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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:45 - Who is God?
14:25 - Christianity
19:13 - Sin
36:43 - The Trinity
38:27 - Catholicism
48:24 - Sexual abuse scandal
55:11 - Evil
1:06:55 - Atheism
1:18:16 - Jordan Peterson
1:20:51 - Jesus
1:23:37 - The Bible
1:26:12 - America
1:29:03 - Nietzsche
1:33:07 - Word on Fire
1:36:26 - Gay marriage
1:38:43 - Abortion
1:45:33 - Advice for young people
1:48:08 - Mortality
1:52:25 - Meaning of life

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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 powerless for their purposes?

When we forget ideas like equality and rights, which are grounded in God, Why are we surprised that death camps follow?

The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire and 1 of the greatest educators in the world on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism, Christianity, and religious faith in general.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron.

According to Christianity, according to Catholicism, who's God?

I'll give you Thomas Aquinas' definition.

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.

Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God.

They are kind of gnomic, 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.

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 1 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?

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 gesturing the way the tradition does toward God, using language that's at the same time philosophically precise and gnomic.

What God is is the same as God's active to be.

I'm not quite sure because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that.

Everything in our experience 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 that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is, 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.

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.

No, that's precisely what 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.

In more theological language, God's the creator of all things.

So if God is outside of our world, is it possible for us to visualize, to comprehend, to know God?

And I would say 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.

I always like Aquinas who says the language about God that we use is analogical.

So it's not univocal, meaning what I say about that can or about this bottle, I can say about God.

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.

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 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?

God is a rock, you know, God's like a lion, God's like this and that.

Or the Bible will sometimes imagine God as a human being walking around, you know.

Now, only the crudest Fundamentalism would say, well, that's a univocal, accurate description of God.

It's an image that's catching something of God's manner of being.

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, there's a word called faith.

So if we can't really directly know God, You kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors.

So if I stay perfectly within the realm of I'm seeking, with my kind of eagle eyes and my inquiring mind, I'm not gonna find God that way.

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.

I'm with Paul Tillich, though, the Protestant theologian, said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary is faith.

Because he said the way we take it usually is something subrational.

I really know this and I only kind of believe that.

That's just a personal opinion or impression.

But that's to identify faith with the kind of infrarational, and that's not it.

I mean, I don't want something infrarational.

I don't want superstition or childish credulity.

So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason and the far side of reason.

It's super irrational, not infrarational.

At the limit of what I can know, at the limit of my striving and my vision, there's this 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.

The darkness beyond the horizon prior to reason.

First of all, the poetry of your language is incredible.

So first of all, let me just jump around.

Well, to be me is to be a human being, right?

To be this is to be a table, to be this is to be a microphone.

It's the act of being poured, if you want, into the receptacle of some essential principle.

It's an existent, it's a thing that exists, but it's existing in a limited way, according to an essential principle.

When the Israelites ask me, what's your name?

But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark.

So Moses is wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities, which 1 are you?

You gotta be 1 of them, so tell me your name.

In philosophical language, give me the essence that receives your act of existing.

And God's answer blows the mind of Moses and the whole tradition.

So I'm not this or that I'm not up or down.

God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it.

Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that?

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 going to go over confidently and find out what this thing is, this burning bush.

Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground, because you're not in charge here.

You're not in command, because if you've got shoes on, you can walk wherever you want.

But you take your shoes off, you're much more vulnerable.

And that's appropriate when you're talking about God.

But here's another interesting, I didn't think about the burning bush in this connection before, but it's a bush that's on fire but not consumed.

These can't be in the same place at the same time, these 2 beings, they're mutually exclusive if you want.

But as God comes close to a creature, he doesn't destroy it or consume it, but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant, right?

And see, Compare it to the classical gods and goddesses.

When they come bursting into life and experience, things are incinerated 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.

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?

But the basic idea of God is non-competitively transcendent to the world.

David Non-competitively transcendent to the world, so it's beyond being, is the source of being.

I think a really good analogy would be author to book.

So like Tolkien or someone that writes 1 of these big, sprawling novels.

And Tolkien's good too, because he creates a whole world.

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 he's not in the story.

You're not going to find him as a character in the book.

So that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way is, I'm looking for God, 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

Right, He is deeply in the story somehow.

Even if he is a character, he's not really...

And people inside the book can't really know about the author.

Well see, Augustine says God is simultaneously in Timior intimo meo et superior sumo meo.

And he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine at the same time.

Because once you get the insight that God is the sheer act of to be, well, of course that's true.

So right now, God is sustaining us in existence.

Aquinas says God is in all things by essence, presence, and power, and most intimately so.

But 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, because all the mystics talk that way in these high paradoxes about God's availability and unavailability.

I've often thought in the Bible, story after story, God can neither be grasped nor hidden from.

So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God's, I've got him, I understand him, I can manipulate him.

Story after story is told you can't do that.

Well, then the other extreme of the sinner, all right, then I'm going to run from God.

Jonah and the whale, you know, so he has the call from God and he said, no, no, I'm going to refuse that.

I'm going to go to Tarshish, which meant like Timbuktu for them at the end of the world.

God's got the whale, swallows him up and brings him right back where God wants him.

It's a poetic way of saying you can't escape the press of God.

At the same time, tower of Babel, I'm gonna build a tower up to God, I'm gonna grab hold of God.

So live in the space in between those 2 things, which would be the space of friendship with God, falling in love with God, is neither grasping nor hiding from God.

You mentioned, again, a lot of beautiful poetic things.

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 broadly speaking to those that follow the religion.

In a way, what we've done so far is a necessary propedutic because we're talking about God.

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 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.

This supremely weird claim that God becomes 1 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.

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.

And what follows from that is the redemption of all of reality, so not just of human beings, but in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world.

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.

So it's a distinctive thing, but why is it so important philosophically to what it means to be a Christian.

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, why is incarnation so important?

Well, I think it's massively important because it's the divinization principle that God wants to divinize his creation 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 an organism.

The church is this organism that begins with Jesus and then he's drawing all of humanity, but ultimately all of nature, 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 scattered creation.

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?

Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable.

God became 1 of us in order to divinize us.

The goal of my life is not just to be a good person, not just to be materially successful, not just to be a member of society.

The goal of my life is to become a participant in the divine nature.

And so 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.

And just our notion of God is non-competitive to us.

That is so important, because I think in so many systems from mythology onward, you have these competitive understandings of God.

When Jesus says to his disciples, the night before he dies, I no longer call you servants but friends, it's an extraordinary moment.

Because every God, right, who's ever been served, well that's the best we can hope for, is that we'll be as the servant of God.

You know, I've tried to obey you, Lord, I'll try to do what you want.

But when Jesus says, I no longer call you servants, or slaves, he would have said in the Greek there, you know.

But friends, I don't know, I can't imagine anything greater than that, becoming God's friend.

Now I should mention, you're 1 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, which is a very unique, bold, brave thing, And on 1 of them, somebody asked, what's the most challenging of the 7 deadly sins?

What do they have to do with Christianity?

How essential, how crucial they are to the religion, and what's the most challenging in our modern day?

Yeah, to name them, pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust are the 7 deadly sins.

We'll quote capital sins sometimes, from Copeland, they're the head sins from which things tend to flow.

Probably most people today, if you talk about vice or you talk about a deadly sin, they would think about lust.

But the classical authors, including Dante, who does this pictorially, that's the least of the deadly sins is lust, because it's the 1 that's most sort of dependent upon the body and its passions and so on.

Pride is the, Augustine calls it, in curvatus in se, I'm caved in around myself.

Like a black hole, right, to get into the scientific.

But the Black hole to me is a great symbol, that it's so heavy that it draws everything, including light.

We're like black holes, that we draw everything into ourselves.

So as a sinner, and I'll confess I'm a sinner, the temptation is, okay, this is the Bishop Barron moment and I'm drawing you now into my world and so on.

What that does is it kills us off and it darkens life and it makes it small and heavy and awful.

But see, compared 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.

You're just talking, you know, to a friend and the 2 of you together are discovering something true 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?

I become radiant because I'm overcoming this tendency to fall in on myself.

Dante is so good because the way he pictures Satan in Divine Comedy, and he's at the center of the earth, So like a black hole that way, like he's at the center of gravity, he's at the heaviest place and there's not fire where he is, but ice, which is 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 because 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 beating his wings over the ice and making everyone else colder.

And then he has, this is cool too, he has 3 faces, Satan, because he's the simulacrum of the Trinity.

Also from all 3 mouths, he's chewing a sinner.

He's got Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the 3 mouths, you know, the 3 traitors.

But I thought, 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.

See, that's an image of pride, because Satan, that's his great sin, pride.

Which is why he needed Michael, right, Mikael, who's like God.

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