The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Bishop Barron： Catholicism and the Modern Age

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00:00:16.220 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

00:00:20.660 important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those

00:00:25.680 battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions

00:00:30.560 can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:35.180 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you

00:00:40.620 might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that

00:00:45.500 while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're

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00:01:02.560 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:01:13.780 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 14 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson,

00:01:19.520 dad's daughter and collaborator. If you're new to tuning in, you might not have heard of the health

00:01:23.940 troubles my mom's having. Not to get everybody down, but people have been asking about what's

00:01:28.280 going on in our family, so here it is. She had a kidney removal surgery about six weeks ago in May

00:01:33.280 and has suffered from some serious and extremely rare post-operative complications. We've been

00:01:38.460 stressed to death, particularly dad, but mom's getting better slowly, so we have some tentative hope at

00:01:43.580 the moment. I think everything will be okay, but it's been really hard on my parents. Well, it's been hard on

00:01:48.320 everybody. We've received a lot of really kind messages and support, and so if you were one of

00:01:52.660 those people who reached out, it's meant a lot. That's the update for this week. Next week is

00:01:57.220 hopefully going to be a bit brighter. Today, we're presenting the podcast titled

00:02:01.300 Catholicism and the Modern Age with Bishop Barron. Dad's conversation with Bishop Barron was recorded

00:02:07.260 on March 26, 2019. Bishop Robert Emmett Barron was a professor of systematic theology at the

00:02:14.180 University of St. Mary of the Lake. He founded the Catholic ministry Word on Fire and has published

00:02:19.420 a number of books, including Catholicism, a journey to the heart of the faith. He has a large YouTube

00:02:24.560 and Facebook presence and is among the rare religious figures managing a substantial public

00:02:28.900 impact in the present world. When we return, Dad's conversation with Bishop Barron.

00:02:33.700 Bishop Robert Emmett Barron is a U.S.-based prelate of the Roman Catholic Church, serving as an auxiliary

00:02:47.860 bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He was a professor of systematic theology at University of St.

00:02:55.640 Mary of the Lake from 1992 until 2015, upgraded in 2008 to the inaugural Francis Cardinal George

00:03:05.820 Professor of Faith and Culture. He founded the Catholic ministry Word on Fire, which employs traditional

00:03:14.600 and digital media to describe the doctrines of Catholicism to the general public. Word on Fire published

00:03:21.760 the 10-part series, Catholicism, which was broadcast on PBS in 2011 and which Bishop Barron hosted.

00:03:30.800 He's published a number of books, including Catholicism, A Journey to the Heart of the Faith,

00:03:38.240 Vibrant Paradoxes, the both slash and of Catholicism, and very recently Your Life is Worth Living with Fulton Sheen,

00:03:48.960 published on March 5th, 2019. He has a substantive YouTube presence with a total viewership of 30 million

00:03:58.000 and is well known on Facebook as well with 1.5 million followers. Clearly, Bishop Barron is among the

00:04:06.160 rare religious figures managing a substantial public impact in the present world. It's very nice to see

00:04:13.840 you. I've been looking forward to our meeting for quite a long time. Yeah, me too. Thanks for having

00:04:19.520 me on the show. Yeah, well, people keep writing and saying, you have to talk to Bishop Barron,

00:04:24.960 and then they come up to me and they say, you have to talk to Bishop Barron. Well, I've heard the same

00:04:29.600 thing from the other side. Everyone's telling me to talk to you, so it must be in God's providence.

00:04:34.400 I suppose. At least we can hope that that's the case. So why do people want us to talk as far as

00:04:43.140 you're concerned? Yeah, you know, I'm not entirely sure, but I would say I think you've opened a lot

00:04:48.920 of doors for people to religion in an era when, you know, the new atheists are very influential among

00:04:56.020 young people. And I think you've opened doors that legitimize at least re-approaching these great

00:05:02.360 issues and questions and texts. I'm doing it, I suppose, in a more explicit way, but you're,

00:05:08.060 I think, paving the way for an awful lot of people, at least to reconsider religion.

00:05:11.980 So maybe they find that intriguing, and probably the fact that we're both coming out of an academic

00:05:16.900 background, but then trying to reach out, you know, more widely through the social media.

00:05:21.400 So there's that in common. But, you know, I used to speak for myself. That's what I see in you

00:05:26.180 that's been so powerful. Because in the wake of the new atheist critique, I mean, I just find that so

00:05:31.980 such a desert opens up for young people. And I deal with young people all the time. And I hear

00:05:37.500 the echoes of Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris all the time. But it's such a finely bleak view,

00:05:44.100 you know, and religion speaks to these deepest longings of the heart. And I think you've, for a

00:05:49.540 lot of people, made that again possible, at least to think coherently and rationally about those

00:05:54.080 things. So I found that very uplifting and helpful. And I think a lot of people have too.

00:05:58.800 And maybe they see a point of contact there between the two of us.

00:06:01.980 Well, maybe, you know, it's funny, because I've received letters from people of different faiths

00:06:09.860 from all over the world, like a surprising number of people, Catholics, and a lot of Orthodox Christians,

00:06:20.200 a lot of Orthodox Jews, a substantial number of Muslims, far more than I would have ever

00:06:26.580 suspected. Protestants and monks and Buddhists and Hindus who are all following the lecture series I did

00:06:43.680 on Genesis back in 2017. And also, you know, a tremendous number of atheists, I would say,

00:06:50.160 they probably outnumber the religious people, surprisingly enough. And they've said that

00:06:55.320 the tack that I've taken, which is, I would say, kind of a fine balancing line between the religious

00:07:03.540 and the psychological, seems to... Well, I guess it's had the same effect on the people that I've been

00:07:13.980 talking to that it's had on me. Like, these stories have had a profound effect on me.

00:07:23.120 Well, you know, I've talked about you, actually, to the American bishops, because I'm on this,

00:07:27.640 I'm the chair of the Evangelization and Catechesis Committee. So the bishop's concerned about how we

00:07:32.800 propagate the faith today, you know. And I've laid out for them a lot of the grim statistics,

00:07:37.220 and they are grim about, especially young people leaving the Catholic Church. For every one that

00:07:43.100 joins, six are leaving now. We have the highest rate of people leaving. Anyway, I've gone through

00:07:49.200 some of those stats, but then I've signaled signs of hope. And you're one of them. I've said,

00:07:55.600 the fact that this gentleman who's speaking about, I'd say, spiritual things, and certainly now about

00:08:01.000 the Bible in a way that is smart and compelling, especially young people, is hopeful. So many might

00:08:09.800 be leaving, you know, official religion, but the religious questions have not left their minds.

00:08:14.780 And I think you're addressing that in a way that's very provocative and compelling. And it's given me

00:08:20.580 a sort of renewed courage to say, well, why can't we do the same thing? Why have we... It's our book.

00:08:28.100 I mean, let's face it, the Bible is the book the Church has, you know, produced. It's the heart of

00:08:32.140 the Church's life. But why isn't there someone who's, at least in a formal sense, outside the Church,

00:08:37.300 doing a better job than we are at explicating it? And so I take it to be a side of hope.

00:08:43.380 It's a mystery. Well, I feel, too, that my position outside the Church is actually critical to the

00:08:55.840 success of what I'm doing. You know, people have tried to pin me down multiple times with regards

00:09:02.740 to my belief in God. I actually did a two-hour lecture in, I guess it was a 70-minute lecture

00:09:10.380 in Australia about that question, because I thought about it a lot and about... I've always felt

00:09:17.520 imposed upon, I would say, and boxed in when people asked me that question. But I finally

00:09:24.780 figured out that I didn't really feel that I had the moral right to make a claim about belief

00:09:39.260 in God. I mean, that's not a trivial thing to, to, let's say, proclaim.

00:09:48.300 Yeah.

00:09:48.700 You know, because it's not merely a matter of stating in some verbal manner that I am willing

00:09:56.540 to agree semantically with a set of doctrines. It means that you have to live. You have to

00:10:08.480 commit to living a certain way. Yeah.

00:10:11.260 And the demand of that life is so stringent and so all-consuming, and you're so unlikely

00:10:23.560 to live up to it that to make the claim that you believe, I think, is a... To me, it smacks

00:10:35.280 of a kind of... I mean, I understand why people do it, and this isn't a criticism of people's

00:10:41.100 statement of faith, but for me, the critical element of belief is action. And the requirements

00:10:51.500 of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that I don't see how you can proclaim yourself

00:10:59.280 a believer without being terrified of immediately being struck down by lightning or some such

00:11:08.320 cosmic event.

00:11:09.560 No, there's a lot to that. I mean, there's a lot to it. The story that I've always loved

00:11:13.680 about Origen, the great church father, whom Jung loved, by the way. I mean, Jung saw the

00:11:17.760 church fathers as some of the first great psychologists, and Origen's sermons on Genesis, Exodus are like

00:11:23.240 yours in many ways. I mean, I don't know if you've been reading him explicitly, but that sort

00:11:27.340 of psychodynamic and spiritual reading origins all over that. But the story is about this

00:11:31.920 young guy named Gregory who comes to Origen to learn the doctrine of the Christians. And

00:11:37.140 Origen said to him, first, you must come and live our life, and then you'll understand our

00:11:41.920 doctrine. And that young kid, Gregory, became St. Gregory Thalmaturgus. He becomes the great

00:11:47.080 saint of the church. But he had to get into the life first. And there's a lot to that. I think

00:11:52.540 the practices of Christianity, they get into your body before they get into your mind. It's also

00:11:59.340 true, I think, that when you take away a lot of practices that surround certain doctrines,

00:12:03.780 the doctrine fades from people's minds. When I was a kid, there was still the practice around

00:12:08.900 the Blessed Sacrament. People, you know, with genuflections, and before you entered the pew in

00:12:13.740 church, you would genuflect. In fact, they say that Catholics of my parents' generation, when they'd come

00:12:19.400 into a movie theater to see a movie in the rows of seats, they would genuflect before they got into

00:12:25.100 the row. But see, that means this thing was so in their bodies, you know. But that practice was

00:12:30.180 communicating to the mind the importance of what's in front of them. Well, the same is true really of

00:12:34.440 all the doctrines, you know. God, in some ways, is a function of this manner of life. And so I've

00:12:40.800 emphasized that actually a lot in my own work. The postmoderns who have influenced Christianity are very

00:12:46.420 strong on that, too, practices. I mean, my take, Jordan, is that there's a hundred ways in to the

00:12:52.320 question of God. There's all kinds of paths, you know. One of them being just that, ritual, the body,

00:12:59.660 the moral life is a way in. To look at the saints and try to be a saint is a great way in.

00:13:06.480 Jared Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet, who was a convert under John Henry Newman, so he himself

00:13:12.640 went through this process of discovering the faith. But someone came to him and said, you know,

00:13:16.720 I'm really wrestling with belief in God. And he said, give alms. He didn't provide an argument or

00:13:24.240 prove. He said, do something. And of course, if you play the whole thing out, I mean, if God is love,

00:13:29.520 that's what God is, then performing an act of love gets you closer to God than almost anything else.

00:13:35.120 And so the giving of alms can lead you into that sacred space. Now, the questing mind, I mean,

00:13:42.180 then wants to ask all kinds of questions about it and ground it. So, you know, feed as querent

00:13:47.160 intellectum of Anselm, right? Faith seeking understanding. That's where theology, philosophy

00:13:51.900 will come in. Well, you know, and I've been talking to my audiences practically about certain

00:13:58.120 elements of, let's say, Judeo-Christian fundamental beliefs. So, you know, I spent, I think, two and a

00:14:08.980 half hours, the first biblical lecture I did on the first sentence of Genesis and then tried to take

00:14:14.020 the opening chapters apart in great detail. But some very interesting propositions from a psychological

00:14:22.820 and philosophical perspective in Genesis. I mean, I look at it sort of technically,

00:14:29.640 in some sense, as a statement about the nature of being. I mean, what Genesis reveals to me is that

00:14:35.820 there has to be a structure to encounter possibility or that there is a structure that

00:14:42.820 encounters possibility. That's part of, that's built into reality itself. And that structure is God the

00:14:49.660 Father. And that structure uses a process. And the process is the Logos. And the Logos is something

00:14:57.060 like courageous, truthful communication. It's the word, but it's much more than that.

00:15:02.580 And it uses that to encounter this potential and to generate order. And it seems to me that that's

00:15:10.820 psychologically akin to what human beings do with their own consciousness. You know, the new atheist

00:15:17.400 types and the materialist scientists tend to consider human beings deterministic organisms. But my

00:15:25.420 understanding of neuropsychology is that the only time that we are deterministic organisms is when

00:15:31.760 circuits for specific tasks have been built up through lengthy practice and can be run automatically.

00:15:38.940 And much of the time in our lives, and I talk to my audiences about this, what we do is we wake up

00:15:46.180 in the morning, our consciousness reappears on the plane of being, let's say. And what we face in front

00:15:52.820 of us is an unstructured and potential-filled chaos. And our consciousness determines the manner in which

00:16:01.500 that potential transforms itself into the actuality of order, into the present and the past. And I think

00:16:10.320 everyone understands that. We treat each other that way. Like, we treat each other, we treat ourselves as if

00:16:16.200 we are responsible for what we bring into existence. That's part of our moral responsibility.

00:16:24.260 We treat each other as if that's part of what makes us worthwhile as creatures, right? That's part of our

00:16:30.580 value. We treat ourselves as if the nature of what we bring into being is determined by our choices

00:16:39.920 between good and evil. And we treat other people the same way. Like, you can't have a friendship with

00:16:48.680 someone if you don't believe that they have that power of choice and that capacity for morality.

00:16:58.320 You don't have any respect for them, and they won't interact with you. And so you can't found a

00:17:05.100 friendship on that, and you can't found a family, and you can't found a society without the fundamental

00:17:13.580 presupposition that individuals, and this is another element, of course, of the presuppositions in

00:17:20.560 Genesis, that the individual is somehow made in the image of God. If God is that which confronts

00:17:27.420 potential and generates order, and more, you know, because God says too in Genesis that every time he

00:17:33.880 constructs something that's new and orderly using the logos, he says, and it was good. And that's so

00:17:40.760 fascinating to me because it's repeated so many times because what it implies is that if you confront,

00:17:47.720 if the potential of being is confronted with what's good and truthful and courageous, then what emerges as

00:17:58.100 consequence is good is good. And I also believe that to be the case for individuals. If you confront

00:18:04.980 the world in a manner that's Cain-like, bitter, incapable of making the proper sacrifices, enraged,

00:18:18.980 jealous, outraged at the suffering of existence and its essential unfairness, then you become vengeful,

00:18:27.780 and bitter, and murderous, and genocidal. And that seems like no positive way forward.

00:18:38.020 That's no bargain, yeah.

00:18:39.460 With the new atheist types, you know, they demolish the metaphysics without really thinking it through,

00:18:46.900 I think. And they leave people with nothing. And the nothing is so empty that it just produces,

00:18:54.900 it really produces pain for people. Like, I've talked to many, many, many people, including atheists,

00:19:01.940 who have been vastly relieved to find some deeper meaning in the archaic stories that our culture is predicated on.

00:19:11.380 Every day, I deal with that. It's people that they feel obligated intellectually to accept the new atheist,

00:19:15.820 you know, conclusions, but then their whole soul is rebelling against it. And I would say for obvious reasons.

00:19:20.100 You know, what's very interesting to me, Jordan, is I've got a colleague, Chris Kazor, who teaches at LMU.

00:19:25.460 He's written on your stuff. And he said, what Peterson is doing is what the church fathers would have called

00:19:30.340 the tropological reading of the scriptures, you know, the four senses. You've got the literal historical

00:19:35.620 interpretation. You've got the allegorical, so it has to do with Jesus. You have the anagogical having to do with

00:19:42.260 the journey to heaven. But the tropological, they would have seen as the moral sense. So what it has to do about our

00:19:47.860 moral lives. And I think in our categories, say, maybe the psychological life, et cetera.

00:19:52.740 And so I think what you just proposed there is a cool, you know, sort of tropological

00:19:57.060 reading of those texts. I mean, I, without denying it, I'd press on the more metaphysical stuff.

00:20:03.460 Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, did a wonderful meditation on Genesis, saying that

00:20:09.700 to say, I believe in God is to say, I believe in the primacy of Logos over and against mere matter.

00:20:14.980 Over and against a merely materialist view that what's more metaphysically primordial is Logos.

00:20:21.540 And he would stress intelligibility, that the fact that God speaks the world into being means it's

00:20:27.460 marked in every nook and cranny by something like intelligibility, which in turn would ground

00:20:32.340 anything like the sciences. I mean, any scientist goes out to meet a world that at least he or she assumes

00:20:38.740 is intelligible, you know. So the intelligibility of things, the rational structure within being

00:20:45.460 is coming from the Logos. But the other thing that I think is really intriguing about the Genesis,

00:20:50.740 that opening move, is the dethroning of all the false claims to divinity. So all the things that come

00:20:57.380 forth from God, you know, from sun and moon and the animals and so on and so forth, were all things that

00:21:03.220 were worshipped in various cultures in the ancient world. So the author is saying, no, no, no, no.

00:21:09.780 These things are not themselves ultimate. They're not the Logos from which all things come. But then

00:21:14.980 the cool twist to me, it's not just a no, because I see Catholics get this, because the way that text

00:21:21.620 is structured, it's liturgically structured. It's like a liturgical procession. Everything coming forth in

00:21:27.220 this ordered way. At the end of the procession come human beings, right? So at the end of a liturgical

00:21:33.700 procession is the one who will lead the praise. And so the point there, this goes back to Augustine

00:21:39.380 and people like that. The point is, none of these things is God, but all these things belong in a

00:21:45.700 chorus of praise of the true God, led by us. So, and there's the human role is to give proper praise to

00:21:53.060 God. Well, you know, there's critics, for example, there's a critic in Canada,

00:21:59.700 a well-known environmentalist, David Suzuki, who believes that one of the sins of the Judeo-Christian

00:22:07.620 perspective is that it gave human beings dominion over the world. And the philosopher,

00:22:16.180 the German philosopher, what's his name? You have to narrow that one down.

00:22:22.660 Yes. The phenomenologist.

00:22:26.660 Husserl?

00:22:27.860 No, his student.

00:22:29.860 Heidegger.

00:22:30.400 Heidegger, you know, believed that the Judeo-Christian texts had given us the right to treat the world as

00:22:39.020 if it's produce, you know, therefore...

00:22:41.460 Yeah, but that's getting exactly backwards, isn't it?

00:22:43.700 Yes, well...

00:22:44.580 It's this deep respect for our fellow creatures as part of the chorus of praise, and the dominion

00:22:50.740 is not domination. I think it's that kind of right ordering. And the thing there is,

00:22:55.140 there's been a lot of interesting studies recently of the temple, the ancient temple, and how it was

00:23:00.740 covered inside and out by symbols of the cosmos, you know, of animals and plants and planets and

00:23:06.020 stars and so on. The idea being, when Israel gathered for right praise, it was the whole universe

00:23:12.420 being gathered for right praise. Now, look at that in the Gothic churches. You go up to Notre

00:23:16.660 Domino, that it's not an anthropocentric thing. You've got the planets and stars and astrological

00:23:22.740 signs and animals galore, because the cathedral was the successor of the temple, the place of right

00:23:27.700 praise. And it's drawing creation in. Right.

00:23:31.140 I think it's much more modernity that is rough on nature and rough on the animal kingdom. Thomas

00:23:36.660 Aquinas is not. I mean, go back to the pre-modern Christian thinkers. They're not anti-nature. On

00:23:42.580 the contrary. Because the biblical vision is salvation is a cosmic reality. God's trying to save all of

00:23:49.060 his creation. That's the Noah story. The ark is like a floating temple. Right? So it's a little

00:23:55.860 microcosm of the right order of things led by Noah's family. Yeah, by a family that's properly ordered.

00:24:04.260 And what are they concerned about? The animals. They're concerned about life that God created.

00:24:09.220 That's why the ark becomes a symbol of the church. So all the churches are meant to look like ships.

00:24:13.860 You have like nave, right? The ship, the central isle of a church. But they're meant to be a little

00:24:18.900 floating temple where creation is honored and preserved. So it's also interesting to note that

00:24:26.020 in the Noah story that there's a tremendous emphasis on the idea that like Noah, who is someone who

00:24:34.660 like Adam before the fall walked with God, was capable because he could act nobly and courageously

00:24:41.780 and truthfully and truthfully and also put his family together. He was actually capable of shepherding

00:24:47.140 the complex creation of being in its totality through a period of absolute chaos. And you know,

00:24:54.180 when I look at the environmental challenges, let's say that we face today because of the complexity of

00:25:04.100 the 9 billion of us or the 9 billion that there will be and the necessity of making sure that everyone

00:25:10.260 has adequate security and shelter and food and freedom. I see that the proper pathway forward to

00:25:18.340 dealing with that is for people to put themselves together and to put their families together and

00:25:24.020 their communities together and that the consequence of that, the natural consequence of that adoption of

00:25:31.300 ultimate responsibility would be the extension of care beyond the immediate, beyond the social even.

00:25:40.820 And so that everything does depend, I would say, and this is something I learned

00:25:48.260 from Jung, was that far more than we think depends on the orderly

00:25:55.380 progression and care of the soul. All of it depends on it. And you know, when I talk to my audiences,

00:26:06.340 it's so interesting. And I think it might be something that the church is missing if I could be so bold.

00:26:12.660 Well, you know, I've talked to about 150 live audiences now about this sort of thing,

00:26:21.380 independent of all my classroom lectures. And I'll tell you, I tell people, I suggest to people that

00:26:31.140 the ancient idea that life is suffering and that it's tainted by malevolence,

00:26:37.620 that there's no more true ideas than that, in some base sense. And that that's something that

00:26:44.260 everyone has to contend with. And if you don't contend with it properly, then you become embittered

00:26:49.940 and you work to make things worse. And everyone understands that. Everyone knows that's true.

00:26:56.340 And then I suggest to them that the proper way out of that isn't the pursuit of material

00:27:02.260 satisfaction or impulsive happiness or rights from the individual perspective, but the adoption of

00:27:08.900 responsibility. And I'll tell you, every single time I talk about that, you can hear a pin drop in the

00:27:18.020 auditorium. Yeah, I believe that. And I think one of the things that the church has failed to

00:27:24.500 communicate properly is that

00:27:31.300 you need a noble goal in life to buttress yourself against its catastrophe. And I mean, Abel's a good

00:27:38.580 example of that in the Abel and Cain story, because he devotes himself properly to God and things work

00:27:44.180 out for him. Well, they work out for him.

00:27:47.140 More or less. It doesn't end very well.

00:27:48.900 No, it doesn't. But I mean, good is sometimes defeated by evil. But I mean, obviously, he lives

00:27:55.220 a proper and admirable life. And it needs to be communicated to young people, especially young men.

00:28:04.820 The biblical key is always right praise. And I go right back to Genesis 1, is when we give praise to

00:28:12.900 God, drawing all creation together, then our soul becomes ordered properly. And then around us,

00:28:19.700 a kingdom of right order is built up. In the Catholic Mass, we have that wonderful prayer of

00:28:25.220 the Gloria. We say, glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to people of goodwill. And it's

00:28:30.180 like a formula that if I give glory to God in the highest, then there will be peace around me.

00:28:37.140 It's like a condensation of the Sermon on the Mount, because that's exactly what that sermon seems to

00:28:42.420 you. See, that sermon seems to me, and I also believe it to be psychologically true,

00:28:50.100 is that it's necessary for you to aim at the highest value that you can conceive of.

00:29:00.500 You know, and that has to have something to do with the amelioration of suffering and

00:29:09.540 the constraint of malevolence.

00:29:13.220 It'll express itself that way, naturally, yeah.

00:29:15.380 At least as a negative. And then, once you concentrate on that, and focus on that, and decide that that's your

00:29:23.060 primary aim, then things do start to order themselves around you, because everything that

00:29:29.860 you see and do directs itself towards that aim.

00:29:32.900 But that's the, I'd say, strangely and uniquely Christian thing, is that we say, okay, the God that

00:29:38.820 we're worshiping, the God revealed in the Old Testament, but then finally revealed in Jesus Christ.

00:29:43.700 As I'm looking over my computer screen right now, I'm looking at the crucifix of Jesus, right?

00:29:47.540 So my praise is directed to a God who's entered radically into suffering.

00:29:53.780 Not just the physical suffering, but the whole brokenness of the world,

00:29:56.660 of stupidity and cruelty and injustice and hatred. That's where God is gone. So the God that I worship

00:30:03.780 is the God who himself is dedicated to the amelioration of suffering, or of healing the

00:30:09.780 suffering of the world. But that's the way it's going to express itself. In a fallen, conflictual

00:30:14.020 world, right praise will end up looking like love, looking like love for those who suffer.

00:30:20.340 But see, I think that's the, to me, the master theme of the whole Bible.

00:30:23.140 But Israel always goes wrong, without exception, when its praise goes wrong.

00:30:27.700 It starts praising the wrong things.

00:30:29.940 No, that's what happens in Exodus, when Moses leads the Israelites through the desert, right?

00:30:36.180 They're in the same position we're in in the modern world.

00:30:43.700 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 14 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:30:48.260 I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

00:30:51.140 If you're new to tuning in, you might not have heard of the health troubles my mom's having.

00:30:55.060 Not to get everybody down, but people have been asking about what's going on in our family,

00:30:58.900 so here it is. She had a kidney removal surgery about six weeks ago, in May, and has suffered

00:31:03.940 from some serious and extremely rare post-operative complications. We've been stressed to death,

00:31:08.820 particularly Dad, but mom's getting better slowly. So we have some tentative hope at the moment.

00:31:13.860 I think everything will be okay, but it's been really hard on my parents. Well, it's been hard on

00:31:17.940 everybody. We've received a lot of really kind messages and support, and so if you were one of

00:31:22.260 those people who reached out, it's meant a lot. That's the update for this week. Next week is

00:31:27.060 hopefully going to be a bit brighter. Today, we're presenting the podcast titled

00:31:30.980 Catholicism and the Modern Age with Bishop Barron. Dad's conversation with Bishop Barron was recorded

00:31:36.980 on March 26, 2019. Bishop Robert Emmett Barron was a professor of systematic theology at the

00:31:43.780 University of St. Mary of the Lake. He founded the Catholic ministry Word on Fire and has published

00:31:49.140 a number of books, including Catholicism, A Journey to the Heart of the Faith. He has a large YouTube

00:31:54.260 and Facebook presence and is among the rare religious figures managing a substantial public

00:31:58.660 impact in the present world. When we return, Dad's conversation with Bishop Barron.

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00:34:51.540 Bishop Robert Emmett Barron is a U.S.-based prelate of the Roman Catholic Church,

00:35:03.700 serving as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He was a professor of systematic

00:35:10.580 theology at University of St. Mary of the Lake from 1992 until 2015, upgraded in 2008 to the inaugural

00:35:21.220 Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture. He founded the Catholic ministry Word

00:35:28.900 on Fire, which employs traditional and digital media to describe the doctrines of Catholicism

00:35:35.300 to the general public. Word on Fire published the 10-part series, Catholicism, which was broadcast on

00:35:43.220 PBS in 2011 and which Bishop Barron hosted. He's published a number of books, including Catholicism,

00:35:52.340 A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, Vibrant Paradoxes, the Both slash and of Catholicism,

00:36:00.500 and very recently, Your Life is Worth Living with Fulton Sheen, published on March 5th, 2019.

00:36:09.620 He has a substantive YouTube presence with a total viewership of 30 million and is well known on

00:36:16.340 Facebook as well, with 1.5 million followers. Clearly, Bishop Barron is among the rare religious

00:36:24.180 figures managing a substantial public impact in the present world. It's very nice to see you. I've

00:36:31.860 been looking forward to our meeting for quite a long time. Yeah, me too. Thanks for having me on the

00:36:37.060 show. Yeah, well, people keep writing and saying, you have to talk to Bishop Barron, and then they come up

00:36:42.900 to me, and they say, you have to talk to Bishop Barron. Well, I've heard the same thing from the

00:36:47.380 other side. Everyone's telling me to talk to you, so it must be in God's providence. I suppose. At least

00:36:53.780 we can hope that that's the case. So, why do people want us to talk as far as you're concerned?

00:37:01.660 Yeah, you know, I'm not entirely sure, but I would say I think you've opened a lot of doors for people

00:37:07.340 to religion in an era when, you know, the new atheists are very influential among young people,

00:37:13.900 and I think you've opened doors that legitimize at least re-approaching these great issues and

00:37:20.340 questions and texts. I'm doing it, I suppose, in a more explicit way, but you're, I think, paving the

00:37:26.020 way for an awful lot of people at least to reconsider religion. So, maybe they find that intriguing,

00:37:30.780 and probably the fact that we're both coming out of an academic background, but then trying to reach

00:37:36.120 out, you know, more widely through the social media. So, there's that in common, but, you know,

00:37:40.980 I used to speak for myself. That's what I see in you that's been so powerful, because in the wake of

00:37:46.700 the new atheist critique, I mean, I just find that so, such a desert opens up for young people, and I

00:37:52.440 deal with young people all the time, and I hear the echoes of Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris all the

00:37:57.940 time, but it's such a finely bleak view, you know, and religion speaks to these deepest longings of the

00:38:04.380 heart, and I think you've, for a lot of people, made that, again, possible, at least to think

00:38:09.540 coherently and rationally about those things. So, I found that very uplifting and helpful, and I think

00:38:14.940 a lot of people have, too, and maybe they see a point of contact there between the two of us.

00:38:19.160 Well, maybe, you know, it's funny, because I've received letters from people of different faiths from

00:38:27.300 all over the world, a, like, surprising number of people, Catholics and a lot of Orthodox Christians,

00:38:37.360 a lot of Orthodox Jews, a substantial number of Muslims, far more than I would have ever suspected,

00:38:45.760 Protestants and monks and Buddhists and Hindus who are all following the lecture series I did on

00:39:01.180 Genesis back in 2017, and also, you know, a tremendous number of atheists. I would say

00:39:07.340 they probably outnumber the religious people, surprisingly enough, and they've said that

00:39:12.500 the tact that I've taken, which is, I would say, kind of a fine balancing line between the religious

00:39:20.700 and the psychological, seems to, well, I guess it's had the same effect on the people that I've been

00:39:31.140 talking to that it's had on me. Like, these stories have had a profound effect on me.

00:39:40.240 Well, you know, I've talked about you, actually, to the American bishops, because I'm on this,

00:39:44.840 I'm the chair of the Evangelization and Catechesis Committee, so the bishop's concerned about how we

00:39:49.980 propagate the faith today, you know, and I've laid out for them a lot of the grim statistics,

00:39:54.760 and they are grim about especially young people leaving the Catholic Church. For every one that

00:40:00.280 joined, six are leaving now. We have the highest rate of people leaving. Anyway, I've gone through some

00:40:06.560 of those stats, but then I've signaled signs of hope, and you're one of them. I've said, the fact

00:40:13.120 that this gentleman who's speaking about, I'd say, spiritual things, and certainly now about the Bible

00:40:18.740 in a way that is smart and compelling, especially young people, is hopeful. So, many might be leaving,

00:40:27.600 you know, official religion, but the religious questions have not left their minds, and I think

00:40:32.620 you're addressing that in a way that's very provocative and compelling, and it's given me a

00:40:37.980 sort of renewed courage to say, well, why can't we do the same thing? Why have we, it's our book. I

00:40:45.400 mean, let's face it, the Bible is the book the church has, you know, produced. It's the heart of

00:40:49.320 the church's life, but why isn't there someone who's, at least in a formal sense, outside the church

00:40:53.980 doing a better job than we are at explicating it? Well, that's a real mystery. It's a mystery. Well,

00:41:01.920 I feel, too, that my position outside the church is actually critical to the success of what I'm doing.

00:41:15.180 You know, people have tried to pin me down multiple times with regards to my belief in God. I actually

00:41:23.220 did a two-hour lecture in, I guess it was a 70-minute lecture in Australia about that question,

00:41:29.540 because I thought about it a lot, and about, I've always felt imposed upon, I would say, and boxed in

00:41:39.300 when people asked me that question, but I finally figured out that I didn't really feel that I had the

00:41:47.640 moral right to make a claim about belief in God. I mean, that's not a trivial thing to,

00:42:01.240 to, let's say, proclaim. Yeah. You know, because it's not merely a matter of

00:42:08.280 stating in some verbal manner that I am willing to agree semantically with a set of doctrines.

00:42:19.820 It means that you have to live, you have to commit to living a certain way. Yeah. And the demand of

00:42:30.420 that life is so stringent, and so all-consuming, and you're so unlikely to live up to it, that to make the claim

00:42:45.700 that you believe, I think is a, to me, it smacks of a kind of, I mean, I understand why people do it,

00:42:56.100 and this isn't a criticism of people's statement of faith, but for me, the critical element of

00:43:03.880 belief is action, and the requirements of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that

00:43:13.400 I don't see how you can proclaim yourself a believer without being terrified of immediately

00:43:22.100 being struck down by lightning or some such cosmic event. No, there's a lot to that. I mean, there's a lot

00:43:28.940 to it. The story that I've always loved about Origen, the great church father, whom Jung loved,

00:43:33.720 by the way. I mean, Jung saw the church fathers as some of the first great psychologists, and Origen

00:43:37.660 sermons on Genesis, Exodus, are like yours in many ways. I mean, I don't know if you've been reading

00:43:42.860 him explicitly, but that sort of psychodynamic and spiritual reading, Origen's all over that.

00:43:47.620 But the story is about this young guy named Gregory, who comes to Origen to learn the doctrine of the

00:43:53.260 Christians. And Origen said to him, first you must come and live our life, and then you'll understand

00:43:58.820 our doctrine. And that young kid, Gregory, became St. Gregory Thalmaturgus. He becomes the great saint

00:44:04.500 of the church. But he had to get into the life first. And there's a lot to that. I think the practices

00:44:10.460 of Christianity, they get into your body before they get into your mind. It's also true, I think,

00:44:17.020 that when you take away a lot of practices that surround certain doctrines, the doctrine

00:44:21.480 fades from people's minds. When I was a kid, there was still the practice around the Blessed

00:44:26.860 Sacrament. People, you know, genuflections, and before you entered the pew in church, you

00:44:31.280 would genuflect. In fact, they say that Catholics of my parents' generation, when they'd come into

00:44:36.720 a movie theater to see a movie in the rows of seats, they would genuflect before they got

00:44:41.700 into the row. But see, that means this thing was so in their bodies, you know. But that

00:44:46.660 practice was communicating to the mind the importance of what's in front of them. Well,

00:44:50.760 the same is true, really, of all the doctrines. You know, God, in some ways, is a function of

00:44:55.700 this manner of life. And so I've emphasized that, actually, a lot in my own work. The

00:45:00.280 postmoderns who have influenced Christianity are very strong on that, too, practices. I mean,

00:45:06.080 my take, Jordan, is that there's a hundred ways in to the question of God. There's all kinds

00:45:11.040 of paths, you know. One of them being just that, ritual, the body, the moral life is a

00:45:18.400 way in. To look at the saints and try to be a saint is a great way in. Jared Manley Hopkins,

00:45:24.760 the great Jesuit poet, who was a convert under John Henry Newman, so he himself went through

00:45:30.180 this process of discovering the faith. But someone came to him and said, you know, I'm really

00:45:34.520 wrestling with belief in God. And he said, give alms. He didn't provide an argument or

00:45:41.420 prove. He said, do something. And of course, if you play the whole thing out, I mean, if

00:45:45.500 God is love, that's what God is, then performing an act of love gets you closer to God than almost

00:45:51.000 anything else. And so the giving of alms can lead you into that sacred space. Now, the questing

00:45:58.620 mind, I mean, then wants to ask all kinds of questions about it and ground it. So, you know,

00:46:03.540 fides querens intellectum of ansomite, faith-seeking understanding, that's where theology, philosophy

00:46:09.060 will come in. Well, you know, and I've been talking to my audiences practically about certain

00:46:15.280 elements of, let's say, Judeo-Christian fundamental belief. So, you know, I spent, I think, two and a

00:46:26.140 half hours, the first biblical lecture I did on the first sentence of Genesis, and then tried to take

00:46:31.220 the opening chapters apart in great detail. But some very interesting propositions from a

00:46:39.480 psychological and philosophical perspective in Genesis. I mean, I look at it sort of technically,

00:46:46.540 in some sense, as a statement about the nature of being. I mean, what Genesis reveals to me is that

00:46:53.020 there has to be a structure to encounter possibility, or that there is a structure that encounters

00:47:00.460 possibility. That's part of, that's built into reality itself. And that structure is God the

00:47:06.840 Father. And that structure uses a process. And the process is the Logos. And the Logos is something

00:47:14.240 like courageous, truthful communication. It's the Word, but it's much more than that. And it uses that

00:47:21.260 to encounter this potential and to generate order. And it seems to me that that's psychologically akin

00:47:30.040 to what human beings do with their own consciousness. You know, the new atheist types and the materialist

00:47:36.500 scientists tend to consider human beings deterministic organisms. But my understanding of

00:47:43.360 neuropsychology is that the only time that we are deterministic organisms is when circuits for specific

00:47:50.840 tasks have been built up through lengthy practice and can be run automatically. And much of the time

00:47:57.280 in our lives, and I talk to my audiences about this, what we do is we wake up in the morning,

00:48:03.960 our consciousness reappears on the plane of being, let's say. And what we face in front of us is an

00:48:10.700 unstructured and potential-filled chaos. And our consciousness determines the manner in which that

00:48:19.040 potential transforms itself into the actuality of order into the present and the past. And I think

00:48:27.480 everyone understands that. We treat each other that way. Like, we treat each other, we treat ourselves as

00:48:33.100 if we are responsible for what we bring into existence. That's part of our moral responsibility.

00:48:41.480 We treat each other as if that's part of what makes us worthwhile as creatures, right? That's part of

00:48:47.620 our value. We treat ourselves as if the nature of what we bring into being is determined by our choices

00:48:57.100 between good and evil. And we treat other people the same way. Like, you can't have a friendship with

00:49:05.860 someone if you don't believe that they have that power of choice and that capacity for morality.

00:49:14.740 You don't have any respect for them and they won't interact with you. And so you can't found a

00:49:22.280 friendship on that and you can't found a family and you can't found a society without the fundamental

00:49:30.740 presupposition that individuals, and this is another element, of course, of the presuppositions in

00:49:37.720 Genesis that the individual is somehow made in the image of God. If God is that which confronts

00:49:44.580 potential and generates order, and then more, you know, because God says too in Genesis that

00:49:49.880 every time he constructs something that's new and orderly using the logos, he says, and it was good.

00:49:57.300 And that's so fascinating to me because it's repeated so many times because

00:50:00.580 what it implies is that if you confront, if the potential of being is confronted with what's good and

00:50:11.740 truthful and courageous, then what emerges as a consequence is good. And I also believe that to

00:50:19.160 be the case for individuals. If you confront the world in a manner that's Cain-like, bitter,

00:50:30.420 incapable of making the proper sacrifices, enraged, jealous, outraged at the suffering of existence and its

00:50:40.920 essential unfairness, then you become vengeful and bitter and murderous and genocidal. And that seems

00:50:50.700 like no positive way forward. That's no bargain.

00:50:56.600 With the new atheist types, you know, they demolish the metaphysics without really thinking it through,

00:51:04.080 I think. And they leave people with nothing. And the nothing is so empty that it just produces,

00:51:12.700 it really produces pain for people. Like, I've talked to many, many, many people, including atheists,

00:51:19.160 who have been vastly relieved to find some deeper meaning in the archaic stories that our culture is

00:51:27.680 predicated on.

00:51:28.520 Every day I deal with that. It's people that they feel obligated intellectually to accept the new atheist,

00:51:32.900 you know, conclusions. But then their whole soul is rebelling against it. And I would say for obvious

00:51:36.840 reasons. You know, what's very interesting to me, Jordan, is I've got a colleague, Chris Kazor,

00:51:41.220 who teaches at LMU. He's written on your stuff. And he said, what Peterson is doing is what the

00:51:46.420 church fathers would have called the tropological reading of the scriptures. You know, the four

00:51:50.220 senses. You've got the literal historical interpretation. You've got the allegorical,

00:51:55.440 so it has to do with Jesus. You have the anagogical having to do with the journey to heaven.

00:52:00.500 But the tropological, they would have seen as the moral sense. So what it has to do about our moral

00:52:05.580 lives. And I think in our categories, say maybe the psychological life, etc. And so I think what

00:52:10.760 you just proposed there is a cool, you know, sort of tropological reading of those texts. I mean,

00:52:16.160 I, without denying it, I'd press on the more metaphysical stuff. Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope

00:52:22.360 Benedict XVI, did a wonderful meditation on Genesis, saying that to say, I believe in God is to say,

00:52:28.700 I believe in the primacy of Logos over and against mere matter. So over and against a merely

00:52:33.560 materialist view, that what's more metaphysically primordial is Logos. And he would stress

00:52:39.640 intelligibility, that the fact that God speaks the world into being means it's marked in every

00:52:45.440 nook and cranny by something like intelligibility, which in turn would ground anything like the

00:52:50.400 sciences. I mean, any scientist goes out to meet a world that at least he or she assumes is

00:52:56.100 intelligible, you know. So the intelligibility of things, the rational structure within being

00:53:02.620 is coming from the Logos. But the other thing that I think is really intriguing about the Genesis,

00:53:08.080 that opening move, is the dethroning of all the false claimants to divinity. So all the things that

00:53:14.360 come forth from God, you know, from sun and moon and the animals and so on and so forth, were all things

00:53:20.380 that were worshipped in various cultures in the ancient world. So the author is saying, no, no, no,

00:53:26.360 no, that these things are not themselves ultimate. They're not the Logos from which all things come.

00:53:31.540 But then the cool twist to me, it's not just a no, because, I see Catholics get this, because

00:53:37.680 the way that text is structured, it's liturgically structured. It's like a liturgical procession,

00:53:42.600 everything coming forth in this ordered way. At the end of the procession come human beings,

00:53:48.760 right? So at the end of a liturgical procession is the one who will lead the praise. And so the

00:53:54.760 point there, and this goes back to Augustine and people like that, the point is none of these things

00:53:59.620 is God, but all these things belong in a chorus of praise of the true God led by us. So, and there's

00:54:07.900 the human role, is to give proper praise to God. Well, you know, there's critics, for example,

00:54:14.100 there's a critic in Canada, a well-known environmentalist, David Suzuki, who believes

00:54:20.900 that one of the sins of the Judeo-Christian perspective is that it gave human beings dominion

00:54:27.900 over the world. And the philosopher, the German philosopher, what's his name?

00:54:38.860 You have to narrow that one down.

00:54:40.100 Yes. The phenomenologist.

00:54:43.800 Husserl?

00:54:45.100 No, his student.

00:54:47.040 Heidegger.

00:54:47.600 Heidegger, you know, believed that the Judeo-Christian texts had given us the right to treat the world

00:54:55.980 as if it's produce, you know, therefore our taking.

00:54:59.300 Yeah, but that's getting exactly backwards, isn't it?

00:55:01.060 Yes. Well, it's this deep respect for our fellow creatures as part of the chorus of praise.

00:55:06.720 And the dominion is not domination. I think it's that kind of right ordering.

00:55:11.240 And the thing there is, there's been a lot of interesting studies recently of the temple,

00:55:15.340 the ancient temple, and how it was covered inside and out by symbols of the cosmos, you know,

00:55:21.240 of animals and plants and planets and stars and so on.

00:55:24.060 The idea being when Israel gathered for right praise, it was the whole universe being gathered

00:55:30.080 for right praise. Now, look at that in the Gothic churches. You go to Notre Domino, that it's not

00:55:35.300 an anthropocentric thing. You've got the planets and stars and astrological signs and animals galore

00:55:41.440 because the cathedral was the successor of the temple, the place of right praise. And it's drawing

00:55:46.460 creation in. Right.

00:55:48.300 I think it's much more modernity that is rough on nature and rough on the animal kingdom.

00:55:53.160 Thomas Aquinas is not. I mean, go back to the pre-modern Christian thinkers.

00:55:58.080 They're not anti-nature. On the contrary. Because the biblical vision is salvation is a cosmic reality.

00:56:04.820 God's trying to save all of his creation. That's the Noah story.

00:56:08.820 It's God. The ark is like a floating temple, right?

00:56:12.400 So it's a little microcosm of the right order of things led by Noah's family.

00:56:17.160 By a family that's, yeah, by a family that's properly ordered.

00:56:21.280 And what are they concerned about? The animals. They're concerned about life that God created.

00:56:26.500 That's why the ark becomes a symbol of the church. So all the churches are meant to look like ships.

00:56:31.200 You have like nave, right? The ship, the central aisle of a church.

00:56:34.880 But they're meant to be a little floating temple where creation is honored and preserved.

00:56:39.560 So it's also interesting to note that in the Noah story that there's a tremendous emphasis on the idea that Noah, who is someone who, like Adam before the fall, walked with God, was capable.

00:56:55.840 Because he could act nobly and courageously and truthfully and also put his family together.

00:57:01.280 He was actually capable of shepherding the complex creation of being in its totality through a period of absolute chaos.

00:57:10.560 And, you know, when I look at the environmental challenges, let's say, that we face today because of the complexity of the 9 billion of us or the 9 billion that there will be and the necessity of making sure that everyone has adequate security and shelter and food and freedom.

00:57:30.920 I see that the proper pathway forward to dealing with that is for people to put themselves together and to put their families together and their communities together and that the consequence of that, the natural consequence of that adoption of ultimate responsibility would be the extension of care beyond the immediate, beyond the social even.

00:57:57.680 And so that everything does depend, I would say, and this is something I learned from Jung, from Jung, was that far more than we think depends on the orderly progression and care of the soul.

00:58:19.260 All of it depends on it.

00:58:21.180 And, you know, when I talk to my audiences, it's so interesting.

00:58:24.700 And I think it might be something that the church is missing, if I could be so bold.

00:58:29.640 Yeah, go ahead.

00:58:30.620 Well, you know, I've talked to about 150 live audiences now about this sort of thing, independent of all my classroom lectures.

00:58:40.640 And I'll tell you, I tell people, I suggest to people that the ancient idea that life is suffering and that it's tainted by malevolence, that there's no more true ideas than that in some base sense.

00:59:00.240 And that that's something that everyone has to contend with.

00:59:02.860 And if you don't contend with it properly, then you become embittered and you work to make things worse.

00:59:09.960 And everyone understands that.

00:59:11.600 Everyone knows that's true.

00:59:13.720 And then I suggest to them that the proper way out of that isn't the pursuit of material satisfaction or impulsive happiness or rights from the individual perspective, but the adoption of responsibility.

00:59:27.040 And I'll tell you, every single time I talk about that, you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium.

00:59:36.480 Yeah, I believe that.

00:59:37.780 And I think one of the things that the church has failed to communicate properly is that you need a noble goal in life to buttress yourself against its catastrophe.

00:59:53.920 And, I mean, Abel's a good example of that in the Abel and Cain story, because he devotes himself properly to God and things work out for him.

01:00:02.460 I'm like, well, they work out for him.

01:00:05.100 It doesn't end very well.

01:00:06.200 No, it doesn't.

01:00:07.380 But, I mean, good is sometimes defeated by evil.

01:00:10.680 But, I mean, obviously he lives a proper and admirable life.

01:00:14.580 And it needs to be communicated to young people, especially young men.

01:00:21.960 The biblical key is always right praise.

01:00:25.560 And I go right back to Genesis 1, is when we give praise to God, drawing all creation together, then our soul becomes ordered properly.

01:00:35.640 And then around us, a kingdom of right order is built up.

01:00:40.340 In the Catholic Mass, we have that wonderful prayer of the Gloria.

01:00:43.060 We say, glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to people of goodwill.

01:00:46.980 And it's like a formula that if I give glory to God in the highest, then there will be peace around me.

01:00:54.360 It's like a condensation of the Sermon on the Mount, because that's exactly what that sermon seems to.

01:01:00.100 See, that sermon seems to me, and I also believe it to be psychologically true,

01:01:06.600 is that it's necessary for you to aim at the highest value that you can conceive of.

01:01:17.880 You know, and that has to have something to do with the amelioration of suffering and the constraint of malevolence.

01:01:29.920 It has to have something to do with that, at least as a negative.

01:01:34.940 And then once you concentrate on that and focus on that and decide that that's your primary aim,

01:01:41.880 then things do start to order themselves around you, because everything that you see and do directs itself towards that aim.

01:01:50.200 But that's the, I'd say, strangely and uniquely Christian thing, is that we say,

01:01:55.040 okay, the God that we're worshiping, the God revealed in the Old Testament, but then finally revealed in Jesus Christ.

01:02:01.220 As I'm looking over my computer screen right now, I'm looking at the crucifix of Jesus, right?

01:02:05.100 So my praise is directed to a God who has entered radically into suffering.

01:02:11.020 Not just the physical suffering, but the whole brokenness of the world,

01:02:13.880 of stupidity and cruelty and injustice and hatred, that's where God has gone.

01:02:19.240 So the God that I worship is the God who himself is dedicated to the amelioration of suffering or of healing the suffering of the world.

01:02:28.140 But that's the way it's going to express itself in a fallen, conflictual world.

01:02:32.060 Right praise will end up looking like love, looking like love for those who suffer.

01:02:37.600 But I think that's the master, to me, the master theme of the whole Bible.

01:02:40.300 Now, Israel always goes wrong, without exception, when its praise goes wrong.

01:02:44.960 It starts praising the wrong things.

01:02:47.460 Now, that's what happens in Exodus, when Moses leads the Israelites through the desert, right?

01:02:53.220 They're in the same position we're in in the modern world, where we've escaped a tyranny of sorts, let's say,

01:03:01.460 or we believe we have, and entered into this domain of untrammeled freedom.

01:03:05.920 And there's nothing but false idols calling to us from every direction.

01:03:11.780 And that's the diversity idea, as far as I'm concerned, because unity is certainly as profound a moral necessity as diversity.

01:03:22.300 There should be diversity within unity.

01:03:24.320 I fight it all the time, you know, in the church, too, because we bought into that ideology.

01:03:30.740 And I actually look, it's the oldest problem in philosophy, the one and the many.

01:03:34.060 But all we do today is we completely valorize the many.

01:03:36.740 We never see its shadow side.

01:03:38.320 We denigrate the one and never see its positive side.

01:03:41.460 The one is extraordinarily important.

01:03:44.180 Well, that's part of the death of God.

01:03:47.240 Yeah, I think so.

01:03:47.880 It's the death of that overarching unity.

01:03:50.440 It's the same thing that drives constant, thoughtless criticisms of hierarchy, even though all the biological evidence suggests you can't even organize your perception without using an ethical hierarchy.

01:04:03.520 Because you have to select from all the things that you can choose to look at, those things that you value high enough to attend to.

01:04:13.040 And that's our point about worship, isn't it?

01:04:14.960 What's of highest value to you?

01:04:16.740 Everything else will follow from that.

01:04:18.840 Yes.

01:04:19.540 If you read to Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, but he said, all you need to know about a person, you can find out by asking one question.

01:04:27.780 What does he worship?

01:04:29.380 And everyone, of course, I mean, Sam Harris worships something.

01:04:32.140 Worship.

01:04:32.640 What's of highest worth to you?

01:04:34.820 Then your life will be organized accordingly.

01:04:36.920 The biblical idea, it seems to me, is if it's other than God, you will disintegrate on the inside, and the society around you will disintegrate.

01:04:46.400 Yes, well, that's where the idea of the logos has been so helpful to me, and partly as a consequence of reading you.

01:04:53.120 If the logos is that element of being, let's say, that's allied in some sense with consciousness, that does in fact confront potential, and that does cast it into reality as a consequence of ethical choices, then I can't see how it can be otherwise.

01:05:14.320 Then that has to be regarded as the ultimate value, because it's the thing that continually creates the world anew.

01:05:26.820 And we know perfectly well that you can take the opposite tack.

01:05:31.420 Let's say I don't worship courage and truth in the face of the potential of being, and that I worship instead cowardice and deceit and vengefulness.

01:05:43.660 Well, then we know where that goes.

01:05:46.420 We had the entire 20th century as a...

01:05:52.660 It's the template for that whole thing.

01:05:54.920 And the template from every perspective.

01:05:58.060 I mean, it's obvious, it's obvious beyond a shadow of arguable doubt that human beings as individuals are capable of generating something around them that is so akin to hell, even metaphysically speaking.

01:06:15.880 The difference is, you have to be picayune, let's say, to quibble about the difference.

01:06:27.620 And I do think there's something metaphysical about it.

01:06:30.320 I mean, these things that we see on earth, let's say, seem to me to be reflected continually at deeper and deeper levels of reality.

01:06:39.120 You know, I mean, I don't tend to talk about specifically religious issues because I think that would, in some sense, compromise the approach that I'm attempting to take, you know, which is a conciliatory approach in some sense between those who are possessed by the scientific viewpoint but curious about the religious viewpoint.

01:07:01.360 But if you abandon those initial presuppositions, the sovereignty of the individual, the necessity for courage in the face of being, the moral imperative to struggle uphill with your cross towards the city of God.

01:07:19.060 I mean, people understand these things if they're explained carefully and they know in their souls that they're true.

01:07:27.320 Yeah, and they're all over the culture.

01:07:29.000 That's been a presupposition of mine doing this work is I tend not to begin with, you know, direct instruction or moral finger wagging, but I tend to begin with something going on in the culture.

01:07:39.040 And you've talked about this, you know, the hero myth is in practically every movie you watch, but the Christian themes are every place.

01:07:46.220 One of the most remarkable to me being, I just saw it on TV the other night, was the Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.

01:07:51.480 If you want to see the best exemplification, I think, in fiction of what the Church Fathers meant by the meaning of Jesus' cross.

01:07:59.940 In other words, a move of self-sacrificing love that exposes evil and liberates those who are under the tyranny of evil.

01:08:07.460 That's how they read the cross in a very clever way, expressed in more mythic language, you know, but the ideas are very powerful.

01:08:14.520 And they're beautifully exemplified in that movie, the move that Eastwood's character makes at the end.

01:08:19.980 And, of course, as he dies, he's in the figure of the crucified Jesus, lest we miss the point.

01:08:24.560 Right, and he's such an – it's so interesting, too, because he's – I actually made a video where I used a picture of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount, I think.

01:08:37.220 And I put Clint Eastwood's face, I superimposed it on top of his, and it was for exactly that reason.

01:08:43.100 It was that – the reason that's exemplified in Gran Torino.

01:08:47.880 Yeah.

01:08:48.180 Because, I mean, Eastwood in that movie is – he's a very harsh character, very, very judgmental.

01:08:54.980 He's like the Christ that comes back in Revelations, right?

01:08:58.640 He's very, very, very judgmental.

01:09:02.020 Right.

01:09:02.220 And he cuts no one a break, except that he actually does.

01:09:07.480 Like, he does separate the wheat from the chaff.

01:09:09.940 And he's even, interestingly, in that movie, you know, he ends up being more akin to the foreigners who he hypothetically hates.

01:09:21.440 Like the – who's the Good Samaritan.

01:09:27.520 It's the same idea as the Good Samaritan.

01:09:29.340 And he becomes more family to these people that he hypothetically hates than to his own children because he regards them as ungrateful and unworthy.

01:09:38.480 And whereas these new immigrants are striving to be good people.

01:09:42.720 Yeah.

01:09:42.800 It's a very interesting movie.

01:09:44.780 Oh, yeah, it is.

01:09:45.460 And it was a good example of the principle – one of my professors years ago said the once-integrated Christian vision, let's say at Reformation and the Enlightenment, sort of blew up.

01:09:54.880 And the pieces flew every place.

01:09:56.420 And they're kind of twisted and they're charred and everything.

01:09:59.380 And they've landed here and there.

01:10:01.360 And so as you go through the cultural landscape, you see them all over the place.

01:10:04.720 Well, there's a bit of, you know, eschatology or there's Christology or there's the Trinity and so on.

01:10:09.880 But they're usually in distorted form.

01:10:12.120 So that's a good example of there's the Christus Victor theory, to give it its proper name, that Christ is the victor over sin and death.

01:10:19.920 He's conquered the dark powers and liberated us in the process.

01:10:24.280 There it is.

01:10:24.980 But it's in somewhat distorted form, of course.

01:10:27.340 But that's been the game I played a lot is to try to find these –

01:10:31.280 Well, it happens everywhere.

01:10:32.660 It's so common that it's –

01:10:34.680 Well, it isn't merely common.

01:10:36.980 It's universal because –

01:10:38.280 Yeah.

01:10:39.220 And this is, of course, one of the reasons that I became so deeply interested in archetypes is that if the story doesn't have an archetypal foundation, then it's not a story.

01:10:49.860 I mean, something makes something a story.

01:10:52.820 It's not just a random collection of statements or images.

01:10:57.500 And so it has an archetypal structure and, you know, I think what's happened in the modern world, at least partly, is this fractionation that you've described, but also something that a student once made me think deeply through.

01:11:13.360 She came up and asked me after a class, well, if these archetypal stories are the fundamental element, let's say, of psychobiological reality, then why not just tell the archetypal story over and over again?

01:11:30.500 And I thought, well, first of all, to some degree, that is what cultures did for a long time.

01:11:37.680 They just repeated the archetypal story.

01:11:39.980 But in our modern culture, what literature seems to do is to take the archetypal story and to bring it closer to the individual.

01:11:50.560 It's like it's brought closer to earth, almost like the Renaissance paintings brought the divine figures closer to earth, closer to the actual individual, say, than the Baroque paintings did.

01:12:04.400 And so you have this meeting place of the divine, the archetype and the personal, that constitutes something like popular culture.

01:12:13.080 And there's some utility in that because it reopens a doorway to the presence of what's missing that's been closed by whatever has happened to the church over the last, well, what, 150 years, 200 years.

01:12:34.040 And the accelerating degeneration of the church over the last 200 or 150 to 200 years.

01:12:41.360 So I see it as a good thing, although it isn't obvious that people understand that it's happening.

01:12:48.080 You know, I explain movies like The Lion King and Sleeping Beauty and so on to my audiences, and they don't know the, they don't consciously see the Christian symbolism or the Christian symbolism in works like Harry Potter, which is unbelievably deep, symbolic structure.

01:13:07.620 I mean, she did that so beautifully.

01:13:09.260 You know this remake of True Grit, when the Coen brothers did it, and they brought, and beautifully brought out these religious themes that were not in the John Wayne version that I saw as a kid.

01:13:19.740 Or even like there was a remake, Kenneth Branagh did, of Cinderella.

01:13:24.180 And you say it's a charming, sentimental story, but it's a deeply Christological telling.

01:13:28.260 And he got all that and brought that out.

01:13:30.540 I mean, so those are there for sure, I mean, within the Western framework.

01:13:33.380 Well, it seems, it doesn't seem in part, look, like I've been accused, let's say, although I've stopped apologizing for it, and I should have stopped long ago, of fundamentally speaking to young men.

01:13:48.180 You know, I mean, most people on YouTube are men, so there's a baseline problem.

01:13:52.980 But, you know, it seems to me that partly what I'm suggesting to young men is that there really is an ennobling heroism about the fundamental Christian vision,

01:14:14.900 which is to accept with gratitude your privileges and your limitations.

01:14:25.520 The privileges, those are talents.

01:14:27.740 You have a responsibility to make the most of them.

01:14:31.440 That's the price you pay for the talents.

01:14:34.580 The obstacles, you're limited being, and you pay a price for being, and the price is that limitation.

01:14:44.440 And so you have to be grateful, in some strange sense, for your limitations, maybe the same way that you're grateful for the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of the people that you love.

01:14:57.220 And then that your task, it's an extraordinarily difficult task.

01:15:02.600 There's no more challenging task than to accept all that, you know, with gratitude and with goodwill toward being and to attempt to work towards making things better than they are, or at least not worse.

01:15:24.100 And people understand that, you know.

01:15:26.480 No, for sure.

01:15:27.640 But see, let me press something here, because I think all that's true from the sort of psychological and human side, the hero's journey and our call to, you know, move toward a transcendent moral good, et cetera, to give ourselves for the sake of the other.

01:15:42.020 But see, and that's all there within the Christian and the biblical framework.

01:15:45.460 But see, what I think is really interesting, where the fireworks really start, is that God has gone on a hero's journey, you know.

01:15:54.520 So it's not just the story of this human being, Jesus, going heroically to his cross, et cetera.

01:15:59.820 But that, strangely, it's God going heroically to that place.

01:16:05.860 It's God going into dysfunction.

01:16:09.400 And whatever heroism we can summon is predicated upon this primordial grace that was given to us, you know.

01:16:17.000 Because the danger, you know, look, I'm a Catholic.

01:16:19.800 Catholics like faith and reason.

01:16:21.280 So we like to operate both sides of that divide.

01:16:24.060 So Thomas Aquinas constructing cosmological arguments.

01:16:28.160 Well, good.

01:16:28.600 Those are, I think they're fine.

01:16:29.660 But that's from our side of the equation.

01:16:31.320 We're kind of moving our way toward God.

01:16:34.020 But the fireworks start when God moves toward us.

01:16:38.920 God acts.

01:16:41.200 And grace is operative.

01:16:43.140 It's saying, I can't manipulate.

01:16:44.440 I can't control.

01:16:45.740 It comes as a gift, you know.

01:16:47.700 And so at the cross of Jesus, it is Clint Eastwood.

01:16:50.420 So there's a human being imitating this great move.

01:16:53.580 And that's indeed what we're called to, to become other Christ.

01:16:56.480 But he's also, if you want to press it, that's God.

01:16:59.840 That's what God does.

01:17:00.840 God enters into our weird, dysfunctional, off-kilter world and suppresses evil, awakens our freedom.

01:17:11.040 And that's when it really gets interesting, you know.

01:17:14.300 Well, it seems to me that this has to do with this theme that I've also popularized about rescuing your dead father from the underworld.

01:17:28.360 Well, you know, if you take on a heavy burden of responsibility, then that changes you.

01:17:40.980 It calls forth from you things that would never be otherwise called forth.

01:17:46.160 Partly because you encounter new things and learn, but also because the demands, the psychophysiological demands of the confrontation, and we know this biologically, turn on new parts of you that are coded genetically.

01:18:06.440 And it's, you know, there's an immense potential that lurks inside of human beings, and it's a potential of unlimited scope in some sense.

01:18:17.760 And I think that that's alluded to in the idea that there's a relationship between logos, Christ, and God and man.

01:18:29.100 And that the way that you become closer to God, in the literal sense, is by adopting that burden, because that transforms you into what it is that you could be.

01:18:47.300 And I think that's, you know, look, the other thing you said that was really interesting, you talked about the fragmentation of Christianity.

01:18:54.780 And, you know, in the old Egyptian story, when Osiris is overthrown by Seth, who's the precursor of Satan, etymologically and conceptually, Osiris is willfully blind, and Seth is his evil brother.

01:19:11.380 And Seth waits for the opportune moment, and he chops Osiris up into pieces, and he distributes him all over the kingdom.

01:19:18.440 And so Osiris can't pull himself back together, like he's still there in nascent form, because there's no destroying something that's divine, not permanently, but you can make it very difficult for it to get its act together for some period of time, let's say.

01:19:35.000 And that fragmentation, I think, has occurred in our culture, is the death of God.

01:19:42.380 But I think Nietzsche is wrong about that.

01:19:45.440 I think it's the dismemberment of God, and not the death.

01:19:49.940 And something that's dismembered can be remembered.

01:19:54.620 And what we need to do is to remember.

01:19:57.600 And we do remember in our literature and our art and our popular culture.

01:20:02.980 That's all a form of remembering.

01:20:04.520 But we also remember when we act in a way that works in accordance with our conscience, and that sets our soul into a configuration of peace.

01:20:19.760 You know, it's been fascinating.

01:20:21.740 I've had hundreds of, and mostly young men, I would say, come and talk to me after my lectures.

01:20:29.340 And many of them had been in very, very dark places.

01:20:33.300 You know, addicted, alcoholic, suicidal, chronic pornography users, incapable of settling into a committed relationship, vengeful, nihilistic, cynical.

01:20:50.920 And also possessed by a kind of inertia that made them immobile during the most vital part of their youth.

01:21:02.120 And, you know, they told me, look, I decided I was going to develop a vision for my life.

01:21:09.660 I was going to imagine what things could be.

01:21:12.980 And then I was going to try to tell the truth, and I was going to try to act responsibly, and not in a praying in public manner, but in a manner that began with cleaning up my room, say, a fairly humble act.

01:21:28.260 And then comes the kicker.

01:21:30.940 And this is one of the things that's kept me going through this entire 150-city tour.

01:21:36.060 They all say, and my life is way better.

01:21:39.220 It's like, I'm healthy, my job is going well, I've had three promotions, I'm making twice as much money, I've spoken to my father, I haven't talked to him for 10 years, I'm putting my family together.

01:21:54.500 It's like things, good things are just happening left, right, and center.

01:22:00.080 And I mean, I heard amazing stories.

01:22:02.680 You're in touch with the deepest rhythms of reality.

01:22:05.300 It's an ethical move, but it's a metaphysical move.

01:22:07.320 As you mentioned, the Sermon on the Mount of the Lord, I mean, that's how I look at it, is it's not just giving, you know, moving ethical recommendations.

01:22:15.900 It's trying to get us aligned to the fundamental nonviolence of things, the fundamental move of God as he gives rise to the world.

01:22:26.160 And so, of course, your life comes together.

01:22:28.520 Again, right praise gets you online and knits you back together.

01:22:32.400 That theme, to me, is really strong in the spiritual tradition of the knitting back together of the splintered self.

01:22:38.860 It's the coming together of things.

01:22:41.300 Do you, I mean, as a psychotherapist, you deal all the time with this, but like in the scriptures, so you mentioned Satan, you know, hasatanas is the accuser, and there's a lot to that.

01:22:50.560 But the other great word for the dark power is the diabolos, right, the scatterer, the one that divides and separates.

01:22:57.720 And so the demon's always speaking in the plural in the New Testament, and Jesus bringing them back to themselves, back to the center.

01:23:04.400 But that's all of us sinners.

01:23:06.420 I mean, we're all over the place.

01:23:08.340 Our mind and will and passions and sexuality and body, they're all going different directions.

01:23:12.840 Right, it is.

01:23:14.440 It's very disorienting for people.

01:23:16.360 It's very confusing and anxiety-provoking to be going in all those directions at the same time.

01:23:21.980 Right.

01:23:22.320 And that's, what do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?

01:23:24.520 Have you come to destroy us?

01:23:25.740 You know, and the answer is yes, I have come to destroy this disparate reality and knit you back together.

01:23:32.840 So, see, I can knit you for a second, because I want to ask you about that.

01:23:37.540 But my conviction is, atheists both old and new, so the Hitchens and Dawkins, Sam Harris today, but then go back to the Feuerbachs and Nietzsche's and company, that they're rebelling quite properly against a false god.

01:23:51.840 What I would characterize as a false god, the god who is posing a threat to our freedom, the god who broods over us in this moralizing and dehumanizing way, the god who I would say is a supreme being among other beings, all of that.

01:24:05.860 I applaud them.

01:24:08.000 I mean, the atheists, old and new, are rebelling against that.

01:24:11.280 But it's partially because, I think Jung saw this in his own father, right, who was a Calvinist minister, that we got so bad at proclaiming the true God, who is not brooding over our freedom in this sort of moralizing and oppressive way, who's not competing with our flourishing.

01:24:29.100 But, you know, the glory of God as a human being fully alive, says Irenaeus.

01:24:33.480 That's the biblical idea.

01:24:35.260 Or the, you know, the burning bush, the fathers love that, is the bush that's on fire but not consumed.

01:24:40.740 Well, that's the way the true God relates to creation.

01:24:43.700 He makes it beautiful and radiant, but doesn't burn it up.

01:24:47.360 You know, we're like in so many of the Greek and Roman myths, when the gods break in, things have to give way or they're incinerated or they're destroyed.

01:24:55.900 But the Bible presents this very unique and humanizing view of God and then culminating in the incarnation.

01:25:05.580 So God becomes one of us without, that's why it's so beautiful to me in those seemingly abstract formulas about, you know, the two natures that come together in Jesus without mixing, mingling, and confusion.

01:25:16.740 And you say, well, that's a lot of these Greek abstractions.

01:25:19.740 But no, that's very powerful that God and humanity can meet in such a way that humanity is not overwhelmed and destroyed.

01:25:28.880 See, but that's what the atheists quite rightly, old and new, are objecting to, is precisely that false understanding of God.

01:25:36.140 Well, and I've always thought of Nietzsche as a, as he's, it's a very disturbing analogy, but I've always thought of Nietzsche playing the same role as maggots do when they're cleaning out a wound.

01:25:51.640 Yeah.

01:25:51.740 You know, I mean, I'm not, he's a very sophisticated thinker and to think of Nietzsche simply as an atheist, I think is a, is a, is a terrible mistake.

01:26:01.020 I mean, he certainly had plenty of good things to say about Catholicism, about the fact that Catholicism was an anti-diabolical movement that united Europe.

01:26:11.240 United, yeah.

01:26:11.880 You know, under, under the rubric of a single, of a single mode of thought and disciplined the European mind.

01:26:18.600 And he also had wonderful things to say about Christ as a figure.

01:26:22.980 You know, he said, well, Nietzsche believed that the only true Christian was Christ.

01:26:26.960 And his criticism was essentially saved for the dogmatic structure of the church.

01:26:33.140 Now, you know, I actually have more sympathy for Dostoevsky, who I think thought more deeply about this than Nietzsche, which is quite a frightening thing to say because Nietzsche is such a deep thinker.

01:26:43.980 But, you know, in, in, in the Grand Inquisitor, when, when Christ comes back to earth and, and is then arrested by the Seville, by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville, Seville, in, during the Spanish Inquisition, you know, the, the Grand Inquisitor takes Christ into the cell and tells him why it's necessary for him to be put to death again.

01:27:09.500 He says, you know, the church has worked diligently to humanize the impossible load that you've placed on people and, and to make it bearable for the common man.

01:27:21.040 And the last thing we need is someone as perfect as you and, and terrifying as a consequence, as a judge, because something that perfect is a judge coming back to mess up all our work.

01:27:34.760 And, you know, that, you know, that's a sympathetic portrayal of Catholicism, I would say, or maybe Orthodox Christianity as well, that, that it had that merciful element that the demand for perfection was, was, was, was, was, was antithetical to.

01:27:52.700 But then, of course, Dostoevsky has the brilliance to, when the Grand Inquisitor leaves, hypothetically having, having sentenced Christ to death, he leaves the door open.

01:28:05.760 And I've often thought that that's so true of Catholicism and Protestantism as well, is that for all their faults and for all the faults that people like Nietzsche and Hitchens and Dawkins, etc., lay at the feet of these traditions.

01:28:23.840 And they at least did preserve the tradition and leave the door open.

01:28:29.140 And that's not an easy thing to do over the course of, of centuries.

01:28:33.040 I think the institutions deserve a certain amount of sympathy, even though I'm very concerned that they're degenerating and disintegrating in a manner that doesn't look easily forestallable.

01:28:46.100 Can I, let me ask you a quick question about the Brothers Karamazov, because, you know, twice in my life, I tried to read it, and I think I just got bogged down with the Russian names and stuff.

01:28:54.800 So I, I failed both times.

01:28:56.320 I got a little further the second time.

01:28:57.780 But then, just about six months ago, I got an audio of it, because I'm in the car all the time in California, I'm going back and forth.

01:29:04.940 And I'm just about finished with it.

01:29:06.500 I love it, love it.

01:29:07.440 It finally just, it sang to me as this guy read the thing, you know.

01:29:10.720 Yeah, it's amazing.

01:29:11.660 It's amazing how powerful it is on audio.

01:29:14.360 It's wonderful, wonderful.

01:29:15.560 How do you read, first of all, the silence of Christ in the presence of the Inquisitor, but then secondly, the kiss, the kiss on the lips at the end?

01:29:22.720 You know, so he sits in silence as this great accusation is read, but then kisses him full on the lips at the end.

01:29:30.400 Well, I think, I think he accepts the accusation.

01:29:33.240 Like, one of the things Jung said about Christ in the Gospitals, which I thought was, it was indescribably brilliant, was that Christ, not entirely, but is presented as a figure of mercy.

01:29:47.440 And Jung was wise enough to know that, and he used religious sources for this idea that God rules with two hands, with mercy and with justice.

01:30:00.180 Because if it's just mercy, then, well, all is always forgiven, and you have no responsibility, and you're an eternal infant.

01:30:08.580 But if it's all justice, then look out, because every single transgression you commit, you'll be held to account for in some infinite manner.

01:30:21.600 And people are so fallible that, well, you kind of see that happening on Twitter now, you know, if you make a mistake of any sort at any point in your life, you're roasted over the open coals for it.

01:30:35.640 And no one can stand that, because everyone makes mistakes.

01:30:38.920 And so there has to be this balance between mercy and justice.

01:30:42.120 And Jung regarded Christ's return in Revelation as psychologically necessary, because any figure of perfection has this element of the judge, because any ideal is a judge.

01:30:58.340 Yeah.

01:30:58.740 And so...

01:31:00.380 Yeah, you can't bracket that in the name of...

01:31:03.020 Because the master category is love, right?

01:31:05.340 And not to be sentimental about it, love means to will the good of the other.

01:31:08.540 So that always has a judgmental dimension.

01:31:11.160 Of course it does, because if you have a child or a friend or yourself, it's like...

01:31:16.060 And I felt this when I was a psychotherapist, practicing as a psychotherapist.

01:31:20.060 I mean, Roger said, well, you had to have unconditional love for your client.

01:31:25.220 And I thought, no, I have unconditional positive regard for the part of my client that's striving toward the light.

01:31:34.820 And I am a co-enemy with that part against the part that's trying to drag that person down.

01:31:42.880 And that's a...

01:31:43.620 Can I tell you that an entire generation of Catholic priests was formed under the Rogerian assumption?

01:31:50.240 Because that's what my generation got.

01:31:52.580 Now, I mean, I learned things from Rogers and the whole...

01:31:55.160 Me too.

01:31:55.600 It works in a way.

01:31:57.440 When I was doing pastoral ministry and counseling early on as a young priest, you know, that

01:32:01.880 whole idea of just kind of mirroring back to someone what they're saying and giving them

01:32:05.500 the...

01:32:05.900 I mean, I get it.

01:32:06.700 I get it.

01:32:07.520 But I agree with you.

01:32:09.220 There's a severe danger in that.

01:32:10.640 If that's all we're doing with people, we're not moving them in the manner of a spiritual

01:32:15.600 teacher.

01:32:16.040 I had a student years ago who said to me, what we're missing from the church is Yoda

01:32:21.880 on our shoulders.

01:32:22.940 You know, he meant Yoda on the shoulders of Luke Skywalker, instructing him and pressing

01:32:27.560 him and telling him what he's doing wrong and how to get going, you know, that we were

01:32:31.440 all Rogerians.

01:32:33.060 We just were unconditionally positively guarding everybody.

01:32:36.540 Well, it's a great compliment.

01:32:39.380 See, the other thing that's made me popular among young people, this is so perverse.

01:32:44.780 I have a hard time believing any of it, really.

01:32:47.860 I mean, the first thing that I have a hard time believing is that, you know, I can attract

01:32:54.580 audiences of 5,000 people and tell them that the problem with their lives is that they're

01:33:00.460 not bearing nearly enough responsibility, and that's where they're going to find the

01:33:04.180 meaning that sustains them.

01:33:06.000 It's a pretty rough message.

01:33:08.240 Yeah.

01:33:08.620 And the second thing is, especially with young people, because the message has been for 50

01:33:13.840 years, and this is part of the humanists from the 1960s, is, well, you're okay the way

01:33:18.940 you are.

01:33:19.800 Yeah.

01:33:20.280 And I think there isn't anything more damning that you can tell a young person that, well,

01:33:26.140 you're okay the way you are, especially if they're suffering and nihilistic.

01:33:30.080 It's like, well, you're okay the way you are.

01:33:31.140 It's like, get me out of where I am.

01:33:32.140 I want to get out of this state.

01:33:34.020 That's right.

01:33:34.640 They want to crawl right out of their skin.

01:33:36.440 And so you tell them instead, no, look, man, you don't know anything.

01:33:40.400 You're barely beginning.

01:33:42.360 You're suffering because, in a sense, because you are steeped in sin to an almost unimaginable

01:33:49.500 degree.

01:33:50.660 And I'm saying that compassionately, not judgmentally.

01:33:54.500 And that if you want to put your life together, you have to start small and you have to be careful

01:34:00.940 and awake.

01:34:01.600 And if you do it carefully, then you can eliminate these flaws in your character that no one should

01:34:07.780 be celebrating.

01:34:09.740 And then people light up when you tell them that.

01:34:12.840 It's so strange.

01:34:14.840 It was a real pastoral failure on the part of the church as I was coming of age, because

01:34:19.580 we were reacting against maybe a hyper stress on sin.

01:34:23.300 So my parents' generation probably got that, especially sexual sin.

01:34:26.860 So I understand that there was a hyper reaction, but that is exactly the problem.

01:34:31.000 As you ended up with a generation of Catholics that felt like, oh, okay, God is love.

01:34:34.640 I'm okay.

01:34:35.660 Everything will be fine.

01:34:37.020 So then there's no energy.

01:34:38.860 There's no directionality.

01:34:40.280 There's no sense of purpose.

01:34:41.860 There's no sense of spiritual struggle.

01:34:44.240 There's no evil.

01:34:45.940 Right.

01:34:46.280 There's a real problem when you're dealing with situations like Nazi Germany.

01:34:51.500 Right.

01:34:52.040 Right.

01:34:52.600 But no, that was a huge pastoral failure.

01:34:55.080 One was intellectual as a coming of age.

01:34:57.060 We became very deeply anti-intellectual and this problem.

01:35:00.940 Of a hyper kind of Rogerianization of our pastoral practice.

01:35:06.760 See, I liked Rogers a lot, because one of the things Rogers really taught me to do was

01:35:11.800 to listen.

01:35:13.080 You know, like his advice about listening and then restating to people what you heard so

01:35:20.060 that they agree with you, that's unbelievably powerful, because it does force you to listen.

01:35:25.600 But Rogers was a seminarian, and he did dispense with the idea of evil and the devil, fundamentally.

01:35:33.420 And he fell into the trap of Rousseau, where, you know, the idea was that people were basically

01:35:38.580 good.

01:35:39.060 And that's just, it's such a devaluation of people to say that they're basically good,

01:35:44.920 because it's clearly the case that people have an unbelievable capacity for malevolence.

01:35:51.840 And to me, that's heartening, you know, because, again, I can talk to my audiences and I can

01:35:59.160 say, look, you guys just sit on the edge of your bed and you think about all the things

01:36:03.740 that you're doing wrong, that you know that you're doing wrong, the way that you're leading

01:36:07.680 yourself and other people astray.

01:36:09.900 Those things will come to your mind momentarily.

01:36:12.440 Imagine briefly where that would take you if you allowed your imagination to take you to

01:36:19.140 where it could in its depths.

01:36:21.840 And everyone nods their head because they bloody well know.

01:36:24.720 And I say, imagine just for a moment that if you have that capacity for absolute mayhem

01:36:30.100 and malevolence, that the opposite is also true.

01:36:33.040 Because if there is that darkness and that evil, then obviously the opposite also exists.

01:36:38.820 And then it's also possible to make a case for people, to people, that they can believe

01:36:45.140 that good has the capability of triumphing over evil.

01:36:49.460 But you don't do that by minimizing evil.

01:36:51.800 You do it by maximizing evil.

01:36:54.140 That's right.

01:36:54.520 I mean, I would say part of spiritual direction is helping people see what they're really capable

01:36:59.460 of.

01:36:59.840 And I mean that in the negative sense.

01:37:02.100 Helping people to see, like, I'm really capable of some really wicked business.

01:37:06.740 And if I'm hiding from that all the time, I'm suppressing it all the time, that's not

01:37:10.600 the thing.

01:37:10.960 Because from now a religious standpoint, you want to say Christ goes all the way down.

01:37:17.360 Now, that's the descent into hell theme.

01:37:19.140 But that happens in us.

01:37:21.300 He goes all the way down in me to the bottom of my dysfunction.

01:37:26.300 And people like Dostoevsky are really good at showing that dimension of life.

01:37:29.460 Yes, that's for sure.

01:37:30.400 But if we don't do that spiritually, then we're not understanding the cross.

01:37:34.940 We're not understanding redemption, salvation, that we're healed by this downward journey

01:37:40.420 of the Son of God.

01:37:41.300 But he goes with us.

01:37:42.720 There's Dante now.

01:37:43.740 There's the journey downward through all the levels of our dysfunction.

01:37:48.020 Till you find, I think he's dead right about that, you find some originating dysfunction.

01:37:54.560 So the Satan whose wings beat the air and create the atmosphere of hell, there's something

01:38:00.660 in me that's generating all the different levels of dysfunction.

01:38:04.940 But until I find that, I'm not going to solve it.

01:38:07.780 I've got to go all the way down.

01:38:09.460 No, the inferno is right.

01:38:11.700 Is that there's just like there's a hierarchy of good, there's a hierarchy of evil.

01:38:16.240 And I mean, Dante places the betrayers at the bottom with Satan.

01:38:20.400 And I think that's true because, you know, one of the fundamental necessities of positive

01:38:29.140 interpersonal existence, even with yourself, much less or let alone other people, is trust,

01:38:36.840 like essential trust.

01:38:38.540 And it's a form of courage.

01:38:40.140 Another thing I talk to my audiences about is trust because like we tend in our society

01:38:46.440 to worship naive trust by making the claim that people are basically good.

01:38:51.420 And the problem with that, and this is what entices so many young people into that nihilistic

01:38:55.860 atheism, is that they're taught this idea and then they're betrayed very badly by themselves

01:39:02.700 or by some other person.

01:39:03.980 And that's the death of innocence.

01:39:05.840 And so then they go from naivety to cynicism.

01:39:10.480 And cynicism is actually an improvement over naivety.

01:39:13.620 But it's not the end.

01:39:16.600 And they don't know that because the next step is to trust as a consequence of courage and

01:39:25.500 to say, look, I'm going to extend my hand once again to myself or to my friend or to

01:39:31.140 my family member, despite the fact that I've already been betrayed and hurt.

01:39:36.900 Because by extending that hand again, I allow the person the possibility of redemption and

01:39:44.640 and I open up a space for us to rekindle a productive relationship.

01:39:50.140 But that's predicated on courage and not naivety.

01:39:53.380 I know that it's like stretching out a hand to a dog that's frightened and barking and

01:40:00.460 and looks at looking like it's going to bite, you know, it's it's still the best way if

01:40:06.340 you're careful to.

01:40:09.200 To establish peace, let's say, with that animal and and the problem with the betrayers

01:40:17.200 is that they take trust, which is the most fundamental necessity for interpersonal relationships.

01:40:25.660 And then they violate the very principle of trust and it undermines everything.

01:40:31.340 And so that's why they're at the bottom of hell.

01:40:32.860 That's why Brutus and Judas are there.

01:40:35.100 You know, it reminds me of that story of Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio.

01:40:39.440 Francis, you know, it's like a dream, that story.

01:40:41.600 Francis reaching out to the animal that's been that's been threatening the town, you know,

01:40:45.640 and and frightening everybody.

01:40:47.060 But Francis has the trust to reach out to the animal and he tames it and then makes a deal.

01:40:51.900 If you feed the animal, then he won't harm you and so on.

01:40:55.120 But it's doesn't Jung say a lot of dreams when animals function that way of dimensions of

01:41:00.820 ourselves that we're kind of.

01:41:01.880 Well, that's a that's a dream for sure, because what it means is that, you know,

01:41:06.080 there's a part of you that's ravenous and malevolent and not being fed properly.

01:41:11.140 Right.

01:41:11.360 And that's often because you're not attending to it.

01:41:13.740 You're you're you're putting it in a blind corner and it's it's acting out because it demands

01:41:20.220 recognition.

01:41:21.280 And like people do this with their own with the power that gives them integrity.

01:41:27.020 You know, I've had clients and I would say they were more often female than than male.

01:41:31.880 Um, who had this particular problem, but who had a very acute and judgmental intelligence.

01:41:38.400 Um, very, very bright people, but they were also unbelievably agreeable.

01:41:43.300 And so their intelligence would report to them something that was not positive about someone.

01:41:50.040 You know, it would see around a corner, it would see into a hidden motivation and reveal a negative

01:41:57.000 truth.

01:41:57.820 And the person temperamentally was so shocked by the revelation that instead of regarding

01:42:04.580 it as a genuine insight, they felt that there was something wrong with them for thinking that way.

01:42:10.240 And then that's the same thing as keeping that ravenous wolf, um, um, unfed.

01:42:16.700 It's like the, the, the particular client I'm thinking about, I spent hours talking to her

01:42:22.900 about what she thought about people because she was a very pleasant person and it, it caused

01:42:29.880 her a lot of trouble.

01:42:30.840 She was far too much mercy and not nearly enough justice and God, her insights into the malevolent

01:42:37.180 motivations of people were unbelievably accurate and deep, but she was almost completely incapable of

01:42:44.000 allowing that to be real.

01:42:46.920 It reminds me of, we mentioned the Coen brothers earlier, their remake of True Grit.

01:42:51.540 Do you remember the young girl in that?

01:42:53.900 Who's just, she's seized by justice.

01:42:56.060 She wants to get revenge because her father was killed and she just, and people, people

01:42:59.940 are dying around her.

01:43:01.200 Corpses are piling up because she's just going to get what she wants.

01:43:04.960 And then of course she's bit by the snake, which has a certain archetypal overtone and

01:43:08.940 she loses her arm, you know, but she's carried after the snake bite, she's carried in the two

01:43:14.120 arms of, of, uh, rooster Cogburn, you know, who's a law man.

01:43:18.460 He's a man of justice, but you find out that he's, he's also a man of mercy.

01:43:22.080 He's a man of, of deep human connection and the, the story is prefaced by the line.

01:43:28.940 There's only one thing in the world that's truly free and that's the grace of God.

01:43:33.280 And I just thought it's that wonderful, so the grace of God is not just mercy and not

01:43:39.080 just justice.

01:43:39.820 It's the two arms of it.

01:43:41.960 She ends up, she's all justice.

01:43:43.620 So the one arm is missing.

01:43:45.940 Brewster's got the two arms able to carry her, you know, but I think that's what we've been

01:43:50.300 missing a lot in the church is the two arms.

01:43:52.920 Um, we become just too much for mercy church.

01:43:56.080 I don't, that's what I think of.

01:43:57.660 Like, I don't think that you guys ask enough of your people.

01:44:01.460 You're, you're not, you're not giving them hell.

01:44:04.520 Yeah, no, I think there's something right about that.

01:44:06.660 And that's the Yoda on your shoulder.

01:44:08.680 So he's, there's someone who's kind of pushing me and telling me and teaching me and bringing

01:44:12.120 me on that downward journey.

01:44:13.500 Like the Virgil move that you're going to accompany this person all the way down.

01:44:18.560 So now the importance, here's like Pope Francis is really good because accompaniment and the

01:44:23.520 church is a field hospital.

01:44:24.860 He says for people deeply wounded, that's really right.

01:44:27.740 And we got to accompany people though, all the way down.

01:44:31.260 My generation got, I think a very superficial sort of, you know, everything's okay.

01:44:35.600 God is love and you'll be fine.

01:44:37.360 Um, but that led to a lot of drift.

01:44:40.060 And see when my generation came of age and we got hit by life, I can testify.

01:44:45.080 There's a lot of my classmates, they left religion in a heartbeat because we got a very superficial,

01:44:50.700 childish, one-sided approach, but then life hits all of us inevitably and they, religion

01:44:57.320 had nothing for them.

01:44:58.780 Right, right.

01:44:59.340 Well, and that's exactly when it's necessary.

01:45:02.320 Yeah.

01:45:02.780 And, and, you know, love is a terrible thing.

01:45:05.960 Right.

01:45:06.360 It's demanding, you know, if you love your children, you, you don't let them get away

01:45:15.780 with anything.

01:45:17.000 Right.

01:45:17.280 You call them on their transgressions.

01:45:20.240 And that's very, um, I remember, you know, this situation with my son when he was about

01:45:27.060 four or five and, uh, and I had a really good, have a really good relationship with my son.

01:45:35.700 And I, you know, I've always assumed that he had the capability to make intelligent judgments

01:45:42.180 and expected him to do so from a very early age.

01:45:45.960 Yeah.

01:45:46.400 And, you know, when he was four, he was talking to me and I thought he was lying to me and I

01:45:54.280 didn't know because I couldn't tell, but, you know, that internal Damon was saying, no,

01:45:59.900 there's something that's not right here.

01:46:01.980 And I wasn't going to let him get away with it because I couldn't let him learn that it

01:46:08.460 was acceptable to do that or that I would put up with it.

01:46:13.220 And so I told him in this weird thing, it's kind of like Pharaoh or it's kind of like God

01:46:18.140 hardening Pharaoh's heart.

01:46:20.100 I said, look, kid, here's the deal.

01:46:22.560 I think you're lying to me and we can't have that.

01:46:29.080 But if you're not, I want you to put up like a tremendous fight here to defend yourself,

01:46:35.260 because if you're being honest, well, then I want to know that, but I'm not going to back

01:46:42.440 off because I don't believe that what you're saying is true.

01:46:46.440 And so I went after him, you know, for a good long while.

01:46:52.460 And it did turn out that he was telling me something that wasn't true, which hardly came

01:46:57.240 as a relief, you know.

01:46:59.180 I mean, children do that and it wasn't a surprise to me.

01:47:02.260 But that love is, if you really love someone, you can't tolerate when they're less than they

01:47:15.380 could be.

01:47:16.960 Right.

01:47:17.520 It hurts.

01:47:18.500 And so when someone comes into the church and it's all forgiveness, there's no care there.

01:47:27.000 It's like, what the hell are you doing?

01:47:29.360 Look at you.

01:47:30.060 You're addicted.

01:47:31.120 You're hooked on pornography.

01:47:36.820 You cheat on your wife.

01:47:38.220 You're doing a terrible job at work.

01:47:40.760 It's like you don't take care of yourself.

01:47:43.200 It's like, what the hell's wrong with you?

01:47:45.360 It's like, where's the real you and the person, anyone who is subject to that, as long as it's

01:47:53.300 done with care, you know, and not I'm better than you, which is a whole different thing.

01:47:58.340 It's like, God, man, you're nothing like you should be.

01:48:08.960 Yeah.

01:48:09.660 And if you don't do that, you're not willing to go to the other.

01:48:12.580 In fact, you're trying to move into an easy space.

01:48:14.940 If I'm nice to this person, he'll be nice to me and we'll all be happy.

01:48:17.580 But that's not fun.

01:48:18.040 Yeah, that's right.

01:48:18.860 It's a no conflict.

01:48:20.500 It's a no conflict conversation.

01:48:22.780 It reminds me of at the beginning of the Inferno when Dante, you know, he sees the hill with

01:48:28.720 light on it.

01:48:29.340 Oh, there it is.

01:48:29.960 That's where I need to go.

01:48:30.940 I know I'm lost.

01:48:31.700 I'm in the wood, but that's where I need to go.

01:48:33.340 And off he goes, but then he's blocked by the three animals, right?

01:48:36.180 The wolf and the leopard and the lion, I think.

01:48:39.440 So there's no easy route.

01:48:41.600 That's the point.

01:48:42.200 There's no easy route to that hill.

01:48:44.060 You've got to go down and all the way down.

01:48:48.000 But I think we probably did tell our people that there was too easy a route.

01:48:52.100 You know, everything's okay.

01:48:53.540 You're okay.

01:48:54.200 God is love.

01:48:55.400 But then everyone...

01:48:56.580 Well, God is love and love is nice.

01:48:58.700 Love is harsh and dreadful, right?

01:49:00.180 That's the...

01:49:00.880 Well, that's the thing.

01:49:02.360 Love is harsh and dreadful.

01:49:04.260 Right.

01:49:04.560 And they'll find out soon enough that the road is blocked.

01:49:07.460 Everyone does.

01:49:08.340 But then what's the way forward?

01:49:09.760 And there should be spiritual masters in place that know exactly what to do.

01:49:15.800 The Virgil move.

01:49:17.060 I know what we got to do here.

01:49:18.320 We got to do a searching moral inventory and go all the way down.

01:49:21.600 All the way down.

01:49:21.900 Well, and that's the descent before the ascent.

01:49:25.840 Right.

01:49:26.140 You know, and that's a classical fall of man story.

01:49:29.860 It's the story of Exodus.

01:49:31.480 It's part of the reason that people aren't enlightened.

01:49:33.920 It's that if you're going to go up, man, every up is predicated by a down of equivalent

01:49:41.320 magnitude.

01:49:42.440 Right.

01:49:43.060 Because look, if you're going to improve, you're going to discover that you're wrong

01:49:47.900 about something first.

01:49:49.620 And then to be wrong about something means you're going to fragment and it's going to

01:49:55.800 be painful to recognize the fact of that error, to recognize the consequences of that error

01:50:02.320 across your life, to have to reformulate yourself so that that error is no longer acting out as

01:50:10.140 part of your personality in your life.

01:50:12.220 It's an unbelievable descent.

01:50:15.460 Yeah.

01:50:15.520 And so that's another thing that this is part of the reason why, for all the respect I have

01:50:21.660 for Joseph Campbell, you know, Campbell says, follow your bliss.

01:50:25.900 And that is certainly not something that Jung said, because Jung said, you'd search out what

01:50:32.640 you're most terrified of and what you're most disgusted by and the place you least want to

01:50:38.680 go, where you have to bow the lowest.

01:50:42.200 And that's the place where salvation might be found.

01:50:45.520 And that's like, and I believe that's true.

01:50:48.320 And I believe it's terrifying.

01:50:50.400 The pathway to redemption is through recognition of error, not through bliss.

01:50:56.720 Right.

01:50:57.400 That was where Campbell got enamored of a kind of mindless Buddhism.

01:51:02.660 Yeah.

01:51:03.120 The only way up is down.

01:51:04.700 And that's in all the spiritual teachers.

01:51:07.120 Or go back to origin.

01:51:08.040 You mentioned Exodus, you know, where he says that the Egyptians and the Israelites symbolize

01:51:12.180 the best of us is often enslaved to the worst of us.

01:51:17.060 The Egyptians, the slave masters represent the worst instincts in us and the most twisted

01:51:21.760 and dysfunctional aspects of us.

01:51:24.020 And the Israelites symbolize, he felt, you know, our creativity, our intelligence, our courage,

01:51:28.420 all these good things.

01:51:29.340 Our friendship.

01:51:29.500 Our willingness to move forward.

01:51:31.860 Yeah.

01:51:32.100 But the best of us is enslaved to the worst of us.

01:51:34.640 And so you've got to come to terms with who are the Egyptians in you.

01:51:37.920 And they're making you do two things, he says.

01:51:40.380 They're making you build fortified cities for them.

01:51:43.280 So we take the best of ourselves to build fortifications around the worst of ourselves

01:51:47.920 to protect them.

01:51:49.040 And they build monuments.

01:51:51.400 So, hey, look at me.

01:51:52.720 So, I mean, how much of life, he says, is spent doing those two dysfunctional things,

01:51:57.020 defending the worst of ourselves and then building monuments to the worst of ourselves?

01:52:01.220 When, in fact, we've got to get free of that and get to the promised land.

01:52:04.480 But, I mean, he was the original master of all that psychodynamic reading, I think, of

01:52:09.580 these texts.

01:52:11.080 Well, it's also surprising that so few people know what a multiplicity of readings the Bible

01:52:19.220 has actually withstood.

01:52:21.260 We get hung up on this goofy fundamentalism, which is a 20th century phenomenon.

01:52:25.420 You know, the scopes for all stuff and all that.

01:52:27.260 In America, especially, but in the West, we got hung up on it.

01:52:30.740 You read Augustine, who is deeply indebted to origin.

01:52:33.340 You've got these very creative interpretive strategies in place around Genesis, for example.

01:52:39.920 It's not literalism by any means.

01:52:42.640 And that's, we're talking origin.

01:52:43.960 We're talking the third century.

01:52:45.340 Right, right.

01:52:45.720 It would be a second century.

01:52:47.260 Augustine, fourth century.

01:52:48.620 I mean, these are really early figures.

01:52:49.960 Well, these were mystical thinkers.

01:52:52.700 Right.

01:52:53.020 They were scientists.

01:52:53.420 They're not hung up on literalism.

01:52:55.060 Right.

01:52:55.860 So, yes, we need to recover that, I think, even as Christians, our own biblical interpretive

01:53:01.780 tradition.

01:53:02.660 So, what are you hoping for in the coming year for you and for what you're doing?

01:53:09.500 What am I hoping for?

01:53:10.760 Yeah, what would you like to see happen as a consequence of what you're doing?

01:53:14.820 And what do you think you are doing?

01:53:17.640 I mean, you're on this public, I wouldn't call it a crusade, but you're engaging with

01:53:24.020 the public, you know, in this new way.

01:53:26.020 And it seems to be quite successful.

01:53:30.160 And what do you think it is that you're doing right?

01:53:32.700 And what would you like to see happen as a consequence of that?

01:53:35.680 I think what I'm doing right is beginning with the Semina Verbi.

01:53:41.640 It's the church father's idea.

01:53:43.020 The seeds of the word.

01:53:44.160 The seeds of the word are everywhere.

01:53:46.080 Or that's the bits of the fragmented Catholicism that are found in the culture.

01:53:49.640 So, I tend to begin with the culture and lead from there.

01:53:52.900 I think that is more winsome.

01:53:54.780 So, I tend not to begin with a lot of preaching or, you know, a moralizing approach.

01:53:59.980 But I begin with a cultural approach.

01:54:01.700 And I think that's been more appealing.

01:54:03.680 I mean, my ultimate goal is I want to bring people to faith in Christ in the Catholic

01:54:08.880 Church.

01:54:09.520 I mean, that's my ultimate goal.

01:54:10.600 I'm an evangelizer.

01:54:11.940 But I'm using certain methods to try to draw people to that point, realizing that there's

01:54:16.980 an awful lot of obstacles in the way, you know.

01:54:20.140 I'm trying to kick open some doors.

01:54:22.200 I'm trying to, part of it is to help people with their intellectual blocks.

01:54:27.700 There are so many, especially younger people, they're just stuck because certain intellectual

01:54:32.180 objections have occurred to them, and they've heard them from their university professors

01:54:36.020 or whatever.

01:54:36.980 To clear up some of that, to knock over some of those obstacles, that's part of it.

01:54:41.740 But then to open up, and I think that's what you're doing too, I mean, open up the richness

01:54:46.040 of this spiritual tradition.

01:54:48.340 Because it makes people, it's not just an intellectual feast.

01:54:53.380 It saves your soul, you know.

01:54:55.700 That's what I want to do.

01:54:56.760 I want to help people.

01:54:58.660 You know, your fellow Canadian, Charles Taylor, the great Catholic philosopher, talks about

01:55:03.420 the buffered self, the self that's caught in this little space, and there's no sense

01:55:08.500 of a link to the transcendent.

01:55:10.080 That's what I'm trying to do.

01:55:11.020 I'm trying to knock holes in the buffered self and let in some light from a higher,

01:55:15.660 you know, dimension of reality.

01:55:18.080 So, I mean, ultimately, it's to bring people to salvation, I'd say, is what I want to do.

01:55:21.500 But knock some holes in the buffered self, I want to keep doing that.

01:55:26.180 And I said this, I was in Rome in October, we had this month-long synod with the Pope

01:55:31.180 on young people, and I was elected to go to that synod.

01:55:35.260 And it was interesting, you know, like, what's our strategy for reaching young people?

01:55:39.200 And I said, I think a miracle of providence right now is we have this massive problem of

01:55:44.720 young people leaving, but we have this new tool of the social media, which we didn't

01:55:49.800 have.

01:55:50.200 I mean, heck, 10 years ago, we couldn't do this.

01:55:52.840 And now we can reach out to young people into their space.

01:55:56.320 Because Catholic, we tend to say, what programs can we develop?

01:56:00.960 You know, lecture series that we can develop.

01:56:03.460 Well, people aren't coming to our institutions for all kinds of reasons, but we can sort of

01:56:07.820 move into their space with the social media.

01:56:09.660 So that's kind of how I see what I'm up to and, you know, trying to do.

01:56:14.460 It'd be nice to see if something could be done with all those beautiful cathedrals.

01:56:19.580 Yeah.

01:56:20.060 Well, that's, I wrote about them years ago.

01:56:22.540 I studied in Paris.

01:56:23.380 I know, I know.

01:56:24.160 I studied in Paris, and I used to give tours at Notre Dame.

01:56:27.860 And I was a doctoral student.

01:56:30.120 I was a priest, but a doctoral student.

01:56:31.720 And we were told by the tour guides, now, don't talk about religion.

01:56:35.600 So we were just meant to talk about, you know, how tall the building was and what it was built.

01:56:39.760 But I used it to sermonize, really, to talk about the Christian faith.

01:56:44.400 And I've written a little book on the spirituality of the cathedrals, you know.

01:56:48.460 I'd like to read that.

01:56:50.200 I mean, is there a decent bibliography in that book?

01:56:54.220 Because I'm really interested in cathedral architecture.

01:56:57.280 No, and I am, too.

01:56:58.220 I wrote this years ago.

01:56:59.580 It's a little book of kind of spiritual meditation.

01:57:01.400 So it wouldn't be, you know, with an academic apparatus.

01:57:03.960 But I read a lot of those books at the time and love the cathedrals, too, because they're

01:57:08.740 just, talk about, you know, like moving into a dream space of the archetypal realities are

01:57:13.980 all over the place.

01:57:15.880 Chartres is my favorite place in the world, maybe.

01:57:18.860 My favorite covered space in the world is Chartres Cathedral.

01:57:22.680 Why?

01:57:23.220 Why that cathedral?

01:57:25.080 I don't think anything is richer.

01:57:27.240 I remember spending a weekend there.

01:57:28.980 I went down from Paris on a Friday and just got a hotel room, and I stayed there until

01:57:32.700 mass on Sunday, and I made sure I saw everything in it.

01:57:36.700 I walked all around the outside, all over the inside.

01:57:40.380 And my Old Testament imagination was so engaged by Chartres, you know, because there's your

01:57:45.980 thing about the allegorical.

01:57:47.640 They read the Old Testament in constant relation to Christ, you know, as a fulfillment.

01:57:52.980 And the sculpture, I mean, God, the sculpture is just incomparably beautiful in its execution.

01:57:57.640 But then the windows, there are no better windows, and most of them are real medieval windows

01:58:03.040 from the 13th century.

01:58:05.520 Nothing sings to me more, just the way it's situated, the topography of it.

01:58:08.740 You know, you kind of come up to Chartres, and when you go back behind it, you take the

01:58:13.440 pilgrim's route up to it.

01:58:14.720 And all of that, the pilgrim's journey is implicit there.

01:58:17.880 But the windows look like, they look like diamonds on a black velvet background.

01:58:23.900 They're like jewels, and it's the shining jewels of the new Jerusalem.

01:58:28.040 So there's the anagogical sense.

01:58:30.060 It's all about the journey to heaven.

01:58:31.560 And then the labyrinth, which unfortunately has been kind of co-opted by a new agey spirituality,

01:58:37.200 but the original labyrinth that most of the ones we see today imitate is there.

01:58:42.140 It's Chartres.

01:58:42.660 Yes, I know.

01:58:43.840 The labyrinth is an amazing thing.

01:58:46.100 Extraordinary.

01:58:46.540 I mean, I walked in, I walked in several times, and it's a very powerful experience.

01:58:51.080 Anyway, Chartres has all of that in it and more, you know.

01:58:55.240 Yes, well, it's such a shame that these buildings that, you know, you see what happened in Europe,

01:59:01.160 but I don't understand it, is that Europe went through this several hundred years long period

01:59:05.820 of time where beauty was worshipped in a profound way, and you see that manifested in the construction

01:59:14.880 of these great cathedrals that took centuries to build.

01:59:18.260 And they were, these people were, well, the bricklayer wasn't just laying bricks.

01:59:24.740 The bricklayer was building a cathedral to God, you know, which is how our lives should be, right?

01:59:30.840 Yeah.

01:59:31.260 Every little thing that we do should be imbued with that higher vision, which is possible if you have that higher vision.

01:59:39.340 And, you know, the contribution of that vision to Europe and to world culture is absolutely priceless.

01:59:48.140 I mean, people make pilgrimages from all over the world to view these insanely beautiful and complex buildings.

01:59:56.720 And they were driven by a spirit that was, well, hopefully unconquerable, but certainly of sufficient potency,

02:00:05.820 even in a fundamentally atheistic age, to pull people in for reasons they don't really even understand.

02:00:11.120 And just the sheer awe at the, at the, at the, what, at the daring of the architects.

02:00:18.740 And to talk about a door or a window, a transcendent, and that's a way of punching through the buffered self, those cathedrals.

02:00:24.520 And don't get me started on church architecture for the last, you know, like 40, 50 years,

02:00:28.240 when we largely adopted a kind of brutalist modernism within Catholicism and built what Baltzar called the great barns, you know,

02:00:37.380 these big empty spaces. And we wonder, you know, well, then why are the young people leaving in droves?

02:00:42.960 The church building itself didn't sing to them in any way, which they used to do.

02:00:47.620 Even the, you know, like imitation Gothic buildings from the, from the 1930s.

02:00:51.260 But man, a young Catholic coming of age at that time was, I mean, look at that.

02:00:55.700 I'm just surrounded by the imagery of the faith and the whole narrative of salvation.

02:00:59.700 And I was just...

02:01:01.000 Well, and the incarnation of the song in stone.

02:01:05.900 You know, you talked about part of the goal of salvation, let's say, to bring everything together,

02:01:13.820 to have everything come together in a kind of integrity and, with a kind of integrity and in a union.

02:01:19.820 And of course, music portrays that better than anything else, as far as I'm concerned.

02:01:24.660 And those cathedrals were symphonies in stone.

02:01:27.300 And so then they portrayed architecturally exactly what music attempts to portray orally.

02:01:37.460 And it works. I mean, it works.

02:01:42.220 Oh, gosh, yeah.

02:01:43.460 It works for someone who has no belief.

02:01:46.540 Right. Absolutely.

02:01:47.220 Absolutely. And, you know, it's a bit of a cliche to say it, but the Summa of Aquinas and the Divine Comedy of Dante are like that.

02:01:55.760 They have that same kind of quality of integration and, like, the whole of life being on display.

02:02:01.960 And that's part of what fell apart.

02:02:03.580 You know, that we needed the critique of the Enlightenment, for sure.

02:02:07.360 I mean, I get it.

02:02:07.980 We needed that in a lot of different ways.

02:02:09.700 But, sadly, often that critique got overstated and we, you know, baby bathwater phenomenon and a lot of the integrity was compromised.

02:02:19.860 How do you keep the critique without throwing out the substance?

02:02:23.100 You know, it's been one of the struggles.

02:02:25.620 And much of the theology of the last couple hundred years has been so conditioned by the Enlightenment criticism.

02:02:31.500 I mean, I get it and take it in for sure, but don't so condition your theology by that critique

02:02:36.680 that you lose all this stuff that we're talking about now that has the soul-transforming power.

02:02:42.280 Well, that's it.

02:02:43.060 You know, it seems to me that it's, and this is so necessary, is that it's, there's something.

02:02:50.420 What's required is a re-emphasis on the potential nobility of the human being

02:02:56.700 and the moral responsibility to make that nobility a reality.

02:03:01.800 We don't even talk about words like that.

02:03:03.500 Like, I use the word nobility in my lectures and it's such an archaic word.

02:03:09.940 It's like, well, you should have a noble goal.

02:03:11.980 It's like, who, what child is told that now?

02:03:15.700 Yeah, no.

02:03:16.700 And we're built for nobility.

02:03:21.620 You're a psychotherapist, obviously, but it seems to me that we're so concerned about people's feelings

02:03:27.140 and that the feeling's getting hurt or getting repressed or something, that we're afraid.

02:03:31.340 If we use that language of a noble aspiration or, come on, you can do better, or, hey, you've got a serious problem,

02:03:37.580 that it'll awaken such negative feelings, leading eventually to, you know, self-mutilation or suicide at the limit,

02:03:44.320 that we're so afraid of that, that we're reluctant to use the language of nobility.

02:03:48.680 Yes, well, we're afraid of hurting people's feelings in the present and willing to absolutely sacrifice their well-being in the future.

02:04:00.460 And that's the sign of a very immature and unwise culture because the reverse should be the case.

02:04:06.420 You know, it's like, look, you said already, there's no up without down.

02:04:13.500 And that initial conversation, when you lay things bare and you put everything out on the table

02:04:19.360 and you discuss what the problems are and maybe the potential solutions, man, that's a rough conversation.

02:04:26.700 You know, it's almost more than people can bear.

02:04:30.020 But if it's a discussion of reality, well, they're already bearing it.

02:04:34.860 And at least placing it on the table indicates that, well, that there's someone who's willing to listen

02:04:40.500 and that it isn't so terrible that, like Voldemort, it can't be named.

02:04:45.600 You know, that's been exactly my argument.

02:04:47.580 I alluded to it earlier that when you say, oh, we got too much for people to take.

02:04:52.080 See, but life is going to force itself on them.

02:04:54.800 Life will force them into this, and then there won't be any wisdom or guide to help them with it.

02:05:01.500 So if we say, look, I'm so concerned about sparing people's feelings.

02:05:04.840 Heck, life doesn't care about your feelings or nature doesn't care about your feelings.

02:05:07.880 Well, one of the things I learned from Jung, he was very, very, and I think this is a psychotherapeutic truism,

02:05:16.300 is that if you're going to confront a monster, and you most certainly are,

02:05:21.840 then you do it at a time and place of your choosing.

02:05:26.920 Because otherwise it waits until you're at your weakest and most vulnerable, and then it attacks.

02:05:34.640 And so there is no monster-free pathway forward to prepare as a knight of Christ, let's say,

02:05:44.780 so that when it comes, you're there or, in fact, confronting it at its weakest point,

02:05:52.740 or you cower and you wait and it devours you.

02:05:57.440 And those are your options.

02:05:59.260 And we don't have the wisdom of the kind of pessimism that enables us to view life that way.

02:06:05.500 We think, well, if we're careful and we're quiet, well, the monster will avoid us completely.

02:06:11.260 And everyone knows that's a lie.

02:06:13.440 Yeah. Oh, gosh, yeah.

02:06:15.700 Do you find this, because sometimes when I use this language, people say,

02:06:19.600 well, yeah, that's great for the young men, but the young ladies don't respond to it.

02:06:22.740 But years ago, my niece, who's now, she's what, almost 30, I guess.

02:06:26.700 When she was about 17, they took her on one of these nature things,

02:06:30.680 you know, where they took the kids out into the woods,

02:06:32.400 and they had to hike, and they had to build their own campfire,

02:06:35.540 and then they had to ford streams.

02:06:37.600 And they had, you know, it's one of these really demanding things

02:06:39.980 where they were up against nature and up against life.

02:06:43.140 Man, did she come back utterly transformed as a human being

02:06:47.020 in a way that religion had never done.

02:06:49.800 She was Catholic all her life, gone to Mass.

02:06:51.700 Her uncle's a bishop.

02:06:53.620 There's nothing in our faith that changed her the way that experience clearly changed her.

02:07:00.180 There's a serious conversation to be had with young women.

02:07:03.560 You know, a woman asked me a question on my Q&A this month.

02:07:08.120 She said that her friends are really down on her because she claims to not be a feminist,

02:07:14.160 but even more importantly, because she wants to have children.

02:07:17.240 And they're telling her that only an evil and cruel person would bring a child into a world

02:07:23.220 this terrible, and worse, to do the damage to the planet that that child will inevitably do.

02:07:30.960 And people are very serious about this, and they're very hard on young women.

02:07:34.900 And, like, I always think of the paeda, you know, because I kind of think of it

02:07:39.100 as the Christian equivalent of the crucifix.

02:07:43.280 You know, you have Mary there with her broken son in her arms.

02:07:46.740 And I think that the great adventure for women, at least in part,

02:07:53.000 this is the maternal adventure, is to bring a child into the world,

02:07:57.560 knowing full well that the consequence is a crucifixion-like brokenness,

02:08:07.240 and that it's still a mark of faith in the possibilities of being to participate in that,

02:08:13.900 and not to hide from it, and to say, well, despite everything,

02:08:17.620 I'm going to act out my faith in life and in the possibilities of being,

02:08:24.080 and I'm going to bring someone into the world who will be a net force for good rather than evil.

02:08:28.960 And that's my moral obligation.

02:08:31.400 And I think to present that to young women as a major part of the adventure of their life,

02:08:38.260 which is certainly the truth, is something that's attractive to far more of them

02:08:43.460 than would be likely to admit it in today's time and age.

02:08:48.100 Yeah. I'm glad you used the word faith there, because just a couple days ago,

02:08:52.320 we had the Feast of St. Joseph, you know, and Joseph in the New Testament is like Abraham in the Old Testament.

02:08:56.700 He's the paradigmatic person of faith, right?

02:08:59.200 So I was talking to a group of high school kids, and I said, okay, listen to me, everybody.

02:09:03.300 I know you're going to hear this from your professors in college,

02:09:06.040 and you probably hear it already, that faith means, you know, being uncritical,

02:09:12.000 and you accept any old nonsense on the basis of no evidence that it's superstition.

02:09:16.040 And I just said, look, we're against that.

02:09:19.360 And I speak now as a Catholic, faith and reason.

02:09:22.200 We don't want anything subrational, anything that it's a lie and you know it, that's irresponsible.

02:09:29.000 Anything that's stupid and you know it, it's irresponsible to accept it.

02:09:31.900 So that's not faith, you know, but I said close to what you just said.

02:09:36.140 Faith in the Bible is this willingness to risk, under the providence of God, some great adventure.

02:09:42.960 Yeah, that's exactly right.

02:09:44.560 Here's Joseph, you know.

02:09:45.580 That's a great phrase.

02:09:47.140 Yeah, no, I think that's it.

02:09:48.520 And that's what faith means in the Bible.

02:09:50.340 It doesn't mean, oh, I'm an idiot and just tell me any old nonsense and I'll believe it.

02:09:54.680 No, it means that adventure.

02:09:56.760 That's the other thing is that one of the things I really learned from reading the Abrahamic stories

02:10:01.060 is that the fundamental call is to, is it called to adventure, not to ease or to happiness.

02:10:08.560 And even the adventure, the part of the relationship with God that's part of that adventure is wrestling with God.

02:10:17.640 I mean, that's what Israel itself means is that it's another aspect of that strange element of belief is like, what does it mean to believe?

02:10:25.380 Well, it means to adopt this moral burden, but it also means to wrestle with God.

02:10:31.420 Yeah.

02:10:31.980 Right?

02:10:32.180 And not to blindly accept preposterous blandishments that no one with any sense would ever swallow.

02:10:42.120 Right.

02:10:42.560 But I think we've been, again, pretty bad at propagating that.

02:10:45.840 If the new atheists have got an awful lot of traction with that idea that religious people are just sort of naive and superstitious and uncritical,

02:10:52.680 then we haven't explained very well what we mean by faith.

02:10:55.200 No, we certainly haven't explained the element of it that's associated with courage.

02:10:59.700 No, right.

02:11:00.340 And then under the guidance of a spiritual master that will help you through that and push you toward the edge and help you navigate those waters.

02:11:10.540 And that's Dante got that.

02:11:12.020 All of our great spiritual teachers have it, but we've not been good at that, in my judgment, you know.

02:11:18.000 Well, maybe we'll learn before it's too late.

02:11:22.620 That would be nice.

02:11:25.240 I guess I should probably stop.

02:11:27.960 We've gone for about 90 minutes.

02:11:29.640 Oh, my gosh.

02:11:30.280 We have gone a long time.

02:11:32.580 It was really a pleasure talking with you.

02:11:34.740 Yeah, I loved it, Jordan.

02:11:35.880 Thank you very much.

02:11:36.780 I was delighted.

02:11:37.680 I'd like to have another conversation, a darker one, I would say.

02:11:41.100 I've been reading a book recently.

02:11:46.320 Let me just find the name of it here.

02:11:50.360 Just give me one second.

02:11:53.780 Ah, well, I'm not having any luck.

02:11:56.840 Oh, yes, here we go.

02:11:58.420 Have you read In the Closet of the Vatican?

02:12:01.160 Oh, I did.

02:12:01.940 Yeah, I did.

02:12:02.960 It's a bad book.

02:12:04.380 But, I mean, we can talk about it.

02:12:05.960 I'd be happy to...

02:12:06.740 I would like to have a conversation about it when I'm more prepared for it, because I

02:12:10.440 don't think I am prepared for it enough yet.

02:12:12.800 I did read it, because I figured everybody would be talking about it.

02:12:15.680 And it's a bad book in many ways, meaning I think it's poorly researched and all that.

02:12:20.260 But, sure, let's talk about it.

02:12:22.360 All right.

02:12:22.800 All right.

02:12:23.300 Well, let's call it a date.

02:12:26.040 All right.

02:12:26.920 All right.

02:12:27.340 Great.

02:12:27.740 Thank you for having me on.

02:12:29.600 Well, thank you for coming on.

02:12:31.300 And we'll get this up and out as soon as possible, both in YouTube and audio forum.

02:12:37.780 Nice.

02:12:38.360 And I guess we'll see what the consequences are.

02:12:40.940 We'll see.

02:12:41.860 You do find out on YouTube pretty quickly.

02:12:43.740 You do.

02:12:45.580 More power to you, as far as I'm concerned.

02:12:47.860 And thank you very much for spending the time speaking with me today.

02:12:52.960 Yeah.

02:12:53.260 God bless you.

02:12:53.800 Thanks.

02:12:54.580 Bye-bye.

02:12:54.940 If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books,

02:12:59.480 Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life,

02:13:04.180 An Antidote to Chaos.

02:13:05.500 Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

02:13:10.460 See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your

02:13:15.320 favorite bookseller.

02:13:16.660 I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

02:13:18.580 If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode

02:13:24.060 with a friend.

02:13:24.940 Next week's podcast is going to be the first in a series of three in a row.

02:13:29.080 It's a surprise, though.

02:13:30.400 We'll talk to you next week.

02:13:31.500 Have a wonderful day.

02:13:32.480 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

02:13:39.140 on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at jordan.b.peterson.

02:13:45.420 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my

02:13:52.400 list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanbpeterson.com.

02:13:57.880 My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand

02:14:03.240 themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found

02:14:08.720 at selfauthoring.com.

02:14:10.660 That's selfauthoring.com.

02:14:13.180 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 23, 2019

Bishop Barron： Catholicism and the Modern Age

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