Christianity and the Modern World | Bishop Barron | EP 162

Hello! If you have found the ideas I discussed interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore. This new book, Beyond Order, provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 Rules for Life and before that, Maps of Meaning. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.

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Hello everyone! I have the pleasure today of speaking with Bishop Robert Barron. We've spoken before on YouTube, but felt that it was worthwhile doing so again. It's been a long time, and many people have reached out to both of us continually asking us to converse, and so we felt that that would be useful and something at least in principle of public interest. Bishop Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He's a number one Amazon best-selling author and has published numerous books, essays, and articles on theology and the spiritual life. He has been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of Facebook, Google, and Amazon and is one of the most followed Catholics in the world on social media. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Bishop Barron: Yeah, my pleasure, Jordan. Great to see you too! So why do you think that people have written to you and to me suggesting that we converse? What's your take on this?

It's surprising to me in some sense because it's not really my bailiwick, you know, although obviously I've been putting my nose in there. Anyway, I think for a number of reasons people see the work you do as at least opening a door to the religious dimension of life, for a deeper dimension of life. I'll tell you a story. I got up in front of the bishops of the United States because I was chairman of our committee on evangelization, and I talked about why we're losing a lot of young people. I went through some of the statistics and then reasons why we're losing them, and then I gave various signs of hope. One of the signs of hope I gave was—I called it the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. What I meant was this: I told the bishops, here's this gentleman who gets up in a pretty non-histrionic way and speaks for several hours in some cases about the Bible, and young people all over the English-speaking world are listening to him in theaters, and they're by their millions on YouTube. I said, you know, I'm not here to endorse everything that Jordan Peterson is saying, but I think that in itself is a sign of hope. That became a source of some conversation among the bishops. But I do think it's a sign of hope. And I said to them, and it's really in some ways to our shame that you are making the Bible more compelling and appealing in many ways than we were, so that's our bailiwick; that's our profession as the Bible. But you were opening the Bible up in a way that young people especially were finding very compelling, and you were indeed, I think, thereby opening a door toward a richer and fuller understanding of the scriptures.

I think that's part of it. But I also think it's the opening to the realm of objective value. So, I think as I read you and listen to you, you talk a lot about the objective realm of value. That's not simply a matter of my subjective whim that, you know, I'll decide what to do, or I make up my values as I go along. But there's something about the tradition, something about what's been given to us, an objectivity to moral value, aesthetic value, intellectual value. And see, to me, that's—it's a good way, a gateway drug to religion, because God, I would say, is the ground and the source of objective value. When you sort of hyper-subjectivize the whole operation, that becomes questionable. So I think your work there, too, has sort of primed the pump for a deeper exploration of God as the source of these objective values.

There's a couple thoughts I'd have about it. But I remember it's almost as if we need a third category—subjective, objective, and something else that is an admixture of both. I mean there are things I come across in information in the biological sciences particularly that speak deeply of an intrinsic morality. You see this—you can look at the work of Frans de Waal, for example, who's a Dutch primatologist, and he's been studying the social interactions of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees share a tremendous genetic overlap with human beings, and from an evolutionary perspective, we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees something like seven million years ago. Our cultures also share—or our biology also shares properties with that of bonobos, but I'm going to talk about the chimps for now.

De Waal has been interested in what makes a chimp leader. So chimps organize their societies essentially in patriarchal fashion; the top chimp is male. That doesn't mean there aren't high-status females—there are—but the fundamental power structure appears, let's say, patriarchal. And it's in the popular eye, it's easy to assume that the top chimp is the most physically intimidating, but that's actually not the case. What de Waal has shown is that alpha chimps who maintain stable sovereignty, let's say, are more engaged in reciprocal interactions than all the other chimps in the troop. So they're very generous and reciprocal; they play fair. Now you can get the odd situation where a chimp troop will be ruled by a tyrant, but the structure becomes unstable, and the tyrant chimp tends to be overthrown by coalitions of other male chimps torn to pieces and so on.

And so then if you think, well, maybe there is a pattern that constitutes, this is the crucial issue as far as I'm concerned: is there a pattern of behavior that typifies stable sovereignty? And I think that's in some sense the fundamental religious question: is there a pattern of behavior that constitutes stable sovereignty? And if so, what does it consist of? Yak Panksep has looked at rat behavior, and juvenile male rats engage in rough-and-tumble play, and when you pair them together, if one rat is ten times bigger than the other, he can dominate the lesser rat. And so they do that, and they establish their relative dominance. And then if you repeatedly pair them together, which is a crucial issue—it has to be repeated pairings—the lesser rat has to invite the dominant rat to play, so that's his role in the larger rat agrees and plays. But if the larger rat doesn't let the little rat win thirty percent of the time across repeated play bouts, the little rat will stop playing.

And what I read that just blew me away—it's so significant because it shows, imagine that part of what morality is: it’s morality is precisely that pattern of behavior that serves to keep repeated interactions going. And those repeated interactions might be across days or weeks or months or years or decades or centuries or eons—tremendously long time span. And so what you get is the emergence of a pattern of behavior that's stable for the individual and stable for society. And as that's instantiated more and more deeply, it becomes something we can observe, something that we adapt to, and something that then becomes part of our central nature. And for me that's the way into the bridge between biology and religion right there.

And because there it looks like there's an evolved ethic that even goes beyond human beings.

Bishop Barron: Yeah, no, I wouldn't deny for a second there was a biological ground for a lot of this business. And I’m with Lonergan, the great Canadian philosopher, that the condition for the possibility of real objectivity is a properly constituted subjectivity. So, I like your opening comment about something that bridges the two. We don't just live in, you know, the subjective and objective as though they're discrete, but it's a properly constituted subjectivity, which means one free of various prejudices, one free of various fears, one free of games of self-denial and all that, that can properly intuit the objective value. And objective value does indeed come up out of the physical to some degree. I mean we're embodied creatures, so the biological plays a role in that for sure. But I think, too, it goes beyond it. I mean it goes beyond simply a question of survival of the individual or even of the species, but certain values, you know, of truth and beauty and the good that transcend that although they're grounded in it for sure.

Well this is one of the things I really wanted to ask you about because I do think in evolutionary terms and across the time scale that evolutionary biologists and physicists have come to accept—and so that's a universe that's about fifteen billion years old on a planet that's about 4.5 billion with life being three and a half and mammalian life, say being 60 million years—that's my time span. The biblical time span is much truncated in relationship to that. And that sets up a certain tension between the biblical stories, certainly if they're read as objective truth, but the Catholic Church from my understanding has—and this comes from the pope himself—the Catholic Church has already accepted the basic tenets of evolution. But I don't know...

Bishop Barron: Yes. Is that wrong?

Sure! Oh no, absolutely yes.

Okay, so but that begs the question because, for me, and I'm sure this is part of the sticking point for young people and maybe for people in Western culture in general, is that it's easy to say that evolutionary theory has been accepted, but that still begs the question, "It's right." Okay? So fine, you can look at the span of life over three and a half billion years before you get to human beings, but our religious stories talk of a reality that looks like it's about fifteen thousand years old, something like that, right? And so that I'm not blaming the Church for that, obviously, and I think the stories in the Bible are far older than five to ten thousand years. I suspect they were part of an extraordinarily ancient oral tradition that stretches back tens of thousands of years, because that's the rule rather than the exception.

But, and I don't know to what degree the Catholic thinkers within the Church are working constantly to attempt to reconcile these two viewpoints apart from saying that they do accept them both.

Yeah, but I don’t think they are apples and oranges in a way. I mean, I don’t worry too much about that issue. I’m not trying to read the Bible as a scientific text. It’s not about the evolutionary process; it’s a theological and spiritual text that’s discerning truths that are, I think, available within our experience. But there are discrete moments there. I mean the scientist who talks about evolution, fine, I’ve listened to him or her—the Bible’s not concerned so much with that. But it’s giving us a theological interpretation of history and indeed of the cosmos, but not in scientific terms.

It has implications for our understanding of the cosmos for sure and of the nature of human nature, but it’s not done in a scientific manner. So it just predates—as you say—I mean any of what we’d associate now with the scientific method. The last biblical text is around 100 A.D. and it long predates that preoccupation. So to me it’s kind of an apples and oranges issue. And I think a lot of that religion-science stuff in that sense is an early 20th century preoccupation that we should just get beyond.

Right, but I don’t think people have gone beyond it, and I also think that—and this pertains to something we also talked about discussing—which was the continual drain from the Catholic Church perhaps in particular but perhaps not in the West of young people. And I think part of that is their inability to make intellectual sense of everything that they’re faced with: a religious tradition and a scientific tradition, especially on the biological front. But not only that, they don't know where to place these things in their view of the world. I think that's partly why my lectures—because you'd asked about that—had become popular, because I am trying to do that.

And I'll say this: you look at the surveys—there are a lot of surveys now that ask young people precisely that question, "How come you left?" And people speculate, "Oh, it must be because of the scandals" or because, you know, they had a bad experience in church or something. Number one reason across many years in all the surveys is, "I don't believe the teachings." And then to specify that, "Religion and science seem to be at odds with each other." So for young people, the scientific way of knowing is the way of knowing. So it's sort of scientism, at least implicitly holds sway in the minds of a lot of young people. So once you make that move, knowledge equals the scientific manner of knowing, well then the Bible is non-scientific; therefore, it's, you know, old superstition; bronze age mythology, etc.

I see what you were doing, Jordan. I think you were doing what a lot of the Church Fathers did with the scriptures because the Church Fathers are very interesting people like Origen and Augustine and Chrysostom and those people. They knew fully well in the third and fourth century that the Bible should not simply be read in a sort of straightforwardly literalistic way. Augustine knew that very clearly. Origen did that clearly, and they talk therefore about the different senses of scripture. What you're doing I think in a lot of your lectures is what Origen would have called the moral sense of the Bible, the tropological—the given it’s kind of technical term. The biblical texts are about the moral life. Now we might say today the psychological life or what makes you psychologically healthier or more productive. They would have said the moral sense. They knew all about that. And so the texts began to open up in these marvelous ways.

So, you know, Noah and the Ark, Jacob and wrestling with the angel and the latter going up to heaven, etc., etc. If you start fussing about the literal truth of these stories, you're going to miss these really deep spiritual insights which the Church Fathers knew very well. I think you were in your own way tapping into that, and the fact that young people were responding to it, see I think it’s very encouraging. That’s why I told the bishops it’s a positive sign that you were getting the audiences you were getting around this.

Well, the problem with the scientific viewpoint technically speaking is that it's amoral within its own confines. By definition it strives not to address issues of value. Now, it can't help it because scientists have to investigate some things and not others, so value enters into it. But by its own nature, science can't answer and tries not to answer questions of value. Now it gets more complicated when you look at work like the primatology I discussed earlier, the origin of morality and animals and game playing, say among rats. That starts to move into the domain of morality, to some degree.

But the problem with science is that it strips out all subjective meaning—it's designed to do that—and that leaves everyone at a loss about what to do with the world of value. And I do believe that stories in particular address the world of value—that's their function. And the world of value is the world that we act in. They're guides to action.

Well, I come across it all the time in my work on the internet. So I have, you know, dialogues with people that interact with my videos, and they'll say things like: "Well, the sciences give us access to the truth, period. The scientific method—that's how you get to the truth." And I’ll say, "So, Hamlet tells you nothing true? Plato tells you nothing true? T.S. Eliot's poetry tells you nothing true?" I mean, who would believe that except the most ideologically scientistic person? Because my fear is a lot of young people are in the grip of that. They're in the grip of a real ideological thing. They don't know how to think their way out of it, and so they just abandon the attempt. But it leaves them nowhere.

What you were doing, though, is you're showing a way out. And there is a way out, and it's by, you know, an introduction into the great masters of these texts to show you how they function. That's what a good preacher ought to be doing.

You know, so let me throw another objection then, and this is another stumbling block I think. And I think this emerges in post-modernism in particular. Because the post-modernists—there's reasons they weigh for their manner of thinking. So one reason is, so artificial intelligence researchers discovered in the early 1960s that perceiving a landscape was much more difficult than anybody had ever suspected. Originally, it was sort of felt that objects were just there in some simple way, and the complicated computational problem would be how to move among the obvious objects. But it turned out that it's really, really difficult to perceive the environment. There's an infinite or near-infinite number of ways that you can perceive even a finite set of objects.

So, that means there's a multitude of potential interpretations for every set of events. And so that was a radical discovery in the computer world, but the same discovery basically occurred at the same time in the world of literary analysis for the same reason. Is that every text is susceptible to an inordinately large number of interpretations, and it's not easy to identify the canonical interpretation, and maybe the canonical interpretation isn't canonical; it just serves power, for example. That would be, you know, religion as the opiate of the masses or religion as a political tool.

And I think that takes things far too far, but there’s a real problem here is that if you divorce the narrative from the objective world and say, well, the narrative is valuable because it gives us a guide to value, then you have another problem, which is instantly which is okay, which narrative? And how do we make a hierarchy of value among narratives? We would say Hamlet is deeper than a Harlequin romance, right? But trying to specify why that is and what "deep" means is very, very difficult. And you might say, well, the Bible is the deepest of all narratives, but that still begs the question: well, compared to Buddhist writings, say, compared to the Upanishads, or compared to any long-term complex mythology that's developed over thousands and thousands of years, what makes it canonical? Why is it preferable to Shakespeare, for example?

So, perhaps I could get you to address that because that's a vicious problem.

There's a lot there and I'll start with your opening remark about post-modernism because I quite agree with you. I’m not simply anti-post-modern. In fact I wrote a book called Toward a Post-Liberal Catholicism where I took in a lot of the insights of the post-moderns, one of which is, as you quite correctly say, a sort of legitimate perspectivalism that we never get reality—you know—too cool, right? Just open my eyes, there's reality again. That's Lonergan. It’s only a properly constituted subjectivity that that opens the door to the properly objective. But one of those ways of properly constituting your subjectivity is to put your subjectivity within a community of discourse.

So, it’s never the case that I simply intuit the way things are, and end of the argument. No, it’s as Lonergan said, it’s not the cogito. That was the trouble with the Enlightenment, it’s the cogitamus. It’s always we think, and that means I have my perspective, I bounce it off your perspective, you bounce off somebody else's; we have a disciplined and structured conversation. And in that process, all the different aspects of the real begin to emerge.

Or like my intellectual hero, John Henry Newman said, the contents of a real idea is equivalent to the sum total of its possible aspects. That was about 1870 he said that, which is really an extraordinary thing because he anticipates in many ways the phenomenologists when they talk about walking around an object and to intuit its essence thereby. And the walking around is not just I walk around, but you're walking around, and someone else is walking around; we’re all exchanging our points of view.

And again, I’d bring this into line with Catholicism, which has always stressed the communitarian element that we know precisely in the community of the church. Now, linked to the Bible, the Bible's never like just open it up; you're a single subjective viewer, and now you take in its meaning. Well no, we’ve always said the Bible is read within the Church in this long interpretive tradition where I’m bouncing it off of Augustine’s perspective. We’ve got it from Origen who now throws it to Thomas Aquinas who now brings it to Newman and then through preachers and teachers through the saints.

So you’ve got the technical intellectual interpretation of the Bible. Then you have the saints who in many ways embody the Bible. So, I'm going to read a lot of the biblical stories in light of Francis of Assisi, in light of Teresa of Calcutta, etc., so I like that side, if you want, of the post-modern which is much more attuned to the communal way in which we come to know things.

The big question you raised at the end we could spend some time with that: how do you make ultimate judgments and determinations? Like this one is right, you know? Well, you hinted at it a bit there by saying, well, look, many, many people have looked and worked on this for a very, very long period of time. And in some sense, it’s a living document, right? Because, right? Because it does have to be. The Bible just doesn’t exist as a book on a shelf; it’s a pattern of meaning within a context, and the context has to be taken into account.

So, you say, well, there’s a powerful context for its interpretation. It's also a fundamental text in that the Bible is implicit in all sorts of other great texts like Shakespeare or anything that's a product of Judeo-Christian culture. That’s a deep product, it's deeply affected by the Bible. So it’s there implicitly whether you like it or not, and so it has to be taken seriously, I would say, even if you don’t believe it.

But then to the degree that you believe the central axioms of Western culture, you have to wonder how much of what's biblical you do end up believing because of its implicitness.

Oh yeah, I mean it’s all through the Western culture for sure.

And the question of belief, you know, in some ways is the most fundamental question in all of theology. We call it fundamental theology. How do you articulate the meaning of belief? And you know for the best people in our tradition, belief is always on the far side of reason, not the near side of reason. And that’s a mistake that so many people make today, young people especially; faith or belief they mistake for credulity or superstition, something sub-rational.

And our best people of course have always repudiated that authentic faith is on the far side of reason. So reason’s done all the work it can and should do, but then there’s this moment when the claim is made, Deus dixit—that God has spoken. Now do I believe that or not? I think it’s precisely analogous to coming to know a person. You know, so I know something about you just from watching you over the years and I can Google you, and I can read your books and I can come to some sort of objective knowledge of you—now in this virtual means I’ve, you know, met you. So my mind is working trying to understand where you’re coming from.

But let's project into the future. If you and I met in person, you and I eventually became friends and at some point you spoke a truth about yourself that I could never have gotten on my own. I could never have gotten it from any objective source; you revealed something to me, right, of your inner life. And at that point, I’ve got to make a decision: well do I believe that or not? I can’t prove it; I can’t ratify it. It’s congruent with everything I’ve known so that’s one test I could give. If you told me something that’s just wildly incongruous with everything else I know about you, I’d probably not believe that.

But if you tell me something that’s congruent with what I know but goes beyond it, then I have to say at that point: okay, I have to believe that or not. I think faith is like that in a way. So the Bible, I can approach it in all kinds of different ways, but the claim being made at the heart of the Bible, of biblical revelation, is Deus dixit—God has spoken. God has said something in this text. Do I accept it? And that has to be a decision that’s born of something beyond reason—not opposed to it, but beyond it.

So, I have—I understand that argument, but I have trouble with it. I would say, so we could talk about faith a little bit. This is groping around in the darkness. It seems to me that gratitude is a form of faith—that's a dis—it's like a decision in some sense, because you could look at the world and you could say, well, there’s plenty of reasons to be grateful and there’s plenty of reasons not to be. And so the evidence doesn’t necessarily support one interpretation or another, but a decision about whether or not to be grateful is going to affect the way I interpret the world and also perhaps the way it reveals itself to me and the way I act in it and the consequences of my actions.

So I would say it seems to me to take faith to be grateful, and that seems to be a worthwhile faith. It seems to me to take faith to operate always when we don't know what we're doing, and we usually don't know what we're doing. And so part of the reason that you have to have faith is because you’re actually ignorant, and it fills in the gaps, right? Because otherwise, you’d be stuck with a never-ending regress; you just ask why all the time, and then you could never act because the "why" has to end somewhere. And I think by virtually—by definition, it ends with an act of faith. That might be akin to your idea about faith being beyond reason.

It’s like, well look, if I ask you why you're having this conversation with me, you'll give me a reason. And if I ask you why that reason is valid, you'll give me another reason. And if I do that five or six times, you’re going to run out of reasons. And but you’re still having the conversation—so that means you have faith that the conversation can go somewhere good. And that’s not actually a delusion.

No, and actually you’re moving toward God, and I think that’s a classic route in our tradition. And just the way you were doing it—why are we having this conversation? I give these particular reasons, but then ask the "why" again. Ask it a third or fourth or fifth time. Finally I’m going to get to something like, well because I want to be happy, you know? What ultimately motivates the will is some desire for happiness. What’s happiness? Well, keep pressing that question. It can’t be something simply in this world—we all know that doesn’t make us happy in the way that we’re seeking. It’s something like the summum bonum, right? Somewhat the ultimate good.

I want to be happy in the fullest possible sense all the time, which is why you know Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said this: that I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning unless I believed in God. And that’s what he meant was if you do that kind of horizon analysis of every act of the will—even the simplest, like getting out of bed—you finally come to the summum bonum, okay. So, let me walk through that.

Okay, let me walk through that because I think that’s a useful thing to think about. Technically I’ve thought about identity in this regard because identity is a nested structure. Yeah, it’s also a lens through which we view the world. And so if I’m sitting at my typewriter typing, you might ask me what I’m doing, and the answer is, well I’m moving my fingers up and down. Yeah, but then that’s true, and the next answer is, well I’m producing words on a page. But I’m also producing phrases, and I’m producing sentences, and I’m producing paragraphs, and then chapters, and then a book. And then you might say, well, am I writing a book or am I being a professor? And I’d say, no, well, I’m being a professor pushing my fingers up and down on this keypad.

And then you might say, well, what is—what’s professor nested in? And the answer to that would be something like, well, good citizen. And then that’s nested in good man, and then that’s nested in—well, then that’s right where you start to encounter what I think are something like religious presuppositions. It's like, right? Well, what exactly do you mean by good man? And I think psychologically, I think, well that means to act out the mythological hero. And that's exactly the point where that identity touches on something that's, I think, indistinguishable from religion at that end.

Now, I'm not sure what that means about God per se. I would say this: that God in our great tradition could be defined as the good in its unconditioned form. So all the things you’ve been raising here, right? So the "why?"—I’m answering with some kind of good— with a conditioned good. The very fact that I can put it in a wider context means it's conditioned, it's good I'm seeking, but it’s not the ultimate thing I’m seeking. So unless we have an infinite regress, which I think is repugnant to reason and immobilizing, you know, there are people who have neurological conditions that put them into an infinite regress and they cannot act, right? So if that’s repugnant both let’s say, epistemically and psychologically, we have to come to something that’s properly called the unconditioned good.

Good in its absolute form—that which is most actual—but I like the analysis; it comes not so much cosmologically but psychologically from what motivates me. And finally, unless my life just sort of founders into irrationality, I am motivated by, ultimately, oh my God, right?

Well, I think so because, you know, I would also say, well let’s reject that argument and say, well, you’re not nested in good man, good citizen, hero, and then beyond that, you know, cosmic hero. And I think psychologically speaking, the figure of Christ is, if nothing else, a cosmic hero. And I’m not saying it’s nothing else, but it’s at least that.

Well, what would the alternative be? Well, you wouldn’t be doing what was good. Well then what’s on the outskirts of your value structure is something that’s adversarial, something that’s the opposite of good. And maybe you’re likely—in fact, your psyche is not pure and you know you vary depending on your faith, I suppose—but there’s no escaping being nested in some sort of transcendent structure like that.

And then I think of it this way. So you have this outermost reach of your identity structure which is something like whatever the idea of good man is grounded in. And I do think it's grounded in this hero narrative. But then I look at the hero narrative and I think, well, that's a biologically—that's an emergent narrative. It has evolutionary roots. It's something like man has discovered that his goal is to move into the unknown, to confront what's predatory and dangerous, and to garner something of great value in return and to share it with the community. And it’s an ancient, ancient story; it echoes through the Old Testament continually. You're right.

It’s even there—it's even there, it lurks underneath the accounts of God’s creation itself. And that means that that outermost rim of identity is something that has an evolutionary origin. And then you think, well, that means that it has to be connected—it's connected with reality in some fundamental sense. Does that demonstrate the existence of God? That's a—well, that's a different question. But you can push—you can make a logical case for the necessity of that hypothesis of goodness to that point, as far as I can tell.

Stay with first, with your example of someone, let’s say, who’s really wicked and there are wicked people. You know, we can analyze that psychologically or two of them are sitting right here.

Bishop Barron: Well, yeah, I mean because it goes right through the human heart, as soon as said.

But Thomas Aquinas says a wicked person, even the most wicked person, is seeking at least the apparent good. So something that appears good to that person now they could be totally mixed up about it; it’s not in fact good for them, but at least it appears good to them. So even the most wicked person, Thomas says, is incoherently seeking God because it’s always some good. And now he’s got the wrong sense of it, but he's still being drawn and motivated by this first cause of the will—even the most wicked person.

Bishop Barron: See, but I think that’s a sign of hope. That means grace is always possible.

Now read whether it’s Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor and people that talk about the most wicked types, but they're sometimes the place where grace breaks through, you know because they are seeking God in their in their perverse way.

So in a way, he’s got you coming or going. I mean whether we’re Mother Teresa or we’re a wicked Dostoevsky character, we’re all seeking God in some way. And I agree with you about the Bible.

Bishop Barron: The Bible...

Well, see I’m not that optimistic because I think—I think I don’t think that all evil actions are misguided. I think that because—and I think that’s best illustrated in the story of Cain and Abel. And I take the story of Cain extremely seriously; I think it has unbelievable explanatory power. It's quite staggering the power of that story, the explanatory power, especially for how short it is.

You know, Cain is resentful; he has his reasons. His sacrifices were repudiated by God for reasons that aren’t made clear in the text, which is a great ambiguity, because often our sacrifices are repudiated. And Cain is bitter, and no wonder. And he has Abel around to rub his nose in it as well. But Cain's reaction is, I’m going to destroy what God values most. And that, now you might say, well, Cain is conflicted and ambivalent about that, and I believe that. But yeah, but I don’t think he was seeking the good when he killed—when he struck down. He was he was he was shaking his fist at God.

Bishop Barron: Yeah. Indeed, he was objectively, but he was seeking at least the apparent good for him in his twisted mind. He thought that was the good.

I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I think you can get to a point where you're so resentful, I really believe this, that you’re so resentful that you will do harm to yourself as well as everyone else and actually truly—but a suicide is seeking at least the apparent good. A suicidal person thinks my nonexistence is a good thing, so they are seeking the good, but in a twisted, misguided way. And it's to me, it's got metaphysical roots because I would hold to the classical view that evil is a privatio boni, right? It’s a privation of the good.

So good is always more fundamental than evil; it has to be. They’re not co-equal principles fighting away. So I’d repudiate any sort of Gnostic or Manichaean system that metaphysically, too, I believe that.

I thought about that a lot. Jung is being accused of Manichaeanism, for example, because he took evil so seriously.

Who, who, yes?

C.G. Jung.

Yes, yes.

But, but, you know he took evil extraordinarily seriously, which is something that’s definitely worth doing. So look, you look at examples like the Columbine killers that, well, you know, you could have—the suicide could have come before the murders, but it didn’t. And so I don't— I even see maybe in those situations the desire for nonexistence not so much as a seeking of the good but a desire to punish God for the inadequacy of his creation.

Bishop Barron: Yeah, oh no, it could be. But at least in their mind, that’s a good thing. So that’s the Cain connection, that the resentment against God and getting back at God.

Sure. I see it in the pastor's life all the time.

Bishop Barron: It’s a justified thing they think for them; it is; God deserves it because look at what's happened.

But see, but God has you coming or going because that is in fact a quest for God.

Bishop Barron: That’s right. I mean even the most resistant sinner is in fact under grace in that sense.

That’s why I’ve always liked both Origen and C.S. Lewis say this, that it’s the love of God that lights up the fires of hell, right? If someone’s in hell, it’s the resistance to God’s love that’s lighting up the fires. It’s causing the friction. And so God has you coming or going. I mean is God present in hell? Sure, because whatever is has to be grounded in God. And God’s even present in the fires of hell because it’s the resistance against God that’s causing them.

You know, so I think it’s a metaphysical statement and a psychological statement about the primacy of the good, but it’s a source of hope in a lot of my pastoral work, you know, and you as a psychologist too when you go into people’s pain in a very deep way. And priests go all the time to these limit situations where people have lost loved ones, they’re facing their own death, they’re facing tremendous failure—that’s where priests go, you know, because that’s often where grace is going to break through.

Well, there are—I’ve encountered situations as a clinician where religious language is the only language that can be used to describe what’s happening.

That’s quite interesting, yeah.

It’s difficult to relay those experiences outside the specific framework of the occurrences.

Yeah, I always think of, you know, Hegel said to know a limit as a limit is to be beyond the limit. And I think that’s true here. So whether it’s the physical sciences or psychology, our reason comes to a certain limit. But then it recognizes the limit as a limit, and that’s to be already beyond it in a way. And they often talk about religious questions as limit questions or it’s a limit situation when I begin to ask the meta question beyond questions or I come to a meta experience beyond any ordinary experience.

And that’s why again priests tend to show up at those limit cases. That's when we're looking into this abyss, and it is from our standpoint rather abyssal. I mean, what is it that stands beyond what I can know and control? And there’s this—I mean, do Kierkegaardian; there’s a kind of leap that that abyss is something loving, and what stands beyond what I can control is a force of love that's actually summoning me.

And that’s where I go back to what I said about Deus dixit—God speaking through the scriptures. I think that’s what it means. The voice from the cloud is a symbol of it, you know? When someone hears the voice of God, it’s coming from the abyss. It always is. Job, you know, the voice comes out of the whirlwind. So your eyes are closed, and you know you can’t see anything, but from the whirlwind comes the voice because—and again that speech is so important because, Job, where were you when I did all these? I mean, what do you know about what’s going on? You know nothing about what’s going on.

But from the abyss beyond reason comes the voice, and the Bible witnesses to that stuff all the time. And boy, it happens in people’s experience. I mean you and I both know that when you come up against limits, what comes out of the abyss is a very interesting thing.

Well, one of the ways that’s interesting to think about this, I think, is that, well, let’s assume that at the outermost limits of your identity you don’t make the assumption that you’re involved in an enterprise that’s good, nested inside a being that’s good. Let’s say you take the opposite approach to that; what happens to your behavior?

And what I believe I’ve observed—and I tried to document this particularly in my book Maps of Meaning—is that you start acting in ways that make everything worse very rapidly. Yes. So, and that—and so for—I had a debate a while back with an antinatalist, David Benatar, and he believes that existence is so rife with suffering, conscious existence is so rife with suffering, that it would be better if it just didn’t exist at all.

And so Dostoevsky’s Ivan makes that case in The Brothers Karamazov brilliantly. It’s brilliantly he tortures his brother Alyosha, who’s the novitiate. And it’s a very interesting book because Alyosha is nowhere near the returration that Ivan is, but he is the most admirable character in the book because of the totality of his personality—not because of the brilliance of his rational mind. It’s an amazing book in that regard.

But the problem I had with Benatar’s hypothesis wasn’t its axiom because I think you can make a strong case that there’s so much suffering in the world that the question of its validity is a valid question. The problem for me there is that if you do that and you start to act that out, things take a vicious turn very rapidly. You start working against everything that’s alive and striving.

Yes, and no, quite right. Gosh, there’s a lot there. I was thinking of, as you were talking, the Dante’s image of Satan at the pit of Hell—not in a fiery place but an icy place. Much, much better symbol of stuck, surrounded by the betrayers, chewing on the three great traitors. But his great wings, he’s meant to fly, he’s meant to fly up into the presence of God. But all they do is he’s beating his wings, and that’s our earlier point about he’s seeking God, I mean Satan is seeking God.

You have to—that's the way the will functions. But all he’s managing to do is make the world around him colder. So as he’s beating his wings, he’s just—he’s creating the meteorology of hell. You know, so that’s what happens when someone gets really stuck. They are in fact seeking God, but they—and he cries from all six eyes, he’s got six eyes and he’s weeping and he’s drooling from the people he’s chewing, and he’s stuck and he’s making the world colder. It’s a beautiful picture of what happens.

It’s really useful too for listeners to realize, you look, if you look at this, is my opinion, and you can take it for what it’s worth, the images of Satan in Paradise Lost and in Dante’s Inferno are unbelievably instructive. If you start to understand that what these thinkers were trying to do was to produce an imaginative representation of evil and evil as an embodied and transcendent being, and the psychological rationale for that I believe is that the evil we do is informed by the entire human race's conception of what constitutes evil.

And stretching back from the beginning of the time when we began to communicate. So for example, you see this quite clearly. I read the Columbine killer’s notes in quite a bit of detail, and it’s saturated with satanic thought. And the reason for that is that that sort of thought is part of the culture because we’ve come to represent these transcendent figures of evil in poetry and in movies, and it happens all the time in movies with characters, say like Hannibal Lecter and in horror movies.

And the Milton’s Satan, who’s often viewed, at least by some, as a revolutionary hero, seems to me to be something like the rational mind. It’s what happens to the rational mind when it places its presuppositions in the place of God. Because Satan seems to presume that he can replace the transcendent by his own presuppositions. And I think that’s my reading of that is that’s actually what happened on Earth not long after Milton wrote when these totalitarian states emerged. It’s something Solzhenitsyn commented on, where the presuppositions—the utopian presuppositions of man, rationally thought out—were seen as sufficient to to represent everything, the totality, to eliminate the need for something transcendent.

And the consequence of that was that they produced something that looked an awful lot like hell. Hell and Dante did that more psychologically. And so Milton, being the great poetic genius that he was, had a poetic sense that that was what was coming down the pipelines.

Do you wonder if you read your countrymen Charles Taylor much? The Canadian philosopher? Because he’s Catholic too. Taylor said that we in the West, let’s say Western Europe, America, Canada, Australia, we might be the first civilization ever to think you can find real happiness apart from a transcendent reference point.

And everyone in human history has felt something like the alluring darkness beyond what I can control and know is necessary. A relationship to that realm is necessary for happiness. We are the first culture ever that said no. I don’t care; I’m indifferent to it. But that does produce versions of hell for sure because something will take the place of the transcendent point of reference.

Well, it seems useful even from the perspective of humility. I mean, I don’t know if this is a reasonable thing to say, but a tyrant who believes in God is likely preferable to one who doesn’t because, at least in principle, a tyrant is held accountable by something that isn’t him.

Bishop Barron: He even—and he would get caught, at least in principle again, in the operation of his own conscience.

Don’t you? I love the fact in the Scriptures they’re very unique this way. They do not apotheosize their leaders. And it’s very different from so many other ancient cultures where the kings become like gods. The Bible, I mean the Bible is bluntly honest about its leaders and its kings, even the greatest—even David, murderer, adulterer, Solomon, Saul, the whole realm of them. That’s a brilliant insight of the Bible that all these people are under God and they’re under judgment. And that’s a liberating idea.

And when we lose that, the leaders do become apotheosized. Well you saw that in Rome constantly, in ancient Rome. That literally happened. You know, and there's always a proclivity for that to happen. That’s the imperial presidency, you know?

And I think it’s very important. I always tell when I’m preaching on this subject to Christians the fact that Jesus is called the Son of God. It was so important because it was dethroning the Roman claim that the emperor was the austus, you know? So one of the titles after Julius Caesar is divus. He’s divinized. Then his son Augustus becomes the son of the god, you know? So when the first evangelists were saying I’ve got good news about Jesus, the son of God, they were saying right—it’s not Caesar. He is not the Son of God. This one whom Caesar killed, by the way, he’s the Son of God. But the Bible's always making that move of knocking our own pretensions off their pedestals.

I think that’s an amazing observation, actually. And it is one of the things that is extraordinarily striking about the Old Testament is that it’s so sophisticated psychologically because what’s happening there is that the idea of absolute sovereignty is disconnected from the person bearing the sovereignty. And so at the very least, again, speaking psychologically, what you have is the representation of God as that which is sovereign, and now each individual can be a representative of that and can have that operate within them, but they aren’t that.

And that’s—that well, as I said, at the least that's a brilliant psychological innovation. And the fact that the biblical characters are so—they’re realistic to the point of Dostoevsky and painfulness. You know, Abraham doesn’t leave home till he’s what, eighty? He’s seventy-five. Seventy-five, yes. He’s a slow—he’s a late starter, right? And then his life is just one god-awful catastrophe after another for the first while. It’s like, you know, you have some contempt for him, let’s say, because he’s hanging around his father’s tent. And then he does finally pay attention to the call of adventure, to God’s voice, and he goes out and encounters tyranny and starvation and corruption. And yeah, and he makes all sorts of mistakes.

And you know, and it’s easy to be contemptuous, I think, of the biblical characters because of that. But it actually speaks to their intense psychological realism, and it’s so useful for people to see that. Because Abraham, for example, is blessed by God despite the fact—despite his evident character flaws. And that’s the case for the patriarchs in general, and it is remarkable, right?

A descent of yours, I'll put in the throne that will last forever to David, who was a deeply flawed character. What I find cool is that even before you get to the human characters, go to the very beginning of the Bible, and you have a dethroning of the cosmic pretenders to the absolute. So in the creation account, you know, sun, moon, stars, planet, animals, the earth itself—all the things mentioned were worshiped in different contexts. So the author is saying, no, no, no! They’re not divine; they’re creatures.

But then he turns it around beautifully, but they have a purpose which is to give praise to God. So they’re not God; they should be dethroned from that. But now they’re given the privilege of praising God with their manner of being, led by the conscious creature, human beings, who—and Catholics know this—whoever comes at the end of a liturgical procession is the one that leads the prayer.

So Genesis’ opening verses sound like a liturgical procession: you know, the first was then; that evening came; morning followed; and then the fourth day. And it’s like a steady procession of liturgical actors. The last figure, the human being, is the one now that will lead the chorus of praise.

To my mind, it’s the master theme of the whole Bible, if you want, is we’re rightly constituted when we give praise to God and can lead all of our creaturely brothers and sisters in the right praise of God. Sin is bad praise. Without fail in the Bible it’s they went after false gods; they went after the gods of those people; they abandoned the teaching of the Lord. Bad praise leads to the disintegration of the self.

So that’s now in the psychological order. That’s really well—praise is what you praise is what you pursue. And so if you’re pursuing the wrong thing, then you’re going to fall apart, right?

One of the great biblical ideas, I think, is you become what you praise. So what gets your worth-ship? That’s the origin of our word there. What’s the highest worth for you? You become that, you know? So you become what you worship. You’re meant to become children of God. But what happens? We end up worshiping something. So every one of us worships something, and we become conformed to that. And then if it’s not God, we disintegrate.

And then like Satan, we start beating our wings and making the world around us worse. So that's the Bible. The Bible tells that story over and over and over again. You know, which is why— you know, from a Catholic perspective, a Christian perspective, that Jesus on the cross is offering the Father right praise on our behalf. And see now you’re getting to the Mass, which is very powerful, you know?

That the Mass is the great act of praise where we join ourselves to the sacrifice of the Son. We say we, we conform ourselves to Christ. I have to ask you about that because it’s just burning a hole in me. Well, I’m in chronic pain a lot of it, and it’s constant. And I’m not—I don’t know what to do with it generally speaking. I know things that make it worse.

You said something—a lot of ideas were flashing through my mind, and I want to hit at it because it’s a crucial concern. You said something so surprising that Christ on the cross was offering up the proper praise to God. It’s like, well, I’m not going to just let you say that without noticing it because that’s a hell of a thing to say.

So I’m going to put together some things that you touched on, and then we can address this. So you said in the Bible one of the things that’s remarkable about it is the conception of the divine. So the conception of what is of highest worth is stripped from some of its obvious objects of projection—the sun, the moon, the cosmos, the stars—but then also earthly leaders of other cultures, idols, and also earthly leaders of your own culture. It says no, whatever the ultimate divine is, it’s not to be found in its fullest expression in any of those examples. It’s something else.

Okay, so then the question is, well, what is that else? Well, the Christian answer is, well, whatever it is in its human form, let’s say, it’s something human. It’s something that humans can aspire to. It’s both of those. And it’s made manifest in the figure of Christ—something specifically human. But then you have this terrible paradox with Christ which is partly the paradox that you just laid out, which is a very difficult thing to get a grip on.

So what is it exact? Why is what Christ is doing proper sacrifice? Is it because it—what is it? His willingness to bear the pain? What is it?

That’s close to it. So we say the word became flesh. So the Word who is always in the presence of the Father—the Word doesn’t worship the Father because the Word is God. So we shouldn’t talk about worship within the Trinity itself, but now the Word becomes flesh because the Father—God so loved the world He sent His only Son that all who believe in Him might have eternal life in His name.

He sends the Son into flesh, but into flesh that’s been so compromised by sin. So not into a pristine creation. Now, what do you have? That’s an interesting question theologically. What do you have sent the Son if creation had not fallen? That’s an interesting question, right? In fact it did—the valuable fall that laid the—the cool part, right? Yes, it’s a remarkable idea.

It is indeed, but like Don Scotus argued, you know, the Franciscan medieval theologian, that God would have sent His Son even if we hadn’t sinned. But that’s another question.

Okay, so let’s take that apart for just a sec, so that people are clear about it. So the theory here is that there is something wrong with the structure of creation—that’s its steepness and sin—and everyone has to ask if they believe that. And it seems to me that people do. There’s a sense that things aren’t how they should be, that we’re not how we could be, that something has gone astray and is continuing to go astray, which is a mystery in and of itself. If it’s a God-created world, it’s like, why is that precisely?

Well, I mean the quick answer is corrupted freedom, you know? Or a misguided freedom, you might say. But the word comes into flesh, into fallen flesh, and the cross is what? The cross is cruelty, hatred, and violence, and institutional injustice and stupidity. And, you know, if you read the passion narratives, it's a beautiful sort of poetic presentation of all that’s wrong with us that comes out to meet Him. And bearing all of that, He continues in His relationship of obedience and unity with the Father.

So bearing the sins of the world, bearing all the dysfunction and twisted quality of the world, He brings us back online. So in the attitude of the Word made flesh on the cross, we see a sinful, corrupt, hate-filled world now brought painfully back online. That's the sacrifice of the cross that's pleasing to the Father.

So we should never play the game of, well the Father is like a dysfunctional alcoholic father that, you know, is now demanding this blood sacrifice. It’s rather the Father is pleased by the Son’s entry into our fallen situation and His bearing of all that dysfunction, even as He brings us back online to the Father.

Okay, so why does—okay, so let’s say Christ maintains His— I know this isn’t exactly the right way of thinking about it, but it’ll work for rhetorical purposes, I think. It’s so Christ is tortured by betrayal, by physical and spiritual as well, because the best way to torment someone is when is to punish them despite their innocence, right?

Yeah, so right!

Right? Or maybe worse than that, to punish them because of their virtues. That's even better.

Yeah!

And so that’s intrinsic in this story as well. Christ bears up under that. He doesn’t repudiate God or doesn’t repudiate His own essence. It’s something like that. But then what is it? Is the example of that— is the example of bearing up under that exceptional duress and maintaining a moral stance? Is that the example that redeems the world? Is it that if you do that in your own life, the world is de facto redeemed?

It is that, but more because if it’s just that, then a Pelagian system would be true, that we just need a good, you know, moral exemplar. It’s something more than it’s just merely good. I mean, it’s superhuman what’s being asked for.

No, true! But it’s something more metaphysical about it. It’s a reworking of the way things are. If Jesus takes upon Himself all the dysfunction of the world and swallows it up in the ever greater divine mercy, so it’s Christ bearing all of our dysfunction but transfiguring it in His great act of forgiveness and obedience to the Father.

That I think all of that coming together simultaneously is the sacrifice that’s pleasing to the Father. In some ways, the word from the cross, “Father forgive them; they know not what they do” is the most important, or play with this, Jordan: that after the resurrection, so Jesus comes back precisely to those who had denied Him and betrayed Him and ran from Him in His moment of greatest need.

And in almost any telling of a similar story, if that all happened and then the person who had died is back from the dead and he appears to those who had abandoned Him, you’d expect him to, you know, wreak havoc on them, right?

Bishop Barron: Right.

So Jesus shows His wounds, to be sure, because the wounds of Jesus are a sign of the world’s dysfunction. If I’m ever tempted—you know, when we were younger the book I'm Okay, You're Okay came out, right? So we’re always tempted to say, well, basically we’re okay; you just need a little fixing up around the edges. Whenever we’re tempted to say that, it’s the wounds of Jesus that say otherwise.

That’s why I was insisting earlier that I don’t—you know, that it isn’t merely misguided good that turns people towards the darkness, it’s voluntary desire to produce the darkness as well. And anyways, I do take that very seriously, and it’s an interesting idea that the ideal is wounded in proportion to the degree that everything has deteriorated away from the ideal. And that’s almost by definition true, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s true. But it’s just that if the very act of the will itself is structured in such a way, it has to be seeking some kind of at least apparent good. But that’s our earlier issue.

So the wounds show the dysfunction of the world which the Son of God took upon Himself. But then the word of shalom, which is in all the resurrection accounts that Jesus says: peace. So when Paul, for example, says, “I’m certain that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor height nor depth nor any other creature could ever separate us from the love of God,” how does he know that?

Because we killed God, and He returned with the word of forgiveness. So that means it’s like it’s, it’s like for the divine goodness and forgiveness can trump any evil, even the evil of killing God. So we killed Him, but yet He returned in forgiving love. I think that’s the moment when Christianity is born in the dual sense of yes, we killed Him—look at the wounds!—but He says shalom to us nevertheless.

So that I can’t run away from Him. I can try, you know—that’s what all the sinners do—I can try, but ultimately the divine love is such that it’s greater. That’s why Paul can all say, “Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.” That’s Christianity.

So the greatest sin, we kill the Son of God, there’s no greater sin than that. Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more. And see all of that was made possible in a way by the great sacrifice of the cross, which is why it’s a saving act.

Now, I’m striving to understand person, okay? So I want to ask you a bunch of questions about that. So we talked a little bit before about the Church bleeding its people—they're leaving. The young people are leaving. And my sense of that is it’s because the church does not demand enough of its of the young—of young people.

Bishop Barron: Yeah.

I think it doesn’t demand enough, and by not demanding enough, it doesn’t indicate its faith in their possibility. And, yeah, so now in Orthodox Christianity, as I understand it, there seems to me to be more emphasis on the idea that it’s each human's obligation to become like Christ. That’s the goal.

Bishop Barron: Well, that’s by definition we could say, and we could speak psychologically about this as well. That means to become the ideal—the ideal that’s beyond rationality even—that’s what you're aiming at. That’s what hypothetically within your grasp for—and it seems to me as well that that's what the Mass symbolizes—is that.

And I'd be happy to have any objections to this. I would be happy to hear it. The incorporation of the host is the embodiment. It’s the incarnation of Christ within—that’s what it’s acting out; that's the idea.

I mean in some sense, it’s the consumption of the saving element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being. And this isn’t hit home; it’s like, look, the Church demands everything of you.

Bishop Barron: Yeah! Absolutely everything!

And then the reason that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them. It’s like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that’s nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.

Yeah, I wish you’d preach to our people because I think you’re absolutely right about that. The language we’d use is be a saint. That’s the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint. A saint means someone who’s holy or utterly conformed to Christ. Now press that to be conformed to Christ means you’re willing to go into the dysfunction of the world, to bear its pain and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love. Now fill in the blank: Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, maybe in our time—like when we were younger if someone said, well, who’s a living saint, we all would have said Mother Teresa.

Well, what did she do? She went into the worst slum in the world. I’d been there. And she bore the suffering of the world, literally picking up the dying and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering, and she took on herself the wounds of Jesus. But then think about, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa she brought to that place—the ever greater, more super abundant mercy of Christ. That’s being a saint, and you’re dead right. I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that.

Okay, I can tell you one thing I’ve experienced, and this is really something to see. I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between and to large audiences, three to ten thousand all the time, something like that. And I always paid attention to the audience.

Singly because I was always talking to one person at a time but also on mass, you know, to see—to hear. Because if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there’s silence. And sometimes that silence can be dramatic, and that's why people say, well you could have heard a pin drop. It's no one’s moving because their attention is 100 percent gripped by whatever just happened.

And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility. And people that—and I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now. They say happiness, or they say rights, or they say privileges, or they say reward or something like that. They don’t say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry and care for that matter and stumble forward.

And I’ve seen people cut those ideas and put them on T-shirts and play with them, and so it’s not that the Church is asking too little of its people. No, I—it is asking too little of them. I quite agree. It’s precisely—and so there’s no heroism in it, and there’s no call to—well because and because finally I call it the culture of self-invention is a very boring culture.

Stanley Hauerwas, a Methodist theologian, defined liberalism or you know the modern attitude as I have no story except the story I invent for myself. And that’s finally a very boring place to live. It seems to me that in fact you’re part of this incredibly rich and complex narrative, which I would refer to as God’s creation and God’s providential movement.

But I go back to Luke’s gospel, you know, when Jesus says to them, “Duc in altum,” is the Latin—go out into the depths. You people have been horsing around in the shallows way too long. That’s where the fish are, by the way, but also it’s where adventure is; it's where—that’s where the glory of life is. Get out into the depth. And we have, I think, allowed our people to be kind of horsing around by the seashore all the time. It's also shallow; it’s also where what protects you from hell is because you need to be engaged in something that’s deeply meaningful enough to justify the suffering.

And so, you know part of what happens in the story of Christ is the only thing deep enough to justify that level of suffering is absolute immersion in a cosmic drama. And then you ask yourself, well, are we each—are we each immersed in a cosmic drama? And it’s all—it’s not so easy to say no to that. It’s a life or death situation, and everything’s in it.

Well, and I would say the instinct of a Christian is to go where the suffering is. So I spent a lot of my life forming priests, so working in the seminary, eventually I was the rector of the seminary. So my job was to help these young guys discern the priesthood. And I would say that’s the test. I mean, do you have an instinct to go where the pain is? To go where the suffering is? If you want to live a comfortable life, then don’t become a priest! You might be a bad priest, you know, if you embrace a comfortable life.

But it’s the Mother Teresa model. It’s the “duc in altum,” go out into the depths, and the depths mean the depth of human suffering. With what you guys are doing, why isn’t it working? Well, what’s our problem? It’s true that we’re not doing enough of that, and I do think we’ve succumbed a bit to the modern thing, which is a preoccupation with rights and freedom and my individuality and so on.

But you see this with church activism so much now is that so much so—like the church seems to be replacing itself in some sense with social activism. It’s like we’ve got enough social activists. Yes, well, but I’d say this: Pope Benedict XVI was a great intellectual hero of mine. He said the church always does three essential things.

The church worships God; it evangelizes; and it cares for the poor—poor broadly construed, as I say, anyone who’s suffering, right? But that first move, as we said earlier, is indispensable; the church worships God. It teaches the world right praise because without right praise, the whole thing falls apart.

Secondly, it evangelizes. What’s that? Well, here’s a cool thing, too, because euangelion in Greek—good news—they were playing with that because the Romans would have used that in the eastern part of the empire to announce an imperial victory. They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news. “Hey, Caesar won a victory!”

So these very edgy first Christians, who had zero social status, no power, no military behind them, said, “Oh no, no, I got the true euangelion! It’s about Jesus risen from the dead who was put to death by Caesar but whom God raised.”

So that’s the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope. Now the sacrifice has been made, and God’s love is greater than anything that’s in the world. Okay, now I got those two things in place. Now, serve the poor; now go where the pain is; go where the suffering is.

But if you divorce them from each other—and that has happened—so who cares about worship and that’s fussing around with altars and sacristies, and who cares about evangelization? Let’s just get down and serve the poor. Then it does devolve simply into social work, right?

But if the three are together—worship God, evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus, and serve the poor—now the Church is cooking, you know?

Alright, so let's look at the second one of those. So, you know, it seems to me, I can understand this, not that whether I can understand it or not is a hallmark of its validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand. I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction, acting as if being is intrinsically good and that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good, bearing up under—all that up as a set of propositions, even in the most extreme cases of suffering. I can see that as a valid moral good.

That’s—that’s Christ’s refusal to be, what would you say, corrupted by the injustice of his and terror of his fate. And so that might be something like you don’t have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized, let’s say?

Yeah!

And I think that’s an unshakable moral proposition. But then there’s the resurrection element of it because I could say, well, the first thing I would say is, well, I kind of understand that psychologically parts of us die and they have to die because they’re in error. They have to be cast off, and we’re reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement, our ascent forward.

And I see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit. It’s not something trivial, but then there’s the insistence on, in the church of the bodily resurrection, which is—well, let’s call that a stumbling block to modern belief.

No doubt about that! That’s something more than mere metaphor, and so you might ask, well, why is it insisted upon? Why isn’t the proposition that you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear—to operate for the good of all things regardless of your suffering a hard line? No justification with the defeat of death necessitated?

I’m not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection because I know there are things that I don’t know. I know that for sure, and God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured. But it seems—and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense, too, and a Freudian criticism—it seems in in some real sense too good to be true.

Yeah! So, and so what do you make of the resurrection? How do you conceptualize it, even as it's related in the gospels?

Good. You’re raising a lot of interesting things. First of all, everything you said about it in terms of psychological archetypes and metaphors—good, fine. I think those are legitimate. I think those are our correct perceptions of things and it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world—resurrection-type stories.

But I think what’s really interesting about the New Testament—as Lewis said, you know C.S. Lewis—when someone said, well, the New Testament is just another iteration of the ancient myth. And he said, anyone that says that has not read many myths. Because there’s something so distinctive about the New Testament.

And what I would say, Jordan, first this: I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation what you get throughout is this what I call this grab-you-by-the-shoulders quality. They knew about literature; that is conveying deep psychological and philosophical truth. You know Paul certainly knew that literature very well.

It doesn’t sound like that though. It has overtones with it; it bears some of that. But what what you find on every page is this one euangelion, this good news. So everything you said is true, I think it is true, but it’s not exactly news. It’s part of the philosophy of permanence that’s been around for a long time.

And a lot of the great thinkers of the world—but again, I agree with it; I like the philosophy of permanence, but the New Testament is people who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say something happened. Something’s happened here that we were not expecting that was not part of our thought system, and it’s so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careening around the world and indeed to our deaths announcing it and defending it.

And what it was was the fact—here in the tenth chapter of Acts of the Apostles, this sort of almost tossed offline—we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead.

I don’t think people trading in mythic talk use that kind of language—mythic language. Again I say it with high praise—I love the myths—but you know once upon a time, or in a galaxy far, far away, and then a mythic story unfolds. But you read the Acts of the Apostles; do you hear about what happened?

It was verses up in Galilee and then in Judea, you know, those people—John the Baptist, remember John the Baptist? Well, and then this Jesus, and then in Jerusalem. And then we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead. It’s—that’s what—and then look at Paul. Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus.

Now the Paul line letters—they do not read like myths. They just don’t, and I love the myths; I love the philosophy of permanence, but it doesn’t read like that. It reads like someone who is—has been so bowled over by something—and he wants you to know about it.

And it’s changed everything, and I think what it was was what we said earlier