The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 202. Meaning, Awe and Conceptualization of God - pt. 3

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

This episode is comprised of multiple Season 4 episodes from the podcast, specifically, Jonathan Pageau, James Orr & Nigel Biggar, Ian McGilchrist, Lawrence Krauss, Christopher Kaczor and Matthew Petrusek and Bishop Barron.We have paired this compilation with the release of the full video series on YouTube in one video.This episode is brought to you by Jordan's personality course available at https://courses.jordanbpeterson.com/personality?utm_source=jbp_clips_yt_description&utm_medium=Video1&utm_campaign=black-friday-nov-2021The Personality Course is available for the week of Black Friday for 53% off.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, season 4, episode 61. I'm Ekela Peterson. This is part three of meaning awe and conceptualization of God, where we continue to investigate the religious realm. This episode is comprised of multiple season 4 episodes from the podcast, specifically Jonathan Pajot, James Orr, and Nigel Bigger, Ian McGillcrest, Lawrence Kraus, Christopher Kessor, and Matthew Petrusek, and Bishop Baron. Today's Part 3 is also accompanied by the release of the YouTube version of all three parts of our Meaning, Aw, and Conceptualization of God's Series. Before we start, I'd like to talk about Dad's Black Friday sale for his Discovering Personality Course. From now until December 2nd, the Discovery Personality Course will be available for $69 instead of the regular $140.

Everyone's personality comes with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. And getting acquainted with them can be decisive in how we tackle life's challenges and how we navigate relationships. Knowing that you're agreeable and need to learn how to stand up for yourself in order to match your partner can be game changing to a relationship. For this Black Friday sale, we're offering a 50% discount. You'll get a free personality assessment. When you get into the course, that's the personality assessment.

I've mentioned a lot. This is the lowest price the course goes throughout the year. So if you've been interested in taking it, you should check it out. You can visit JordanB Peterson.com slash personality or visit JordanB Peterson.com and click on courses in the menu. It'll take you to the same page. I hope you enjoyed this episode. See, one of the things I've thought is that at minimum, what Christianity is, is a thousands of years long discussion about what constitutes the human ideal. It says purely psychological viewpoint.

Now, I understand the metaphysical implications, and I don't want to dispense with them, but it's best to start with what's simple. So there's this discussion of what constitutes the ideal and we're exploring it and discussing it. And we explore and discuss it in all sorts of interesting ways, right? Because it's not merely rational. We Bach writes this soul-inspiring music.

And that makes us feel a particular way. And that's a hint as to the nature of the ideal. And then there's these great cathedrals that are built all across Europe. And they're awe-inspiring masterpieces of stone and light, right? So opposites conjoined. And they bring the primeval forest into the city, and they provide color, and the music is set in there. And then there's the invocation of the ancestors,

and the dogmatic formulations that Christianity consists of, that go back centuries as well. And all of that, and that's all part of this exploration. And to me, it's the exploration of that. And that's all part of this exploration. And to me, it's the exploration of that central animating spirit. And when we're debating the postmodernists who say everything is power, this is the sort of thing that needs to be pointed out as a rejoinder. It's like, no, it's not. We're doing our best to manifest this ideal that we're discussing. We're flawed and fragmented and ignorant. And we don't know.

So for example, you asked me earlier, Nigel, what sort of things I had to discuss in order to make people attracted, say, to a discussion of Genesis. And what it is is that I try to get the wheat from the text. And in the chaff, I think a lot of that's my ignorance. It's not necessarily chaff, but I'll leave it be because I can't, I don't have the intellectual wherewithal to make sense of it. So I just leave it be without despising it because I can't understand. It doesn't mean there isn't something to it. Now, you know, we're still stuck because we have problems like, well, the idea of the resurrection, you know, which is obviously a very big problem in a very fundamental sense. And I leave that be, except to say that I have seen, you know, in my studies of mythology, that there are stories

of dying and resurrecting God's throughout history. And the idea of Christ seems to be of that type, although it's not only that, but it's something I can't touch, and that's a problem, but that doesn't mean that there isn't this investigation that we're all undertaking, including us in this conversation of what constitutes the ideal and how we could manifest it if we could only understand it. And I think that's unbelievably compelling to people.

And it's not only compelling, they die without it. Because we can't live with only knowledge of our limitations. We have to be moving towards an ideal. Well, I mean, just a quick thought there. I mean, certainly within the Christian tradition, the claim is that God's decision to become incarnate is not accidental. He chose this particular human being, not just because he had to choose some human being in order to become a human being, but he chose a human being and as it were exhibited,

the qualities that he wanted to, as it were disseminate as a kind of moral exemplar that were profoundly counter-cultural to the values and the exemplars of the time. So you think of the kind of the weakness of Christ in some contexts, the sort of obviously the sense of self-sacrifice, the radical openness to those on the margins, the poor in particular, the the ceremonially unclean, and of course to women. And so it's as if that this is completely subverting the kind of the sort of power and narrative that dominated for the first century Palestine, particularly in the form of the Roman legions and the Roman Imperium.

So I think that's a quick thought. I've really been struck constantly by some of Jung's descriptions of Christ as a member of the Trinity, because Jung makes much of John's sense of Christ, the logos that's there across time, which I read as something like the creative consciousness that's involved in the bringing to awareness of being, something

like that. It's maybe identical to consciousness itself, at least in its higher stages. It's very abstract, but then there's Christ, the carpenter, who lived in a particular time and place, which is kind of a mystery because everyone asks, like in the movie, Jesus Christ superstar, you know, why that time and that place. And the answer is, what has to be some bounded time and place. And so if we're, if what Christ is, is a representative, in some sense, of what a human being is, is that there's a divine aspect to us, which is this creative consciousness that's very abstract, but it's also localized intensely, you know,

in a historic, in an arbitrary throne to use the existential phrase historical context, and then each of us is unique in that manner, but there's something universal about each of us too, that enables us to reach out to each other. And... And also gives each of our individual lives a lot of significance. Otherwise, they're different than ever at all. Well, yes.

And the significant, you know, one of my students wants to ask me a brilliant question is like, well, if the, if all stories have the archetypal structure, why not just tell the same archetype over and over? And I thought, you know, wasn't that so interesting? Because what you want is you want old wine and new skin, so to speak, right? You want the universal story particularized. And then I thought, well, that's exactly what Jung said about the figure of Christ. It's the universal story particularized.

And both of those, like both the particularization and the universality, it's the intersection of those two that produces the meaning. It also produces, I guess you say meaning, I would say human dignity, because on the one hand there is individuality. No one quite grasped the truth or speaks to the truth in my time in place like me. So in a sense, everyone is a unique prophet and has a unique responsibility, but we are commonly subject to a universal order, universal obligations, universal calling, which endows our little lives with the largest significance. The important things are hard to articulate in words. They're implicit meanings. All the deep things like love, religion, poetry, music. How do you say these in words? How do you say them in

language? But they have extraordinary meaning and power. They're the things we live for, not for the things that we can say, put down in a notebook, you can know what I mean. I try to look at things scientifically in so far as the science allows those things to be viewed. And so to the degree that I can look at religious matters from a biological perspective, I do that because it's simpler. Okay, so I believe that the religious instinct manifests itself in a variety of fundamental motivations, but they're abstract motivations to some degree. So the experience of awe, that's a major one, the experience of beauty, that's another one. The experience of admiration and the desire to imitate, Those are crucial.

And so one of the things that I would point out, you can tell me what you think about this. And I've been trying to formalize this idea and I don't know what its extent. So I look at Christianity in particular, although not uniquely Christianity, but Christianity in particular, as a thousands of years investigation into the structure of the abstracted

ideal to imitate. So imagine we imitate those we admire, okay, but we're abstract creatures, so we want to know what's the essence of what should be imitated itself. Now we investigate that. It's not all explicit. We have to represent it in music. We have to represent it in art. We have to represent it in architecture. Because we're we're we're hitting at it from multiple different domains. And that is a reductionist to argument, right? It says nothing to do about divinity itself. Sure. It's purely it's purely psychological or biological argument. You're saying that everything is relevant, that what these philosophers were talking about, what these artists were painting, what these musicians are doing, what filmmakers are doing,

this is all something that's trying to get us that way. No, that's what a cathedral represents. You know, it's an expression in stone of this yearning to bring the material world into harmony with the spirit. It's something like that, and that's what music does as well. And there's this proclivity within us to strive upward. And the cathedral, I mean, the cathedrals, they're absolutely amazing. These lattice-like structures of stone, there's something about the harmonious interplay of shadow and light that's key to it as well. It's like the opening up of dark

matter to the light that pours in. That's all embodied in the architecture. And and I can't say, and neither can anyone else, what that ultimately represents. And then to bring music into that space and tradition, it's all pointing upward to something, to the direction that we're supposed to go. It's so terrible to see these buildings empty out. I mean, thank God that they're being preserved in some sense by the tourists who come there driven by a sense of awe.

But we can't inhabit them anymore the way that we used to, and that's a terrible thing. It means there's a kind of ideal that we're no longer pursuing. Perhaps we're no longer pursuing it. It seems like a catastrophe to me. No one really knows how to revitalize it, though, unfortunately. So... Well, I think one of the problems to me when I was in Paris working on men in the Iron Mask, I would want on a Sunday morning to go to a mass. And it was very difficult to find. Well, for one thing, in a bad dis we would church would start at 11 o'clock on the Sunday morning and the masses

aren't like that. But go into say the cathedral, Sanger Ma, and there was no one there. It was a it's magnificent ancient cathedral and It was a magnificent ancient cathedral and a few tourists. And the place didn't feel dead. The architecture was alive. But it was very difficult to have a congregation. And a congregation is what the church, of course, is supposed to be.

It's a collection of people who are united and different. It's a collection of centers acknowledging their sins. And I think that is a fascinating thing to me about how we keep... how we keep. Only it's so surprising, it's also so surprising those hundreds of years ago when those buildings, most of those buildings were built, that those cultures would dedicate themselves to such great cost to produce these absolutely spectacular, impossible buildings made out of stone or brick, these,

they're like a dance in stone. They're so magnificent and then to fill them with the greatest of artworks and to bring the light in in the most colorful possible ways and then to bring the music in to set the scene and then to have everyone come in and commit to at least not being as bad as they were, right? Like it was a joint moral enterprise that everyone was involved in. You can be as cynical about that as you want and talk about, you know, Sunday Christians and all of that, but an hour a week to contemplate how it is that you should be living your life or to become in tune with your conscience once again, which at least the confession can offer that. And then to see that so much effort was poured into that, it's amazing that that overoccurred. And then it's also equally amazing that we stop doing it,

because you might think, well, wouldn't we be interested in jointly coming together and saying, well, here's how we're inadequate. And here's how we're conceptualizing what would be ideal. And couldn't we move together toward that? And I was talking to Bishop Baron this week, and about this issue, about the loss, especially in the Catholic Church of young people, and it seems that there's a great adventure there

that isn't being communicated properly. And it's a terrible loss for all of us. What do we have to replace that? You know, I've talked to the new atheists, especially Sam Harris. And it's not like I don't understand their arguments. It's not like I don't have sympathy for them for that matter. But there's nothing poetic or artistic or magnificent about the alternative. Yes. Right, it loses, it loses, it loses. There's something that just disappears.

It's that artistic ineffability. There's no room, there's no obvious room for that in the, say, the Enlightenment worldview. I'm an admirer of Stephen Panker, for example. And he falls into the Enlightenment rationalist camp. And in his book The Language Instinct, he talks a little bit at the end about culture, philosophy, music, art, and all of that, religion, even for that matter to some degree. But it's like a throwaway chapter at the end, whereas by my way of looking, that's the whole book, all of that, that artistic endeavor, and that shades into the religious endeavor. And that's the scent, that's not some side effect

of human cognitive development, quite the contrary, it's the central feature. And I agree. With Jordan, when you were speaking with Juliet, the most recent podcast I heard, the, reminded me, her description of her life reminded me of an experience I had in Russia, was in St. Petersburg, and we were doing a scout for a film I wrote called Love and Honor,

based on a novel that I wrote. And we were finished with the scout. We had seen everything that we were scheduled to see. And this young woman who was in her early 30s, a Russian woman, asked if there was anything else we'd like to see because we had some time, and I said, well, I'd love to see some of your churches. And she got this quizzical look on her face. She was surprised that, I don't know, a Hollywood director would ask that.

And she said, well, I'll take you to my church. And I said, you've got a church. And she said, oh, yes, I'm Christian. And I said, but you grew up when that was discouraged, and I was illegal, or your parents Christian, and she said, no, mothers confirmed atheists. Her father was baptized as a child, but he's also an atheist. And so I said, well, how did you become Christian? And she said, there was no beauty. I was a young girl walking around

and nothing was beautiful. And one day I passed the church and I could see candlelight in it and heard music coming out. And I went in and I kept going and I kept going and I became a Christian. And that to me says so much. And people have no idea. They have no idea. That's why I wrote chapter 8. They have no idea how much they're starving for beauty. Yes. Like it's a hunger that goes far beyond, well, let's not say that, it doesn't have to go beyond material hunger, but it

no matter how well fed you are without some relationship to beauty, there's too much suffering in the world for it to be viable. It's the end. It's along with truth. It's the antidote to suffering. It's not optional. Right. It's crucial. And then you can tell that by its economic value.

For those who are hard-headed, it's like, you can't point to anything with more economic value. Period. The end. And so, well, some weeks back, when you were, you were, I felt really working your way back that, that, that work and engagement and in your calling is helping to heal and sustain you.

You said something along the lines of that, that you wondered why in the Christian community and religious community, the people were telling you that your work means so much. why it's somewhat overwhelming to realize that so many people are drawing from you. And I think I can tell you. It is completely, it is. I today, I was sitting on a bench with my friend

who walks with me and this kid came up to me. And he said, apologies for interrupting you, but I was listening to your podcast while I was walking down the street and I saw you here. He said, he started to tear up right away. He said, five years ago, I was suicidal. And I was, I've been listening to your lectures on a regular basis. He said said an hour and a half a day, which seems like an overdose to me. He said he's invented prosthetic limbs and has helped all sorts of disabled people and is on his way to MIT.

It's like, it's to random meeting on the street, you know? Yes, yes. And thank God for that. It is so much. Yes, of course it is. But I tell you, like I know you like to understand, you know, that's the, the, um, there's something else you said a couple of weeks back about. I want to, I want to understand why. I want to understand why this story makes sense.

And I do too. But the whot of it all, to me, gets it the whot of it all. But the whot of it all is that you speak to people like me and like others who know this experience of more, who know what it is to stand in awe, to feel the awe of a moment, and you combine all the different elements of of perspective, of thought, of experience. And you validate or endorse that people who choose faith and who seek courage and sacrifice

as crucial divine values are not idiots. I think that that's... You know, it's no accident that crucial and cross are the same thing. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And, you know, we go through this thing of, well, you're choosing an opiate.

And to me, it's like, well, the alternative is not attractive, too. I started working on the post-story. I came across a statement that I believe is one of the talk show guys, late night talk show guys, it said Conan O'Brien, I believe it was, but he said that Pope Francis had made a pronouncement that he thought even atheists could go to heaven. And in gratitude atheists have said that the Pope, when he dies, is welcomed to enter their endless void of nothingness. So, well, the problem with that worldview is, in some sense, that endless void of nothingness confronts us right here and now. Yes, exactly.

I try to tell people, I'm not so much concerned about life after death, is life after birth. You know, Jesus said, come that you can have life and have it more abundantly. And I'm not trying in a movie to espouse my particular dog, I don't believe in my own dogma. My own dogma is limited. And I'm not trying to think that when I was in school and I'd study systematic theologians and I remember asking my mentor who was the head of the department,

what is really the point? What are they trying to do? Will they're trying to have a system of understanding that holds up from every angle. But how is that working out for them? Because ultimately, you get into, do you have faith or not? When I write a story, I've got to jump in and trust, and I don't know where they'll lead, but I know that to not jump in is death. And so for me, it's like the Old Testament says, you know, I said before you life and death, choose life. And that to me is what I hope my works about. And I'm damn sure it's what your works about.

Let's delve into this faith issue a bit too. Because the faith is a very complicated term. And you know, it's often parodied by the rationalists, you know, to have faith in God is parodied by the rationalists, to have faith in God is parodied as a primitive and superstitious belief. But my psychological investigations convinced me that there's no action without faith.

Because we are always stepping into the unknown, we have to take a leap of faith to exist, to do the simplest of things, literally to move. And that has to do with what I said earlier, is that we're trying to move from a place of less value to a place of more value. So we have to make some assumptions about what constitutes value. And then we have to believe that our actions are going to have the outcome that we desire. And we do that without evidence. I mean, that's partly why to be human is to be riven with anxiety. It's because there's no certainty. And so you can't act without faith.

And so then the question might, if you accept that proposition, you can't act without faith. And I actually believe, I don't believe that that's a disputable proposition, unless you view people as deterministic in the way that clocks are, you know, so that we're just stimulus response machines. It seems to me that instead we're moving into the unknown. And we do that in dread, in some sense, dread and hope. And we do that because we have faith. And when we lose that faith, our lives fall apart.

And we don't know which way is up or down. And so then the question is, well, if we have to have faith, what is it that we should have faith in? And then the answer seems to be something like, well, we should have, if we have to make a decision about that, maybe we try to have faith in what, in the idea that the best should be pursued and will prevail.

As an organizing principle, and then the question is, well, what is the best? And the answer is, well, that's really hard question. And so we need cathedrals, and we box music and we need the stories and genesis and we need the world's great literature. And we need all of that theater and drama and art and aesthetics to help us understand what the best is and to determine how it should prevail. And I don't see that technically as any different from, I think it is the same thing psychologically

as the worship of Christ. I think it's the same thing. Because again, I'm trying to speak psychologically to think about what Christ represents. I'm not thinking about him as a historical figure. That's something we can get to later. That image, which is seen, for example, laid out on these massive cathedral domes,

Christ as Logos, as generator of the world, it's the idea that the proper mode of being is brought into existence by consciousness that's operating according to the highest possible principles. And like, why wouldn't, and that is the kind of faith that's maybe got some courage associated with it. Right, I'm going to act as if this is the case. We're all going to act as if this is the case. Now, that begs the question, does that make it real? Well, hope Benedict XVI who's a great intellectual hero of mine said, the question, does that make it real? Well, hope Benedict XVI, who's a great intellectual hero of mine, said, the church always does three essential things.

The church worships God. It evangelizes, and it cares for the poor. Poor broadly construed, as I say, anyone who's suffering, right? But that first move, as we said earlier, is indispensable. The church worships God. It teaches the world right praise, because without right praise, the whole thing falls apart.

Secondly, it evangelizes. What's that? Well, that's a cool thing too, because Oon Gheleon in Greek, good news, they were playing with that, because the Romans would have used that in the Eastern part of the empire to announce an imperial victory.

They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news. Oon Gheleon, hey, Caesar an imperial victory. They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news. Who on Geliond, hey, Caesar won a victory. So these very edgy first Christians who had zero social status, no power, no military behind them said, oh, no, no, I got the true who on Geliond. It's about Jesus risen from the dead, who was put the death by Caesar, but whom God raised. So that's the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope, now the sacrifice has been made, and God's love is greater than anything that's in the world.

Okay, now I got those two things in place, now serve the poor, now go where the pain is, go where the suffering is, but if you divorce them from each other, and that has happened. So who cares about worship, and that's fussing around with alters and sacracies, and who cares about evangelization?

Let's just get down and serve the poor, then it does devolve simply into social work, right? But if the three are together, worship God evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus and serve the poor, now the church is cooking, you know. All right, so let's look at the second one of those. So, you know, it seems to me, I can understand this, not that whether I can understand it or not,

is a hallmark of its validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand. I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction, acting as if being is intrinsically good and that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good. Bearing up under, bearing all that up as a set of propositions, even in the most extreme cases of suffering, I can see that as a valid moral good. That's Christ's refusal to be moral good. That's Christ's refusal to be what would you say corrupted by the injustice of his and terror of his fate. And so that might be something like, you don't have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized, let's say. And I think that's

an unshakable moral proposition. But then there's the resurrection element of it because I could say, well, the first thing I would say is, well, I kind of understand that psychologically, parts of us die and they have to die because they're an error. They have to be cast off and we're reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement, our ascent forward. There's no movement forward without some death of the past. And so I can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit. It's not something trivial, but then there's the insistence

on in the church of the bodily resurrection, which is, well, let's call that a stumbling block to modern belief. No doubt about that. That's something more than mere metaphor. And so you might ask, well, why is it insisted upon? Why isn't the proposition that you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear to to to operate for the good of all things, regardless of your suffering, a hard line, no justification with the defeat of death necessitated. I'm not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection because I know there are things that I don't know. I know that for sure. And God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured. But it seems, and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense, too, an aphoridian

criticism. That seems in some real sense to good to be true. And so what do you make of the, what do you make of the resurrection? How do you conceptualize it, even as it's related in the gospels? Yeah, good. You're raising a lot of interesting things. First of all, everything you said about it in terms of psychological archetypes and metaphors. Good.

Fine, I think those are legitimate. I think those are our correct perceptions of things. And it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world, resurrection type stories. But I think it's really interesting about the New Testament. As Louis said, you know, CS Lewis, when someone said, well, the New Testament is just another iteration of the ancient myth. And he said, anyone that says that has not read many myths, because there's something so distinctive about the New Testament.

And what I would say, Jordan, first does. I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation, what you get throughout is this, what I call this, grab you by the shoulders quality. They knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and philosophical truth. Paul certainly knew that literature very well. Doesn't sound like that though. It has overtones with it. It bears some of that.

It has family resemblance with it. But what you find on every page is this, one galeon, this good news. So everything you said is true. I think it is true. But it's not exactly news. It's part of the philosophy of perennas. It's been around for a long time

and a lot of the great thinkers of the world. And again, I agree with it. I like the philosophy of perennas. But the new testament is people who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say something happened, something's happened here that we were not expecting that was not part of our thought system.

And it's so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careering around the world and indeed to our deaths announcing it and defending it. And what it was was the fact, here in the 10th chapter of Acts of the Apostles, this sort of almost tossed off line, we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead. I don't think people trading in mythic talk used that kind of language. Mythic language. Again, I say it with high praise.

I love the myths, but you know, once upon a time and in a galaxy far, far away, and then a mythic story unfolds. But read the Acts of the Apostles. Do you hear about what happened? It was verses up in Galilee, and then in Judea, you know those people at John the Baptist, remember John the Baptist, well, and then this Jesus,

and then in Jerusalem, and then then we you aid and drink with him after his resurrection from the dead. It's, that's what, and then look at Paul, Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus. Now the Paul wine letters, and they do not read like myths, they just don't. And I love the myths, I love the philosophy of Prennus, but it doesn't read like that.

It reads like someone who is has been so bold over by something. And he wants you to know about it. And it's changed everything. And I think what it was was what we said earlier, it's, okay, now, now we know God's mercy and love is greater than anything we can possibly do. Why? Because we killed God. And that's why Paul will say, I'm going to hold up one thing to you, Christ and crucified. And crucified, I'm an animal, it's a horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world.

It was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion. Paul says, no, no, let me put it right in your face. See, the author of Life came and we killed him. But I got the good news. One goinghan is God's mercy and love is greater because he brought this Jesus back from the dead. That's what you do have the following argument, which is that it isn't clear which is harder to believe whether that happened or whether people made it up.

Because if they made it up, that was really something. And that does strike me quite frequently reading the New Testament. There are lines in there that hit so hard, you think, hmm, it isn't obvious to me how someone could have just thought that up. And there is that, well, in Jung, Carl Jung, who I greatly admire, you know, he believed, I think in the same way that CS Lewis did, that he doesn't talk about this that much,

but that there is this archetypal mythological pattern of the dying and resurrecting hero that has this psychological reality, which is extraordinarily deep, but that archetype was realized once in history, and that's the fully realized, so it came from the mythic realm, let's say, the realm of eternal truth, the realm of pattern, instinctive pattern for that matter, and was fully realized at one point in history. And you might think, well, if it's going to be fully realized, it has to start somewhere, you know, it can't start everywhere at the same time. Right. Right. Was an archetype look like when it takes flesh?

Might be way to get at that. Well, and the thing is we do see this and it does grip us because movies, like we see representations of this all the time. In my new book, I talk a fair bit about Harry Potter. And you know, Harry Potter is definitely an archetype. It's crazy figure Take it in flesh. Well, clearly, he's in battle with Satan himself, obviously. I mean, and she has an unbelievably profound mythological imagination.

And the thing that's so fascinating about all of that is that because her mythological imagination is spot on, she captivated the entire globe. And there's a immense storehouse of wealth and dominated the entertainment landscape for a decade. And you know, people don't take that seriously, but it's a it's a great mystery to watch that. Absolutely, they should. It's it's it's a phenomenal, you know, anything that grips people's attention like that is obviously worth paying attention to by. So, you know, I, Lewis, call them good dreams, right?

So all the sort of archetypal anticipations of the gospel, they're the good dreams of the race. Or do you, the Jungian? I love Jung too. But what happens if that archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, you know, conslanguage? What would happen if that archetype became flesh? And indeed, that's how they put it.

The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. Oh, I think that's also the question we should each be asking ourselves in our own lives. Yeah, quite like. It's like, well, who could we be? And you say, well, you don't have to ask yourself that question, it's like, well, good luck with your conscience then you should be another Christ.

That's the objection to the self-created person. It's like, well, good luck with your conscience. Then you should be in other Christ. That's the objection to the self-created person. It's like the idea that you can create your own values is, well, good luck. Right. Good luck with that project. Yeah, good luck. It's not going to work. You know, Newman referred to the conscience.

I always love this as the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. So he took the language descriptive of the Pope, you know, the vicar of Christ, but he said, the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. So we took the language descriptive of the Pope, you know, the vicar of Christ, but he said, the aboriginal vicar of Christ. Which newmen? John Henry Newman. Okay, because, oh, I was thinking of Eric. No, I'm in.

So, no, John Henry Newman. And it's a beautiful way of describing it, because we'd say the Christ dwelling within you is the voice of the conscience. That's calling you to sanctity, ultimately, to heroic self-sacrifice, to being who Christ is. It also is what people worship because here's a way of thinking about it technically. Well, look, when I have a conversation with you, there's something I want from you. I want everything you can give me. I want you to be as there as you can

possibly be. That's what I'm in demanding all the time. If my attention, assuming a properly constituted subjectivity, if my attention wanders, that means you're not delivering. And so if you're wandering around and everyone's attention is wandering away from you, you're not delivering. And so if you're wandering around and everyone's attention is wandering away from you, you're not delivering. And conscience, because we're so social, we're social creatures to the final degree, conscience tells you when you deviate from the ideal. And that ideal is what people worship. They, by attending to that manifestation of the ideal in you, they worship it. And so that's there. It's there in the in the demands that we can't help but make of each other and of ourselves. There's no escape from that. And so I do think it's a perfectly good question. What would happen? And this is the right question for your life. What would happen if you took that seriously. And so again, what I see is that it doesn't seem to me to be

if the church can no longer attract young people, it has to be that they're not taking that with sufficient seriousness. Now, yeah, I think there's a lot to that. I don't want to externalize the blame. It's like, I know the church is a human organization and all of that. But it's still evidence. But it's not just about going to church. One time I told you something, and I don't know if I could drive it through. There's something about being in a hierarchy that is, because there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about, which is just kind of striving to kind of be the best within that hierarchy. But there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy, which is that the hierarchy covers you. Well, definitely, there's no doubt about that. And so there's something about such as the lowest status members of a CHIMP group will

still fight off interlopers. Yeah. And so there's a value in being in a community and a hierarchy where you, like I go to confession, right? I go to confession, I go to my priest and I confess my sins, and I give that to him. He actually takes responsibility for an aspect of listening to my sins and kind of participating in my salvation. The weight ends up being distributed across the community. You don't actually just bear it on yourself. It's not just a living community.

It's not just those that are alive in the hierarchy, but those that have left their story. All the saints are part of this hierarchy that you engage in, that you participate in, and that you see as consolation, as examples, as example of the people who have lived through difficult things that you can shoulder up against. And so that's one of the reasons why I kind of insist with, at least for the people that watch my videos, is, is, when I say go to church, it's not just because I, trying to moralize you into doing something,

it's because it's actually a participation in how the best vision of reality works. I've got no objection to any of that. But I've seen you, I've seen you objection. I've probably one of the only people in the world that has actually seen you in church and seen you. Yeah, how that's go. Worm. Yeah. Squirming church. Why?

See, the other thing, I was reading, again, I was reading this book, and it's mostly a jumping off place for me to think. It's like, there's also something because I'm not inside the church, so to speak. It's hard to say what the utility of that is. The utility of being inside the church.

Of being outside it. Of being outside. Because I'm an outsider talking about religious matters. Yeah, but I think that it has played a great role. Like I've often said something that, I've often said that you're something like King Cyrus. If you know the story of King Cyrus, in scripture King Cyrus. If you know the story of King Cyrus, in Scripture King Cyrus was a

Persian king who told the Jews to go back to Israel and build their temple. So he wasn't Jewish, he wasn't in Israelite, he wasn't believing the God of the Israelites, but he was like, hey, you know, that temple of yours looks pretty nice. Why don't you just go back there and rebuild your own thing? And so that's definitely an effect that I've seen you have. You know, the number of people that have become Christian because of you is hilarious. Sorry, it's not hilarious, but it's just kind of this strange thing. Because you kind of stand outside and you're looking at the door and you're looking at the church and you're saying, hey, this isn't not so bad. You know, look at this. What is going on here?

Like, what is this about? And then because of that how do you think you've got something better? What was it Milton? Didn't Milton write paradise laws to justify the ways of God to man? It's a hell of an ambition. In some sense, that's what this entire religious endeavor does. The literary endeavor as well. What's the point of all this? What's the meaning of this? And you know, when you think about that in two, two propositions, Lee. And this, I also saw this in my therapy practice. It's like, well, what's the meaning of life? And I could easily get off on a nihilistic argument with some of my more intelligent clients. They had a rejoinder for every proposition about why life was valuable. But then if you said to them, don't be so sure that that part of you is your friend. Look what it's doing to you. It's so destructive. And it has

all of itself justifying arguments and they might even be coherent, but look at the consequences and then contrast that with your own experience, like when does that sense of nihilistic despair disappear? For some people, it's when they're with people they love, they're with friends or family, some people find it in creative activity, some people find it in charity. There are various sources of meaning and that's not propositional. You see

it in your own life, right? You can literally, in therapy, you have people track that. It's like, well, you're dialistically depressed. Let's watch your life for a week and see how that ebbs and flows with what you're doing. And then see if we can get you participating more in what makes it ab, than what makes it flow. And that's empirical in a sense, right? I'm not asking you to believe something. I'm asking you to watch the structure of your own reality to see where meaning manifests itself. And then you could say, in some sense, the sum total of where meaning manifests itself, that's where God resides. And that

relationship with God that you described as what would you say, as that has to be maintained by our good behavior, I suppose that's that desire to live in that space of meaning. And then you can propositionize that. You can say, well, that's associated with love and it's associated with courage. It's associated with these classical virtues. And it's not these things that we've learned to deem as evil. And that's where you...

Is it reasonable to say that that's where you find God if you're searching? Is that the, is that an appropriate way of looking at it? I think so. I met a guy one time who told me he went to a lecture and the lecture was on God's existence and the guy who was lecturing. And then after the lecture, my friend came up to him and said, you know, everything you say is a bunch of malarkey. There's no God, it's just, your lecture is just meaningless. And the guy said, okay, what I want you to do is for the next week, I want you to treat everyone

that you meet as if they were Jesus in disguise. Mm-hmm. For the guy left the lecture and he went home and you know, he gets home and you know, mom's there doing the dishes and he thought to himself to himself well if this were Jesus and disguise during the dishes I'd probably go up and like help my mom do the dishes And then dad came home from work and rather than ignore me said hey dad How is how is work how's everything going and you know because if that were really Jesus and disguise

I would do that and then they're eating dinner together with the family and there's one hamburger left And he turns to his brother says hey, why don't you have this? And the guy told me his life was completely transformed by literally one week of acting in this sort of way. And that's not really surprising. Pope Benedict talked about this in one of his encyclicals that one way to God is to act in this sort of way, to act as if God exists, to act as if other people

are Jesus and disguise. And Mother Teresa talked about that too, for her, the poor and the leper and the destitute were all Jesus in disguise. And so she served them as if they were Jesus. And so that is one way it seems to me to move towards God. I don't think it's the only way though. And the reason is that I know a philosopher, Alistair McIntyre, who mentioned to us in class one day that he was an atheist until he carefully studied the arguments for God's existence. So there are at least some people,

at least one person Alistair McIntyre, who really did come to God through that way, but I think the more common way is through lived practice, lived action. You brought up the case of severe depression. And it is the case, of course, that you can make profoundly coherent arguments of for why your life is meaningless and why meaning there is just a vast nullity to all existence. But the question isn't are they coherent? The question is are they true?

The question is are the premises right because anything can be coherent within false premises. The question is, is it the case that your life is worth nothing? And the answer has to be no. That's a false statement. It's a false apprehension of reality. Look what happens if you act that out. Of course. But even then, you could say, well, no, I'd be doing a sum. If within the grips of depression, you'd still be thinking that I am acting according to a good given the premises that I have about the meaninglessness of my own life and of all life. So I think the foundation, which keeps going back to the same question, the foundation of truth must be there.

But then the next thing to say is not that you are wrong about your life being meaningless. It's a false statement, but that you're also loved. You are loved. And I think that's the kind of thing, at least my own experience, that can take you out of the darkness, that your life is not about you and your own thoughts. It's not about you and the systems that you are building. Ultimately, you are in response to something much greater than you. And that thing that's greater than you is looking at you and calling you out and saying,

I love you. So it's not either or. It's not, well, what's true propositional about the nature of existence and it's there is soul, it is that and I'm calling you, which is a universal call for us as Catholics. This exercise that you described, Dr. Kaser, I believe that when we see other people, When we see other people, except under very extraordinary circumstances, we see an illusion that we project upon them. Mostly, it's a simplifying illusion.

We don't see the whole person. Partly, I suppose, because we couldn't tolerate the complete vision. It would be too much for us, you know. So our doors of perception are three quarters closed and exactly why that is isn't obvious. But I do believe that the more accurately you perceive a person, the more you perceive them in the manner that you described,

you perceive them in the manner that you described. You see this eternal recurring, conscious, hero striving against the darkness. It's, and when you treat people like that, of course they're what compelled by that, it's a compelling way to be interacted with. Although, I don't know what it is, is that maybe it's not obvious how much of that you can tolerate, which is a very strange thing too. You know, I'm thinking about this. Most of what we perceive is our memory. And sometimes that is stripped away and we see what's there,

but seeing what's there is awe, awe, inspiring. It's gripping and it instills terror. And I think that's the same as the burning bush. And in some sense, everything is a burning bush. But you're blinded to it. You see what's there. I think when you really love someone, a child, you really see that in a child, you really see that in a

child if you're a parent, right? You see, you don't see a generic baby, you see that actual person, so that memory that pushes generic baby into your field of vision dissipates and you see what's actually there and that love drives that. I imagine it does that. Love seems to, I got to say, when people fall in love with one another, they see the perfection that could conceivably exist. It's like the curtains of a volusion pull apart momentarily and you see the paradisal state that could be there hypothetically if everything was done properly. And that drives the love.

And then maybe if you work across time, you can achieve that to some degree, you know, because other people think about themselves as deluded when they're in love. And that's a very cynical way of looking at it. It certainly doesn't apply to the love between a parent and a child. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I know in my own life, having children has been such unbelievably enriching experience. And I think about, especially when kids are little

and they're asleep, you go in there and they're just sleeping and you see their little chest moving up and down, there's something painfully beautiful about that. I mean, you just wish it could go on just indefinitely. And for me, that is something, that taught me something about God's love. Right? If God really is God the Father, well, then, you know, we, that's sort of how he looks at us. And he sees the good, he sees the effort and of course, there's imperfections too. But I don't know it. For me, having children is a kind of, I tried to sometimes tell my students most of whom don't have kids what it's like. And it's very hard to describe.

So the best way I came up with was, well, remember when you were a little child, you know, like six. And you thought, um, oh, boys have cooties, girls have cooties. And the idea of romance or kissing someone is just repulsive. And then, you know, you could imagine trying to explain to a six year old look, at some point, you're going to look at someone else and just find this person unbelievably captivating and you're going to want to kiss them. And you can say the words, but a little kids are like, oh, no way. That's hard to describe. And I think becoming a parent is similar to that in that. Yeah, it seems to me that it is so enriching that and has given so much at least to my life, and including calling out something for me

that would have never been elicited, is there's kind of sacrifices that you'll do for a kid that you'll never do for an adult. So that's interesting. That ties in with this idea that you brought forward of treating everybody as if they were manifestation of Christ. You see that meaningful fragility in your children, and it's beautiful, and maybe if you've been warped and hurt, you get resentful about it, and jealous of it, and that can lead

to all sorts of terrible things. But to the degree that you're privileged to see that, that calls you to be a better person. And you can think of that, you know, biologically, well, you have these fragile creatures that you're responsible for. Of course, that's gonna call you to a higher mode of action because otherwise they're not going to live. So it's very practical. But what you see there is if you view someone with love,

then it's incumbent upon you to treat them as if they're valuable. And then the more you treat other people as if they're valuable, the better person you are. That just comes along for the ride in some sense. So none of that seems questionable to me. That that seems solid. And so then maybe the more love you view other people with the higher the moral demand that's placed on you. And then I would say, too, well, then that's another reason why it's so important to. And then I would say, too, well, then that's another reason

why it's so important to be truthful and in some sense to be good because it isn't obvious to me that you can withstand that moral load if you're compromised by too much sin. It's too much. And that's another thing that we're not very good at teaching young people about. You know, we shouldn't do that. You know, it's like there's a sanctimonious authority that goes along with that that's the wrong tone. It's more like, you know, I don't know how you lay it out properly, but you tell people that you love how to avoid the road to hell. And you don't do that because you're shaking your finger at them or because you're a moral authority. because you're a moral authority, you do it because you don't want them to burn.

And I think there's too much of the moral authority still in the church, and not enough of the, you know, the love that helps people avoid the fire. helps people avoid the fire. I think though it's you just beautifully described as the unity of the love commandment that you love your you love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and you love your neighbor as yourself. The love of God identifies the pattern and then the interplay between the love of the neighbor and the love of the self, they're inextricated, they're differentiated, but inextricably intertwined. So to love the neighbor is to see the neighbor

as he or she actually is, and to respond to the actuality, not to your desires, not to what you want this person to be in a utilitarian or instrumental sense, but to the reality of that eternal soul right there. And in and through that, then you see who you are. That's a commentary on the 10 commandments, right?

That's Christ's summation of the 10 commandments. So that's another illustration of that abstraction, proper behavior, the story on top of that, the propositions, that would be the 10 commandments, let's say. So then Christ is challenged on the 10 commandments, something like rank order these if you're so wise. Right? Exactly. Because you're going to say something heretical. And Christ does this unbelievable sleight of mind and extracts out two superordinate principles. And it's done in such a compelling way that the interlocutor who's basically a prosecutorial mind, like an inquisitionist in some sense, is reduced

to silence. That's a very powerful story. It's one of those stories you read that you think, And that's a very powerful story. It's one of those stories you read that you think, it's not obvious how someone could have made that up. There's a lot of genius. There's an immense well of moral genius in that story. And the idea that that's some sort of casual, false construct, you know, produced for the purposes of power. It's like, well, you try to write a story that's short, that that's, that is that wise. See how far you get with

it. So. No, I'm a Catholic. Heck, rituals are a whole thing, you know. Yeah, well, there's peace in ritual, right? That's the thing. You know what to expect? It's a place of safety. And in a world that changes constantly, ritual is the only thing that provides order. And so we may need that now more than ever because things are changing. So unbelievably fast, which is also partly why the church should be careful about being too relevant. It's like, yep, I agree. I agree. Yeah. Catholicism is as sane as people get. You know, it's baroque, right? And and and go. It's gothic. It's not baroque. It's gothic. It's dark. It's it's it's it's it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film. And I'm not

being I'm not being I'm not saying something denigrating by that. I mean, it's part of its strange mystery and all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it than they are with it. It's a container for that religious impulse. And that impulse is to the good. Yeah, and the image of the crucified Christ and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right? If you think of the symbolism of communion,

you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most transgressive, all of it comes together. That's worth unpacking that. It's ritual cannibalism in the service of God. Yeah. Yeah, and it's also seen as a normal meal of communion. And it's also seen as a sexual union because there's a relationship, there's a notion in which then in the altar and in that moment of communion, there's this joining of heaven and earth, you know, the rays of the chalice

and there's this joining, which is this image of this sexual of union between God and the soul, between God and His church. And so all of it, it just jammed into this ritual as a kind of center of reality would call it. And so like you said, if you get rid of that, then you're going to have all kinds of strange you