YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Barron

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123
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2022-07-20
most recent
2022-07-20
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1
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podcast

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  1. “It's so heavy that it draws everything, including light, nothing can escape from it. See, that's the sinner. We're all sinners. We're like black holes, that we draw everything into ourselves. So as a sinner, and you know, I'll confess I'm a sinner, the temptation is, okay, this is the bishop barren 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. It's like”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “To name them pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust are the seven deadly sins. Record capital sins sometimes Kaplut. They're the head sins from which things tend to flow. The most fundamental is pride. Probably most people today, if you talk about vice or you talk about 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 one that's most sort of dependent upon the body and its passions and so on. The most important is pride. Pride is the deadliest of deadly sins. And it's very simple to see why. Pride is Augustine calls it incurvatus and say 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.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “When Jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies, I no longer call you servants but friends. It's extraordinary moment because every god, right, who's ever been served, well, that's the best we can hope for he is the servant of God. You know, I try 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.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “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 as Non-competitive to us. That's so important because I think in so many systems from mythology onward, you have these competitive understandings of God.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “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. Like cells and molecules in an organism. That's the church. It's not an organization. That's a deformation of ecclesiology. The church is this organism that begins with Jesus and then he's drawing all of humanity, but ultimately all of nature, 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. So in that way, it's at the heart of it. Then there's all kinds of things. 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? Ancient medieval, modern, contemporary. Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable. God became one of us in order to divinize us. The goal of my life is not just to be a good person, not just to be”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the integrity of the creature he becomes. What we see in the burning bush, that principle which obtains across the board. So the closer God comes to me, the more radiant I become, right? But take that now to the nth degree would be what we mean by the incarnation, the incarnation of the Son of God becoming a creature in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful. That's the pillar of Christianity. It's the incarnation. 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. You know, the Greek fathers always said God became human, that humans might become God. And that's a good way to sum up, I think, the essence of Christianity.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “In a way, what we've been doing so far is a necessary propedic 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, you know, the Bible itself and all the great commentators within Judaism, I think, would agree with this basic theistic stuff that I've been talking about. Take Moses Maimonides, for example. Now, what makes Christianity distinct this supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us, God becomes a creature.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “God's got the whale swallows him up and brings him right back where God wants them. It's a poetic way of saying you can't escape the press of God. At the same time, Tower of Babel, I'm going to build a tower up to God. I'm going to grab hold of God. No, no, no, you can't do that. So live in the space in between those two things, which would be the space of friendship with God, falling in love with God is neither grasping nor hiding from God”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “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. I've got Him. I understand Him. I can manipulate Him. No, no, no. 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. I'm going to avoid God, Jonah and the whale, you know, so he has the call from God. And no, no, I'm going to refuse that. I'm going to run as far away. I'm going to go to Tarshish, which meant like Timbuktu for them at the end of the world.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “No, right. Well, see, Augustine says God is simultaneously intimi or intimomeo et superior sumomeo. He's closer to me than I am to myself, and he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine at the same time. But see, once you get the insight that God is the sheer active to be, well, of course that's true. So right now God is sustaining us in existence. True. Aquinas says God is in all things by essence, presence, and power, and most intimately so. And he's nowhere in this room. Okay, well, where's God? He's nowhere in this room. He's totalitar, we say. He's totally other. Same time. 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.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Right. Let me make it maybe more imagistic. I think a really good analogy would be author to book, so like Tolkien or someone that writes one 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 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. He's not in the book. 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 everyone.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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? So that's kind of the next step. But the basic idea of God is non-competitively transcendent to the world. That's another way to get at it.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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. 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.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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 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. I'm going to find out. No, no, no. Take off your shoes. You're on holy ground because you're not in charge here. You're not in command. Because if you got shoes on, you can walk wherever you want. You can walk with confidence. But you take your shoes off, much more vulnerable. Here's another interesting thing. I didn't think about the burning bush in this connection before It's a bush that's on fire but not consumed. Beings are competitive with each other. And so these can't be in the same place at the same time. These two beings, they're mutually exclusive, if you want”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Go back to Moses now when the Israelites asked me, What's your name? What shall I tell them? And he says, you know, famously, I am who I am. But see, Aquinas reads that as a very accurate remark. So Moses is wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities. Which one are you? You got to be one of them. So tell me your name. In philosophical language, give me the essence that receives your act of existing, right? And God's answer blows the mind of Moses and the whole tradition. I am who I am. To be God is to be. So I'm not this or that. I'm not up or down. I'm not here or there. God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it. Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that? No. And in a way, that's the whole point.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, to be me is to be a human being, right? To be this is to be a table, to be this to be a microphone. So I'll use Aquinas' language. It's the act of being. If you want into the receptacle of some essential principle. So it's got a ontological structure. It's an existent. It's a thing that exists, but it's existing in a limited way according to essential principle. God said, well, what's God? What's God's name? What kind of being is he?”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Or childish credulity, so authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason and the far side of reason. It's super irrational, not infra-rational. And that's a very important move. At the limit of what I can know, at the limit of my striving and my vision, there's this horizon that opens up. And I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing. There's 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.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Better, he sneaks up on us because I like the language of grace. God's action comes first. 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 going to 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 Tillock, 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 sub-rational. You know, I have proof of this. 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 infra-rational. And that's not it. I mean, I don't want something infra-rational. I don't want superstition or...”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “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. God's like a lion. God's like this and that. Or the Bible will sometimes imagine God as a human being walking around. 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.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Not utterly, of course. 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. So we gesture toward it. 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. No, that makes God an entity. At the same time, it's not simply equivocal. So if I say, well, that thing is, and God is, I mean, totally different things. No, no. I mean something analogous. To be God is to be to be. So the real meaning of being is the being of God. The being of that thing or this thing or the being of galaxies or subatomic particles would be analogous to God's manner.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “According to the mode of some essence. That's not true of God Is why you 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. And that's precisely wrong. That's just a category error. 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. That's the way to put it. In more theological language, God's the creator of all things.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “In the world. 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 Even the genus of being it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition, but it's really interesting. So you say, well, at the very least, God must be a being, right? And Aquinas' answer is no. He's not in the genus of being. So we talk about God being beyond being and so on. To say in God essence and existence coincide is to say God's very nature is to be. And that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world. So what I'm doing there is I'm gesturing the way the tradition does toward God using language that's at the same time philosophically precise and gnomic. It's both accurate. It's true. God, essence and existence coincide. What God is the same as God's active to be. Now what does that mean? I'm not quite sure because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that. Everything in our experience is a being of some type. It's existence received.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I'll give you Tom's acquaintance definition God is ipsum essay subsistence God is the subsistent act of to be itself another way to state that in Aquinas is God is that reality unique absolutely unique in which essence and existence coincide to be God is to be to be those are all ways of talking about 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. And God is not an entity.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source