Bishop Barron and Matthew Petrusek discuss Gad Saads's book Suicidal Empathy and the Catholic understanding of love versus empathy
Bishop Robert Barron joins Matthew Petrusek on the Word on Fire Show to discuss Gad Saads's book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.
Summary
Gad Saad's book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind argues that the West has distorted the otherwise noble capacity for empathy into a destructive moral framework. Bishop Robert Barron, joining Matthew Petrusek on the Word on Fire Show, contends that the core problem is not empathy itself but its elevation to the central organizing principle of moral life — a place that properly belongs to truth, justice, and love. He draws on Thomas Aquinas's definition of love as "willing the good of the other" to show that authentic Christian charity is fundamentally different from empathy, and that conflating the two produces the very harms Saad identifies. Barron also connects the ideology of suicidal empathy to wokeism and the influence of Marxist binary thinking, arguing that as Christianity has receded culturally, distorted quasi-Christian forms — including progressive empathy-centered morality — have rushed in to fill the void. The episode closes with a listener question about where God was before time began, which Barron answers by explaining that time itself is a creature and that God exists outside of it entirely.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Bishop Barron's recent interview with the Vice President
Matthew Petrusek: Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Matthew Petrusek, Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you for joining us.
The evolutionary behavioral scientist and public intellectual Gad Saads has recently published an influential book entitled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. In it, Saad argues that much of the West has unfortunately come to embrace a perversely deficient understanding of empathy, twisting the natural and otherwise noble human capacity to feel and respond to other people's sufferings into a moral license to upend the moral, economic, and political order. According to the dictates of suicidal empathy, for example, society should prioritize criminals over victims, illegal immigrants over citizens, lawbreakers over law-abiders, racial identity over competence, adult sexual expression over childhood innocence, and trans women — that is, men pretending to be women — over real women. Suicidal empathy's endgame, Saad warns, is nothing less than societal ruin and the eventual totalitarian eclipse of the individual.
How, from a Catholic perspective, should we assess these claims? Is Saad's characterization of suicidal empathy and its dangers accurate? If so, how should we as Christians constructively respond? What role in particular should the biblical conception of love play in defining what it means to show true compassion and care for those in need? Here to discuss Saad's book and to explain how authentic Christian charity is and is not related to empathy is Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop, welcome back to the studio.
Bishop Barron: Thanks, man.
Matthew Petrusek: Today we're talking about a highly influential and very timely new book by Gad Saads called Suicidal Empathy. But before we do — there's lots to talk about — what have you been up to recently?
Bishop Barron: A number of things. When this comes out, this will have happened a while ago, but I had the great privilege of interviewing the Vice President. We set up this time and we had to get to his residence, and getting in to see the Vice President has a little bit of a workout in terms of security. We went through several different levels — dogs and things examining the car, and then being wanded several times. And finally they brought us to the pool house, which is a little house adjacent to the main house of the Vice President. Cameras were in there. It was a small space, and then he just came right on time. I shook his hand and within about 25 seconds we were having the conversation. That was a delight, and he was great. We had a great conversation for an hour.
Matthew Petrusek: And it's available on the Bishop Barron channel.
Bishop Barron: It's out on a different platform.
Matthew Petrusek: Definitely worth a watch. All right. Well, let's now turn to Gad Saads's new book, Suicidal Empathy. The full title is Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind — I love that, "dying to be kind." So we'll get into evaluating and analyzing it, but first let's lay the foundation of what his argument is, starting with how he defines empathy. How do we define it as a concept distinct from other concepts?
Defining empathy and its place in the moral order
Bishop Barron: Literally, pathos means feeling. Empathy means to feel into — to enter into the feelings of somebody else. As he uses it, it's to spare the feelings of somebody, to make sure their feelings aren't hurt. If I'm empathetic, I feel what you feel and I want to make your life as emotionally comfortable and rewarding as possible. That's empathy for somebody.
Matthew Petrusek: Saad is an evolutionary scientist who focuses on behavior, so he recognizes empathy as being grounded in our evolutionary nature, but also as being a virtue. What do you think he's getting at there? Why would we think of it as something good?
Bishop Barron: We'll get to the fuller discussion there, because it's very interesting and very telling that empathy is not listed, of course, as one of the classic virtues in the tradition. I think what he means is: all things being equal, it's a good thing to respect someone's feelings. You don't go out of your way to hurt someone's feelings — that itself would be a kind of act of injustice. If justice is rendering to each his due, and people are due respect, then to go out of your way to hurt their feelings is an act of injustice. So all things being equal, in itself, it's a decent thing to enter into the feelings of somebody else and try to respect those. As far as it goes, it's a good thing. I'd rather be empathetic than not empathetic. As we'll get to, it's the exaggeration of it — placing it as the central defining value — where we get problems.
Matthew Petrusek: Let's turn to that. Tracing his argument, how does he lay out how something that is otherwise good and maybe even noble goes so wrong?
Bishop Barron: I think — and I agree with him here — it goes wrong when it becomes exaggerated to the point that it stands athwart truth, reality, and justice. When you say, "I'm so empathetic with you that I'm going to spare your feelings even if it means I won't tell you the truth" — or "I'm so empathetic that I'm going to make sure your feelings aren't hurt even if that involves an act of deep injustice toward you or to somebody else" — it's giving such primacy to something that doesn't deserve it.
From an epistemic standpoint, that's the problem he's put his finger on, which I think is very interesting. When you take something that shouldn't be in the central place and you put it there, the whole system begins to shake apart. In the great moral tradition, the right things are placed in the center, and then things fall into place. If justice and love are your central values, then you'll know when to be empathetic, you'll know when it's appropriate to respect someone's feelings and when it's not. But what belongs at the center of our preoccupations? Do it biblically: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind." God must be placed at the center of our preoccupations, and everything else understood in relation to God. If empathy itself becomes a kind of God, now we're in trouble.
Forbidden knowledge and the epistemic dimension of suicidal empathy
Matthew Petrusek: Dwelling more on that epistemic dimension — Saad spends a whole chapter on what he calls "forbidden knowledge." What did you think about that? The connection he's making between suicidal empathy and suppressing true but otherwise controversial statements about reality?
Bishop Barron: That's the problem. If you say, "I've just discovered something that is true, but I know if I say it, it's going to really hurt someone's feelings or it's really going to go against a reigning narrative" — I thought of Bernard Lonergan, the great Catholic epistemologist and philosopher, and his four imperatives. Be attentive — what's really going on? Be intelligent — have bright ideas, clever hypotheses about what's going on. Be reasonable — make a judgment about what is really going on, which of your ideas is right. But then finally, be responsible — act in accord with the truth that you know.
So if I've come to know something is true, but I say, "I'm not going to publish it, I'm not going to announce it, I'm not going to tell you about it because it's going to get me in trouble, it's going to hurt someone's feelings" — I'm now epistemically unconverted. Lonergan would say one form of that lack of conversion means I'm not attentive. A lot of us are like that — we don't really see what's going on. It's the ostrich thing. Or I'm not intelligent — I see what's going on but I never really think about it that deeply. Or I see what's going on, I'm pretty clever about it, but I never make a judgment — because if you make a judgment, then you know that guy's going to get mad. And then finally, I've made a judgment, I know what's true, but I'm not going to act on it, I'm not going to tell you, I'm not going to publish, I'm not going to cause trouble. Those are all forms of epistemic, you might say, moral failure. I think that's what he's driving at with the truth issue.
Matthew Petrusek: That Lonergan approach is so helpful for understanding the deeper issues at stake.
Bishop Barron: Lonergan was a Jesuit, and as a Jesuit he was very interested in the question of conversion — what brings you to Christ. But I think he saw the applicability of that conversion language to the epistemic dimension. We have fallen minds. He's helped me more than anyone to see what that means. Your mind is fallen — it's inattentive, unintelligent, unreasonable, and irresponsible. That's a fallen mind. Most of us have that most of the time. I would argue that wokeism represents a beautiful example of the fallen mind.
Suicidal empathy and the threat to Western civilization
Matthew Petrusek: Well, we'll turn more to wokeism and progressivism in just a moment. But bookending the description of Saad's argument — he pulls no punches in saying this will lead to the destruction of Western civilization. I want to quote him: "Suicidal empathy is a deadly contagion of one of humanity's most noble virtues. If not properly contained, it will destroy the West." Bishop, do you think this claim is accurate in its severity?
Bishop Barron: I would broaden it a bit. The West, which is grounded in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, has a keen sense of the centrality of certain epistemic, moral, and aesthetic values — these are things that ground Western consciousness. When those get compromised — and they have been — that to me is postmodernism. Much of wokeism is a questioning of those values. Read the postmoderns — they're upfront about it. What they're doing is deconstructing Western civilization. So putting something like empathy at the center where it doesn't belong — where I would argue justice, truth, and love belong — when those are jettisoned in favor of empathy, it's like an engine that's poorly put together and the engine will shake apart. This moral and epistemic framework that puts empathy at the center is going to shake apart, and that's what's happening.
Matthew Petrusek: You've been a long-time vocal critic of progressivism and wokeism. Say a little bit more about the connection you see between the ideology and suicidal empathy.
Bishop Barron: That's it, isn't it? I think wokeism has placed empathy — let's say fellow feeling for those viewed as marginalized — so central to the moral project that the other things that ought to be in the center are themselves marginalized. Hence truth — well, if it bothers someone too much, don't talk about it. Meaning — oh, meaning is up to you to decide, and if this structure of meaning is going to hurt the feelings of a large group of people, well then don't talk about it. Moral values — if you keep harping on those moral values, you're going to really hurt the feelings of certain people. What you've done is, in the name of empathy — which is not a central, unquestionable value — you've now compromised things that are central and non-negotiable. What properly belongs in the center? Revisiting the classical thinkers: justice, temperance, prudence — and I would broaden it to love and truth. Those things are properly central to the moral enterprise. Empathy is not one of those.
Matthew Petrusek: I'll try to ask this question as sincerely as I can, without it being a rejection of progressivism. On the one hand, as you're describing it, it's an ideology that rejects all objective values and all objective moral claims — they simply don't exist, they're the result of power structures. But as Suicidal Empathy is bringing out, it's also highly moralizing — you must act in certain ways with specific groups of people. Is there any way internally to square those two claims, or is it just hopelessly incoherent?
Bishop Barron: I think it's incoherent, again for the reason that it's taken something that is valid but secondary and made it primary — made it the central organizing principle of the moral enterprise. That is not going to work. That's where the moralizing will come in. Wokest people moralize all the time, but they're doing it in an incoherent way because their central value is, as I think Saad properly points out, empathy rather than love, truth, and justice. When that happens, the thing will shake apart and will actually do far more damage to the human project.
Marxist roots and the oppressor/oppressed binary
Matthew Petrusek: Do you see any Marxist or communist elements driving suicidal empathy, especially recognizing that empathy is only for certain groups — those associated with the oppressed — and certainly not for those defined as oppressors?
Bishop Barron: I think that's it — that binary of oppressor and oppressed. The Frankfurt School is behind a fair amount of wokeism, critical theory, and those are certainly influenced by Marxism. That's one form it takes: dividing the world into antagonistic groups of oppressor and oppressed. Catholic social theory, for example, would see society in a much more subtle and variegated way — as a play of interdependent classes and modes of being and modes of organization. But the Marxist binary haunts us today. You're on one side or the other. Everyone now is so impossibly eager to get on the right side of that binary — I want to be oppressed, I want to be an oppressed person so I get special consideration. What that's done is turned us into people who are simply antagonistic constantly, and there's no way out, it seems. There are the guilty oppressors, but what's the route of salvation? How is justice ever found? I don't think in a wokeist framework there's a solution to that problem.
Matthew Petrusek: Connected to that — surveying the moral landscape as best you can tell — do you think suicidal empathy is the result of just an honest mistake, of good feelings that are simply misguided, or is this something being orchestrated and calculated for political ends?
Bishop Barron: I do think it's trickled down from the universities. I've said that for a long time. You can almost trace when the contagion came from the universities in Europe to American universities — postmodernism, the Frankfurt School, critical theory — and then it worked its way through the university system. And when you say universities, it's very powerful, because you're saying the place that trains other university professors, high school teachers, grade school teachers, people very influential in the wider culture — they have taken in this perspective. So I think it trickled down very much from that.
I do think there are a lot of people in the wokest camp who mean well, and they would see empathy as the same as love. And it's not. As I read Saad's book, that's what came to my mind all the time: empathy and love are different things. If you conflate them or reduce love to empathy, then you've got the problem that he's put his finger on.
The biblical and Catholic understanding of love versus empathy
Matthew Petrusek: Let's now turn more directly to how the Catholic tradition and the biblical tradition can help us understand and respond to this problem. Biblically speaking, what insight do we have into the problem of suicidal empathy? What is it getting wrong about humanity? What is it getting wrong about the nature of the moral world?
Bishop Barron: It's getting wrong what love is. It is a limitation of the English language that we don't have a word that really gets at what the Bible and the Greek tradition mean, because "love" is a very ambiguous word. That's why I go back to Thomas Aquinas all the time. To love is not to have positive feelings about someone. It's not to empathize with someone. To love is to will the good of the other. I like the austerity of that language. Love is an act of the will, not a feeling of the heart. Can it be accompanied by feelings of the heart? Yes. Can feelings of the heart clue you into the direction of love? Yes, I think they're related. I looked at someone like Dietrich von Hildebrand, who wanted to bring the heart into the discussion more than it had been — I think he's right about that. But let's keep the clarity and austerity of the definition: to love is to will the good of the other. Empathy is not to hurt the feelings of another. Those are entirely different, because sometimes to love someone means you are going to hurt his or her feelings.
I'll give you a couple of simple examples. You're a university professor. Someone writes a lousy paper for you and you give a grade of C. The student, especially raised in our culture today, expects an A for everything, and their feelings are deeply hurt. I get that — I remember my feelings being hurt by bad grades when I was a kid. If empathy is my prime value, I'll say, "Oh, I'll change the grade. I don't want to hurt your feelings, and obviously this is really affecting you, so I'll give you an A." Well, what have you done? First, you're standing athwart truth, because it's not a good paper — it's not an A paper, it's a C paper. But press it further: you're also being unjust to that young person, because you're discouraging them from improving.
I remember I had a tough teacher — he was really good — a freshman high school teacher at Fenwick High School who taught us English. He was tough and did not take, you know, "oh, that sentence is okay." If your sentence was lousy, he told you, and it was covered with bad marks. He would even read bad sentences aloud so we would all laugh at them. Thank God for him. Because I've spent much of my life writing, and I go back to him. I really do. I go back to things he taught me. What if he had just said, "Whatever you write, you get an A, because I don't want to hurt your feelings"? It would have been an act of deep injustice to me.
Giving that kid a C — that's willing his good. It's telling him the truth and urging him to get better. It's an act of justice and love, even though it prompted very bad feelings.
Another example: someone goes out for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They're a trombone player — they're okay, pretty good, but not Chicago Symphony level. And the director says, "Nope, sorry, we're not going to accept you." Feelings hurt, undoubtedly — deeply hurt, angry, probably. What if the head of the Chicago Symphony said, "I don't want that guy's feelings to be hurt, so yeah, we'll let you in the orchestra"? You're not being nice to that person or anybody else, because now you're lowering the standards of one of the finest orchestras in the world, so those who come to hear it are not going to be hearing music at the finest level. And that trombone player is not going to get one bit better — he's going to be surrounded by players much better than him and is going to be hurt and embarrassed. To say "no, you're not good enough for this" is maybe not empathetic, but it's an act of love, an act of justice, an act of truth. That's what needs to be at the heart of the moral enterprise.
I think Saad is putting his finger on this confusion between authentic love and empathy.
Matthew Petrusek: I'm thinking of how you brought up Lonergan earlier, who helps us understand that our intellect is fallen. Could we also say that our emotional life is fallen, and that we shouldn't take feelings about ourselves — or others — as necessarily normative? That maybe we do feel bad, but we shouldn't feel bad?
Bishop Barron: That's right. And feelings — look at Plato, who knew this a long time ago — the feelings are like horses. They're full of energy, going in different directions, and they need reason as the charioteer who holds the reins. Without the feelings, that chariot won't go anywhere — they're going to drive it — but under the aegis of reason. That's fundamentally right. Of course we all have feelings about all kinds of things, but they've got to be controlled by reason. And reason is governed by truth, justice, and love. When that's the combination, now you're going to move forward confidently.
Any parent knows it. If you were to say, "In regard to my kids, my number one value is to be empathetic — I will never hurt their feelings" — you'd be the worst parent in creation. Parents are hurting kids' feelings all the time, because they're motivated by truth, justice, and love. They want what's best for that child. God help us if parents have forgotten that distinction and empathy is now their primary value — those kids will be out of control, deeply unhappy, morally dysfunctional.
Matthew Petrusek: Confirmed. I think that's the best image — the whole country is getting seduced in this direction of wanting to be the empathetic parent, not the loving parent.
Bishop Barron: And Jesus does not say "be empathetic with one another." He doesn't say "be empathetic with your enemy." He says "love one another," "love your enemy." Nor does John the Evangelist say "God is empathy." I challenge you to read the Bible and tell me that God is empathy. The right formulation is "God is love" — God wills the good of his creation, which means there'll be a lot of hurt feelings. And that confusion — even the prevalence, when I was coming of age, of the word "compassion" — compassion is like empathy: pati, feeling, cum, to feel with. I like compassion, I'm not against it. Compassion is good in itself, like empathy. But compassion and love are not the same thing.
Going back to your example as a parent — when you have to correct one of your kids and express love in a challenging way, I bet you feel compassion for your child. You know how this is landing in their hearts and minds right now. Of course. But nevertheless, you love rather than merely show compassion. The blurring of that distinction is the source of a lot of mischief.
Matthew Petrusek: And using the parent analogy, that's a sacrifice not only for the recipient of the tough truth, but for the giver of the tough truth as well.
Bishop Barron: Totally. It would break your heart that your kids have to suffer. My father was a wonderful man in so many ways. He was a deeply compassionate, empathetic person — he really was. But he was a person of love, and he would guide me through some tough times, knowing "I know how hard this is, but this is the right thing for you to do."
I've told this story a few times here in the diocese: I joined the altar servers when I was about nine or so, went to the first meeting, signed up, and then decided, "I don't know, this is too much. I don't like this. I don't like being up that early, and I don't want to wear this cassock." So I came home and said I'm not going to do this. And my father said to me, "If you don't want to sign up for something, you don't have to, but once you do, then you do it." I remember that to this day. It's been a guiding principle of my life — where I've committed to something, even when I think, "Oh God, I don't want to do this."
I remember when I went to Paris to do my doctoral studies. I got off the plane, I was in this foreign city, this language I barely knew. It was hot, uncomfortable. I was living in this tiny room at the Redemptorists' house. My feelings were screaming, "Get me out of here." But I remembered my father: when you sign up for it, you stay. I didn't have to go to Paris — I could have told my superiors I didn't want to do doctoral studies — but I signed up for it. That's the voice of truth, love, and justice, not the voice of your feelings.
I think Saad is right: when the feelings move into the central place, God help us.
Niceness, kindness, and authentic Christian charity
Matthew Petrusek: One of the sort of generic assumptions about what defines Christianity — from the secular side, but also I think among many Christians — is that you're supposed to be nice and you're supposed to be kind. Are those actually meaningful moral categories from this deeper understanding of charity you're describing?
Bishop Barron: Same with love. I'm not against kindness or niceness — be nice, be kind, sure, all things being equal. But kindness and niceness are not the same as love. That's why Dostoevsky famously said — now it's a cliché, but famously said — that love is a harsh and dreadful thing. Authentic love. Being nice is never harsh and dreadful. Being kind isn't harsh and dreadful. But real love is, because love means willing the good of the other, and that can mean something very demanding and harsh and frightening. That's why to be in relation to the God who is love — "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," says the Bible. To fall into the hands of the merely empathetic — that's easy. But a God of real love who wants what's right for me and true for me and good for me — that's a different game.
Suicidal empathy within Christianity and the preferential option for the poor
Matthew Petrusek: Bishop, I wish I could say that all of the mischief of suicidal empathy is coming from the secular world, but unfortunately it's not. There are many Christians and denominations that have embraced this idea. When you said "God is empathy," I envisioned a bumper sticker on the back of a Volvo. There are those who use empathy as the primary category for describing what it means to love thy neighbor. What's a charitable way of addressing that form of suicidal empathy that's been falsely Christianized?
Bishop Barron: I think of a church here in Rochester that had a sign out front that said "Love thy neighbor" — and then it was like an asterisk — "thy Black neighbor, thy Brown neighbor, thy gay neighbor." I kept thinking: yes, but you have to define what you mean by love, because I bet what the author of that sign meant by love is something like "be nice to," "be kind to," "be empathetic with." As far as it goes, okay. But if real love is involved, and that means offering moral challenge to somebody, that's a different game being played.
I think the Christian churches have been lulled into this. And the fact that wokeism has so come to dominate the culture — I would argue that as Christianity has become attenuated and we've become less of a cultural force, wokeism has moved in. That's the problem. Not enough Christians know the distinction between love and empathy to challenge it. So the wokeist philosophy says, "Of course — empathy, that's what matters the most." No. Love matters the most. Justice and truth matter the most.
Matthew Petrusek: One of the pillars of the Catholic social thought tradition is the preferential option for the poor. That too is sometimes used as evidence in support of the empathetic view — we're called to pay attention to the marginalized, the voiceless, the most vulnerable, and what that means is to raise up their interests over and above the interests of others. How do we distinguish the authentic Catholic understanding of the preferential option from this kind of hijacking of it?
Bishop Barron: I think it's perfectly legitimate to say there are deep inequalities, deep injustices in society, and it's right to give special attention to those who are disadvantaged. Sure — I have no problem with that. That's an expression of justice. You're trying to will the good of the other, trying to render to the other his due. I have no quarrel with that. I'm with Leo XIII, who would say, "When the demands of necessity and propriety are met in your own life, the rest of what you own belongs to the poor." That's pretty challenging stuff. Or Thomas Aquinas speaks of the universal destination of goods — the same idea that the world belongs to God, not to us. We are stewards of it. The purpose of the goods that I own is ultimately the common good. That's Thomas Aquinas. I'm fine with that. That's good Catholic social teaching.
The relevant point again is love versus empathy. If you're doing that under the aegis of love — truly willing the good of the other — then fine. And here too, people of goodwill can disagree about what the good of the other actually is in a given case. That's why we have Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives of goodwill who are disagreeing about the details. Fine. I have no quarrel with that.
But what we're talking about is a confusion at a much more fundamental level. It's not two people disagreeing about the best way to will the good of the poor. It's that we've jettisoned justice, truth, and love in favor of empathy. That's the more fundamental problem.
Evangelizing those sincerely caught in suicidal empathy
Matthew Petrusek: Before moving on to our listener question — in a summary way, Bishop, looking at that contingent of the woke progressive ideology who are sincerely misguided, who do have good hearts, who have a desire for rightness and maybe even righteousness — what kind of message can we give them as evangelists to recognize the goodness that is there, but help them avoid the trap they're currently caught in?
Bishop Barron: That's a good instinct — when you're dialoguing with someone you disagree with, find the point of contact. And the point of contact I would argue, even as it comes through critical theory and all that, is a vestige of Christianity, which has been the dominant thought form in the West. Even those like Karl Marx and Foucault who repudiate it — in a way you can't get around it. That's Tom Holland's point in Dominion: you can't get around this Christian formation. So in this sympathetic, empathic concern for the marginalized and the poor — yes, that is a vestige of Christianity indeed. As Holland argues, that concern for the suffering other, for the marginalized, goes right back to the cross of Jesus. Begin with that.
But then make the distinction — as Karol Wojtyła would say, philosophy is the art of making distinctions — make the right distinction between empathy and love, and then you'll be in the right place. As Christianity has receded culturally, these aberrant forms of Christianity — and you might read wokeism that way, as a sort of aberrant form of Christianity — have asserted themselves aggressively. They'll borrow the language of Christianity, like that sign, but at the heart of it is something that's really not biblical, not Christian.
Listener question: Where was God before time began?
Matthew Petrusek: It is now time for our listener question. Today we have a young man named Augustine from Long Island asking about the classic question: where was God before time began?
Augustine (listener): Hi Bishop Barron. I'm Augustine from Long Island, New York. And my question is: where was God before time existed?
Bishop Barron: May I say, young Augustine — that is a very Augustinian question. I don't know if you've read Augustine, but he was preoccupied with the question of time and God's relation to time. You're living up to your name. That's beautiful.
Here's a quick answer. Time is a creature. So before creation, there is no time. God is eternal, which doesn't mean he exists endlessly in time — that's like a vampire. He's outside of time. He's not caught in time. So even to speak of "what's before creation" is anomalous — it's a category error. There isn't a "before" creation. Before, during, after — that begins with creation. Time itself is a creature, and God is outside of time. So he's not before creation — he's other than creation, which includes time. That's a little bit of a technical answer, but my inspiration Thomas Aquinas, and behind him your hero Augustine, is the one who helped us think through those things.
Matthew Petrusek: Thank you so much, Augustine, for reaching out to us. Well, thank you again for a very enlightening conversation, Bishop.
Bishop Barron: Always a pleasure, man. Thanks.