Here is the full transcript of Dr. Peter Kreeft’s talk titled “The Most Certain Principles for a Philosopher” at Franciscan University.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you, Glenn. Thank you all for coming out. Thank you for the privilege. Whenever I enter this campus, I feel a breeze, and I think it’s the wings of the Holy Spirit.
I also thank you for giving me a topic to talk about. I’m lazy, and therefore I’d like you to do half my work for me. Getting the question out is half the work. Finding the answer is the other half. My students don’t realize that until they start to read Plato. Not your Mr. Plato, but the other Mr. Plato.
And they ask me for topics, and I say, no, I will not rob you of half your work. What do you mean, they say. Well, getting the question out, as Socrates did, is half the work. And I won’t tell you the question. I’ll make you do that, as well as find the answer. Getting the question out is harder than you think, and getting answers is easier than you think. In fact, it’s too easy. There are too many answers out there. They’re confusing.
Well, you’ve done half my work for me. You’ve given me a topic. There was a little misunderstanding about the topic. I thought it was the 10 things that I’m most certain about, and it was the 10 principles that, as a philosopher, I feel most certain about.
So I’ll give you two talks. I’ll give you a very short one for the original title, and then I’ll give you a longer one for my title. Neither of them, unfortunately, is going to be full of that much wisdom, because I just won all four of my ping pong games, and therefore I didn’t get wisdom.
However, I was played to a draw by a chess game, so that gives me wisdom. Principles. 10 most certain principles.
Number one, God is God. The Muslims are right about that, at least. La ilaha illa Allah. Only the one true God is God.
Secondly, Christ is Christ, and nothing less. Third, the church is the church. We believe in the church because it’s the church of Christ, and we believe in Christ because He’s the Son of God, and we believe in God because He’s God. Then there are three attributes of God that we all know and love and seek and demand infinitely, and that’s truth, goodness, and beauty.
So my fourth principle is that truth is true, and that goodness is good, and that beauty is beautiful. Our establishment doesn’t believe that. They believe that lies are true and truth is a lie, and they believe in the goodness of badness and the badness of goodness, and if they’re in the art establishment, they hate and fear beauty.
And then I’ll talk about three other things that are both good, true, and beautiful that philosophers don’t usually talk about and can’t explain very well. Humor, music, and tears. And I’ll say something about animals because they’re usually neglected, and I’ll finish with another tautology, heaven is heavenly. Was that 9, 10, or 11? I’m bad at math.
Doesn’t matter. All right, let me start with a very logical deduction. If you’re not an atheist, and there are dozens of reasons for not being an atheist, the most practical of which is in order to be an atheist, you have to be a snob. Because an atheist is somebody who thinks that the vast majority of all human beings, both educated and uneducated, in the East and in the West, in the past and in the present, both male and female, both writers and non-writers, everybody, has been not only wrong, but insane.
They believe in cosmic Santa Claus. They’re like Jimmy Stewart in that old movie, Harvey. He believes in this invisible 13-foot-high rabbit that nobody else sees. That’s insane, of course, but God is much bigger than Harvey. So if there’s no God, most of the human race is insane.
Well, there’s no proof that that’s not so, but very hard to live that unless you’re very snobbish. That’s not my number one proof of the existence of God, but it’s my most practical one.
So from the premise that there is a God, I ask now, what deserves the name God? Suppose I believed in one of the pagan gods. All right, they’re formidable. They’re superhuman. They’ve got more power than we do, but none of them is all-powerful. They’ve got to struggle against each other. None of them is all good. They’ve got our weaknesses. And none of them is all wise. They make mistakes.
All right, so a god that is weak is not a god. A god that is wicked is not a god. A god that is stupid is not a god. That seems self-evident. So if God is neither weak, nor wicked, nor stupid, He must have unlimited power, and unlimited goodness, and unlimited wisdom.
All right, let’s start with unlimited goodness. If he has unlimited goodness, what is goodness? Well, I think Kant gets it right. The essence of goodness is a goodwill. And the essence of a goodwill is the will to the good of the other, of everybody. That’s St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition of charity, or agape, or love. Love is not a feeling. Love is a willing.
All right, in that case, God must love all of us. Okay, fine. So what? Well, let’s add to that now. God has all power. He created the entire universe out of nothing. He banged the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking was once asked, if you’re a scientist and you believe in the principle of causality, how do you explain the universe? It began with the Big Bang. You don’t believe in the Big Banger. And he supposedly replied, well, universes just happen. I wish he was still alive. I think I could sell him my timeshare in Florida.
Since you’re in the mood to laugh, let me tell you a bad joke. Which of these four things is not like the others? A timeshare in Florida, cancer, herpes, and AIDS? The answer is cancer. You can get rid of that.
Okay, so, if you don’t think… I’m not being disrespectful. God has a great sense of humor. If you don’t know that, you have never stared into the face of an ostrich. Or into the mirror. Tell me Jesus didn’t have a sense of humor. What beast did He choose to go into Jerusalem to do His most important work with? A jackass. He has the same taste in His associates.
All right, so, God is all good. God is all powerful. This brings up the problem of evil. If He’s all good and all powerful, how come there’s evil? Set that aside for a moment. And He’s all wise. He doesn’t make mistakes. He’s not like the giant Rumblebuffin in the Chronicles of Narnia. You know, a good guy who’s bumbling.
Well, in that case, God wants nothing but my best good, and He can do it, and He knows exactly what it is. All right, that seems pretty obvious. I don’t think anybody wants to worship a God who’s either weak or wicked or stupid.
And therefore, what follows is the hardest verse in Scripture to believe. And the most wonderful one. Romans 8:28: All things work together for good for those who love God. For those who say yes to God. For those who swim in His river that always leads into His sea. So, that’s total trust.
I have ADD, and I get confused by confusions, and I am very forgetful, so I like simple things. And my favorite spiritual writers are simple ones, like Brother Lawrence in The Practice of the Presence of God, and de Caussade in Abandonment to Divine Providence, and Sister Faustina. And her prayer, the prayer that Jesus Himself gave to her to put on all those pictures, is very simple. Jesus, I trust in You. That’s a necessary consequence of the most non-negotiable, non-atheistic theological premises you could imagine.
Even agnostics, like the philosopher Wittgenstein, wrote in his diaries that he has an experience that he labels mystical, in a very broad sense. He calls it the experience of absolute safety. Fearlessness. Nothing bad can ever really happen to me, even though it certainly seems to. And he lived a very difficult life. Three of his brothers committed suicide. He was a very confused philosopher. He was never satisfied. He tried to be a war hero. He was a disastrous failure.
And he admitted that his philosophy was a failure. The Tractatus was repudiated in his later work. And yet, he was a very happy man. That feeling of what he called safety. I don’t know how explicitly he deduced that as a very good logician from those three theistic premises, but wherever it came from, it’s true. And that’s kind of your fortress.
If you’re close to God and you love Him a lot, and if you want to remain faithful, I guarantee you the devil is going to hate you and fear you and fight with you and give you all sorts of troubles. If there’s no trouble in your life, you’re not that close to Christ. If you’re not getting at least splinters from the cross, you’re not close enough to the cross.
All right, what in medieval warfare is the final, last redoubt, the last defense against the enemy, the aggressor? It’s the castle keep. It’s the castle within the castle that’s impregnable. And the only way to get anybody out of a castle keep is to starve them out. So if you’ve got years of food in there, you’re safe.
But there’s only room for the royal family. And if you’re losing the battle, and if the castle walls fall, you at least go into the keep and you’re safe. Well, Romans 8:28 is our castle keep. No matter what happens, you can always truly say, Jesus, I trust in You.
That assumes that Jesus reveals God. That assumes at least some form of at least heretical Christianity. You can’t trust the God of most forms of Hinduism that way, because he’s got a dark side. He’s George Lucas’s Star Wars force. Brahman becomes Vishnu, the creator, when he dreams a world into existence, but then he becomes Shiva, the destroyer, when he wakes up 28 billion years later. That’s not a God you can trust.
But if Jesus is at least, as even modernist Christians admit, the best window to God, that’s what God looks like.
Which brings us to Jesus. Here’s my second point. Probably the greatest non-Catholic theologian of the 20th century was Karl Barth, the dragon slayer of the dragon of theological modernism. And in his last lecture, some of you know this story, I’m sure it’s quite famous, there was a Q&A section, and afterwards somebody asked him, Professor Barth, almost everybody in this room is here because this is your last lecture, and most of us believe that you are the greatest theologian of the 20th century. Please tell us what is the profoundest idea you have ever had in your life. He responded instantly, without a moment’s hesitation, Jesus loves me, this I know. Perfect answer.
That’s almost as good as Thomas Aquinas’ answer to God’s question from the Crucifix, after he had almost finished the Summa, and the voice said, you have written well of me, Thomas, what will you have as your reward? Thomas says, only yourself, Lord. Perfect. Nothing less, nothing more.
Augustine says, with his usual brilliant rhetoric, he who has God has everything, and he who has everything else except God has nothing, and he who has God plus everything else doesn’t have anything more than he who has God alone.
So, if I died tonight, and I met God at the gate of heaven, and he said, who do you think you are anyway to come in here? My answer would be, and I think this is a very Catholic answer, although I get it from my Protestant evangelical background, I’m only a sinner saved by grace.
When I ask my students in questionnaires, all sorts of questions, and one of them is that, what would you say if you died tonight, and you met God, and he asked you why He should let you into heaven?
Less than 5% even mention Jesus. Most of them begin with the word, I. You know, I’ve tried, I haven’t killed anybody, I’ve led a good life, I’m sincere. That’s the answer the Pharisees give. Wrong answer, wrong pronoun. Okay, that I know.
Do a thought experiment. Suppose you died tonight, and you found, to your shock, that you weren’t who you thought you were. Let’s say you were adopted. You don’t know who your parents were. Your parents never told you that. That would be something of a shock.
Suppose you found out that your father was really a Russian spy, like in that TV series, The Americans. That would be a bigger shock. All right. Suppose you found out that, if you thought you were a man, you were really a woman, hormonally, physically. You were confused. Wow, that would be a bigger shock.
All right. Suppose you died, and you found out that you were not an earth thing at all. You were deposited from a flying saucer, whose GPS misfunctioned, and they deposited you on the wrong planet. That would be even a bigger shock.
What would be the biggest possible shock to your identity? Well, it’s in the Bible. Here is my candidate for the scariest verse in the Bible. It’s Jesus’ own parable, The Last Judgment. He says to the sheep on His right hand, come ye blessed of My Father. I know who you are. I knew you from the foundation of the world. There’s a place set just for you with your name on it at the heavenly banquet table.
Then He turns to the goats on His left hand, and He doesn’t say, I hate you. I damn you. I reject you. He says something far worse than that. He says, I never knew you. Your identity is him. Does Hamlet have any identity outside of Shakespeare? No. Do we have any identity outside of our logos, our creator and designer? None. All right. That’s non-negotiable.
Third, why am I a Catholic? Well, I believe the essential claim of the church, which, like the essential claim of Jesus, is divisive. By the way, when you hear people in the church criticized for being divisive, remember they would have kicked Jesus out for that too. He was extremely divisive. He came into the world for that division. And it would divide even families, which for the Jews, as for us, were sacred.
You know, I’m sure you’ve all heard the Lord liar or lunatic argument. That’s the argument for that division. If Jesus is not far more, infinitely more than non-Christians think he is, namely just a good man, if he’s not God himself and worthy of absolute adoration and worship, then he is either the world’s biggest liar or the world’s biggest lunatic.
Well, the same argument can be made for the Catholic Church. It’s not just one of many Christian denominations. If it’s not what it claims to be, the one true, infallible and authoritative voice of Christ himself, then it’s the most arrogant, egotistic false prophet that has ever existed. That’s the abstract argument.
The concrete argument, which I suspect leads more people to the Church than any other, is that if you start out as a Protestant, you at least believe that Jesus is God incarnate and your Lord and your Savior. And then you realize that the Catholic Church has built these incredibly beautiful, impossibly technologically advanced things called cathedrals, mainly because they believed in the real presence. He’s really there in the Eucharist. And difficult as this is to believe, you can eat him. You can eat the meaning of life.
Many great philosophers tried to save the world by their search for truth and values, and that’s a great thing. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Lao Tzu and Confucius and Buddha, they all say, this is my mind. Jesus gave us more than that. He saved the world by saying, this is my body. So that’s not true. If that’s not Jesus there, that’s just a holy symbol.
Well then, as Flannery O’Connor said at a fashionable cocktail party when they started mocking the Eucharist, if it’s only a symbol, then the hell with it. Worse than that, if it’s only a symbol, then Catholics are the stupidest idolaters in history. They’re bowing down to bread and worshiping wine, confusing it with Almighty God. But if they’re right, then that’s our marriage bed in this life. That’s the closest you can get to God.
That’s better than mystical experience. That’s the more complete, more total union with God than any other available in this life, because that’s all of him, body and blood, soul and divinity. Everything or nothing. So that’s either astonishing or horrible.
Sometimes thought experiments are good. Sometimes they’re dangerous. Here’s a dangerous one. Imagine you lose the faith. Imagine you drift away for whatever reason. Indifference, anger, rebellion, pain. What’s going to make you come back? That little red light behind the altar. That’s home. That’s your fireplace.
And once you’re homeless, no matter what is in your head, the home is still in your heart. I think that magnet has drawn more people to the Catholic Church than any other down through the centuries.
All right. Here’s point number four. I’m only a little too late. Truth. What’s truth? Truth is an absolute. Everybody needs it. Everybody wants it. It’s the only honest reason why anybody ever believes anything. William James, one of my favorite philosophers, because he’s very honest and very commonsensical and very open-minded, although he’s a lifelong agnostic, said that there’s two kinds of people. Tender-minded and tough-minded. Tender-minded people want truth and facts above all.
Tough-minded people want happiness and goodness and values most of all. And everybody’s got both a head and a heart. They want both. But when the two conflict, what do you do? Well, the tender-minded go by happiness and the tough-minded go by truth. I think he’s wrong. I think deep down all of us are tough-minded.
And I think I can prove that by another little thought experiment. Remember when you were about two years old, you learned about Santa Claus. Maybe three years old. All right. What difference did your belief in Santa Claus make when you were three years old, at least in December?
Well, number one, it made you very happy. Number two, it made you very good. Okay. Here are two things everybody wants, happiness and goodness. So, why don’t you believe in Santa Claus today? Why have you drifted away from the Church of Santa Claus? Because you’re tough-minded. Because you’re honest. Because it isn’t true. It’s only a fairy tale. Symbolically true, maybe, but not literally true.
Oh how tough-minded you were. If you believed in Santa Claus, you’d be a lot happier today. Why don’t you believe that this room is heaven and I’m God? Oh, come on. You’ve got to be kidding. Well, why don’t you believe? If you did, if you believed that right now you were in the beatific vision, wouldn’t you be in ecstatic happiness? Of course you would. Well, why don’t you bring yourself to believe it? I can’t. Why? I know it’s not true.
Who cares about truth? I do. We all do. We might want to deceive other people, but nobody wants to be deceived themselves. It’s an absolute. I think the most effective apologist of modern times is C.S. Lewis, with G.K. Chesterton in a very close second.
If Lewis could make everybody in the world read just one little article or chapter in a book of the many that he wrote, I’m pretty sure I know which one it would be. It’s a little article called Man or Rabbit, which begins with the question, can’t you just lead a good life without believing in Christianity? And the answer is, well, it all depends on what a good life is. If it includes truth, no.
Another thought experiment. You’re God. This is obviously a ridiculous thought experiment, but it can still be useful. And you’re doing the last judgment. Two people come before you. One of them is a faithful Catholic, been in church, obeyed the laws, etc. But he doesn’t really believe in truth. He just does it because it feels good. He’s not a liar, but he just doesn’t care about truth.
Second one is an atheist. Let’s say Albert Camus. He’s an unhappy atheist. He wishes God were real, but he can’t help believing that it’s only a nice fairy tale. It’s too good to be true. He meets with a priest every week for the last month of his life, trying to work through his doubts. He fails. The priest fails. He dies an unbeliever.
But he’s so concerned with truth that his most famous anti-hero, Meursault, in his first novel, is a man who cares about nothing, even murder, until at the end when he’s on death row, a priest comes and says, Don’t you think you ought to think about the question of truth? Maybe there’s a God. Maybe there’s a heaven. Maybe there’s a hell. Maybe you have an immortal soul. What are you going to do about that?
That’s the only thing that gives him passion. He’s terrified of that. He attacks the priest. Most atheists couldn’t have written that, nor could they have written another hero of Camus, Dr. Rieux, in The Plague. Here’s a French doctor who has a comfortable practice, and he’s in North Africa, probably Algeria. A plague breaks out. Nobody can do anything about it. He’s the only doctor around that can maybe save some people, and certainly relieve their suffering, but he might catch the plague, and if he does, he’ll probably die. He stays. Nobody understands why.
Here’s his explanation. I know the meaning of life. The meaning of life is to be a saint. Now, I don’t believe in God, but I don’t see how you can be a saint without God. And I know one of those ideas has to be wrong, because there’s a contradiction there, but I can’t bring myself to believe that any one of those three is wrong.
So, here’s a man who tries to be a saint without God. Why didn’t he believe in God? He didn’t think it was true. He was too honest. All right. I’m God. I’m judging these two people. Let’s say I send them both to purgatory. They’re not quite worthy of hell, but certainly they’re not ready for heaven. Who’s going to have the worst purgatory? I think the Catholic. I think the one who’s going to shoot into heaven surprisingly quickly.
Because light or truth is the very first thing that you need. Here, a surgeon is performing an operation. He needs the right instruments. He needs the help of the nurses. He needs the right chemicals. He needs to have read the right medical books. He needs to have gone to the right schools. But above all, he needs light.
If the electricity goes out, the best surgeon in the world can’t perform the simplest operation in the world. Light’s an absolute, and light’s a natural symbol for truth. So, truth’s an absolute. There’s another absolute. It’s goodness. You’ve got to be a saint. You’ve got to be good. What does that mean?
Well, we all know what it means. Every religion in the world teaches some version, some much better than others, of the fact that the meaning of life is charity. Get that self off the throne. Some of them don’t have a very good conception of what God gets on the throne, but we all know that this is something you can’t not know.
That, as Leon Bloy famously puts it, life contains only one tragedy, not to have been a saint. We also all know that that’s the secret of joy. Because insofar as we are saintly and loving and unselfish, it always gives us joy, deep joy, in the end, lasting joy. And insofar as we’re wicked and selfish, it always gives us misery, not immediately, but in the end, not on the surface, but deep down.
And we’ve all lived long enough to go through that in the end and that deep down. So, we all know from experience, not just by faith, that sin makes you miserable, and unselfish love of God and neighbor makes you deeply joyful.
All right. We have free choice, which means that God has two hands, not just one. He’s not the Godfather who makes you an offer you can’t refuse. He’s God the Father who makes you an offer you can refuse. So, he says, here’s my right hand, here’s the secret of all joy. Say to me, your will be done, and I’ll respond with my love.
And here’s the secret of all misery. Say to me, my will be done, and I’ll respond with my love. And here’s the secret of all misery. Say to me, my will be done. That’s the song they all sing as they enter hell. I did it my way.
Okay. So, now here comes your next choice between selfishness and unselfishness. We all have these choices, these temptations. And what’s our natural reaction to that? Gee, gee, that’s a tempting, tempting fruit there. Let’s see, left hand, right hand, joy, misery. Every time I’ve chosen the left hand, I’ve gotten misery. And every time I’ve chosen the right hand, I’ve gotten joy. Now, I’m confused. Gee, which should I choose this time? Let me try the left hand. Maybe it’ll work this time. That’s why I call us donkeys and ostriches. We’re nuts. We’re insane. That’s my proof of original sin. I call it original insanity.
You see, sanctity is exactly the same as sanity. Sanctity simply means living in the real world. The world that was invented and created and designed by God. The world in which there is the justice of good being rewarded and evil being punished. At least in the end.
All right, so we all know that. That’s not controversial. People who say, I don’t think the meaning of life is to be good, they’re playing a game with you. This is something you can’t not know. If you have any conscience at all, you know that. You can pretend not to know it. You can try to rip up your moral motherboard, but you can’t do it.
A third thing we all want, besides truth and goodness, is beauty. This is more relative than the other two. And it differs a lot more, but we all want it. We all want what we find to be beautiful. And my conviction is that every thing is beautiful. Beauty is a transcendental, just like truth and goodness. You might see it as the child of truth and goodness. When they marry, they produce beauty.
Thomas Aquinas’ definition of beauty is, That which, when seen, pleases. But what it pleases is not just the mind, and not just the will, but the heart. Which is another part of the image of God, which classical philosophy tends to neglect. I highly recommend the little book by Dietrich von Hildebrand called The Heart, which seeks not to undermine the classical view, but just to complete it and to add to it.
There’s a wonderful scene in the most popular play in the world, the play that somewhere in America is being put on on a stage tonight. Every single day of the year, this play is put on, usually in high schools. And high school students are the only people in the world that shouldn’t read this play. It’s called Our Town, by Thornton Wilder.
And teenagers are usually rather cynical and self-centered, and they’re not mature enough to see the play. And they think it’s hokey and idealized. It’s not. It’s terrifyingly tragic. And there’s a scene where Emily, who dies very young, is allowed to return to Earth one day of her life, and just to see it. And her fellow dead warn her against that. Don’t do it, Emily. Don’t do it. But she does it.
And it’s so beautiful, she can’t stand it. It’s more terrifying than the fires of hell, that beauty. When that was first seen by the Hollywood elite, the money-grubbing secularists, the whole Hollywood audience broke out into tears. It made these tough-minded money-grubbers weep. It broke your heart. It did the most precious thing any work of art can do. Because our hearts were made to be broken. Nobody’s got a complete heart unless it’s been broken.
One of the Cavalier poets, I forget which, wrote a wonderful line. Look on all things lovely every hour. Look thy last on all things lovely every hour. Because nothing in this world is going to live forever. All beauties here are mortal. And death makes you appreciate that. But you can die at any minute, and you know you’re going to die at some time.
So in that context of the mortality of beauty, you can see the preciousness of beauty. Otherwise you just take it for granted. Notice I didn’t say everything is beautiful. I said every thing is beautiful. Not every idea, not every action, not every perversion is beautiful. But God is the creator of all things. And there are no ugly things, and there are no bad things. Ends Estabonim. Being as such is good.
My sixth point is a three-fold point. Here are three things that philosophers have not explained. Humor, music, and tears. Suppose you meet somebody without a sense of humor. You tell them every kind of joke in the world. They just don’t get it. How can you explain that you can’t?
Here, you hear a piece of music that you find transcendently beautiful. It breaks your heart. The person next to you says, that’s just noise. That’s ugly. Beauty is very, very different. Take two people, put them both in a hard rock concert. One will find it heaven, the other hell. Then take them both to the opera. The one will find it hell, the other will find it heaven. Which may be a kind of parable for the last judgment.
One of the Russian Orthodox saints says something like that. That heaven and hell are the same place. But those who love what heaven is, which is what God is, truth, goodness, and beauty, love it. And those who hate that, who prefer darkness to light, well, they don’t get darkness. They get light, and to them it’s darkness. It’s like staring at the sun.
Music is another thing, which like humor, you can’t put into words. Just as you can’t explain a joke, you can’t prove that a certain piece of music is beautiful. You just have to see it. But most people think that music, which is the most powerful of the arts, and all the other arts in general, are merely things that make us happy, that gratify our desires, that please us, that touch our feelings.
I don’t think that’s true. I think they touch our mind. They touch our intuitive understanding. They teach us something. What do they teach us? You mean you want me to put it into words? Yeah, I can’t.
If I could put it into words, I’d put it into words. Somebody once asked Tolkien, what was the meaning of the Lord of the Rings? And he said, it’s not an allegory. And they said, oh, I know it’s not an allegory, you said that, but what does it mean? He said, it means what it says. Well, tell me the meaning of the Lord of the Rings. So he started reading it from the first verse to the last verse. That’s the right answer.
Here’s another puzzle. Why do the things that cause us the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy elicit exactly the same reaction from us, uncontrollable weeping? Isn’t that strange? Huh. Why is the greatest compliment you can give to any artist, you have broken my heart. I just saw a book in your bookstore. I recommended it to somebody by Sheldon Vanauken called A Severe Mercy. He said what’s good about that good? I said, I have met 40 people who have read that book, and I have asked each one of them, did you weep when you read the book? 39 of the 40 said yes. The other taught philosophy at Cambridge. I kid you not.
Okay, let’s make those three points my point seven. And to finish up, because I want to leave plenty of time for Q&A, point eight is something that is probably less controversial, at least to this crowd, than anything else, namely that your family is your number one vocation and that having families is the single most important thing any society can do to ensure its longevity and its survival and its health.
Because the family is the number one teacher of the number one lesson in the world, namely unselfish love. Certainly today, maybe not so much in the past where children were sometimes seen as slaves or just farm workers, certainly today you can’t have children successfully, in any meaning of the word success, unless you love them unselfishly. They’re going to be the new center of your life. They’re going to change absolutely everything.
So if you don’t have that unselfish love, please don’t have children. But without families, who teaches unselfish love? Certainly not the workplace. They value what you do, not what you are. And no matter what else you do, family has to come first. The only thing that comes above family is God, and that’s the holy family.
All right, point nine. I want to put a good word in for our funny little friends, the animals. They teach us much more than we think we do. They’re like the handicapped. Our family’s backyard is Pet Sematary. We’ve had almost every conceivable animal, not monkeys or snakes, but go down the list. But we’ve always had both dogs and cats, and most of our dogs have been basset hounds. And basset hounds are so serious and so weepy and so funny looking that you feel good about yourself. You laugh at them.
But you don’t laugh by sneering. You laugh at them as you laugh at a clumsy little kid who’s falling over his feet all the time. When you understand that you’re an idiot and that you’re clumsy and that you’re an animal and that you’re an ostrich and that you’re a donkey and that you are one of the so-called handicapped. I’ve never met a single human being who wasn’t handicapped. Get to know the handicapped. They’re mirrors. You can understand yourself that way. That’s wonderful.
Pascal says, if you don’t know both animals and angels, you’ll almost certainly not know yourself because our two great temptations are to confuse ourselves with mere animals or with angels. And we’re neither. They certainly teach kids lessons from the bottom up. Kindergarten lessons about love. Very simple lessons.
All right, last point. The one thing we know for sure is we’re all going to die. And the one thing everybody hopes for is heaven. And the one thing nobody can define is heaven. There’s never been a good movie about heaven. They’re all hopeless. There have been good movies about hell.
But just as in modern novels, rarely do you get really interesting heroes. In Tolkien, you do. That’s a remarkable achievement. You almost always get interesting villains. Why? Well, because heaven is literally inconceivable and unimaginable. Here’s the Bible’s definition of heaven. Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him.
Isn’t it strange that everybody either believes that there is a heaven, or if they don’t, they say it’s a fairy tale. They don’t say it’s a horror story. They say it’s too good to be true. Not too bad to be true.
C.S. Lewis’ most famous argument is about what he calls Sehnsucht, or deep desire, or deep longing. And it’s a mistake to say this is the longing for heaven, or this is the longing for God, in a theological sense, because everybody has it, even those who don’t believe in God, as they think God is anyway, or heaven.
And the argument doesn’t start with some concept of God and then try to prove it exists, as Anselm’s ontological argument mistakenly tries to do. But rather, like Thomas Aquinas, it’s empirical. It looks at the data. Everybody, no matter what else they believe, has a lover’s quarrel with the world. Everybody wants the world to be better, wants their life to be better, wants more truth, more goodness, more beauty.
Well, define that more. Can’t do it. Well, make a list. Design your own heaven. All these things are going to be in heaven, all these things are not going to be in heaven. It’s not going to work. Why? Well, take an example. Do I want baseball to be in heaven? Sure, it’s my favorite game. I’m a Red Sox fan, which is short for fanatic.
So the Yankees are our enemy. They’re the evil empire. So I’ll put the Red Sox in, that will be in heaven column, and I’ll put the Yankees in, that will not be in heaven column. But then the Red Sox can’t beat the Yankees. That’s no fun. Well, you want sinners in heaven? No. Well, won’t that be boring? No. Why not? I don’t know. Well, God will be there. Oh. Yeah, but you know, God is just. No, no, no. There’s no way to end that sentence. God is merely, only, just. That’s reductionism. Nope.
The only word that works all the time for God is more. Not the opposite works. Not merely, only, just. So we all want something we can’t define. How can you desire something you don’t understand? Only if deep down you do understand it, but you can’t get that program up onto the computer screen. You can’t get that deep unconscious knowledge into your conscious mind.
What we want is ecstasy, standing outside yourself. Self-forgetfulness. Every peak experience you’ve ever had, every deep happiness you’ve ever had in your life was, I guarantee you, not an insight into yourself. Oh, look what a good boy I am. Oh, I am having a mystical experience now. I shall write a term paper on it. No, that doesn’t work.
You simply forget yourself. And when you see God face to face, you think you’re going to write a term paper about that? You think you’re going to think about yourself? Of course not. Lewis argues from that experience, once you grant that experience of a desire for something that you can’t define, and you certainly can’t have it in this life, nobody is ever totally satisfied. We all have a lover’s quarrel with the world.
Once you admit that data, you’ve got a very strong argument for the existence of a perfect God in heaven. And the argument goes like this. Every natural, innate, universal desire corresponds to something real. It would be ridiculous to have sexual desire if there’s no sex, or hunger if there’s no food, or tiredness if there’s no such thing as sleep, or curiosity if there’s no such thing as truth.
But we have a desire for something that nothing in this world of time can ever possibly totally satisfy, and therefore it must exist somehow, somewhere. Every atheist that I have ever talked to about that argument, every intelligent, philosophical atheist, has been unable to refute it, except by denying the premise.
No, I don’t want there to be a heaven. I don’t want there to be a God. I’m perfectly satisfied with my life. All I want is a little more health care and the right president. In other words, they have to fool themselves. I can’t believe they’re that foolish.
If you believe in this ecstatic heaven that is infinitely more, inconceivably more, unimaginably more good and true and beautiful than you can conceive, if you believe in that, then that changes everything on earth. Then you fully understand St. Teresa’s definition of this world. She lived a very difficult life with a lot of suffering. And she said, in light of heaven, once you get there, you’ll look back on your life on earth and here’s your definition of life on earth.
One night in an inconvenient hotel. G.K. Chesterton said something somewhat similar. He said, an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly conceived. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly conceived. So heaven turns all inconveniences into adventures.
Heaven also gives you infinite passion. We don’t have that in our world. If you’ve read that great speech by **Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, probably the greatest novelist of the 20th century, The Harvard Commencement Address, 1978. Google it when you get home. For the sake of the survival of western civilization, that’s a spot on diagnosis.
One of the things he said that shocked his audience and turned former admirers into critics is basically this: You people don’t have passion. You’re comfortable. You’re living in a bubble. You just want security. You just want to win all the time. We Russians, we’re wicked and we’re crazy, but at least we have passion. At least we’re interesting. We write interesting novels. You don’t. We got heroes and villains; you don’t. I think he’s absolutely right.
What’s the biggest insult anybody can ever give you in polite society, in high-level cocktail parties, let’s say, in the establishment in America? What’s the new F word? Fanatic. Especially religious fanatic. Oh, you’re a fundamentalist. Yeah, but unless you have infinite passion, life is not a drama. And there are no really significant choices. They’re just choices between steak and chicken or between this system and that system which delivers you a little more money for your pocketbook or a little less. That doesn’t satisfy your heart.
And if you’re honest with your heart and you ask your heart what you really want, the answer is inevitably going to be, I want something that’s bigger than me. Something that can break me. Something that can change me. Something that is an adventure that I can’t control. That’s one of the reasons why Jesus is such a good psychologist. He said, blessed are the poor. He talked almost more about money than anything else. And it was all negative.
Very hard for the rich to go to heaven. How come? Well, one obvious answer is he’s talking about the riches in the heart. A millionaire who will willingly give away all his money isn’t attached to his money. And a poor man who wants to be Scrooge is addicted to it. That’s a part of it. But it’s also that money makes life boring because money is power. Money is control. And everything is now secure and you’re in a gated community and you’ve got billions of dollars in the bank and you can do whatever you want and there’s no adventures. There are no limits.
It’s almost like artificial immortality which would be the worst thing that could ever happen. I think the second coming would be triggered if the Silicon Valley transhumanists got their way and genetic engineering gave us the immortality pill.
Life would be supremely boring. No death. Well that’s all I have to say. I’ll see you for the next 20 or 30 minutes in Q&A and then I’ll see you at least in the next world I hope. Goodbye.
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