Episode Transcript  

One

Layers of Signification

Let’s begin this meditation with an image, part of which is taken from St. Augustine. Suppose a man, to express his undying love for a woman, buys her a diamond ring, which he gives her when he proposes. Obviously, that diamond ring is meant to express the character of his love. And it would be a sad thing if the woman valued the ring itself more than the love that the ring was meant to express; she’d be valuing the symbol more than the reality.

But let’s also imagine that when he buys the diamond ring from the jeweler, they give him a certificate, listing the various properties and value of the diamond he bought. Here too, the certificate is meant to express the character of the ring. And it would be totally weird if she valued the certificate more than she valued the diamond ring. If she went around wearing the certificate but not the ring, or she spent more time appreciating the beauty and color of the certificate than the beauty and color of the diamond.

And yet, the way we’re spending our days makes it clear that, like this hypothetical woman, we care more about representations than the reality they’re meant to express. So what can we do about that?

Two

The Three Levels of Reality

In the example of the man’s love, the diamond ring, and the diamond certificate, there are three levels. The love is the most important, expressed by the diamond, whose value is itself testified to by the certificate. So too, the ultimate reality is transforming union with God and Heaven. He is the supreme Good. At the next level is the world He has made, all the marvels listed in the first book of Genesis: light, dark, sun, moon, sky, sea, birds, fish, land, and the animal kingdom. And to crown it all, the beautiful kaleidoscope of human beings made in His image. This level is like the diamond ring: it’s a gift that expresses God’s goodness and His love for us.

And then there’s another level: this is the level of the symbols and representations we use to communicate about the created world. Words, books, paintings, pictures, videos, art, songs, movies. These are all ways of depicting or presenting things in the real world. Even in the case of fiction, a movie or a novel is supposed to be a roundabout way of showing us something in the real world, the way Lord of the Rings teaches us about heroism, or War and Peace teaches us about relationships over time.

So again, three levels: first, the divine; secondly, the created, which is meant to manifest the divine; third, the representational, which is meant to manifest the created. There’s a descending order of importance. The divine is the most important; the natural is the next most important; and then comes the representation.

The great danger is that we increasingly prefer the lower order over the greater.

Three

Disordered Preference

All sin is preferring some created thing over the Creator. In other words, all sin would rather have something from the second level than from the first. Just like it would be strange for a woman to care about a diamond ring more than the love of the man who gives it to her, so it is the irrationality of sin to care more about the things of this world than the love of the God who gives it all to us as a pledge of Himself. But it’s also possible to push the irrationality further down into the next level of being, and come to love the representational more than the real.

We can come to love art more than nature; videos more than conversations; pictures more than people; fictional stories more than real life. That’s like appreciating a diamond certificate more than the diamond it certifies. And that’s a disorder that is threatening each of us today, in a world where people are designing representations to be as addictive and immersive as possible.

Four

The Challenge Before Us

There’s always been the temptation to the insanity that is preferring images to reality. There were always some people who preferred books to real life. There were always some people who preferred money to accomplishment and the good things in life that money was supposed to symbolize. But with the pervasive spread of movies (in full color! On the big screen!), the human race faced a massive, society-wide temptation to prefer representations to reality. Because the representations are bigger, brighter, louder, faster, and much more dramatic than anything reality has to offer.

This challenge has only increased with things like video games, the internet, the smartphone, and now, of course, generative AI. Now people lose themselves regularly, for the bulk of their waking hours, in representations. But do you see that this is death to the soul? Not only forsaking God for His creatures, but for the creatures of his creatures?

God wants representations to bring us to think about the created order, and then from the created order to the divine order. So what can we do to make that happen?

Five

Resolution

Jesus knows how to bring our attention from lower things to higher: from sparrows and lilies up to dispelling human anxieties up to God’s love and providence. For a resolution, let’s see if we can do that today. When we find ourselves reading about something, or watching something online, let’s see if we can push the pause button, put down our phone, and then silently use whatever we were watching or reading about as a stepping stone, a stepping stone to help us understand our own lives better, a stepping stone to help us understand and love God better.

Then we’ll be going from lower to higher, not simply letting ourselves free-fall in the opposite direction.

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