Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church | Lex Fridman Podcast #304

Bishop Robert Barron 0:00 When we're beyond good and evil, you know, and all that's left is the will to power, then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes? When we forget ideas like equality and rights, which are grounded in God, why are we surprised that death camps follow?

Lex Fridman 0:20 The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire and one of the greatest educators in the world on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism, Christianity, and religious faith in general. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron.

Lex Fridman 0:45 Let's start with the big question: Who is God-

Bishop Robert Barron 0:49 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 0:50 ... according to Christianity, according to Catholicism? Who's God?

Bishop Robert Barron 0:53 I'll give you Thomas Aquinas' definition. Uh, God is ipsum esse subsistens. God is the subsistent act of to be itself. Another way to state that, in Aquinas, is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique, in which essence and existence coincide. To be God is to be to be. Those are all ways of talking about (laughs) what we mean by God. They are kind of gnomic, and, and that's on purpose. There's almost a Zen koan kind of quality about the way we talk about God. I'm saying something that's substantive, but it's more in like a via negativa mode. It's more like what God is not, because there's nothing in the world that would correspond to those descriptions. So anything in the world would be a being of some type or an event of some type, some particular mode of existence, and God is not an entity in the world. In fact, I would say that's the fundamental mistake that atheists, old and new, make all the time, is they think of God as a big being. When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being, it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition, but it's really interesting. So you say, "Well, at the very least, God must be a being," right? And Aquinas' answer is, "No, he's not in the genus of being." So we talk about God being beyond being and so on. To say in God essence and existence coincide is to say God's very nature is to be, and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world. So what I'm doing there is I'm, I'm gesturing the way the tradition does toward God using language that's at the same time philosophically precise and gnomic. (laughs) You know, it's, it's both accurate, it's true. I- in God, essence and existence coincide. What God is is the same as God's, uh, active to be. But now what does that mean? (laughs) I'm not quite sure, because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that. Everything in our experience is, is a being of some type. So it's existence received according to the mode of some essence. That's not true of God, which is why he can't be found in the world. And, and that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is, uh, oh, I guess theists are those that believe there's this being alongside the other beings in the universe. And then atheists say, "Oh no, there is no such being." Um, and that's precisely wrong. That's just a category error. Uh, Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell to the effect that proving the non-existence of God is a bit like proving the non-existence of a china teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars. You know, no, that's precisely what (laughs) God is not, some entity that's sort of hidden among the other entities of the universe. God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all. This is a way to put it. In more theological language, God's the creator of all things.

Lex Fridman 3:45 So if God is outside of our world, is it possible for us to visualize, to comprehend, to know God?

Bishop Robert Barron 3:54 Not utterly, of course. A- and I would say, uh, our knowledge begins always in this world, begins in ordinary experience. But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis, through philosophical reasoning, can come to some knowledge of a reality which is transcendent to our experience. So we gesture toward it. I, I always like Aquinas who says the language about God that we use is analogical. So it's not, it's not univocal, meaning what I say about that can, or about this bottle, I can say about God. No, that makes God an entity. At the same time, it's not simply equivocal. So if I say, "Well, that thing is and God is," I mean totally different things. No, no, I mean something analogous.

Lex Fridman 4:35 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 4:36 So (laughs) to be God is to be to be. So the real meaning of being is the being of God. The being of that thing or this thing, or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles would be analogous to God's manner of being. So on that basis, I can make some statements. I can, I can theorize, and even at the limit, as you suggest, I can visualize. So we have metaphors for God, and the Bible is replete with those, right? So God is a rock. Uh, you know, God's like a lion, God's like this and that. Or e- the Bible will sometimes imagine God as a, as a human being walking around, you know. Now only the crudest fundamentalism would say, well, that's an (laughs) univocal, accurate des- uh, description of God. It's an image that's catching something of God's manner of being.

Lex Fridman 5:25 Then what does it mean to believe in God? So there's a word, and we'll have to limit ourselves to human interpretable words today.

Bishop Robert Barron 5:37 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 5:37 There's a word called faith. What does faith mean? So if we can't really directly know God, you kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.

Bishop Robert Barron 5:50 Better, he sneaks up on us. 'Cause I, I like the language of grace. God's action comes first. So i- if I stay perfectly within the realm of, "I'm seeking," with my kind of eagle eyes and, and my i- inquiring mind, I'm not gonna find God that way. I, I might find a path that opens up.... but I would say finally God finds me, and I think then the language of faith begins to make more sense. Um, I- I'm with Paul Tillich though, the Protestant theologian, said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary is faith.

Lex Fridman 6:22 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 6:22 Because he said the way we take it usually is something sub-rational. You know, I have, I have, uh, proof of this. I, I really know this and I only kind of believe that, like I... that's just a personal opinion or impression. But that's to identify faith with the kind of infra-rational, and, and that's not it. I mean, I- I don't want something infra-rational. I don't want superstition or, or childish credulity. So authentic faith is, is the darkness beyond reason and on the far side of reason. It's- it's supra-rational, not infra-rational. And that's a very important move. At the limit of what I can know, at the limit of my striving and my vision, there's this, uh, horizon that opens up, and I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing. There's a kind of a horizon that lures us beyond what I've got. Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness rather than a darkness prior to reason.

Lex Fridman 7:18 The darkness beyond the horizon, prior to reason, y- first of all, the poetry of your language is incredible, to be, to be.

Bishop Robert Barron 7:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 7:25 I have a million questions. (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 7:27 Yeah, go ahead. I do too, and that's-

Lex Fridman 7:29 Uh, so first of all, let me just jump around. W- uh, you mentioned to be, to be a few times.

Bishop Robert Barron 7:34 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 7:34 What does that mean?

Bishop Robert Barron 7:36 Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?

Lex Fridman 7:39 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 7:39 To be this, to be a table, to be this, to be a microphone. So it's... I'll use Aquinas' language, it's the act of being poured, if you want, into the receptacle of some essential principle, so it's got a ontological structure. It's, it's an existent, it's a thing that exists, but it's, it's e- existing in a limited way, according to e- essential principle. Uh, God, so well, who, what's God? What's God's name? What kind of being is he? We'll go back to Moses now, um, when the Israelites asked me, you know, "What's your name? What shall I tell them?" And he says, you know famously, "I am who I am." But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark. (laughs) So Moses is wondering, "Okay, there's a lot of gods and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities, but which one are you? You got to be one of them, so tell me your name. In philosophical language, give me the essence that receives your act of existing," right? And God's answer blows the mind of, of Moses and the whole tradition, "I am who I am." To be God is to be. So I'm not this or that, I'm not up or down, I'm not here or there. God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, as, as the mystics put it. Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that? No.

Lex Fridman 8:55 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 8:55 And in a way, that's the whole point. If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind. So to be God is to be, to be is to... and that's, you know, Moses, take off your sandals, you're on holy ground. So I'm gonna go over confidently and find out what this thing is, this burning bush. I'm gonna find out. No, no, no. Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground 'cause you're not in charge here, you're not in command, 'cause i- if you got shoes on, you can walk wherever you want, you can walk with confidence. But you take your shoes off, you're m- much more vulnerable, uh, and that's appropriate when you're talking about God, you know? Here's another interesting thing

Narrator 9:30 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 9:30 ... but the, I didn't think about the burning bush in, in, in this connection before, but it's a bush that's on fire, but not consumed. Is... beings are competitive with each other, and so I, uh, these can't be in the same place at the same time, these two beings-

Lex Fridman 9:44 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 9:44 ... they're, they're mutually exclusive, if you want. But as God comes close to a, a creature, he doesn't destroy it or consume it-

Lex Fridman 9:55 Hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 9:55 ... but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant, right? And see, compare it to the, to the classical gods and goddesses, when, when they come bursting into (laughs) life and experience, things are incinerated and, and people give way and they're overwhelmed. Then there's this biblical idea of God comes close and sets things on fire, but doesn't burn them up. And that's because he's not a competitive being in the world. If he were a big being, then he'd be in this... he'd be competing for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid, but he's not like that. So God can come close and we come more fully alive. N- now we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation. I mean, the central Christian doctrine that God can actually become a human without overwhelming the human he becomes, right? So I mean, that's, that's kind of the next step, but the basic idea of God is non-competitively transcendent to the world. That's another way to get at it.

Lex Fridman 10:55 Non-competitively transcendent to the world, so it's beyond being... it's the source of being.

Bishop Robert Barron 11:01 Right. Let me make it maybe more, more, um, imagistic. I think a really good analogy would be author to book, right? So, uh, like Tolkien or someone that writes one of these, you know, big sprawling novels, and, and Tolkien's good too 'cause he creates a whole world-

Lex Fridman 11:18 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 11:18 ... he creates a new nature, a new language, new history, all that. Think of, you know, the thousands of characters and the plots and subplots and all of it. Tolkien is utterly responsible for every bit of that story, right? Every character, every plot, every subplot, every description, he's completely responsible. He's involved in every nook and cranny of it. But yet (laughs) he's not in the story. He's not in the book. You're not gonna find him as a character in the book. So th- that's the category mistake of, of the atheists in a way is, "I'm looking for God. He's, he's a character in this story somewhere." No, he's the author of the story, mysteriously present to every aspect of the story, but not a character in it.

Lex Fridman 12:00 (laughs) Right. He is deeply in the story somehow.

Bishop Robert Barron 12:04 Right.

Lex Fridman 12:04 He's present, but he's not, um, there... even if he is a character, he's not really the full embodiment, is not a character, and people inside-... the book can't really know about the author, 'cause-

Bishop Robert Barron 12:18 Right.

Lex Fridman 12:19 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 12:19 No, right. Well, see, Augustine says, "God is simultaneously intimior intimio meo et superior summo meo. He's closer to me than I am to myself, and he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine, at the same time." But, see, once you get the, the insight that God is, is the sheer act of to be, well, of course that's true. So, uh, right now God is sustaining us in existence, true. Aquinas says, "God is in all things, by essence, presence, and power, and most intimately so," and (laughs) , and he's nowhere in this room. Okay, well, where's God? Th- he's nowhere in this room. He's totaliter aliter, we say. He's totally other, same time. But once you, once you crack that code though, I think you see it of, like, why that would be true. And see, now I'm getting from more philosophical language to more mystical language, 'cause all the mystics talk that way, in these high paradoxes about God's availability and unavailability. I- I- I've often thought in the Bible, story after story, God can neither be grasped nor hidden from. So the, the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God. I've got him, I've, I understand him, I can manipulate him. No, no, no. Story after story is told that you can't do that. Well, then the other extreme of the sinner, all right, then I'm gonna, I'm gonna run from God, I'm gonna avoid God. Jonah and the whale, you know, so he h- he has the call from God and he said, "No, no, I- I'm gonna refuse that. I'm gonna run as far away. I'm gonna go to Tarshish," which meant, like, Timbuktu for them, at the end of the world. God's gotta... The whale swallows him up and brings him right back where God wants him. It's a, you know, poetic way of saying you can't escape the presence of God. At the same time, Tower of Babel. I'm gonna build a tower up to God. I'm gonna, I'm gonna grab hold of God. Nah, no, no, you can't do it either.

Lex Fridman 14:12 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 14:12 So live in the space in between those two things (laughs) , which would be the space of friendship with God, uh, falling in love with God is neither grasping nor hiding from God.

Lex Fridman 14:25 You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things. You mentioned grace.

Bishop Robert Barron 14:30 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 14:30 You mentioned sin, you mentioned incarnation. Is there a philosophical pragmatic way to start talking about the pillars of Christianity? What are the defining things that make Christianity, to you and, and broadly speaking, uh, to those that follow the religion?

Bishop Robert Barron 14:51 You know, in a way, what we're doing so far is, is a necessary propodeutic because we're talking about God. Um, what makes Christianity distinctive, of course, is the claim of the incarnation. So we come up out of Judaism, we come up out of this great monotheistic tradition, and, you know, the Bible itself and all the great commentators within Judaism, I think, would agree with this basic theistic stuff that I've been talking about. Take a Moses Maimonides, for example. Um, now, what makes Christianity distinct, this (laughs) supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us, God becomes a creature, but without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the integrity of the creature He becomes. What we see in the burning bush, that principle which obtains across the board, so the closer God comes to me, the more radiant I become, right? But take that now to the Nth degree, would be what we mean by the incarnation, the incarnation of the Son of God becoming a creature in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful. That's the pillar of Christianity. It's the incarnation, you know? Um, and what follows from that is the redemption of, of all of reality. So not just of human beings, but in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world, you know? The Greek fathers always said God became human that humans might become God, and that's a good way to sum up, I think, the essence of Christianity.

Lex Fridman 16:23 Why is this such an important thing? So it's a distinctive thing-

Bishop Robert Barron 16:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 16:26 ... but why is it so important philosophically to what it means to be a Christian? Like, h- wha- (laughs) ... What impact did that have on our world, on human civilization, on human nature, on our morals of why live, what to live for, the meaning of it all? Like, why is incarnation so important?

Bishop Robert Barron 16:46 Well, I think it's, it's massively important because it's, it's the divinization principle, that God wants to divinize his creation and, and sort of in this concentrated point of Jesus of Nazareth. But then we talk about the mystical body of Jesus, so that goes right back to Paul. As we're grafted onto Christ, we talk about that as the church. We become like cells and molecules in a organism. That's the church. It's not an organization. That's a, that's a deformation of ecclesiology. The church is this organism that begins with Jesus and then he's drawing all of humanity, but ultimately all of nature, a- all of, all of creation to himself. When the Son of Man is lifted up, he will draw all things to himself, that idea of the gathering in of a, of a scattered creation. So in that way, it's at the heart of it. Then there's all kinds of things. I- if God becomes human, that means there's a dignity to humanity which goes beyond anything any humanist of any stripe has ever said, right? (laughs) Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary. Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable. God became one of us in order to divinize us. The, the goal of my life is not just to be a good person, not just to be, you know, materially successful, not just to be, um, a, a member of society. The goal of my life is to become a participant in the divine nature. And so there... I don't think there is a humanism greater than that, even conceivably. So that's where I think humanism is profoundly influenced by the incarnation. Uh, and just our notion of God as-... noncompetitive to us. That is so important because I, I think in so many systems from mythology onward, y- you have these competitive understandings of God. When Jesus says to his disciples, uh, the night before he dies, "I no longer call you servants, but friends," it's an extraordinary moment. Because e- every god, right, who's ever been served, well, that's, that's the best we can hope for, is, (laughs) would be as the servant of God.

Lex Fridman 18:47 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 18:48 You know, I, I try to obey you, Lord. I'll try to do what you want. But when Jesus says, "I, I no longer call you servants," or slaves, he would have said in the, in the Greek there, you know? Um, but friends. I don't know. I can't imagine anything greater than that, becoming God's friend.

Lex Fridman 19:04 That's a call to become one with, with God.

Bishop Robert Barron 19:08 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 19:08 It's possible to become, uh, become one with God. Now, I should mention,

Lex Fridman 19:13 you're one of the greatest religious communicators I've ever experienced. A lot of... a huge number of people are fans of yours. You've done a lot of great conversations. You've done Reddit AMAs-

Bishop Robert Barron 19:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 19:25 ... which is a very unique-

Bishop Robert Barron 19:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 19:26 ... bold, brave thing. And, uh, on one of them, somebody asked, um, what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins? So first, what are the seven deadly sins? What do they have to do with Christianity? How essential, how crucial they are to, uh, the religion, and what's the most challenging in our modern day?

Bishop Robert Barron 19:51 Yeah. To name 'em, uh, pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust are the seven deadly sins. Or called capital sins sometimes, uh, from caput. They're, they're the head sins from which things tend to flow. The most fundamental is pride. Uh, probably most people today, if you talk about, like, vice, or you talk about s- you know, d- deadly sin, they would think about lust. But the classical authors, including Dante, who does this pictorially, eh, they're... that's the least of the deadly sins, is lust, 'cause it's the one that's most sort of, uh, dependent upon the body and its, and its, uh, passions and so on. The most important is pride. Pride is the deadliest of the deadly sins. And it's very simple to see why. Pride is the... Augustine calls it in curvatus in se. I'm caved in around myself, like a black hole, right, to (laughs) get into the scientific... but I... the black hole, to me, is a great symbol. You know, that it, it's so heavy that it draws everything, including light. Nothing can escape from it. See, that's the sinner. That's the... we're all sinners. Uh, we're like black holes, that we draw everything into ourselves. So as a sinner, and, you know, look, I'll, I'll confess, I'm a sinner, um, the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment, and I'm gonna... I'm drawing you now into my, you know, world and so on. It... what that does is it kills us off, and it make... it, it darkens life, and it makes it small and, and heavy and awful. Right? (laughs) It's like... a- and... but see, compared to the, to the contrasting thing, is when you're lost in a moment, you're not concerned about the impression I'm making. You're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself. You're not concerned about this monkey on my back that's always telling me, you know, "Look good and sound right." But you're, you're lost in something.

Lex Fridman 21:43 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 21:44 You're just, you're just talking, you know, to a friend, and, and the two of you together are discovering something true or, or beautiful, or you're lost in a movie, or you're lost in a book. Those are the best moments in life. Those are the best because they're the least prideful moments, right? Th- that's when I... the light comes out.

Lex Fridman 22:00 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 22:00 I, I become radiant because I'm, I'm overcoming this tendency to, to fall in on myself. Um, Dante is so good because the way he pictures, um, Satan in Divine Comedy, and, you know, he's at the center of the earth, so li- like a black hole that way. Like, he's at the center of gravity. He's at the heaviest place. And he... there's not fire where he is, but ice. It's a much, much better image that you're frozen in place and you're stuck. And he's got wings, right? And they used to be angel wings, 'cause he's an angel, but now they're like bat wings for Dante, and they're flapping. And all they're doing is making the world around him colder because he's ice. He's stuck in his own iciness, and then he's, he's beating his wings over the ice, making everyone else colder. It's a great image. And then he has... this is cool too. He has three faces, uh, Satan, because he's a simulacrum of the Trinity, so every sinner thinks he's God. So, "I pretend I'm God." So, he's got the three faces, and from all six eyes, he weeps. Also, from all three mouths, he's chewing a sinner. He's got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the three mouths, you know, the three traitors. But (laughs) I always thought, it, it's just a great image of all of us sinners, is we're stuck, it's heavy, it's cold, we're chewing on our past resentments, we're weeping in our sadness, and we're making the world around us colder. It's beautiful. It's a great... so that's pride. See, that, that's an image of pride, 'cause Satan, that's his great sin, pride, which is why he needed Michael, right, Mikael, who's like God. So the, the great challenge to him, which (laughs) we need all the time, is someone to say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You're not God." But the minute we say, "I'm God," vroom, black hole. I now cave in on myself. I suck everything into myself, and I turn into Do- Dante's Satan. So that's a great image. That's pride. That's the most fundamental. That's the uber capital sin. It's... all the other ones flow from that in a way.

Lex Fridman 24:06 So, in general, empathy, humility, compassion, love thy neighbor-

Bishop Robert Barron 24:11 All of 'em.

Lex Fridman 24:11 ... is the way to fight the s- the sin of pride.

Bishop Robert Barron 24:14 Right. Which is why the masters tend to say... this was Bernard. Saint Bernard was asked, uh, "What are the three most important virtues?" And he said, "Humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas."

Lex Fridman 24:24 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 24:24 Because it's the opposite of pride.

Lex Fridman 24:26 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 24:26 So... but, you know, there bring Aquinas in again, uh...'cause we think, "Oh, hum- humility, I'm, I'm, I'm no good." That's not what it means at all. It means what I was describing before, when you're, you're just lost in something.

Lex Fridman 24:37 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 24:37 You're just lost in it. Um, my image... you know, I, I live out in Santa Barbara, and, uh, I like to walk on the beach out there. And there's a section of the beach where they let the dogs, you know, run free without leashes. And, uh, when you see a dog, and...... he's well cared for and his master is right there, and, and the master is throwing the tennis ball out into the surf, and the dog goes galloping out into the surf and he gets it with a big smile and comes running back. Th- that's, that's humility, that's an image of heaven, because he's just lost in that moment. He doesn't care about impressing anybody, he doesn't care about, uh, what people think of him. He's just lost in it. That's it. That's heaven, right? And those moments in our life when we s- when we get that, it's a little hint of, of paradise. But, but the trouble is most of us live, frankly, most of the time, in various levels of hell, you know, and we're, and we're dealing with these deadly sins. Like envy flows from pride, because if I'm prideful, I'm a black hole, I'm in curvatus unae, I'm collapsed in, what am I really gonna be concerned about? "That guy is getting more attention than I am. That guy is richer than I am. Th- th- that, that lady, she has got a bigger reputation than I do. And why, why don't I have that?" Right?

Lex Fridman 25:46 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 25:46 So envy is a very close daughter of pride. Um, anger flows from ... (laughs) you know, why do I get angry? The dog isn't getting angry on the beach when he's running after the tennis ball, but I get angry all the time, sputter with anger when things aren't going my way, and, and you're insulting me, and you're not doing what I want, and I'm being hurt, my reputation. So anger flows from pride, you know? All of them do, all of the deadly sins do.

Lex Fridman 26:10 So you said, "I'm a sinner." So we're all sinners.

Bishop Robert Barron 26:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 26:16 Um, and you mentioned Satan. Where's the ... so there's heaven and hell, there's God and Satan, where's the line between what it means to be good and, uh, not good enough? Or I, I, I hesitate to use the word sort of, uh, evil, but, uh-

Bishop Robert Barron 26:39 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 26:39 ... maybe, uh, overwhelmingly sinful. (laughs) Where's the line between hell and heaven?

Bishop Robert Barron 26:45 Think of them as limit concepts, maybe, they're like heuristic-

Lex Fridman 26:48 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 26:48 ... devices.

Lex Fridman 26:48 Yes.

Bishop Robert Barron 26:49 So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God. So think of the dog on the beach who has just ... he's fallen in love with his environment, with his master, with the surf. He's just lost in it, right?

Lex Fridman 27:01 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 27:01 He's forgotten himself, he's transcended himself, and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place. Now imagine the limit of that is the, is the friendship with God that we talked about, that I become the friend of God, I become so forgetful of myself, so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God, that I'm ... I've, I found beatitudo, right? I found joy, the beatific vision we call it. Uh, that's the limit case. That's where, that's where we're tending. That's where God wants us to go. Think of hell as a limit case in the opposite direction. That's curvatus unae. That's the black hole. And we're all sinners, meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum, you know. We, we have good days and bad days, and we have good moments and bad moments, and I can be drawn toward sin. What's God's purpose and, and Christianity's reading is to bring us out of that, you know. Now where did he go? He went all the way into it, to get us out of it. It's, it's like pulling a sock back out. The sock is inside out, you have to go all the way in and pull it back out. And so God had to go all the way down, you know. And there, there's the trajectory of the incarnation. Though he was in the form of God, you know, this is Saint Paul, "Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men." But then he was known to be of human estate and he accepted even death, death on a cross. And so Paul imagines that the incarnation is this downward journey in order to get all of us, right? (laughs) All of us who have been ... were stuck, were stuck in our sin.

Lex Fridman 28:40 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 28:40 And so, again, Paul says, "He became sin on the cross." It's a really, really powerful idea. He wasn't a sinner, 'cause then he'd need to be saved too. He's not a sinner. But he entered into our dysfunction in order to pull us back out of it.

Lex Fridman 28:55 So that's a really powerful message in embodiment, uh, um, sort of educating the world about sin. Th- that said, day-to-day, there is like, uh, oscillations in terms of how much, um, each human sins, and there's a struggle against that. So, you know, that dog that loses himself-

Bishop Robert Barron 29:21 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 29:22 ... on the beach may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that-

Bishop Robert Barron 29:26 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 29:26 ... that was, uh, (laughs) may, may have been not the best dog he could be, uh, leading up to that. So how ... you know, if it's a math equation, what is the final calculation look like in terms of ending up in heaven? What does it mean to live a good life in the end? Is it, um, the average amount of sin you do is, is low? Can you ... are you allowed to make mistakes?

Bishop Robert Barron 29:52 Yeah. Uh, you know, the, the, the metric is love, right? And love is not a feeling, it's an act of the will, to will the good of the other. That's Aquinas again, "To will the good of the other as other." You see, and that's the anti-black hole principle. When I, I, I don't-

Lex Fridman 30:08 To will the good of the other as the other.

Bishop Robert Barron 30:11 As other. See, 'cause if, if I'm willing your good because it's good for me, so, uh, I get, you know, it's good for you that I'm on this program, I guess. I'm, I'm willing your good, but that's 'cause it's gonna redound to my benefit.

Lex Fridman 30:21 Right.

Bishop Robert Barron 30:21 That's just an indirect egotism. That's why, see, love is really rare and strange, that I really want what's good for you as other.

Lex Fridman 30:32 Yes. Yes.

Bishop Robert Barron 30:32 So not connected to the black hole tendency of my own prideful ego. When I've broken that, I've forgotten self, and I've moved into the space of your own good. That's what love is. Now God wants us to be, you know, "By this they will know that you're my disciples, that you love one another," Jesus says. So that's it.Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth, and we're better or worse at that. Uh, the point of a church is to graft us onto Christ, that we might become more and more conformed to love. But, you know, the final calculus, I'll leave that to God. I mean, I, uh, but, but use love as the metric. At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience, did I will the good of the other today? How, how effective was I at that? And, and be, this is like Ignatius of Loyola, be brutally honest. Or was I just willing someone's good because it was good for me? Uh, what, where, where were those moments where I was like the dog on the beach?

Lex Fridman 31:28 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 31:28 See? See, and, and see, play it the way, not so much God the lawgiver surveying, and you did, you know, three of those and four. It's God wants us to be fully alive. The, Saint Irenaeus is one of my great heroes, ancient, you know, patristic figure, and his famous line is (Latin) , right? "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." See, and, and that gets us over this sort of obsession with illegalism, and, "Did I do enough?" And, "Is that, that's a big enough sin?" And God wants us fully alive. The key to that is willing the good of the other. He, he died (laughs) that we might come to a richer, uh, appropriation of that.

Lex Fridman 32:08 So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world, or to love the world deeply. And what love means is the other. Is, uh-

Bishop Robert Barron 32:21 Get out of yourself, right.

Lex Fridman 32:22 It's, it's, it's the humility, yeah, getting out of yourself.

Bishop Robert Barron 32:26 Let go.

Lex Fridman 32:26 But that somehow is not, uh, that's not even selfless, because, uh, the word selfless requires there to be a self. Uh, it's, it's almost like just letting go.

Bishop Robert Barron 32:38 You might talk about, like, a gift of self, that you, you're self-aware, but you, you give a gift of yourself. Your self becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself, but it becomes a radiant source of life for others. I think Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense of herself, it seems to me, but it was, um, to light other people, uh, up so that they might be, uh, uh, radiant. You know, that's the game. So I think you, you could probably articulate it that way too.

Lex Fridman 33:04 Yeah. I love love. It's such an interesting thing.

Bishop Robert Barron 33:08 But we have to be hard-nosed about it, like, you know, your friend Dostoevsky, that love is a harsh and dreadful thing.

Lex Fridman 33:13 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 33:13 Right? It's not a feeling. And our, our culture has so sentimentalized love, that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want, and that's not it at all. Love is always correlated to the order of the good, 'cause if I'm willing the good of the other, I have to know what that good is, right? (laughs)

Lex Fridman 33:28 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 33:28 So a parent that says, "Oh, I'll give the kid whatever she wants," well, that's not love. That's, that's indulgence or that's sentimentality. But I have to know what the goods really are if I'm gonna will them for you, right?

Lex Fridman 33:39 Yeah, I, in some sense, you're, you're, you're absolutely right. A component of love is the struggle to know the other.

Bishop Robert Barron 33:47 Right.

Lex Fridman 33:47 It's the struggle to understand. I mean, that's, um, that's what I mean by empathy, is the-

Bishop Robert Barron 33:52 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 33:53 It's not, it's, yeah, it's not Valentine's Day romantic gifts. It's, uh, it's a struggle. It's like, uh, trying to understand, trying to perturb your own mind and that of another human being to try to figure out who they are, what they want, what makes them, uh, happy, what are they-

Bishop Robert Barron 34:13 Right.

Lex Fridman 34:13 ... afraid of, what are they hoping for. And it's like a dance.

Bishop Robert Barron 34:18 Right.

Lex Fridman 34:18 A dance of conversation, a dance of-

Bishop Robert Barron 34:20 Yes.

Lex Fridman 34:20 ... uh, just, like, shared experiences and all that kind of stuff. And all of that requires for you to be, I guess, um, yeah, empathize, imagine yourself in their place, and then love that person when you're living inside that person. (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 34:40 Yeah. Several minutes ago about the pillars of Christianity.

Lex Fridman 34:43 Yes.

Bishop Robert Barron 34:43 So we talked about God, talked about incarnation, but you're getting now to a third key one, namely the Trinity, because we're monotheists, right? But we don't think God is monolithically one. We think God is a play of persons. And the Father, from, from all eternity, uh, by a great mental act, forms his interior word, as Aquinas puts it. And that's the Logos, right? That's the Verbum. That's the, the Word by which the Father knows himself, and we call it the Son. So the Imago, it's the image of the Father. But then, see, the great thing is that Imago is not like just a dead image on a, on a mirror or a dead image in a pond or something. It's, it's a full reflection of the Father's being. He's one in being with the Father. Therefore, the Son has everything the Father has except being the Father. But that means that the two of them look at each other and they're just crazy in love with each other, because (laughs) the, the Father is the fullness of being. The Son is the fullness of being. And they're so crazy in love with each other that they, this is, um, uh, Fulton Sheen, uh, put it this way, that there's this (sighs) . They just, they love each other with this sigh, and we call that the Spiritus Sanctus. That's the Holy Breath, right? The Holy (sighs) Sigh of Love between the Father and the Son. And, and that's, it's one being, (laughs) so one essence, we say, of God, but in these three persons. But all your language about, like, dance and play and community, the Greek fathers talked about perichoresis, which means God, the three persons kind of sit in a choir together. So they, they, um, they sing together, you know? And, and that's why, see, Christianity is unique in this claim, that God is love. So every religion will say God loves, you know, in some way. Love is an attribute of God. God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes.

Bishop Robert Barron 36:43 But Christianity is unique in all the religions in saying that God is love.

Lex Fridman 36:47 And somehow, the Holy Trinity embodies that idea. I mean, that-

Bishop Robert Barron 36:52 Yes.

Lex Fridman 36:52 ... philosophically, has always been confusing to me.... w- what it means to be three things and at the same time be one God; the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. What, what is this dance between these three? What, what exact... Like, how do, how do you visualize? How do you understand this? (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 37:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 37:15 This, this very, this very fascinating essential thing for Christianity.

Bishop Robert Barron 37:20 The first thing I'd say is what we already have been sort of talking about, is if you say God is love, and most people probably say, "Yeah, I like that. That's a good idea. God is love." But it's very peculiar because if he is love, there has to be in his unity a lover, a beloved, and the love that they share. Otherwise, he, he isn't love by his very essence. He would love. It would be an attribute of God or an action of God. But if it's his very nature, there has to be lover, beloved, and love shared.

Lex Fridman 37:49 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 37:49 And the tradition eventually came to see that. The, the image I was using before of, of the Father, his imago, the Son, well, that's born of God's infinite mind. So of, of course God has an image of himself. Heck, I've got an image of myself. That's something I can pull off as a, as a puny little creature. God, in his infinity, has a perfect imago of himself. And they have to fall in love with each other. What else can they do? Because they're in the presence of infinite good. (laughs) And so it has to follow that you then have the shared love that connects them, and that's how we generate, if you want, this idea of the three persons in God.

Lex Fridman 38:28 Let me ask you about the church.

Bishop Robert Barron 38:30 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 38:30 One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism is the Catholic Church.

Bishop Robert Barron 38:37 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 38:38 What is the Catholic Church?

Bishop Robert Barron 38:40 I would say it's the mystical body of Jesus. So as I said before, it's not an organization. If we do it that way, we're gonna miss it. It's got organizational elements to it, you know, so I'm a bishop, I'm a, I'm a office holder within the church. But the church is an organism, not a, not an organization. So it's a organism of interconnected cells, as I said, namely all of the baptized, gathered around Christ mys- in a mystical union. That's the church.

Lex Fridman 39:07 But there's buildings.

Bishop Robert Barron 39:09 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 39:09 There's titles.

Bishop Robert Barron 39:10 Sure.

Lex Fridman 39:11 Uh-

Bishop Robert Barron 39:11 'Cause it manifests-

Lex Fridman 39:12 Or is that-

Bishop Robert Barron 39:12 ... itself institutionally then, but-

Lex Fridman 39:14 So are the sort of heavy things about that all have to do with pride?

Bishop Robert Barron 39:19 Yeah, sure. Whatever is corrupt in it.

Lex Fridman 39:20 The sexiness of the buildings. (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 39:22 Yeah. No, whatever is corrupt in the church, of course, it comes from pride, from sin. And one thing I like about... You know, the, the New Testament is so clear on that. I mean, Paul is... In his little tiny communities, so before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything, Paul has these little tiny communities of Christians, like in Corinth and Ephesus, you know. (laughs) What's the one thing we know about them? Is they fought with each other. Uh, 'cause Paul's always up- upbraiding them and, you know, telling them, "Come on, would you people get it together?" And, you know, "Who's bewitched you?" And so from the beginning, we've been fighting with each other because we're made up of sinners, and, uh, you know. So one of the things we do in, in Catholic ecclesiology, is the official name for like the study of the church, is to talk about the treasure in earthen vessels. Paul's language again. The treasure is Christ. The treasure is, is, is the love he's bequeathed to the world. That's the treasure that we have, but it's always held in these really fragile vessels, namely us, and so it's gonna be marked by corruption and stupidity and pride and everything else.

Lex Fridman 40:21 Well, nevertheless, there's a hierarchy, there's titles, and so on.

Bishop Robert Barron 40:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 40:27 If we remove pride from the picture as the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy that makes up this one organism, this living organism-

Bishop Robert Barron 40:35 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 40:36 ... what's the, what's the role of the Pope, for example? What is the role of, uh, a bishop, for example? Like, what is the role of the hierarchy in terms of the broader vision of Christianity, Catholicism as a religion?

Bishop Robert Barron 40:52 I'm a devotee of this guy named Johann Adam Müller, who was a theologian early part of the 19th century, and he was part of the kind of Romantic movement, and he said the purpose of the Pope is to symbolize and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church. So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church. Who's a bishop? The bishop is the personal symbol of the unity of a diocese. Who's a pastor of a parish? He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish. So he, he understood it not so much organizationally as organically again. It was like, um, what? Uh, the- that around which the pattern, uh, organizes itself. And if you don't have that, that unifying figure, the community will kind of fessibrate, and, and you see that all the time without headship, we would say. So it's more symbolic and organic than it is, um, organizational.

Lex Fridman 41:47 So symbols for community, but there's such, uh, fascinating peculiarities to each individual symbol. To... There's different characteristics that make up the different people that have different, uh, ways of communicating, they have different hopes and fears and all that kind of stuff. What, um... If, if they're all symbols, what's the role of the different peculiarities of those symbols, of being an inspiring uniter versus maybe a stronger type of, um, more judgmental kind of communicator, all that kind of stuff? I mean-

Bishop Robert Barron 42:28 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 42:28 ... can, can you maybe speak to the human part of the s- of these symbols?

Bishop Robert Barron 42:34 Yeah, well, I, I might just shift to another image, um, of shepherd, so that's a classic biblical image, and as a bishop, I walk around with this thing called a crosier which is a shepherd's staff, right? So it's the symbol of the bishop's office, and the (laughs) crosier though is a kind of, um... It's a kind of in your face thing in a way 'cause it's got the-... the, the end of it was meant to hold off wild animals, and then the, the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back to the fold, right?

Lex Fridman 43:01 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 43:01 So I walk in with them, people, "Oh, this is nice. Oh, look at the bishop coming in." But that's a kind of in-your-face symbol that I'm here to defend the church against predators, and I'm also here to draw people in who are wandering too far away.

Lex Fridman 43:14 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 43:15 So that's okay. I mean, that's part of, of the role of the hierarchy and the pope and bishops and, and pastors. Pastor just means shepherd, right? So I'm the shepherd of a parish. So that's okay. It's not like just all, you know, sunshine and light and what a pretty image. Uh, the, the one who embodies the unity of the community is also the shepherd.

Lex Fridman 43:34 Okay, but again, leaning on the human thing-

Bishop Robert Barron 43:38 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:39 ... the church is an institution.

Bishop Robert Barron 43:41 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 43:42 And I don't know if you've heard, but there is a, an element to power that corrupts.

Bishop Robert Barron 43:47 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:47 And absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the old saying goes. Um, let, let me ask you something else that came up on the Reddit, uh, AMA.

Bishop Robert Barron 43:57 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:57 Megachurches and the prosperity gospel.

Bishop Robert Barron 44:00 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 44:00 And you've mentioned that you may not be a f- a fan. What are your views on this? And what are your views in general of money and power corrupting the heads of these institutions?

Bishop Robert Barron 44:13 Uh, I don't like the prosperity gospel because, uh, the gospel is about Jesus' journey into radical self-forgetfulness on the cross. And he never makes a promise of earthly, um, wellbeing.

Lex Fridman 44:27 Can you explain what the prosperity gospel is?

Bishop Robert Barron 44:29 Yeah, the view that, you know, if I follow Jesus and I follow God with great trust that I will be rewarded with wealth and, and position and status in this world. It might be God's will when I get that. But, you know, Aquinas said this, that, uh, say, I look at a, a very sinful person, I say, "God, he's got a great house and he's richer than I am and all that." Aquinas says, "Yeah, but what... Maybe that's a punishment 'cause maybe all that is leading him away from God, and actually that's God's way of punishing him. And the fact that you don't have wealth and a big house is actually a great gift to you because now it frees you for doing God's will." So we, (laughs) we can't read, you know, God's favor in worldly terms. I would say God's favor is am I awakened to deeper love? Then I know that I'm finding God's favor. Now God might decide, sure, I want you to have this and that. I want, I wanna provide this to you. Fine, then I say, "Thank you, Lord. How can I use it as an instrument of love?" See, all the masters talk about detachment, and that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel as though I'm, I'm getting attached now to all these material advantages, and I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor. No, let go of all that. You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love. So if you're rich, the right question is, "Okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich so that... What can I do, how can my riches be an expression of love?" If I'm popular, if I'm healthy, "Okay, why am I popular? Why am I healthy? How can I use that for your good?" I'm sick, in bed, I'm suffering. "Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love?" So I, I'd rather measure it that way than through worldly success. That's why I'm against the prosperity gospel.

Lex Fridman 46:10 Okay. So there, there's, uh, don't seek worldly possessions, but-

Bishop Robert Barron 46:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 46:15 ... whatever happens to you, good or bad, seek how that could be used to increase the amount of love in the world.

Bishop Robert Barron 46:24 Right. The image I, I love for this is the wheel of fortune, which is a, a device in a lot of the gothic cathedrals and it's, it's this great circle, right, this wheel. At the top of is, is a king and then it turns this way and it's a king who's lost his crown, and the bottom is a pauper, and then over here is a king, is a guy climbing up to power, right? And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ. And the idea is just very simple but very profound that the wheel is life, you know? It's sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down! Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige, other times you're losing it, you're going down. Other times you got none of it, other times you're coming back up. Okay. Don't live on the rim of the wheel. It'll make you crazy. E- every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety. Where you should live is the center of the wheel where Christ is, right? 'Cause that's the link now to the eternity of God. That's the point of, of love where love can flow through you to the world. And then you can look at the wheel. You're a Beatles fan, right?

Lex Fridman 47:21 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 47:21 I think I discovered that. I love the Beatles.

Lex Fridman 47:22 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 47:23 And, uh, the song that always comes to my mind when I, when I think of that image is John Lennon at the end of his life. So a guy that, I mean, rode the wheel of fortune like crazy, you know, he was w- a- at the top of the world in every way. And then Beatles break up and he kinda loses it, and then he's at the lost weekend in the '70s, he's at the very bottom. When he died, he was just kinda coming back up again. But the song I always think of is Watching the Wheels, right? "I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round. I really love to watch them roll 'cause I'm no longer riding on the merry-go-round." That's right out of the medieval mystics that he's not riding on the, on the wheel, he's just watching it go round and round. That's the point of, uh, the Greeks called it apatheia, and the Latins called it, um, uh, in- indifference. You know, not like I'm blase, it just means I'm, I'm detached from success, failure, less success, more succes- I'm detached from that. I'm sitting here watching the wheels go round and round 'cause I'm not riding on it anymore. The mystics have always made that transition.

Lex Fridman 48:25 Let me ask you a difficult question about the darker sides of human nature, of human power, of institutions. What's your view on the long history and widespread reports of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests? So this is a, a difficult topic, but maybe an important one to shine a light on.

Bishop Robert Barron 48:45 Yeah, it's awful, you know, and it's, it's been a problem go back to Peter Damian back in the 11th century was talking about it. So it's been a problem and whenever really sinful human beings have been in close proximity to children, we've, we find this issue. Has it been around the church? Yes, um...Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years? Absolutely. Um, I'm glad the church has made important strides, and it has. Uh, back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas Accords where the Bishops of America put a lot of these protocols in place that really have been effective at ameliorating this problem. Uh, the numbers spiked in the '70s and '80s, and that's been demonstrated over and over again. And then they fell dramatically after that. So th- that's not to excuse anything, but it's to say I think progress has been made with it .

Lex Fridman 49:36 What's the impulse to secrecy?

Bishop Robert Barron 49:38 Yeah, well, to protect institutions, you know, and that's always, that's a sinful, uh, instinct. Uh, I mean, not altogether. I mean, sure, an institution is, is worth protecting, but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent to people's, uh, wellbeing, then you're in trouble.

Lex Fridman 49:52 So institutions' role should be transparent and honest with the sins of its members an- and of itself?

Bishop Robert Barron 50:01 Sure. Sure, yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:02 (sighs) So maybe you can speak to the fact, uh, as a priest, a bishop, as part of Catholicism, you're not allowed to marry, you're not allowed to have sex. Uh, you're s- you're sworn to celibacy.

Bishop Robert Barron 50:21 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 50:22 What is, what is behind that idea? What is the sort of... We talked about some broad stroke-

Bishop Robert Barron 50:28 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:29 ... ideas of love.

Bishop Robert Barron 50:31 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:31 Uh, what's behind the idea of celibacy?

Bishop Robert Barron 50:33 Well, and that's a good way to get at it. It's a path of love. So it, the church is always in favor of inculcating love. Marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy. Um, Saint Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied with the things of, of this world and family and those who are free from that are freer for doing the, the work of God. So that's kind of a pragmatic, uh, justification for celibacy. And we still, I think, take that seriously. I look at my own life. I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things and go places and, and, and, and, uh, minister in a way that I could not if I had been married. So I get it, I get the pragmatic side. But I, I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it. Um, i- i- i- remember Jesus was challenged about the person who had, you know, a whole series of, of, um, husbands and, and then they all died, and so in heaven, which one will, will, uh, you know, which, which husband will the wife have? And his answer is, is, "In heaven, people don't marry and they're not given in marriage." There's a, there's a higher way of love. It's a more radical way of love that's not tied to a particular, but I think through God is tied to everybody. The celibate... And this has been from the beginning of the church, not as a law, but there, there were celibates from the very beginning of the church, including Jesus, of course, (laughs) and Paul. Um, they sensed something, that that way of living mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven. It's a sign even now within this world of how we will all love in heaven. So in that way, it's a bit like pacifists. Um, I'm glad there are pacifists in the church, and I, I've known some, you know, some very powerful, uh, witnesses to pacifism. I'm glad they're pacifists because they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares and, you know, it... Heaven's a place of radical peace that some people even now live it. At the same time, I'm glad not everyone is a pacifist 'cause I, I would hold with the church to just war theory that there's... Sometimes all we can do in this finite world is to, is to fight, you know, uh, manifest wickedness. So-

Lex Fridman 52:46 And just in the same way they're just sex? (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 52:49 Well, no, right, I'm glad there are celibates, but I'm glad not everyone is a celibate.

Lex Fridman 52:53 Yeah. (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 52:53 I wouldn't want that. I mean, 'cause, because, uh, married love is a marvelous expression of, of the divine love. So that's why it's good there are some. And it's, it's always been a small number.

Lex Fridman 53:03 The actual experience of it, uh, would you... Uh, the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fasting? So I've been enjoying fasting, uh, recently, so not eating-

Bishop Robert Barron 53:15 Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:15 ... uh, for several days, that kind of stuff, and that somehow brings you even deep... I'm mean, generally, I'm in love with everything and na- with nature and everything, I see the beauty in the world, but there's a greater intensity to that when you're fasting, for example.

Bishop Robert Barron 53:31 Yeah, yeah, I, I might use the language of, you know, sublimation or redirection of energy and all that. Um, I, I think that's true. There's a certain sublimation of energies into, um, prayer, into mysticism, into ministry, um, a redirection of energies. So it's meant to be life-enhancing the same way fasting is. It's meant ultimately to be life-enhancing and make you healthier and happier. So celibacy is a, is a path of love, and I think it does involve, yeah, a certain redirection of energies. You could say that.

Lex Fridman 54:03 Don't you think... Do you think it's a heavy burden for some humans to bear-

Bishop Robert Barron 54:11 Sure.

Lex Fridman 54:11 ... for some priests to bear? Is that-

Bishop Robert Barron 54:12 Sure.

Lex Fridman 54:13 ... is that the thing given this, the, the, the sexual abuse scandal, um, is that the thing that breaks humans?

Bishop Robert Barron 54:22 No, I, I wouldn't tie that to celibacy, and that's been, uh, demonstrated a- over and over again. There's a priest named Andrew Greeley who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago, and Andy did a lot of research. He was a sociologist of religion, did a lot of research into that very question, and there really is not a correlation between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse of children or of anybody. So I, I wouldn't make that correlation. Uh-

Lex Fridman 54:44 So bad people, sinful people are going to do what they're going to do?

Bishop Robert Barron 54:48 I think people, uh, who have a tendency toward, uh, abusing children sexually are drawn to situations where they get ready access to kids and they get institutional cover.

Lex Fridman 55:00 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 55:00 So that's... You know, we can go through the list of, you know, from sports and, and boy scouts, et cetera. Um, and that's been proven again and again. So I, I would tie it more to that. I wouldn't tie it to celibacy.

Lex Fridman 55:11 So the, the challenge, of course, there's all kinds of, y- you said institutional cover, there's all kinds of institutions that cover for-

Bishop Robert Barron 55:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:18 ... people that don't......that do, uh, evil onto the world, that do, uh, sinful things-

Bishop Robert Barron 55:24 Sure.

Lex Fridman 55:24 ...after world. But there's something about the church, which is, um, the, as an organism s- is supposed to be an embodiment of-

Bishop Robert Barron 55:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:33 ...good in this world.

Bishop Robert Barron 55:34 Right.

Lex Fridman 55:34 Of love in this world. And it, it breaks people's hearts-

Bishop Robert Barron 55:38 Yes.

Lex Fridman 55:38 ...to see this kind of, even a small amount-

Bishop Robert Barron 55:40 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:41 ...uh, this kind of thing happen within the church. It, it wakes you up to the cruelty, the absurdity of the world sometimes.

Bishop Robert Barron 55:48 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:48 Like, (laughs) it's, it's, uh, it's back to the, the question of why do bad things happen to good people?

Bishop Robert Barron 55:56 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:56 Why does God allow this kind of thing to happen? And, uh, so maybe unanswerable que- do you have an answer to that question?

Bishop Robert Barron 56:04 I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language, which is true enough. It's completely emotionally unsatisfying, but it's naming it, uh, uh, truthfully enough. And it goes back to Augustan, which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good. Now, again, I know how unsatisfying that sort of spare austere language can sound, but it gets us off the horn of a, the horns of a dilemma, you know. Aquinas, you know, when he lays out a, a question, he always has the objections first. So is there a God? Well, objection one, objection two, objection three. And he's really, talk about steel manning an argument, Aquinas is great at that.

Lex Fridman 56:44 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 56:45 Um, one of the really steel manned arguments... Is that the right grammatical form to... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 56:51 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 56:51 One of the... What's the past participle about the steel man? Um...

Lex Fridman 56:54 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 56:55 But one of (laughs) the best arguments, he formulates it this way. Um, if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. And his example from his medieval physics, he goes, "If there were an infinite heat, there'd be no cold," right? But God is described as infinitely good. Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil. But there is evil, therefore God does not exist. That's a darn good argument, that's a really persuasive argument. And, and I think, I've done this for a long time in apologetics and in, in sort of higher philosophy, um, that's the best argument against God. Um, but, you know, here's something that before I, I press ahead with it, something I find really interesting. I think the three best arguments against God all come from within the religious tradition.

Lex Fridman 57:43 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 57:44 Namely, uh, the book of Job. So Job, he's great. I mean, he's a great guy, he does everything right. He's the, he's God's great servant, and he, and he's punished in every (laughs) possible way. You know, he has every possible suffering. Aquinas' argument from The Summa, and then to your friend and mine, uh, Dostoevsky. I, I think in The Brothers Karamazov, uh, Ivan's argument when he's trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha. And it's, um, uh, uh, these examples drawn, they, they think, from Dostoevsky, from the headlines of his own time of the most abject cruelty to children, like an innocent child being made to suffer. How in God's name could that happen if God exists and he's all good? So I, I get it. But see the book of Job, Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky, these are all profoundly believing people. It's like when I hear, um, Stephen Fry, you know, the, uh, famously atheist writer, he, he will bring out this argument with great authority. He does, of, of, you know, children with bone cancer and worms that go into the eyes of children and blind them before they kill them, and... But he's been proceeded by the author of Job, Thomas Aquinas and Dostoevsky who, who stood right... Uh, uh, think of Job in, in the whirlwind. He s- he stands there in the, in the whirlwind, you know? So you can't blame the Christian tradition for not dealing with this problem, you know, for like, uh, um, brushing it under the carpet. I mean, it, it has, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.

Lex Fridman 59:23 It's still a difficult problem to deal with that there's all this-

Bishop Robert Barron 59:26 Of course.

Lex Fridman 59:26 ...cruelty of the world. It's, uh, there's a lot of example through history just, uh-

Bishop Robert Barron 59:33 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 59:33 ...in my own family history with the Soviet Union, with-

Bishop Robert Barron 59:37 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 59:37 ...uh, Stalin.

Bishop Robert Barron 59:39 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 59:41 The atrocities that Stalin has brought onto its, the people of the Soviet Union throughout the 20th century is, um, uh, nearly immeasurable.

Bishop Robert Barron 59:51 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 59:52 Um, and yet when you look at the entirety of human history, you'll see progress, not just the Soviet Union, but the entirety of the civilization throughout the 20th century, and Stalin has a role to play. There's a, there's a dark aspect to somehow evil helps us make progress. And I don't know how to put that in the calculation. It's, uh, I don't, you know... On the local scale, I want to alleviate suffering. I'm-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:00:24 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:00:24 ...probably a lean, heavily lean pacifist, not out of weakness, but out of strength. But, man-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:00:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:00:33 ...it does seem that, uh, history sprinkle with evil, and that evil does somehow nudge us towards good.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:00:42 Yes, sometimes we can see it, and that's where the, that's where the idea comes from, that evil's permitted to bring about some greater good. And we can sometimes really see it. Um, can we always see it? No. In fact, typically we don't see it. But now you bring another factor into this, which is the difference between our minds and God's mind. So our minds, I mean, look, even they're remarkably capacious, but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of, of space and time. And even like, our eyes can only take in so much of the light spectrum and that these little, these little ape sensorium that we have that can just take in a l- a little tiny bit of reality, really.How are we ever in a position to say, "Oh, no, there's no possible good that would ever come from that"? E- even the greatest evil that, you know, every... Dostoevsky and, and, uh, can conjure up, and Stephen Fry, still, h- how could we have the arrogance to say, "I know there's no good that could ever come from that. I know there's no morally justifiable reason why God would ever permit that." 'Cause I think that's hubris, uh, uh, to the nth degree for us to say that. And that's, see, the assumption behind this claim that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good. Now God understands it, but we're like, we're like little kids, you know, uh, like a f- four-year-old, and their parents make a decision, and we say, "What in the... Why in the world would you do this to me?" Um, th- this is my pastoral experience. Years ago, there was a young father and his son was like three or something, and he was in the hospital for something, I forgot what it was, but he had to undergo surgery, right? So after the surgery, he's in great pain, this poor kid, this three-year-old kid. And the dad was there with him, you know, holding his hand, and, you know. And the son, this is what the father told me, he said, "He's looking at me, like, 'What gives here?' I mean, why would you... You love me, I- I've always assumed that, and yet you're presiding over this somehow, you're approving of this, and doing nothing to get me out of it," right? And he, he said the kid couldn't articulate that, but his eyes did, and his eye... And, and the father said, "It was just killing me because I knew I couldn't explain it to him." And it's true. I mean, he could vaguely gesture toward... But the kid didn't understand surgery, and cutting his body, and taking things out of it, and that this was gonna, you know, make him much better in the long run. But I remember thinking, that's a great metaphor for us vis-à-vis God is, here's God, infinitely loving God, who's with us all the time, and we say, (laughs) "Wh- what are you doing? Why aren't you taking this away from me?" And the answer, I mean, ultimately, is trust. Trust me, trust me, surrender to me.

Lex Fridman 1:03:24 And when we don't, that's, uh, get, we get in trouble with the old pride and the hubris and all-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:03:30 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:03:30 ...that kind of stuff.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:03:31 Yeah. You know, but, uh, and trust me when I tell you, I mean, I completely get it in my own life. And as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time, with people in pain all the time. I remember as a young priest, there was a, uh, there was a policeman in our parish. He had... So he had a gun. And inexplicably, no one had any clue, he got up one night, shot his son to death, and then shot himself. He's in my parish. So I went to the, uh, the wake, I remember. I show up and I'm, I'm this young, you know, 27-year-old goofball priest. And I, like, roll my collar around and I, I walk in, and there were two coffins. There are two coffins in the room, you know, there's the son and the father, and the mother was there. And she, she went like this to me, like, like... But she saw me, like, "Okay, you're the, you're the religious guy here."

Lex Fridman 1:04:20 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:04:21 "What?" And just by instinct, I, I went like that too. I went like, "I, I don't, I, I don't know what to tell you. I, I can't. I don't have an answer for you." But, but I was there. And I'm not saying to pat myself on the back. It's just, that's where the church goes, because Jesus went there, see? So now, now we're gesturing toward a, uh, more theological response. The first one's more austerely philosophical, that God permits evil to bring about a good, but the theological response is, that's where Christ went, is he went all the way down. He went all the way down into our suffering. A- and see, the cross as the limit case of, of, of evil (pauses) , um, humiliation, and cruelty, and institutional injustice, and psychological suffering, and spiritual suffering, and death. It's all there, and that's where the Son of God went. And I would say that's why as a, as a priest, I, I went there. That's my job is to go to those places, you know? So that's the ultimate, like, answer to the problem. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:05:26 So there is... Uh, we can't comprehend it, but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:05:34 We trust it because we know on other grounds of God's existence. See, I, I, I would resist the claim that, "Well, this is such a, such a knockdown argument, so now we know there is no God." I would say, "No, there are all kinds of other rational warrants for God." And so I, I know that God exists, I know that God is infinite love, and now I gotta square that with this experience. And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence that God knows what He's about, you know? Again, I know how, how inadequate that always seems to anyone who's suffering, including myself when I'm in, in great suffering, but I think that's the best that we've done in the great tradition.

Lex Fridman 1:06:11 So if you were to steel man that case against God or the existence of God-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:06:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:06:18 ...you find the most convincing argument is there's evil in the world-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:06:23 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:06:23 ...therefore, there's no God.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:06:24 There's too much of it. Yeah, I- if I were to steel man that argument, I'd, I'd do what Stephen Fry does. I would do what Dostoevsky's Ivan does. I, I would do exactly that. I would say there's just too much. And then if you wanna keep pressing it, um, animal suffering. So we talk about human suffering, but the suffering of animals, uh, over the eons and so on, um, isn't there just too much suffering to be reconciled with a, with an infinitely good God? And that's, again, Thomas Aquinas. I've, I've just used his very steel man-ed argument.

Lex Fridman 1:06:55 You mentioned that, uh... Again, on Reddit, somebody asked who your favorite, um, communicator of atheist ideas was a- and you mentioned, uh, Christopher Hitchens.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:07:05 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:07:06 Uh, are there other ideas, um, for atheism that you find particularly challenging?

Bishop Robert Barron 1:07:15 Well, that's the one is the problem of evil. The other objection in Aquinas which has a lot of contemporary, um, resonance is...Can't we just explain everything through natural causes? W- Why would you have to invoke a cause beyond the causes in the world? So as I'm trying to explain, let's say for Aquinas, motion, causality, you know, finality, can't I just do that with natural causes? Wouldn't that suffice to explain it? So I-I get like when naturalists, uh, are speaking or people that are pure materialists, they'll just say, "No, that's perfectly adequate. Uh, a scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience." Um, so I-I would steel man that and say, "Well, show me why we need something more." And to do that, (laughs) you gotta get out of Plato's cave, it seems to me. Because that- that- my- my objection to naturalism is it- it- it's staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable, and making the mistake of saying that's all there is to being, that's all there is that needs to be explained. And long before we get to religion, just stay with Plato. The first step out of the cave, if you combine it now with the parable of the line, is mathematical objects. And- and I'm with those, the many people that would say, "Mathematics is an experience of the immaterial." I- I've stepped out of a merely empirical, physical, naturalistic world the minute I understand a pure number or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship, uh, which would obtain in any possible world, which are not tied to- to space and time. Uh, that's the first step out of the cave. And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections. For example, on the nature of being, I mean, so I could- I could talk about this thing as a physical object, and I can analyze it at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists, you know, up and down through this thing and... Fine, fine, but I'm still in Plato's cave, I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall. But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm, I- I have entered a different realm of being, it seems to me.

Lex Fridman 1:09:28 Do you think it's possible for the cave to expand so large that it encompasses the whole world? Meaning, is it possible to... Is it possible that we're just clueless right now in terms of, um, scientifically speaking, with most of the world we haven't figured out yet, but do you think it's possible through science to know God, to-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:09:49 No.

Lex Fridman 1:09:49 ... look outside the world? So it's fundamentally the limit of-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:09:52 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:09:52 ... the empirical scientific method is that we can't know some of these-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:09:56 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:09:56 ... very big questions?

Bishop Robert Barron 1:09:57 No, I- I- Again, I love the sc- I'm not a scientist and I was never all that good at science, you know, I was more of humanities guy. But I- I love and respect the scientists, but I hate scientism. And scientism is rampant today with especially young people. The reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge, and I- I'm a- a vehement opponent of that. Um, there are dimensions of being that are not capturable through a scientific method of mere observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera. As great as that is, as wonderful as that is, but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave. And that's not to say it's not real, it's just at a relatively low level of reality. Um, you step out of Plato's cave when you go into the- in pure mathematics. That's right, you know that article, I just came across it recently and discovered this whole literature around it, is Eugene Wigner's article in 1960 called The Unreasonable Applicability of Mathematics to the Physical Sciences. I think that's the title of it.

Lex Fridman 1:10:51 Mm-hmm. Or- Or Effectiveness or something like that.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:10:53 Something like that, yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:10:53 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:10:53 But what is so cool is that, you know, he's not a religious man, he was a kind of a secular Jew, um, but yet he uses the word miracle like eight times in that article. And 'cause he just- he's so impressed by the fact that high, complex mathematics describes so accurately the physical world and could be used to- to create things and to manipulate. And why should that be true? Th- there- there's something very weirdly mysterious about that relationship, you know? And I would say it's because you- you've stepped into a higher order of being which is inclusive of a lower level of being. That's the platonic approach, is that as you move... Now I'm going to a different metaphor, you move to higher levels, they're inclusive of the lower levels.

Lex Fridman 1:11:33 Yeah, there's some magic there that seems to, at least in our current understanding of science, uh, to be not quite capturable, even consciousness, the idea of consciousness.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:11:45 Can I ask you, w- where do you think the laws of nature come from? So, uh, I mean, sort of the Wigner question, w- where does the deep- the deep mathematical structure of things come from? How do you explain that?

Lex Fridman 1:11:57 The mathematical structure or the fact that the structure is- is somehow pleasing and beautiful 'cause those are different-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:12:04 Yeah, that's... Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:06 Those- those are two different...

Bishop Robert Barron 1:12:07 No, we'll do the first one for, well, I- I'm just curious necessarily, where do you think it comes from?

Lex Fridman 1:12:11 I tend to believe, even in terms of physics, we don't really know what's going on. There's-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:12:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:15 ... so, so, so much more to be discovered. We're, um, walking around in the dark trying to figure out little puzzles here and there, and we're patting ourselves on the back on how many puzzles we've discovered so far.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:12:27 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:28 Even Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, what are the limits of mathematics' axiomatic systems? I don't- I don't know what is the purpose of mathematics. What is the power of mathematics? Is it just a useful tool to, um, study the world around us or is it something deeper that we're just discovering? Uh, um, all I know from my emotional perspective, now I am an engineer, I'm a ro-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:12:55 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:12:55 ... robotics AI person. From an emotional perspective, I just find the whole thing beautiful.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:13:00 Yeah. But- but that's really cool to me. That's- that's a very interesting clue. See, one of the arguments for God is based on the intelligibility of the world. Th- this very, it's like Wigner, it's a very peculiar fact, it seems to me, that the world is so radically intelligible. Why should that be true? Why should it be the case that being has this intelligible structure to it? So it corresponds to an inquiring mind. So Aquinas can say that the- the intelligible enact is the intellect enact, meaning there's some- there's some deep correspondence between this and that. And it- it's... I- I'm with Wigner, that's, I think, really weird and unreasonable and strange.Now, my answer is (laughs) because the, the creator of the universe is a great mind and, uh, has stamped the world with intelligibility. Uh, in the beginning was the word, right? And the word was with God and all things came to be through the word. D- don't... We shouldn't picture that so much. It's a... It's gesturing in this very powerful direction. There's an intelligence that has imbued the world with intelligibility. And, and we discovered that, you know?

Lex Fridman 1:14:10 There's something about the simplicity of the way the world works that j- that's where the beauty comes from. And yes, there's something profound to the mechanism, whatever that is, um, God that brought that to be.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:14:23 That thought it into being, that the world has been... So the... When the Bible says that God, God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God said... Again, we don't literalize the poetry, but it's, it's very rich that God spoke the world into being. So that means it's, it's been, it's been imbued with intelligibility from the beginning. Um, they, they say that, you know, the condition for the possibility of the, of the western physical sciences was a basically Christian idea, namely that the world is not God, therefore I can, I can analyze it, experiment upon it. I can... I, I don't divinize it.

Lex Fridman 1:14:55 Mm-hmm.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:14:55 I don't have a mystical relation to the world. It's not God. But secondly that it's, (laughs) it's absolutely in every nook and cranny intelligible. And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation. So it's been created. It's not God, it's other than God, but yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind. And when those two things are in place, the sciences get underway, you know? I don't worship the world anymore, but I'm also utterly confident that I can come to know it. And those are theological ideas.

Lex Fridman 1:15:24 Well, we live in this world, so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world by making an assumption that this world is fully understandable.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:15:34 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:15:34 And we don't need to worry about what's outside the world in some sense in order to build bridges and rockets and computers and all that kinda stuff. It's only when we get to the questions that are deeper about why we're here at all, what does it mean to be good-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:15:50 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:15:50 ... all those kinds of things, do we need to reach outside of this world.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:15:54 Well, can I introduce another one? So I talked about mathematics, I think is stepping out of the cave. It's stepping out of just the purely empirical, you know, world. But the very fact that we use a word like universe to me is very interesting. Even if you say multiple universes, to me that it's like, well there (laughs) ... There... So whatever this, the whole is-

Lex Fridman 1:16:12 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:16:12 ... the totality. Universum, turn toward the one. Um, why would we call it that? Why wouldn't, why wouldn't we just call it an aggregate? You know, it's just an aggregate of stuff. It's an aggregate of all k-... But we call it a universe. And, and my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition is, is the intuition of being. So I immediately experience things here, the color and shape, and I can measure them. But when I've really stepped out of the cave and I've now engaged beyond mathematics even, I'm now into metaphysical reflection, I'm interested not just in this thing as an object and how it's colored and shaped, and what its atoms and corks and all that are. That's fine. But I'm interested now in, what does it mean to say this thing is real? So what makes this a being? And then what are the characteristics of being? So now from Aristotle to Heidegger, you know, this question of, of the nature of being. Because see, I always say we call it a universe because it's turned toward the one of being. It's this intuition that whatever from corks to, to galaxies to whatever, g- give me a, a billion other universes, they... It would still be existence, right? (laughs) Is turned toward the one that being unites our experience. And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis. I've, I've taken another step out of the cave. In Plato's language, I'm at the formal level now, beyond mathematics, the level of forms. And, and the formal is inclusive of the ma- mathematical, which is inclusive of the physical. And I think that's Eugene Wigner is that the mathematical includes the physical. It, it is metaphysically prior to it.

Lex Fridman 1:17:43 But here we are sitting in the physical trying to make sense of why the unreasonable effectiveness of the thing that's, uh-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:17:49 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:17:50 ... that's by- is beyond, which is the mathematics.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:17:52 My answer is God. And I, I don't know a better answer. And I... As I read (laughs) Wigner, he wasn't ready to say that. But I think the language is gesturing. Uh, uh, who... I was reading someone recently, some very well-known physicist who said his answer to Wigner's question is that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician.

Lex Fridman 1:18:12 (laughs)

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:13 And I thought, "Yeah, that's right."

Lex Fridman 1:18:16 Uh, let me ask you about Jordan Peterson. You had a great conversation with him.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:19 Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:20 Um, he has a complicated and nuanced view of faith, or faith-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:25 ... period. Um, he has said that he believes in Jesus, the person, and the myth, and some of the-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:32 ... the full richness and complexity that you've t- talked about. But he's surprised by his faith. He's not sure what to make of it.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:39 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:39 He's, he's almost like, uh, meta struggling with, with-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:42 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:42 ... what the heck is it faith means. He's a super powerful intellect that can't compute the faith-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:48 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:48 ... that he's experiencing. So, uh, what are some interesting differences between the two of you, or simi- commonalities, uh, in terms of-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:56 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:57 ... your understanding of faith?

Bishop Robert Barron 1:18:59 He's a very interesting guy. A- and I've had a couple conversations with him. And I, I do think he's, he's moving in the direction of, of faith. And his lectures in the Bible are very fine, I think. Uh, he reminds me of the church fathers because the church fathers would've s- looked at the, they called it the moral sense of the scripture. Peterson probably called it the psychological meaning. But I think he's doing a lot of that. He... A- as I read him and talk to him, I think he's kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus. What I mean there is, for Kant, Jesus is... It's not so much the historical Jesus, this figure from long ago, it's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life. You know, he says he's the image of the person perfectly pleasing to God.And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination as a, as a heuristic, a- as a, as a, a goal that we're tending toward. But the historical person of Jesus for

Lex Fridman 1:19:51 Yeah.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:19:51 ... Kant is like, "Well, let's not fuss about that so much." It's this figure. And as I read Peterson especially and talk to him, I think he's kind of there with the archetype of Jesus, and even language of, like, live as though God exists. That's the als ob of Kant, you know, the, the kind of as if, um, attitude. And w- where I sort of press him when we talk is in the direction of, "No, that's not Christianity yet. I mean, that's enlightenment, uh, moral philosophy." But Christianity is very interested in this historical figure and very interested that God really became one of us. And He's not just an archetype of the moral life. He's someone, He's a person who's invaded our world and gone all the way to the bottom of sin and thereby saved us, you know? So the facticity of Jesus and then the resurrection. So, like, Peterson will talk about the resurrection as a, as a myth and all that.

Lex Fridman 1:20:45 Yes.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:20:45 And you can find that in different cultures, et cetera. But I- I, Christianity, um, is saying something else.

Lex Fridman 1:20:51 So in Christianity when we're talking about who is Jesus, it's not just an archetype.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:20:56 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:20:56 It's not just a myth. It's a historical figure. And the very grounded fact that God became one of us-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:21:04 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:21:04 ... is fundamental to this idea of what it, what Christianity is, what it means to be a Christian. It's the, uh, the sin and the love that came here down to Earth-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:21:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:21:16 ... means we can be one with God. So that's essential. It's not just-

Bishop Robert Barron 1:21:19 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:21:19 ... an archetype.

Bishop Robert Barron 1:21:20 That's right. Y- you know, i- it always strikes me the difference between, let's say, mythic expressions and the New Testament is... (laughs) Read someone like, you know, Carl Jung and then, and then Joseph Campbell, whom he influenced, and then now Jordan Peterson, who's very Jungian, and this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures. And great. I mean, I think it's very interesting,