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I'm Delighted to be joined by the esteemed Dr.

You have a new book out, The Logos of History and the History of Logos.

Actually, it's called Logos Rising, a history of ultimate reality, but it breaks down into 2 parts and they're the parts you just mentioned.

The first part is the history of Logos and the second part is the Logos of history.

It's interesting, you know, kind of looking at history through this lens of Logos, because I haven't seen any other, maybe you can enlighten me, but I haven't seen other Catholic writers do this.

And obviously, Hegel is well known for his historicism, but it seems like kind of a recent phenomenon.

I don't know, did this start with Hegel or did he pick it up?

1 of the early practitioners of meta-history, well, Hegel, it began with Hegel, and then immediately after Hegel's death, there was a reaction.

A reaction set in, and the reaction was basically materialism, best symbolized by Feuerbach and Marx.

But by the end of the century, the historical nature of his thought made a comeback and a bunch of meta-histories appeared.

Wells' History of the World, and that prompted Chesterton to write The Everlasting Man.

And so in many ways, I think I'm following in the footsteps of Chesterton, writing the 21st century version of The Everlasting Man.

But probably the most famous practitioner was Christopher Dawson, and he got started in this doing the age of the gods, which came out in the 1920s and which tried to Basically pull together all of the enormous amount of research that took place in both anthropology and archaeology toward the end of the 19th century.

I guess symbolized best by Schliemann's excavation of Troy.

So at that point, by the middle of the 19th century, just as Dawson was reaching the peak of his career, he had a chair at Harvard, the Stillman chair at Harvard, the reaction said and the reaction was logical positivism.

So it was again a repetition of what happened in the 19th century, this kind of pseudo-scientific reaction to big narratives and you have philosophers confining themselves to quibbling over insignificant semantic details.

what that's what's interesting is, you know, from your perspective, I guess the 2 great periods of the discovery of Logos would be ancient Greece and maybe then the strand of German idealism.

So why do you think that that period in Germany was so fruitful for philosophy and for the study of Logos?

Well, because first of all, Hegel, to give the guy who was probably the pinnacle of it, was in a position where he was reading the ancient Greek philosophers as a theology student studying Lutheran theology, and at the same time that the French Revolution broke out.

So here's a bright man who is at the kind of the crux of all of these things, trying to put all these pieces together.

And it was, you're right, it was, I think it ranks with Greece.

If anything ranks with Greece, maybe nothing ranks with Greece.

But if anything does, I think Germany from the time of Kant's first work to the death of Hegel.

1770s to 1831, an enormous step forward in philosophy.

And again, you have the same dynamic over and over again.

You have basically Newtonian physics leading to the deification of science, which in the philosophical world led to the skepticism of David Hume, and then he reached a dead end.

Well, Kant basically solved Hume's problem and inaugurated another birth of real philosophy in reaction to this pseudo-scientific ideology that got imposed on it.

So was it really thanks to the 1 figure of Kant that it was Germany that had this great sort of philosophical renaissance?

He said that Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumbers.

Now I don't want to mean to denigrate Leibniz and people like that, but I think it was Kant that basically saved Logos.

He saved Logos from skepticism, which is always the danger.

You just think, oh, I can't, you know, this in many ways, the whole nominalist crisis in, in, in the Middle Ages was also a form of skepticism.

Again, it's the same, it's the same dynamic over and over again where you suddenly have a bifurcation of science and religion.

That's the biggest problem in the world right now And that's what the problem is.

And I'm saying, the reason I wrote this book is that Logos reunifies those 2 antinomies.

They're false, it's a false dichotomy, but it's a false dichotomy that is ruling the world right now in terms of the COVID-19 virus.

We still have the same false dichotomy where basically you've got some some loser like Anthony Fauci pronouncing in the name of science and the net result is, well, we can't go to church anymore because science has pronounced this, you know.

So the whole Logos book is to basically put reason back into the hands of the people and say look, you don't have to be a scientist, you don't have to be a microbiologist, You don't have to be a nuclear physicist.

You have logos, and that's enough because ultimately whenever you've got 1 of these guys, some microbiologist saying we have to shut down the economy forever, the politician is going to have to say yes or no, and he's got to apply reason to what the scientists are saying.

So that's pretty much the dynamic of the book and its location right now in history.

Yeah, and it's interesting talking about Kant, because obviously Kant was kind of a reaction to and a rejection of Hume's skepticism and, you know, Kant's project trying to leave a place for God and faith and the soul against this trend of enlightenment reason.

But you know, Kant's philosophy does lead to a kind of agnosticism and you can almost see Kant's philosophy as like taking reason as far as it can go.

So is it just the revelation that's missing from Kant to take him that extra step further?

Or is there something in his philosophy that maybe scholastic philosophers had that he didn't that would have would have taken him to the next level?

Well, Kant was also plagued by the problem of Descartes and what's the relationship between the res cogitans and the res intellectum.

And he basically proposed a subjective solution to the problem.

In other words, he said that his idea of the res extensa was the ding an sich, the thing in itself, and he said it's unknowable.

And so basically everything becomes subjective at that point.

Well, as soon as everything becomes subjective, that's idealism, and that's exactly what Fichte did.

He wrote a book that sounded so much like Kant that they thought Kant wrote it.

And he basically reduced, basically put the whole Ding An Zich, the whole res extensa in question.

And in doing this, he was reacting to Spinoza, who did the exact opposite, who said basically put the whole, he was a pantheist, he basically put the whole res cogitans in question by saying everything is res extensa, everything is nature, everything is the universe and your manifestation of thought.

You think you're thinking, but it's just the universe thinking itself.

So Kant's solution was subjective and as a result, it was provisional, and it led to idealism through Fichte.

Yeah, that was that was an interesting part of this book is, you know, following camp that there's there's this kind of problem lingering where either you have an absolute that's noble and you kind of remove a place for human freedom Or else you have like the absolute subject of fictus.

So then there's this, there's this kind of conflict.

If you have that absolute subject, so the absolute universe is real, but there's no meaning and then you have the absolute subject, which has meaning, but it's not real.

And that's the dichotomy that they were facing at that point.

That's the dichotomy that Hegel faced and that's what he tried to resolve.

Right, and what's Hegel's solution to that then?

Well it's it's it's crypto-Lutheran theology, That's the whole point.

It's like can we pretend first of all, what is the solution to this transcendent universe that doesn't care about you and the imminent universe that does, but it's not transcendent.

Well, it's the incarnation Because that was the dichotomy at the time of Plato and Aristotle.

You had 2 different versions of God and they were mutually contradictory.

And it turns out that they were both right.

They were like the 7 blind Hindus in the elephant.

They both got it right and they both got it right because there was a Logos incarnate, and that happened with Jesus Christ, the arrival of Jesus Christ.

John took over the word Logos from the Greek philosophers is an indication that he saw this as the fulfillment.

In other words, I'm not going to reject what these guys are saying.

Of course they're pagans, of course they lived before Christ, but I'm not going to reject the legitimacy of their aspirations, and I'm saying this was the fulfillment of their aspirations.

So Hegel's in a position here where he's like the guy who can look up the answers at the back of the book.

Well, the book is called the Bible, but is that scientific?

That's the whole issue, because he's faced with, he's got to give some type of scientific credibility to the Logos that he understood from the Bible.

He's a Lutheran seminarian who's in the seminary at the time the French Revolution breaks out.

How about How is he going to bring those 2 things together?

Yeah, that's what I found most interesting about this because I was familiar with the Hegelian philosophy, but I never realized how much Lutheranism impacted some of the conclusions he came to, And you covered that really well.

Had Hegel been maybe more acquainted with Catholic theology or with scholasticism, what contradictions in his thought could he have resolved without the contradictions you think he ultimately came to?

Yeah, well, that goes to the crux of the matter.

So it comes down to the fact he was completely infatuated with this Catholic girl.

He's a teenager, pretty much, 20 years old when the French Revolution breaks out.

And so he's got all of the teenagers' attraction to the opposite sex, and he's struggling with Lutheran theology, philosophy.

There is no Lutheran philosophy, Lutheran theology.

Now, I would, I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to say history could have changed, would have changed if he had married that Catholic girl.

And the fact of the matter is that, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag here, but he goes to ends up in Jaina.

It's high noon of their version of the sexual revolution.

He fell in love with his 1 of these ladies that gets passed around from 1 notable figure to another, and he's having an affair with her.

And I think Hegel got swept away by the spirit of sexual revolution.

So he was not a particularly attractive guy.

Schelling was a very attractive guy, Hegel not so much.

And he ended up having an affair with his chambermaid.

Okay, now that's not really daring or it's just kind of exploitative.

But at this point, he's in a different situation, okay?

And I'm saying at this point you're in the same situation that Luther was in.

And so it's no coincidence you're going to fall back on Lutheran theology.

Well, Luther was a man who had difficulty controlling his passions.

But worse is when you try and rationalize the fact, And that's precisely what Luther did.

So he was involved in all the looting of monasteries and in human trafficking, we have to say it for what it is.

He and his boys, he wasn't involved as personally, but his boys would break into convents and liberate the nuns in quotation marks, drag them out.

They were willing to be liberated for the most part.

And then he would recommend arrange marriages with the Reform Party.

Now I've called him a pimp at some point or other, but I think that's too harsh because, well, I think you know where I'm going here.

He offered, he wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz offering the best-looking nun of the bunch if he would become a Lutheran.

Now maybe money didn't change, maybe he didn't stick the Archbishop of Mainz's head in the toilet, you know, the way they do in pimp movies these days, but there was something going on here.

There was a kind of quid pro quo that was being offered here for inhuman trafficking, and Luther was involved in it.

And then finally he couldn't control his own passions and so he up and married 1 of those nuns, Katharina von Bora.

And her nickname was Keta, and he used to call her Keta, which is the German word for chain.

And sometimes you'd call it katena, which is the Latin word for chain, because he, he wrote at the same time, his treatise on the enslaved will.

And what Luther did was basically abolish free will and said, God made him do it.

Well, that wrecked Lutheran theology and it had a horrendous effect on German culture to this day.

And 1 of the most horrendous of all those horrendous effects was Hegel, because Hegel finds himself in exactly the same situation.

So he's trying to write the phenomenology, the Disguistes, and he's having an affair.

Well, he's really writing about the Trinity, because the Trinity is in many ways the dialectic.

The dialectic is something he got from fichte.

So you have unconscious nature, which is real but has no meaning, and then you have consciousness, which has meaning but it's not real, and then what you need to do is bring these 2 things together so you have something that is both real and meaningful and that is anunfurzik.

So the best example I can give is you've got a block of marble and you've got an idea of Moses and then you put the idea together with the block of marble and you have that brilliant statue that Michelangelo did of Moses.

That's the dialectic, that's all of human history.

Now because, you have to say in some sense, because the Trinity isn't like anything else in this universe.

It's God and God is the only God there is, and so he's completely unique, and any attempt to describe it is going to distort it.

But if you're going to describe it, then the Catholic Church has recommended a preparation, and they call it contemplation.

So the best preparation to do this type of thing is not sleeping with your chambermaid because this is involved, you're involving yourself in lust and lust darkens the mind.

So instead, so conflicted with his own guilty conscience, he writes the preface to the dramatic moment in the history of philosophy.

Napoleon is just fighting the battle of Jena with the Prussians.

He can hear the cannons in the background.

He's writing his preface to the phenomenology.

And then out in the middle of nowhere, there's a statement, a child is born.

Well, it turns out that he found out that his chambermaid was pregnant now and that the child was imminent.

That's the situation out of which the phenomenology came.

And confronted with that situation, let's put it this way, unable to go to confession, deprived of sacramental confession because you're a Lutheran, you didn't marry that Catholic girl.

And he chooses the Lutheran option, which means basically, I'm going to blame God for what happened.

And that becomes part of the dialectic because the second part of the dialectic is now the negation of the first part.

And he introduces negation into the Trinity.

He did not create him, he begat him, whatever that means in Trinitarian terms.

But that means that the son is not the negation of the father.

It looked as if it might be the negation of your entire career as a professor.

I mean these were days when scandal could prevent you from getting the chair that you've dedicated your life to and that's precisely the situation that he found himself in at that dramatic moment in the history of philosophy.

Yeah so Hegel often looked to theology to try and resolve some of this stuff and obviously he looked to Lutheranism, but I find that really interesting because I always kind of saw Hegelianism as like kind of a rationalized mysticism and there's a lot of talk that Hegel was influenced by like hermeticism and some of these traditions.

So I know you mentioned Jacob Bohm in the text.

Do you think that that's maybe overstated the influence that mysticism had in his doctrine or

It's not because there's a kind of fetalism involved in boom and these so called mystics because and this is the legacy of Luther.

Because basically Luther calls reason a whore.

Well, this is not going to work with the Enlightenment.

You know, the Enlightenment is the exact opposite of saying that, and that's part of the quandary that Luther finds himself in.

And part of this got worked out in his relationship with Goethe.

Goethe was a very powerful figure at this point, and especially for an aspiring academic like Hegel.

completely unlike Vico, who failed as an academic, completely unlike me who failed as an academic.

He wanted to be the spokesman for the Prussian ruling class, wanted to get to Berlin, wanted to have that chair, and he knew Goethe would help him and could help him in that regard because he was the most influential cultural figure in the Germanys at that time.

And so he had these long conversations with Hegel, and I think that they came out in, I'm sorry, Hegel had these long conversations with Goethe and I think they came out in Faust because Goethe was writing Faust at the same time that Hegel is writing the phenomenology.

And part 1 comes out and I think Hegel is Mephistopheles because Mephistopheles says to Faust, ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.

And I think Hegel saw, I'm sorry, I think the Goethe saw Hegel as Mephistopheles, the man who introduced evil into God.

Well, that's a demonic thing to do, and that's why Faust is about the devil.

You know, it's really like, some of the names you've thrown out there, you know, reading this book, I don't realize how sort of closely linked they all were and that they were going to each other's lectures and sharing dorms with each other and discussing this stuff.

You know, Shelley and Hegel go to, it must've been an amazing time in history.

I mean, I think Hegel said that the Battle of Jena was the end of history, but I mean, you can kind of see why they thought this was really like the pinnacle of the intellectual history of the West when you look at some of these names.

Yeah, I mean, Hegel felt that he was the culmination of Logos in human history.

And the Prussia, well, Prussia was, and he was the spokesman for Prussia, so he was.

And this is where, okay, this is where the academic scheming comes in, and this is where the dishonesty was.

Now, I've already talked, I've just talked about Hegel's ontology, introducing evil into the dialectic, and it tanked, it was a disaster.

But he also had a philosophy of history, and that has remained influential, I think.

All the people we talked to at the beginning of our interview here, were all influenced by Hegel's understanding of history.

And his understanding of history is basically the Enlightenment version of divine providence.

So instead of calling it divine providence, he called it the list of an oomph, which is the cunning of reason.

It's usually translated cunning of reason.

And I think that was part of what saved him.

But it involved dishonesty as Well, because everybody knew that Hegel was beholden to Vico.

I'm saying there's evidence that Vico, Vico was the man who resurrected history.

No, it's a he's a nobody from a minor power.

But the Germans were going to Naples on a regular basis at the end of the 19th.

Italian and Isis is part of his an important part of his biography.

And during his Italian at Isa, he met people in Naples who gave him The Nuova Sienza, which is basically Vico's history of under of you, understanding of human history, the logos of history.

And at this point, Hagel's in a bind, Because what his whole theory of history is basically that Prussian Protestantism is the culmination of human history of a culmination of logos in human history.

But in order to make that claim, he has to base it on Vico, who happened to be an Italian Catholic.

He simply eliminated Vico from any discussion.

Even though I think in the book you can see what I said, but I'm trying to show that it was clear that he was influenced by Hegel because he knew the people that were promoting Hegel in Germany at that time.

Why am I confusing all these people's names here?

Well, you know, I think you kind of touched on this, but, you know, a lot of people would see Hegel as like the culmination or the pinnacle of metaphysics.

And then it is interesting that Hegelianism is so popular.

And then within a couple of decades, it's completely out of fashion, you know, with the positivists in Britain, people like Bertrand Russell.

And then for the whole 20th century, it seems metaphysics and ontology kind of go out of fashion.

And you have like, you know, on the analytics side, you have these endless discussions about language and logic, and then the Continentals go into existentialism and all this stuff.

So, like, in a way, it kind of seems like Hegel kind of ended metaphysics in the Western tradition.

First of all, the bow that he was able to pull was too big for anybody who followed him.

No 1 had the intellectual firepower that Hegel had.

You had an era of unprecedented technological progress beginning around 1830 with the invention of the steam engine.

And so everyone was fascinated by steam engines and boats and guns, and they just naturally gravitated toward materialism.

And the problem is the 1 we just discussed about the dialectic.

If you introduce evil into the dialectic, then the dialectic functions all by itself and you do not need God.

And that is precisely the conclusion that Feuerbach drew.

Feuerbach was a student of Hegel's in Berlin.

He wrote a letter to Hegel explaining this to him.

And Hegel, of course, does not want to hear this because the, the, 1 of the main consideration in Hegel's life is the advancement of his career, as far as I can tell.

And he was willing to make all sorts of compromises like, like many professors today.

It's the occupational hazard of professors.

And it was Vico, thank God that he did not get the chair that he desired because it freed him up to read the right what he really wanted to write, which was the Nuova Sienza.

So you have this constant occupational hazard of professors and Hegel succumbed to it.

There's no question that he was basically interested in being the mouth of the Prussian monarchy, the mouth of the Prussian-German enlightenment at the time when Prussia was the rising power in Europe.

And he was willing to compromise what he said.

And you know, he did it by shutting Vico out.

He did it by ignoring people like Feuerbach, even though Feuerbach was right.

Because if he admitted, yes, that the dialectic functions on its own, well, there's no need for God.

And if there's no need for God, it's atheism, and he would have gotten fired because Fichte almost got fired from the same university when they accused him of atheism.

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