The Michael Knowles Show - December 25, 2023


A History of Christmas ｜ Bishop Barron


Episode Stats


Length

40 minutes

Words per minute

169.3466

Word count

6,793

Sentence count

495

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

32

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Is December 25th the day of the birth of our Savior? Is it a Christian holiday or a pagan holiday? What does the Bible say about the date of Jesus' birth, and how did it come about? Does it really matter when it happened? What is the point of celebrating Christmas if you don t know when Jesus was born?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:37.720 Merry, Merry Christmas, everyone.
00:00:40.100 I hope you're having a marvelous first day of Christmas.
00:00:42.960 You know, there are 12 days of Christmas.
00:00:44.920 People, they want to take down the Christmas tree at 5 o'clock on Christmas Day itself.
00:00:49.760 It goes on much, much longer.
00:00:51.080 There is so much about the Christmas season, Advent, the 12 days of Christmas, the whole even
00:00:58.560 why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th that is confusing to many modern people.
00:01:05.140 I consider it all part of the war on Christmas. 0.77
00:01:08.140 I like to consider myself a general in the war on Christmas.
00:01:11.220 But I decided we need to bring in some outside support here because I don't know, what do
00:01:16.040 I really know about any of this?
00:01:17.240 So I figured I would bring in an expert on Christmas, and that would be His Excellency,
00:01:22.400 Bishop Robert Barron.
00:01:24.760 Bishop Barron, thank you so much for coming on.
00:01:27.420 Michael, good to be with you.
00:01:28.520 Merry Christmas to you.
00:01:29.640 Merry Christmas.
00:01:31.560 Wonderful that you could make the time.
00:01:33.080 I actually want to talk specifically about time and about history and about this claim
00:01:40.840 that, one, Christians just invented Christmas and made it this time of year to steal a holiday 1.00
00:01:49.400 from the pagans.
00:01:50.700 That's one claim I often hear.
00:01:52.380 Two, that there's no good reason that they picked December 25th other than there were pagan 0.93
00:01:58.080 holidays and winter solstice.
00:01:59.420 And three, that it doesn't really matter when we celebrate Christmas.
00:02:03.280 It doesn't matter when this stuff happened.
00:02:05.480 Forget about history altogether.
00:02:07.980 Let's just enjoy the good feelings of the season or something like that.
00:02:13.880 In no particular order, feel free to give me your thoughts.
00:02:18.080 Well, as you suggest, the standard view, and I would have learned it certainly as a student,
00:02:21.880 is that we don't really know for sure when Jesus was born exactly.
00:02:24.840 And December 25th corresponds to the pagan feast day of the Sol Invictus, the all-conquering 1.00
00:02:31.560 son.
00:02:32.240 So, the return of the light.
00:02:33.340 And there's a beautiful association there of Christ, the light of the world, et cetera.
00:02:37.660 And that could be the case.
00:02:39.440 We don't know.
00:02:40.480 That's a basic fact.
00:02:41.640 Another angle on it, though, is that some suggest, you know, the feast of the Annunciation,
00:02:48.600 March 25th, so nine months prior to December 25th, is actually older than the feast assigned
00:02:54.700 for Christmas.
00:02:55.360 And so, is there some ground, if there was some reason to believe that was the case
00:03:00.140 historically, then wouldn't it make sense that December 25th would be the day of Jesus'
00:03:04.980 birth?
00:03:05.160 But I think the wider point you're making is the most important one, namely, that Christianity
00:03:10.540 is an historical religion.
00:03:12.720 We are not a mythic system.
00:03:14.880 So, I love the myths.
00:03:16.120 I love myths of all the different, you know, cultures, and they're fascinating, and they
00:03:19.640 tell fundamental truth.
00:03:21.340 That's the great virtue of the myths about nature, about the cosmos, about human psychology,
00:03:26.580 et cetera.
00:03:27.320 But a mark of the myth is always that little phrase, you know, once upon a time or in that
00:03:33.140 time, they usually use the Latin, in illo tempore, or I've often said the contemporary version
00:03:38.900 is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
00:03:42.560 That's a way of signaling, I'm dealing with a myth here, because I'm not trying to situate
00:03:47.560 it historically.
00:03:48.700 No one wonders, you know, who was the king of, you know, Greece when Hercules was cleaning
00:03:53.780 the Aegean stables, or it's just a category error, because a myth deals with kind of trans-historical
00:04:00.780 truths.
00:04:01.440 Then there's Christianity, which is a stubbornly historical religion. 0.99
00:04:07.780 It's not just making generic claims about our psychology or about the cosmos or the rhythms
00:04:13.520 of nature.
00:04:14.360 It's making very specific claims about something that happened.
00:04:19.040 I think of it, Michael, every single Sunday when we recite the Creed, and we say that little
00:04:23.040 line, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
00:04:25.800 But we're not talking about the cross as an archetypal symbol, we're not talking about
00:04:31.320 the mystery of death to life.
00:04:33.940 No, no, we're talking about this particular first-century Jew who was crucified in the Roman
00:04:40.080 manner under this governor, whose existence can be verified outside the Bible, named Pontius
00:04:47.520 Pilatus Pilatus, that grounds Christianity in a way that mattered immensely from the beginning.
00:04:55.880 The first Christians knew how vitally important it was that these things happened, you know?
00:05:01.080 So there's a constant temptation to reduce Christianity to a mythic system, and it should be vigorously 1.00
00:05:09.960 resisted.
00:05:11.500 Right, because one often hears Christianity referred to as the true myth.
00:05:17.840 You know, we're not denying that there is this mythic significance, that there's this incredible,
00:05:25.300 you know, semiotic significance to the cross and to the mysteries of life and death.
00:05:31.620 And even when we read in the Gospels, we read in illo tempere, but then what happens right
00:05:36.060 after in illo tempere?
00:05:37.280 We hear, Jesus dixit, you know, Christ said.
00:05:40.400 And now we've lost the realm of mere poetry or high prose, and we're now into the realm
00:05:49.480 of journalism, something that really happened with a real man among other men and women in
00:05:55.460 a real place, in real time, and we can trace that historicity all the way back.
00:05:59.820 I love that you mentioned the coincidence of the Annunciation, you know, nine months prior
00:06:08.080 to Christmas.
00:06:09.080 I think it was St. Hippolytus of Rome who pointed that out.
00:06:12.440 And even Pope Benedict XVI observed that while one recognizes these beautiful parallels between
00:06:21.020 the pagan feasts and Christmas, it's very difficult to argue now that the pagan feast, the Sol Invictus
00:06:28.600 predated Christmas because the earliest evidence we have of both in a calendar is from the chronography
00:06:36.280 of 354, I think it is.
00:06:38.040 And so it might just as well be the case that the Feast of Sol Invictus went the other way
00:06:42.980 around.
00:06:43.460 Exactly.
00:06:44.320 And what's so beautiful about it to me, I suppose, is that when you have the historicity, you
00:06:51.780 don't have to lose the myth.
00:06:53.220 And that I suppose in a broader view, the nativity and the crucifixion and the resurrection, it
00:07:02.520 is the crux of history, literally.
00:07:05.440 It's what gives meaning and redeems all of the history, secular and otherwise, that we
00:07:12.560 have around us.
00:07:13.200 Quite right.
00:07:14.200 And you were referring, at least implicitly there, to C.S. Lewis, who made that observation
00:07:19.340 that those who say Christianity is just another myth haven't read many myths.
00:07:25.340 And Lewis himself was a great expert in mythic literature.
00:07:28.480 But it's the same Lewis who makes that remark.
00:07:31.140 If you want, it's the true myth.
00:07:33.560 It's not just one more mythic telling among many.
00:07:36.920 So you could say, remember, and this goes back a few years when I was just ordained, Joseph
00:07:42.620 Campbell came on the scene and talked about the myths of the world.
00:07:46.600 And he used the phrase, the mono-myth.
00:07:49.240 He felt that really all the cultures are telling one great story.
00:07:53.860 And I mean, look, that might be true at some archetypal level, but you can't say Christianity 0.73
00:07:59.120 is just one more iteration of the mono-myth because we're up against the stubborn historicity
00:08:05.260 of it.
00:08:06.840 Elements of truth from the mono-myth that are also in the Gospels, sure.
00:08:11.640 But it's the true myth.
00:08:13.740 It's the myth that sprang to life.
00:08:17.600 So Lewis talks about the good dreams of the human race, that the myths represent the human
00:08:23.420 race dreaming about what will be accomplished in Christ.
00:08:27.560 And so they're anticipating him.
00:08:29.660 And that's why when Christ is announced, a lot of cultures said, oh, yeah, I recognize
00:08:35.260 that.
00:08:35.720 I understand that because their imagination had been evangelized through the myths.
00:08:40.940 So I think that's a great way of combining the two ideas.
00:08:43.520 We don't have to just reject the mythic tradition, but we see it as a true myth.
00:08:48.440 Even I was just flying back from India where I flew out for a friend's wedding.
00:08:56.020 And by the way, a big reminder to people, be very careful if you're going to become friends
00:09:00.180 with Indians because one day they might expect you to fly to India for their wedding.
00:09:03.720 But it was a lovely wedding.
00:09:05.040 And it was actually in the more Catholic state in Kerala where legend or maybe history,
00:09:11.360 but at least legend says that St. Thomas landed.
00:09:14.540 Pope Benedict also.
00:09:16.140 Well, I think that's a good, that's credible.
00:09:18.900 Well, that's, I hope, I hope it's credible because I like to think that I was there where
00:09:22.580 my confirmation saint landed.
00:09:24.560 I think it was Pope Benedict suggested he, he really only made it to Northwestern India,
00:09:29.640 Pakistan say. 0.64
00:09:30.540 And that, but, but I'd prefer to say that I was walking the ground that St. Thomas did.
00:09:35.540 Yeah.
00:09:35.940 And, but on my flight back, I was reading some church fathers and I was reading this great
00:09:44.040 book about Dante.
00:09:45.740 You know, I love Dante and I figured this will be some indulgent reading, especially in Advent
00:09:49.480 time.
00:09:49.840 And something that Dante does is he, he gets into not only religious history and not only
00:09:57.000 myth also, but, but secular history, you know, you, you see these confounding figures, these
00:10:02.100 old Romans, you know, Cato, for instance, in, in purgatory plays a really big role.
00:10:06.900 And it, it's a reminder that, you know, the historical aspects of Christianity are not just confined
00:10:14.980 to the faith or to some tiny little sliver of history, but to all of it.
00:10:20.660 And then, then I was reminded of this bizarre fact of Christmas, which is that at the time
00:10:26.800 of the nativity, at the time of the Christ's birth, you have sitting on the throne in Rome,
00:10:33.360 the, the, the man referred to as the son of the divine, the Filius Divi, and then born
00:10:38.340 in Bethlehem, you have the Filius Dei, the son of God, the, the ascension to the throne
00:10:44.600 of Caesar Augustus, Filius Divi, was heralded by, by a star, by a, a comment.
00:10:50.680 The, the nativity of our Lord, heralded by another star in Bethlehem.
00:10:56.480 The, the Filius Divi on the throne in Rome heralds the Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
00:11:01.480 The, the, the nativity of our Lord heralds the Pax Mundi, you know, the, the whole peace
00:11:06.320 of the world.
00:11:07.200 The, the, if a Hollywood screenwriter could put that story on paper, you wouldn't believe
00:11:12.500 it.
00:11:12.640 You'd say it's too on the nose.
00:11:13.820 We can't, and yet that really happened.
00:11:17.620 Yeah, and you mentioned Pope Benedict a couple times, and, you know, go back to that famously
00:11:22.280 controversial Regensburg address he gave that was misconstrued in a thousand different ways.
00:11:27.340 His main point there was, it's remarkably significant that Christianity says in Jesus,
00:11:32.940 the logos became flesh.
00:11:35.100 Because what that does, it permits a dialogue, literally dialogue, with the sciences, with
00:11:42.240 history, with culture, with law, with all the deepest aspirations of the human heart.
00:11:48.480 Because what we're longing for, whether we're in a cultural framework, a legal framework, a political
00:11:53.740 framework, we're looking for logos in some way.
00:11:56.660 We're looking for mind, for reason.
00:11:59.540 And so, Christianity doesn't have to position itself as sequestered over on the side of things.
00:12:05.200 No, it's at the heart of everything.
00:12:07.120 Because if the logos that every scientist is seeking, every artist is seeking, every decent
00:12:13.500 person is seeking, that's the logos that became flesh in Jesus.
00:12:17.320 So, it enables this marvelous cultural conversation, which has marked Christianity at its best from
00:12:24.520 the beginning.
00:12:25.860 The point he was making there at Regensburg is a really vital one in a time of religious
00:12:30.420 and cultural conflict.
00:12:32.940 And if religion is seen as dangerous, you know, to our political arrangements and all that,
00:12:37.800 no, no, it belongs at the heart of all of it because of the unique claim being made by
00:12:42.760 Christianity.
00:12:44.000 Logos, logos.
00:12:44.920 The beginning of John's gospel, that matters immensely for our conversation today.
00:12:49.240 I love that you mentioned the Regensburg address because the part that got the late Pope in
00:12:54.560 trouble was he pointed out that the Christian conception of God is the God who is the logos,
00:13:02.160 who's the divine logic of the universe.
00:13:03.820 Whereas the Muslim conception, and he cited Ibn Hazm, this medieval Islamic scholar, is that
00:13:10.880 Allah is utterly transcendent such that if Allah were to order a follower to worship an idol,
00:13:17.680 he could do that.
00:13:18.860 And that would be understandable within the Muslim conception of God.
00:13:22.240 That would not be understandable within the Christian conception of God, which is a perfectly 0.99
00:13:25.740 fine point that he made.
00:13:26.800 And I thought it was silly that he got in trouble for it.
00:13:28.720 But it's extraordinarily significant because if our God is the God that is the logos, then
00:13:39.040 that means it all has to make sense, you know, that the whole story has to make sense.
00:13:44.540 And so you mentioned in the beginning of the gospel of John, you see Christ identified with
00:13:49.300 the logos.
00:13:50.040 In the beginning of the synoptic gospels, what do you get?
00:13:52.600 You get history, you get a genealogy, you get, so how does one, how does one make sense
00:13:59.900 of those two origin stories?
00:14:04.120 Well, I mean, I read them together as the Bible compels us to.
00:14:09.300 The genealogy accounts are meant to ground us in Israelite history.
00:14:13.760 I think it's wonderful that the first page you see in the New Testament is this long, complex
00:14:18.480 genealogy, three sets of 14 generations, 14 being the number that corresponds in Hebrew
00:14:24.280 to Dawid or David.
00:14:26.500 So Matthew is saying David, David, David has come.
00:14:31.180 But you can't avoid Israel if you don't understand Jesus.
00:14:34.860 See, that grounds him in history.
00:14:36.600 He's not a mythic archetypal figure.
00:14:38.760 He's the culmination of this long, roiled and complex and loamy history of Israel. 1.00
00:14:45.760 But it's that same Jesus who is uber particular.
00:14:52.040 He's an Israelite, came through this long, particular tradition, who's also the logos.
00:14:57.920 The logos, the reason behind all things, is made plain to us in this baby who's the culmination
00:15:06.320 of the long history of Israel.
00:15:08.400 God speaks his word in all things, which every scientist has to assume, right?
00:15:13.420 There's an intelligibility in everything.
00:15:15.400 So God is speaking in all things.
00:15:17.800 But he spoke in varied and fragmentary ways to our ancestors.
00:15:21.820 But now in the fullness of time, he's spoken by means of his son, by means of his word.
00:15:27.260 And so it's the, what appears as the culmination of Israel is in fact the logos by which all 0.88
00:15:34.980 things are informed.
00:15:36.220 I think that's the beautiful coming together, if you want, of a more Greek and a more Hebrew
00:15:40.780 view that are right on display in the New Testament.
00:15:43.680 I love that point you just made too, which is every scientist, whether he knows it or
00:15:48.800 not, believes this.
00:15:51.100 They have to.
00:15:52.120 They have to.
00:15:52.980 Otherwise, nothing we say would be understandable one to another.
00:15:56.500 Intelligibility of the world, and that's Ratzinger too.
00:16:00.460 One of the best arguments for God's existence is the radical and universal intelligibility
00:16:05.840 of the world.
00:16:06.720 How do you explain that without recourse to some sort of creative intelligence which has
00:16:13.100 thought the world into being?
00:16:14.640 The world is not dumbly there.
00:16:16.320 It's intelligibly there, which is why the inquiring mind goes out to meet it.
00:16:21.380 But Aquinas says that, you know, that there's this wonderful congruence between the seeking
00:16:26.380 mind and the intelligible world.
00:16:29.520 Well, how do you explain that without some kind of recourse to logos?
00:16:33.720 Now, the genius of Christianity, so any Greek philosopher might have said that, you know,
00:16:37.740 Pythagoras would have known that.
00:16:39.120 Plato would have known that.
00:16:40.020 But who would have guessed that that logos is most fully revealed in this baby in Bethlehem,
00:16:48.160 wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, that the logos by which the whole
00:16:53.300 universe is governed is something like the self-emptying love of God.
00:16:58.840 That's the genius and poetry of Christianity, that it brings those two things together.
00:17:03.680 If you resolve it one-sidedly on the side of history or one-sidedly on the side of philosophy,
00:17:09.160 you're going to miss it.
00:17:10.440 It's the coming together of those two that's so powerful.
00:17:13.820 And to think about the symmetry of that in history that one would read only in the very
00:17:19.820 finest myth or see in only the most significant aspects of history.
00:17:24.440 Namely, you have Adam, from Adam comes Eve, and then we have the fall of man because of
00:17:32.940 the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
00:17:35.500 And then in the new Adam, our Lord, and in the new Eve, our Lady, you have the new Adam 0.89
00:17:43.560 coming from the new Eve.
00:17:45.860 And you have the, just as we have the fall of mankind because of their disobedience to
00:17:50.260 God, of our first parents, so you have the redemption of mankind in our Lady acquiescing 0.97
00:17:55.740 and saying, yes, I'm the Lord's handmaid, be it done according to his will.
00:18:01.160 And then you have this little baby.
00:18:04.100 From our oldest first father, you have this little baby as the new Adam.
00:18:08.020 It's just so beautiful.
00:18:11.620 And it really happened.
00:18:13.220 And even that kind of perspective on it, I fear, is somewhat lacking in even the Christian
00:18:21.940 consciousness today, to say nothing of non-Christians who've probably never heard of such a thing.
00:18:27.000 Well, you've been reading St. Irenaeus, it sounds like, because that was Irenaeus.
00:18:30.500 I mean, look, very early on, he's a second century figure.
00:18:33.840 Irenaeus dies around the year 200.
00:18:35.500 He's writing in the 160s, 170s, the time of Marcus Aurelius.
00:18:40.420 But Irenaeus, I mean, he saw all of this.
00:18:43.560 And I think one of the real seminal geniuses of our tradition, you know, we say Augustine
00:18:48.440 and Origen, of course, but I think Irenaeus is one of the top three figures among the church
00:18:52.820 fathers.
00:18:53.400 And he saw all those parallels that you were pointing out.
00:18:56.640 And let me stay with Mary for a second, because you're right, the new Eve, he was very
00:19:00.100 strong on that.
00:19:00.760 But look at Mary in Luke's gospel, is presented as the new Ark of the Covenant, because she bears 0.65
00:19:09.060 within her the presence of God as the Ark bore the presence of the Ten Commandments.
00:19:13.880 And that's echoed all throughout that story.
00:19:15.840 Most beautifully, I think, when she goes into the hill country of Judah, and we'd say, okay,
00:19:21.680 it's a geographical reference.
00:19:23.380 It is, but it's also a reference to the Old Testament, because when the Ark was lost
00:19:28.260 through a long series of events, it ends up in the home of this man in the hill country
00:19:33.380 of Judea.
00:19:34.380 Same phrase.
00:19:36.180 Mary goes there.
00:19:38.780 When David came to get the Ark, he brings it back to Jerusalem, and he does this festive 0.73
00:19:44.820 dance in front of the Ark, right?
00:19:47.780 Well, what happens when John the Baptist, in the womb of his mother, hears the greeting of
00:19:54.900 Mary, but he leaps in her womb? 0.93
00:19:57.440 Well, the father saw that as a recapitulation of David's dance.
00:20:01.500 So it's a new David dancing in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant.
00:20:06.820 They didn't miss any of that stuff.
00:20:08.660 I mean, they saw Israel coming to its fulfillment. 0.96
00:20:12.800 And again, that's the point we have to make over and over again, Michael, I think, is without
00:20:16.300 Israel, you will not understand Jesus. 0.99
00:20:18.100 And when you try, and it happens all the time, you turn Jesus into a sage.
00:20:27.180 He's a wise speaker of timeless truths.
00:20:29.700 He's one moral exemplar among many.
00:20:32.680 Well, who cares?
00:20:33.520 Who cares?
00:20:34.360 There's a thousand such figures.
00:20:36.540 But when you see him through the lens of Israel, and as Paul said, he's the yes to all the promises 0.92
00:20:43.680 made to Israel, ah, now we get him, now we understand him, that Israelite side of Christmas, 0.52
00:20:51.700 I think, needs to be recovered.
00:20:53.600 It seems to be a peculiar eccentricity of our age that there is a desire to dehistoricize everything.
00:21:03.920 Yes, and de-Judaize. 1.00
00:21:06.100 I'd be more particular.
00:21:07.200 And I don't want to be too provocative, but go back to the early 20th century when a lot
00:21:11.300 of the historical critical figures, so these are biblical commentators in a more liberal,
00:21:16.200 mostly Protestant tradition.
00:21:17.780 But a lot of them were coming up out of a frankly anti-Semitic viewpoint.
00:21:23.100 Some, I don't want to overgeneralize, but some were even sympathetic with the Nazis.
00:21:27.440 And there was, even when I was learning the Bible as a young seminarian, there was a somewhat
00:21:32.960 anti-Jewish reading of Jesus.
00:21:36.120 You see it in biblical scholarship to the present day.
00:21:39.140 When you turn him into, he's a stoic philosopher, or he's a, you know, he's another mythic commentator.
00:21:45.600 No, no, he's the yes to all the promises made to Israel. 0.54
00:21:48.900 Only then will you really get him.
00:21:51.220 Right, right.
00:21:52.140 That's a great point.
00:21:53.160 I never made a connection here with the sort of critical historicist school that basically
00:22:01.180 denies all of these concrete historical facts.
00:22:03.660 Trace it to the beginning of the 19th century.
00:22:06.260 Someone like Friedrich Schleiermacher, who's the founder of modern liberal Protestantism.
00:22:09.900 From Schleiermacher all the way through Bultmann and those people, you do find a certain anti-Jewish
00:22:15.800 prejudice.
00:22:16.500 And so, you know, Bultmann puts it very much in dialogue with the kind of the Greek, the
00:22:21.660 Hellenistic world.
00:22:22.720 One of the marks of the last maybe 30 years biblical scholarship is the re-Judaizing of 1.00
00:22:29.780 Jesus.
00:22:30.320 And I think that's borne tremendous fruit.
00:22:32.680 And speaking of the Israel of the Old Testament, I've noticed one argument against modern Christians
00:22:40.780 we hear.
00:22:41.780 And it's, I guess, a kind of historical argument is, well, we eat shellfish.
00:22:46.740 You know, we cut our hair.
00:22:48.220 And so, we're violating the laws of God.
00:22:50.660 And furthermore, how dare you Christians insist upon any kind of moral law because, you know, 1.00
00:22:55.940 you've violated some obscure passage of Leviticus.
00:22:59.380 And it seems to me a beautiful thing, though somewhat unknown these days, that the divine
00:23:06.320 law is threefold, perhaps, as we might expect.
00:23:09.500 Moral and ceremonial and civil.
00:23:13.960 And that, you know, the other day I mentioned something about the natural law.
00:23:18.940 People looked at me as though I had three heads, you know, that they'd never heard that the moral
00:23:23.920 law might be distinct from a ceremonial law or a judicial law.
00:23:31.920 You're absolutely right about that.
00:23:33.420 And you hear that argument in different forms all the time today.
00:23:35.920 People need to read that wonderful section in the second part of the Summa of Aquinas when
00:23:40.880 he makes that distinction between the moral, ceremonial, and what he calls juridical precepts
00:23:45.320 of the law.
00:23:46.320 Those latter two, he said, are subsumed.
00:23:48.720 They're kind of seen as symbolic anticipations of what will happen in Jesus, especially
00:23:53.860 on his cross.
00:23:54.780 So they're not negated.
00:23:56.160 They're kind of raised up into a higher expression, whereas the moral law remains
00:24:00.580 intact.
00:24:01.220 In fact, the Ten Commandments Aquinas construes as basic expressions of the natural law.
00:24:07.620 Well, that remains the case all the way through.
00:24:10.160 By the way, I just gave a sermon on this recently.
00:24:12.620 A lot of the debate in the Reformation around Paul in regard to the law, I think, can be cleared
00:24:18.240 up if we make these right distinctions.
00:24:20.420 We're not saved by the works of the law.
00:24:22.060 I think Paul is referring to Aquinas' juridical and ceremonial precepts.
00:24:27.740 It doesn't mean we abandon the moral precepts.
00:24:30.340 Because read it in Paul to the Romans, where he's so strong on the, you know, it's not the
00:24:34.340 law and all that.
00:24:35.460 But heck, by the end of Romans, he's happily welcoming all these expressions of the moral
00:24:41.380 law.
00:24:42.020 So they're not repugnant to the work of salvation at all.
00:24:45.700 Right.
00:24:45.940 But that distinction is lost in a lot of people, unfortunately.
00:24:49.340 Well, and even here we see a distinction between the natural law and other aspects of revelation.
00:24:58.580 And it reminds me of a line from the First Vatican Council, which says that the existence of God
00:25:03.260 can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason.
00:25:07.080 The light of natural reason.
00:25:07.960 And this today is shocking to so many people who throw their hands up.
00:25:13.200 They say, you know, well, man, we can't really ever know if God exists, you know, pass the
00:25:17.260 bong.
00:25:17.740 And it's this real subjectivist sort of hippy-dippy talk.
00:25:20.960 But that was not the view for most of history.
00:25:24.800 We did believe that we can know the existence of God with certainty.
00:25:27.680 But we can't necessarily know very much about God, or we can't know how to serve God in
00:25:33.480 this world, or we can't know the specifics and the way in which God enters into history
00:25:39.340 without revelation.
00:25:40.860 So it's not just reason without revelation.
00:25:43.580 It's not revelation without reason, as many modern people would like to characterize religion.
00:25:47.840 It's both.
00:25:50.440 Both and.
00:25:51.320 That's, you know, Thomas Aquinas and all the great figures in our tradition, faith and
00:25:54.860 reason.
00:25:55.240 And you're right, Thomas would refer to arguments for God's existence and all that as part of
00:26:01.260 the preambula fidei, right?
00:26:02.960 The preambles to the faith.
00:26:04.800 But you might say the conditions for the possibility of taking revelation seriously.
00:26:08.860 So if, you know, you have some sense from reason of God's existence, God's attributes and
00:26:13.960 all that, well, then it makes perfect sense that God would speak, that God would reveal
00:26:20.140 himself to us in a personal way.
00:26:22.640 So I think, for example, you know, and you and I have met a few times, and I've come to
00:26:26.340 know you through videos and all that.
00:26:28.120 And so my reason can say a number of things about you.
00:26:31.400 And I could look you up on Google and Facebook, and my mind could construe something true about
00:26:39.080 you, right?
00:26:39.820 But I'm not going to know you, no way, unless you ultimately deign to speak to me from your
00:26:48.280 heart, right?
00:26:49.680 Not that I'm expecting you to do that right now.
00:26:51.900 But I mean, only if we became exceptionally good friends and that you decide, I'm going
00:26:56.620 to tell this person something about myself that he would never know otherwise, right?
00:27:01.420 He would only know it if I revealed it.
00:27:04.000 That, to me, is the perfect analogy for the faith reason.
00:27:07.980 We can know a lot of things about God, I think, through our reason.
00:27:10.960 And God delights in that.
00:27:12.220 God wants us to come to know him.
00:27:14.500 And Paul says that, Romans 1.20.
00:27:16.140 I mean, through the visible things of the world, the invisible things of God are known.
00:27:19.980 Great.
00:27:20.600 Great.
00:27:20.960 And pagans can do that, and modern pagans can do that.
00:27:24.160 So that's terrific.
00:27:24.920 But the claim of the church, still startling, is that this God whom we know through reason
00:27:32.640 spoke to us.
00:27:35.840 Deus Dixit, God has spoken.
00:27:38.000 And he's revealed certain things about himself that we would never have known otherwise, that
00:27:43.560 come from the heart of God and most fully in his son, right?
00:27:49.000 He spoke in varied and fragmentary ways.
00:27:51.180 But now, in the fullness of time, he's spoken through his son.
00:27:55.540 And it's like that baby in Bethlehem, like that poor, destitute figure on the cross.
00:28:03.360 But that's God speaking his deepest heart to us, you know?
00:28:09.080 That's the, again, paradox in poetry of Christianity. 0.71
00:28:12.200 We don't eschew reason, but we go beyond it.
00:28:14.680 And we listen attentively as God speaks his heart to us.
00:28:18.820 And it's very difficult for some people.
00:28:20.820 You know, a very good friend of mine of many years, raised Jewish, read St. Augustine,
00:28:27.960 decides to convert to Catholicism.
00:28:30.420 But then I caught up with him maybe a year after he had this revelation.
00:28:33.440 And I said, oh, well, have you done it?
00:28:34.860 And he said, I haven't.
00:28:36.340 And I said, well, why is that?
00:28:37.380 I said, you know, you're no longer persuaded?
00:28:39.320 He said, no, I'm persuaded.
00:28:40.620 I am entirely intellectually persuaded, not just of Christianity broadly even, but specifically
00:28:46.160 of Catholicism.
00:28:46.920 He said, I'm totally persuaded.
00:28:47.860 He said, I can't bring myself to pray to a man.
00:28:52.680 It's, I just can't get myself to do it.
00:28:55.700 And I said, but you're persuaded it's all true.
00:28:57.580 He said, yes.
00:28:58.620 I said, you're persuaded that you need baptism. 0.87
00:29:00.880 He said, I am.
00:29:01.700 I said, how do you even cross the street if you think all of that, but you haven't done it?
00:29:05.940 And he said, very carefully, but he couldn't, he said, and then I was reminded that the
00:29:13.880 incarnation is a stumbling block for people.
00:29:17.200 Yeah.
00:29:18.540 No, and in a way, fair enough.
00:29:20.880 It always has been.
00:29:22.060 Right.
00:29:22.580 You know, that God becomes one of us.
00:29:24.200 God takes to himself a human nature to use for his iconic purposes, and that this incarnate
00:29:30.660 God dies and rises to save us from our sins.
00:29:34.560 That's a weird story.
00:29:36.100 Yeah.
00:29:36.460 You know, and that's why Paul knew it, right?
00:29:38.960 This is folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, which for him meant everyone's 1.00
00:29:44.100 going to hate this story.
00:29:45.440 Yeah.
00:29:45.580 No one's going to get this story.
00:29:47.280 Right.
00:29:47.500 But of course, that's part of the, weirdly, the convincing power of it, you know?
00:29:54.140 If it was just a conventional story that we could kind of figure out on our own, what's
00:29:58.820 the likelihood that that's God speaking to us?
00:30:01.700 But the supremely strange story, the supremely strange world of the Bible that opens up to
00:30:08.920 us, to me, that has its own sort of convincing power.
00:30:12.880 But, you know, at the end of the day, and this is every single one of our great figures
00:30:15.880 who say this, at the end of the day, it's the Holy Spirit that has to convict us.
00:30:21.240 We can't aggressively think our way through it.
00:30:26.240 We can think about it, and we should, but we can't compel this thing.
00:30:31.100 It's like any relationship.
00:30:33.660 You know, I can't compel someone to be my friend.
00:30:37.200 I can make offers of friendship.
00:30:39.420 I can even speak my heart, you know, to someone.
00:30:42.400 But if they don't want to be my friend, I can't compel it.
00:30:45.880 And the same is true of God.
00:30:47.240 God wants to be our friend, and so he can't coerce us in that relationship.
00:30:53.200 That's beautifully put.
00:30:55.280 And even this point about how odd it all is, you know, a priest friend of mine in New York
00:31:00.660 once said, he said, people want really clear religion.
00:31:04.460 They want just five bullet points or something.
00:31:06.100 He said, shallows are clear.
00:31:07.760 Profound things are a little murky sometimes.
00:31:09.980 They're a little more obscure, you know.
00:31:11.980 So before—
00:31:13.640 Oh, sorry.
00:31:14.680 Go ahead.
00:31:15.220 But the best analogy there is Chesterton's about the key, you know.
00:31:19.020 The reason a key works is it's like really complicated.
00:31:22.200 And if it were simpler, it wouldn't be effective because anyone could then, you know, pick the lock.
00:31:27.180 It's a very weirdly complex convoluted thing that will open this equally weird convoluted lock.
00:31:34.960 And so life is very strange and complex, and God gives us a very strange and complex key to open the door.
00:31:44.100 And the key is, I would say, Israel culminating in the Mashiach, in the Messiah of Israel. 0.55
00:31:52.120 That's the key that he handed to people like Peter and Paul, you know, and who hand that key on to us.
00:31:58.280 That's the key that opens the door.
00:32:00.180 So then looking ahead to the rest of the story, we know how the story begins.
00:32:06.200 We know the pivot of history.
00:32:08.520 We know the big turn of the story, which we're celebrating now.
00:32:11.820 And then we know how the story ends, though there are some gaps to fill in, I suppose, in the middle.
00:32:17.620 We've just come out of Advent.
00:32:19.180 We're now beginning the—even though people treat December 1st as, you know, the first day of Christmas and it goes on for 25 days.
00:32:24.800 We've once heard a modern religion—that's not my own line, but described as the old religion had first the fast and then the feast.
00:32:32.120 Now we have first the feast and then the hangover.
00:32:36.320 But we're looking ahead now.
00:32:39.000 And even coming out of Advent, people are awaiting the birth of this little baby Jesus.
00:32:45.560 But that's not what we're awaiting now.
00:32:47.020 We're still in a period of awaiting something.
00:32:48.660 And we're still in a period of awaiting Jesus, but we're now awaiting the second coming.
00:32:53.680 And so traditionally during Advent, one considers the four final things—death, judgment, heaven, and hell, which is why it's a penitential period.
00:33:03.800 People don't really treat it that way anymore.
00:33:05.920 What do we do as we await now this second Advent, which is going to be more significant, perhaps, even than the first?
00:33:14.680 Right.
00:33:15.300 There's a vigil quality to Christian life.
00:33:18.060 That's why a season like Advent names something permanent within Christianity.
00:33:23.620 Our whole life is a vigil.
00:33:25.840 All of the last 2,000 years have been a vigil.
00:33:28.680 So we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior.
00:33:32.060 Think of the last lines of the Bible, you know, Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus.
00:33:38.700 We're in like this permanent stance of vigil keeping.
00:33:42.760 And that's, I think, a lot of the spiritual life.
00:33:45.060 I used to teach it under that rubric, is we have to learn to be vigilant.
00:33:51.360 We keep the candle burning.
00:33:53.000 That means we're alert and awake even when we don't feel like it, even when we are growing tired, we're growing indifferent.
00:34:02.060 I've been waiting so long.
00:34:04.080 Yeah.
00:34:04.620 But stay at your post.
00:34:06.680 You know, stay at your post.
00:34:08.500 You're—it hasn't come perfectly yet.
00:34:11.380 And that's obvious to everybody.
00:34:13.660 You know, that the world is not perfect.
00:34:15.140 And final justice has not been realized.
00:34:17.900 And wicked people prosper and good people suffer and all those things.
00:34:21.620 Wars and rumors of wars and all of it continue.
00:34:24.440 So it hasn't arrived yet.
00:34:26.660 But Christians are vigilant.
00:34:28.680 And we keep the—you know, it's like the five wise virgins, right, that have oil in their lamps.
00:34:34.200 Because it's a long wait.
00:34:35.700 And so the foolish virgins fall asleep. 0.56
00:34:37.600 And so when the master comes, they're not able to greet him.
00:34:41.260 That name's a permanent quality of the Christian life, is vigilant waiting for the Lord.
00:34:47.120 And it's a great discipline, you know, Michael, because, again, we want to be in command of the spiritual life like we are anything else.
00:34:53.740 I want to get in shape.
00:34:54.800 I want to learn how to play the piano.
00:34:56.180 I want to learn how to play golf.
00:34:57.460 And I'm in charge.
00:34:58.600 Let me get my book and figure it out.
00:35:00.080 But it'll never work that way with religion, with the Christian religion.
00:35:04.220 You have to wait.
00:35:05.740 Remember in Dante, you mentioned him.
00:35:07.480 There are those in anti-purgatory who waited too long in life.
00:35:13.980 And so before they even begin purgatory, they just have to wait.
00:35:19.700 And how long?
00:35:20.960 I don't know.
00:35:21.940 I don't know.
00:35:22.500 You just got to wait.
00:35:23.980 And that also names something very important to spiritual life.
00:35:27.980 Sometimes you just have to wait for grace.
00:35:31.600 And in a way, that is the whole of your spiritual life, is come, Lord Jesus.
00:35:38.320 Come.
00:35:38.880 I'm waiting for you to act in my life.
00:35:41.880 So I think that's okay.
00:35:43.640 It's a challenge, but it's a very important aspect of the Christian life.
00:35:48.160 Right.
00:35:48.660 Right.
00:35:49.300 That's beautifully put.
00:35:50.540 And now I'm reminded even of those early cantos of purgatory where people wait around a little bit too long.
00:35:57.360 These people, they've waited in their lives.
00:35:59.980 And Dante falls into this a little bit too, where he says, you know, I've just been through this arduous journey.
00:36:05.240 I've gone through the very pit of hell, climbed up through Satan.
00:36:07.980 And he just wants a little comfort, you know.
00:36:10.720 He just wants a little rest or something.
00:36:13.280 And he's reminded of one of his own lines of poetry, a very famous line.
00:36:16.720 Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.
00:36:18.800 Because Dante wrote all this famous love poetry, you know.
00:36:21.720 Love which reasons in my mind, you know.
00:36:26.180 And he's going on about his love.
00:36:27.520 But he's forgetting his end.
00:36:29.660 So he's getting a little bit too complacent.
00:36:31.420 And he's not looking forward to it.
00:36:32.620 He's going to go all the way up Mount Purgatory as well.
00:36:36.060 So we're called.
00:36:36.920 Remember the.
00:36:37.500 Sorry.
00:36:38.980 No, no.
00:36:39.480 That reminded me of the very beginning of the whole Commedia, when he's wandered off the straight path.
00:36:45.140 And then he sees the hill covered in sunlight.
00:36:48.080 Oh, that's it.
00:36:48.620 There's my goal.
00:36:49.160 And I'm just going to go.
00:36:50.520 And then, of course, he's blocked by the three beasts that represent the three modalities of sin.
00:36:55.680 And that's the person that wants to rush his way through the spiritual life.
00:36:59.540 No, no.
00:37:00.140 You need to do a lot of work.
00:37:02.160 That's what that's saying to Dante.
00:37:03.260 You need to do a lot of work before you're ready for this vision of God.
00:37:07.500 And that's the whole ascetic dimension of the Christian life that we don't like. 1.00
00:37:13.280 That's where we want to feast all the time. 0.96
00:37:14.840 But much of life is this ascetic preparation and this willingness to accept the arduousness of the journey.
00:37:24.420 And that's Dante.
00:37:26.520 It's a long trek, as you say, all the way down through hell.
00:37:30.200 Not part way.
00:37:31.260 All the way down.
00:37:32.080 And you've got to see Satan at the very center of your own sinful life, generating all of the coldness and wickedness of sin.
00:37:42.560 And then you've got to patiently climb up Mount Purgatory.
00:37:45.780 So that's a permanently valuable insight.
00:37:49.480 But I think today we want to just rush through the spiritual life.
00:37:53.580 Oh, yeah, let me figure this out and just give me the book to follow.
00:37:57.100 No, no.
00:37:57.580 You've got to wait and you've got to go through a journey.
00:38:00.260 It might be the consequence of people no longer reading Dante or reading The Church Fathers or reading The School Men, St. Thomas Aquinas, or reading the Bible, certainly.
00:38:09.140 But they're all reading self-help books.
00:38:11.160 And it's ironic because if all you ever read is self-help, you're never going to help yourself at all.
00:38:16.480 Right.
00:38:17.360 Well, just think of, you know, we're coming out of the Advent season and the great Advent hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.
00:38:25.140 Well, that's someone who is held captive, taken captive and held for ransom.
00:38:30.520 Maybe in a distant country, maybe chained in place and completely incapable of saving himself.
00:38:36.020 And all he can do is hope, come, come, can someone come and ransom me?
00:38:40.180 Well, that's all of us sinners, you know.
00:38:42.320 We're not able to lift ourselves out of our situation.
00:38:45.920 That's why God had to come to us and come all the way down.
00:38:50.860 There's the meaning of the cross, you know.
00:38:53.280 There's this, Paul says, Christ becoming sin on the cross.
00:38:56.180 Not a sinner.
00:38:57.320 If he's a sinner, then he needs to be saved too. 0.83
00:38:59.420 But he becomes sin on the cross.
00:39:02.040 Goes all the way into our dysfunction and then lifts us up through his grace.
00:39:06.600 That's Christianity. 0.86
00:39:07.740 It's not a self-help program.
00:39:09.560 I mean, it's not that.
00:39:11.400 That's Pelagianism. 0.98
00:39:12.300 That's why Augustine fought that battle.
00:39:15.140 It was a very important battle because he realized Pelagius was a very charming figure and a very bright man and saw something true.
00:39:22.580 But if he was basically right, Christianity falls apart.
00:39:25.960 Because then we're just one more, you know, the classical philosophers had that.
00:39:30.740 Enough knowledge and enough habituation to virtue, you know, you'll be fine.
00:39:34.940 Modernity has its own version.
00:39:36.360 We have our own versions of it.
00:39:37.780 And then there's Christianity. 0.70
00:39:39.580 That we're not saved by any of that, but we're saved by the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
00:39:47.500 Go where he is.
00:39:49.120 Go where he is.
00:39:50.100 We're saved by the destitute man on the cross.
00:39:52.420 Go to him, you know.
00:39:53.760 You know, that's a permanently countercultural message, especially now.
00:40:01.120 Bishop Barron, Your Excellency, Merry Christmas.
00:40:03.580 Thank you for coming on.
00:40:05.160 Merry Christmas to you, Michael.
00:40:06.480 Thanks.