Silk Road Seminar with J.P. Marceau

30:08Dr. John Vervaeke:And here's the thing. Repeatedly, it's emphasized in this Eastern Orthodox take on Neoplatonism, that person does not mean individualized substance. That is not what person means. Persons are inherently relational. Persons only exist in community. Personhood and participation are inter-defining. So the original meaning of person is to face, right? To face something, right? And then we get persona, the mask, but we forget that the original meaning is actually... So it's an adverbial notion of what a person is a way of realizing participation at the level of agency and selfhood and normativity. So it's an inherently communal notion.

31:01Dr. John Vervaeke:And in that notion, apophatism doesn't point to the negation of propositions. It points to the recognition that we have when we come into the recognition of a person. So, for example, when you have somebody that you love, not somebody you have a mere social interaction with. So I'll use Sara, right? Sara has a suchness to her. I'll use Buddhist language because I find it very helpful here. There is that about her that I relate to that is not captured by any category. There's something non-categorical about how she is present to me. There's also Amornis. She is mysteriously beyond my grasp in a powerful way.

31:49Dr. John Vervaeke:And so there's an apophatism as I come into an I-thou relationship with her, because what it does, and this is Yunaris' point, is the point of apophatism is to constantly keep the field of questioning open. So Sarah is always in question for me. I can never come to a conclusion about her. Doesn't mean I stop thinking about her or I stop reasoning about her, but the relationship is always more than I can conceive because the relationship is ultimately how we are participating in each other and growing beyond ourselves through each other. And so the notion is apophatism is an attitude of moving into a non-propositional orientation.

32:40Dr. John Vervaeke:And I'll change it from the word question to quest, like the pilgrimage. It's so that we're constantly questing into the inexhaustibleness of ultimate reality. It's a very different notion. It's not a logical notion of apophatism. Negation is not what you're understanding it as. And he calls this personal apophatism as opposed to essence apophatism. Now, that's really interesting philosophically and religiously because it emphasizes God as a person while totally rejecting the idea of God as an individual substance. So very unlike the way you and I are persons, but we are also individualized substances.

33:32Dr. John Vervaeke:Does that make sense? Can you repeat the last part? You said that... So it's very unlike how you and I are persons because we participate in normativity and narrative, right? We have selfhood and personhood that transcends our biological agency, a distinction that these thinkers keep coming back to. So we are biologically individualized substance because we are organisms. So God is not like an organism in that sense. So all of our notions of person can be misleading because especially in modernity, we have tended to emphasize the individualism, the privatization of personhood as belonging to an individualized thing.

34:27Dr. John Vervaeke:uh, Yonaris calls it the monism of the subject. And that binds us radically into the subject automate object dichotomy, the fact value dichotomy, and blinds us to the very field in which meaning and being and truth are to be found. I got to stop talking because like, but, but that's that. So that's very provocative for a lot of people because a lot of people think of God as a guy and that's really radically radically wrong if this line of argument is correct so anyways go ahead yeah yeah good perfect there there's all there and talking about persons goes where I wanted to go and when I first started hearing you because I know this this is related to the Trinity um you've talked about that with failure also i think that uh you talked about that with uh jordan hall yes and um i i don't have anything against the uh these kinds of arguments for pure relationality or for the the trinity um i think i think i think they're great arguments i don't know that i would have been convinced personally by them like 10 years ago let's say i think it might have been a bit too quick um i don't know maybe the world is different now and people in their early 20s can accept it now.

35:50I would say the same thing.

35:51Dr. John Vervaeke:I wouldn't have been convinced by them 10 years ago also. So we're in the same boat there. So please proceed. But I think it's important to talk about the Trinity, especially for East-West differences. This is a point you probably are already familiar with it, but the analogies that are used in the East and the West to talk about the Trinity have been different for quite a long time. Yes. In the East, people tend to use analogies of human persons who are related. So you start with the multiplicity and then you try to establish the unity. And in the West, from Augustine onwards, Augustine was super impressive to think about that.

36:28But he started by thinking about a single human being. And then within the intellect of that human being, I don't remember the exact categories, but it distinguishes, I think, between the intellect and the will and some other. I don't remember the third faculty and I don't want to mess it up, but he ends up establishing that they're both three at the same time. But if you start with this, it's harder to establish the difference between the persons of the Trinity. So I think both analogies are like, because of where they start, they end up being a bit deficient. I think if you have an opponent processing between both, then you can get closer to the truth.

37:07But I think there's this understanding of the Trinity that I think is different and is going to play an important role.

37:17And to go more specifically on Aquinas and Thomism and what ended up happening in the Western tradition, and it's something that I see in practice too, because I have some some Thomist friends who are very much the kinds of Thomists intellectually that we talked about earlier that are very much seemingly in their heads when you're having philosophical argumentation with them. But I think what ends up saving them from, let's say, rationalist limitations is the theology. They'll go as far as they can with the philosophy, and they might even in some ways fall or pray to the limitations that we want to rightfully criticize.

38:04But then because they will accept the Trinity, and it's not just like at some point they submit their reason to whatever. It's also because it's embodied in practice, and they see that, OK, then if I accept the doctrine of the Trinity, then I get all of these things that I can explain afterwards. I think what ends up saving them is the fact that, OK, ultimately the the pure act let's say the the the single substance um we we like there's something wrong um if we see it like as a strict like one thing we also have to to see okay like in some way you have the trinity you have three persons in in one god they're one and they're three at the same time all the all of the creed and with so i think that that's how it ends up like saving them um And I think based on what I just said, we could go a few directions, but I'll let you respond to those responses.

39:03Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, thank you. That's very charitable. So a couple of things. So the concern I have is I'm going to be a little bit derogatory, but you know that I just mean it playfully. Yeah, of course. I don't think apophatism should be after the fact apophatism. I don't think you should run with your argument, and then you get to a place, and then, and I get it. Plotinus does this too. There's this, you take the intellect as far as you go, and then you leap. What I'm seeing with Yanaris and others is, no, no, the apophatism is actually, it's not after the fact. It's from the primordial to the ultimate. You're actually always, because, I would say, the propositional always sits within the non-propositional.

39:53Dr. John Vervaeke:The apophatism is equally primordial. It's also your fundamental starting point, your point of contact, your point of orientation. Not only is it like when you then say, ah, and your reach exceeds your grasp. So I'm saying I want an apophatism. Sorry, I want, because I like what Yanaris is arguing, but he's clearly arguing for an apophatism that's not after the fact. It's not after the fact. You're trying to recognize it is always present because it's not just I get to this point and then I negate my reason. It's no, no, no, no. All the way through, there has been this, right? There has been this nurturing by the inexhaustible, intelligible that has these non-propositional dimensions to it.

40:41Dr. John Vervaeke:So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing is, Yonars actually specifically criticizes Augustine for that taking it. He talks about this internalization and then the privatization. And he says, and he's right, there's a straight line between Augustine and Descartes along that. And that leads to the psychologism towards God, that God ultimately becomes, and he's somebody we both know, and I know him well, and I have a lot of affection and respect. I also have a lot of criticism, and here's one of them. I don't like Jordan Peterson's proposition that God is the highest value. Value is something that subjects do, and he's still using value in the sense of the fact-value dichotomy, and that means ultimately God is completely subjectivized because God becomes a merely psychological factor.

41:43Dr. John Vervaeke:And so that's also... So I would put this in this line. Augustine forgets the dialogical nature of the self. Even though the confession is written dialogically, he forgets that the self is ultimately dialogical. He thinks of it as something he can look at. at least that would be my criticism and then that goes to something else which is the over masculine notion of this even the pure actus and now I'll bring in William Desmond all this though this is also in Yanaris so Desmond talks about the canatus ascendi everything has this canatus this pure act of being but Desmond rightly points out and here's where eastern philosophy by that I mean Asian philosophy is helpful.

42:33Dr. John Vervaeke:You have to have the passio ascendi. You have to be that which makes that possible. In ultimacy, you can't prioritize actuality over possibility. Not only is there actualization, there's possibilization. That's a Desmond term. And they both are like, you look like that through them towards ultimate reality. So again, I want to challenge after the fact apophatism. I want to challenge an internalization of it because it misses the dialogical, inactive nature of the self and opens us up to the death of God, the reduction of God to value, are my highest value, which is my greatest preference, which that has no ontological significance within the fact-valued economy.

43:29And then I even want to challenge the pure act.

43:34Dr. John Vervaeke:And I see this coming to fruition in Spinoza. And then Spinoza has to wrestle with it because he realized it can't be pure act because it has to be also not only pure act, but it has to be pure reception too at the same time um so those are my three three responses how's that yeah yeah it's good um i can i can like speak abstractly and also um personally at the same time for this response please that's good um i think because i think it will also make it clear for people we said earlier that like in for both of us if we add er 10 years ago let's say um feller's argument or also John Hall's argument for the Trinity.

44:14Like it wouldn't have convinced us probably. Like for me, it was really a step-by-step thing. Maybe because we're so embedded by default in our culture in the Aristotelian way of thinking. Like it was much easier for me to go solely, okay, like away from materialism to something like Platonism or like some kind of hierarchy of form and matter I can accept that and I can also map this hierarchy of format and matter to the hierarchy of evidence yes in the Bible I can accept that there's there's these two poles of creation and we've talked about that a lot in the past between like emergence from the bottom-up at the same time as there's emanation from the top home yep yep and the the key for me I think to like understand why the world would be structured this way and also how i fit into that world was balthazar's analogy of the mother and the child yes good good go because there's a big issue like if you just take this uh this hierarchy of foreign matter it for me it remained mysterious until the child mother analogy because okay why would why would god emanate down into the world let's see like why if god is already perfect then why would he create something different?

45:39He's already perfect, like everything in the world. It's not going to add anything to him. Or if you want to take the opposite pole and you just want to stress emergence and you don't want to talk about emanation, then you're going to have the problem of explaining why there is coherence, like why there is somehow this oneness. So you need both.

46:01And it's also intermatched with all kinds of other problems. like for for the greeks let's say who stressed more emanation um and there are other metaphysics that did this it's hard to explain why you would care about the body let's say why you would care about the the weak why you so it's hard to explain the bottom up in general like not just metaphysically but also morally like what you would give any value to anything that's low um and then conversely if you're a materialist and you stress more emergence it's hard to explain why there would be any value like what there would be like any value to coherence at a at a high level it's hard to explain also like if you don't have love like deep in your metaphysics it's hard to explain why why how the world can exist with with God somehow because if if the world is distinct from God then it looks like the world is kind of its own God like it it's not self-sufficient like why how can it exist but if it's just fused in God then how do you explain the fact that some things like seem like they're broken and evil and so on so you must like somehow explain the

47:04Dr. John Vervaeke:the unity and difference between god and the world um and i think the mother and child analogy that balthazar provides is great at this you can find the root of this really in dionysius yes that's right dionysius does explain that like contrary to many other philosophical categories you can use to try and understand the world love entails that there's a distinction and a unity between two persons so like if you're a a good parent like balthazar is the the mother specifically if you're if you're a good mother you want your child to grow up and become independent from you you don't want to just assume the child in you and not let it grow but what's very interesting is that if the child does grow up to be its independent person it will also be better able to love the mother back and be more united to the mother in fact so love is this is this fundamental category of being that explains the distinction and the unity at the same time and it's also it's already in dynasius and dynasys is the it depends on how you found the citations but it's uh the first or the second most person quoted by Aquinas.

48:17Yes. So, and I think if you stress this as opposed to some other of the metaphysical categories that we can use, that Thomas can use, you avoid, I think, the pitfalls of substance ontology. You can see, okay, and I can go back to some of your other points. let's say that if you think about the individual subject the and psychologizing the risk that you talked about with uh with augustine and decal or let's say not seeing apophysis apopheticism as something that is just negative like okay you reach as far as you get i see a lot of people do this and like fair enough okay like i'm going to do my philosophy as far as i can and then i'm going to look for the theology that it's my philosophy the best and then i'm just going to move to that theology and and fair enough but i think when you do when you do that i think retroactively, and that's what I did.

49:11When I learned this argument from Balthazar and Dionysius, I could see, okay, when I talk about form and matter, when I talk about pure actuality, pure actuality, I think it's true that there is a risk of seeing God as only top-down, as only emanation. Yeah. But if you stress more the love aspect, I think this is not as big of a risk. I can see why, OK, I'm going to... I can even take the philosophy example again. So I was trying to reach for God as far as I could on my own philosophy, and sometimes with wrong notions. And then I got to a point where I could see ultimately from theology that the mother and child analogy works.

49:57And then I could sort of retroactively and fill in my philosophy from before and where sometimes I would put too much emphasis, let's say, on emanation or even an emergence for that matter. But when I would put too much emphasis on the wrong categories, let's say, or the incomplete categories maybe is a better word, then I would put love again in there. So now when I see, let's say, the hierarchy of heaven and earth, the hierarchy of form and matter, what I see is I see form as a kind of love that's going to try to inform matter. When I look at matter, I look at the kind of love that's attracted by fans, like the child in the mother and child analogy, that is moving erotically to be formed higher and higher.

50:41But I think this is great because then I can keep all the nice, let's say, intellectual hierarchies that I had built up to understand the world between foreign matter, evident earth, and so on. but now I can fill them with love. And it also means that there's deep resonance between that whole hierarchy and me. Like if I learn to love other people, love my wife, my kids, my parents, and so on, like if I learn to love people better, I'm actually getting closer to everything in the hierarchy. Like one way that I've put it before in writing is like if you want to know the deep nature, let's say of the electron, which is something that physics isn't going to tell you.

51:19Physics is going to tell you just the behavior of the electron with a few equations, but you're not going to know what the electron is. But by the mere fact that you participate in love, and the electron does too, then you can get closer actually to the deep nature of the electron. So that's how I would answer the challenge. I admit that there are many phosphorous categories that don't do the job completely in the Thomistic system in general. But you can use the category of love, which Aquinas does use and which goes back to Dionysius, to, I think, fill in for the weaknesses.

51:53Dr. John Vervaeke:First of all, congratulations. That's a beautiful, excellent answer. Thank you. There's a lot in there. I mean, love is, you know, I often describe participatory knowing as knowing by loving. It's to indwell and internalize, which is what love is. It's knowing by co-identifying with, which is what love is. But love has a perspectival aspect. Love is also orienting, and there's the beauty of the beloved that are integral to love. And love has voluntary necessity to it and needful freedom, the markers of mind and life that I think are so central. And that way we can understand its connections to faith, where faith isn't belief without evidence or argument.

52:43Dr. John Vervaeke:Faith is a sense of being a voluntary necessity, needful freedom, of being faced by something and called by something. And when I was on the Philosophical Silk Road, I won't go into the detail of it, but I had one of the most profound experiences of my life, which was not a typical mystical experience of oneness. I've had many of those, and I'm grateful for them. But this was an overwhelming experience of as much as possible for me at that time, a non-egoic love for God that just spontaneously burst out from me and overwhelmed me and overtook me. It was funny because this may sound harsh to your ears, but I ended up saying something like, I don't care if I'm insignificant to you.

53:38Dr. John Vervaeke:I love you. I love you. I'm not saying that God... But for whatever reason, that was the right way to talk at that time. It was a way of saying, in that moment, there's no utilitarian dimension to my love. It's what Spinoza advocated in the pure intellectual love of God. You love God because God. yeah yeah yeah yeah um and so i i totally take that and and then you know baltazar and the mother and the child and the mother facing and this is wind's work about there are moments when we get this inversion and it's the universe is not a container filled with things it is like a face in which the whole is meaningfully present in every part like the way of faces and we feel faced by ultimate reality and it calls to us because it's calling us into self-transcendence and so we feel like we're facing a mother because that's what a mother does she faces you she calls you into personhood she affords you agopically with personhood notice it's a mother by the way i just to emphasize that um um and so i think that all of that is uh deeply deeply uh correct um And I think this is the point where there needs to be a renewal, although I think David is doing D.C.

55:05Dr. John Vervaeke:Schindler, especially his book on love and the postmodern predicament. So David is a clear exception to the point I'm going to make, and I think he exemplifies what we need. There needs to be a renewal and a deepening of the discussion of the deep philosophy of love found within Plato and the deep philosophy, and I'm meaning it in the sense we talked about at the beginning. a way of wisdom found in Christianity, especially in Jesus was Nazareth, the great, and you know, and the binding of logos, not logic, the binding of logos and agape together. I think that's deeply, and so I wanted to share with you something, because this is why I want to emphasize the Neoplatonism, because for me, the Silk Road is the Neoplatonic thread that goes through all the Abrahamic and pagan traditions, the four great traditions of the West, the pagan, the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic.

56:06Dr. John Vervaeke:And this is Ibn Gabaral, right? And I talked with Zevi Slavin, because Ibn Gabaral proposed in the Fountain of Light exactly what you just said, that matter is an eros for form, and form is an eros for matter. That's exactly the heart of his ontology. And it's a radical transformation of Neoplatonism. And it was mistranslated by the Latin West, by the way, just to get a little bit of a critique in there, as will. But the Arabic term erada doesn't really translate as will. It translates as desire and this sort of resonant, eros is a much better, sort of translation for it. And then, of course, Eros was already alive within the Neoplatonic tradition.

57:01Dr. John Vervaeke:So I would recommend, there's a great book by, what's her name, Sarah Palin on Ibn Gabarol. I think you would love it because that's, to me, that's where the Neoplatonism goes. And it's interesting because he has a huge influence that goes obviously into Maimonides and other people, but also a pretty interesting line to Spinoza and also to Aquinas. Aquinas is apparently also deeply influenced by it. So I just wanted to recommend that to you. Yeah, that's interesting. That's an aspect of, let's say, intellectual history that I'd be interested to dig into more because in the Bible itself, right away in Genesis, I think you see this where God doesn't just create the heavens and then let's say the sky and the stars.

57:55And like, it's not a top down thing. It's the heaven and then the earth. And then he calls things forth from the earth.

58:00Dr. John Vervaeke:He's calling things out of the earth. Let the earth spring forth. Foo's this. Give birth to. Yes, yes. Yeah. I think that's fascinating because it really fits this emergence and emanation dynamic that we talked about earlier. It doesn't seem like there's like, Maybe you could say there's a kind of primacy of the... I don't even know if I would... Primacy would be the right word. It seems like the potential comes first temporally. It's always like a kind of question. And then the form will come from above and something will start forth. So it's always this dynamic between the two. But I'm sort of surprised that in the West, I haven't seen more people make the explicit connection between heaven and earth and matter.

58:52Because there's this tendency within Aristotleism too, I think it's clear in Aristotle, but even then it's taken up largely in the Western intellectual tradition, that matter isn't really real. And it's hard because if you do this, then it's hard not to end up with just is strict emanation of metaphysics. That's right. And there's, by the way, Schindler talks about this. I don't remember in which article, but in one article, he mentioned that for Aquinas, that's not true, but for Aquinas, matter as a kind of being. It's in a footnote. I don't remember. I can find a feature and put it in the description, and put it in like a comment in the video.

59:30But Schindler argues that it's not true for Aquinas. And I'm just surprised that it, let's say, hasn't been made more explicit in intellectual history, given that it's so clear, like right from Genesis, from the beginning of the Bible?

59:47Dr. John Vervaeke:So it's a buried history because the person who could have born that – so what happened is he gets mistranslated and mislabeled, and he gets separated. He was both a poet and a philosopher, Ibn Gabbal. And so the philosopher sort of gets taken up and mistranslated and misnamed. And then Ibn Gabaral just gets reduced. It's not really reduction. He's a great poet also to poetry. But this is also what I find fascinating. He's both a great poet, like a liturgical poet as well, and a great philosopher. And these come together in this image that he gives, which is one that is not prominent in the West, but is the title of his work, which is God is the Fount or the Fountain of Life, where life doesn't just mean biological life.

1:00:43Dr. John Vervaeke:It means what we've been talking about here, this whole urge up and down, right? And you can see Michael Levin, right? You can see those urges at work in Michael Levin's new biology, just right there, right there. So what do you think of that? I mean, the reason why I bring it up is, and so now I'll chat. So we've come to a really powerful resonant agreement. Now I'll throw a fly in the ointment and shake things up a bit. So we get back into it? Because I've become increasingly critical of the notion of the sacred, or if you want to make it more personal, divinity as perfect. And here's where I'm actually critical of Platonism, the notion of perfection as completeness and being at rest, a sense of finished.

1:01:44Dr. John Vervaeke:because the fountain of life model is opposite. It is a dynamic inexhaustibility that is being portrayed as the fundamental feature. And by the way, there's legitimacy for this, even in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Gregory of Nix's notion of epictasis, that God is the dynamic field through which and by means of which we can perpetually self-transcend. And whenever we self-transcend, something new about God is ultimately disclosed. And so, yeah, that's my provocation. I've become unhappy with the notion of perfection as one of the great superlatives by which we try to understand ultimate reality, especially given everything we've been talking about here.

1:02:40Dr. John Vervaeke:That's my next provocation to you. Yeah, yeah. That's also something I want to think more about because I feel like there are historical reasons that we can mention for not just what you just said, God being perfect, but also for, say, tending to emphasize more the masculine or the uh emanational aspect of god i think there are historical reasons for this but i suspect that um maybe like we're sort of try to like step like we're sort of trying to feel our way around something that uh like we keep bumping into and we can't quite like name yet it seems like we're like bumping into a problem and uh So we don't have a good explanation yet.

1:03:33But I think it's intermatch also with the universalism issue. Because I think it's maybe where it's clearest in universalist metaphysics. And there are lots of Christian precedents for this. Some church fathers explicitly condemned because of this. But arguably, there are many saints church fathers that were universalists. but like it's a bit secret, but like not that secret if you read into it.

1:04:01Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, and current ones. I mean, David Bentley Hart is a universalist explicitly. Yes, but there seems to be an issue. Like if you try to like all that explicitly as an institution with real people, it doesn't seem like it works well. Like it seems, and it's like the criticism that maybe you expect that, like if you just tell people that of course, matter is going to emerge into god and that's it uh then like it's it's like it's like the child isn't grown gun is not gonna grow up to be like independent and a real like adult that can love uh their their mother correctly if you just like don't let me let me push back on the metaphor because i'm i'm a parent you're a parent now too right yeah yeah yeah so i'll switch it because I'm not a mother, and I wouldn't pretend that I know what it is like to be a mother, because I think being a mother is in some ways, well, at least different, but maybe harder than being a father.

1:05:06Dr. John Vervaeke:The mother, it's not just the child grows, the mother grows, right? They grow together because they're participating in each other in a profound way. You see, I want living things grow. And if God is, this is what even Gabriel is trying to get with the fount of life. If we remove life from an organism, right? Because the perfection model is wound up with substance benefit. This is perfect. It's complete. It's autonomous. It's self-enclosed, right? And so that's why if we reject a substance ontology, I think we're bound, even logically, to have to reconsider what we mean by perfection. But see, I want—the Bible clearly repeatedly says that God is a living God.

1:06:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Living things grow. That is not an accident—I'll speak Thomas' language here—that is not an accidental feature of living things. autopoetic things grow they adapt, they evolve that's how can God grow if he's perfect that's my concern that's and I'm bringing that back into that primary analogy we're using a mother who doesn't grow with her child and for her child is not a good mother yeah yeah that's true fair enough I think you probably know the classical response, but classically, the way that Thomas would put it is that in himself, God is perfect. But when, let's say God acts through history, it's glory that is manifested.

1:06:57God is more perfect, but his profession is more manifest. I know. Yeah. I know. Yeah. So, I mean, you probably know this, and I'm sure you have responses, but, and I think it doesn't really answer the core question that you have, but I'm still stuck in some way of, how do you avoid the universalism issue? Because I think it's the same kind of issue. I think if you stress a bit too much, let's say, the bottom-up aspect of God, or even just the bottom-up aspect of creation too much, or you could talk about sociology also in the East, and this has a, historically, it doesn't seem to have gone that well.

1:07:37So how do you... I'm just not sure. I don't know exactly what the solution, but it seems like there are things that if we try to stress them too much, we run into concrete problems.

1:07:49Dr. John Vervaeke:Right, right.

1:07:53Dr. John Vervaeke:So let me try and answer this. I mean, obviously, in the background over here too is Whitehead who's rejecting any kind of substance ontology for process relational ontology. And I just wanted to give credit. But Whitehead had a different proposal than that, which is the community, the common unity, that things are bound together in community. And that community requires, as I said it before, the sacralization of both primordiality and ultimacy, that to emphasize one over the other is destructive of community itself. So that's my abstract response. It's not good enough yet. Now, I want to get into the problem you see with universalism is when we advocate universalism, is the problem that people don't need to practice?

1:09:00Dr. John Vervaeke:So there's my abstract response, but it's not touching the core of your concern because there's a concrete problem I want to get clearer on. What is it? Because, again, like I said, relationship – this is one of the best slogans I was ever given. Relationships grow or they die. They cannot be static. And so that's what I'm trying to get. I'm trying to get that into this. saying that god is inexhaustible doesn't mean that demands have been removed from us in fact it could be more demanding on us because it it's calling for it's it's calling for us to give up the idea that we can rest complete and that instead we always have to transcend and grow epictasis, right?

1:10:01Dr. John Vervaeke:We have to constantly self-transcend. Wouldn't that, couldn't, I'm not saying wouldn't it, because that presupposes it's already happened, but couldn't that be a source of ongoing, even more powerful sensed presence of normative demand, top-down demand placed on people, right? So it's like, yeah, there's universalism, but the universalism is something you have to grow into. You can't just receive it. You're not a substance receiving another substance possession. You're a living person in relationship, and that requires that you are constantly growing, and growth is a normative notion. That's how I would try to respond at that.

1:10:45Dr. John Vervaeke:So I gave you an abstract response, and I gave you my concrete response. How does that, what does that do for you? yeah um and there's lots of thoughts going through my mind um me too me too i mean like in some ways like as you said in the language of the bible itself you have many things that describe god as i mean some kind of activity having relationships between the persons of the trinity and so on um it seems that there is a kind of inevitability that when we talk about it from below let's say we're gonna stress more the

1:11:25okay so we end up saying that okay like god god is active god gets like in you even have language of god getting angry and like negotiating with people in the bible and so on but we always end up saying okay like it's not like our getting angry or our negotiation um like it's in a metaphor but god doesn't really change his mind let's say um And because it seems that if we, I guess maybe it's just hard to explain to people like quickly how you do this correctly, like in one step. Because I think the danger, of course, is that if you stress too much the language of God changing, then people won't see.

1:12:11Right.

1:12:11Dr. John Vervaeke:But there's a difference here. Do we want certainty or do we want trustworthiness? I would never demand from Sara that she stops changing, but I find her trustworthy in that change. So let's remember, I mean, this is why that's a great point. Process isn't flux, right? Right? And so what would be wrong with saying, I understand that people like God could stop loving me or something like that. I get the concrete worry. I'll give you the counter worry in a sec. But my response to that is, I'm worried that your metaphysics now is trying to make God a certainty that you can reason to yourself about so that you don't have to worry.

1:13:05Dr. John Vervaeke:Whereas, right, I should never stop being in question about my relationship to Sarah, but that doesn't mean I don't find her deeply trustworthy, which is, and I'm troth to her and true to her. Truth, troth, and trust are the same etymologically. That's my response there. My counter worry is, again, I'm worried that you're trying to make God something of which you can be certain, Cartesian certainty, with a kind of anthropomorphic idolatry. That's, so again And we may not be able to resolve this, JP But that doesn't mean this is fruitless What we're doing I think we're both We're doing good dialogos We're pulling stuff out from each other And inducing, as Socrates would say Yeah, this reminds me of a concrete thing That you can see in churches The people who do, let's say The most abstract philosophizing of the kind that we're attacking right now, they won't be necessarily the ones who are praying the most.

1:14:19And who are trying to actively see like, okay, what does God want for us now? Like how is God moving through history? Like the people who pray most about this kind of stuff, they're typically not the people who spend the most time like in the abstract philosophizing, trying to find a certain God that they can rely on, let's say. So I do think that is a concrete problem too. um and yeah but as you said i'm not sure i guess maybe it's just not something that's easy to put down into like propositional form in a book very clearly i think like when it's probably something that's easier to do like in person in a community when you're like mentoring people one-on-one even in we can even go back to the church fathers reminds me of something from at the end of Balthazar's book on Maximus.

1:15:10He addresses a little bit the question of whether Maximus was the Universalist or not. And he sort of leaves the book at suspense by going back to the same argument that Maximus himself had sort of left at suspense saying that, okay, there's this explicit teaching that we can talk about. And then there's this other explicit there's this other teaching that we cannot talk about and I think it's this like yeah there's some things that if you yeah I guess is the problem how do you like okay so you need to go through a process of transformation to understand our turner stand out okay God is acting on us we respond we try to listen to him at the same time god isn't changing like in the same way that we are he's more perfect and he's uh like his actions are more eternal and so on so that's sort of the second step and then third step like would be what you try to advocate for okay there is still some kind of change but like this third step maybe that's not something that's so easy how do you get people through those three steps uh and fair enough maybe like that third step that's a totally legitimate criticism

1:16:26Dr. John Vervaeke:JP. I mean, yeah, I'm, for me, I guess my answer to that would be in this, this, this, I've, I, I'm doing a lot of work and I mean like, like work on a philosophy of pilgrimage and the proposal of pilgrimage as how to take people who are in an ecology of practice and then put that ecology of practice on the road to stress test it by moving it between other places and other persons and other other ecologies of philosophy and faith so that would be my initial answer but I still am working out what that is so I want to come back at another time and talk to you about that then um well maybe after the first few episodes of the philosophical silk road which is coming in the spring of uh 2026 come out and then you and i could get back together and we could talk about that and because the the what i'm talking about here is kind of a sense that has come to me out of the philosophical silk road yeah but we're running out of time so i need to uh i need to finish on something can i finish i'm sorry i'm sorry yeah please i mean i'm not finishing up one point that i was starting but uh what you said reminds me of uh one thing that i heard jonathan say that i think is like relevant to pilgrimage because there's a way in which like the liturgical calendar is a pilgrimage that we're going yes yes yes and the tension we're trying to talk about i think also fits with uh especially holy week where um jonathan said okay like somehow we have to both like remember good friday where it looks like everything is lost and all is going to l and also easter where it looks like l is empty uh and somehow like we go through all of these steps every year but it's hard to hold both at the same time in our minds yeah i mean we always have to remember our finite transcendence when we're doing all of this Um, and so everything we should, I mean, I know it's the case for you.

1:18:45Dr. John Vervaeke:Maybe it didn't seem that way for me, but from everything I said should be taken as offered from a place of, of humility. Uh, this is exploratory. Uh, this is the attempt to afford, uh, a better understanding, a better life for people. Um, that, that, that, that is my intent. Sometimes I get a little too enthusiastic, uh, but, um, that's very much it. I want to give you the opportunity to say any final words. And then I don't remember if it didn't work, if we're going to Q &As or not. But before we do that, JP, do you have anything you'd like to say? No, it's good. I would have kept what I just said about Easter and Good Friday as my final word.

1:19:36That's why I wanted to interject. Okay, thank you.

1:19:57Centa