Eternal Truth and the Uphill Climb | Bishop Barron | EP 431

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.

I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book, out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I'm looking forward to this! I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

That's an ancient connection in the tradition to connect Job and Jesus, and he is associated appropriately with Job because what Jesus takes on is precisely that. Because it's not just suffering, it's suffering that's undeserved. It really is, you know, for the most part, undeserved.

And you, as a therapist, I have a priest, we've met Job a number of times. I mean, I know in my pastoral work people that are in that kind of suffering. What God helps Job to see is he's trying to break Job out of this curvatus in se, my little consciousness that has this overweening pride.

Hello everybody! I had the pleasure today of speaking with Bishop Robert Barron. I've spoken with Bishop Barron a number of times before, sometimes with John Verveke, sometimes with Jonathan Pou, sometimes alone, in all sorts of different places, including Rome. We've developed a good relationship and he's a very interesting religious thinker in my estimation.

He's contending with the core meanings of the narratives that sit at the base of our culture and that for better or worse, sometimes both unite us fundamentally and most profoundly. For better, we talked today about, I suppose, something approximating the undeniable reality of the Divine or the sacred. Even by definition, we tried to lay out a mode of conceptualizing the proposition that there is a highest and uniting value which I would say allegiance to that highest and eternal value is something like faith.

It's something like covenant. It's something like the proper aim of life—it’s something like the proper aim of life in so far as your life is meaningful and generous and productive—all of that by definition. We laid out the modern understanding of that and how the church at least in part has deviated from its obligation and responsibility to explain the nature of that relationship and to help people understand why it needs to be primary.

So that's where the discussion will go. Join us!

Alright, so let me share some of my thoughts with you. It'll be kind of a lengthy introduction to our discussion, but there's been some very exciting technical developments that actually bear surprisingly on the religious question.

So I'll give you one example. One of my former students, who's now working with me, has been using large language models to investigate the concept of God. Now one of the things that Sam Harris—one of the criticisms that Sam Harris and the atheists in general have levied at thinkers like myself and thinkers, let's say, like Carl Jung—this is also a postmodern critique—is that the interpretation of a given narrative is arbitrary.

That you can read into a narrative anything you want and that there's no, you might say, intrinsic meaning in the text. Now there's actually—that's actually wrong and we can actually demonstrate that it's wrong. I have no idea what the ultimate significance of that will be, but let me tell you why because this is really quite fascinating.

So we know that some words are more similar than others and then you might say, well, what makes words or concepts similar? The answer would be something like substitutability, or you could think about it as substitutability with regard to a purpose. It's a very critical and strange definition of similarity but also proximity in the space of meaning.

And then you might say, well what does it mean for things to be proximal in the meaning space? It means likely to co-occur. Now this student I'm referring to, his name is Victor Swift, by the way, he's been able to show—and this is essentially mathematically—a conceptual overlap between ten concepts and the concept of God.

So imagine this, Bishop Barron, imagine this: that you have every concept has a center. Okay? So the concept of God, the center of the concept of God would be God. But then imagine that there's a cloud of immediate associations around that concept, and that those associations are the concepts that are statistically most likely to co-occur with that concept.

Okay? So this is something approximating a mathematical fact. It has nothing to do with subjective opinion. So then you could imagine—and we're trying to map this—that you have God in the center and then close to that would be the true, the beautiful, and the good, and then there'd be another cloud of associations around that that would be second-order associations.

Now, yeah, the way a large language model works is that it actually learns those associations at multiple levels of comparison simultaneously. So it actually maps out what you might describe as the semantic space or the space of meaning.

Now, so this would also imply—this is where it gets so cool—imagine if we took a cloud of concepts that people universally recognized as good. So you could imagine that you, me, and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins would have a fair amount of agreement on what those goods were: you know, individual dignity of the individual, the idea of the good, the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of upward striving.

Okay? Now imagine that that makes a conceptual cloud. There's going to be a center of that cloud that constitutes the reason for the similarity of the ideas, and it looks to me like, semantically speaking—in terms of our verbal content—this might also be true with regards to the stories we tell that the central concept around which all goods rotate is indistinguishable from the semantic representation of God.

And it also looks like we can now map that. So I think we can dispense entirely with the criticism that the interpretation of, say, biblical narratives has to be something arbitrary. And we can also make the case, which Carl Jung made to begin with, is that in any system of value that's coherent, there's going to be a central factor that accounts for its coherence and it's certainly the case—it's highly probable that that's indistinguishable from the concept of God.

That's how it looks. It's so—this is so cool because this is starting—we're starting to be able to use this technology to dispense with opinion. So you know, Jung said, “Called or uncalled, God is present. God is there now,” right? And I don't remember who he derived that from but that was what he had carved on his castle at Bingen.

But that's the same idea, right? That implicit in a semantic landscape is the central concept of the highest ideal. That's kind of like the sum of all things. So I'm just wondering what you might be thinking about in relationship to that possibility.

Yeah, there's so much there! There's questions of hermeneutics and questions of metaphysics and questions of psychology. And you know, I'm against the postmoderns who want to unravel the self. First of all, there's no really coherent self that does this judging and analyzing. There's also—they want to unravel metaphysics.

And what you're arguing there, in a more sort of semantic way, is that there is a coherence to the self. There is a coherence to the metaphysical structure of the real. So to use an example of God, yes, we would say that God is not a being but being itself. So the famous answer given to Moses, “I am who I am.” Moses is asking, "What kind of being are you?" He's trying to put God in categorical terms and the answer there is so important because that makes all the difference when it comes to understanding religious language.

If we follow Moses and his question, we will inevitably end up in atheism because if you think God is a categorical object in the world, eventually you'll say, "Well, I don’t see this object, and there's no evidence for it, and I can explain the world without it." So that's why the answer of God in Exodus is so powerful because he's saying, "Dumb question, wrong question. I'm not a thing in the world that you can name. I am who I am," which means I'm the Prius— that's Augustine's language. I'm prior to thought and to language. I'm prior to being. I'm that upon which the categorical realm depends.

So right from that, if you get God as Aquinas says, the actus essendi itself, so if you say that, well then right away you've got the central organizing principle of all reality and that everything else has to cluster around, which is why we speak about God as being the creator of all things.

But also, your semantic point about the good and the beautiful and so on, the true, we call those the transcendental properties of being. Wherever you find being, you find those things. Therefore, they are closely related to the central idea of God, and which is precisely why in the spiritual order we get at God through those avenues, through the true and the good and the beautiful.

It's, you know, there's our friend James Joyce. You know when you see the beautiful girl off the beach and you take in her beauty, what that leads you to, as Stephen Daedalus says, is “Oh, Heavenly God.” You know, so that's the Platonic path that Joyce, you know. So that's the clustering of those ideas tightly around God.

And then to your point about stories, I think that's really important because I don't agree with the postmodern kind of unraveling of narrative and it's simply a matter of subjective opinion. It's just the reader's response. See, what tells against that, as you well know, is this ancient tradition of a coherent reading of these texts.

I mean, why is it that people, over now millennia, have read these texts and found very deep and consistent ideas? It's because they have a semantic structure which is dependent upon a metaphysical structure which gives rise to a spiritual transformation. They're classic texts for that reason, and we shouldn't simply read them as, "Oh, they're just this coming together of words, and I can read any old way I want to."

Well, no! The whole of human interpretive history tells against that. So I think we do have to battle the postmodern ultimately nihilism metaphysically and the sort of indifferentism at the level of interpretation. No! No, these are classic texts that have spoken for very good reason.

I think I actually think that that battle is over because I think the large language models are going to demolish their pretensions. So here’s the way of two things. Why did God disappear, die—let's say—the psychoanalyst believed that God sunk into the unconscious. That was Jung's proposition that if God dies formally, all that happens is that the prime factor becomes unconscious.

So imagine this, this is how you could think of that technically. So imagine now you have your cloud of concepts with the central factor of the good itself. And maybe the essence of being itself being, by definition, this is by definition, by the way, that's what God is. And when there's a concordance between the explicitly religious belief and that implicit network of meaning, you have a conscious God at the center—like you're conscious of that God.

But then if you dispense with that central uniting proposition, you don't eradicate the commonalities between what is good, you just let them sink back into implicitness. And that seems to me to be equivalent to the descent of God into the unconscious.

That's the same thing as Geppetto, for example, going down into the belly of the whale is that now God becomes implicit, right? But that doesn't mean that he's not there. He's still coded in the relationship between those things that are meaningful. Okay, so that's pretty wild.

And then with regards—go ahead if I can just jump in. What happened to God? The disappearance of God is a function of this misinterpretation of God as a being, and we can see when that happened. It happened by the late Middle Ages when Aquinas's more analogical metaphysic gave way to a univocal conception of being.

That's in people like William of Ockham. And when that happens, see, God's still there. We take him seriously, but now moving forward, as God is seen as a being among many, he becomes more and more distantiated, more and more irrelevant to the world. And then in early modernity, he becomes a rival to the world.

And it has to be that way. If you and I were sort of plotted on the same mathematical grid, we're going to be to some degree over and against each other. We'll be battling for the same space. So God and humanity are in the same grid, both beings—one's smaller, one's bigger—but they're of course going to come into conflict.

Now read a lot of the early moderns that way, then keep going, and you come right up to the atheists who finally say, "Look, I've had it with this being. I don't want this big being interfering with my freedom." And my self-definition, now you've got Jean-Paul Sartre right, saying, "If God exists, I can't be free. But I am free, therefore God doesn't exist." That, I would argue, is in the mind of almost every teenager in the West today, that idea—God is a rival to my freedom.

But you know this—how repugnant all of that is to the Bible! Right? In fact, this morning in my office, so as a priest, I pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, and we had the passage from Isaiah, and it says this: "Lord, you have accomplished all we have done." It's a little line, but it'll take your breath away if you get it: "Lord, you have accomplished all we have done." We've done it, but you accomplished it.

The implication there is God is not a rival to our thought or to our action or our achievement. In fact, the glory of God is a human being fully alive, as St. Irenaeus said! See, that's what modernity begins to have a problem with. And when you follow that trajectory, you get all the way right to the atheist, who say, "Well, I don't want this big being interfering with my life and my accomplishments."

And then we'll go back to something we've both talked about a lot: the burning bush, right? Which is on fire but not consumed. And that's a Biblical imagination. When God comes close to the world, the world is luminous and beautiful, compelling, and it's not consumed. It's not destroyed by divine proximity; that's the biblical idea.

That was compromised by the late Middle Ages, became exaggerated in the modern period, and then comes to full fruition with the atheist.

So whether it's Feuerbach or Sam Harris, it's a very simple problem, and they're not getting, it seems to me, the biblical understanding of the non-competitiveness of God with the world. But that comes from this idea of God as to be itself, not a being, right? I think all of that's the deep metaphysical background for what we're dealing with today.

Okay, so let's go. I want to go two places with that: I want to investigate the burning bush more and I want to talk about the fall.

Yeah, and it's okay, so with regard to the burning bush, so I've been working on this new book, We Who Wrestle with God, and I've been trying to map out the semantic space.

I think that's a reasonable way of thinking about it. Now, it's not only semantic because it's also the space of the imagination and it's also the space of the cultural traditions that unite us because the monotheistic hypothesis is something like there's an underlying unity rather than a diversity or a plurality. And that will make itself manifest at the behavioral level and at the level of the imagin and at the level of the semantic simultaneously, right?

So this is also why the postmodernists are wrong, because they think meaning is only encoded in the semantic space, and that's not true. Like a story is not precisely semantic; it's like a parable because it draws on the power of the image as well as on the power of the word, and those images are related to behaviors.

Okay, in any case, what seems to happen in the burning bush story... so imagine this: Moses is attracted by something. Something calls to him, okay? And so that's like a beckoning or a promise.

Now, the way that that works neurophysiologically is that we're always looking for things that beckon and call as indicators of the path to treasure; even bees do this, by the way. This is very, very deeply embedded inside living creatures. And so there will be things that call to us now that attract our attention and pull us off our current path, which is exactly what happens to Moses.

And this happens to him near Mount Sinai, which is the connection between the earthly and the divine—the two dimensions—the vertical dimension. And so Moses pursues this thing that glimmers and gleams and compels him, and he pursues it right to the bottom. And as he gets closer and closer to the core concept, let's say, so that would be the core idea in this web of meaning, he starts to understand that he's on sacred ground, right?

So then he becomes even more humble. He lessens himself more. Exactly! Exactly! The shoes—I was thinking the shoes mean you're in command. If you have shoes on, you can walk anywhere you want to go.

And if it's rocky soil or it's an incline, whatever, you can walk. You take your shoes off; you're much more vulnerable and you're much more humble, you have to be. You can also feel the ground better, you know? And you can imagine that as you're approaching the sacred, you don't want to have anything between you and the sacred because you want to feel out where you're going.

Okay, right.

Yes! And that only happens through humility. You're close to the earth. So humility is not like, you know—right? It's not like degradation. It's just getting close to the earth and if you got your shoes on in that kind of aggressive sense of "I'm going to go and look and I'm going to examine," you're not humble enough to get in touch with the sacred.

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Right, right, right, right. Well, you can imagine that it has to be the antithesis of pride because pride is perhaps the cardinal sin. I mean, it resides with resentment and deceit, I would say, but it's certainly up there.

Okay, so Moses allows himself to be transformed and compelled in this interaction with what calls to him. Right? The voice of the voice underlying being itself reveals itself to him, right? The essence of being, let's say—or it's more than that—just as the truth is not instantiated in the given truth, as you pointed out, the principle of being is not in—okay?

So that's what Moses gets in touch with. But then, so what's very cool there is that's also now that he's grounded in the right place or now that he's established a proper relationship with the transcendent an ineffable ideal, he now becomes the man who's capable of fighting against tyranny and destroying slavery.

Exactly! And despite his inadequacies, right? Because he still can't speak. He's right. So it doesn't matter. The message there is regardless of the limitations that have been imposed upon you by fate and circumstance, if you delve deep enough, if you follow your calling with sufficient integrity, you'll reach, you'll form a relationship, a covenantal relationship with that which underlies being itself.

And that will make you the leader capable of eternally opposing tyranny and leading people out of slavery. Yeah, I think all that is right. You see, you become a vehicle of love. You become a vehicle of grace if you open yourself to the transcendent mystery, you open yourself to God, and the ego has stopped its blockage.

So the ego's you is always obsessed with wealth, pleasure, power, and honor, says Aquinas. So if I got those things in the way, then my ego is seeking those all the time; and they're not bad in themselves but they're not the summum bonum. And so when I seek all that stuff and I become addicted to them, then I block others' access to the sacred through me.

So I become a block to the sacred rather than a vehicle for it. The saints are those who have taken off their shoes and they know they're on holy ground. They understand.

And then God can act through them. And now Isaiah again, "You have accomplished all we have done." That happens when you're in touch with the sacred. As long as God is construed as a competitive supreme being, that language makes no sense.

I'd have to say, "No, no, look Lord, I'm going to do it. I'm going to accomplish it, and you know, thanks for your inspiration, but I'll keep you at a distance or at the limit." No, no, I want you out of the picture completely.

I'm going to do it. But a religious consciousness of all values that Aquinas spoke of—and he said that we should do that, right? That we should take on to ourselves the right and even the responsibility of creating our own values.

So let me ask you about this then in regard to that. So when God is laying out the rights of human beings in the garden—and please correct me if you think I have anything wrong here theologically.

Okay, so God basically says to Adam and Eve, now that the garden has been created, that they can utilize the resources of the garden as they see fit, except for one thing: they can't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Okay, so now I've been thinking through that. What does that mean? Well, I think it means the same thing as taking to yourself the ability to make any moral claim that you want, so that now you become the supreme master of the moral as such.

Okay, now what Satan offers Eve—this is so interesting—because the serpent is affiliated with Satan and Satan is the spirit of the intellect that wants to overthrow God. It wants to put itself in the highest place, so it's something like intellectual pretension.

And what the serpent offers Eve, he says this directly: "You'll become as gods, knowing good and evil." And the knowing, the knowing means master of—you can take to yourself the right to be the master of what's good and evil.

Okay, now I would say when people do that, they bite off more than they can chew. So now Eve starts to conceptualize herself as the omnipotent feminine that can clutch everything to its breast, right? Including the poisonous snake, it can incorporate any fruit, no matter how bitter and poisonous—that's her presumption.

It's a presumption of pride. And then she entices Adam and she uses his proclivity to name and to categorize. And what Adam says, "Eve comes to Adam and says we should hearken even to the snake, even to what's most poisonous. We should incorporate even what's most poisonous." And Adam says, "I can do that."

And so you see a twin kind of pride: a feminine pride, which is I can incorporate everything and clutch it to my breast, and a masculine pride, which is I can now reshape the ordering principle itself even to incorporate that which is poisonous.

Now, if that's okay—one more thing on that and then tell me what you think. There is this Christian insistence that suffering is a consequence of sin, and that's a weird one because death and deterioration seem in some ways to be built into the structure of existence, but it's an open question how much our tendency to overreach pridefully is the consequence of our continual suffering.

Right, because we certainly know that when we suffer, especially when we suffer unbearably, it's often because we've taken upon ourselves more than we have the right to do. We've exceeded our domain of competence. And I think the false story is exactly illustrating this modern proclivity that we have now that Nietzsche put forward as a moral command that we have to become the source of all value.

Now, if it is the case that value itself is encoded in the structure of being—which is certainly the case semantically and seems to be the case in the realm of the imagination—then we literally cannot take to ourselves the right to transvalue and establish all values without ceasing to be human, which is another inference of the story, right? Because that implicit moral order—there's no difference between that implicit moral order and being human. They're the same thing.

Yes, we could talk all day about this of course, but to your very first point, I think it's very important to point out that the great permission precedes the prohibition.

So eat of all the trees, see? In the Church Fathers, read that as God's desire that we flourish.

That there's this view that Christians are hung up on sin, and especially sexual sin, and God is just, you know, surveying us like Kim Jong-un and, you know, we live in a totalitarian... come on! The great truth of that story is the permission, as God creates this universe out of sheer gratuitous love and then offers it to us to take advantage of, to pursue, to love, and to enjoy.

So the Fathers read that as its science and art and its politics and its literature and its friendship and it's all the good things of life, and God says, "Yes! Enjoy them!" In other words, it's a structure of value that's built into the being of the created order and God says, "Off you go! Off you go! Enter into it!"

But right; the one thing you can't do is pretend that you're the criterion of value. This is John Paul II who reiterated this ancient tradition in his writings—when you become the criterion of good and evil, the garden turns into a desert. You get expelled from the garden because now you don't have the humility to enter into the world of value.

You become a sort of arbiter of value; you’re even a creator of value. You're the evaluator of value. Well then, well that's the accuser and the adversary. Yes, well you see, because the minute you stand apart from it in that sort of judgmental way, then you lose contact with it.

That's why the garden becomes a desert. God is expelling them not out of, he's in a snit. It's just spiritual physics. It's just the way it has to go. You, as you say quite rightly, stop being human when you lose your contact with this objective value system and you become the criterion of value because essentially you have made yourself into God.

And that's, in the Bible's reading, always the fundamental problem. It just rings the changes on that theme. That's always the fundamental problem is we turn ourselves into gods, and what God’s trying to teach us is how joyful it becomes when you forget that goofy pretension.

You surrender in faith—there’s that grossly misunderstood word of faith—you surrender in trust. I’d put it that way, in trust to the world of value, at the top of which is the summum bonum, God, the source of all value. And when you surrender to that, it becomes a garden.

We’re back into the garden! Now, fast forward all the way to Jesus, you know, as God undertakes a rescue operation to get us out of this bad consciousness and to move us toward fulfillment.

The fact that Jesus is buried in a garden and then rises from the dead out of a garden is not accidental. You know, so that's the story of the Bible in some ways. Is would you people please get over this pretension that you're divine, that you're the center of activity, because then you will be unhappy. Period.

It just happens like night follows day.

Well, it's also, Bishop, it's also very interesting what people mean implicitly when they say that now they are the source of all value, because that begs a question. You know, I think you mentioned that—that was Aquinas who identified wealth, pleasure, power, and honor.

So you might say, "Okay, so let's say that Sartre says, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'—that was actually Aleister Crowley, right? Okay, so but that’s a good statement of this self-centeredness."

Okay, so what are the inevitable consequences of this? Okay, so one of them is that you become self-conscious. And this is what happens to Adam and Eve, right? They become self-conscious. They become aware of their own nakedness, and the reason they do that is because—or the consequences of that—if they've taken that burden of valuation onto themselves, they're going to be self-reflective and self-conscious.

We know from the psychological literature that self-consciousness and neurotic suffering are conceptually indistinguishable; they occupy the same space! And we all know that from experience. We all know that—that's Augustine!

When you have katā sin, you've turned in on yourself. That’s his definition of sin, but I would say of unhappiness—the ipso facto you’re unhappy! And the best moments of life, we all know this, are when we're least self-conscious. When we're lost in—that's when we're walking with God.

Yes, when you're less self-conscious is when you're walking with God in the garden in the cool of the evening. Right, right, right! Okay, so now here’s the other flaw as far as I can tell.

So now I'm going to make the proposition that I can do whatever I want, but that begs the question, as Aquinas knew by the way, what "I" are you talking about? Because here's another way of thinking about it: you’re going to be possessed by something.

And you're either going to be possessed by the highest thing or you're going to be possessed by something lower or, in the worst possible case, you could be possessed by what is technically lowest. But those are—that's the range of options, you're going to be possessed by something.

Now, why would I say possessed? Well, it's partly because you're socialized. Okay, now if the center fragments, so I think it fragments first into sex and power and you could see the exploration of sex with Freud and the exploration of power with nature, but the next two gods, so to speak, that are lurking under the superordinate concept of the divinity are going to be something like hedonic pleasure—yeah, that would be the Babylon, in its worst possible manifestation—and power.

And that would be the beast that you see in Revelation with the woman on its back. Okay, so that means that when the postmodernist or the modernist or even the liberal says "I can do what I want," they fail to understand that that "I" now being referred to is likely possession of the self by power or hedonism or some combination of the two, because like when you say "I want," when you're angry, for example, "I'm angry, I want to hurt this person," what you're also saying, even if you don't know it, is that I am now possessed by a spirit.

So it might be the spirit of vengeful anger that has taken possession of me so completely that I fully identify myself with that whim. And so it isn't a matter of "I” versus God; it’s a measure of subordinate idols. It's a matter of the competition between sub-idols that should be properly subordinated and that which should be put in the higher place.

And one of those would be, we talked about power, we talked about sex, but we could also think about that's the pretentious intellect. It’s the thing that's most likely to possess you, and it's the thing that's most likely to ferment rebellion against God. And that's why Satan is referred to as Luciferian in his pretensions by people like Milton.

Well, you're putting your finger on something very ancient in the spiritual tradition, which is true self, false self, and go right back to St. Paul when Paul says casually enough, "It's no longer I who live; it's Christ who lives in me."

Now notice how, like Isaiah, that is right? You have accomplished all we have done. You look at Paul's letter, you'd never get the sense that Paul has somehow lost his personality. I mean, Paul's personality is on every page of his letters. You can see—he's palpable, right?

But he can still say, "It's no longer that old self that lives; it's Christ who lives in me." And that doesn't mean Christ has kicked me out, no. No, I'm like a burning bush now. I'm on fire but I'm not consumed.

So it's the false self has given way to the true self. And that's the heart of the spiritual tradition. When Jesus says, you know, metanoia—we have those opening speeches in the Gospel of Mark, and we say, "Repent," you know, fair enough as a translation, but literally metanoia—go beyond the mind you have. So you’ve got a fallen mind, and that's what you're talking about: a mind that's been possessed by wealth or pleasure, honor, or the love of knowledge, whatever it is.

It's an idol. So metanoia—go beyond the mind you have! Believe the good news. So what he's saying is, "Get rid of the old self!" The good news is that I have come! I, the Christ, have come!

So you should be able to say with Paul, "It's no longer that old self that lives; it's Christ who lives in me." There's the whole spiritual life!

You know, I also thought of my fellow Montan, Bob Dylan. You know, "You got to serve somebody." It might be the devil, it might be the Lord. And that sounds simplistic, but it comes from the Book of Joshua, and it's dead right. It’s what you just said: we’re possessed by something.

You know, it’s going to be the summum bonum or it’s some lesser good that has turned into an idol, and it’s going to start manipulating us. But all you got to do—that's, you know, Paul Tillich said that—just find out what people worship! That’s all you need to know about them; the rest will follow!

So you got to serve somebody. So when you meet a person and they’re suffering, you, as a psychologist, I, as a priest, over the years, you deal with people who are suffering—I always, that’s a super illuminating question. Try to figure out, "Okay, what are you worshiping?" There’s something that’s the center of gravity; if it’s not God, that’s that implicit God.

Well, that’s what you do when you go to a movie, man. You take a—you try to infer the aim of the protagonist. And basically, by inferring the aim, you’re inferring the central theme around which the entire personality rotates, and there is no difference between that and understanding—those are the same thing.

Okay, so as I said, I've been writing this book, walking through the biblical corpus. And so once Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden, you have this situation where they have to work, right? They're condemned to work and to slog away, let’s say.

And so work becomes integral to adaptation now. And that begs a further question, which is, well, what is the best possible work? What is the greatest possible work? Now, as far as I can tell, there's no difference between sacrifice and work—they’re isomorphic concepts.

And the reason for that is that here’s a definition of work, and you tell me what you think about this: Work is the sacrifice of the present to the future, right? Now, if you're doing it optimally, it would be the integration of the present and the future, but if it's work, it's the sacrifice.

Okay, so then the next question is, okay, what should you best sacrifice? What's the sacrifice that is most pleasing to God? Well, the thing we see happening in the biblical corpus is that's exactly the center concern of the next story, because the story exactly—and so these are two patterns of sacrifice, proper and improper, right? Bitter and resentful versus upward-looking and faithful, let's say.

Okay, and the sacrifice of Cain is motivated by Cain’s willingness to allow himself to be possessed by the spirit of bitterness and resentment because that's what God calls him out on. Okay, so okay, so now we could say the rest of the Bible is an attempt to work out the definition of the highest form of sacrifice.

Now, you see that being played with across a whole array of great stories—that’s the stories of the prophet's lives, let’s say, and the encoding of the lessons of their lives in the law. But then you have, okay, now that sort of culminates in some ways with the story of Job, right? Because Job and the pattern of sacrifice that’s exemplified by Job—okay?

So what happens to Job is that almost all the unjust suffering of the world is laid on his shoulders. Yeah, okay, and what Job says—please correct me if I’m wrong—what Job says, and Job is suffering so much and so unjustly that his wife comes to him and says, “The only thing left for you is to curse God and die.”

Right, and of the great figures in the Bible—exactly! Exactly! And, well, and she is, she's upset by what's happening to him and can't see a way out. Now, Job says, "She's right; she's the voice of so many today who—they resent God."

Absolutely! Just curse God and die. I mean, who needs all this transcendent nonsense? Exactly! Exactly! Well, or the whole bloody game. Like that's the antinatalists, right? Well, it’s a powerful argument: "Curse God and die!"

Okay, but Job says, "No! I refuse to do that!" And I refuse to do it on principle. I'm going to assume—so this is a statement of faith—I am not going to abandon my faith in the essential goodness of being, regardless of the proximal evidence.

And I’m not going to curse myself finally, because although I'm not a perfect man, I am a good man, and so I’m not going to say that everything that's happened to me I deserve in some causal manner, and I'm certainly not going to say that the structure of being itself is corrupt.

Now, you can think about that practically. So imagine if you're in a situation like Job’s where your world has fallen apart and maybe, and maybe even genuinely, to some degree through no clear fault of your own or no fault that couldn’t be laid at the feet of good men in general.

What's your best strategy? Well, I can tell you as a clinician if you take your suffering and you allow that to be transformed into resentful bitterness, there's no limit to the amount of hell you can turn anything into, right? Deepen your suffering! Right? You multiply it immensely!

You know, whereas if you're suffering and you can and you still strive to find good in that and you still maintain your faith in the essential goodness of being, then instantly that ameliorates your suffering to some degree. It puts you in the best possible position to deal with it, but it also helps you embody like this supreme metaphysical claim.

Okay, so now let's take that one step further. So I think you see the full flowering of this in the story of Christ. I mean this technically, because so the question is, what suff—what sacrifice is most acceptable to God? So what work works best across all possible situations and places?

And Christ embodies the spirit of the sacrifice of what's lesser about the self, regardless of circumstance. So because his story is an ultimate tragedy, right? Because he has to face betrayal, tyranny, the collapse of his friendships, a humiliating death in front of his mother—like it is the concatenation of all the potential dimensions of suffering that is outlined to some degree in Job.

And Christ’s example is that you establish a firm relationship with good despite all that. You continue to aim up in love and truth despite all that, and by doing so, you simultaneously transform and transcend all that, and that’s the proper model for the highest form of being.

My suspicions are that that pattern of voluntary self-sacrifice, which is also key to therapeutic transformation, I suspect that that pattern is isomorphic with the good that lies at the center of the network of conceptions of good. And I think that that's what the biblical revelation is, is that there is no difference between the Son and the Father.

That would be how you would conceptualize that notion in religious terms, is that if the Spirit of Yahweh was properly embodied in a human soul, then it would be that spirit. It would be the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice as the proper offering to God that would prevail.

And then I would say further, okay, let's think about this as practically and what would you say realistically as possible. We know this in the therapeutic realm: the best pathway forward is to face the things that challenge, confront, and threaten you voluntarily.

Right? We know that that is transformative; we know that it improves people's mental health; we know that it makes them braver. What you do with a person in therapy is you find out what obstacles are standing in their way, stopping them, and making them bitter.

And you plot and strategize with them about how they can decompose that obstacle into smaller constituent elements and face it. And that's the same thing as facing the serpent on the cross—the brazen serpent on the cross that Moses has his people do when they're stung in the desert, right? Heals them! It’s the serpent!

You've just touched on pretty much every major theme in metaphysics and theology in that last bit, and there's so much there, Jordan. You talk about Job.

That's an ancient connection in the tradition to connect Job and Jesus. And Job, of course, at the end of the book says, “I know that my Redeemer lives.” I mean even in the midst of his great suffering—and then Jesus himself, who is the Redeemer in person.

And he is associated appropriately with Job because what Jesus takes on is precisely that Job is a kind of limit case of suffering because it's not just suffering—it's suffering that's undeserved, or at least, you know, for the most part undeserved.

So it's all of that, and you, as a therapist, I have a priest, we've met Job a number of times. I mean, I know—I have in my pastoral work—people that are in that kind of suffering.

Metaphysically speaking, at the heart of it, it seems to me is this claim that being and good are always more fundamental than evil. And that's because evil is best characterized as a privatio—right? It's a privation of the good.

So evil is always parasitic upon the good, which means no matter how intrusive it is and no matter how kind of bold it is, it’s parasitic. It can only exist in and through the good. So as Paul would say, "Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more."

So sin can never outpace grace. Evil can never be greater than the good. And so Job, his great you might say spiritual genius is to see that—to see it.

Now how did he come to see it? He was very good in his dealings with his friends, who were kind of lousy friends. They were great for the first seven days when they sat with him in silence. And you and I know that too, when you're dealing with people in great suffering, often, it's silence and solidarity that's the best thing you can do.

When they start to speak, that's participation in their suffering, yeah, right, right? And that's what's so so helpful about it. But then they start engaging in the most kind of trite theological discourse. They’re like, “Oh, Job, you must have done something wrong.”

This clearly— you know, it’s just evil comes because you do things wrong. That's a very naive level of spiritual understanding. And it's—I think it's interesting is it's the only time in the Bible where God upgrades people for their bad theology because remember at the end of the story, when God says, "Unlike your friends who spoke ill of me," your friends who did not speak well of me.

So God is taking them to task for bad theology, and the bad theology is this silly, trivial, superficial—what God helps Job to see is this metaphysical truth, right? That evil is always parasitic upon the good. But also this more theological truth that your overweening intellect is just this little tiny, teeny finite mind that can take in a tiny swath of reality.

And Job, did you hear about—do you know about Leviathan and Behemoth and these creatures of the mind? You know about them; they're my creatures, and you know, where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?

And where were you when I sang at the dawn? And all this is—he's trying to break Job out of that curvatus in se, my little consciousness that has this overweening pride. No, there's no justification for what I'm going through. There's no morally sufficient reason for what I'm going through. Where were you?

You know, so it's a metaphysical move if you want and it's a theological move where Job is broken out of that. Can I say a quick thing about sacrifice? Because to me, that's such a central notion in the Bible.

The fact that Adam is working not just after the fall but before the fall, so he's given the task of tilling the garden. So John Paul II saw this—that we shouldn't construe work as simply a kind of, you know, result of sin or a punishment for sin.

Work there, you might construe as art and science and philosophy and, you know, all these wonderful things that are just good in themselves and that call forth our powers. And we know what that feels like, you know, when it's a strain in a way to read a philosophical book and enter into a philosophical argument, but it’s also—it’s wonderful.

It’s not the result of sin or the fall; it’s just an exercise of your powers. But furthermore this, the term in Hebrew—and I forget what it is exactly—but the term for tilling the soil is the same term used for the care of the temple. Eden is a primordial temple.

Which means a place where God is rightly praised. So the summum bonum is properly aligned with the human mind and will and body, and that's why Eden is a temple.

The expulsion from the garden is yes into a desert, but it's also an exile from the temple. We're not praising! Right? Now read that as a master motif of the entire Bible. What goes wrong with us? Bad praise! I start praising the wrong things!

Idolatry is the fundamental problem! And then look at the story of the Old Testament. It’s trying to discover the temple again, you know? Pharaoh, let my people go, that they might worship the Lord in the desert so they might find a place to worship!

And then they build the Great Tabernacle in the desert while they're on the move, Mount Sinai, and so on. And then finally the Solomon temple in Jerusalem. Jesus who says, "I’ll tear down that temple, and in three days rebuild it," referring to the temple of his body.

And then Paul, "And you members of Christ's mystical body, you're the temple." You know, so that theme of how do we bring people back to right worship? A right ordering to the summum bonum, that’s the whole Bible!

You know, now see—in go back to Job for a second because what gets in the way of right worship? Lots of things, but one of them can be intense suffering. There’s Mrs. Job: “Curse God and die!”

So cursing God is the opposite of praising God. So she’s saying, "You know, your suffering is so intense, Job, that just give up on this project of praising God." That's why that book is so pivotal because even at this limit case of suffering, Job doesn't curse God. He maintains his connection.

Now St... One one more step, because of the Jesus-Job connection. Jesus on the cross, we say bearing all the sins of the world—that’s what you just said—you know, bearing all of human suffering maintains nevertheless his connection to the Father.

So it’s—you might say it’s like at a breaking point. Even God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Chester said God becomes an atheist on the cross, you know? So you're almost at a breaking point, but it doesn’t break. Jesus maintains the connection with the Father.

That’s—we would say the second person of the Trinity, having united himself with human nature, bringing humanity with him online, which is why we say the cross is central to worship.

So at the Mass, which is our—the Great temple moment when we give God right praise, we do it by remembering the cross: This is my body given for you; this is my blood poured out for you.

We're going right from Genesis through Sinai, through Job, up to Jesus, up to the temple of the church, up to someone at Tuesday morning Mass at 6:30. It’s the biblical trajectory and it’s on exactly what you're talking about.

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Okay, okay. So a couple of thoughts associated with that. So the first thing I would say is work properly done, so that would be in the garden, unself-consciously motivated by covenant with the highest good—that becomes play.

Yeah, good! Right! But I even mean that technically. Like, yes, if you're—so imagine there is a form of work that allows you not to sacrifice the present to the future but to align it perfectly.

Okay? I think that's signaled by the emergence of the spirit of play. So the kingdom of God is the garden in which mankind can eternally play. And the play would be musical, so it would be—so you could conceptualize Heaven as an upward moving spiral where everything is as good as you could imagine it, but it's getting better and better.

It's getting still—right? Like a piece of music does when it unfolds. It's already perfect, but it’s still reaching higher and higher heights. That's the highest form of play—this spiral upwards!

Okay? We have an independent biological circuit for marking the presence of that spirit—that spirit of play. Okay?

So let me add one more thing to that. Go ahead.

Well, just to pull in the symbolism of the Mass, then we could say in parallel that sacrifice, properly undertaken—so that would be voluntary—is indistinguishable from celebration.

And then you might say, "Well, could you get to the point where you could celebrate the crucifixion?" And then, so let’s imagine that practically. So what that would mean is that you came to regard your mortal vulnerability as a blessing—not merely as something that you could hoist and bear, because there’s certainly that element—but more than that, beyond that, that you would take it on as a gift.

You know, I saw this triptych in Australia that really shocked me. The central panel showed Christ in front of the cross inviting—and I thought, "Oh my God.” You know, could you possibly have a more perverse invitation than the invitation to the cross?

And the answer to that is obviously no, because an invitation to the cross is an invitation to bear the voluntary suffering of life—but more than that even—to will the encounter with hell itself, right? So it's literally an invitation to fully confront the worst of all possible realities or potentialities.

But then you think, "Okay, let's be sensible about this. How the hell are you going to adapt to your life if you shy away from mortality and malevolence? There's no way you can have a full adaptation to life if you hide from that shadow."

And so then you might say, "Well, I can't confront it fully because it would tear me to pieces and destroy me." But I would say no! If you did that voluntarily in faith, it would destroy sin in you. It wouldn't destroy you!

Now if you were rife with sin, that might feel a lot like destruction, but—well, that's a different issue to some degree. Think of the—Jesus and the disciples singing before he goes out to the Garden of Gethsemane.

So we think of the Last Supper as simply this kind of gravely serious thing, which indeed it was, but singing before they go out—the all the themes of life coming from the cross. I think of that great mosaic in the apse of St. Cecilia in Rome, which is the cross at the center of it, but then flowering out from it are all these forms of life.

That's a basic, you know, Christian intuition. And yeah, even the— you know the invitation—that's the tree of life, isn't it?

Right? And to enter into that space spiritually of identifying with the crucified Lord—I loved yourself about play!

Because play is such a key idea—go right back to Aristotle. I mean those things that are sought for their own sake are always higher than those sought for the sake of something else.

And so the highest activities are forms of play. They’re good in themselves. I do them because they’re good to do. You and I are engaging in play right now, you know?

It’s a—something good in itself to be talking about ideas. And I’m not looking for something, right? I’m not looking for something beyond this. No!

I—I—oh, this will lead—no, no, I'm right in this moment, you know? Well, Romano Guardini and the leaders of the liturgical movement in early 20th century wanted to bring forward this idea of the Mass as play.

The Mass is the most useless thing that we can do, and I use that language a lot. It always draws people up short. But I say, look: the Mass, which is outside of time, it’s not meant to lead to anything else, right?

It’s not instrumental, right? And we're being drawn into precisely the dying and rising of Jesus. And so that’s why it’s the supreme form of play, and that’s why, you know, I put on fancy vestments and I incense, and I put—I light candles, and we move around in a kind of liturgical dance, etc.

Well, all of that is expressive of play! Yeah! Right! It’s a play! You know, we saw that very clearly—it was Chesterton who was a very playful figure.

But he saw that, you know, that kids love to dress up and they love to do... well there's the Mass! You know, we dress up in fancy garb and we carry candles around, and we sing and we dance!

And so, well, what’s the Mass but a reflection of the prayer that was in the Temple in Jerusalem which in turn they claim was meant to imitate the dance of David before the ark as he comes into Jerusalem? So it's this—it’s a playful dance that the Church does at the summit.

So we say the source and summit of the Christian life is the Eucharist. Well there’s your summum bonum! Right? It's the praise that aligns us to the summum bonum, and that’s a playful space to be in.

Okay, two things there. So we could say that the Mass is an attempt to dramatize the transformation of death and Hell into play, which—that’s a very difficult transformation to pull off—but you could see it as a kind of ultimate—you take the worst thing possible, and that isn’t just death, because hell is worse than death.

If you don’t understand that, you’re kind of a fool. And people might say, "Well, what’s your proof of that?" And I would say, "Well, most people who are traumatized are shattered. They’re shattered by an encounter with malevolence, not an encounter with tragedy."

Right? So something bad happened—it’s sort of like purposeless bad or worse intentional bad, right?

So there are levels that are worse than death. Okay? Now, you could take death and hell, you know, as sort of exemplars of the of what is most unbearable, and you could transform them.

Like the ultimate alchemical endeavor would be to transform those into play. That’s the same as finding the gold of most value, the pearl of a highest price that the worst possible dragon guards.

It’s the same thing.

Okay, so okay, so there’s that. Now you talked about concentration on the moment. Okay?

So this is how the Sermon on the Mount looks to me. Tell me what you think about this. We’re going to discuss this in our Gospel seminar that’s coming up in April.

Alright? So essentially what Christ does in the Sermon on the Mount is he says orient yourself so that you are acting out your covenant with God in all matters.

So that has to be first and foremost in your structure of attention. So that would be, I’m here to serve whatever is highest. And that would include my willingness to even transform what I conceptualize as the highest as I learn, but that's my goal.

So our goal in this conversation, let’s say, to the degree that we're doing that truly is that we’re doing nothing but trying to pursue the truth, and we're trying to do that in the spirit of whatever’s highest.

We want to foster life more abundant, let’s say. We want to rectify suffering to the degree that that’s possible, and we’re inquiring into how to do that.

Okay, so first of all, you set your aim, and the proper aim is the highest aim—always! Okay? Now once you do that—and that’s aligned with the desire to treat other people as you would like to be treated, right?

So that’s part of that iterative altruism—that's part of that structure of aiming highest. Okay? So then the next thing that Christ implies is that sufficient unto the day.

And so what that would mean is that if you aim properly at the highest, then you can now focus all your attention with faith and productivity on exactly what's happening right now. And if you do that with enough intensity, that will be sufficient.

But that's also—I'd say that’s also the revelation of the kingdom of God, because if you are aiming at what’s highest, and you are absolutely attending to the moment, then you’re walking with God in the eternal garden.

You lose all your self-consciousness, you're in that state of play that’s simultaneously transformative, right? And that’s going to suffuse you with a sense of sufficient and sustaining meaning.

And I think that’s—by the way, I think just—just this might be of some interest to you—I think we actually know how that all operates now at a neurophysiological level.

Like, I actually think that the neuroscience and these theological concepts have converged! And you know I've talked to a number of neuroscientists about this, not quite as explicitly as we're doing, but like it’s certainly the case that our primary positive emotions system, mediated by dopamine, let’s say—that’s a treasure-seeking system!

And it’s definitely the case that we feel the most positive emotion when we see progress towards the highest possible goal. Yeah, that’s literally how it works!

Yeah! There’s so much we can say about the Sermon, of course, and I agree with those instincts, Jordan, very much. I think if you know, it’s on a mountain; so there you’ve got Eden was a mountain because we know the rivers flow out from Sinai—is a mountain!

You know, Calvary is a mountain. Mount Tabor is a mountain! So it’s a sermon on the mount, and he’s a new Moses! Right? It’s where heaven and earth meet, and he’s the new Moses—the new lawgiver.

But what strikes me about it, as I read Aquinas on the sermon, is the four things he identified as the blocks to the flow of grace: Wealth, pleasure, power, honor—they're all taken on in the Beatitudes!

You know, so if wealth is your problem, how lucky you are! And the Greek there, makarios—is the word! And we say blessed or happy, but they say you could even translate it as lucky! How lucky you are if you're poor or poor in spirit, is in Matthew’s version.

You might say how lucky you are if you’re not addicted to wealth. So I mean wealth leads you down a path toward addiction, and when you follow that path, then you block the flow of grace.

If pleasure is your problem, well how lucky you are if you mourn! So it’s not a masochistic thing; it’s saying how happy you are if you’re not addicted to good feelings because sometimes, as you say, following the summum bonum means you will not have good feelings at all—just the contrary.

So how lucky you are if you’re not so addicted to that, that you block the flow of grace? Let’s say power is your hangup, well how blessed are the meek?

How blessed are those without any particular power? Well, read it as how lucky you are if you're not addicted to power, because power is extraordinarily—a powerful addiction!

So how lucky you are! And then honor, if honor is your hangup, well how lucky you are when people hate you, despite your name. Yeah, revile you.

Because, well, in other words, how lucky you are if you’re not addicted to honor because sometimes following the summum bonum means you’re not going to be honored!

Well then, once those four blocks, once those four blocks are out of the way, then the rest follow! How blessed are the pure of heart?

That means my heart's not divided—I'm not following this and that and what's my vulnerable today—it's this! No! I'm pure. I'm single-hearted, integrated, single-minded!

Right? Single-hearted! And that’s the old katharos, the saint—someone who wants one thing, who desires one thing, right? So the single-hearted—how blessed are the peacemakers? Because you’ll become a maker of peace the minute you get rid of these blocks, and grace flows through you!

You will become, instead of a servant of power, you’ll become actually a peacemaker. Why am I blanking on the other ones? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That’s the same thing.

What do you hunger and thirst for? Wealth, pleasure, honor or righteousness? I hunger for one thing: the one thing is to do the will of God, right?

So the Beatitudes set up the basic dynamic, and then the rest of the sermon, I think, reveals kind of what that life begins to look like.

So to love will the good of the other. Okay? What’s the ultimate test? Because if you're hooked on—you've gotten rid of your addictions at least to some degree, and you've found purity of heart, you're going to be attached to the summum bonum, whose name is love!

That's what God is! God is love! So now you have to live utterly aligned to love! What’s the ultimate test of that love? Your enemies!

Because the enemy is someone who's not going to will your good in return because the great temptation is I will be kind to you or just to you or whatever, that you will be kind and just to me, so then I’m just caught in the ego game, you know, in a more subtle form.

But if I love my enemy, then I’m proving I’m willing the good of the other as other, you know. So all the turn the other cheek and the go the extra mile and love your enemies, um, and then this will turn into, you know—life increasing in you 30, 60, and a hundredfold because you’re hooked onto the source of life.

You’re in what I’ve called the loop of grace. As you receive grace, you give it as a gift because grace only exists—that’s part of that upward spiral, yeah?

No, well, I think there’s a very important point! And I think it's a sign of hope in our situation today that people like yourself and many others, I think, are opening up these spiritual treasures.

And, you know, the Church has got to help us, you know, we—with the scandals and all that, people tend to look at the Church as corrupt, and then the Bible, "Oh yeah, the Bible's old; this old book."

And it’s bad science and all that—is that we—we ourselves stop teaching our tradition effectively. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but there are others today I think who are opening up this tradition and helping people see it.

And that is enormously important because I—it’s bothered me immensely that the rise of the new atheism and among young people, the dismissal of religion, which is a very dangerous proposition when you start bracketing these truths, and then you start living in a hyper-superficial way.

You live in the buffer space, you know, as Charles Taylor puts it—that's very dangerous ground to be honest. And that we need—that's the ground where a multiplicity of malevolent spirits can invade your heart and possess it unbeknownst to you.

And this strange concatenation of pride and hedonism that characterizes the modern world, it’s so interesting how those are so tightly allied—that is the of Babylon and the great beast of Revelation, right?

It's the same idea. The eternal threat to mankind is that the state will deteriorate and become multi-headed and that female sexuality and hedonism will deteriorate in parallel to that.

And that is, it’s not like, see, this is where Dawkins and the new atheists are naive—they believe that you could supplant superstition with rationality.

And first of all, all of what was being supplanted was not superstition—that’s the first thing! And the second thing is, well, re-rationality—serving what master? Well, we can serve our own master—it’s like, yeah, you can! Good luck, you’re serving Satan!

Well, that's how it works out. Yeah? No, right?

Well, I mentioned Bob Dylan earlier, but you do the Ignatian exercises. At a certain point, you come to this two standards meditation, and it's simply you’re meant to imagine two armies, you know, the army of Christ, the army of Satan.

And which one are you going to join? And it’s as simple as that! And you say, "Oh no, I don’t want to join either army." Then you're in Satan’s army!

“I don’t—I can’t decide yet.” You’re in Satan's army! “I’d like to join Christ’s army, but I’m not ready.” You're in Satan’s army!

And so Ignatius compels you to the Bob Dylan moment! You know! You’ve got to serve somebody here! Now, it’s going to be the devil or the Lord, meaning it's going to be the summum bonum or some simile.

There’s no other option; there's no third route. And right? And coming to that point for Ignatius, that's what the spiritual life is all about. Is to bring yourself to that point, make that decision, and then by God, live by it—live according to that decision!

That's an excellent place to stop, sir. And we should stop because we have to have our half an hour conversation for The Daily Wire.

For everyone watching and listening, you can continue to join us there, and we’re going to be able to continue our conversation at some length in April. Just so everyone watching and listening knows, we’re going to do a seminar on the Gospels for The Daily Wire, akin to the seminar we did on Exodus, and we’re going to have a chance to discuss this with great thinkers at length and to walk through all of this.

And it’s a very exciting time because it does appear that the underlying structure of the sorts of things that we’re discussing is starting to become clearer and clearer in front of us, right? That does present us with a starker choice—the choice that you described so—and that's at the base of this culture war as far as I can tell.

Very good talking to you, as it always is. Thank you very much for joining me today.

Thank you to all of you watching and listening and to The Daily Wire people for facilitating this. We’ll see you in a short couple of months. God bless you!