Transcription
I saw a great meme. It's a kid standing on a couple of books looking at a library and he says, "God exists." And then the next is a man standing on several books and he says, "God does not exist." He's looking just above the bookshelf. There's a third guy who's got so many books that he's now looking at the universe and he says, "Oh [ __ ] it's God again." Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great. Yeah.
So, I mean, let's put it this way. I mean, to borrow a phrase of Aquinas, since we're having pints with Aquinas, I mean, um, God is the ground of all being. Yeah. So the ground of all being is not going to go away, and he doesn't need to employ kind of double glazing salesmen and insurance agents to get his word out there. It's always going to be there. He is the root and ground of being. And also, all the atheist arguments are old.
I've been talking about Aquinas again. So when I decided I was going to specialize in medieval literature, I thought, I've got to read the guys, you know, read Augustine. So I, I had ques some controvert, which is, you know, I'm a gentile. Speak to me. So you may remember that that book more or less begins with, you know, is there a god? It would seem not for the following 10 reasons. And he gives you 10 really. And I thought, blimey, I'm an atheist. How are you going to get out of this? I'm an atheist and I've only thought of five of these. So he really, and that, that's totally disarming. Yeah. Because the modern narrative is people only believe, you know, like Christianity is for dummies. Yeah. You're not going to say that after reading Aquinas. No. So the assumption I had was that now we'd seen science and now we understood, you know, more about the mechanics of the universe, we didn't need that stuff. That's the childhood of the world, you know.
Does he give 10 arguments? I mean, in the Summa Theologia, he gives two. I didn't realize. No, there's a bunch of them. He, he, he goes through why you shouldn't believe and then, you know, in the famous phrase that comes, he says, *sed contra*. That's right. On the other hand. *Sed contra*, he, yeah. I mean, I'm remembering this from a long way back, so I hope, but, you know, I won't fact-check you in real time. I just want to see what he says.
But anyway, the point is just the fact that he then sets it out in terms of argument, and then, okay. So I get to the Summa Theologia, and then there's this distinction between faith and knowledge and the proper relationship between faith and knowledge. And faith isn't plugging a gap in knowledge, but it's a foundation and ground of knowledge. And then that's developed later by, well, it's developed before, before Aquinas, by Anselm, who says theology is *fides quaerens intellectum*, it's faith seeking. But earlier Augustine had said, "I don't understand in order to believe. I believe in order to understand."
Mhm. And anybody who says, just to say that other people exist is an act of faith, 'cause you only have the evidence of your interior monologue, your interior mind about it. Maybe you're just making it up. You know, to believe that there's a truth beyond yourself, to exercise reason. Fantastic. Very good. That's a good analogy, right? Because I could be a solipsist and just assume you don't, and then life's pretty bloody confusing. And I remember my dad explaining to me what solipsism was. Well, I went through a bout of that as a teenager. But as soon as you assume, okay, what if I'll act as if there are other people, or believe, and now all of a sudden I understand what's going on.
Yeah. Exactly. So the question about belief is not whether you're going to believe or not, 'cause everybody's going to believe something. It's what, and on what grounds. And on what grounds are you going to assess whether you were right to have put your faith there. So the question really about the Christian faith is whether it makes more sense of the world as we actually live it. That's right. Than the atheist alternatives. Yeah. And if the atheist alternatives are telling you you have no real personhood, no real soul, you're just the unwinding of an enzyme, and they and self, how is it that you actually experience choice and the peril of choice, and you experience responsibility, and you experience, and you experience beauty, and your experience of beauty is essentially transcendent rather than limited? You kind of have a sense, I mean, it's all there. Yeah.
I mean, even if you even if you go back to say, like a Shakespeare sonnet, so famously, you know, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Right? You know, I mean, executive summary: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? No, you're way better. Yeah. So, he's going through what's the problem with summer. It's full of promise, but it's full of, it's problematic. So, you remember, you know, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate." Now, here's the problem with summer. "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date." It's temporal. It flies. It promises, and it goes away. And it, you know, winter comes. Says, "Your lease is up. Your time is up. It's gone." What's the next line? He says, "But thy eternal summer shall not fade." Now, "eternal summer" is a contradiction in terms, or better still, a paradox. There's something in spring, or something, that says there's more of this. It doesn't have to fly away. That this is coming. This temporal, fleeting thing that you, you have to love and it leaves you, is always telling you that there's something that won't fade.
That there's something, and in this case, in the experience of human love, just paradoxically, even as the moment flies, I think there's something permanent. There's something eternal. "Thy eternal summer shall not fade." And we've just, we've been left with the stories, but they're telling us there's no eternity. There's a, there's an English folk folk songwriter called, um, Alan Franks, who's got a great line in one of his songs. He says, "They give us the wings then dismantle the sky."
So, so yeah. Um, I think what's returning is precisely the sense of the eternal coming through the temporal, and the temporal, the the material temporal accounts can't account for it. It's a real experience for millions of people, and they don't have a philosophy that makes sense.
I was sitting here with a fellow, I'm going to go, I'm going to switch to the, to the cigar. You see how quickly I did that? Yeah. Um, I was sitting with a fellow here yesterday, Dr. J. Bujashevsky, who was a Nietzschean, uh, nihilist. Uh, he said, more nihilist than Nietzsche. He came to Christ. He's a Catholic in Austin. Um, uh, what was he saying? Golly, forgive me, I'm sure there was a point there, but, bloody, I like that little clippy sound of a cigar clipper, you know. Well, that's the, that's the ritual. It's exactly. It's all, yeah, the ritual's lovely. Okay, here's what he said. It came back to me. He said that he ripped up his mind. That's how he put it. Like he ripped up his mind with nihilism. Yeah. Um, and we're living in a time where, period, people are longing for culture. They're longing to be reconnected to the story. Yeah. Exactly. But they may have, may, like my friends say, they've ripped up their mind. How do we put the mind back together?
Well, let's just look. We do so by remembering the things we've forgotten. And we just need to think for a moment about the etymology of the word "remember." To remember is to remember, to take what has been split apart and ripped apart and severed, and bring it back together again into one whole. And we can only, if we've been, as it were, culturally and psychologically dismembered by the kind of trashy philosophies we inherited, then we need to remember deeper ones and older ones. And this is the great gift of Christianity. You know, we've been around for a while, and, uh, there's a, there's a reason for that, because we're, we are a story being told by God himself.
And I'll tell you an interesting thing. I noticed in the last 10 years of my chaplancy in in Cambridge, that whereas we were all being told, you know, in theological college, that we should be down with the kids and like, you know, two guys with a guitar in a cafe, and, no, it turns out the most popular services were the most traditional ones. 100%. That we do Prayer Book Even Song, you know, Book of Common Prayer, 1660, anthems, going beyond that sometimes, sung in Latin, full choir. And no explanations. Yeah. No kind of cheesy little talks. Yes. Just this incredibly powerful. We have erred and strayed from thy like lost sheep. You know, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. Boy, a kid with an iPhone knows more about devices and desires than even Thomas Graham did. You know.
But I think, why is this happening? And I think it's partly that that generation of kids, like if they buy a new smartphone, it just, in the time that took them to walk home from the shop and unwrap it, the software is already obsolete. Like they have to upgrade it, you know, to the new version, whatever. And everything about life is it's like that. And in that situation, you long for anything with permanence, stability, you long for stability. You, you know, and when I can say to them, look, we've been doing this exact service for the last 400 years, and we're just beginning to get it. I don't think we get it totally, but we'll get there. You know, there's headroom, there's growth room, you know, it's not, you know, if you get it straight away, then it's less than you are. Yeah. But if it's transcendent, it's got, you know.
When I, I eventually returned to my Christian faith, you know, fairly thoroughly in my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge. And one of the things that held me back from it was a fear of intellectual suicide and a fear of stasis. There were some Christians in the kind of Christians going around saying, like, here's exactly what you have to do. You have to find Jesus. You have to give your life to him. You say this prayer, then you're done. And, um, and you're, you're right with God through the, through the sacrificial blood of Jesus. And like, then you can carry on being a chartered accountant and in need never trouble your mind again, 'cause you're fixed. And I thought, I, I don't want to do that.
So I can remember actually, I was just beginning to think there's more to this Christianity than I realized, because I was reading the Confessions of St. Augustine, and I got to this bit where he says, "Late have I loved you, beauty always ancient, always new, always new." It hadn't occurred to me that you could call God beauty, and that although he was always ancient, he was always just moving me. Then there's a knock on the door, right? And there's two ardent young, you know, evangelical guys with a tract. While you're reading. Yeah. Yeah. And they come in and lay it on the line and they say, "You've got to believe this or you're going to go to hell, but thank God for Jesus. Here it is." You know, basically. And I'm going, "Oh, like, is this the same thing as Augustine?" I like. And had those guys said, "What are you reading?" And I'd said, "This is what I'm reading. Amazing." And if they'd said, "Yeah, we too believe in that, that that God, you know," but they didn't do it. They had like a, a set pattern.
It's almost like this Western efficiency. And it kind of put me off. Yeah. No, I did. Thanks God I came, but it kind of delayed the moment. Um, but eventually I, I got there. And, um, here, here's one way I would imagine people could have re-remembered their mind, have their mind remembered.
I just, I haven't read this before, so I just, I just, can I read two, uh, stanzas from your book? Please do. "As I walked out one morning, all in the soft fine rain, it seemed as though a silver veil was shining over hill and dale, as though some lovely long-lost spell had made all new again. And through that shimmer in the air, I seemed to hear a sound, as though a distant horn were blown in some lost land that I had known, that seemed to speak from tree and stone, and echo all around. And with the music came these words: Poet, take up the tale. Take up the tale. This land still keeps, and earth and water magic sleeps. And dryads sigh and naiads weep." Yeah. But you can lift the veil. I mean, God, I didn't know that I was about to read the answer to what we're talking about. We're talking about isolation, cut off from culture and community. "Take up the, take up the tale."
So there's a great bit at the end of C.S. Lewis's novel, um, *That Hideous Strength*, in which kind of Merlin recovers. There's a conversation between two of the characters where he says something, "We may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres." Now, Logres is the name for Arthur's Kingdom. It's the Welsh name for Arthur's Kingdom. And he says, he says, "We've heard better than we can do." And he says, "Don't you see it in everything English? You know, we're a nation of poets, but we're a nation of shopkeepers. You know, behind every Arthur and Morrid, you know, after every Milton or Cromwell, you know, and it's as if we have an ass's head. We got it. We've forgotten ourselves. We've forgotten who we are. We need to recover."
So, in that same prelude, a little bit later, that's the kind of, that's the muse giving me my marching orders. I kind of riff on that and it tells you what I'm trying to do. Uh, and I'll just, I just, tell me the page, too. Find it for you. So this is, this is just the page after you were reading. Okay. So I talk about all the things I need to tell, and then I talk about reviving memory, and then I say this, um, "But listen well before you start. Be still where you begin. See through the surface roundabout, the noise, the rush, the fear, the doubt. Though modern Britain lies without, fair Logres lives within." And I'm playing a little. "You may yet walk through Merlin's aisle by Oaken ash and thorn. The ancient hills do not forget, and you might wake their wisdom. Yet, who knows what wonders might be met on this midsummer morn." So, I have taken up the tale to tell it.
Thank you for taking up the tale. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed that clip, you are going to love the full interview. Please click it and watch it, or else I will tell on you.