Full text of Dr Peter Kreeft on ‘Morality, The Lord of the Rings, and Awkward Jokes…’
TRANSCRIPT:
PETER KREEFT: So it was forbidden to dress up as a character in The Lord of the Rings.
MATT FRADD: Yes, it goes back to those who are watching now.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, now suddenly we’re live.
MATT FRADD: It’s a very different kind of interview, these ones.
PETER KREEFT: Before the Soviet Union fell, I heard that people were dressing up as The Lord of the Rings characters, renting hundreds of acres of woods as Middle Earth and staging The Lord of the Rings. And the Soviet Union got wind of it and forbade it. So that you were thrown in jail for…
MATT FRADD: Dressing up like a hobbit.
PETER KREEFT: For acting like a hobbit, yes.
MATT FRADD: And why do you think they were sent to jail for that?
PETER KREEFT: Because the Soviet Union is smarter than Peter Jackson. They realised that, as Tolkien said, The Scouring Of The Shire was an essential part of the story, and there’s a political takeaway to it, and it’s an attack on state socialism. And these people were acting out Tolkien’s vision, namely [Haraffova], the original shire, a boo to the socialist shire.
And when Peter Jackson was asked why he didn’t include that in his movie, he lamely said, we didn’t have enough money, which is ridiculous. But you don’t offend Hollywood by trashing their favourite religion.
MATT FRADD: But what did you… which is?
PETER KREEFT: State socialism.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. Are you seeing that more and more these days?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, yeah. I just got through yesterday doing an hour’s worth of training required at Boston College on diversity, inclusion and sexual harassment.
MATT FRADD: Oh, Lord. How did that go?
PETER KREEFT: Well, you don’t have to do anything. You just sit there and listen to it and click the right buttons. But it starts with a lot of ideological stuff. Like, you know, sodomy is good and transgenderism is good, and you must not offend people in more acceptable language. And then it mixes that with a lot of necessary stuff about sexual harassment and so on.
MATT FRADD: But when you said you just got to click and go on, does that mean you have to lie or that you just have to say, I’ve read it?
PETER KREEFT: Yes, you have to lie. What’s the right answer? And if you put down the wrong answer, they give you a chance to do the right answer. Nobody can flunk it.
MATT FRADD: Why don’t you just say the right thing then, even if they don’t want you to?
PETER KREEFT: Well, I learned to do that, yes. We learned to lie.
MATT FRADD: Well, then why don’t you not lie? Why don’t you stand up to them?
PETER KREEFT: It doesn’t make any difference. All you have to do is get through the hour-long program that certifies, gives you a certificate that you have been a student of the diversity and inclusion program. It’s a federal thing.
MATT FRADD: Do you not think you’re morally obligated to sort of deny the bullshit, for lack of a better word, that they’re trying to push us?
PETER KREEFT: Well, yeah, you can try.
MATT FRADD: Why don’t you do that?
PETER KREEFT: For instance, in the last election, I could not vote for either a murderer who wants to destroy our own children or a liar and a thief, so I voted for Donald Duck. I have a write-in candidate.
MATT FRADD: Donald J. Duck. So is the hope that if you just kind of go along with this diversity inclusion stuff, that you’ll at least get to be in front of students and do good work for them?
PETER KREEFT: Well, this was not just for universities. It was for any workplace environment. And I don’t quarrel with the idea that such a thing is necessary because of all the sexual harassment that’s going on. What I quarrel with is the ideological stuff they snuck in. Especially that transgender movement. For such a minority, they have totally conquered the media. It’s crazy how quickly.
Well, the philosophy behind it. I got in trouble at Boston College.
MATT FRADD: What happened?
PETER KREEFT: Well, we were discussing. It was a class in C.S. Lewis. And the last day of the course, we had covered all the books, so it was a free and open discussion. So the students wanted to talk about sexual morality. So I did. And I was asked what I thought of the transgender movement. And I said, I think that there’s a serious problem here that we have to address and we should not treat any people with disrespect. But I think the movement itself is literally insane. That you can design your own sexuality and that there’s no objective truth anymore. And I came down rather hard on it.
And one of the students, who was probably transgender himself or else had a transgender friend, complained.
MATT FRADD: Did anyone object in the classroom or was it after the fact?
PETER KREEFT: I thought we had a pretty free and open discussion in the classroom. It was about 50-50. Some defending it, some attacking it. So I thought it was a good discussion. But one student was very deeply pained by it. So I met him. And he’s a reasonable guy. He’s wrong. He’s confused. But we didn’t paper it over. But we said, alright, let’s agree to disagree.
And the administration was fine. There was no charges brought up or anything like that. It was just a complaint that was settled.
MATT FRADD: Do you think that’s only going to get worse?
PETER KREEFT: Yes, yes, absolutely. To ruffle students’ feathers. To destroy their peace with themselves is unacceptable. You can lose your job. There are people who have lost their jobs by confessing that they did not agree with the transgender movement.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I might lose my YouTube channel for doing that thing.
PETER KREEFT: You probably will.
MATT FRADD: I will, yeah. Ruffle.com. That’s my point though.
PETER KREEFT: Absolutely.
MATT FRADD: I also don’t want to talk about it for the sake of talking about it. Just to be abrasive. But I also don’t want to be a coward and not say anything so that I can keep my nice little YouTube channel.
PETER KREEFT: The thing that bothers me most is that very distinction that you make between the sin and the sinner. Between subjectivity and objectivity. Between loving people and disagreeing with their ideology. That is denied universally by such movements. You insult what we do, you insult us. If you disagree with what you do, you demean us. We are what we do. We are nothing but that. That is our identity. My name is Sauron, that is my ring. You take that from me, you take my identity from me. That scares me.
MATT FRADD: When did that become a philosophical, tenable opinion? How did that enter in or has it always been with us?
PETER KREEFT: Politically I think it had something to do with homosexual activists who were intelligent and philosophical enough to realize that they had to be that kind of subjective philosophy in order to claim that they had the right to control our speech. If a speech, even though not directed towards individuals and even though it is qualified to help individuals. If speech disagrees with your ideology which you so internalize that that is your identity. Then you have the right to say you are hurting me when you are disagreeing with my ideas. And that I think is the line that must not be crossed. That is true totalitarianism.
A real tyrant doesn’t want just to control your body, he wants to control your mind. Now I certainly don’t believe that all homosexual activists or all transgenderists or all liberals or anything like that are in that state.
MATT FRADD: But the ones with the megaphone in those groups seem to.
PETER KREEFT: Yes.
MATT FRADD: The ones who are speaking on behalf of those groups seem to. Does this lack of distinction between who I am, what I am and what I do exist in any other realm of morality? It seems to be specific to do with sexuality.
PETER KREEFT: So far it is specific to do with sexuality, yes. And I find that atheists are not threatened by Christian theology. That theology, insofar as it stays clear of morality, especially sexual morality, is perfectly tolerable. I feel no religious or theological persecution in society unless it has something to do with sexuality.
MATT FRADD: That’s right, yeah.
PETER KREEFT: Which is why 100% of everything I have seen on television, political, in the last month is pro-choice. Not a single pro-life ad because that’s obviously about sex. I mean abortion is a sexual issue. Why does any woman want an abortion? Because her birth control failed. And what is birth control? The demand to have sex without having babies. And that’s our non-negotiable.
MATT FRADD: Why do you think that is? Why do you think the culture seems to butt heads mainly with the Church on that point?
PETER KREEFT: Well, you’ve got to have some sort of God. And if it’s not the real God, it’s either sex or power. Or both. Sexual autonomy. Maybe it’s more power than sex.
MATT FRADD: But it does seem though that for many people those who get a lot of power, if they abuse it, it ends up in something sexual.
PETER KREEFT: I think it’s the other way around. I think it starts with sexual desire and then you realize that you can be the lord of your own life. I think power is probably even a more dangerous thing than sex because you can only have so much sex but you can have infinite power. It’s like the difference between money and the stuff money can buy. You can’t enjoy the stuff money can buy beyond a certain limit.
MATT FRADD: Well, money and power are similar in that way in that they exist to be exchanged for something else. The controlling of our surroundings.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. And therefore they are potentially infinite.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, when we’re not rooted in Christ.
PETER KREEFT: And sex is finite. It’s enormously powerful but it’s finite until it’s joined with power. Sexual autonomy. I get to decree that there are now 54 different genders in Canada.
MATT FRADD: That’s how big it is. I think there’s at least a thousand.
PETER KREEFT: Must be. Must be.
MATT FRADD: The sad about it is they’re turning people’s psychological pain and their disorders into a joke really by making it so silly.
PETER KREEFT: And it obviously won’t work because human nature was not designed at Harvard or in Hollywood but in heaven and it will have its revenge. It will not make people happy. Nature makes people happy. Anti-nature does not make people happy. You can fool them only for a couple of generations.
MATT FRADD: Have you heard of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse?
PETER KREEFT: No.
MATT FRADD: She was on my show and I want to run this by you. She says we shouldn’t think of this as a left versus right issue because there’s insanity everywhere. Like Trump was pro-transgenderism in certain instances. And so she said we should think of them as a gnostic death cult. And the Sexual Revolution, she says, since it is a lie and therefore cannot work in reality, needs three things to get off the ground. A lot of power. A lot of propaganda. And then finally a scapegoat for when the thing that can’t work doesn’t. And that thing is Christianity in particular.
PETER KREEFT: Especially the Catholic Church.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. And Christian sexual morality.
PETER KREEFT: Yes.
MATT FRADD: Yes. What do you think about that?
PETER KREEFT: I feel privileged to be the new chosen people. I mean Catholics are the new Jews. Instead of racial antisemitism, it’s sexual antisemitism. We’re the traditionalists, the holdouts, the ones who claim that we’re God’s chosen people or recipients of God’s chosen revelation. That’s harmful to diversity. You can’t have that much diversity. Everything must be relativist. An absolutist has no place in a diverse community.
MATT FRADD: An absolutist has no place. Yeah. There’s that line from the Second Vatican Council, I believe it is, that says, when God has forgotten, the creature himself becomes unintelligible?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah. Yeah. Pope John Paul II loved to quote a line like that. Only Christ reveals man to Himself. He doesn’t just reveal who God is, He reveals who we are. And if we really believe that, if that’s our true identity, that would permeate our whole day. The practice of the presence of that philosophy, even if not incarnated in that person, would change everything.
MATT FRADD: Whereas if I don’t take my identity in who I am before God, as I don’t believe He exists or I don’t believe He loves me, then the only thing that’s on offer is what the world suggests will make me happy, like ambition and self-aggrandizing and these sorts of things. And then the sins that seem to assuage the loneliness that results when those things don’t work. So like sex and drink and all this stuff is just a way to…
PETER KREEFT: What’s so interesting to me when I read the Old Testament is that, in one sense, I don’t find the modern situation there because there’s no secularism. You either worship the true God or you worship another God. And I think that’s what’s going on behind the scenes. If God designed the human heart, there’s an infinite vacuum there which can’t be filled with finite things. So you’ve got to pretend that something finite is infinite. You’ve got to worship some idol if you don’t worship the God, whether it’s sex or power or the right or the left or whatever. So relativism itself becomes a new absolute.
MATT FRADD: Well, maybe that’s why some of these social movements, what they’re aiming at, never seem to be concrete in reality. Like Marxism working, for example, or the sexual revolution. It’s utopian, as it were. So I can make something that doesn’t yet exist infinite because it doesn’t exist yet to disappoint me in its finiteness.
PETER KREEFT: Yeah. And that is also why to believe in objective truth is very threatening to that because objective truth about nature is always finite and it has limits. And you bump up against a wall. But the Gnostic has no walls. Never bumps up against anything. He can create a new universe.
MATT FRADD: I think that’s why she called it a Gnostic death cult because it seems to be at war with the body. This idea that…
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, because the body has limits.
MATT FRADD: What do you think… Because you wouldn’t have thought 20, 30 years ago that transgenderism would be as big a thing as it is.
PETER KREEFT: No. No, it’s astonishing.
MATT FRADD: As Ricky Gervais said, no one saw that coming. That one day you get kicked offline for saying women don’t have penises and now you get banned.
NO ONE CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS
PETER KREEFT: Well, ask Larry Summers, you know, the president of Harvard who got fired. First president of Harvard’s history to get fired for not believing in the idea that there is some innate difference between men and women but saying that it is an idea worth discussing before we refute it and go on to other ideas which explain why Harvard is not drawing enough women to the hard sciences. And the feminists at that faculty meeting rose together and demanded his resignation and got it soon after for believing that that idea is worth discussing or to be expressed in public. The idea that every single culture in the history of the human race is believed.
MATT FRADD: Reminds me of Chesterton’s Gate or Wall, the idea that you shouldn’t tear it down unless you know what it’s for. And we’re just tearing everything down.
PETER KREEFT: Of course.
MATT FRADD: I think it’ll be great.
PETER KREEFT: Which is, I think, the real attractiveness in postmodernism and deconstructionism.
MATT FRADD: Can you define those terms for us?
NIETZSCHEISM
PETER KREEFT: Well, postmodernism is a vague term which is basically disagreement with the power of reason as in the Enlightenment. And deconstructionism is the application of that especially to text and literature and words. Words do not intend things. There is no objective truth. Words create your own truth.
MATT FRADD: Right. So there’s no concept within the term that’s necessarily linked to it. We can, if you think of a term like a cardboard box that I present to you and you open it up and there’s something in there, something I’m conveying to you, in the sense of just replace that object within that term.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. And it is also associated with voluntarism. That is, it is the will that commands the reason to say what it wants it to say. There’s no humility. There’s no learning from the reason what reality is like. There is only the will to power. It’s Nietzschean. Nietzsche is the most popular philosopher today. More doctoral theses are written about Nietzsche than anybody else. And of course Nietzsche was insane, literally. He spent the last 11 years of his life in an asylum. And it wasn’t just his syphilis, it was his philosophy that drove him insane.
I think the idea in Nietzsche that most drove him insane was questioning the will to truth for the first time. He said, all philosophers before me failed to have the courage to ask the most dangerous of all questions, why truth, why not rather the lie. There’s no answer to that question. If you answer that question, you’re assuming the will to truth. So you can’t prove it.
MATT FRADD: What about if you just said something that like, because aligning myself with reality is more conducive to my own good, it works better.
PETER KREEFT: That’s your truth. My truth is different than your truth. Don’t impose your truth on my truth.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: I do recall Nietzsche writing something to the end of, it was an answer to a rhetorical question of if this world that you believe in Nietzsche is so grim and dull, then why pursue that truth and try to lay that out?
PETER KREEFT: And his answer is no reason. You choose it, and that’s your courage. Yes, life is meaningless, but you love it anyway, because you want to.
MATT FRADD: How much has Nietzsche been distorted by Christians trying to refute him? Do you feel like Christians are fair to Nietzsche?
PETER KREEFT: I don’t know either Nietzsche or the Christians whom you’re talking about well enough to answer that question.
MATT FRADD: What do you think Neil? Because I know you like Nietzsche.
PETER KREEFT: Nietzsche has many sides. He’s certainly a genius.
MATT FRADD: I know as a Christian I get very frustrated when Richard Dawkins, who clearly never read even the Summa article on God’s existence, seeks to refute him and just totally misunderstands Aquinas. And I’m wondering if people perhaps in the atheist community, or even those who are theists who like Nietzsche, think that maybe we’re misinterpreting him.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: For me, something my professor said in college was something to the end of Nietzsche contradicts himself apparently, and apparently knowledgeably he does that. And so it’s kind of like there I think are people who read one or two quotes from Nietzsche and sort of think they understand the gist of what he’s saying, but kind of part of the point of Nietzsche is he doesn’t really have one gist. It’s sort of the only way to truly understand him is to kind of grapple with him at multiple points because he says things he doesn’t really mean that are hyperbolic and that he thinks is poetic and things like that. And I think that, yeah, I don’t know, I think he has a lot to say, but I think it’s kind of difficult to grasp.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I see.
PETER KREEFT: Well, the law of non-contradiction does not apply to Nietzsche. He deliberately contradicts himself.
MATT FRADD: So does Plato though.
PETER KREEFT: I don’t think he ever read Walt Whitman, but you know that line from Leaves of Grass, do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Very good. Hurrah for me, I contradict myself.
MATT FRADD: But do you think Plato contradicts himself intentionally?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Yes, I think Nietzsche did too.
MATT FRADD: But you think Plato did that?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Yeah.
PETER KREEFT: Well, Plato playing games with you sometimes. He certainly believes in the law of non-contradiction. But he’ll play devil’s advocate.
MATT FRADD: Just real quick, that Muslim philosopher, whose name I forgot, who said,
PETER KREEFT: Al-Ash’ari?
MATT FRADD: The one who thinks to be beaten and burned is not the same. He said, whoever denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he finally admits that to be beaten and burned is not the same thing as to not be beaten and burned.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, that was not Al-Ash’ari. Al-Ash’ari was a voluntarist. That was a rationalist. Well, you know, there’s the famous Euthyphro problem that philosophers talk about that’s relevant to this. In the Euthyphro, Socrates has a dialogue with this arrogant young man who believes that he knows what piety is and piety is simply doing the will of the gods. And Socrates asks the question, is a thing pious because the gods will it or do the gods will it because it’s pious? And Euthyphro says, oh, the only reason it’s pious is that the gods will it. In other words, if the gods will you to lie, you should lie. They will you to hate, you should hate. And Socrates says, no, it’s the opposite.
And when the early church fathers dealt with that problem, they didn’t accept either Socrates’ rationalism or Euthyphro’s voluntarism. They said that the good and the true are what God is and God’s will is what God is. So the will and the intellect are absolutely united in God. So neither one is the authority over the other. They are identical.
MATT FRADD: So the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one.
PETER KREEFT: It is indeed. Nietzsche is certainly a Euthyphro in and so is postmodernism. And the enlightenment is Socratic rationalism. Reason is higher than anything, even God. So that if scientific reason says miracles are impossible and God says, well, I’m going to do one, rationalism says, no, you’re not.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
MATT FRADD: Has it been difficult for you being a philosopher teaching at a secular school and maybe feeling like you can’t have these open discussions about really important issues?
PETER KREEFT: Well, it’s not a secular school I teach at Boston College.
MATT FRADD: It’s not a secular school?
PETER KREEFT: No, it’s a Jesuit school. That’s halfway between Catholic and secular.
MATT FRADD: So earlier you said that you were forced to go through this inclusivity training. That wasn’t on behalf of the school specifically? Did the school mandate that you do it?
PETER KREEFT: I believe that the federal law Title IX mandates that all universities require that. And I have no quarrel with that because there is a problem about sexual harassment. But I have a quarrel with sliding in the leftist ideology into it.
MATT FRADD: Has it been as difficult as people think, speaking your mind on the university campus as a professor? Or do you find actually, despite all the hype, people are generally open, students are generally open to having intellectual discussions about it?
PETER KREEFT: Boston College is an unusual place. If I were teaching at a state university, I would be in trouble. Probably it was my job, but Boston College is a genuinely Jesuit and Catholic university that still believes in objective truth and academic freedom. It’s kind of a mirror of our own society. Most people still have enough common sense to be rather suspicious of the far left ideology. And most people have enough common sense to be suspicious of the far right ideology. But those are two powerful forces that are increasingly driving us apart.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. Although doesn’t it seem like the far left ideology has government, big tech, universities, corporations?
PETER KREEFT: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We’re getting closer and closer to a brave new world. That’s a prophetic book.
MATT FRADD: And that doesn’t seem to depress you. That’s what’s interesting to me. It’s like you’ve lived long enough to see the devolution of the universities and America and…
PETER KREEFT: Oh, I’m a horrible pessimist, but I’m also selfish. And I’m 85 years old and I’m getting out of this insane asylum pretty soon.
MATT FRADD: I remember Benedict Groeschel saying something like that. Oh, God, I can’t wait.
PETER KREEFT: Yes.
DEATH (AND THE DEMONIC)
MATT FRADD: How do you feel about death, your death specifically?
PETER KREEFT: Death is wonderful. Dying is awful. Dying is losing. Death is winning. But once you watch through that door, you’re guaranteed heaven. No matter how painful your purgatory is, it’s a joy because you want it. It’s God’s will and you’re totally in that will. You can’t sin after death. That’s the best thing about death. It takes away sin.
MATT FRADD: Thérèse of Lisieux, on her deathbed, said that her soul was kind of engaging with the deepest, darkest doubts of God’s existence, you know? Atheism was plaguing her soul. Do you experience that? Do you fear that you’ve just sort of wasted your life and it’s just going to be a big, black, nothingness?
PETER KREEFT: No, no, not that. But I’ve experienced more spiritual warfare this past summer than ever before in my life. I always believed in it, but I never felt it. I’ve lost a lot of sleep. I’ve had a lot of silly worries and only God and His angels come in and deal with it. I mean, I’ve never experienced such a direct answer to prayer as my prayer, God, get rid of these bad angels and Your angels, and He does it.
MATT FRADD: Wow. Can you share more about that, about what that spiritual warfare was like and the specifics of it? I don’t want you to feel like you’ve got to share too much.
PETER KREEFT: In general, pride and despair are really the same, but they manifest themselves in opposite ways. And some people are tempted to pride and arrogance and extending their power. Others are tempted to pessimism and despair and giving up. I’m the pessimist. I’m an optimist by conviction, but a pessimist by temperament.
MATT FRADD: You don’t seem that way.
PETER KREEFT: And devil… Well, this is probably why I joke a lot. A half clown lash, you know, that syndrome. And the devil knows us very, very well and hits us at our weak point. So he tempts me to give up. And sometimes temptations are really, really stupid. And I’ll just forget how stupid they are and I’ll succumb.
MATT FRADD: How do you distinguish between spiritual warfare and just having a bad night’s sleep or having certain worries?
PETER KREEFT: You don’t.
MATT FRADD: Or is that a false dilemma?
PETER KREEFT: You don’t. I don’t know if it’s a false dilemma or not. I don’t think it is because the supernatural is not the same as the natural. But they blend. The devil usually uses natural forces, uses our weakness. But it’s the strategy of the war room and hell that’s the origin of all of that. So I think to isolate the supernatural as literally supernatural and miraculous on the one hand and the natural as simply natural on the other hand is a false dilemma. They usually blend.
MATT FRADD: For me, I was giving a conference recently and I just felt this cloud of despair upon me, this fog that I couldn’t see through and everything felt hopeless and I was anxious and scared. And it’s usually in that moment, unfortunately, that you’re not thinking, wow, this could be spiritual warfare. So I stopped and I prayed some prayers and within half hour it was really like a dark cloud lifted.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. And there was a sudden answer to prayer as in that area. I know exactly what you mean.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. I’ve said before that trying to understand Christianity without reference to the demonic is like trying to understand the Lord of the Rings without reference to Sauron. It’s a boring story and it’s not one that makes any sense really, you know. And maybe it’s because we’ve sort of forgotten about the intervention of the demonic that we’re looking for enemies within and without the church. They have to be the wellspring of the problem.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. If we don’t admit that we wrestle against principalities and powers, then we’ve got to find some natural substitute, whether it’s the left or the right or the whites or the blacks or the Jews or the Semites, whoever. You’ve got to have a scapegoat.
MATT FRADD: How old are you now?
PETER KREEFT: Eighty-five.
MATT FRADD: As you’ve sort of grown in your Christian journey here at 85, would you, if you were to talk to young Peter Kreeft as he was writing his first book, would you want him to focus on a particular topic more than you have? Or say this is more important than you think or the thing that you think is really important isn’t as important as you think?
PETER KREEFT: The answer to that is going to be disappointingly obvious. Focus on the plus, not the minus, on God’s mercy, not your stupidity. No matter how bad we are, no matter how weak we are, no matter how stupid we are, God is stronger.
There’s a movie, don’t know the title, don’t know the main character. I asked a lot of moviegoers. I know this movie exists.
MATT FRADD: Maybe Neil will get it. Neil, ten points if you get it. And ten dollars.
PETER KREEFT: A holy priest, I think he’s a Franciscan, in some South American country who’s combating corruption. He sees corruption everywhere, including in the church. And finally, his bishop lets him down somehow. He’s trying to help the poor people and the bishop is so corrupted he’s preventing it. And he says, he does the opposite of St. Francis. He throws away not his rich secular clothes but his priestly garments and says, I’m out of here.
And there’s this woman who has been trying to tempt him all his life and he’s resisted the temptation. And now he accepts and he goes and chacks up with her in a little hut in the wilderness. And you think this is an anti-Catholic, pro-sexual, romantic, idealist thing, but it isn’t. It’s just the opposite. He gets a little more antsy and antsy and the relationship cool somewhat and she still loves him but he’s not sure that he loves her. And then one day she finds him missing in bed in the middle of the night and she knows where he goes and she goes down this little road into a tiny little chapel and sure enough there he is all alone, prone on the floor, talking with Jesus in the crucifix. And she says, you’re going to go back, aren’t you? And he says, yes. I don’t understand it. Why? They’re going to kill you. Why are you going back there? And he points to Christ in the tabernacle and says, because He is stronger. Three powerful words. And then he goes back and he is martyred. And that’s the end of the movie. An extremely powerful line.
If anybody knows that movie, put it in the comments.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, that is.
PETER KREEFT: He is stronger.
MATT FRADD: I want to speak about adultery for a second and just destroying everything the Lord’s given you. And the reason this is on my mind is, without giving any details away, a dear friend of mine’s father is on his deathbed. And this man, from all appearances, kamikaze’d his marriage and went to another country, was with prostitutes, came back. Just a sad life, living in government housing, very overweight, maybe an alcoholic addicted to gambling.
And I hear that story and I’m like, I totally get the temptation to destroy everything and go look for heaven here on earth. I’ve said before that I don’t know if I would trust any man or woman who’s been married for more than 15 minutes who doesn’t understand the temptation of going elsewhere to find what they have not yet found. But having that image of this person in my mind is like, yeah, this beautiful marriage that you have, Matt, and these lovely children and this beautiful Catholic little wife with your friends, this is not unbreakable. You can destroy the whole thing with your own stupidity, but it ends in that. And I pray for his salvation and I have been praying for it, but yeah, there is a way that seems right to man and in the end leads to death. That’s sort of what I’m seeing in this person’s life.
PETER KREEFT: Well, scripture frequently uses that sexual analogy from our relationship with God. Idolatry is spiritual adultery. We’re meant to be married to God and it’s a stormy marriage. It’s not easy. It’s not automatically satisfying. There’s war in it as well as peace. And we look for an alternative. So we break it. Every time we sin, we commit spiritual adultery. I mean sin is insanity.
We know from our past experience time and time again, every time we say to God, ‘No, my will be done, not Yours,’ it’s miserable. And every time we say Your will be done, it’s peace and joy deep down in the long run. And yet the next moral choice we have, my way or your way? Well, let’s see God. I’m not sure. Let me try my way. Maybe it’ll work this time. We’re nuts. But God deeply loves His severely retarded children.
MATT FRADD: I often think that’s the story of Christianity, the long story of God disagreeing with me when I tell Him I’m shit and unworthy of His love and affection. I love that He seems to disagree with our opinion of ourselves in that regard.
PETER KREEFT: God has to have the greatest sense of humor in all of existence. There’s no other way to tolerate us. But it’s not just toleration. It’s passionate love.
MATT FRADD: How has marriage sanctified you specifically? How long have you been married now?
PETER KREEFT: I think 60 years.
MATT FRADD: Terrific. Congratulations.
PETER KREEFT: Well, it’s shown me what can be done by ordinary human choice to love. And that’s not a stoical, I’ll endure this. I will actively work on this wonderful vocation and create and perceive all the goods that I can in it. And every marriage and every family is full of some disappointments and failures, especially with children. The more you have, the more joys and sorrows you have. We have only four. I have a number of friends that have a dozen. That’s an amazing achievement. I’ve written a hundred books, but I’ve only had four kids. To have five kids is more than to have four kids plus a hundred books. But you love them anyway. And it’s always somewhat reciprocated.
No matter how rebellious the kid is, that you’re the father or mother of that kid. And the kid knows it. And the kid knows that you gave them life. And it’s the pass it on system. Pay it forward system. You can’t even try to give to your parents a gift greater than they gave to you. So you give it to your kids. And if you don’t have kids, you give it to the world or the church or your friends. We all deeply know that. And we all, no matter how screwed up we are, conscience isn’t totally dead. And conscience isn’t just negative, don’t do this. But conscience is, this is what you’re called to. You’re called to do something. You’re called to be a saint far more than you are. But that’s the direction. No matter how little you climb the mountain, the direction is up rather than down. And we all know that.
MATT FRADD: What’s been more difficult for you, marriage or having children?
PETER KREEFT: Oh children, children. I mean my wife and I are equals and respect each other and understand each other far more than parents and children understand each other.
BREAKDOWN IN MARRIAGE
MATT FRADD: How do you think parents can maintain their peace in light of a rebellious child? And maybe not just rebellious, but somebody who is mutilating their sexual organs, right? I come across parents who come to me and they say this is happening because of the transgender insanity. That’s an extreme example. But how do we as parents maintain our peace as opposed to flagellating ourselves and thinking if only I had done a better job?
PETER KREEFT: I’ve got to be very honest with you. I don’t know. None of our kids have deeply disappointed us. They have kept the faith. They still believe. And that’s an unusual thing. When I was a kid growing up as a Protestant, every family I knew was Protestant. And I didn’t know a single family that had a divorce in it. I must have known 50 or 100 families.
Now as a Catholic, I also know maybe 50 or 100 families and almost all of them are Catholic. Not a single one does not have a divorce in it. I think that’s a remarkable breakdown of the fundamental institution in civilization. That can’t be sustainable. We talk about a sustainable ecology. What about a sustainable human ecology? We don’t have it. I don’t think our society is going to last more than a couple more generations. I think it’s just going to fall apart.
MATT FRADD: What will that look like when it does?
PETER KREEFT: It might be civil war. The left and the right are increasingly angry. It might be just disillusioned like the end of the Roman Empire. It might be a reversion to barbarism. It might be just, you know, not with a bang but a whimper.
MATT FRADD: I love that poem, by the way. All right, it’s easy for you since you’re on your way out. But what about these young ones and these young parents with children? How are they to maintain hope? How should they live the Christian life amidst this turmoil and pessimism and insanity?
PETER KREEFT: Well, you have to have a kind of optimism and a kind of pessimism. The pessimism of realizing that you’re in a decaying and decadent culture and you’re going to be increasingly called upon to make heroic sacrifices. And an optimism to realize that He is stronger and He will win in the end and we are on the winning side. We are hobbits and we’re facing orcs. But God has given us the whole story, including the future.
And if you look at the book of Revelation as future history, and of course it’s highly symbolic and mystical but it’s true, you see two things. There’s horrendous stuff in the future. And Christ Himself says, ‘If God had not shortened those days, no one would be saved.’ On the other hand, it’s a fixed fight. The Lamb versus the dragon. Arnion versus Therion. The bad beast and the innocent beast. The lamb wins. The hobbit wins.
MATT FRADD: So there’s no way around it. You’re going to need supernatural faith unless you want to fall into despair.
PETER KREEFT: Yeah.
MATT FRADD: Because all the indicators just look bleak for many of us.
PETER KREEFT: Expect it. God sends you to a battlefield. He doesn’t send you to a garden. We’re not in the Garden of Eden. We’re not tending the garden. We’re trying to save people from death, from spiritual death.
MATT FRADD: How did you meet your wife?
PETER KREEFT: By a very strange divine providence. My college friend had a sore neck. That’s how I met my wife. I went to college in Michigan, Calvin College. I’m an ex-Calvinist. And my friend went to New York to find a job. Couldn’t find a job. Spent a week looking. Sat on a bench waiting for a bus to take him back to Michigan. He had an extra hour. And he tried to look to the right where the employment office was. And his neck hurt. So he turned to the left instead and saw a restaurant. And said, I’m hungry. So I’ll go in the restaurant and eat before I go back.
As he was entering the restaurant, the busboy was leaving. He just got fired because he had his hand in the till. So he said, hey, maybe there’s a job here for me. So he goes in and he gets a job. So now he’s working at that restaurant. He meets the, what’s it called, the head waitress. And sort of makes friends with her. And she’s a middle-aged lady. And she invites him home to meet her daughter. Which he does and starts dating her. This is the beginning of the summer.
He calls me up in the middle of the summer and says, ‘Pete just met a nice girl in New York. She’s got a friend. Let’s go on a double date.’ So we go on a double date.
MATT FRADD: Where’d you go?
PETER KREEFT: A restaurant actually. And his date, Maria, was really smart and really funny and very beautiful. And my date was very nice and very polite and sweet. Good friend still. But nothing electric. So at that point I wasn’t thinking of romance or anything. But we had a date and we went back to our homes. I lived in New Jersey. And I went to Yale in the fall for graduate school. And I got a letter from my friend who was back at Calvin for another year. And said, ‘Pete, remember that girl I was dating in New York? I think I got a good thing going here. But I’m trying to keep the romance going by letter. Why don’t you write her a letter and tell her what a good guy I am?’
So I wrote Maria a letter saying, what do you see in Sam anyway? What does he have that none of the other students in your college have? She was still going to college then. And she wrote me back a very funny letter saying, well, I think you can answer that question yourself if you realize that I go to an old girl’s college. And we became friends, literary friends. And she invited me to go to New York and meet the family and whatnot. And at that point I was thinking of becoming a priest and didn’t have romance in mind. But we became very good friends.
And when I got baptized into the Catholic Church, Maria was the only Catholic girl that I knew. So I asked her to be my godmother. And she did. And at the baptism she joked with the priest, hey father, I suppose I fall in love with this guy. Can you marry your godmother? And she said, no. This is forbidden by the Church. You’ve got to get a special dispensation from Rome, the spiritual incest. You have to write to the Pope and he’ll say okay.
So a year or two later we go to the priest and say, father, remember that question? Meanwhile, my friend Sam started dating my ex-girlfriend at Calvin. And I started getting serious about Maria and said that’s the kind of father I want to be. Not a priest, but the other kind of father. I married my godmother.
MATT FRADD: That’s incredibly wonderful.
PETER KREEFT: Because my friend got a crick in his neck waiting for a bus in New York. Divine providence has an incredible sense of humor. I often use this analogy. Pascal says that history is big things caused by little things. Like the inch of flesh on Cleopatra’s nose. If it hadn’t been there, Mark Antony would never have fallen in love with her. The Egyptian campaign wouldn’t have happened. The Republic wouldn’t have changed into an empire. And the whole history of Western civilization would have changed.
MATT FRADD: Here’s another one. Obama made fun of Trump at that dinner party. And then Roe versus Wade was overturned.
PETER KREEFT: There might be some connection there. Well, think of this. You exist probably because of some event like this. A squirrel dropped a nut on a branch in a city park in 1 October. And that nut fell in a pile of dry leaves and made a strange noise that attracted the attention of your great grandfather who was sitting nearby. And he turned his head left rather than right to see what made that noise. And noticed this pretty girl sitting on a bench across the way and said, Don’t go track up a conversation with her and eat lunch with her. And one thing led to another and they got married and you existed because that branch was there directing the nut. That’s divine providence.
MATT FRADD: How old were you when you proposed and how did that happen?
PETER KREEFT: 21 I think. I just graduated. Maybe 22.
MATT FRADD: I think I was 21 when I proposed as well.
PETER KREEFT: I proposed on the Staten Island Ferry and I’m so clumsy I almost dropped the ring overboard. I’m a clumsy idiot with ADD.
MATT FRADD: So you kind of knelt down and almost dropped it off the edge?
PETER KREEFT: I didn’t quite kneel down. But the ship was a little shaky. And so was my heart.
MATT FRADD: Oh, that’s really great. Wow. What was the toughest thing about marriage?
PETER KREEFT: Kids.
MATT FRADD: Really?
PETER KREEFT: I mean they’ll break your heart with love. And they change everything. Absolutely no regrets.
MATT FRADD: But would you say you and Maria are good friends?
PETER KREEFT: Of course. I mean everybody has differences and I’m from a quiet Dutch family and an older child. And she’s from a very loud, wild Italian-Russian family. So it’s like, oh, I don’t know. It’s like a cat and a dog getting married. But it has been, it has been everything. It’s a mirror of the whole of life. And we deeply respect and love each other and are totally committed. And from the beginning to the end. That’s it.
MATT FRADD: I think maybe that’s the reason why we’re having more divorce is people are getting into marriages thinking that if this doesn’t work out, then I have an escape.
PETER KREEFT: Of course. One of our favorite movies when we were dating was Divorce Italian Style. It was a 50s comedy about a guy who wanted to divorce his wife. But there was no divorce allowed in Italy at the time. So the only way you could divorce your life was by murder. So he hired a mafia hitman to murder his wife. And the hitman killed like six other women thinking that it was his wife. And we thought that was very funny because we said, you know, murder is more reasonable than divorce. So if we don’t have instruments of destruction in our house, we’re going to stay married. We’ll kill each other before we’ll divorce each other.
MATT FRADD: Why is that the case? Why is murder more reasonable than divorce? Is that because divorce is impossible?
PETER KREEFT: It’s a myth. It doesn’t exist. In the eyes of God, there is no such thing as divorce. Jesus clearly says that. I often have arguments with some of my Protestant friends who say that your church is authoritarian and tyrannical and whatnot. And I say, no, it’s yours that claims more authority than Christ because Christ clearly forbade divorce in three of the four Gospels and your church allows it and mine doesn’t. So you’re correcting your Master and we’re not. Divorce is a superstition.
MATT FRADD: I’ve been thinking lately it’s not terribly well thought out and it’s not terribly insightful, but here’s what I got. It’s like you’ve got the concrete reality in front of you, which is disappointing because it’s finite and can’t make you fully happy in this life. And then over here you have the idea. It’s kind of what we talked about earlier with Marxism and the sexual revolution. Over here there’s this kind of vague notion of what could be. Like I could be married to this woman or that woman or I could have different children or I could live in that country or this state.
And it’s very tempting because it’s vagueness kind of like the unmet Marxism that’s never going to work out or sexual revolution kind of thing. Seems like this could possibly make me happy. But if you were to like take any of those scenarios, I’ll have that woman in this country in this house and you actually lived it, you’d be disappointed again.
PETER KREEFT: The devil loves vagueness. That’s in The Screwtape Letters. Dim the lights. That’s his first principle. Don’t have a realistic honest understanding of the real world with all its limits. Live in your fantasies. You can be whatever you want to be. No, you can’t.
MATT FRADD: How is that different to wanting to read the Lord of the Rings to escape reality as it were? Or are you not doing that?
PETER KREEFT: The whole point of myth is to plunge you into reality. After you read the Lord of the Rings you understand the real world much better.
MATT FRADD: That’s so true.
PETER KREEFT: You understand the mythic nature of objective reality. Tolkien says in his essay on fairy stories that scientific truth is the friend not the enemy of fantasy. If you don’t understand what a prince is and what a frog is, you can’t write a story about a frog who changes into a prince. I forget that line but it’s always, the line stuck with me, I’m forgetting the context. It was Tom Bombadil who said to the hobbits of Farmer, he spoke about Farmer Maggot in a way that challenged their view of him, that he was perhaps far more important than they had suspected. They had always just seen him as a crass farmer.
And I love that because I think that’s most of us, all of us. We kind of walk around bumping into each other, wishing others would get out of the way so we can get in front of them.
PETER KREEFT: How many friends understood how important Blessed Virgin Mary was? She was probably utterly ordinary, like Mother Teresa, like Dorothy Day, two saints that I personally met.
MATT FRADD: Tell us about that.
PETER KREEFT: I was impressed by how extraordinarily ordinary both were. Just Grandma.
MATT FRADD: Wow. It was Chesterton who said there’s nothing so extraordinary in all the world than an ordinary man, his ordinary wife and their ordinary children.
PETER KREEFT: And that’s the whole purpose of politics, to protect that. And if it’s not doing that, it better not exist.
MATT FRADD: That’s right. What was it like meeting Mother Teresa? And where did you meet her?
PETER KREEFT: She came to our local parish. There was a big crowd, maybe 200 people waiting in line. And she saw how big the crowd was and gave each person maybe five seconds. She simply shook my hand and said God bless me, but she looked at me. And in that look, I saw absolute and total attention. Nothing else existed in the world for her except me. And then I learned that other people who had met her had the same impression.
MATT FRADD: Yes, I’ve had that impression with very holy people. Father Bob Bedard, who’s the founder of the Companions of the Cross up in Ottawa, Canada, who’s since deceased. I remember meeting him and feeling like everything else in the world slowed down and he was directly attentive to me.
PETER KREEFT: You know who else I felt that with? Father Scanlan at [Destinville University.] A living Saint Francis. I think he’ll be canonized someday.
MATT FRADD: Do you really? Why?
PETER KREEFT: The miracle that he did at the university.
MATT FRADD: I mean, of course I’ve heard of it and I just had Father Dave on the show to talk a bit about it, but I’d love to hear your perspective on it.
MATT FRADD: Well, I know just what I’ve heard. I wasn’t directly and personally involved in it, but he turned a failing school, failing in every way, spiritually, academically, economically. I’m not sure if you know this, but Franciscan at one point was on the Playboy top ten party universities. That’s remarkable.
PETER KREEFT: And that’s where he started. This is a Catholic university. You’re going to be Catholics, so you’re going to live as Catholics and you’re not going to have sex or drugs in the dorms and we’re going to fire all the atheists and half the students left and he said, so what? And he built it up from there and now it’s an empire.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I would have loved to have met him.
PETER KREEFT: The twinkle in his eyes reminded me of Mother Teresa’s.
MATT FRADD: Really? Yeah, I’d love to get to that point where I’m less distracted, but I’m incredibly distracted constantly.
PETER KREEFT: Well, heaven heals all ills, including ADD, which you probably have because you’re quite intelligent. Most intelligent people have ADD. We go into universities because that’s the only place we can thrive. We can’t quite handle the real world.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I’d be screwed in a normal job, I think. But it would be good to get to that place where we were more attentive to what’s taking place now. It’s like we always have this idea that God’s will is this afternoon or tomorrow or next year or when the kids grow up.
PETER KREEFT: Well, Brother Lawrence’s practice of the presence of God and de Caussade’s abandonment to divine providence, both talk about that, the sacrament of the present moment.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, the future may never enter into my soul. The past I leave into God’s mercy. You, dear presence, are all I have.
PETER KREEFT: How the devil loves to get us to worry about the future or to resent the past? He doesn’t want us to live in the present because that’s where we meet God. That’s where God is. There’s no past or future to God. He’s present.
There’s a line in one of Ingmar Bergman’s movies. Bergman was a God-haunted agnostic. It’s called Cries and Whispers. There’s these three women who are sisters and they hate each other. One of them is dying of cancer and the other two can’t wait for her to die because she’s rich and they’re going to inherit her money. And the dying woman knows it but plays the game anyway.
And one spring, I’m told that spring is magical in Scandinavia because the winters are so long. When the sun is shining and there’s still some snow on the ground but the green grass is poking through, their two sisters take this dying woman out of her bed into the backyard swing and they each sit on one side of her and she’s swinging and you hear the voiceover. You hear her thinking. Yes, I know that my sisters are witches and hypocrites and they don’t love me and they’re just waiting for me to die. But that’s the future. And I know that I’m going to die very soon and I’ve accomplished nothing in my life and I have nothing but pain to look forward to.
But this moment, this perfect yellow sunlight and this perfect green grass and this perfect white snow, that’s all that exists right now. And that’s where I am and that’s it. And then they go back and she dies. But that one moment is like a light in the darkness, like that little star that Sam sees in Mordor. And there’s clouds all around but one star peeks through the fog and like the shaft of an arrow, it smites his heart. It can’t be put out, the light. A tiny little light will overcome an enormous room of darkness. The darkness cannot put out the light. The light always puts out the darkness.
MATT FRADD: What do you mean, smote his heart? I think I know, but…
PETER KREEFT: C.S. Lewis has a little epithet that says, I forget the rhyme, but the basic point of it is that the greatest task that an artist can succeed in performing is to break your heart. Isn’t it strange that tears are the same thing that we shed when we have sorrow that we can’t endure and we have joy that we can’t endure? Both come from a broken heart.
And I think it’s Paul Tournier who says somewhere that the only heart that can be whole is a heart that has been broken.
DECONSTRUCTIONISM
MATT FRADD: I think I know exactly what this means, but I don’t know if I can express it. I’ve been in beautiful situations or have been engaged in beautiful experiences and the thing that broke my heart was the fact that it wasn’t what I wanted. Do you see? So the sun is setting and I’m surfing on this lovely beach in San Diego where I’m intimate with my wife for the most beautiful, you know, back porch, whiskey, chatting with good friends and as soon as I think, oh, this is it, it fades away.
PETER KREEFT: That’s C.S. Lewis, that’s zen zuch, that’s joy.
MATT FRADD: Is that what you mean by smoting the heart or is that something different?
PETER KREEFT: Yes. Appetizers. The smell of the steak rather than the snake.
MATT FRADD: The smell of the coffee rather than the coffee. Or maybe not, I guess.
PETER KREEFT: The pointing finger. That’s why deconstructionism is so damaging. According to deconstructionism, ordinary words aren’t even pointing fingers. Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica defines that deconstructionist credo, I think, as well as anything. He says a poem must be palpable and mute like globed fruit. A poem must not mean but be. Nothing means anything. Nothing points to anything. No matter how transcendent the experience, it doesn’t point to something beyond itself. That’s all it is.
MATT FRADD: And did he mean anything with those words about poetry not meaning anything?
PETER KREEFT: I think so.
MATT FRADD: Did you see the irony?
PETER KREEFT: I think he is a nihilist. He’s a brilliant nihilist. J.B. is a great play, but it’s a retelling of the Book of Job almost from the devil’s point of view.
MATT FRADD: Oh, really? I’m looking up a poem that I found recently that I just absolutely love. What’s one of your favorite poems and can you recite it?
PETER KREEFT: Lepanto.
MATT FRADD: It’s quite a long poem. And can you recite the whole thing?
PETER KREEFT: No, no, no, no.
MATT FRADD: Can you recite any poems?
PETER KREEFT: I played Hamlet once so I can recite some of the soliloquies, but I won’t do that here.
MATT FRADD: Let’s see if we can find this poem here. I love this poem because it’s so humble, and I think you’ll agree it’s beautiful. It is by Edgar Albert Guest. He says, ‘The happiest nights I ever know Are those when I’ve No place to go, And the missus says When the day is through: ‘To-night we haven’t A thing to do.’ Oh, the joy of it, And the peace untold Of sitting ’round In my slippers old, With my pipe and book In my easy chair, Knowing I needn’t Go anywhere. Needn’t hurry My evening meal Nor force the smiles That I do not feel, But can grab a book From a near-by shelf, And drop all sham And be myself. Oh, the charm of it And the comfort rare; Nothing on earth With it can compare; And I’m sorry for him Who doesn’t know The joy of having No place to go.’
PETER KREEFT: Sam Gamgee said that in three words at the end of The Lord of the Rings when he comes back to his family after all these adventures. Well, I’m back, he said.
MATT FRADD: When I finished that final three paragraphs, I had to excuse myself from those I was reading it to and locked myself in my closet to weep.
PETER KREEFT: Yes, because it’s the end. Tolkien himself says, I disagree with most of the critics who criticize my work, but I must agree with one criticism of it. It’s far too short.
MATT FRADD: But it was too short, perhaps. But it was the coming home. That bit about Frodo standing at the shore and the lapping of the water seeking deep into his heart and Sam riding home and seeing the light inside. That was what it was. This is the word. And he was expected. That broke my heart.
PETER KREEFT: Yes, yes, yes. And Yandell says, Not all tears are tears of sorrow. And even death can be a joy. But it’s a strange joy, a paradoxical joy. Joy through the sorrow, through the loss.
MATT FRADD: I have a friend who’s dying right now. Cancer has come back and I’ve got my family asking me to pray for her, but I don’t know, I kind of feel like, what am I praying for here? That she’d be reconciled to God and die?
PETER KREEFT: Praying that the angels do their job and carry him to heaven.
MATT FRADD: That’s right. But it feels like sometimes people are expecting us to be praying for cures and certainly God can bring that about, but I don’t know, like at some point…
PETER KREEFT: The faith is not a spiritual technology. It’s not a how to do it thing. It’s not a press the right buttons and you’ll get your miracle.
MATT FRADD: Right. And I know it’s about abandoning all to divine providence, but if I heard next week or next month that you were sick, I don’t know if I’d be praying for your healing. I’d be like, God, do what You need to do. Bring him close to You. Help him to repent of his sin and to love You more than he ever has. Prepare him for death.
PETER KREEFT: Well, health is good and you should pray for the sick, that they recover. God doesn’t like suffering for his own sake, but He uses it for higher reasons. Health is here for happiness and happiness is here for holiness. So those are three levels, all of which are good, but the lower two are means to the end of the highest one.
MATT FRADD: What was it like being interviewed by Jordan Peterson?
PETER KREEFT: That was a lot of fun.
MATT FRADD: How did that come about?
PETER KREEFT: I had a student who knew Peterson and respected him and thought that this would be a match made in heaven. He’s my second favorite interviewer after you. You should have him on your show. He’s a polymath. He’s on the verge of faith. He’s got the content there but not the personal God behind it.
MATT FRADD: I heard somebody say recently he believes in the crucifixion but not the resurrection, which might be why he’s so eloquent in talking of suffering.
PETER KREEFT: Well, I think he believes in the crucifixion, but maybe not in the one who’s crucified. That I-Thou relationship that’s specifically religious as distinct from mythological or theological dimension I think is still missing, but I think it’s coming.
MATT FRADD: It must be difficult being in his shoes where every conceivable religious group is vying for your attention and allegiance.
PETER KREEFT: I admire him for keeping his honesty and humility in that. He’s an enormous popularity.
MATT FRADD: When did you first hear of him?
PETER KREEFT: I don’t know. Various people.
MATT FRADD: What is it that you saw or read that impressed you? Because you said that to him in the interview, that you’ve appreciated his work or something to that effect.
PETER KREEFT: His honesty. His realism. His insistence on not shifting responsibility to society or ideologies or anything else, but taking responsibility for your mind and for your life. He’s like a father to a teenager who’s dreaming too much. And he’s very intelligent. He’s read all the right books.
MATT FRADD: I watched the first 20 minutes. It was the first conversation that I wished he’d spoken less because I wanted to hear more of what you had to say. What was your favorite part of that conversation?
PETER KREEFT: His admission that he has not made the transition from mythology to religion from a philosophical appreciation and personal assimilation of the values of Christianity to belief that Christ is the Lord and the Savior and the Master of his soul. Christ’s ideas are already mastering his soul, but not his person, I think. I think that’s inevitable though.
MATT FRADD: Why? Because he’s on the right path?
PETER KREEFT: Once you’re totally honest with yourself, you’re sliding down in a certain direction and it may be a twisty and turny sort of water slide and you might even fall off a slide, but you’re going to get back on again and eventually you’ll get into that pool and there’s only one pool at the bottom.
MATT FRADD: Did you get much feedback from folks?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, they all liked it.
MATT FRADD: Are you an intentional… I was going to say Luddite, but that might sound a little… Do you intentionally withdraw from technology?
PETER KREEFT: Of course, of course. We all withdraw from areas of life that conquer us rather than that we can conquer.
MATT FRADD: No, we don’t. Sometimes we’re willing to be conquered if it’ll just shut up my desire for something better. To lose yourself in social media or technology is a way of kind of not existing for a while. If you don’t like yourself…
PETER KREEFT: Of course. And my students find it extremely difficult to do what Pascal suggests. Spend an hour alone with yourself without any diversions or distractions.
MATT FRADD: That’s terrifying.
PETER KREEFT: But I think this is a relatively benign disease in me. The whole of technology drives me mad, but not that mad. I’ve never met anybody that doesn’t have one rather strong or too weak a word remarkable defect and one remarkable talent. I mean, even the most ordinary people are better than most people at something and worse than most people at something. I’m good at writing books and I’m terrible at using machines.
MATT FRADD: So it’s not even a temptation for you to have to put energy into resist. You just don’t care for it. Or don’t understand it and therefore don’t care for it.
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, yeah. I’ll use it and I’ll master it insofar as I have to. But no more than that. I can’t imagine why people are in love with abstract things like algorithms or mental things like computers instead of real things like a cat that can come up and rub against you and say, I love you in a catty way.
MATT FRADD: What do you do on a day off? What does your day look like?
PETER KREEFT: There’s no one answer to that question. I respond to needs around me and if there’s nothing more pressing to do and there’s good surf, which is very rare in the East, I’ll go surfing. I haven’t done that in quite a while. I’ve been to the beach only once all summer. And if there’s nothing more pressing to do, I’ll go to my laptop and do another chapter in a book. I enjoy doing that because I, well, succeed. I think I do a fairly good job at it. And I don’t mind doing household stuff, cooking and cleaning and puttering and whatnot.
MATT FRADD: Well, what if God said to you, I’d like you to tell me exactly what you’d like for just one day and you’re not allowed to say whatever you will, God. You have to come up with a perfect day at this stage in your life. What would that look like?
PETER KREEFT: He would not say, I’m not allowed to say what Thomas Aquinas said only yourself, Lord.
MATT FRADD: I know, but I want to, I guess, okay, well, what I’m asking is what would a perfect, okay, perfect, okay. You’re going to have to allow.
PETER KREEFT: Okay, God, turn me into Kelly Slater and give me a 20-foot wave.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, but my ideal days involve sitting constantly and talking with people and reading and…
PETER KREEFT: Well, my ideal day would include what I’m doing right now, interviewing with you.
MATT FRADD: Well, thanks. I remember the first time I had you on the show, I was really nervous to speak to you.
PETER KREEFT: What?
MATT FRADD: Yeah.
PETER KREEFT: That’s ridiculous. I’m nervous to speak to most interviewers and you deal with that. I’m not nervous to speak to you. Because there’s no time pressure.
MATT FRADD: That helps, doesn’t it? Yeah, and that’s the goal. I mean, that’s why I like to chat for a long time because usually it takes about half hour to get into a conversation. But what I like about you, and it’s impressive to me, it’s not a compliment to say you don’t have to get your defenses up, is that many people who are older than say like 50 or 40 and 50 who have been on the speaking circuit have their answers. They have their ways of answering questions and the ways that they answer them are very good and that’s why they keep saying the same thing. But I like having to just have a conversation with nothing planned.
PETER KREEFT: Well, I think ADD is a blessing in disguise from God because I get bored with myself. So I don’t like packaged answers. When I teach a given course, if I teach it 12 times, I’ll teach 12 different courses. I won’t teach the same course.
MATT FRADD: Okay. What’s your favorite course to give even though, of course, they’re always different?
PETER KREEFT: A course on one great philosopher. Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal.
MATT FRADD: I thought you said one great philosopher.
PETER KREEFT: One at a time.
MATT FRADD: Oh, I see what you mean.
PETER KREEFT: Go deeply into a single. I think the best course I ever taught was the first time I taught Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve taken three courses on Kierkegaard, two by experts, one by an amateur. The amateur was by far the best. So at this point, I was an amateur about Augustine. I just reread the Confessions in the right translation, please, for the first time, fell in love with it, wanted to teach a course on it, even though I was far from an expert on it.
And I got 12 students in a seminar who were also in love with Augustine, the little bits of it that they knew. And we just went through the Confessions, nothing else. We didn’t even finish the Confessions. We got up to book 10, I think. And I think it was the best course I ever taught because the students asked for the privilege of writing journals instead of learned papers. And I said, wonderful idea. Every single journal was at least 200 pages long. They really got into Augustine.
MATT FRADD: I hope you didn’t have to read all of that.
PETER KREEFT: I did. I enjoyed it. I can still read.
MATT FRADD: Can you? I heard somebody. It was Brian Regan who said he’s been getting really, his speed reading has increased, but his comprehension has plummeted.
PETER KREEFT: Well, that usually is the compensation, yeah. But with student papers, that’s all right. Because if a student’s brilliant on page two, they’re usually going to be brilliant throughout the thing. And you can skip around.
MATT FRADD: What annoys you in papers, students’ papers?
PETER KREEFT: Predictability. Merely factual interest. So and so was born in such and such and he became, yeah, okay, go. Let me see your mind.
MATT FRADD: How many books are you working on right now?
PETER KREEFT: A couple at once. One of them is an introduction to philosophy for beginners by the use of the Socratic method. And I’m going to write one comparing the two greatest novels ever written, The Brothers Karamazov and The Lord of the Rings, finding common things.
MATT FRADD: I agree those are the two best books ever written. I think I would have said that too. And finding commonalities in the two. Oh, I’m interested now.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Yeah. Can I ask you to give some of that away or do you want to hold on to all that?
PETER KREEFT: One of them is a Russian word, zobornost, which is usually translated universality or the cosmic dimension of divine providence. We are each responsible for all somehow.
That was one of the few ideas that radically changed my mind simply by reading a novel. Dostoevsky didn’t prove it to me. He showed it to me in The Brothers Karamazov. And you see it throughout The Lord of the Rings too.
MATT FRADD: Well, how, it’s Father Zosima who says this, isn’t he? I don’t get the context of who he says it to. Alyosha perhaps. But how is that displayed? How did Dostoevsky show that in the novel? That we’re responsible for all?
PETER KREEFT: Mainly by Alyosha who practices it. He is an angel in his vocation. An angel means messenger. And he doesn’t do much. He’s a very ordinary person and nothing very spectacular but he just talks to people. And he’s the oil in the pistons that makes everybody else’s engine run.
MATT FRADD: And what’s so beautiful about Alyosha is how he treats, at least in the beginning and throughout the book, how he treats his father with, he doesn’t judge him.
PETER KREEFT: Yes.
MATT FRADD: He doesn’t do the judging.
PETER KREEFT: But he’s a realist. He doesn’t idealize him. But he simply doesn’t judge him.
MATT FRADD: Yeah.
PETER KREEFT: And Dostoevsky’s letters show that he was working on a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov. He died before he could do it. And Alyosha was going to marry Lisa and have a very troubled life.
MATT FRADD: Interesting. Well, that’s another way in which Alyosha isn’t the obvious hero, at least the way in which we might write a story today in that he even just leaves the monastery and marries the crippled Lisa.
PETER KREEFT: Dostoevsky says in his preface that Alyosha is a very strange hero. He is my hero. But he’s a very ordinary man and yet he’s eccentric which means that eccentricity is ordinary. And most of us who are not eccentric are extraordinary for lacking that eccentricity.
MATT FRADD: Let me grab it. I’m going to grab, you keep talking. I’m going to grab Dostoevsky’s book over here.
PETER KREEFT: Good.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: One thing I was thinking while you were talking about teaching courses on single philosophers is kind of a basic question but what would you say your top three are and why if you had to pick?
PETER KREEFT: Top three philosophers, top three books, top three courses?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: The three philosophers of the day. Well, I mean just today, what would you pick?
MATT FRADD: Do you mean who lived today or?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: No. No, just in general.
PETER KREEFT: In other words, if an intelligent student who had never read any philosophy before came to me and said, tell me three philosophers I should read in order to cope with the issues of today.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: I shouldn’t have said today. I just meant to put like a levity to it. So like if not for your life, what would you choose as your absolute favorite philosopher? Just kind of like which one would you like?
PETER KREEFT: If I could have the complete works of A, B, and C on it for the rest of my life, who would I be? Well, I’d start with Plato. Did I like Plato or the place to begin? I’d do Thomas Aquinas who was the greatest philosopher of all time. And I think I’d do Augustine because he’s the total head and the total heart combined. Because no one else has ever combined them.
MATT FRADD: There’s that section in The Brothers and it kind of speaks to what we’ve been addressing about this desire for heaven now and not being able to get it and maybe wanting to kamikaze all the cherished relationships you have in order to find what doesn’t exist.
PETER KREEFT: That’s also Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is a perfect example of that.
MATT FRADD: I said this last time. I read half of it and got bored. Which is my fault, clearly. I’m not blaming Tolstoy. I guess anyone’s wondering. Who’s the fellow who’s… I forget the brother because I haven’t read this in a few years who wants Grushenka.
PETER KREEFT: Well, of course, Theodore wants Grushenka. And Dimitri wants Grushenka.
MATT FRADD: I just want to read this to you and I’d love you to comment on it because this is one of the most beautiful parts in all the brothers for me that breaks my heart, right? With sinking soul, he waited every moment for Grushenka’s decision and kept thinking that it would occur as if unexpectedly by inspiration. Suddenly she would tell him, take me. I’m yours forever and it would all be over. He would snatch her up and take her to the end of the world at once. Oh, at once. Take her far away, as far as possible. If not to the end of the world, then somewhere to the end of Russia. Marry her there and settle down with her incognito so that no one would know anything about them, not here, not there, not anywhere. Then, oh, then a totally new life would begin at once. He dreamed of the other, this renewed and now virtuous life. It must, it must be virtuous ceaselessly and feverishly. He thirsted for this resurrection and renewal. The vile bog he had gotten stuck in of his own will burdened him too much. And like a great many men in such cases, he believed most of all in a change of place. If it only, if it weren’t for these people, if only it weren’t for these circumstances, if only one could fly away from this cursed place, then everything would be reborn. That was what he believed in and what he longed for.
Isn’t that just gorgeous and the human experience and idiotic and lovely all at once.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. And Dostoevsky’s exaggerated characters, like Flannery O’Connor grotesqueries, show us ourselves there. We see our own Dimitri, we see our own Alyosha, we see our own Ivan, we see our own Fyodor. As Fyodor Dostoevsky saw, this is why he named his villain after himself.
Give me that book a minute. I want to find the passage in the introduction where he’s talking about eccentricity.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: One thing I was thinking about Dimitri is, because they do end up, not to spoil, but they end up kind of going off together except he’s being sent off I think in a prison train.
PETER KREEFT: That’s right.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: And she’s being sent off to free him. So I think that maybe this is reading too much into it but I think it’s funny that their epilogue is kind of like, well now they’re off somewhere together either in prison or you know, living their dream life. Like after their kind of…
MATT FRADD: Is that the epilogue? Are they in Siberia at the end? I sometimes get Crime and Punishment mixed up. Did he get sent to Siberia?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: It leaves him being sent to Siberia but Grushenka is going after him with a plan to free him from the prison I believe. I’m remembering that right.
PETER KREEFT: And like Socrates in prison, they bribe the guards and arrange for him to be freed and he does not accept it.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Oh really? I don’t remember that part.
PETER KREEFT: I think there’s that scene. I like this thing about eccentricity because all of Dostoevsky’s characters are eccentric. Starting out on the biography of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in some perplexity. Namely that while I do call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, still I myself know that he is by no means a great man. So that I can see the inevitable questions such as what is notable about your Alexei Fyodorovich? That you choose him for your hero? What has he really done? To whom is he known? For what? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the facts of his life?
One thing perhaps is rather doubtless, he is a strange man, even an odd one. But strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention. Especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and finding at least some general sense in the general senselessness. Whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case, is not so. Odd man out.
Now if you do not agree with this last point, and if you reply not so or not always, then perhaps I shall take heart concerning the significance of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich. For not only is an odd man not always a particular and isolated case, but on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole. While the other people of his age have, for some reason, been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.
Here are two examples of odd people: Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. There was a book written by Max Picard after the war, published in 1945, I believe, entitled, The Hitler in Ourselves. If you don’t see the potentiality for Hitler in you, there’s something wrong with you. If you don’t see the potentiality and the need for Christ in you, we’re destined to be little Christs.
MATT FRADD: What I said a moment ago about, I don’t trust any man who’s been married for fifteen minutes who doesn’t feel the temptation at times to blow the whole thing up. And I’ve said that, and people have been very offended at that. Like, as if I must not love my wife. But it’s just what you’re saying there. Like, yeah, you have a Hitler in you.
PETER KREEFT: Well, I have no temptation to blow my wife or children up, but I have a temptation to blow things up. I have this dream of taking an axe and starting with every computer, destroying it, and laughing, and then doing the same to the house, you know, I’m not that good a carpenter or a plumber or anything. And then to the whole of civilization. That’s a very dark dream.
It doesn’t come to hating people, but it comes to hating the limitations of the things that do not fulfill my dreams. So I understand that Dimitri passage that you just read. There’s got to be an ideal world. No, there isn’t. You’d be bored with it. It’s impossible. It’s impossible to imagine heaven. Because of the problem of boredom. Make a list of all the things you want to be in heaven. All the things you don’t want to be in heaven. How long before you’re bored? Not very long.
MATT FRADD: Like five years if I get breaks in between and naps. I actually do find Socrates’ response to his friends comforting when they talk about the afterlife. Especially the bit about should there be nothing at all. Maybe I’m not supposed to feel this way as a Christian, but okay. If there is nothing, and he says in the dialogue, it would just be like a dreamless sleep. And who doesn’t like that? Something to that effect.
PETER KREEFT: I didn’t get that reaction. I was disappointed by that. I don’t want to sleep. I want to be awake. Dreamless? Yeah, that’s good. Dreams are an alternative to reality. But sleep is an image of death, and death is our last enemy. Christ transforms it into our friend. It’s like He converts Gollum.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Dr. Kreeft, what’s your favorite platonic dialogue?
PETER KREEFT: The Gorgias.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Okay, and then why?
PETER KREEFT: First time I taught that, I had a student who said that that dialogue changes life. He was going to go into some prestigious profession for the money and the power. And that persuaded him to fundamentally change his values. The Gorgias is basically the argument of the Republic without all the political details.
MATT FRADD: And absurdities.
PETER KREEFT: Which is the Republic’s weakness. So I think the Gorgias is an even better dialogue than the Republic.
MATT FRADD: Is that the one with the, I forget the word, but the fake philosophers that were around?
PETER KREEFT: This office….
MATT FRADD: Yes. Gorgias of this office.
PETER KREEFT: And he says that rhetoric is the supreme thing in life because you can get people to do whatever you want by persuasion. You don’t even have to use physical force. Which is the genius of Machiavelli too. Machiavelli understood for the first time the power of propaganda. A kind of spiritual warfare without relying on the military. And it’s a kind of protonician will to power. But a kind of intellectual power rather than just physical power.
And I think it’s in the Gorgias too where Socrates says it is better to be on the receiving end of injustice and to lack that power than to do injustice and to have it.
MATT FRADD: A hundred percent. That’s so evident.
PETER KREEFT: Most of us don’t believe that. We go to movies and we’re not shocked by sin. We’re shocked by suffering. But God is not shocked by that. He uses suffering to deter us from sin.
MATT FRADD: Well I’ve heard you say before that our problem is with moral evil more than it is with physical evil. And if you want proof of that, what would you rather? Your father doing the torturing or your father being tortured?
PETER KREEFT: That’s an appeal to the deep heart. But on the surface, it’s suffering that bothers the most. If sin bothers more than it did, we would do less of it. Go see any movie where there’s a lot of both kinds of evil. And people are not shocked by the sins, they’re shocked by the sufferings.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Matt, do you have a favorite dialogue? Mine’s the Plato to answer your question. Or the Republic to answer your question.
MATT FRADD: I really like the last several dialogues, so I like the Apology and what follows from that.
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, the Apology is a masterpiece.
MATT FRADD: And I have one here.
PETER KREEFT: Like the Phaedo. That last scene in the Phaedo, after all the arguments are over. And the arguments are very clever, but I don’t think they’re very persuasive. When you see Socrates die, that’s the supreme argument for life after death. Because when the idea of Socrates and the idea of death meet in your mind in that death scene. When the two confront each other. Socrates in this corner, death in that corner. Socrates doesn’t change. The meaning of death changes. And that’s what happened with the resurrection too. Although it leaked out into the physical world.
MATT FRADD: I like that leaked out. He says, The world perhaps does not see that those who rightly engage in philosophy study only dying and death. A philosopher releases his soul from communion with his body so far as he can beyond all other men. I think he means while in life.
PETER KREEFT: Well the word body is the wrong word there. Passions. Egotistic desires. That’s the thing we have to die to. And every religion in the world has some version of that mystical death to the ego. That’s very impressive. I mean even Buddhism which has no God, no life after death and no soul, insists on dying to egotism.
MATT FRADD: Have you been following or do you try not to follow church drama? German bishops trying to push sodomy and things like this?
PETER KREEFT: I don’t try to follow it. It follows me. I think that schism would be a wonderful thing. Get rid of the dirty fruit. Drop it from the tree. I mean that’s totally self-destructive. I don’t mean this to be racist but some bad things have come out of Germany. Beginning with the enlightenment figures and obviously fascism. And Marx of course was German. So both the left and the right were tearing us apart. Emerged from similar sources.
But it’s almost funny in a Monty Python sort of way. I thought it was a joke when they had a synod on synodality. That’s like having a meeting about having meetings.
MATT FRADD: Turtles all the way down.
PETER KREEFT: A committee on committees.
MATT FRADD: Oh God, I couldn’t think of anything worse. So you’ve written one book of fiction. Do you tinker with fiction even if it’s not for publication?
PETER KREEFT: I love fiction. I love reading it more than even I love philosophy. Because life is fiction. Life is narrative at least. But no, I will never write another novel. It took 20 years.
MATT FRADD: What about a short story. Do you ever try that?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, there’s a tiny little pseudo-mystical one in the appendix to one of my early books. I think it’s Heaven, the Heart’s Deepest Longing. Where nothing much happens externally. Something happens internally. But I don’t expect ever to write successful fiction. Fiction that people will like. I have no formula. I’m not a Stephen King.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, he seems to have a formula. Have you ever read a novella by Dostoevsky called A Gentle Creature?
PETER KREEFT: No.
MATT FRADD: That destroyed me.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, good for him.
MATT FRADD: So I’ll get it for you and I’ll send it to you. It opens with a dead woman on a card table. And her husband bewildered at what she’s just killed herself. And it’s made apparent on the first page so I’m not giving anything away. And he just recounts how they met and their life together. And how he distanced himself from her to try to earn her respect and punished her. And how he just like ruined the relationship. I have never cried the way I cried after I read that book. I don’t know what it is with books. It’s like every time I put a book down I’m crying. Have you ever read The Road by…
PETER KREEFT: Oh, yes. Cormac McCarthy.
MATT FRADD: Destroyed me. It was embarrassing how hard I cried at that book.
PETER KREEFT: Did you read his Sunset Limited?
MATT FRADD: No.
PETER KREEFT: A black ex-con rescues a nihilist, atheist, over-educated professor from a suicide attempt.
MATT FRADD: Oh, I’ve seen the movie.
PETER KREEFT: Yes.
MATT FRADD: What’s it called? The movie?
PETER KREEFT: Sunset Limited.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, you told me to watch that movie because I told you that I like movies with lots of dialogue. If there’s not a lot of dialogue I get bored. It’s going to be good dialogue. And that sounds maybe a bit pretentious but explosions in car chases bore the hell out of me. But I’m gripped. Maybe that’s why I like doing this. Like I find this way more engaging just talking.
PETER KREEFT: I find movies that try to deal with philosophical or religious themes explicitly embarrassingly bad. Like My Dinner with Andre, which people rave about, I thought was, as a philosopher, I thought it was really bad philosophy. And I’ve seen movies, religious movies by Christians where there’s a lot of argument and it doesn’t work. In this one it works because of the personalities. I mean the black is nothing but his faith. He has nothing else. And the other guy has everything else. It’s like Job arguing with Solomon in Ecclesiastes. The black is Job and the professor is Solomon.
MATT FRADD: And how much better is the book?
PETER KREEFT: It’s exactly the same. A totally faithful movie.
MATT FRADD: Oh, I see. So it’s basically a script.
PETER KREEFT: Almost never done. Which is also why I love Martin Scorsese’s In Silence. Totally faithful to the book. Very, very rare for a brilliant director.
MATT FRADD: I tend to get, I think I’ve watched more movies where I’ve quit halfway through.
PETER KREEFT: Oh yeah, me too. Worst movie I ever saw was the first version of The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi. If you want to get angry at artists, try it.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Is that the strange animated one?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, the animated one. However, the first version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was very well done, even though rather crude technologically.
MATT FRADD: So here was my problem with the trilogy. And again, the problems I mentioned to you prior to the show, C.S. Lewis’s trilogy.
PETER KREEFT: The space trilogy.
MATT FRADD: Right. And just like my problem with Anna Karenina is clearly my problem because it’s Tolstoy. Same thing I’m sure here with Lewis.
PETER KREEFT: Well, I sympathize with that. But even Dostoevsky and as well as Tolstoy, they say too much. And you have to have very great patience and a great memory to get through the book. But once you’re familiar with them the first time, the second time around is always better.
MATT FRADD: That’s why I recommend people read their novellas before their big works so that they can accustom themselves. So The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one of the most gorgeous.
PETER KREEFT: That’s an absolute masterpiece.
MATT FRADD: I forced all of my children to make, I read it to them on a beach trip over three nights. It was a funny Florida vacation. I was reading about a man dying and they were forced to listen to it. It’s glorious. I’ve never seen death so well depicted. I would highly recommend everyone read that book now.
But what were we saying? Dostoevsky. Too much.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: C.S. Lewis’s trilogy.
PETER KREEFT: Oh yeah, the trilogy. You have a problem with it.
MATT FRADD: Again, the problems are me and I’d love you to show me how that’s the case. But I just don’t like his fiction. I like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I got a little bored with his other books of Narnia.
PETER KREEFT: Really?
MATT FRADD: But this trilogy, I just, I had my elbows up against a looming allegory that I was sure was about to come. It just felt, I know he said that there’s no allegory, it’s not a story of allegory. But it was hard not to see, okay, these are the angels and this is the fallen race. I just didn’t like how on the nose.
PETER KREEFT: Well, Tolkien didn’t like it either, so you’re in good company. And you can’t argue about that kind of taste. It’s like music.
MATT FRADD: That’s right, and that’s okay.
PETER KREEFT: Not everybody has the same taste in music, so it’s not a fault. It’s just where you are. Did you try Till We Have Faces, his best novel? I think you’d like that more. It’s much more psychological, much more modern. His wife helped him write it, which is why it’s so good. By the way, the best written book that I wrote was the one my wife helped me write. In fact, I sent it to, it’s one on angels. I sent it to Ignatius Press and Father Fessio said, how come your style improves so much? I said, do not.
MATT FRADD: That’s amazing. The best letter I think I’ve ever received was a letter from you after I had asked you to endorse a short book on atheism, and you wrote back and went, this is very poorly written. You said, I enjoyed you listening to you, so I was surprised at how bad this was. Loved it. I don’t know if you remember that letter, but it made my day.
PETER KREEFT: Ah, there’s a bit of a masochist in you then.
MATT FRADD: Well, I’ll take a beating from you. Other people, it may have offended me, but it was great because I rewrote it and sent it back to you and you actually endorsed it. On Boston College letterhead.
I very much like writing. I like writing horror stories, little horror stories.
PETER KREEFT: Who’s your favorite horror writer?
MATT FRADD: Oh, that’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a favorite horror writer. I like some of Lovecraft. I really like Dracula. Bram Stoker.
PETER KREEFT: The original one.
MATT FRADD: At least until it gets to the epistolary back and forth. So that first bit when he discovers who the Count is and him climbing down the wall like a spider and he encounters those women elsewhere in the castle, that’s terrifying. I remember reading this to my wife and feeling afraid. I haven’t really had that experience with a lot of books, but I…
PETER KREEFT: Do you like Frankenstein?
MATT FRADD: I didn’t like that. Again, surely it’s my problem. He just seems super melancholic and I just found it like boring, sad. But maybe I should give it another shot.
PETER KREEFT: You can’t argue about taste.
MATT FRADD: Have you read any Kafka?
PETER KREEFT: No.
MATT FRADD: You might like that. It’s a little long. Who’s the William Shakespeare of ghost stories? I’ve read some of these lately. What is his bloody name?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: People like Edgar Allan Poe.
MATT FRADD: No, I like him, but…
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, I like Poe too. Poe’s a great poet.
MATT FRADD: And then I love Flannery O’Connor. My kids like her. My kids say, read the one where that old woman gets shot in the chest. And my wife bows her head and just in despair. And I’m like, all right, let’s do it.
PETER KREEFT: Have you tried Walker Percy?
MATT FRADD: I found him far too hung up on sex. It seemed like he had some sort of issue. He was trying to work out.
PETER KREEFT: Try a series of essays called Most in the Cosmos. It’s the funniest philosophy book ever written. It’s a satire on pop psychology.
MATT FRADD: Well, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, though written from a clearly atheistic point of view, is hilarious.
PETER KREEFT: So is Monty Python, especially The Holy Grail.
MATT FRADD: The Holy Grail. What’s one of your favorite lines? Or scenes?
PETER KREEFT: I think The Killer Rabbit. Or maybe The Holy Hand Grenade.
MATT FRADD: Oh my gosh. They had some brilliant things in there. No, it’s not. It’s just two halves of a coconut and you’re banging them together. The Knights of Ni-
PETER KREEFT: Bring me a strawberry. I think more people have memorized the lines in that movie than almost any other one. Except the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
MATT FRADD: I never watched that.
PETER KREEFT: I watched it once and didn’t like it that much.
MATT FRADD: Where did that come from? It was almost like it was just making fun of everything. But it made fun of everything in a brilliant way. I mean, sometimes it didn’t. Like, for example, is this right room for an argument? Like, that’s really clever and funny. Or that scene in The Life of Brian where that guard is correcting the graffiti artist. Or the graffitiist Latin. Like, that’s brilliant.
PETER KREEFT: And the crucifixion scene where Jesus is bringing pop psychology to the dying thieves.
MATT FRADD: Always look on that one. Is that it? No, that wasn’t Jesus.
PETER KREEFT: Some people think the movie is blasphemous. I don’t think so. It’s not a satire in Christianity. It’s a satire in modern pop psychology.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. There are two, three times I’ve fallen out of my chair laughing at movies. And one of them, I remember where I was when… All right, I am the Messiah. I fell out of my chair and couldn’t get up. I was laughing.
PETER KREEFT: You like Dr. Strangelove?
MATT FRADD: I don’t know.
PETER KREEFT: That’s one of the funniest movies ever made. Peter Sellers plays three parts. It’s about the end of the world through a nuclear holocaust. I’m so excited. You told me this. Dr. Strangelove, let’s see if that’s it.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Dr. Kreeft, have you heard the original ending for that movie?
PETER KREEFT: No.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: So the planned ending for that movie was for everyone in the hall to have a pie fight with each other as an analogy. And they changed it at the very last minute because of, I think it was the assassination of, or no, what was it? Something to do with the president. They didn’t want to make the presidency look bad or something like that. So they changed it at the last minute. But I love that ending. I wish they’d kept that or found some way to put it back in.
PETER KREEFT: I like the ending in the movie.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. And you’d recommend I watch this?
PETER KREEFT: Oh, yes. It’s brilliant.
MATT FRADD: I’m so excited. Tell me some good movies. I’m so tired of turning on a movie and getting boiled up.
PETER KREEFT: Well, I think my favorite movie of all time, other than the… I’m sorry. Well, that’s truly funny. Jim Carrey is a genius.
MATT FRADD: But I think you’ve told me. A Man for All Seasons.
PETER KREEFT: A Man for All Seasons. Yeah, that’s an excellent movie. Liar Liar is one of the funniest movies ever made. A Fish Called Wanda is another one.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, that was quite funny. I’ve been watching Hitchcock lately. I think I’ve kind of exhausted what I like in him. I watched like Rope, that movie with excellent back window, I think it was called.
PETER KREEFT: Rear Window, yeah.
MATT FRADD: Rear Window, thank you. I’ve tried watching Birds. Everyone said that was great. I didn’t like that.
PETER KREEFT: I think Vertigo is his best.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. But I didn’t seem to like that either.
PETER KREEFT: There’s something haunting about that.
MATT FRADD: I just watched Amadeus. That was quite good.
PETER KREEFT: Excellent. I like… What’s the Bergman movie with Antonius Block, the knight who comes back from the Crusades and faces death?
MATT FRADD: I don’t know. I’m not a big movie person, I’ve got to say.
PETER KREEFT: I think movies are like science fiction. Most of them are trash, but when you get a good one, you get a very good one. Ever read A Man for All Seasons? I’m sorry. Ever read A Canticle for Leibovitz?
MATT FRADD: I’m so glad you asked that because I’ve tried reading it. I’ve read the first two chapters and I want to keep reading it because everyone has been telling me to read this book.
PETER KREEFT: Only the first two chapters?
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I just…
PETER KREEFT: Oh, wait.
MATT FRADD: Again, more about me than the book.
PETER KREEFT: No, no, no, no. I just want to read it.
MATT FRADD: Again, more about me than the book. I just lost interest.
PETER KREEFT: No, no, no, no. That’s like reading The Lord of the Rings and stopping on page 50 where all you know is how the hobbits live in the shire.
MATT FRADD: All right. So read it.
PETER KREEFT: Well, let me motivate you to do so. The protagonist, who is a rather dull person, dies on page 70 or something and the book is 200 pages long.
MATT FRADD: So what, get to at least that?
PETER KREEFT: Yes. And it’s a philosophy of history. It’s almost allegorical.
MATT FRADD: All right. I’ll read it.
PETER KREEFT: C.S. Lewis has the greatest science fiction novel ever written.
MATT FRADD: When was it written? Like 60s?
PETER KREEFT: In the 60s. The author, who was a troubled young man, he reminds me of Cormac McCarthy, a very dark person. I think he committed suicide. He wrote it in reparation for bombing Monte Cassino. He was an aviator in World War II. And he dropped some of the bombs on the monastery.
MATT FRADD: Wow. I didn’t realize that. And I’ve been reading just bad fiction that I enjoy lately. It sounds like I’m contradicting myself. But there’s a particular kind of series of cyberpunk noir-type books that are like nothing to write home about. But they pass the time and I’ve been enjoying that.
PETER KREEFT: Are you bored?
MATT FRADD: Why are you reading stuff that you don’t really love?
PETER KREEFT: I don’t. I think it’s kind of like candy. It’s like candy. I can’t live off this.
MATT FRADD: So there’s something attractive about it.
PETER KREEFT: There’s something attractive about it.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. It’s written from a first-person perspective, which I really like.
PETER KREEFT: Any good TV shows around lately?
MATT FRADD: Have you watched any of the Lord of the Rings? I hear it’s terrible.
PETER KREEFT: Well, the movie was fine.
MATT FRADD: But the Amazon series has been released.
PETER KREEFT: I watched the first half hour and I thought that the technology was beautiful.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, it looked like Tolkien.
PETER KREEFT: But it wasn’t Tolkien.
MATT FRADD: It lacked his philosophy.
PETER KREEFT: I said, where is Tolkien in this? It’s a totally different content.
MATT FRADD: And I was really surprised when there was that transgender Muslim abortion Dr. Hobbit. I don’t remember that in the books.
PETER KREEFT: I didn’t get that.
MATT FRADD: That was a joke. A terrible joke. I’m sorry.
PETER KREEFT: Oh. Such is our day that we take that series.
MATT FRADD: No, any good shows? Do you and your wife, what do you do to spend time together? Do you watch a show?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, usually the BBC or Masterpiece Theatre.
MATT FRADD: Masterpiece Theatre. I don’t know what that is.
PETER KREEFT: They have some good things. Grantchester is a very well done. About an English cleric and his detective friend.
MATT FRADD: Any good?
PETER KREEFT: Doc Martin is very good. It’s quirky if you like –
MATT FRADD: Doc Martin. I like the shoes. This is British as well, is it? Do you ever watch the show Keeping Up Appearances?
PETER KREEFT: Oh yeah.
MATT FRADD: Wasn’t that delightful?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah. You know there’s a funny one on now. It’s very shallow, but it’s funny, called Upstart Crow. It’s a satire on Shakespeare.
MATT FRADD: Okay. Anything? Anything come to mind?
PETER KREEFT: I think you’ll like it. If you like Monty Python.
MATT FRADD: Upstart Crow. What else was excellent? I remember laughing a lot back in the day. It was Blackadder.
PETER KREEFT: I don’t know that.
MATT FRADD: You don’t remember Blackadder? It was Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie. Oh, that was a kind of classic BBC. I think it must have been after Monty Python.
PETER KREEFT: Hugh Laurie, Peter Laurie’s son?
MATT FRADD: I don’t know.
PETER KREEFT: Peter Laurie did a lot of black horror.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, Blackadder, I’m saying.
PETER KREEFT: Blackadder. It’s a scary TV show about a snake.
MATT FRADD: It’s a comedy and it takes place in different parts of history. It’s like a kind of medieval period and maybe a World War II period.
PETER KREEFT: 1066 and all that.
MATT FRADD: Okay. I’m not sure.
PETER KREEFT: That’s a very funny take on Western history.
MATT FRADD: Jeeves and Wooster. I mean that’s incredible comedy right there. Even my children love it. I’ll read it to them. That’s so funny. You ever read Jeeves and Wooster? I would recommend everyone read Jeeves and Wooster. Yeah, that’s brilliant writing.
Let’s take a break and when we come back, you know what a meme is?
PETER KREEFT: I know what the word means, but I can’t identify one. I’m going to show you several memes for you to respond to that you haven’t seen ahead of time.
What is a meme?
MATT FRADD: Well, I think meme may have been termed by Dawkins. Do you want to tell us what it is since you seem to know?
PETER KREEFT: Is a meme a theme? Is it a sentence? Is it a paragraph? Is it an argument? Is it a fact? What does it mean?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: It’s like I would liken it to like a genre or like a form of media. So like a movie, a film versus like a novel or a novella.
PETER KREEFT: So it’s an artistic genre?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Yeah, somewhat. Essentially, though, it’s just…
PETER KREEFT: How is it distinguished from other genres, like a poem?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: It is generally a… It’s a visual medium. It’s generally an image with some kind of text attached and usually a joke.
PETER KREEFT: An image with a text attached?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Yeah, it’s usually an image with some kind of text.
PETER KREEFT: It sounds like an advertisement.
MATT FRADD: How about I show you… I’ll show you about eight and then you tell me what you think they are and whether you think they’re funny. So what we’re going to do, people are going to see what I’m showing you on the screen. Can you throw that up?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Yeah.
MATT FRADD: I’ll just make sure it’s working. Look good? I’m going to turn this this way for you to look at.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, okay. A visual joke.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Is that working again? Sorry about that. We’re back up. Good to go.
MATT FRADD: All right. So it says, did you know the symbol M in McDonald’s represents the first letter of McDonald’s, which is M?
PETER KREEFT: That’s supposed to be funny.
MATT FRADD: It’s supposed to be funny because it’s clearly not funny and it’s just wasted your time. That’s why it’s funny.
PETER KREEFT: I see.
MATT FRADD: All right. Another one. The guy at the church in Galatia who was circumcised the day before Paul’s letter arrived.
PETER KREEFT: That is funny. Okay. That I get. So meme with a joke.
MATT FRADD: It’s usually coupled with a visual image that’s taken from, it’s almost like that is a face. I don’t know what that face is saying, but it is the perfect depiction of disappointment.
You know? So when I saw that, this is one of the few memes that I actually laughed out loud to as opposed to just blowing air out of my nose gently. My son several times throughout the day said, dad, why are you laughing? So I think that’s so far my all time favorite meme. I posted this on Facebook and Scott Hahn responded and said, I don’t think he’d be standing up. Something or other.
Yeah. All right. Oh, this one’s really small. But Matt Walsh says, why did the trans man eat only salads? And the fellow who’s dressed up like a Sheila says, don’t say it. And Matt says, he was a her before.
PETER KREEFT: The lowest form of humor.
MATT FRADD: Read that. Read that out loud. Just speak into the microphone if you could, just so we can.
PETER KREEFT: The man in armor says, look what I invented. He’s holding up a loaf of bread. And what looks like a woman in a gown says, that’s the best thing since ripped up bread. And it is in fact ripped up bread. So it’s not funny. No, it is funny.
MATT FRADD: That’s sliced bread. So, you know, people see something, they say that’s the best thing since sliced bread. Well, before when they actually made sliced bread, the only thing you could compare it to is ripped up bread. Another one.
PETER KREEFT: Wait a minute. Is the joke the contrast or the identity between sliced and ripped up?
MATT FRADD: I think it’s funny because a common phrase is it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Well, before sliced bread, the best thing you had was ripped up bread.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, so it’s the contrast between ripped up bread and sliced bread. I misinterpreted. Gotcha. I admit that it’s funny, but I’m not laughing.
MATT FRADD: That’s okay. Lord of the Rings. And then Lord of the Rings, but Legolas has a sniper rifle.
PETER KREEFT: Instead of a bow and arrow. Well, they put Legolas on a skateboard in that scene in volume two where he sails down. Legolas was not, I think, a very successful character. Very hard to do elves. He was much too human. And he looked like one of the Backstreet Boys.
MATT FRADD: They’re probably going for a more feminine look to try to make him seem otherworldly or something. Next one.
Hey, says King Henry VIII: can I divorce my wife? The Pope: No. That’s bad. Okay. Watch this. The Church of England. That is funny. That font. There’s something about that font that says The Church of England and I just find it.
PETER KREEFT: The Church of Henry’s Hormones we call it. That is funny.
MATT FRADD: All right. I don’t know how many I’ve got left. I think that’s it. Well, there’s one more that’s particularly offensive. I’ll find that to share with you. But, yeah, all of these are good too.
PETER KREEFT: You’re allowed to tell offensive jokes on this show.
MATT FRADD: I don’t know how long I’ll be here. All right. This isn’t that good. But John Lennon. Imagine there’s no John Lennon.
PETER KREEFT: That’s like God is dead sign Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead sign John.
MATT FRADD: And you might find this one funny.
PETER KREEFT: Not speaking English at mass.
MATT FRADD: Take the connection matters. Traditionalists and charismatics coming together.
PETER KREEFT: All right. Shall we share some tasteless jokes? Why don’t cannibals eat vegetables? They can’t digest their wheelchairs.
MATT FRADD: Oh, yes.
PETER KREEFT: That’s the most tasteless joke I know.
MATT FRADD: I told Neal a joke prior to the interview that was so tasteless that I would never repeat it on air. So I’ll have to tell you that one after.
Let’s see. So this fella somehow owns an elephant. He’s trying to raise some money. And so he decides to put out a challenge. He says, if you can make this elephant jump, I’ll give you a million dollars. But it costs you, say, a thousand dollars to step up to try to make him jump. And so people come from all over to try to make this elephant jump. They pay their money. But, of course, no one can make him jump until one day this red Ferrari drives in and this fella hops out of the car and he pulls out a crowbar. He walks up to the elephant and smacks him in the balls. And the elephant jumps until he gets a million dollars. And the other fella is out of money and he’s really despondent. And he’s wondering what other kind of test that he can come up with. And so he says, well, how about this? Elephants actually are incapable of moving their head from left to right. I don’t know if you know that. That’s a fact. Look it up. They kind of kind of go up and down. So he says, well, if you can make my elephant turn his head left and right, I will give you a million dollars.
And people line up and he’s beginning to make his money back when, lo and behold, the fella in the red Ferrari shows up and he comes out with his crowbar and he says to the elephant, you remember me? The elephant says, you want me to do that again?
PETER KREEFT: I’ve been told by an Arab about how you brick a camel.
MATT FRADD: What does that mean?
PETER KREEFT: Well, camels can imbibe a lot of water for a long trip across the desert. And the more water is in his tank, the longer the trip can be and the more profitable. So when the Arabs take their camels to the oasis and have them in the desert, they fill their stomachs and they get an extra gallon by bricking the camel. With a brick in the right hand and a brick in the left hand, they sneak up behind the camel and squeeze its genitals. And the camel goes and sucks up another gallon of water.
You know the definition of a camel? A horse designed by a committee.
MATT FRADD: That’s good. Yeah, I have to admit that. This fellow comes home from a day of golf and his wife says, how was golf today? And he says, well, it was all right, but Gary died on the second green. She said, that’s terrible. That’s not the worst part. For the rest of the day, it was hit the bull, drag Gary, drag Gary, drag Gary.
You and I have done this before, so I don’t know if I know any more jokes that you would have heard. I told this one recently, so everyone else can forgive me who’s heard it. And you stop me if you have. This fellow shows up at a baseball game and he makes his way through the crowd and he takes a seat with his popcorn and his Coke and he’s getting ready for the game. And all of a sudden, from up in the bleachers, he hears someone shout out, Hey, Wayne! And he’s not sure who it is, so he stands up and he looks around. He scours the bleachers, but he can’t see who it is, so he sits down and several minutes go by. Hey, Wayne! He’s a little frustrated at this point. He stands up. He’s looking for the life of him. He cannot spot the guy.
A few minutes go by. Hey, Wayne! And the guy had had enough and he stands up and he turns around and he shouts up to the bleachers, My name isn’t Wayne!
PETER KREEFT: That’s the end of the joke? Oh, that’s hilariously funny.
MATT FRADD: I can tell you liked it.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, it has broken my heart.
MATT FRADD: You know what’s good about the joke, I think, is that, and it comes back to like G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy where he talks about people don’t care about you. Like, why do you think everyone’s looking at you? No one cares. That kind of idea, right? Where Wayne thinks the world’s revolving around him and he thinks he’s being summoned…
PETER KREEFT: And that’s actually supposed to be funny.
MATT FRADD: Well, I found it funny, yeah. I like that joke. Do you? What’s funny about it? Is it an anti-joke?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Is that why? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s, um, honestly I think you told it a lot better the last time you told it on the show so everyone can go back to that, but I think that this time it wasn’t unclear that he wasn’t, that it wasn’t, it’s supposed to sound like he’s calling at the person. That’s what I was trying to say.
MATT FRADD: Did you get that?
PETER KREEFT: I thought God was going to come into it somehow. He was calling Wayne.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Well, you’re just expecting it to have some other thing of like, oh, he knows this person or there’s some other way it’s going to go and then it’s just, it just changes.
PETER KREEFT: The bait and switch is usually the key to good comedy.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. That didn’t have it. What about this one? I think I’ve told you this before. Here’s what’s funny about the joke. My dad told my, stop me if you’ve heard it, my dad told my mum this joke while she was driving him home from work one day. And this bit’s funnier than the joke itself. And my mother found the joke so funny that she lost. She couldn’t drive because she was crying. And my dad from the passenger seat had to steer the car.
PETER KREEFT: Sounds promising.
MATT FRADD: It’s not as good as it’s going to you think. But here it is. This fellow walks into a psychologist’s office wearing nothing but cling wrap. And the doctor says, well, clearly I can see your nuts. That was the joke.
PETER KREEFT: That’s very cute.
MATT FRADD: Dr. Peter Kreeft, he should have said, what are your habits as a writer? How does a day in which you write look like? Do you write for hours or just a bit every day? Do you have a favourite place in which you do it? A favourite software, pen, jacket? Thank you for your work.
PETER KREEFT: I have no schedule. I write whenever I have free time, sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours and the thing I love to sit on best is my own posterior.
MATT FRADD: Nowhere in particular though.
PETER KREEFT: I have a desk and a laptop and some pretty pictures around.
MATT FRADD: Well here’s a question, because I think writing comes naturally to you. What would your advice be to someone who wants to get into writing?
PETER KREEFT: If you don’t love it, don’t get into it. If you do love it, just do it and do it more and more and throw 90% of it away.
MATT FRADD: The best advice I think I’ve ever gotten on writing was write drunk, edit sober.
PETER KREEFT: Half perspiration, half inspiration.
MATT FRADD: Another person said you don’t try to varnish a boat while you’re building it, so don’t try to perfect the text as it’s coming out.
PETER KREEFT: That is another point, rewriting always improves it.
MATT FRADD: For me, when I write, I just have to dump it out because working on something that’s poorly written is easier than not having it on the toilet. That’s right, just dump it out. On the toilet, that’s actually where I write from. It’s the only place I get peace in my house.
PETER KREEFT: Well, that’s very common I think.
MATT FRADD: Magdala says thank you for saying that divorce doesn’t exist. That’s what I always say too and people usually oppose. How would you explain to someone what is a sacrament of marriage and how does it differ from a civil marriage, for example, and what do you think about so many people trying to annul their allegedly sacramental marriages justifying that they were too young or immature to marry? A couple of questions there.
PETER KREEFT: Well, a marriage is made by God, a civil marriage is made by man. What God has joined together, no man can or should try to put asunder. That is why there is no divorce. God incarnate has told us that. That’s non-negotiable. An annulment is not a divorce, an annulment is a declaration that there never was a valid marriage in the first place.
Now, how you figure out whether that was a valid marriage or not and how fallible and infallible the Church is in annulment cases and how pervasive perversions of that process are is a prudential question which there’s a wide range of opinions about. It seems that since something like 90% of annulments in the United States and Europe get granted and something like 10 or 20% elsewhere in the world, there is something of cultural relativity here and probably some corruption, but the principles are very clear and the Church cannot change those principles, although the Church has never been very good like most of us at practicing its principles.
In fact, that’s one of the arguments for the divine authority of the church. I mean, any institution peopled by such jackasses as us would have gone under long before 2,000 years.
MATT FRADD: Very good. And says, how can we best change the lower and higher levels of Catholic education to help cultivate a wonder and openness to God? Practical tips appreciated.
PETER KREEFT: No practical tips, just do it. You can’t get what you don’t have, so if you’re concerned with your educational system, go into it and show that wonder and that reverence. Showing is more effective than telling. The faith is something like measles. You catch it rather than teach it. It’s a good infection.
MATT FRADD: Do you think, though, that some institutions aren’t worth trying to salvage?
PETER KREEFT: Oh, absolutely. And a lot of colleges have declared that they are not Catholic colleges anymore because they’re honest and they say we don’t have or care for our Catholic identity. Good for them. I mean, an honest atheist has a better chance of going to heaven than a dishonest believer.
MATT FRADD: Should Boston College do that?
PETER KREEFT: No. Boston College is a confused, half secular, half Jesuit, half Catholic college and it has an ongoing honest identity crisis and there are elements in it which want it to be less Catholic and there are elements in it which want it to be more Catholic. And I find it a wonderful place to work because it’s Catholic enough to feel home and find some genuinely holy and serious Jesuits there, but on the other hand, it’s a mission field and it’s got serious problems, as most Catholic places do.
MATT FRADD: Kyle Whittington says, I recently gifted my mother a book you wrote to introduce her to your work. It led to a rather comical and awkward moment. When she first cracked open the book, Before I Go, the first thing she saw was the “Oprah Piss Test”. You’ll have to explain that to me. Now that Oprah is on her way to falling out of public consciousness, is there another name in this day and age that would also make a great piss test?
See, this is what’s so great about you, Dr. Kreeft, is that you’re so highly regarded that publishers apparently allow you to put “Oprah Piss Test” in your books. What does that mean?
PETER KREEFT: The publisher did anyway. Well, the Oprah Piss Test is if your book is not going to piss off Oprah, if it’s going to be endorsed by Oprah, then it is worthless because it says simply platitudes, pop psychology, and what we already know and want to be pat on the head for believing.
MATT FRADD: So he says, now that she’s kind of falling out of public consciousness, is there another name? What would be another name?
PETER KREEFT: Maybe Dr. Phil, although he has occasional good things to say.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I’ve been impressed with him lately in that he’s had certain conservative voices on the show speak, like Lila Rose, if you’re familiar with her.
PETER KREEFT: Oh really? He had Lila Rose.
MATT FRADD: It was an excellent… where she just destroyed the…
PETER KREEFT: Oh, I repent of my sin of mentioning Dr. Phil in that negative way for that.
MATT FRADD: Are you familiar with Matt Walsh?
PETER KREEFT: Yes.
MATT FRADD: Matt Walsh did an excellent documentary called What is a Woman? And Dr. Phil had him on the show to debate some people who thought they were a different sex.
PETER KREEFT: All right. I retract that.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Before we leave that topic, I think that Planets with Aquinas passes the Oprah Piss Test, Matt. So maybe we could get certified. How would I get certified? The Oprah Piss Test. Does our show pass the Oprah Piss Test?
PETER KREEFT: Certain things are self-evident. Certificate I could get put out? Anyone who’s on YouTube who’s threatened with expulsion has passed the Oprah Piss Test.
MATT FRADD: Dr. Christian says, this might seem like a silly question, but I would like to ask Dr. Peter Kreeft whether every person has the same dignity. I learned when you kill a priest, you have the sin of murder, but also the sin of something else. I forgot the term. Maybe sacrilege.
PETER KREEFT: I have four kids. They’re not the same. They will have distinctive personalities. And one day, one of them, I forget who, in the presence of the other three asked, do you love me the most? And I said, yes, I do. And then I turned to the other three and said, I also love you the most. I love you the most. I love you the most. Do we have equal dignity? Yes, because all infinities are equal. Do we have the same dignity? No, we have very different dignities. And some of that difference is hierarchical. And therefore, a priest has a higher kind of dignity than a layperson, but not necessarily an unequal dignity.
Everyone has an absolute end, not a means to any other end. That is the fundamental principle that gives every single human being dignity. Dignity is not a measurable thing. You have this much dignity, but not quite that much.
MATT FRADD: Joe Ward says, I would like to know what Dr. Peter Kreeft’s favorite Bible translation is and any devotional reading he does, such as the imitation of Christ.
PETER KREEFT: Well, this is very personal. I grew up with the King James Version, and I love it, and it’s a masterpiece. And I find that it’s quite accurate, although it’s in Elizabethan English. The same is true of the Douay version. I think the Revised Standard Version, not the new one, but the old one, is the best compromise between contemporary intelligibility and accuracy. I once compared different translations. I don’t know Hebrew, but I know Greek. And I found, to my surprise, that the older translations were not only more beautiful and poetic, but also more accurate.
I had anticipated that I would find the opposite, that modern scholars would be insensitive to poetry, but sensitive to scientific accuracy. But I found that the translation is like even the New American Bible, which is very boring. It’s not that bad, but it’s pretty bad, is deliberately off of the original Greek. Whenever the original Greek is too poetic, there’s a kind of allergic reaction to striking an expression in most modern translations. Also, if it has N in it for the word new, it’s bound to be somewhat politically correct, like inclusive language. So I’d say the RSV, Revised Standard Version, is pretty much the best for most people, even though I love the King James the most.
MATT FRADD: I love the King James, too. I think it’s very beautiful. I prefer it in its beauty over the Douay-Rheims. I find that the Douay-Rheims are a little too clunky in places. Any devotional reading other than the Bible that you use?
PETER KREEFT: I like simple things like the practice of the presence of God and abandonment to divine providence.
MATT FRADD: Do you keep coming back, because that St. Lawrence book is quite short, do you keep coming back to that then?
PETER KREEFT: To its basic idea, yes, yes. And to the book itself, because it is delightfully short, yes. No, I keep coming back to the Bible itself. The Psalms and the Gospels especially.
MATT FRADD: I think it was Jose Maria Escobar who said, there are many devotions within the Church’s treasury, choose only a few and be faithful to them. Which is, I think, very helpful advice to converts, especially, who get overwhelmed by the cornucopia of devotions on offer.
PETER KREEFT: Which is why the Rosary is one of my favorite prayers. I was thrilled to realize that John Paul II, a great genius, also said the same thing. It’s so simple. Having a few close friends is so much better than having hundreds of non-close friends. So having a few perfect prayers, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, it’s like music. You want to sing it over and over again. As long as you don’t think of it as theology, as a science, but rather as music. Music uses and celebrates repetition.
MATT FRADD: Hello, Dr. Kreeft. This comes from Thomas Augustine, probably not his real name. Your books are part of what brought me into Catholicism. I just finished your book, The Greatest Philosopher Who Ever Lived, and I was wondering if you have any advice on how to learn more about philosophy and keep the love of wisdom at the front, instead of falling into the dull and dryness that philosophy is usually associated with.
PETER KREEFT: Well, don’t read contemporary analytic philosophers. Read the classics, starting with Plato. Let your heart as well as your head guide you. Don’t compromise either. Be like Augustine, whose statuary in the Middle Ages almost always pictured as having an open book in one hand and a burning heart in the other.
MATT FRADD: Colin Carr says, what advice do you have for fathers of young boys? How can I help facilitate an adventurous life with a deep love for the faith?
PETER KREEFT: Well, you’ve already done the first and most important thing. You’ve already identified your vocation and your right attitude towards it. There are many good ways of being a father. Find yours. But of course, love them to death, absolutely and uncompromisingly.
MATT FRADD: Even when they’re little buggers.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, yeah. And they’re bound to be little buggers because you were one.
MATT FRADD: My mum has a funny story. She tells me that when she would go to work and she would drop me off at my grandma’s, sometimes my grandma would get so sick of my crying as a baby that she’d put me out the front under the veranda in like a pack and play and leave me there. And mum came home once from work and saw that this was happening and I was out there crying and she said, don’t bloody leave him out there. Someone could steal him. And she said, well, put it this way. Would you steal your kid?
PETER KREEFT: My father once told me a story. He had done something bad and destructive and his father, his father died when my father was only 12. So he must have been under 12 at the time. They were very poor and they were peasants and the family had just immigrated from Holland. And so his punishment was to sleep in the chicken coop with the chickens. And it was summertime, so it was not a problem.
And my father slept with the chickens and he said, I kind of thought of it as an adventure. So when his father rescued him in the morning, he said, you’re not going to do that again, are you? He said, yeah, I like sleeping with the chickens.
MATT FRADD: What a boy. Every morning almost, my daughters ask, can we go to such and such house so that we can be with their babies? And every morning my son wants to kill something. So I took him, we butchered some chickens. He was happy, so happy. And it’s, I know that not all boys express that desire to kill, nor do all girls express a desire to mother children, but it’s beautiful to see.
PETER KREEFT: But very few girls want to kill chickens and very few boys want to be around babies. But that’s okay. There are tomboys and tomgirls.
MATT FRADD: That’s right. My wife and I have spoken about this, about how my wife was a tomboy, very much so. She was captain of the wrestling team in high school. She was big into soccer in primary school. And if she lived today, how sad it is that many people, instead of relishing in the uniqueness of her personality, perhaps would have sought to give her hormones or surgeries or something.
PETER KREEFT: I’m sympathetic with one aspect of the far left in sexuality, namely its attack on social stereotypes. They do a lot of harm. If you’re not Doris Day, you’re not a woman. If you’re not John Wayne, you’re not a man.
MATT FRADD: But I don’t think that is their attack because look at their drag queens. I mean, it’s like a monster of what femininity ought to be. So it’s almost like the nuance of the sexual landscape has been made black or white in the transgender proponents’ mind.
PETER KREEFT: Well, that’s the difference between the old liberalism and the new. The old wanted more openness and more freedom, and that’s a legitimate desire. The new wants to attack nature.
MATT FRADD: One of the best insights I’ve got from Nietzsche, and I’d love you to comment on this, is his idea of resentement, where we demonize that which we believe ourselves impotent to attain.
PETER KREEFT: Most psychologists would agree with that.
MATT FRADD: Now he attributed Christians and Christ, I think, and Socrates in that camp. We wouldn’t do that. But I love the idea that if I feel myself impotent to attain whatever, being a good father, getting married, then I demonize those marriages so that I can seem…
PETER KREEFT: This is why Nietzsche hated total egalitarianism. He would never have made a Marxist. Sartre and Nietzsche are probably the two most brilliant and passionate atheists of all time, but Sartre became a Marxist, Nietzsche would never have become a Marxist. That refusal to stand out, that refusal of any kind of excellence, even the excellence of evil, is something you have to admire Nietzsche for.
MATT FRADD: We have a super chat here, thank you, from Mug, who says, Do you have a favorite genre of music, Dr. Kreeft? Also, did you publish that book on humor? We really enjoyed your talk at the University of Dallas.
PETER KREEFT: Oh, thank you. That was the talk that persuaded me to publish the book on humor. It’ll be out in, I think, a few months. It’s called Ha. I was reluctant to do it because I’m not a stand-up comedian or anything of the sort, but I gave a talk at the University of Dallas and it was by far the most successful talk I ever made in my life. The audience loved it.
And I said at the beginning, this is going to be an experiment. If you react well to this talk, I will reconsider my intention not to publish the book, and they made me publish the book, so he’s part of that. What was the other part of the question, which I forgot?
MATT FRADD: Let me find it, sorry, there’s a bunch here.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Not to spoil another one of your books, but what do you think makes something funny or not? Is that an answerable question?
PETER KREEFT: Read my book. There are more than one answer to that question.
MATT FRADD: And the book again is called Ha, Ha, and it’s out.
PETER KREEFT: No, it’s at the publisher.
MATT FRADD: Oh, I’m sorry. Gavin says, I’m very interested to hear Peter’s stance on lying. I also just wanted to ask what he thinks about double effect and how that can work in self-defense, not in lying, since the means are evil in lying. You cannot unintentionally lie, but you should intend to not kill the person.
PETER KREEFT: Lying is a more relative thing than most evils, because it’s essentially an interpersonal relationship. You lie to another person, either to, that is you, you, you, you deceive, you deliberately deceive another person, either to protect that person or to harm that person. So I don’t think that lying to another person to protect him is a bad thing. Suppose, for instance, your father…
MATT FRADD: I think it is. I’ve come to that. I’d love you to try and talk me out of that, but…
PETER KREEFT: Okay. You’re a Dutchman. You’re hiding Jews in the attic from the Nazis. The Nazis come to your door and they say, do you have any Jews here? I think you’re, what ordinary people would call lying, if you use that definition, I think your moral obligation is to lie to the Nazis, because you promised to the Jews to hide them. And hiding is a kind of lying. So you promised to lie, you must fulfill that promise, because that lie will not only save the lives of the Jews, but save the Germans who want to kill them from an additional sin, and therefore perhaps shorten their purgatory.
MATT FRADD: I think we should define lying and then stick to that definition. So if lying is speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving, then I wouldn’t say that hiding is a type of lying.
PETER KREEFT: I would. Sometimes deception is good. Is a head fake in basketball a sin?
MATT FRADD: Is a head fake in basketball a sin? I don’t… Yeah, I’ve heard different objections like this, sort of like similar in football to sort of, to deceive somebody and then go another way. I don’t know about that, but I do feel strongly that I should never speak a falsehood with the intent of deceiving.
PETER KREEFT: And I think you have to add, I think you have to add to the other person’s harm or to someone’s harm.
MATT FRADD: But Aquinas, I mean Aquinas isn’t infallible, but he doesn’t do that. And he would disagree with you, as would Augustine, as would Bonaventure.
PETER KREEFT: I think he would, in principle, but I don’t think he would open the door and say to the Nazis, yes, alas, I have some Jews in the attic and I know you want to kill them, but I can’t stop you, so come in.
MATT FRADD: Hear me out here then, because I think when people think of the Nazi at the door example, they think, okay, it’s understandable that you would lie to save the Jews. And then I want to say to them, what is another sin? And you may not say that lying is lying in that situation, but let’s say it is. What is another sin that is generally believed to be intrinsically evil that you think would be permissible?
PETER KREEFT: Oh, that’s easy. Killing. Killing a human being made in the image of God, whose life is intrinsically valuable.
MATT FRADD: But that’s not an intrinsic evil to kill.
PETER KREEFT: That’s right. In fact, the commandment doesn’t say thou shalt not kill, it says thou shalt not murder.
MATT FRADD: Right. So what I’m asking though, is there any, okay, I’m going to use an example that’s going to seem crass, but this is a thought experiment, but suppose the Nazis came to your door and said, we’d like you to fornicate with this woman. And if you don’t, we’re going to kill everybody in the basement.
PETER KREEFT: You don’t do it.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, you don’t do it. That’s right. What about masturbate?
PETER KREEFT: No, you don’t do it.
MATT FRADD: What about, certainly not blasphemy.
PETER KREEFT: You don’t do any intrinsic evil.
MATT FRADD: But you just don’t think lying is intrinsically evil.
PETER KREEFT: That’s right.
MATT FRADD: Or you think it is.
PETER KREEFT: If by lying, you don’t include to someone’s harm, if you simply say deliberately deceive, I think there are countless examples in ordinary life where you’re morally obligated to deliberately deceive.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, I don’t think that.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Well then is the evil lying or the deliberately harming someone?
PETER KREEFT: There’s an enemy attacking you and you’re protecting your family. And in order to protect your family, you have to deliberately deceive the attacker.
MATT FRADD: Yes. And I would do that.
PETER KREEFT: Of course you would. Gandhi himself said that he would, in some circumstances, kill to protect his family. If a murderer, I don’t know the exact quote, but if a murderer came into my room and started killing my children, and the only way I could protect my other children from harm, he said I would, without any hate in my heart and without any intent to harm, put up a shield. And if the only shield I could put up was an arrow that would disable him and perhaps kill him, I would still do it.
MATT FRADD: This is part of Aquinas’ just war theory, isn’t it?
PETER KREEFT: Yeah. I think Aquinas is perfectly right about the just war theory.
MATT FRADD: So what do you think about this then, right? The reason we think that contraception is intrinsically evil is that towards the end of the sexual act, what if the end of the act of speech is to communicate what is?
PETER KREEFT: That’s not the only end of speech.
MATT FRADD: That’s right, and procreation isn’t the only end of sex, but it is a end, and to deliberately deceive you with my speech seems to thwart the end of speech, doesn’t it?
PETER KREEFT: Yes, yes, and I’m not sure what the logical, philosophical, theoretical answer to that question is, but I am quite sure that you do not reveal to the Nazis where the Jews are. Now if you call that lying, fine. If you say no, that’s not lying, fine. I think that’s a matter of what language you choose. I think that’s a typical example of a question that seems to be a real question, but it really isn’t.
I think Kant would go so far as to say, I would not even deceive the Nazis. I mean, he’s a literalist and a rationalist and a kind of a stoic, but I think ordinary people would say, of course you deliberately deceive him here.
MATT FRADD: But ordinary people get a lot of things wrong.
PETER KREEFT: That’s true.
MATT FRADD: And a lot of things seem right to us but aren’t. So tell me, I think that this is like an epistemologically reputable position to hold, namely if people much smarter and holier than me disagree with me, and I don’t know fully how to refute them, I’ll go with them until I learn otherwise.
PETER KREEFT: Yeah, that’s called trust.
MATT FRADD: So that’s where I am right now.
PETER KREEFT: And faith has a very large part to play in our secular lives, which we don’t usually recognize. On the other hand, when the authorities contradict, when you have Aquinas and Kant on the one hand and many others on the other hand, then you’re confused.
MATT FRADD: I hosted a debate, which you would love. It’s between a Dominican, very brilliant young Dominican, Father Gregory Pine from the Eastern Province and Janet Smith. Two wonderful people. And whenever one of them stopped speaking, I thought they were right. Yes, that’s just crazy.
PETER KREEFT: Yes, yes. I love the Dominicans. You know the difference between a Dominican and a Jesuit, don’t you?
MATT FRADD: What?
PETER KREEFT: Well, the Dominicans were founded by Saint Dominic in the 12th century in order to combat the heresy of Albigensianism. And the Jesuits were founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century to combat the heresy of Protestantism. Now tell me, how many Albigensians have you met lately?
MATT FRADD: I’ve heard you say that before. It’s good. Oh, I’ve read that about Gavin’s question. How can I learn to suffer well, says Rutger Dum.
PETER KREEFT: Very good question. You’ve already done the first thing. You realize that there is good suffering and bad suffering. That suffering is an act, or your attitude towards suffering is an act, a choice on your part. You also implicitly recognize that God has deliberately allowed this suffering to come into your life. God doesn’t hate you, doesn’t want you to suffer, doesn’t will suffering directly, but allows evil. Why? Because He is working it for a greater good. The only reason the God who loves you allows suffering into your life is because He loves you. Because this has the potentiality of working out for a greater good, if you trust Him. And if you say Your will be done no matter what, if that’s your absolute.
If your absolute is your own pleasure and not suffering, that’s a different absolute. But if your absolute is God knows best, that is His will, well then you struggle to somehow see that suffering by faith. You don’t usually see it by reason, and certainly not at the time that you’re suffering, but you struggle to see that as somehow part of His perfect will for you. And insofar as you can see that, it is possible for you to say yes to your suffering and to offer it up.
MATT FRADD: We’ve already discussed this, but I’d like you to take another swing at it if you will. Moulton says, what did Dr. Kreeft think of his conversation with Dr. Peterson?
PETER KREEFT: I enjoyed it very much. I have a very high opinion of Dr. Peterson. I think he’s just what our society needs. He’s not complete, but he’s got a lot of great stuff to say.
MATT FRADD: When people are honest and vulnerable, if you watch several videos of his, you’ll see him cry, tear up. He doesn’t seem to have his defenses up a lot of the time in interview settings. He was here at the university. Do you know that speaking?
PETER KREEFT: No, didn’t know that.
MATT FRADD: The first time he ever went to Holy Mass was here at Franciscan on campus.
PETER KREEFT: Wow. Wonderful. He never went to Mass before?
MATT FRADD: Never. First time. And Father Dave took him to the Adoration Chapel, that little chapel we have up on campus, and was explaining to Dr. Peterson that Catholics view the Eucharist as more than merely symbolic. And Dr. Peterson stopped in his tracks and said, and what’s wrong with a symbol? And Father Dave said, well, I presume that all those coming to your lecture tonight would be pretty disappointed if they just got a hologram of Dr. Peterson. Fair enough.
PETER KREEFT: Touché. Yes. I had a Muslim student once who asked to go to Mass with me, never been to Mass before, and he was very reverent. He sat. He did not stand or pray or anything, but he was very careful, and afterwards, he said to me, you Catholics believe that that little piece of bread is really Jesus Christ, literally. I said, yes. And he said, you, as Christians, believe that Jesus Christ is God, fully divine. I said, yes. And he says, I don’t think you believe that. And I said to him, well, I don’t expect you to find yourself able to believe that. It’s a difficult thing to believe. It’s a great mystery. He said, no, no, no, no, you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying anything about you. I’m not saying that you’re hypocrites and you don’t really believe what you say you believe. And I’m not saying that you don’t believe it, but I’m saying that, well, if maybe I am, and then he changed and he said, maybe I am saying something about you because I’m putting myself in your shoes and I’m saying, suppose I were a Christian and a Catholic and I believe that Jesus was Allah himself in the flesh and that that flesh was really what was going on in that apparent piece of bread. If I believe that, and then he hesitated and I said, you couldn’t imagine yourself getting down on your knees like all those Catholics did at the moment of consecration. He said, no, I couldn’t imagine myself ever getting up again for the rest of my life. I was very impressed by that.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. That’s a good answer. But do you think it’s the right answer because surely the Eucharist is truly Christ and surely Christ doesn’t want us to get on our knees and knock it off again.
PETER KREEFT: So, no, no, obviously not…
MATT FRADD: But it’s an excellent insight for sure. I also heard a Protestant once say, if I truly believe that was Jesus Christ, I’d call over broken glass daily to receive him. Fair enough.
PETER KREEFT: Well, it’s like Christ himself. It’s either or. I mean, if He’s not God, He’s the most blasphemous person in history. And if that’s not Jesus Christ, then Catholics are the most ridiculous idolaters in history, confusing what’s only a little cookie with almighty God.
MATT FRADD: Colin asks, what advice do you have for fathers of, no, I asked that, sorry. How can I continue, he says, to fall in love with the faith? Now that I’m entering my 30s, I feel like I’m losing the romance I had with the church in college. And I’ll just add to that, I think a line from Chesterton who said something like, let your faith be more of a romance and less of, more of a love affair, less of a syllogism or something to that effect.
PETER KREEFT: Don’t try to squeeze Christ out of the church as you squeeze orange juice out of an orange. You get the church from Christ, not vice versa. So first you have to fall in love with Christ. And since the church is his body, you must fall in love with the church, even though she is an unfaithful whore. But she is his whore.
MATT FRADD: I am his whore. What do you think about that? T-shirts. Very good. So I want to invite people, if you want to enter questions into the chat, Neil, maybe you can pass through some of them and if there are any really good ones, we’ll ask them. I was thinking if you’re open to it, I would like to read a respondio from whether the existence of God is self-evident to see your opinion on the ontological argument. Is that okay? Do you want to sum up the ontological argument first? Do you want me to?
PETER KREEFT: Yes. Best way of summing it up, I think, is apparently we have to define the word God before we can talk intelligently about him. And the best definition of the word God is Anselm’s, the negative definition. God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. If you can conceive of something greater than X, then X is not God. All right. Let’s accept that definition.
Now, if God does not exist, then I can conceive of a God that has all the other attributes that you say you disbelieve in, a being that’s omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent and all their conceivable perfections, but lacks real existence outside the mind. He’s a figment of our imagination. He’s lacking only the attribute of objective existence, which is, of course, a perfection because it’s better to exist outside the mind than dependent upon the mind.
Well, then, if in order to be an atheist, you have to define God in the way that the theist does, and of course, you must in order to deny that God, then you’re contradicting yourself and saying that God, who by definition lacks no perfection, lacks this one perfection. So atheism is self-contradictory, and therefore, theism is self-evident.
That’s a good argument, although I think it’s not valid, and I think Aquinas is right in rejecting that as an argument.
MATT FRADD: What’s fascinating, too, is if you go online, you’ll find atheists impugning Aquinas and saying he’s not a true philosopher, he’s merely an apologist for whatever the Church teaches. That’s clearly not true, since this, I think, it could be argued, is the most prominent argument for God’s existence in the Christian tradition. Actually, there’s another one, too.
PETER KREEFT: It’s not the most prominent in the sense that it’s the most popularly accepted, but it is the most argued about. There is no argument in the whole history of philosophy that’s more argued about than the ontological argument.
MATT FRADD: But what would be another argument prior to Aquinas, not including Bonaventure, and not taking into account the sort of Islamic tradition that would be as prominent an argument for God’s existence?
PETER KREEFT: Oh, the moral argument. If there is an absolute moral law, there must be an absolute moral law.
MATT FRADD: Which Christians were teaching that, or…? That’s what I’m saying. I can’t think of one, I mean, you’d know more than me, but I can’t think of prominent Catholic saints and philosophers.
PETER KREEFT: Cardinal Newman, for one.
MATT FRADD: Well, I mean prior to Aquinas.
PETER KREEFT: Well, the Middle Ages were not an age of moral relativism, so that argument was not needed that much. So let me change my answer to the cosmological argument. Some version. The design argument.
MATT FRADD: Right, something like that. Design in nature. I mean, we see something like that in Paul, and obviously from Aristotle. Point being, Aquinas denies both the ontological argument, which was maybe the most debated and certainly popular, and the Kalam cosmological argument, the Bonaventure. Maybe he made some concessions towards the end of his life, but he seems to, the quick point I want to make is just how intellectually honest Aquinas is, that he refutes two very popular arguments for God’s existence, when he could have just said nothing on them and let people believe them, but he thought to put forth bad arguments in defense of Christianity was to make…
PETER KREEFT: Yes. Don’t take too seriously those atheists on the internet. They don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time. Even Bertrand Russell made the absurd mistake of thinking that the cosmological argument contradicted itself because it began with the premise, everything needs a cause and ends with the conclusion there’s something that doesn’t need a cause, God, but it never began with that premise.
MATT FRADD: That’s right. Of course, most Christians perhaps don’t know what they’re talking about either when they make arguments online. I’m not sure. Here’s his said contra to your, to the ontological. He says, no one can mentally admit the opposite of what is self-evident, as the philosopher states concerning the first principles of demonstration, but the opposite of the proposition God is can be mentally admitted. We read, the fool has said in his heart there is no God, therefore that God exists is not self-evident.
So what is meant by self-evident and why can’t we deny that which is self-evident?
PETER KREEFT: A self-evident proposition is one whose predicate adds nothing to its subject. You ask, why is that not a self-evident proposition? It is in itself logically and objectively and impersonally a self-evident proposition because God is His own existence, but it is not to us self-evident because we do not know God’s essence or nature. If we did know God’s essence or nature, we would see that the argument is indeed valid and in heaven we shall see that because we will see the very essence of God and see that His existence is identical with His essence, but since we do not see or understand His essence in this life, it is not self-evident to us, although Aquinas admits that the proposition is self-evident in itself.
MATT FRADD: What’s interesting is that Richard Dawkins, let’s pick on him, thinks he knows what God is and rejects it, Aquinas knows he can’t know what God is and believes.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. Kind of a sense of humor in allowing for Richard Dawkins.
MATT FRADD: I’m going to read this paragraph and you cut me off whenever you’d like to interject and offer some commentary. A thing can be self-evident in either of two ways. On the one hand, self-evident in itself, we’ve just touched on this, though not to us. On the other, self-evident in itself and to us. A proposition is self-evident because the predicate is included in the essence of the subject. For example, man is an animal, for animal is contained in the essence of man. If therefore the essence of the predicate and subject be known to all, the proposition will be self-evident to all, as is clear with regard to the first principles of demonstration, the terms of which are common things that no one is ignorant of, such as being and non-being, whole and part and such like.
If however there are some to whom the essence of the predicate and subject is unknown, the proposition will be self-evident in itself, but not to those who do not know the meaning of the predicate and the subject of the proposition. Therefore it happens, as Boethius says, that there are some mental concepts self-evident only to the learned, as the incorporeal substances are not in space. Therefore I say that this proposition, God exists of itself, is self-evident for the predicate, is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence, as will be here after shown.
Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us — I love Aquinas so much — but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature, namely by effects.
PETER KREEFT: It is self-evident that the point could not possibly be said more clearly.
MATT FRADD: So no need to comment.
PETER KREEFT: No need to comment. Every word is exactly what it ought to be. I find a lot of things in Aquinas similar to Aristotle’s definition of truth. The question, what is truth, is the easiest question in philosophy to answer. Aristotle says, if one says of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, he speaks the truth. But if someone says of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, he does not speak the truth. You can’t say it better than that.
The example that Aquinas gives is a very useful analogy. It probably sparked the Protestant reformers’ famous joke about scholastic philosophers argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Well, that’s a joke that’s a joke on itself, because that’s a very good question. And the answer is an infinite number.
MATT FRADD: As many as God wishes.
PETER KREEFT: Because spirits do not take up space and are not confined by space, so there’s no limit to the number of angels that can be present in consciousness spiritually at any particular place.
MATT FRADD: That’s good.
PETER KREEFT: I’ve said… Because most people don’t understand spirit. They think of spirits as material beings, and therefore they think there’s some answer to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And other people do understand spirit well, so that’s why Aquinas uses that as an analogy to the fact that none of us understand God’s essence, some of us understand the essence of an angel, all of us understand the essence of whole and part.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. I’ve said jokingly that Augustine is beautiful like a garden is beautiful, and Aquinas is beautiful like a game board instruction manual is beautiful. I’m joking. I know that Aquinas is actually beautiful, but what I love about game board instruction manuals is there’s no ambiguity. No word is wasted. You’d be angry if it was. If during the course of reading the instructions the person began giving you their opinion of the game or about the time they first played it, it would just sort of… That’s not what you’re there for. You’re there for a very direct, concrete answer.
I want to read Aquinas obviously famously has five remedies for sorrow: pleasure, weeping, the sympathy of friends, contemplating the truth, and finally sleep and baths. I love it.
PETER KREEFT: And a glass of wine. He mentions that too.
MATT FRADD: He doesn’t. No. That’s a common misunderstanding.
PETER KREEFT: I’ve seen that quote.
MATT FRADD: I know. It’s not true though. I know because I wrote a book on happiness and did a deep dive into this and was desperately looking for that quotation. I’ve heard that too. A good night, a large glass of wine, but he doesn’t say it. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
But here’s the said contra, no, the respondio, and I’d love, well both, and I’d love you to talk a little bit about self-care. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this phrase, but people a lot today are talking about the importance of self-care, which I think understood rightly is a good idea, but taken to an extreme might just be sort of solipsism or selfishness or abandoning one’s duties. But anyway, he says, Augustine says, I had heard that the bath had its name from balneum, from the Greek, I’m not even going to try, from the fact that it’s driving sadness from the mind. Further on, he says, I slept and woke up again and found my grief not a little assuaged, and quotes the words from the hymn of Ambrose, in which it is said, sleep restores tired limbs to labor, refreshes the weary mind, and vanishes sorrow.
And so here’s Aquinas’ response, as stated above, sorrow by reason of its specific nature is repugnant to the vital movements of the body, and consequently, whatever restores the bodily nature to its due state of vital movement is opposed to sorrow and assuages sorrows. Moreover, such remedies, from the very fact that they bring nature back to its normal state, are causes of pleasure, for this is precisely in what pleasure consists, as stated above. Therefore, since every pleasure assuages sorrow, sorrow is assuaged by such life bodily remedies.
PETER KREEFT: Well, that’s almost self-evidently true. If you accept this psychosomatic unity, if on the other hand, you’re a Gnostic who believes that you create your own identity and your body is simply malleable material, it makes no sense.
MATT FRADD: Yeah, are you familiar, who’s that philosopher we had, golly, we had to walk him up the stairs that time, because the elevators were out. He wrote the meaning of, Jay Budziszewski, he’s terrific, and I love what he said about the body. He says the body is equally a part of who you are, along with the soul. If it weren’t, think of the absurdities that would result. When I kiss my daughter goodnight, it’s merely me manipulating the husk which is not me and pressing it against the husk which is not her. I like that. But if you understand yourself as body and soul, then taking care of the body is to take care of you.
PETER KREEFT: No chemist, when he kisses his wife, says this is only chemicals kissing chemicals.
MATT FRADD: I hope not. Yeah, very good. Alright, we have one follow-up on lying, if that’s okay, from Gavin, who heard our response. He said, for further clarification, well, he doesn’t make an argument for it, he simply states that deception does not equal lying. We also don’t determine whether or not something is intrinsically evil by finding a situation where our intuitions are to do that act. Fair enough.
And then he says, I’m just wondering, what is leading Kreeft to go against Augustine, Aquinas, etc., who don’t think you should lie even to save a life? And then he says, and to clarify, the lying definition I’m having in mind is to assert something you believe to be not true with the intention to deceive. Deception is different than lying because deception can work under double effect and lying cannot. Even in context, card games, acting, etc., are people saying things that are not true and trying to make you believe it, but are obviously not assertions and trying to deceive long term?
PETER KREEFT: Well, if you see war as a kind of serious game, you can use that principle to justify deceiving the Nazis and protecting the Jews. I still think it’s a matter of what language you use to translate the principle that lying is indeed intrinsically, by its nature, wrong because truth is a good and people ought to be willed good things rather than bad things. But life is also a good and sometimes it’s necessary to kill in order to save life, such as in self-defence or in a just war.
MATT FRADD: That was one of the points that Janet Smith brought up. She said, it seems interesting to me that I’m allowed to kill the Nazi. I’m allowed to say, go out and dismantle his car so it no longer works, but I can’t say the Jews aren’t in the basement.
PETER KREEFT: Yeah. Lila Rose was involved in that controversy, too, because –
MATT FRADD: She would go into Planned Parenthood dressed up and pretend to be. Yeah, no, I disagree. I think she’s wrong to do that.
PETER KREEFT: So all sting operations are wrong. You can’t get…
MATT FRADD: I’m biting a bullet like a loser. I know. I am very uncomfortable with that.
PETER KREEFT: I hope you are, because I think your moral intuitions are not working.
MATT FRADD: I think a man who saves three women from sex slavery by pretending to be someone other than he is, sins while he does a great good.
PETER KREEFT: No, you can’t sin and do a great good at the same time, but at the same act, it’s not possible. The act is meritorious.
MATT FRADD: Fair enough. Then he intends to do a great good, but doesn’t.
PETER KREEFT: No. He does a great good.
MATT FRADD: How about the outcome is a great good?
PETER KREEFT: Well, it’s not utilitarianism. It’s not that the end…
MATT FRADD: I’m not trying to justify the act by saying the outcome is good. That would be utilitarianism. I’m saying the act is evil, while the outcome is good.
PETER KREEFT: You are never permitted to do evil.
MATT FRADD: Then that’s why I’m saying you shouldn’t be doing sting operations.
PETER KREEFT: But I don’t think a sting operation is intrinsically evil.
MATT FRADD: And I’m very uncomfortable with that part of the position I’m holding.
PETER KREEFT: Well, I think the difference between us is I would have once agreed with you when I was a more rationalistic philosopher who wanted to do everything deductively, starting with principles and then applying them unambiguously to difficult situations. Now I’m a little more intuitive, I think, and in sympathy with not utilitarianism, but William James’ version of pragmatism.
Sometimes good and evil are not simply an impersonal option that you are to choose or not to choose. Sometimes good and evil are not created by your action, but sometimes your action is so embedded in the situation that it becomes part of the objective principle. That’s a bad way to put it.
Example. Example from James. A new neighbor moves in next door, and he seems to be very snobbish and off-putting because he deliberately avoids you. And when you look at him, he looks the other way. So you conclude that, well, I’m stuck with a snob, and I’ll just have to put up with it. And if he doesn’t like me, I won’t like him, and I won’t talk to him.
Or alternatively, you can say, I shall create a new situation here. I shall deliberately invade his life and welcome him to the neighborhood and see what he’s made of. And you do that, and you find out that he’s extraordinarily shy, and he’s not arrogant at all. And he was in awe of you for some reason or other because your reputation was –
MATT FRADD: So perfectly mowed.
PETER KREEFT: Yes. And you make good friends with him. Now, are you not creating a new good or even a new kind of truth by your action more? So sometimes you don’t start with thought and end with action. Sometimes you start with action and end with thought. Now, whether that applies directly to the cases we’re thinking about is questionable. But the fact that your act of, quote, lying, unquote, to the Nazis intuitively feels right, and at the moment you do not think that you’re sinning, I think counts for something.
MATT FRADD: It probably counts for lessened culpability. You want to say more than that.
NEIL MCDONOUGH: You want to say the base tenet of moral relativism, though, to just say if something feels like it’s not a sin, then it’s not a sin.
PETER KREEFT: No, I certainly don’t want to say that. And our intuitions and our feelings are far from infallible. So this is an example of a genuine moral dilemma that in this life probably will not be settled if two honest and moral people are arguing, they will probably not come to agreement.
MATT FRADD: I mean, most difficult questions, if one is to take a hard position, lead to difficult questions. If God exists and he loves us and then you point to all the insane amount of evil that’s taking place while we’ve been sitting here, I feel uncomfortable about that and may not know how to respond to that adequately.
Or if you’re an atheist and I point to the seeming teleology in the universe and the conditions at the Big Bang, that sort of thing, maybe that makes your life a little difficult as well. Perhaps the person who doesn’t hold any view perhaps can keep changing his mind.
PETER KREEFT: Aristotle sagely says in the Nicomachean Ethics that ethics is somewhere between art and math. Math is very clear and certain, and if it’s not, it’s bad math. And art is very free and creative of its own values, if not, it’s not great art. But ethics is between the two. It has clear principles, but there are inevitably going to be mysterious things that are not very clear and honest and good people can differ about them.
MATT FRADD: As we begin to wrap up, I don’t want to because I’m so enjoying this, but we probably should. We’ve got to go down to the cigar lounge to have you sign some books. Thanks again for agreeing to do that.
What advice would you give, and you’ve kind of mentioned already about the fact that the church has been run by scoundrels from the beginning to some degree or another, and yet they’re still standing and how that’s something of an argument for the legitimacy of the church. But there is a lot of very confusing and difficult things going on right now. What advice would you have for someone looking to convert to Catholicism, but they look in and they just see, A, a lot of confusion coming out of Rome, and B, infighting among Catholics all over the internet. What sort of advice would you give them?
PETER KREEFT: Take your eyes off the whore and look at the husband, God the Father. Christ commanded you to marry this whore, to enter this very imperfect organization, which though run by scoundrels, has preached a high and holy and heroic truth for 2,000 years without ever contradicting itself, which is a miracle.
MATT FRADD: It’s good for me too to remember that it’s, you know, when I stand before our Lord, He’s not going to ask me, did I call Pope Francis out on things, or did I have the correct opinion about the status of the SSPX or what the German bishop said? I mean, unless I’m in a place where I have to make a decision about these things or speak authoritatively on them, which I don’t, perhaps I’m interested in those things because they pull me out of what is my responsibility, loving my wife and children and being kind to those around me. But I have the catechism, I have the lives of the saints, I have the sacraments, there’s no excuse, get to it kind of thing, you know. But we all feel like we need to be pontificating on what’s going on.
PETER KREEFT: Maybe it’s because we want a substitute for a kind of idolatrous revision of the absolutely absolute absolute of the will of Christ, which we know is going to lead us into things we don’t want to go into. Kinds of suffering and kinds of overcoming our self-consciousness and egotism that we’re afraid of. And it’s so much more comfortable to say, I identify myself as a conservative or as a liberal or as a kind of ideology.
MATT FRADD: This reluctance to see myself as the problem. I once had a confessor say to me, you’re far better and far worse than you can possibly imagine.
PETER KREEFT: That’s why I love Dostoevsky. He shows me those two things. There is a Fyodor Karamazov in me, there is an Alyosha Karamazov in me. There is a Hitler in ourselves, there is a Christ in ourselves. Terrifying.
MATT FRADD: Any other, did we get any comments or anything as we wrap up?
NEIL MCDONOUGH: Your wife and son are out the door if you want to, I can run along.
MATT FRADD: Oh, they can come in. They might be locked.
All right, we’ll wrap up. Can we wrap up? Sure. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I hate traveling and I’m 39. Yeah, I hate traveling. I can’t imagine what it was like to be 85 and travel. Thank you so much for taking the time.
PETER KREEFT: When I was your age, I sort of enjoyed traveling.
MATT FRADD: No, it’s just, it’s awful.
PETER KREEFT: Lines everywhere.
MATT FRADD: Yeah. It feels like flying has gotten more and more difficult too, of course, over the years. Anyway, I know you don’t want compliments, but shut up, you’re going to take it. I am grateful to you and on behalf of my audience, who’ve been very blessed by your writings and your example, thank you for being so good and so helpful.
PETER KREEFT: And I will throw those ugly compliments right back in your face.
MATT FRADD: All right, good. God bless you. Thank you, Peter.
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