I'll echo here what others have said. This was one of your best online exchanges. Jaimungal has a mix of curiosity and humility that makes for a good interviewer. I hope you sit down with him again one day.
I have listened to many, many DBH interviews. If I were to recommend one to a friend unfamiliar with your work, it might be this one. I thought it was wonderful that you and Curt began by jumping right into “the deep end.”
Thank you, Dr. Hart. I enjoyed your conversation with Curt very much. I find your faith, when you’ve discussed it, comes across as sincere, and as something that is frequently contended with — it’s not of the wholesale prepackaged variety. It’s therefore compelling and a breath of fresh air. I tend to see people projecting certitude and wonder what sort of rather invigorating substances it might require to make that descent.
Thank you very much for these announcements. I just found out that A.N. Wilson's daughter is the classicist and translator Emily Wilson. Have you read her translation of the Iliad?
I was very happy to see that you did an interview with Curt Jaimungal for his podcast. Curt is one of the best out there, in my opinion, and his podcast has a wide, intellectually curious audience. I hope it leads some of them to pick up your books. The discussion was excellent. With the world going to hell in a handbasket, it is a privilege to "listen in" on such fascinating conversations. Truly an education. We are lucky to have you!
I've only looked at The Odyssey. It's weird, it shouldn't work (& the opening line absolutely does not work), but it often does. It's not at all "Homeric," but somehow that has its own charm. There's not really a good translation of The Odyssey, though (Fagles, Fitzgerald, Lattimore, just to take the big three of the last century, all have their faults & virtues; Fitz is prob the best, all things considered).
Food for thought, DBH. Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra that, “In the end, one experiences only oneself.” In all human history, no human being has ever suffered more than a single individual can suffer. We feel only our own pain, never another’s, just as we spill only our own blood and sweat our own sweat. We can never tap into anybody else’s pain and feel a prick of their suffering or a spasm of their woe. We could never know any more pain than the miles of nerves and the ounces of chemicals in our own bodies allow us to. The numbers freak us out: 6 million here, 20 million there, etc., etc. but in the end it was only their own pain and their own suffering that they felt. There’s no sum total of human suffering because human suffering is never summed up and totaled.This doesn’t answer the question of evil, but this thought has helped me as a believer deal better with it, for whatever this thought is worth.
Sorry, however helpful I have found this idea, considering your recent challenges, it probably wasn’t the most propitious sentiment at this time. You are greatly appreciated.
I completely disagree with this take. Even if I can't literally feel someone else's exact pain, there is a thing called empathy. And even that assumption is not really credible. If Paul and late antique assumptions in general are right, then this view is completely wrong, it smacks too much of modern individualism and atomization as if we're all self sufficient islands. It makes more sense to me that we are all connected whether mystically or not and at least the governing assumption for Christians is that we are all members of one body, so even if my finger can't feel the pain in my eye it's still one body and the body itself feels that pain.
Honestly, that’s simply one of the worst arguments I’ve ever heard. Obviously there’s a great sum of human suffering, of which our capacity for sympathy makes us aware. The problem of evil is not reducible to any individual’s particular suffering. Even in those terms, the price is too high to reckon. But the suffering of a child starving in Gaza is not mitigated by the fact that “only” one child directly experiences that starvation.
God had no choice; if He wanted beings who could love Him, He had to create them free.
All-knowing, He knew that humans would fall into sin and bring suffering and death; but He did it anyway, even though He did not have to (I know of no logical contradiction that our non-existence would entail).
All loving, He is going to ultimately bring good out of all this.
But that leave us a big problem. God is up in heaven, worshipped by the angels, and we're down here, all messed up, and yet He's going to make it ok in the end? That's a problem.
However, 2 Chr 6:29 says that each man knows his "own grief" macovo.
Macov with third person singular. Which is what I have been saying all along.
Isa 53:4, talking about Jesus on the cross, says that He, Jesus, bore movovanu, "our griefs." Same Hebrew word only now in first person plural. Ours, as in the whole world's. (With apologies to Calvinists.)
Without wanting to read too much into the text (but not wanting to read too little) , what it saying helps answer the question left off above about God up in heaven while we struggle down here.
Somehow, and who knows how, God in Christ suffered corporately what we can known only individually. That was what the salvation of humanity cost Him.
But that doesn't answer the question of evil. Nothing does. Who wants a justification for evil? Can you imagine someone in heaven saying, "Oh, yes, Jesus, now I know why my six-year old got cancer, suffered for three years in the hospital, lost two limbs, and then died. Oh, yes, it now makes perfect sense! "
That's sick. If there were a good reason for that, and endless other evils, I don't want to know them. To give a good reason would be in a sense to justify evil, and who wants to justify that?
Theodicy is the justification of God, not the justification of evil. We have God on the cross, suffering for sin in ways none of us could.
That's a reprise of many famously unsatisfactory arguments, though they might be the best we come up with (except the one about suffering being only 'individual', which is just horrendously bad). Still, Ivan Karamazov in 'Rebellion' makes a better case in many respects. I would advise dropping this issue; you're not going to win any points.
Even if it is only your own pain in an experiential sense, one can still simulate what someone else’s experience is as if it were their own with educated assumptions. Empathy is core part of our lived experience as social animals. Furthermore, we often experience this simulation of another’s experience passively and uninitiated by a conscious decision— especially if we care deeply about the other person.
This was a delightful surprise - I've been aware of Curt's podcast for years, and agree that he's an excellent host. He's genuinely humble, curious, smart and open-minded (perhaps to a fault; he's interviewed some outright cranks and charlatans, and the frequency of episodes related to UFO nuttiness had really turned me off to the whole project). But that may be the price of trying to "grow" one's podcast in the current climate. In any case, this is sure to be a very good episode, and I'm looking forward eagerly to watching it.
I’m new here, but not a stranger to your works, particularly TASBS. If you could humor me for a minute, I have some thoughts concerning the problem of evil I’d really appreciate your take on.
I find myself wondering these days why we must be so committed to omnipotency, as that appears to be the real crux of the issue; why didn’t God prevent such instances of evil, or possibly why did God contribute to its causation? (— to the extent that determinism ties consequential evil to prior actions by God that were good or had a future “good” goal in mind.)
Pardon my blasphemy, but as a jaded but sincerely invested, twenty-something, Jungian, post-Christian, I’m going to take the liberty to say what I could not as an infantry devotee because I take special offense now to the issue of gratuitous suffering, and also because I was inspired by the titles of some T.J.Oord books I have yet to actually read. But please note it is not my intention to offend; please do correct anything you find to be ill-thought-out.
——————
*ahem*
Is omnipotence necessary? What’s really stopping the heterodox thinker from ditching it? Perhaps God just cannot provide immediate solutions to suffering despite his power, despite being the *most* powerful being? And perhaps creation was never originally complete or perfect, and God as a creator just could not remedy the incompleteness of creation until he gradually became a part of it? An oft quoted definition of hell is separation from God. Why wouldn’t a portion of creation that God has not been able to fully inhabit be imperfect and painful? Perhaps God completes creation and redeems suffering through his individual and universal process of incarnation into the world and through his resulting suffering, death, and resurrection— with a special emphasis on God’s suffering (to hell with his immutability).
As I see it, the meaning of suffering must come from the one who suffers. We may be open to suggestions and opportunities as to how our tragedies may be redeemed, but outsiders, by definition, have no direct experiential knowledge (and therefore very little meaningful knowledge) of what is truly being lost or damaged; empathy is only achieved by projecting constructs and analogous experiences from one’s own reality onto experiences they themselves have no direct access to. That is why external demands to lessen our evaluation of the severity and reality of our suffering are fundamentally ill-informed and rarely come off as sincere. Short of the original wound, there is no deeper offense when someone unconvincingly assumes an understanding of said suffering. That is why God comes off as neither knowledgeable nor good, but callously contemptible for decreeing/permitting a horror He does not experience and prescribing a “solution” the creature had no participation in creating.
So perhaps God redeems the suffering by truly knowing it: God stands in solidarity with creatures by participating in the suffering himself, and it is only because of that sacrificial participation and direct experience of suffering (as Christ and, possibly, as us) can God transform tragedy’s absurdity into something meaningful, transforming it from within rather than some external mandate. This would be achieved literally, through healing and resurrection; and figuratively, through inspiring everyone touched by evil to participate in the creation of new meaning out of redeemed tragedy, for themselves and others.
So perhaps it is only through God’s struggle for the world’s full redemption is creation made complete— in a process where the incarnation and resurrection were not just single events, but continuous ones that will not cease until God is reconciled to all. And perhaps God is incapable of actualizing the world outside of this process.
I do not mean to insult you by suggesting certain ideas here are new to you. I know you’ve already expressed similar musings on christology, the nature of the incarnation+resurrection, and eschatology. It’s just that you employed those ideas for a different purpose (the exact details evade me) than my current questions. I also apologize if the metaphysics and categories I am using are crude. I am not formally trained and it could be that I am not fully appreciating the logical demands that necessitate commitment toward omnipotence, but I’ve spent a long enough time in the pop-apologetics-industrial-complex to realize a great deal of this commitment is aesthetic and reactionary. If there be any sophomoric oversight in my proposals, I need to hear it from someone who I know isn’t committed to a fidelity that’s mixed with Stockholm syndrome to a strongman.
I enjoyed the interview and am sorry your health continues to trouble you. If you haven't already looked into it for your back pain, trigger point therapy may be worth trying. There are some resources that can be done yourself at home. I've found it very helpful for my own (certainly less significant) back pain, and I figured it was worth sharing.
While I greatly admire the wisdom behind the 道, when it is used to map onto λόγος as a translation, does the Mandarin word/concept contain cultural imports that are not originally found in the Greek word? I understand no translation is perfect, but how close do we really get here? And what concrete differences, if any, are there that aren’t simply aesthetic?
Thank you so much. That gives me deep joy. If it's not too much of a nuisance, could you comment on whether the Indian notion of dharma--as, say, it appears in the Ramayana or, even better, the Bhagavad-Gita--is at all analogous to the Dao? If that would require too long a response, is there any scholarship you would recommend on the topic?
I'll echo here what others have said. This was one of your best online exchanges. Jaimungal has a mix of curiosity and humility that makes for a good interviewer. I hope you sit down with him again one day.
I really enjoy Curt’s podcast; I look forward to listening to this!
P.S. My daughter, Esmé, and I have been enjoying The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla very much.
It’s the Iliad of our day.
الدكتور ديفيد شكرا لكل ما تقوم بة
فهو يساعدنا بشكل كبير أكثر مما تتصور
وصلاتي من أجل استعادة الصحة والعافية
استمتعت جدا بالبودكاست اتمنى ان تكون
هناك لقاءات مجددة
صدقني، أنا ممتن لصلواتك
It was a fascinating interview and I enjoyed the personal questions immensely.
Oh, and I’m praying for your health, David.
Many thanks.
I have listened to many, many DBH interviews. If I were to recommend one to a friend unfamiliar with your work, it might be this one. I thought it was wonderful that you and Curt began by jumping right into “the deep end.”
Thank you, Dr. Hart. I enjoyed your conversation with Curt very much. I find your faith, when you’ve discussed it, comes across as sincere, and as something that is frequently contended with — it’s not of the wholesale prepackaged variety. It’s therefore compelling and a breath of fresh air. I tend to see people projecting certitude and wonder what sort of rather invigorating substances it might require to make that descent.
Well, faith comes in different forms and magnitudes, but I share your inability to trust perfect certitude.
Dear Dr. Hart, thank you very much for this interview. Να είστε καλά!
Από τα χείλη σας στο αυτί του Θεού, όπως λέμε εδώ.
Dear Dr. Hart,
Thank you very much for these announcements. I just found out that A.N. Wilson's daughter is the classicist and translator Emily Wilson. Have you read her translation of the Iliad?
I was very happy to see that you did an interview with Curt Jaimungal for his podcast. Curt is one of the best out there, in my opinion, and his podcast has a wide, intellectually curious audience. I hope it leads some of them to pick up your books. The discussion was excellent. With the world going to hell in a handbasket, it is a privilege to "listen in" on such fascinating conversations. Truly an education. We are lucky to have you!
Troy
I have become enamored of Emily Wilson’s translations.
I've only looked at The Odyssey. It's weird, it shouldn't work (& the opening line absolutely does not work), but it often does. It's not at all "Homeric," but somehow that has its own charm. There's not really a good translation of The Odyssey, though (Fagles, Fitzgerald, Lattimore, just to take the big three of the last century, all have their faults & virtues; Fitz is prob the best, all things considered).
Early in her Iliad you'll find a lot of gratuitous close-ups of "hairy chests". For my part I couldn't take to it. (I'm sorry).
I like the strangeness of the diction. Not the hairy chests, maybe.
I'll try to keep an open mind, then, and maybe take another look in the future--in a spirit of charity.
There’s more than one way of peeling a banana.
Troy, if you are familiar with the podcast, do you happen to know if that recap at the end of the interview was done entirely by an AI?
Hi Momchil, yes, I am familiar with the podcast, but I haven't listened to it in a while. I think the AI recaps are new; I don't like them.
Food for thought, DBH. Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra that, “In the end, one experiences only oneself.” In all human history, no human being has ever suffered more than a single individual can suffer. We feel only our own pain, never another’s, just as we spill only our own blood and sweat our own sweat. We can never tap into anybody else’s pain and feel a prick of their suffering or a spasm of their woe. We could never know any more pain than the miles of nerves and the ounces of chemicals in our own bodies allow us to. The numbers freak us out: 6 million here, 20 million there, etc., etc. but in the end it was only their own pain and their own suffering that they felt. There’s no sum total of human suffering because human suffering is never summed up and totaled.This doesn’t answer the question of evil, but this thought has helped me as a believer deal better with it, for whatever this thought is worth.
Except that that’s quite enough pain to make divine goodness questionable.
Sorry, however helpful I have found this idea, considering your recent challenges, it probably wasn’t the most propitious sentiment at this time. You are greatly appreciated.
Out of interest have you read Elaine Scarry on this in her book The Body in Pain?
Scarry was practically de rigueur in my grad student days.
I completely disagree with this take. Even if I can't literally feel someone else's exact pain, there is a thing called empathy. And even that assumption is not really credible. If Paul and late antique assumptions in general are right, then this view is completely wrong, it smacks too much of modern individualism and atomization as if we're all self sufficient islands. It makes more sense to me that we are all connected whether mystically or not and at least the governing assumption for Christians is that we are all members of one body, so even if my finger can't feel the pain in my eye it's still one body and the body itself feels that pain.
Yes but it is still only your own pain, only your own sensation, only your own nerves, not theirs.
Honestly, that’s simply one of the worst arguments I’ve ever heard. Obviously there’s a great sum of human suffering, of which our capacity for sympathy makes us aware. The problem of evil is not reducible to any individual’s particular suffering. Even in those terms, the price is too high to reckon. But the suffering of a child starving in Gaza is not mitigated by the fact that “only” one child directly experiences that starvation.
Look at it like this.
God had no choice; if He wanted beings who could love Him, He had to create them free.
All-knowing, He knew that humans would fall into sin and bring suffering and death; but He did it anyway, even though He did not have to (I know of no logical contradiction that our non-existence would entail).
All loving, He is going to ultimately bring good out of all this.
But that leave us a big problem. God is up in heaven, worshipped by the angels, and we're down here, all messed up, and yet He's going to make it ok in the end? That's a problem.
However, 2 Chr 6:29 says that each man knows his "own grief" macovo.
Macov with third person singular. Which is what I have been saying all along.
Isa 53:4, talking about Jesus on the cross, says that He, Jesus, bore movovanu, "our griefs." Same Hebrew word only now in first person plural. Ours, as in the whole world's. (With apologies to Calvinists.)
Without wanting to read too much into the text (but not wanting to read too little) , what it saying helps answer the question left off above about God up in heaven while we struggle down here.
Somehow, and who knows how, God in Christ suffered corporately what we can known only individually. That was what the salvation of humanity cost Him.
But that doesn't answer the question of evil. Nothing does. Who wants a justification for evil? Can you imagine someone in heaven saying, "Oh, yes, Jesus, now I know why my six-year old got cancer, suffered for three years in the hospital, lost two limbs, and then died. Oh, yes, it now makes perfect sense! "
That's sick. If there were a good reason for that, and endless other evils, I don't want to know them. To give a good reason would be in a sense to justify evil, and who wants to justify that?
Theodicy is the justification of God, not the justification of evil. We have God on the cross, suffering for sin in ways none of us could.
IMHO
That's a reprise of many famously unsatisfactory arguments, though they might be the best we come up with (except the one about suffering being only 'individual', which is just horrendously bad). Still, Ivan Karamazov in 'Rebellion' makes a better case in many respects. I would advise dropping this issue; you're not going to win any points.
Even if it is only your own pain in an experiential sense, one can still simulate what someone else’s experience is as if it were their own with educated assumptions. Empathy is core part of our lived experience as social animals. Furthermore, we often experience this simulation of another’s experience passively and uninitiated by a conscious decision— especially if we care deeply about the other person.
Encountering this line in Paradise Lost yesterday I thought of DBH (and of others, too):
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and excessive, overturns
All patience...
(PL Bk VI, l. 462)
This was a delightful surprise - I've been aware of Curt's podcast for years, and agree that he's an excellent host. He's genuinely humble, curious, smart and open-minded (perhaps to a fault; he's interviewed some outright cranks and charlatans, and the frequency of episodes related to UFO nuttiness had really turned me off to the whole project). But that may be the price of trying to "grow" one's podcast in the current climate. In any case, this is sure to be a very good episode, and I'm looking forward eagerly to watching it.
You’ll love our extended conversation on the differing agendas of the reptilians and the greys.
Well now I’m really excited
Dear Dr. Hart,
I’m new here, but not a stranger to your works, particularly TASBS. If you could humor me for a minute, I have some thoughts concerning the problem of evil I’d really appreciate your take on.
I find myself wondering these days why we must be so committed to omnipotency, as that appears to be the real crux of the issue; why didn’t God prevent such instances of evil, or possibly why did God contribute to its causation? (— to the extent that determinism ties consequential evil to prior actions by God that were good or had a future “good” goal in mind.)
Pardon my blasphemy, but as a jaded but sincerely invested, twenty-something, Jungian, post-Christian, I’m going to take the liberty to say what I could not as an infantry devotee because I take special offense now to the issue of gratuitous suffering, and also because I was inspired by the titles of some T.J.Oord books I have yet to actually read. But please note it is not my intention to offend; please do correct anything you find to be ill-thought-out.
——————
*ahem*
Is omnipotence necessary? What’s really stopping the heterodox thinker from ditching it? Perhaps God just cannot provide immediate solutions to suffering despite his power, despite being the *most* powerful being? And perhaps creation was never originally complete or perfect, and God as a creator just could not remedy the incompleteness of creation until he gradually became a part of it? An oft quoted definition of hell is separation from God. Why wouldn’t a portion of creation that God has not been able to fully inhabit be imperfect and painful? Perhaps God completes creation and redeems suffering through his individual and universal process of incarnation into the world and through his resulting suffering, death, and resurrection— with a special emphasis on God’s suffering (to hell with his immutability).
As I see it, the meaning of suffering must come from the one who suffers. We may be open to suggestions and opportunities as to how our tragedies may be redeemed, but outsiders, by definition, have no direct experiential knowledge (and therefore very little meaningful knowledge) of what is truly being lost or damaged; empathy is only achieved by projecting constructs and analogous experiences from one’s own reality onto experiences they themselves have no direct access to. That is why external demands to lessen our evaluation of the severity and reality of our suffering are fundamentally ill-informed and rarely come off as sincere. Short of the original wound, there is no deeper offense when someone unconvincingly assumes an understanding of said suffering. That is why God comes off as neither knowledgeable nor good, but callously contemptible for decreeing/permitting a horror He does not experience and prescribing a “solution” the creature had no participation in creating.
So perhaps God redeems the suffering by truly knowing it: God stands in solidarity with creatures by participating in the suffering himself, and it is only because of that sacrificial participation and direct experience of suffering (as Christ and, possibly, as us) can God transform tragedy’s absurdity into something meaningful, transforming it from within rather than some external mandate. This would be achieved literally, through healing and resurrection; and figuratively, through inspiring everyone touched by evil to participate in the creation of new meaning out of redeemed tragedy, for themselves and others.
So perhaps it is only through God’s struggle for the world’s full redemption is creation made complete— in a process where the incarnation and resurrection were not just single events, but continuous ones that will not cease until God is reconciled to all. And perhaps God is incapable of actualizing the world outside of this process.
I do not mean to insult you by suggesting certain ideas here are new to you. I know you’ve already expressed similar musings on christology, the nature of the incarnation+resurrection, and eschatology. It’s just that you employed those ideas for a different purpose (the exact details evade me) than my current questions. I also apologize if the metaphysics and categories I am using are crude. I am not formally trained and it could be that I am not fully appreciating the logical demands that necessitate commitment toward omnipotence, but I’ve spent a long enough time in the pop-apologetics-industrial-complex to realize a great deal of this commitment is aesthetic and reactionary. If there be any sophomoric oversight in my proposals, I need to hear it from someone who I know isn’t committed to a fidelity that’s mixed with Stockholm syndrome to a strongman.
I enjoyed the interview and am sorry your health continues to trouble you. If you haven't already looked into it for your back pain, trigger point therapy may be worth trying. There are some resources that can be done yourself at home. I've found it very helpful for my own (certainly less significant) back pain, and I figured it was worth sharing.
David, what do you think of Chinese translations of John 1:1 that render λόγος as 道?
That no other translation could be better.
Dr. Hart,
While I greatly admire the wisdom behind the 道, when it is used to map onto λόγος as a translation, does the Mandarin word/concept contain cultural imports that are not originally found in the Greek word? I understand no translation is perfect, but how close do we really get here? And what concrete differences, if any, are there that aren’t simply aesthetic?
Thank you so much. That gives me deep joy. If it's not too much of a nuisance, could you comment on whether the Indian notion of dharma--as, say, it appears in the Ramayana or, even better, the Bhagavad-Gita--is at all analogous to the Dao? If that would require too long a response, is there any scholarship you would recommend on the topic?
Analogous, yes; identical, no, as you no doubt already realize.