https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3N3SJzTlI8w
So in the way that we conduct ourselves in our lives, what is it that you think informs most people or gives reason for the things that they think and then the things that they do as informed by what they think? Because on the one hand, you could say that, well, we should contemplate the purpose for why we do things and then rely on some sort of ethical framework to lead us and guide us within that, either through our reason or through something like revelation or a code of ethics that comes down to us through our ancestry. Or maybe I could just be motivated by what I want to do, something that propels me based on my instincts or my passions or maybe my culture around me. How would you describe sort of the context that we are in these days? Do you think that there’s some sort of… Is it not a clear distinction? Are the waters very muddy in terms of what motivates most people? I think definitely. There’s definitely… There isn’t… So in a traditional world, in the ancient world, there was a hierarchy of goods. And this hierarchy of goods was not at all arbitrary because it basically led all the way up to the transcendentals of God, like the transcendental nature of God. And the idea of good, truth, beauty, these things are the real reasons why we do things and we can get distracted. The way to understand is that we have all these secondary desires or these secondary goods that we engage with. And these secondary goods, they can trap us, right? They can confuse us because they usually are goods. Like eating is a good. We have a purpose to eat. It’s one of our purposes. And that purpose is a good purpose. And so we move towards that purpose in love. We actually have a desire to find rest in eating. And that’s not bad. It’s a good thing. The problem is that the way that the contemporary world is set up, it’s almost inverted. It’s almost flipped upside down. Where in a traditional world, especially in the traditional Christian world, you would have this hierarchy of goods which would lead you up towards virtue, which would lead you up towards love, which would lead you up towards freedom. Freedom from these things on the side. But now what we have is the opposite, is that all our idiosyncratic desires are seen as identities. It is like I have a desire for that and I identify with that desire so fully that I can’t break away from it. It becomes an idol. It really is a form of, the contemporary world is really a form of idolatry where we confuse all these things that we want, whether it is accumulating goods, whether it is our own kind of sexual desires, whether it is whatever it is, even our jobs, all this stuff. It’s upside down from what the Christian world has set up. And in a way it became inevitable that this would happen. You can find predictions of it in the late Middle Ages where the idea is if you give up the highest goods, then you’re going to end up with porn, furry, people buying insane things. All of this was going to happen because if you keep your eyes down in the world and you just focus on phenomena and you just focus on the lower things, it’s going to come with that as well. So where did the shift take place or what do you think is the cause of the shift in this thinking going from the ancient world to the contemporary world? Well part of it is definitely, there’s something in nominalism which is very strong, which is, it’s actually, I tend to see the entire progress of the modern world as something like a de-incarnation. And so you have, for example, one of the things that Occam does, that Occam wants to put God so high, wants to make God so transcendent that God becomes arbitrary. And so there’s no connection. Out of the desire to preserve the transcendence of God, there’s no connection with the will of God and the layout of how the world actually flows. And so God’s will is just this arbitrary thing and God ends up being something like an arbitrary being up there that created us and now intrudes in our world once in a while. And so you can see this like de-incarnation to a point where, it’s funny because we tend to think of the modern world as just materialism, but it’s not. It actually, after the kind of break, you could say, even during the time of the Reformation, you see a kind of spiritualism come about. And so you see it happen with secret societies, you know, Freemasons and Rosicrucians, and you have these characters like Jacob Boehm and all these kind of weird esoteric figures. And then you have the Fideism that you talked about down here, this kind of popular faith and scientific rationalism. But there’s a weird connection between the two. Like, Descartes spent his whole life trying to become a Rosicrucian. And people forget that, that there was this weird break. So you had this kind of spiritual world up here, then you had this kind of material world down here, and they just weren’t connected anymore. So you’re talking about the esoteric order, the Rosicrucians? Is that how you say it? Yeah. Okay, I thought you were talking about something else. I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know that about Descartes. He wrote these like public letters to the Rosicrucian order in the hopes that he would be initiated in their thing. But it’s like it’s just an image of what happened, which is this kind of break where you have and you see it today. Like someone says something like, I am spiritual but not religious. Right. That’s a perfect image of that because they view spirituality as something which is floating above. Right. It isn’t connected to the communion that I engage with, isn’t connected to practices that I engage with others. It’s like a purely idiosyncratic. It’s like a dualism between your material life and some other remote thing that you can access when you want to. You can do whatever you want and you have your spirituality that floats above it. And it’s just a powerful image of the de-incarnation which happened. Whereas if you read the ancient file, especially if you read the Dionysian tradition and you look even still in Aquinas, you find it and in St. Maximus, there’s a sense in which God is both fully transcended but also fully imminent and that God permeates the world, that hidden behind all phenomena, you can find a divine spark, that there’s something animating it to make it exist, you could say. God Bless.