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July 13, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:38:03
Bishop Barron: Word on Fire
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You Bishop Robert Emmett Baron is a US based prelate of the Roman Catholic Church Serving as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles Angeles.
He was a professor of systematic theology at University of St.
Mary of the Lake from 1992 until 2015, upgraded in 2008 to the inaugural Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture.
He founded the Catholic ministry Word on Fire which employs traditional and digital media to describe the doctrines of Catholicism to the general public Word on Fire published the 10-part series Catholicism which was broadcast on PBS in 2011 and which Bishop Barron hosted He's published a number of books including Catholicism a journey to the heart of the faith
Vibrant paradoxes the both slash and of Catholicism and very recently your life is worth living with Fulton Sheen published on March 5th 2019 He has a substantive YouTube presence with a total viewership of 30 million and is well known on Facebook as well with 1.5 million followers.
Clearly, Bishop Barron is among the rare religious figures managing a substantial public impact in the present world.
It's very nice to see you.
I've been looking forward to our meeting for quite a long time.
Yeah, me too.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Yeah, well, people keep writing and saying, you have to talk to Bishop Barron, and then they come up to me and they say, you have to talk to Bishop Barron.
Well, I mean the same thing from the other side.
Everyone's telling me to talk to you, so it must be in God's providence.
I suppose.
At least we can hope that that's the case.
So, why do people want us to talk as far as you're concerned?
Yeah, you know, I'm not entirely sure, but I would say I think you've opened a lot of doors for people to religion in an era when, you know, the new atheists are very influential among young people.
And I think you've opened doors that legitimize at least re-approaching these great issues and questions and texts.
And so I'm doing it, I suppose, in a more...
Explicit way, but you're I think paving the way for an awful lot of people at least to reconsider religion So maybe they find that intriguing and probably the fact that we're both Coming out of an academic background, but then trying to reach out, you know more widely through the social media so there's that in common, but I just speak for myself That's what I see in you.
That's been so powerful Because in the wake of the New Atheist critique, I just find that such a desert opens up for young people.
And I deal with young people all the time.
And I hear the echoes of Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris all the time.
But it's such a finely bleak view.
And religion speaks to these deepest longings of the heart.
And I think you've, for a lot of people, made that again possible, at least to think coherently and rationally about those things.
So I found that very uplifting and helpful, and I think a lot of people have too.
Maybe they see a point of contact there between the two of us.
Maybe.
You know, it's funny because I've received letters from people of different faiths from all over the world, like a surprising number of people, Catholics and a lot of Orthodox Christians, a lot of Orthodox Jews, a substantial number of Muslims.
Far more than I would have ever suspected.
Protestants and monks and Buddhists and Hindus who are all following the Lecture series I did on Genesis back in 2017.
And also, you know, a tremendous number of atheists, I would say, they probably outnumber the religious people, surprisingly enough.
And they've said that the tack that I've taken, which is, I would say, kind of a fine balancing line between the religious and the psychological, seems to I guess it's it's it's had the same effect on the people that I've been talking to that it's had on on me like these stories It had a profound effect on me.
Well, you know, I've talked about you actually to the American bishops because I'm the chair of the Evangelization and Catechesis Committee.
So the bishop's concerned about how we propagate the faith today.
And I've laid out for them a lot of the grim statistics, and they are grim, about especially young people leaving the Catholic Church.
For every one that joins, six are leaving now.
We have the highest rate of people leaving.
Anyway, I've gone through some of those stats, but then I've signaled signs of hope, and you're one of them.
I said, the fact that this gentleman who's speaking about, I'd say, spiritual things, and certainly now about the Bible in a way that is smart and compelling, especially young people, is hopeful.
So many might be leaving, you know, official religion, but the religious questions have not left their minds.
And I think you're addressing that in a way that's very provocative and compelling.
And it's given me a sort of renewed courage to say, well, why can't we do the same thing?
Why have we...
It's our book.
I mean, let's face it.
The Bible is the book that churches, you know, produce.
It's the heart of the church's life.
But why isn't it someone who's, at least in a formal sense, outside the church, doing a better job than we are at explicating it?
And so I've taken it to be a sign of hope.
It's a mystery.
Well, I feel too that my position outside the church is actually critical to the success of what I'm doing.
You know, people have tried to pin me down multiple times with regards to my belief in God.
I actually did a two-hour lecture in This was a 70-minute lecture in Australia about that question because I thought about it a lot and about I've always felt Imposed upon I would say and boxed in when people asked me that question,
but I finally figured out that I didn't really feel That I had the Moral right To make a claim about belief in God.
I mean, that's not a trivial thing to to let's say proclaim.
Yeah, you know because it's not merely a matter of stating in some verbal manner that I am willing to agree semantically with a set of doctrines.
It means that you have to Live You have to commit to living a certain way.
Yeah, and the demand of that life is so stringent and so all-consuming and and you're so unlikely to live up to it that to make the claim that you believe I think is a To me,
it smacks of a kind of I mean, I understand why people do it and this isn't a criticism of people's statement of faith but for me the critical element of belief is action and the requirements of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that I don't see how you can proclaim yourself a believer without being terrified of Immediately
being struck down by lightning or some cosmic...
No, there's a lot to that.
I mean, there's a lot to it.
The story that I've always loved about Origen, the great church father, whom Jung loved, by the way.
I mean, Jung saw the church fathers as some of the first great psychologists, and Origen's sermons on Genesis, Exodus, are like yours in many ways.
I mean, I don't know if you've been reading him explicitly, but that sort of psychodynamic and spiritual reading, Origen's all over that.
But the story is about this young guy named Gregory who comes to Origen to learn the doctrine of the Christians.
And Origen said to him, first you must come and live our life, and then you'll understand our doctrine.
And that young kid, Gregory, became St.
Gregory Thalmaturgus.
He becomes the great saint of the church.
But he had to get into the life first.
And there's a lot to that.
I think the practices of Christianity, they get into your body before they get into your mind.
It's also true, I think, that when you take away a lot of practices that surround certain doctrines, the doctrine fades from people's minds.
When I was a kid, there was still the practice around the Blessed Sacrament.
People with genuflections and before you entered the pew in church, you would genuflect.
In fact, they say that Catholics of my parents' generation, when they'd come into a movie theater to see a movie in the rows of seats, they would genuflect before they got into the row.
But see, that means this thing was so in their bodies.
But that practice was communicating to the mind the importance of what's in front of them.
Well, the same is true really of all the doctrines.
You know, God in some ways is a function of this manner of life.
And so I've emphasized that actually a lot in my own work.
The postmoderns who have influenced Christianity are very strong on that two practices.
I mean, my take, Jordan, is that there's a hundred ways in to the question of God.
There's all kinds of paths, you know.
One of them being just that, ritual, the body, the moral life is a way in.
To look at the saints and try to be a saint is a great way in.
Jared Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet, who was a convert under John Henry Newman, so he himself went through this process of discovering the faith.
But someone came to him and said, you know, I'm really wrestling with belief in God.
And he said, give alms.
He didn't provide an argument or prove.
He said, do something.
And of course, if you play the whole thing out, I mean, if God is love, that's what God is, then performing an act of love gets you closer to God than almost anything else.
And so the giving of alms can lead you into that sacred space.
Now, the questing mind, I mean, then wants to ask all kinds of questions about it and ground it.
So, you know, Fides Quarins Intellectum of Anselm, right?
Faith-seeking understanding.
That's where theology, philosophy will come in.
But I think there's a...
I've been talking to my audiences practically about certain elements of, let's say, Judeo-Christian fundamental beliefs.
So, you know, I spent...
Two and a half hours the first biblical lecture I did on the first sentence of Genesis and then tried to take the opening chapters apart in great detail, but some very interesting Propositions from a psychological and philosophical perspective in Genesis.
I mean I look at it sort of technically In some sense as a statement about the nature of being I mean what genesis reveals to me is that There has to be a structure to encounter possibility Or that there is a structure that encounters possibility that's part of that's built into reality itself and that structure is God the father and That structure uses a process And the process is the logos and
the logos is something like courageous truthful communication It's the word but it's much more than that and it uses that to encounter this potential and to generate order and It seems to me that that's that's psychologically akin to what human beings do with their own consciousness and You know,
the new atheist types and the materialist scientists tend to consider human beings deterministic organisms, but my understanding of neuropsychology is that the only time that we are deterministic organisms is when circuits for specific tasks have been built up through lengthy practice and can be run automatically.
Much of the time in our lives, and I talk to my audiences about this, What we do is we wake up in the morning, our consciousness reappears on the plane of being, let's say, and what we face in front of us is an unstructured and potential-filled chaos.
And our consciousness determines the manner in which that potential transforms itself into the actuality of order into the present and the past and and I think everyone understands that we treat each other that way like we treat each other we treat ourselves as if We are responsible For what we bring into existence.
That's part of our moral responsibility Treat each other as if that's part of what makes us worthwhile as creatures, right?
That's part of our value.
We treat ourselves as if the nature of what we bring into being is determined by our choices between good and evil and We treat other people the same way like you can't have a friendship with someone and If you don't believe that they have that power of choice and that capacity for morality You're you you don't have any respect for
them and they won't interact with you and so you can't found a friendship on that and you can't found a family and You can't found a society or without the fundamental presupposition that individuals this is another element of course of The presuppositions in Genesis that that the individual is somehow made in the image of God if God is that which confronts potential and generates order and then more you know because God says
to in Genesis that every time he constructs something that's new and orderly Using the logos he says and it was good And that's so fascinating to me because it's repeated so many times because what it implies is that if you confront If the potential of being is confronted with what's good and truthful and courageous, then what emerges as a consequence is good.
And I also believe that to be the case for individuals.
If you confront the world in a manner that's Cain-like, bitter, incapable of making the proper sacrifices enraged jealous Outraged at the suffering of existence and its essential unfairness Then you become vengeful and bitter and murderous and genocidal and yeah That seems
like no Positive way forward.
That's no bargain.
Yeah with the new atheist types, you know, they demolished the metaphysics and Without really thinking it through, I think.
And they leave people with nothing.
The nothing is so empty that it just produces, it really produces pain for people.
I've talked to many, many, many people, including atheists, who have been I'm vastly relieved to find some deeper meaning in our culture.
Every day I deal with that.
It's people that they feel obligated intellectually to accept the new atheist, you know, conclusions, but then their whole soul is rebelling against it.
And I would say for obvious reasons.
You know what's very interesting to me, Jordan, is I've got a colleague, Chris Kazor, who teaches at LMU. He's written on your stuff.
And he said, what Peterson is doing is what the Church Fathers would have called the tropological reading of the Scriptures.
You know, the four senses.
You've got the literal historical interpretation.
You've got the allegorical, so it has to do with Jesus.
You have the anagogical, having to do with the journey to heaven.
But the tropological, they would have seen as the moral sense.
So what it has to do about our moral lives, and I think in our categories, say maybe the psychological life, etc.
And so I think what you just proposed there is a cool sort of tropological reading of those texts.
I mean, without denying it, I'd press on the more metaphysical stuff.
Joseph Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI did a wonderful meditation on Genesis saying that to say I believe in God is to say I believe in the primacy of Logos over and against mere matter.
So over and against a merely materialist view that what's more metaphysically primordial is Logos.
And he would stress intelligibility.
The fact that God speaks the world into being means it's marked in every nook and cranny by something like intelligibility, which in turn would ground anything like the sciences.
I mean, any scientist goes out to meet a world that at least he or she assumes is intelligible, you know?
So the intelligibility of things, the rational structure within being is coming from the Logos.
But the other thing that I think is really intriguing about the Genesis, that opening move, It's the dethroning of all the false claims to divinity.
So all the things that come forth from God, you know, from sun and moon and the animals and so on and so forth, were all things that were worshipped in various cultures in the ancient world.
So the author is saying, no, no, no, no.
These things are not themselves ultimate.
They're not the logos from which all things come.
But then, the cool twist to me, it's not just a no, because...
See, Catholics get this because the way that text is structured, it's liturgically structured.
It's like a liturgical procession.
Everything coming forth in this ordered way.
At the end of the procession come human beings, right?
So at the end of a liturgical procession is the one who will lead the praise.
And so the point there, and this goes back to Augustine and people like that, The point is, none of these things is God, but all these things belong in a chorus of praise of the true God, led by us.
And there's the human role, is to give proper praise to God.
Well, you know, there's critics, for example, there's a critic in Canada...
A well-known environmentalist, David Suzuki, who believes that one of the sins of the Judeo-Christian perspective is that it gave human beings dominion over the world.
And the philosopher, the German philosopher, what's his name?
You have to narrow that one down.
Yes.
The phenomenologist.
Husserl?
No, his student, Heidegger, believed that the Judeo-Christian texts had given us the right to treat the world as if it's produce.
Yeah, but that's getting exactly backwards, isn't it?
It's this deep respect for our fellow creatures as part of the chorus of praise, and the dominion is not domination.
I think it's that kind of right ordering.
And the thing there is...
There's been a lot of interesting studies recently of the temple, the ancient temple, and how it was covered inside and out by symbols of the cosmos, you know, animals and plants and planets and stars and so on.
The idea being when Israel gathered for right praise, It was the whole universe being gathered for right praise.
Now, look at that in the Gothic churches.
You go up to Notre Domino.
It's not an anthropocentric thing.
You've got the planets and stars and astrological signs and animals galore because the cathedral was the successor of the temple, the place of right praise.
And it's drawing creation in.
See, I think it's much more modernity that is rough on nature and rough on the animal kingdom.
Thomas Aquinas is not.
I mean, go back to the pre-modern Christian thinkers.
They're not anti-nature, on the contrary.
Because the biblical vision is salvation is a cosmic reality.
God's trying to save all of his creation.
That's the Noah story.
The ark is like a floating temple, right?
So it's a little microcosm of the right order of things led by Noah and his family.
Yeah, by a family properly ordered.
And what are they concerned about?
The animals.
They're concerned about life that God created.
That's why the ark becomes a symbol of the church.
So all the churches are meant to look like ships.
You have a nave, right?
The ship, the central aisle of a church.
But they're meant to be a little floating temple where creation is honored and preserved.
So no, I would blame...
It's also interesting to note that in the Noah story that there's a tremendous emphasis on the idea that Noah, who's someone who...
Adam before the fall walked with God was capable because he could act nobly and courageously and truthfully and also put his family together.
He was actually capable of shepherding the complex creation of being in its totality through a period of absolute chaos.
I look at the environmental challenges, let's say, that we face today because of the complexity of 9 billion of us or the 9 billion that there will be and the necessity of making sure that everyone has adequate security and shelter and food and freedom I see that the proper pathway forward to dealing with that is for people to put themselves together and to put their families together
and their communities together and that the consequence of that the natural consequence of that Adoption of ultimate responsibility would be the extension of care beyond The immediate beyond the social even and so that everything does depend I would say and this is something I learned from young from you was that far more than we think depends on
the orderly Progression and care of the soul all of it depends on it and you know when I talk to my audiences It's so interesting and I think it might be something that the church is missing if I could be so go ahead well You know I've talked to about 150 live audiences now about this sort of thing independent of all my classroom lectures and I'll
tell you I tell people I suggest to people that The really the ancient idea that life is suffering and and that it's tainted by malevolence that there's no more true ideas than that in some base sense and that that's something that everyone has to contend with and If you don't contend with it properly then you become embittered and and you work to make things worse and everyone understands that everyone knows
that's true and And then I suggest to them that the proper way out of that isn't the pursuit of material satisfaction or impulsive happiness or rights from the individual perspective, but the adoption of responsibility.
And I'll tell you, every single time I talk about that, you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium.
Yeah, I believe that.
And I think one of the things that the church has failed to communicate properly is that You need a noble goal in life to Butchers yourself against its catastrophe and I mean Abel is a good example of that in the Abel and Cain story because he devotes himself properly to God and things work out for him well More or less.
It doesn't end very well.
It doesn't, but I mean good is sometimes defeated by evil.
I mean obviously he lives a proper and admirable life and It needs to be communicated to young people.
The biblical key is always right praise.
I go right back to Genesis 1.
When we give praise to God, drawing all creation together, then our soul becomes ordered properly.
And then around us, a kingdom of right order is built up.
In the Catholic Mass, we have that wonderful prayer of the Gloria.
We say, Glory to God in the highest.
And on earth peace to people of goodwill.
And it's like a formula that if I give glory to God in the highest, then there will be peace around me.
It's like a condensation of the Sermon on the Mount.
See, that sermon seems to me, and I also believe it to be psychologically true, is that it's necessary for you to aim The highest value that you can conceive of,
you know, and that has to have something to do with the amelioration of suffering and the constraint of malevolence It'll express itself that way naturally, yeah.
At least as a negative.
And then once you concentrate on that and focus on that and decide that that's your primary aim, then things do start to order themselves around you because everything that you see and do directs itself towards that aim.
But that's the, I'd say, strangely and uniquely Christian thing, is that we say, okay, the God that we're worshiping, the God revealed in the Old Testament, but then finally revealed in Jesus Christ.
As I'm looking over my computer screen right now, I'm looking at the crucifix of Jesus, right?
So my praise is directed to a God who has entered radically into suffering.
Not just physical suffering, but the whole brokenness of the world of stupidity and cruelty and injustice and hatred.
That's where God has gone.
So the God that I worship is the God who himself is dedicated to the amelioration of suffering or of healing the suffering of the world.
But that's the way it's going to express itself.
In a fallen, conflictual world, right praise will end up looking like love, looking like love for those who suffer.
But I think that's, to me, the master theme of the whole Bible.
Israel always goes wrong without exception when its praise goes wrong.
It starts praising the wrong things.
So that's what happens in Exodus when Moses leads the Israelites through the desert, right?
They're in the same position we're in in the modern world where we've escaped A tyranny of sorts let's say or we believe we have and entered into this domain of untrammeled freedom and there's nothing but False idols calling to us from every direction and that's that that's the diversity idea as far as I'm concerned because unity is certainly as profound a moral necessity as diversity there should be diversity
within unity and I fight it all the time, you know, in the church, too, because we bought into that ideology.
And I said, look, it's the oldest problem in philosophy, the one and the many.
But all we do today is we completely valorize the many.
We never see its shadow side.
We denigrate the one and never see its positive side.
The one is extraordinarily important.
Well, that's part of death with God.
Yeah, I think so.
It's the death of that overarching unity.
It's the same thing that drives constant thoughtless criticisms of hierarchy, even though all the biological evidence suggests you can't even organize your perception without using an ethical hierarchy.
Because you have to select from all the things that you can choose to look at those things that you value high enough to attend to.
Yeah.
And that's our point about worship, isn't it?
What's of highest value to you?
Everything else will follow from that.
Yes.
If you read Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, but he said, all you need to know about a person, you can find out by asking one question.
What does he worship?
And everyone, of course, I mean, Sam Harris worships something.
Worthship.
What's of highest worth to you?
Mm-hmm.
Then your life will be organized accordingly.
The biblical idea, it seems to me, is if it's other than God, you will disintegrate on the inside and the society around you will disintegrate.
Yes, well that's where the idea of the Logos has been so helpful as a consequence of reading Jung.
If the Logos is that element of being, let's say, that's allied in some sense with consciousness, That does in fact confront Potential and that does cast it into reality as a consequence of ethical choices then I can't see how it can be otherwise then that has to be regarded as the ultimate value because it's the thing that creates continually
Creates the world anew and you know, we know perfectly well that you know, you can take the opposite tack let's let's say I don't worship Courage and truth in the face of the potential of being and that I worship instead cowardice and deceit Yeah Vengefulness and well then we know where that goes, you know, we had the entire 20th century as a as a as a It's the template for that whole thing.
And the template from every perspective.
I mean, it's obvious.
It's obvious beyond a shadow of arguable doubt that human beings as individuals are capable of generating something around them that is so akin to hell, even metaphysically speaking, that the difference is...
You have to be...
Picayune, let's say, to quibble about the difference.
And I do think there's something metaphysical about it.
I mean these things that we see on Earth, let's say, seem to me to be reflected continually at deeper and deeper levels of reality.
You know, I mean, I don't tend to talk about specifically religious issues because I think that would in some sense compromise the The approach that I'm attempting to take, you know, which is a conciliatory approach in some sense between those who are Possessed by the scientific viewpoint,
but curious about the religious point, but If you abandon those initial presuppositions that the sovereignty of the individual the necessity for courage in the face of being the the Moral imperative to struggle uphill with your cross towards the city of God I mean people understand these things if if they're explained carefully and they know in their souls that They're true.
And they're all over the culture.
That's been a presupposition of mine doing this work.
I tend not to begin with direct instruction or moral finger-wagging, but I tend to begin with something going on in the culture.
And you've talked about this.
The hero myth is in practically every movie you watch.
But the Christian themes are every place.
One of the most remarkable to me being, I just saw it on TV the other night, was Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.
If you want to see the best exemplification, I think in fiction, of what the Church Fathers meant by the meaning of Jesus' cross.
In other words, a move of self-sacrificing love that exposes evil and liberates those who are under the tyranny of evil.
That's how they read the cross in a very clever way, expressed in more mythic language, you know, but the ideas are very powerful and they're beautifully exemplified in that movie, the move that Eastwood's character makes at the end.
And of course, as he dies, he's in the figure of the crucified Jesus, lest we miss the point.
It's so interesting, too, because I actually made a video where I used a picture of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount, I think, and I put Clint Eastwood's face, I superimposed it on top of his, and it was for exactly that reason.
It was that The reason that that's exemplified in Gran Torino.
Yeah, because I mean Eastwood in that movie is in he's a very Harsh character very right judgment.
He's like he's like the Christ that comes back in revelations, right?
He's very very very judgmental right and he gave he cuts no one a break Except that he actually does like he does separate the wheat from the chaff and he's even interestingly in that movie, you know He's he ends up being more akin to the foreigners who he hypothetically hates like the Who's the Good Samaritan?
It's the same idea as the Good Samaritan.
He becomes more family to these people that he hypothetically hates than to his own children because he regards them as ungrateful and unworthy.
Whereas these new immigrants are striving to be good people.
It's a very interesting movie.
Oh yeah, it is.
And it's a good example of a principle, one of my professors years ago said, the once integrated Christian vision, let's say at Reformation and the Enlightenment, sort of blew up and the pieces flew every place.
And they're kind of twisted and they're charred and everything.
And they've landed here and there.
And so as you go through the cultural landscape, you see them all over the place.
So there's a bit of You know, eschatology or there's Christology or there's the Trinity and so on, but they're usually in distorted form.
So that's a good example of there's the Christus Victor theory, to give it its proper name, that Christ is the victor over sin and death.
He's conquered the dark powers and liberated us in the process.
There it is, but it's in somewhat distorted form, of course.
But that's been the game I played a lot, is to try to find these bits.
Well, it happens everywhere.
It's so common.
It isn't merely common.
It's universal.
And this is, of course, one of the reasons that I became so deeply interested in archetypes, is that If the story doesn't have an archetypal foundation, then it's not a story.
Something makes something a story.
It's not just a random collection of statements or images.
So it has an archetypal structure.
I think what's happened in the modern world, at least partly, is this fractionation that you've described, but also something that a student once made me think deeply through.
She came up and asked me after a class.
Well if these archetypal stories are the fundamental the fundamental element, let's say of Psycho biological reality then why not just tell the archetypal story over and over again?
And I thought well First of all to some degree that is what cultures did for a long time.
They repeated the archetypal story, but in our modern culture What literature seems to do is to take the archetypal cult story and to bring it closer to the individual.
It's like it's brought closer to earth.
Almost like the Renaissance paintings brought the Divine figures closer to earth closer to the actual individuals say that and the Baroque paintings did and so you have this meeting place of the divine the archetype and the personal that constitutes something like popular culture and There's some utility in that because it's it it reopens a doorway to the presence of What's missing
that's being closed by whatever has happened to the church over the last Well, what 150 years 200 years and the accelerating Degeneration of the church over the last 200 or 150 to 200 years So I see it as a good thing Although it isn't obvious that people understand that it's happening,
you know I explain movies like the Lion King and Sleeping Beauty and so on to my audiences and they don't know the They don't Consciously see the Christian symbolism or the Christian symbolism in works like Harry Potter, which is unbelievably deep symbolic structure.
I mean she did that so beautifully.
You know this remake of True Grit, when the Coen brothers did it, and they beautifully brought out these religious themes that were not in the John Wayne version that I saw as a kid.
Or even like, there was a remake, Kenneth Branagh did, of Cinderella.
And you say it's a charming, sentimental story, but it's a deeply Christological telling, and he got all that and brought that out.
I mean, so those are there for sure, I mean, within the Western framework.
Well, it seems, does it seem in part, look, like I've been accused, let's say, Although I've stopped apologizing for it, and I should have stopped long ago, of fundamentally speaking to young men.
You know, I mean, most people on YouTube are men, so there's a baseline problem.
But, you know, it seems to me that partly what I'm suggesting to young men is that there really is a Ennobling heroism about the fundamental Christian vision which is to accept with gratitude your privileges and your limitations
the privileges those are talents you have a responsibility to make the most of them that's the price you pay for the talents the Obstacles You're limited being and you pay a price for being and the price is that limitation and so you have to be Grateful in some strange sense for your limitations Maybe the same way that you're grateful for the
idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of the people that you love and then that you're that you're that your task is It's an extraordinarily difficult task.
There's there's no more challenging task than to accept all that you know with with gratitude and With with with goodwill toward being and to attempt to work towards making things Better than they are or at least not worse People understand that.
Oh yeah, no, for sure.
Let me press something here, because I think all that's true from the sort of psychological and human side, the hero's journey and our call to move toward a transcendent moral good, etc., to give ourselves for the sake of the other.
And that's all there within the Christian and the biblical framework.
But see, what I think is really interesting, where the fireworks really start, Is that God has gone on a hero's journey, you know?
So it's not just the story of this human being, Jesus, going heroically to his cross, etc.
But that, strangely, it's God.
It's God going into dysfunction.
Whatever heroism we can summon is predicated upon this primordial grace that was given to us.
I'm a Catholic.
Catholics like faith and reason.
We like to operate both sides of that divide.
Thomas Aquinas constructing cosmological arguments Well, good.
I think they're fine, but that's from our side of the equation.
We're kind of moving our way toward God.
But the fireworks start when God moves toward us.
God acts, and grace is operative.
This thing that I can't manipulate, I can't control.
It comes as a gift, you know?
And so at the cross of Jesus, it is Clint Eastwood.
So there's a human being imitating this great move, and that's indeed what we're called to, to become other Christ's.
But he's also, if you want to press it, that's God.
That's what God does.
God enters into our weird, dysfunctional, off-kilter world and suppresses evil, awakens our freedom, and that's when it really gets interesting.
It seems to me that this has to do with this theme that I've also popularized about rescuing your dead father.
Yeah.
From the underworld.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if you take on a heavy burden of responsibility That changes you.
It calls forth from you things that would never be otherwise called forth.
Partly because you encounter new things and learn, but also because the demands, the psychophysiological demands of the confrontation We know this biologically turn on new parts of you that are genetically and it's you know,
there's there's an immense potential that lurks inside of human beings and it's a potential of Unlimited scope in some sense and I think that that's alluded to in the idea that there's a relationship between logos Christ and and God and man and that the way that you Become closer to God In the literal sense
is by adopting that burden because that Transforms you into what it is that you could be and I think that's a you know you look the other thing you said that was really interesting you talked about the fragmentation of Christianity and you know in the old Egyptian story when Osiris is Overthrown by Seth who's the precursor of Satan etymologically and conceptually Osiris is
willfully blind and Seth is his evil brother and Seth waits for the opportune moment and he chops Osiris up into pieces and he distributes him all over the kingdom and so Osiris can't pull himself back together like he's still there in nascent form because there's no destroying something that's divine not permanently but you can make it very difficult for it to get its act together for some period of time let's say and That fragmentation,
I think, has occurred in our culture.
The death of God, I think Nietzsche's wrong about that.
I think it's the dismemberment of God, not the death.
And something that's dismembered can be remembered.
Yeah, what we need to do is to remember and we do remember in our literature and our art and our popular culture That's all a form of remembering but we also remember when we When we act in a way that works in accordance with our conscience and that sets our soul in in Into a configuration of peace,
you know, it's been fascinating I've had Hundreds of and mostly young men I would say come and talk to me after my lectures and many of them had been in very very dark places, you know Addicted,
alcoholic, suicidal Chronic pornography users capable of settling into a committed relationship Vengeful nihilistic cynical and and and also Possessed by a kind of inertia that made them immobile The most vital part of their youth and you know,
they told me look I Decided I was going to develop a vision for my life.
I Was going to imagine what things could be And then I was going to try to tell the truth and I was going to try to act responsibly and not in a praying in public manner, but in a manner that began with cleaning up my room, say a fairly humble act and And then comes the kicker, and this is one of the things that's kept me going through this entire 150 city tour.
They all say, and my life is way better.
It's like, I'm healthy.
My job is going well.
I've had three promotions.
I'm making twice as much money.
I've spoken to my father.
I haven't talked to him for 10 years.
I'm putting my family together.
It's like good things are just happening.
Left, right, and center!
Amazing stories!
You're in touch with the deepest rhythms of reality.
It's an ethical move, but it's a metaphysical move.
As you mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount of the Lord, that's how I look at it.
It's not just giving moving ethical recommendations.
It's trying to get us aligned to the fundamental nonviolence of things.
The fundamental move of God as He gives rise to the world.
And so of course your life comes together.
Again, right praise gets you online and knits you back together.
That theme to me is really strong in the spiritual tradition of the knitting back together of the splintered self.
I mean, as a psychotherapist, you deal all the time with this, but like in the scriptures, so you mentioned Satan, you know, how satanas is the accuser, and there's a lot to that.
But the other great word for the dark power is the diabolos, right?
The scatterer, the one that divides and separates.
And so the demon's always speaking in the plural in the New Testament, and Jesus bringing them back to themselves, back to the center.
But that's all of us sinners.
I mean, we're all over the place.
Our mind and will and passions and sexuality and body, they're all going different directions.
It's very disorienting for people.
It's very confusing and anxiety-provoking to be going in all those directions at the same time.
Right.
And that's, what do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
And the answer is yes, I have come to destroy this disparate reality and knit you back together.
Go back to Nietzsche for a second, because I want to ask you about that.
My conviction is, atheists both old and new, so the Hitchens and Dawkins, Sam Harris today, but then go back to the Feuerbachs and Nietzsche's and company.
They're rebelling quite properly against a false god.
What I would characterize as a false god.
The god who is posing a threat to our freedom.
The god who broods over us in this moralizing and dehumanizing way.
The god who I would say is a supreme being among other beings.
All of that.
I applaud them.
The atheists, old and new, are rebelling against that.
But it's partially because, I think Jung saw this in his own father, who was a Calvinist minister, that we got so bad at proclaiming the true God, who is not brooding over our freedom in this sort of moralizing and oppressive way, who's not competing with our flourishing.
But, you know, the glory of God is a human being fully alive, says Irenaeus.
That's the biblical idea.
Or the burning bush, the fathers love that, is the bush that's on fire but not consumed.
Well, that's the way the true God relates to creation.
He makes it beautiful and radiant, but doesn't burn it up.
Or like in so many of the Greek and Roman myths, when the gods break in, things have to give way, or they're incinerated, or they're destroyed.
But the Bible presents this very...
Unique and humanizing view of God and then culminating in the Incarnation.
God becomes one of us without...
That's why it's so beautiful to me in those seemingly abstract formulas about the two natures that come together in Jesus without mixing, mingling, and confusion.
You say, well, that's a lot of these Greek abstractions, but no, that's very powerful that God and humanity can meet in such a way that humanity is not overwhelmed and destroyed.
See, but that's what the atheists quite rightly, old and new, are objecting to, is precisely that false understanding of God.
Well, and I've always thought of Nietzsche as a...
It's a very disturbing analogy, but...
I've always thought of Nietzsche playing the same role as maggots to cleaning out a wound.
He's a very sophisticated thinker and to think of Nietzsche simply as an atheist I think is a terrible mistake.
I mean he certainly had plenty of good things to say about Catholicism, about The fact that Catholicism was an anti-diabolical movement that united Europe under the rubric of a single mode of thought and disciplined the European mind.
And he also had wonderful things to say about Christ as a figure.
He said, well, Nietzsche believed that the only true Christian was Christ.
Right.
Criticism was essentially saved for the dogmatic structure of the church Now, you know, I actually have more sympathy for Dostoevsky who I think thought more deeply about this than Nietzsche Which is quite a frightening thing to say because Nietzsche is such a deep thinker but you know in in in the Grand Inquisitor when When Christ comes back to earth and is then arrested by the Seville,
by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville during the Spanish Inquisition, you know, the Grand Inquisitor takes Christ into the cell and tells him why it's necessary for him to be put to death again.
He says, you know, the Church has worked diligently to humanize the impossible load that you've placed on people.
To make it bearable for the common man and the last thing we need is someone as perfect as you and terrifying as a consequence as a judge because something that perfect is a judge coming back to mess up all our work and you know,
that's a sympathetic portrayal of Catholicism I would say or maybe Orthodox Christianity as well that it had that merciful element that The demand for perfection was was was was was antithetical to but then of course Dostoevsky has the brilliance to when the Grand Inquisitor leaves hypothetically having Having sentenced Christ to death he leaves the door open
and I've often thought that that's so true of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity Protestantism as well as that for all their faults and for all the faults that people like Nietzsche and Hitchens and Dawkins, etc Lay at the feet of these traditions They at least did preserve the tradition and leave the door open and that's not an easy thing to do over the course of centuries.
I think the institutions deserve a certain amount of sympathy, even though I'm very concerned that they're degenerating and disintegrating in a manner that doesn't look easily forestallable.
Let me ask you a quick question about the Brothers Karamazov, because twice in my life I tried to read it, and I think I just got bogged down with the Russian names and stuff, so I failed both times.
I got a little further the second time.
But then, just about six months ago, I got an audio of it, because I'm in the car all the time in California.
I'm going back and forth.
And I'm just about finished with it.
I love it.
Love it.
Finally, it sang to me as this guy read the thing.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's amazing how powerful it is on audio.
It's wonderful.
Wonderful.
How do you read, first of all, the silence of Christ in the presence of the Inquisitor, but then secondly, the kiss.
The kiss on the lips at the end.
So he sits in silence as this great accusation is read, but then kisses him full on the lips at the end.
Well, I think he accepts the accusation.
Like, one of the things Jung said about Christ in the Gospitals, which I thought was indescribably brilliant, was that Christ, not entirely, but is presented as a figure of mercy.
And Jung was wise enough to know that, and he used religious sources for this idea, that God rules With two hands with mercy and with justice because if it's just mercy then Well,
all is always forgiven and you have no responsibility and you're an eternal infant But if it's all justice then look out because every single transgression you you You commit you'll be held to account for in some infinite manner and people are so fallible that Well,
you kind of see that happening in on Twitter now, you know if you if you make a mistake of any sort at any point in your life You're you're yeah roasted over the open coals for it and no one can stand that because everyone makes mistakes and so there has to be this balance between mercy and justice and Jung regarded Christ's return in Revelation as psychologically necessary because any figure of perfection It has this element of
the judge, because any ideal is a judge.
Yeah, you can't bracket that in the name of...
Because the master category is love, right?
And not to be sentimental about it.
Love means to will the good of the other.
So that always has a judgmental dimension.
Of course it does, because if you have a child or a friend or yourself, it's like...
And I felt this when I was a psychotherapist, practicing as a psychotherapist.
I mean, Roger said, well, you had to have unconditional love for your client.
And I thought, no, I have unconditional positive regard for the part of my client that's driving toward the light.
And I am a co-enemy with that part against the part that's trying to drag that person down.
Can I tell you...
Can I tell you that an entire generation of Catholic priests was formed under the Rogerian assumption?
Because that's what my generation got.
Now, I learned things from Rogers.
It works in a way.
When I was doing pastoral ministry and counseling early on as a young priest, that whole idea of just kind of mirroring back to someone what they're saying and giving them the...
I mean, I get it.
I get it.
But I agree with you.
There's a severe danger in that.
If that's all we're doing with people, we're not moving them in the manner of a spiritual teacher.
I had a student years ago who said to me, what we're missing from the church is Yoda on our shoulders.
He meant Yoda on the shoulders of Luke Skywalker, instructing him and pressing him and telling him what he's doing wrong and how to get going.
We were all Rogerians.
We just were unconditionally positively regarding everybody.
It's a great compliment.
See the other thing that it's made me popular among young people.
This is so perverse.
I have a hard time believing any of it really.
I mean the first thing that I have a hard time believing is that you know I can attract audiences of 5,000 people and tell them that the problem with their lives is that they're not bearing nearly enough Responsibility and that's where they're gonna find the meaning that sustains.
Yeah, it's a pretty rough message Yeah, and the second thing is especially with young people because the message has been fifth for 50 years and this is part of the humanists from the 1960s is Well, you're okay the way you are.
Yeah, and I think There isn't anything more damning that you can tell a young person, well, you're okay the way you are, especially if they're suffering and nihilistic.
It's like, get me out of where I am.
I want to get out of this state.
That's right.
They want to crawl right out of their skin.
And so you tell them instead, no, look, man, you don't know anything.
You're barely beginning.
You're You're suffering because in a sense because you are steeped in sin to an almost unimaginable degree and I'm saying that compassionately, not judgmentally and that if you want to put your life together You have to start small and you have to be careful and awake and if you do it carefully then you can eliminate these flaws in your character that no one is celebrating And people light up when you tell them that.
It's so strange.
It was a real pastoral failure on the part of the church as I was coming of age.
Because we were reacting against maybe a hyper stress on sin.
So my parents' generation probably got that, especially sexual sin.
So I understand that there was a hyper reaction, but that is exactly the problem.
You ended up with a generation of Catholics that felt like, okay, God is love, I'm okay, everything will be fine.
Then there's no energy, there's no directionality, there's no sense of purpose, there's no sense of spiritual struggle.
There's no evil.
Right, there's no real evil.
The problem with situations like Nazi Germany Right, right.
But that was a huge pastoral failure.
One was intellectual as a coming of age.
We became very deeply anti-intellectual and this problem of a hyper kind of Rogerianization of our pastoral practice.
See, I liked Rogers a lot because one of the things Rogers really taught me to do was to listen.
Yeah, right.
His advice about listening and then restating to people what you heard so that they agree with you, that's unbelievably powerful because it does force you to listen.
But Rogers was a seminarian and he did dispense with the idea of evil and the devil, fundamentally.
He fell into the trap of Rousseau where you know the idea was that people were basically good and that's just It's such a devaluation of people to say that they're basically good because it's it's clearly the case that people have an unbelievable capacity for Malevolence that and to me that's that's heartening,
you know, yeah Again, I can talk to my audiences and I can say, look, you guys just sit on the edge of your bed and you think about all the things that you're doing wrong, that you know that you're doing wrong, the way that you're leading yourself and other people astray.
Those things will come to your mind momentarily and imagine briefly where that would take you if you allowed your imagination to take you to where it Could in its depths and everyone nods their head because they bloody well know and I say and Imagine just for a moment that if you have that capacity for absolute mayhem and malevolence that the opposite is also true because if there is that darkness and that evil then obviously the opposite also exists and yeah,
and then it's also possible to make a case for people to people that they can believe that Good has the capability of triumphing over evil, but you don't do that by minimizing evil.
You do it by maximizing evil.
That's right.
I mean, I would say part of spiritual direction is helping people see what they're really capable of.
And I mean that in the negative sense.
Helping people see, like, I'm really capable of some really wicked business.
And if I'm hiding from that all the time, I'm suppressing it all the time, that's not the thing.
Because from now a religious standpoint, you want to say, Christ goes all the way down.
Now, that's the descent into hell theme, but that happens in us.
He goes all the way down in me to the bottom of my dysfunction.
And people like Dostoevsky are really good at showing that dimension of life.
Yes, that's true.
But if we don't do that spiritually, then we're not understanding the cross.
We're not understanding redemption, salvation, that we're healed by this downward journey of the Son of God.
But He goes with us.
There's Dante now.
There's the journey downward through all the levels of our dysfunction.
Till you find...
I think he's dead right about that.
You find some originating dysfunction.
So the Satan whose wings beat the air and create the atmosphere of hell, there's something in me that's generating all the different levels of dysfunction.
Yeah.
But until I find that, I'm not going to solve it.
I've got to go all the way down.
No, the Inferno is right.
Just like there's a hierarchy of good, there's a hierarchy of evil.
And Dante places the betrayers at the bottom.
Right, right.
And that's true.
Because, you know, one of the fundamental necessities of positive interpersonal existence, even with yourself, Much less or let alone other people is trust like essential trust.
Yeah, and it's a form of courage.
You know another thing I talked to my audience is about his trust because Like we we tend in our society of worship naive trust by making the claim that people are basically good and the problem with that and this is what entices so many young people into that nihilistic atheism is that They're taught this idea and then they're betrayed very badly by themselves or by some other person and that's the death of innocence and so then they go from naivety to cynicism and
Cynicism is actually an improvement over naivety But but it's not the end and then they don't know that because the next step is to trust As a consequence of courage and to say look I'm going to extend my hand once again to myself or to my friend or to my family member Despite the fact that I've already been betrayed and hurt because by extending that hand again,
I allow the person the possibility of redemption and I open up a space for us to rekindle a productive relationship, but that's predicated on courage and not naivety.
I know that it's like stretching out a hand to a dog that's frightened and barking and looking like it's going to bite.
It's still the best way, if you're careful, to establish peace, let's say, with that animal.
The problem with the betrayers is that they take trust, which is the most fundamental necessity for interpersonal relationships, and then they violate the very principle of trust.
And it undermines everything.
And that's why they're at the bottom of hell.
That's why Cassius and Brutus and Judas are there.
It reminds me of that story of Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio.
It's like a dream, that story.
Francis reaching out to the animal that's been threatening the town and frightening everybody, but Francis has the trust to reach out to the animal and then he tames it and then makes a deal.
If you feed the animal, then he won't harm you and so on.
Doesn't Jung say a lot of dreams when animals function that way, of dimensions of ourselves that we're kind of at war?
Well, that's a dream for sure, because what it means is that, you know, there's a part of you that's ravenous and malevolent.
Not being fed properly.
Right, and that's often because you're not attending to it.
You're putting it in a blind corner, and it's acting out because it demands recognition.
And, like, people do this with their own With the power that gives them integrity, you know, I've had clients and I would say they were more often female than the male Who had this particular problem, but who had a very acute and judgmental intelligence Very very bright people,
but they were also unbelievably agreeable and so their intelligence would report to them something that was not positive about someone and You know, it would see around a corner.
It would see a hidden motivation and reveal a negative truth.
And the person, temperamentally, was so shocked by the revelation that instead of regarding it as a genuine insight, they felt that there was something wrong with them for thinking that way.
And that's the same thing as keeping that ravenous wolf unfed.
The particular client I'm thinking about I spent hours talking to her about what she thought about people because She was a very pleasant person and it it caused her a lot of trouble She was far too much mercy and not nearly enough justice and insights into the malevolent Motivations of people were unbelievably accurate and deep.
Yeah almost completely incapable of Allowing that to be real It reminds me of, we mentioned the Coen brothers earlier, their remake of True Grit.
Do you remember the young girl in that who's just, she's seized by justice.
She wants to get revenge because her father was killed and she just, and people are dying around her, corpses are piling up because she's just going to get what she wants.
Then, of course, she's bit by the snake, which has a certain archetypal overtone, and she loses her arm, you know?
But she's carried, after the snake bite, she's carried in the two arms of Rooster Cogburn, you know, who's a lawman.
He's a man of justice, but you find out that he's also a man of mercy.
He's a man of deep human connection.
And the story is prefaced by the line, there's only one thing in the world that's truly free, and that's the grace of God.
And I just thought, it's that wonderful, the grace of God is not just mercy, and not just justice, it's the two arms of it.
She ends up, she's all justice, so the one arm's missing.
Brewster's got the two arms, able to carry her, you know.
But I think that's what we've been missing a lot in the church, is the two arms.
We become just too much of a mercy church, in a way.
That's what I think.
I don't think that you guys ask enough of your people.
You're not giving them hell.
Yeah, no, I think there's something right about that.
And that's the Yoda on your shoulder.
Is there someone who's kind of pushing me and telling me and teaching me and bringing me on that downward journey?
Like the Virgil move, that you're going to accompany this person all the way down.
Now the importance, here's like Pope Francis is really good, because accompaniment.
And the church is a field hospital, he says, for people deeply wounded.
That's really right.
And we've got to accompany people, though, all the way down.
My generation got, I think, a very superficial sort of, Everything's okay.
God is love and you'll be fine.
But that led to a lot of drift.
And see, when my generation came of age and we got hit by life, I can testify there's a lot of my classmates, they left religion in a heartbeat because we got a very superficial, childish, one-sided approach.
But then life hits all of us inevitably.
Religion had nothing for them.
And that's exactly when it's necessary.
Love is a terrible thing.
If you love your children, you don't let them get away with anything.
You call them on their transgressions.
And that's very...
I remember you know this situation with my son when he was about four or five and I had a really good have a really good relationship with my son.
You know, I've always assumed that he had the capability to make intelligent judgments and expected him to do so from a very early age.
And you know when he was four and He was talking to me and I thought he was lying to me.
And I didn't know because I couldn't tell.
But you know, that internal Damon was saying, no, there's something that's not right here.
And I wasn't gonna let him get away with it because I couldn't let him learn that it was acceptable to do that or that I would put up with it.
So I told him in this weird thing.
It's kind of like Pharaoh or it's kind of like God hardening Pharaoh's heart.
I said look kid Here's the deal.
I think you're lying to me and We can't have that but if you're not I want you to put up like a tremendous fight here to defend yourself Because if you're being honest, well then I want to know that but I'm not gonna back off because I don't believe that what you're saying is true and so I went after him,
you know for a good long while and it did turn out that he was telling me something that wasn't true which Hardly came as a relief, you know, I mean children do that and it wasn't a surprise to me but That love is, if you really love someone, you can't tolerate when they're less than they could be.
Right.
It hurts.
And so when someone comes into the church and it's all forgiveness, there's no care there.
It's like, what the hell are you doing?
Look at you.
You're addicted.
You're You're hooked on pornography.
You cheat on your wife.
You're doing a terrible job at work.
It's like you don't take care of yourself.
It's like, what the hell's wrong with you?
It's like, where's the real you?
The person, anyone who is subject to that, as long as it's done with care, you know, and not I'm better than you, which is a whole different thing.
It's like, God, man, you're You're nothing like you should be.
And if you don't do that, you're not willing the good of the other.
In fact, you're trying to move into an easy space.
If I'm nice to this person, he'll be nice to me and we'll all be happy, but that's not love.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a no conflict conversation.
It reminds me at the beginning of the Inferno when Dante, you know, he sees the hill with light on it.
Oh, there it is.
That's where I need to go.
I know I'm lost.
I'm in the wood, but that's where I need to go.
Off he goes, but then he's blocked by the three animals, right?
The wolf and the leopard and the lion, I think it is.
So there's no easy route.
That's the point.
There's no easy route to that hill.
You've got to go down and all the way down.
But I think we probably did tell our people that there was too easy a route.
You know, everything's okay.
You're okay.
God is love.
But then everyone...
Well, God is love and love is nice.
Love is harsh and dreadful, right?
That's the thing.
Love is harsh and dreadful.
Right.
And they'll find out soon enough that the road is blocked.
Everyone does.
But then what's the way forward?
And there should be spiritual masters in place that know exactly what to do.
The Virgil move.
I know what we've got to do here.
We've got to do a searching moral inventory and go all the way down.
Go all the way down.
Well, and that's the descent before the ascent.
That's a classical fall of man story.
It's the story of Exodus.
It's part of the reason that people aren't enlightened.
It's that if you're going to go up, man, every up is predicated by a down of equivalent magnitude.
Because look, if you're going to improve, you're going to discover that you're wrong about something first.
And then to be wrong about something means you're going to fragment and it's going to be painful to recognize the fact of that error to recognize the consequences of that error across your life to have to reformulate yourself so that that error is no longer Acting out as part of your personality in your life.
It's an unbelievable descent Yeah, that's another thing that that this is part of the reason why for all the respect I have for Joseph Campbell, you know Campbell says follow your bliss and that is certainly not something that Jung said because Jung said You'd search out what you're most terrified of and what you're most disgusted by and the place you least want to go where you have to bow the lowest and
That's the place where salvation might be found and that's like and I believe that's true and I believe it's terrifying The pathway to redemption is through recognition of error not through bliss Right.
Campbell got enamored of a kind of mindless Buddhism.
Yeah.
The only way up is down.
And that's in all the spiritual teachers.
Go back to Origen.
You mentioned Exodus, you know, where he says that the Egyptians and the Israelites symbolize the best of us is often enslaved to the worst of us.
The Egyptians, the slave masters, represent the worst instincts in us and the most twisted and dysfunctional aspects of us.
And the Israelites symbolized, he felt, our creativity, our intelligence, our courage, all these good things, our friendship.
Our willingness to move forward.
Yeah, but the best of us is enslaved to the worst of us.
And so you've got to come to terms with who are the Egyptians in you.
And they're making you do two things, he says.
They're making you build fortified cities for them.
So we take the best of ourselves to build fortifications around the worst of ourselves to protect them.
And they build monuments.
Hey, look at me.
So how much of life, he says, is spent doing those two dysfunctional things?
Defending the worst of ourselves and then building monuments to the worst of ourselves.
We've got to get free of that and get to the Promised Land.
But, I mean, he was the original master of all that psychodynamic reading, I think, of these texts.
Well, it's also surprising that so few people know What a multiplicity of readings the Bible has actually withstood.
Because we got hung up on this goofy fundamentalism, which is a 20th century phenomenon, you know, the scopes for all stuff and all that.
In America, especially, but in the West, we got hung up on it.
You read Augustine, who was deeply indebted to origin, you've got these very creative, interpretive strategies in place around Genesis, for example.
It's not literalism by any means.
And we're talking origin.
We're talking the 3rd century.
Irenaeus, 2nd century.
Augustine, 4th century.
I mean, these are really early figures.
Well, these were not people thinkers.
Right.
They're not hung up on literalism.
Right.
So, yes, we need to recover that, I think, even as Christians, our own biblical interpretive tradition.
So what are you hoping for in the coming year for you and for what you're doing?
What am I hoping for?
What would you like to see happen as a consequence of what you're doing and what what do you think you are doing?
I mean you're on this public I wouldn't call it a crusade But you're you're engaging with the public, you know in this new way and it seems to be it seems to be quite successful And yeah, what do you think it is that you're doing right and what would you like to see happen as a consequence of that?
I think what I'm doing right is beginning with the Semina Verbi.
It's the church father's idea.
The seeds of the word.
The seeds of the word are everywhere.
Or that's the bits of the fragmented Catholicism that are found in the culture.
So I tend to begin with the culture and lead from there.
I think that is more winsome.
So I tend not to begin with a lot of preaching or a moralizing approach.
I begin with a cultural approach.
And I think that's been more...
My ultimate goal is I want to bring people to faith in Christ in the Catholic Church.
That's my ultimate goal.
I'm an evangelizer.
But I'm using certain methods to try to draw people to that point, realizing that there's an awful lot of obstacles in the way.
I'm trying to kick open some doors.
Part of it is to help people with their intellectual blocks.
There are so many, especially younger people, that are just stuck.
Because certain intellectual objections have occurred to them, and they've heard them from their university professors or whatever.
To clear up some of that, to knock over some of those obstacles, that's part of it.
But then to open up, and I think that's what you're doing too, I mean, open up the richness of this spiritual tradition.
Because it makes people...
It's not just an intellectual feast.
It saves your soul, you know?
That's what I want to do.
I want to help people...
You know, your fellow Canadian, Charles Taylor, the great Catholic philosopher, talks about the buffered self, the self that's caught in this little space and there's no sense of a link to the transcendent.
That's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to knock holes in the buffered self and let in some light from a higher, you know, dimension of reality.
So, I mean, ultimately it's to bring people to salvation, I'd say.
That's what I want to do.
But knock some holes in the buffered self.
I want to keep doing that.
And I said this, I was in Rome in October, we had this month-long synod with the Pope on young people, and I was elected to go to that synod.
And it was interesting, you know, like, what's our strategy for reaching young people?
And I said, I think a miracle of providence right now is we have this massive problem of young people leaving, but we have this new tool of the social media, which we didn't have.
I mean, heck, 10 years ago we couldn't do this.
And now we can reach out to young people into their space.
Because Catholic, we tend to say, what programs can we develop?
You know, lecture series that we can develop.
Well, people aren't coming to our institutions for all kinds of reasons.
But we can sort of move into their space with the social media.
So that's kind of how I see what I'm up to and trying to do.
It would be nice to see if something could be done with all those beautiful cathedrals.
Yeah, well, that's, I wrote about them years ago.
I studied in Paris.
I studied in Paris, and I used to give tours at Notre Dame.
And I was a doctoral student.
I was a priest, but a doctoral student.
And we were told by the tour guides, now, don't talk about religion.
So we were just meant to talk about, you know, how tall the building was and what it was built.
But I used it to sermonize, really, to talk about the Christian faith.
And I've written a little book on the spirituality of the cathedrals, you know.
I'd like to read that.
I mean, is there a decent bibliography in that book?
Because I'm really interested in cathedral architecture.
No, and I am too.
I wrote this years ago.
It's a little book of kind of spiritual meditation, so it wouldn't be, you know, with an academic apparatus.
But I read a lot of those books at the time and love the cathedrals too, because they're just, talk about, you know, like moving into a dream space of the archetypal realities are all over the place.
Chartres is my favorite place in the world, maybe.
My favorite covered space in the world is Chartres Cathedral.
Why?
Why that cathedral?
I don't think anything is richer.
I remember spending a weekend there.
I went down from Paris on a Friday and just got a hotel room and I stayed there until Mass on Sunday.
And I made sure I saw everything in it.
I walked all around the outside, all around the inside.
My Old Testament imagination was so engaged by Chartres.
There's the thing about the allegorical.
They read the Old Testament in constant relation to Christ.
It's a fulfillment.
And the sculpture.
The sculpture is just incomparably beautiful in its execution.
But then the windows.
There are no better windows.
Most of them are real medieval windows.
From the 13th century.
Nothing sings to me more, just the way it's situated, the topography of it.
You know, you kind of come up to Chartres, and when you go back behind it, you take the pilgrim's route up to it.
And all of that, the pilgrim's journey, is implicit there.
But the windows look like...
They look like diamonds on a black velvet background.
They're like jewels, and it's the shining jewels of the New Jerusalem.
So there's the anagogical sense.
It's all about the journey to heaven.
And then the labyrinth, which unfortunately has been kind of co-opted by a New Age-y spirituality, but the original labyrinth that most of the ones we see today imitate is there.
It's sharp.
Yes, I know.
The labyrinth is an amazing thing.
It's extraordinary.
I walked it.
I've walked it several times, and it's a very powerful experience.
Anyway, Shard has all of that in it and more, you know.
Yes, well, it's such a shame that these buildings, you know, you see what happened in Europe.
I don't understand it, is that Europe went through this several hundred years long period of time where beauty was worshipped.
in a profound way and see them manifested in the construction of these great cathedrals that took centuries to build and they were these people were well the bricklayer wasn't just laying bricks the bricklayer was building a cathedral to God which is how our lives should be, right?
Every little thing that we do should be imbued with that higher vision which is possible if you have that higher vision and You know the the contribution of that vision to Europe and to world cultures is Absolutely priceless.
I mean people make pilgrimages from all over the world to view these insanely beautiful and complex buildings and they were driven by a spirit that was well hopefully unconquerable but certainly Of sufficient potency, even in a fundamentally atheistic age, to pull people in for reasons they don't really even understand.
Just the sheer awe at the daring of the architects.
And to talk about a door, a window, a transcendent, and that's a way of punching through the buffered self, those cathedrals.
And don't get me started on church architecture for the last, you know, like 40, 50 years, when we largely adopted a kind of brutalist modernism within Catholicism and built...
What Baltzar called the great barns, you know, these big empty spaces.
And we wonder, you know, why are the young people leaving in droves?
The church building itself didn't sing to them in any way, which they used to do.
Even the imitation Gothic buildings from the 1930s.
But man, a young Catholic coming of age at that time was, I mean, look at that.
I'm just surrounded by the imagery of the faith and the whole narrative of salvation.
And And the incarnation of the stone.
You know, you talked about part of the goal of salvation, let's say, to bring everything together, to have everything come together in a kind of integrity, with a kind of integrity and in a union.
And of course, music portrays that better than anything else, as far as I'm concerned.
And those cathedrals were symphonies in stone.
Absolutely.
And they portrayed architecturally exactly what music attempts to portray orally.
And it works.
I mean, it works.
Oh, gosh, yeah.
And they're comparable.
It has no belief.
Right, absolutely.
It's a bit of a cliche to say it, but the Summa of Aquinas and the Divine Comedy of Dante are like that.
They have that same kind of quality of integration and the whole of life being on display.
And that's part of what fell apart.
We needed the critique of the Enlightenment, for sure.
I mean, I get it.
We needed that in a lot of different ways.
But sadly, often that critique got overstated, and baby bathwater phenomenon, and a lot of the integrity was compromised.
How do you keep the critique without throwing out the substance?
It's been one of the struggles.
And much of the theology of the last couple hundred years has been so conditioned by the Enlightenment criticism.
I mean, I get it and take it in for sure, but don't so condition your theology by that critique that you lose all this stuff that we're talking about now that has the soul transforming power.
Well, that's it.
You know, it seems to me that it's, and this is so necessary, is that it's, there's something What's required is a re-emphasis on the potential nobility of the human being and the moral responsibility to make that nobility a reality.
You don't even talk about words like that.
Like I use the word nobility in my lectures and it's such an archaic word.
It's like we set a noble goal.
It's like, what child is told that now?
Yeah, no.
And we're built for nobility.
Well, I mean, you're a psychotherapist, obviously, but it seems to me that we're so concerned about people's feelings and that the feelings getting hurt or getting repressed or something that we're afraid, if we use that language of a noble aspiration or, come on, you can do better, or, hey, you've got a serious problem, that it'll awaken such negative feelings, leading eventually to, you know, self-mutilation or suicide at the limit, that we're so afraid of that, that we're reluctant to use the language of nobility.
Yes, well, we're...
We're afraid of hurting people's feelings in the present and willing to absolutely sacrifice their well-being in the future.
And that's the sign of a very immature and unwise culture because the reverse should be the case.
You know, it's like, look, you said already, There's no up without down.
Yeah, and that initial conversation when you lay things bare and you put everything out on the table and you discuss what the problems are and Maybe the potential solutions man.
That's a rough conversation.
Yeah, you know, it's almost more than people can bear but If it's a discussion of reality, well, they're already bearing it, and at least placing it on the table indicates that there's someone who's willing to listen, and that it isn't so terrible that, like Voldemort, it can't be named.
That's been exactly my argument.
I alluded to it earlier, that when you say, oh, it'll be too much for people to take.
But life is going to force itself on them.
Life will force them into this, and then there won't be any wisdom or guide to help them with it.
So if we say, look, I'm so concerned about sparing people's feelings, heck, life doesn't care about your feelings, or nature doesn't care about your feelings.
Well, one of the things I learned from Jung, he was very, very, and I think this is a psychotherapeutic truism, is that if you're going to confront a monster, and you most certainly are, then you do it at a time and place of your choosing.
Yeah.
Because otherwise it waits until you're at your weakest and most vulnerable and then it attacks and so there is no Monster-free pathway forward to prepare as a knight of Christ,
let's say, so that when it comes you're there or in fact confronting it at its weakest point or you cower and you wait and it devours you and yeah, those are your options and we don't have the Wisdom of the kind of pessimism that enables us to view life that way we think well if we're careful and we're quiet Well, the monster will avoid this completely and everyone knows that's a lie Yeah.
Oh, gosh, yeah.
Do you find this, because sometimes when I use this language, people say, well, yeah, that's great for the young men, but the young ladies don't respond to it.
But years ago, my niece, who's now, she's what, almost 30, I guess.
When she was about 17, they took around one of these nature things, you know, where they took the kids out into the woods, and they had to hike, and they had to build their own campfire, and then they had to ford streams, and they had, you know, it's one of these really demanding things, where they were up against nature and up against life.
Man, did she come back utterly transformed as a human being in a way that religion had never done.
She was Catholic all her life, gone to Mass.
Her uncle's a bishop.
There's nothing in our faith that changed her the way that experience clearly changed her.
There's a serious conversation to be had with young women.
You know, a woman asked me a question on my Q&A this month.
She said that her friends are really down on her because she Claims to not be a feminist but even more importantly because she wants to have children and they're telling her that Only an evil and cruel person would bring a child into a world this terrible and and worse to do the damage to the planet that that child will do and the people are very serious about this and they're very hard on young women and like I always think of the paeda you know because
I kind of think of it as the as the Christian equivalent of the crucifix you know you have Mary there with her broken son in her arms and I think that With the the great adventure for women at least in part This is the maternal adventure is to bring a child into the world knowing full well that the consequences the consequences is Crucifixion like brokenness.
Yeah, and that it's still a mark of faith in the possibilities of being to participate in that and Not to hide from it and to say well despite everything I'm going to act My faith in life and in and in the possibilities of being and I'm going to bring someone into the world who will be a net force for good rather than evil and that's my moral obligation and I think to present that to young women as a major part of
the adventure of their life which is the truth is something that's Attractive to far more of them than would be likely to admit it in today's time and age Yeah.
I'm glad you used the word faith there because just a couple days ago we had the Feast of St.
Joseph, you know, and Joseph in the New Testament is like Abraham in the Old Testament.
He's the paradigmatic person of faith, right?
So I was talking to a group of high school kids and I said, okay, listen to me, everybody.
I know you're going to hear this from your professors in college and you probably hear it already that faith means, you know, being uncritical and you accept any old nonsense on the basis of no evidence that it's superstition and Look, we're against that.
As a Catholic, faith and reason.
We don't want anything sub-rational.
Anything that's a lie and you know it, that's irresponsible.
Anything that's stupid and you know it, it's irresponsible to accept it.
So that's not faith.
But I said, close to what you just said, faith in the Bible is this willingness to risk.
Under the providence of God, some great adventure.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Here's Joseph, you know.
That's a great phrase.
Yeah, no, I think that's it.
And that's what faith means in the Bible.
It doesn't mean, oh, I'm an idiot and just tell me any old nonsense and I'll believe it.
No, it means that adventure.
Right.
The other thing is that one of the things I really learned from reading the Abrahamic stories is that The fundamental call is to is it called to adventure?
Yeah, easier to happiness and and even the adventure the part of the relationship with God that's part of that adventure is wrestling with God and What Israel itself means is that it's another aspect of that strange element of belief is like, what does it mean to believe?
Well, it means to adopt this moral burden, but it also means to wrestle with God.
And not to blindly accept preposterous blandishments that no one with any sense would ever swallow.
Right.
But I think we've been, again, pretty bad at propagating that.
If the new atheists have got an awful lot of traction with that idea that religious people are just sort of naive and superstitious and uncritical, then we haven't explained very well what we mean by faith.
No, we certainly haven't explained the element of it that's associated with courage.
No, right.
But then under the guidance of a spiritual master that will help you through that and push you toward the edge and help you navigate those waters.
Dante got that.
All of our great spiritual teachers have it, but we've not been good at that in my judgment.
Well, maybe we'll learn before it's too late.
That would be nice.
I guess I should probably stop.
We've gone for about 90 years.
Oh my gosh.
We have gone for a long time.
It was really a pleasure talking with you.
Yeah, I loved it, Jordan.
Thank you very much.
I was delighted.
I'd like to have another conversation, a darker one, I would say.
I've been reading a book.
Have you read In the Closet of the Vatican?
Oh, I did.
Yeah, I did.
It's a bad book.
But I mean, we can talk about it.
I'd be happy to...
I would like to have a conversation about it when I'm more prepared for it because I am prepared for it enough yet.
I did read it because I figured everybody would be talking about it and it's it's a bad book in many ways meaning I think it's poorly researched and all that but sure let's talk about it all right all right well let's call it a date all right all right great thank you for having me on well thank you for coming on and We'll get this up and out as soon as possible, both in YouTube and audio forum.
Nice.
And I guess we'll see what the consequences are.
We'll see.
You do find out on YouTube pretty quickly.
You do.
More power to you as far as I'm concerned.
And thank you very much for spending the time speaking with me today.
Yeah.
God bless you.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
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