a lot of the confusion comes i think from confusion about genre if we say boy this is really primitive science well then i'm going to write it off or i say boy this is really faulty history with no you know support from well yeah then i'm going to write it off but then you're you're just misconstruing it's it's nature welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vott the senior publishing director joining me is bishop barron for a discussion about the book of genesis we're kicking off a new series here we're going to
ask how we understand the creation story in genesis and what's its literary genre and what are the big significant religious truths that each line is intending to communicate but before we get there bishop it's good to see you welcome back to the show hey brandon thank you always a pleasure to see you and talk to you every time we get together we have some new publication to share whether it's a book or some print periodical and today it's the newest issue of the evangelization and culture journal i'm holding up here on camera this one is
dedicated to the topic of poetry so we've got articles on virgil and dante and gerard manley hopkins we got feature pieces on faulkner and bob dylan one of your favorites and i think there's a lengthy interview in there with you about dante and his divine comedy tell us about this issue on poetry and why people should be interested in it i love it yeah i just was going through it the other day and as always it's beautiful to look at beautifully laid out todd warner the editor does a marvelous job and as you say a
lot of good content i'm particularly pleased they have a lengthy excerpt from this book of mine that we just reissued called the now i see i wrote it years ago but i have a section there from william faulkner's the bear which is one of my favorite stories in the 20th century because it's really about god and it's beautifully illustrated in the journal and that excerpt is in there as you say write the interview with me about dante and my kind of relationship with dante over the years and then lots of other good stuff and beautifully
laid out and you got to join the institute to get it that's right you have to go to the website wordonfire.institute to sign up when you do you will receive a welcome package in the mail that will include this issue of the evangelization and culture journal also a book also some extra materials of course when you sign up you get access to all the videos inside of the institute all the bishop baron's films and study programs so if you've been sitting on the fence for a while now is a good time to sign up and
get this special issue on poetry all right well as i mentioned at the beginning today we're going to kick off a new five-part series of discussions on the book of genesis i thought this deserved a much longer discussion a much longer conversation than just a quick one-off episode so i thought we'd walk through genesis and in particular the roughly first half of genesis we'll do a new episode every three to four weeks in this first one today we're going to discuss creation and then that's going to be followed by episodes on adam eve in the
fall and then an episode on abraham an episode on jacob and then finally joseph so a really power-packed series here on the book of genesis now genesis of course is the first book of the bible maybe the most foundational book but it's also as we all know the source of so much confusion especially among non-christians and that's one of the focuses of our podcast is discussing christianity with non-christians bishop would you say that genesis is the most misunderstood book of the bible and if so why do you think that is yeah probably and i'd say
the reason is a confusion about genre so i go right back here to the great vatican ii document dave verbum very short you can read it one sitting i would urge all catholics especially to read that it gives you the catholic approach to the bible let's say well one of the most seminal observations that is made in de verbum is that we must be attentive to the genre of the literature when we're trying to interpret a given book so as i've often said the bible isn't a book it's a library of books it's a collection
tablia in greek means the books it's plural so the bible better we call it maybe the scriptures as we say might be more accurate it's the collection of writings genres include something like history um epistolary literature think of paul it's letters think of apocalyptic literature book of daniel the book of revelation for example prophetic literature gospel gospel is its own kind of literary genre poetry think of the psalms wisdom literature think of proverbs the book of wisdom etc my point is you've got a whole slew of different genre when interpreting a text the very first
question perhaps to ask is what kind of text is this so if i pick up melville's moby dick and i think okay this is an instruction manual and how to how to hunt whales well you might find some of that in there but no it's a novel and that is going to change your whole way of approaching it i pick up for example i'm currently reading ron chernow's big biography of george washington well it's a biography in the full kind of modern sense of the term meaning it's an attempt to tell this life story as
precisely and completely as possible it's got thousands of footnotes you know from letters and diary entries and previous histories and so on um it's a biography of of a modern type okay what kind of genre is the book of genesis well one complicating factor is even within the book of genesis you've got shifts in genre right but we're going to look at the very beginning maybe the most controversial part of the book what is that well if you pick up the opening chapters of genesis i doubt you'd be tempted to say oh that's a biography
like ron chernow's biography of george washington it just doesn't read like that it doesn't have that literary form or style by the same token you read those opening chapters you're not going to say oh this this is um like isaac newton's uh physics oh this reads like um stephen hawking's cosmology well no it's it's written long before the rise of those modern physical sciences so it's not that kind of text either what is it well people have made different suggestions i rather like carl bart's suggestion that it's in the genre of saga you might say
theologically informed saga legend if you want myth if you want though that word is so easy to misunderstand i've used the language of theological poetry think of great poems that convey very profound truths about human life about god about you know meaning and purpose and all that well it's theological poetry it's poetry that is bearing to us very profound truths about god about god's relationship to the world about the purpose of the world about salvation history all of it so you know saga okay i rather like that theological saga theological poetry and once we get
that right then we know how best to read it to get back to your question a lot of the confusion comes i think from confusion about genre if we say boy this is really primitive science well then i'm going to write it off or i say boy this is really faulty history with no you know support from well yeah then i'm going to write it off but then you're just misconstruing it's uh it's nature i think the importance of identifying the genre helps us to solve the the situation most christians find themselves in when discussing
genesis with others and they receive a question like do you believe in the bible or do you believe in genesis do you think genesis is true and without this focus on genre that that becomes as silly or simplistic a question is like do you believe in the library is the library true or do you do is moby dick true well i i know how to begin to ask that so the genre is like the first thing you have to solidify right that's precisely right and stay with moby dick for a second because melville the young
melville spent time on whaling ships uh he traveled around the world in whaling ships he knew a lot about whaling ships so is moby dick true there's a lot of truth in there even at that level of what a whaling ship is like what was like to live on one what did people sound like what'd they look like what did they do he has long sections there about how they dragged the whale onto the ship and how they cut it up and well yeah he knew all about that and probably there's a lot of of
practical historical truth in there but well was there really a moby dick was there a white whale where was he you know well now we start asking the wrong questions so the same with the bible i mean can you find a lot of historical truth in the bible yeah yes indeed lots of it but we have to attend the genre is the first question all right so now that we've identified the genre which you've described as theological saga theological poetry i thought maybe for the rest of this episode we'd walk through this creation story almost
line by line and have you unpack it for us explain it to us the opening lines of genesis maybe the most famous lines in the bible say in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth now there's so much pact in there we know there's been whole books just written on that sentence alone but let me let me ask you this from the very fact that god is creator that's what we learn in the very first verse god created what can we learn about his nature what does that tell us about god himself a
lot because in every other religious and philosophical perspective god or the gods are supreme instances of worldly things if i can put it that way think of here greek and roman mythology where the gods clearly exist within nature right whether we say they're on the top of mount olympus or we see them operating and acting coming down in a kind of a physical way they're great they're they're exalted instances of creaturely natures but they're still worldly natural things right when genesis says in the beginning god created everything other than god right the heavens and the
earth mean as we say in the creed the visible and the invisible whatever is contingent categorical finite whatever exists in the world was made by god that means god is not a worldly object god is not an item in the universe now welcome to every atheist i know from foyerbach through christopher hitchens they all make the same mistake of of conceiving god as some item or object in the world and i'm looking now for evidence of that reality i've told the story often of the you know the russian cosmonaut going up into space and hey
i looked all around there was no god well there's someone that has never understood the opening line of the book of genesis god as the creator of all these things is not an item with within the world i've used in comparison it's not a perfect comparison but not bad of the author of a text right so the author of a text is responsible for everything in a text think of moby dick if you want or of a great dickens novel you know he invents a world he created everything in that world every description every character
every action the plot everything was created well where's dickens in that novel where is he i don't see dickens anywhere but where's melville in this story well there's there's queequeg and there's ishmael and there's captain ahab and there's the white whale oh there he is there's melville well of course not but melville is responsible for the entirety of the story well in a similar way where's god oh i don't see him there's brandon there's a camera here where's god well that's a stupid way to approach it he's the reason why there's something rather than nothing
he's the reason why the world exists at all and therefore we know to get i am getting to your question therefore we know god is an unconditioned reality god is not a worldly reality so as aquinas puts it god is not an ends he's not a being but rather ipsum essay the sheer active to be itself from which all beings come but who's not reducible to the level of beings that's all contained i would argue implicitly in that opening line of genesis we then read that when god created the heavens and the earth the earth
was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep kind of mysterious almost poetic description there what does this mean and why is it significant yeah and it's the the famous hebrew term behind that the tohu bohu um is this formless waste or the watery chaos i like how carl bard again called the das nishtika the the nothing the non-being don't think of it as oh there's god and there was some kind of primal stuff that god worked with because we're dealing again with poetic language here not precise philosophical language because philosophically the
philosophically precise way to put it is that god makes the world ex nilo out of nothing or from nothing what's being described here though it seems to me is god's power over das nistiga god's authority over all that would stand a thwart him so think of the watery chaos sin rebellion all that stands athwart god's creative purposes it pops up in the waters of the red sea it pops up in um the water that jesus comes and walks upon that's the tohu va bohu and god shows his sovereignty over this this resistance next we read
that a wind from god swept over the face of the waters what's going on here there's a lot of commentary about that wind and what that wind could have been right the breath of the lord the the breath of yahweh the holy spirit if you want the spiritual sanctus means the holy breath the creative energy and power of god that from the beginning brings all things into being and then i would say brandon see not just looking back but looking around the ruach adonai the the breath of the lord hovers continually over the world that
he's made because god is breathing life into the world sustaining the world drawing the world to himself so the author of genesis is signaling that from the beginning there's been this power brooding if you will over the the uh the world the the hebrew specialists talk about that the verb there hovering sometimes brooding has the sense of a like a mother bird brooding over her eggs you know of the the fomenting life giving rise to life and i think that's a very good way to describe the holy spirit breathing life into the world breathing life
into us breathing life into the church i'd make a link between the rock the breath of yahweh and then jesus after the resurrection he breathed on them and said receive the holy spirit right and then what do we hear on pentecost but a great driving wind comes there's the ruach yahweh again there's the same creative spirit this time enlivening the church well that's every time i do a confirmation i'm calling on the ruach right the breath of the lord so it's a wonderfully pregnant sort of idea that has implications all up and down the bible
next up we read again some of the most famous words in the bible it says god says let there be light and there was light we mentioned at the beginning that it's significant that god created that that is somewhat unique among religions but what does it tell us that god created through an act of speech it tells us a whole world doesn't it unlike the other or unlike ancient myths god does not make the world through an act of violence so very typically in the ancient myths god or the gods have to face down opposition
they fight they they impose themselves and very often the world is construed as made up of these severed parts of the conquered bodies of the gods enemies right well the point is there's none of that in the creation account in genesis god does not resist anything he's not intervening he's not opposing anything rather through a non-violent and generous act of speech god gives rise to the world there is a universe brandon in that of of the morality that comes up out of the bible i mean why is in jesus for example non-violence and love of
enemies so fundamental because that's the divine way of giving rise to order almost every myth from the ancient world up to the present day says some version of order comes through violence now look we won't get into the whole just war debate in a finite fallen world sometimes i think violence has to be used but is the biblical ideal that god's manner of bringing order is not through violence but non-violence yes it seems to me and jesus says exactly that in the sermon on the mount and then light if if the breath of yahweh is
a consistent symbol look at light you know in darkness we there's something lovely about darkness there can be but in the bible darkness is usually a symbol of of sin of being lost but the studio i'm in right now uh i've got bright lights on me but like all around me it's just it's dark and if i started walking in that direction i'd probably stumble on on a camera or something you know darkness means i don't know where i'm going i'm lost light what does jesus say i am the light of the world i'm the
light of the world but by my light you know where to go you can follow me i'm the way see well all that i think is implied in god's opening move of let there be light from him comes the light of the spiritual life of the moral order and then take one more step um we even use the image when we get a a new idea or we we understand something we put a light bulb over our head right um the light went on hey i was in the dark and the light went on god
speaks the world into being which means he imbues the world with intelligibility how wonderful how strange and mystical it is that every dimension of the universe is imbued with intelligibility we can understand it it corresponds to a mind i've argued we've talked about this before the contemporary sciences depend upon this intuition which is a mystical one it can't be proven a priori or i should say it can't be proven a posteriori it's more accepted a priori that the world is characterized by intelligibility well that's beautifully conveyed in god's intelligent speech and let there be light
let there be luminosity and intelligibility all that's there i think over the next several paragraphs in the first chapter of genesis we read about god creating all sorts of things you've got the waters the fish the birds the cattle the creeping things as my kids say the creepy things why did god create the creepy things but they all come out of the creator in a sort of stately procession you've often linked this to a liturgical right a procession of ministers like we might see at mass what's going on here what's the author trying to communicate
with this literary style i think it's a it's an ingenious move the way a great writer will take a particular symbol or image and then he imbues it with with multivalent meanings right so all the things you mentioned uh from trees and mountains and animals and the earth itself and the sun the moon were all in different cultures in the ancient world worshiped weren't they as gods sun worshipers moon worshippers i worship this mountain i worship this river right so in one move the author of genesis is dethroning all these things he's saying no not
god not god not god not god remember in augustine's confessions at that lyrical passage when augustine imagines the the all of creation speaking to him and they say look higher look higher look higher everything in creation don't look at me i'm not the one you should be worshiping look higher so the author of genesis here is saying the same thing look higher but then now this is the other side of it the positive side all these things now dethroned from from let's say a pretentious place of of primacy but now watch what they do as
you say they come forth one after the other in an ordered procession and catholics right away recognize that that's the way a liturgy begins the cross and then the maybe the candle bearers and then the the one bearing the book and then the the deacon and then the priest and then the bishop if you're in a full you know liturgy what we're seeing is a kind of liturgical procession which tells us the purpose of creation the purpose of all these things now is to enter into a great chorus of praise to the one who created
them now who comes last in a liturgical procession the one who leads the praise the priest or the bishop who comes last in the great procession of the book of genesis human beings right well there's the whole story and i'd argue brandon that's the hermeneutical the interpretive key to much of the bible what's our purpose not to be god's i mean watch now every sinner in the bible falls into that trap i turn myself into god no no you're not god you're a creature moreover not to be the one who dominates creation no no that
that's that's also a mistake rather the one who is to lead all of creation in a great chorus of praise we are the priests now fast forward to the formation of people israel you are a holy priesthood you're a royal nation a people set apart they're meant to remind all of humanity of what our task is to lead all of creation from planets and stars to the creepy crawly things in a great chorus of praise uh wonderful it's a wonderful move there now watch it throughout the entire bible whenever something goes wrong and i i
would challenge anyone to to find an exception here whenever something goes wrong with the human race with the people israel with jesus followers whatever it is it's because of bad praise right as augustine just put they mistook the the creature for the creator that's always the fundamental problem we've lost our mission our vocation to be the priests that lead creation in a course of praise i think that's the whole bible in a way and we just we're going to ring the changes on that theme now up and down the whole bible after all of this
creative work is finished we read that god rests on the seventh day and at first glance it can seem a little odd that why would god need to rest was he fatigued was he tired after all this work so why did god rest right the omnipotent unchanging god doesn't get tired so right it's a it's a symbol here we speak of when someone's died we say may may he rest in peace right we don't mean may he sit in a hammock for all eternity rick we ask god in patches rest aquinas says that the will
has two basic moves right it seeks the absent good so that's a very active there's a good that i want i don't have it i'm going to go after it right but the second move of the will aquinas says is to rest in the good possessed that means to savor it to to taste it it's i use a comparison as a baseball fan to i mean watching a baseball game it's not so much seeking an absent good it's i'm in the presence of this good this game is unfolding before me and it's not really accomplishing
much uh it's gonna end and it'll be over and i'll move on but while i'm there i'm resting in it or i'm playing a game of chess or i'm riding my bike or i'm playing golf i'm resting in it i'm savoring it i'm not thinking about anything else not trying to get anywhere else well that's what god does now importantly on the seventh day after the six days of making the world god savors the world which is why we'll see eventually israel is invited into a similar sabbath rest the day of savoring it doesn't mean
lying in a hammock though that could be part of it but it's to savor the goods that you have like you know brandon with you and your now with seven kids um probably the i'm guessing the best moments in your life are when maybe in between lots of seeking absent goods right which we all have to do you have these moments where you just say it's good to be here this is good this is wonderful i'm i'm savoring these kids i'm savoring uh the presence of my wife you know well that's a sabbath moment the
sabbath day is meant to be that in a very focused way so that we don't forget it so that's the beautiful thing is that god himself sets the tone for the sabbath day by savoring the world he's made and i always think well god does that all the time right that's what god does all the time with his creation he savors it and seeks to foster it and seeks to bring it where he wants it to go and we're meant to imitate god as we savor the goods of the world [Music] well it's time now
for a question from one of our listeners today we have a question from new delhi india so for us all the way on the other side of the world it's a really good question about prayer here it is [Music] hi my name is helena i am from new delhi india so my question is how do i start mental prayer what is the best way to begin with pencil prayer since i am a person who always is distracted and finds it really difficult to focus on one thing at a time so can you tell me what
is the best way to start mental prayer yeah thank you it's a good question um i would recommend the rosary i think the rosary is a great contemplative prayer i i've used that to term from thomas merton that it calms the monkey mind and you're describing that it's like i'm distracted i'm going here and there i'm i'm doing this and doing that i'm worrying about tomorrow and i'm worried about what happened yesterday and that's the monkey mind the rosary by its repetition has a mantra like quality calms the spirit it calms the mind it focuses
the mind but then as you know part of that prayer is to bring before your mind's eye bring before your your imagination these great scenes of the annunciation and the visitation and the resurrection and the crowning of mary et cetera good that's mental prayer and the very rhythm and repetition of the rosary predisposes the mind to enter into that contemplative place so i can't think of a better way to begin as what you call mental prayer than the classic prayer of the rosary well thanks for your great question if other listeners have questions for bishop
barron they can send them in at the website askbishopbarren.com every episode we pick a question to answer here on the air well we hope you like this first discussion about the book of genesis we just covered a few verses from chapter one in this long discussion but we've got several more episodes planned and the next one will turn to chapter two and we'll look at adam eve and the fall so look for that sometime soon and then finally remember pick up your copy of this gorgeous new volume of the evangelization and culture journal it's a
volume on poetry lots and lots of beautiful pictures reflections on famous poets and poems including some contemporary poets some really good uh modern poetry in here as well so pick it up you can get yours by joining the word on fire institute at the website wordonfire.institute well thanks so much for listening we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel
