431. The True Stories That Drive Spiritual Growth | Bishop Barron
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Hello everybody. I had the pleasure today of speaking with Bishop Robert Barron. And I've spoken with Bishop Barron a number of times before, sometimes with John Vervaeke, sometimes with Jonathan Pagiot, sometimes alone. In all sorts of different places, including Rome, we've developed a good relationship and

He's a very interesting religious thinker in my estimation. He's contending with the core meanings of the narratives that sit at the base of our culture and that, for better or worse, sometimes both unite us fundamentally and most profoundly for better. We talked today about, I suppose, the

It's something approximating the undeniable reality of the divine or the sacred. Even by definition, we tried to lay out a mode of conceptualizing the proposition that there is a highest and uniting value, which I would...

what would you say, allegiance to that highest and eternal value is something like faith. It's something like covenant. It's something like the proper aim of life. It's something like the proper aim of life insofar as your life is meaningful and generous and productive. All of that by definition. We laid out the modern understanding of that and how the church, at least in part, has deviated from its obligation and responsibility to

explain the nature of that relationship and to help people understand why it needs to be primary. So that's where the discussion will go. Join us. All right, so let me share some of my thoughts with you. It'll be kind of a lengthy introduction to our discussion, but there's been some very exciting technical developments that actually bear surprisingly on the religious question.

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

is that the interpretation of a given narrative is arbitrary. That you can read into a narrative anything you want, and that there's no, you might say, intrinsic meaning in the text.

Now, that's actually wrong. And we actually know why now. And we can actually demonstrate that it's wrong. And I have no idea what the ultimate significance of that will be. But let me tell you why. Because this is really quite fascinating. So we know that some words are more similar than others. And then you might say, well, what makes words or concepts similar? And the answer would be

Something like substitutability, or you could think about it as, so substitutability with regard to a purpose. It's a very critical and strange definition of similarity, but also proximity in the space of meaning. And then you might say, well, what does it mean for things to be proximal in the meaning space? And it means likely to co-occur. Now, this student I'm referring to, his name is Victor Swift, by the way,

He's been able to show, and this is essentially mathematically, a conceptual overlap between ten concepts and the concept of God. So imagine this, Bishop Barron, imagine this, that every concept has a center. Okay, so the concept of God, the center of the concept of God would be God. But then imagine that

There's a cloud of immediate associations around that concept. And those associations are the concepts that are statistically most likely to co-occur with that concept. Okay, so this is something approximating a mathematical fact. It has nothing to do with subjective opinion.

So then you could imagine, and we're trying to map this, that you have God in the center, and then close to that would be the true, the beautiful, and the good. And then there'd be another cloud of associations around that, that would be second-order associations. Now, the way a large language model works is that it actually learns those associations at multiple levels of comparison simultaneously.

So it actually maps out what you might describe as the semantic space or the space of meaning. Now, so this would also imply this is where it gets so cool. So imagine if we took a cloud of concepts that people universally recognized as good concepts.

So you could imagine that you and me and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins would have a fair amount of agreement on what those goods were. You know, individual, the dignity of the individual, the idea of the good, the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of upward striving. Okay, now imagine that that makes a conceptual cloud. There's going to be a center of that cloud.

that constitutes the reason for the similarity of the ideas. And it looks to me like, semantically speaking, so in terms of our verbal content, this might also be true with regards to the stories we tell, that the central concept around which all goods rotate is indistinguishable from the semantic representation of God. And it also looks like we can now map that. So I think we can dispense entirely with the criticism that

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

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

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

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

And what you're arguing there in a more sort of semantic way is that there is a coherence to the self. There is a coherence to the metaphysical structure of the real. So to use the example of God, yes, we would say that God is not a being but being itself. So the famous answer given to Moses, right? Ego sum qui sum, I am who I am. Moses is asking, what kind of being are you? He's trying to put God in categorical terms.

And the answer there is so important because that makes all the difference when it comes to understanding religious language.

is if we follow Moses and his question, we will inevitably end up in atheism. Because if you think God is a categorical object in the world, eventually you'll say, well, I don't see this object, and there's no evidence for it, and I can explain the world without it. So that's why the answer of God in Exodus is so powerful, because he's saying, dumb question, wrong question. I'm not a thing in the world that you can name. I am who I am, which means I'm the—

Prius, that's Augustine's language. I'm prior to thought and to language. I'm prior to being. I'm that upon which the categorical realm depends. Right, right. From that, if you get God is, as Aquinas says, the act of to be itself. So, Aquinas says God is not ensumum, highest being, but ipsum esse, right? Right, the principle of being. To be itself.

Right. So if you say that, well, then right away, you've got the central organizing principle of all reality. And then everything else has to cluster around, which is why we speak about God as being the creator of all things.

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

There's our friend James Joyce. When you see the beautiful girl off the beach and you take in her beauty, what that leads you to, as Stephen Dedalus says, is, oh, heavenly God. So that's the platonic path that Joyce—so that's the clustering of those ideas tightly around God. And then to your point about—

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

I mean, why is it that people over now millennia have read these texts and found very deep and consistent ideas? It's because they have a semantic structure which is dependent upon a metaphysical structure which gives rise to a spiritual transformation.

They're classic texts for that reason. And we shouldn't simply read them as, oh, they're just this, you know, coming together of words and I can read any old way I want to. Well, no, the whole of human interpretive history tells against that. So I think we do have to battle the postmodern, ultimately nihilism metaphysically and the sort of indifferentism at the level of interpretation. No, no, these are classic texts that have spoken for very good reason.

I actually think that that battle is over because I think the large language models are going to demolish their pretensions. So imagine this. Here's a way of two things. So why did God disappear, die, let's say, and

And the psychoanalysts believed that God sunk into the unconscious. That was Jung's proposition, that if God dies formally, all that happens is that the prime factor becomes unconscious. So imagine this. This is how you could think of that technically. So imagine now you have your cloud of concepts. So

with the central factor of the good itself and maybe the essence of being itself, being by definition, this is by definition, by the way, that's what God is. And when there's a concordance between the religious, explicit religious belief and that implicit belief,

network of meaning, you have a conscious God at the center, like you're conscious of that God. But then if you dispense with that central uniting proposition, you don't eradicate the commonalities between what is good. You just...

You just let them sink back into implicitness. And that seems to me to be equivalent to the descent of God into the unconscious. That's the same thing as Geppetto, for example, going down into the belly of the whale is that now God becomes implicit, right? But that doesn't mean that he's not there. He's still coded in the relationship between those things that are meaningful,

Okay, so that's pretty wild. And then with regards to— Go ahead. If I can just jump in. What happened to God, the disappearance of God, is a function of this misinterpretation of God as a being.

And we can see when that happened. It happened by the late Middle Ages, when Aquinas' more analogical metaphysic gave way to a univocal conception of being. That's in people like William of Ockham. And when that happens, see, God is still there, but God is now one being among many. God's the supreme instance of the category being.

Well, all right, in the late Middle Ages, God's still there. We take him seriously. But now move forward. As God is seen as a being among many, he becomes more and more distanciated, more and more irrelevant to the world. And then in early modernity, he becomes a rival to the world. And it has to be that way. If you and I were sort of plotted on the same mathematical grid, we're going to be to some degree over and against each other. We'll be battling for the same space.

So God and humanity are on the same grid, both beings, one smaller, one's bigger, but they're of course going to come into conflict. Now, look, read a lot of the early moderns that way. Then keep going and you come right up to the atheists who finally say, look, I've had it with this being. I don't want this big being interfering with my freedom and my self-definition. Now you've got Jean-Paul Sartre, right? Is if God exists, I can't be free, but I am free. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

That, I would argue, is in the mind of almost every teenager in the West today, that idea. God is a rival to my freedom. But you know this, how repugnant all of that is to the Bible, right? In fact, this morning in my office, so as a priest, I pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, and we had the passage from Isaiah, and it says this, "'Lord, you have accomplished all we have done.'"

It's a little line, but it'll take your breath away if you get it. Lord, you have accomplished all we have done. We've done it, but you accomplished it. The implication there is God is not a rival to our thought or to our action or our achievement. In fact, the glory of God is a human being fully alive, as St. Irenaeus said.

See, that's what modernity begins to have a problem with. And when you follow that trajectory, you get all the way right to the atheists who say, "Well, I don't want this big being interfering with my life and my accomplishment."

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

became exaggerated in the modern period and then comes to full fruition with the atheists. So whether it's Feuerbach or Sam Harris, it's a very similar problem. And they're not getting, seems to me, the biblical understanding of the non-competitiveness of God with the world. But that comes from this idea of God as God.

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Yeah. And it's okay. So with regard to the burning bush, so I've been working on this new book, We Who Wrestle With God, and I've been trying to map out the semantic space. I think that's a reasonable way of thinking about it. Now, it's not only semantic because it's also the space of the imagination, and it's also the space of the cultural traditions that unite us. Because the monotheistic hypothesis is something like there's an underlying unity between

rather than a diversity or a plurality, and that that will make itself manifest at the behavioral, at the level of the imaginative, and at the level of the semantic simultaneously. Right? And there's going to be... This is also why the postmodernists are wrong, because they think meaning is only encoded in the semantic space, and that's not true. Like...

A story is not precisely semantic like a parable because it draws on the power of the image as well as on the power of the word and those images are related to behaviors. Okay, in any case what seems to happen in the burning bush story, so imagine this, is that Moses is attracted by something, something calls to him. Okay, and so that's like a beckoning or a promise. Now,

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

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

Right. Right? So then he becomes even more humble. He lessens himself more. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Because the shoes, I always think the shoes mean you're in command. If you have shoes on, you can walk anywhere you want to go. And if it's rocky soil or it's an incline, whatever, you can walk. You take your shoes off, you're much more vulnerable and you're much more humble. You have to be.

You can also feel the ground better, you know, and you can imagine that as you're approaching the sacred, you don't want to have anything between you and the sacred because you want to feel out where you're going. Okay, so— Right. Yes, and that only happens through humility. Right, exactly. You're close to the earth. So humility is not like, you know—

Right. It's not like degradation. It's this getting close to the earth. And if you got your shoes on in that kind of aggressive sense of I'm going to go and look and I'm going to examine, you're not humble enough to get in touch with the sacred.

Right, right, right, right. And you can imagine that it has to be the antithesis of pride because pride is perhaps the cardinal sin. I mean, it vies with resentment and deceit, I would say, but it's certainly up there. Okay, so Moses allows himself to be transformed and compelled in this interaction with what calls to him. Then the voice underlying being itself reveals itself to him, right? The essence of being, let's say, or it's more than that.

Just as the truth is not instantiated in a given truth, as you pointed out, the principle of being is not instantiated. Okay, so that's what Moses gets in touch with. But then, so what's very cool there is that's also, now that his...

Now that he's grounded in the right place, or now that he's established a proper relationship with the transcendent and ineffable ideal, he now becomes the man who's capable of fighting against tyranny and destroying slavery. Exactly. And despite his inadequacies, right? Because he still can't speak. Right. Right. So it doesn't matter. The message there is, regardless of your...

of the limitations that have been imposed upon you by fate and circumstance, if you delve deep enough, if you follow your calling with sufficient integrity, you'll reach, you'll form a relationship, a covenantal relationship with that which underlies being itself. And that will make you the leader capable of eternally opposing tyranny and leading people out of slavery.

Yeah, I think all that is right. You see, you become a vehicle of love. You become a vehicle of grace. If you open yourself to the transcendent mystery, you open yourself to God—

And the ego has stopped its blockage. So the ego is always obsessed with wealth, pleasure, power, and honor, says Aquinas. So if I got those things in the way, then my ego is seeking those all the time. And they're not bad in themselves, but they're not the sumum bonum. And so when I seek all that stuff and I become addicted to them, then I block the

others access to the sacred through me. So I become a block to the sacred rather than a vehicle for it. The saints are those who, right, have taken off their shoes. They know they're on holy ground. They understand, they've come to understand

And then God can act through them. And now Isaiah again, you have accomplished all we have done. That happens when you're in touch with the sacred. As long as God is construed as a competitive supreme being, that language makes no sense. I'd have to say, no, no, look, Lord, I'm going to do it. I'm going to accomplish it. And thanks for your inspiration, but I'll keep you at a distance. Or at the limit, no, no, I want you out of the picture completely. I'm going to do it.

But a religious consciousness can say— That's the revaluation of all values that Nietzsche spoke of. And he said that we should do that, right? That we should take on to ourself the right and even the responsibility of creating our own values. So let me ask you about this then in regard to that.

So when God is laying out the rights of human beings in the garden, please correct me if you think I've got anything wrong here theologically. Okay, so God basically says to Adam and Eve, now that the garden has been created, that they can utilize the resources of the garden

as they see fit, except for one thing. They can't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Okay, so now I've been thinking through that. What does that mean? Well, I think it means the same thing as taking to yourself the ability to make any moral claim that you want so that now you become the supreme master of the moral as such. Okay, now what Satan offers Eve, this is so interesting because the serpent says,

is affiliated with Satan and Satan is the spirit of the intellect that wants to overthrow God. It wants to put itself in the highest place. So it's something like intellectual pretension. And what the serpent offers Eve, he says this directly is you'll become as gods knowing good and evil. And the knowing means master of. You can take to yourself the right to be the master of what's good and evil. Okay, now I would say when people do that, they bite off more than they can chew.

So now Eve starts to conceptualize herself as the omnipotent feminine that can clutch everything to its breast, right? Including the poisonous snake. It can incorporate any fruit, no matter how bitter and poisonous. That's her presumption. It's a presumption of pride. And then she entices Adam and she uses his proclivity to name and to categorize what Adam, what Eve approaches Adam and says,

We should hearken even to the snake, even to what's most poisonous. We should incorporate even what's most poisonous. And Adam says, "I can do that." And so you see a twin kind of pride, a feminine pride, which is, "I can incorporate everything."

like, and clutch it to my breast in a masculine pride, which is I can now reshape the ordering principle itself, even to incorporate that which is poisonous. Now, if that's, okay, one more thing on that, then tell me what you think of this. There is this Christian insistence that suffering is a consequence of sin. And that's a weird one because death and deterioration seem in some ways to be built into the structure of existence. But it's an open question of

how much our tendency to overreach pridefully is the consequence of our continual suffering, right? Because we certainly know that when we suffer, especially when we suffer unbearably, it's often because we've taken upon ourselves more than we have the right to do. We've exceeded our domain of competence. And I think the fall story is exactly that.

illustrating this modern proclivity that we have now that Nietzsche put forward as a moral command that we have to become the source of all value. Now, if it is the case that value itself is encoded in the structure of being, which is certainly the case semantically and seems to be the case in the realm of the imagination, then we literally cannot take to ourselves the right to

trans value and establish all values without ceasing to be human, which is another inference of the story, right? Because that implicit moral order, there's no difference between that implicit moral order and being human. They're the same thing. Yes. We could talk all day about this, of course, but to your very first point, I think it's very important to point out that

The great permission precedes the prohibition. So, eat of all the trees. See, and the church fathers read that as God's desire that we flourish. There's this view that, you know, Christians are hung up on sin and especially sexual sin, and God is just, you know, surveying us like Kim Jong-un, and, you know, we live in a totalitarian—come on—

The great truth of that story is the permission, as God creates this universe out of sheer gratuitous love, and then offers it to us to take advantage of, to pursue, to love, and to enjoy. So the Father's read that as it's science and art and it's politics and it's literature and it's friendship and it's all the good things of life. And God says, yes, enjoy them.

In other words, it's a structure of value that's built into the being of the created order. And God says, "Off you go. Off you go. Enter into it." But you're right. The one thing you can't do is pretend that you're the criterion of value. John Paul II reiterated this ancient tradition in his writings. When you become the criterion of good and evil,

The garden turns into a desert. You get expelled from the garden because now you don't have the humility to enter into the world of value. You become a sort of arbiter of value. You're even a creator of value. You're the evaluator of value. Well, that's the accuser and the adversary. Yes. Well, you see, because the minute you stand apart from it—

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

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

You surrender in faith. You know, there's that grossly misunderstood word of faith. You surrender in trust—I'd put it that way—in trust to the world of value, at the top of which is the sumum bonum, God, the source of all value. And when you surrender to that, it becomes a garden. We're back into the garden, you know? Now—

Fast forward all the way to Jesus, you know, as God undertakes a rescue operation to get us out of this bad consciousness and to move us toward fulfillment. The fact that Jesus is buried in a garden and then rises from the dead out of a garden is not accidental, you know. So that's the story of the Bible in some ways, is would you people please get over this pretension that you're divine, that you're the center of activity? Yeah.

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what people mean implicitly when they say that now they are the source of all value, because that begs a question. You know, I think you mentioned that it was Aquinas who identified wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. So you might say, okay, so let's say that Sartre says,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. That was actually Alistair Crowley, right? Okay, so, but that's a good statement of this self-centeredness. Okay, so what are the inevitable consequences of this? Okay, so one of them is that you become self-conscious, right?

Okay, and this is what happens to Adam and Eve, right? They become self-conscious. They become aware of their own nakedness. And the reason they do that is because, or the consequences of that, if they've taken that burden of valuation onto themselves, they're going to be self-reflective and self-conscious. We know from the psychological literature that self-consciousness and neurotic suffering are conceptually indistinguishable.

They occupied the same semantic space. Yeah. And we all know that from experience. We all know that. That's Augustine. When you're cravatus in se, you've turned in on yourself. That's his definition of sin. But I would say of unhappiness. The ipso facto you're unhappy. And the best moments of life, we all know this, are when we're least self-conscious. Right. When we're lost in a conversation. That's when we're walking with God. Right.

Yes, right. When we're least self-conscious is when we're walking with God in the garden. In the cool of the evening, right. Right, right, right. Okay, so now here's the other flaw as far as I can tell. So now I'm going to make the proposition that I can do whatever I want. But that begs the question, as Nietzsche knew, by the way, what I are you talking about? Because here's another way of thinking about it. You're going to be possessed by something.

And you're either going to be possessed by the highest thing, or you're going to be possessed by something lower, or in the worst possible case, you could be possessed by what is technically lowest. But that's the range of options. You're going to be possessed by something. Now, why would I say possessed? Well, it's partly because you're socialized. So, okay, now, if the center fragments...

So I think it fragments first into sex and power. And you could see the exploration of sex with Freud and the exploration of power with Nietzsche. But the next two gods, so to speak, that are lurking under the superordinate

concept of the divinity are going to be something like hedonic pleasure, that would be the whore of Babylon in its worst possible manifestation, and power, and that would be the beast that you see in Revelation with the whore on its back. Okay, so that means that when the postmodernist or the modernist or even the liberal says,

I can do what I want, they fail to understand that the I that's now being referred to is likely possession of the self by power or hedonism or some combination of the two. Because like when you say, I want, when you're angry, for example, I'm angry, I want to hurt this person.

What you're also saying, even if you don't know it, is that I am now possessed by a spirit, so it might be the spirit of vengeful anger, that has taken possession of me so completely that I fully identify myself with that whim. And so it isn't a matter of I versus God. It's a measure of subordinate power.

Idols, it's a matter of the competition between idols that should be properly subordinated and that which should be put in the higher place. And one of those would be, we talked about power, we talked about sex, but we could also think about that. That's the pretentious intellect. It's the thing that's most likely to possess you. And it's the thing that's most likely to foment rebellion against God. And that's why Satan is referred to as Luciferian, Luciferian in his pretensions by people like Milton.

Well, you're pointing your finger on something very ancient in the spiritual tradition, which is true self, false self. And you go right back to St. Paul, when Paul says, casually enough, it's no longer I who live, it's Christ who lives in me. Now, notice how like Isaiah that is, right? You have accomplished all we have done. You look at Paul's letters, you'd never get the sense—

that Paul has somehow lost his personality. I mean, Paul's personality is on every page of his letters. He's palpable, right? But he can still say, it's no longer I, the old self, who live. It's Christ who lives in me. And that doesn't mean Christ has...

kicked me out. No, no, I'm like a burning bush now. I'm on fire, but I'm not consumed. So it's the false self has given way to the true self. And that's the heart of the spiritual tradition, is when Jesus says, you know, metanoiate, and it's this opening speech in the Gospel of Mark, and we say repent, you know, fair enough as a translation, but literally meta, nous, go beyond the mind you have.

So you've got a fallen mind, and that's what you're talking about, a mind that's been possessed by wealth or pleasure, honor, or the love of knowledge, whatever it is. It's an idol. So metanoia te go beyond the mind you have.

believe the good news. So what he's saying is, get rid of the old self. The good news is that I have come. I, the Christ, have come. So you should be able to say with Paul, it's no longer that old self that lives. It's Christ who lives in me. There's the whole spiritual life, you know. I also thought of my fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan, you know,

You got to serve somebody. It might be the devil. It might be the Lord. And that sounds simplistic, but it comes from the book of Joshua, and it's dead right. It's what you just said. We're possessed by something. It's going to be the summum bonum, or it's some lesser good that has turned into an idol and is going to start manipulating us.

But all you got to do, that's, you know, Paul Tillich said that, just find out what people worship. That's all you need to know about them. The rest will follow. So you got to serve somebody. So when you meet a person and they're, maybe they're suffering, you're as a psychologist, I as a priest over the years, you deal with people who are suffering.

I always found that's a super illuminating question. Try to figure out, okay, what are you worshiping? There's something that's the center of gravity. If it's not God, it's going to cause you— That's that implicit God. Well, that's what you do when you go to a movie, man, is you try to infer the aim of the protagonist. Right.

And basically, by inferring the aim, you're inferring the central theme around which the entire personality rotates. And there is no difference between that and understanding. Those are the same thing. Okay, so as I said, I've been writing this book, walking through the biblical corpus. And so once Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden, you have this situation where they have to work.

right? They're condemned to work and to slog away, let's say. And so work becomes integral to adaptation. Now, and that begs a further question, which is, well, what is the best possible work? What is the greatest possible work? Now, as far as I can tell, there's no difference between sacrifice and work. They're isomorphic concepts. And the reason for that is that here's a definition of work, and you tell me what you think about this. So,

Work is the sacrifice of the present to the future. To the future. Right. Now, if you're doing it optimally, it would be the integration of the present and the future. But if it's work, it's the sacrifice. Okay, so then the next question is, okay, what should you best sacrifice? What's the sacrifice that is most pleasing to God? Well, the thing we see happening in the biblical corpus is that's exactly the

center concern of the next story. Because the story, exactly. And so these are two patterns of sacrifice, proper and improper, right? Bitter and resentful versus upward looking and faithful, let's say. Okay, and the sacrifice of Cain is motivated by Cain's willingness to allow himself to be possessed by the spirit of bitterness and resentment, because that's what God calls him out on. Okay, so now we could say,

The rest of the Bible is an attempt to work out the definition of the highest form of sacrifice. Now, you see that being played with across a whole array of great stories. That's the stories of the prophets' lives, let's say, and the encoding of the lessons of their lives in the law. But then you have, okay, now that sort of culminates in some ways with the story of Job, right? Because Job...

And the pattern of sacrifice that's exemplified by Job. Okay, so what happens to Job is that almost all the unjust suffering of the world is laid on his shoulders. Okay, and what Job says, and please correct me if I'm wrong, what Job says is,

And Job is suffering so much and so unjustly that his wife comes to him and says, the only thing left for you is to curse, shake your fist at God, and die. Mrs. Job, one of the great figures in the Bible. Exactly, exactly. Well, and she's upset by what's happening to him and can't see a way out. Now, Job says...

No, but she's right. She's the voice of so many today. They resent God. Absolutely, man. Absolutely. Just curse God and die. I mean, who needs all this transcendent nonsense? Exactly. Exactly. Well, or the whole bloody game. Like, that's Gertha's Mephistopheles. It's like suffering. The world is so rife with suffering, it would be better if the whole game just ceased. Right. That'd be the antinatalists. Right. Well, it's a powerful argument. Right.

Curse God and die. Okay, but Job says, no, I refuse to do that. And I refuse to do it on principle. I'm going to assume, so this is a statement of faith, I'm not going to abandon my faith in the essential goodness of being, regardless of the proximal evidence.

And I'm not going to curse myself finally, because although I'm not a perfect man, I am a good man. And so I'm not going to say that everything that's happened to me, I deserve in some causal manner.

And I'm certainly not going to say that the structure of being itself is corrupt. Now, you can think about that practically. So imagine if you're in a situation like Job's where your world has fallen apart and maybe even genuinely to some degree through no clear fault of your own or no fault that couldn't be laid at the feet of good men in general.

What's your best strategy? Well, I can tell you as a clinician, if you take your suffering and you allow that to be transformed into a resentful bitterness, there's no limit to the amount of hell you can turn anything into. You'll deepen your suffering. You multiply it immensely. Whereas if you're suffering and you still strive to find good in that and you still maintain your faith in the essential goodness of being, then inevitably,

instantly that ameliorates your suffering to some degree. It puts you in the best possible position to deal with it, but it also helps you embody like this supreme metaphysical claim. Okay, so now let's take that one step further. So I think you see the full flowering of this in the story of Christ. And I mean this technically, because...

So the question is, what sacrifice is most acceptable to God? So what works best across all possible situations and places? And Christ embodies the spirit of the sacrifice of what's lesser about the self,

regardless of circumstance. So, because his story is an ultimate tragedy, right? Because he has to face betrayal, tyranny, the collapse of his friendships, a humiliating death in front of his mother. Like it is the concatenation of all the potential dimensions of suffering that is outlined to some degree in Job. And Christ's example is that you have

Establish a firm relationship with good despite all that. You continue to aim up in love and truth despite all that. And by doing so,

you simultaneously transform and transcend all that, and that that's the proper model for the highest form of being. My suspicions are that that pattern of voluntary self-sacrifice, which is also key to therapeutic transformation, I suspect that that pattern is isomorphic with the good that lies at the center of the network of conceptions of good. And I think that that's what the biblical revelation is, is that there's a

There is no difference between the Son and the Father. That would be how you would conceptualize that notion in religious terms, is that if the spirit of Yahweh was properly embodied in a human soul, then it would be the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice as the proper offering to God that would prevail. And then I would say further, okay, let's think about this as practically and practically

What would you say? Realistically, it's possible. We know this in the therapeutic realm. The best pathway forward is to face the things that challenge, confront, and threaten you voluntarily. We know that that is transformative. We know that that improves people's mental health. We know that it makes them braver. What you do with the person in therapy is you find out what obstacles are standing in their way, stopping them and making them bitter.

And you plot and strategize with them about how they can decompose that obstacle into smaller constituent elements and face it. And that's the same thing as facing the serpent on the cross, the brazen serpent on the cross that Moses has his people do when they're stranded in the desert. You bet. It's the healing pattern.

What bites them? It's the pharmacology.

Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at capella.edu. You've just touched on pretty much every major theme in metaphysics and theology in that last bit. There's so much there, Jordan, we talk about.

You know, for the Job thing, that's an ancient connection in the tradition to connect Job and Jesus. And Job, of course, the end of the book saying, I know that my Redeemer lives. I mean, even in the midst of his great suffering. And then Jesus himself, who is the Redeemer in person, and he is associated appropriately with Job because what Jesus takes on is precisely that. Job is a kind of limit case of suffering because it's not just suffering, it's suffering that's

undeserved, or at least, you know, for the most part, undeserved. So it's all of that. And you as a therapist, I have a priest. We've met Job a number of times. I mean, I know I have in my pastoral work, people that are in that kind of suffering.

But metaphysically speaking, at the heart of it, it seems to me, is this claim that being and good are always more fundamental than evil. And that's because evil is best characterized as a privatio, right? It's a privation of the good. So evil is always parasitic upon the good, which means no matter how intrusive it is, no matter how kind of bold it is, it's parasitic.

It can only exist in and through the good. So as Paul would say, where sin abounds, grace abounds the more. So sin can never outpace grace. Evil can never be greater than the good. And so Job, his great, you might say, spiritual genius, is to see that, is to see it. Now, how did he come to see it? He was very good in his dealings with his friends who

who were kind of lousy friends. They were great for the first seven days when they sat with them in silence. And you and I know that, too, when you're dealing with people in great suffering. Often it's silence and solidarity is the best thing you can do. When they start to speak— But that's participation in their suffering. Yeah, right, right. And that's what's so helpful about it, therapeutic about it. But then they start engaging in the most kind of trite theological discourse—

By the way, you know, because, oh, Job, you must have done something wrong. This clearly, you know, it's just evil comes because you do things wrong. That's a very naive level of spiritual understanding. And I think it's interesting. It's the only time in the Bible where God upbraids people for their bad theology. Because remember at the end of the story when God says, unlike your friends who spoke—

ill of me, your friend who did not speak well of me. So God is taking to task bad theology. And the bad theology is this silly, trivial, superficial. What God helps Job to see is this metaphysical truth, right, that evil is always parasitic upon the good, but also this more theological truth that your overweening intellect is just this little, tiny, teeny,

finite mind that can take in a tiny swath of reality. And Job, did you hear about, do you know about Leviathan and Behemoth and these creatures of mine? Do you know about them under the sea? You can't even see them, but they're my creatures. And, you know, where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? And where were you when I sang at the dawn and all this?

is he's trying to break Job out of this curvatus in se, my little consciousness that has this overweening pride. No, there's no justification for what I'm going through. There's no morally sufficient reason for what I'm going through. Where were you? So it's a metaphysical move, if you want, and it's a theological move where Job is broken out of that. Can I say a quick thing about sacrifice? Because to me, that's such a central notion of the Bible.

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

work there you might construe as art and science and philosophy and all these wonderful things that are just good in themselves and that call forth our powers. And we know what that feels like. It's a strain in a way to read a philosophical book and enter into a philosophical argument, but it's also wonderful. It's not the result of sin or the fall. It's an exercise of your powers.

But furthermore this: the term in Hebrew—I forget what it is exactly—but the term for the tilling of the soil is the same term used for the care of the temple. Eden is a primordial temple, which means a place where God is rightly praised. So the summum bonum is properly aligned with the human mind and will and body. And that's why Eden is a temple.

The expulsion from the garden is, yes, into a desert, but it's also an exile from the temple. We're not praising right. Now, read that as a master motif of the entire Bible. What goes wrong with us? Bad praise. I start praising the wrong things. Idolatry is the fundamental problem. And then look at the story of the Old Testament is trying to discover the temple again. You know, Pharaoh, let my people go,

that they might worship the Lord in the desert. They might find a place to worship. And then they build the great tabernacle in the desert while they're on the move, Mount Sinai and so on. And then finally, the Solomon Temple in Jerusalem.

Jesus, who says, I'll tear down that temple and in three days rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body. And then, Paul, and you, members of Christ's mystical body, you're the temple. So that theme of how do we bring people back to right worship, a right ordering to the summum bonum, that's the whole Bible. Now, see, go back to Job for a second, because what gets in the way of right worship? Lots of things.

But one of them can be intense suffering. There's Mrs. Job. There's Mrs. Job. Curse God and die. So cursing God is the opposite of praising God. So she's saying, you know, your suffering is so intense, Job, that just give up on this project of praising God. That's why that book is so pivotal, because even at this limit case of suffering, Job doesn't curse God.

He maintains his connection. Now, one more step because of the Jesus-Job connection. Jesus on the cross, we say, bearing all the sins of the world. It's what you just said. Bearing all of human suffering.

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

That's, we would say, the second person of the Trinity having united himself to human nature, bringing humanity with him online, which is why we say the cross is central to worship. So at the Mass, which is our—that's the great temple moment when we give God right praise—we do it by remembering the cross. This is my body given for you. This is my blood poured out for you.

We're going right from Genesis through Sinai, through Job, up to Jesus, up to the temple of the church, up to someone at Tuesday morning mass at 630. It's the biblical trajectory, and it's on exactly what you're talking about. Okay, okay. So a couple of thoughts associated with that. So the first thing I would say is,

Work properly done, so that would be in the garden, unselfconsciously, motivated by covenant with the highest good, that becomes play. Yeah, yeah, good. Right, but I even mean that technically. Yes, yeah. So imagine there is a form of work that allows you not to sacrifice the present to the future, but to align it perfectly. Okay, I think that's signaled by the emergence of the spirit of play.

So the kingdom of God is the garden in which mankind can eternally play. And the play would be musical. So it would be, so you could conceptualize heaven as an upward moving spiral where everything is already as good as you could imagine it, but it's getting better. It's getting better, yeah. Right, like a piece of music does when it unfolds. It's already perfect, but it's still reaching higher and higher heights. That's the highest form of play, this spiral upwards. Yeah.

We have an independent biological circuit for marking the presence of that spirit, that spirit of play. Okay, so let me add one more thing to that. Go ahead, please. Well, just to pull in the symbolism of the mass, then we could say in parallel that sacrifice...

properly undertaken, so that would be voluntary, is indistinguishable from celebration. And then you might say, well, could you get to the point where you could celebrate the crucifixion? And then, so let's imagine that practically. So what that would mean is that you came to regard your mortal vulnerability as

as a blessing, not merely as something that you could hoist and bear, because there's certainly that element, but more than that, beyond that, that you would take it on as a gift. You know, I saw this triptych in Australia that really shocked me. The central, it was an Orthodox triptych, the central panel showed Christ in front of the cross inviting

And I thought, oh my God, you know, could you possibly have a more perverse invitation than the invitation to the cross? And the answer to that is obviously no, because an invitation to the cross is an invitation to bear the voluntary suffering of life. But more than that, even to will the encounter with hell itself, right? So it's literally an invitation to fully confront the worst of all possible realities, right?

Or potentialities. But then you think, okay, let's be sensible about this. How the hell are you going to adapt to your life if you shy away from mortality and malevolence? There's no way you can have a full adaptation to life if you hide from that shadow. And so then you might say, well, I can't confront it fully because it would tear me to pieces and destroy me. But I would say, no, if you did that voluntarily in faith,

it would destroy sin in you. It wouldn't destroy you. Now, if you were rife with sin, that might feel a lot like

But, well, that's a different issue to some degree. Think of the Jesus and disciples singing before he goes out to the Garden of Gethsemane. So we think of the Last Supper as simply this kind of gravely serious thing, which indeed it was, but singing before they go out. All the themes of life coming from the cross, I think of that great passage

mosaic in the apse of San Clemente in Rome, you know, which is the cross at the center of it, but then flowering out from it are all these forms of life. That's a basic, you know, Christian intuition. And yeah, even the invitation to enter— That's the tree of life, isn't it? Right. And to enter into that space spiritually of identifying with the crucified Lord.

I loved your stuff about play because play is such a key idea. Go right back to Aristotle. I mean, those things that are sought for their own sake are always higher than those sought for the sake of something else. And so the highest activities are forms of play. They're good in themselves. I do them because they're good to do.

You and I are engaging in play right now. You know, it's something good in itself to be talking about ideas. Playing with them. Right. I'm not looking for something beyond this. Oh, this will lead. No, no, I'm right in this moment, you know. Well, Romano Guardini and the leaders of the liturgical movement, early 20th century, wanted to bring forward this idea of the Mass as play. Right.

The mass is the most useless thing that we can do. And I use that language a lot. It always draws people up short. But I say, look, the mass, which is outside of time, it's not meant to lead to anything else. Right. It's not instrumental. It's not.

Right, and we're being drawn into precisely the dying and rising of Jesus. And so that's why it's the supreme form of play. And that's why, you know, I put on fancy vestments, and I incense, and I light candles, and we move around in a kind of like liturgical dance, etc. Well, all of that is expressive of play. It is a play, yeah. Right, it's a play. You know who saw that very clearly was Chesterton, who was a very playful figure.

But he saw that kids love to dress up and they love to do—well, there's the Mass. We dress up in fancy garb and we carry candles around and we sing and we dance. So, well, what's the Mass but a reflection of the prayer that was in the temple in Jerusalem, which in turn, they claim, was meant to imitate the dance of David before the ark as he comes into Jerusalem?

So it's a playful dance that the church does at the summit. So we say the source and summit of the Christian life is the Eucharist. Well, there's your summum bonum, right? It's the praise that aligns us to the summum bonum, and that's a playful space to be in. Okay, two things there. So we could say that the Mass is an attempt to dramatize the transformation of death and hell into play.

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And that isn't just death, because hell is worse than death. And if you don't understand that, you're kind of a fool. And people might say, well, what's your proof of that? And I would say, well, most people who are traumatized, so shattered, they're shattered by an encounter with malevolence, not an encounter with tragedy.

Right. It's beyond just something bad happened. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like purposeless bad or worse, intentional bad. So there are levels that are worse than death. Now you could take death and hell as sort of exemplars of what is most unbearable.

And you could transform them like the ultimate alchemical endeavor would be to transform those into play. That's the same as finding the gold of most value, the pearl of the highest price that the worst possible dragon guards. It's the same thing. Okay, so there's that. Now, you talked about concentration on the moment.

Okay, so this is how the Sermon on the Mount looks to me. Tell me what you think about this. We're going to discuss this in our gospel seminar that's coming up in April. All right, so essentially what Christ does in the Sermon on the Mount is he says, orient yourself so that you are acting out your covenant with God in all matters.

So that has to be first and foremost in your structure of attention. So that would be, I'm here to serve whatever is highest. And that would include my willingness to even transform what I conceptualize as the highest as I learn. But that's my goal. So our goal in this conversation, let's say to the degree that we're doing that truly, is that we're doing nothing but trying to pursue the truth. And we're trying to do that in the spirit of whatever's highest. We want to

foster life more abundant, let's say. We want to rectify suffering to the degree that that's possible. And we're inquiring into how to do that. Okay, so first of all, you set your aim. And the proper aim

is the highest aim always. Okay, now once you do that, and that's aligned with the desire to treat other people as you would like to be treated, right? So that's part of that. That's that iterative altruism. That's part of that structure of aiming highest. Okay, so then the next thing that Christ implies is that sufficient unto the day. And so what that would mean is that if you aim properly at the highest, then

you can now focus all your attention with faith and productivity on exactly what's happening right now. And if you do that with enough intensity, that will be sufficient. But that's also, I would say, that's also the revelation of the kingdom of God. Because if you are aiming at what's highest, and you are absolutely attending to the moment,

then you're walking with God in the eternal garden. You lose all your self-consciousness. You're in that state of play that's simultaneously transformative, right? And that's going to suffuse you with a sense of sufficient and sustaining meaning. And I think that's, by the way, I think just, this might be of some interest to you. I think we actually know how that all operates now at a neurophysiological level.

I actually think that the neuroscience and these theological concepts have converged. I've talked to a number of neuroscientists about this, not quite as explicitly as we're doing, but it's certainly the case that our primary positive emotion system, mediated by dopamine, let's say, that's a treasure-seeking system. And it's definitely the case that we feel the most positive emotion when we see progress towards the highest possible goal.

Yeah. That's literally how it works. Yeah, and there's so much we could say about the sermon, of course. And I agree with those instincts, Jordan, very much. I think of, you know, it's on a mountain. So there you've got Eden was a mountain because we know the rivers flow out from it. Sinai's a mountain. You know, Calvary's a mountain. Mount Tabor's a mountain. Yeah. So it's a sermon on the mount. From the center point.

Right. It's where heaven and earth meet, and he's the new Moses, the new lawgiver. But what strikes me about it, as I read Aquinas on the sermon, is the four things he identified as the blocks to the flow of grace, wealth, pleasure, power, honor. They're all taken on in the Beatitudes. So if wealth is your problem, how lucky you are. And the Greek there, makarios, is the word, and we say blessed or happy. But they say you could even translate it as lucky, right?

how lucky you are if you're poor, you know, or poor in spirit is Matthew's version. You might say how lucky you are if you're not addicted to wealth. So, I mean, wealth leads you down a path toward addiction. And when you follow that path, then you block the flow of grace.

If pleasure is your problem, well, how lucky you are if you mourn. So it's not a masochistic thing saying how happy you are if you're not addicted to good feelings. Because sometimes, as you say, following the summa bonum means you will not have good feelings at all. Just the contrary. So how lucky you are if you're not so addicted to that that you block the flow of grace. Let's say power is your hang-up.

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

And then honor. If honor is your hang-up, well, how lucky you are when people hate you and prescribe your name. Yeah, revile you. Well, in other words, how lucky you are if you're not addicted to honor. Because sometimes following the summa bonum means you're not going to be honored. Well, then, once those four blocks are out of the way, then the rest follow. How blessed are the pure of heart followers.

That means my heart's not divided. I'm not following this and that and what's my summa bonum today? It's this. No, I'm single-hearted. Integrated. Single-minded. Single-eyed. Single-hearted. And that's the old Kierkegaard, the saint, someone who wants one thing. Right. Who desires one thing. Right. So the single-hearted. Right.

How blessed are the peacemakers, because you'll become a maker of peace. The minute you get rid of these blocks and grace flows through you, you will become— Instead of a servant of power. Yeah, you'll become actually a peacemaker. Why am I blanking on the other ones? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That's the same thing. What do you hunger and thirst for?

wealth, pleasure, or righteousness. I hunger for one. The one thing is to do the will of God, right? So, the Beatitudes set up the basic dynamics. And then the rest of the sermon, I think, reveal kind of what that life begins to look like. So, to love—

Will the good of the other. Okay. What's the ultimate test? Because if you're hooked on, you've gotten rid of your addictions, at least to some degree, and you found purity of heart, you're going to be attached to the summa bonum whose name is love. That's what God is. God is love. So now you have to live in

utterly aligned to love. What's the ultimate test of that? Love your enemies, because the enemy is someone who's not going to will your good in return. Because the great temptation is, I will be kind to you or just to you or whatever, that you will be kind and just to me. So then I'm just caught in the ego game, you know, in a more subtle form.

But if I love my enemy, then I'm proving I'm willing the good of the other as other, you know? So all the turn the other cheek and the go the extra mile and love your enemies. And then this will turn into, you know, life increasing in you 30, 60, and 100-fold because you're hooked on to the source of life.

You're in what I've called the loop of grace. As you receive grace, you give it as a gift because grace only exists as a gift. That's part of that upward spiral. Yeah. No, and I love that because that's very close to the mystics when they talk about heaven. Aquinas says that in heaven, we will see for the first time

how incomprehensible God is. It's a delicious formula, because you think about, "Here below, He's incomprehensible, but boy in heaven, then I'll really see Him." And Aquinas says, "Yeah, you will, but what you'll see is how inexhaustibly fascinating He is, because you're going to keep spiraling upward, you know, infinitely." Anyway, the anticipation of that here below is trying to deal with these addictions

hook onto the source of grace, enter into the loop of grace. As you receive it, give it, and then you'll get more. That's the physics. You'll get more, and then when you get more, give that away, and then you'll get more. Right, right. And that's inexhaustible. It's not a zero-sum game. Yeah, well, so this is one of the things I've really been toying with, you know, is this idea that

If, and this is the faith that moves mountains, let's say, or the power of the mustard seed, that's another way of thinking about it, is that what is possible, what is laid in front of you in terms of its potential is proportional to the attitude of faith and courage that you bring to bear on the situation. And it may well be that, oh, this is the proposition, is that the source of being is literally inexhaustible.

There's nothing that it could bring forth anything conceivable. And the precondition for that is cultivation of the proper receptive attitude. So now we could look at how sophisticated this is too. Let's take wealth, for example. So

One way of conceptualizing wealth is as an evil in itself. Maybe that's associated with the victim, victimizer narrative and the evils of capitalism. But that isn't what happens in the Gospels because when Christ goes after the rich man, the rich young man, like he asks him a bunch of questions before he tells him he has to sell everything.

You know, he says, first of all, the young man says, well, I'm miserable and I don't know why. And Christ says, okay, well, let's, you know, let's diagnose this. Are you abiding by the principles of Moses? And the young man says, well, yeah, you know, I'm actually pretty good at that. I honor my mother and my father. I abide by the ideal rules. And they continue that analysis until Christ's final judgment.

Revelation is something like, well, look, you're doing a lot of things right, apparently, but you're still miserable. And what that means is that the life you've set out for yourself isn't working for you. It's not in accordance with the needs of your soul. And so what you may have to do is to dispense with all of your privilege and your security and the opportunity of your wealth, because it looks like it's interfering with your potential allegiance to an even higher good.

And that makes the young man, I guess his countenance falls in some ways, right? He's shocked by the idea that in order to follow Christ, to enter the true kingdom of heaven, that he would have to sacrifice everything he owns. And all the disciples say, well, if that's the cost of getting into heaven, then no one's going to pay it.

But the thing is, it's not a critique of wealth in and of itself. It's a critique of the worship of wealth as a substitute for the divine. Right now, you see that even more subtly, I think, in the parable of the unjust steward.

Because, and tell me if you think I've got this right or wrong, but basically what Christ tells the unjust steward who does some shady machinations to increase his wealth, he says something like, the children of darkness are in some ways wiser than the children of light. And what he's implying there is that

not only is wealth or abundance not an evil in and of itself, but if you pursue that diligently, that's better than no diligent pursuit as well at all. And that dedicated pursuit could produce in you the discipline that could be then used for a higher aim, right? And so you can't just casually dispense with the

with the economic realm, let's say, and supplant and substitute for that the spiritual, is that these things, wealth, pleasure, power, and honor, they might not be evils if they were put in their proper place, right? If they were subdued properly. Okay, okay. No, that's exactly right. There's a lot we could say there. The rich young man is fascinating. For one reason, it's one of the only times Jesus seems...

to fail. Like, you know, whenever when he calls people, oh yeah, they drop everything and they come after him and, you know, sure, I'll follow you. And Matthew leaves his task ledger post and he comes after him. Well, the rich young man receives this extraordinary invitation from Jesus. I mean, just leave your wealth behind and come after me. And he doesn't do it, which to me is a witness to how extraordinarily powerful the grip was on him. Here's John Paul II's reading on that. He

He takes him—see, Luther read him in the Protestant way as, well, you know, he just—he thinks he's following the commandments, but, I mean, no one can follow commandments. We're all hopeless, and that's why we all need grace, you know.

But John Paul, in a more Catholic way, said, no, no, I take the kid at his word. He's a seeker, and you're right, that his life is miserable. And so he's coming to the source of good, good teacher. You know, the Lord, he said, why do you call me good? Only God is good. But, you know, good teacher, what must I do to be saved? Well, I'll take him at his word. He wants to be saved, healed, right? He wants to be healed. He's knocking.

Right, he is. And so Jesus says, as a good Jew, all right, are you following the commandments of Moses? Which I would construe there as the fundamentals and preambles of love. So you're going to be a person of love in line with God. Well, of course, you can't be killing people and you can't be stealing things from people. You can't be raping and you can't be, you know, committing adultery. And these are like fundamental violations of love.

Okay, and the kid says, and I'll believe him, I've kept all these since my youth. All right, fair enough. So you've done the basics, but now you're ready for some high-octane spirituality. And what Jesus clearly intuits is your big problem is you're carrying your wealth around like this terrible burden. It's an enormous block to the flow of grace. And so if you're ready for the serious stuff,

Sell all you've got, give to the poor and come follow me and you'll have treasure in heaven.

And he's not willing to do it, which witnesses to the power of that in that kid's life. And I've known people like that, that they really do want joy. They really do want God. And they're not bad people. They're doing the basic things, right? They're not raping and stealing and killing. But there's some block that's so big, and it might be one of the other three. You know, they're addicted to pleasure, to honor, and they can't let go of it. And

And that's all the spiritual masters will use that kind of language, is find out what that thing is you're carrying around. You've got to get rid of it. Right, right, right, right. Well, that's the sacrifice of the thing you most love. That's also why Christ says in the Gospels that unless you're willing to forsake your mother, your father, like everything, you can't follow me. It's a matter of prioritization. People get that wrong all the time. And I love the treatment of Abraham, the sacrifice, the akedah, the binding of Isaac.

oh my goodness, what a terrible father, and God making that horrific demand, and who could believe this whole nonsense, and I would have that guy arrested. Come on. It's people that are just opaque to the spiritual meaning of these stories. The Bible is so edgy, such an edgy book, and it doesn't compromise. So, Isaac,

Good, yes, it's your son, and he's the bearer of the promise, and he's all of that. He's great. I love Isaac. And God says to Abraham, you know, Isaac? Yes. Your son, whom you love? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just that we're really clear on how good Isaac is. Okay, I want you to sacrifice him to me. Now, this is in the sort of coded language of the Bible. This is not God being manipulative and cruel. It's forcing this question.

Okay, yes, Isaac is all those things, but he's not the sumum bonum. And your family is not the sumum bonum. Family's great. And that's why Jesus is saying, hey, Lord, I'll follow you, but first, can I just bury my father? What are you thinking? Well, of course you can bury your father. And the Lord says, let the dead bury their death.

And he said, well, wait. There's no first. There's no other first, no matter what it is. You have to be prepared at a moment's notice, no matter what's happening. That's the edgy language. It's a spiritual training manual in a way. And it's forcing you to come up against the

Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career, so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu. Thanks. Okay, so with regard to Isaac, like we could look at the paeda. It isn't only that Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son to God. It's that if you were a good father, that is what you would do.

Now, weirdly enough, you see, what happens is that because Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, he doesn't have to. And that's so cool. Okay, so what you see in the figure of Mary with the paeda is Mary has entered into this covenant with God and she's going to fully offer her child to the world with no reservation, even if that means his demise and torture. Now, that is what a mother has to do because if she doesn't,

isn't willing to offer her child to the world. She is now an impediment to that child's development. So that it's only the parent who is willing to sacrifice the child to the world, who can even bring the child into being. Look, I mean, part of the reason that the birth rate is plummeting, this isn't the whole reason, but part of the reason is that women ask themselves, the eternal question is,

How is it ethical to bring a child into a world such as this? Right, yeah. Right, and they may be doing that locally, say, well, we don't have the security or the wealth to provide what's necessary for the child. But then there's a metaphysical question is, well, given that my child will definitely suffer and encounter evil fully, how dare I presume to play that game with God?

That's what Mary's asked to do when the angel comes to visit her, right? And so you see this, there's no higher offering than the willingness to offer up your son to God, let's say. Well, that's also the game God plays when he offers up Christ, right? And it does have this element that you described, which is off-putting to begin with. But of course you have to sacrifice. You have to celebrate the sacrifice of your child to the world. You have to let them go out there and be...

bang up hard against everything. And that should be a celebration. And I would also say the fact that you love your child and that you would mourn his or her demise is actually a testament to the fact that that sacrificial offering is the essence of love. Those are the same thing.

I'm just thinking of our friend Carl Jung, who said the first great psychologists were the church fathers. He knew the church fathers and saw that they grasped a lot of these—he might call them psychological, I might call them spiritual truths. But one of them, the connection there is between Isaac and Jesus.

So the church father's got that right away. So Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son, but then, you know, his hand has stayed. But it anticipates the father willing to sacrifice his son. Yeah, right. But when all the way, he didn't stop the sacrifice. And Isaac bringing the wood of the sacrifice up the hill is an anticipation of Jesus carrying the cross up Calvary. Right, right, right. So they saw these connections that are meant to speak the very spiritual truth that we're talking about.

Right. Well, those are connections that I would say occupy the same semantic space. Yes, precisely. And I think we'll be able to map those out, by the way, so that this, like I said, it will no longer be a matter of opinion. We'll be able to identify, okay, so now here's another issue with regards, let's say, to the pearl of great price that the farmer sells everything he owns to possess. Well, Christ contrasts earthly and heavenly treasure. Okay, so let's imagine that heavenly treasure is a kind of metaphysical treasure that is

that leads to true abundance. Okay, now you already touched on this. So, okay, let me make this real concrete. So I had this graduate advisor at McGill, Robert Peel. Robert is still alive and I still work with him. Now, he was a very particular sort of professor and I would contrast him with another sort. So whenever I went and talked to Bob,

in his office, he always made time for me, he was very generous with his time. All we did was talk about potential research projects and hypotheses. And he was 100% generous with his ideas. Okay, so, and that generosity was manifest to his other students, but also practically speaking. So, if you looked at the relationship that Bob had with his graduate students, his students produced a lot of papers, a lot of first authorship papers.

many of which were derived from an idea that Bob had planted. But he was 100% committed to the fostering of his students' flourishing. And so we had a blast in his lap because the entire place was set up with his ideas

with the student's future well-being in mind. Now, that redounded to his credit because he produced many outstanding students who went off to be professors who had stellar research careers. So it multiplied his effect. But here's something even cooler. So his initial proposition was that ideas, revelations, were to be given away freely. Okay, so let's imagine the consequence of that. So now you and I are talking, and I'm completely un-

remitting in my willingness to share my ideas with you. Okay, so that's inspiring. Now, what I get back from you is a corresponding enthusiasm. And that's the possession by God for you, because that's what enthusiasm means. But that enthusiasm technically is a form of incentive reward. It's what keeps the conversation flourishing. Now, here's the neurophysiological consequence of that.

So imagine that you have a network of living tissue that is capable of generating even scientific ideas. Now, you keep feeding that, you feed it new information and so forth, but when it operates, because you express its contents, it meets, it seeds land on fertile ground, and it receives the optimum response, which is rewarding,

Okay, that produces a dopaminergic response in you. That's part of the enthusiasm of the... Okay, here's what dopamine does. The dopaminergic system watches, monitors the pattern of neurological activation that precedes the receipt of the reward. So imagine that there's a network in me that is operating just before I say something that you respond enthusiastically to.

Okay, that enthusiasm triggers a dopaminergic response in me. That makes that system grow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's literally what happens. It reinforces it. So there's a rewarding element of dopamine and a reinforcing element. So what that means technically, in principle, is that the more you give away your ideas, the more unselfish you are in sharing your talents or not hiding your light under a bushel, the more ideas you're going to have

And so, and that, okay, then one more thing. Then imagine that participating in that now becomes the heavenly treasure because now you've tapped into the well that's literally inexhaustible and that's way better than just security. The other professors, they would shepherd their ideas and guard them like they were treasures. And they ran out very rapidly, like their trajectory was downward and closing and their students didn't thrive.

Because they were stingy about their treasure. Right. Can I suggest, in a way, we're very close to the kingdom of God here, to use Jesus' language.

And it goes right back to the beginning of our conversation. We've been talking about metaphysical truths and psychological realities and spiritual things. But with this, we're coming very, very close to the heart of it. John Paul II formulated what he called the law of the gift, which is exactly what you said. The law is this. Your being increases in the measure that you give it away.

So it's so counterintuitive. Our sinful world teaches us exactly the opposite all the time, which is why there's so much suffering, spiritual suffering. It says, no, no, fill up your ego with all these, the goods of the world. And then, as you said, shepherd them, hang on to them, defend them, make sure people know they're yours. But now there's the prodigal son.

Father, give me my share of the inheritance coming to me. So three times in one sentence, he says, me. Give me my share coming to me. What I deserve. Yes. And so the father, who symbolizes God, gives. That's all the father knows how to do. God is love. He is, in a way, like the platonic form of the good that just knows how to give. That's all God knows how to do. So, of course, he gives. Well, then the son, hanging on to these goods he's received,

fritters them away. Now, read that spiritually. It is the minute you turn grace into a possession, it stops being grace, and therefore it disappears. It disappears. Well, that's the danger of that material wealth, right? That's the transformation of the spiritual into the merely material, into what you possess. And then that, even if it was valuable to begin with, that now becomes an impediment to your movement forward, because you're going to cling to it.

Right. And so the discovery has to be, actually, no, when I give away the grace I've received and

Being increases in me. I get more of it. Now as I give that away, I get more of it. Now I'm in the loop of grace and I found exactly what Jesus means when he says treasure in heaven. Yes, we would say after we die and we go to a higher dimensional. Yes, that's true. But even now, even now I can tap into treasure in heaven.

Well, that's in eternity. That's in eternity, right? That treasure in heaven is the eternal treasure. And I agree. I also see, again, the practicality of this. Like, look, we know this even. There's almost nothing that devastates a person more than the devastation of their reputation.

Now, there can be prideful reasons for that, but the reason that we value reputation so highly is because it is an element of the treasure in heaven. Like, if I have a social support network, if the hearts of the people around me in the broadest sense are filled with goodwill to me because I've been unstintingly generous in my provision of the good that God has granted to me,

There is nothing even possible that could best make me more secure and provided with opportunities because we live in this intensely social surround. I mean, even money itself, even money itself is nothing but a promissory note predicated in the final analysis on something like reputation. And so Christ's message is something like,

Don't ever let the concretizations of your reputation, which might be your money, interfere with all those actions that would redound to your reputation in the space of eternity. And I actually can't think of a more practical piece of advice than that. And because the advice in some sense is, well, don't subordinate the higher to the lower.

Even if it's a fairly high form of high, which material wealth might, you know, you might regard it exactly as that. You don't want to sacrifice the source of material wealth to the wealth itself. Right.

But it's a tricky game. That's why the spiritual tradition is so insistent on some of these exercises and on the stories that are meant to bring you up against it. So you begin to see, okay, that's what's going on in my life. And yes, I am that rich young man. I am the prodigal son. They force us into that space because we can talk about it abstractly. And I think I've

I can say I've grasped the principle, but in terms of living the principle, I mean, that's why I go to confession all the time. And that's why, you know, I'm very aware of my limitations and my moral problems because I need these stories all the time. I need the Mass all the time and, you know, the sacraments all the time. Well, those parables in that story, you know, those and the Mass, those are—okay, first of all, the parables make the semantic imaginal.

Right? Because they put flesh on the bones. They're like the movie version of the explicit ethic. Okay, well, the advantage to that is that if it's merely a semantic discussion, an abstract discussion, it's difficult to conjure up the appropriate surrounding emotions. But if you place it in a story, then you can embody that and you can participate in the emotional states that the stories are pointing to. It's visceral. Right? It's visceral.

Right. It's embodied. That's very Jewish. It's very biblical. The fact that the Bible has all these truths, but very rarely articulates them in a philosophical way. So the Greek tradition does that. But the Bible, a little bit in the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Wisdom, there's some moments when it's got a more philosophical voice. But typically, no, the Bible speaks in narrative language and imagistic language.

That's probably more accessible to people too, eh? Because even a simple person can go to a complex movie. Right now, they may not be able to tell you explicitly afterward

They can't explain the philosophical themes of the movie, but that didn't mean they didn't participate in its transformative capacity. They might have gotten the message without being able to say it. Right, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's been true over centuries now with the Bible. And even you go to those great churches in Italy where the whole facade of the cathedral is biblical stories and biblical characters, and people learn these moral truths from those works of art.

The tragedy now, as again, it's in the hands of very ham-handed people, the new atheist types. Oh, the Bible, it's Bronze Age mythology.

as though I'm judging the truth of something by when it was written. I mean, so stupid. Aristotle, I don't read him because he's pre-scientific. I wouldn't read Dante. Give me a break. And these are people that don't understand how these texts are working and the themes that we've been throwing back and forth. But that's where the great spiritual tradition—and look, the brightest people in the West prior to the scientific revolution, this is what they studied. They studied soul doctoring.

This is soul doctrine language. Well, even in the scientific revolution, I mean, Newton's a great example of that. Well, sure. You mean that they were religious themselves, the founders? Absolutely. Well, I actually also don't think, I don't believe, by the way, I don't believe that you can be a scientist without being implicitly religious. And here's why. Oh, yeah, I agree with that, too. Well, you have to believe the world is intelligible. Intelligible, right. You have to believe that it's intelligible to a human being so that there's a concordance between its structure and our world.

cognitive capacity. You have to believe that pursuit of that relationship with reality is a good, and that's disputable. You know, like the story like Frankenstein stories, for example, are an indication of the fact that, well, the pursuit of knowledge per se isn't necessarily a good. It has to be oriented in the right direction, or it can be terribly dangerous.

I don't believe, and I think we're seeing this by the way, and I think that people like Dawkins are seeing this. And I know that you may have noticed that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Neil Ferguson, and to some degree Douglas Murray and Brett Weinstein have all come out publicly in the last month or two saying that they no longer believe that the humanist enterprise can aim at good without being embedded in this underlying imaginal and metaphysical space.

Right now, some of them are wrestling with that to some degree more than others. Ayan and Neil Ferguson, they have converted to Christianity. Now, Douglas Murray, for his part, and this is the same with Brett Weinstein, they've started to see that the materialist, atheist, humanist, moral enterprise is not sustainable. It's going to be overcome. It's going to be overtaken by lower spirits, right? And that's partly what's happening on the culture war front.

No, I think this is a very important point, and I think it's a sign of hope in our situation today that people like yourself and many others, I think, are opening up these spiritual treasures. And, you know, the church has got to help us, you know, with the scandals and all that, and people tend to look at the church as corrupt. And then the Bible, oh, yeah, the Bible's old, this old book, and it's bad science and all that.

is that we ourselves stop teaching our tradition effectively, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But there are others today, I think, who are opening up this tradition and helping people see it. And that is enormously important because it's bothered me immensely, the rise of the new atheism and among young people, the dismissal of religion, which is a very dangerous proposition. When you start bracketing these truths—

And then you start living in a hyper-superficial way. You live in the buffered space, you know, as Charles Taylor puts it. That's very dangerous ground to be on. And that we need— That's the ground where a multiplicity of malevolent spirits can invade your heart and possess it, unbeknownst to you. And this—

Quite right. This strange concatenation of pride and hedonism that characterizes the modern world. It's so interesting how those are so tightly allied. That is the whore of Babylon and the great beast of Revelation, right? It's the same idea. The eternal threat to mankind is that the state will deteriorate and become multi-headed and that female sexuality and hedonism will deteriorate in parallel to that. And that is, it's not like, see, this is where Dawkins and the new atheists

are naive. They believe that you could supplant superstition with rationality. And first of all, all of what was being supplanted was not superstition. That's the first thing. And the second thing is,

Well, rationality serving what master? Well, we can serve our own master. It's like, yeah, you can, eh? Good luck with that. Then you're serving Satan. Well, that's how it works out. Yeah, no, right.

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

And it's as simple as that. And you say, oh, no, I don't want to join either army. Then you're in Satan's army. I can't decide yet. You're in Satan's army. I'd like to join Christ's army, but I'm not ready. You're in Satan's army. And so Ignatius compels you to the Bob Dylan moment. You've got to serve somebody here. Now, it's going to be the devil or the Lord, meaning it's going to be the sumum bonum or some simulacrum.

There's no other option. There's no third round. And coming to that point, for Ignatius, that's what the spiritual life is all about, is to bring yourself to that point and make that decision. And then by God, live by it. Live according to that decision.

That's an excellent place to stop, sir. And we should stop because we have to have our half an hour conversation for the Daily Wire. For everyone watching and listening, you can continue to join us there. And we're going to be able to continue our conversation.

at some length in April, just so everyone watching and listening knows, we're going to do a seminar on the Gospels for The Daily Wire, akin to the seminar we did on Exodus. And we're going to have a chance to discuss this with great thinkers at length and to walk through all of this. And it's a very exciting time because it does appear that the

the underlying structure of the sorts of things that we're discussing is starting to become clearer and clearer in front of us, right? That does present us with a starker choice, the choice that you described. So, and that's at the base of this culture war, as far as I can tell. Very good talking to you, as it always is. Thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you to all of you watching and listening, and to the Daily Wire people for facilitating this, and we'll see you in a

short couple of months. God bless you, Jordan.