EP. 127: A PHYSICIAN TO THE SOUL

WITH MIROSLAV VOLF

Aug 27

WITH MIROSLAV VOLF

A theologian and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture shares insights from faith traditions around the world on living an intentional, fulfilling, interconnected, and meaningful life.

Listen Now

Episode Summary

What makes a life worth living? This question has animated great thinkers and faith traditions for millennia. Interestingly enough, in our time of rapid globalization, technological advancement, and material abundance, we often seem more unmoored from our conception of the self and its relation to the world than ever before.

Our guest on this episode, Miroslav Volf, has spent his life wrestling with this question of questions and helping others to do the same. Volf is a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and his work explores the intersections of faith, identity, and public life. He is the author of more than 10 books, including the bestselling Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (2023), based on one of the most popular courses at Yale University, which he co-teaches. The book, an inquiry into the nature of human flourishing, invites readers to consider wisdom drawn from various religious, philosophical, and literary traditions. He challenges the often superficial metrics of happiness promoted by modern society, urging readers to reflect deeply on the kind of life they want to lead — one that is not just pleasurable or successful by conventional standards, but that is positively shaped by adversity, contemplation, and interconnectedness.

In our conversation, we discuss how growing up as the son of a Pentecostal minister in Former Yugoslavia influenced Volf's relationship with Christian theology, why faith is a “comfortably difficult” thing, why “finding your authentic self” is a problematic concept in modern culture, how social media, divisive political currents, and the relentless drive for productivity distract us from what matters most, and the nobility in pursuing a richer, more intentioned, and just life.

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen, Germany.
He has written or edited more than 20 books, over 100 scholarly articles, and his work has been featured in the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Christian Century, Sojourners, and several other outlets, including NPR's Speaking of Faith (now On Being with Krista Tippett) and Public Television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
A member of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and the Evangelical Church in Croatia, Professor Volf has been involved in international ecumenical dialogues (for instance, with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and interfaith dialogues (on the executive board of C-1 World Dialogue), and is active participant in the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum. In October 2007, Prof. Volf was the lead author of the Christian response to “A Common Word Between Us and You,” the historic open letter signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics, and intellectuals, which identified some core common ground at the heart of the Christian and Muslim faiths (the complete text can be found online at http://www.acommonword.com). The “Yale response,” as this response to “A Common Word” has become known, was published in November 2007 as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, signed by more than 130 prominent Christian leaders and scholars.
In this episode, you will hear about:
• 3:12 - What Volf’s work as a systematic theologian entails, and key childhood experiences that shaped his relationship with faith
• 12:18 - The philosophical basis for the Yale class that inspired the book Life Worth Living
• 20:23 - Why Volf uses Smokey Bear as a representation of the pursuit of a meaningful life
• 26:53 - Shifting the focus of life from personal desires toward the quest to live by “truth”
• 40:38 - The inherent challenge in shifting focus away from “I, Me, and Mine”
• 45:49 - How the search for a meaningful life relates to the experiences of a medical professional
• 51:42 - Advice for how to add philosophical practices to a busy modern life
Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:02] And I'm Tyler Johnson.
Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and healthcare executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine. We will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.
Tyler Johnson: [00:01:02] What makes a life worth living. This question has animated great thinkers and faith traditions for millennia. Interestingly enough, in our time of rapid globalization, technological advancement, and material abundance, we often seem more unmoored from our conception of the self and its relation to the world than ever before. Our guest on this episode, Miroslav Volf, has spent his life wrestling with this question of questions and helping others to do the same. Volf is a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and culture, and his work explores the intersections of faith, identity, and public life. He is the author of more than ten books, including the best selling Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, based on one of the most popular courses at Yale University, which he co-teaches the book. A Profound inquiry into the nature of human flourishing, invites readers to consider wisdom drawn from various religious, philosophical, and literary traditions. He challenges the often superficial metrics of happiness promoted by modern society, urging readers to reflect deeply on the kind of life they want to lead, one that is not just pleasurable or successful by conventional standards, but that is positively shaped by adversity, contemplation, and interconnectedness. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss how growing up as a son of a Pentecostal minister in former Yugoslavia profoundly influenced Professor Volf's relationship with Christian theology. Why faith is a comfortably difficult thing. Why finding your authentic self is a problematic concept in modern culture. How social media, divisive political currents, and the relentless drive for productivity distract us from what matters most and the nobility in pursuing a richer, more intentioned and just life.
Tyler Johnson: [00:03:08] Miroslav Volf, welcome to the show.
Miroslav Volf: [00:03:11] Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Tyler Johnson: [00:03:12] So you are I think it would be fair. You can recategorize yourself if you feel it's necessary, but as I understand, you consider yourself to be a philosopher or a theologian. Why don't you first tell us what is your job like? What do you do all day?
Miroslav Volf: [00:03:29] Oh, well, the whole day I consider myself to be a physician of the soul. I consider myself to be a theologian, but I more basically, if you want for people who want categories broader than typical academic silos, I think about the kinds of things that I consider to matter most for us as humans. What kind of life is worthy of our humanity? What kind of world is worthy of our humanity? How do we live in various domains of life? What are the issues? Where are the shoes? Where are the stones in our shoes that need to be removed? And what should we aspire for? So something like that would be my description. If I were sitting next to somebody in an airplane and they asked me what I do if I want them to stop talking to me. I tell them I am a systematic theologian at Yale University.
Tyler Johnson: [00:04:31] Okay, so those are the questions that animate you. But I think that if you tell most people, even if you don't use your systematic theologian title, even if you say these are the questions that are really important to me, then they might say, well, okay, those are the questions that are important to you. But like if I looked at your daily schedule, right, like how do you fill your schedule? Like what are the hours of your day devoted to?
Miroslav Volf: [00:04:55] Yeah. So mostly I research and write. The second thing that takes quite a bit of my time is I teach. I teach at Yale, I teach undergraduate students, but I teach actually primarily teach divinity school students. And I also manage direct Yale Center for Faith and culture, which is associated with Yale Divinity School, and where we try to think about those kinds of issues that I have named, and look at the places where faith in our case, it's a specifically Christian faith and various aspects of broadly construed culture intersect. And so these are kind of three hats that I wear.
Tyler Johnson: [00:05:41] Got it. Okay. Now that we sort of know what you do, how did you end up doing that? How does a person grow up to become a systematic theologian or to spend all of their time considering the deepest questions of life.
Miroslav Volf: [00:05:56] Yeah, so I was a preacher's kid. Okay. So I was inducted in something of that sort from the beginning. But I was a preacher's kid who rebelled for about two years or so and then found my way back out of that rebellion, and I ended up being the only openly professing Christian kid in my high school. But 3000 students, I think it had. And people have kind of knew me. I was I was an item in the school, and then they just were completely puzzled as to why would anybody want to embrace a faith. And I think in some ways that made a theologian out of me. They asked all these questions, and then I searched for literature, talked to my father, and pretty soon my brother in law, who is also a trained theologian, was there. He helped me out, and my intellectual curiosity was then stimulated about the questions which moved me, and against which some of my fellow students have rebelled. They wanted to push back at what I was trying to. To do. And that was then and kind of intellectual journey for myself.
Tyler Johnson: [00:07:14] And where were you living?
Miroslav Volf: [00:07:15] I grew up in former Yugoslavia. That was in a town in Serbia called Novi Sad.
Tyler Johnson: [00:07:21] So I recognize this line of inquiry is by its very nature, personal. And so you can answer it to whatever degree you you want to. But I'm not particularly surprised to hear that. What sounds like maybe when you were a teenager that having grown up, as you put it, as a preacher's kid and in a household of faith, that you decided to rebel against it, right? That sort of tale as old as time and I think a pretty common trope. But what is less common, perhaps, is that after just a few years of that rebelliousness, you felt called back to a life of faith. Can you talk a little bit about what was it that called you back?
Miroslav Volf: [00:08:01] Yeah, that's that's interesting. I think maybe we should start at what repelled me from faith. Some of it was simply that being a Christian in that environment and being associated with a father who was a minister, which was also was kind of a terrible thing for even ten year old. You know, I would at the beginning of each academic year, teachers would need to fill out the book of records. This was Pre-computer time. And then we would stand up and each give information about ourselves. So I stand up and I give them my name. That's pretty fine. And then the question is, what's your father's profession? And then I have to say, my father is a preacher, a minister, and they don't know what the minister is because they're not familiar Unfamiliar with Protestants and they think in Catholic or Orthodox terms. So I have to explain what the minister does, and I'm red in my face, and I think this is terrible. And then they ask me, where does your father work? And I have to say, my father works in Christ's Pentecostal Church of Yugoslavia. And then they've never heard of Pentecostal. And then I have to spell Pentecostal for them. And it's like.
Tyler Johnson: [00:09:13] Every teenager's nightmare.
Miroslav Volf: [00:09:15] Totally. So this is the kind of one thing. And the reason why I rebelled was, was this kind of environment of hostility. And the second thing is not because the fate lived in household was somehow compromised. And I saw my parents doing something that they ought not to be doing, but they're professing to be. And then I'm disappointed in them. Actually, it was the other way. It was a very genuine fate that I could at some level deeply appreciate, but which I felt I couldn't make my own. You know, I have compared it. There's a story about Franz Kafka who is telling about how his father has bequeathed to him his Judaism. And he said he was secularized. The father was already. And so he handed to him just a little bit of Judaism he had. But in the process of handing it to him, it dribbled out of his hands. There was nothing for him to receive his exact opposite for me. The hands were full and what they had to give to me, my hands were too weak to carry. So from these two sides I had, I had a sense that I was so hard and I didn't want him to squirm out of it.
Miroslav Volf: [00:10:33] And that was the extent of my, my rebellion. And then I discovered, actually, when I returned, that the faith was that it can be beautiful, that it was beautiful, and that it was somehow comfortingly hard. And it's understandable why it's hard because it's a high. Demands are placed on you if you want to follow Christ, which is what I was aspiring to do. You can never do it properly because the demands are high. But then there is this kind of comfort in that. And I got that from Dostoyevsky, who speaks about this elders, monks who lived this faith that is that is hard. And it's comforting in its hardness, because you almost think it's consoling to know that there has been a human being who lived a life when there were human beings who lived these kinds of lives. It's almost like an ennobled human condition for me. And I felt a certain kind of comfort, a certain kind of sense of assurance in my own humanity by being associated with this, with this ideal of Christ and the people who followed in his footsteps.
Tyler Johnson: [00:11:44] The first part of your story kind of tracks with what I would usually expect from a teenager. The last part of your story a little bit less so. Not that there are no religious teenagers, but those are very deep thoughts for a young person.
Miroslav Volf: [00:11:58] I'm not suggesting necessarily that this was at a conscious level. That was what was working for me, right? I wouldn't have ever put it in terms of faith dribbling out of or not my parents. This is me now looking at what has transpired and interpreting, trying to understand what happened there.
Tyler Johnson: [00:12:18] So we'll get to some of the the details of, of your most recent book in a moment. And I don't want to be overly summary to start, but in effect, what I understand from reading the book is that this book is trying to put into text form, accessible text form so that anybody, anywhere can read it. A conversation that you and your colleagues have with mostly undergraduate students at Yale. So in effect, it's trying to sort of encapsulate at least the spirit or the broad outlines of a class into a book, so that people who can't be in the class can still access some of the richness of the material. So can you tell us a little bit what is the class, how is it started and what what is it trying to do and sort of how does it work. Because I think that's helpful context for then talking about some of the broader issues that we'll bring up in a minute.
Miroslav Volf: [00:13:12] Sure. The class is called Life Worth Living, as is the title of the of the book, together with one of the authors who was at that time my doctoral student. I started this class about ten years ago, and the trigger for the class was reading a book by a colleague of mine from law school, and the title of the book was his book was Education's End. On why American colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life. And he gives a kind of history of higher education in United States from Harvard, where the question of meaning was baked in as a kind of foundation of of everything. And it's straight through the late 20th century where it has become to dwell in the margins of university education and how universities became a kind of sites of instrumental reason. We're interested in explaining reality. We are interested in orienting ourselves in reality and kind of manipulating a reality for our good. But in the process, the question of purpose has dropped out. So sometimes I put it this way. We train people in universities to be expert in getting from A to B, but we never ask what B is worth getting to.
Tyler Johnson: [00:14:38] All right.
Miroslav Volf: [00:14:38] We assume that people will know what that is. That's that's clear. But that B is. And that B's will pursue a good B's. But I think it's really important for us to ask the question not simply immediate B, but what's the place of destinations that to which we are going in the larger vision of what human life should be? What is human fullness? What does it mean to flourish so that we are not running in vain? We're not leaning a ladder on on the wrong wall, even though we climb up onto the top of it.
Tyler Johnson: [00:15:16] Yeah, I'm reminded of two things. One is when Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which way she's supposed to go, and the Cheshire Cat says, well, where are you going? And she says, I don't really know. And then he says, well, then it doesn't really matter which direction you go then.
Miroslav Volf: [00:15:29] Anyway, right?
Tyler Johnson: [00:15:31] The other thing, you know, I've been struck for many of the same reasons that you are mentioning. You know, William Dershowitz now is sort of famous or infamous, depending on who you talk to for writing the book Excellent Sheep. But before he wrote that, he wrote an article that was along the same lines. But what is almost more striking to me than William Dershowitz's original article or the book, is that after the article came out, the article for we had him actually on the podcast some time ago. But for those who haven't read the article in effect, what he says is that universities are have become instrumental institutions, but no longer know how to help students make a soul or how to get into some of these deeper questions. He levels this as a critique, and then basically says that even the supposedly best and the brightest in the country, people who are going to places like Yale and Harvard and whatever, have become, as he puts it, excellent sheep. Because really what they do is they're just very good at being kind of bright and shiny in certain ways that are smiled upon by the institutions that they attend. But there's not a lot of there there, when you get underneath the shiny artifice. That's sort of his argument. But what was really interesting to me is that then, after his original article came back, Steven Pinker, who's a very famous tenured psychologist at Harvard, wrote this sort of stinging rebuke where in effect he said, you know, I've said on whatever hundreds of tenure committees and A and P committees and whatever throughout my time at Harvard, and we have never in one of those considered a faculty member's ability or success in helping students to discover or make their souls.
Tyler Johnson: [00:17:11] And if that were to happen, some I'm paraphrasing, of course, but in effect, if that were to happen, I wouldn't even know what it looked like or how to measure it, or how to think that that was important. And if that's what you're worried about, then you're going to be reading critiques like this endlessly for a very long time, or something to that effect. But it's just to say that it was so interesting to me that the I mean, it wasn't, you know, he wasn't offering, per se, an institutional response on behalf of Harvard, but it certainly was not as if Harvard came out and said, what are you talking about? This is a ridiculous response, right? Of course, we are in the business of making souls or whatever. And so it sort of felt like a de facto institutional response. And it's just interesting that that response was in effect. Of course, we don't do that. We not only do we not have interest in making souls, we don't even know what that means. We don't even know, in effect, what it looks like. Right? And to your point, I'm no expert in the history of higher education in the United States. But as you point out, I think that's very different from where we started. And it is interesting that we have the idea that higher education can function almost purely as an as a means to a particular end without ever really questioning what those ends are or whether the ends that people are seeking, whether institutionally or the students personally, are the right ones.
Miroslav Volf: [00:18:27] Yeah. And even if you want, you know, maybe putting it in terms of crafting a soul is too much has echoes of religious, religious language. But I think the issue is much broader than that. It's a question of what happens to the who. Human beings are, and whether we can simply assume that we know what is human, what is worthy of our humanity. And after all, we have continued and still continue to have humanities departments. The problem that Tony Kronman identifies, and I think it is a problem to a large extent, is that scientific rationality has come to dominate, the rationality of natural sciences, has come to dominate universities, so that all different disciplines have to align themselves with that kind of hard science reason, and therefore they drop the questions of purposes, drop completely out, and humanities then also change, and correspondingly they change no longer to be about conversation spanning centuries about questions that matter to our lives, but it becomes identify the causes and reasons and trends for emerging certain things and trends that have followed them. And that seems to me a really important endeavor. I don't want to put down my colleagues who do that, but at the same time, something really important is being lost in the process. I want Shakespeare to speak to me. I don't want to know everything about what contributed to Shakespeare formulating or crafting a particular work of his. And the same is true in other domains. And it's this kind of speaking to you, having something to say to you that I think is missing that ought not and cannot be marginalized whether you're atheist or theist or something else.
Tyler Johnson: [00:20:23] Yeah. So let me frame the rest of the conversation in this way. Our listeners probably long ago grew tired of the fact that I refer. It seems like every other episode to a conversation that we had now, probably two years ago, but it has become really foundational to my way of thinking about the modern world, and I think it's really, really important. And in that conversation, we spoke with a psychiatrist from Stanford who is also a widely published author and, and a, I think, a sort of a leading thinker in the space of addiction. In particular, she wrote a book called Dopamine Nation, and in her book she proposes this. I mean, to me, it almost feels like a sort of cultural theory of everything for 2024, which is that modern people have become addicted to dopamine in whatever form it comes. Right? And so whether we get our dopamine from likes on social media or whether we get it from calorie dense junk food or whether we get it as was, you know, more traditionally the case from tobacco or alcohol or drugs of abuse, or whether we get it from online pornography. However, we get it between smartphones and ubiquitously available foods of all kinds and alcohol and whatever else, we have basically plugged into a matrix where we can get dopamine hits all the time. But then her fascinating thesis is that just like a person who is addicted to opiates becomes progressively sensitized to opiates such that they need increasing doses of opiates just to feel normal, never mind to feel the kind of high or whatever you want to call it, that they felt at the outset.
Tyler Johnson: [00:22:08] We are in this sort of relentless chase for more and more and more dopamine, and when we don't find infinitely increasing amounts of dopamine, then paradoxically, we actually end up feeling more depressed and more lonely and more disconnected, even though we are awash in dopamine that would normally make us feel like we were quote unquote high all the time. So as part of this conversation that we had, we talked about how she will sometimes see college students. And the first thing that she will do is to tell them to go into what she calls the great quiet, which is to say that they need to go spend a weekend or a week or whatever they can manage where they're completely disconnected from their devices, completely unplugged from all of the streams of dopamine that are usually bringing them pleasure to sort of reset a homeostasis so that they can then delve into trying to build a life of deeper and more substantive and durable meaning. But what we didn't really get to do very much of is to say, well, okay, let's pretend you have a person who feels they're addicted to dopamine in whatever form, and then they go into the great quiet and they disconnect from everything, and they're able through whatever means to kind of reset the homeostasis. Where we sort of left off was, okay. But then if I had a college student who came to me and I helped them through that process, I think the next the logical next question would be, okay, now I have this great gaping space that used to be filled with all my social media feeds and whatever, and I'm going to try to build a meaningful life in that space, right? How do I do that if I'm a college student or whatever, or a 60 year old? Doesn't matter if I'm going to try to build make the rest of my life meaningful, to fill the space that used to be filled by the thick of thin things, by the ephemera of of dopamine nation.
Tyler Johnson: [00:24:03] How do I do that? And so what I love about your class, from what I gather, and your book from reading it, is that, in effect, you and your colleagues are trying to directly answer that question. You're trying to say, okay, here's how you try to build a meaningful life. And so I'm hoping that the rest of the time we can take going through some of your answers to those questions. So the first thing that I'd like to ask you in that regard is can you talk a little bit about, of all things, one almost funny simile that comes up or analogy that comes up over and over in your book is that of Smokey Bear. So can you talk a little bit about what is the deal with Smokey Bear? Why does that come up in your book and what does he represent?
Miroslav Volf: [00:24:52] Well, Smokey Bear and Smokey Bear is Only You is really, really important in the sense that when you ask the question about what kind of life is worthy of our humanity, there are many answers that are there that could be considered. But actually for yourself, only you can answer that question and you can answer it. I don't mean in the sense that you can give it content, but as much as you have to answer the question, what will I stand by? And what for me constitutes the horizon and the path towards human fullness. Nobody can live a life in our place. We have to live it. And therefore we have to ask this question of our of ourselves. It depends on us. It also calls into question that we are responsible. Only you can protect that. But. But you are responsible for those forests, for somebody before somebody. And so we ask the question, well, to whom do you feel responsible when you think about what kind of life you should lead? You could be responsible simply to yourself. That's one option. Whether that will carry you through is another, another question. You can be responsible to your family. You can be responsible to your tradition, to your nation. You can be responsible to God. Name it and think through the weight of this responsibility. How much weight of responsibility can you place on each of these possibilities. And what would that do for your life? So it's in a way leading students to think through options and not to take those options as varieties of taste of an ice cream in an ice cream shop. What suits me? What do I have a craving for right now? But rather to take this as a question of discernment about what is true in fact.
Tyler Johnson: [00:26:53] Yeah, and you know, I think that when I read your book, perhaps the the single idea that resonated with me the most deeply, which it's one of those things where once you articulate it, once you say it out loud. In some ways it sounds so obvious that it seems silly to have ever articulated it, except that the paradox is that in my experience, it is also, in its way, deeply and thoroughly countercultural in the current cultural moment, at least in much of the United States, Because the difference that I think you're making, if you had some way to measure the most popular or the most, at least the most deeply internalized of sort of the current cultural slogans for how to live a life, I think that it would be some version of you do you? Right, which is this idea that life can be reduced to your preferences, and that at the end of the day, all life is, is preferences. And so our happiness, our fulfillment, living up to the measure of our humanity is nothing more than doing two things one, figuring out what your preferences are, and two, pursuing those preferences. And then maybe some sort of guardrail language about while not hurting other people in the process, or something to that effect. But what I hear you saying is that, as you put it, there are many ways to pursue a life, and that's one way to pursue a life. But what you are asking your students and your readers to do is to engage in a deeper question, which is to say, okay, preferences are one thing, but truth is a different thing, and that the quest to discover and live by, and even as you point out, even to be measured by our attempting to live by truth, is something that matters. Does that seem fair?
Miroslav Volf: [00:28:50] Yes, that seems very much fair. So what you have been describing is certainly, in our experience, true, we assign, just for this reason, students a small book, at least portions of the book by Charles Taylor, Ethics of authenticity. He takes up this issue as as an ideal, and we see to what extent that might fit. There's something unique about each one of us, but there may be something common. And in fact, the language that we use is a common, common thing. So it already takes us. The meaning takes us into broader space than what we experience ourselves. And so that's in a way a first step that we have students make so as to ask the question, okay, well, how would I articulate this? What are the reasons for that? And I think we express it then in terms of distinction between what do you want and even what do you deep down want when you're kind of self-aware and you can read the layers of yourselves and then discover that what the immediate desire isn't necessarily the deeper desire, but even that is at the level of what you want, what you really want. I think we as human beings ask always evaluative questions, and then the question follows what is actually worth wanting is what you really want worth wanting. Now we are in a territory in which we want to take the students so that they can make discerning judgments about what is worth about the way they live their lives. And I think students respond really well. It's not a difficult job for us to take them from the place. You know, the only thing that matters is that I follow my dream. Doesn't matter that that my dream authentically mine is a dream that is shared by a billion of other people, roughly of your your age. Right. And they see it immediately how much mirroring occurs and imitation occurs in what is allegedly authentic self deep down. And then they're ready to go onto a journey and discern what might be what they would consider worth wanting.
Tyler Johnson: [00:31:11] Yeah, you know, I am not by any stretch a scholar of Confucianism, but I, I have been struck in other reading that I have done and again, in your book, I think that the idea from that wisdom tradition that most deeply resonates with me, even though I'm sure that I have only a, you know, a kindergartners understanding of it. But the idea of the way. And I know that Confucianism then has a number of, you know, very detailed elements of what the way looks like and how the way is supposed to play out in daily life and things, which I don't. As I said, I'm no scholar of Confucianism, but but what strikes me as really beautiful about that idea, broadly understood, is just that there is such thing as the way. Right? That there is some ultimate truth. There is some pattern that is better than other patterns, and that we are meant we exist in order to try to discern the pattern and to pattern our lives after it. Again, you know, some people, depending on the, you know, how you were raised and whatever that may sound to some people. Like it's so self-evident that it hardly bears saying. But for many people, my experience is that for many of the students that I teach and with whom I have conversations, this is an idea that doesn't have as much obvious cultural purchase as it once did, and that there is even in some ways, I think students are worried that the very suggestion that there is truth, ultimate truth, or, you know, capital T truth, or that there is the way that should be followed, feels almost inherently, I don't know, condescending or parochial or, you know, like it's somehow sort of associated with the patriarchy and heteronormativity and, and a sort of a, you know, and it has these kind of it sort of feels like the idea keeps bad company, and therefore we should stay away from it because it might be dangerous, something like that. Does that seem fair?
Miroslav Volf: [00:33:15] Yeah. So that seems fair. It seems also that it's related to the ethic of authenticity that you have described about our lives. At least each one of us is knowledgeable sufficiently to know what the truth of my existence is. That's generally what people want to students suggest, or more broadly, people suggest. Now, where I tend to introduce the class is by saying each of these traditions Confucianism as Buddhism, as Christianity, as Islam, Judaism, we sometimes do Nietzsche or John Stuart Mill. Each of these traditions, in some significant way, makes claim to be true.
Tyler Johnson: [00:33:59] Yeah.
Miroslav Volf: [00:34:00] Now, all of these traditions may have overlapping claims and therefore can be, to a certain degree, true, all of them together. But they make also incompatible kinds of claims and sometimes incompatible claims that concern very purposes of our lives and therefore their stand intention. And so it's an. Invitation to students take them seriously at their word. Treat them as if they were actually making truth claims. Argue with them, but also always ask the question what bearing would this position, this philosophy, this way of life have on how I conduct my own life, if it were actually true? So it's kind of an exercise of both the discernment and imagination. Imagine yourself that you are a follower. How would your life have to change? What would it entail? What would be gains? What would be losses from the perspective where you stand now? So it's an it's an invitation to take them with seriousness and not to simply dismiss them. And pretty soon you find students that they're kind of captivated. I remember early on we talked about Buddhism at one point, and then one student in the middle of the discussion said, you know, but if this were true, would I ever have been qualified to be admitted to Yale? He concluded, I'm not sure that's necessarily correct, but he concluded it would have to devote his life to many other things than what he was devoting his life to in order to get admitted to Yale. And I said, well, if that is the result of our class, this is fantastic because you've asked a fundamental question how should you spend your time? What should you do with your life? What sacrifices in direction do you make going one way rather than the others? Perfect.
Tyler Johnson: [00:35:53] Yeah, and I couldn't help but think as I was reading those parts of your book, you know, I sometimes, admittedly, grow a little bit weary of the especially national political discourse in the United States, because not always, but often it feels like an endless discussion of quote unquote rights. And I don't mean to dismiss the importance of rights. And certainly historically, there are obvious and egregious examples where the cruelty and mistreatment of certain marginalized communities by dominant parties required invoking those minoritized communities, invoking rights in order to just be treated humanely. And I don't that's complicated, and I don't question that in any degree. But at the same time, if the entire political discourse becomes about rights, it often feels like what we miss there is an ethic of responsibility, right? As a body politic. Every once in a while you see glimmers of this. Politicians sometimes talk about our responsibility towards what have you, but it it does strike me that it would be such a different conversation if it were framed more in terms of the responsibility of those who have much towards those who have little, rather than endlessly invoking rights.
Tyler Johnson: [00:37:18] And and to your point, on the level of an individual student or just an individual person, student or not. What most touched me about your book were certain examples that you gave in the book of people who had sort of ridden the rocket to great levels of success, right? So, for example, you tell the story, I think, of an architect in Dallas or something who had become this very wealthy, well-to-do, respected, admired, powerful architect who was designing big, quote unquote, important buildings. And. Et cetera, et cetera. And then had this sort of a spiritual awakening where he came to recognize that even though he was, by all popular metrics, wildly. Quote unquote, successful in his life, he was not living up to the responsibility that he had to do good for those who didn't have as much. And so then sort of shifted his entire paradigm pretty late in his life, from what I gather, or middle age, I don't remember. I don't know the age. But anyway. And then started doing something very different. Can you maybe fill in a little bit of the details of that story?
Speaker4: [00:38:31] Yeah. I mean, he's citizen here of New Haven, and I occasionally eat in the coffee shop he has established right underneath where he lives. It was triggered by, by the war in Syria. He is originally from from Syria. And he suddenly realized how much is being lost there and how much he has and somehow couldn't put together himself as a Syrian and as as an architect without doing something to relieve the pain of others. And that ended up being the kind of the beginning of a spiritual journey for him and a shift in the career. And I think these kinds of transformations, they're often fundamental to religious traditions. There are often how religious traditions starts. They're often how religious traditions are embraced. Certainly, it's the case in Christian tradition for those who come from the outside. And in that sense, they really are about not simply about what my rights are. And I'm very happy to affirm rights. We have a dignity as a people created in the image of God that is inviolable, so kind of inviolability of human beings and certain spaces that are around them seem to me uncontested. But to take the example of Christian faith, the two greatest commandments, or the single greatest commandment is not about rights, it's about duty. And it's a duty to love God with absolutely all of your heart and to love your neighbor as you love yourself now. That seemed to be significant. That is to say, I am called not simply to protect myself, which I think is the right thing to do. But I'm called to go out of myself and give myself to others in love and orient my life around. If you want gift giving, rather than about preserving what I have or getting simply what is due to myself.
Tyler Johnson: [00:40:38] Yeah, and I think that that's a really, again, I'm not saying entirely countercultural, but in many, at least strains of modern culture, I think that that's a very countercultural idea. That and again, you were appealing to the sort of the Christian or also, I think the same ethic applies to some degree in Judaism, maybe formulated slightly differently, but but again, to quote from the Christian ethic, I think the idea that you find yourself by losing yourself and that to the point that you were making earlier. Although the wisdom traditions and if you count, you know, however you want to formulate quote unquote modern culture as a sort of another tradition if you try to line those up next to each other. Yes, of course they have areas of overlap, and yes, they can speak back and forth to each other, but not all parts of all of them can be true at the same time. And that strikes me as one of the places where most of the age tested wisdom traditions differ pretty dramatically and fundamentally, with the sort of current ethos is that you do you or as you put it, this idea of authenticity. Most wisdom traditions affirm that that can't be all there is. That, and in fact, Christianity, for example, seems to suggest that that specifically will not bring happiness, and that the only way that you can find happiness is precisely by not doing that. It is by, as you said, losing yourself in the service of others, that that is actually the road to self-fulfillment, even though that would seem paradoxical because you're abandoning the self to some degree in doing so.
Miroslav Volf: [00:42:17] Yeah, I certainly agree with you. And there are psychological studies that confirm that that money spent on myself is less satisfying than the money spent on somebody else in certain instances. In many instances, it's just very hard for us to shift away from the self orientation to the orientation on others. And by the way, it's not just hard for us moderns to do that. I was reading recently, rereading, actually, a mystical text from the Christian tradition from the middle of the or late 14th century. We don't know the author. I don't know whether he he felt endangered and therefore didn't put his name. Or maybe he felt it was appropriate to the kind of text that he was writing, which was all about I, me and mine as a kind of central categories and going away from that. But I read in that text and one of the comments he makes, there is nothing more contrary to the human nature than giving up on precisely this me or I, me and mine. And those are his actual his words that he's using. So there are features of our culture that magnify that self orientation. But it's a it's as old as humanity is itself. And I think that's what, as I see it, that's what many traditions are seeking to transform in us. The transformation through which we have to go is from this exclusive self orientation, or even predominant self orientation, to something that's much more open for others, open to receive, but also open to give and be there for others.
Miroslav Volf: [00:44:06] That is the secret of our worthiness as human beings, that sense that we are worthy. And, you know, it comes also in the certainly in the Christian tradition, in the sense that you almost don't need to care whether you are loved or not, because you are always already affirmed and loved. Right? That's what the tradition tells you. Obviously, this is a concern psychologically, very important concerns that we have, but it ends up being satisfied, as always, already being held by God. And I think that's one of the most revolutionary things that can happen in our performance oriented society. So one is ethics of authenticity, but the other one is performance orientation, and two of them often have a have difficulty co-existing and create significant problems. But imagine every single moment of your life from the moment you get up, you are performing yourself right in order to satisfy some criteria that are being placed by you from the outside. And no matter how much you want to do yourself, you do yourself under the conditions that are placed upon you. And those are the conditions of striving for superiority, for competition in the context of performance. But if somebody could tell you there, listen, you are loved the way you are before you put makeup, before you wash your face. You are loved as you are. I think it's the most one of the most revolutionary messages one can hear today. And it's true from my perspective, that's what I think. Christian faith is so beautiful.
Tyler Johnson: [00:45:49] Well, and I think that I was going to say even before you made that last comment that most of our listeners are healthcare professionals. Many of them are doctors in training. And I think that one of the things that is vitally important to take away from this conversation. So I think that doctoring and health care professions in general, it can be a very tricky business for the following reason. You know, if I don't mean any offense to such people, but if you are working for a high powered law firm and your only goal is to become a partner in the law firm so that you can make a lot of money more easily, we can have a discussion about whether that's a good goal to have or not, but it's apparent on the face of it that that is mostly self-directed, right? I mean, the goal is sort of by definition, that's what it's doing, is it's trying to empower and enrich yourself. But in medicine, there is always at least the veneer of being directed towards the good of others. Right? But the rub comes because the question then is, is that the veneer or is that really the core of what you're doing? And my experience suggests to me that it is very easy. In fact, it's almost. The current of the river is pushing you towards a place where you will either you, yourself or the culture, or whatever you want to call it, will do a bait and switch where you go into medicine, genuinely hoping to relieve suffering and help others.
Tyler Johnson: [00:47:19] But somewhere along the way, almost by necessity, just for survival, because the training is so intense and there's so much about getting the best medical school and the best residency, and the best fellowship and the best faculty position, and then getting tenure and being promoted and everything else that for many people, it feels a little bit sort of like echoes of Citizen Kane, where they end up becoming the very thing that they were so desperately trying to avoid at the beginning of the journey. Right. They begin with true desires to help others, but they end most interested in how can I climb the next rung on the ladder? Or how can I get, a faculty position that's a little bit better than the one that I have? Or how can I, you know, get more plaudits from my chief or my chair or my dean or whatever, that the tragic irony of that bait and switch is that in doing so, it's like you have created, without knowing it, a form of medicine that because I think medicine genuinely can be a deeply soul fulfilling. If you don't like the word spiritual, metaphysical, whatever you want to call it, practice something that truly fills the measure of your creation, whatever you want to call it. But you can end up ripping the very heart out of the body of medicine by robbing it of its ability to be about alleviating suffering, and instead making it into a quest for self-aggrandizement and climbing the ladder.
Miroslav Volf: [00:48:52] It's very interesting and variety of reasons that you give. Obviously, you know, the the field so, so well seem all very, very plausible to me when I think about it. I think the earlier conversation we had, and which was the conversation about what it takes to be happy, plays a role in that. I certainly see that it plays a role in other fields, maybe also in medicine. I was recently reading I was writing something about Arthur Schopenhauer for your listeners, Schopenhauer is one of the one of the great, one of the grumpiest philosophers that has ever lived, kind of a great pessimist. And so you may want to take what he says with a grain of salt, and I'll quote it. But but it's actually I find it actually true. And he said this, there is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy. And basically says, you know, this is this is kind of baked into us, but it is an error. We talked earlier about this transformation of the form orientation, the self orientation of others. And to the extent that one wants to, even in the good that one is doing, one is aiming not that the good, but at the happiness that one will receive, receive from it.
Miroslav Volf: [00:50:20] The good itself becomes instrumental in kind of sours in our own mouth as we are trying to to do it. No wonder that we then take other areas in which we would be feel feel fulfilled because we are superior to this or the other, then arduous, hard work of helping people get back to their own feet, if that is. If that is possible, and it's easy, then to simply do that hard work in order to get compensated for it, or in order to be thought well about it or whatever other motivation might be. You know, I see that, you know, I'm ordained minister as well. And I've I'm a preacher's kid and you can see it in the pastoral profession as well that provides you immense opportunity to be serving. But pretty soon it becomes also difficult. You get to be depleted. And then if you have this idea that you ought to be happy, but you aren't for whatever reason, it's very difficult not to succumb to the temptation. And so my sense is, when it's kind of spiritual disciplines that would keep us on this path, we need many other things enough rest and and few other things as well. But but certainly have clarity about the vision of what the good life consists of.
Tyler Johnson: [00:51:42] Yeah. And I want to make clear, just for listeners, I feel like this, this draw to focus on what I would argue are lesser aims for the life of being a doctor. I'm preaching primarily to myself here, right? This is a thing that I have to battle all the time. I have to constantly question myself about. Do I care more about how I'm thought of? Or do I care more about becoming good? Do I care more about alleviating suffering, or do I care more about, you know, promotion or notoriety or whatever? Do I care more about the appearance of good or being good? And there are powerful cultural and institutional forces that I think push us towards caring about the things that will, in effect, glorify the institutions for which we work or enrich the institutions for which we work. And it requires a certain degree of daily dogged pushing against the current to not get swept away in that because it's so easy to allow that to become the default. Well, you have been so generous with your time, Miroslav. Let me ask you this final question. I think that the issue for many of the people who are listening to this, if you're in the middle of your, you know, internal medicine rotation in your third year of medical school or you're busy being an intern, or you just started your year of fellowship, or you are a young attending or whatever.
Tyler Johnson: [00:53:19] The thing is, I think a lot of people might listen to this podcast and say, okay, but, you know, gosh, I barely have time to go to the bathroom and eat a Clif Bar between surgeries or, you know, barely have time to get my notes filed before I fall asleep in a heap at 1:00 in the morning or whatever. And I'm just not going to be going out and reading philosophical treatises or comparing the, you know, five major world wisdom traditions to figure out which is the best one for me to base my life on. That's just not, you know, maybe ten years from now, but not right now. But they still might say, but I want to be more fulfilled than I am. I want to make sure that my life is amounting to something, that it's going to mean something. But how can I even begin to approach that when my time and my emotional resources are so limited? What would you say to that person if they were in your office asking you that question?
Miroslav Volf: [00:54:15] First I would understand. We live in the time of multiple overwhelming, as one of my colleagues has put, so that from every side things come at us that we cannot fully, fully master. And I can imagine how that's particularly true of the medical profession. I have some experience with friends and and relatives who are in the profession. It can be brutal. At the same time, it seems to me that, you know, all of us have 15 minutes a day to stop and and reflect. All of us have two minutes a day. In a sense, a kind of meditative five minutes can be extraordinarily restful and also fruitful. So I would simply encourage the reflection, piecemeal reflection, but regular reflection, I mean, most, most folks take some time to, to exercise, to exercise something of that sort. You don't need to take it even that that long. And their domains of life on which we can, we can concentrate about motivation, about sense of oneself reading texts that are devotional. You know, I spend my time parsing out fine points of philosophical discussion. None of that is necessary as a spiritual practice. It may be necessary for one to get to the clarity of what the spiritual practice might be, and what differences might might it entail. And it takes a kind of a sense of awareness. Here's an example in which how it sometimes happens to me, I like to walk stairs and not use escalators.
Miroslav Volf: [00:56:03] And when I go from in Chicago, from terminal A to terminal terminal B to terminal C, I think is you go under this long underpass and there are 60 stairs. You go up and 60 stairs you go, you go down. And sometimes I carry my bag and and go stairs up or down. And I see people on escalators and I think of myself, oh, I'm some kind of a better specimen of humanity because I'm burning calories and they're burning fossil fuels there, or whatever else thing I can come up, come up with. And then I say, well, what an idiot you are to think that you have no idea about their lives, what they do, what else they do when they're not on that escalator, just cut out the judgment and don't live a life in such such comparison. And this is a five minute climb up the stairs. But it's a moment of spiritual reflection, and the whole way of who I am as a self is involved in this practice, a judgment that I make about others or judgment about myself. And I would want to encourage us to in the moments when we can have this introspective time, find a book that you can read that can help you in this, and slowly move forward.
Tyler Johnson: [00:57:23] Just to put a medical face on that broad idea. For decades now, part of my spiritual practice has been daily encounter with books that I consider to be holy writ Scripture. Right. And so as an intern, I remember very distinctly I had the text for these books downloaded on my phone or whatever, or actually at the very beginning of my internship, before I had a smartphone, I actually had a little paperback copy of one of them that I would keep among my things that I had in my pockets or my bag while I was being a doctor. But the point of this is just to say that on many long, difficult call nights, you know, I would do all of my I'm working a 30 hour shift. I'm on like the 18th or 20th or whatever hour of the 30 hour shift, and it's two in the morning. And I finally finished my notes, and I'm so tired that I can hardly keep my eyes pried open with toothpicks under my eyelids. And I would go up to the call room. But I would do my very best to make sure that every single night before I drifted off to sleep, even though the sleep was maybe for one hour, that I would read a couple of verses from these books. Now, objectively, that almost seems stupid, right? Like, what possible good can it do when you're already in a fugue state anyway to, you know, ingest a couple of verses that you're probably not even understanding, and that probably hardly make it past your retina before you fall asleep, right? But even in retrospect, it feels to me like, if nothing else, what that did, it was a sort of a way that the deeper part of me could say every day these questions matter.
Tyler Johnson: [00:59:07] You're not going to answer them tonight. You're probably not even going to really think about them in any important way tonight. But they matter. And by even a sort of a token nod to reading them, I was affirming that they matter, and I was affirming that I was continuing, even in a time when I had barely enough time to sleep. I was affirming that it that it was important to me to try to understand the way and to try to pattern my life after the way, however wildly unsuccessful I have always been at actually achieving that. And so that's just to say that that may have been 30s. It may have been 60s. It may have been two minutes. Whatever it was, but at least it was something every day. And you know, if you do one thing, even for two minutes every day over the course of years, that can become the kind of pattern that shapes your life. And I think that to the point of your book, that is something that still matters.
Miroslav Volf: [01:00:01] Yeah. It's beautiful what you have said. And as I was listening to, I thought also, it's not only that my 30 hours of work matter. I matter too, and my humanity matters. And if it's even for two minutes, a formation of of the agent, of the self, of the agent, in this profound sense, I think it's a key to who we are as human beings.
Tyler Johnson: [01:00:25] Well, thank you so much again. We really appreciate we know that a lifetime of study and erudition go into being able to teach classes like this, write books like this, and have conversations like this. And we really we appreciate you for allowing us to avail ourselves of all of that wisdom that you have gained over time. And we we really appreciate you being with us.
Miroslav Volf: [01:00:47] And thank you. I really appreciate the conversation and the depth to which it could go under your guidance.
Henry Bair: [01:00:55] Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at the Doctor's Art.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [01:01:14] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in healthcare who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [01:01:28] I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [01:01:29] and I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.