On this episode of Theology Thursday, we have a special guest on the show, Bishop John Barron of the Diocese of Winona Rochester, Minnesota. John and I discuss the role of faith in our understanding of the world, and how it relates to the Christian faith.
00:00:43.800That's why. That's right. I was just up in Minnesota.
00:00:47.180And we had a marvelous conversation, as I always find our conversations to be marvelous.
00:00:54.200But a topic came up that we didn't have a chance to discuss too much.
00:00:58.500So I said, all right, we have to talk about it on the show for Theology Thursday.
00:01:02.340Your Excellency, people are going to expect us to talk about Advent or about Christmas, which everyone is trying to rush along, or about Santa Claus or something.
00:01:12.580But I want to talk about something much more important, and that is voluntarism.
00:06:11.400God knows himself as supremely good and so he wills his good.
00:06:16.200But that's why the divine mind and will coincide.
00:06:19.240When they split apart, as they do in voluntarism, all kinds of mischief ensues.
00:06:24.660Right now, go to hallow.com slash Knowles.
00:06:26.460Ladies and gentlemen, Christmas is upon us.
00:06:28.800What a blessed journey it has been through this season of Advent.
00:06:31.220As we celebrate the birth of our Lord in this joyous season, I want to share something that's made this time truly extraordinary.
00:06:37.440Something that has been helping many prepare their hearts through prayer and reflection.
00:06:41.240Rather than getting lost in the commercial chaos of happy holidays, I'm talking about Hallow.
00:06:45.640The number one prayer and meditation app that has been guiding us through its incredible Advent prayer challenge, For God So Loved the World.
00:06:51.960The challenge features survivalist Bear Grylls and Jonathan Rumi from The Chosen, who guide you through his severe mercy, a remarkable story of a couple's divine encounter.
00:07:00.700You will be moved by Francis Chan and Jeff Kaven's powerful scripture reflections.
00:07:04.740You'll be inspired by Kevin James' discussions of the spiritual classic, Divine Intimacy.
00:07:10.200What would Christmas be without music?
00:07:11.540The challenge includes beautiful Advent performances from award-winning artists like Gwen Stefani, Lauren Daigle, Matt Marr, and more.
00:07:20.940This Christmas, as we celebrate God's greatest gift to humanity, why not give yourself the gift of deeper spiritual connection?
00:07:28.540Experience God's transformative love through Hallow.
00:07:34.860The first time I ever even encountered the notion of volunteerism was actually not from within the Christian tradition or even the liberal political tradition or wokeism or whatever.
00:07:46.320It was in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address when he was discussing Islam.
00:07:50.900And he was quoting a medieval Islamic writer, Ibn Hazm, who said that Allah is totally transcendent, such that if Allah willed for you to worship idols, you ought to do that.
00:08:04.680And that this is different than the Christian version, which understands our Lord as the divine logic of the universe, as the logos.
00:08:12.040So I always considered it to be some foreign thing.
00:08:15.340But you do see it crop up within even the broad Christian tradition.
00:08:24.860When you give pride a place to voluntas, to will, well, then the thing is open-ended.
00:08:30.400That's why Descartes, who was certainly a Christian, certainly a believer, said, yes, two plus two could be equal to five if God so desired.
00:08:38.640But that means something's broken apart in our fundamental metaphysics.
00:08:43.000The metaphysics, again, it's that of Aquinas, which is the divine simplicity.
00:08:47.000God is not a being, but ipsum esse, the sheer act of to be itself, in and through which all things come to be.
00:08:54.460So we're creatures through the power of God sustaining us.
00:08:58.380Well, that means, furthermore, that the divine truth, logos, can be discerned in creation.
00:09:04.780As I look, mathematics, science, psychology, sociology, any of the logoi are reflections of the supreme logos of God.
00:09:13.400That's the ground for that whole approach to faith and reason, and that gives us confidence in knowing the world.
00:09:20.180A voluntarism undermines that, because now logos is subordinated to will, and so things are up for grabs.
00:09:28.760Why did the sciences emerge when and where they did, precisely out of the Christian universities?
00:09:33.980Because of the supreme confidence that the world is marked by logos in every nook and cranny.
00:09:39.240That's the mysticism underneath any science.
00:09:43.580You have to assume, I'm going to meet a world that's marked by objective intelligibility.
00:09:48.340Well, that's grounded in the logos of the creator God.
00:09:51.400If you separate logos and voluntas, that all falls apart.
00:09:56.260Now, welcome in some ways to a lot of the excesses of the modern world came from a breakdown in what we call participation metaphysics.
00:10:08.260Because there are going to be a lot of people listening who say, all right, well, this is interesting enough, but, you know, does it really matter in my everyday?
00:10:26.180That's what it means to live an upright life, is that you live in imitation of God.
00:10:30.320What does that look like on a Thomas reading?
00:10:32.040It looks like I'm going to discern the objective values that are out there in the world, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I'm going to try to bring my interiority into line with those objectivities.
00:10:42.520So, I'm going to become the person God wants me to be, and those intelligibilities are on display within nature.
00:10:48.960Okay, that's a classically Catholic view.
00:11:31.260But see, the whole point of classical spirituality is not that awful game, but now to bring my life into alignment with objective, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value.
00:12:10.880Again, welcome to much of wokeism is a sort of popularization of Nietzsche mediated through Foucault, who was one of Nietzsche's great disciples.
00:12:19.840So, my point is, and I'm glad you pressed it, is these seemingly, you know, arcane, logic-chopping medieval debates have huge implications for our situation today.
00:12:31.460And even, you mentioned Nietzsche, this means that this is not merely a problem for the political left.
00:12:37.560I mean, I'm all for taking shots at the left, and I do it frequently.
00:12:40.500But this also becomes a problem for the right, because there are people who are in thrall of Nietzsche.
00:12:46.560Or there are people who come out of even certain aspects of Protestantism that seem to favor a more voluntarist view of things,
00:12:54.020who I think will just even unthinkingly embrace that understanding of God.
00:13:02.440You know, can I make a perhaps provocative statement?
00:13:05.780What we call left and right in our political situation can often be just debates within a fundamentally modernist point of view.
00:13:15.960And what I'm advocating, and here I stand with people like Russell Kirk, you know, it's that kind of conservatism that I would embrace.
00:13:22.340Because, in a way, he tended to say a plague on both your houses, because he didn't want just to have a debate between elements of modernism.
00:13:31.440He wanted this classical view that's really different from the modern view.
00:13:36.800And even as that splits between more liberal and more conservative, what's needed is a really different point of view.
00:13:43.760And I would say now, speaking as a Catholic bishop and theologian, one that comes up out of this very integrated participation metaphysics.
00:13:56.020When I argue with some of my friends, even on the right, I find myself viewing left and right sometimes as just two sides of the same coin.
00:14:05.580The same coin of a fundamentally liberal modernity.
00:14:08.300And modernity, which looks back and mocks the scholastics, metaphysicians like St. Thomas Aquinas, and say, you know, they're all just quibbling over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
00:14:20.780But it actually seems to me, I think it matters how many angels can, it matters at least what an angel is, doesn't it?
00:14:26.980Yes, and of course, what you're putting your finger on there is a tendency within largely Protestant historiography, intellectual historiography, to mock the Middle Ages, to mock all this medieval superstition.
00:15:25.660But see, that's not Aquinas' understanding of freedom at all.
00:15:28.600It's not arbitrary self-determination.
00:15:31.240It's rather a kind of disciplining or focusing of desire so as to make the achievement of the good possible and then effortless.
00:15:40.900So, for example, you're a very free speaker of English.
00:15:44.180It's not because you speak any way you want, but rather you allowed the syntax and grammar and vocabulary and people like Shakespeare and so many others to guide your freedom so that now you can say whatever you want.
00:16:00.940It's not, I decide to live any way I want to.
00:16:03.700No, I've discerned objective moral values, and now I've so disciplined my will to conform to them that now being good is relatively easy to me.
00:22:11.700I'm not the least bit puzzled by that.
00:22:13.700If you adopt a fundamentally voluntarist modern view of freedom, that's what you're going to get.
00:22:19.860If you move into the classical view, now it's the intuition of value, the alignment of your life toward those values, which now make you come alive, right?
00:22:33.380You know, the great image of freedom in the Christian tradition is Jesus on the cross.
00:22:39.260And you say, well, what are you talking about?
00:22:40.660I mean, he seems to be the most unfree person possible.
00:22:43.160He's free from wealth, pleasure, honor, power, any of the attachments of the world.
00:22:50.480And he's aligned utterly to the will of his father.
00:22:54.520So it's ironic, but the great image of freedom is the cross.
00:23:10.260So my message, I'm a Christian Catholic apologist and teacher, is to say, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you'll find the freedom you want.
00:23:20.720Don't follow these priests of Baal, I mean, these false prophets.
00:25:12.120And then together we're going to walk toward the Father.
00:25:14.400And it's a brilliant point too, Bishop, on it had not occurred to me that those who would divorce will from reason are reenacting the fall.
00:25:24.540This is the essential cracking of the fall.
00:26:10.300And, Your Excellency, there's so much more we could have talked about with Advent and Christmas and, I don't know, St. Nicholas or something like that.
00:26:17.880But I think, actually, this topic is much more urgent, especially as we consider the final things in these days of Advent.
00:26:25.840Your Excellency, thank you so much for coming on the show.