Ep. 16 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Christianity and Agape

[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time we had begun to take a look at the transformation that was occurring in the eastern Mediterranean around the time of the advent of what was going to become Christianity of course this figures upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth a very controversial figure to say the least and as I said I'm not going to endeavor to claim to give the absolute or exhaust his account of this extraordinary individual but instead I'm going to try and do what I've done before which is to show how what he did contributed to our understanding of meaning and wisdom and how that eventually pushed the history that has led to the meaning crisis Ford so we were talking about one of the core messages of Jesus Jesus seems to have understood himself or at least those around him understood him as Kairos if you remember that's a turning point in the course of history because as we spoke before the Israelites and by this time they were known as the Jews had developed the psycho technology of understanding history as a cosmic narrative and which there are crucial turning points and Jesus saw himself as such a Kairos whether or not he saw himself as the Kairos that was known as the Jewish Messiah is again controversial I don't need that for the purposes of my argument it seems though that he had a sense of himself as deeply participating in the way in which God was directing and involving himself in the course of history if you remember the model of God we talked about when we talked about the ancient Israelites the god of the exodus is a God who is creating into an open future and that human beings participate in that creation by identifying with a particular course the auth loving it being shaped by it as well as shaping participating in its flow and Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as having an especially deep participation such that he felt himself to be at one with this God who is capable of altering the course of history and redeeming human beings he seems to have understood this Kairos as having something to do with a profound way of understanding the participation in God which we've talked about before makes sense we've talked about how this participatory knowing is a process in which you're coupled right you're neither making it or be made by it but it's this reciprocal revelation in which you are you are making it and it is making you the way you participate in your culture the way you participate in your language the way you participate in history and you know this not by gathering beliefs but the way in which yourself is fundamentally transformed and so Jesus understood this participation this his participation in God as the disclosing of this profound kind of love and we began talking about this the kinds of love that human beings experience and how love is something that deeply transforms who we are and our salience landscape our character we talked about the Greeks have three terms and it's helpful because by this time the New Testament is being run written in Greek it's helpful to understand these Greek terms so there's eros which is the love of being one with something right and it can be just you know drinking water so I become one with it but of course it could become what has become more commonly known as becoming one with someone through sexual you Ioan erotic love then there's valia that's at the core of philosophy yeah this is the love that is born of right cooperation so I Ross is consumptive making one with Phi Lea is cooperation we work together we work together and a lot of of how we succeed as human beings is by the way we work together but Jesus starts to emphasize a new kind of love agape and then this is not the love of consumption or cooperation this is the love of creation it's the love that God is demonstrating towards humanity in the way God is an ongoing creation of the open future so God is creating the future is creating the historical process and course of that history that makes people possible see agape is the kind of love that creates persons so the main metaphor for agape if you remember is the way a parent loves a child you don't love a child because you want to consume it in some way that's hideous and vicious you don't love your child when you bring it home from the hospital because it's a great friend to you it can cooperate it can't do that at all it's fact it's not even a a person it's not a morally rationally reflective agent in fact it's exactly the opposite you love it precisely because by loving that non person you turn it into a person this is the powerful creative it's it's a god-like ability that we have by participating through love in another being we can transform that being from a non person into a person a person that could enter into a community of persons and find meaning fellowship belonging so that radical transformative power of of agape its ability to radically transform us and reorient us brings about a Metanoia a radical turning this means above and beyond and this means your salience landscaping how you were fundamentally prospectively knowing the world so metanoia I'm fundamentally turning altering my whole field of consciousness altering my whole orientation and what's fundamentally happening in the metanoia Rite of agape is I'm having a personal Kairos my personal course is being radically transformed so Jesus is not only teaching this he is exemplifying it he he experiences himself as a Kairos and he's giving to people through agape the possibility of experiencing their own personal Kairos see what happens in the experience that Jesus is pointing to I believe is we get a fundamental reorientation at for a very long time we are born out of we we are the receivers of agape it is only because you as an animal because that's what you are before you're a person a biological animals it's only because you as an animal received the agape love of others that you were actually transformed into a person and what you actually do right is you internalize other people and how they are aware of you and that is how you gain your reflective rationality that is how you gain your own understanding you find 'mentally gain your self understanding your sense of self and your ability to reflect on yourself by how you are reflected through like through other people it's a fundamental thing to say and and because it it is so fundamental and we can say it with few words it can be trivialized but we are in a very deep sense born out of an a gothic love that precedes us it's because of agape because of the way other people have devoted themselves and participated in you that you went from a non person into a person that you got the ability it's almost like other people are mirrors through which you come to see and realize yourself that you got a sense of self that you got the ability to reflect on yourself that you became got a sense of your own ownership there's nothing that in fact is more transformative for an adult than having a child so from the child's perspective what's happening is right they are in a sense consuming the love that the adult is giving them they're taking in this love and they are becoming one with it you understand yourself and can reflect on yourself because of the way you have internalized other people's attention on you but that's the child's perspective view so you can see for the child it's very egocentric and Freud picked up on this that in but I think he also twisted it in this sense it's very our relationship to our parents and please listen to this very carefully is in that sense erotic right in the sense that we are consuming them we are internalizing them we are becoming one with them now I don't mean erotic in the sense that Freud ultimately meant because Freud thought that all of that was always a sexual experience I think that's too simplistic but I think there is insight here but take a look at this from the parents perspective from the parents perspective the person giving agape it is not egocentric at all in fact there is nothing that will more challenge your egocentric orientation that everything is moving this way then having a child if you're a good parent and of course we all vary in how good we are as parents I have been privileged to be a parent myself but what happens is you are no longer the center of your salience landscape the child is because the child is absolutely dependent upon you do you see this is the Metanoia of agape I mean the metaphor is turning but the problem with that metaphor is all turning is still egocentric you have to think of the turning this way the turning is I go from being egocentric to being centered on someone else and what I'm actually centered on is I'm very I'm centered on the process right of creating a person like God but not egocentric like oh my god it's like I am participating in that a gothic process that made me the the agape that precedes me flows through me and transforms me as I'm oriented and what Jesus was offering I believe was he was offering a teaching so that all people could experience this not just individually personally with their own parents but in terms of a relationship to God we could all experience this fundamental turning such that we become vessels through which agape creates other human beings so what's going to happen of course and you see this in the epistles of John is the Christian the Christian community starts to understand this capacity for radically transforming people so that they become conduits of this this godlike creative process whereby non persons are turned into persons they're coming to understand agape itself is God that's what God is this is the that so the Israelite notion of God creating the open history becomes right it becomes specified in the teachings of Jesus to the idea that no God is agape God is this process that we participated and we put look it made you you didn't make it you participate in agape it precedes you it flows through you and you participate in it insofar as you help other people to come to personhood through you know this is a radical idea as I mentioned last time this is going to give the Christians a psycho technology they a grammar for how to transform perspectival and participatory knowing that is going to allow them to conquer the Roman Empire I don't mean militarily of course what I mean is what Christians can do is they can offer all the non persons of the Empire a process by which they become persons within a community of persons and mesh together in a gothic love so all the women all the widows all the sick all the poor all the non male Roman citizens all the weak can come to Christianity and receive the opportunity and the community that supports this opportunity of a radical transformation now we know that the community around there's many different communities around Jesus I should say there's just like around Socrates there's did many different Jesus movements but this seems to be the the key idea and it seems that it carries with it some kind of notion of a sacrificial element to it and again there's a lot of controversy around this and we have to be careful not to read too much of Paul into this but we'll talk about Paul in a few minutes but agape has a sacrificial element to it in in that you give yourself you for give you give before the person earns it's not fine Lea it is not reciprocity it is not you and I are working together you have earned my trust and love by Lia is great and it's important right and it's not eros I love you because of how you can I can consume you and right make you one with me now agape has a sacrificial component to it because what I'm actually doing right is I'm giving up I'm making myself an affordance for your transformation from non person into person so this is why Jesus emphasizes forgiveness as central to his message right and one of the things we should remember and this is controversial to say is Jesus does not anywhere in the Gospels present himself right as the wit means by which right we obtained forgiveness from God he often presents himself as a way and things like that and we'll talk about that but when asked how to obtain forgiveness from God this opportunity of radically transforming ourselves Jesus consistent message by forgiving other people we experience agape from God the degree to which we give it to others and this has been of course radically trivialized in our culture right we think about we think of forgiveness largely as a matter of you know somebody feels sorry and we tell them it's okay that's not the core idea of forgiveness the the court of the idea of forgiveness doesn't depend on your contrition the degree to which you are trying to afford someone else growing into their personhood and the degree to which you are making a sacrifice towards that it's already forgiveness some forgiveness is when somebody has slighted us and the relationship has been damaged and we have to act agape clay in order to re-establish the relationship but in a very real sense all a gothic love is forgiving love because it is giving before right the person that is receiving the love can in any way be said to have earned it so this idea that are we we are sacrificially extending the capacity for individuals to redirect their own history experience their own Kairos was often captured by Jesus in the famous language of being born again you're dying and you're being born again this radical transformation of your entire orientation your entire way of being now the tragedy that befall --zz the Jesus movements at least some of them because not all the movements care about this this is again something that many people don't realize they are many elements of the the early followers of Jesus communities that don't care about his death they only care about his teaching but of course Jesus does die and that has a profound effect on some of these movements and again this is hard to state anything clearly or anything that we could have any great confidence in but somehow his death exemplifies the sacrificial forgiveness that right that is at the core of God as agape somehow Jesus death enables people to internalize that sacrificial love and empowers them to transform other human beings now there of course is resistance to the Jesus movements into Jesus it's plausible that his death was due to the fact that he was angering and upsetting a lot of people we see this as a right as something similar to what confronted Socrates one of the people that seems to have been an early persecutor is a guy by the name of Saul now Saul's a very interesting person he's both a Jew and a Roman citizen at a time when these two groups of people are quite antagonistic towards each other there has been already wars between the Romans and the Jews a new one was about to come to major Jewish revolts so the relationship is a very tense one filled with a lot of tension and this is reflected within this person himself he seems to have he seems to have integrated these two disparate and warring aspects of his personality and his identity together around a commitment to law organized rules of behavior and conduct and he sees the Jesus movements the followers of Jesus they're not in fact in fact just to point out something they're not initially called the followers of Jesus initially call the followers of the way because Jesus had presented a way aka a it's see the word way is so wonderful because it doesn't just mean method it it's not just some procedures it's also an affordance of how you're going to move into the future it is a new orientation so Jesus is the way in which we can experience the Kairos of metanoia and become forgiving individuals who are constantly forgiving Agathe CLE to others in Paul so it's all seems to see these people right and their their language of agape and their adoration of Jesus as deeply threatening to his Jewish heritage and also to Roman order and so he becomes involved in the persecution of the followers of the way and it's about the time that he's involved in the persecution that they start being called actually as an insult initially Christians the followers of Christ what means The Anointed One and so he's involved in persecuting them he's there the first time he's mentioned in the Bible he's there when the first Christian is martyred Stephen Stephen is talking about this message and the crowd gets angered and they stoned him and Saul gathers every saul basically holds everybody's coats so that they can more effectively stone Stephen to death so Saul becomes deeply involved in this and he he gets basically a writ a letter an official letter to travel to Damascus and round up these so-called Christians and bring them in for prosecution and on the road he has what I think we could call a transformative experience he relates it himself and a couple places it's also represented third-person and the book of Acts and there's differences in it as there always is in something that has a mythological element to it again where myth doesn't mean fable where myth means trying to present a profound pattern but he's struck by a bright light and of course this is the metaphor of enlightenment and we know the transformative experiences often involve this experience of radical super salience often tremendous light then he is struck to the ground by it's overwhelming experience and then a voice speaks to him and says why why it's all Saul why do you persecute me and Saul says who are you lord Lord ease into title for God Lord is anyone who as some important higher status than you and the experience carries with it that on to normativity that we talked about this he Saul has the sense that he's confronting something more real than himself who are you and the voice says I am Jesus who you persecute and that's all we need to talk about I mean Saul is blinded by this light and encountering this voice right and we can think about Plato's metaphor here of as we encounter these things were often blinded by the light but what we need to understand is this engenders in Saul a deep deep inner conflict and in fact when you read his biography as I've already painted here you can see that his experience of inner conflict is really profound and this reminds us again it's it's analogous but different of Plato's concerned with inner conflict the way inner conflict reveals the psyche but as whereas Plato is going to develop a scientific theory of inner conflict Saul is going to undergo a transformative experience because of this inner conflict it is going to Riven him to his core because how can it be that he hasn't had this transformative experience this awakening experiences more real from the very being that he was persecuting how can he reconcile these together he's actually he travels to Antioch and he actually gets taken in by the very people he was going to persecute do you see this this is this forgiveness the very people he was going to persecute take him in so the people that he was going to destroy are actually responsible for his care and under their care his sight is restored what's all this pointing to again it's a pointing to right he's at war with agape itself and we all are like we all are we have a very tough time and this is part of the message of Jesus and John and Paul at least to my mind we have a tough time acknowledging the reality of agape we like to create personal fables of how we are self-made and self-directed and self secure and self-sustaining when agape challenges that in a profound way so Saul goes into the desert to reflect and this is always a biblical mythological paradigm for a process of undergoing radical reflection and when he comes out he has gone through a radical transformative experience so he's had this higher state of consciousness this visionary experience he then experiences agape from the very people he was persecuting he goes into the desert and when he comes back he's a new person he's gone through a radical transformative experience and we know that because he's changed his name changed his name from Saul to Paul and he has a radical message it's a powerful message he comes to present agape and one of the most beautiful passage of famous passages in the Bible you've probably heard it at some point it's often misread weddings people read this passage often at weddings and they I think are misinterpreting it because what Paul's talking about is Anna Gothic spiritual kind of love now there should it definitely be that aspect in a romantic relationship but I don't think romantic relationships typically are understood by most people as venues in which a Coptic love is the primary focus let me read the passage to you so Paul begins by saying and now I will show you the most excellent way so he's showing you the most excellent way this is and notice the word excellent the way in which we can most radically go through transformation and grow I'll show you the most excellent way now he's not gonna make an argument like Plato instead what he's going to do is he's going to he's going to present everything from the framework of a participatory kind of knowing that's how he begins if I so he's not making an argument he's talking about what his very identity how his identity is being informed and transformed by its conformity to a gothic love if I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love I am only a resounding gong clanging cymbal if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith that can move mountains but have not love I am nothing notice all the language here this is participatory language this is the language of knowing by identifying if I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames because Christians are starting to be burnt all right but I have not love I gain nothing notice this language it's very radical love is patient love is kind it does not envy it does not boast now this of course is not romantic love because romantic love does it experience envy and jealousy it is not proud it is not rude it is not self-seeking it is not easily angered it keeps no record of wrongs love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth it always protects always trusts always hopes always persevere those are the those are the features you need in order to help and afford someone coming into personhood love never fails now we think what are you talking about I've been in so many relationships and they fail that's because you're thinking of this as romantic love that love does fail what he means is agape can't fail we are always born from and always have to give birth to agape or personhood itself will disappear but where there are prophecies they will cease where there are tongues they will be stilled where there is knowledge it will pass away now he's trying to get them to understand like what what are we talking about here before we know in part and we prophesy in part but when perfection comes perfection here meaning completion the Emperor disappears and and people like what and so he gives a metaphor one we've seen elsewhere when I was a child I talked like a child I thought like a child I reasoned like a child when I became a man I put child tyldus ways behind me okay so when you're a kid you have a particular identity you have a particular salience landscape right and things really really matter to you in a certain way we talked about this when we talked about software so when you become an adult right your world becomes radically reoriented what is salient and what is central to you is radically changed so I hope for many of you as adults your life is not primarily centered upon and oriented towards the super salience II of candy and toys if you're right really really oriented towards candies and toys and playing then of course you're not growing up as an adult when we go through agape it is like the change in our salience landscape and our fundamental identity how we participate in ourselves in the world is fundamentally transformed and that's what Paul is offering here then he says look you've got to know what this means now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror then we shall see face to face now I know in part then I shall know fully even as I am fully known and now these three remain faith hope and love but the greatest of these is love okay so now it's like we're seeing on a reflection we're not in touch with reality we're like the people in Plato's cave we're looking at the right the shadows and the echo we don't see things as they are we're not in touch with reality but with gah pay the most excellent way we will come to know as we are knowing right he's talking about this participatory love think about how when you are D and now you can even use a romantic relationship one with some significant up when you're when you really love someone how you know them to degree to which they know you it right it is it is such a participatory way of knowing you you you get to be in touch with their reality in a way that somebody else doesn't that's I mean that's part of the bargain of of a mature understanding of a romantic relationship right you give up the extensive erotic pursuit of many different partners in order that you can deeply know and be known by someone else you and and then and that's that's like growing up that's like going from being a child to a man so Paul is actually talking about there's a way of knowing we're going to come back to this the term that's being used there is gnosis that is bound up with agape this way of loving see so all these things God is agape we forgive agape we are forgiven by agape we know as we are known we are participating in the the the becoming a person of others and then they are participating in ours it's this powerful new whole new way of being and it has become so sedimented in our culture and so ossified and so below how we live it's like the ground we're walking on and like the ground we walk on we have contempt for it without realising how much it holds everything up I'm not a Christian I'm not advocating for Christianity I'm trying to get you to understand how profound an expression of meaning transcendence and way to wisdom is being on offer here now there is a dark side to this I think and here's where I will probably part company with people who identify as Christians see the difficulty with participatory knowing and this gnosis this is we'll talk more about this right there's knowing by participation and going through radical metanoia transformation right this gnosis agape that Paul talks so much about there is a danger with it right there's a danger of misunderstanding so look that we have to go carefully here look when I am knowing someone participatory a gothic relationship right my knowing of them and my knowing of myself are deeply their inseparably bound together that's why Jesus will say his for this relationship he has to God is I and the father are one and Paul will say it's not I who live but Christ who lives in me right this is knowing by this deep bonding of identity you know not by transforming your thoughts or even right your mind you know by transforming yourself but there's a danger to this the danger is that any aspect of yourself that you do not properly understand has not come into knowledge can get projected onto what you love this is the great danger also in under romantic relationship precisely because you are so bound to this person in your identity a lot of what is unconscious in your identity getting in get projected on to that person so see this is why there's such a moral obligation on you when you enter into a romantic relationship to commit yourself to a process of self-knowledge in the Socratic sense self discovery because the degree to which you are self ignorant is agreed to which that participatory knowing will be darkened and twisted into a projection of aspects of yourself and I think to my mind for all of his astonishing spiritual brilliance that's also happening in Paul see the inner conflict in Paul was very profound he comes up against the problem that many of us encounter Aristotle talked about this with a crazy and weakness of the well we know what we should do and we do the opposite of what we know is the right thing to do I know what I should do it's clear in my mind that this is what I should do and yet I do this somehow even though knowing what I should do I find myself almost as if I'm being pulled to do something else and he describes it Paul Paul uses the language of like somebody in the midst of a civil war who's standing sort of at the center of their Citadel and the outlying provinces are in revolt and experiences this radical inner conflict there's lots of different theories about what this is what's he what's he so it conflicted about but Paul comes up with a narrative of course it's gonna be a narrative right he's he he's in the Israelite Jewish tradition he comes up with a narrative for understanding this conflict and it it's the narrative that comes from a personalization of the notion of the movement from the two worlds as being right the liberation from an old place and a movement to a new place the Exodus because Christianity is personalizing this the X Paul experiences the Exodus personally he experiences there's two of him there's the old Saul right who wants to write follow the way of the law but is actually right it feels guilty and angry and feels feels disconnected from God and rejected by God and then there's the new Paul the Paul of love who feels connected and he sees he sees the old man and the new man and what's happening is the new man is trying to be born from the old man and so we we have picked this has become endemic to our culture this idea of the old me and the new me we think oh this is just natural I came up with this such we tell ourselves at times the old me in the new me Paul understands this and he understands this tension between the old Saul that was committed to law and order and justice and punishment and the new Paul who is participating in the liberation of love and he's trying to understand why do I have this in a conflict because he's personalized the god of history he understands his inner conflict and here's where I think the danger of projection is clear he understands his inner conflict as reflecting an inner conflict in God God was actually conflicted within himself it's it's it's a radical idea we need to know this not because again I'm trying to advocate for Christianity because we have to understand Paul in order to understand Augustine and in order to understand Luther and we have to understand Augustine and Luther if we're going to understand the meaning crisis so you've got this idea that God has two aspects to him or herself one part is God represents law and justice and order and insofar as God represents that we are we stand in judgment we have somehow failed we have not lived up to the moral perfection that morality demands for us look the court made a good point about this morality demands nothing less than perfection from you you have to be completely honest it to be completely written courageous and none of us can ever meet that standard now I mean we need to we need to balance that with compassion and love but what Paul is seeing is he's saying well God is perfectly just and therefore we fail to meet that standard and therefore legally we are condemned to death but yet God isn't just a judge God is also the a gothic parent that loves us and so what he does is he takes the notion that Jesus's death was somehow sacrificial because we've talked about our sacrifices borne up within a gothic love and he gives it to this idea that Jesus sacrificed himself in order to satisfy God's demand for justice so that God was capable of really loving us now there and and you know and and how that Redemption model works out there's all kinds of theological bottles about it and and whether or not we should understand it this way or that way is not relevant to our purposes what's relevant right is that within this astonishing foundational message of gnosis and agape there's also an attempt to project art like sorry this sounds so radical and I don't mean to make it sound ridiculous I'm not I'm trying to be respectful but the the idea that somehow the course of reality itself is a meshed in a conflict between justice and agape what that's going to mean is that people that experience deep inner conflict are going to find a welcoming home within the auspices of Christianity individuals who are riven by a sense right of personal failure of not living up to what they can and should be that their personhood has been thwarted they have not come into a fullness of perfection as Paul says a completeness of their personhood are going to be deeply attracted to the Christian message now you are probably now seeing how this might be relevant to the meaning crisis because what happens if we still because we are still participating in the waters of Christianity within our culture even if we're not Christians and most of us aren't anymore how do we tap into all of this the power of agape acknowledging its reality the participatory gnosis the radical transformation our own sense of not living up to the fullness of our personhood what if we still experience all of that but we do not have the machinery of Christianity with its metaphysics of cosmic Redemption available to us that could be a powerful experience of despair I mean Camus famously said my whole of my life I've tried to figure out how can I be a saint without there being a God and he of course famously came to the conclusion that reality was radically absurd and come back to that so there is a price we pay and this is not a statement of resentment but there is a price we pay for the gifts to use a Christian word the grace that's what grace originally means the gifts that Christianity has given us it has given us expectations of love and transformation and growth into personhood and relief from inner conflict expectations that I would say are not well met in our post Christian worldview so we carry the grammar of God but we no longer believe any of the things we say with it for many of us so what I'd like to do is try and now trace how Christianity coming out of the Israelite Jewish heritage and I've already sort of be giving making allusions of this starts to intersect with the actual revolution that was coming out of Greece because Christianity is going to take up into itself it's going to take up into itself the stoicism we've already talked about Paul quotes stoicism in the Bible as it does that it's also going to come into conflict not conflict well some conflict actually to be honest it's but it's going to come into confluence with that strain of the actual revolution spirituality that came out of Greece it's going to come into connection with Neoplatonism it's going to come into connection with Gnosticism so next time what I want to look at is I want to look at the Gnostics these followers of Jesus because of course it's controversial to call them Christians who really sent her in on this gnosis agape what they were talking about and the Neoplatonism because all of that is going to have an impact on the generation of more orders of meaning we'll review that again but if you remember we talked about how with Aristotle we had developed right in the West a Noma logical order - meaning a way in which we could pursue worldview attunement we're gonna see that as Neoplatonism and Christianity come together we're gonna get two more orders of meaning emerging an order by which we pursue the most excellent way and an order by which this cosmic narrative history is a meshed into the Western worldview thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you [Music] you you you [Music]

Channel: John Vervaeke

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, religion, meaning, meaning in life, meaning crisis, personality, meaning of life, U of T, university of toronto, john vervaeke, vervaeke, lecture, existentialism, continental, analytical, consciousness, cognitive science, insight, mental health, chrstianity, agape, love, jesus christ, jesus, bible, st. paul, paul, saul

Id: Jbwm03djuJc

Length: 54min 38sec (3278 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2019