Aquinas 101 Live: Wisdom and Metaphysics - Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

so of course we're talking about Thomas Aquinas in this lecture and this QA and one of the features of Aquinas is philosophy is that he takes on the mantle you might say of the traditional aspirations of classical philosophy that he inherits from people like Aristotle and before him Plato but also in a certain way also from the neoplatonist like latinas for Christian philosophers theologians like Agustin and one of the aspects of this traditional classical form of thought is that it aspires to study philosophy as what they call a wisdom Sapienza and latin sophia in greek which is to say an attempt to try with the mind to aspire to knowledge of ultimate causes and ultimate explanations you might say it's the attempt to get your mind up to or around the things that are the ultimate first causes of everything what's the big picture where do we come from where we headed what are we living for and then wisdom also for the ancients implies this idea of practical knowledge if you actually know what life's about you have ultimate perspective you know what you're living for so this is not really a dead idea it's just a somewhat undisclosed idea in the minds and hearts of lots of people in fact a lot of materialist philosophies claim to give modern human beings wisdom because once you really understand that we're just derivative from material processes in the university of transcendence horizon the meaning in life then you really understand that it's the advent of modern science and technology and contemporary political systems that are going to allow us to derive the most utility and happiness in life and there is no other higher it's a religious or mystical significance existence and that's wisdom that's a kind of ultimate explanation that yields practical knowledge of course for Aquinas it's really knowledge of God philosophically the yields ultimate philosophical perspective and it allows you to ask how we ought to live in light of the kind of real realization that God is real and there's something in us that resembles God in our capacity for intellectual life and for love and freedom to love virtuously so Aquinas wants to adopt a kind of theory of wisdom and re-appropriate and you might say Christianize it but Christianize it while being distinctively philosophical by demonstrating that we can in our intellectual quest for understanding find you might say structures in reality and from those structures in realities show that the realities around us depend upon a transcendent cause we call God who is the Creator who gives being sustains and sustains and gives being to all things that sustains all things to be and then we can arrive at this knowledge of what we call God or the transcendent first cause naturally philosophically demonstrative lately it demonstrative ly and with certitude and that this has a kind of practical end because it teaches us that we're actually made ultimately for contemplation that where we can kind of discover things about God indirectly as philosophers and we can understand the world in light of God and ourselves light of God which doesn't do away with political practical activity doesn't do with away with ethical responsibility in fact in some way yeah in some ways it heightens all that it makes all those obligations of justice and those relationships of love that we undertake in this world more meaningful but that's seen within a higher light at higher ambit and he also thinks that this kind of Christian philosophical wisdom is subject to and open to a higher theological wisdom or a mystical wisdom the wisdom that comes from revelation because however great or perfect philosophical wisdom is even on Christian soil in a Christian context it's always because it's a natural knowledge that derives knowledge of God genuine knowledge about from his effects but not directly or immediately it's always an imperfect knowledge of God it's an imperfect knowledge the image situation so as noble as philosophy is for Aquinas and how much however much it really can can achieve and it can achieve a lot in his mind so very he has a very ambitious view of philosophy compared to MOG many moderns like a manual contour Hume but at the same time however much it can do on its own power so to speak it really is limited in what it can achieve with regards to intimate knowledge of God or the divine or even the sort of mystery of the human soul so there's room you might say for divine revelation and yet higher wisdom I get higher intimate knowledge of God that would not contradict philosophical with but in a way complement and even in a certain sense assimilate philosophical wisdom so that's why in theology even though you know God in a new way higher through faith through Hope through charity in an intimate life of God and you actually know God personally his father as son and his holy spirit you know Christ as God become human and you really know Jesus in a personal sense you also can still make use of all the philosophical knowledge and you can actually distinguish what you don't philosophically from what you know by faith and interior to faith and you study the Holy Trinity you can make use of philosophical wisdom to think about topics that are also known about God not just the revelation but also through philosophy like the divine unity the divine nature the divine eternity the divine immutability perfection and love and so forth so you can think about the Trinity if you like also making use of philosophical wisdom while simulating that natural wisdom to a higher wisdom I want to turn to the next topic the next topic is that's all sounds great how do we get there what is a starting place that could even permit us to make this kind of ambitious ascent that sounds very fanciful and perhaps very challenging well Aquinas is kind of core metaphysical intuition and he has many metaphysical commitments so it's really a silly thing to try to reduce everything to this but one of his core commitments that really is a kind of Greenwich Time of equilibrium and his thought is the distinction between essence and existence so Aquinas thinks its composition and all the realities around us now if I say there's composition all the realities around us you might think about material composition like everything's made of atoms everything's made of chemicals everything's made of cells all living biological animals made of organs okay yes that's true or at least those things are material component parts of physical bodies and living bodies but Aquinas is thinking about a metaphysical composition and when he talks about the composition G in essence the existence he's talking about a way of thinking about all things in so far as they have what you might call ontological structures by ontology you mean pertaining to being so if you take just to use things from the videos kangaroos and human beings and you try to say what is each one essentially what you need to say they differ from all things other than them by fact that they are living beings in the sense that they are marked out as living beings as distinct from stars or stones or snowflakes and they're also as living beings distinct from plants because they have since eight knowledge and Aquinas gives long explanations for why plants and animals really fit into different specific categories and are different species specific kinds of things and then within the animal world you can have different properties or tropes or notes by which you identify that animals have accidental properties or you know developed and particular is historically through evolutionary process these in all likelihood of course and so you have like pouches in one mammal and then you have no pouch in another animal like the human being but then you can say in the human being there's something distinctively specific that is a capacity for in material rationality through abstract thought causal analysis the grasping of real relations the aspiration to know invisible things capacity to pray and freewill decisions that pertain to the will of capacity to the love in other words the intellect of the will distinguish the human animal from other animals which don't exhibit any indications of the immaterial Universal thought capacity for language art causality modern technology and so forth okay so you can start to as it were compare things and get to essences and things and try to get what their natures are and the questing says hard and murky work because the idea that we just has it wearing to it immediately the essence of everything that would be great that'd be like having an engine what he thinks like an angel can do for an angelic intellect because it gets that kind of I'd be into used by God but we don't we learned through the census we abstract and we make progress slowly over the course of a lifetime and we're held by teachers and were helped by reading good books and analysis is difficult and so forth but then there's something you know so here's another here's a way I think about existence is distinct from essence so you've got kangaroos and human beings and apple trees and stars and aardvarks and these things all fit into different essential kinds of groups so you know if I'm a human being another person is a human being we are equally and identically human no matter what our age whenever our mental capacities our skin color our capacity to play a sport or a violin or you know our handicaps our genealogical development whatever we're all human beings okay equally and identically it's a mess and that's true also of aardvarks that's true also kangaroos that's true also stars but that's not true about it like of existence existence is a different mystery you might say so we have these common natures that both sequester us in groups and divide us from other groups I am NOT an apple tree I am a human being but on the other hand we have existence which divides us from the others in our group right my existence is totally unique it is not that a Paul or Rebecca or Andrew or Lucy we are all individually distinct existence we have an existence each one of us that's unique I have a unique existent you are too and you know when one of us lives or dies we are a unique manifestation what is the human so that's weird it's like separates us out to be this existing reality and on the other hand here's another weird idea existence is what unites us with all those other things that we are not so we're not kangaroo stars artworks to stars but those things existing we exist so we have this kind of basic communion actually quite uses the phrase in Latin si community this community of being are this commonality of existence that's present in all of us so that star exists is different than me but each of us has in common existing even though we're across the different essences were separated by essence but United in being and yet also distinct in our existence okay so you know existence is a weird and mysterious thing we all have it it kind of is something we all hold in common we also have it although in a unique existent way that's proper to us and that gives our essence our nature its actuality I actually exist now as a human being it was a time I didn't exist I will not ease this later in the way I do now so we can be or not be as Hamlet says and that's in a certain way because we have this existence that can can come and go in us when you start to think about existence common to all things then you can start thinking about what a quest calls the transcendentals this is my 4/3 idea those things that he says transcend any particular category of essence that are present in everything so being is one of them all things that exists really have being they're real they have a certain he calls it a liquid other Ness uniqueness like I am other than you you are other than Rebekah see and Andrew because each of us is this uniquely existent thing so that feature is common to all things to have this unique existence its transcends any category and it goes out being goes out into everything but so then also this unity unity is a transcendence because no matter how complicated a human being is and I mean you'd be too complicated in lots of ways like you know my roommate is complicated or my brother is complicated but also like psychologically but also ontological II you know where animals were rational we're biological we have all these different organs we're usually like the most complicated thing faced if it's even beings we're spiritual animals but in all that there's a unity amidst the multiplicity because we're one being so we're you have existence you have unity and that's true of the apple tree the aardvark and a star but it's also true of our little properties like my capacity to solve math problems is a unit has at certain communities it's a property it's quality of the intellect I'm actually very bad at mathematics but it says it it's a convenient hypothetical example and you know there's like a unity to the habit of being able solve mathematics or there's a unity to oh I don't know you know like what color is my hand it's one color or you know um how many eyes do I have each eye is like one eye it's part of my body okay so you have unity within parts and within properties of things but they're all integrated ontological unity of the thing the third transcendentals truths and that has to do with intelligibility that is knowable everything in Samarra says being and it's huge its unified has certain intelligibility the aardvark has an art intelligibility different than the kangaroo the star is intelligibility different than the human being you might call it we all are essential eyes we all have because we exist you have these essential features that are intelligible and then the last transcendental really is goodness there's some kind of perfection well actually there's various forms of perfection that are in us all in so ours we exist when it's subsistence so just the day the baby is born the baby is already good and the baby has being you know it's a substantial human being it's good as nobility you know don't drop the baby the baby's human being as human dignity but then the baby becomes a great mathematician or you know basketball player or violinist you know then we say well that's incredible knowable that's persons a really good basketball player really good violinist a really good I don't know what but the point is you know we develop properties so they subsist in that more deep fundamental substantial nobility and everyone deserves fundamental respect and their dignity she recognized basic fundamental subsistence in the knowable nature that is human but they can also develop properties which by which they can perform more nobly moral acts or more no or more like ignoble moral active acts so we can evaluate their moral behavior or their virtues of vices and things like that even well recognize the deeper substantial goodness and you know aardvark goodness is very different and not as great not as interesting but you know like scientists could be interested in a good specimen of an aardvark or you know a good horse for various reasons of utility versus you know a good kangaroo you know but the point is you can get into like the the developmental perfection of the kangaroo in the developmental perfection of the characteristic of things ok so when we've got ideas that there's these transcendental features of existence unity goodness truth in all things we can ask ourselves why these features are and the things that are insofar as their existence also is we could use the word contingent it's actual now but it's also possible to be or not be each and here's a simple fact now each of us can exist or not exist we are all existent now but we like everything in the world around us have come into being through causalities of others we have been caused to exist none of us none of us has always existed none of us gives ourselves being and none of us can sustain ourselves in being in virtue simply of our own nature right we all can be or not be and we have that radical potency to exist or not exist which is a sign that we have derived our existence from another so you in Christ can ask the question as he does often can you just have only reality's giving being to one another depending on one another as they exist for their existence that are only derivative so that everything that is is receiving existence from another and you know through argumentation he suggests I think quite frost plausibly you know that doesn't work if you have a world where things are all derived in existence you have to ultimately explain it by Porcia and reason for it you have to give a proportion reason for its causal I called for the causality of its being and that's something give being everything existence insofar as everything it exists as a derived existence so we all have derive existence none of us causes ourselves to be or is by nature and we all receive being but where are we receiving being well then you get into the problem of the Creator the fact that there's a mystery of one who is giving us philosophical mystery might say of one who's giving us all being and causing us to exist and then we could then say can we by analogy is my last theme speak you know if I cause out by inference of this transcendent cost can we speak analogically about that transcendent being as existence as one who exists but not like us because he's under I've existence he's existence by nature so there's a way when she subsistent existence whatever that is you know the existence of God is not like the existence of the kangaroo star the aardvark human being it's the existence of one who diffuses being into all things who gives being in sustains in being all it has created so it's as the Bible says fair to also say in philosophy I am he with God as you is subsisting being but also God is somehow one for Aquinas he argues that God is one you can know this naturally and rashly but I'm not gonna make the argument here your God is subsistence truth or intelligence an act of knowing in some very analogical sense personal and that God is subsisting goodness supreme goodness and that he is the source of the intelligibility and goodness in all things all things that are have being that aren't somehow one that have somehow an essential intelligibility and goodness in them all derived from an unknown transcendent source the unknown is important the fact that we only have analogical knowledge is in direct our language for existence unity goodness and truth has the refashioned bones have to be broken and reset we have to speak differently when we speak of God he has something in common with us he's also utterly different there's alternative there's unknown you know there's a Cloud of Unknowing that covers over our language so we can denote God but as in darkness and that opens the way you might say in philosophy for the idea that revelation is attractive that if God wants to speak out of the darkness you might say the Cloud of Unknowing on Mount Sinai and speak to us his name cross the frontier of the Gothic chasm between the creator and creation cross that frontier in chasm and speak to us out of the the darkness and out of the Cloud of Unknowing and say his name or even become human and invoking us a knowledge of what is he is by being one of us in a human life among us he has the power to do that but that would be a special and novel form of information compatible perhaps with philosophy but distinguishable and maybe supreme more more perfect and allowing a the philosopher to be satisfied by yet more perfect knowledge of God made possible by grace so I'll finish with that and I've broken my own rule a little longer but you know the miniguns always talk too long I'm gonna open the floor to questions and if I need to know how to do that Jennifer will well let me know otherwise I'll I'll just wait to be queued thank you thank you so much father white we will go to our first question so father white is st. Thomas method a thing of its time does it need to be updated or is it timeless your thoughts yeah I think it's all three I mean in some ways it's important realize of what a question in his own time by introducing Aristotelian dialectical argumentation into the demonstration existence of God was not characteristic so some people say well you know Aquinas was a daring thinker in his own age we need to be daring in our own age that means getting rid of two mystic ideas because it's no longer daring to be autonomous so we should be daring by being a ferret Indian that daring there at vidya i mean yeah i mean you know being daring on its own you know trying to be novel is not the end or sort of aim of the intellect Aquinas didn't use the Aristotelian forms of argumentation which was daring in his own time because he wanted to be original because he thought they were true and the intellect is sort of centered and correct it gravitates around the search for the truth and that's not really hmm you have to free yourself a little bit from conventions which doesn't mean your own eras wrong it could be that the truth is widely available in our own era or it could be that it's forgotten things or that's yet to discover things but it also means learning from the past and Aquinas leaves and learning from the past and being daring that's why he learned a lot Marisol who was before him and aerosol learned from Plato as for it being needing updating well it does but I think you know the method is actually not the problem the the application of the method it's not that it's not been tried and found wanting it's been tried Conroy's it's not been tried all right so what does aerosol do the beginning of all his books he first gives you the opinions around him then he tries to show the principles that he actually thinks are immutably true your idea from the questioner about it perennial truth and then he tries to show how you can respond or in a count take account of the partial truth of the objections around you so our objections today aren't objections from Avastin amaryllis or for that matter the Manicheans that our objections are from Nietzsche ins and humans and analytic philosophers who believe there's problems with generating analysis the intrinsic formal causes of things of people who are skeptical about alliances non reductive ontology and people who are in scientism who think the world's just a bunch of haphazardly arranged it's themselves out in such a way that we develop very large frontal lobes and asks way too many questions and the point is we have to engage with those people and have a kind of real dialogue of truth where we try to take seriously what their objections and framework is and think about whether there actually is a distinction between essence the existence what we can know essences and whether the distinctions do as it were permitted to make these more made more you know large-scale metaphysical claims and whether the medical claims allow us to have this way of access toward real knowledge but I wrote I'm not trying to be advertised here but I mean I wrote about this my first book called wisdom in the face of modernity and in that book what I try to do is take the con Sein claims and the high daguerreian claims in modernity that we can no longer make these kinds of arguments about and look at their concern and show why we might need to be ambivalent about dismissing Aquinas in other words Kant's criticisms of the bargains consist have gotten Heidegger's criticisms don't I think really work against Aquinas as ways of argumentation and I see a lot of new writers authors working on this kind of stuff in dialog with analytic philosophy like David oder Berg and fazer gavankar Elinor stomp John Haldane and there are many more people out there doing it so I think that those those people are helpful to us in engagement and I think if we do make that engagement we can still demonstrate these of God and so we can't discover perennial truths but I'm a Thomas but I didn't know wasn't always at least I mean I was argued into it and I think and argue I thought a lot critically about it I still I still just leave it because I think it's true not because it's convenient or daring or reactionary thank you father white our next question comes from YouTube it was submitted by Sylvia Chris check who was one of our student leaders at Yale University and she asks how do we articulate the difference between being and existence can't we say that non subsistent things such as forms and qualities have being in a certain sense yeah so hi Sylvia yeah I mean actually quences are released because he has such a well thought out and on reductive ontology and he's not alone in this I mean he's he's reflecting also on great metaphysicians like Avicenna he differs with Avicenna on you know it's a great 12th century Muslim philosopher he differs with Allison on important things but there's a lot in common he's talking about Albert the grade and with you know a lot of other major thinkers so it's not like he's throwing up all this stuff on his own but he has his own formulations cuantas uses different language for being so he has ends in Latin which means like what we call an entity an existent like a thing okay a substance having being then he talks about existence which is a kind of a not a property but actually it kind of actualization and that's President all that a thing is and that's a kind of mystery in Aquinas almost like existence is something very radical and everything that a thing is and then essence when an essence is also a way of talking about being like the nature of a thing you sometimes says that the form or the nature gives being doc essay format essay that's a very saying say like why do you have existence because your nature your nature is giving you being oh that sounds like the opposite was saying earlier and Aquinas does sometimes say it like almost the opposite way but the point is you're sustained and being by your nature but in another sense your nature exists in act actual in actuality but it doesn't have the power and say in itself to sustain itself in being when we talk about little properties or accents of being like so it's one thing to be essentially like say human being another thing to have these qualities solves math problems walks on two legs or various quantities like size height you know based on your age and two-year-olds different quantity and the seventy year old and so forth when you talk about the quantities the qualities the relations the relationships the habits the actions the passions these are what is called the categorical properties or accidents of being there that sort of fuller description of all the stuff that's all the properties of a given being he also says those have si they have existence you know like I used to for example a real example I used to know some Hebrew and I've forgotten it you know so I had an existent habit of reading Hebrew and now I don't have that exist in heaven I'm developing the existent habit of speaking Italian very slowly so things can not exist anymore begin to exist right so you get once you get that taxonomy of all these different properties or accidents quality quantity relation habit fashion actions and position and you sort of study that in ourselves categories and metaphysics but five years tall then you have this larger richer vocabulary of existence it allows you to talk about micro changes and you can talk about parts also in the whole like my gallbladder does it exist anymore no but does my heart beating exist yes no so we can talk about the existence of the parts so it's a very existence is very both general but in another way powerful work because it allows you to get into everything and make distinctions and have a non reductive way of speaking about being thank you Father our next question comes from YouTube Gillian Waller has this question could you say more on what you mean that questions of practical politics can become more important when one takes a transcendental approach to human life compared to modern materialistic ideologies yeah that's a great question I mean in one sense it seems to me that if one does not have a religious horizon of reference then what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls the imminent frame imposes itself that's to say we kind of in navigate existence within a more imminent a terrain of of being the horizon of being narrows and so effectively then first philosophy can often become politics because the most noble being we experience around us is the human being and the human being has its most challenging political and ethical decisions to make primarily not only in family polity but especially in civic polity and national and international quality and so the horizon of you might say a human ambition for study and for activism often is reduced to the philosophical sorry the political the political horizon and I mean I think you see this very clearly in the work of Michael Kahn where in the latter part of his life he really is articulating a way to move actually the sort of transcendental orientation of human existence from the medieval aim for communion with the transcendent in the divine to a you know merely temporal and horizontal aimed put on the to put bass make me be the ambition of the human mind Universal and political cosmopolitan ethical change right so it's a political program so that would seem to speak to the kind of absolute cessation of politics and it does seem like in figures like Conte and one way and Marx in another or Hegel and for that matter you see this kind of a historic eyes imminent istic search for transcendence wait denigrates i think it becomes consumerism and hedonism now that being said the other problem is the human sort of quest for meaning is very Desura so finding something truly worthy of its own desires ardent desires for ultimate explanation and kind of you know ethical imperative and if all you have is a materialistic view of the universe it's possible to think of the political horizon is really just kind of meaningless and you do find you know materials positivists you just say you know it's great to be so ethically concerned about how all these Homo Sapien animals are beating up on each other mistreating each other but effectively in the end since we're all just accidental Stardust's there's nothing at stake we're hovering over the void there's nothing real down there in terms of lasting values to worry about so it's just a kind of game and you find this in some ways like in some hard core materials positivist and I would give examples but I won't right now both have it you also find it away in Nietzsche Nietzsche wants to read enchant the universe but he doesn't think the way to do it is by this severe moralistic modern political liberalism art for that matter I think I don't think Nietzsche would be much favouring favourable Marx's and Minds my guess but I mean I think Nietzsche thinks the the meaning comes to clay through artistic liberty through the will to power is a will to artistic destruction and reconstruction and the revalorisé ation of values so I think you get you get modes of atheism that find the political realm two banal or it's too much in one way for the positive sense too little for a kind of existentialist and so mmm or you reinvest in politics as a kind of pseudo religion or is this or artistic in a cartoonist artistic way as a sort of style or stance like I think Sartre just start being a Maoist you know was that really an ethical stance or was it to show a kind of gratuitous freedom it's an interesting question like philosophically and psychologically what's going on in the kind of embrace of the Maoist politics especially when I think he had some knowledge of its ethical dubiousness so you know you have interesting questions about how reducing things down to the lower kind of imminent frame horizon in some sense absolute Isis the political perspective and notice doesn't if you think by contrast that there's a kind of divine meaning to human existence that each human beings made in the image of God and that as a philosophical indication in our rationality and our freedom and the nobility of each human being and every human being has a unique existence and that the story of every human life is conducted through a Providence that connects us to one another in the aspiration to a community of persons and that every human life from conception natural death acquires meaning because it's made the image of God and there's something distinctive about human beings individually and collectively that makes us different than everything else in the universe not against the universe but as the summit of the universe that's the Christian vision and then political your political sense of what's at stake is very high and so I think actually only Christianity can really provide the ultimate framework for a politics of human solidarity and communion of forgiveness I think one thing with Christ's DC days you don't really have a politics of forgiveness but you also don't have a really deep notion of justice so you have it's kind of haphazard sort of hurts at sense of justice you don't have a deep sense of mercy there's not a great sense of deep solidarity dignity to each human person it seems to be retained but it still is thin and moving target of what are seemingly human rights we articulated all the time so I think we're living through a crisis of real knowledge of the basis for ethics and politics and that Christianity and deeper to mystic vision in particular provided a new framework then the church's social doctrine teaching on natural law which is derived out of a domestic tradition in large part alright great so we have another question this time through zoom David best gona's says I am aware that you are a proponent of beauty as an important aspect of the two mystic philosophical tradition is Beauty a transcendental property in the same way as you have described the other properties okay hi David it's good to hear from you yeah okay so that's a that's a great question it's a disputed question like Thomas is beauty in everything the way existence unity truth and goodness are and if so is it something that distinct transcendental and does Aquinas think that my own reading is that Aquinas does think that beauty is a transcendental so I did not mention it but I do think that one can make that argument and one ought to he doesn't in his list of the transcendental is he doesn't mention it but he does speak in his commentary on Dionysius is divine names which is a very important six century Christian text and the famous Dionysus the Areopagus she comments on how we name God when he's discussing that treatise and he's talking about beauty he says that God is beautiful and that everything that God has given existence to insofar as it has being is beautiful and so it seems to me that that passage in the contrary into my names as well as something he says in Summa theologia about how everything resembles the beauty of the eternal son the Eternal Word everything created in the word just the splendor in God in which he creates all things the eternal splendor of the uncreated word is reflected in the splendor and beauty of all things we see these two texts it seems to me quiet things everything that exists in some forms exists is beautiful then you get in the thorny problem with beauty is and there's really two ways to think about it one is the primacy of goodness the truth and the other is the primacy of truth goodness always implicating the other so if you think about beauty as the group the splendor of the truth or the attractiveness of the truth and what what happens is in a given form or nature when it has it when it achieves a certain perfection and interior intelligibility and you see the truth of it or the the robustness that robust truth of its form it's splendid right so it's beautiful all right so you know a perfect human being you know purchased persons natural beauty there's a kind of splendor of the physical appearance but there's also like the splendor of a human thought like somebody explains and arguments it has a splendid and beautiful argument as you perceive the inner form of it the treatise it comes beautiful argument or you see the beauty of the moral activity of mother trees so you see like the in the truthfulness of her action she says beautiful as Malcolm Muggeridge the Atheist was converted to her said she was doing something quote-unquote beautiful for God something beautiful for God that was her words that really struck him let us do something beautiful for God so you see the truth of her action and it's beautiful so the other side of you can think about it as the truth about goodness so it's the way something that's good that's reached a kind of perfection acquires a formal intelligibility so I say well you know like that horse is so perfect that racehorse is running so perfectly it's so good as a racehorse like what it's doing is this is such a good job of running at that perfect speed and as I watch it gallop like I see the form emerge that sort of truthfulness of that goodness and it's beautiful look at the beauty of that horse running splendidly so you can do about the pregnant or you say like God that's a good argument that are you so perfect and the goodness that are you guys see how like the formal technicality of it how integral it is and gosh it's splendid and it's beautiful right so you can think about all those say max you know the goodness of other treats is moral activity of caring for the poorest of the poor you see how good that is the intensive goodness as you see the formal intelligibility of it's beautiful so I mean I I will more toward the former and it's the goodness of the problem of the UM it's the goodness of the form but in another way if you think about it is the form of the goodness it's kind of the same thing said from another angle but that's what appliance thinks beauty is they talks about notes of beauty but I won't go into those now all right thank you father white our next question comes from Dennis Dubrow from YouTube and he says people have told me even warned me about neo tome ISM can you explain what neo tome ism is well you know I mean you know I don't know if it exists anymore quite in the way it used to this is okay so the way an analytic philosopher would answer your question is he'd say that's a sociological category which is a nice way of saying it is people put a bunch of people in a box and they call me Oh Thomas and then other people start repeating that and and it's just a sociology so don't like look for like deep causes but if I were to try explain it and in a nutshell I mean you know in the 20th century in the 19th century leo xiii tried to revive to him ism he wrote a very beautiful important document called eternity pot sweets and that gave rise to so-called Rome and tome ism well actually the Roman School totemism he was trained in preceded him but then it's strengthened Roman tome ISM and then there were all these new schools in tourism that cropped up places like Notre Dame Catholic University of America Toronto movin and you had all these like studies of Aquinas and sorta mystic philosophy as a me toward the modern world a contemporary world and everybody's training to him is I mean not everybody but a lot of people then you had sort of like some two mystic polemicists you know the famous cases of Gary do LeBrons in Rome glue Brown Charlie Angelica was a famous and very gifted intellectual who wrote a lot of you know commentaries and articulate defenses of tomans but you also had scholastic handbooks you had to kind of more simplified versions of Tommen ISM in the handbook form and what when people call it so then you have the rejection of all that evaluative little you gotta be open-minded let's study modern phenomenology and existentialism find a way to talk to people their own day in our own day and age and that was prepared in part by people like blonde ale and brew solo and modern philosophers who we're trying to open a different way to talk about like a more augustine way about interior already in dialogue with modern philosophy so in the post vatican ii period you have coexistence of tome ism and kind of other other approaches and his peaceful co-existence mostly you also have the rise of that historical tourism where people study a question store context the French call this not leave dummies him but but Tamas in they say I'm a Tomasi and meaning I study of Thomas itself in historical context the truth is the commentator is a very competent Aquinas always tried to read a crisis you know in this historical context or what he's releasing himself and then apply to their own era and we know better now about how to make use of historical material system modern you know historical critical method of putting texts in context and so comparing them points with Albert Alexander Bonaventure's CODIS and Avicenna you get a richer kind of historical taupe iographer topography of how his texts develop and we should be doing that kind of stuff I mean we need to read the great historical toe mists from potential stone to jean-pierre Torrell to sheila Marie today you know these people were very important sources but you also have to have engagement and sometimes whenever you have engagement you have this like people the radar you know goes off oh you're neo total missed you're here to control us you're you've invaded and you're here to like uh punish us for the evening non to mystic but actually I mean really should be at home assist to be a personal analysis dialogue reason dispute truth seeking and a lot of what Aquinas holds is not that particularly original I mean the formatter distinction and the active potency composition the idea of free will and intelligence a material features the human soul the capacity to live virtuously and so forth so there's a lot of aquinas that's part of a common patrimony and so a hyper defensive this sorts aquinas is probably not a great sign of open-mindedness about a larger a sort of patrimony of christian thought but i think that thomas can create a reaction if they try to police the minds of others or send the message that everything has never been thought anything thought by a non tech nanak wine not thought by quiet why not that way says yours or more the point is uninteresting and that that is a kind of danger I think because there is so much truth in Aquinas you can kind of it sequestered in him so I think is very important to be dialed to be kind of open to what's going on and engaged and I think Alistair McIntyre in his book three rival virgins versions of moral inquiry gives us some good keys about how to do that alright thank you for those insights our next question comes from YouTube from Cynthia Gonzales she writes how can we make sense of the unity of love insofar as God is love and God is one while maintaining the differences in the love say between a parent and child and the love between husband and wife I'm not sure I totally understand the question but let me try to speak to it because I mean the thing is that okay so but you know actually so let me talk about God first and then talk about features they do make it clear or at least somehow address the issue so quite we talked about the Trinity makes a distinction between essential names of God and notional or personal names and he says you know when we think about the oneness of God are actually really wasting us the divine nature God's one miss in nature being deity or God he says we can assign its central terms like love because God not only exists or is and is one and eternal and in some way perfectly actual but God eternally knows and loves himself and is an act of self-knowledge and of love of self love God knows himself and loves all himself he knows his own infinite being and he loves his own infinite being his own infinite supreme goodness and in us that would be kind of egoistic you know like Oh what are you doing all-knowing I'm studying myself I'm loving myself like we're not that's not how we develop but God is the fullness of being and so to know and love himself is to know and love all that is in its transcendent source to know the perfection of being in existence so God is personal but God is also this kind of ocean of perfect and if and being and he knows and loves himself perfectly and in doing that he can actually give us being you can know all things in knowing himself and he can love all things loving himself even though we're distinct from him and he can give us all being freely and know us and love us in light of his own internal goodness so that it's paradoxical but because God loves himself in his own eternal perfection in know and loving his own goodness he gives out of his goodness he gives being to all things and he loves all things that are in an on in an utterly not egoistic way because he gives us being as a purely free gift without any weight that doesn't perfect God at all this is perfect God at all to give us being so he knows us and loves us in a way that doesn't perfect him but actually brings us into being out of a sheer act of gift at the same time we can talk about the notional acts or the personal axing God and talk about the father internally be getting the uncreated word digital word who is a procession of wisdom or knowledge in God that there's the eternal beginning of the word from the father and the internal spy raishin of the Holy Spirit as love who proceeds from the father and the son and here what he thinks is that everything we say my god essentially like the God is one eternal loving instead of all three persons but according to an order of derivation so the father is eternal and one and loving but internally knowing himself he begets the son and he and the son and eternally loving one another aspiring naturally spire eight the holy spirit not my choice but by nature they spired the holy spirit and all these peer receives as it were all that is proper to being God from the Father Son Holy Spirit now this is takes us into trataron theology and it's actually more beautiful than I can make it seem and it's biblically based more beautiful that I make it seem in two minutes but the point is that all this in the father's and son and all this in the fatherless sons the Holy Spirit and each of the persons is truly the one God so that you never have anything in one of them that's not in the other two and the love that's present in God as God and virtue that by nature is present in the spirit as the spy rated love who were sees all that he has all the goodness of God from the father and the son okay well to cut to your question then it may not be clear from what I said just now very rapidly but what this means is the three persons in God who are each though one God are one in a way to human beings never could be like we are not even if I love someone very intensely and that person loves me very intensely or we get married which wouldn't happen to me but you know to man and when we get married and have children and they you know beget a child out of the intensity of their personal love as man and wife none of those three people are one being none of those three people are one in concrete specific individual human nation like they are all one man or one woman or one child there are three individual substances that one dies the other to stay alive right so there's some kind of perfection in the mystery of the Trinity that's a numinous mystery that we understand vaguely opaquely through the faith that is far more perfect and more beautiful than the unity between three human beings what grace does is it allows us to strengthen our human interpersonal love for other people we don't become them but we can love them in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit and participate imperfectly in the Divine Love in a way that's suited to creatures we don't become God we don't love as God loves but we participate by grace and something of the love of God we whisper this way we come to resemble more perfectly the union of love that exists among the three persons and the mystery of church is this communion of persons that's created different from the uncreated communion of persons in God and in God that's different because all three persons were they are why being and are each the one guy there's nothing in the Father to stop the son the holy spirit there's nothing in son stop the father in spirit there's nothing in spirits not the father son so everything that's in the father says in the spirit whose love okay so the persons are called we call mutual well in Perry choruses in Greek the mutual indwelling is utter we only indwelling each other through knowledge and love from the exterior we don't we don't become one another we learn about one another ever unites you know there's no union that's substantial unlike the kind of image that the wonderful romantic metaphysical image in symposium of the the people originally were spherical unities they got severed and they got separated I'm looking for the one I'm going to United - that's actually a bad nostalgia the one that we can really be united to most deeply in that way is God not that we can become God but because everything in us is from God and can be given back to God and God gives it where it's good enough Jesus because it's a preeminent goodness God is good enough to really be loved in all that we are another human being can be loved a lot intensively and even exclusively these the other human beings but sake of marriage children but not as a God and not as an existential resolution of all our needs in the order of love only God can really fulfill all our existential needs in the order of love thank you Father white our next question comes from zoom from Calvin Behe gasps he has a bit of a multi-part question he says father white could you speak about Aquinas theory of participation how it differs from a platonic participation how it may connect or derive from Aristotle and how it ties in with hierarchy of being okay so just to say so we're don't play to an aerosol so Plato has a theory of participation in the forms and you know in plato's theory of forms Calvin and I are two human beings but beyond us there's the concrete form of a human being that is immaterial that pre-exists us and that we participate in so the abstract concept of man or human nature precedes us and is something as it were formal that we come to participate in Aristotle rejects this idea because he says look we all have the same human nature but we aren't all the same form we don't all participate in some invisible former species the species is something we abstract from a reality so I see Calvin and Thomas and I see you know Jennifer and I abstract out human nature and that you gotta strike universals in my mind that corresponds to something in all three of them they're all real human beings but the human being in them is something individualized it's unique in each case it is common it's not common in a universal mode like an abstract concept of human nature so aerosol rejected platonic theory of participation whenever Aquinas comments on those passages in like Nicomachean ethics one six or in metaphysics book 11 in his commentaries on a Tercel Aquinas 2 totally follows Aristotle and rejects the Platonic theory of participation but unlike Aristotle he also develops a whole language of participation in si what I was talking about earlier so we're all in si community we all have the existence I think about how all this is unique in existence but some ecumenical we all have it it's the most common thing characters to start aardvarks angels human being son they all have being there's all exist so then you think about like what is it that were okay if we're all receiving being from God and God is the plenitude of being giving us existence he's not our existence God's not a pantheistic groomed to use the German word a kind of foundation of being in which we all exist or which we emanate from as like like we're in some deep way really deeply down God but but God is deeply within us more more profoundly in us than we are toward he's closer to us in our to ourselves it's Agustin and Aquinas a-and that we do emanate from God has caused creatures and we do reflect something of God in our existence therefore is received and so when Aquinas talks about the fact that all of us received existence from him and then something common to all of us that's when he talks about participation when his participation in existence meet he reinterprets it in a kind of Aristotelian way by using AK potency composition I'll go into that right now but basically he says insofar as the thing is of being an act not just in potency and it really exists actually all the things that exist collectively in the world right now that are actual they all participate in existence it's kind of common sense look if it's real if it's real now actually it's participating in being its participate exist that's what is this okay so what is rooms what is participation in three things is parts its part it's a reception we received being from another that's kind of efficient causality idea we're derivative God is the fullness of being infinite being and he has creator gives us being that's recept received in each of us since the reception being it's also got to doing that it something we all participate in and that you know might say are quite sometime says each of us is in essence that delimits existence so my existence is limited because it's received into a delimiting essence I'm only a human being one little unit then there's the trees in the forest and then there's the Stars and then there's the mountains and all these things participate in being they all delimit the existence but they also all participate in it so you got this idea of a participation as a kind of reception in a not just receiving from another but reception in a in a sort of essential way and then you've got a third idea which is exemplar ism meaning say we all participate in being and therefore resemble something that has being in a more exemplary perfect way and that realities God God just exists until the other way he can't be or not be he doesn't have some limited existence everything that is derived from him and he's unknown to us we don't know how perfect is we just know it's not he's not a potentiality become greater because then he'd have to like cause himself to be God it's not a causal sweet where is he gonna get the power to become more if there's a first cause and being it's perfect because it's the cause of all imperfect being it's not causing itself to improve right so there's something under I've been god that's infinite and perfection you have to make more arguments to I said it very quickly be able to make like go to the long argument of route but that means that everything's like in some way everything is receding existence is measured by a transcending simpler so this is very different it's a totally unique to - he has his own unique theory of participated being the champion of it in 20th century was a priest in Italy who lives about 100 yards from here wrote a lot of massive books and his name was Cornelius Fabro he was probably the greatest priest loss for the 20th century and Fabro has a lot of major works on participation and they're people who are sort of disciples of his Monsignor John Whipple of the Catholic University of America and so people Rudy de Velde a is a good living Thomas has written a very fine book on participation metaphysics implies frano Rourke is a very good book on participation metaphysics so you can study this kind of element in the lines that's unique to him thank you Father wait we've time for one more question so we'll go to YouTube the next question is are there any semantic concerns with using analogy in demonstration there are a ton of semantic concerns and you're some gentle person out there is just ever so so carefully probing to see if I even pay attention to statistic worries so one of the worries that before coin is Avastin it has an after points dumb SCOTUS has and other logicians of the 14th century is that analogy is too weak a concept to carry you to God through the medium of syllogistic argument a argumentation because you can't formulate demonstrations without you might say you nibble speech specific content so like I say you know simple example Socrates is a man all men are capable of smiling therefore Socrates is capable smiling even if I never seen such a smile so serious miss tickle him let's tell him a joke I bet we'll make him smile like that's that's true we can't get him to smile because I'm your smile because he's even be um ok notice that the middle term there was human nature alright you know he's a human being or he's a man human being so so a human nature I can smile alright so that's the middle term blocks everything down and that's a specific that's the knowledge of a species or essence so there the idea is we need an essential term for God a you nipa Klee identified specific term in order to be able to define God in advance and then make arguments about whether we can demonstrate the or maybe we can't to find God in advance but we need something like that that we have in mind this world and specifically typical terms that we can then apply to God specifically and uniquely and a lot of people have semantic and logical concerns think that the analogical mode of reasoning is too weak and I you know that's a it's a great technical question it's not a place as my particular expertise although a little bit about it and worked on it a little bit and my own inclinations say it's exactly the opposite actually what we know is that being is not an ingenious or species and therefore can never be demoted denoted uniquely like let's just say that I set them goodness is identical with the lion specifically let's define what goodness is uniquely specifically it's the lion so everything that's not a lion is therefore not good right arguments over everything is not a lion is not good it's a dumb argument because everything that's not a lion is also good but the problem is everything is not a lion it has some specific or generic content there for goodness is in every genus and species of thing so yeah you know it's pretty simple goodness is not in the genus or species and you know Scott is sort of sees this but it's not really happy with that answer even what I'd say is once you get it give it at that point now we begin to actually have a way to think about the cause of all species and all geniuses of the genre of things who can't by its very nature because he's the cause of all would be in any particular one and ways we can then designate analogically terms to God in semantically and logically logically sound and semantically safe ways so as to know what God is and also maintain a kind of safe distance sort of you know security from trying to denote God in anthropomorphic or univocal semantic terms because you have on the one side the kind of you know worry about whether you can talk about God if you only use analogy and you have the other side of the worry is a little worried which is are you gonna think you know God is like a big angel or a big human being or just like another human mind but to the infinite and so you actually entered were more flies God and you create a conceptual kind of Idol and talk about God in ways that know what notes sort of serious person's gonna believe this happens all the time I'm afraid to say analytic philosophy that sets people up from the very notions of God you know I just say is you can use all the essentials and speech specific terms of God like you say God is personal or gods intellectual or God's wise and you can use no appropriate specific terms they just have to be qualified analogically and you know how you qualify the manna logically as part of a larger account about religious language but I think you can't actually I would actually turn the ring around you can't make the syllogisms work right to talk about the transcendent cause of all things in a proper way in sound semantically clear and logically sound ways unless you use some kinds of analogical reasoning which are going to be demonstrably valid and defensible but it's very good that people probe the question and then they pose the question we should worry about it I mean we should absolutely worry about whether we were saying demonstrative ly two things about God whether we make logically sound arguments and whether we're preserving mystery as much as trying to really you might say ascribe real content to what we mean when we talk about God we need to both be catyph attic to use the Greek word and say positively true things about God an apathetic and preserve a sense of mystery and Aquinas is a sense of analogy since Pete is very balanced in this respect against the extremes of you know overly apathetic approaches like Maimonides and overly I'd say you ambitiously you mythical approaches like that about a sentence SCOTUS so I think he's a balanced figure in this respect

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Published: Thu Jun 04 2020