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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:03.167)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Mark McEnroy, Associate Professor of Contemporary and Systematic Theology at the University of Oxford. And we're here today to talk about his book, Balthazar on the Spiritual Senses, Perceiving Splendor. Dr. McEnroy, wonderful to have you on today.
Mark McInroy (00:23.49)
Thanks for having me, PJ.
PJ Wehry (00:26.348)
So, Dr. McEnroy, why this book?
Mark McInroy (00:31.118)
Well, this book, I hope, manages to do a few things. The first of which is to make Balthazar clearer than he is himself. So Balthazar, for all of the provocation that he issues to contemporary theology and for all of the eagerness with which he is engaged, tends to write in a manner that is rather opaque.
and even even the most enthusiastic Balthazar aficionados will acknowledge this. And so there there's a need to translate Balthazar you might say to make Balthazar comprehensible to those who are coming to his to his material to his ideas for the first time or even fairly deep into that engagement. And so that's that's one effort that was put forward with the book.
Additionally, you know, when I first came to encounter Balthazar, I was extraordinarily fascinated by what he was doing with beauty and what he was doing with perception as well. And after quite some time of engaging with his texts, what I started to see was that perception is playing a crucial role in his understanding of beauty.
but also that perception is not of the ordinary kind, we might say. So he's doing something very creative, very difficult to track when it comes to what perception amounts to on the part of the human being. And here there's some scholars who definitely paved the way to getting to where I got to be with my engagement. So I'm immensely grateful to them for everything, stand on their shoulders in a lot of ways.
But what I hope the book does is to make a bit clearer what Balthazar is doing with perception, his use of this idea that one finds in the Christian tradition called the spiritual senses tradition or spiritual perception, which I expect we'll be talking about in some greater detail during the course of our conversation. So to figure out what he's doing with that tradition, that idea, and the way in which he's
Mark McInroy (02:45.262)
both drawing from it, but also putting his own stamp on it. So he's doing something quite distinctive with it. And among those distinctive things concerns him pressing the doctrine or the idea into service for this use of beauty, this what she calls a theological aesthetic. So that might be at least a start for what I hope the book does, bringing attention to, in particular, use of the sensory language.
PJ Wehry (03:09.886)
Yeah.
Mark McInroy (03:13.602)
And maybe there's one more thing to add, it would be that there's been a tendency, because Balbozor uses this dizzying array of terms and ideas, there's been a tendency to think that he must not really be talking about perception, that he must be using sensory language, yes, but in a manner that you might call figurative or metaphorical, that he's not really hanging on to the notion of perceiving.
all the way down, especially when we get into these enigmatic matters concerning perceiving the spiritual, perceiving the invisible, perceiving splendor. It gets, it gets awfully slippery real quick. And so to point out the moments when Balthazar actually is quite serious about his use of sensory language, but it needs to be shifted into this spiritual register rather than a corporeal or bodily manner of perceiving.
PJ Wehry (04:13.659)
And so for people who aren't as familiar with the field of theology, what is Balthasar's impact, both within theology, where I think he looms pretty largely, looms pretty large, and even in other disciplines? What is Balthasar's impact as a thinker?
Mark McInroy (04:35.732)
Yeah, his impact has been massive. It's been truly massive. He is these days routinely invoked as the most significant Catholic theologian of the 20th century. And his thought is, his court was voluminous, his thought just has so many facets to it, that it's difficult to track at all. So he wrote approximately 100 books and about 500 articles during the course of his scholarly.
career. And so he's weighing in on any number of theological matters. With all that said, what he's best known for, especially for those coming to his ideas from outside of the discipline of theology, is this theological aesthetics, this idea that beauty is in the first place, as it's put, a transcendental property of being, which is to say beauty is at the very foundation of things. All things have beauty.
And then in addition to that, beauty is a feature of the divine. It's a divine attribute such that engagement with God, relationship with God, encounter with God.
needs to be configured along aesthetic lines to Balthazar. So it is something like, with all kinds of dissimilarities obtaining at the end of the day, but it's something like being enraptured by a beautiful piece of music, being just transfixed by a beautiful piece of art. And if that's right, then to many, and Balthazar would be the first to say this, that can reconfigure quite dramatically our relationship with God.
What it means is that we approach God out of intrinsic motivation, it might be said, rather than an external, extrinsic imposition. We don't drag our feet as we're going to church on Sunday morning because somebody told us to do so. Instead, we go precisely in order to get more of something like the beautiful music that we heard.
Mark McInroy (06:41.102)
previous evening or a gorgeous sunset that we encountered the night before. So that notion of rapture, Balthazar really capitalizes on this. gets a lot of mileage out of the notion of rapture. He thinks that that's what our relationship with God is like. And this has very, very far reaching implications. So one place it leads, and this is where those extra theological disciplines might encounter him.
is to a thorough going engagement between theology and the arts, right, to say that there are robust connections here for various reasons popping up at different moments during the course of the history of Christianity. are sometimes some fraught relationships with the arts, which makes for a complicated state of affairs in the present day. But to give a thorough theological rationale for
the arts, the arts being illuminating for our relationship with God and deepening our relationship with the world as well. That's point of contact that can expose some people to Balthazar's thought. And then it goes, it goes yet further from there into other facets too. But so it's primarily his aesthetics. He's got a lot more to say to be sure. But if there's one thing Balthazar is known for, it's for being, as it sometimes is, but the theologian of beauty.
Now, he himself would say he is, in a certain sense, doing something unusual for the 20th century, although there even some precursors in the 20th century to his project. But really, he would say he is simply continuing something that gets established very early in the Christian tradition, even in the biblical materials themselves. And then one finds in the early church, one finds among medieval figures. As we move into modernity, things get much more complicated.
but this idea of beauty at the root of all things, beauty as a fundamental property that obtains within the structure of the world. In that, he's drawing from any number of previous figures. So he sees himself, along with some confrères of his in the mid, early to mid 20th century, as doing a ressourcement, as it's put, so a retrieval or returning back to.
Mark McInroy (08:59.852)
various figures out of the conviction that contemporary theology has become preoccupied with a certain fairly narrow set of problems or issues. And that if we look to the early church, if we look to the medieval period especially, that we have a whole wealth of material at our disposal that we've to a great extent forgotten about in modernity.
So it's relatively new, it provokes certainly, it gets people thinking, and he's not simply repristinating the tradition, he's not just kind of it, doing it all over again, he's putting in a conversation with all kinds of contemporary disciplines. But it's very much consistent with, he thinks, the proclamation that's at the very core of the Christian tradition.
PJ Wehry (09:46.952)
Thank you. And yeah, I appreciate the brevity and the delimiting that you're demarcating. Like I think it would be funny to try and ask you to summarize all 100 of his books in an hour. But I feel like that also be cruel. we'll stick with beauty. Now, so you don't have beauty in the title, but you have splendor. How does
Mark McInroy (10:04.534)
I'm not terribly engaging for the listener, I'll right.
PJ Wehry (10:15.973)
Splendor work with beauty. What job is Splendor doing in the title there, subtitle?
Mark McInroy (10:18.51)
All
Mark McInroy (10:22.03)
Good, yeah, thanks for that question. It's got a contemporary resonance, of course, and kind of evocative nature. It's a very particular term that Balthazar is deploying. And it's drawing from scholastic understandings of beauty, and specifically scholastic understandings of forms. So forms have as a kind of inner component this splendor.
that in their view shines forth from within the form itself. And so Balthasar is engaging with this tradition, again as intimated maybe moments ago, he's riffing on it in some ways, he's rearticulating it. And so what Balthasar wants to say is that we have within everything that's beautiful, it appears to us as a form, and the term he uses as Gestalt is that the German could be translated as figure or shape, form is what most
English translations will use. And the form has these two aspects to it. So forms have, on the one hand, a material component. there's the physical features of the beautiful thing that confront our senses. But then in addition to that, and this is where things get a little enigmatic, but those are things that there's something invisible in a form. It ultimately shines forth as splendor to us.
but it's not visible in the same way by any means as those corporeal, those physical components. And so this invisible aspect of form to many, it's almost like a force. So it's what pulls together the disparate elements of the form, each of its components, and unifies those elements, making it one thing.
So forms have these material dimension, but there's also this immaterial aspect. It's what's holding the form together. And this is where Balthazar gets creative and where the spiritual sense of this tradition comes in. He thinks that immaterial dimension, spiritual is how he talks about it at other points, invisible is the term he uses. He thinks that isn't simply like an organizing principle or a forceful stop.
Mark McInroy (12:41.314)
He thinks that it actually shows itself to us. So although it is invisible, although it is not on the order of physical reality, we still detect it. And if that's a tough sell, if we need a little help with wrapping our heads around that, what he would suggest, and maybe we can sympathize with this, is that those most beautiful things,
have a tremendous diversity of components that are nonetheless pulled together and made one. But precisely because they are so diverse, they have so many different things happening, right? You think of these enthralling beauties that you just can't stop staring at, right? Why is that? Well, because they have so much happening. Balthazar thinks that with those highest beauties, as he would put it, you can sense the tension, right? You can almost feel the thing
just on the verge of falling apart, right? Because it seems so unlikely that all of these aspects could be unified, could be presenting themselves to us, especially when they are intricately organized, right? So we notice this meticulous manner in which something might present itself to us. There's a difficulty there, there's a tension there, and he thinks we pick up on that.
So, yes it's invisible, yes it's spiritual, it's immaterial, it's not the corporeal stuff of the form, but it still manifests itself to us, it still shows itself to us. And he even goes so far, and this is where he gets, again, it's a creative move on his part, he thinks that it's in these moments when we are detecting the very depths of being.
So beauty, say beauty is a transcendental property of being is to say it permeates all things, it's in everything, it's at the very roots of reality, it's not as we might be tempted to think in our contemporary setting, it's not a kind of surface level embellishment, it's not something inconsequential, it's not something trivial. And again, there's a history through which we get to that perception about those are very hard on some figures in that history who get us to this point.
Mark McInroy (14:57.838)
So it's not doing that, but what it is doing instead is displaying to us in this sensory manner the very depths of being itself.
So being is manifesting itself to us, showing itself to us, and it's all rendered through this category of splendor for Balthazar. That's one of the terms he uses in addition to this kind of invisible, this spiritual light is another term that he'll use picking up on, again, some themes in the tradition.
PJ Wehry (15:30.784)
And forgive me for kind of saying this back to you. I just want to make sure that I'm tracking with you. And so as you're talking about rapture, I think about and it's astonishing because I live in central Florida now and the light pollution is quite bad. But I lived an hour and a half north of Green Bay, Wisconsin and.
And I realized that many people have never been that far out in the country where they're able to truly see, you you need a moonless night and you need a clear night and all these things. But I got to see the Milky Way in a way that most people never get to see. You'd have to either be very intentional or you have to live out in the boonies. And there is a sense of overwhelm to the senses.
Like it's more than my senses can take in, yet at the same time I am also perceiving the overwhelm. And so this idea of being of rapture, or another word maybe, awestruck, that kind of over an abundance that yet we are still somehow able to perceive even though it's more than we can really break down. Is that another way to talk about this kind of tension? Is that kind of over an abundance, that overwhelm? Or is that slightly different?
Mark McInroy (16:54.274)
Well, I think it's very closely related to something Balthazar wants to do, which is to talk about, as you put it, as was previously said, that rapture, that transport is another thing that he'll capitalize on, right? The idea that when we encounter beauty, we are pulled out of ourselves, right? We are transformed in that encounter.
PJ Wehry (17:04.532)
Mm-hmm.
Mark McInroy (17:16.582)
And what he gives us is a very elaborately articulated metaphysics for what's happening in those moments. So one might be tempted to, in the midst of that rapture, witnessing the Milky Way to think, my goodness, something extraordinary is happening. And yet one might also not have the equipment or the framework to put that into a broader set of considerations about
PJ Wehry (17:26.504)
Okay.
Mark McInroy (17:44.448)
what it means to be a human being engaged with reality, right? One could be forgiven for not being able to integrate at all. And so I think about those are as someone who wants to say that these moments have a place. And even more than that, these moments actually put us in touch with reality at a deeper level, right? And so there might be the temptation, maybe not so much with the Milky Way as an interesting example, but there might be a temptation to think,
Especially once you're out of that mode, you could think, wow, I really got carried away back there. I don't know that was real. don't know what was happening, if that was an illusion, if I misperceived things, if the rapture that I experienced was a moment of temporary insanity. These kinds of questions haunt aesthetic experience. What is it doing to us? And what Balthazar wants to convey is that
PJ Wehry (18:18.791)
You
Mark McInroy (18:41.742)
it is getting us in touch with the real. We see it maybe more vividly when we engage with art. So we're moved by a piece of art. There plenty of currents in the world in which we live that
might want to emphasize that being a kind of momentary flight, right? It's getting away from it all. It's a retreat from the world, even insulating yourself from the world. So there's some figures who worry very much about art performing this kind of function. What Balthazar wants to say is that this is, it's not a flight away from the world. It's getting us in touch with some deep features of reality.
that we all too frequently lose sight of, that we all too frequently are blunted to. And so when he's talking about perception, he's talking about tuning in to things that are happening. They're not to be discounted. They're instructive. They're instructive for the nature of reality. And ultimately, they're instructive for the source from which reality comes, namely God.
PJ Wehry (19:47.328)
And I think I understand what you're talking about, I am and forgive me. I'm just working through this on my own here. I've been working through Ezekiel and I was really struck. There was a sentence, one of the commentaries that said the same storm that makes Ezekiel look to God is the same storm that makes the farmer look to his field and try and get things done faster. And so does this idea of beauty?
Mark McInroy (19:53.518)
That's fine.
PJ Wehry (20:16.251)
There's this idea of transport, you're... I think I'm missing the connection between that and the metaphysical side of it. Maybe I'm thinking too experientially. there's that idea of Ezekiel saw God in the storm, and the farmer starts looking at his field. Is that a way of illustrating how spiritual senses are something that needs to be trained?
Mark McInroy (20:37.176)
Yeah.
Mark McInroy (20:44.596)
Yes, there connections there to be sure. one needs, depending on with whom one speaks in this tradition. So it starts very early and you see one figure after another. And among the variables is the balance between training that one can undertake on one's own.
PJ Wehry (20:54.747)
Yes
Mark McInroy (21:07.618)
and the grace of God, which ultimately fulfills that striving for spiritual perception. Even to put it that way, it's just a bit misleading. mean, there are very few, if any, figures are going to tell you that it's all on your own for a certain stretch, right? You've always got a certain enabling of any number of actions by God. But for some figures,
One works really hard. So asceticism in particular, right? So the devotional life. And for origin of Alexandria, who's a key figure for Balthazar and to many, it's this font of the spiritual sense. It's where it all begins. It arguably goes a bit further back, but he's certainly a very noteworthy figure. For origin, one progresses through different stages of the spiritual life.
and it's in that final stage that one receives this capacity to perceive spiritually. So it is after quite a bit of striving and training, in other words, that one receives it. For others, and actually Balthazar is among those who would make more of an emphasis on grace, more of an emphasis on spiritual perception arriving.
not so much at the conclusion or after a great deal of trying very hard, but instead at the very foundation of the Christian life. So he wants to talk about spiritual perception as much more common than some other figures in tradition will. He democratizes the idea in what might be said.
And the reason for that is because it's to him it's the key to perceiving the form again that term gestalt gets applied to divine revelation So so God reveals gods itself God shows God's self to us through the form of Christ and perceiving that is integral to
Mark McInroy (23:07.788)
the perception, the reception of divine revelation on the part of the Christian. So he's, to put it that way, with any luck, if it's coming through, reconfigures actually how revelation was understood in the Christian tradition as well. Certain figures will say this, but it's not the first place to go when one thinks about God revealing God's soul to humanity.
One doesn't automatically land on the idea of this glorious form of Christ displaying itself to the human being. So that's something that Balthazar wants to bring to the table, and that's where spiritual perception comes in. that's one of the arguments of the book is that we have spiritual perception, this idea of spiritual senses.
I'm doing quite a bit more heavy lifting than it has in other articulations of the doctrine where it could be something that is a feature of mystical experience, it could be something that maybe a handful of folks are fortunate enough to receive. Again, caricaturing it just a touch for a moment. For a Balthazar, one actually needs these spiritual senses for the very center of
in theology, namely receiving divine revelation.
PJ Wehry (24:29.727)
Is that why, and you mentioned that the Milky Way was in some ways not problematic, but an interesting example that kind of creates certain, and you mentioned that Balthazar really thinks about art, and is he kind of drawing on John of Damascus? I think you mentioned that art can be an escape, but also there's that classic platonic argument about art is an inferior copy, and so it's not really, you know, it's a lie.
And John Damascus, of course, is saying, no, it's it's incarnational truth, which is exactly what we see in Christ. And so as you mentioned that, like at the center of this is that is God's revelation in Jesus. And so for him, that's part of reason why art is kind of one of the essential, if not the essential. I there I I bow to your expertise. But is that is that a fruitful avenue discussion or am I just taking this way off track?
Mark McInroy (25:20.718)
There.
Mark McInroy (25:26.062)
No, it's very fruitful. It's very fruitful that there are deep, deep affinities between the arguments that get advanced by iconodules, iconophiles, so sort of defending the use of icons against iconoclasts in the Byzantine, starting in the eighth and ninth centuries. So John of Damascus is certainly one of them. Theodora the Studite is another.
And what Theodore says fits along very well with ideas that Balthazar is putting forward. So Theodore has this wonderful way of defending images. He says that God did not reveal God's self in a quote, merely mental way, but instead disclosed God's self to the senses in the person of Jesus Christ. So in other words, Christians are
fully authorized then to use images, to engage with images as the way in which to engage with God. That's what God chose, right? God did not choose a purely mental way, a purely immaterial mode.
of self-disclosure, is that God showed God's self to the senses. And this has very, very far-reaching implications. I mean, one might say that the full implications of that idea have yet to be spelled out, I think, because it makes images, it makes engagement in that sensory register indispensable for Christian faith. It's in keeping with what God has selected.
for how God will relate to us. There's lot of invading against revelation as a set of propositions that one finds in the modern period.
Mark McInroy (27:09.638)
simplification, distillation, even distortion, and thinking about Revelation as a set of ideas, right? And then there's, you get quite a bit of pushback, It's not like the God is providing us a checklist, right? So I am triune, I was revealed in Jesus Christ, I was on the other end, we just go to the, yeah, kind of got it. Revelation is much more, well, for one thing, it's personal, this is one emphasis that's made, right?
But the further step where we can go using the or the Pseudite using Humphreys and Balthazar is to say that it's not only personal, it's sensory. It's in that sensory register. the God to whom Christians devote themselves, a God who has made himself available to the senses. And that needs some commentary, right? We need to follow through on that idea. I tend to get that idea more thoroughly than we have.
PJ Wehry (28:03.519)
Yeah
PJ Wehry (28:08.575)
Yeah, I mean, even, go ahead.
Mark McInroy (28:09.006)
And well, as you can say, one thing we're up against, and this is why I want to appeal to spiritual senses, is that the senses in the history of philosophy and theology are notoriously suspect, right? They're unreliable. They get all kinds of data that might be best discounted. We misperceive things on a fairly regular basis.
And so they are in a secondary role at best. And then you've got within theology, the worry about images kind of piling on as it were to that worry that one finds especially in Greek philosophical traditions associated with Plato, so Platonism, Middle Platonism, Neo-Platonism.
There's quite a bit of worry about the senses of many junctures there.
that produces a situation that's right for reconsideration. that's where Balazsar comes in, right? say that perception actually gives us something much more significant, something that needs to be contended with, something that can't be discounted. And here he, like a number of other 20th century figures, Heidegger comes to mind as one of the exemplars here. He breaks down these German words into their roots and then riffs on
them, it gets a lot of mileage out of what they suggest when so when broken down in such a manner. and you know you can have an appetite for that or that cannot be something that is particularly thrilling. But with the case of perception it's illuminating, so that's why it's worth the trouble maybe to bring it up here now. So in German perception is Vahnehmann, Vahnehmann is the term, and that breaks down into Nehmann,
PJ Wehry (29:47.048)
Yeah
Mark McInroy (30:03.574)
which is to take and var, which is true. And so to take, to be true, in other words, is in this word, if it can be broken apart a bit. And the author comments on this. says, what an incredible irony that we have this category, this idea of perception that has been so relegated to the second class status at best.
when it has in its very terminology and very roots of the word, it had the idea of to take to be true. And that's what he wants to get at with perception, is to retrieve the idea and for a whole lot more.
emphasis on it and pressure on it, weight on it, because he thinks that properly understood can bear that weight and it needs to be rehabilitated so as to be in accord with God's chosen mode of self-revelation.
PJ Wehry (31:04.287)
I don't think we have time to really delve into it, but being in central Florida, the primacy of preaching over, the Eucharist is such a reflection of the loss of the incarnation as an epistemological model. don't even know if that's right. Certainly, this idea of spiritual senses...
Mark McInroy (31:18.592)
and
PJ Wehry (31:34.144)
I don't need to get into all that. from the Anglophile, you're talking about the German tradition, there's this rejection of the senses as not being trustworthy. But in the Anglophile, the senses are trustworthy, but they're horrifically mundane. It's almost always employed against religion.
And so it's really interesting to see in some ways that Balthazar is escaping both of these things.
Mark McInroy (32:08.588)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. I think I know what you're getting at, that the senses are in a certain regard at least. Maybe this goes further than you want to suggest, but they can be a threat, right? They can really detract one from what one should be doing with one's time, especially in the Christian tradition. I the sacrament is quite helpful though, because that's an arena in which
One does have an unequivocal commitment to the material, right? So one of the features of the Eucharist is that it's got a material dimension, all kinds of ways of regarding what's happening there, right? But it's an outward, invisible sign of an inward, an invisible grace, as a guess put.
So that's something that is something of a touchstone about this. I talked quite a bit about the sacrament. That's one arena in which spiritual perception is definitely occurring within liturgy and within the liturgy itself, it's within the sacrament. So it's something that is available on offer to which it can turn when he's trying to elucidate or draw out what it is that he's saying.
PJ Wehry (33:16.477)
I apologize for the rabbit trail. It's so... My current very local, the Baptist side of theology, this is a strong contrast.
Mark McInroy (33:32.364)
Yes, indeed. You know, if you don't mind, it might be an occasion to mention one thing, which is as much as we are waxing enthusiastic about beauty and there are good reasons to do that, it might be valuable to note that Balthazar is certainly alert to the dangers that beauty presents. So we've spoken of
PJ Wehry (33:35.155)
The now, go ahead.
Mark McInroy (33:57.902)
as a beauty kind of straightforwardly leads one into these acts of being in the glory of God unproblematically. There are all kinds of risks along that path that Balthazar is well aware of. In this regard, actually, Karl Barth, who is routinely regarded as the most significant Protestant theologian of the 20th century, even since Calvin, so major, major figure, he also speaks of the glory of God, the beauty of God, and Balthazar is engaging with his thought along with
a number of others. But both of these figures, and Balthazar, will note that beauty has its dangers, right? So let's not have two rows tinted a celebration of it. What they hasten to emphasize, though, as soon as they've acknowledged that danger, is other categories, goodness, for instance, has its dangers as well as does truth, right? In other words, we can pursue these things.
PJ Wehry (34:37.854)
Yes.
Mark McInroy (34:54.19)
and get it all wrong, get it tragically wrong even, right? So the good can be an ideal toward which we strive and because of human sinfulness or the ways in which we manage to mess things up, We can, in the name of goodness, actually inflict harm, right? So in other words, the beauty is a very palpable, very visceral almost.
Instance of the dangers that could be brought to one but it but it's not alone. It's not alone by any means and ultimately it's its rewards so to speak outweigh the risks that that it brings so it's Let's not go in naively. They are in effect saying but and you know, let's be alert to it, but let's also understand that
precisely because of the potency of beauty, can reinvigorate academic theology. That's one of the things about the Tsar wants to reinvigorate, but ultimately it's the life of faith, I think, that he has his eye on.
PJ Wehry (36:03.891)
Well, life is dangerous, and the life of faith is dangerous, right? So you cannot have the potency without the risk. If you don't mind, can you give one example or maybe a couple examples of what the risks of beauty would be?
Mark McInroy (36:20.887)
Well, yeah, so in as much as beauty.
plugs into, drums up, even desire, right? And here, also drawing from a deep tradition found especially in Christian mystical writers, so-called mystics, but even outside of that register, that genre, these figures make it abundantly clear that the love they have for God is eros, right? It is erotic. It is
the desire, the love that burns for union with its object. To have that drummed up could land one in a number of different places, right? And in fact, there's a, as you might know, there's a whole history of...
various theologians writing commentaries or sermons or homilies on the Song of Songs within scripture. And the Song of Songs is an encounter, very vividly depicted encounter between a bride and a bridegroom. And that the bride yearns for the presence of the bridegroom and makes no secret of that desire. Of course, theologians origin is one, Gregory of Nyssa is another.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a number of figures comment on this. And the typical direction in which they go is to say that the bridegroom is Christ, that this is to be understood not in a literal manner, but in an allegorical or spiritual manner. So the bridegroom is Christ and the bride is either the individual Christian or the church as a whole.
Mark McInroy (38:13.086)
And so what's being conveyed here is the yearning that the individual Christian has for union with Christ. So just as the bride yearns for to be in the presence of the bridegroom, so too the Christian yearns for union with Christ. Now, all that is something I'm pretty able to say. It's.
routinely acknowledged in this tradition of reflection on the song of songs that this is to be that this material is to be introduced to those who are advanced in the spiritual life. This is not something that you roll out for an inquirer's class at church, right? This is the stuff that those who are well versed in what they are dealing with can handle.
PJ Wehry (38:50.879)
Yeah.
Mark McInroy (39:01.378)
precisely because, just to maybe get back, I hope, to the point, or the question that you had, precisely because desire can lead us in so many directions, right? And so if we are not aware of those possibilities, we can end up in an eddy, right? We can end up in a kind of...
something that's not advancing our relationship with God but instead of keeping us trapped. So Augustine is a figure here to whom one can turn, I think, in an illuminating fashion, right? So Augustine opens his confessions with this incredible line, says, our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in thee. So we have desire then built into the very constitution of the human being to Augustine. We have this restlessness that no, nothing we encounter in the world could.
could make us still, could bring stillness to us. It's only when we are finally united with God that we find that rest. So our desire just runs over one thing after another in our worldly existence. So desire then crucial for Augustine. If you know anything about Augustine, if you read his confessions, you don't have to get very far to know how desire, I mean, he'd be the first to tell you, misled him at a number of moments in his life. So much so that he felt deeply trapped. I it's one of the reasons.
And he turns famously to grace rather than the human being kind of on that person's own performing various good works as so-called Pelagianism would would contend. Augustine relies on grace because he was so shackled by that desire that was misdirected in his understanding. So all that is to say, this idea is a powerful one. It's one that can
PJ Wehry (40:40.287)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (40:51.266)
take any number of twists and turns, but ultimately it's a way of capturing something fundamental about the human being that Balthazar is certainly sympathetic to, he speaks quite a bit about this idea, this eros that is within us. And what it means is that when one encounters God, when one even engages with ideas within Christian theology, teachings of the church and whatnot,
There's an important manner in which that grace fulfills humanity, right? So it's not something that is, as we were speaking about earlier, that's not that extrinsic imposition. It's not something that is just completely discontinuous with us. Instead, what we get in the Christian life,
PJ Wehry (41:29.3)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (41:43.21)
is something that is that for which we've been yearning all along, even if we couldn't quite recognize it at various points prior to that reception. So in other words, it makes for a continuity between what God has in store and what we ourselves are looking for.
PJ Wehry (41:55.678)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (42:03.342)
It should be added. It's not simply what we want, It's not kind of reducible to our desires. Instead, it challenges us in various ways. It's beyond what we can even conceptualize, right? So there's an important element of it's not what we desire without remainder, you might say. There's something more there. But nonetheless, it's something that fulfills human nature and
does not destroy it in order to supply grace. Instead, it supplies what we are most, most deeply wanted.
PJ Wehry (42:41.647)
And I mean, in fact, think it would generally this tradition would argue the opposite, that if you gave exactly what people desired, you would actually destroy what is human about them. I mean, not completely, but like you're actually warping. so it's like we need that challenge and shaping of our desires to something greater.
Mark McInroy (43:03.97)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Without a reformation of our desires, If we remain kind of curved in on ourselves, then our desires would lead us into bad places. Yeah, so it's a proper desire, a desire properly ordered. Again, a key category for Augustine. That gets us in that movement toward God. it definitely... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (43:27.263)
I've written Disordered twice as you're talking. Yeah. I got excited about that and then I lost what I was going to ask you. so when we talk about I want to be respectful of your time, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is how do these spiritual senses play a role in the life of faith? So we have this democratization by Balthazar.
Mark McInroy (43:38.542)
That's fine.
PJ Wehry (43:56.0)
What role did spiritual senses play in human formation? Is it something that where the spiritual senses are shaping us or And maybe it's a little bit of both or are we also training our spiritual senses in order to better perceive? And what does that look like on a practical daily? You know day-to-day I Think I said that backwards day-to-day. What does that look like?
Mark McInroy (44:20.942)
Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah, good, good. And good to keep us grounded in the concrete. There's a tendency to kind of veer into these high-flying speculations.
PJ Wehry (44:30.995)
Well, we are talking about seeing the form, so...
Mark McInroy (44:33.996)
Yes, And it's very much in keeping with one of Alphazar's emphases, to be sure. So I think the way to put it might be to say, when we, these spiritual senses, we receive them through grace. There certainly, for many, would be some cultivation of the self that might occur kind of preparatory to that moment. But when it happens, we are receiving beauty in its fullness.
And where that leads is to some rather important places, because if it is the case, as Balthazar wants to insist, and as a number of others previous to him will, if it's a case that it's not only beauty that's a transcendental property of being, but also goodness and also truth, then what's happening is that beauty is getting us engaged with reality, getting us in this life-giving relationship with God.
that's just utterly entrancing. But it's also helping us to do the good and it's helping us to see the truth. Right? So that which is true has an allure to it, has a fascination that it provokes. And again, this is why it's so important for beauty to be at the foundation of things and not this trivial kind of epiphenomenon.
It's not we're pulled away from the world. It's not that we're in a fit of madness. It's that we plug in. And when we do, we see things better. We understand the truth of things better. There's a very interesting, although I'm sure we don't have time to pursue it, there's a very interesting parallel here. One has to make all kinds of qualifications, but I'll just kind of boldly sketch it just for the listeners. I hope benefit is quite provocative.
one finds in all places, those who are willing to countenance this notion of beauty having quite a bit to do with truth in 20th century and 21st century physicists. So they will in a number of very noteworthy instances, these are household names for us, incredibly well known, well regarded physicists will quite openly acknowledge
Mark McInroy (46:51.212)
Not only that beauty drew them to their investigations of the world at this most fundamental level, but they'll even say that aesthetic categories actually lead in some key regards when they are at the very edges of what we can comprehend. So categories such as elegance, categories such as simplicity, symmetry is a
wielding quite an influence in physics has for some time now. These notions help them to understand reality better. If there are two possibilities that are being discerned, what one figure after another will tell you is they might initially choose the more beautiful because of its aesthetic allure.
And time and time again, it turns out also to be the truth. Which is a, it's a whole different way of doing business. It's empirically driven, right? So there different things that need to be understood that the discontinuity is something and, you know, fundamental, principle property of being. They might not be comfortable with that terminology, but there's an affinity here that's really quite striking. And it helps us maybe to understand.
PJ Wehry (47:56.415)
you
PJ Wehry (48:14.015)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (48:15.47)
how it could be that beauty could lead one to truth. In fact, there's even one physicist who will say that contemporary physics is driven not by the search for a new particle anymore, not for a new force, but instead new understandings of symmetry so that they can probe yet deeper into the very fundamental features of reality.
Right, again, the aesthetic category wielding enormous influence being how we grow up our way in the darkness, as it were. For some of, for the lay person, some of the most rigorous thinkers that we can envision, those who really doing very, very sophisticated work.
consult their aesthetic sensibilities, it seems, on a regular basis in a number of instances. So that is kind of beauty and truth coming together. Beauty and goodness as well have everything to do with one another if one is thinking of all three of these transistentals. And that too has some rather far-reaching implications. So what both of worried about is a version of the good that
feels like an unwelcome imposition, right? That one performs dutifully, but without a great deal of enthusiasm. And what he wants to bring together are beauty and goodness in the interest of making the attractiveness of the good manifest, making that obvious, making that clear to us, right? So that we are, when we are,
PJ Wehry (49:27.103)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (49:50.786)
Pursuing beauty again, started in the right way, all kinds of, know, qualifications need to be issued here, right? Or pursuing a beauty, true beauty, you might say that has everything to do with goodness. We're bringing about something that is good, that has its own beauty to it as well. So to cultivate the good is to pursue a state of affairs.
that is also beautiful, that has, just to refer to some previous moments in the conversation, has its own intrinsic attractiveness, has its own value. You're not doing it because you're supposed to. You're doing it in order to bring about this beautiful state of affairs that has goodness also turned to it. So this has far-reaching implications for ethics, for moral theology, when beauty is brought in.
PJ Wehry (50:36.031)
So for instance, what a way to think about this is contrary to Kant, that duty should shape our desires, not kill our desires. Because for Kant, the affections shouldn't really play any role in ethics. that's in some ways almost feels like he's a little bit of the whipping boy here. I could be wrong. I haven't read all the Theotokos.
Mark McInroy (50:49.464)
Yes.
Mark McInroy (50:59.854)
No, Yeah. The categorical imperative looms large, I think, even if not overtly mentioned. So yes, I would say that's one element that's in play. And in that regard, might be noted Kant, along with any number of moderns, is very concerned about desires, very concerned about emotions, concerned about passions. All of this stuff needs to be really handled very, very carefully.
PJ Wehry (51:04.639)
You
Mark McInroy (51:28.366)
And what wants to be textured and nuanced in one's reading of these figures, but I think it's safe to say that there is rather severe disciplining of desire in many, many cases. And you see it with Kant's aesthetic theory, actually, with his, way in which he talks about beauty. And so we are able to make aesthetic judgments that are universal precisely when we do not.
get carried away with a way in which they might gratify us. So we are to take a disinterested delight in things that are beautiful. And our disinterest enables us to make universal judgments. And if we cannot bracket our interests, we're going to make judgments in accord with idiosyncrasies within such a, I might, you know,
really enjoy something, but that's not universalizable. So it's going to take away from, it's going to detract from our abilities. so the, his whole treatment is just, it is brimming with the self-restraint, right? One has to engage with beauty, but one does so in a meticulously disinterested fashion.
PJ Wehry (52:49.887)
I like the phrase brimming with self-restraint. I'm definitely going to steal that. So I want to be respectful of your time. Kind of as a final question, besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone should do, what would you recommend to someone who has listened over the course of the last hour to either think about, meditate on, or do over the next week in response?
Mark McInroy (53:19.981)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (53:23.374)
Two things to which one can attend, I think, carefully. One would be within one's own experience, moments of beauty. They are more pervasive than one might immediately think. When one has eyes to see, so to speak, one can recognize those moments.
Mark McInroy (53:48.046)
attend carefully to them. And I would invite the listener to, if that person is tempted, who knows where this person's coming from, but if that person is tempted to think, well, this was a momentary flight of fancy, and now I'm back to my sober, authentic, properly engaged self or something along those lines.
PJ Wehry (53:50.303)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (54:08.223)
Yeah, the real. Yeah.
Mark McInroy (54:12.014)
I thought that I would encourage the listener to just remain in those moments, recognize things that might be happening in those moments. And it might be an opportunity to mention, as much as we tend in certain regards to think of beauty as trivial, as ornamental, right, as not getting the heart of things. At the same time, if I ask you, if anybody told me the top five experiences of your entire life.
Odds are good. is going to play a prominent role configured in various ways, But beauty is going to play a prominent role in many, not all, those instances. on the one hand, we think it's not all that important. On the other hand, we maybe implicitly move to a more substantive notion of beauty when we think about those most important things. So that's the first thing I guess I would say is to attend experientially to the way in which we'll navigate someone's world.
And if one is the sort of person who devotes oneself to texts of various kinds, if one engages with philosophical materials, theological materials, but actually much broader than that, look for beauty there too, because it is also more endemic to those materials than one might perceive. And here you get into the primary text as always.
PJ Wehry (55:26.174)
Hmm.
Mark McInroy (55:33.622)
a valuable move you don't get the way in which they're kind of glossed or summarized by scholars, but instead you get in contact as it were with these figures and their own voices. One can find beauty there too. It's in the biblical materials, it's in the history of Christian theology, saints, if one is inclined in that direction.
But it's much more pervasive than that. It's within philosophical materials and as mentioned briefly tantalizingly so, I hope it's in physics, it's in scientists. And that's really one of the particularly intriguing arenas to pursue. So if the listener, if one is a hard-nosed person who likes some...
no fluff assessments of reality. If one's drawing something that one can think of as credible with ease, then Einstein, Dirac, Richard Feynman, Frank Wiltzak, contemporary physicists, Hardy, a mathematician, which are the day these figures speak about beauty in extraordinary ways that can provoke a kind of paradigm shift.
PJ Wehry (56:47.721)
Mm.
Mark McInroy (56:51.094)
such that one thinks of this idea of beauty in a different way.
PJ Wehry (56:56.339)
Beautiful answer. Dr. McEnroy, been an absolute joy having you on. Thank you.
Mark McInroy (57:00.418)
Thank you so much, P.J. It's been a real delight for me too.