The Intellectual Life

welcome back to the word on fire show I'm Brendan Vaught the host and the content director at word on fire and we're joined back stateside with Bishop Robert Barron he's back from Rome from his big Adlam and a visit which we'll talk about here bishop it's good to have you back Brandon good to see him I'm just still recovering from jetlag event I slept okay last night but it always takes me about five days to recover when I get back from these trips yeah now that you're out in Santa Barbara it's a grueling trip back into Rome multiple flights driving through hours back to Santa Barbara it's time in a 9-hour time difference you know so my poor body had zero idea what time it was or anything so now it always takes me a while while you were there in Rome you wrote a couple of articles one of them was reflecting on your experience with Pope Francis so you spent over three hours in a discussion with Pope Francis along with the other bishops from California Nevada and Hawaii and then another article reflecting on your experiences praying at the tomb of st. Paul so I don't want to dwell too much on that but in addition to that any other major highlights or important things that happen during your trip there all was it was a wonderful trip memorable I think we'll do a special video on the visit with the Pope but that was extraordinary spend that amount of time with a figure of that you know importance for me the bottom line was he really was a spiritual father that was the the atmosphere he created that's the the persona definitely that he exhibited at that meeting and and I was actually quite close to him just the way it worked as Archbishop Gomez came in right after Cardinal Mahony was you know it's everything in Rome is very hierarchical so the Cardinal first then the senior Archbishop Gomez and then after Gomez his auxiliaries so that meant that I was fairly close to the front I was maybe five chairs away from the Pope so he was I don't know you know twelve feet away from me so just that in itself was kind of extraordinary meeting him talking to him face to face what interesting thing you know as he spoke he told us then he was to us an Italian and he had a translator who translated into English but then I'd say 2/3 of us who spoke to him spoke to him in Spanish so we didn't use the translator and he said to us look use any language you want in this exchange so I asked him a question in Spanish and then he responded though in Italian which was then translated into English so it was an interesting little linguistic moment again we're gonna have much more recapping the Adlam in a visit we'll do a few more videos on that so look forward to that but Bishop while you were in Rome I think you met with the Holy Father on Monday and the day before that Sunday I texted you there was lots of news flying around we learned about the death of Kobe Bryant who obviously you know is a Catholic in your Archdiocese of Los Angeles tell me about what it was like when you heard about it and what it's been like since then yeah it was so shocking it when I first I think it was something came over the Facebook or something and I thought oh this has got to be a hoax and this can't be right and then of course it was confirmed and I was so struck because he was on his way to a sports facility in Thousand Oaks which is in my pastoral region and where the helicopter went down was just outside my region Calabasas but just south of the 101 Expressway so when I was coming home yesterday now I was still pitch dark was early in the morning but I went right past the site where his helicopter went down and then what we did is a lot of us from Southern California over in Rome we're monitoring the reaction back here and I remember I said along with some others to Archbishop Gomez and and some of the other more senior bishops up you know I think we should really do something we should react from Rome because it's such a strong reaction back home so we did a little video I don't know if you saw it the Southern California Bishops we were and I think was it John Lateran or one of the basilican churches we just had massed and then we gathered together and we just said some prayers you know for him and his family so yeah it was some it's disturbing I mean whenever someone that young and then there's the special tragedy of it's the death of his daughter and the other people on the helicopter it was just especially tragic but then that Kobe by all accounts went to mass the morning of his death with his daughter so there's a lot of poignancy a lot of things very moving about it well in today's episode we are going to be talking about the intellectual life and you and I were talking beforehand about about asking you about it and you just saying what's that or I don't have what you know but I know we get questions all the time from people about Bishop Barron's reading habits his writing habits as he study how does he write I think a lot of people know you bishop through your online work through YouTube videos but not as many people know about your academic background that for years you were an academic professor you taught at the seminary graduate level courses in theology and philosophy you wrote scholarly articles scholarly books it's a huge part of your life and I want to unpack that here and maybe glean some tips for aspiring intellectuals as well so uh first of all when did you first become interested in the intellectual life the life of the mind what drew you in and maybe around what age well it was it was probably the aquinas moment that i've talked about many times when i was a freshman in high school and it came across aquinas as arguments I mean prior to that I was always a good student I always liked to read when I was a kid let's say you know I'm 8 9 10 11 years old I read sports books I devoured books about baseball football basketball players Jerry Kramer I'm dating myself here but Jerry Kramer the great guard for the Green Bay Packers Dave DeBusschere wrote a memoir of the New York Knicks 1970 season I read about ten times I'm not kidding so I love to read but I wasn't exactly an intellectual it was probably that moment when I discovered Thomas Aquinas and realized how thrilling it was to come to know something in a deeper way and that lit a fire and led me to a number of other books in those early years they want I was going to Catholic school but I had no mentors really because it was like a little private hobby or obsession of mine so I began reading philosophy long before I really should have all right without the proper supervision but I loved it and and then the other way it goes you know that when it comes to reading one thing leads to another and the flame kind of just keeps growing in intensity as you come to know things so this probably word started talked a little bit about the transition from that sort of life where you're just reading broadly you're reading things that interest to you one book leads to another but then in the serious study where you're doing research you're writing papers you're focusing when did that transition happen and then how'd you learn to do that how did you learn to do serious scholarly type work I probably learned that at Catholic University so you know I went to Notre Dame my first year then I entered the seminary and I you know was writing papers and that sort of thing but when I became a Bazelon scholar at Catholic you Basilan is a scholarship program for philosophy and when I went to Catholic you and I worked with some great master teachers John Whipple Monsignor Whipple still alive and well my senior Sokolowski I've talked about many times professor thomas proofer who was Sokolowski intellectual hero taught us under their tutelage I began to apprentice I'd say to the serious intellectual life what was involved in in research and writing especially see writing I think of Sokolowski you know it his seminars we read the great texts we have one in political philosophy we had one in phenomenology and we read the great texts but then he had us every single week right proofer did the same thing now that I think about it write a two-page paper not on the 20 page you know research but a two page paper on some topic that emerged from the reading but the point was to train us to hone in on something and to make a real argument and I remember both proofer and Sokolowski to their great credit we're real tough with us and we got bad grades in the beginning because they were trying to tell us no no that's not what I want I remember proof or saying this is just a little research paper I don't want that I want you philosophizing I remember one time my first year with him psychologically the first day I got on a paper and he said something like you've made a real argument here say and so they were they were training us they were masters we were apprentices in how to make a point clearly incisively for Sokolowski who famously said philosophy is the art of making distinctions I remember with this paper it's funny how all these years later I still recall it the first day I got from him it was it rests upon a key distinction like okay here's the problem here's how you know people have tried to solve it here's the distinction that that sheds the key light and then I draw this conclusion and to do that in no more than two pages double-spaced I mean so it's got to be succinctly argued I think now every time I sit down to write a column I mean that's what that is I hope it's something that succinctly argued that depends upon a key distinction or two that makes a succinct point all that I was being trained by Sokolowski another memory I have from those years dan Dahlstrom who was a young professor at the time now he's a he might be retired right now at Boston University but he was a Hegel Marx Heidegger specialist and one day in class I was what 19 or 20 and the issue was divine foreknowledge and human freedom a classic problem and so he set it up and then kind of invited us to enter into it so with some trepidation I raised my hand and I made some observation about it and then he decided okay this is the moment when I'm either I'm gonna go Socratic on this kid you know so then he began just asking me further questions about it forcing me to say yeah but and then well what about this well all right yeah and before I knew it I was really in a dialogue with him not that I was anywhere near his level but it was it was like you know think of someone being trained into martial arts you have a master and a disciple and he's trying to draw you in by fighting with you and the fighting brings out your capacities that's what was happening that day with him so it went by the way in the Middle Ages that's how young Thomas Aquinas young Bonaventure young Don Duns Scotus would have learned their art by a kind of you know khumba sort of combat intellectual combat so I think the Catholic you years to answer your question how is where I kind of learned that the disciplines of of high-level academics I like the discipline of the short essay the two-page paper and I think a lot of listeners here will resonate with the fact that when you're in middle school in high school the longer the assignment the more daunting right if the teacher says five pages oh ten pages oh my goodness how am I ever gonna do that but then when you get to more serious level work maybe graduate level work longer is easier you can write on and on and on and on stuff but if they say you need to write a one-page summary of this major contentious argument or topic you know it's harder to synthesize it all down to just a short little summer yes and I'll say this too branded anyone that has aspirations to write a book like a book-length study make sure that you could summarize your book in those two pages in other words there's an argument there's a kind of beginning middle end there's a problematic there's a key distinction there's a resolution even if your book is 500 pages long it should have that basic structure to it that's an old trick by the way in homiletics which I've never forgotten years ago a professor said you know the little science outside usually the Protestant churches but we have them too when there's like in one little line this sermon is summed up he said if you can't do that with your own sermon you haven't thought about it enough and there's a lot of wisdom to that it doesn't mean you're gonna become simplistic it means even if you're giving a 15 minute somewhat densely packed sermon you could summarize it in two or three lines that you put up on a sign and if you can't do that you don't probably have the argument of it clear in your own mind that's true of a sermon is true about an essay is true of a book we've talked about this on the podcast before specifically in regards to the modern philosophers that one mark of a good thinker a good ant elect as clarity and in a lot of the modern philosophers you find the exact opposite there so up to so difficult to dig into and comprehend is is that still you think a necessary component of good thinking is clear thinking I'm most yeah I think it's it's one of the marks of it and there I agree it's the fellow I mentioned for voltar Kaufman the Great's historian of philosophy who makes that argument I think very persuasively that people like in his mind Heidegger and Hegel are good examples of people that write very poorly and that it's a kind of a mask for or sign of imprecise thinking underneath those who are who are easier to read are in fact better philosophers and see we have kind of a prejudice in the other direction don't we like we say oh that was pretty easy to read it must not be very deep no he argues on the contrary now I'll give you the best example of it in my mind and someone I've used for a model for many years is Robert Sokolowski read his text on phenomenology which are extremely clear in their articulation and very deep in their perception I always compare it to like looking through very still clear water at the rocks on the on the base of the lake or something you know you're looking clearly and deeply at the same time I think that's a mark of good writing and in a way it's easy to be obfuscated it's easy to use all kinds of jargon and and doublespeak and and writing you know kind of byzantium sentences in a way that's easy but if you're you really you've grasped something of importance you know the distinction upon which it depends well then you can lay it out with some clarity so read Sokolowski I think is a good example of that all right we've talked about Robert Barron the young student at CUA from there you go to get your doctorate at the Institute catholique in Paris then you become father Robert Baer and the seminary professor then Bishop Robert Barron still writing academic books and papers how have your study habits changed over all those years or maybe they haven't are they the same now as you were back then or have they changed significantly well I would say that I'd say voracious reading has always been part of it now I must say my eyes aren't up to it the way they used to be your eyes do get worse as you get older I remember you told me do all your serious reading in your 20s and 30s that was that you have to back off because of your eyes Hans Kuhn said that and I don't often agree with hunt schooling but I think he's right about that he said read all your Hegel and Bart and content and company when you're young and your eyes can handle it no I but I've always been a voracious reader and tried to stay at it I'd say this Brandon use Aristotelian language I have a virtue when it comes to reading by which I mean reading is a good thing I have habituated myself in such a way that it's easy for me to be good in that regard you know it's not a struggle like oh I'm gonna read no I like reading and I savor the opportunity that's what a virtue is it's when you find it easy to do something good you know where a vice is when you find it easy to do something bad most people ourselves said our continent or in continent meaning they they struggle to do the good or they struggle against evil but when it comes to reading I've got the virtue I suppose the the happy toes of reading that's been true all my life let's talk a bit about your reading habits how do you typically read they're short bursts here and there do you sit in a chair and read for three or four hours long sessions what does it look like for you I used to do that ladder remember when I was in Paris as many years ago you know it's full-time doctoral students so my whole job was to read and write and no one knew who I was in those days I'm in a little this little tiny room at the Redemptorist house I'm Oprah nas and that's what I did and I remember my friend Benedict gave in who was and still is a monk at CNN and so happy in New Hampshire but he came up to my room I remember early in the morning and I was I was on my chair you might share and I had a little it was my steamer trunk that I brought my things over that was my coffee table had my feet up on that I was reading something and then he went away and he came back like at 8 o'clock that night for something else and there I was in the chair and he said you know you should have been a monk you're like a total monk I said yeah I've been basically just a reading here all day now I can't do that anymore I just physically can't spend hours and hours and hours at it still though like for example recently I was it's not an airplane coming home from Rome so long flights in New York long flight to LA that's a good time for me to read so I had it for enjoyment I read this this biography of Napoleon and when I have know for my serious reading has read something else that's a good time for me because you don't have distractions there's really nothing else you can do you got pretty good lighting on an airplane so that's when I do kind of long term things I've always got a book next to my bed so I read before I go to sleep usually something more relaxing like I finished Churchill biography now than Napoleon one so I might read like you know 10 pages of that for gonna sleep at night and then what I'm doing research is a different thing because there you might sit down and you're saying I'm looking at things that are pertinent to this part of my paper and it's not maybe the whole book I have to read but it's a certain section I've got a concentrate on however however prior to that let's say I've got a paper in mind like I've got to write that paper on whatever it is I'll say okay I better read the following like seven or eight books as the deep background for that and here in Santa Barbara to do because the weather is typically nice is I go out my back porch I've got a porch of my household patio and there's a nice chair out there and I read so there I might spend hour or so with one of these serious books another another thing to the Napoleon biography I'm just reading but whenever I'm reading for serious purpose I've got a pen in my hand and I'm always annotating and underlining and checking and question marking and commenting as I go and that's not just it keeps your your mind in the game the way to keep you score does you know and you're watching a baseball game you don't keep score you're gonna save it but you keep score because it kind of keeps your mind in the game well that that accomplishes that particular end but also then when you go back to that book and you say okay I gotta find real quickly what it was that central here Oh yep there OPI that checkmark that's that's the section so I always read serious books with the pen in hand I always like the marginalia from famous authors you know being able to go and you feel like you're reading the book with them I think I actually have a couple of your books that you've written in before and again it feels like I'm reading this with Bishop Baer and I get his thoughts here on every other page it's like a gift you can give as part of your you know lasting legacy yes and it's funny when I go back I find a booklet say in my own library that I haven't read for a long time and I oh there's my notations and I'll say like what that's one of my question mark exclamation point or no excavation point or yes you know or right I'll put that in sometimes and so that can be illuminating when you go back and say what was I thinking when I was reading that book you know a lot of people have hang-ups when it comes to finishing books they think if I start up yoke and I'm a third of the way through even if I'm not enjoying it I got a power all the way through do you feel that way do you quit books early how often do you do it well sometimes I'll give you some insight here from Jack Shea was a teacher of mine at one the line jack said I think very wisely if you're into a book and you realize I I could have written this book myself you should stop reading immediately and I know that sounds a little bit pretentious but not really once you've you know you let's say you're in your field so my field of philosophy or theology and you're reading saying like yeah okay I know I could write the rest of this book if I had the time then I put that one away I don't like leaving books unread they're always kind of bugs me if I find a book on my shelf and there's a there's a bookmark in it and I really owe ya I stopped reading at that point I don't like that so generally I'll get through it one thing you know is to Brandon is the deeper you go into your own field usually you've got a sense for okay this part is really important or this next section yeah I kind of got that I kind of understand that I I'm gonna skip to something else and it's okay I think if you have enough of a feel for your own tradition like let's say Newman is one of my great interests I've written a lot about Newman as I'm reading a book on Newman I might come to a section and say like okay I know I know exactly what's gonna do here so I'm gonna just skip through to an area I don't know as well that's okay generally though I like to plough through a book alright let's switch gears from reading to writing I want to talk about your writing habits in your history with writing many people have remarked on your clarity of writing your voice it's unique how'd you develop this did were you writing the same way back as a CUA student as you are now did your voice develop over time talk about that it gets and I think it just gets better the more you're at something if you're a basketball player and you watch a film of yourself playing when you're in eighth grade and in high school than college I hope you see improvement and if that just comes from a lot of practice and from writing bad sentences I take sentences very seriously a sentence is a beautiful thing to craft an English sentence is first of all like breaking rocks I don't find writing easy people say that oh you write so you know easily I don't I don't write easily I think it's like breaking rocks I think it's very very hard work and we look at the great literary figures they often say the very same thing they don't just sit down and start mama it's it's it's a craft and it's a it's a slog at the same time so I I work at it and you know for clarity that I think is the great that's the great master rule of writing you write to be read your right to be understood doesn't mean you write simplistically I don't think I write simplistically but I I want to be understood I want to communicate and that takes some effort you know to do that any one of us in our chosen field can use all the jargon language of that field and jargon is okay it's shorthand for people who are who speak the same kind of our go it's a it's a shorthand to you know get quickly to the point what are we trying to communicate the more you've kind of larded your prose with jargon it probably obviates that process you know but it's I would stress how hard it is to write you know I'll pay tribute to someone here he just died less than a year ago his name was mr. Lang underfur and he was the freshman English teacher at Fenwick high school so that same year I discovered Aquinas I would have had mr. Lang underfur for English and he was like Sokolowski this way where he made us write something I think was every week and he was brutal in his criticism but he man was that useful and helpful if you get your paper back and no matter what you wrote the person says oh I'd love you it's wonderful you're expressing yourself aren't you great I affirm you well that might be good psychologically it's not good in your formation as a writer language refer was extremely tough on our these little novice writers but what he was teaching us was the craft of putting it an English sentence together so not just the level of clarity and grammatical correctness but also issues such as rhythm and contrast and the interest form by shaping different types of sentences so I still have it I was what 13 when I first heard this but I still have in my brain don't just do subject-verb-object sentences mix it up what's the way you're using questions what's the way you're using introductory phrases watch the rhythm of your sentence does the writing gallop a little bit is they have a little energy and Verve to it he taught us a lot of that when we were just kids and he was tough on us the way I'm sure you know you've had coaches that were tough on you and they're always the best ones right so I'll pay tribute to him he was a big shaper of my own writing what writers would you look to for inspiration which ones do you think have mastered this craft of writing good sentences uh I mentioned already Sokolowski and I'll say it again in terms of academic writing he's one of my models of how to write well you know another one Brandon and I've mentioned him many times before Tomas mertens writings I always found compelling from a stylistic standpoint Merton was not a flashy writer not sort of self-consciously do you know Baroque or anything in his style as a young man he was very influenced by Hemingway and there's some of that I think in his mature spiritual writings where there's a I call it a clarity and precision in the language sophisticated yes dealing with with complex ideas yes but in a way that was kind of bracing in its directness so the Merton to me has been a model of good theological writing I mean at the level of style here let's say that you've blocked out a few hours tomorrow morning and you're working on a serious book or a serious paper talk us through what that morning looks like for you what what is the environment like how do you work how do you write something are you jumping back and forth between books are you just focused on the computer was it look like well the first thing you said correctly I did much more of this in my previous life when I had more time for it I think of my little cubbyhole office at Mundelein a key to me first of all is to take the time I used to leave the breakfast room at 8:30 because I said well it's time I gotta get to work by 9:00 you know it always takes a little bit of time for me psychologically just to kind of get in the mood - right and so that means the door is closed maybe the window is open I spend a little time and sort of contemplation sipping coffee you know just this is sort of getting in the mood in terms of the actual writing what I typically do when I'm doing a book or a serious article is I write what I call outline slash draft so I'm not sitting down as it now Here I am writing my book what I'm doing is writing a draft of let's say this paper and that's letting the ideas kind of tumble out on the page without a lot of discipline I'm not doing the Lang and Der Fuhrer thing there if I'm really crafting sentences with enormous care I'm just kind of letting the argument or ideas come out I'm attentive at this level to the thing having a coherence and a structure to it so let's say I'm writing away and I think no that belongs later I got to do something between well move vet down a little bit in the page and then put some more ideas in there so when it finally comes time to writing the article I might have 25 pages of these notes I'll call them or rough draft or outline and then I'm old-school I still don't quite know how to do the to screen thing that well so I like to just print that out and then I have it next to me and then I'll sit down and actually craft the sentences but kind of based on you know I often compared to Brandon when when I go Michelangelo was doing the Sistine ceiling he would draw what he called a cartoon cat athame is that like a like a big and then he would actually a fix that cartoon to the plaster and he'd make little marks in it for the outline and then he would you know paint well in a way that's what that draft is it's like a kind of Tomei it's like a first run at it which is is now the foundation for the actual crafting of the paper all right let's close with this I know we probably have a lot of people listening to this that are aspiring intellectuals maybe they're younger high school college-age and they want to go into a full time intellectual academic career or maybe they're just lay people like me married people work in normal jobs and they want to ramp up their intellectual life what advice would you have for aspiring intellectuals take the time I'll use mertens line about prayer take the time also read I'd say carefully what are your interests what what do you want to focus on in your own writing well then only read you know good books don't waste your time a lot of fluff if you you realize okay this book I'm reading is either not that good or it's not pertinent to my interest put it down and find those that are so take the time and be a little bit discriminant and careful in the kind of books that you choose so you don't end up wasting a lot of time you can do that with a book you can spend a lot of time and say I don't know either I could have written this thing or I'm just not getting that much out of this one life is short and choose your reading carefully I would say well that sound means it's time for our question from one of our listeners today we have one from Laurie in Georgia who is asking for book recommendations very apropos to this topic here here's her question this is Laurie from Georgia I would like recommendations of books to be read in english and literature courses at a Catholic High School thank you okay yeah I am presuming from the question that she wants books that really have explicitly Catholic themes in them because I'm there's so many great books that high school kids can be drawn into but you know I'd mentioned grant green a lot of high school kids read the power and the glory which is a great book at many levels but it does have a lot to say about the Catholic faith obviously a hero both of ours j.r.r tolkien read the the whole thing or parts of The Lord of the Rings I love evil in wall maybe it's a little bit much for high school kids but Brideshead Revisited I'd recommend any of the short stories of Flannery O'Connor if you got the stomach Forum and you've got the courage for them and the kids read a few of those stories and then you know heck Chaucer or parts of Chaucer if they're in more modern English form dante of course parts of the Divine Comedy I think those meet all wonderful things from a literary standpoint for Catholic kids to read and if you're looking for more of Bishop Aaron's book recommendations we put together a whole PDF of his favorite areas organized by category you can find it at word on fire dot org slash books word on fire org slash books and there's a whole bunch under the literature category that your high schoolers might like there all right well listen as we wrap up here I wanted to mention one special thing we're doing for Lent I've mentioned in the past that we're sending out these lint reflections booklets and we've sent out thousands of them already if you haven't got yours go check it out word on fire show.com slash lint I think is that you are if not I'll put the correct URL under this video but there's one more thing I wanted to highlight and that's our engage platform we've created this to help parishes to evangelize not just the people in their pews but people that don't even show up we have a really cool technology to allow us to do that also whenever your parish signs up for this engaged tool all of your parishioners get access to all of Bishop Barron's films and study programs they can watch the Catholicism series the pivotal player series all that and more and we've decided to give it away completely for free throughout Lent your parish can sign up for this engage platform for free throughout Lent again all parishioners get access to Bishop Aaron's videos and all sorts of other cool stuff so check that out you can find it at engage dot word on fire org engage dot word on fire org so sign up and get it for your whole parish free during Lent well thanks so much for listening to this episode we'll see you next week on the word on fire show [Music]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 70,575

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Id: NfMgKp2WQKQ

Length: 36min 5sec (2165 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020