordan peterson phenomenon and what i meant was this i told the bishops here's this gentleman gets up in a pretty non-histrionic way and speaks for several hours in some cases about the bible and young people all over the english-speaking world are listening to them in theaters and they're by their millions on youtube and i said you know i'm not here to endorse everything that jordan peterson is saying but i think that in itself is a sign of hope and so that became a source of some conversation among the bishops but i do think it's a sign of hope and i said to them and it's really in some ways to our shame that you are making the bible more compelling and appealing in many ways than we were so that's our that's our bailiwick that's our profession as the bible but you were opening the bible up in a way that young people especially were finding very compelling and you were indeed i think thereby opening a door toward a you know a richer and fuller understanding of the scriptures i think that's part of it but i also think it's the opening to the realm of objective value so i think as i read you and listen to you you talk a lot about uh the the objective realm of value that's not simply a matter of my subjective whim that you know i'll decide what to do or i make up my values as i go along but there's something about the tradition something about what's been given to us an objectivity to moral value aesthetic value intellectual value and see to me that's i mean it's a good way a gateway drug to religion because god i would say is the ground and the source of objective value and when you sort of hyper-subjectivize the whole operation that becomes you know questionable so i think your work there too has has sort of primed the pump for a deeper exploration of god as the source of these objective values there's a couple thoughts i'd have about it but i remember it's almost as if we need a third category um subjective objective and something else that that is a an admixture of both i mean there's things i come across information in the biological sciences particularly that speak deeply of an intrinsic morality and you see this you can look at the work of franz duvall for example who's a dutch primatologist and he's been studying the social interactions of chimpanzees and chimpanzees share a tremendous genetic overlap with human beings and from an evolutionary perspective we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees something like seven million years ago our cultures also share or our biology also shares uh properties with that of bonnabel's but i'm going to talk about the chimps for now um dewalt has been interested in what makes a chimp leader so chimps organize their societies essentially in patriarchal fashion the top chimp is male that doesn't mean there aren't high status females there are but the fundamental power structure appears let's say patriarchal and it's in the popular eye it's easy to assume that the top chimp is the the the most physically intimidating but that's actually not the case what dewal has shown was that is that alpha chimps who maintain stable sovereignty let's say are more engaged in reciprocal interactions than all the other chimps in the troop so they're very generous and reciprocal they play fair now you can get the odd situation where a chimp troop will be ruled by a tyrant but the structure becomes unstable and the tyrant chimp tends to be overthrown by coalitions of other male chimps torn to pieces and so and so then if you think well maybe there is a pattern that constitutes this is the crucial issue as far as i'm concerned is is there a pattern of behavior that typifies stable sovereignty and i think that's in some sense the fundamental religious question is there a pattern of behavior that constitutes stable sovereignty and if so what does it consist of yak pancep has looked at rat behavior and rats juvenile male rats engage in rough and tumble play and when you pair them together if one rat is 10 bigger than the other he can dominate the lesser rat and so they do that and they establish their relative dominance and then if you repeatedly pair them together which is a crucial issue it has to be repeated pairings the lesser rat has to invite the dominant rat to play so that's his role in the larger rat agrees and plays but if the larger rat doesn't let the little rat win 30 of the time across repeated play bouts the little rat will stop playing and what i read that it just blew me away it's so significant because it shows imagine that part of what morality is it's morality is precisely that pattern of behavior that serves to keep repeated interactions going and those repeated interactions might be across days or weeks or months or years or decades or centuries or eons tremendously long time span and so what you get is the emergence of a pattern of behavior that's stable for the individual and stable for society and that as that's instantiated more and more deeply it becomes something we can observe and something that we adapt to and something that then becomes part of our central nature and for me that's the way into the that's the bridge between biology and religion right there and because there it looks like there's an evolved ethic that even goes beyond human beings yeah no i wouldn't deny for a second there's a biological ground for a lot of this business and i'm with lonergan the great canadian philosopher that the condition for the possibility of real objectivity is a properly constituted subjectivity so i like your opening comment about something that bridges the two uh we don't just live in you know the subjective and objective as though they're discreet but it's a properly constituted subjectivity which means one free of various prejudices one free of various fears one free of games of self-denial and all that that can properly intuit the objective value and objective value does indeed come up out of the physical to some degree i mean we're we're embodied uh creatures so the biological plays a role in that for sure but i think too it goes beyond it i mean it goes beyond simply a question of of survival of the individual or even of the species but certain values you know of the truth and beauty and and the good that transcend that although they're grounded in it for sure well this is one of the things i really wanted to ask you about because i do think in evolutionary terms and across the time scale that evolutionary biologists and physicists have come to accept and so that's a universe that's about 15 billion years old on a planet that's about 4.5 billion and with life being three and a half and mammalian life say being 60 million years that's my time span the biblical time span is much truncated in relationship to that um and that's that sets up a certain tension between the biblical stories certainly if they're read as objective truth but the catholic church from my understanding has and this comes from the pope himself the catholic church has already accepted the basic tenets of evolution but i don't know yes is that wrong sure oh no absolutely yes okay so so but that begs the question because for me and i'm sure this is part of the sticking point for young people and maybe for people in western culture in general is that it's easy to say that that that evolutionary theory has been accepted but that still begs the question it's right okay so fine you can you can look at the span of life over three and a half billion years before you get to human beings but our religious stories talk of a reality that looks like it's about fifteen 000 years old something like that right and so that i'm not blaming the church for that obviously and i think the stories in the bible are far older than five to ten thousand years i suspect they were part of an extraordinarily ancient oral tradition that stretches back tens of thousands of years because that's the rule rather than the exception but and i don't know to what degree the catholic thinkers within the church are working constantly to attempt to reconcile these two viewpoints apart from saying that they they do accept them both yeah but i don't think they're i think they're apples and oranges in a way i mean i i don't worry too much about that issue i'm not trying to read the bible as a scientific text it's not about the evolutionary process it's a theological and spiritual text that's discerning truths that are i think available within our experience but there are discrete moments there i mean the scientist who talks about evolution fine i've listened to him or her the bible's not concerned so much with that but it's giving us a theological interpretation of history and indeed of the cosmos but not in scientific terms so it has it has implications for our understanding of the cosmos for sure and of nature of human nature but it's not done in a scientific manner so it just predates as you say i mean any of what we'd associate now with the scientific method the last biblical text is around me are 100 a.d and so it long predates that preoccupation so to me it's kind of an apple's oranges issue and it's i think a lot of that religion science stuff in that sense is an early 20th century um preoccupation that we should just get beyond right but i don't i i think that may be the case but i don't think people have gone beyond it and i i also think that and this pertains to um something we also talked about discussing which was the continual drain from the church the catholic church perhaps in particular but perhaps not in the west of young people and i think part of that is their inability to make intellectual sense of of everything that they're faced with a religious tradition and a scientific tradition especially on the biological front but not only that they don't know where to place these things in their in their view of the world i think that's partly why my lectures because you'd asked about that had become popular because i am trying to do that and no i'll say this you look at the surveys there's a lot of surveys now that ask young people precisely that question how come you left and people speculate oh it must be because of the scandals or because you know they had a bad experience in church or something number one reason across many years in all the surveys is i don't believe the teachings and then to specify that religion and science seem to be at odds with each other so for young people the scientific way of knowing is the way of knowing so it's sort of scientism at least implicitly holds sway in the minds of a lot of young people so once you make that move knowledge equals the scientific manner of knowing well then the bible is non-scientific therefore it's you know old superstition bronze age mythology etc i see what you were doing jordan i think you were doing what a lot of the church fathers did with the scriptures because the church fathers are very interesting people like origen and augustine and chrysostom and those people they knew fully well in the third and fourth century that the bible should not simply be read in a sort of you know straightforwardly literalistic way augustine knew that very clearly origin do that clearly and they talk therefore about the different senses of scripture what you're doing i think in a lot of your lectures is what origen would have called the moral sense of the bible the tropological the given it's kind of technical term the biblical texts are about the moral life now we might say today the psychological life or what makes you psychologically healthier or more productive they would have said the moral sense they knew all about that and so the texts began to open up in these marvelous ways so you know noah and the ark jacob and and wrestling with the angel and the latter going up to heaven et cetera et cetera if you start fussing about you know the literal truth of these stories you're going to miss these really deep spiritual insights which the church fathers knew very well and i think you were in your own way tapping into that and the fact that young people were responding to it see i think it's very encouraging that's why i told the bishops it's a positive sign that you were getting the audiences you were getting around this well the problem with the scientific viewpoint technically speaking is that it's amoral within it with within its own with it's within its own confines by by definition it strives not to address issues of value now it can't help it because scientists have to investigate some things and not others so value enters into it but by its own nature science can't answer and tries not to answer questions of value now it gets more complicated when you look at um work like the primatology i discussed earlier the origin of morality and animals and game playing say among rats that starts to move into the domain of morality to some degree but the problem with science is that it doesn't it strips out all subjective meaning it's designed to do that and that leaves everyone at a loss about what to do with the world of value and i do believe that um stories in particular uh address the world of value that's their function that's and the world of value is the world that that we act in it they're guides to action well i come across it all the time in my work on the internet so i have you know dialogues with people that interact with my videos and they'll say things like well the sciences give us access to the truth period the scientific method that's how you get to the truth and i'll say so hamlet tells you nothing true plato tells you nothing true t.s eliot's poetry tells you nothing true i mean who who would believe that except the most ideologically scientistic person because he might my fear is a lot of young people are in the grip of that they're in the grip of a real ideological thing they don't know how to think their way out of it and so they they just abandon the attempt but it leaves them nowhere what you were doing though is you're showing a way out and and there there is a way out and it's it's by you know an introduction into the great masters of these texts to show you how they function that's what a good preacher ought to be doing you know so let let me throw another objection then and this is another stumbling block i think and i think this emerges in post-modernism in particular um because the post-modernist there's reasons the way for the for their manner of thinking so one reason is so artificial intelligence researchers discovered in the early 1960s that um perceiving the landscape was much more difficult than anybody had ever suspected originally it was sort of felt that objects were just there in some simple way and the complicated computational problem would be how to move among the obvious objects but it turned out that it's really really difficult to perceive the environment there's an infinite or near infinite number of ways that you can perceive even a finite set of objects so um and that means there's there's a multitude of potential interpretations for every set of events and so that that that was a radical discovery in the computational world but the same discovery basically occurred at the same time in the world of literary analysis for the same reason is that every text is susceptible to a an inordinately large number of interpretations and it's not easy to identify the canonical interpretation and maybe the canonical interpretation isn't canonical it just serves power for example and that would be you know religion as the opiate of the masses or or religion as a political tool and i think that takes things far too far but there's a real problem here is that if you divorce the narrative from the objective world and say well the narrative is valuable because it gives us a guide to value then you have another problem is which in instantly which is okay which narrative and how do we make a hierarchy of value among narratives we would say hamlet is deeper than um harlequin romance right but trying to specify why that is and what deep means is very very difficult and you might say well the bible is the deepest of all narratives but that still begs the question well compared to buddhist writings say compared to the upanishads or compared to any long-term complex mythology that's developed over thousands and thousands of years what makes it canonical why is it preferable to shakespeare for example and so well so perhaps i could get you to address that because that's a vicious problem there's a lot there and i'll start with your opening remark by post-modernism because i quite agree with you i'm not simply anti-post-modern in fact i wrote a book called toward a post-liberal catholicism where i took in a lot of the insights of the postmoderns one of which is as you quite correctly say a sort of legitimate perspectivalism that we never get reality you know too cool right just open my eyes there's reality again that's liner again it's only a properly constituted subjectivity that that opens the door to the properly objective but one of those ways of properly constantly your subjectivity is to put your subjectivity within a community of discourse so it's never the case that i simply intuit the way things are and end of the argument no it's as lonergan said it's not the kojito that was the trouble with the enlightenment it's the kojitamos it's always we think and that means i have my perspective i bounce it off your perspective you bounce off somebody else's we have a disciplined and structured conversation and in that process all the different aspects of the real begin to emerge or like my intellectual hero john henry newman said the contents of a real idea is equivalent to the sum total of its possible aspects that's about 1870 says that which is really an extraordinary thing because he anticipates in many ways the phenomenologists you know when they talk about uh walking around an object and to intuit its essence thereby and the walking around is not just i walk around but you're walking around and someone else is walking around we're all exchanging our points of view and again i'd bring this into line with catholicism which is always stress the communitarian element that we know precisely in the community of the church now link to the bible the bible's never like just open it up you're a single subjective uh viewer and now you take in its meaning well no we've always said the bible is read within the church in this long interpretive tradition where i'm bouncing it off of augustine's perspective we've got it from origen who now throws it to thomas aquinas who now brings it to newman and then through preachers and teachers through the saints so you've got the technical intellectual interpretation of the bible then you have the saints who in many ways they embody the bible so i'm going to read a lot of the biblical stories in light of friends of assisi in light of teresa of calcutta et cetera so i like that side if you want of the post-modern which is much more attuned to the communal way in which we come to know things um the big question you raised at the end we could spend some time with that how do you make ultimate judgments and determinations like this one is right you know well you you hinted at it a bit there by saying well look many many people have looked worked on this for a very very long period of time and in some sense it's a living document right because right because it does have to be the bible just doesn't exist as a book on a shelf it's it's a pattern of meaning within a context and the context has to be taken into account um so you say well there's a powerful context for its interpretation it's also a fundamental text in that the bible is implicit in all sorts of other great texts like shakespeare or any anything that's a product of judeo-christian culture that's a deep product is deeply affected by the bible so it's there implicitly whether you like it or not and so it has to be taken seriously i would say even if you don't believe it but then to the degree that you believe the central axioms of western culture you have to wonder how much of what's biblical you do end up believing because of its implicitness well yeah i mean it's all through the western culture for sure um and the question of belief you know in some ways is the most fundamental question in all of theology we call it fundamental theology how do you how do you articulate the meaning of belief and you know for the best people in our tradition belief is always on the far side of reason not the near side of reason and that's a mistake that so many people make today young people especially faith or belief they mistake for credulity or superstition something sub-rational and our best people of course have always repudiated that authentic faith is on the far side of reason so reason's done all the work it can and should do but then there's this moment when the claim is made deus dicks it right that god has spoken now do i believe that or not i think it's precisely analogous to coming to know a person you know so i know something about you just from watching you over the years and i can google you and i can read your books and i can come to some sort of objective knowledge of you uh now in this virtual means i've you know met you and so my mind is working trying to understand where you're coming from but let's i mean project into the future if you and i uh met in person you and i eventually became friends and at some point you spoke a truth about yourself that i could never have gotten on my own i could never have gotten it from any objective source you revealed something to me right of your inner life and at that point i've got to make a decision well do i believe that or not i can't prove it i can't ratify it it's congruent with everything i've known so that's one test i could give if you told me something that's just wildly incongruous with everything else i know about you i'd probably not believe that but if you tell me something that's congruent with what i know but goes beyond it and i have to say at that point okay i i have to believe that or not i think faith is like that in a way so the bible i can approach into all kinds of different ways but the claim being made at the heart of the bible of biblical revelation is deus dixit god has spoken god has said something in this text do i accept it and and that has to be a decision that's born of something beyond reason not opposed to it but beyond it so that's i think where belief in the in the religious sense comes in so um i have i understand that argument but i have trouble with it i would say um so we could talk about faith a little bit um and this is groping around in the darkness um it seems to me that gratitude is a form of faith it's a deci it's like a decision in some sense because you could look at the world and you could say well there's plenty of reasons to be grateful and there's plenty of reasons not to be and so the evidence doesn't necessarily support one interpretation or another but a decision about whether or not to be grateful is going to affect the way i interpret the world and also perhaps the way it reveals itself to me and the way i act in it and the consequences of my action so i would say it seems to me to take faith to be grateful and that seems to be a worthwhile faith um it seems to me to take faith to operate always when we don't know what we're doing and we usually don't know what we're doing and so part of the reason that you have to have faith is because you're actually ignorant and it fills in the gaps right because otherwise you'd be stuck with a never-ending regress you just ask why all the time and then you could never act because the y has to end somewhere and i think by virtually by definition it ends with an act of faith that might be akin to your idea about faith being beyond reason it's like well look if if i ask you why you're having this conversation with me you'll give me a reason and if i ask you why that reason is valid you'll give me another reason and if i do that five or six times you're going to run out of reasons and but you're still having the conversation so that means you have faith that the conversation can go somewhere good and that's not actually a delusion no no and actually you're moving toward god and i think that's a classic route in our tradition um and just the way you were doing it why are we having this conversation i give you know these particular reasons but then ask the why again ask it a third or fourth or fifth time finally i'm going to get to something like well because i want to be happy you know what ultimately motivates the will is some desire for happiness what's happiness well keep pressing that question it can't be something simply in this world we all know that doesn't make us happy in the way that we're seeking it's something like the sumumbonum right somewhat the ultimate good i want to be happy in the fullest possible sense all the time which is why you know taylor de chardin said this that i wouldn't get out of bed in the morning unless i believed in god and that's what he meant was if you do that kind of horizon analysis of every act of the will even the simplest like getting out of bed you finally come to the sumo bonum okay so let me walk through that okay let me walk through that because i think that that's a useful thing to think about technically i've thought about identity in this regard because identity is a nested structure yeah it's also a lens through which we view the world and so if i'm sitting at my typewriter typing you might ask me what i'm doing and the answer is well i'm moving my fingers up and down yeah but then that's true and the next answer is well i'm i'm producing words on a page but i'm also producing phrases and i'm producing sentences and i'm producing paragraphs and then chapters and then a book and then you might say well are you writing a book or are you being a professor and i'd say no well i'm i'm being a professor pushing my fingers up and down on this keypad and then you might say well what is what's professor nested in and the answer to that would be something like well good citizen and then that's nested in good man and then that's nested in well then that's right where you start to encounter what i think are something like religious presuppositions it's like right well what exactly do you mean by good man and i think i think psychologically i think well that means to act out the mythological hero and that's exactly the point where that identity touches on something that's i think indistinguishable from religion at that end now i'm not sure what that means about god per se i would say this that god in our great tradition could be defined as the good in its unconditioned form so all the things you've been you've been raising here so the yyy i'm answering with some kind of good with a conditioned good the very fact that i can put it in a wider context means it's conditioned it's good i'm seeking it but it's not the ultimate thing i'm seeking so unless we have an infinite regress which i think is repugnant to reason and immobilizing you know there are people who have neurological conditions that put them into an infinite regress and they cannot act right so if that's repugnant both let's say epistemically and psychologically we have to come to something that's properly called the unconditioned good good in its absolute form that which is is desirable simply for its own sake so aquinas will say god is called good because god is the supremely desirable what do we desire thomas says some form of actuality or being that's why we call god the fully real that which is most most uh actual octaspuros right but i like the analysis it comes not so much cosmologically but psychologically from what motivates me and finally unless my life just sort of uh founders into irrationality i am motivated by ultimately oh my god right well i i think so because you know me i would also say well let's let's let's reject that argument and say well you're you're not nested in good man good citizen hero and then beyond that you know cosmic hero and i think psychologically speaking the figure of christ is if nothing else a cosmic hero and and i'm not saying it it's nothing else but it's it's at least that well what would the alternative be well you wouldn't be doing what was good well then what's on the outskirts of your value structure is something that's adversarial something that's the opposite of good and maybe maybe you're likely in fact your psyche is not pure and you you know you you you vary depending on your faith i suppose but but but there's no escaping being nested in some sort of transcendent structure like that and then i think of it this way so you have this outermost reach of your identity structure which is something like whatever the idea of good man is grounded in and i do think it's grounded in this hero narrative but then i look at the hero narrative and i think well that's a biologically uh that's an emergent narrative it has evolutionary roots it's something like man has discovered that his goal is to move into the unknown to confront what's what's predatory and and dangerous and to garner something of great value in return and to share it with the community and it's an ancient ancient story it echoes through the old testament continually um it's even there it's even there it lurks underneath the accounts of god's creation itself and and and that that means that that outermost rim of identity is something that has an evolutionary origin and then you think well that means that it has to be connected it's connected with reality in some fundamental sense does that demonstrate the existence of god that's a well that's a different question but but you can push you can you can make a logical case for the necessity of that that hypothesis of goodness to that point as far as i can tell stay with first with your example of of someone let's say it was really wicked and there are wicked people you know we can analyze that psychologically or two of them are sitting right here well yeah i mean because it goes right through the human heart uh as soon as said um but thomas aquinas says a wicked person even the most wicked person is seeking at least the apparent good so some something that appears good to that person now they could be totally mixed up about it it's not in fact good for them but at least it appears good to them so even the most wicked person thomas says is incoherently seeking god because it's always some good and now he's got the wrong sense of it but he's still being drawn and motivated by this first cause of the will even the most wicked person see but i think that's a sign of hope that means grace is always possible now read whether it's dolcevsky or flannery o'connor and people that talk about the most wicked types but they're sometimes the place where grace breaks through you know because they are seeking god in their in their perverse way so in a way he's got us coming or going you know i mean whether we're mother teresa or we're a a wicked dostoevsky character we're all seeking god in some way and i agree with you about the bible the bible well i see i'm i'm not that optimistic because i i think that i think i don't think that all evil actions are misguided um i think that because and i think that's best illustrated in the story of cain and abel and ike took the story of kane extremely seriously i think it has unbelievable explanatory power it's quite staggering that the power of that story the explanatory power especially for how short it is you know cain is resentful he has his reasons his sacrifices were repudiated by god for reasons that aren't made clear in the text which is a great ambiguity because often our sacrifices are repudiated and cain is bitter and no wonder and he has able around to rub his nose in it as well but kane's reaction is i'm going to destroy what god values most and that now you might say well kane is conflicted and ambivalent about that and i believe that but yeah but i don't think he was seeking the good when he killed when he struck down he was he was he was shaking his fist at god yeah indeed he was objectively but he was seeking at least the apparent good for him in his twisted mind he thought that was the good i don't believe it i don't believe it i think you can get to a point where you're so resentful i really believe this that you're so resentful that you will do harm to yourself as well as everyone else and actually truly but a suicide is seeking at least the apparent good a suicidal person thinks my non-existence is a good thing so they are seeking the good but in a in a twisted misguided way um and it's to me it's got metaphysical roots because i would hold to the classical view that that evil is a provazzio bony right it's a privation of the good so good is always more fundamental than evil it has to be they're not they're not co-equal principles fighting away so i i'd repudiate any sort of gnostic or manichaean system that metaphysically too i believe that i thought about that a lot jung is being accused of manichaeanism for example because he took evil so seriously who he has sorry i couldn't carl you yes yes but but but you know he took evil extraordinarily seriously which is something that's definitely worth doing so look you look at examples like the columbine killers yeah well you know you could have the suicide could have come before the murders but it didn't and so i don't i even see maybe in those situations the desire for non-existence not so much as a seeking of the good but a desire to punish god for the inadequacy of his creation yeah oh no it could be but but at least in their mind that's a good thing so that's the cain connection that the resentment against god and getting back at god sure i see it in the pastor life all the time it's a justified thing they think for them it is god deserves it because look at what's happened but see but god has his coming or going because that that is in fact a quest for god that's right i mean even even the most uh resistant sinner is in fact under grace in that sense that's why i've always liked both origen and c.s lewis say this that it's the love of god that lights up the fires of hell right if someone's in hell it's it's the resistance to god's love that's lighting up the fires it's causing the friction and so god has you coming or going i mean is god present in hell sure because whatever is has to be grounded in god and god's even present in the fires of hell because it's the resistance against god that's causing them you know so i i think uh it's a metaphysical statement and a psychological statement about the primacy of the good but it's a source of hope and a lot of my pastoral work you know and you as a psychologist too when you go into people's pain in a very deep way and priests go all the time to these limit situations where people have lost loved ones they're facing their own death they're facing tremendous failure that's where priests go you know because that's often where where grace is going to break through well there are i've encountered situations as a clinician yeah where where religious language is the only language that can be used to describe what's happening that's quite interesting it's difficult to relay those experiences outside the specific framework of the occurrences yeah i always think of you know hegel said to noah limit as a limit is to be beyond the limit and i think that's that's true here so whether it's the physical sciences or psychology our reason comes to a certain limit but then it recognizes the limit as a limit and that's to be already beyond it in a way and they often talk about religious questions as limit questions or it's a limit situation when i begin to ask the meta question beyond questions or i come to a meta experience beyond any ordinary experience and that's why again priests tend to show up at those limit cases that's when we're looking into this abyss and it is from our standpoint rather abyssal i mean what is it that stands beyond what i can know and control and there's this i mean do a kierkega guardian there's a kind of leap that that abyss is something um loving and what stands beyond what i can control is a force of love that's actually summoning me and that's where i go back to what i said about deus dixa god speaking through the scriptures i think that's what it means the voice from the cloud is a symbol of it you know um when someone hears the voice of god it's coming from the abyss it always is job you know the voice comes out of the whirlwind so your your eyes are closed and you know you can't see anything but from the whirlwind comes the voice because and again that speech is so important because joe where were you when i did all these i mean what do you know about what's going on you know nothing about what's going on but from the abyss beyond reason comes the voice and the bible witnesses to that stuff all the time and boy it happens in people's experience i mean you and i both know that when you you come up against limits what comes out of the abyss is a very interesting thing well one of the ways that's interesting to think about this i think is that well let's assume that at the outermost limits of your identity you don't make the assumption that you're involved in an enterprise that's good nested inside a being that's good let's say you take the opposite approach to that what happens to your behavior and what i believe i've observed and i tried to document this particularly in my book maps of meaning is that you start acting in ways that make everything worse very rapidly yes so and that and so for i had a debate a while back with a with an anti-natalist david benatar and he believes that existence is so rife with suffering conscious existence is so rife with suffering that it would be better if it just didn't exist at all so and dostoevsky's ivan makes that case in the brothers karamazov brilliantly brilliantly he tortures his brother eliosha who's the novitiate um and it's a very interesting book because eliot is nowhere near the returration that ivan is but he is the most admirable character in the book because of the totality of his personality not because of the brilliance of his rational mind it's an amazing book in in that regard but the problem i had with benatar's hypothesis wasn't it's its axiom because i think you can you can make a strong case that there's so much suffering in the world that um the question of its validity is a valid question the problem for me there is that if you do that and you start to act that out um things take up things appear to take a vicious turn very rapidly you start working against everything that's alive and striving yes and no quite right um gosh there's a lot there i was thinking of as you were talking the uh dante's image of satan at the pit of hell not in a fiery place but an icy place much much better symbol of stuck surrounded by the betrayers yeah to chewing on the three great traitors but his great wings he's meant to fly he's meant to fly up into the into the presence of god but all they do is he's beating his wings and that's our earlier point about he's seeking god i mean satan is seeking god you have to that's the way the will functions but all he's managing to do is make the world around him colder so as he's beating his wings he's just he's creating the meteorology of hell you know so that's what happens when someone gets really stuck they are in fact seeking god but they and he cries from all six eyes he's got six eyes and he's weeping and he's drooling from the people he's chewing and he's stuck and he's making the world colder it's a beautiful picture of what happens it's really useful too for for listeners to realize you look if you look at this is my opinion and you can take it for what it's worth um the images of satan in paradise lost and in dante's inferno are unbelievably instructive if you all if you start to understand that what these thinkers were trying to do was to produce an imaginative representation of evil and evil as an embodied and transcendent um being and uh and the the psychological rationale for that i believe and it has something to do with our ability to communicate which you referred to earlier is that the evil we do is informed by the entire human race's conception of what constitutes evil and and and stretching back from the beginning of the time when we began to communicate so for example you you see this quite clearly i read the columbine killer's notes in quite a bit of detail and it's saturated with satanic thought and the reason for that is that that sort of thought is part of the culture because we've come to represent these transcendent figures of evil in poetry and in movies and it happens all the time in movies with characters say like hannibal lecter and in horror movies and um um the the the milton's satan who's often viewed at least by some as a revolutionary hero seems to me to be something like the rational mind it's what happens to the rational mind when it places its presuppositions in the place of god that because satan seems to presume that he can replace the transcendent by his own presuppositions and i think that's my reading of that is that's actually what happened on earth not long after milton wrote when these totalitarian states emerged it's something solzhenitsyn commented on and where the presuppositions the utopian presuppositions of man rationally thought out were seen as sufficient to to represent everything the totality to eliminate the need for something transcendent and the consequence of that was that they produced something that looked an awful lot like hell hell and dante did that more psychologically and so milton milton being the great poetic genius that he was had a poetic sense that that was what was coming down the pipelines do you i wonder if you read your countrymen uh charles taylor much the the canadian philosopher because catholic too taylor said that we in the west let's say western europe america canada australia we might be the first civilization ever ever to think you can find real happiness apart from a transcendent reference point and everyone in human history has felt something like the alluring darkness beyond what i can control and know is necessary a relationship to that realm is necessary for happiness we're the first culture ever that said no i don't care i'm indifferent to it but that does produce versions of hell for sure because something will take the place of of the transcendent point of reference well it seems useful even even from the perspective of humility i mean i don't know if this is a reasonable thing to say but a tyrant who believes in god is likely preferable to one who doesn't because at least in principle tyrant is held accountable by something that isn't him that's right he even and and he would get caught at least in principle again in the operation of his own conscience don't you i i love the fact in the scriptures they're very unique this way they do not apotheosize their leaders and it's very different from so many other ancient cultures where the kings become like gods and there's the bible i mean the bible is bluntly honest about its leaders and his kings even the greatest even david murderer adulterer solomon saul the whole realm of them that's a brilliant insight of the bible that all these people are under god and they're under judgment and that's a that's a liberating idea and when we lose that the leaders do become apotheosized well you saw that in rome constantly in ancient rome that literally happened you know and there's always a proclivity for that to happen that's the imperial presidency you know right and i think it's very important i always tell when i when i'm preaching on this subject to christians the fact that jesus is called the son of god it was so important because it was dethroning the roman claim that the emperor was the austro you know so one of the titles after julius caesar is is divas he's he's divinized then his son augustus becomes the son of the god you know so when the the first evangelists were saying i've got good news about jesus the son of god they were saying right it's not caesar he is not the son of god this one whom caesar killed by the way he's the son of god but the bible's always making that move of knocking our own pretensions off their their pedestals i think that's an amazing observation actually and it is one of the things that that that is extraordinarily striking about the old testament is that it's so sophisticated psychologically because what's happening there is that the idea of absolute sovereignty is disconnected from the person bearing the sovereignty and so at the very least again speaking psychologically what you have is um the representation of god as that which is sovereign and now each individual can be a representative of that and can have that operate within them but they aren't that and that that that well as i said at the least that's a brilliant psychological innovation and the fact that the biblical characters are so they're realistic to the point of dostoevsky and painfulness you know abraham doesn't leave home till he's what 80. he's 75.75 he's a slow he's a late starter right and and then his life is just one god-awful catastrophe after another for the first while it's like you know you have some contempt for him let's say because he's hanging around his father's tent and then he does finally pay attention to the call of adventure to god's voice and he goes out and encounters tyranny and starvation and corruption and yeah and he makes all sorts of mistakes and you know and it's easy to be contemptuous i think of the biblical characters because of that but it actually speaks to their intense psychological realism and it's so useful for for people to see that because abraham for example is blessed by god despite the fact despite despite his evident character flaws and that's the case for for for the patriarchs in general and it is remarkable right a descent of yours i'll put in the throne that will last forever to david who was a deeply flawed character what i find cool is that even before you get to the human characters go to the very beginning of the bible and you have a dethroning of the cosmic pretenders to the absolute so in the creation account you know sun moon stars planet animals the earth itself all the things mentioned were worshiped in different contexts so the author is saying no no no no they're not divine they're creatures but then he turns it around beautifully but they have a purpose which is to give praise to god so they're not god they should be dethroned from that but now they're given the privilege of praising god with their manner of being led by the conscious creature human beings who and catholics know this whoever comes at the end of a liturgical procession is the one that leads the prayer so genesis the opening verses sound like a liturgical procession you know the first is then that evening came morning follow then the fourth day and it's like a steady procession of liturgical actors the last figure the human being is the one now that will lead the chorus of praise to my mind it's the master theme of the whole bible if you want is we're rightly constituted when we give praise to god and can lead all of our creaturely brothers and sisters in the right praise of god sin is bad praise from it's without fail in the bible it's they went after false gods they went after the gods of those people they they abandoned the teaching of the lord bad praise leads to the disintegration of the self so that's now in the psychological order that's really well praises praises what what you praise is what you pursue and so if you're pursuing the wrong thing then you're going to fall apart right one of the great biblical ideas i think is you become what you praise so what gets your worth ship that's the origin of our word there what what's the highest worth for you you become that you know so you become what you worship you're meant to become children of god but what happens we end up worshiping something so every one of us worships something and we become conformed to that and then if it's not god we disintegrate and then like satan we start beating our wings and making the world around us worse so that the world around us disintegrates that's the bible the bible tells that story over and over and over again you know which is why you know from a catholic perspective a christian perspective that jesus on the cross is offering the father right praise on our behalf and see now you're getting to the mass which is very powerful you know that the mass is the great act of praise where we join ourselves to the sacrifice of the son we say we we conform ourselves to christ i have to ask you about that because it's just burning a hole in me well i'm in chronic pain a lot of it and it's constant and i'm not i don't know what to do with it generally speaking i know things that make it worse you said something a lot of ideas were flashing through my mind and i want to i want to hit at it because it's a crucial concern you said something so surprising that christ on the cross was offering up the proper praise to god it's like well i'm not going to just let you say that without noticing it because that's a hell of a thing to say so i'm going to put together some things that you touched on and and then we can address this so you said in the bible one of the things that's remarkable about it is the conception of the divine so the conception of what is of highest worth is stripped from some of its obvious objects of projection the sun the moon the cosmos the stars um but then also earthly leaders of other cultures idols and also earthly leaders of your own culture says no whatever the ultimate divine is it's not to be found in its fullest expression in any of those examples it's something else okay so then the question is well what is that else well the christian answer is well whatever it is for in its human form let's say it's something human it's something that humans can aspire to it's both of those and and and it's made manifest in the figure of christ something specifically human but then you have this terrible paradox with christ which is partly the paradox that you just laid out which is a very difficult thing to get a grip on so what is it exact why is what christ is doing proper sacrifice is it because it is what is it his willingness to bear the pain what is it yeah that's close to it so we say the word became flesh so the word who is always in the presence of the father so the word doesn't worship the father because the word is god so we shouldn't talk about worship within the trinity itself but now the word becomes flesh because the father god so loved the world he sent his only son that all who believe in him might have eternal life in his name he sends the son into flesh but into flesh that's been so compromised by sin so not into a pristine creation now what do you have that's an interesting question theologically what do you have sent the sun if creation had not fallen that's an interesting question right in fact it did the valuable fall that laid the yeah the cool part right yes it's a remarkable idea it is indeed but like don scotus argued you know the franciscan medieval theologian that god would have sent his son even if we hadn't sent but that's another question okay so let's take that apart for just a sec so that people are clear about it so the theory here is that there is something wrong with the structure of creation that that's its steepness and sin and everyone has to ask if they believe that and and it seems to me that people do is there's a sense that things aren't how they should be that we're not how we could be that something has gone astray and is continuing to go astray which is a mystery in and of itself if it's a god-created world it's like well why is that precisely well i mean the quick answer is is corrupted freedom you know or a misguided freedom you might say but the word comes into flesh into fallen flesh and the cross is what the cross is cruelty and hatred and violence and institutional injustice and stupidity and if you read the passion narratives it's it's a beautiful sort of poetic presentation of all that's wrong with us that comes out to meet him and bearing all of that he continues in his relationship of of obedience and unity with the father so bearing the sins of the world bearing all the dysfunction and twisted quality of the world he brings us back online so in in the attitude of the word made flesh on the cross we see a sinful corrupt hate-filled world now brought painfully back online that's the sacrifice of the cross that's pleasing to the father so we should never play the game of well the father is like a is a dysfunctional alcoholic father that you know is now demanding this blood sacrifice it's it's rather the father is pleased by the son's entry into our fallen situation and his bearing of all that dysfunction even as he brings us back online to the father okay so why does okay so let's say christ maintains his i know this isn't exactly the right way of thinking about it but it'll work for rhetorical purposes i think it's so christ is tortured by betrayal by by by physically and spiritually as well because the best way to torment someone is when is to punish them despite their innocence right yeah so right right or maybe worse than that to punish them because of their virtues that's even better and so that's that's intrinsic in this story as well christ bears up under that he doesn't repudiate god or doesn't repudiate his own essence it's something like that he but then what is the is the example of that is the example of bearing up under that exceptional duress and maintaining a moral stance is that the example that redeems the world is it that if you do that in your own life the world is de facto redeemed it is that but more because if it's just that then a pelagian system would be true that we just need a good you know moral exemplar it's something more than it's just merely good i mean it's super human what's being asked for no true but it is something more metaphysical about it it's a reworking of the way things are if if jesus takes upon himself all the dysfunction of the world and swallows it up in the ever greater divine mercy so it's it's christ bearing all of our dysfunction but transfiguring it in his great act of of forgiveness and obedience to the father that i think all of that coming together simultaneously is the sacrifice that's pleasing to the father in some ways the word from the cross father forgive them they know not what they do is that is the most important or or play with this to jordan that after the resurrection so jesus comes back precisely to those who had denied him and betrayed him and and run from him in his moment of greatest need and in almost any telling of a similar story if that all happened and then the person who had died is back from the dead and he appears to those who had abandoned him you'd expect him to you know wreak havoc on them right so jesus shows his wounds to be sure because the wounds of jesus are a sign of the world's dysfunction if i'm ever tempted you know when we were younger the book um i'm okay your okay came out right so we're always tempted to say well you know basically we're okay just need a little fixing up around the edges whenever we're tempted to say that it's the wounds of jesus that say otherwise that's why i was insisting earlier that i don't you know that that it isn't merely misguided good that turns people towards the darkness it's it's it's voluntary desire to produce the darkness as well anyways i do take that very seriously and it's an interesting idea is that the ideal is wounded in proportion to the degree that everything has deteriorated away from the ideal and that's almost by definition true right yeah yeah no that's true but it's just the if the very act of the will itself is structured in such a way it has to be seeking some kind of at least apparent good but that's our earlier issue um so the wounds show the dysfunction of the world which the son of god took upon himself but then then the word of shalom which is in all the resurrection accounts that jesus says peace so when when paul for example says i'm certain that neither death nor life nor angels or principalities nor heighten or death nor any other creature could ever separate us from the love of god how does he know that because we killed god and he returned with the word of forgiveness so so that means it's like it's it's like for the divine goodness and forgiveness can trump any evil even the evil of killing god so we killed him but yet he returned in forgiving love i think that's the moment when christianity is born in the dual sense of yes we kill them look at the wounds but he says shalom to us nevertheless so that i i can't run away from him i can try you know that's what all the sinners do i can try but ultimately the divine love is such that it's it's greater that's why paul can all say we're sin abounds grace abounds the more that's christianity so the greatest sin we kill the son of god there's no greater sin than that where sin abounds grace abounds the more and see all of that was made possible in a way by the great sacrifice of the cross which is why it's a saving act um now that's i'm i'm striving to understand person okay so i want to ask you a bunch of questions about that so we talked a little bit before about the church bleeding its people they're leaving the young people are leaving and my sense of that is it's because the church does not demand enough of its of of the young of young people yeah i think it doesn't demand enough and by not demanding enough it doesn't indicate its faith in their possibility and yeah so now in orthodox christianity as i understand it there seems to me to be more emphasis on the idea that it's each human's obligation to become like christ that's the goal well that's that's that by definition we could say and we could speak psychologically about this as well that means to become the ideal the ideal that's beyond rationality even that's what you're aiming at that's what's hypothetically within your grasp for and it seems to me as well that that's what the mass symbolizes is that and i'd be happy to have any objections to this i would be happy to hear the the incorporation of the host is the is the embodiment it's the incarnation of christ within that's what it's acting out that's the idea i mean in some sense it's it's the consumption of the saving element but the saving element is actually a mode of being and this isn't hit home it's like look what the church the church demands everything of you yeah absolutely everything and then the reason that that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them it's like look you can have your cars and your money and all of that but that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on yes i i wish you'd preach to our people because i think you're absolutely right about that uh the language we'd use is um be a saint that's what that's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint a saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to christ now press that to be conformed to christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction of the world to bear its pain and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love now fill in the blank francis of assisi mother teresa may be in our time like when we were younger if someone said well who's a living saint we all would have said mother teresa well what did she do she went into the worst slum in the world i'd been there and she bore the suffering of of of the world literally picking up the dying and and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering and and she she took on herself the wounds of jesus but then think about you know the smile of mother teresa she brought to that place the ever greater more super abundant mercy of christ that's being a saint and you're dead right i think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that okay i can tell you one thing i've experienced and this is this is really something to see i spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between and to large audiences three to ten thousand all the time something like that and i always paid attention to the audience singly because i was always talking to one person at a time but also on mass you know to see to hear because if if the words are in landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source then there's silence and sometimes that silence can be dramatic and that's why people say well you could have heard a pin drop it's no one's moving because their attention is 100 percent gripped by whatever just happened and one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility and people that and i thought i thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now they say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or or or they say reward or something like that they don't say pick up the heaviest load you can care and carry and care for that matter and stumble forward and i've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and and play with them and and so it's not that the church is asking too little of its people no i i it is asking too little of them i i quite agree it's precisely and so there's no heroism in it and yeah there's no call it to well because and because finally i call it the culture of self-invention is a very boring culture stanley howard was a methodist theologian who said he defined liberalism or you know the modern attitude as i have no story except the story i invent for myself and that's finally a very boring place to live it seems to me that in fact you're part of this incredibly rich and complex narrative which i would refer to as god's creation and god's providential movement but i go back to luke's gospel you know when jesus says to them duke and ultim is at the latin go out into the depths you people have been horsing around in the shallows way too long that's where the fish are by the way but also it's where adventure is it's where that was where the glory of life is get out into the depth and we have i think allowed our people to be kind of horsing around by the seashore all the time it's also shallow it's also where what protects you from hell is because you you need to be engaged in something that's deeply meaningful enough to justify the suffering and and and so you know part of what happens in the story of christ is the only thing deep enough to justify that level of suffering is absolute immersion in a cosmic drama and then you ask yourself well are we each are we each emerged immersed in a cosmic drama and it's aw it's not so easy to say no to that it's a life or death situation and everything's in it well and i would say the the instinct of a christian is to go where the suffering is so i spent a lot of my life forming priests so working in the seminary eventually i was the rector of the seminary so my job was to help these young guys discern the priesthood and i would say that's that's the the test i mean do you do you have an instinct to go where the pain is to go where the suffering is if you want to live a comfortable life then don't become a priest you might be a bad priest you know if you embrace a comfortable life but it's the mother teresa model it's the duke and ultim go out into the depths and the depths mean the depth of human suffering with what you guys are doing why isn't it working well what's what's our problem it's true that we're not doing enough of that and i do think we've succumbed a bit to the modern thing which is a preoccupation with rights and freedom and my individuality and so on but you see this with church activism so much now is that so much so like the church seems to be replacing itself in some sense with social activism it's like we've got enough social activists yes well but i'd say this pope benedict xvi was a great intellectual hero of mine said the church always does three essential things the church worships god it evangelizes and it cares for the poor poor broadly construed as i say anyone who's suffering right but that first move as we said earlier is indispensable the church worships god it teaches the world right praise because without right praise the whole thing falls apart secondly it evangelizes what's that well that's a cool thing too because uwangelion in greek good news they were playing with that because the the romans would have used that in the eastern part of the empire to announce an imperial victory they would send an evangelist ahead with the good news um hey caesar won a victory so these very edgy first christians who had zero social status no power no military behind them said oh no no i got the true ewan guelion it's about jesus risen from the dead who was put to death by caesar but whom god raised so that's the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope now the sacrifice has been made and god's love is greater than anything that's in the world okay now i got those two things in place now serve the poor now go where the pain is go where the suffering is but if you divorce them from each other and that that has happened so who cares about worship and that's fussing around with altars and sacristies and who cares about evangelization let's just get down and serve the poor then it does devolve simply into social work right but if the three are together worship god evangelize the dying and rising of jesus and serve the poor now the church is is cooking you know all right so let's let's look at the second one of those so yeah you know it seems to me i i can understand this not that whether i can understand it or not is a hallmark of its validity but i have to try to understand what i can understand i can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction acting as if being is intrinsically good and that hum that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good bearing up under bearing all that up as a set of propositions even in the most extreme cases of suffering i can see that as a valid moral good that's that's christ's refusal to be um what would you say corrupted by the injustice of his and and terror of his fate and so that might be something like you don't have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized let's say yeah and i think that's an unshakable moral proposition um but then there's the resurrection element of it because i could say well the first thing i would say is well i kind of understand that psychologically parts of us die and and they have to die because they're in error they have to be cast off and we're reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement our ascent forward there's no movement forward without some death of the past and so i can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit it's not something trivial but then there's the insistence on in the church of the bodily resurrection which is well let's call that a stumbling block to modern belief no no doubt about that that's something more than mere metaphor and so you might ask well why is it insisted upon why isn't the proposition that you you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear to to to operate for the good of all things regardless of your suffering a hard line no justification with um the defeat of death necessitated i'm not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection because i know there are things that i don't know i i know that for sure and god only knows how the world is fundamentally structured but but it seems and this is a nietzschean criticism in some sense tuna freudian criticism it's that seems in in some real sense too good to be true yeah so and and so what do you make of the what do you make of the resurrection how do you conceptualize it even as it's related in the gospels yeah good you're raising a lot of interesting things first of all everything you said about it in terms of psychological um archetypes and metaphors good fine i think those are legitimate i think those are our correct perceptions of things and it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world resurrection type stories but i think what's really interesting about the new testament as as lewis said you know c.s lewis when someone said well the new testament is just another iteration of the ancient myth and he said anyone that says that has not read many myths because there's something so distinctive about the new testament and what i i would say jordan first this i think from the first page of matthew through revelation what you get throughout is this what i call this grab you by the shoulders quality they knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and and philosophical truth you know paul certainly knew that literature very well um it doesn't sound like that though it has overtones with it it bears some of that it has family resemblances with it but what what you find on every page is this one galleon this good news so everything you said is true i think it is true but it's not exactly news it's part of the philosophy of perennis that's been around for a long time and a lot of the great thinkers of the world and again i agree with it i like the philosophy apprentice but the new testament is people who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say something happened something's happened here that we were not expecting that was not part of our of our thought system and it's so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careering around the world and indeed to our deaths announcing it and defending it and what it was was the fact here in the in the 10th chapter of acts of the apostles uh this sort of almost tossed offline we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead um i don't think people trading in mythic talk use that kind of language mythic language again i say it with high praise i love the myths but you know once upon a time and or in a galaxy far far away and then a mythic story unfolds but you read the acts of the apostles do you hear about what happened it was versus up in galilee and then in judea you know those people that john the bat remember john the baptist well and then this jesus and then in jerusalem and then we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead it's that's what and then look at paul paul who saw him on the road to damascus now the paul line letters man they do not read like myths they just don't and i love the myths i love the philosophy apprentice but it doesn't read like that it reads like someone who is has been so bowled over by something and he wants you to know about it and it's changed everything and i think what it was was what we said earlier it's okay now now we know god's mercy and love is greater than anything we can possibly do why because we killed god and that's why paul will say i'm going to hold up one thing to you christ and him crucified and crucified and it was the most horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world it was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion paul says no no let me put it right in your face see the author of life came and we killed him but i got the good news who won gilean is god's mercy and love is is greater because he brought this jesus back from the dead well you do have a you do have the following argument which is that it isn't clear which is harder to believe whether that happened or whether people made it up because if they made it up that was really something and that that does strike me quite frequently reading the new testament there are there are lines in there that hit so hard you think hmm it isn't obvious to me how someone could have just thought that up so and there is that well and young carl jung who i greatly admire you know he believed i think in the same way that c.s lewis did that and he doesn't talk about this that much but that there is this archetypal mythological pattern of the dying and resurrecting hero that has this psychological reality which is extraordinarily deep yeah but that that archetype was realized once in history and that's the fully realized so it it it came from the the mythic realm let's say the realm of eternal truth the realm of pattern instinctive pattern for that matter and was fully realized at one point in history and you might think well if it's going to be fully realized it has to start somewhere you know it can't start everywhere at the same time or right right what does an archetype look like when it takes flesh might be a way to get out well well and and the thing is we we do see this and it does grip us because movies like we see representations of this all the time in in my new book i talk a fair bit about harry potter and you know harry potter is definitely an archetype taking christ's figure taken flesh well clearly he's in battle with satan himself obviously i mean and and she has an unbelievably profound mythological imagination and the thing that's so fascinating about all of that is that because her mythological imagination is spot on she captivated the entire globe and and produced you know this immense storehouse of wealth and dominated the entertainment landscape for a decade and you know people don't take that seriously but it's a it's a great mystery to watch absolutely they should it's it's a it's a phenom you know anything that grips people's attention like that is obviously worth paying attention to but you know so you know emery lewis called them good dreams right so all the sort of archetypal anticipations of the gospel the good dreams of the race um or do you think jungian i love young too but what happens if that archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to god you know kant's language what would happen if that archetype became flesh and indeed that's how they put it the word became flesh and dwelt among them i think that's also the question we should each be asking ourselves in our own lives yeah it's like well who could we be and you say well you don't have to ask yourself that question it's like well good luck with your conscience then you should be another christ that's the objection to the self-created person it's like yeah the the idea that you can create your own values is well good luck right try good luck with that project yeah good luck it's not it's not going to work you know newman referred to the conscience i always loved this as the aboriginal vicar of christ in the soul so he took the language descriptive of the pope you know the vicar of christ but he said the aboriginal vicar of christ which is the conscience john henry newman okay because oh i was thinking of eric neumann so no john henry newman and i it's it's a beautiful way of describing it because we'd say the christ dwelling within you is the voice of the conscience that's calling you to sanctity ultimately to heroic self-sacrifice to being who christ is it also is it is what people worship because here's a way of thinking about it technically well look when i have a conversation with you there's something i want from you i want i want everything you can give me i want you to be as as as as there as you can possibly be that's what i'm demanding all the time if my attention assuming a properly constituted subjectivity if my attention wanders that means you're not delivering and so if you're wandering around and everyone's attention is wandering away from you you're not delivering and conscience because we're so social we're social creatures to the final degree conscience tells you when you deviate from the ideal and that ideal is what people worship they by attending to that manifestation of the ideal in you they worship it and so that's there it's there in the in the demands that we can't help but make of each other and of ourselves there's no escape from that and so i i do think it's a perfectly good question what would happen and this is the right question for your life what would happen if you took that seriously and so again what i see is that it doesn't seem to me to be if the church can no longer attract young people it has to be that they're not taking that with sufficient seriousness now yeah i think there's a lot to that i don't want to externalize the blame it's like i know the church is a human organization and all of that and but but it's still evidence when i was coming of age so back in like the 1970s the presumption of the church was we should make this thing as easy as possible because if we make it hard these people are going to run away so we don't want make it we want to make it intellectually easy so i got a very dumb down catholicism it was through the grace of god that i discovered later in life the very rich catholic intellectual tradition but when i was going through school including through high school you know banners and balloons and collages and it was a very superficial we got the clearer impression when i was a kid that english and science and math and all that were serious subjects religion was like religion was like gym or it was like you know i don't know what else like art class or something it was considered not that serious so we dumbed it down intellectually and we lessened the moral demand for sure because we didn't want i think people to run away and then you know i'll say it bluntly rather pathetically we tried to be as relevant as possible that was the term from our time right and that's like the uncool guy at the party man right you know if you have to strive to be relevant you're you're you're not you're not on the cutting edge that's for sure right and so there's a study i read some years ago that i thought was very plausible the conclusion was what young people find compelling in a mentor figure are the two things one is that the person knows a lot about the subject that he or she is sharing and secondly they're really committed to it and when the kids sense those two things there's a lot to know here and this guy or this woman they really they really believe it they find that compelling you don't need you know the the games of relevance you don't need to dumb it down in fact smarten it up and and make it as intellectually challenging and morally challenging as possible um we dropped a lot of practices that were that were much more common years ago you know to kind of draw young people into the challenge of it so that is a problem absolutely well you know one of the things that i've been so delighted by is my observation that there's a tremendous hunger for serious conversation yeah in public hunger for it and when i when i have engaged in my lectures i'm always extending my myself to my limits of thought like that's what the lecture is it's an it's an attempt to go past what i think and there's absolutely no doubt that that um everyone in the audience is on board with that i mean it was the case when i debated sam harris for example that discussion which you know was as technically complex as sam and i could make it and you know and that might not be as philosophically complex as the absolute ideal but it was it wasn't dumbed down by any stretch of the imagination and there there's just there was there's no reason that that is if you spoon feed that material it it catches no one what and i can tell you this those new uh atheists so sam and and uh hitchens and dawkins those guys uh they were good evangelizers i mean for their position uh i deal with yeah and they didn't dumb it down either they didn't dumb it down they had the two things i talked about they were they were intelligent and they were passionately committed to it but every day on the internet when i go into these comm boxes i hear the phraseologies from hitchens and dawkins and sam harris a lot of young people read them they didn't hug them into atheism they argued them into atheism so i've been telling our people we got to stop trying to hug people back into the faith we have to argue them back in the faith we have to make it compelling and i had a worldly challenge i've been walking with this friend of mine on talking with him and you know he said something quite interesting um he was raised in a communist country and was an atheist after that um he said his family observed christmas and he criticized them for that because it was logically incoherent and then he realized that all that would happen if they abandoned christmas was that they wouldn't have christmas anymore it wasn't like he had something to replace it with right and so it's magical you might even call it naive if if you're of the sort of mind that would call that naive but do you want to have it or not and if the answer is well i'll replace it with another weekend then that's really not helpful and the problem with the atheists is that they don't have the best they can offer is something like a materialistic utopia i've got nothing against that like i've been talking to people like bjorn lomberg and and uh who who who lay out this vision of an increasingly wealthy world where absolute poverty is a thing of the past and where people can take the levels of health that are more or less taken for granted in the west for granted everywhere in the world through a process of incremental economic improvement and you know more power to that i think yeah but i also know that that that isn't a sufficient story is and there's a kind of despair that goes along with material security because the adventure is drained out of it and dostoevsky touches on this and this is where i really learned this when i first encountered this idea you know dostoevsky in notes from under the ground underground says look this is something you have to understand if you gave people everything they need so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and and busy themselves with the continuation of the species if if they were so happy that nothing but bubbles of bliss would appear on the surface of the water that they were in they would smash it all to pieces just so that something adventurous and unique could happen and so like there has to be a call to a higher order of spiritual being let's say a psychological being that accompanies that materialism or it's or we won't even kill us no absolutely it'll kill it'll smother us um it's got to be the call to sanctity and the call of sanctity is a call to love uh and they're dostoevsky you know love is harsh and dreadful it's not a cute little emotion or it's not a it's not a sentiment real love is harsh and dreadful because it means going into the place where people are suffering and becoming another christ and bearing the burdens of the world that's serious business love is is and something awful about it you know but when you summon someone there's also something awful about the judgment you know because if you love someone you also hold them to a standard yeah you will they're good right and that means holding to a standard do you know this russia triggers my mind i'm reading the these wonderful books by this uh priest walter chizak i kind of know that name he died in 1984 but for 23 years he was a prisoner in the soviet system so he was arrested in 1939 right when the war got going with the germans and make a long story short he was in lubianca prison for five years in moscow basically in solitary confinement then he was sent for 15 years or so to siberia to the worst work camps you know and he describes it in this book called with god in russia in this kind of bold just straightforward way but all through it he says okay i went into russian to be a missionary to announce the gospel it's it's not the way i expected it to be i didn't expect to be in a prison camp but okay this is what god has willed obviously at least his permissive will is that i be here so i'll do what i can so for 23 years this man set up when he was in solitary a jesuit program of prayer and he would go through his day he had the prayers of the mass memorized then when he gets to the camps they would smuggle in little bits of bread and wine so he would say mass on a little table clandestinely you know and he would minister in his own quiet way to the people around him i'm telling that story because in the most horrific circumstances in a way he never saw coming he said okay but i'll try to be a saint here i'll try to be christ bear the sufferings of those around me and bring the grace of god he was finally sprung in 1963 jfk was involved in getting him out with a prisoner exchange as he left russia he's the plane's taking off and he did the sign of the cross over the country bless the country and it's an incredibly moving story because it's not at all flashy it's told in a really almost bland manner but it's someone who decided no i'm going to go in the depths i'm going to deal with what i've been given and it's horrific i'm in a i'm in a soviet siberian concentration camp doing hard labor but i'll be christ for the people here um that's it i mean that's the adventure there's the hero's journey that he went on so well so let's get back to the to the resurrection idea there because again see that story to some degree doesn't require the resurrection to to to to to to underscore his heroism in fact to say in some sense to say well that was motivated by faith in the resurrection in some sense undermines the heroism of the action and again i'm saying i'm not trying to casually dispense with the idea of the resurrection at not least because of its undoubted metaphorical re structure and but there is this this crazy emphasis this crazy idea that somehow bearing up under all that burden reformatted the entire structure of being and that's associated with i believe and i'm no theologian i believe that's associated with the idea of the harrowing of hell is that is that well yeah there's something but i do as a first step though that's the church the church christ's resurrection is the seed from which the church grows and the church is the means by which god wants to reconfigure the world that's right we're not there just to kind of whisper our convictions among ourselves our whole purpose is to go now and and recreate the world that's the church's purpose it reminds me i read history and history is so interesting that it's unbearable right if you read history it's it's unbearably interesting and yet if you go sit in the history class taught by the typical history teacher it's so dull that you can hardly keep your eyes open and there's you know you need to memorize what happened in 1612 and that's not the point the point is the unbelievably magnificent drama and so then again if that story that that the church is telling is not being taken up it's not being sold there's something about it that's not being sold properly i'm not saying you have the answer to that's true but like i saw this kid once when i was in montreal and he was about 17 years old and he was big guy big like six foot five guy and and uh you know like a physical specimen and he was standing on the corner of of a like a shopping area and he had two pink shopping bags in his hands and he looked kind of bereft and i thought you know if you came up to him and said um i've got some heroism in battle for you around the corner he dropped though and you said it right he dropped those damn pink shopping bags in a second and be off for the adventure of his life yeah and and you you it it has to what is it is it a lack of faith that a fundamental faith that that is sapping the lifeblood out of that story because you're saying well here i'm calling you to an adventure that's as great as any adventure you could possibly conceive by definition this is the ultimate adventure that you're being called to yeah but but the hobbit hole is so attractive i mean there's so billboard would rather stay in his hobbit hole i mean it's comfortable and i got my doilies and it's nice it's comfortable here so gandolf has to summon him to adventure it's a it's a it's a burden it's a task you know and so the church has got to play that role of of gandalf to get into these hobbit holes and get people motivated to get them out you know what was it walter cheese like i'll tell exactly he's a jesuit novice in pennsylvania 1930-something and pope pius xi at the time from rome says russia's just gone communist the church is being persecuted i need and he said it this way i need uh heroes to go into russia and you jesuits you're kind of my shock troops i'm going to summon you into russia and young walter cheesex 18 or 19 says he just knew that's where i'm going and he went up to the speaker and said i'm in okay they sent him to rome to study russian language and russian liturgy and they sent him into russia so i mean he was summoned he was summoned to adventure and he took it you're in why why like what happened in your life to to pull you in this direction and and and and how has it worked for you you know what was jordan for me uh i was a catholic kid you know going to mass on sunday but not all that interested in religion and i was interested in baseball when i was like 13 14. but i'm in high school freshman high school class and it was a catholic high school so it's a religion class and one of the teachers laid out for us one of thomas aquinas's famous arguments for god's existence and i did not disbelieve in god and i believed in god but i never in my life thought that you could think about god in a serious way and it opened up something it set my mind on fire and i started going to libraries back in those days we went to libraries and i was taking these books of thomas aquinas off the shelf i had no idea what i was reading but but i was i i still to this day think of those like magical days that i discovered something that just turned my my mind on you know so that was the opening of the door then the other book i read at that time that was so influential was thomas merton you know merton the he's a trappist monk he'd been a man of the world you know all the way and then had this huge conversion experience and becomes the most radical kind of monk you you can become and those two thomas's aquinas and merton had a big impact on me when i was a kid because there's something romantic about it you know mertens was the story of someone kind of falling in love with god totally um that's what got me in the door and then i followed a lot of the intellectual path i was always kind of a thinker type and that got me into the priesthood and then you know off i go but at every stage it was something like a summoning to mission is language we would use summoning to a mission a ever greater kind of mission that kept me going i always found it i don't know the most compelling option on the table it always struck me that way is you look at the options of life like well serving god yeah duh wouldn't that be the most exciting thing is that's it is that apart from the terror that that might reasonably evoke it's it is the best by definition and again you could just speak psychologically here by definition that's the best game you can play that's how it struck me when i was a kid yeah well it's almost a tautology you know right it struck me that way you know so it and i understand everyone's different everyone's path is different but that's how it struck me how grace i would say you know entered my life and i truly i've been a priest now for 30 what five years um bishop now for five years um i i've i've never been i've never been unhappy as a priest i mean i've suffered certainly and have gone through difficult times i've never been unhappy though as a priest i've never been tempted to leave never felt like oh god why did i do that i've never felt that um and this social media enterprise of yours you know i when i introduced you i noted that you're perhaps the most well-known catholic speaker in social media circles i think that's a reasonable presupposition do you have competitors so to speak oh yeah there are some people i was one of the pioneers in a way because i know like when youtube first got started was 2006 by early 2007 i did a review of um scorsese's movie that departed because my instinct was let's talk about the culture let's talk about things going on that have a religious overtone you know so i started early 2007 right when youtube got off the ground and then everything else facebook and instagram came along and then others sort of saw what i was doing and got into the game too but i guess i was one of the first ones to do it not that i know that world that well i got all these young people that helped me navigate that world but i've been providing a lot of the content and and so what's what's that been like and how is that received by your peers or your superiors for that matter i i would say well to answer the second part first i think well i think they saw oh yeah this is good i'm glad he's doing it i'm glad someone has taken the initiative and they began asking me early on like hey tell us more about this and how are you doing it and what are the pitfalls and how's it working so i think my superiors have always been you know very open to it interested in it when i've spoken to the now that i'm a bishop i'll speak at the bishops conference meetings about it and there's always tremendous interest now these are all older men for the most part they don't know you know facebook from you know french fries but um they get it they get the importance of it and and why it's worth doing um and and the the success of it in a way has been a source of surprise and delight to me when i started youtube videos i mean we thought if we got 300 views we're doing great i was thrilled when i my first one got the 300 views um you know and then it just grew it just grew from there and i think it was a willingness to talk about the culture and then engage people so i can't do it as much now but in the early days i would get in the comm boxes and i would really enter into these debates and you know as you know 97 of people that come on com boxes are mad at you for some reason or they you know don't like what you're saying so okay i was able then to at least have an argument i could get into the you know lists with them well it's interesting you know you say that because i've certainly met my fair share of opposition in the media domain let's say especially with you know the legacy media um but i'm stunned by the positivity of the comments it's absolutely overwhelming i can't really make heads or tales of it that it's so consistent and it's been very sustaining to me so and i i don't really i don't i guess the reason i think that's the case is because i think i'm encouraging people you know who haven't had any encouragement or enough and that's lots of people maybe everyone because i mean how much people should be encouraged to the ultimate degree right they should say well you want to reveal the divine within in your own particular way you could do that and you know i'm curious about you did the reddit ama didn't you a couple times well i did that i've done it twice now and i think one one year i was like you were first and i was third and not because they knew me i'm sure they didn't but i just got on and said i'm a catholic bishop who loves to dialogue with non-believers and atheists or something right so you were asking also inviting some push back there as well so yeah but but it was i loved it we got an enormous response now a fair amount of obscenity and just people that hate religion see part of it might be religion that i'm so institutionally identified with religion so all that but but i loved both times i did that the the questions that emerged and the themes that emerged were very illuminating to me you know so no i i've i've loved that world too of entering into it and it's you know it certainly gets attention people watch these videos and then i've done a lot of you know writing and so on longer form things i've done documentary films as well so what kind of crowd are you getting now with your youtube channel and your podcast what what's your audience numbers yeah we have like 77 million or something uh you know total views uh oh yeah on you on your channel yeah wow that's that's that's a lot are people cutting up your your videos and posting them in pieces as well yeah sometimes sometimes um i'm trying to get the an average it depends on the type of video we're doing but yeah we're getting you know good numbers solid numbers um not in your ballpark but uh well 77 million total views is like that's far beyond respectable that's i mean you know you think about comparing that to something like a published book i mean youtube has a reach that's absolutely staggering right and i appreciate that very much you know that all these different forms and then that's just youtube you know many of all the other forms of social media so you know i'm look as an evangelist as someone trying to speak for the church i'm delighted by that and um you know we just did it we just as as you did i mean i think the first video of yours i saw you were in a like a poorly lit room sitting in this chair talking about nietzsche or something i thought wow this guy someone said oh he's getting these enormous numbers and i thought well but it speaks to the wasn't the production quality that was doing it yeah no it wasn't it was it was the it was the content and the willingness to talk about important ideas and to do it in a way that respects the audience i think all that uh is is worthwhile you know well look that was that was really good um we got we got nice and deep into it that yeah i appreciate that very much um loved it i wish it i wish it could have gone on longer i had more questions but i think i've i've exhausted my capacity for for concentration we went for a couple hours huh yes well it's a good natural end i would say as well yeah no i loved it jordan thank you i appreciate you taking the time you know anything else that that you um want to say or that we didn't cover just you know tell your wife's name is tammy right yes tell her you know we did just came out with it it's on youtube a series of reflections i did on the rosary and i know with her interest in the rosary that she just go on youtube and check it out she might find that interesting yeah it's too bad we didn't have a chance to talk to that a little about that because yeah just tell her that because i i love the rosary too it's a great prayer and it it works at so many different levels you can look at it psychologically and even physically you know what that does to you so have a look at those maybe and uh you know give her my best and i remember we were in rome right after you and i spoke the first time our team was in rome doing some filming and i think we i forget whom we sent it to somebody in your office but we did a little video and i knew that your wife was very sick at the time i didn't know that you were on the verge of your issues you know but i just said we said mass in my room there in in rome which is the hotel room and said it for your wife so we sent that to you so let her know that we have been for a long time praying for the two of you well that's much appreciated and certainly all the care that people have shown including the care that you've shown has been extraordinarily helpful and she's listening to you on a regular basis and she's certainly found the practice of the rosa tammy is quite a physical person and yeah so she's it's practice for her rather than an intellectual endeavor not that she's incapable of intellectual endeavor but she's an adept practitioner so she's she does as well yoga for years in your hand matters you know it's a very physical thing yes well it was it was it was it was it didn't it helped her maintain peace while she was facing death yeah essentially continually and and so the the the that's the ritual element which we never talked about at all partly i suppose because you know we tend towards the abstract in the intellectual but the ritual next time the ritual shouldn't be yes exactly the ritual shouldn't be uh dismissed no i'm a catholic heck ritual's our whole thing you know yeah well there's peace in ritual right that's the thing you know what to expect it's a place of safety and and and in a world that changes constantly ritual is the only thing that provides order and so we may need that now more than ever because things are changing so unbelievably fast which is also partly why the church should be careful about being too relevant it's like yep i agree i agree yeah all right well thank you very much no i enjoyed it immensely and god bless you me too um thank you i need all the blessing from god i can get i can tell you that so i'll keep praying for you thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 644,127

Rating: 4.9242272 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: BVrLqpt0APo

Length: 111min 29sec (6689 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021