https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RxqQeqZfhok
So a good way to formulate it that I use all the time is that everything is both one and multiple at the same time. Everything you can encounter. Unpack that for me because I don’t know what you mean by that. Right, so a chair is one thing. Yes. It’s a chair. But a chair is also many things. Right, it’s legs and it’s a back. And those legs are also many things. So it’s composed of many things? It’s made of wood, it’s made of paint, it’s made of all these different identities. And so identities stack up. So everything you encounter is both one and multiple. Now the way in which things are one is a complete mystery to the modern scientists. It’s a given. Like why do I think that a chair is one thing? What makes it one thing? Because it’s a bunch of things. And it’s a bunch of a bunch of things. And it scales all the way down to like quantum fields or whatever. And so this is the problem now that as science kind of reaches its limit, they’re realizing the problem of identity. The problem of, you know, they use words like emergence and all these kind of words to try to talk about the manner in which multiple things jump up into unity. Yeah. Right, and so this, and so that once this happens, like even in the scientific world, once they realize the problem of unity and multiplicity coexisting, and they realize that, I mean, that’s what Plato was talking about. That’s what Aristotle was talking about. And that’s what Aquinas was talking about. Exactly. They were talking about it thousands of years ago. And the weird scientific age is like a strange parenthesis where people stop realizing the problem and just started looking at all the details and didn’t realize that they’re not accounting for the manner in which things coalesce into into unities. Right, right. So have names that things have identity, right? And that this is related to something like consciousness or something like intelligence. Okay. So how do you start to answer some of these questions? Like, do you just look back at it and say, well, it’s a mystery or it’s a starting point or it’s an axiom, or can you unpack that a little bit more, drawing more from ancient thought where maybe a contemporary thinker would be ignorant? No, it’s not difficult at all. It’s not difficult because it can help, it actually can help people understand religion so much better, right? And so you have at the outset of the scripture, you have a description, there’s heaven and there’s earth. And even in the Middle Ages, you read someone like Dante and he completely linked it with Aristotle and said, you know, heaven is the place of actuality and earth is the place of potentiality. So you have names, you have identities, you have principles, and then you have potentials in which those principles can exist. And so a chair has an identity and it’s a purpose, right? It’s not just a general identity. It’s like a chair is for sitting. Yeah. That’s what it’s for. And so that’s what it’s for. It’s final cause. Exactly. Yeah. The final cause will, let’s say, legislate what can participate, how it gathers unity together. Okay. So it’s harder, it’s easier to see in terms of, like, it’s easier to see in terms of human interactions, obviously. So a sports team is a great way to understand it. Okay. Like you have a team, you have a bunch of people, and those people can change, right? Yeah. It can actually change. You don’t have to be the same people, but there’s something joining them together. There’s a purpose joining them together. And that purpose is the unity of principle, which makes the team exist. Okay. Right. And that purpose is to play basketball or whatever. Yeah. And to play within a hierarchy of different teams that play together. Yeah. And so the players are potential. They’re potentials in which the identity of the team can gather together and create unity. Okay. And so it’s the same with anything, anything, everything that exists between one and multiple has that reality. So you would say that this potential for a purpose kind of scales up to everything in life and eventually leads to what? God? Is that where it goes? Yeah. Well, I mean, it ultimately leads to God. There’s a jump at some point, obviously. God is beyond all description. Definitely that’s necessary. But it definitely scales up in a way that… So the reason why I emphasize this so much is that one of the problems people have today is that they think that religion is arbitrary and superstitious. Right. That it doesn’t make sense. It’s just made up. Why would I go to a building and stand there and then sing songs and eat bread and wine? What is all this nonsense? What is going on? And so what I try to help people understand is that that reality is… The reality that you participate in church is a reality you participate in every single human interaction that you have that is… Let’s say you sit together for a family meal. That family meal is the thing that’s binding you together. And then there’s a ritual in which you participate in order for that to exist. But you can’t do anything at the table. There’s certain things you can do and there’s certain things you can’t do. If you stand on the table during dinner, you’re going to ruin dinner. If you lay down on the floor during dinner, if you scream at each other during dinner, you’re going to ruin dinner. So there’s this ritual, there’s this pattern, there’s a pattern of being that makes a family dinner exist. That makes it what it is? Is that what you’re saying? The joining of multiples into one, and those multiples are not arbitrary, they’re like a dance, they’re like a pattern. We are like breathing in and breathing out, you could say. You sit together, you eat the same meal, you talk to each other, everybody has to listen to each other. There’s a liturgical thing, a family dinner. I can appreciate the significance of that as someone who lives a liturgical tradition and understands what that word means. But for somebody who is on the outside of that looking in, how do you underscore the significance of it for them? For them, they might just say, well, that’s just customs, that’s just cultural habits to make us all feel comfortable and welcome. It could just as easily be that the best thing to do at a dinner party is to stand on the table and do something crazy. If our customs were so constructed in a different way. There’s a… I mean, it’s nonsense because there is a reality. Like if I said standing on the dinner table, then maybe that could exist in some culture, but taking a dump on the dinner table is not going to exist. There’s a limit, there’s flexibility in the potential. There’s always flexibility, but there is a manner in which that flexibility starts to break down on the edges. You can’t have anything. If you encounter someone and you have a conversation, that conversation is ritualized and you will talk to them. Just spit in their face, then you’re breaking the communion. And these things, these patterns are inevitable. But it doesn’t mean that there’s only one way to do it. There could be flexibility, but that flexibility, just like a chair can be made out of a lot of things, but a chair can be made out of water. You can’t make a chair out of water, it’s just not possible. There’s a… There’s a manner in which potentiality is bound to an identity in a certain pattern that holds it together for a certain way. And so let’s bring back to a religious ritual, for example. So our rituals scale up. So we have small rituals, like you brush your teeth. You have to brush your teeth in a certain way. You can’t brush your teeth in any way. If you brush your teeth with a razor blade, you can’t brush your teeth in any way. If you brush your teeth in any way, if you brush your teeth with a razor blade, then you’re going to be in trouble, right? So you have to brush your teeth in a certain manner. There’s flexibility, but there’s a reality to that. And that is for a certain good. And then you have families, you have communities that have ritualized encounters for a good, that is maybe a little higher. And church is that, but for the highest good. We gather together, right? And we attend and we celebrate the highest good, the God of infinite love. And so we come together, first of all, we recognize that good. And then we act together in a way that makes us attend and makes us, let’s say, connect together towards that highest good. And this is something, like I said, that happens in a soccer team. We do that in a soccer team. It’s just that the soccer team isn’t attuned to the highest good. It’s attuned to a lower good, which is, it’s fine to win a soccer team, but you can’t base all of human civilization on soccer. Right. You need higher goods. And that’s where religion inevitably becomes a part of any real civilization. Because you have to find a way to identify, join together in that good, and recognize and celebrate that good. So the community at large has to recognize some purpose of their own unity that brings them all together. Or else they’re not a community. Right. Or else they’re a crowd. Or else they’re the suburbs. And suburbs are a great example of a breakdown of that process. Okay. Because if you think of an ancient town, you would have a town with, usually the church is somewhere in the middle or maybe in the east, like it’s in a prominent place. Or a monastery or something. The church spire is higher than all the buildings. And so the town exists, and they all can look up and see the thing which binds them together. Right. They can all see it at the same time. And then on Sundays, they go there and they do the same things at the same time to recognize the good which is binding them. Okay. And then lower than that, you’ll have like a civic building, you know, maybe a market, places of communion, which we recognize, but have to be submitted to that higher good. Yeah. If the civic authorities aren’t submitted to the God of infinite love, they’re going to become corrupt. Right. And they do become corrupt. They become obsessed with economy, they become obsessed with trade, they become obsessed with power over people. Yeah. And then you scale that down. Now the suburbs is a great example because they said, no, we don’t need the churches, right? The churches in the structure of the way the city is. Or a city center even necessarily. Yeah. But once you remove the church as the center, then you have this, at first you have the civic building, but at some point it’s going to break apart, you’re going to remove that, then you’re going to have the mall. The mall is going to be the last remainder of like unity in cities. Then you get rid of the malls and now you just have individual points spread out on land where there’s no connection. You don’t know your neighbor, you don’t have any common projects. And that is an inevitable consequence of breaking down, of getting rid of the higher identities or the higher meanings that we participated in.