Transcript for Episode 12

Ryan: I'm here with Terence Sweeney, who is the editor at large of the Genealogies of Modernity blog, a project co-sponsored by the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania and also by Beatrice Institute. And we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in that project.

Terence is also finishing up his PhD in philosophy at Villanova and has been publishing a slew of articles, with five of them forthcoming in the next six months or so. And so there's a lot to… Terence is an up and coming young scholar of philosophy and theology.

So it's very nice to have you with us, Terence.

Terence: It's good to be here.

Ryan: Terence, why did God create time?

Terence: Because… It's a good question. But I think love always desires someone else to love. And God's eternality means that if there wasn't – you can't have duplicate eternalities. And so for there to be others to love, God made time, which is what allows for plurality. And so a plurality of both God loving the plurality and the plurality able to love God and to love each other. That would be that would be my fast answer.

Ryan: According to a certain reading of Nietzsche, as the editor of the Genealogies of Modernity blog, you must be feeling senile by now. Has this project been aging you?

Terence: Yeah, one of the articles I wrote that I liked, partially inspired by having a child, was about Hannah Arendt and newness because there is this threat of suddenly doing all this geological work and getting older and older and realizing everything has more and more causes and family connections. But to realize that actually, this work when it has been really done well, actually, I think what Nietzsche wants and the “untimeliness” of things, is to be able to make something new. And that, I think, is also grounded in possibility of a theological genealogy since God has a strong insistance on “See, I'm doing something new.” I actually think that genealogical work can participate in that. That tracing the olds does not doom us to gray hair, even if I'm starting to have some on my chin.

Ryan: Right. So what distinguishes Christian genealogy from other kinds of genealogy?

Terence: Yeah, so I think, I mean, I’m definitely influenced by MacIntyre here and trying to think through this question that in some sense we can think of there being three, at least in Western thoughts. And so the modern or enlightenment, or what MacIntyre calls “encyclopedia” focus, which tends to be this progress-based celebration of rational knowledge moving along at a good clip. Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment”’s process of critique in which the liberal modern subjects ultimately doesn't really have to critique themselves. Not my favorite position.

But the Nietzschean-Foucauldian tradition really is one that wants to deny anything besides temporality and historicity. And so there's just the flow, the flux of time and events. And things happen. We can analyze them, but things happen.

And so the Christian genealogical tradition is trying to take seriously that account by not denying the meaning of temporality and historicity while also seeing an intimacy with the eternal. That in fact actually what we get with the eternal is that that space of contrast that lets history be real and lets us see where the eternal pops into time, most significantly in the Incarnation and then in the sending of the Holy Spirit.

So it's this intimacy with the temporal and the eternal, and it's a hard task because you can start drifting in the direction where everything becomes a focus on stasis, where all we really want to talk about really is the eternal, but then the temptation and the other direction is to slide to mere temporality. And so finding that way, and in this sense this is in some ways a Christological challenge. We want to talk about Christ, how do we speak of his humanity in a real way, and how do we speak of his divinity in a real way, without losing either? And I think that's the task of the Christian genealogist: to take seriously time while taking seriously the eternal.

Ryan: The Bible is invested in literal genealogy. It's all over the place. Books often begin with that. Two, and in some ways, three of the gospels begin with genealogies. What's going on in the Gospel genealogies? How do you think about the work that's being accomplished there?

Terence: Yeah, I think that's a key question. Something I really started reflecting on more after this past summer's Genealogies 3 when you were talking about this question and trying to see really how all four gospel beginnings – of course, Matthew and Luke place their genealogies in slightly different locations – what they're trying to draw on. And I think in some sense Matthew grounding in the particular of the Jewish tradition. And then, and Luke drawing on a much more, broader story of humanity being the sons and daughters of Adam. And I think both want to show this family connection for the Hebrew people and then the family connection for all of humanity at the same time. We need to think of the Chosen people and the nations together. And that's ultimately part of the Christian vision, itself a fraught project because of the way Christians have treated the Chosen people, and sometimes have forgotten that that lineage doesn't cease with Christ. So looking at both the story of humanity and the story of Jewish people and then the Church as the Chosen people grafted onto the Jewish people.

But then again, John's insistence that to speak of Jesus requires to speak of the Logos. And so trying to think those clearly genealogical texts with John’s “In the beginning.”

And then Mark, who wants none of that, he just is BOOM: “Repent and believe the Gospel.” Jesus shows up almost out of nowhere. John says, “This guy's coming.” And then he is there and we're off to the races. And I think, on the question of senility and feeling old from genealogies, one of the great bracing things about Mark is it's immediate. It's now. That's the kairological reasoning. The Kairos is now; this is the moment of decision. And sometimes family trees pop up out of nowhere and we have to be willing to be faced by that.

So I think trying to think all four together is again, another great Christian task. Why four gospels? Why not one? Well, we can't just ignore them and we don't want to explain away each one, so to be challenged to think with each one in in different veillances.

Ryan: In 2004, I shared a taxi at a conference with Merold Westphal, and I distinctly remember him pronouncing that this new century was beyond metaphysics. Metaphysics had been overcome. The future of philosophy would no longer have metaphysics, and the future of the Christian faith depended on overcoming metaphysics. And at that conference that was held at Purdue, it seemed that he was absolutely right. I mean, granted, there was still some papers about overcoming metaphysics, but there were also a lot of papers that were clearly working beyond metaphysics or after metaphysics, and it sure seemed like the future of philosophy was going to proceed without metaphysics.

But metaphysics seems to be making a comeback, not only in the enlarged footprint of analytic Thomism, but also in some circles of continental philosophy. How do you explain the return of metaphysics?

Terence: Yeah. Its death was maybe a little bit anticipatory.

I think, I mean, in one sense the postmetaphysical claims, which are old; I mean, we're going to get after metaphysics with Kant and then now we're after metaphysics with Hegel and now we're after metaphysics again and again. But I think it speaks to a recurring question that we do care about the being of things. I actually think in some ways, Walker Percy, the novelist, is a great aspect about this in some of his essays where the child who wants to know the name of something and wants to be able to say, “That is a robin” and gets excited for such a thing is I think speaking to a metaphysical exigency, a need for being.

And I also think this is where the influence of someone like Emmanuel Levinas, the great Jewish Lithuanian philosopher, and William Desmond, a great Irish philosopher, both want to think metaphysics because they think to think metaphysics is to think you're other. That being, certainly for Desmond, is not radically other, since I, too, am, but that it's the allowing the other to appear. And in a lot of a sense, with postmetaphysical thought, what ends up happening is you have some version of thought thinking itself, a wide variety of those versions. And so I think figures like Desmond and Levinas pushing again. That we should be trying to think of what is other to thinking and being is other to thinking. And for Desmond that otherness is intimate. There's a communicative love there. And so I think that's one of the big reasons metaphysics won't go away and is starting to come back.

The other reason I think it's coming back is because the anti-metaphysical crowd has had some really important lessons for us that if we just say, “Well, the substance of human is we're a rational subsistent being,” blah, blah, whereas you would seem there's no difference between Terence Sweeney in 2020 and my ancestor in 1020, that their static anthropology or even questions about a static God where we can't think any kind of change, that mode of metaphysics, which is coming back in analytic journalism often, well, it can't speak to history.

And so I think metaphysics is coming back because the anti-metaphysics crowd taught us something valuable. But now we want to think about continuity over time. How am I related to my ancestor in southwest Ireland a thousand years ago? And is that relation partially grounded in some kind of continuity of a human nature? So that's why I think it's coming back. It's a perennial question and the anti-metaphysicians taught us something really valuable about it.

Ryan: So, Desmond has described modernity as a system of resistances to metaphysics. Does this mean that much of what goes by the name of “post-modern philosophy” is actually the culmination of modernity?

Terence: Yeah, I think… So for Desmond, he – always terminologically challenging thinker – but modern thought, it is an obsessive search for rational explanations tended to a univocity. That we just want clear and determinant explanations. And that way of thinking ultimately creates its own problems. And post-modern thought really is trying to shock, deconstruct that.

But it's still the case that in postmodern thought, it's the agent doing that work. That I, Terence, will deconstruct some univocal framework. And for Desmond, the critique there, the reason why… the equivocal flip side of the modern project is it's the emphasis on the autonomous agent, even if they claim to be deconstructing that agent, which they often are, but who then is doing the deconstructing? And so for Desmond, an attempt for another kind of post-modernity would be one where we are allowing the other really to speak to me and not so much about my agency or emphasis on receptivity and communication so that the other, whether it's the tree that I liaison the person with whom I speak, or the big Other, God, speaks to me as other. And so I see that as the space of being.

Ryan: What is authority?

Terence: Yeah, great. So one of my greatest successes as an academic was John Caputo, along with Merold Westphal were at Villanova, and they're on a panel and Caputo just gave his talk on Saturday. And I asked, I said “all this stuff, but what's authority?” And Jack Caputo told me afterwards that he had to rewrite his paper because he realized he really can't – what does it mean to talk about religion without an account of authority? Hurray me. But I didn't agree with his response to my ultimate question, but…

I mean, authority is the experience of a community having a shared founding, some kind of sufficiently strong task that we have. So it's not so much – I think a mutilation of this would be that I have the power and I tell you what to do. But rather, one might think of a team. There's going to be a leader, but the leader is part of the team, and their task is to serve a purpose that extends beyond the team. And so, for Hannah Arendt, the paradigmatic example of this is really the Roman Empire, with this strong sense of a founding and the task was to work for that founding in new ways over time. Ultimately, Rome falls, although it's hard to tell when it fell.

So in some sense, the theological task inherited by Augustine's work through Roman philosophy is the authority to teach the Gospel. And that authority suffuses the whole Church. Parents have to teach children. Neighbors have to teach neighbors. And so the authority there is to “go and make learners of all people.” So in a theological sense it suffuses the community, and in a political sense it suffuses the community. Arendt, one of the reasons she had such a fondness for the American project was she saw an account of authority in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a task to build and repair that foundation.

Ryan: If the young Augustine were a college student today, what kind of college student would he be?

Terence: Yeah, I think he'd be interesting. We assume he'd be a partier and… But yeah, I don't think he really was. I mean, he settles down with a girlfriend at about 18 and stays with her for, I think, 12 years. I don't remember exactly how long, but about that much time.

So yeah, he fools around a little bit, but he's mostly really, really driven. I bet you he would've come out of high school, having taken plenty of summer internships and SAT prep classes. He would be a kid from nowhere, some backwater corner of the United States of mixed ethnic backgrounds, dealing with the complexities of people often reminding him of his African-sounding dialect and dealing with the snobbery of I guess what we would call these days “coastal elites.”

But he'd be at U. Chicago or U. Penn, Villanova U. Pitt, one of these high-level schools. And he'd be working very hard. I assume by the end of college he'd have an internship for a senator in DC and be heading off to give the occasional press release. And sure, tagging along with his live-in girlfriend and maybe drinking a little too much, but never too much, because you got a job to do and your dad is spending a lot of money on you.

Ryan: Right. So thinking of the young Augustine then, as a winner in the meritocratic game or race, what then is the conversion that takes place in that status-seeking rush?

Terence: I think a key moment that sometimes gets forgotten is the story, he's going to give this speech in praise of the emperor. He is going to say how the emperor's a great guy and blah, blah, blah. And on the way there, he sees a homeless guy, drunk and cheerful. And the homeless guy apparently is yelling at everyone, “Have a great day. Have a great day.” And Augustine looks at him and says, “This guy's happier than I am and he's speaking lovingly.” I mean, “Have a great day” is a kindly thing to say. And I think that's a key moment in the account of conversion that we forget because he suddenly thinks, “I'm going to go and say a bunch of lies to praise an emperor who is part of the long history of conquest, including the conquest of my own my own part of the world. And everyone's afterwards going to praise me and that will help me get a governorship someday, particularly if I ditch my girlfriend and marry a rich girl.” And he sees this homeless man, and he thinks, I think he thinks he should be more like that man.

And so that, I think, is going to lay the foundation for what happens in the garden when he “takes up and reads” and the message is to put on Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ is not a member of the meritocracy. In fact, quite the opposite. It's grace. Christ is the giver. Christ himself is grace by the Incarnation. And so suddenly he starts thinking a little differently and it's notable that what he finds solace in is yes, definitely that message that he can overcome his unchaste approach to life, but it's also to release oneself from envy and this jealousy and desire for success.

And what does he do almost immediately? He hasn't even mentioned that he breaks off a relationship with somebody. He quits his job and he goes to live at a house and sit around and talk to people about philosophy and listen to people recite parts of the Aeneid. He goes to a liberal arts college and, sure, he ends up becoming a great success anyway. I think ambition never left his heart, but that ambition suddenly started shifting its veillance towards, “I'm going to return to the backwater of North Africa. Plenty of corn coming out of there, but not so fancy. I'm going to go to a place called Hippo, which is particularly not fancy, and I'm going to spend my life preaching to people who know a little bit about being conquered.

Ryan: For Plato, philosophy is a spiritual exercise, but Plato did not believe in the gods. So in what way can we say that Plato prayed? And was Plato's prayer different from the meditation practices of Neostoics? You know, the kinds of things that that we hear about on “life hack podcasts” and so on?

Terence: Yeah. Yeah. So my take on both Socrates, who's harder to know than Plato cause he's behind all these dialogues, and on Plato is that, really, we should be thinking of them certainly as philosophers, definitely, but also as religious reformers. That they see in the religious practice of Athens and the Greek cities different modes of atheism. One, a rising mode in which we deny God's existence. So it's pretty rare, but is starting to come up. And see some of these Sophists. And other modes where the gods don't care about us: also, still probably rare, but growing. And then the last mode is: “Well, if you want something, you give the gods a heifer, and then you get what you want.” So you bribe them.

And Plato wants to purify this, and so I would contend Plato definitely does believe in the gods. But he wants to insist the gods are purely virtuous, that they are the wise ones, and that their movement is to attend to the forms, or the ideas, better Greek, and ultimately to revolve around the Good that is beyond being, which he sometimes calls God, although is confusing about.

And so what I do when I pray is I'm keeping company with people who are, or beings who are, superior to me and who can help elevate me. So prayer is a process of keeping better company, relating with the gods, and so as a consequence, becoming, ultimately the goal is yourself to become immortal, without body and contemplating the ideas.

So I think where Plato is very different than Neostoics in this is that meditative practices, which we can tend to be enormously valuable, but they tend to be self-work, which is great. But prayer is “other talk.” When you're praying, you're talking to somebody else, and in the Christian tradition, somebody else is talking to you and that person, God taught you how to talk.

So, but even for Plato, I think in this count, when we're praying, we're keeping company with the gods who are “other” with us. So meditation is really valuable as self-work, but prayer is other-directed. And that, I think, is one of the key lessons that that Platonic theology has for us. And is valuable for thinking through Christian practices and really any religious or meditative practice, that sometimes we need to move beyond meditation and talk to somebody else.

Ryan: So if fear of the Lord is an affective disposition, a certain approach to knowing and to loving, then it would seem that fear of the Lord is a habit. And if it's a habit, then how does one acquire a habit of feeling like this?

Terence: Yeah, yeah. The greats’ problem of how do we acquire habits which has haunted virtue ethics since Aristotle.

Ryan: But in this case, it seems like there's the kinds of habits and habituated practices that we tend to think about are not feelings, right? And so, I think there's, in the affective turn and late-20th-century humanities, we begin to think about structures of feeling in a way that's somewhat new in the intellectual tradition. And yet feelings can be habituated and then we also don't typically think of fear of the Lord as a habituated thing. But it would seem that it could be.

Terence: Yeah. So I think to develop this affect and we'll just, we'll bracket that in itself would be a grace.

But I think what matters here is attention to religious practice, so in particular reading scripture, where you're going to encounter a God who is pretty wild and does not act according to your expectations and requires that you act according to his expectations. And this wild God is ultimately the more fundamental reason. I'm warped, I don't actually understand what's reasonable, but that wild God appears to me in such a way. And so reading things like the Psalms in particular is going to be the kind of things that's going to help cultivate this, but also trying to develop yourself so that when you see the command, particularly commands you don't like, you know, love your enemies, care for the poor, these commands, the response, it could be a thoughtful engagement, but the response is: do them. And so seeing these passages and saying, “This is something that is required of me.”

So I think that's part of how cultivating affect is, it's a hard nut to crack. And I actually would have to really think about more what we're doing when we're cultivating an affect. But certainly, Scripture seeing these as commands and seeing them as commands in the face of others that we might walk by and ignore, the poor, the oppressed African American, and realizing that the command there is one that I should tremble at because my neglect to the poor or the neglected African American or others, it weighs heavy on the possibility of my relationship with God. So that's part of an answer.

Ryan: So, shifting gears, if you’re game, we’ll have a little interlude of the game “Would You Rather?” where you have to pick between two options, often, both undesirable or two wonderful options that you would never in real life want to choose exclusively. Are you ready?

Terence: I'm ready.

Ryan: Would you rather be stuck in a desert island with the collected works of C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien?

Terence: Tolkien.

Ryan: Would you rather send your kid to a nominally Catholic college that still has pockets of truth-seeking or to a secular university that has a very strong Catholic or Christian studies program such as the Collegium Institute or the Beatrice Institute?

Terence: Yeah, I love nominal Catholic colleges. So I'll go, I'll go with that one. I’d like them to change a little bit. They're nominalists. But yeah, yeah. Go Wildcats. Nova.

Ryan: Early Augustine or late Augustine?

Terence: What's the difference? I guess ultimately late Augustine. Late Augustine doesn't lose the intellectual focus, but late Augustine's, when he is like, “Well, how you want to know how to get closer to God? Help the poor guy next to you.” And that's not in early Augustine. He has to learn that. He has to learn that from Christ. He has to learn that from his mother. He has to learn that from the people of North Africa.

So there's a lot of continuity, but if I had to, later Augustine.

Ryan: Henri De Lubac or Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange?

Terence: Oh, that's not hard. Henri De Lubac. I mean, I love the Dominicans, go Friars. But De Lubac.

Ryan: Guinness or Irish Whiskey?

Terence: Guinness. Beer man.

Ryan: The Gospel of Luke or the Gospel of John?

Terence: I'm going to go with Luke. Yeah.

Ryan: Hannah Arendt or Martin Heidegger?

Terence: Oh yeah, yeah. Hannah Arendt. I mean, I don't think you have to be able to admire a thinker's personal life in order to engage with them, and there's a lot to learn from Heidegger. But if I'm going to have to spend my life with somebody, I'd like to spend my life with somebody whom I admire, not with somebody who was in just so many ways, a terrible man.

Ryan: The Canterbury Tales or The Four Quartets?

Terence: The Canterbury Tales. It’s ass-kissing and just, it's just too much fun.

Ryan: Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways or Pascal's Wager?

Terence: I'll go with Pascal's Wager.

Ryan: Why?

Terence: I think it's, partially... We'll see. I'm going to teach it this semester for the first time. We'll see how that goes. I've been teaching the Five Ways past couple semesters.

I love the Five Ways, but Pascal really captures the fact that, this, particularly this one liner “You must wager.” And what Pascal says is he means that not just, it's a moral imperative: in fact, you are wagering. No matter what you're doing, you're in this game. And that existential challenge that the stakes are high and I'm actually already playing them I think is really…

Well, for me, when in college I read the Five Ways and I wrote, recently reread this essay by 19-year-old me – it's not good, but – critiquing the Five Ways. But when I read Pascal, my heart was on fire.

Ryan: What would the Augustinian analysis of Twitter be according to use and enjoyment or curiosity?

Terence: Yeah, so definitely you should not enjoy it. Don't enjoy it. You should only enjoy God and other people in their relationship to God. Twitter can be used. There’s an enormous danger of curiosity on it. I mean, there's partially, it's constantly feeding my eyes mind with stuff and… but to use it.

And I don't know why, but I haven't really encountered as much negativity as others. I was struck recently by a couple people I saw on Twitter talking about how many people have blocked them. And I haven't blocked anyone and to my knowledge, I haven't been blocked by anyone. I don't know if I should actually just try harder and then maybe I'll get blocked. But I have found remarkable ways that all of a sudden I realize I'm actually connected to somebody. I send them an email to write for Gen Mod and I check on Twitter and realize that we already follow each other, that there's this little tendril of connection and you see interesting discussions floating on up there.

So I think it can be a really valuable place for use, for writers to get ideas out there. But it's not quite as bad as the one ring in The Lord of the Rings, but one should be very careful putting that ring on.

Ryan: Curiosity is one of the chief virtues that universities desire to instill in their students. Is this an instance of the transvaluation of values, where something that was considered a vice in pre-modern times has now become a virtue, or is just a confusion of terms?

Terence: Both? I think we do have this way of talking about curiosity now that Augustine would still roundly condemn, and that I would: we should always be taking in more information and as many viewpoints as possible and without asking the serious questions. And in some sense, that's the importance of Pascal's Wager. One reason I want to teach it this semester is that all the stuff, it can be a distraction from what are the core things I had to figure in my life. I can add endless amounts of information and disregard the question of God, disregard the question of what do we make of Ahmaud Arbery's death. It’s flooding me. And that, in that sense, I think Augustine would still be strongly critical.

So in some sense this transvaluation that we've shifted. Like of course endless knowledge, knowledge acquisition is great. So in that sense, I think that is a real transvaluation. And I don't know a lot of the scholarship, but there has definitely been work on genealogies of curiosity.

On the flip side, I think there is some amount of the word meaning something a little different. Augustine is actually pretty knowledgeable about the natural sciences for his time. He is often referencing them, and names of stars and is very, very interested in plants and animals and weird reproductive habits and weird ways things eat in other parts of the hemisphere. So the desire to know is good and Augustine definitely makes room for it. So in that sense, that's what's the “pro” aspect of curiosity.

The key is though, is it obscuring the demands for justice, demands for love, the demand for God, the demand of God? In that sense, I think Augustine would still be very strongly critical of universities and their “rah rah rah” curiosity.

Ryan: So the 21st century university is ordered toward knowledge production, right? That's what you'll find at the top of all the mission statements of at least research universities. But a charitable way to read this is that knowledge production is for the sake of problem solving. So the assumption underlying these mission statements is that the world is full of problems and we produce and accumulate knowledge, new knowledge, to address these new problems. So now knowledge production is ordered toward problem solving. Could that be considered interested knowledge rather than disinterested?

So it would seem that the modern research university is not as invested in curiosity as its mission statements might claim. Do you see this as engaged and committed interest in problem solving? Is this a form of charitable knowing?

Terence: Yeah, that's interesting, because you can put some of these problem-solving endeavors towards incredibly good use. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of places working very hard on a vaccine for the coronavirus. I'm sure some of those are universities. I, along with everyone, or alas, almost everyone, are eager for such a vaccine to arise. And that can be a real act of service.

I think Augustine didn't have that robust of a sense, probably for a lot of historic reasons, of the ability to fix problems. Yeah, you go to the doctor, but you can anticipate the doctor is going to cut your leg off the same way he cut his leg off 500 years ago. And roughly speaking, that was the case. So I don't think he had quite the imaginary for the idea of productive research solving problems to make the world better.

Conversely though, I mean, extensive research into psychology so we can design marketing programs that will constantly convince us to buy more: that's solving a problem (how do we get people to buy more?). But to what ends? So yeah, I mean, coronavirus vaccine, I can get behind, advancements in digital humanities, I don't know a lot about them, but that sounds good too. But all in the service of capitalist system that is often spiritually corrosive and unjust: that doesn't seem like problem solving. That seems like problem creating.

Ryan: So to go back to Pascal's Wager and this sense of committed knowledge-seeking, does this affective commitment apply only to major existential questions, or is it also a necessary disposition even for knowing things like chemistry or physics or the history of the Crusades?

Terence: Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I think they're… Yeah, it is good to moderate a little here in the sense that our interest levels don't always have to be existential. I mean, if all people could only investigate things that are existentially important, human life would suddenly slough away enormous areas of creativity and dynamic enterprise. So not everything has to be Pascal's-Wager level of intensity. But when we're dealing with these questions, I mean, certainly when I've talked to historians, or I had a great conversation several years ago while I was couch surfing in Kentucky – I hope couch surfing survives Coronavirus – and I was staying at this place and this woman, she was getting her PhD and she was studying the digestive tract of a specific spider, how one kind of spider digests. And it was fascinating. And I mean, maybe Augustinians would get a little nervous about that, but I think ultimately Augustine would say, “Yeah, it's the glory of God. What a wonderful thing that spiders digest in various ways.” And so I think for that person, there's a deep need to understand the spider. And that's rich. The danger is the deep need to understand the spider blocks out any other core questions: to understand God, to understand others. But I don't think it needs to. I've known house painters and carpenters who have intense focus on being a good house painter or being a good carpenter, and maybe figuring out how to fix their pickup truck when they get home, but still have a lot of room for God and for taking care of their little kids and volunteering at the local fire department.

So I think we are not infinite by any means, but we are capacious. And so we can take a deep interest in the digestive tract of spiders while still taking seriously the question of God, justice and what love means.

Ryan: So maybe another way to come at this is Gabriel Marcel presents a contrast between problems and mysteries. First of all, when Marcel talks about problems, does he mean the kinds of problems that the modern research university sets itself to solving? And then is there a way where the seeking after mystery can be pursued as part of pursuing a problem?

Terence: Yeah, so I definitely think Marcel would say a lot of what research universities are doing and what most us are doing most of the time is dealing with problems. And I think it's important when Marcel has a distinction between mystery and problem. The point is not that problems are bad or that we shouldn't pay attention to them. If a problem is determining how to fix the gears on my bike, that's great. Get to work. Marcel's concern is that if we let problems dominate our whole way of thinking, that's a problem. So he wants to insist that we need both. His emphasis is on mystery because he thinks we are squelching that.

I think in some sense it's good to be attentive to the way that problems, particularly ones where we're trying to know particular things about particular things, these things can add up to a vision that helps us with questions of mystery. When Augustine is gazing at trees and mountains, at the Mediterranean Sea just off the coast of Algeria, or what we now call Algeria, I think he's trying to pay attention to things. And I think that that little attention, also true of the woman studying spider guts, can help us to start having a vision of certain mysteries. They can almost be propaedeutics or preambles.

The danger is if in thinking that we're going to solve mysteries as though they were problems. Now that I have a six-month-old and I've been married for a year and a half, I can opine on marriage and childbirth, but there are problems that arise, but I wouldn't say that I need to “figure out” marriage like a problem. I have to live it. In that sense it's a mystery. In that sense it's temporal. Because I have to live it now. And if Good Lord's willing and I'm still kicking in 40 years, I'll have to live it then. So I think there's a lot more continuity between mystery and problem and problems actually can help us think about mystery.

Another great example of this would be everything that Annie Dillard writes, but particularly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where she's trying to figure out why a bug eats a frog in a certain way. And you're reading this and like, “This is gross, and why is she writing about this?” And then the next thing you realize it's a theodicy. “Why evil?” So I think there can be a much more fruitful continuity between the two than sometimes we like to think, but we need –

Ryan: And Dillard’s a great example and it seems to me that the pathway there between problem and knowledge, problem and mystery, is wonder.

Terence: Right, right.

Ryan: And it's not so much curiosity. It's interesting that curiosity is all over mission statements. And I have seen the language of wonder popping up here and there, but not as much. And I think this is partly because wonder can seem to be a rival to critical thinking. And anything that could possibly rival critical thinking has to be set aside.

Terence: I think that's right. Yeah.  I think particularly that wonder is experience of being struck by other things. It comes over us. It requires things of us. In my dissertation, I try to argue this dialogical nature to wonder that what we're encountering when we wonder about things is, “What's this other thing like?” whereas critical thinking is an activity done by me on other stuff. I critique; I am the critic. And wonder is not like that. I wouldn't say I want to apply critical reasoning to my wife, rather I should experience with wonder her as a person. And I think, wonder, it's a metaphysical virtue and has been largely banished from most schools. I actually have never seen a mission statement for a standard university type setting.

Ryan: So, because wonder is as much an affective disposition as it is anything else, could I take some time, could I perhaps meditate to get myself into the right disposition of wonder prior to going on Twitter or Facebook or reading the newspaper and then turn that experience of curiosity in the bad sense into an experience of wonder? Is it possible to do that?

Terence: Yeah, I think spending time just watching things, looking out the window – Jess and I have wonderful roof spots where we can sit and watch trees. I'm particularly interested in squirrels – actually can help.

I think for instance Saint Ansel and his prayers and meditations: meditations build you up to get to the point where you can pray. And I think if you practice this way, particularly if you are filled with the wonder of plurality, that there are so many people with so many voices, which is wonderful. We all know there’s a lot of darkness to that, but that's the wonder of plurality that I think, in many ways what Arendt wants to do in her work, I think, is restore wonder to this experience of political plurality.

And when you turn on Twitter, as it were, what you'll find can be actually at times wonderful. There's this group of young scholars, grad students who are just out of PhDs. They call themselves the “Hegel Dads,” for whatever reason. It's four or five guys at different schools right now. And they're super psyched to argue that Hegel is like the most important Christian philosopher. They want us to stop reading William Desmond and Cyril O’Regan. So I don't agree with these guys at all. They don't like Augustine. But they're so ginned up on talking about Hegel and why Hegel is like Origen for our times. And that's pretty amazing. Like that's awesome. Or whoever it is who runs the Twitter account “A Raccoon for Every Hour” that posts a picture of a raccoon on Twitter every hour. I love that person. Like it's amazing that someone would be like, “You know what, I'm going to put pictures of raccoons up.” Yeah, so I think it can be a place full of wonder. Now we all know the ways that it can be a place of curiosity and a place of bitterness and acrimony, but I love those pictures of raccoons.

Ryan: And to what extent do the objects of knowledge determine whether we can approach them with wonder or curiosity or fear of the Lord?

Terence: Yeah. Yeah. I think to some extent, I would say some things are going to depend on the person. I think it's okay that some people are filled with wonder at wilderness and other people don't have much desire to go into wilderness. I go into the wilderness. I love being in the wilderness, but I also love being in a city. And I don't mind that people experience joy in living in different ways. So it's good to recognize particularity is going to be key in this experience. I don't care about the digestive tracts of spiders, even though I find them mild interesting. Studying the digest attractive spiders to me sounds pretty horrible.

So being aware of particularity, I think is key, for different objects, but I also think we should be careful delving – I mean, I think Tolkien said this about C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters – being careful about delving too deeply into dark arts. That if I'm interested in – I can't think of an example, necromancy or something.

Ryan: Fascism.

Terence: Fascism. – I should be very careful about that. Why am I interested in it? Why am I – I'm not doing this by the way, but – why am I suddenly watching endless clips of fascists on YouTube? Well, probably the content there is going to be hard to square with a deep sense of wonder or certainly the fear of the Lord.

Now, this isn't to say that there isn't legitimate research into these things. I remember I was in a college course on the Third Reich and I was watching “Triumph the Will” and someone was like, “What are you watching?” I was like, “It's Nazi propaganda, but it's for a class.”

So being aware that yes, I think certain objects certainly, anything like pornography, maybe a lot of pop culture, seem hard to square with an experience of wonder or certainly the fear of the Lord. So I'd want a lot of breath and plurality there, but I think there are areas where my interest in them… if I have a deep interest in developing more powerful chemical weapons, I can't imagine that that deep interest is grounded in the fear of the Lord. That seems impossible to think.

Ryan: Now I want to read you part of a poem and ask you a question about it. This is William Carlos Williams’s “The Catholic Bells”:

Tho' I'm no Catholic

I listen hard when the bells

in the yellow-brick tower

of their new church

ring down the leaves

ring in the frost upon them

and the death of the flowers

ring out the grackle

toward the south, the sky

darkened by them, ring in

the new baby of Mr. and Mrs.

Krantz which cannot

for the fat of its cheeks

open well its eyes, ring out

the parrot under its hood

jealous of the child

ring in Sunday morning

and old age which adds as it

takes away. Let them ring

only ring!

So what is the relationship between church bells and birds? What difference do birds make to church buildings?

Terence: Yeah, I mean, definitely having climbed into a couple church towers in my life you'll find copious amounts of bird crap in them. So the relationship can often be intimate.

But I think, I mean, the sounds of birds and the sounds of church bells can summon us to something very similar. I mean, some birds don't sing too beautifully. but most are really lovely. I am blessed to be in West Philadelphia. We have lots of trees and consequently lots of birds. And so I can wake up to the sound of the birds chirping, and nowadays, my daughter chirping.

And I think those sounds, they ring out and they call us to attention. We can ignore them at our own peril in some ways. But, so I think both are singing the glory of God. And I think I think that's partially what William Carlos Williams, not himself religious, is hearing in those bells, the ways they summon forth all these different things: the baby, – I've forgotten this poem, this word “the grackle,” which I realize I don't even know that word means here. I've read this poem so many times and, what is that word? The things one does not notice. – So I think that summons forth from us. The bells and birds are both callings.

Ryan: Say you have a church with bells, suppose you're the sexton of a church with bells as you actually are, what traditional protocols are there for using them?

Terence: Yeah, so we typically try to ring – you ring them before Masses as a summons, to let people know Mass is starting soon. You can ring them for the Angelus, which is a Catholic prayer reminding us of the Incarnation. And you ring them at 6:00 PM, noon, and one can ring them at 6:00 AM, although you will probably get complaints if you do that. The other time you're going to ring them is as a death toll. Commonly you would ring the number of years of the person who has passed away, or 70 years is I think the biblical age, if you don’t know the person's death age. So you have a number of occasions.

The best ringing I've ever done was when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. And I went up in the bell tower and just banged away for quite a long time. And I went outside and there were all these people outside cheering. And so you ring them for joy. There will come a day when Pope Francis and Pope Benedict pass away, and I will go over to the church and ring the death toll for the pope. So they can be rung in tragedy and joy. As a summons to church, as a reminder of prayer. They're a wonderful thing.

I didn't get to go to any Easter liturgies this year because of the coronavirus. My wife and I went down at about 9:00 PM for the Easter Vigil, and we rang the Gloria. We hadn't been able to sing it for all of Lent, haven't sung it once for all of Easter. But I got to ring it and people got to hear it. And that's the sound of resurrection.

Ryan: What are the logistics and the pros and cons of keeping a church building perpetually open?

Terence: Yes, this is unfortunately becoming the perpetual battle of my life in West Philadelphia, keeping church doors open. The logistics are in sometimes –

Ryan: In normal times, of course. We're not talking about, no, yeah –

Terence: Yeah. No, I mean, I'm always running into people who think my parish, St. Francis Sales, should lock its doors. And usually the argument for locking the doors, at least in an urban setting is – well, I would say there's two arguments. There's one that I don't agree with, but it has some strength, and there's one I find morally unacceptable.

So one would be the question of danger. If the church is not secured, there's no one onsite always in the building, something could go wrong, whether a crime or an injury. That's a legitimate concern. I think you do what you can to keep the place safe, turning lights on and anything like that. But that's one of the biggest arguments against keeping church doors open, at least in an urban setting.

The other argument tends to be that homeless people – a lot of times we have homeless people come in and they sleep in our church. And some people, whom I shall not name, think that's terrible. And that argument I find completely unacceptable as a Christian, the idea that we would be appalled by the homeless sleeping in our church. I have a hard time seeing the virtue of that argument.

So those are two reasons, though, that I've heard why they should be kept locked. The logistics also are you've got to make sure the place is well enough lit, and that costs a little bit of money. In the age of LED that's a little easier. And then finding a way to make sure that people know it's open so that the baptized and unbaptized can come in and see the space. Most churches, not all, but most are beautiful, an incredible experience of space and capaciousness. So there are challenges, and certainly at my parish there are people who have pushed to have our doors locked, separate from the coronavirus, and everyone knows what I'll say in response to such arguments. But opening them up is symbolic and literally important. The church is too tempted by closure. Or maintenance, you know, “We have to keep the church closed to maintain it.” Well, that is no way for something to grow.

Ryan: Terence Sweeney, thank you very much for your time.

Terence: Thank you.