204. The 4 Horsemen of Meaning ｜ Bishop Barron, John Vervaeke, and Jonathan Pageau
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Bishop Robert Barron, John Verveke, and Jonathan Pajot have a roundtable to explore meaning. They discuss the Judeo-Christian narrative, reality, and symbolism, and explore the role of religion in our understanding of the world. This episode is brought to you by Elysium Health, a company that makes the benefits of aging research accessible to everyone. They work with leading institutions like Oxford and Yale and collaborate with the world s best scientists working with them, and 8 of them are Nobel Prize winners. Their products just might be the perfect gift that keeps on giving for the holidays! You ve heard me talk about Elysium, and their products, Basis for Cellular Aging, Matter for Brain Aging, and Formula for Immune Aging. That s a brain health supplement that slows the natural brain loss that occurs with age in important areas of the brain like the hippocampus, the brain s memory center. There s nothing more important than health and family, and Elysium's subscription service makes it easy to gift your products at checkout. Simply choose a subscription plan at checkout, and choose the best value. They have a monthly, semi-yearly, and yearly plan. That last one being the BEST value! These holidays, you can save big on Elysium health products with their special offer for JVP listeners! Go to ElysiumHealth.com/JBP10 and enter code JBP10 at checkout to save 10% off your entire order! And enter code: JBPODP10 to save $10 off your standard plan, and get 10% all year-round. Remember, and a freebie! JVP10! JVP is the best deal you can get for the holiday season! And remember, you re not just JVP! of the JBP Podcast Podcast! JBP is a JBP! Subscribe to JBP. . Subscribe, Like, Share, and subscribe to JVP. Subscribe & Retweet this episode on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a review on iTunes and other podcasting services! If you re looking for a chance to win a FREE gift from JBP, click here, you ll get 20% off JBP and other perks, too! and more JBP will be able to access all JBP products and more! You ll get access to the latest episodes of JBP goodies, plus a discount code and much more!
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
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Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.040
Welcome to the JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 61. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:01:00.060
This episode was recorded on September 10th, 2021.
00:01:03.920
Dad, Bishop Barron, John Verveke, and Jonathan Pajot have a roundtable to explore meaning.
00:01:09.640
All three guests have been on the podcast before.
00:01:12.260
They had an incredibly deep discussion, trying to get to the roots of meaning and religious significance.
00:01:17.220
Bishop Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and the Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
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He's one of the most followed Catholics on social media worldwide.
00:01:30.140
John Verveke is a colleague of Dad's and an associate psychology professor at the University of Toronto.
00:01:36.200
Jonathan Pajot is a symbolic thinker, YouTuber, and a class carver of Orthodox icons.
00:01:41.640
Dad and Jonathan have an ongoing dialogue about the Judeo-Christian narrative, reality, and symbolism.
00:01:53.180
I just listened to a talk Dad did, and let me tell you guys, he's on fire.
00:01:58.360
The talk was recorded, so hopefully if we get footage, we'll turn it into a podcast.
00:02:04.460
Remember, we have an episode coming out on Thursday as well.
00:02:07.620
This episode is brought to you by Elysium Health.
00:02:11.780
Elysium makes the benefits of aging research accessible to everyone.
00:02:16.120
They create innovative health products that enable customers to lead healthy lives for longer.
00:02:20.760
They work with leading institutions like Oxford and Yale and collaborate with many of the world's best researchers.
00:02:26.580
They have dozens of the world's best scientists working with them, and eight of them are Nobel Prize winners.
00:02:32.460
Their products just might be the perfect gift that keeps on giving for the holidays.
00:02:36.320
You've heard me talk about Elysium Health and their products, Basis for Cellular Aging, Matter for Brain Aging, and Format for Immune Aging.
00:02:45.580
Matter is a brain health supplement that slows the natural brain loss that occurs with age in important areas of the brain like the hippocampus, the brain's memory center.
00:02:54.820
A two-year clinical trial at the University of Oxford showed that matter can slow the loss in areas associated with memory and learning by an average of 86%.
00:03:04.400
There's nothing more important than health and family, and Elysium's subscription service makes it easy to gift their products.
00:03:14.080
They have a monthly, semi-yearly, and yearly plan.
00:03:20.260
These holidays, you can save big on Elysium Health supplements with their special offer for JVP listeners.
00:03:35.040
And enter code JBP10 at checkout to save 10% off Elysium Health prepaid plans as well as other Elysium Health supplements.
00:04:18.920
It's always been interesting to me, and to some of you, at least, according to the comments.
00:04:23.440
I thought it would be very interesting to get these three gentlemen together with me and talk about meaning.
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What religious meaning means more specifically.
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And we're hoping to have a free-flowing conversation to investigate that question from psychological, theological, and personal perspectives.
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And so I'm happy to have John Verveke, a professor at the University of Toronto.
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And Jonathan Paggio, who's an Orthodox Christian icon carver.
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And now, as well, a frequent YouTube commentator and public speaker.
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And these men, I found my conversations with them always stretched my mind and taught me new things and made me think.
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And so I thought we'd see what we could all do together.
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I'm going to ask you what you think meaning means.
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And then there's some implicit idea, I suppose, that meaning has different depths and that religious meaning is among the deepest of depths.
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Then we'll start talking as if it's a conversation.
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So there's a question, as you said quite correctly, that's at the center of a lot of my work and also, I guess, my own personal project.
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I take it when we're talking about meaning in this context, we're using meaning as a metaphor.
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We're talking about something similar to the way a sentence works.
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It has an intelligibility to it that connects us to the world in some important way so that we can interact with the world and so we can be informed by the world.
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And that what we're talking about when we're talking about meaning in the sense of meaning in life, not just the meaning of a sentence, the question to ask is what is that metaphor pointing to?
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So I've put forth the proposal that what that metaphor is pointing to is something that's fundamental to our cognitive agency.
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And, Jordan, this is something you and I have talked about before in other contexts, which is the problem of relevance realization, which is this deep, profound problem at the heart of cognitive science.
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You find at the heart of AI, many issues within cognitive psychology, categorization, communication, and this is of all of the information available to me, how do I zero in on the relevant information?
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Of all of the information available in my long-term memory and all the potential ways I could combine them, how do I connect and zero in on the relevant information?
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Out of all the possible courses of actions I can undertake, the way I could sequence various things together, how do I select the appropriate sequence of actions?
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And the thing that's mysterious and wonderful and perplexing and intriguing and I'm obsessed about is we're doing it all right now and we're doing it like this and it's not a cold calculation.
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You know, I'm standing out, I'm salient, there's an element of arousal, there's affect, you're caring about some information and you're backgrounding and ignoring other information.
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So it's this very affectively laden connectedness because the idea of relevance realization is it's not, relevance isn't in the head, it isn't in the world, it's in a proper real relation between the embodied brain and the world.
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This is what's known as embodied cognition, this is the kind of cognitive science I am involved in.
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So the idea is, this is a dynamical self-organizing process and you can feel it a little bit at work right now as I'm talking, part of your attention wants to drift away and think about other things, right?
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This is like variation and evolution, another part of your attention is focusing in and selecting and you're constantly varying and selecting and you're evolving in this dynamically coupled fashion, a salience landscape that makes you feel that you're here now in this particular state of consciousness in this situational awareness.
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So you're deeply fundamentally connected and that is deeply central to your cognitive agency.
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If you don't have that, you're not a cognitive agent.
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And this is, of course, one of the things that has the whole project of artificial intelligence has disclosed.
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We thought that intelligence was mostly about propositional manipulation, right, getting, you know, sort of coherence.
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And instead, no, this dynamical, embodied, evolving connectedness is very central to our cognitive agency, so much so that it stands to good reason that it is a core motivational feature and dimension of our whole agency.
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So I talk about meaning in life and I use a word and I use it deliberately, but I hope it's not offensively.
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I use the word religio to describe this connection, because that's one of the, that's the meaning of religio, to bind together.
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It's one of the purported etymological origins of the word religion, and that allows me to now segue into what I would want to say religious meaning is.
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So I think when we are, here's a metaphor, and I often use this, a lot of our, a lot of the time our mental framing is transparent to us, like my glasses, we're looking through it and by means of it.
00:10:14.800
But there are times when I need to step back and consider, this is what you do in mindfulness practices, I need to consider that mental framing.
00:10:21.940
And I might want to not only consider it, I might want to educate it, I might want to celebrate it.
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So normally, religio is transparent to us, and therefore it affords our agency.
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But there are things we do where we step back and we try to become more directly aware of religio in order to educate it, perhaps correct it, improve it, celebrate it.
00:10:46.460
And when we're doing that in a way that creates what I call a reciprocal opening, the opposite of what happens in addiction.
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Reciprocal opening is my agency is opening up, the world is opening up, and I'm experiencing this inexhaustible fount of emerging intelligibility that's not just conceptual, but is this, about this religio.
00:11:12.740
And so when we focus upon religio rather than focus through it, in order to accentuate it and accelerate it, so that we can come into the deepest mutual resonance between ourselves and the depths of reality, that for me is what religious meaning would be, the religio about the sacred.
00:11:38.520
Okay, so I'm going to comment on that, and I'll make my comments about this question, because I'm also a psychologist, and then we'll move to you guys, to Jonathan and to Bishop Aaron.
00:11:51.440
So, if you think, when you look at the world, there's a central point of focus, and that's mediated by your fovea, and that's at the back of your, that's on your retina in the center, essentially.
00:12:07.360
And you'll notice that when you zoom your eyes on something, that becomes very clear.
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It's a very small area that becomes very clear.
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And then you'll notice that around that area, it's less and less and less clear until it fades out into nothingness, and the nothingness you don't even perceive.
00:12:27.440
And so, it's high resolution in the center, lower, lower, lower, lower, way out here in the periphery, you actually don't even see color.
00:12:38.420
And you're better at detecting motion, because maybe you should look at moving things.
00:12:44.540
So, and that's sort of what, that's very much like what consciousness is.
00:12:48.520
And, and you're, and, and also it's associated with meaning, because you, you focus your fovea on what's most meaningful.
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And those foveal cells are tremendously connected into the visual cortex.
00:13:02.220
That, it takes a lot of brain to make those, that fovea work.
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And that's why it's such a small area, and we move it around, instead of just having a retina that's all fovea.
00:13:12.460
We'd have to have a brain like this big to manage that.
00:13:14.980
So, okay, so that's sort of like a metaphor for consciousness and meaning.
00:13:18.660
And then, I want to layer something on top of that metaphor.
00:13:22.020
So, and this is something like the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious,
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and also the relationship between narratives and consciousness and consciousness and unconsciousness.
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I'm looking at his eyes, because that's what you do when you converse with someone.
00:13:40.800
And I'm doing that because we're having a conversation.
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And so, I have this little frame of reference that helps me realize what's relevant right now.
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My goal is to have an interesting conversation.
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And I'm picking out the targets that I presume are relevant to that goal.
00:13:59.340
And then, but then you might ask yourself, well, why that goal?
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And then, so that story that's guiding me is nested in a larger story, which is, well, maybe I'm an educator and a communicator,
00:14:15.800
and I'd like to bring this knowledge to myself, but also to other people.
00:14:19.480
And then, outside of that is another story, which is, well, why am I doing that?
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And, well, it's because I think that it's an interesting thing to do, and it's a meaningful and useful thing to do,
00:14:30.880
but it'll help educate people, and maybe that'll make the world a slightly better place in some manner.
00:14:36.740
And then, outside of that, there's another presumption, which is, well, why would I bother trying to make the world a better place?
00:14:43.600
And maybe that's because, well, because not suffering is better than suffering,
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and because I think that that's a moral way to act, and I would like to act in a moral manner.
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And then, outside of that, there's yet another story, which is, well, and that's where you start to shade into the religious.
00:14:59.480
It's like, who exactly am I imitating when I enact that morality?
00:15:04.700
And I think that's where we can have a particularly interesting discussion,
00:15:08.920
because I would say, psychologically, that implicit figure at the outer edge of the narrative structuring
00:15:16.920
of my consciousness and meaning realization, that would be something that's psychologically equivalent to the hero of heroes.
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In some sense, that would be culture-free, but in our culture, in the Judeo-Christian culture, that figure is Christ.
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And so, then there's a, then there's a, this is independent of religious belief, as far as I'm concerned.
00:15:42.280
Now, there's an interesting relationship with formal religious belief, but I think this is the way it works psychologically.
00:15:49.240
And I got some of this from studying neuroscience, the same sorts of things John is studying,
00:15:54.020
but some of it from studying Jung, and, you know, Jung proposed that, at the very least, speaking psychologically,
00:16:04.900
And what he meant by that is that Christ is the symbolic realization of our culture's determination of the embodiment of the ideal.
00:16:16.520
It's the thing we imitate, or we fight against.
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And then the question becomes, for me, okay, that's a psychological truth,
00:16:26.960
but it can also be a metaphysical claim, and an ontological claim,
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and that's where this starts to shade into the religious per se.
00:16:47.340
And Jonathan and John, to meet you for the first time, at least virtually.
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I've met Jordan twice now, virtually, but good to be with all of you.
00:16:57.140
Because all I can think of, as you both were talking about Lonergan,
00:17:00.380
I'll get maybe back to him, but one of my favorite philosophers,
00:17:03.200
the Canadian Jesuit Lonergan, came to my mind a lot.
00:17:05.800
But to answer the opening question, I guess I would say meaning is to be in a purposive relationship to a value.
00:17:14.420
So, I think certain values appear, epistemic values of the true, moral values, and aesthetic values.
00:17:22.240
So, the true, the good, and the beautiful, right?
00:17:28.360
And I really like what you were saying, too, both of you, about attention.
00:17:35.200
Why, like, you know, William James says, the mind is like a bird that flies, and it perches for a time,
00:17:47.320
And a meaningful life is one that's lived in a purposive relationship to values.
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Is a life lived in purposive relationship to the supreme value, the sumum bonum,
00:18:02.500
to the source of goodness, truth, and beauty, which is God.
00:18:07.000
And you know what came to my mind as you were talking, Jordan, was two things from Aquinas.
00:18:12.080
One is probably the most misunderstood and overlooked of his famous five arguments is the fourth argument.
00:18:27.340
And what he says is we experience things in the world as more or less true, good, and beautiful.
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So just what I was saying, we notice values, and we also notice them ordered hierarchically.
00:18:43.180
Then Thomas says we only can make that calculation in implicit relationship to something we consider highest in goodness, truth, and beauty.
00:18:53.440
And the way it's misunderstood is people think, oh, I guess, well, there's a tall building.
00:19:02.300
But he's not talking about something as trivial as that.
00:19:04.280
He's talking about the properties of being, the good, the true, and the beautiful.
00:19:11.080
So therefore, it's true that we make those calculations, we see those hierarchies, only finally in relationship to an unconditioned.
00:19:20.640
I can use the more modern kind of Kantian language.
00:19:23.820
Some unconditioned form of goodness, truth, and beauty.
00:19:27.300
That's religious meaning, it seems to me, is to be in purposive relationship to that.
00:19:33.220
The other thing from Aquinas, and I think, Jordan, you and I talked about it last time we were together.
00:19:37.120
I love what you did there because that's an implicit argument for God.
00:19:43.040
From final causality, every time I make an act of the will, I'm seeking a good.
00:19:51.320
But as you say quite correctly, and that's just like Aquinas, that value nests in a higher value, which nests in a still higher value.
00:20:03.200
So I've got to come finally to some summum bonum, some supreme value that's motivating me.
00:20:10.220
That's religious meaning, it seems to me, is now to be in relationship to this most alluring horizon of all desire.
00:20:19.840
Now there's Lonergan again, my Canadian reference.
00:20:24.580
To be in relation to God, Lonergan said, is to want to know everything about everything.
00:20:28.840
So that's the value, the epistemic value of the truth, but now in its unconditioned form.
00:20:36.120
We call that in religious language the beatific vision.
00:20:41.380
So I'm talking to the three of you now, which I think is a good.
00:20:44.700
But it's nesting, as you say, in a higher good.
00:20:49.120
And so finally, I want not just this particular good.
00:20:57.720
So I guess that's how I'd approach it, maybe piggybacking a bit on what you both said.
00:21:05.540
I think, I mean, it's interesting because, by the way, thank you for making me last in this stacking up on everything that everybody said.
00:21:14.480
But I think that what's interesting in what John said in terms of relevance realization and in terms of this hierarchy of values that both Jordan and Bishop Barron brought up,
00:21:25.820
the thing that I might add, at least in my perception, is that, first of all, this pattern recognition that we engage with and this hierarchy of values and just hierarchies in general,
00:21:38.480
they really are teleological in the way that Bishop Barron said.
00:21:42.020
That is, that the reason why we perceive hierarchy is because we're always judging or perceiving or trying to evaluate whether something is good.
00:21:50.880
But the other thing that this does in terms of, so it binds reality together, right?
00:21:55.320
So you're looking at something and you want to evaluate the apple and this desire makes you see the pattern of the apple because you have to engage with it.
00:22:05.080
So because you have to eat the apple, that's why you see it and that's why you can perceive it and that's why you're evaluating it.
00:22:11.940
But this pattern, let's say, of binding, of religio that John mentioned, it stacks up.
00:22:18.320
So until now, we've actually talked mostly about individual relationship, this individual relationship with the field of being that presents itself to us,
00:22:27.500
the individual relationship with the ultimate good.
00:22:31.040
But it also does something else, is that it stacks up people together.
00:22:37.380
And that's in terms of meaning of religio in a broader sense, that can also kind of help you understand religious practice, why we get together, why we sing together, why we celebrate, as John mentioned, why do we celebrate together?
00:22:53.160
Because when you see the apple and you see a good apple, you're implicitly celebrating it.
00:23:01.020
Every act of recognition of a good is going to be a mini celebration.
00:23:06.000
But that stacks up together in terms of people gathering and singing and processing and doing all the things we do in order to celebrate the highest good.
00:23:16.560
And let me just intersperse something there from a psychological perspective.
00:23:27.100
So there's a technical reason for that in some sense.
00:23:30.800
So let's say you specify a goal and that goal is nested inside the value hierarchy that we've already described.
00:23:39.180
If you see something that leads you down the pathway to that value, that produces positive emotion, technically speaking.
00:23:49.600
And so there's psychological, there's a fundamental neuroscientific reality underneath the idea that to perceive something good in relationship to a higher good is a celebration.
00:24:00.220
And that is, it is definitely that, that imbues our life with a sense of positive meaning.
00:24:06.860
And I mean that directly, like meaning is derived from this nested hierarchy.
00:24:11.280
And then the perception of, of valued, what would you, the perceptions of values that lead us down that pathway.
00:24:21.700
Without that, there is no positive emotion in my, in my understanding of it.
00:24:27.480
And so the last thing I might want to say is that, so in the same way that the world reveals itself to us as this hierarchy of the good,
00:24:34.760
in the same way that, that we see that we, it also reveals to reveal itself to us cosmically.
00:24:43.060
And that's why there are these, that's why there are temples.
00:24:46.960
That's why there are, there's the law of Moses that was received on the top of the mountain,
00:24:51.320
that there is a cosmic revelation of the same pattern that you encounter as an individual,
00:24:58.740
And so that is what ends up creating these revelations of, you know, of being into the world
00:25:04.580
and binding us together as a, as a body instead of just these disparate individuals.
00:25:10.200
And as Jordan said, it's very appropriate to discuss, you know, what are these revelations and what do they look like?
00:25:19.200
And, and of these revelations, which is the one that binds the most reality together into itself.
00:25:25.360
And I think that that is when the, the image of Christ as being God, man, as going all the way down into death,
00:25:32.980
as reaching to the highest summit, as, as, you know, we, we, we could, I don't want to go into his story too much,
00:25:38.520
but Jordan, you know, that there's a, most of Christ's story seems to go to the limit of storytelling
00:25:44.620
in all the aspects in which he goes, right? It's like Christ doesn't just go down into the underworld
00:25:48.960
and resurrect. When he comes back up, the underworld is empty and death is defeated.
00:25:53.180
And that's the end. And so it's like that for almost every aspect of Christ's story,
00:25:57.780
where he reaches the limit of storytelling. And so in that way, it's, it's a, it's, it is ends up just
00:26:04.260
being the fact that we recognize it, that we've brought it together, that we've celebrated it means
00:26:09.760
that it is part of this kind of cosmic revelation. And it's something that we can look at objectively
00:26:15.860
and talk about and discuss, but it's definitely there in our story as a, as Europeans, as, you know,
00:26:21.520
as Westerners and, and we've discounted it completely, but I think we're at a point now
00:26:26.040
with this meaning crisis where we can go back and reevaluate it and understand it as this,
00:26:32.940
the possibility of these relevance realization pattern stacking up beyond the individual, let's say.
00:26:39.760
Okay. So, so I want to comment on that revelation idea. I'm going to go a little
00:26:43.600
sideways here. And so you might say that the standard view of the world now is that there's
00:26:50.920
an objective reality that's devoid, that's made out of faint material things. That's the most
00:26:56.560
appropriate way to conceptualize it. It's made out of objective things. They exist independently of
00:27:03.640
consciousness. Um, and we project a value structure onto them. And we, and when we die, let's say,
00:27:14.020
when there is no human consciousness, that value structure is, there's no value structure like that
00:27:18.740
there. And so it's epiphenomenal and evanescent. It's not a fundamental part of objective reality
00:27:25.740
outside of subjectivity. So now there's a couple of problems with that viewpoint. I would say,
00:27:33.020
first of all, it isn't obvious to me that we see objects, we see patterns. It's not obvious that we
00:27:39.400
see it's, it, I, you can make a strong case. Um, and this was made by man who wrote, uh, uh, ecological
00:27:48.560
approach to visual perception that what we perceive first and foremost, aren't objects.
00:27:52.780
We perceive meaning. We perceive a falling off place. If we get too near a cliff and even a six
00:28:00.500
month old will perceive that children, infants, very, very young perceive beauty. They perceive
00:28:07.520
symmetry, they perceive value. And so we don't perceive the object and obviously project the
00:28:13.420
meaning. You can't say that that's the way the neuroscience of perception has laid out the world.
00:28:20.920
And then the last thing is, is that the problem with the idea that we merely project meaning onto a
00:28:28.480
meaningless objective world is that meaning is disclosed to us in ways that we can't predict
00:28:35.060
and that are outside of our, our, our, what would outside of it, that the new knowledge that we don't
00:28:45.740
have can be revealed to us through the perception of value. It's not, it's not obvious how we can
00:28:51.200
project that and then also have something new revealed at the same time. So meaning is disclosed
00:28:56.300
to us. Um, and the phenomenologists, phenomenological psychologists made much of this in the
00:29:02.060
like first third of the 20th century, uh, following Heidegger. So, so anyways, I'm going to leave it at
00:29:09.860
that. Can I just jump in? I go back here to Dietrich von Hildebrand's famous distinction
00:29:14.180
between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable. And I mean, he certainly
00:29:20.580
understood the play between the subjective and the objective and all the classical philosophers knew
00:29:25.020
that. Aquinas certainly knew it. I mean, if the, the mind and the intelligible form light up each
00:29:31.300
other, he said, I mean, each, each one illumines the other. So I don't think the pre-modern people had
00:29:36.740
the sense of, you know, sharp demarcation of, of the two. Nevertheless, there's a distinction. I
00:29:41.580
think Jordan, you're hitting at it there. We, we feel the distinction between the merely subjectively
00:29:46.760
satisfying and the objectively valuable. The objectively valuable addresses me. It, it rearranges
00:29:54.840
me. It's not something that I've, I've configured or I've projected it. It, it's turned me upside
00:30:01.660
down. I think we've all had that experience. There was an article in Rolling Stone years ago,
00:30:06.580
and it asked a number of the famous rock and rollers, what was the first song that rocked your
00:30:13.020
world? And I remember liking the formulation of that question because it didn't say, what's the
00:30:17.660
first song you liked? It was the first song that changed you, that rearranged your consciousness.
00:30:24.220
And I can, I can name that very clearly. My own case was Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. It wasn't
00:30:29.080
the first song I liked, but it was the first song that rocked my world and rearranged me. And I think
00:30:35.280
that's what real value is like. Now bring it to the religious level. Now we're in a biblical kind
00:30:41.780
of framework where, you know, uh, it's not you who've chosen me. It's I who've chosen you. And
00:30:47.060
now when the sumum bonum isn't just dumbly out there waiting for us to rise up through some
00:30:53.200
contemplative exercise, because I mean, the sumum bonum, Plato and Plotinus and Kant could all say,
00:30:58.200
yeah, there's a sumum bonum. But when it really gets interesting to me is when the sumum bonum is
00:31:02.780
after me, the sumum bonum is, is trying to find me and is breaking into my reluctant and
00:31:10.140
recalcitrant consciousness. And now you're talking about religious revelation, but it has to do with
00:31:15.700
that, that, I don't know, stunning objectivity, the good. Think of like Iris Murdoch there. She was so
00:31:22.300
strong on that theme that the good confronts us and it changes us and it doesn't let us go. And,
00:31:28.380
um, religious revelation is the sort of ultimate expression of that, it seems to me.
00:31:36.120
I, I, I, I, I may, I, this is something with which I'm in significant agreement, but I think it's
00:31:44.340
also important to wonder, uh, together why this has become so problematic. Uh, I think we're in a
00:31:51.820
crisis. So, um, and I think we should remember, you know, the factor, I mean, so Bishop, you invoked
00:32:00.440
Aristotle's conformity theory. Uh, uh, and of course that was replaced by a representational
00:32:07.140
theory of knowledge, a propositional representational theory for various reasons.
00:32:11.340
One was trying to account for the Copernican revolution, et cetera. We had nominalism that said
00:32:16.180
those patterns aren't out in the world. And that's why I keep saying Jonathan is more radical than he
00:32:19.980
sometimes realizes because he's challenging a fundamental, uh, nominalism in his work.
00:32:24.680
Yeah. Um, and Kant is the, is the culmination of that. The real patterns are only in your mind and
00:32:30.880
we, we have no access to the world and there's reasons why we got there. And, and, and then of
00:32:36.620
course there are, you know, related issues around ideas of levels of being, uh, which is, uh, you know,
00:32:44.140
I think you're right. All of you have said this and I, and this is, you know, central to the
00:32:50.520
phenomenology of intelligibility, but it seems to be, you know, contradicted, uh, by something that,
00:32:57.240
you know, starts with Scott us and goes through Ockham and goes into the heart of the scientific
00:33:00.380
revolution is there's no such thing as levels. This is not a reality just is, you know, existence isn't a
00:33:08.480
predicate and those kinds of things. Now I'm not, I'm not mentioning these things to espouse them.
00:33:14.080
I'm mentioning them to try and indicate there have been very profound philosophical, historical
00:33:19.960
developments that have challenged this, uh, uh, phenomenology. Um, and that part of the task,
00:33:28.380
um, well, sorry, I don't want to be presumptuous. Part of what I see my task of being is to try and
00:33:34.160
take the very best of science and answer all of those challenges in a way that restores confidence
00:33:40.000
in the hierarchies of intelligibility and the phenomenology of connectedness. Now that's one
00:33:45.340
thing I'd want to say. The second thing. Now, why are you doing that? Why, why are you called to do
00:33:50.420
that, John? Well, I'm called to do that because, um, well, this is how, uh, uh, I, I put it to my
00:33:58.360
students who take my introduction into cognitive science. We have a scientific worldview
00:34:03.280
in which science and the scientists and their meaning making have no proper ontological place.
00:34:11.560
We are the whole science and, and we are the black hole within this worldview that dominates
00:34:18.460
this. And let's, let's be very clear. And this is Hediger's point. Domination is not just ID,
00:34:23.640
ideational or even ideological. It is woven into the fabric of our technology, the ways we communicate,
00:34:30.380
uh, it's, it's woven into our cognitive grammar. We talk about like, even the way that we divide
00:34:35.700
subjective and objective, one of Gibson's points, right? Jordan, you mentioned Gibson is the notion
00:34:41.860
of an affordance and an affordance is not properly objective or subjective. The graspability of this
00:34:47.500
cup is not a feature of the cup. It's not a subjective feature of me. It's a real relation between me.
00:34:52.940
And so, I mean, Gibson, again, Gibson's work is really profound. This is why it gets taken up
00:34:59.300
into 40 cognitive science. He's trying to, he's trying to challenge this grammar and there's a
00:35:03.780
whole bunch of us. I don't want to, I'm in no way a singular, um, individual, although I might be a
00:35:10.600
bizarre one, but, uh, I mean, I represent a lot of people who are feeling called to the fact that
00:35:16.700
this, this lack of ontological placement and the fact how, and it, how the way it ramifies through,
00:35:24.120
you know, our ontological technological structure and our cultural cognitive grammar, the, the very
00:35:29.680
ways we think is causing, causing massive suffering. Um, so I, I, I, I'm still, I'm clear about that a bit.
00:35:39.140
I'm still unclear about exactly what you mean. What is this black hole? This is, I mean, is this the
00:35:43.620
insistence on the absolute distinction between the subjective and the objective? Like what is this
00:35:48.960
black? Okay. So I, what is it? Well, what I meant, I mean, it's related to that, but what I was, what I
00:35:53.220
was directly referring to at the black hole is that science, the science exists. Okay. If it is, what
00:36:00.540
kind of entity is it? And tell me using physics or chemistry or even biology, use just though that
00:36:08.520
ontology and those methodology, tell me what science is and tell me how it has the status to make the
00:36:15.180
claims it does. And tell me how science is related to meaning and truth and how do meaning and truth
00:36:21.220
fit into the scientific worldview. They're presupposed by that worldview, but they have no proper place
00:36:27.120
within it. That's what I mean. So whenever we're doing the science and saying this, this is what the
00:36:32.980
world is, we are absenting ourselves from it. We have no home in which we are properly situated.
00:36:42.100
And I think that ramifies through everything we think, say, and do to, to each other and with each
00:36:48.660
other in a profoundly corrosive way. That's what I mean by the meaning. Okay. What's the profoundly
00:36:53.400
It's caused enormous suffering. It causes enormous suffering. So, I mean, like I was talking to
00:36:58.800
somebody just the other day in Australia and there are more deaths by suicide in Australia right now
00:37:05.280
than COVID. And Australia is one of the epitomes of, you know, the best countries in the world,
00:37:12.120
affluent, liberal democracy, not much conflict, been at peace for a long time, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the
00:37:19.360
things that the enlightenment said would bring in unending happiness. And what you have is spiking in
00:37:26.480
suicide. You have the loneliness epidemic. You have the addiction epidemic. You have people
00:37:31.520
choosing to live in a virtual world rather than the real world. You have all of these things that
00:37:38.360
are pointing to the fact that there's a significant stressor. You have positive responses too. You have the
00:37:43.880
mindfulness revolution. You have the resuscitation of ancient, you know, wisdom philosophies like
00:37:49.460
stoicism. You have, you know, you have the work of people like right here. I mean, one of the things,
00:37:56.520
and I hope Jonathan takes this as a compliment because he knows how highly I think of him. I think
00:38:01.240
one of the things that Jonathan is doing with his work is responding to this suffering and the
00:38:06.100
meaning crisis. We were drawn to each other because we both saw the zombie as a mythological
00:38:12.600
representation. The culture was saying to itself, we're suffering a meaning crisis. I'm talking too much.
00:38:17.520
I'm going to stop. Jordan, if we go back to the image that you used, which is the idea that we
00:38:23.120
project meaning on an objective world, already you can see the alienation that is bound up in that
00:38:29.600
very proposition, which is, okay, so where are we then? We're not in the world. We're like these,
00:38:35.000
these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality. Like, and where does that come from? Like,
00:38:39.640
where does that floating intelligence come from that's able to separate itself so completely from the
00:38:44.860
world that, that it's able to just analyze it objectively and then project, and then realize
00:38:50.200
that, realize that it's projecting subjective meaning on top of it. And so when, once I think
00:38:56.060
that some of the work that John's been doing and some of the work that you've been doing is to realize
00:38:59.280
this embodied reality is that we are in the world and we are part and parcel of the manner in which
00:39:05.780
meaning even the world itself discloses itself. We, people who think they can imagine the world
00:39:11.900
outside of human consciousness, like, where are they? Where are these signs, where are they standing
00:39:16.620
that they can tell us that we are projecting meaning onto the world? Are they like gods, you know, up in,
00:39:22.480
up in, up in the world? They would, they would never say that. They've taken themselves out of the
00:39:26.600
equation. And so coming back into reality and understanding this image of communion, for example,
00:39:33.740
like a lot of the images that John is saying is really this image of communions, that meaning is
00:39:38.280
relational, that it's communal, that it's all these things that can help us even understand once again
00:39:43.200
what the religious patterns are for, is to just hold, it's actually holding reality together. And
00:39:48.980
once we've, once we've broken that, then we get this increasing alienation, we get the increasing
00:39:54.900
fragmentation, you know, the suburbs as just a spread of people that don't know each other,
00:39:59.300
they don't have common projects that have nothing in common except that they're living in,
00:40:03.660
in a, in a, in just this equal space. And so this kind of reducing of hierarchy in the world that
00:40:10.040
they, that the scientists wanted to happen, it's happened now to us and everything's breaking apart
00:40:16.480
and nobody can hear each other. And, and it's a, it's a direct consequence of that thinking.
00:40:22.300
Yeah. There's a lot that's just stimulating my thinking here. And one is, I mean, God, I love the
00:40:27.360
sciences, but I hate scientism and scientism is all over the place in our culture. I deal with it
00:40:33.480
all the time in my evangelical work, hearing from not just younger people, from everybody in our
00:40:38.080
culture that science is the criterion. You know, I saw a video, Jonathan, you and Jordan were talking
00:40:45.300
to Brett Weinstein and it was about, I don't know, maybe it's something along these lines, but he made
00:40:50.720
very articulately, intelligently, but made the argument that the sciences, the physical sciences
00:40:56.080
belong in the supreme position vis-a-vis all forms of human knowing. And I'm shouting at the screen,
00:41:02.260
no, no, that's exactly where they don't belong. And that's a form of scientism. The medievals call
00:41:09.720
theology like the queen of the sciences. Well, at least you're, that's more appropriate. You're
00:41:14.260
talking about God and the sumum bonum having some kind of supremacy. I also go right back to the
00:41:20.740
classical world. The sciences from a Platonic standpoint, they're terrific, but you're just
00:41:27.340
getting ever more precise accounts of the cave, right? Of the images, the fleeting, even as an
00:41:34.700
images of the world to rise to higher forms of consciousness by way of mathematics, first of all,
00:41:40.880
then, then to the higher forms of philosophy and metaphysics. Aristotle, you know, moving from physics
00:41:46.480
to mathematics to metaphysics. It's not to denigrate for a second the sciences. Aristotle is the founder,
00:41:53.680
many ways of physics. But it is to say there's a hierarchy again. There's an epistemic hierarchy,
00:41:59.540
and science, physical science, does not belong at the top of it. When it does, something goes really
00:42:05.800
wrong with the human spirit, and there's a starvation of the spirit.
00:42:11.360
Well, and it's hard to know how to take that seriously. Like, let's say that's a fact. There's a
00:42:18.780
starvation of the human spirit. That's a fact. Well, is it a fact like a fact that emerges from
00:42:24.740
physics? Well, not exactly. It's a different kind of fact. But what happens if we ignore it? Well,
00:42:30.740
people suffer and die. And we don't use the fact that in the absence of a proposition,
00:42:39.000
people suffer and die as an index of its truth. Not from the scientific perspective,
00:42:44.360
that that isn't the methodology of science. But that leaves us with this problem of meaning.
00:42:52.160
It's sort of delivered to us. And it isn't something, it isn't obvious to me that science
00:42:57.140
can address it at all. I mean, Sam Harris and other thinkers like Harris have tried to put the value
00:43:01.760
up to bring the domain of value within the domain of science. I think it's an effort that's doomed to
00:43:09.340
failure, because I don't think they're of the same type. I think that science by its very nature,
00:43:14.120
excludes, it does everything it can to exclude value, except, John, it leaves us with the problem
00:43:20.640
you described, which is the problem that Jung addressed when he was tying the development of
00:43:25.220
empirical science back to alchemy, because, and this goes back to the idea of the hierarchies that
00:43:29.520
we started out with. You know, Jung believed that he was really curious about why people ever became
00:43:39.080
motivated to take things apart, like scientists did, to concentrate on the minute, like that, what
00:43:44.040
dream drove them, what fantasies drove them. And for Jung, it was, he found that fantasy in the
00:43:51.260
thousands of years of work on alchemy. And the alchemical notion was, there exists a substance,
00:43:58.320
which eventually became a material substance, whose discovery would grant upon its bearer,
00:44:03.780
immortality, perfect health, and endless wealth. So the idea, the dream was that
00:44:09.260
substance could be found in the material world. And that was a deep, deep unconscious fantasy
00:44:16.520
manifested in all sorts of images, all sorts of bizarre images that Jung had the genius to be able
00:44:21.620
to analyze and understand. He saw that as the dream that preceded the development of science in
00:44:27.660
Western culture. It took thousands and thousands of years to unfold this dream. And scientists were
00:44:34.760
encapsulated within that dream, whether they knew it or not. And so the prime example would be Newton,
00:44:40.240
who wrote much more on alchemy than he did on physics. And so, John, as scientists, at least from
00:44:48.180
the Jungian perspective, let's say, were necessarily motivated by a narrative that we don't understand
00:44:55.420
scientifically to engage in the scientific process per se. And we're so deeply possessed by that, that
00:45:01.700
it guides and moves our perceptions without us as scientists even necessarily having to be aware that
00:45:08.720
we're participating in that narrative. So, to your point, the whole enterprise is driven by a dream
00:45:14.800
whose reality can't be encapsulated within the process itself. It's a very strange thing.
00:45:24.120
I think it's very interesting, that dream and sort of the undercurrents of development. So, substance
00:45:31.000
goes back to hypostasis. But of course, there's another history of hypostasis, which is into the
00:45:35.840
persons of the Trinity, which is a very different history. And so, there's no necessity that you go from
00:45:42.900
hypostasis, the grounding of intelligibility, to materiality. And of course, what happened, right, was also the
00:45:49.920
conversion of matter as pure potential to that which resists. And I think that's part of, again, about
00:45:57.520
how a history of how, you know, the reason was supplanted by will as the dominant faculty by which
00:46:06.960
humans understood and identified themselves. I would like to say that that's bound up with a couple
00:46:15.380
other strands. I'm not trying to do, and I wish I could do exhaustive history here, but I took 50
00:46:21.320
hours to do it. So, I'm not going to try and do it now. But, you know, you also have, like people
00:46:26.780
like Harris and others, you have a deductivism model, right, which is, whatever I can deduce from
00:46:33.140
the science is real. But in the Neoplatonic tradition, you also look at what is presupposed
00:46:38.340
by your sciences. And that is also a proper location for the real. So, I have to presuppose,
00:46:45.680
right, the intelligibility of the world in order to do science. I can't use science to establish
00:46:51.780
intelligibility. And then, if I'm realistic about my science, which I better be, because that's what
00:46:57.640
scientists seem to be doing, I have to be realistic about this intelligibility. But that's in
00:47:02.420
the contradiction to the anomalous presuppositions, the flat ontology. Notice the contradiction. Notice
00:47:09.220
the contradiction in reductionism. So, you have this whole tradition that says there are no levels
00:47:13.100
of being, get rid of all that platonic stuff. But the bottom level is the really real level,
00:47:18.320
and all the levels above it are false. That is exactly symmetrical to the upper level is most real,
00:47:24.260
and everything coming down from it is derivative. There's no deep difference, this is part of the
00:47:30.660
point I've made. Between an emergentist ontology, it is hierarchical, it has levels, and an emanationist,
00:47:37.900
it is hierarchical and have levels. And so, do you think dark and selfish gene is an example of that?
00:47:44.380
I think the idea that you can explain things in a purely bottom-up fashion, this is part of the
00:47:51.060
alchemical revolution. It was like, and I think, and I agree with Jung on this, and maybe my interpretation
00:47:56.660
is slightly different, but, you know, there was a predominance of, you know, emanation,
00:48:02.720
an emanationist ontology coming out of the neoplatonic tradition, and we needed to rediscover,
00:48:07.880
we needed... Okay, so let me address that for a second, drag the Christians in here,
00:48:12.820
because one of the... That's a bad sentence. ...one of the claims that...
00:48:16.900
One of the claims... Yeah, I know. One of the claims that Jung made in his works on alchemy,
00:48:23.280
which are very, very difficult to understand, was that, look, the Christian revolution took place
00:48:29.000
and spread across, well, across what became the Christian cultures and the West, broadly speaking,
00:48:35.840
and there was an offer of salvation, right, of deliverance from suffering,
00:48:42.960
and then... And the hope that Christ would return in the kingdom of heaven would be established
00:48:49.400
on earth, or something to that end, and then thousands of years went by, and the disquiet grew
00:48:55.780
as that wasn't revealed, and the unconscious imagination looking to find a source of new knowledge
00:49:05.440
that could redress that suffering and lack started to focus on this emergent,
00:49:11.100
this opposite emergent ontology that you described, said we haven't paid sufficient attention
00:49:18.100
to the reality of the material world. Maybe that's what holds the key to the alleviation
00:49:23.280
of our suffering. And so then there's a pull away from the top-down, this top-down hierarchical
00:49:29.480
structure that Christianity had imposed, in some sense, or revealed, to the opposite,
00:49:35.080
and now it's swung way in the other direction. And so...
00:49:40.080
Could I just say one thing in the defense of the Neoplatonists, which is, you know, if you read
00:49:46.180
Eregena and Cusa, you get to, you get to, and Eregena's clear on this, you get a dialectical,
00:49:55.540
in the Platonic sense, not the Hegelian sense, in which the emanation and the emergence completely
00:50:00.520
interpenetrate. They're both needed, and they interpenetrate each other. And I would argue
00:50:05.260
that what's happening now is people are moving, especially in the philosophy of biology, towards
00:50:11.100
we need bottom-up and top-down. You know, Jordan, this is rife through all of cognitive psychology,
00:50:16.060
bottom-up, top-down thinking, right? And that's not just specific to the mind. I think it's now
00:50:21.580
spreading out as, no, no, this is how we should start to think about it. But I think a more proper
00:50:26.380
reading, especially of the later Neoplatonists, points to that heritage within Neoplatonism
00:50:30.860
itself. So it doesn't have to be something necessarily foreign to Christianity, I would
00:50:35.960
No, St. Maximus is clearly a bottom-up and top-down at the same time. In St. Maximus's
00:50:40.960
cosmology, you have the notion that, you know, these revelations are both a communion of love
00:50:46.560
and also a revelation from above, and that there's absolutely no contradiction between the elements
00:50:52.380
coming together and coagulating in this relationship of love and it expressing this divine principle
00:51:00.340
or this higher principle, which is coming down from above. And in terms of Jung's theory, I mean,
00:51:06.200
I don't want to be picky about it, that he kind of imagined this story. You know, alchemy came very
00:51:11.920
much from Islam, by the way. A lot of its development was in the Islamic world. Even the word
00:51:17.340
alchemy is not a Western word. And so I find it a little too simplified to just say Christians
00:51:25.120
were waiting for Jesus and then they created this bottom-up science. There's a deeper kind
00:51:29.200
of transformation which happened in the West related to nominalism and to a kind of slow
00:51:33.860
progression towards this separation of heaven and earth. We could call it like this kind of ripping
00:51:38.720
apart of the two sides, which kind of led both to materialism and to all these esoteric
00:51:45.580
things that were going on at the same time, right? It's not true that materialism was on its own,
00:51:50.080
but there are all these kind of esoteric developments that were manifesting themselves.
00:51:54.660
We have to remember that Descartes spent his whole life trying to become a Rosicrucian. Like these two
00:51:58.660
things were, it's like a ripping apart of reality that leads into the new age, into all this kind of
00:52:03.880
neo-spirituality. And Christianity's true message is rather the incarnational one. It's the one that John
00:52:09.440
said, it really is this binding of multiplicity and unity, the binding of the emanation of part and
00:52:17.040
this kind of emergent part together. And so, Bishop, sorry, I interrupted you.
00:52:22.680
No, it's very stimulating stuff. And I would add, you know, the structuring element in the Summa of
00:52:28.320
Aquinas is the so-called exitus raditus, right? All things coming out from God, then all things returning
00:52:34.580
to God. And so, God makes a world that's good, indeed very good, but not perfect. And part of the drama
00:52:41.180
of salvation, which is, in the Bible, always cosmic, not just human, not just personal. The drama of
00:52:48.120
salvation is this wonderful process of raditus, the return of all things to God, the coming together from
00:52:54.160
below, if you want, but under the, you know, the alluring power of God's love. So, that's just one
00:53:00.220
observation. A second one about the sciences. I mean, I agree with, there's an army of scholars
00:53:04.720
that say the condition for the possibility of the physical sciences in the West was Christianity.
00:53:09.800
That is to say, the fundamental assumption that the world is not God. If you divinize the world,
00:53:15.100
you're not going to experiment on it. You're not going to analyze it in this sort of objectivizing
00:53:19.660
way. So, the world is not God. It's been created. Therefore, it can be experimented upon. It can be
00:53:25.660
analyzed. But then secondly, as we've all been saying in different ways, it is radically intelligible,
00:53:31.640
not just in a superficial way, not just in certain parts, but in every nook and cranny,
00:53:36.700
the universe is intelligible. That's a very weird thing, the more you think about it.
00:53:40.900
Why should that be the case? And of course, it's coming out, I would argue, of a Christian
00:53:44.900
conception that the world did come forth. The Bible puts it poetically as a great act of speech,
00:53:50.980
meaning it's imbued with intelligibility from an intelligent source. Well, when you bring
00:53:56.300
intelligibility and non-divinity together, you get the rise of the modern sciences. So,
00:54:03.040
they're not the least bit repugnant to Christianity, on the contrary. What is repugnant is this
00:54:07.680
scientism, and you've all been hinting at it in different ways, you know, trace it to people
00:54:11.740
like Descartes. But I'm with John. I'd go right back to Don Scotus and Ockham and the breakdown
00:54:19.040
of a participation in metaphysics. And when you get this univocal conception of being,
00:54:23.900
and following from that nominalism, and I would even dare say certain forms of Protestantism are
00:54:29.160
very much conditioned by that way of looking at things, you get a lot of the problems we're facing
00:54:33.780
today. I'm for a recovery of the premodern, this wonderfully rich premodern sense of a participative
00:54:42.860
view of being. You know, the world in God, the world reflecting God, not a world of separated
00:54:51.640
things, and God being the supreme thing among them. So, Aquinas says that God is not the supreme
00:54:57.080
being. He doesn't call him en sumum, but he calls him ipsum esse, to be itself. So, there's a whole
00:55:03.920
view of reality that's implicit in that description of God. And that is repugnant to scientism in its
00:55:11.040
various forms. And I think that's the key to recovering a lot of sense of religious meaning.
00:55:17.700
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00:58:05.980
I really liked the invocation of the participatory. Part of what I've been arguing is that the cutting
00:58:15.700
edge cognitive science, what's called 4e cognitive science, is challenging the reduction of knowing
00:58:22.200
to propositional knowing, knowing that something is the case, that what we're discovering, and you can
00:58:28.500
even find specific kinds of memory for each one of these. There's also procedural knowing, there's
00:58:33.220
knowing how to do something, the skills. There's perspectival knowing, which is knowing what it's like
00:58:38.240
to be here in this state of mind, in this situation, giving me situational awareness. And then the deepest
00:58:44.380
is participatory knowing. This is the way in which we know by how we are conformed and transformed by
00:58:53.640
others, by the world. So that our knowing of ourself and our knowing of this. So you see this, of course,
00:58:58.620
prototypically in the way you know your beloved. You don't know them by your skills or your proposition.
00:59:05.400
Of course, you know them this way, but this is not the essence of it. The essence of it
00:59:09.340
is the way you are conforming to them and you're being transformed. So your self-knowledge and your
00:59:14.800
knowledge of them are bound together. But this is now becoming these ways of talking about other
00:59:20.320
kinds of knowing and the way in which they are stored in different kinds of memory, procedural memory,
00:59:30.940
episodic memory, that weird kind of memory we call the self. This is now coming to the fore.
00:59:36.620
But here's the point I want to make. The point is, right, we've suffered kind of a propositional
00:59:42.100
tyranny from Occam on where we reduced all of knowing to the propositional. And I would argue
00:59:48.120
that most of what I called religio is being carried on by the procedural and the perspectival
00:59:52.880
and the participatory. And so that is in a fundamental way how it's not just out there. It's like right
01:00:03.240
Yeah. And the question, I think one of the questions is, what is the ontological significance
01:00:09.040
of that, let's say? I mean, one of the, leaving aside the truth or lack thereof of various religious
01:00:19.240
claims, one of the weaknesses, I believe, of the rational atheists' position is that, first of all,
01:00:28.000
that their argument is carried out almost entirely in the propositional landscape. They treat religious,
01:00:34.640
they treat religion as if it's a set of propositions that are in some sense expressed in a manner
01:00:42.180
contrary to the propositions that constitute science. And then I think, well, wait a minute,
01:00:48.080
guys, you're missing the point here. There's a propositional element to religious claim,
01:00:53.960
and I often think that's the weakest element. But what do you make of the fact that people have
01:00:59.880
religious experiences? What do you make of that exactly? Well, you say, well, that's epiphenomenal.
01:01:06.020
It's like, well, yeah, is it really? Like, are you so sure about that? So let me give you an example.
01:01:12.140
So I talked to Brian Murarescu and Carl Rock a while back, and they'd be doing some investigation
01:01:17.940
into the Eleusinian mysteries. And Murarescu's book is predicated on the idea that what the Greeks were
01:01:27.520
doing was using an LSD spiked wine, essentially, to produce a collective mystical experience,
01:01:36.460
and they had technologies to harness that so it was collective, and that that constituted the core
01:01:42.240
of the Eleusinian mysteries, and that that enterprise was practiced by the ancient Greeks for thousands
01:01:48.960
of years continuously, and that that experience was at the basis of the unity of Greek culture.
01:01:55.840
But more than that, that it was the fountain from which Greek wisdom flowed.
01:02:02.000
And so it's a revelatory hypothesis, by which I mean, sorry, it's a hypothesis about the function
01:02:10.340
of revelation in the society. If these drug-induced, dreamlike states of religious experience
01:02:21.080
are the fountain from which a culture like the Greek culture emerges, well, what are we supposed
01:02:27.220
to make of that ontologically? I mean, we're great admirers of the Greeks, right? We see our culture as
01:02:32.320
certainly the rational element of it, and perhaps a tremendous amount of the aesthetic element as
01:02:37.060
deeply rooted in Greek presuppositions. It's like, well, is that, are the Eleusinian mysteries,
01:02:42.160
that religious element, is that an aberration? Or is it, is it that which, that within which
01:02:49.540
everything else is embedded? This is a, this is a fundamentally important question. It's not
01:02:54.200
something trivial. I really don't know what to make of it, because it throws the whole problem of,
01:02:59.320
well, the ontological significance of psychedelic substances into the mix, and that's a thorny problem
01:03:05.820
if there ever was one. And that's a problem of the lower meeting, the higher, that's for sure,
01:03:11.600
right? These chemical substances that can reliably induce overwhelming mystical experiences.
01:03:17.460
You can just set that aside and say, well, that's a form of insanity, but it's not schizophrenia.
01:03:23.520
It's, it's not obviously within the category of, of mental illness. And then, and to, you know,
01:03:31.060
to, mirror rescues hypothesis runs quite contrary to that. Not only is it not insanity, it's,
01:03:36.820
it was a vital source of, of revelatory knowledge, philosophical knowledge, and, and got the ball
01:03:43.800
rolling in some sense. So, God only knows what to make of that. But, well, there's, I mean,
01:03:50.380
there's lots of experimental work being done on this right now, the Griffith lab. I did an experiment
01:03:55.900
in my lab, right? It's not epiphenomenal. People who have more mystical experiences have,
01:04:01.040
more meaning in life, reliable correlation. But yeah, they become more open. Now they undergoes
01:04:08.500
a permanent transformation. Well, at least longstanding. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a couple of
01:04:12.980
years anyways, like it's, and it's not trivial. It's one standard deviation increase. It's a big
01:04:18.040
difference, man. And you have all of Yadin's work showing that when people will have these
01:04:22.680
experiences, they will reliably improve their life. Yeah. Well, so, so a good friend of mine,
01:04:32.380
who's a genius, by the way. Um, and so I listened to what he has to say, and he's a technological
01:04:37.920
genius. He talked to me about his, his mushroom experiences when he was a mixed up teenager,
01:04:43.820
you know, engaging in various forms of delinquent activity. And he said that
01:04:47.540
from the, after his psychedelic experience, his sense of what was right and what was wrong was
01:04:56.980
massively heightened. And he abided by it from then on. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I look at his life,
01:05:03.780
it's like, well, you know, you, you've accomplished a fair bit and he's a very solid person and quite the
01:05:09.680
monster in, in the most positive way. And, you know, you can't just dispense with that. It's like,
01:05:15.380
well, it taught him the difference between good and evil. And then he abided by that
01:05:18.620
for the course of his life. And, and, you know, when, when, when Griffiths, Griffiths people have
01:05:23.680
his laboratory subjects, have these mystical experiences and they quit smoking. Yeah. And you
01:05:28.380
think, and if you take a look at this work, you'll see like it's, so it's onto normativity. People
01:05:36.400
encounter what they call the really real. And it's really unusual because normally what we do is we
01:05:42.360
take these experiences that are disconnected from our everyday intelligibility, like a dream. And we
01:05:46.840
say it's not real because it doesn't fit in. People do the opposite with these experiences. They say
01:05:51.860
that was really real. And all of this has to change to get closer to it. Now, I think there's a way though
01:05:58.440
of starting, I'm not, this isn't going to be a complete answer, Jordan, but I think part of the
01:06:03.020
reason why we find it problematic, these kinds of experiences, and this is what some of the empirical
01:06:07.540
work I did showed is because we've reduced rationality to inference. And we've forgotten that
01:06:15.260
rationality is broader and includes insight. And if you think of how an insight works, and you can see, you
01:06:21.260
can see a continuum between insight, flow, transformative experience, even the flow experience has
01:06:26.380
mystical aspects to it. And people get into it on a fairly reliable basis, right? And what we have,
01:06:32.640
what we have to say is the core of rationality is not inferential coherence. It's the capacity for
01:06:37.840
self-correction. And insight is one of our most powerful ways of self-correcting. I point to your
01:06:44.260
own work. You showed in some of your experiments that, you know, one of the things that predicts insight
01:06:50.140
is the anomalous card sorting task, right? And you also showed that that predicts how well people
01:06:56.020
are overcoming self-deception. You did the experiments on both of those, right? And that's
01:07:02.340
not a coincidence. Insight is one of the fundamental machineries by which we overcome how we fundamentally
01:07:07.980
misframed. It's a fundamental self-correction. We need a model of rationality that includes them both.
01:07:13.600
Let me ask you about that. Let's go back to this nested idea, right?
01:07:19.380
Can I just say something about psychedelics, which is important to mention, is that, I mean,
01:07:24.780
obviously a lot of people are talking about it right now. And I did, you know, I did watch that
01:07:28.540
interview with Mura Rescue. And I think that in this question of psychedelics, I think we're actually
01:07:33.800
seeing an increase of the problem that we're talking about, this kind of alienating problem,
01:07:39.580
which is that psychedelics seems like a very nice solution because there it is. There's the
01:07:44.080
mushroom. I can analyze the chemical substance. I can, I can. So when we talk about the Eleusinian
01:07:49.600
mysteries, now everybody's excited to talk about the spiked wine, but no one cares to talk about the
01:07:55.040
entire ritual in which this was embedded. And it becomes this kind of weird reductive thing in which
01:08:00.480
the tool that we can identify, which is, you know, you can, you can put it in a box and you can,
01:08:05.060
you can nicely identify it. Then everybody's attention goes there right now because of our
01:08:10.860
kind of materialism and art. And so I find it very difficult because, you know, what we saw
01:08:17.140
psychedelics do in the sixties is that ripping open the veil, supposedly in a world where the ritual
01:08:23.460
around, let's say the coherence of society, the place where society coheres together and engages in
01:08:30.240
a common ritual and in common attention and in common storytelling. And then we kind of throw
01:08:35.960
this stuff out into a world that is individualistic and based on, on everybody's own little whims is not
01:08:42.780
necessary is going to, I think, and I, we saw it happen is going to create these experiences that
01:08:49.440
are frameless. And instead of binding, we'll, we'll, we'll continue to kind of fragment our society.
01:08:55.960
I'm really worried about the psychedelics. Yeah. Can I just jump in on, I'm sort of thinking out
01:09:00.700
loud because I, you know, I really loved in what both Jordan and John were saying is the, the way
01:09:06.520
the mystical is being described. There's something really right in that. I think when you have a true
01:09:11.380
mystical experience, meaning an experience of, of God, of the sacred, it does have those effects
01:09:16.860
that it convinces you that's really real as opposed to the world that's, it's real, but it's not as real
01:09:23.760
as that, that now I'm clearer about good and evil. I mean, the authentically mystical, I think has
01:09:29.880
that, but what, when you talk about drugs and all that, look, for me, it's a closed book. I've never
01:09:34.820
experienced that myself directly, but I don't say this, the great mystics in the Western tradition,
01:09:39.940
think of John of the Cross, especially, who's my go-to guy. John of the Cross probably had what we call
01:09:46.340
extraordinary experiences. Certainly his colleague, Teresa of Avila did, I mean, visions and that sort of
01:09:51.600
thing. But what did John of the Cross consistently say? Let go of them. Let go of them. When people
01:09:57.160
said, oh, what do I do when I have an experience? See it. It's kind of a Buddhist thing. See it and let
01:10:02.680
go of it. John of the Cross never wanted people like hanging on to the extraordinary vision or the
01:10:09.220
extraordinary manifestation. So there is the mystical for sure. And, and, you know, I use my
01:10:16.060
Platonic thing going from, you know, the cave, going from physics to mathematics to metaphysics.
01:10:22.780
But beyond metaphysics, there is indeed this mystical dimension of knowing. So I don't discount that for
01:10:28.220
a minute, but I'm also, I've got a lot of John of the Cross in me that says, be very wary of hanging
01:10:33.320
on to those. And to Jonathan's point there about, you know, well, if I just take this drug, that's going
01:10:38.680
to be my, my guaranteed path into the mystical, whatever is going on there, the real mystical,
01:10:45.280
you know, tonight I'll be probably in front of the blessed sacrament at some point with the rosary.
01:10:51.200
And I believe me, I'm not having any kind of LSD like experiences, but that's the mystical as far
01:10:57.000
as I'm concerned. So I'm trying to find what's really good in that description of it, which I think
01:11:01.760
it really is accurate, but I'm wary of clinging to it.
01:11:05.180
There's one thing to be clear, just to respond to Jonathan's criticism. I mean, the point that
01:11:11.120
Jonathan is making is being recognized by people in the field. First of all, there's a distinction
01:11:14.860
even in Griffith between a psychedelic experience and a mystical experience. And secondly, most people
01:11:20.500
are clearly indicating, for example, all the therapeutic interventions using psychedelic and the
01:11:25.260
evidence is mounting that it's not the drug that does it, right? It is the drug in concert with the
01:11:33.240
set and setting, the therapeutic framework, all of this other stuff. And I consistently argue for
01:11:39.140
this. You have to have this wrapped in a sapiential framework because it can just as much take you off
01:11:45.480
into self-deception as it can into self-correction. But I want to be clear that there's a lot of people
01:11:53.060
that take the criticisms that have been made here very seriously, and it's actually woven into a lot
01:11:58.140
of the research. Yeah, well, it's interesting with regards to the scientism issue. So if you look at
01:12:05.100
Griffith's research, so you see that his subjects take psilocybin and then they have a mystical
01:12:11.600
experience and then they quit smoking or they're less afraid of death. It's like, and the way it's
01:12:16.620
written up in the journal is it is bottom-up drug effect because there's no description of the content of
01:12:23.540
the mystical experience. It's like, well, the drug produces a mystical experience and then people don't
01:12:27.880
smoke. And the scientific journal format only allows for that. And so, but then there's this
01:12:34.660
question that's like, this is a big question. It's like, okay, well, why are these people no longer afraid
01:12:39.500
of death? Like, did that switch just get turned off? Well, that's not, that's not how it works there. The
01:12:45.440
whole view they have of reality has been reoriented in some manner. And what manner? It's like, well,
01:12:51.400
what happened exactly? That's, that's an even more key question and it's relevant to Jonathan's
01:12:56.380
point. And then, John, to go after your, you a little bit on this topic, Jonathan is pointing
01:13:02.900
to something that's, that's, that's a very intelligent caution. And that is that, I know,
01:13:08.560
you know that, I know, you know that. And these, these hypotheses of set and setting are, they're just
01:13:15.120
the beginning of that surround that needs to be created to integrate these experiences into the
01:13:20.760
broader culture. They're just, they're, you know, they're not much changed from the early
01:13:25.580
sixties. Well, you have to be somewhere calm. You have to be with someone who, you know, is going
01:13:29.660
to take care of you. It's like, yeah, that's, we're just barely beginning to, to figure out what
01:13:35.540
to do with this. And then Bishop Barron, I, I believe for what it's worth, and I don't know what
01:13:41.160
you guys think about that. I think that revelation is a psychedelic account, literally.
01:13:47.240
Oh, the book of Revelation. I really believe that. You bet. You bet. I think that the author of that
01:13:52.840
had a psychedelic experience, and all he did was write down what happened to him.
01:13:58.240
No, it's too grounded in the, it might not be right, but. It's too grounded in the Old Testament.
01:14:01.860
That's right. The classic apocalyptic literature. I mean, it's, it's not idiocy.
01:14:06.140
Why is that, why is that an objection? Why is that an objection? He was grounded in that tradition,
01:14:11.040
and all of that tradition was, was made vivid in imagery during the experience. That's not,
01:14:17.480
certainly not beyond the, the, the confines of such experiences. So, and I think the church is
01:14:24.200
going to have to wrestle with this seriously in the years to come, because there's an association
01:14:28.080
between psychedelic use and revelatory meaning that the church is going to have to grapple with,
01:14:35.860
I believe. Well, there are plenty of monks who have revelations and have visions and have all
01:14:40.200
these types of experiences, but that don't take psychedelics. They, you know, it, that it,
01:14:44.780
it's actually through asceticism and through transformation. And I think this is coming back
01:14:48.960
to, to Bishop Barron's point is that let's say in the hesychastic tradition, in the mystical tradition
01:14:54.360
of the East, it's exactly like what he said about St. John of the cross. They consistently insist
01:14:59.400
that the mystic has to ignore all experiences because the purpose is not to have experiences. The purpose
01:15:05.360
is to be united with God, to be transformed, you know, to be free of your passions, to be free
01:15:10.060
of the things that kind of bind you. And it's going to happen. And maybe that can actually,
01:15:15.200
maybe it can be somewhat instructive for others, but that's not the point. And so, so I think that
01:15:20.440
I can, I understand it because there's something about our world too, that wants experiences, right? We,
01:15:27.000
we can, we want to have these, these exciting or very kind of exciting experiences,
01:15:34.080
but the real purpose is to be transformed, which is why someone is willing to be martyred or someone
01:15:39.840
is like, that has nothing to do with like having a really great mystical experiences. There's something
01:15:44.280
about, it really is about the transformation of the, of the person into, into the image of Christ,
01:15:50.520
let's say. Jonathan, is it true? I'm curious in the Eastern traditions, I don't know as well,
01:15:54.640
but in the West, certainly the mystics all talk about God actively stripping these things away.
01:16:00.560
So even something like the great contentment I get in the beginning of my relationship with God,
01:16:06.500
my sense of, of consolation to use Ignatius' term, God will take that away because I'm not meant to
01:16:13.420
fall in love with the consolation. I meant to fall in love with God. So I'm not meant to fall in love
01:16:17.700
with the mystical experience or with the vision or whatever. I meant to fall in love with God. And so
01:16:23.040
God actively, John on the cross will talk about the, you know, the dark night of the soul. And that's
01:16:27.960
really what he means. It's not a psychological state. It's, it's God actively taking away
01:16:33.740
these experiences because there's something else that we're really talking about.
01:16:38.680
And in the Eastern tradition, the highest point is, is absence of all image and thought.
01:16:45.320
That, that, that you, you actually don't have any, there's no imagination. There's no thought.
01:16:51.240
There's nothing. There's only this kind of pure presence and this pure light,
01:16:55.480
let's say that kind of gathers you into God. Uh, so it's, it is the, and they constantly say the
01:17:01.320
same thing. They say all of these experiences, let them go. You got to drop them. You got to,
01:17:05.700
don't become a guru and, you know, kind of teach out of your, out of your little mystical insight,
01:17:11.220
but rather just drop it and keep going up the ladder. Let's say, right. I mean, I'm very wary of
01:17:16.420
the idea that the communion cup, the origins are in some kind of psychedelic experience. I mean,
01:17:21.680
trust me, it's never happened to me. I've been going to mass since I was a kid. Uh, because
01:17:26.420
the reality of it is other than that. I mean, even if there was something and certainly the
01:17:31.540
Ellisonian mysteries have been well studied and perhaps there was, uh, a psychedelic element and
01:17:36.980
so on, but I would never want to put stress on that. I would, I would want to say that first of
01:17:42.920
all, if you talk, I talked to Aidan Lyon, who was right, his book is coming out, a psychedelic
01:17:47.680
experience of philosophy of psychedelic experience. First of all, he doesn't, uh, he doesn't pin the
01:17:52.760
term on the use of psychedelics per se. It just means mind revealing experience. Okay. So, uh,
01:17:59.780
what I would say is that the substances are belong to a class that don't require chemical substances.
01:18:06.100
So these are disruptive strategies. You know, Jonathan mentioned, you know, ascesis, right?
01:18:11.820
Asceticism, the shamans chanting, the drumming, the sleep deprivation. There's a whole family of
01:18:16.960
disruptive strategies, but let me, let me try and show you what I think this is related to.
01:18:22.080
If you are, if you are trying to, if you're having a problem, a problem, because you've
01:18:26.660
missed framed the situation and you're, and you need an insight, what's actually really good for
01:18:32.060
an insight is to be moderately distracted from the problem. Or it's like, if you're trying to solve
01:18:37.600
an insight problem on the computer screen, and I put a bit of static or noise into it, that will
01:18:42.120
actually help you break up the inappropriate frame and find a new frame. You do the same thing with
01:18:46.580
neural networks. Neural networks are trying to learn and you periodically have to throw in noise
01:18:51.120
because if you don't throw in noise, they'll get too narrow and too fixed on what they're picking up
01:18:55.400
on. So this is, this is, and this is what I meant. I did a talk about this. It's like insight requires
01:19:02.380
these disruptive strategies and they look exactly the opposite from our model of rationality.
01:19:07.500
So I think a more appropriate thing, because I mean, I, I see disruptive strategies in St.
01:19:13.080
John of the cross. I certainly see those. Uh, and of course they're all the way through the
01:19:17.060
Neoplatonic tradition. Um, and, and they can be cognitive disruptive strategies. Nicholas of
01:19:22.280
Cusa puts you like, you know, that an infinite circle is also a straight line and you go like
01:19:26.620
that. Right. So I think I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that. I'm thinking of, uh, Thomas
01:19:33.780
Merton used the Buddhist term of calming the monkey mind. And he said that was the purpose of the
01:19:38.620
rosary. And I was conducting a retreat just about three years ago with the priests of Dublin. Now
01:19:43.920
I'm all Irish. So this is in my cultural DNA, but they were praying the rosary one night. These
01:19:48.580
about 60 men and they prayed the rosary, which normally takes about 25 minutes to do it at usual
01:19:54.500
pace. They finished it in about six minutes and it was, but at first it seemed ludicrous, but what it
01:20:03.320
was doing was setting up just that kind of buzz, that sort of mantra-like quality that I think does
01:20:09.840
allow something to happen, that allows something to happen in deeper parts of the psyche, deeper
01:20:14.980
parts of the soul. So I think that's right. I agree with those elements are there in the mystical
01:20:19.300
tradition. The Jesus prayer too, Jonathan's an example of that, I think. Yeah. And so I, for me,
01:20:25.860
as a scientist, I'm studying these things. Like when I did the, the, the, the one experiment I
01:20:29.960
mentioned, the content, which I think is supportive of Jonathan's point, isn't the key thing that's
01:20:35.300
predictive of the changes in people. It's predictive of the relationship to meaning in life. It's
01:20:39.800
actually the insight process rather than the particular phenomenological content that seems to
01:20:44.900
be driving the transformation. The Christian aesthetic and the Christian mystic, this insight
01:20:51.120
gathering or this kind of mounting up into insight is bound up in the transformation of the person
01:20:58.800
in terms of their own passions and also the transformation of the community in terms of
01:21:04.760
liturgy and participation in communion. And so it's buffered. Like it, like I said, it's binding. It
01:21:10.320
doesn't, it's not just someone, you know, doing something to get some insight, but it ends up being
01:21:16.200
this, this binding of the, of the, like if Bishop Barrett was talking about all these monks sitting
01:21:21.660
together, doing the rosary together, and then maybe going into liturgy and, and taking communion
01:21:27.080
together and working together. And so there's something more than just the, just the kind of
01:21:32.260
psychological or, you know, personal experience or personal healing from, from this or that problem.
01:21:38.340
But it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's a holistic thing. I hate using that word, but it's a holistic process,
01:21:43.720
let's say. Well, because both ways, right, the insight isn't just propositional, it's perspectival
01:21:49.360
and procedural. And, and, and, and I think mystical experience is the most profound version of
01:21:54.740
participatory knowing. I mean, I think, and they can make a very strong Neoplatonic argument. And I,
01:22:00.020
and I think, I agree with you, Jonathan. I think, I mean, you, you see this in some of the things I've
01:22:04.620
been doing the ethnographic work on, what people do with the circling. You, you, you can, you can get,
01:22:09.320
you can get shared insight flow that doesn't belong to any one person. It belongs to the community as a
01:22:15.260
whole and people, right. And, and, and I, and I think that's, that's very important for, as you
01:22:21.960
said, making sure that this doesn't, I mean, it's so easy for these experiences to become a magnet of
01:22:27.880
narcissism for people. Right. And so the, the de-centering that happens when we are immersed in
01:22:35.120
something larger than ourself, which I think helps cultivate the virtue of reverence. I absolutely agree
01:22:40.800
with you. I think that absolutely has to be the case. And I've argued repeatedly for that. I hope
01:22:46.900
I'm not coming across as trying to say it's a, it's an individual personal thing that I'm talking
01:22:52.120
about. That's not fundamentally what I'm talking about. I'm talking about it being systemic in the
01:22:56.460
individual and systematic throughout the community. So, okay. So let, let me, Jonathan, I'm curious about
01:23:04.880
this. I mean, I, your cautions are duly noted on my end. I, I saw, see what happened, say in
01:23:11.920
retrospect, when the hallucinogens were introduced to Western culture, right? I mean, it didn't work
01:23:19.200
very well. And look at what happened to Timothy Leary. So, for example, I had his old job at Harvard,
01:23:27.980
by the way. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yes. Many people have pointed that out to me, Jordan,
01:23:32.880
by the way. Yeah. Jesus, of all the weird things. And in any case, you know, Mircea Eliade also
01:23:41.000
believed that the true shamanic tradition wasn't psychedelic driven. No, and that was an aberration.
01:23:48.440
I think he was wrong. I really do believe that he was wrong. And I think that, and I, I'm,
01:23:54.340
I'm also not entirely convinced that that, the practices that you're describing can produce
01:24:01.660
experiences that are as intense as those that are produced chemically. Maybe they are, but even if
01:24:07.280
they are, they're not, they're not available to the typical person. They take tremendous amount of
01:24:13.140
training. And then, so that's a big problem. And then, is that a problem or is that a feature?
01:24:17.640
Well, I, it seems like, well, I don't, I don't, yeah, look, it's a feature too, Jonathan, because
01:24:22.600
maybe you need to do all that training to handle the insight, you know, and, and I'm not trying to
01:24:26.960
look for a facile solution here, believe me. But the church has a hard time attracting people at
01:24:32.400
the moment. And I don't know what's happening in, in the broad church with regards to the sort of
01:24:39.420
work, for example, that Griffiths is doing. And it's not like I have the answers to these things,
01:24:44.820
but I, by, we shouldn't look to the psychedelics as a, as a savior, certainly, but they should also
01:24:52.360
not be discounted because they are the means by which people can have the sorts of experiences
01:24:58.640
that the scientists, the followers of scientism discount. It's right there. It's right there as
01:25:06.900
proof in some sense. I'd be more at home, though, with using the wisdom tradition, Jordan, as you've
01:25:12.340
been doing. I mean, the fact that you're drawing a lot of people back toward Christianity through
01:25:15.760
the opening up of the Bible and the wisdom way of reading the Bible, that to me is a, is a great way
01:25:21.780
the churches can start drawing, especially young people back. It's obviously working in your case.
01:25:27.460
You know, we've got our problems and some of it came from the scandals, certainly, but some came
01:25:33.380
from an exaggerated attempt to be relevant to the society and to sort of dumb down our language and to
01:25:39.500
make it sound like an echo of the culture. That's what did us in, I think, in terms of attracting
01:25:43.580
younger people. But what you're doing, opening up the scriptures, that's what the church fathers did.
01:25:48.980
And people are flocking to that because they find in that the wisdom tradition. And through the
01:25:54.240
wisdom tradition, they're finding mysticism, authentic mysticism, a contact with God. So I
01:26:00.180
think that's the route to go. We have to deal with our moral issues. We have to deal with the scandals,
01:26:05.580
that's for sure. And we have to deal, though, with this dumbing down of the faith and this
01:26:09.980
flattening out of the faith. That's, I think, what has really compromised our mission.
01:26:20.480
Because, like, I think this is part, first of all, I want to challenge two things you said,
01:26:26.820
Jordan. I've had both experiences and I've had peak versions of both and I can't find them
01:26:33.880
ultimately distinguishable, like through a contemplative practice and taking a psychedelic.
01:26:39.560
They have, and when you look at the research, people say they can be the same, they tend to
01:26:43.940
orient a little bit differently. The psychedelic experience, the psychedelic mystical experience
01:26:48.620
tends to, on average, be a little bit more impersonal. The contemplative one tends to be
01:26:53.900
a little bit, on average, more personal in the ontology, but no deep, you know, differences.
01:27:00.560
And the other thing I would say is, you know, I don't know how much we have to rely on them.
01:27:05.160
I take your point that it's instructive and I think the science should do it. I think it's
01:27:09.940
immoral to not investigate these substances because of the clear evidence that's mounting
01:27:14.740
for their ability to alleviate, you know, untreatable addiction, depression, a host of
01:27:21.380
issues. And so I think we should keep doing the science. I'm not, but, you know, the research
01:27:26.040
sort of reliably indicates that 30 to 40 percent of the population have these transformative
01:27:32.020
experiences. That's what Taylor says. I think the problem is not an absence of the experience.
01:27:36.720
To go to Bishop Barron's point, I think it's the absence of a wisdom framework that allows people
01:27:43.320
to properly appropriate and metabolize these experiences. So I'll do this in my class. I think
01:27:50.660
I mentioned this to you, Jordan. With my students, I'll say, well, where do you go for information,
01:27:53.980
the internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where do you go from knowledge, science, maybe the
01:27:57.660
university? And I'll say, where do you go for wisdom? And there's a deafening silence.
01:28:02.340
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right? And wisdom is not optional. Well, you know what? I don't care about being
01:28:08.480
connected and overcoming self-deception and harming other people because of the ways in which I'm
01:28:13.280
willfully... Of course, it's not optional. Wisdom is a necessity. It's an absolute prerequisite to
01:28:21.740
religion. Yet our culture, right, has no way in general of providing people with a sapiential
01:28:30.060
framework to process these experiences and also to have properly cultivated a prepared character
01:28:36.080
for them when they do emerge. So I would argue that that's where the problem lies. It's not in
01:28:42.320
the absence, I think, of these experiences for people. It's the absence of a framework and a
01:28:47.780
worldview that allows people to properly process them. And we've had a few centuries of Christianity
01:28:53.480
really kind of falling into the trap of materialism, first of all, trying to constantly justify its
01:29:00.560
stories through history and some statuette found in Palestine or whatever, like all these strategies
01:29:05.740
to try to constantly justify the stories through these scientific methods. And at the same time,
01:29:12.580
focusing on the idea of being saved or going to hell and going to heaven rather than the more mystical
01:29:17.740
tradition, which is there. It's all there, right? It's all there and it's all available to us.
01:29:22.620
It's just that the emphasis has been, I think, the wrong one in the past few centuries, but it is
01:29:28.520
possible. And I think it's happening now. And like Bishop Barron said, I think, Jordan, one of the
01:29:32.980
things you're forcing a lot of Christians to do is to reconsider what this has to do with my life,
01:29:38.960
how it binds it together, how it connects us together. And we have the church fathers that
01:29:43.760
just right there, it's all there in their teaching. And it's there in the liturgy itself and
01:29:49.660
the imagistic vision of the chants and the iconography. And all of this is, it's all
01:29:55.640
present. We just need to kind of go back and help people connect things together so that they can have
01:30:02.540
But we forgot a lot of our own tradition or we underplayed it. I'll give you one example. When
01:30:07.680
I was coming of age in the Catholic Church, so you're now late 70s into the 80s, the way we were
01:30:12.860
instructed in the Bible. So those of us preparing for the priesthood, right, to be preachers and to be
01:30:17.120
spiritual counselors and soul doctors, it was pure historical criticism. That was a method of
01:30:22.540
biblical approach that emphasized very much, you know, what was in the mind of the human author as
01:30:27.240
he wrote. And so using very rationalistic methods to kind of break the scriptures down, break them
01:30:33.360
apart. But the whole idea of meaning about what the scriptures were telling us about God, about our
01:30:39.480
relation to God, the mystical dimension of life, that was all very muted. As a result, our preaching,
01:30:45.600
and I accuse, you know, my own generation of this, our preaching became very flat, often very
01:30:51.300
politicized, maybe psychologized in the worst sense of that term. But the mystical depth of the
01:31:00.140
scripture, we forgot. We didn't read the church fathers as they, Jung himself said the first
01:31:06.040
psychologists were the church fathers. It's dead right, it seems to me. So we do, we share a lot of
01:31:13.300
this blame here. By we, I mean the religions themselves. We forgot our own best traditions,
01:31:18.140
and we allowed this scientism to hold sway. And that's why people are struggling.
01:31:23.880
So I've been trying to figure out, I mean, I really don't know how to, I'm stunned at the
01:31:30.320
popularity of the biblical lectures. I can't wrap my head around it, you know, no matter how hard I try.
01:31:36.920
And I can't, I can't even judge their significance. So small or great, but they've attracted a lot of
01:31:47.680
views. So we'll stick with that. So then, assuming that they have some significance, I've tried to
01:31:54.300
figure out, well, what was it that made them work? Why did people come and listen to what I was saying
01:32:00.220
about Genesis? And I think partly it was because I wasn't exactly telling people what I thought
01:32:08.220
about them. I wasn't saying, this is how you should read these stories. I was trying to investigate
01:32:14.760
something I knew was beyond my comprehension. And I was doing that on my feet. Now, I talked to someone
01:32:22.120
this week who is quite explicitly religious, and I could hardly listen to him because he kept telling me
01:32:27.080
what was right. He kept telling me the dogma. It's like, well, are you so sure you know that? And
01:32:33.160
like, who the hell are you to tell me that? And that, and it just, there was just no meaning being
01:32:37.940
revealed from that. There was no investigation. Like I approached the Bible as a psychologist in
01:32:43.220
some sense, but as if it was something I really didn't understand, a strange artifact. God only knows
01:32:48.680
what it is. It's this book that's been around forever, cobbled itself together in a manner we can't
01:32:55.800
understand. It's lasted for a very, very long period of time. It's had an inestimable impact.
01:33:00.880
It's full of extraordinarily strange stories that, that we understand very little about in some
01:33:08.580
profound sense. And it was an investigation. And I kind of pulled people along with me during the
01:33:13.640
investigation. And that, that seemed to, and maybe when I, when I go to church, do I see,
01:33:20.240
do I see that? Do I feel that I'm being led along an investigation into the structure of deep meaning?
01:33:25.800
And the answer is not usually. I, I usually feel as if I'm being told what to think or told what to
01:33:32.240
believe. And that's just, that doesn't seem to work. It's...
01:33:36.100
But the church fathers preached it exactly the way you're describing. And we, we luckily have some
01:33:41.160
of these sermons, like of Augustine, that he gave, we'd say, off the cuff. There was a secretary
01:33:45.480
out in the crowd who would take them down. He would probably polish them later. But you get a sense of
01:33:50.460
someone who's doing what you're saying. I think thinking through with the text as he goes.
01:33:56.800
He was theologizing, philosophizing, but he was, he was trying to draw his people. He was a pastor,
01:34:02.660
Augustine. He wasn't an academic. He wasn't a professor of theology at a university. He was a
01:34:07.180
pastor trying to draw his people closer to God. And he learned the method, by the way, from Ambrose.
01:34:12.220
When he goes to Ambrose in Milan, he's a, he's a manichae. He's not even a Christian. But he heard
01:34:17.760
that Ambrose was a great rhetorician. So he went to hear his rhetoric. And while he was there, he
01:34:22.280
learned the method of reading the Bible, which is this more allegorical spiritual method. That's
01:34:28.060
what Jung appreciated. That's what you're doing in many ways. The young Augustine learned it from
01:34:32.220
Ambrose. And then he bequeathed that to us in his sermons and biblical commentaries. But trust me when
01:34:38.360
I tell you, we didn't study that. We didn't study that approach. Ours was a very scientific,
01:34:44.700
rationalistic approach to the Bible. And that's why preaching is relatively bad, I would say.
01:34:49.200
So you've, in a way, stumbled on something that's very old, you know, but still has enormous power
01:34:58.140
There's also something important, Jordan, in understanding that at least that the traditional
01:35:02.840
churches, at least the liturgical churches, that you don't, you don't, like for example,
01:35:08.160
in the Orthodox Church, they always say, if the sermon is more than 15 minutes, it's pride.
01:35:12.840
It's like, keep your sermons as short as possible, because you're not there to encounter.
01:35:19.200
You're not, you're not there. I mean, it's propositional understanding is fine, but it's
01:35:24.140
participatory, right? Church is participatory. So you enter into the church, like imagine an
01:35:29.440
Orthodox Church, even a traditional Catholic Church, you have a space which is structured as
01:35:33.800
the hierarchy, ontological hierarchy of being. And then you see these images, which are patterned,
01:35:39.120
and are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words. And then you participate in
01:35:44.900
this singing, these processions, and it is a participative thing. And so if you go there to kind
01:35:51.360
of get knowledge, it's not the same type of practice. And as you're singing these songs,
01:35:58.160
and as you're hearing these hymns, all of a sudden, two images connect together. And all of a sudden,
01:36:03.100
you know, these things start to connect inside you in somewhat, in almost a kind of super rational
01:36:08.680
way. And the insights you get, sometimes you have difficulty explaining them, but they're very deep,
01:36:14.560
and they're embodied as you bow down, as you kneel, as you eat the body and blood of Christ. These are
01:36:23.160
And Jonathan, I'm totally in agreement with you. And what did we do in our Catholic churches in
01:36:28.180
the West? The same time we were presenting the Bible in this flattened out historical critical
01:36:32.860
way, we also were flattening out our churches, emptying out our churches of just that mystical
01:36:38.340
cosmic symbolism, the angels, the saints, color, the cosmic dimension, and we flattened them out,
01:36:45.560
and we made them like, you know, empty meeting spaces. So there was a terrible rationalism
01:36:51.280
that descended upon the church, and it dried us up in many ways. You know, so this is, again,
01:36:57.420
my mea culpa as a Catholic. I think we passed through a period that was really problematic,
01:37:02.940
and recovering the sources, you know, ressourcement, we say, right? Recovering the great sources of the
01:37:09.220
Bible and the fathers. That's what we're talking about. What the Bible had by its nature,
01:37:15.780
what the fathers understood, that's what we need to revive the church, I think.
01:37:21.280
So, look, but Bishop, you're doing something right, obviously. You're attracting some online
01:37:26.620
attention, some substantial online attention, and Jonathan, the same is true of you. And, well,
01:37:31.600
John, it goes without saying for you to some degree, because you're a professor and you have
01:37:34.780
that whole, you know, that whole world at your fingertips in some sense, and you've been very
01:37:39.400
successful at that. But in the more specifically religious domain, the more specifically Christian
01:37:43.760
domain, you two are having some public success. What are you doing right, do you think?
01:37:52.240
Actually, I think, you know, I think Bishop Barron and I are doing very similar things, which is why
01:37:57.560
I've always felt akin to what he's doing. I've written for one of his publications. I always felt
01:38:02.780
we're close in the approach, which is, first of all, avoiding just argumentation, but rather this kind of
01:38:12.380
presentation of beauty. You know, Bishop Barron also, even in his publications, this desire to kind of have
01:38:17.520
a beauty first approach, this kind of encounter with these powerful patterns of being, and, you know,
01:38:24.180
how they kind of point to Christ. And I think that showing the deep coherence, the deep narrative
01:38:28.840
coherence in scripture, and then pointing back out to the world and saying, this deep coherence in
01:38:34.820
scripture, you're going to encounter it in movies and in all these cultural phenomena that you're going
01:38:40.000
to see, you're going to encounter the same deep patterns that you find in scripture at a lower level,
01:38:45.300
we could say, but that all of these kind of culminate into, and so it really is like a meaning
01:38:49.860
first approach and a beauty first approach, I think, which is, which is, which is attracting
01:38:54.960
people because the insights they get at first, they can't, I have people who watch my videos for
01:38:59.320
two years and tell me they don't understand what I'm saying. And I'm like, well, why are you watching
01:39:03.640
my, how can you been watching my videos for two years if you don't understand? And they seem to express
01:39:08.200
that they get these insights and they can't totally explain them. And, and then it keeps them kind of
01:39:13.800
wanting to, to continue on in, in, on this path, let's say towards, ultimately a lot of them end
01:39:19.320
up moving towards Christianity and entering a church at some point.
01:39:23.520
Yeah. My thing has been a beauty and truth. I mean, so don't dumb it down. I lived through
01:39:27.680
dumbed down Catholicism and it was a pastoral disaster. You look at all the surveys. I studied
01:39:32.260
them very carefully, why young people are leaving. The scandals come up, the scandals will be mentioned,
01:39:36.940
but by far the most prominent reason is I don't believe the doctrines. I never had my questions
01:39:43.080
answered. It's in conflict with science. It doesn't make sense. They're intellectual problems.
01:39:48.240
Well, yeah, I get it. We dumbed the project down for about 50 years. So smarten it up and,
01:39:56.000
and reintroduce people to this tradition we've been talking about. The second thing is the beautiful.
01:40:01.940
We also, as we dumbed it down, we also uglified it. You know, we, we, we de-emphasized the beautiful.
01:40:10.200
So one example, you know, we put out this word on fire Bible. So the text of the, of the gospels,
01:40:16.180
but it's a bit like an illuminated manuscript idea that we surrounded it with glosses from the
01:40:21.800
fathers and the popes and the great theologians, but also lots of artwork, lots of color. So I want
01:40:27.960
to reintroduce people to the Bible, but not in a flat rationalistic way, you know? So that's what I've
01:40:33.920
been trying to do. Yeah. Well, I was certainly attracted to Jonathan to begin with because of the
01:40:38.760
quality of his artistic endeavor, right? This absolute, these absolutely beautiful
01:40:42.920
and archaic, traditional, let's say not archaic traditional, this traditional, uh, medium that
01:40:51.560
he was revitalizing and in such a stunningly beautiful way. And that's the, that was the
01:40:57.020
entry point into getting to know him and getting to understand his thought. And yeah. And beauty
01:41:02.380
isn't the thing you can't argue against today. Beauty just smacks you and, and, and, and that's
01:41:08.660
really something. So, and you can also help people notice that it's like, well, notice beauty book,
01:41:14.880
beauty brooks, no argumentation. Right. What do you think that signifies? What's it pointing
01:41:19.240
to? Is it pointing to something higher? It certainly seems to what might be higher. We need to figure
01:41:25.040
that out. Well, it's the least threatening of the transcendentals in the postmodern context.
01:41:29.340
So people today, you say, here's something that's true. Who are you going to tell me
01:41:33.000
what's true? I got my own truth. Even worse. Here's the way you ought to live. Here's the
01:41:37.380
good. Who are you to tell me how to live? But the beautiful doesn't preach in that negative
01:41:41.680
sense. It, it just is, you know, it shows itself. So it's more winsome. And it's a more,
01:41:47.580
it's a less threatening way into the project. So that's why I've tried to lead with it.
01:41:51.680
Especially in a world that's ugly. Like our world is just so ugly. You know, the modern,
01:41:55.700
the modern world is just so banal that, you know, there's a reason why tourists go to cities and
01:42:01.160
visit churches, even though they're not Christian and they don't care about it because they go
01:42:05.320
someplace and they're looking for a beautiful, for beauty. And then they end up in a church rather
01:42:09.480
than in a mall. Yeah. And that's definitely worth thinking about, you know, and the intent,
01:42:16.000
incredible value that's to be found in those unbelievably beautiful, beautiful constructions.
01:42:21.240
It's like, what is that beauty? And why do we experience it there? Those, those lattice-like
01:42:26.120
creations of stone and crystal with color and the addition of the music that all goes to your
01:42:31.500
liturgical point, the drama that's part of that. And, and, and the celebration of beauty,
01:42:39.120
which is definitely absent in the modern culture. Yes. Yeah. When I was a student in Paris,
01:42:43.780
I'd go there all the time. And Chartres to me is the most beautiful covered space in the world.
01:42:48.620
Uh, but I remember this years ago, I brought a classmate of mine. So a priest from Chicago
01:42:53.340
to see Chartres and we walked through it and I explained everything. We looked at the windows
01:42:57.740
and all this. And he said, gosh, it's something, uh, it's just too bad. It's so liturgically off.
01:43:06.000
And I knew what he meant. Cause I was formed in the same way, you know, that no, the church would be
01:43:10.720
in the round so we could see each other and there should be clear sight lines and, you know,
01:43:14.560
should be brightly lit and all this stuff. And like, you said Chartres Cathedral is liturgically
01:43:19.600
off. It's like, it's the supreme liturgical space in the world, but that shows that the quality of
01:43:25.760
the bad quality of the formation that we got in my generation.
01:43:28.640
Um, my experience with Christianity has been, uh, different. Um, and, um, so I was brought up
01:43:41.120
in, uh, a fundamentalist Christian, uh, family, family. Um, and so, uh, I very much, um, was traumatized
01:43:50.840
by that. And, um, um, I think if you talk to some of the nuns, N-O-N-E-S-S, uh, I think there's a
01:43:58.680
mixture, like you said, I don't think the scandals, which the media likes to focus on are not the primary
01:44:02.680
factors, not what the research shows. One is this issue about intelligibility. And I want to talk
01:44:09.140
about that. And the other is there, I, I meet a lot of people are attracted to my work because they,
01:44:16.420
because they've had similar histories, uh, not just specific to Christianity. I'm not beating
01:44:20.900
up on Christianity. I've had people coming out of other traditions, Islamic, Buddhist, uh, this is
01:44:26.660
possible, um, in all of, uh, uh, of all of the traditions I've encountered. Um, so I, I think, uh,
01:44:37.160
what there's two things I want to say, and they're not intended to be pushback, but they're intended to
01:44:42.260
open up questions, which is, uh, and this is for Jonathan that I also, uh, we rub up against each
01:44:49.080
other, but it usually creates a good friction and good sparks. Um, and, and maybe, uh, uh, it'll call
01:44:56.240
forth a response for you too, Bishop. Um, I think the project is not to try and resurrect, um, uh,
01:45:02.900
neoplatonism or the neoplatonic structure. Uh, I mean, uh, Aquinas, uh, sorry, Augustine wasn't only,
01:45:08.820
uh, you know, taught by Ambrose. He explicitly talked about, you know, Platonus and the Platonists
01:45:14.040
and the mystical experience, the neoplatonic mystical experience he had and how important
01:45:18.860
that was, et cetera. And it's clear that it's through pseudo Dionysus and Maximus. And so I,
01:45:24.700
uh, like, um, and so I think the project, if I were to put it, if we want to reach the nuns
01:45:32.520
is to show them a reconciliation, a profound one. And he, here, my ambition runs not personally,
01:45:39.740
but the ambition of the project, uh, towards Aquinas or Maximus, which is to show, right,
01:45:46.840
to revise that neoplatonism. And perhaps it's a neoplatonic Christianity, but I'm not going to be
01:45:51.800
specific about that right now to show how it is profoundly, uh, you know, to do a reciprocal
01:45:58.820
reconstruction between the neoplatonism and the scientific worldview. And there's a lot of people
01:46:03.380
doing that right now. I think we, we need, we need a post-nominalist neoplatonism, if I could put
01:46:09.160
it that way, in a profound way. John, you, you opened that, that, uh, salvo with the statement that you
01:46:19.480
were traumatized by the fundamentalist Christianity. Yes, very much. And that, that's, that's not irrelevant
01:46:24.500
to the salvo and, and, and to the nature of your project. And, and it's something we should discuss
01:46:30.680
too, because you also brought up the idea of reconciliation. It's, so people have left the
01:46:36.460
church, but in some sense, the church has alienated people from it as well. And some of that's the
01:46:42.000
scandal and some of it's the sort of experience that you described. Yes. People have been left with,
01:46:47.320
uh, with the horrors of childhood experience that were a consequence of their religious education.
01:46:53.740
And I'm not trying, believe me, I'm not trying to attack the institutions per se, but, but it's
01:47:02.440
something that they need to deal with. It needs to be dealt with it. All of us need to deal with,
01:47:06.640
not they, there's no they here. You know what I, there's no they here. We have these problems.
01:47:11.740
We have this meaning crisis. It's everyone's problem. So it's, there's no they in some sense,
01:47:16.880
but, but so what has that done to you? Let's say with regards to your appreciation of Christianity
01:47:23.160
per se. Well, first of all, I want to say that those two things that were talked about, the one
01:47:28.240
that Bishop Barron brought up about, and my response to it is, I think we need, and maybe
01:47:34.300
Jonathan will have a response because he has this model of Christianity going through a resurrection
01:47:37.740
cycle itself. So maybe there is a possibility for our discussion here, but I think we need to,
01:47:42.860
I think we need a reciprocal reconstruction. We need a post-nominalist, uh, form of Neoplatonism
01:47:48.440
that will provide that bridging. And I do not think Jordan, that the lack of that is unrelated
01:47:55.260
to the trauma that I experienced because of, there was no bridge. Take that apart. Exactly. Okay.
01:48:03.260
Because there was no bridge, it was easy to give me an either or isolating choice. You're either in
01:48:10.700
this worldview or you're in that worldview and that one's demonic. And if you go over there,
01:48:15.940
you're lost. There is a deep connection between the lack of bridge between the religious worldview,
01:48:22.480
if I can put it that way, and the scientific worldview that allowed for that kind of tyranny
01:48:26.960
over my mind that I found so deeply traumatizing. Those are not separable phenomena. That's what I'm
01:48:32.600
arguing. They are deeply interpenetrating and mutually supporting. That's how I experienced it.
01:48:37.920
And what opened me up was a science fiction book that showed, was a book by Rogers Elasny,
01:48:43.260
the Lord of Light, that showed the possibility of wonder and self-transcendence within a scientific
01:48:48.900
worldview. That's what blew me open out of fundamentalism.
01:48:53.540
Yeah. Well, lots of people who are followers of scientism, let's say, find their religion
01:48:59.480
That's where literature grabs them, right? That's where they're grabbed by the religious. I mean,
01:49:06.020
Star Wars is the classic example of that, for sure.
01:49:09.700
So, and that's, you know, that's worth pointing out to these rationalist atheists.
01:49:15.880
When I deal with atheists online, which I do a lot, very often, I'd say, when you scratch
01:49:22.720
the surface of a really angry atheist, you'll find, as you put it, a traumatized fundamentalist.
01:49:29.120
At first, that surprised me. Now it doesn't anymore. That when I press a little bit and
01:49:32.900
probe a little bit, it's someone recovering from just the kind of traumatizing experience
01:49:38.040
that you had as a kid. So that makes sense to me.
01:49:40.340
Yeah. I want to be clear. I wouldn't self-identify as an atheist.
01:49:45.920
No, no. I wasn't jesting that. No, but I think just to your point, that I understand that
01:49:50.500
the severe reaction to it that people would have.
01:49:53.720
What did you think of the point that I made that there's a deep connection between
01:49:57.320
sort of the psychological trauma and the fact that it was facilitated by this gap between
01:50:04.320
religion and science? That is very much the Enlightenment grammar that we've been
01:50:10.320
given, right? And you see, what I find attractive about the Neoplatonic tradition was the idea
01:50:16.840
of rationality and the mystical being deeply interpenetrating. But we can't leave it as
01:50:21.980
it was, is what I, well, I think we, it needs a fundamental reorganization, but, and it needs
01:50:31.200
to connect to this fund. There's a huge thing happening in science, at least the science that
01:50:37.360
I, where the fundamental ontology is coming into question, the way we have seen since
01:50:42.780
the beginning of the 20th century. There's a golden opportunity here. There's a golden
01:50:47.000
opportunity. What do you see happening? I mean, what do you, what do you see? Because you're
01:50:50.840
far seeing, so I want to know, like, what is it that you're taking up? Oh boy, I don't know
01:50:55.360
how I want to take that, but thank you for that. Well, what I see is this, I see, I see
01:51:02.320
that we are, there are, we're moving back to the understanding that we need the emanation
01:51:09.340
with the emergence, not throwing out the emergence, but we need the emanation with it. For, let
01:51:14.760
me just see, give you one example. So when you, in cognitive science, even in biology, we
01:51:20.920
are getting to the point, and, and, and, you know, Aristotle would like this, and maybe
01:51:26.220
even more Plotinus, where we, we, we understand possibility as a real thing. So, for example,
01:51:34.600
right, and this, this lines up with some Eastern traditions. So I'll do this sometimes, I'll
01:51:39.320
put a pencil on the table, and I'll roll it, and this goes to, like, cutting-edge work
01:51:43.400
by Alicia Uraro, and I'll ask my students, why did it roll? And they give the standard sort
01:51:47.420
of Newtonian answer, because you pushed it, right? And then I'll say, think, think, think,
01:51:51.860
what are you not seeing? Think, think, and what, what? I said, it also rolled because
01:51:55.480
there's a flat table, and there's open space in front of it, and it has the shape that it
01:52:00.540
has. There are, in addition to causal events, there are constraining conditions that are just
01:52:05.940
as real, and they are as much explanatory of how things operate as the bottom-up causes.
01:52:12.760
So think of a tree. You have all of the events causing the structure, but the structure,
01:52:17.280
why does a tree have the structure it has? Because it increases the probability that a
01:52:21.560
photon will hit a chlorophyll molecule. It's structuring possibility into potentiality,
01:52:27.660
and that's just as much needed to explaining a tree as the chemical events causing it. We
01:52:33.820
need both to explain life, to explain cognition, and more and more people, like Eastman's work,
01:52:39.400
there's a lot of people from sort of the Whiteheadian philosophy of physics are saying we need that
01:52:44.440
even for our fundamental physics, because we can't reconcile bottom-up quantum mechanics
01:52:49.920
with top-down relativity. We can't do it, and we keep trying to make it, it's got to come from
01:52:55.800
quantum up to the relative, the relativistic, which is, you know, top-down. But I would argue
01:53:01.740
the fact that we've tried this strategy, and we keep trying it for 40 years, and it's failing,
01:53:06.740
is probably a reason to think that maybe we're framing the problem fundamentally the wrong way,
01:53:12.220
and we have to think about, no, no, no, we have to give up a purely bottom-up. We have to make the
01:53:18.300
top-down as real to all of our explanations. That's happening in the science right now. Now,
01:53:24.200
to my mind, and I don't mean to be insulting, because I don't want to be reductionistic,
01:53:28.100
but that sounds a lot like a lot of the language I hear Jonathan using, and I agree, Jonathan,
01:53:35.560
it's not identical, but you and I have good conversations around this. We can talk to each other.
01:53:40.860
There's a chance of real communication even communing, but I don't think that's specific
01:53:46.880
to us. I think that's a very real possibility right here, right now.
01:53:51.260
Yeah, there's an opening up of the space that's happening now, and I think people who are tuned
01:53:55.720
to it can notice it, and it does have to do with what you're saying in terms of this kind of limit
01:54:00.060
of science and the problem of the observer and all of these realities that everybody's trying to deal
01:54:04.300
with, and it's almost like a zeitgeist. It's interesting because your experience you talked
01:54:10.720
about of being traumatized and then having this separation of the two worldviews, it really is
01:54:16.220
akin to the way I was trying to describe at the outset the separation between, let's say,
01:54:22.040
the religious in a very kind of moralistic and legalistic and materialistic way, and this kind
01:54:29.100
of rise up above of these esoteric things that kind of came up in the West, whether it goes into
01:54:34.800
theosophy and to all these different very, very popular, you know, all the occultists, all of this
01:54:39.460
stuff was very, very popular. We tend to ignore that, but it was extremely, it had a lot of effect
01:54:45.020
on culture, and so that's why it's interesting because some people today, to me, will say things
01:54:49.440
like, oh, you're saying occult things because I'm actually trying to reconnect these things
01:54:56.060
together, right, to reconnect these things that went up too high and these things that went too low
01:55:01.240
into this top-down, bottom-up reality. When you read St. Maximus the Confessor, you really do have
01:55:07.940
exactly that structure that you're talking about, and I think that if you read St. Gregor of Nyssa,
01:55:12.920
and especially the mystical, like the more mystical fathers, I think that, like you talked about
01:55:18.260
pseudo-Dionysus, there are some theologians, interesting theologians right now that are positing
01:55:22.940
Dionysus's theory as a solution to the problem of complexity and emergence, and they don't want
01:55:29.580
to come on my channel yet because they're still working on their papers, but it's happening right
01:55:33.440
now, like people are talking about it and thinking about it. Yes. Can I suggest something? This comes
01:55:38.440
from Cardinal George of Chicago, who was kind of a mentor to me, and he was a brilliant guy,
01:55:43.520
and he used to say, we start the religion science thing the wrong way because it's too much
01:55:49.140
a polar opposition, that we should work on the recovery of philosophy as a rational path.
01:55:55.860
And what I think he meant was a lot of people, especially young people, think the only rational
01:56:00.580
path is the scientific one. Those are simply coterminous. To be rational is to be a follower
01:56:06.520
of the scientific method. And so if religion isn't that, well, then it must be irrational.
01:56:12.000
Well, if it introduced philosophy as indeed a rational path, the most brilliant people in the
01:56:17.200
tradition have practiced it, but it's not a scientific path. It's rational without being
01:56:23.840
scientific. And that might open the door, Cardinal George used to say, to thinking about religion
01:56:28.720
as also a rational path that's not scientific. I think it's hard for younger people even to imagine
01:56:35.500
what that is. Rational means scientific. Well, we can help them out to some degree. I mean,
01:56:41.440
I titled my first book Maps of Meaning for a very specific reason, is that this narrative structure
01:56:48.880
is a map. Yeah. And what that means, if that's true, and I do believe it's true, and I studied a
01:56:56.640
lot of the early work on hippocampal function from animal researchers, and they made some real
01:57:02.080
fundamental discoveries in the field of cognition. It's like, we need a map to traverse the world.
01:57:10.400
It's not optional. Without a map, you're lost. And to be lost is a terrible thing.
01:57:18.620
And so, and there's rationality in the development of a map. There better be, because otherwise it
01:57:23.820
doesn't get you to where you want to go. And you certainly want to get away from being lost, let's say.
01:57:28.060
And science is not a map. It's a description of the terrain. Without direction. There's direction
01:57:35.720
there, I suppose, but it's implicit. The scientists impose that direction by following the dictates of
01:57:40.980
their intuition of meaning. But science itself doesn't offer a map. Well, there's no rationality
01:57:46.820
outside of science. Okay, well, they let the irrational people design the map. Well, that's what's
01:57:50.580
happening with the politicization of our culture. And so the religion, and then the rationalists,
01:57:55.800
you know, they say, well, if we weren't religious, and we weren't superstitious, well, everyone would
01:57:59.960
be rational, and wouldn't the world be a better place? And I think, no, the religious would drop
01:58:03.900
into the political. And then you watch what happens, and we are watching what happens, because there's
01:58:09.100
no domain for the religious now, no specified domain. So tiny things become imbued with religious
01:58:14.980
significance, because there's no proper place, right? And that's not good. And so it's not that,
01:58:22.600
it's not impossible. I mean, I don't see, I don't see a flaw in this claim. I can't see a flaw in it's
01:58:29.980
like, don't we need a map? Well, can science provide that map? I've never heard a thoroughly
01:58:37.740
critical, scientifically trained, deep philosopher make the case that science can provide the direction
01:58:48.080
for ethical behavior. And that's the map. What's good? Where should we head? So what do we do with that?
01:58:53.600
There's nothing? There's nothing? There's no map?
01:58:55.720
No, and that's why I objected so much to that claim that science belongs in the highest place,
01:58:59.960
that physical sciences are the queen of the sciences. That can't be right, because that's saying,
01:59:05.440
the one that can't provide the map is governing all the other ways of knowing, and that can't be right.
01:59:10.020
But I think we have lost a sense of that. And again, I think as a religious person,
01:59:14.500
I'll take some responsibility. I think we have not been great at providing the map. And we have to
01:59:23.440
Well, Bishop, I think this follows from what you and Jordan were talking about. One of the problems
01:59:31.060
about invoking philosophy is which one do you mean? Do you mean academic philosophy? Or do you mean
01:59:37.040
the philosophy that Pierre Hadot has brought back?
01:59:41.360
That one, I think, is better. Yeah, it's a way of life.
01:59:45.460
Well, yes. And what I would point to is that that points us to a kind of, what's the difference
01:59:53.040
between the academic philosophy, and I have training in that, and philosophy as a way of life. And it
01:59:58.420
goes to points that Jonathan was making about how much the transformation. Look, the Cartesian claim
02:00:07.540
is that truths, all truths are available to a method. You go to earlier, you know, the Neoplatonic
02:00:15.120
tradition, right? It's like, no, no, no, there are some truths that will only be disclosed if you go
02:00:20.800
through fundamental transformation. And then, and so we have to talk about the rationality of
02:00:27.120
transformation, which is about, you know, the procedural, the perspectival, the participatory
02:00:32.700
transformation. And the thing about this, and this is what's really exciting, is a lot of the work is
02:00:38.200
showing that, you know, I got a series I write with Greg Enriquez and Zach Stein, that you can't
02:00:46.720
infer your way through transformation. This goes to, I mean, the person who wrote the book on this
02:00:50.220
is L.A. Paul. I know, Laurie, she's a great philosopher. Tight analytic argument to make
02:00:56.600
the point, you can't infer your way through a transformative process. And so you have to ask
02:01:02.160
the question, okay, is it just willy-nilly? No, what do human beings actually do? What kind of
02:01:06.940
rationality? Agnes Kallar did this in her book on aspiration. She calls it proleptic rationality.
02:01:12.900
What kind, what is the rationality? What does it look like when people are, you know, going through
02:01:18.220
fundamental transformations in order to conform to reality? That's their way of getting at the truth,
02:01:23.600
rather than marshalling a method. And so, I go back to my point again, we need to expand the notion
02:01:28.840
of rationality, and the way it was exemplified in Phileo Sophia, rather than the way it is
02:01:37.560
exemplified, I would say, in, still to a large degree, academic philosophy. I went into-
02:01:46.180
The academic philosophers have the same problem that Bishop Barron described about the priesthood.
02:01:56.700
Your countryman again, Lonergan, you know, we had those four imperatives. If you want to know
02:02:02.320
the world, you've got to be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, and be responsible. And he describes
02:02:07.920
all four of those. But his point was, we tend not to be those four things. The mind is fallen. It falls
02:02:14.440
away from attention. It doesn't see what's there. Or even like, John, to use your stuff, it doesn't
02:02:20.120
maybe make the right siphoning moves to say, let me be attentive to the right things. It's not
02:02:27.660
intelligent, which for him meant it doesn't have insights. So, it doesn't discern intelligible form.
02:02:34.520
It's not reasonable, meaning it doesn't make judgments. So, I'm looking at a phenomenon. I say,
02:02:40.300
it could be this, could be this, could be that. But I never make the judgment to say, no, that's
02:02:45.440
truly what this thing is. And then finally, it's not responsible, meaning it doesn't follow up the
02:02:50.980
implications of its judgments. But what he was getting from his own Christian tradition, I think,
02:02:55.440
was the deep sense of the fallenness of the mind. The mind is, it's, it's not, it's not a wreck,
02:03:01.920
but it's compromised. And it needs to go through a disciplinary process. It has to go, and that's,
02:03:08.020
I think, what Pierre Audeau and those people are recovering from the ancient world, is you had to
02:03:12.120
go through, Plato's Academy was not a classroom where you could sit and take in Plato's theory of
02:03:17.460
the forms. It was a way of life, and you learned a manner of being and knowing and so on. So, I think
02:03:26.720
that's true in any intellectual discipline. You've got to be converted, and you have to acknowledge,
02:03:32.620
and we have to acknowledge your sin in a way, that your mind is not what it should be,
02:03:38.820
Well, gentlemen, we've, we've, we've passed our two hour mark. And so, I think, and I'm starting
02:03:51.700
to drift somewhat. So, I'm going to call this to a halt, I think, somewhat arbitrarily, unless there
02:03:57.120
are pressing issues that any of you would like to conclude with. Maybe a concluding statement from
02:04:02.040
each of you might be a nice thing. Jonathan, I put you on the spot. Do you want to say something to
02:04:06.500
close up? Sure. I mean, I think that, first of all, Jordan, thank you for the opportunity for us to
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talk, to speak to each other. I never met Bishop Barron. I had some admiration for him, and obviously
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for you, and for John. And I think that these discussions are very fruitful. And I think that
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these, especially as people watch them, it's because it's obviously not just happening here.
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People watch them get engaged, and kind of people who haven't listened to John's things, or haven't
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listened to Bishop Barron's things, or mine, you know, to kind of see what is, what is the
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discussion happening now, because a lot of the things we brought up are really on fire in terms
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of subjects in the world. And so, we need to be continuously explored, and we need more people
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to dive in. And so, thanks for the opportunity. John? I want to reinforce what Jonathan just said.
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It's been wonderful. The two hours flew by for me. It was wonderful to meet you, Bishop.
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And I think we could have some wonderful conversations in depth about, you know, the project of
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perhaps integrating Neoplatonism and science. I think Lonegrin would be helping, you know,
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insight, of course, was crucial to that. So, I really appreciate all that. Yeah, I just wanted to say
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that I take the meeting crisis very seriously. And I think COVID has made it worse. I've got a lot of
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evidence for that. And I don't think, I think the vein, I think it's a vain hope that everything's
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just going to go back to the way it was. I think that is not where we should place our existential or
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epistemic bets. And I think we need to ramp up the project of getting the call to a sapiential
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framework and a way of life to people out there. So, that's what would be my final word.
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Bishop? Yeah, mine again is just to thank everybody. I enjoyed it immensely. And I agree
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with John. The time flew by, and I found it fascinating. Yeah, the recovery of the wisdom
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tradition over and against this deadening scientism, the recovery of value over and
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against this equally deadening culture of self-invention, that I just generate my own
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values. I think that, I mean, bores me to death. Good luck trying that. No, it bores me to death,
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and I think it's killing people spiritually. So, the recovery of the wisdom tradition, the recovery
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of objective value culminating, speaking as a Catholic bishop, in God, the supreme value. That's the
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key to meaning. Well, thanks very much, guys, for participating in this. I really appreciate it. And
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I'm sure we'll, I hope, I pray all of that, that we'll have a chance to converse again, and that
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people who are listening are benefited by this, and that we do this immense technology that we have at
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our fingertips. So, surprisingly, ethical justice, and help dispense whatever wisdom we've managed to
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cobble together to as many people as we possibly can, and invite them along.