My wife had a baby on Sunday morning. I watched my fifth child be born. He’s at home now; my kids are loving him and spending the day with him, wanting to hold him and hug him.
Of course, when it comes to small babies, they are extremely cute, but also deeply dependent and demanding. They’re up at all hours of the night.
But there is something incredible and eternal and magical about having a child, and watching them grow and watching them change over time, watching them become independent, interact with the world, interact with each other; it is an unbelievable thing.
So this has put me in a sort of emotionally vulnerable place, not a place I’m used to.
Or maybe I’m just a sucker for this particular clip.
I was browsing the internet, and I came across this clip from a Daily Wire show, “Pints With Aquinas,” with our own Matt Fradd. He was interviewing a man named Dr. Peter Kreeft, who is a professor of philosophy at Boston College.
In the clip, Dr. Kreeft is not talking about philosophy as much as he is talking about what it means to be a good human being and what love for another human being means.
Fradd asks, “What advice do you have for someone watching this who’s newly married or who is about to be?”
“Do you think that when you are very old and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled and fat and not very bright or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful?” Kreeft answered. “If so, marry her.”
“The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again,” he continued. “Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body. It’s as beautiful as a crucifix. Because that body ain’t going to last. But the soul is. So if you don’t love her soul, but just love her body, don’t get married.”
An astonishing clip. At a normal level, when you watch your wife have a child — and it is a tremendously physically demanding process for her — it’s not a time when I ask my wife, “Is that when you looked your best?”
The answer, of course, is no. That is certainly not when she has looked her best, but it is when she is at her most beautiful. In the 18 years of our marriage, the moment she gives birth is when she looks the most beautiful to me as a human being, especially when the baby is put on her chest, and she’s holding the baby.
That’s not because that is when she is at her most physically beautiful. Of course not. It’s because her soul is at its height. Here is a new soul that she’s just brought into the world, and she’s holding the baby, she’s looking down at the baby, and she has the same expression every time, this expression of astonishment and joy and bewildered happiness all at the same time.
I’m watching this happen; I’m looking at her, and I’m not seeing her face or her eyes or her body. At that point, I’m seeing something different.
And that is what makes the world a beautiful and astonishing place: the soul. It is why we, as individual human beings, matter. It’s not our bodies. It’s not the physical condition we’re in.
That’s why when people say the purpose of life is “human flourishing,” they have to mean something more than flourishing in the physical sense, because the soul is the thing that matters in the world.
All of that is inspiring because it says that you can have a lifetime of meaning. It’s available to you regardless of material circumstance if you can see the soul of another person.
It doesn’t require magic. It’s not just pretty words. It’s a plan of action. You can make decisions based on that. You can decide who to marry based on that. You can decide whether to have kids, how many kids to have, based on that philosophy.
I know there are a lot of young people right now who favor black-pilling. They’ve decided that they’ve given up on Western civilization or on agency in their own lives. They say things such as, “I can’t find a woman. It’s impossible to get married now. I can’t have kids now.”
That’s wrong. It is eminently doable. It is available to you. Be that guy, find your faith, find your wife, and fall in love. Fall in love with her soul and have kids and build a life and honor the God who created you.
The world is an incredible, beautiful place created for us by a loving God, but it’s also a place of heartbreak and tragedy.
Dr. Kreeft is saying it’s the same place. If he can see the beauty in the broken body of his elderly wife after her death, can’t we find the beauty in the world around us? A world that’s not just filled with physical beauty, but actual spiritual hope, faith, and family?
That’s the stuff that life is made of. It’s what makes the adventure so wonderful. It’s finding the soul in another human being and recognizing that you have inherent value as a human being, inherent value as a creation of God.
All of this has a biblical background. Dr. Kreeft is a biblical thinker. He’s Catholic and I’m Jewish, but this always goes back to the Bible, where God creates man in Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living being.”
Those are two different things, the breath of life and the dust of the ground. The Hebrew word for the breath of life is ruach, which also means spirit. The first reference to that word describes God’s Spirit. It describes earlier in the Bible that God’s Spirit was hovering over the unformed waters.
The idea here is that there is something spiritual, something to the universe beyond just the physical things that we see.
We can see it manifest most clearly when we look into God’s creation. It’s a clue. We have the Spirit of God, and then God infuses the Spirit into man. Human beings are special, and it’s God’s infusion of us with value that makes us special.
It’s also what makes the West particularly special, and it makes America particularly special, because the American concept of rights that attach to you as an individual human being came from that line of biblical thinking that you are made in the image of God. God infused you with spirit.
When the Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” that is also what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
When the Founders spoke about the equality of human beings, they meant that in the sight of God, we all have a soul.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t have collective interests or collective identities; human existence is a bunch of different layers. There is you as an individual. There is you as a member of your family. There is you as a member of your community. There’s you as an American.
And we, as Americans, have collective interests. But the most important interest we have is in preserving this worldview, where the individual soul stands at the center.
That worldview has to win because it has very powerful rivals. And those powerful rivals are terrible.
Historically speaking, there have been two large-scale threats to this idea of the individual soul as something filled with worth.
Go back to the Bible. In the book of Genesis, God posits a few different forms of human civilization.
One is the family. That’s the one that God settles on. God says that human civilizations that are rooted in family are the ones that survive. Noah takes his family on the ark. He survives. God chooses Abraham and his family to generate the children of Israel. It is a family-based system.
But there are two rivals.
One is the anarchic civilization of the pre-Noah Flood era. The Bible before the Flood describes that civilization as corrupt and lawless. What does the Bible mean by that?
In that civilization, people treated others as means to their own ends, and human beings were simply tools. You used them because they were useful to you. You did what you wanted with them. They didn’t have any inherent value. They were instrumental.
The second form of civilization was the bizarro-world reverse of that: the tyrannical civilization. That’s the Tower of Babel story, an entire civilization that was built for a single goal: to build a giant thing designed to attack God or without reference to individual human beings.
The Midrash, a Jewish commentary that adumbrates the Bible, suggests that the building of the Tower of Babel took so long and was so arduous that it would take weeks for bricks to move from the base all the way up to the heights, and so workers would actually cry when a brick would fall and break. But if an individual human being died, that was not a big deal, because his labor could easily be replaced.
These two rivals to the soul-filled American way still exist.
We can see the secular utilitarianism that says that all human beings don’t have a soul, basically a nihilistic universe in which everyone is either an obstacle or a tool, as well as tyrannies that see the collective as the chief mechanism by which the world moves, the French Revolution idea that the revolution eats everything in its path. That would be Chinese communism or Russian tyranny, or the Iranian mullahcracy.
All of these practices are currently alive. They are simply old pathologies poured into new bottles.
The American system matters. It insists we each have a soul.
It is a precious gift.
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