TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 69

Ryan: Gaven Kerr is a mixed martial arts fighter. He's also a lecturer in philosophy at St. Patrick's Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland outside of Dublin. That's where in May I got to attend a boldly-named conference, "The Future of Christian Thinking," which was the brainchild of Gaven and his colleague Philip Gonzalez.

Gaven exudes an energy more typical of a storybook pirate than a philosopher, and it makes for a compelling combination. In my “Genealogies of Modernity” thread, this interview is a fitting follow-up to Cyril O'Regan, who reflected on Ireland's secularization, and that's because Gaven Kerr has a surprisingly optimistic, up-to-date, on-the-ground evaluation of Christianity's prospects in Ireland.

Before we get to the interview, though: two brief announcements. First, it's not too late to join the Genealogy and Tradition Reading Group, where we are reading Anne Carpenter's new book, Nothing Gained is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition. If you're interested, email admin@beatriceinstitute.org. That's A D M I N at beatrice institute.org to get on the mailing list and for scheduling details. The first meeting is December 28th at 1:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.

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From all of us at Beatrice Institute, I wish you all the joy and comfort of Christmas. Now, on with the show.

My guest today is Gaven Kerr. Do you pronounce it "Kerr" or "Karr"?

Gaven: Kerr.

Ryan: Kerr. Okay. And Gaven is Professor of Philosophy at National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Gaven: Actually, I'm not.

Ryan: Okay. You're at the college?

Gaven: I'm at St. Patrick's Pontifical University.

Ryan: Right. Maynooth. Sorry, I got that confused.

Gaven: Yeah. I'm not a professor, actually, not formally. We have a different system than in the States. So in the states I would be called a "tenured professor." Here, I'm just a "permanent lecturer."

Ryan: Okay.

Gaven: Yeah.

Ryan: Just a permanent lecturer.

Gaven: That's our system, but yeah. And it's like your "tenured professor."

Ryan: Right. Okay. Super. And your specialty is...

Gaven: I am based on for my work on Aquinas, but I work on the thought of Emmanuel Kant, I work on Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy more generally, and Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic, Ethics; I do all of that.

Ryan: So at one point in history, it would've been an obvious path for an Irish boy to end up studying Catholic Philosophy. James Joyce could have gone that direction himself, but these days, at least for people outside of Ireland, it's surprising that someone - I mean, you're, we're in a similar generation; you're, I think you said 39 years old.

Gaven: 39 years old.

Ryan: What led you to take this anomalous path?

Gaven: Oh yeah, it was strange. So, at school, sort of in my mid-teens, I was sitting thinking, what am I gonna do for what are called "A-Levels," which are the exams we take whenever we leave school at 18 and go on to university.

And I didn't know what topics to do, and I had two teachers who were really inspirational. One teacher that I had around the age of 14 or 15 and I'd had them for mathematics all the way since starting school at 11. He was a mathematics teacher and all I can just say, he just lived, breathed mathematics. He had a direct vision of Plato's forms. That's the sort of math teacher he was. And he managed to inspire the rest of us with mathematics. And so he really taught me how to think about abstract matters in a very concrete way to bring together the abstract and the concrete, which is necessary I think, for good philosophical thinking.

So my mind was already formed in that way, and I was thinking about doing mathematics for my A-levels. But because I wasn't doing the sciences – I didn't want to choose the sciences – I wasn't allowed to do mathematics, so they wouldn't let me take mathematics as a subject. So I ended up doing – everybody my age, they ended up doing I.T., computers, that sort of stuff – I took history and I took religion. And in the religion class we had a graduate of Queens University, Belfast, that's Scholastic Philosophy, and he had a doctorate in scholastic philosophy, and he just mesmerized me. His name was Aidan Donaldson. And he was able to introduce me to the thought of Aquinas and the history of philosophy, and we did Philosophy of Religion in the religion course. And I just fell in love with it. That's what I wanted to be. And I just met the lady – I was 15 years old – I just met the lady who is now my wife, at that time. So life was coming together and I was making these life choices.

And my parents wanted me to do I.T., computers, that sort of thing at university, because that's where the money is. That gets you the job. And talking to my wife, my girlfriend at the time, I thought, I kind of like Phil; I want to do Philosophy, something Philosophy/Theology oriented. So I applied for Scholastic Philosophy at Queens University and got in and seemed to be good at it, and just kept doing it. And so that's where I am today.

Ryan: You're now organizing this conference, "The Future of Christian Thinking." We're sitting here in your office outside of Dublin and there are a bunch of big names who, looking back 20 or even 30 years would've been the "future of Christian thinking." But what I was so delighted to see.... So those are the big names, kind of, on the mast. There are a few people that wouldn't have been recognized 20 or 30 years ago when we were coming up, but, you've packed out this hall - this pretty big lecture hall - and my guess would be that 40% of the attendance are under 40. Which was a bit surprising because a lot of them are here from Ireland, and I think the picture many people have, especially in the United States, is that it's just a sociological fact that Ireland is quite possibly the quickest process of secularization in modern history. And yet there seems to be, here, evidence of some kind of resurgence of theological and philosophical interest. How do you account for that?

Gaven: Irish people like to do things in the extremes. We're extremists. I've just discovered that we like to, we like to go to the extremes. There's no middle for us. It's one of the reasons why I think Platonism has always been popular in Ireland. There's not that balance, Aristotelian moderateness, it's just the extremes of the purely immaterial and the gasoline material. So Irish people like to do these things in extremes.

And there was a certain generation of Irish Catholicism, which was very, very devout, very holy, I would say an awful lot of sense and their Catholicism was something meaningful to them. But what I think happened, and I think it was part of deeper historical issues with the Partition and independence from Britain, is that Catholicism just wasn't passed on to the next generation, either through the parents or through the schools.

And the reason why I think is because with Partition and the setting up of the Irish Republic, there basically just wasn't the infrastructure there in the country that there was with the British state. So once a former place which is occupied by foreign territory, loses its colonial status, it just doesn't have that infrastructure. You still have the buildings and you still have a memory of what that infrastructure was, but it just wasn't there. But there was a very strong and supportive church presence. And so the Church ended up picking up the slack where the State just couldn't at the time cause it was building itself up.

So the church ran a lot of the schools. And that's because historically in Ireland, for Catholics to get an education, they've had to be dependent on the Church, just given the history of the penal laws and just what it was like to be an Irish Catholic for the last few centuries. So the church ran a lot of the schools throughout the world. The church runs a lot of the hospitals. And the church was always heavily involved, in politics, in Ireland. And that went both ways. Politicians were heavily involved in the Church. And so, to be Catholic in Ireland was simply to be Irish. That's all it was. It was to be Irish. And so whenever Ireland started to thrive and started to really take on an identity of its own as an independent, international, nation, it started to cast off its Catholicism.

And so for members of the state, when that Catholicism was being cast off its identity, there wasn't a Catholicism there in the individuals, which was strong and coherent and rigorous. And so identifying as Irish then no longer meant identifying as Catholic.

And there wasn't any sort of faith there to begin with to pick up the slack. So when another generation comes through, Catholicism just isn't implanted in them. The schools, yeah, they're Catholic, but what is Catholic about them? They prepare you for your sacraments, but they don't exhibit a culture of Catholicism where the virtues are inculcated in the way that, say, some liberal arts colleges in the States would try to bring about a campus where about when one goes there, one's not indoctrinated with Catholicism, but one just eats, lives and breathes Catholicism and becomes a Catholic in the process of learning. That's not what the schools were like here.

So Catholicism just didn't have a chance to pass on to people. And a clear example of this is that it used to be the case that nobody did anything on Sundays; there was nothing done on Sundays. Then when they started doing Sunday sports, everybody went to the Sunday sports and missed Mass.

So, the Catholicism wasn't deeply ingrained. And Irish people, they can also be quite superstitious. We saw with the talk of the Holy Wells today a lot of the people who come along and then we leave with superstitious bits behind. That's a deep feature of Irish Catholicism, a lot of that superstition, which was here from pre-Catholic times.

And so the religiosity of Irish people under Catholicism, when it was just a general phenomenon, was more at the presence of Irish superstitiousness rather than a deeply committed faith.

So now what we're seeing, so, that all fell away, and now what we're seeing is that people who are Catholic in Ireland choose to be so. They're intentionally so, either because like myself, they're just cradle Catholic, fell in love with God, wanted to be a saint and have just remained that way or they maybe just fell away from the Faith and came back to it in a massive way through study, through engagement, through the Dominicans and their preaching, or just through some heroic priests.

And so they've become very intentional about their Catholicism. And I think that's what we're seeing with a lot of the Irish people here at the Conference. They're people who are deeply engaged, and with access to the internet, with access to YouTube and stuff like that, they see the dates with the apologist, they get access to a lot the apologetical information. They see my PhD student, Karlo Broussard on Catholic Answers and it fires them up and they want to learn more, which is why they come to a conference like this.

Ryan: So, you mentioned the Holy Wells. And Philipp Rosemann, who's been on this podcast before; he's German, but he spent a good amount of his life in Ireland and he has this real fondness for the Holy Wells. And I do too. I also am fascinated by fairy rings and Clootie Trees. And these phenomena, all of which, as you said, were, as far as we know, pre-Christian phenomena, at least pre-Christian sites in many cases. One story that John Milbank would tell about secularization is that by making a strict demarcation between proper religion and superstition around these kinds of nature, religions, folk practices, Christianity ran itself into a corner, where it was just going to be secularized because it turned its back - when St. Boniface chopped down Thor's Oak, as a colleague of mine likes to say – it turned its back on what would've been the wellspring of an integrated Christianity. What's your take on that when you see these practices? And is that potentially a way for Irish Catholicism to be reborn? Which might be what Philipp Rosemann was suggesting today in his talk.

Gaven: Yeah. When St. Patrick first came him here, he integrated the Catholicism, he preached with the native paganism, that very spiritual mystical, paganism that the Irish people, they had. And so you see that with the High Cross. It's got the high Cross with the circle behind it, and that represents the sun and St. Patrick bringing this sun worship to the Cross because the True Sun, which today we're all worshiping as a Son was Christ.

And this is something which is just part of the Christian tradition that pagans and polytheists, they worship nature. They worship the wind, they worship the sky, and they're searching for something. They're like Plato's prisoner trying to leave the key. If they are searching for God and they're trying to find God, and if you don't have the revelation, well where are you gonna find God? If you're Plato and the Neoplatonists, it's in the One. But if you're just a normal person, you see these great forces of nature and of reality and they're foundational for us, so obviously you're gonna think there's something divine in that.

And we as Christians, what we realize is what they're after is what Christ gives us. And so Christ transforms that spiritual experience that pre-Christians have of the world. What happens is that we don't deny that spiritual transcendence through which pre-Christians see the world; we direct it to its goal, which is in Christ. And so when you have these pagan practices that we have in Ireland and that every culture has, the goal shouldn't be to eradicate them. That's not what Patrick did. The goal should be to transform those devotions and those practices into something Christian, so that the world, that pagan world, is illuminated by Christ.

We talk about Christmas Day. Everybody complains, “Well, the Christians just stole that from the ancient pagan religion, the Saturnalia” or whatever. And didn't, they just transformed it. This was a spiritual practice, a devotion of the pagans, and then the Christian said, “Well, look, this is the true meaning of this.” And they redirected the practices to that.

Ryan: So, then what would be your symbolic reading of, the Masses that were taking place during Covid at the Mass Stones? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that these Mass Stones are where Irish Catholics under British rule would go to have secret Masses back in the 17th century, but that they also in some cases may have been used for other kinds of pre-Christian sacrificial rituals. So, how would you frame that? And did you ever go to one of these Masses?

Gaven: So I never went to one of the Masses. But where I grew up in Belfast - so I grew up, just a little bit outside of Belfast, just a couple minutes drive, at a place called [inaudible], where they filmed an episode of Game of Thrones and the TV series, Sons of Vanity, Season Three; they drive through it. So that's my claim to fame, but I grew up there.

Ryan: Is it a megalithic site, or?

Gaven: No, it's sort of up on the side of a mountain. And there's a glen and forest and everything. And, so it's called "Glen.”. And there's a Mass Rock there. And so, when we were young there was a whole big deal about this Mass Rock and people just went, when you went down into the fields or the forest to play as kids, you went to the Mass rock and all.

Ryan: Wow.

Gaven: And then the local parish they organized Masses at it just to commemorate the people of the parish. And so, yeah, you're right in saying that these Mass Rocks were used to avoid the British forces. And there's stories about some of the churches in Belfast, which were set up to look like houses and the altars maybe look like kitchen tables and all the rest. But you're also correct, I think, that some of these older Mass Rocks were sites of celebrations in pagan worship. I've heard that. I don't know if I can verify it, but let's say that it is true. So, what I think about that? First of all, if it's just a normal Mass at the Pagan site: we are called to celebrate the Mass, and recusant priests in England as well celebrate Mass in cubbyholes and houses and places like that. So long as the proper form and the rubric of the mass and all the rest is followed, I don't see an issue, because God gives grace sufficient to the challenges that we face.

When it comes to, let's say a Mass Rock in which pagan sacrifices occurred, that might not be the most prudent thing to do. I'm not sure if it would be a problematic thing to do in itself, but it might not be a prudent thing to do. But I would see that within the context of what I was saying. Christ transforms nature and purifies nature. Particularly purifies it spiritually. It redirects the spiritual experiences that people have to him.

And so in a way, you could see the celebrating of a Mass at one of these Mass Rocks which was formerly Pagan as christening the Mass Rock. Correcting it to Christ. And that would be a nice way to see it. If it's permitted; there could be something in Canon Law which forbids it, but if it's permissible, I would read it that way, that it christens the Mass Rock.

Ryan: So that idea that there would be a resurgence of Christian faith through a renewed openness to nature religions would seem to be running in almost an opposite direction than the idea that there would be a resurgence of Christian Faith through recovery of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways. But that's something that you're pretty actively involved in, is trying to recuperate the Five Ways, for a contemporary apologetics, right? And it seems like when you teach these undergraduates, many of whom I gather are not particularly formed in the Christian faith already - How does that work?

Gaven: There's a lot of angles there. We can tackle that. I think the mind and the heart aren't separate from each other. The heart is informed by the mind and the heart is really just the desire of the mind for the good. Our minds, our intellects, they come to rest in the truth. They see the true as good, and they direct us towards the good as an object of desire.

Something that I was talking about in my talk yesterday is that when it comes to Aquinas and Bonaventure and people like that, they fell in love with God and wanted to be a saint. And their sainthood drew them to the academic life. And in being drawn to the academic life, they sought to express the truths about God that they have come to realize and incarnate in themselves and embody in themselves, and that that meant asking the difficult questions that people are asking about God, which includes issues of whether or not God exists, what is his nature, as well as how do I orient my private life of prayer to God as well, how ought I to live my life. Those more existential questions. They're all part and parcel of that same process of trying to become a saint.

And for me, my goal in life is to be a saint. There's no Saint Gaven on the calendar. There's no Saint Gaven that I know of. Well, there is a Saint Gavinus, who is a soldier saint; I believe he's a Roman soldier. So there's him. But my goal in life is to be a saint.

And in order to be a saint, I've been drawn to this academic life. As I said at the beginning, I sort of got into philosophy, saw that I was all right at it, and pursued things from there. And God's never put anything else in my way. He's always, for some reason, kept me in the philosophical life, even when it wasn't bringing a salary, even when it didn't have a position, and you're struggling to find work and you're having trouble writing articles. God didn't give me any other option but to pursue philosophy.

And I always find that when you listen to God and you kind of do what he wants you to do, things aren't easier, but you're just more content. We're called to follow the Lamb. And you're an Ireland here - have you ever tried following a lamb in a field? It doesn't go in a straight line. It goes everywhere.”

So in following God to be a saint, he's brought me into philosophy and I've been asking these sorts of questions about God's existence and nature, how to live a good life, and trying to put forth these formal responses to them because these are the interlocutors that I have.

And so I've become well known for my work on Aquinas. But I think when you bring up teaching this to people: it's one thing to put it down on paper, and I think we should do that. I think people should be able to read this material and judge it for themselves. But when we engage with people, students in the classroom, I think a student can spot a mile away a somebody who's inauthentic. One needs to be authentic. One can't just be up there gushing about this material, you know? Talking about how great it is, and taking us through a whole paper about something when our heart isn't in it, because then our words go out, they go around the classroom, they go through the ears of the students, they come out the other ear and they come back to you.

You're not being a Socratic midwife when you do that. You're basically speaking at the student. You're not drawing out of the student what needs to be drawn out. I like to think when I present this material, the students can see my authenticity, its meaningfulness, its importance, why I think it should be important for them. And if they catch the bug, if they see something interesting in it, then they pursue it. Well that's my job; that's what I'm there to do. So that's my experience of teaching.

Ryan: David Hart asked, at the beginning of his talk, "Is there a future of Christian thinking? Or just a posterity? Does Christian thinking only have a retirement plan?" How do you respond to that?

Gaven: Yeah, so one of the best pieces of advice I was ever given for writing papers is that today's writing is editing yesterday's work. Today's writing is editing yesterday's work. you always have something which you're editing and chipping away at, and as you edit and chip away at it, you end up writing more and that's how things get written. And the history of Christian thinking goes right back to Christ. Christ gives us the Deposit of Faith and then the apostles and those that come after them, and those who succeed them right up till today we are just editing what came before.

There is a historic Deposit of Faith that our systematic theologians figure out and they put down in dogmas and we have our creeds. And that's grand. And that figures out what it is we're committed to. But Christian thinking is editing our thoughts around that, forming our thoughts around that, to see where we can go with it.

And so I think, when it comes to the future of Christian thinking, the future will always be a creative retrieval of the past to see how it will allow us to face the challenges that we are facing today. Because St. Thomas Aquinas is dead and buried. And Decartes and Hume and Kant have all come in between. If St. Thomas Aquinas were alive today, he would be engaging with these significant authors, theologians, thinkers that there are today. And he would do so using Augustine, Avicenna and everybody that he uses because that's what he did in his own day. And as I was saying in my paper yesterday, don't just be another be another Thomas. We can't just do Thomism for the sake of being Thomists. We have to try to be Thomas. Reading Thomas can help sharpen this and can help us address the questions of today, but Thomas never read Kant. Whereas I have read Kant. So I need to try and figure out Kant, given that I have been convinced of Aquinas's metaphysical system, and I have to come to terms with that and I either have to show that Kant was wrong or there might be a creative way in reading Kant, such as McDowell, from Pittsburgh, where you are. There may be a real interesting way of reading Kant, which is consistent with what I'm committed to with Thomism. I think that's what we have to do today. When it comes to being Christian, that's what Christian thinkers have to do today: to engage with the interesting thinkers of today from the standpoint of those of the past.

It's very much a shoulders of giants approach, I think. And, if we get rid of the giants, then we have to start all over. And we can't really start all over. I think only when we have come to understand and see what the great figures of the past came to understand and see, then that's when we can transcend them. And when we own them. That's what I think of the future.

Ryan: In so many theological genealogies of Modernity, it seems that there was a point where Christian thinking was at an advantage to where we are today. 30 years have gone by, maybe even a little bit more, but about about 30 years have gone by since Radical Orthodoxy took up Foucault's genealogical method, turned it against secularization hypotheses, Whiggish grand narratives, and even incipiently nihilist accounts of modern philosophy coming out of the Heideggerian tradition. Then, in Radical Orthodoxy, it started out that, before the Reformation, we were at an advantage. And then it turned out that before the 13th century, we were at an advantage and now it just seems to keep getting pushed back and back. And David Hart took it back today to pre-Nicaea or even pre-Augustine. Has there ever been a point at which we were a greater advantage for the future of Christian thinking than we are today?

Gaven: Yeah. Whenever Christ was here and incarnate. I think that's where we had the greatest advantage. After that we're just trying to follow Christ and the kingdom which he built and which he instituted. Christ being incarnate was God present here at one particular point on the earth at one particular time. He ascends into heaven, he sends the Spirit. The Spirit descended at Pentecost, the Spirit hasn't ascended again.

We have the spirit. So we have that presence of God throughout the Church's kingdom. So we are always going to be at an advantage. But it's not an advantage over a period of history. It's an advantage over the world. God's kingdom will always have that advantage over the world.

And Christians and Christian thinkers, unfortunately, when they engage with the world, sometimes forget that they're in the world, but they're not of the world. And so I get a sense that they're not heroic in engaging with the world and they don't have that confidence of Pentecost of possessing the Spirit and casting out into the deep.

I think we're always going to have periods in history of thought where Christianity waxes and wanes, but we're never going to have a period in history where Christianity dies out, because Christ gave us his Church and the Spirit enlivens the Church and the blessed Trinity resides in every one of us through our baptism. So we are always going to have a Church, and we're always going to have Christianity and the gates of hell won't stand against it. So in being a member of the Communion of Saints through baptism, our duty is to sanctify the world. Our success will be our success.

And we might have Christendom, and we may not have Christendom, we may feel his persecution the way we did in Ireland, but the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Maybe God wants a good sort of persecution, to liven up the church. Maybe God wants the Church to thrive. It's up to him. All we are required to do is just respond to the grace that God has given us in the individual situation.

And maybe not read the history of philosophy like some grand Hegelian, you know, a clash of ism's and we have to try to figure which one is at the top of the spiral and which one is moving towards the middle. Maybe we should read history like that. Maybe we should just read history as the engagement of individuals, the encounter of individuals, some of which are Christian, some of which are not. Trying to build a society either as Christians or either as Christians and non-Christian alike.

I think if you think of history that way, then you cease to think of it in the way that was being discussed maybe today, that there seemed to be this period of great Christianity, but then prior to that there was even greater advantage and so on and so forth.

Christ came. He died; he resurrected; he ascended; he sent the Spirit. And I don't think we really need any more than that. We don't need to dwell too much on the past. I think we should dwell on that more.

Ryan: Well, and he said, unless I ascend to my father you won't have the Spirit.

Okay. Final question. It became scandalous news recently that there were only nine seminarians entering in all of Ireland last year. Contextualize that for us.

Gaven: Those nine seminarians were nine seminarians for dioceses. So they were secular priests. They're entering a community of more than nine, put it that way.

A lot of the students you've see today here walking the cloisters are seminary students. But what we've also seen over the last few days is an army of Dominicans in their habits, all of them students. I think there's about 14 or 15 students, and I don't even think they're all the Irish Dominican students. And they're certainly not all the Irish Dominican priests. And these Irish Dominican students, they're younger than me. I'm 39. They're all younger than me. All young men going to be priests, preachers serving the Church in Ireland.

So, okay, nine people enter the national seminary. Well, they're for dioceses, but a lot more men are entering religious orders such as the Dominicans and others. And they're going to be of service in the Irish Church. That's the context there. There are men entering the priesthood in, putting themself forth for the priesthood.

Ryan: And the population of Ireland is?

Gaven: I have no idea. Several million? Four or five million?

Ryan: Yeah. It's not a lot.

Gaven: It's not as big as Texas. We have a small population. And one of the good things to see is that men who have a calling to the priesthood are looking towards religious orders as well as looking towards the secular clergy, because that speaks to a thriving Catholicism with different strands and different tapestries. If the only Catholicism you have is that as the secular priesthood in the diocese, well that's great. But if that's all your Catholicism is, then it becomes quite univocal. It becomes a single-minded experience of the Church and Catholic life. Whereas when you have Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines - if you like the liturgy, you go to the Benedictines, if you like the preaching, you go to the Dominicans - it can enrich your Christian life.

You can still live off chicken and broccoli. And that's fine. And that could be secular clergy experience, or you can have the Italian dining experience and that's with all the religious orders and your chicken and broccoli, as well. That's what's occurring in Ireland at the minute. We're getting a lot of vocations to all these various different religious orders, and it's enriching and enlivening the country.

Ryan: Gaven Kerr, thank you very much.

Gaven: Thanks very much.