Socrates, Jesus, and the Fall of Rome | Dr. John Vervaeke

Okay, so you got turned onto philosophical and theological ideas. I took an intro to philosophy course, and we read the Republic, and I met Socrates. Aha! And what did that do?

Well, see, the thing about my upbringing is it had left a taste in my mouth for the transcendence. You know, a missing a sage, if I can put it that way. And then I met this figure of Socrates, who made the logos come alive and gave me a new way of understanding rationality and made me a way of understanding spirituality and transcendence in a way that was consonant with my burgeoning interest in science and reason. And that, right. So that was a defragmentation process. Profound, profound!

That's why I will not follow any religion, any pseudo-religious ideology, any political vision that says, "You must abandon your loyalty to Socrates." That's not going to happen for me. That's not going to happen for me.

And okay, and so what was it specifically about Socrates that attracted you, do you think?

Well, there was a lot. Originally I thought, but see, Socrates talked about that himself. He talked about how he seduced people into philosophy, right? Because at first it was, "Oh look, he wins all the arguments," right? And you, when you're a first-year student, and you're coming out of high school in the meeting crisis, right? That's very appealing. Because then you can, you know… But then you realize the people he’s defeating are the sophists, are the people who are after the phronesis, not philosophia. And then you realize that he criticizes himself as much as he sees, and you get drawn into this.

You get caught up in this process of self-correcting and self-transcending, and doing it with other people dialogically—getting caught up in, like, you know, Jesus talk.

So is there something about the essence of higher-order meaning that is either analogous to or identical with self-correction?

I think, well, I think that’s the axio revolution. The axio revolution, right? When people like Siddhartha or people like Socrates is the recognition that our meaning-making machinery is actually also simultaneously the source of a lot of our suffering. And that simultaneously empowers us and challenges us, because, I mean, you think about the damop, you know? The mind is the beginning of everything! And if you don’t—if like, your best—the greatest ally you can have is your mind, but the greatest enemy you can have is your mind. Right?

And so you get this tremendous… yeah, because questioning improves, but it also destroys.

Right, exactly! And so you need a figure that is like Socrates, you know? He’s open to following the logos. Wisdom begins in wonder. But there’s tremendous courage he demonstrates—unto death! He demonstrates it unto death! This is tremendously encouraging, for that was tremendously encouraging for me.

And so I got caught up in this, and then I wanted to follow this. Except academic philosophy at the time, after first year, stops talking about wisdom and the love of wisdom, and you get into all of these arguments about meta-ethics and meta… you know, epistemology. And those are useful tools. You—I— they’re useful for science. And so I kept going on for that reason. But this hunger was not being satisfied.

So literally down the street from me, there was a TA-Chin Meditation Center. So I went there because I decided to give Eastern philosophy—because I’d been reading some Hermann Hesse—a chance. And I started practicing Tai Chi Chan and practicing the pastan meta. I was introduced to… I was introduced to Siddhartha.

And so these things opened me up. And around that time, I started to read Pierre Hadot and how our ancient philosophy—the Stoics, and the Epicureans, and the Neoplatonists, and the Skeptics— they also practice philosophy as a way of life. And then I started to realize how much this overlapped with early Christianity and some forms of existing Christianity. It started to help me approach Christianity and to religion because I became very… I became very…

Well, you've always struck me at your core as a religious thinker. I mean, that’s part of grappling with deep ideas.

And that’s the same thing, but you’re right. And it’s one of the things that distinguished you from, say, the other professors that were at the University of Toronto, but the professorate in general. And I also think it accounts to some degree for your impact on students.

I think that’s true. My, around this, when I did the episode I did for Awakening to the Meaning Crisis on Agape, I had Christians, Christian ministers, like Paul Clay, said that was one of the best presentations of Agape.

And then, yeah, define that for everyone.

So, other than sort of desire, there are three kinds of love. Eros is the love that is accomplished by consummation. So, and I don’t mean this in some creepy Fran sense, but I can have Eros for a cookie because I become one with the cookie by eating it. And we consummate a marriage, right? And you consummate a relationship in sexual intercourse. And then, there’s Philia. This is the love that is born out of reciprocity. This is friendship love. This is the love that emerges and affords dialogos. That’s why it’s Philia Sophia—it’s the dialogical love of wisdom together.

And then there is the love that a parent has for a child. You don't love a child because you want to be one with the child. That’s exactly the wrong project! You’re trying to make the project autonomous from you. And of course, your child isn't your friend when you bring the child home from the hospital. They can’t do anything. They’re not even a cognitive agent. They’re a moral person, but they’re not a cognitive agent. You love a child. It’s like this magic! You love them because by loving them, you turn them into a full-blown cognitive agent. It’s like if I could stare at a sofa and turn it into a Ferrari! It’s that kind!

And, in that sense, it is the most fundamentally profound creative engagement. And we’re cre—like, we’re not just creating meaning; we’re creating the beings that participate in meaning that, as you indicated earlier, could disclose some of the most fundamental aspects of reality! So Agape is the deep recognition of that, in that sort of voluntary necessity and being compelled to draw into it.

And Jesus is right! Jesus, you know, the Epistle of John: God is Love. Jesus is the sage of that.

Think about what Agape means. Jesus comes, and he—the agapic way, the most excellent way, as Paul says. Agape says, "I, to the Roman people in the Roman Empire, we can take all the non-persons of the Roman Empire—all the women, all the children, all the widows, all the slaves, all the impoverished, all the non-Romans—and we can make them into persons because we live the most excellent way of Agape."

And Agape is the god power that turns non-persons into persons! And that conquers the Roman Empire!

And that’s why—it conquers the whole ancient world—and that’s why it conquers the Roman Empire. Right? And precisely! And my partner Sara, who’s not a Christian, right? And I don’t profess to be one, but she took me aside at one point and said—and I want this understood that I’m saying this at an arm's length, okay? And you’re a good friend, so I’ll trust you for that. But she said, “You’re actually the only real Christian I’ve ever met.”

What did she mean by that?

Well, I, of course, I asked her. Yeah, right. And she said, “Because you know… she said I get it. You don’t identify with a set of doctrines, but you try to live Agape. You try to embody it. And you’ve structured your whole life around that.”

And you… well, that’s what belief—that’s believing! To give your heart to that, that’s what it definitely— to stake your life on it. That’s why I have a certain amount of problem with the propositional—the reduction of belief to the propositional. Propositional tyranny, that’s what it is.

Well, it’s also, you know, it’s propositional tyranny, but it’s also substitution. It’s like, well, now I’ve got the propositions down, you know? And I talked to some evangelists in Washington. I know some very, very wise evangelicals in Washington. They do remarkable work. They’re involved in the prayer breakfast there and have been for decades—really committed people. And we were having a very serious conversation one day about the errors, let’s say, of the evangelical movement. One of them being the substitution of the propositional for the existential. And then the counting of souls, you know, the number of people who accept the propositional creed.

Which isn’t nothing! You—it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient! It’s also maybe one way that the propositional can echo down through the emotions and the motivations and become something embodied. But that’s a—a large journey from the purely propositional, let’s say the Apostles’ Creed, to actually embodying.

There are so many—we mentioned this earlier. This is Socrates. This is Plato through and through. There are truths that are only disclosed to you after you go through fundamental transformation, and that is different from assenting to a proposition because you have been convinced of its truth.

That’s a very different… see, this is the Cartesian problem. The Cartesian project is: here’s a universal method that does not require you to undergo existential transformation. You just apply the universal method, and it will give you access to all the universal propositional truths. And that’s all we need. And that is a big mistake.

This is why I practice a form of cognitive science that emphasizes that I have a new paper out. I think I shared it with you: Why relevance realization is not computational. Because ultimately you can’t capture all of that relevance realization—all that binding, all that transformation, all that meaning-making in a formal set of propositions. It’s just not going to do it for you.

Right, right, right, right!

So, yeah! Yeah! Well, that’s an extension of the argument that the propositional isn’t sufficient. Yes!