https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nXn529VSFd4
Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Welcome everyone to Another Voices with Vervecki. I’m excited to talk to Patrick Deneen. Patrick reached out to me by email, a very long but nevertheless well-written email, describing how he is teaching philosophy to high school students and how in many ways when it’s properly presented, they take to it, I believe one of your sentences was like ducks to water, and so I’m really, really, really, really impressed by that. And I want to get a chance for you to say what you’re doing and explain how it works and how it fits in. So why don’t you just introduce yourself and a little bit of your background and how your work connects to mine. Yeah, thank you very much, Dr. Vervecki. Yeah, I reached out mostly to say thank you for awakening from the meaning crisis. You know, naturally, academics don’t have to make their work so publicly available, and I think it’s a great gift to all of us that Dr. Vervecki was generous enough to give so much good content to us. And Dr. Vervecki, your take on intellectual history is more or less my go-to. I’ve pulled from it more times than I can count just in conversation, teaching, etc. I think you more or less have it down just in how we got from there to here. So all that to say, I started teaching at the Chesterton Academy of the Sacred Heart in Peoria, Illinois in August of 2021. Right. The school itself was founded in 2007 by a group of parents who were looking for, you know, looking for something that the community didn’t yet have in terms of education. All of them had previously homeschooled their students and in co-ops, such as co-ops and as well as individually, and decided that they wanted to get together and do something a little bit more institutionally rooted and pool expertise, pool resources, and, you know, actually get a brick and mortar building, which is where I am right now. So Chesterton Academy is part of the Chesterton Schools Network. Now there are about 35 of them, 35 of them throughout the United States and a couple in Canada, actually a couple even. There’s one in Italy, there’s one in Iraq, and they were founded, sorry, I’ll correct myself, the Chesterton School was founded somewhere in the 2000s in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Ours was only founded in 2017. We share curriculum, we get together for various events, conferences, so on and so forth, all inspired by what we call the wit and wisdom of GK Chesterton. Chesterton himself was a Catholic journalist, editor, writer, poet, intellectual author, just kind of a Renaissance man, although he might object to that terminology in the early 20th century, and we draw a lot from him and just his ability to speak to the modern world and to draw people into just happier, better lives of truth, beauty, and goodness. Just the Chesterton Schools Network is part of what’s generally called the Classical Education Movement, sort of turning our attention to the whole of human history instead of just taking the 20th, 21st century for granted. So we study all the way from the pre-Socratics to the present day, trying to receive whatever we can from each of those eras, and always, always, always, with the goal of living well, not just moving on to the next grade and eventually moving on to the workforce and then moving on to retirement and moving on to death. No, we consider education to be really a forming and shaping the human person to have a real affinity for truth, an affinity for goodness, moral and otherwise, and to lead a good life. So it’s tough for me to really articulate what classical education is, because to be quite honest at this point, I would just call it good education. Classical education is really what education should be, and we said the fruits of it in our students’ lives. Well, thank you, Patrick. Please call me John. So you are making use of Awakening from the Mini-Crisis in your course or in some courses that you teach? Yeah, so I teach, this year I teach the freshman philosophy, combined junior sophomore philosophy and the senior philosophy. The Chesterton curriculum has, for all the schools, philosophy three times a week for all four years. And yeah, and the way that the curriculum is set up is to have more or less intro to philosophy in the freshman year. So we start with the pre-socratics, we read the Gorgias Dialogue, second semester logic. Sophomore year is focused on Plato and Aristotle, junior on Aquinas and the other scholastics, and then a little bit of the early moderns as well. And then senior year is for kind of modern through contemporary with a good dose of political philosophy. And so what Awakening from the Mini-Crisis fits in is that I find myself more as a resource for me to go and learn from your study of intellectual history and really how the Mini-Crisis developed and how we built up to it, the different techniques and the different methods, the different systems that each thinker has contributed. So for example, today I was teaching the sophists to my freshman and I think that your framework of Harry Frankfurt’s work on bullshit didn’t use that word with them, but I think it says a lot about who the sophists were and how Socrates entered into that. I think another way that Awakening from the Mini-Crisis is so valuable is the way that you’re able to bring in the connections from many different fields, cognitive science, psychology, etc. to really articulate the philosophy and the connections between the philosophy and everyday life in a way that is not so foreign to modern experience as some of the specialized terminology that you see in Aristotle and Aquinas. I guess specifically Finsting, for an example, Finsting, your discussion of multiple object tracking and how those sort of experiences show us that being is first, you identify the being of the thing and only then start to articulate the essence. Excellent, excellent, excellent. I mean that’s what empirically, that’s really what I would consider that empirical backing to the old Aristotelian semistic idea of simple apprehension as the first act of mind. I mean, Aquinas wrote, being is the first thing to fall into the mind and it’s wonderful all these experiments and all these experiences and all these developments that show how that has actually lived out in the real world. Do you have like, do you have a PhD in philosophy or you must have some training in philosophy? I have actually not much. Yeah, I certainly articulate it as I am seeking wisdom and then I share the fruits of my pursuit with my students. I certainly wasn’t hired because I’m a specialist. My own academic background, I graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2020 with a bachelor’s in African American and Diaspora studies. Right. After that, I did a year of Catholic seminary. I’m discerned that that was not going to be exactly the way of life for me and so I am teaching as I’m figuring out my next steps and seeing where I might fit into this pursuit of meaning of all of humanity and even all of the universe. And so, yeah, really all my philosophical background is having that lens all throughout college without real philosophical training and then my one year of grad school. Yeah, not a specialist, but that’s cool. That’s fine. So is this what you’re doing now something you might consider doing permanently? I think so. I think so. I really do find a great deal of fulfillment in education. I have found my gifts and talents to be quite adept for it and I found a lot of joy in it. So certainly going forward, I think that I think I’m made to teach. So a couple things. I don’t know if you’re aware of a lot of the recent, the episode on Thomas Aquinas is the one I would, one of the episodes I would most like to correct from Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Oh, excellent. I would also like you to correct that episode. In particular, I mean, I’ve been very influenced by Sebastian Morello and the arguments of people like him and Clark and DC Schindler and others that Aquinas is much better understood as a neoplatonist than as an Aristotelian. Like Plotinus, he uses Aristotle, but the person in the pagan world that I think you could most aptly compare Aquinas to is actually Plotinus rather than Aristotle. So Sebastian Morello’s book, The World is the Icon of God, great introduction to that argument, very carefully made. I just reminded me, I need to contact Sebastian again, we haven’t talked in a bit. So that’s one thing. And then I guess the second thing I would want to say to you is or recommend to you, have you encountered any of Pierre Haddow’s work on what is ancient philosophy, philosophy as a way of life, because the emphasis there on philosophy is the cultivation of wisdom. It was actually the influence of Haddow and Drew Hyland that really turned my mind towards seeing philosophy as a spiritual practice and not just an academic enterprise. I haven’t read any of him, but I do remember you mentioning him early on in the series. So, like, tell me what this is like, teaching these kids. Like, and I mean, I was moved at the one point where you said that one of the students, especially in the group that was initially resistant to Socrates, that one of the students, you know, I take it you were reading the Phaedo and they were crying when Socrates was dying. So you did something amazing there. You moved them from an initial, you know, resistance to Socrates to, you know, really identifying with them. What’s that like? How do you do that? Yeah, I don’t. I don’t. I mean, it’s a Catholic school and that’s my own background. And so I’d say that grace has a lot to do with it. I would say that these kids’ parents have really formed them in such a way that they are just constitutionally, just who they are is inclined towards that truth and that goodness. And so really, I think what I was able to achieve was to show them the intrinsic connection between truth and goodness. And that was what sold them on Socrates. Now, of course, they’re not entirely sold. He still irritates them sometimes. I’d say that over the course of that year, as many, they started out interpreting him as just trying to irritate people, prove he’s right. He doesn’t actually have any answers. He just tells people they’re wrong, you know, which is an understandable first take on him. But it’s really through patient engagement with his dialogues and patient engagement with his moral vision, and also their own drive towards living well, living virtuously, living in love, loving well, right? Yes. In Socrates’ own terminology, and just seeing his deep commitment and even to his willingness to die for what he believes to be right. Yes. And the way that he believed self-examination to be so integral to that. One thing that I really highlighted for them was in the last few pages of the Apology, in which he requests that the people around him challenge his sons. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Which he tells them that if any of them think that they are something when they’re in fact nothing, you must. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the way of life that he wants for himself. This is the way of life that he wants for everybody. And then, right, tracing that through the credo in which he, facing death, he still thinks, right? Still believes that living in accord with the truth that is found in being is the only right way to live. And then the feto too. I think the feto especially, beautifully expresses his relationship with his students and his care for them and his really fatherly characteristics in leading them towards wisdom, leading them towards what makes life meaningful. And so by the end, yeah, they got it. And of course, they’re all faithful Catholics as well. And so they can, over time, they came to see how deeply that pursuit of truth as one of the basic precepts of what the human person is made for is what’s going to lead them towards union with God. And that’s ultimately what they care about. However clearly they may or may not be able to articulate it. Right. Right. Right. Well, first of all, we’ve filmed 17 episodes of After Socrates, the next series, and there’s four or five more to go. And then that’s going to be there and it’s going to be released. So that’s going to follow the whole Socratic, Neoplatonic tradition about the development of dialectic into dialogos. And so you might find that that’s valuable for going more in depth about Socrates. Thank you very much. What kind of thing do you do? Like what kind of practice, obviously they’re reading the dialogues. Do you have them discuss it? Do they argue about, like I’m really intrigued as to what’s going on in the classroom when you’re confronting these great texts? Right. So this year, actually, so the Socrates is handled in sophomore year. And just because of the size of the school, we actually only have 35 students. So it’s very small, very personal, very much a community. Yeah. So with that size, so far, we’re almost to the level of offering all four years of the curriculum every year. But for this year, the sophomores and juniors are together in the junior curriculum. So I’m not teaching Plato this year. And last year teaching him, I was very much just getting my feet under me. I don’t have too much of a pedagogical background. And so it’s more just like, deliver the content, discuss it with them, see how it goes. So I’d say I didn’t structure it, especially deliberately. More or less, I read the text closely, read it as deeply as I could. I prepared notes, prepared questions, specific items to highlight. And then we went through and discussed and I addressed the objections and we went down rabbit holes, so on and so forth. And, you know, blessed to have such brilliant and such good hearted students that they’re able to contribute a lot as well. So what do they, and I guess you’re influencing them, what do you see as the proper relationship between philosophy, ancient philosophy, and your particular religious commitments? What do you see as the relationship there? What are they learning? I mean, there’s many contexts in which Christianity is antagonistic towards Greek philosophy. I mean, I was brought up in such a framework. So I’m interested in how that’s different for you and your students. And how do you see what you’re doing, working for them as people who are cultivating sort of a committed Catholic life? Yeah, that’s a great question. And certainly we know well, especially, I mean, the controversy when Aristotle reached the West. Yes. All those other controversies like that. But as you well note in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I mean, the Catholic Church completely lifted from Greek philosophy in order to make sense of Revelation. Right. Right. When the Catholic Church was dealing with all the controversies of the heresies, right, Arianism, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, etc. Right. Where did we get the terminology to make sense of how three persons are one God? Where did we get the terminology to make sense of how Christ is fully God and fully man? We got it from the Greeks. We got these words that help us to articulate what Christ and his apostles were talking about when they preached in Israel, when they preached in Greece, so on and so forth. Another point, I think a point that’s especially relevant, and this is maybe where Catholicism diverges from Protestantism in a really fundamental way, is the Catholic understanding of analogy. And perhaps I shouldn’t say the Catholic understanding of analogies, because it’s not really doctrinal, but the understanding of analogy that underpins everything that we hold about the faith, right, that human nature and the natural world is not so corrupt that we cannot know anything. I mean, I think you really have Luther’s number there with the act of violence against human reason that he does in making faith simply something that has nothing to do with us and is just God-choosing. Because that is completely antithetical to the spirit of the Catholic Church and to the spirit of Aquinas, who is undoubtedly our greatest philosopher in whom the popes call our universal teacher, right, the angelic doctor. And for Aquinas, it’s complicated, but really, if you understand analogy, you understand everything. If you understand the relationship between how God loves us and how we love all the different things that we love and wanting, desiring, loving, all those together, related, but somewhat distinct. And then if you’re able to connect that to how, I don’t know, if you have two free-floating hydrogen atoms, they want to form a diatomic bond. And when you drop a rock, it wants to go downwards. I think that in the Thomistic worldview, which is the foundation of mainstream Catholic worldview, those are all natural appetites that are analogously linked. And that analogy is what makes it possible for us to make sense of revelation. Every word has so much behind it that we don’t say. Every word presupposes a certain experience of being and a certain relationship with being. And it’s those words that God uses when he speaks through the prophets, when he speaks through Jesus. When he speaks to the apostles. And so I teach all my students how, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, it’s in his introduction to Summa Contra Gentiles, he says that an error in thinking about creation leads to an error in thinking about God. And if we’re able to use our philosophical tools to refine our familiarity with being on a natural level, when that supernatural level enters into it, through our senses, fundamentally through our senses, because as Paul tells us, faith comes from hearing. If we have a well-trained mind, if we have that affinity towards being and goodness and beauty and truth and all the divine attributes, we’re going to be able to get that deeper faith, that deeper knowledge, and have a greater predisposition towards divine charity, because grace builds on nature. So an understanding of nature is going to offer space for grace to enter in. I can see the deep influence of Aquinas on your thinking. You’ve internalized it very beautifully. So what does, and that was a good answer. I want to follow up on that good answer and ask, what’s the relationship to your mind and how you teach it to your students, between the Platonic cultivation of wisdom and the Catholic life of faith? What’s the relationship? Those are both deeply committed, and I think it’s fair to call them both spiritual ways of life. They seek transcendence, they seek transformation, they seek coming into right relationship, ratio religio, with the true, the good, and the beautiful. So I see the convergences. I’m wondering, what do you see as the relationship between the love of wisdom and the love of God, if I could put it that way? Yeah, the love of wisdom and the love of God. I think that’s a great way to articulate it. I would say that human beings are made for boundless love and the fullness of truth. That’s what we desire, boundless love and the fullness of truth. And I think another commendation of awakening from the meaning crisis, I think you articulate Augustine’s spirituality of that beautifully. I think that his bringing together all the wisdom of the ancient world to say this is what the human person is made for. And you express that very beautifully. And it really is a convergence. I mean, many of the church fathers, many of our early theologians point to the ancient Greeks as essentially God providing a certain type of revelation to the Greeks to prepare them to receive the gospel. In that, God made the human person, right? As Augustine writes in Confessions, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. So the Christian is first a man or a woman, right? And then the gospel enters in and essentially gives us what we long for. That’s how I would articulate it. I would articulate that those who cultivated wisdom in really any tradition, those who really cultivate wisdom are inclining themselves towards God. But we can’t do it by ourselves, right? We can’t do it by ourselves because of the darkening of the intellect. The church talks about the broken relationships due to sin, right? It starts out in Genesis. You can do some beautiful commentaries, some beautiful exegesis on how when we turn away from that highest good, when we turn away from that fullness of truth, which each and every one of us does in our lives, we have this broken relationship with God, this broken relationship with one another, this broken relationship between body and soul, this broken relationship between one and another, and finally this broken relationship between man and nature, right? So as well as the fact that God is pure spirit, and again, in the Thomistic tradition, everything that we know comes to us, everything that we know naturally comes to us through our senses. So we simply, on this earth, and by our own strength, we cannot fulfill what we’re made for. We can be inclined towards it. We can cultivate a heart that’s made, that’s more perfectly directed towards truth, beauty, and goodness, but the way that the gospel answers into that, so to answer your question more directly, it’s the supernatural fulfillment of that desire. It’s the supernatural fulfillment of what natural reason tells us we’re made for. I think the gospel of John gives us the most powerful pointed articulation of this, specifically John chapter 17, probably my favorite chapter in the whole Bible, how it is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, all that God is made man to invite us into that relationship, to invite us into that restored relationship in him with all of the characteristics, right? Your discussion of our human drive for coherence, our human drive for significance, is it? And our drive for purposefulness, right? All of that, we would say, is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, is fulfilled in entering into the life of the blessed Trinity with him. Natural reason can tell us what we’re made for. Revelation gives us this ability to incline ourselves to it more perfectly and in its fullness and such that we’re able to enter into that communion in the afterlife. So you genuinely see Christianity as you understand it as following from and in some way a culmination of the whole Greek intellectual tradition? I would articulate it a little bit differently and say that by God’s providence, the Greeks did something to prepare us for the reception of the gospel, right? We, especially Pope St. John Paul II, would often talk about these strains of development that come together, these strange strains of history, right? The Israelites, these people who received this special revelation, who received this covenant relationship with God, it’s restored in Christ and sent out to the whole world. The place where that really most powerfully and persistently takes root is the Greek world, right? The Greek world that has this seeking the logos, who for us is Christ, right? They’re seeking the logos and they have these incredible conceptual tools that attune them to that logos. And finally, for the Catholic faith, at least, we have Roman law, we have Roman order, we have Roman discipline that gives structure to the whole being, the whole body. And so for the Catholic tradition, it’s God’s providence working and bringing together his chosen people, the Jews, the fulfillment in Christ, who then takes root among the Greeks and the Latins to form the church. So two questions for you. Do you think it’s the fact that your students already have a commitment to the religious life that helps to explain why they take up this ancient philosophy so powerfully? Do you think that’s part of the reason? I think that’s a huge part of it. I think that’s a huge part of it. One thing that this school has convicted me of so deeply is the connection between moral virtue and intellectual virtue, which is right there, which is right there in Aristotle. And I mean, I think all of us know it common sensically, vice gums up our minds. If we’re paying our attention to the lowest things, to the bodily instincts, vices, concupiscence, abusing one another, we’re not going to turn our eyes up to the stars. We’re not going to turn our eyes up to the heavens. We’re not going to have that affinity within us for the word. And so for these kids, to their parents, great credit. They come here ready to love one another, ready to love God, ready to love truth. And then the community, the culture, the culture really inculcates that in them further. One of my favorite quotes about education is from, I think he’s the headmaster of a classical school somewhere in the southeast. He said that culture is the hidden curriculum of a school. Yeah. Culture is the hidden curriculum of the school. And the headmaster here, my colleague, Dr. Joshua Russell, has done a tremendous job of cultivating that culture. If I could tell an anecdote, I think it’s my favorite anecdote for the caliber of young people that I get to work with here. To preface it, so the school opened 2017. Dr. Russell, his professional background is in concert piano. And so concert piano and literature are his specialties. And so when he started, another thing that’s mandatory in the Chesterton curriculum is choir. Four years of choir, three times a week. And when he started, naturally they’re teenagers, so they want to sing pop songs. They want to do this. They want to do that, blah, blah, blah, blah, this more lowbrow stuff. But he was firm and he held them to it, kept them with that discipline to sing challenging pieces, challenging classical sacred music, so on and so forth, as well as the more lighter, as well as lighter contemporary stuff. But he held them to this high standard of musicianship. They don’t ask for pop songs anymore. Right? And it’s, I mean, it’s naturally, it’s not because, you know, I mean, the kids cycle through, but the culture is such that, and I think this is what makes the school that I teach at so special, right? So it’s such an incredible place is that the students encourage one another towards that goodness. Right. And so just last year, so we don’t have, you know, we’re a private school, we’re not state funded, and we keep tuition at a quite reasonable, quite reasonable level so that it’s accessible to all people. And so we have to fundraise. Right. And so as part of the run up to our annual gala, we asked our students to go out to businesses with people whom you know, family, friends, whatever, and see if they’ll be willing to pledge. Right. Ask. So we set the fundraising goal for across the 30 of them. If they could raise $5,000, they would get, you know, this reward, right? We’ll give them movie night snacks, freedom, whatever. On the day that that was due, one of the students had an idea. And he wrote a petition, wrote a petition, shared it, all the kids were getting hyped about it. I’ve never seen them so excited. I hadn’t at that point seen them so excited about anything. I saw the petition. I liked the idea. I signed it because the petition was for Dr. Russell to play a classical piano recital for them. Oh, we had a group of 30 teenagers who were just off the walls excited and longing for their headmaster to play a classical piano recital for them. Oh, wow. It’s a reward for, you know, for the gala funders. And so Dr. Russell thought about it, despite the fact that he, you know, he has, he has nine children. So he does not have, and the duty is here. So he does not have much time to practice, but, you know, he’s certainly still got it. So he, so one day during finals week, we went on a field trip to the piano store just down the road that way. And Dr. Russell played Mozart, Liszt, Chopin, and I think Debussy for them. And they were just enraptured. They were absolutely enraptured. Yeah, so it was a wonderful day. And Dr. Russell and I, we called it an appetite check. We called it an appetite check. And they passed with flying colors because these kids really are inclined towards the higher things in all walks of life. Another connection to your work, general intelligence, right? They love good, they love good virtue. They love good philosophy, good theology, good literature. They really, really love good literature. They’re getting there on the math and science. They’re getting there on the math and science, but so on and so forth. You know, they encourage one another to incline towards the highest things. That’s really uplifting. Yeah, it really is. It’s been a great source of joy and hope for me. Is each school associated with like a particular church or or anything like that? Or are they paired up or? The Testament Schools Network, all of the schools are Catholic, right? It’s a deeply Catholic curriculum. Generally, we’re not really generally generally it works in these schools like it works here, like it worked here, and like it worked at the original school in Minneapolis, St. Paul, a group of parents who are convicted of the vision of just classical education, right? Forming their children in accord with the best that every age has to offer and for union with God, period, full stop, right? If you have that, you have everything. If you lack that, you have nothing. And so this, I mean, that is the vision that drives our parents to send their students here. That is the vision that drives students to do what they do here, and that’s the vision that drives the faculty to do what we do. So generally, it is independent groups of parents who get together and build something beautiful for their children. What happens when the children of the original parents have graduated? What brings in the new kids? That’s a great question. A lot of it comes from the strong homeschool communities that we have around here. A lot of it, you know, obviously comes from grace, but also just the parents stay engaged and a lot of them have reasonably large families. And, you know, as Jesus said, by their fruits you shall know them, and this place bears fruit and people notice. So I’m wondering what do you make of the parts of the series? I mean, where I’m obviously being influenced by both religions and philosophies outside both the Christian and Greek heritage. I mean, I did, I dive into Buddhism to explore mindfulness. I talk about Taoism and flow. And, of course, they also have profound philosophical traditions and transformative practices. And how does that sit for you and your students when you’re encountering those kinds of ideas? Yeah, another great question. Well, as Catholics, what we would say is that God gave the fullness of truth to the Catholic Church. God, it’s not because we’re great. It’s not because we’re special. It’s because God loves all people and wants us all to know the truth and live in perfect love. However, he guides those who are outside the fold as well through more or less partial revelation, right? Through convertibility to the transcendentals, right? Everything that is, to some extent, is true, right? Everything that is, to some extent, is good. And the human person is made for truth and goodness. And as you well know, in our tradition, evil is nothing. Evil is nonbeing. Falsity is simply an absence of truth. And so there’s something there, right? There’s something there. And our task is to identify what we can share and identify where the disagreement is. So I’d say that the consensus position among most of the Catholic philosophers and theologians I follow is that the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western philosophy is that Western has maybe a deeper affinity for being, whereas Eastern is maybe more about dispensing illusion and kind of breaking samsara, so on and so forth. So I think that there’s a lot to be said for the fact that you do need to pour yourself out, right? Jesus said, he who does not deny himself, take up his cross and follow me, has no part in me, right? There’s a certain apathetic side to it. There’s a certain penitential side to it that other traditions hit really well, right? But then there’s a certain affinity for the construction of the human person, right? This, you are a real being and you are made for communion with divine love, you know? That’s, there’s a construction there. There’s an affirmation of being that I’m not especially well versed in Eastern philosophy, but that I do not see in Eastern philosophy. I see. So for you, there’s a fundamental difference in sort of philosophical anthropology. You have a very different understanding of human nature and therefore the ways different philosophical religious positions sort of plug into that model of human nature. Is that a fair way to say it? I think that, but also, you know, fundamental, fundamentally divergent metaphysics. And I guess, yeah, and I guess it sounds like your articulation in Awakening from the Meeting crisis is that Buddhism is less about the metaphysics, less about the claims about the way that the universe is and more about maybe the practical side, would you say? The transformative side, yes. I think, yeah, I mean, there is an ontology there, but the ontology is always in the service of helping to liberate people from dukkha, from profound self-deception, self-destructive behavior. Yes. Right. So I’d say that I don’t want to, I don’t want to get out over my skis. I really don’t know terribly much about East, despite the fact that it actually was a course in Indian philosophy that got, by a round about way, led me back to the practice of the Katha-Pith when I was in high school. Oh really? That’s interesting. Yeah. What, you read a book on Indian philosophy, like Vedanta or something like that? I took a course, yeah, I took a course. So when I was in high school, I went to a laboratory school, one that was, for me, it was associated with Illinois State University. And just out of curiosity, I took a dual enrollment class on Indian philosophy because it sounded cool, sounded interesting, so on and so forth. And this is, for many of my friends and many of the people that I’ve talked with, this is a common experience that growing up, we see, we do not get a convincing articulation of what Christianity holds, right? Both on an intellectual level and on a moral level. I mean, one thing that really strikes me, so, slight side comment, in philosophy 12, we just finished Machiavelli and we’re starting Descartes. I think one thing that ties them and many others together is how deeply scandalized they are by the failures of Christians, intellectually and morally. Yes. Right. And while I didn’t grow up in Italy ravaged by civil war, influenced by worldly popes, so on and so forth, right? I would say that I was not especially well served by my parish growing up. I don’t really remember anything from my religious education. I, at the very least, I did not notice, it was never palpable to me, a person whose life had really been transformed in Christ. And I certainly wouldn’t slight the people around me, but I didn’t notice, at the very least. And so, you know, I was pretty smart, I was pretty arrogant as a freshman in high school, and so I started thinking about things and I said, I have no reason to believe this to any of this to be true. I’ve seen no evidence for this. I’d never heard an articulation of God as subsistent being itself, right? Right. I’d never heard the actual doctrine of who Christ is. And on a personal level, I hadn’t encountered him, right? I hadn’t encountered him in all the dimensions of my being. And so I came up with my alternative articulation for how things are, right? Very much in this, you know, secular humanist mind frame of morality coming from evolution, so on and so forth. And I just, you know, went away from it. Until two years later, give or take, in this course on Indian philosophy, even just thinking metaphysically again. Right. Right. Like this idea of God as this super powerful grandfather in the clouds, that didn’t make a bit of sense to me, because it doesn’t really make a bit of sense, right? Like it’s a helpful analogy for children, maybe. But as you grow up, right, and St. Paul would tell you, you got to go from milk to solid food. I was never given solid food. And so I never hadn’t actually considered being until that course in Indian philosophy. That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting. Yeah. I couldn’t believe in this bearded grandfather, essentially taking the Sistine Chapel’s image of God to be literally true, which it’s not. It’s analogically true. But I could believe, I could believe in God as the substrate of being. Because disagreements between theists and non-theists, or, you know, agnostic atheists, what have you, it’s not really about God generally. It’s generally a disagreement about the nature of the universe. Yeah, the nature of being. I get that. I find it interesting. Sorry. Well, I find it, sorry to interrupt, I just find it interesting. I mean, you’re kind of like Augustine, like he talks about how, you know, it was the Plateness that taught him to think about God as something other than a material substance. Yeah, absolutely. Sounds like you encountered some version of Vedanta that did the same thing for you, which is really intriguing. Yeah, I certainly did. What, I mean, so that brings up, I mean, in Canada and Ontario, we have an official Catholic high school system, state supported. And one of the courses that is actually mandatory is World Religions. And do you have something like that in your school where they’re taught about the world of religions in any way? There’s no formal course on the world religions, but our four-year history curriculum, chronological, we hit just about all of them in that. So I taught sophomore history last year, and I gave them a pretty medieval history, and so I gave them a pretty substantial introduction to Islam. Other teachers will do the same in other courses. And I think theology would be one that would hit some of those. Right, so they have to take classes in theology as well as philosophy? Oh yeah, four years philosophy, four years theology, three times a week. Wow, what are the theology courses like? Do they read only Catholic theologians, or do they read theologians across like Orthodoxy, Protestant, etc.? I would be ashamed if they never got to read Paul Tillich, for example, who I think is a great theologian. Yeah, I’m not too sure about the theology curriculum. I certainly understand it to be, perhaps I’ll say almost exclusively, focused on Catholic texts, just because so much at the high school level, so much of theology is just going to be catechetical. It’s going to be this construction of the tradition that you are born into. Tillich, do you think it’d be appropriate for a high school depth of understanding of theology? Yeah, I think the courage to be is very accessible, not to like grade nine, but grade 12. I think it’s very accessible, very relevant. I consider him one of the prophets of the meaning crisis, and the way that book goes through Stoicism, and then Spinoza, and then goes into Christianity, and then goes into the current meaning crisis. I think that book’s a masterpiece. Excellent. It’s a better introduction to the problems around standard onto theology than having them try to read Heidegger or something like that. Tillich is a personally brave man. He’s the first non-Jewish academic that was actually persecuted and driven out of Germany by the Nazis, because he resisted them right from the beginning. His insight wasn’t just intellectual. It was, as it should be for him, because he’s so influenced by existentialism, it was also a profound existential and therefore also ethical insight that he had. If you gave me a case to your headmaster, I’d be happy to do it. Sounds like it could be valuable. I will say I don’t teach any theology courses. That’s my colleagues, but it sounds like that could be especially rooted in that current historical context, because that’s another thing that we really try to emphasize, to prepare them for Christian life in the 21st century. There are particular difficulties in it. Christian life isn’t easy at any time, but it manifests a little bit differently in different eras. To draw on the wisdom of the past, but also to take a sober understanding of the present, that’s part and parcel of what we do here. Reading Gabriel Marcel, who is a Catholic, and Tillich, and their contemporaries, and they’re both talking about the intersection between existentialism and Christianity and then the cultivation of wisdom as a response to the meeting crisis. That sounds to me like actually a really good course, or even at least a good section and a course. Excellent. I have one more question for you, or perhaps more than one, but at least one right now. You mentioned the transcendentals, but I hear you talking a lot about the true and the good. Where’s the beautiful, which of course plays a very important role within the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition? Where’s the beautiful in the educational program? How does it show up, and how you teach your students? Well first and foremost, it shows up in four years of art as well. That one’s only once a week, but it’s a double block, so it’s an hour and a half once a week of art. That’s another place where the kids really excel. There’s some extraordinary artists in this building, as well as the music. I suppose, and the literature of course, if you’re not teaching beauty, you’re not teaching literature very well. Dr. Russell does teach the literature very well, and so they get it. That’s a great question, and I’d say that it’s integrated throughout. It’s integrated throughout. It’s a very human curriculum. It’s a very human curriculum. We really do seek to shape the whole person, and God’s beauty is one of the ways that he does certainly, certainly reveal himself to us in a deeply convicting and powerful way. So the literature, what’s the kind of literature that’s being read? Novels, poetry, drama, that sort of thing? Yeah, so let’s see, the freshmen, I think they’re still in the Iliad. Yeah, yeah. The sophomores, not taking this year, but I think that around this time last year, maybe they were in Beowulf. Shame it’s Haney’s translation. Right now, the sophomore juniors are just are working through the Divine Comedy. Oh wow! I am too. Oh excellent. Yeah, as am I. I just started in heaven, right? I’m still in hell, so there you go. You’re the students. They hate it. They love the literature, but they, let’s say they respond to it as Dante would have them respond to it. And really, they’re supposed to be horrified. Yeah, yeah. So they’re looking, they’re very, let’s say they’re very much looking forward to Purgatory. They’re very much looking forward to getting to Purgatory, and then the seniors just finished Goethe’s Faust and are just starting Great Expectations. Oh my gosh, Faust by Goethe. What a profound work to consider. Yeah. Well, that strengthens my conviction. If you’ve got them reading Goethe’s Faust, they could read Tillich for sure. I think that that would be a very powerful argument. More or less universally, their two favorites are Dante and Shakespeare. Shakespeare. They adore Dante and Shakespeare. Yeah, well, as they should, as they should. So what, what, I mean, do you do any longitudinal follow ups? What happened? Like, what’s the career of most of your students after they leave the school? That’s a great question. I mean, our, our first graduate only just graduated college last year, and he was a class of one, right? He was that first year. The rest of them are, you know, they’re making, I think one of them is undergraduate. He’s looking towards medical school. Another just off the top of my head is in kind of exercise science, and she wants to do kind of physical therapy type of stuff. A lot of these are, I’ll say that a lot of these are students that I do not know, especially well, because they were before my time. Right, right, right. Right. So I don’t know, but according to the people that I’ve spoken with, you know, they go on and some of them enter, you know, priesthood or seminary, religious life. Many of them have families and they, you know, live upstanding, happy lives contributing to a culture in which meaning is restored. Well, that’s the, that’s the sort of last topic I want to broach with you. You think that what you and, you know, I understand you’re coming from a particular position, nevertheless, do you think that what you’re doing, anyway, not just you, the school and the way your students are being educated, do you think it is helping to address the meaning crisis? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Because I’ll say, and this is a, you know, certainly a respectful, I’ll say a respectful criticism of your project. It almost seems like you beg the question that Christian life is not viable in the 21st century. I’ll respond with a quote from GK Sheserton, right? The patron of our school. He said that all the way back in the early 20th century, he said that Christian life has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. So I would say that, I mean, and certainly as I worked my way through your articulation of the sweep of intellectual history, you see that when they turn away from the Catholic faith and a worldview that really emphasizes being and the unity of the transcendentals, that’s really where things start to decay. Yes, I agree with that. Obviously, because I made that argument. Continue. I’m certainly receptive to the difficulty, right? The difficulty of reconciling science and faith, and it’s certainly a hot topic among Catholics right now. I would recommend, especially for popular consumption, the Dominican Fathers, right? The Dominican priests of the Eastern province and various scientists whom they collaborate with just finished season two of Aquinas 101, right? A series of introductory videos to mystic thought with various, you know, articles and such that supplemented. Their second season was about science and faith, and how do we properly establish the properties of each of them? And how do we seek the unity of truth, right? Because double truth theory is nonsense. Truth is one. Christ said, I am the way, the truth and the life. If you’re seeking truth in a certain way, you’re seeking Christ, whether you’re seeking that truth through empirical methods or through conceptual methods, relying on natural reason alone, or whether you’re relying on divine revelation in the field of theology. So I’d say that certainly it was, there was difficulty when we got these Aristotelian methods back in the West, right? And there was suddenly so much more that we could understand about the physical world. And then when we had the massive acceleration of empirical science and mathematics, so on and so forth, it certainly challenges the traditional worldview. But I don’t consider science to be a threat to the Catholic faith whatsoever. I consider it to be, you know, it introduces certain difficulties. And I’d say that some of your commentary on neuroscience and free will and the soul and how this these acts of mind work, I’d say that, you know, honestly, thank you for helping us to beat substance dualism. Right? Substance dualism is nonsense. Substance dualism is heterodoxy. But the reality is much more difficult to conceptualize. It’s much easier to just conceive of the soul as this special kind of spiritual stuff that, you know, plays the puppet master for this, you know, meat sack. But that’s not the Catholic worldview. That is not the Catholic worldview whatsoever, right? The soul is the form of the body, period. The soul is the form of the body. And they are made for a certain union. They are made for this composite union in accordance with God’s plan for the human person. So I’d say that, I mean, just for an example there, a place where science forces us to refine and, you know, be more precise in what we claim theologically and the truth that we have discovered. Right. But nevertheless, you know, just different spheres, right? Science explores material causes by means of the senses. Philosophy explores what is knowable by natural reason. Intellectually, right? You observe the physical world and you say, what must be the case in order for this to make sense? And then theology takes that and says, okay, what did Christ say? How does he invite us to union with the blessed Trinity? So all that to say, and I think that Christian life has always been difficult. I mean, you know, our captain was tortured and butchered by the Roman state, while his deputy, metaphorically speaking, St. Peter was lying and denying that he ever knew him. And it hasn’t gotten terribly much better since then, right? You had the persecution of Catholics and Christians and, you know, obviously religious strife all throughout the world. But we’ve had martyrs from the very beginning. I’ve heard it said many times that there were more martyrs made in the 20th century than in any century before. We’ve had heresies from the beginning. We’ve had some good popes, some bad popes, so on and so forth. Christian life has never been easy, but it’s always been possible. It’s always been possible for those who choose to trust that what Christ offers, he’s actually going to provide. I appreciate that, but I wonder, I mean, your own experience that you related is that many people are not rejecting Catholicism because of some inconsistency between it and the metaphysics of the scientific worldview. They’re rejecting it because they’re given a picture that is not intellectually viable for them. That was your own experience. And surely your experience is not unique. And I’ve talked to lots of people who are former Catholics for that reason. Absolutely. So do you see that what you’re doing at your high school is also addressing that concern? I mean, if you take a look, and of course I do, the research on the NUNS, the N-O-S-C-N-S, you know, N-O-N-S, they are not rejecting it largely because they have some sort of philosophical atheistic argument against the truth of particular doctrines. They reject it on the grounds of relevance. They find it obscure, irrelevant, and not touching them and satisfying their maturing intellect, their maturing spirituality. That’s what the research shows. And you are an instance of that yourself. And so it seems to me that there’s also this other thing. It’s not just the difficulty of the Christian life. There’s a degree to which there has been a failure on the part of the church to be concerned with exactly that issue, that issue about a living viability. And I take it you think that you believe, not think, you believe that your high school is addressing that concern in some deep way. Yeah, I’m sorry. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for your addition there. I think that that’s also part of the difficulty that I’m talking about, the difficulty of proclaiming Christ to a world that has so much else going on, so much other promises that it makes. There’s a reason why Christ made his most profound headway with the poor, to those on the peripheries, to those on the margins, to the downtrodden, who had nothing else but his promises in which they could hope for happiness. I mean for the first few hundred years as well, Christianity spread like wildfire among the unwashed masses of Rome, and that’s part of what made it difficult for Augustine to accept it. Yes, yes. Same deal all throughout. Aristotle, the rediscovery of Aristotle through this Muslim lens of Verui’s Avicenna at all, it offered them something else that was more compelling than the disputes about these fine little distinctions, so on and so forth. So you see figures such as Siger of Brabant proposing something, it seems something of a double truth theory, all throughout. Scientific revolution, economics, et cetera, offers something that, I mean obviously I have my own position, I would say that distracts people from what they’re really made for. I mean we carry around in our pockets, we carry around these devices that have constructed this artificial sensationalistic world that is meant to trap us. Trap us so that it can buy and sell us, buy and sell us stuff, but more than anything buy and sell us, change our behavior, shape our behavior, right? Little dopamine machines essentially, right? And I think your discussion of addiction is relevant to this. There’s this fundamental unreality that’s I think part and parcel of the meaning crisis that you speak of. There’s a fundamental dissociation from the real world. I mean even just today the temperature is starting to drop in central Illinois and so I was half seriously preaching the merits of feeling cold and feeling hot and feeling rain and just being in touch with nature, right? Being in touch with nature knowing that man’s works cannot satisfy us, right? There’s nothing in this material world that can satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts, right? And that’s not to divide the emotions from the intellect, right? By no means, right? When I say when Catholics speak of heart, at least when reflective Catholics speak of heart, they speak of really just the core identity of the human person, that which drives us, that which knits us all together and guides us towards our proper end, which is the fullness of truth and unbounded love. So I think that part of the difficulty of proclaiming the promises of Christ to people in the 21st century is that there is so much else going on and that there is so much apparent cause for despair. There’s so much apparent cause for despair. I firmly believe and I tell my students this that, you know, engaging with the culture and proclaiming Christ, which is, you know, the duty of all the faithful, right? And it’s, but I almost don’t want to say duty because first and foremost, it’s just the fact that if we really believe that we’ve encountered something good, we’re going to share it. Yes, yes. And these kids have and so they want to share it and so, you know, when we talk about that, I say that it’s not about winning arguments. It’s not about winning arguments. First and foremost, I think people need hope that truth is knowable. Yes. Right. That’s knowable. Metaphysics is difficult, but it’s only by, even if it’s, even if it’s not on a very technical level, just to consider what being is, just consider reality. Right? If you understand, you understand everything, right? And of course, none of us understands being because it’s beyond us, but we can know something about being. We can start to make these, right, real mental distinctions. We can start to consider that it’s common to all, but not all in the same way, right? The one in the many, but nevertheless, it is God’s presence in us. Being is God’s presence in us. So to consider that and to to be awakened to the fact that human beings can know these profound, transcendent, transformative truths and then can delight in them. Right? Augustine defines happiness as joy in truth. Yes. Yes. Aquinas articulates that further by speaking of it as the vision of the divine essence. We’re made to know God. We’re made to love God. And for so many people, it’s just that, I think, I think maybe that’s, I think maybe that’s what you’re speaking of when you say it’s not viable. It’s just, it’s hard to believe in that when we’re so enmeshed in not even just the workaday world, but this artificial representation of the workaday world. And so all that to say, I think that the fundamental dissociation from reality that so many people experience is a challenge that only God’s grace working through one another, as well as working in the hearts of each and every person can break through. And I hope that I am participating in preparing these students to be receptive to that grace and to encourage others to be receptive to that grace, because Christ really does promise more than anybody else who has ever lived. So your conviction as a Christian is very apparent. Is there anything that you’d like to say before we close off? I mean, you have fulfilled your, I agree with you, it’s not your duty, it’s your love of the good, and you’ve shared it. And you’ve articulated how it intermeshes with the Greek tradition of the cultivation of wisdom and responding to the meeting crisis now. So what I’m saying is, I don’t have no authority over you, but I feel like I’m releasing you to say you’ve done what, you’ve done your duty in that sense. Is there anything beyond that you’d like to say or share? Yeah, I guess two more quick things. One, I think that the Christian tradition is one, we’re not special here. Chesterton Academy of the Sacred Heart, I would say, is a special community, but we’re all finite persons who, I mean, the guys have arm wrestling tournaments over lunch. One of them brought in a pull-up bar this week, and so they’re having pull-up competitions during the lunch hour now. We’re repentant sinners. None of us knows everything, not by a long shot, but none of us knows nothing. All of us have imperfections, but nevertheless, all of us are inclined towards the good, which is true of every single human person who has ever lived. All of us are inclined towards truth, and it’s simply a matter of unleashing that and asking ourselves just, you know, what if? That’s a very platonic claim you just made, which, like, we have this inclination, we have this affinity, we have this love in us towards Metaxu. We’re always between. We’re always being drawn beyond ourself, and then I didn’t take you, just to give you some feedback, I didn’t take you as presenting yourself as any kind of, I didn’t get any sense of elitism or the chosen community kind of thing. No, I didn’t get that at all. I got a sense of no, no, you have a model, and it overlaps with mine considerably, you know, of, you know, humans wisdom, as I like to say, wisdom is not optional. You either do it explicitly in a sapiential community with traditions of practice, or you do it implicitly, and you’re largely doing it unconsciously or with a mixture of doing it autodidactically, and that has a great chance of going wrong. So I’m in agreement with you about that part of it, I think. I just wanted to feed that back to you. I wasn’t hearing elitism or exclusivism. I mean, you were making a particular claim about what you consider to be the superiority of Christianity, but you did acknowledge that, you know, it was actually book an Indian philosophy that turns you back towards Catholicism, which I think is well said. There was two things. What was the other thing you wanted to say? Oh, the other thing is you are a martial artist, yes? Yes. Is it Tai Chi, you said? Tai Chi Chuan. I do a slow form, a sword form, and then I do a very fast fighting form called a Fijian. Oh, very cool. Yeah, I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I moved to Piorre here. Cool. I think you should consider that also as part of your curriculum. You know, the arguments I’ve made about mindful movement as being integral to the cultivation of wisdom and Plato, of course, is a wrestler, his broad shoulder. That’s his nickname. And Socrates was a warrior and a stonemason and they’re meeting in the gymnasium. And so, and all the current cog-sai about how important it is to bring that into the cultivation of wisdom. You yourself made the point that you’re not substance dualists and therefore the mind, the body is not just a vessel. The mind is constitutive of your humanity and therefore it plays a constitutive role in the cultivation of wisdom. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve met so many decent people at my Jiu-Jitsu gym. Yes. So many just really sound people. I think part of that is the humility that, you know, one, everybody starts somewhere and it’s very visceral when there is somebody who is much better at martial arts than you. Yes. You know, it’s the humility of no matter how, you know, no matter how much you deadlift or whatever, no matter how good you are at high school sports, no matter how smart you are, blah, blah, no matter how much money you make, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? If you’re a white belt going up against a black belt, he’s going to be, he’s hopefully going to be gentle with you, but he’s going to kick your butt. Yeah. And then also with that, I think that I’ll say that it’s hard to deny the reality of a person who has you in a triangle choke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think yeah, it’s, it also, it connects to the, you know, maybe the point I made about just engagement with reality, engagement with what we would call God’s creation, the sunsets, the rivers, the streams, the clouds, the birds, insects, everything, you know, and then to use our bodies in a way that is just kind of fundamental to human life in most areas of human history, right? The preparation for combat, that life is hard and to, you know, at least stimulate that I think is incredibly helpful for integrating, integrating emotions, integrating muscles, integrating thoughts, integrating attitude, everything, integrating virtue, right? I think that that engagement with reality is, I and many others would say that that is perhaps first and foremost in disposing oneself towards both natural wisdom and the divine wisdom, which is Jesus Christ. Well, that sounds like a good place to end. Patrick, I want to thank you for coming. It’s it’s powerful to see. I was, I was unaware of this whole network of Chesterton schools and powerful to see people basically trying to sort of fulfill, you know, what Augustine and Aquinas and even people like Nicholas of Cusa are up to, we’re up to in powerful ways. And so thank you for sharing that and thank you for reaching out. Leisure. It’s about living well. It’s about, it’s about inclining yourself towards a happy life, a life of you, Diomedia. Yes, very much. Well, I’m interested. I hope you’ll watch it after Socrates. I’m interested in hearing from you. That series when it comes out. Excellent. Thank you very much. Bye bye.