Hell and Hedonism | Dr. Peter Kreeft | EP 291

You have to make a decision one way or another because you're either going to take the Mephistophilian route and say, "You know, life is so terrible that it should just come to an end, and that if there is a God he should be damned for having the presumption to make such a terrible world," or you're going to say, "No, despite everything, I'm going to work in all possible ways to make everything better and to tell the truth while moving forward, and I'm going to conduct my life according to those principles, and then I'm going to have the adventure that comes along with that and see what happens." That's what the scientific atheist does not understand.

I think that there are some truths that you cannot simply discover; you have to live them. You have to make the experiment. I think of kindergarten's night of faith from the viewpoint of Juliet: Here comes Romeo with no guarantees. He does not bring an array of lawyers and philosophers to persuade her that it is utterly rational for her to elope with him. He says, "Leap into my arms," and she does not know whether that will end well or not. It's an act of faith; it's a leap. And in the play, of course, it doesn't pay off; they both die. Or you might say that even that, since it was, in a sense, a noble death, was a payoff. But there's no guarantee. That's why there's faith.

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Thank you. Hello everyone! I have the great pleasure today to be talking to Dr. Peter Kreeft. Peter John Kreeft was born March 16, 1937. He's a professor of philosophy at Boston College and King's College. He took his A.B. at Calvin College in 1959 and an M.A. at Fordham University in 1961, where he also undertook his doctoral studies in 1965. He subsequently completed his post-grad at Yale University. Dr. Kreeft joined the philosophy faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Boston College in 1965. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Dr. Kreeft is the author of over 80 books on Christian philosophy, theology, and apologetics.

We're going to discuss religious issues in the modern world today, with some foray into the relationship between the Abrahamic faiths, particularly Islam. Dr. Kreeft, welcome!

Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

I have the same to say to you! Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. Some of the things we're doing seem to be somewhat similar. I'm very interested in religious ideas and practices. I'm very interested in the idea that such beliefs and practices sit at the foundation of the web of beliefs through which we view the world, and you're an unapologetic advocate of traditional beliefs in a world that seems increasingly distant from them and skeptical of them.

I guess what I'd like to know, first of all, is your books follow a thread. What do you think the thread is that unites your work, and what is it that you're trying to accomplish and why? I know that's not an easy question.

Well, I'll give you a very concrete answer. One of my favorite books is Chesterton's book on Thomas Aquinas called "St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox," and the main point of that book is that this brilliant theologian and philosopher is the champion of common sense. The rising of the intellect to the contemplation of eternal truth, on the one hand, and practical living out common sense tradition, on the other hand, are not only not opposites; they reinforce each other. So I think our common respect for tradition is also a respect for common sense, which is why I admire your work.

So you wrote a book on Jacob's Ladder, and I recently went to New York and saw Wagner's "Die Meistersinger." In that opera, which is about cobblers—interestingly enough, shoemakers—so very practical people, the great cobblers are part of a guild. And the greatest of the cobblers become singers, and the master singers from all the guilds get together and elect a new master singer. And that master singer that is elected in this particular story is a, uh, analog of Christ.

What I really liked about the opera was this idea—it's like the bricklayer who's building a cathedral, brick by brick. Each brick is just a brick, and you could be cynical about the smallness of the task in some sense. But when the brick is conceptualized in relationship to the entire cathedral, then it becomes a task where the lowest is united with the highest. And I think that's what Jacob's Ladder signifies conceptually—that there has to be a sequence of action all the way from the most concrete tasks to the highest level of theological abstraction, and that has to be harmoniously arrayed in some manner that's approximately akin to a symphony. If that's done properly, then even the most mundane of tasks, which aren't mundane at all, take on—a well, I would say—in the optimal sense, they take on a kind of eternal significance.

It's in that union there of the practical and the highest that strikes me as germane to what you're describing about the link between the practical and the philosophical and the abstract.

Yes, I love the old story about some peasants hauling stones on logs through the mud in a storm in order to build one of the great medieval cathedrals. A visitor from another country asked one of the peasants what he was doing, and he was sweating and cursing and saying, "I'm trying to get this damn stone through this damn mud." Then he asked another of the peasants who were doing exactly the same thing but smiling what he was doing, and he said, "I am building a cathedral."

Right, right, right. Well, it does make you think. I know from a psychological perspective that the emotional functions that fill us with enthusiasm and hope, and also the emotional functions that quell anxiety and despair, are related to our apprehension of sequential goals. You can imagine that we have nested goals, and so it might be getting the mud through or getting the rocks through a swamp, and then getting the rocks to the building site, and then building the foundation, etc. But then it's building the foundation, having a family, and doing that within a community, and then building a cathedral in relationship to the highest glory of the most glorious—well, we can leave it at that, of the most glorious. And then everything along that chain is imbued with the entire significance of the whole.

Yes, everything is imbued with significance, if and only if you start at the end of the chain. If there's just—as if there's no first cause, there are no subsequent effects. So if there's no final end, there's no ultimate purpose for doing anything.

Okay, so there's a good thing to delve into. I've been walking through the Bible recently with a particular goal in mind, and I noticed that in some of your books you use characterization as explanation. It looks to me that if we build a hierarchy of value, a hierarchy of attentional priority, that's another way of looking at it, that there's only two options to how that might be constructed. One is that it has a multitude of ends, and the other is that it has a single end. Now, the problem with a hierarchy of value having a multitude of ends is that it's internally self-contradictory, and that has two psychological consequences: One is it decreases hope and enthusiasm because the linkage between each goal isn't associated with something that's at the highest point. But probably more relevant to today's anxious secularism is that if there's no unifying superordinate goal, then the state of psychological affairs that obtains is one of confusion, anxiety, and social disunity. Now, I actually don't see any options to that. So something is either put in the highest place, or confusion and anxiety and hopelessness reign. Those seem to be the alternatives.

I think that is the psychological reason why pagan polytheism declined and Abrahamic monotheism triumphed. We need one great love to be one great person; you can't integrate your personality around multiple some emotions, multiple greatest goods.

Well, because it does produce this conflict. And then you mentioned the notion of a person, and so I was thinking, well, what should be at the highest point? Is it a description or is it a spirit? And again, I'm trying to speak psychologically and think, well, it has to be a spirit and not a description, because maybe you have a beautiful description of the nature of the objective world. That's something you might do if you're a scientist, but that doesn't provide a guide to perception and action. What human beings need at the highest place is something to emulate and act out and see through, like you might see through lenses. And so the phenomena—the phenomenon that has to be at the highest place has to be something to emulate and imitate, and therefore it has to have the nature for all intents and purposes of a spirit or of a being and not of a mere description.

I think there are a number of people, especially in academia, who can live for abstractions. It's the difference between Socrates and Plato. Plato believed that the absolute was the good—the good itself. Apparently, that is not a god, not a person. Socrates was moved and motivated by his fidelity to what he called his unknown God. Most people identify with Socrates rather than Plato, except perhaps in academia, because abstractions will not disappoint you, and they will not change, and persons will.

So the major objection, I believe, especially on the part of people in the Orient to Abrahamic monotheism, is that if God is a person and concrete, then he might disappoint you. He's unpredictable; he's a concrete entity rather than an abstraction. Abstractions are safe.

Yeah, well, the problem with the abstraction orientation is that it still leaves you with the mystery of how to live and act outside of your obsession to the abstraction. But even more particularly, you know, I've spent a fair bit of time speaking with famous atheists, and a number of atheists—a very large number—have watched my biblical lectures and apparently found them useful, which I think is quite interesting. And the thing about the atheist crowd, in some sense, especially the scientifically-minded atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, is that I can't help but see that their scientific pursuit is nested inside a spiritual faith that they leave implicit.

So Dawkins, for example, who I respect a tremendous amount, I've read a lot of his work, and I found it very useful. Dawkins clearly believes that there's a transcendent object that you can encounter through the scientific method that will correct you, because he doesn't believe that his theories are final. He believes that out in the domain of ignorance—in the logos of the world, let's say—there is corrective information, and that seeking that corrective information is a moral good. He clearly also believes that the truth will set you free, which you have to believe if you're going to be a practicing scientist.

And so I think even those who presume that they've put an abstraction that's disembodied in the highest place are actually wrong psychologically—that there's something they are embodying as spirits, even if it's mimicry of the great scientists and the scientific spirit of inquiry. There’s something they're mimicking that serves them as the highest orientation point, and I can't see how that's not related to the idea of the logos.

Yes, and if Dawkins has this will to truth—and without the will to truth, without the love of truth, truth is meaningless. It may still exist, but it doesn't affect us without that will to truth. His whole worldview collapses—even his atheist worldview—which is why I think Nietzsche is the key thinker here, because he is the first, as far as I know, in the history of human thought to explicitly deny the will to truth. He says, "Why truth? Why not rather untruth?" His contrast between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, between the will and the mind, between the fire and the light—that tears the human heart apart more radically than anything else I've ever encountered. So I think post-modernism is a much greater danger than atheism, because the atheist can still have that will to truth, but the post-modernist has lost it.

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Yeah, well, okay, so let's go back. Let's concentrate for a bit on the Nietzschean front. So when Nietzsche announced God was dead, he did it, weirdly enough, in the same way that God told Moses, in some sense, to set his people free in Egypt. So I just did a seminar on Exodus—half a seminar—with a group of scholars in Miami, which we're going to release in November. But God tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh to let his people go—which you hear all the time, that phrase—but that's not the whole phrase. He says, "Let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness," which is very different than just "let my people go," which is more like a call to maybe even a hedonistic freedom.

When Nietzsche says that God is dead—which is what you see written on bathroom walls, for example—and that's the claim that's trumpeted, he followed that up with an observation that I'm paraphrasing, which is something like: "God is dead and we have killed him. The holiest of all that has ever existed has now bled to death under our knives and will never find enough water to wash away the blood." And that's very different than a triumphal statement that God is dead.

I've been thinking that through on the atheist-materialist front as well, and it's possible, and I think Dawkins and Harris, to some degree, are experiencing this in the culture right now, is that when you lose that sense of the transcendent spirit, let's say, that's more explicitly associated with religious belief, because God is now dead, there's a good possibility that you lose the transcendent object too. And so if we kill off the Judeo-Christian or even the Abrahamic tradition under the onslaught of post-modern criticism, we're also going to simultaneously kill off scientific inquiry and scientific endeavor. I think that's inevitable.

I agree, but there's something more. The love of truth is not enough. If truth doesn't somehow rebound on you and love you back, if truth is only an abstraction and not a person—not a spirit with a will—you have theology but not religion. Theology is a one-way relationship: "I try to understand the truth about God." Religion is a two-way relationship: God's initiative comes first, and our response comes second. That's the grammar of being. The theologian is tempted to change that grammar of being and play God and almost call God into existence through his concepts. That's the great danger of being a mere theologian.

So this idea here, this is another idea that's relevant on the issue of the question of whether what needs to be put in the highest place is a spirit or a description. The other thing that I found very much characteristic of thinkers like Harris and Dawkins—and this is probably even more true of Harris because Sam Harris is extremely obsessed by the idea of radical evil, which he believes in devoutly, I would say—and has been looking for a means of producing, let's say, an objective morality as a counterpoint to the existence of absolute evil as manifested, let's say, in genocidal atrocity. And so in some sense, it's accurate to say that his heart is in the right place, but stemming off from that is this observation—Harris and Dawkins and scientists of their ilk also implicitly accept the idea, I believe, that truth has to be nested inside love.

Because the governing idea behind the scientific endeavor is that we're striving for prediction and control to bring about something like life more abundant, to make life better. And so I read this book a while back that was written by an ex-KGB agent, and he discussed the Soviet attempt – scientific attempt – to produce a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox and then to aerosolize it as a weapon. So it would be extremely deadly and extremely transmissible. And I was thinking, well, from a mere technical perspective, how to hybridize Ebola and smallpox is a perfectly valid scientific question. And so then the question is, well, why not do it? And the answer to that has to be something like, well, it's wrong; it's clearly wrong. This is a bad idea. And so what that also means is that when scientists' attention is directed towards a given set of phenomena and they undertake an investigation, in order to be properly motivated scientifically—and I think psychologically as well—they have to be operating on the assumption that this search for knowledge is going to be beneficial to humanity in the particulars and in the generalities. And so that's an orientation that's essentially predicated on love, and that truth—the scientific truth—has to be the handmaiden of that broader ethical concern.

Does that seem reasonable to you?

It's reasonable, unless you are someone like Karl Marx, who once said that his favorite line in all of human literature is from Goethe's Faust, where Mephistopheles, the devil, utters these words: "Everything that exists deserves to perish." That is what I would call absolute evil.

I can't believe that. You know, because that's a phrase that I've used repeatedly in my lectures. Because Mephistopheles actually says that twice; he says it in the first—there are two books to Faust, written very far apart in Goethe's life, when he was a young man and then when he was a much older man—and he has Mephistopheles utter that credo in two different forms. And he basically elaborates on what you said: that Mephistopheles' position is that, like Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, he says life is so rife with catastrophe and suffering, betrayal, malevolence—it's so intrinsically unworthy—that it would be better if consciousness itself was just brought to an end. I didn't know that Marx made reference to that—that's absolutely stunning because it is the core ethos of Mephistopheles.

And so, a core satanic ethos, let's say, that non-being is better than being. It also contradicts these statements in Genesis. This is something very striking about Genesis, which of course you no doubt know—that when God steps through the days of creation, using the word to engender order out of chaos, he insists after each phase, let's say, that what has been created is good. So not merely that it exists but that its existence is good, and that that goodness is preferable to non-being.

And so one of the issues that I've struggled with is the notion that part of what the biblical narrative does is outline for its adherence a pathway of existence and perception, of action and perception and social interaction that enables that best enables our participation in creation to be the good that overcomes suffering and malevolence and not just the good that overcomes suffering but the good that overcomes evil. There's two very different kinds of evil: the evil that we do that we're responsible for and then there's the evil that we suffer harm. The human heart wants both: it wants to love and be loved; it wants to be good and experience good.

And if the truth is that those two things are impossible together; if evil is stronger than good and not surrounded by good—if, in other words, the benevolent God who created the universe is a myth, and the universe is the ultimate being and there's nothing beyond it—then the universe is very much like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, who says to us, "Frankly, my dear, I just don't give a damn." It's beyond good and evil. And I don't know if there's a proof that such a God exists or not, but it's certainly an option. It's Pascal's wager: you can believe that in the mind of God there is an adequate and more than adequate reason why God allows these horrendous evils, even though he can miraculously stop them, or you can believe that there is no such reason.

And I love Pascal because he's very practical. He says, well, you cannot be refuted whichever of those two wagers you pick. There is such a God; there is not such a God. But look at the consequences for life: even if you're wrong, your life is meaningful, and it gives you hope, and it gives you order. And if you're right, then you'll find out in the end that you were on the true path. And if you're wrong, well, maybe at the moment of death, you'll find out that it was all an illusion, but even the good illusion is better than nothing.

Well, let's take a Kierkegaardian twist on that. I noticed that you also have written about Kierkegaard, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I derived from Kierkegaard. Because Kierkegaard talks about this idea of being a knight of faith, and he's classed with the Christian existentialists as a consequence of the practicalities of his view. He basically puts forward a proposition that I think is akin to the proposition that undergirds marriage, which is: you cannot find out—and this is relevant to Pascal's wager—you cannot find out whether creation as such is good or evil without being all in on your bet. Just like you can't be married without saying, "Well, I'm shackling myself to you, and I'm not going to run away no matter what, so we better get to know each other and get along because this is how it's going to be." And without that, you can't be deeply committed enough to the marriage to make it work.

So it seems to me on the forefront of faith, which is you have to act in the world with courageous trust—not naive trust, but courageous trust—in the potential goodness of being in order to actually discover whether or not that faith is justified. And so that's partly why it's faith—that you have to put the cart before the horse. You can't wait around. You know, in the Book of Revelation, when Christ comes back to judge everyone, he says something like, "If you were neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." And so his harshest judgment isn't reserved for outright unrepentant committed sinners, and certainly not for people who are 100 percent committed to the courage of their faith, but the judgment is harshest for people who play both ends against the middle and who won't commit.

And one of the things that I've started to toy with is the idea that faith is actually a subset, in some sense, of existential courage. I've talked to my listeners and viewers about the notion that if you want to pursue the good, you do that in some sense despite. So if you're naive, you're good because you think everything is good and everyone is good, but if you're naive, you're immature and you're unwise. And then you get jolted out of that naivety by betrayal and tragedy, and then you become—or you're tempted by cynicism. And the cynicism is wiser than the ignorant naivety, but it's not good. It's the desert, let's say. It's the Exodus desert after the tyranny of naivety.

And the way out of that is to invent a courageous faith. And the courageous faith is something like, "I'm going to do good despite the evidence for tragedy and malevolence and the atrocity of history and all of that." And that's part of the courage of faith: "I'm going to commit myself to this." And that, in some sense, bypasses Pascal's wager because it doesn't even have anything to do, in some sense, with what would you say your own redemption. It's a decision about how to be in the face of the catastrophe of life.

And you have to make a decision one way or another because you're either going to take the Mephistophilian route and say, "You know, life is so terrible that it should just come to an end, and if there is a God, he should be damned for having the presumption to make such a terrible world," or you're going to say, "No, despite everything, I'm going to work in all possible ways to make everything better and to tell the truth while moving forward, and I'm going to conduct my life according to those principles, and then I'm going to have the adventure that comes along with that and see what happens."

That's what the scientific atheist does not understand. I think that there are some truths that you cannot simply discover; you have to live them; you have to make the experiment. I think of kindergarten's night of faith from the viewpoint of Juliet; here comes Romeo with no guarantees. He does not bring an array of lawyers and philosophers to persuade her that it is utterly rational for her to elope with him. He says, "Leap into my arms," and she does not know whether that will end well or not. It's an act of faith; it's a leap. And in the play, of course, it doesn't pay off; they both die. Or you might say that even that, since it was, in a sense, a noble death, was a payoff. But there's no guarantee; that's why there's faith.

Well, there's this idea from the materialist determinists, let's say, that if we just derived enough information about the nature of things, that we could produce an algorithm that would enable us how to compute our movement forward. Now that is nice; it is naive. Well, I think it's technically naive because I've talked to some great scientists, like Sir Roger Penrose, and Penrose believes that, in principle, the horizon of the future is not fundamentally predictable from the positions of the past. So this is not a clockwork universe. What we've confronted is a horizon of potential, which I think of as somewhat equivalent to the chaos that God confronted at the beginning of time. We confront this potential that has multiple potential branches, which is the way that the world could array itself as a consequence of our decision.

And that we impose a vision on that, and that vision is a production of faith, and then we enact the vision, and that enacting is an act of faith. That's part of what's attracted me to the existential thinkers, let's say, rather than the scientific materialist determinists.

I would not use the word impose; I would use the word add. Whether the universe is a clockwork universe or not doesn't much matter because our lives are not clockwork lives, so that we can add to the universe new data by our choices, by our living. And what effect that has on the universe, I don't know. I don't know if the stars tremble a little bit when we love each other more or not. I suspect that there's some connection, because spiritual gravity and physical gravity have to be at least analogous. And if every particle of matter in the universe is relative to every other particle of matter in the universe, why shouldn't every particle of personality, every individual human being, and their choices and their loves and hates also have effects on everyone? That's the Russian concept of subordinast, which is so strong in Dostoevsky, especially The Brothers Karamazov.

I love Ivan Karamazov; he's my favorite atheist. He's passionate; he's committed; he's moral; he's a moral atheist. He's not an amoral atheist.

Right, well, and he's admirable, and he's charismatic, and he's good-looking. And I mean, one of the things that's so absolutely wonderful about Dostoevsky, which puts him in the top rank of all-time geniuses, I actually prefer Dostoevsky to Nietzsche in the final analysis, I would say, although it's a tight battle—is that when he makes an atheist, when Dostoevsky makes an atheist, he pulls out all the plugs, man.

And so I know in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan wins pretty much all of his arguments with Alyosha because he's so articulate and so able to put forward his claims, although Alyosha beats him on the characterological side, which is one of the great, what would you say, brilliant literary accomplishments of Dostoevsky. It's really something. I don't think anyone in history has ever written fiction about Jesus which moves you except Dostoevsky.

In The Grand Inquisitor, Jesus says nothing and does nothing except for that kiss, and that's sufficient. And it looks as if Ivan won the argument earlier than that because Ivan got Alyosha to admit, "If you were God and you were creating a universe, and you gave man free will, and you saw that it would inevitably result in these horrors—these parents who are torturing their children—would you consent to be the architect?" And right, Alyosha, who's utterly honest, says, "No, I wouldn't consent."

So there is an Ivan in Alyosha; there is a rebel in us, and it's a good rebel. God approves Job's rebellion rather than the three friends' comfort at the end of The Book of Job. God says an amazing thing; he says, “I burn with anger against you because you have not spoken rightly about me, as my servant Job has.” But what they said was simply orthodox. It's in the rest of the Bible—God is great and God is good, let us thank him for our food. Amen.

And Job, who admitted that his words were wild because the sufferings were so great—it's accusing God and wishing that he could take him to court, and yet God approves that honest rebellion on Job's part rather than the comfortable acceptance on the part of the three friends. Dostoevsky must have loved that.

Right! While Job is at least wrestling as honestly as possible with the issues of tragedy and malevolence, he's facing that four-square. And I would suspect that the reason to put words in God's mouth that Job is approved of is that the more naive advocates for God's goodness are merely avoiding looking at the calamity and catastrophe and protecting themselves in that way. But that means a real faithlessness in some profound sense because, as Nietzsche pointed out, I suppose, is that there's some real utility in staring into an abyss. And Nietzsche warned, “If you stare into an abyss, the abyss might stare into you.”

And that if you fight with monsters, you risk becoming a monster. And that's an extremely wise caution. But one of the things I've sort of sorted out in relationship to the crucifixion image is that the crucifixion image and the passion story, in some real sense—and I'm speaking psychologically here, not religiously, at least to begin with—is the ultimate abyss because it brings together all the elements of unfair suffering that might characterize life, or that do characterize life. It brings them together in a single story, and then it makes the claim that if you gaze upon that image with sufficient intensity and duration, and perhaps faith, which you have to have in order to gaze upon it at all, is that what you end up seeing and contemplating is not death and hell, but the resurrection and the overcoming of death in hell.

And you know, one of the things clinicians have learned in the last hundred years, perhaps above all else—maybe they learned two things—is that honest dialogue promotes health and redeems. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, if you face what disturbs you and forces you into paralysis and avoidance and tyranny, if you face that forthrightly and voluntarily, that will ennoble your character and help you grow.

And so a lot of what a clinician does is take a fear that someone might have that's paralyzing them and then break it down into small subsets, sort of like the brick in relationship to the cathedral, and then have people practice voluntary confrontation. And what inevitably happens is not that people get less afraid, but that they become braver and more competent.

And so then you might say, if you tie that back into this idea of the evil that besets creation and the notion of human free will, you might say that the universe is constituted such that it's a greater good that evil can exist as a possibility, and that it's a greater good that human beings have free will than that they're compelled slaves. And the downside of that is that we can freely choose evil, and then that accounts for the pervasive evil that characterizes human endeavor and the cosmos in some sense.

But that a world without that possibility—because it would involve pure subjugation and no choice and no voluntary ascent and no real destiny—a world without that would be a much lesser place because one of the things you can say is that it's possible that God left human beings something important to do.

Yes, and that's very good theology and very good apologetics, and even in a sense justifying the ways of God to man. But that's not yet religion; that's still, I'm in the driver's seat and I'm making the road maps, and I'm traveling on this journey, and I'm making my life meaningful, and I'm making my character honest and courageous, and that's all very good, but that's not yet Abrahamic theism; that's Norse mythology.

Maybe the gods will go down into defeat; maybe evil is stronger than good. Well, then let's go down in defeat on the right side, because right is more important than might, and that's noble; that's the second-best thing in the world. But then you have the resurrection; then you have the God who adds power to his goodness and his love, so you have it all together. But that has to come from God, not from us.

So our response to that has to be secondary; it has to be a response. We don't impose that upon the universe; we don't read our faith into the universe. We see—we are Juliet, and we see Romeo coming with this marriage proposal, and we say yes to it, like the Blessed Virgin Mary. You know, "Fiat; be it done unto me according to your will." That's the essence of religion.

And that's why I love Islam; it's so simple. It's so centered on absolute surrender and submission.

Okay, so a couple of things to tie together there. So when Nietzsche announced the death of God, he formulated another proposition: he said that we may have to become gods merely to atone for the sin of deicide. And so he believed that the overman—the Superman—would be someone who, through the power of his own will, set his own values.

Now, I spent a lot of time reading Jung. Carl Jung, in relationship to Nietzsche. Jung, for example, published a 1,500-page, two-volume book on the first third of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," and was a very deep Nietzschean scholar but fell under the influence of Freud, and this turned out to be of cardinal significance because Freud was one of the first secular thinkers to note that, in some unbelievably fundamental sense, we are not masters in our own house. There are subpersonalities within us; there are complexes within us; there are angels and demons within us—that's another way of thinking about it—and they pull us this way and that, sometimes independent of our will and often contrary to our will.

And so Freud's conclusion was, it's very difficult for human beings to create their own values because we have an intrinsic nature that's not subject to our arbitrary will. And then Jung took that a step further, and he said, well, there's no doubt that we act out a myth and a story and that, in the deepest sense, that has to be a theological story, and that some—the spirit that guides us has to have a unitary nature, which he did associate with Christ quite explicitly. And it was a vicious rejoinder to the Nietzschean presumption that we can create and impose our own values, for the psychoanalysts—those values, and I would say for the wise clinicians—those values have to be discovered, not self-generated and imposed. Plus, you just don't live long enough to do that. You're just not wise enough to generate a whole system of universally applicable values out of whole cloth in the span of your trivial life.

And if you know you're doing that, then you reduce life to a game. You have created the meaning of life; well, who is the creator? You? What gives you the right to do that? What gives you the power to do that? You did not create the universe. How can you write the laws of morality any more than you can write the laws of physics?

Well, it's also—people find that shallow. You know, in my clinical work, I saw this time and time again, so if I was dealing with someone who was suffering—maybe they had a tragedy in their own life, a medical tragedy, or a medical tragedy among members of their family, or maybe they had been subject to some really vicious malevolent actors and they were despairing—they had to discover the values that would lift them out of that catastrophe. They couldn't impose them. And it's a real search! I think this is probably related to your work on prayer. It's a real search. And one of the things I used to counsel my clients about—and I also built a program called self-authoring that helps people do this—is, and this is associated with that biblical injunction in the New Testament to knock and have the door open and to ask and to receive and to seek and to find—is that you can have a dialogue, an interior dialogue, that precedes something like this—and I think it's a prayer—which is, "Okay, I understand because I'm reasonably mature that there is a tragic and malevolent element to life and it's deep enough to destabilize me and to upset my faith in existence itself. Is there a path that I could walk down that would be so rich and meaningful that I would find the challenge of dealing with the tragedy in malevolence ennobling and worthwhile?" And then it's a search. You think, "Well, what would be of sufficient value to offer that possibility?" And people find that in— they find it in love, they find it in family, they find it in friendship, they find it in sacrificial occupation, let's say. They find it in beauty.

But these aren't created values; they're discovered values. And then you bring yourself into alignment with them. That's when you wrote your book on Islam; one of the things that you had to say about Islam that was very laudatory was that the Islamic people have appeared to do a better job of insisting that human beings are subordinate to the divine will in this—in the best sense.

In this sense of discovery that we're talking about. Especially in Europe and North America, we have this obstacle about an obsession with freedom and a misunderstanding of freedom. We are not totally free; our freedom in every sense is limited. We are finite, and we don't like that. We want to play God with regard at least to freedom and autonomy.

That's maybe the biggest difference between modern Western civilization and all others in world history. We could think about that freedom—you know, because it isn't so—let's say here's the claim: I want to be free to do what I want.

Okay, well, hang on a sec; which "I" are you talking about? Are you talking about the mature "I" that sees next week and next month, next year, and ten years out and it takes the community into account? Or are you talking about the impulsive, hedonistic, self-serving, narrow "I" that just wants exactly what it wants right now? What makes you think that when you make a case for that hedonism that you're not just falling under the sway of an impulsive short-sighted demon, so to speak?

And then I used to play this game with my students when we were talking about ordered freedom and that the notion that freedom itself has to be ordered. I think I mentioned earlier that when God calls his people out of tyranny, he says that they need to be free in order to serve him in the wilderness—not to be free in some absolute sense.

So I used to play a game with my students. I'd go up to one student; I'd say, "Do you want to play a game?" Put him on the spot, and he'd say, "Yes." And I'd say, "Okay, you'll move first," and that would paralyze the student into absolute immobility because he was now faced with a plethora of choices so utterly broad that there was no pathway forward. And that was part of a discussion about the fact that if you look at music, for example, music operates by very sophisticated rules and so it's ordered and constrained, but out of that rules system of rules comes an almost infinite array of possibility.

And so, you know, we have this sense—we think it derives from Rousseau—that any constraint of order is a limit on freedom when what we should be hypothesizing is that with the optimal set of principles, you get the maximally desirable freedom. And it's not freedom from everything, and it's not freedom to do anything; it's certainly not a narrow hedonistic freedom because that backfires on you like the next day.

Yes, if there is no world outside of Plato's cave, then it is not freeing to escape from the cave. There's certainly a great value to freedom—we must be free from everything that opposes us and restrains our better impulses—but that assumes that there's a better and a worse; that assumes that there's something like Plato's the good outside the cave. So you can be free, right, from the shadows of the cave.

And that notion of Freud—that there are a lot of people inside of us, good ones and bad ones—a little good in the worst of us and a little bad of the best of us—so that it all becomes the worst of us to speak well of the best of us. That's from Thornton Wilder, I think.

That's very helpful because when you talk to atheists, you're talking to not just one person but many persons. One of the things that shocked me the most in talking to atheists was that when I give them something like the argument from desire—don't you at least wish there was a God? Don't you at least see religion as an attractive fairy tale? Don't you at least hope that it's true, even though you don't believe that it's true?—almost always they say, "No, I don't want there to be a God. I don't want there to be a heaven. I would be threatened by that."

And I think they're suppressing something. I don't think the human heart is that different between an atheist and a theist. The human heart was not designed at Harvard or Hollywood; it was designed in Heaven. So we all want the thing we can't define; we're all mystics deep down. We want unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty.

This is definitely the case. I mean, I would say in some sense, by definition, is that the most profound goods are reflected in the structure of the human heart if people are striving forward. And I mean forward rather than downward, let's say. Forward and uphill, they are by definition pursuing something that's a reflection of a transcendent good. It's transcendent because if they already had it—which means it would be imminent—if they already had it, they wouldn't have to pursue it. They posit something outside of themselves as better, and then the ultimate definition of that, in some sense, is the pursuit of the divinely good.

And again, I see that as a matter of definition. And so now, you know, on the atheist front, I've read a lot of comments from atheists in my YouTube comment sections on my biblical lectures. I probably read at least hundreds of them, and maybe thousands of them, but at least hundreds. And one of the things that has struck me continually is that many of the people who become atheists are reactionary. And I don't mean that in a denigrating sense; a huge proportion of people who are stridently atheistic were hurt very badly by people who purported to be religious when they were young.

And I think that also applies to Dawkins, by the way. I've seen some evidence for that in his public utterances. And so you have people who've been terribly betrayed by the agents of what was supposed to be the best, and so they carry that utter bitterness with them—that ultimate betrayal—because I think there isn't anything worse, in some sense, than being betrayed by people who claim to be acting, let's say, in Christ's name.

I mean, how could anything be worse than that? And so then they're driven to this atheism, and they're so afraid then, again, to re-establish a new faith because they've been hurt so badly that they're willing to suffer this purgatorial drought of vision rather than to put themselves up on the chopping block one more time.

Wasn't Freud himself an example of that? Didn't he have a very bad relationship with his father and come to use Freud’s analysis to explain Freud?

Well, you can imagine, too, at a theological level because especially in the Abrahamic traditions, God is construed as a paternal spirit, in some fundamental sense. I know it's complex when you get to the highest level of abstraction. But what that would also mean was that if you had an impaired relationship with your father or with the patriarchal spirit in general, that that's going to put a resentful twist in your relationship to the eternal spirit as such. And I certainly see that as well. It's something that bedevils our current society as well because there's so much objection to the patriarchal system and the catastrophic atrocities of history and the fundamental unreliability of the paternal or patriarchal spirit.

That all of that is tied together and it is tied together with the problem of sin. You know, a lot of women who object strenuously to the patriarchy, let's say, are also simultaneously women who have been rendered bereft of any positive relationship with any man even once in their whole life.

Yes, yes, yes, I have found that too in my limited experience. And I think the only adequate answer to that is, is not merely psychoanalysis and understanding, but Alyosha's kiss—to experience genuine love—to meet a Mother Teresa that will convert you much faster than all the arguments in the world.

Right! Well, that's really the theme, in some profound sense, both of The Brothers Karamazov and of The Idiot because the great characters, the heroes of both of those novels, Alyosha in the one and Mishkin in the other, is that despite their relative lack of facility with delineated abstract arguments—even in favor of the existence of God—their character is such that their very being stands as the best proof of their beliefs.

And that seems to me to be a way forward too in this interfaith dialogue. You know, I talked to a relatively fundamentalist Islamic leader, a young leader, Muhammad Hijab in the UK. And we were talking about the use of compulsion in faith, and I was trying to sort out how the different doctrines might compete and cooperate with one another going forward, especially in the face of this secular onslaught, which I think is the worst threat that any of the Abrahamic religions currently confronts, is that it should be something like a competition of invitation.

It should be something like, let the best man win. And that would mean that an adherent of a given faith—let's say Orthodox Christianity or Orthodox Judaism or Islam—is that the people who abide by those faiths should be such stellar examples of a light shining on the hill that people are convinced of the validity of the belief by the exemplar of the practitioners. And that's the right place to have a—what do you call that? What's the Islamic word for holy war?

Jihad.

Yes, exactly, a competition of invitations. And I think that ties into the Old Testament biblical notion of radical hospitality. So one index of that would be, well, how well do you treat strangers, for example? Or how well do you treat women? That might be a good example as well.

I think God has set the world up in such a way that that necessarily happens—the religion that produces the most saints will make the most converts.

Now, you wrote a book on Islam; you went out of your way to be positively oriented towards Islamic belief and practices. Now, you delineate the differences between Islamic belief and Christian belief, let's say, but nonetheless you make a strong case that the Islamic world has something to teach the secular and Christian world. So would you mind elaborating on that a little bit? Why did you do that, and what did you conclude?

It seems to me that when I look at Christianity in Western culture, you're up in North America, I see a kind of nice spinelessness—an absence of courage. When Solzhenitsyn came to America and gave that great Harvard commencement address in 1978, one of the great speeches in the history of Western civilization, I think he said, "I noticed something lacking here. I certainly would not recommend the USSR or communism; we are indeed wicked, but at least we have courage. You don't."

Where are the heroes? For all its mistakes and all its faults and all its tendency towards violence and fundamentalism, at least Islam is a heroic faith. It tends to be a bit too hard and spiny without flesh, but we are our flesh without a spine. I think we should—we should exchange some of our pop psychologists for some of their fiery mullahs so we got a spine and they get some flesh.

Well, that might be a real positive outcome for a genuine dialogue. I mean, classically, God has—correct me if I'm wrong in my presumptions here—but my understanding is that God has long been seen to rule with two hands: left and right. And the left hand is mercy, and the right hand is judgment. And that judgment element—that's discrimination—that's the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff; that's the willingness to pluck out an eye if it's corrupting your vision or to cut off a hand if it's airing, right? It's this stringent discrimination between that which is not worthy and that which must be retained.

And it seems to me that heaven is definitely a place, let's say, where anything unworthy does not exist, and that means that the judgment of what is unworthy has to be extremely painstaking and harsh for anything like heaven to come about because anything that isn't heavenly can't belong there. And so that requires that judgment. And what I'm seeing happening in the West is that we've made the case, and I think this is a feminist case in some deep sense, we've made the case that the cardinal moral virtue is mercy and forgiveness, and forgetting completely about the fact that another cardinal virtue is judgment.

And that mercy—I mean, Freud knew this, right, with—and this is the brilliance of his insight with regards to the Oedipal complex. You know, he regarded, biologically, he thought, well, human beings have this unbelievably protracted period of dependence, and they're basically born, in some sense, feeling so—their depending on this and so there's an evolutionary arms race between the width—the circumference of an infant's head and the hole in the pelvic floor that enables women to give birth. And there have been a bunch of compromises, so to speak, to make birth possible. One is the baby's head is compressible, which is quite the needle to thread, let's say.

Women's hips are wider—almost wide enough so that they're impaired in their ability to run. If they were any wider, they couldn't run well. And the babies are born much earlier than they would be typically for a mammal of our size. And then human beings have this immense capacity for socialization and particularized development, and so they're extremely dependent—not only in that first postnatal period, the first year, let's say, when they should still be gestational in some real sense, but then for 18 years after—they're being socialized.

And that brings up a danger. And the danger is that the all-encompassing love that's properly devoted to an individual—to an infant—will be sustained longer than it should be and become a devouring force. And so the psychoanalyst, I think it was Freud who famously said, "The good mother must necessarily fail." It's like the Paella Michelangelo's Paella, you know, Mary offers her son to be broken by the world, which is a real act of courage on the part of women, but it also means that they can't be—and neither can fathers, for that matter—they can't be entirely merciful and forgiving because that's good for infants, but it's not good for people who are developing. You have to bring judgment into the equation, and that starts as soon as the child starts to mature.

And one of the things our civilization lacks is a ceremony of adulthood—a harrowing, courage-inspiring transition from that infantile to adult responsibility that has to somehow be restored.

Well, anthropologists have remarked upon that. So the idea there is, well, girls mature earlier than boys, and they hit the menstrual cycle and they are subject to pregnancy. And so in some sense, nature comes pouring in brutally for women at about the age of 12 or 13. And so there's a cut-off there between childhood and maturation that's very marked. That would be the onset of menstruation.

But for men, that's not the same. And anthropologists have noted that many initiation rituals among archaic people involved something that looks like a ritual duplication of the onset of menstruation. So you get penile subincision, for example, which is quite a brutal practice but it is an initiation in blood—or the boys will be taken away from their mothers when they're 12 or 13, let's say, and the mothers put up quite a bit of fuss and make quite a show of their sorrow for losing their child. And then they're taken away by the men and put through a—I don't know what you'd call it—a radical baptism where they force where their previous identity, and they learn to consciously abide by the masculine traditions of the society.

And many, many societies have evolved or produced or spontaneously and wisely generated these rituals of maturation, and they definitely—the closest we have probably is high school graduation. But it's shallow in some deep sense.

Would you say that, in an unconscious attempt to substitute for that, we form gangs and perform acts of violence against society? Is that part of the explanation for it?

Well, yes. Look, here's an interesting case example of that. So elephants are extremely social and the males can be quite aggressive, the young ones in particular. And that's particularly the case under sexual motivation. Let's say, if you take an elephant herd and you kill off all the old males, then the young males basically become antisocial and criminal among the elephants.

And what happens among young men is if they don't have older men to guide them, is they do spontaneously form gangs in an attempt to separate themselves from their maternal influence. That happens in teenagehood, you know, when for every teenager the friends become more important than the parents, and that's how it should be because the friendship group is this intermediary stage toward full adult development.

So you get these gangs, and then the gangs do tests of courage and toughness, and they can degenerate into a kind of blood-letting brutality without that wisdom of guidance that would be provided by elder men.

So what has to be done then is to somehow combine this justice and this mercy, this toughness and this tenderness, this patriarchal and matriarchal—and isn't the Christian answer to that precisely the crucifixion? Here is justice and mercy united. Thomas Aquinas wrote his initial—I don't know what the technical term was. I got him a theological degree on the verse, "Justice and mercy will meet; compassion and truth will join hands because truth will spring both from the earth and from the heavens."

Here you have the ultimate justice being done, the ultimate judgment on sin, the horror, and the motivation for that is the total mercy—the infinite mercy—simultaneously.

Well, there's something to that. So tell me what you think about this. So in this Exodus seminar, one of the things we talked about… okay, this is complicated. So this brilliant scholar, Jonathan Pagio, brought up an issue with regard to the pillars of fire and the pillar of cloud that guides the Israelites through the desert. Okay, so you leave a tyranny, and you don't go to the promised land; you leave a tyranny. It might be the tyranny of your own presumptions, but you leave a tyranny and you end up in the desert, and the desert isn't a lot preferable to the tyranny.

And so that knowing that is very useful in helping you understand why people won't drop their own tyrannical presuppositions because it doesn't free you to begin with; it puts you in the desert. Okay, now what should guide you in the desert? Well, a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud during the day. And Pagio said—and I thought this was stunningly brilliant—he said that's analogous to the black dot in the white paisley and the white dot in the black paisley in the Taoist yin and yang.

And the idea is that there's light in the darkness and there's shade and cool and darkness in the light, and the balanced interplay between those provides divine guidance. So it's like the interplay between chaos and order, and that provides divine guidance in the desert.

And so that, okay, now take that—now imagine those two pillars. Now step back in the Exodus story briefly and think about the Passover. So you have the lintel, and there's two pillars, one on each side, and then God asks the Israelites to mark the space between the lentils with the blood of the innocent—that's the lamb. And so then there's an idea—this is an unbelievable idea—that the innocent must be sacrificed in a meaningful way in order for the spirit of—for in order for us to escape God's rebuke to the tyrant.

And so Christ is the sacrifice of the innocent. You think, what does that mean? Why does the innocent have to be sacrificed? And it has to—it has to be something like, "Well, imagine that you're living a good life and that you're trying to be a good person, and so you're striving towards a kind of innocence." You still have to sacrifice yourself to life; you have to accept mortality.

You have to accept malevolence; you have to be willing to undertake the sacrifice of the innocent in order for life itself to continue. And so—and that's the story—that's a crucial central element of the Passion, right? Because Christ is a sinless being and he takes the full weight of existence upon himself voluntarily.

And I can't help but think that that's something that is incumbent upon all of us—is that we're all subject to betrayal; we're subject to the mob; we're subject to the dictates of tyrants. We have to sacrifice our own innocence as well as our guilt in order for life to prevail. We have to bear all that weight—that's the cross in the most fundamental sense.

And that, weirdly enough, does unite mercy and judgment because to the degree that you're willing to act as a sacrifice to the Lord, then life optimizes around you. And because it's a radical acceptance of the preconditions of existence—tragedy and malevolence—and that works.

It's very practical! Just to go back to the idea of what's practical, the only alternative to that would be the triumph of evil or the conquest of evil by force. But once you conquer evil by force, you yourself always become corrupt. If you conquer evil instead by this strange joining of mercy and justice, then you're like the lamb—the innocent lamb—who defeats the dragon, to use the imagery from The Book of Revelation.

The lamb means "we little lamb," and therion is "horrible beast." Here is all of human life at stake—the heavyweight championship of the universe—and the lamb wins by his blood! That's a secret weapon.

Well, okay. You know, you might say, "Well, in order to keep the dragons at bay, the thorns and the serpents at bay, we have to make sacrifices." Now, that's one of the first ideas that emerges in the stories of Genesis because once Adam and Eve are divorced from paradise, they have to toil. And so that's where the sacrificial idea first comes in. And then in the next book, you have Cain and Abel, and it's a book about proper and improper sacrifice.

And Cain's sacrifices are somehow second-rate and rejected by God, and because of that rejection, Cain becomes embittered and homicidal, and his descendants become genocidal, whereas Abel makes the highest possible quality sacrifices, and as a consequence, he's favored of God. And so then you think, okay, well, do we believe any of that? It's like, well, we know perfectly well that if we make sacrifices with blood in them, that we're more likely to be successful.

Right? If we go all in, if we don't hold anything back, if we commit 100 percent, if we try as hard as we can, the probability that we will succeed is much higher. And we know that if we hold back and offer second-rate sacrifices and try to pull the wool over our own eyes and that of others and that of God, that we're going to be rejected and fail. Everyone knows that.

And so then it begs another question, which is, okay, well, you have to make the highest possible sacrifice—the highest possible quality sacrifice. And that has to be your willingness to sacrifice yourself. Like, what else could it be?

I mean, maybe you could argue that a mother allowing her child to mature and be broken by the world is an equivalent sacrifice. I think you could make that case. But fundamentally, you don't have anything to offer more profound than that. I mean, maybe you could argue that a mother allowing her child to mature and be broken by the world is an equivalent sacrifice; I think you could make that case.

But fundamentally, you don't have anything to offer more profound and more valuable than your own innocence. And I think we all know that—I think this does not depend upon one religion or another religion.

In the Harry Potter series, I know a lot of Christians don't like it because his author is not a Christian, but I think the morality there is very Christian. Harry sacrifices himself; that's profoundly Christian. Absolutely!

Oh yes, well that whole series is amazingly profound, archetypally. She has it unerring religious imagination, and you can tell that because why else would she have been able to get hundreds of thousands—millions of young people to read a sequential array of 600-page books? Obviously, she tapped into something.

And I mean, the second volume is pretty much a straight retelling of Saint George and the Dragon, and it's brilliantly structured mythologically. And it's clearly the case that Voldemort is a stand-in for Satan, for all intents and purposes.

And that Harry does undertake a track and a quest, like Frodo and Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and overcomes evil through self-sacrifice. Those two books are probably the two most popular books in the English language today.

And talking in a more subtle way, it's saying the same thing because the three Christ figures there are Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf—all of whom sacrifice themselves—all of whom, in different words, in different ways, die. And Frodo can't live in the Shire anymore; he can only be healed in the other place.

And Gandalf actually dies and resurrects, and Aragorn goes through the paths of the dead, which no other man can do. So there's profoundly Christian imagery of sacrifice there.

Our wiser selves—when we read that story, we can't help saying yes to it.

Right, right, because we see ourselves.

Well, or no, yes, right—because we can reject it. But there’s no being ambivalent about it; there’s no being not gripped by it.

Well, you see the same thing reflected in the New Avengers series, which is a profoundly counter-cultural entertainment series because it's not woke, or at least it—what would you call them?—unacceptable snippets.

The main character there, Iron Man, is trying to transform himself into a being of gold, for all intents and purposes. And he's a sacrificial agent as well, like Icarus; he flies up to keep the Chitori from descending upon Earth, and their satanic agents for all intents and purposes. And he sacrifices himself in doing so.

And he's an ambivalent character because he's a bit of a fascist and he's an arms dealer, and so he's definitely somebody whose character is complex, let's say. He's a technological intellect as well. But fundamentally, he's a sacrificial figure in the battle between good and evil—in heaven, in the good.

It's so interesting to me that we’ve poured all these computational resources into telling those stories because, you know, a lot of what drives our hunger for computational power is our desire to render likenesses of the world in a fictional setting—to retail archetypal stories.

Because we have enough computational power for most of what we use computers for, but not enough to render potential alternative worlds with sufficient degree of accuracy. And so I know people who work very intently on the technological front, and I've asked them where they access demand for computational power comes from, and it's all the desire to render more and more accurate fictional worlds.

And they all have an archetypal structure, which is something like the sacrificial battle in the constant war between good and evil. It's always something like that. It isn’t obvious that we think anything is more important than that!

So do you see, even behind the technological revolution, the same unconscious thirst that Augustine speaks of—the restless heart? Is it a confused search for God? Isn't there a doubleness there? On the one hand, we want to be God and play God, but on the other hand, we want there to be a God.

Well, I think—I mean the people I know who are operating on the technological front—the wise ones are hyper-concerned that this endeavor occurs in a moral direction.

So I know people, for example, who are working assiduously to produce advanced computer chip technology optimized for artificial intelligence, and they’re getting close to the point where they’re going to produce computational devices that have the computing power of a human brain. That’s probably only three or four years away now. I could be wrong about that, but that isn't what the calculations indicate.

And they're very concerned that this occurs within a moral rubric, and that fight is going on. So for example, people like Elon Musk—who I haven't spoken to directly—he wants to ensure that the benefits of artificial intelligence are placed in the hands of individual people because he's concerned that if a huge conglomeration like Google gets artificial intelligence first, that that will turn them into something approximating the world's most imaginably effective dictator.

And so even on the technological front... I mean, to the degree that we're trying to modify the world to limit malevolence and to bring about life more abundant and to redress suffering—all of the people who are striving forward on that front, who are far-seeing, are very, very much concerned that this takes place in the proper relationship to such things as good and evil.

But if their only notion of good and evil is human happiness—if what they want above all is to limit human suffering and to conquer nature in a Baconian and Faustian and Promethean way—then this is not going to succeed until they conquer death by genetic engineering, which some people, I'm told, in Silicon Valley, especially the transhumanists, say is feasible.

If that happens, if we get the immortality gene, you don't really think that that's going to make a better world? I think that's going to make a kind of hell on Earth because we're designed to—we're designed to suffer and sacrifice and break and learn that way. We're like eggs. We're like eggs. If you don't hatch, you go bad, rotten!

Yeah! I should have said unnecessary suffering rather than suffering per se, perhaps. I don’t know. Many of the people that I'm talking to aren't Promethean in that manner. They're very cognizant of the complexities of the necessity of mortality, let's say.

But maybe I could ask you a question about that in terms of visions of heaven. So I've had visions of heaven, and one element of that vision was that heaven was a place where everything was perfect, and yet everything within it was striving to make it even better. And I thought about that musically and psychologically.

So you know, a great piece of music in each—at each moment—is in some sense as good as it can be, but then it brings forth something additional that's even better, and it just keeps doing that. And that way you get—you know, because you could imagine a state of static perfection as a heaven, but then you might say, "Well, a state of static perfection is imperfect because it's static."

And so what you want is to join being and becoming, so that you have a perfect being plus perfect becoming. And so that's a heaven that just gets more heavenly as we work on it. So I'll set that aside for a moment and then ask you, well, I'm also curious about the beatific vision, let's say, and about notions of paradise in the land of milk and honey and say, "Well, something beckons us forward into the future."

And do you think—do you personally think that, I guess heaven is something that we mutually strive to bring about on earth? You know, like in this dialogue we're having, you and I are trying to be as honest as we can, and hopefully we're trying to aim at the good; we're trying to establish little microcosms of paradisal interaction in the here and now.

And I wonder, well, you know, I think Christ said, "The kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, but men either cannot or will not see it." It's like, for me, I don't know to what degree heaven is intermingled in the structure of the reality that we perceive as mortal beings and to what degree we can bring that reality into being as a consequence of our shared effort.

Well, there's a very obvious and simple answer to that question. Just as music is a better image of heaven than technology, so human love is an even better image of heaven than music. In fact, it's not an image; it's that which heaven essentially consists of. If you truly love someone, you love them more and more and more every year despite whatever problem you have.

And that's not boring; that's the one thing in human life that doesn't get boring because the object is another human being who is potentially infinite. You can grow forever together. So I asked my parents at one point—they're in their 80s now—I said, "If you could take a drug that would restore you to the health that you experienced and were blessed with, let's say, when you were 18, but you got to keep the accumulated wisdom, would you do it?"

And I asked them to think about it seriously, and they were ambivalent about it. And this made me think a lot because I think of Socrates' Apologia and Socrates, in his Apologia, basically says something like, if you live your life fully, then it would be enough.

And so you could imagine being constrained by our mortal limitations but exhausting yourself in the pursuit of your life and emptying yourself in some consequence—maybe, what would you call it?—bringing into being every jot and tittle of the law, and not hiding your light under a bushel but letting it shine on a hill.

And then maybe by the end of your life you'd look back and you'd say, "Well, I did this. I had my life that—that was not only sufficient but wonderful." And you could accept death with equanimity. But then I wonder: we do have this notion of heaven as characterized by immortal existence. So would it be possible for us to strive to continually expand our lifespans and to start living 300 years or 400 years as we became better and better at that?

And then could it be the case that that would be a blessing rather than a curse? And I don't know the answer to these things. I think if—and only if our quality increased as well as our quantity—that would work. But if it doesn't; if it's 300 more years of the same, it would be oppressive and boring.

So I think time itself has to change after death. It's not going to be a linear time based on the movement of matter through space; it's got to be a Kairos, a spiritual time—something like the expansion of music or, better, the expansion of human love. Look, my wife and I are in our 80s, and we fell in love in our 20s, and we're both old and wrinkled now, and we love and respect each other more now than we ever did before.

I think that's the way it has to go; you can't go back; you go forward.

How did you manage that? How long have you been married now?

Almost 60 years.

Okay, so you said that each person—and I believe this—that each person is associated with the infinite in some fundamental sense, and so there's no end to the degree that a person can be discovered or co-discovered. And that's why there's variety in monogamy. If it's deep, there's tremendous variety of monogamy, much more so than serial sexual activity, let's say, much more and comparably more.

What did you do as a practice, you and your wife, if you don't mind me asking, that enabled you to say such a thing after being married for such a long period of time?

It's just a will; it's just a resolution; it's just a commitment. It's an either/or; it's an absolute. You are the center of my world, or you're not. And if you are, you are forever.

Right, okay, so that's a decision. That's a decision of faith—a choice to love. Love is a choice.

Yes, yes, right, right, right.

Okay, okay. Well, this is another thing that I've been trying to sort out with the atheists—this idea that, because their criticism of Christianity seems to be something like, "Well, religious faith is the willingness to suspend rationality and to abide by a set of arbitrary propositional claims that are analogous in some sense to a scientific hypothesis," right?

So you could think about the biblical creationists in that sense, and I think, "No, no, that's not what faith is. Faith is the courage to move forward in the face of the unknown." It's something like that, or faith is the willingness to make a marital vow because you don't have the evidence, right? You love this person, and I suppose that's some evidence, but then you decide—for better or worse, despite our mutual flaws and inadequacies—"We're going to bind ourselves together, and then we're going to make it work."

And that's a statement of faith; it’s not derivation from the evidence. And I think we're—and you said that that served you well in your marriage, in your married life. It's not rational evidence, but in a sense, it is evidence because it's a response to something that's given. That other person is put into your life by God.

So as the Jesuits speak about finding God in all things, so I speak of finding God in the other person, of course, in all persons, because we all bear the image of God. But especially in that one person that God has put into your life as your one and unique other.

Yeah, well maybe that's the intimation. You know, I've done a couple of marriage ceremonies and I've talked to people about love during those ceremonies. And you know, the classic evaluative framework for marriages: well, you fall in love when you're young, and something like a biologically instantiated delusion; you overvalue the other person, and then that fades away.

And I think, "No, that's not right." It's that love is more like what you see when you see your children when they're very young—it's that you see them clearly. And that's a grace.

That there are some people in your life that you have the privilege of seeing in something like a totality. And then that manifests itself as love, and then that's a gift that's given to you. And then it can recede unless you take the steps necessary to fortify it and to continually revivify it. So it's like a glimpse of paradise—that love that you fall into. But then you have to earn it; it recedes and then you have to earn it.

And re-establish it! It's the primary image of religion. It is a choice; it is not a proof; it is not a necessity. It is not a substitute for anything else. It's simply a yes or no. If they're all or nothing, it’s a zero-sum game—you either play it or you don't.

Yes, yes, well that's—a zero-sum game without—again, as I said earlier, that's part of the reason I was attracted to Kierkegaard and to the existential thinkers, the 1950s existential thinkers in particular because they weren't—they were also much, I suppose, in the aftermath of the Second World War, they were also like Solzhenitsyn’s and very skeptical of a kind of shallow hedonism.

Solzhenitsyn's perspective on hedonism was, well, that just disappears as an orienting strategy the moment the jackboots kick down your door at three in the morning. It's like, but it's the case—if you're right.

Yeah, right! Or it's the case if you suffer a very serious illness or someone you love does or if you're betrayed or really if you encounter any of the tragedies of life. It's like that he