God Is Not a Being on the Same Grid as the Teapot

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, starts where Fridman asks him to start: who is God, according to Christianity and Catholicism? He gives Thomas Aquinas’s definition. God is *ipsum esse subsistens*, the subsistent act of to-be itself. Another way Aquinas puts it: God is that unique reality in which essence and existence coincide. To be God is to be. The language is gnomic on purpose. Barron compares it to a Zen koan: something substantive said in a via negativa mode, because nothing in the world corresponds to those descriptions.

Everything in ordinary experience is a being of some type, existence received according to the mode of some essence. A table exists as a table, a microphone as a microphone, a person as a person. God is not an entity in the world. Aquinas’s strangest remark, Barron says, is that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being. You want to say that at the very least God must be a being. Aquinas’s answer is no. In God, what God is and God’s act of existing are the same. Barron is not quite sure what that means, because nothing we meet is like that. That is why God cannot be found in the world.

The fundamental mistake of atheists old and new, he argues, is to think of God as a big being. Theists then look like people who believe there is this extra entity alongside the others, and atheists like people who deny that extra entity. Both, he says, are making a category error. Richard Dawkins cites Bertrand Russell: proving the non-existence of God is a bit like proving there is no china teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars. Barron’s reply is that that is precisely what God is not. God is not a hidden object among objects. God is the reason there is a contingent realm at all. In theological language, God is the creator of all things.

Can we know a God who is outside the world? Not utterly, Barron says. Knowledge begins in ordinary experience, but metaphysical analysis can gesture toward a reality transcendent to that experience. Language about God is analogical: not univocal, which would make God another bottle on the table, and not simply equivocal. The real meaning of being is the being of God; galaxies and subatomic particles are analogous to that manner of being. The Bible is replete with metaphors — God as a rock, a lion, a human being walking around — which only crude fundamentalism treats as a univocal description.

Faith, he insists, is not sneaking up on God. God sneaks up on us. He prefers the language of grace: God’s action comes first. Stay inside eagle-eyed seeking and you will not find God that way. You might find a path that opens; finally God finds you. Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, said faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary, because we take it as something sub-rational: I know this, I only believe that, a personal opinion. That identifies faith with the infrarational — superstition and childish credulity. Authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason, super-rational rather than infrarational. At the limit of striving and vision a horizon opens. Faith has to do with that darkness, not with a darkness prior to reason.

Fridman asks what “to be to be” means. To be Barron is to be a human being; to be this object is to be a table or a microphone: the act of being poured into the receptacle of some essential principle. Moses at the bush asks for a name, which in philosophical language is: give me the essence that receives your act of existing. God’s answer, “I am who I am,” blows the mind of Moses and the whole tradition. To be God is to be. God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it. If you could get a clear and distinct idea of it, you would be talking about a being of some kind. Take off your sandals: you are on holy ground, which means you are not in command.

The bush is on fire but not consumed. Beings are competitive: two of them cannot occupy the same place. When the classical gods burst into life, things are incinerated. The biblical image is different. As God comes close to a creature, he does not destroy it; the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant. God is not a competitive being on the same ontological grid, so God can come close and we come more fully alive. That is already a gesture toward the Incarnation: God can become a human without overwhelming the human. Barron’s formula is non-competitively transcendent to the world.

The image he likes is author to book. Tolkien creates a whole world — language, nature, history, thousands of characters, plots and subplots — and is utterly responsible for every bit of it, present in every nook, and not a character in the story. The atheist’s category mistake is to look for God as a character. God is the author, mysteriously present to every aspect of the story. People inside the book cannot really know the author as a fellow character. Augustine says God is simultaneously closer to me than I am to myself and higher than anything I could imagine. Once you have the insight that God is the sheer act of to-be, Barron says, of course both are true. God is in all things by essence, presence, and power, and nowhere in the room, totally other, at the same time.

Story after story in the Bible, he thinks, says God can be neither grasped nor hidden from. The first sinful instinct is to grab: I understand him, I can manipulate him. The Tower of Babel is that instinct in architecture. The other extreme is to run. Jonah heads for Tarshish, Timbuktu for that world, and the whale brings him back. Live in the space between grasping and hiding, which would be the space of friendship with God.

What they have been doing so far, Barron says, is a necessary preamble about God, which Judaism would largely share — he names Moses Maimonides. What makes Christianity distinctive is the claim of the Incarnation: God becomes one of us without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the integrity of the creature. Take the burning-bush principle to the nth degree and you have the Son of God becoming a creature in such a way as to make humanity radiant. What follows is the redemption of all of reality. The Greek fathers said God became human that humans might become God. That, for Barron, is a good way to sum up the essence of Christianity.

Why does it matter? It is the divinization principle, concentrated in Jesus of Nazareth and then in what Paul calls the mystical body. The Church, Barron insists, is not an organization; that is a deformation of ecclesiology. It is an organism, cells and molecules grafted onto Christ, drawing all of humanity and ultimately all of creation. If God becomes human, there is a dignity to humanity beyond anything any humanist of any stripe has ever said. The goal of a life is not to be a good person, materially successful, or a member of society. It is to become a participant in the divine nature. Christianity, he says, is the greatest humanism imaginable.

The night before he dies, Jesus tells the disciples he no longer calls them servants but friends. Every god who has ever been served, Barron says, offered at best the status of servant. He cannot imagine anything greater than becoming God’s friend. That is a call to become one with God.

On a Reddit AMA someone asked which of the seven deadly sins is the most challenging. Barron names them: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust, the capital sins from which others flow. Modern people hear “deadly sin” and think of lust. Classical authors, including Dante, treat lust as the least of them, the one most dependent on the body and its passions. The most fundamental is pride. Augustine calls it *incurvatus in se*, caved in around myself. Barron’s scientific metaphor is the black hole: so heavy it draws in everything, including light. Sinners are like that. He includes himself. The Bishop Barron moment on a podcast can become a way of drawing Fridman into his world, which kills life, darkens it, makes it small and heavy.

Dante places Satan at the center of the earth, the heaviest place, in ice rather than fire. Frozen, stuck, he has wings that used to be angel wings and are now bat wings, flapping and only making the world around him colder. He has three faces, a simulacrum of the Trinity, because every sinner thinks he is God. From six eyes he weeps; in three mouths he chews Cassius, Brutus, and Judas. Barron reads it as a portrait of all sinners: stuck, cold, chewing past resentments, weeping, making the world colder. The opposite of pride is humility. Saint Bernard, asked the three most important virtues, said humility, humility, and humility. It does not mean “I am no good.” It means being lost in something.

Barron lives in Santa Barbara and walks a stretch of beach where dogs run off-leash. A well-cared-for dog, master throwing a tennis ball into the surf, gallops out and comes back smiling. That, he says, is humility, and an image of heaven: lost in the moment, not impressing anybody. Most of us live most of the time in various levels of hell, and the other deadly sins flow from pride — envy of attention, anger when things are not going my way. Heaven and hell he treats as limit concepts. Heaven is ultimate friendship with God, self-forgetfulness in beauty and truth. Hell is the black hole. We are all somewhere on that spectrum. God’s purpose, in Christianity’s reading, is to bring us out of it by going all the way in: Paul says Christ emptied himself, accepted death on a cross, became sin without being a sinner, in order to pull the sock right-side out.

The metric of a good life is love, and love is not a feeling. It is an act of the will: to will the good of the other as other. Willing your good because it is good for me is indirect egotism. Love is rare. The final calculus Barron leaves to God; at the end of the day, examine whether you willed the other’s good, with Ignatius of Loyola’s brutal honesty. Saint Irenaeus’s line is *gloria Dei homo vivens*: the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Dostoevsky’s “love is a harsh and dreadful thing” is the correction to a culture that has sentimentalized love into warm feelings. Love is correlated to the order of the good. You have to know what the good actually is, or you are only indulging.

A third pillar, Barron says, is the Trinity. Christians are monotheists who do not think God is monolithically one. The Father, from all eternity, by a great mental act forms his interior word, the Logos, the image of the Father, one in being with him. Fulton Sheen put it that the Father and the Son love each other with a sigh, the Holy Spirit, the holy breath. One essence, three persons. The Greek fathers talked about *perichoresis*: the three sitting in a choir, singing together. Christianity is unique, Barron claims, in saying not only that God loves but that God *is* love. If love is God’s very nature rather than an attribute, there has to be in the unity a lover, a beloved, and the love they share.

The Catholic Church he defines as the mystical body of Jesus, an organism of the baptized gathered around Christ. It has buildings and titles because it manifests itself institutionally; he is a bishop, an office holder. Whatever is corrupt in it comes from pride. Paul is already upgrading tiny communities in Corinth and Ephesus for fighting. Catholic ecclesiology talks about treasure in earthen vessels: the treasure is Christ and the love bequeathed to the world, held in fragile vessels, namely us. Johann Adam Möhler, a nineteenth-century theologian, said the pope symbolizes and draws together the unity of the entire Church; a bishop, of a diocese; a pastor, of a parish. Without that unifying figure the community dissipates. Barron also walks with a crosier, a shepherd’s staff: one end to hold off wild animals, the crook to bring sheep back. Hierarchy, at its best, is defense against predators and a draw for those wandering too far.

He dislikes the prosperity gospel, the view that trusting God will be rewarded with wealth and status. Aquinas’s tart remark is that a sinful person’s great house might be a punishment, and the lack of one a gift that frees you for God’s will. God’s favor is awakening to deeper love. The image he loves is the wheel of fortune on Gothic cathedrals: king at the top, pauper at the bottom, climbers on the rim, Christ at the center. Live at the center, not on the rim, where every point is anxiety. John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” Barron says, is right out of the medieval mystics: no longer riding on the merry-go-round. The Greeks called it *apatheia*, the Latins indifference — not blasé, but detached from success and failure.

Fridman asks about the long history of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. Barron calls it awful. Peter Damian was talking about it in the eleventh century. Whenever sinful human beings have been in close proximity to children, the issue appears; it has been around the Church, and it has surfaced in a sickening way in the last thirty years. He is glad the Church has made strides. In 2002 the Dallas Accords put protocols in place that, he says, have been effective. Numbers spiked in the 1970s and 1980s and then fell dramatically. That is not to excuse anything. The impulse to secrecy is the sinful instinct to protect institutions. An institution is worth protecting until you become indifferent to people’s well-being. Then you are in trouble. Transparency with the sins of members is the job.

Celibacy he frames as a path of love, not a negation of it. Marriage is a path of love; so is celibacy. Paul’s pragmatic justification is freedom from preoccupation with family for the work of God; Barron’s own life, he says, has let him go places a married man could not. The mystical side is Jesus’s remark that in heaven people neither marry nor are given in marriage: a higher way of love, tied through God to everybody. Celibates from the beginning, including Jesus and Paul, anticipate that heavenly way of loving, as pacifists in the Church witness even now to a peace that is not yet universal. He is glad not everyone is a celibate, because married love is a marvelous expression of divine love. Sublimation of energy into prayer and ministry is meant to be life-enhancing, like fasting.

Is it a heavy burden, and did it cause the abuse scandal? He will not tie the two. Andrew Greeley, a priest-sociologist from Barron’s home diocese of Chicago, researched the question and found no correlation between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse of children. Bad people will do what they do. People with a tendency toward abusing children are drawn to ready access and institutional cover — sports, the Boy Scouts, the list. That it happened inside an organism supposed to embody love breaks people’s hearts. Fridman takes that as a door into the problem of evil.

Why does God allow this? Barron can gesture in abstract language that is true enough and emotionally unsatisfying. It goes back to Augustine: God permits evil to bring about a greater good. Aquinas, laying out objections first, steel-mans the case. If one of two contraries were infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed: infinite heat, no cold. God is described as infinitely good; therefore if God exists there should be no evil; but there is evil; therefore God does not exist. That, Barron says, is a darn good argument, the best against God. What he finds interesting is that the three best versions all come from within the religious tradition: the Book of Job, Aquinas’s *Summa*, and Ivan Karamazov wrecking Alyosha’s faith with the suffering of innocent children. Stephen Fry’s bone cancer and worms in children’s eyes have been preceded by Job in the whirlwind. You cannot blame the tradition for brushing the problem under the carpet.

The first response remains metaphysical: evil permitted for a greater good, which we can sometimes see and typically cannot. Another factor is the gap between our minds and God’s. Our sensorium takes in a tiny swath of space and time; even our eyes take in only so much of the light spectrum. How are we in a position to say there is no possible good that could come from the worst evil Dostoevsky or Fry can conjure? That, he says, is hubris to the nth degree. Years ago a young father in his parish watched his three-year-old in post-surgical pain. The boy’s eyes asked why a loving father would preside over this and do nothing. The father could not explain surgery to a three-year-old. Barron took it as a metaphor for us vis-à-vis God: trust me, surrender. When we do not, pride returns.

The more theological response is that Christ went all the way down. The cross is the limit case of evil: humiliation, cruelty, institutional injustice, psychological and spiritual suffering, death. That is why, as a young priest, Barron walked into a wake with two coffins — a policeman who had shot his son and then himself — and when the mother looked at him as the religious guy with an answer, he gestured that he did not have one. He was there because Jesus went there. He would resist the claim that the argument is a knockdown and now we know there is no God. There are other rational warrants; he knows God exists and is infinite love, and he squares that with experience by a trusting confidence that God knows what he is about. If he were to steel-man atheism he would do what Fry and Ivan do, and press animal suffering over the eons: is there just too much?

Asked for his favorite communicator of atheist ideas, Barron named Christopher Hitchens. The other objection in Aquinas with contemporary resonance is: can we explain everything through natural causes? Naturalists and pure materialists say a scientific account is utterly adequate. Barron’s objection is that naturalism stays inside the immediately empirically observable and mistakes that for all of being. Long before religion, Plato’s cave and the divided line already take you out. The first step is mathematical objects. Mathematics, he thinks, is an experience of the immaterial. The minute you understand a pure number or a relationship that would obtain in any possible world, not tied to space and time, you have left a merely empirical world.

He loves and respects the sciences and hates scientism, the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form, rampant especially among young people. There are dimensions of being not capturable by observation, hypothesis, and experiment. That method is wonderful and still, in his metaphor, at a relatively low level of reality. He cites Eugene Wigner’s 1960 article on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. Wigner was a secular Jew, not a religious man, and used the word “miracle” about eight times, so impressed that highly complex mathematics describes the physical world and can be used to create and manipulate. Barron’s Platonic answer is that you have stepped into a higher order of being inclusive of a lower one.

Where do the laws of nature come from? One argument for God is the intelligibility of the world, the peculiar fact that being has a structure corresponding to an inquiring mind. Aquinas can say the intelligible in act is the intellect in act. Barron’s answer is that the creator is a great mind who has stamped the world with intelligibility: in the beginning was the Word, and all things came to be through the Word. God spoke the world into being — do not literalize the poetry. Two ideas, he says, were the condition for Western physical science: the world is not God, so you may analyze it, and it is intelligible in every nook. Those are theological ideas correlated to creation. Even the word *universe*, turned toward the one, is for him an intuition of being. Give him a billion other universes and it would still be existence. A well-known physicist’s answer to Wigner, Barron reports, was that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician. He thought: yes, that’s right.

Jordan Peterson, Barron says after a couple of conversations, is moving in the direction of faith. His Bible lectures are very fine and remind Barron of the Church fathers: they looked at the moral sense of Scripture, Peterson at the psychological meaning, doing a lot of the same work. Where Barron reads him is at a Kantian level regarding Jesus. For Kant, Jesus is less the historical figure than the archetype of the moral life, the image of the person perfectly pleasing to God, a heuristic in the moral imagination. Live as though God exists — the Kantian as-if. When they talk, Barron presses that that is not yet Christianity. That is Enlightenment moral philosophy. Christianity is very interested in this historical figure, in God really becoming one of us, not just an archetype but a person who invaded the world and went to the bottom of sin.

Read Jung, Joseph Campbell, and a Jungian Peterson, and the archetypal reading is interesting, with a sort of calmness: this culture, that culture, the form of the moral life. Then you read the New Testament. Those people are grabbing you by the shoulders. The myth of the dying and rising god shaping consciousness is fascinating and is not the New Testament. The New Testament is: did you hear? Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death, God raised from the dead; he was seen by five hundred, by Peter, and lastly by me. That is how Paul talks. The intensity of the historical details is essential. Christianity is a historical religion. Philosophical reflection and common ground with archetypal thinking are real; Aquinas uses Aristotle. The history still matters immensely.

Is the Bible the literal word of God? Barron thinks the best way in is to think of it as a library, not a book: different periods, authors, audiences, genres. Poetry, song, something like history, gospel as its own genre, Paul’s letters, apocalyptic. Asking whether the library is literally true depends on which section you are in. Samuel and Kings have historical elements, theologically interpreted, more like Herodotus than modern footnoted history. God breathes through all of it — *inspirare*, breathing through — in different voices, human instruments, genres. The psalms are songs; Barron prays them every morning. Revelation is wild enough to be filmed by Spielberg. The Gospels correspond to ancient biography, not simply myth. Be sensitive to genre all the time.

Was America founded as a Christian nation? The Declaration holds these truths to be self-evident: all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The founders, Barron says, were some mix of deism, Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, not simply Aquinas. He sees the Enlightenment as a child of Christianity. Having said that, the words express at least the residue of a once deeply integrated Christian sense: rights are not created or doled out by government; they come from God. Still more interesting is equality. Classical political philosophy — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero — found inequality interesting. Plato’s three classes, Aristotle’s tiny coterie of propertied educated males, some suited for slavery. We are not equal in beauty, strength, moral attainment, or intelligence. The residue comes through in that little word *created*. Our equality is that we are equally children of God.

Take God out of the picture and Barron thinks we slide rapidly into an embrace of inequality. Look at the twentieth century, when God was excluded in a systematic way: rights and equality suspended like mad. That we are a nation under God is not pious boilerplate. It is at the rational foundations of democracy. On Nietzsche he is sympathetic to Peterson’s reading: not crowing from the mountaintop that God is dead, but a lament. We have killed him; what follows? Much of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century follows from questioning God and dismissing God from public life. When we are beyond good and evil and all that is left is the will to power, why be surprised that the powerful rise? When we forget equality and rights grounded in God, why be surprised that death camps follow?

Fridman offers his own sense that people tend toward good unless power centers and charismatic leaders manufacture conflict. Barron does not contradict him. What it triggers is a point about modern science: it drew strength from narrowness, bracketing Aristotle’s formal and final causes and focusing on efficient and material ones. For Aristotle the more important causes are the final and the formal. Any act of the will seeks a good nested like a Russian doll in a higher good, until you come, with Aquinas, to an uncaused final cause, a *summum bonum*. That is God. Another rational path: every day, implicitly, we are seeking God. Word on Fire, which began as a 5:15 a.m. Sunday radio sermon Barron begged his parish to fund, is his attempt to take that conversation outside the narrow Catholic world. Young people, he tells fellow bishops, keep asking four questions: how do you know there is a God, why so much suffering, why is your religion the right one, and why are you so mean to gay people.

On gay marriage Barron says the Church loves friendship, and there is nothing wrong with friendship between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Go back to Aristotle and Aquinas on natural finalities and intelligible forms: human being includes the physical and the sexual, with a proper finality that is twofold, unitive and procreative. That is why the Church holds that sex between a man and a woman within marriage is the right expression. It reaches out, he says, in love and respect, seeking to understand lives from the inside. In official teaching, what is problematic is the physical expression of sexual passion between two men, not their friendship, not their love for each other.

On abortion he is against it; he is pro-life. The Church recognizes from the moment of conception a human life worthy of respect and protection, and stands opposed to the outright killing of the innocent. Every pastor, he says, deals with people in these painful situations. Legally he thinks *Roe v. Wade* was terribly decided, one of the worst expressions of American law since *Dred Scott*. *Casey* is instructive because it gives staggering scope to freedom: it belongs to the nature of freedom to determine the meaning of one’s own life, even of the universe. That is repugnant to everything they have been talking about. Choice should be correlated to the order of the good; it is not sovereign over being. Overturning those decisions returns the question to the states. A California constitutional amendment to make any limit on abortion illegal he calls barbaric.

In classical philosophy and theology, freedom is not self-determination. It is the disciplining of desire so as to make achievement of the good first possible and then effortless. The modern idea, with roots in William of Ockham, is that I hover above yes and no as sovereign subject and will on no basis — like Louis XIV, or like Stalin. Aquinas would not have recognized that as freedom. Learning French in a Paris doctoral seminar, Barron felt unfree in awkward French among fluent francophones; over time, ordered more to the good, he became a freer speaker. That is the better picture. Advice to the young: find something you are good at, because that is from God, then dedicate it to love — science, math, sports, musicianship as benefit to the world, not as aggrandizement. Without moral and intellectual mentors, “just decide for yourself” is deadly. Freedom is guided.

He thinks about his own death every day. The Hail Mary ends “now and at the hour of our death”; a full rosary says it fifty times. He is afraid, because he does not know what is next the way he knows Fridman. What he thinks happens is that he is drawn into a deeper embrace of God’s love. He cites John Polkinghorne, the Cambridge particle physicist who at midlife became an Anglican priest. What survives, Polkinghorne said, is what Aristotle called the form, the pattern that has organized the matter of a life while atoms and cells turned over — little Bobby Barron in Birmingham, Michigan, and the bishop in the chair, not the same material, still one pattern. God knows that pattern and can re-embody it at a higher pitch, a spiritual body. Christian hope is not Platonic escape of soul from matter; it is resurrection of the body. The meaning of life, Barron says, is love. God is love, and the purpose of a life is to become God’s friend, more and more like the burning bush, radiant with that presence. Begin with the beautiful, he has said, which leads to the good, which leads you to truth.