Livesplaining 007 - Lessons from Literature + Q&A

hello friends and welcome to live splaining um you know i have to say uh i guess i'll begin with an apology right like today you might have come on hoping to see father gregory pine and father jacob bertrand jan sick and today you get uh father bonaventure and father patrick so the b team is here do not worry if you have any uh particularly burning questions about kant and other kinds of obscure continental philosophy or are wondering uh questions about how to interpret uh catholic media we've had sort of an exciting week on that front uh father bonaventure and father patrick are your guys here we are so we did we did propose a topic to uh to kick us off a little bit as we're as we're talking uh to get kind of the thoughts going on those friday afternoons live explaining um so father bonaventure and i wanted to talk about lessons from literature not to be dogmatic or moralistic but to begin by making a case uh for literature so father bonaventure for literature yeah and this is something if you've listened to god's poignant before um it comes up a good bit when i do things with father gregory we talk about a lot of literature and why do we do that sort of thing well one because it's fun but two because it's valuable in terms of truth a lot of people i think ask well you know why do we why should i read literature like why should i read and most people don't say literature they mean they say fiction like fiction and fiction has this idea of not being true right so literature is an exalted thing but fiction is this thing that's not true and then so non-fiction is the thing that's true and so fiction is is like stories and non-fiction is science and um i've shared this in other place but it's it's this experience has stuck in my mind about how backwards this conception of fiction equals things that aren't true is i was a before i joined the dominicans i was doing some work at barnes and noble of course and uh we liked books i always liked books and i was a book seller there and one of the joys of the of barnes and noble is people come to you at the information desk or used to maybe they just use their cell phones now but they just come to the information desk looking for books and they usually had almost nothing it was like 20 questions and so you had to decide they'd come and say i want a book and you'd have to say like great what's the title like i don't know well who's the author i don't know what's it about i don't know i mean literally i remember i mean i remember i remember one time someone came in they had absolutely no idea about and i said okay hold on a second i said is it this book and they said yes that's it it was amazing but to be honest if they don't know about it they probably just heard an oprah so i pretty much know where that is if you're a bookseller but one time someone came in to play this 20 questions game and said to me i'm looking for a book and i said great do you know anything about it and said i don't really i forget which one it is could you help and i said okay 20 questions the first thing is to break up the store into fiction and non-fiction i said well is it fiction or non-fiction and she said which ones well which one's the true one and that just it floored me it floored me like i wanted to call the police because there was an issue involved here uh that this young lady did not understand that i mean the true one is fiction right that's the literature section and then there's the factual one the kind of boring statistics um that's over in nonfiction right like if you want to know how many planets there are according to our current numbers or like what the chemical composition of salt is or something you go to non-fiction if you want to know what the human condition is like who you are what this business is and what we're doing then boom here you go you need to go to literature and fiction and someone that say might say well how is that true none of those characters actually existed in dostoyevsky tolstoy or tolkien that we know of as far as we're concerned right and yet they do exist they're the archetypes the fundamental like structure they're more real i would say maybe than electrons are what are those anyway that's my my first foray into this i mean is that do you get a similar reaction to that father right oh absolutely i mean my something deep something deep uh inside me wants to rebel uh with every fiber of my being against the idea of fiction not being true um i love the quote from chesterton about this he says um had to do my best father gregory impression to go write for chesterton right he says fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist children already know the dragons exist fairy tales tell children that the dragons can be killed and i think that there's something there's something about that uh that speaks to to this that you're saying father bonaventure about the human condition that fairy tales very stories fiction tells us something about the human condition that we that we don't yet know and we see particularly in heroes of people to imitate we see in villains things to avoid and in the fabric of fairy tales we're given um a kind of sandbox to work out uh how we interact with reality so uh you know father bonaventure as a kid i mentioned fairy stories but as a kid what were some of the most uh important books that you read books would you say to the chapman universe yeah i mean i didn't read until i was like 14. so not many i mean stephen hawking's briefing time yeah brief history time was the first book i really read i mean you've read little stories things now my mother did read read to me uh the lord of the rings the trilogy so tolkien is obviously very very important i remember coming home from school and we would read that together so so tolkien that vision was there um so the so that that universe uh had formative influences but my brother was really the reader i i wasn't reading as other than my mother um uh thanks mom for uh for reading and planting those seeds of in there i wasn't god bless marsha yeah yeah i was more of a science i was more of a stupid science guy i probably would have believed in something about that factual stuff but here's the thing about um and one more point about this because i'm here i might as well say something about wittenstein um would victor stein 20th century uh austrian german philosopher if we want to call him that a philosopher he says that he that says there are some things that you say and there are some things that you show in truth this is the tractatus um logical philosophical um and he says there's some things that you say and some things that you show like so you can say some things and other truths you have to the deeper truths the structural truths you have to show them show them and to my mind that's what saying is what kind of non-fiction does it collects sentences propositions you know things like chunks but literature collects the truth in the showings right so it shows the truth which of course has a saying that you then take from it but the saying is always a lesser form of the showing it's like if you have if there's an event and you want to explain that to someone you know what is the meaning of this piece of art or what happened in this battle or what happened you know what did you what is your what is your point in doing this right you you're gonna have a hard time saying exactly what's going on there but you but the event itself the action shows what that is right in our christian faith of course um we're people of the book but not really of the book where the people of the word the showing right the events of the passion resurrection and that's in a sense a literary kind of thing because it requires interpretation but it's it's a showing that then theology i would say is kind of the saying version of that this isn't noc theology per se but it is to say that it catches up to that showing and literature i think takes propositions and embeds them in a story structure and that's so it gets at those truths and teaches us those truths in a fuller more three-dimensional way as opposed to kind of two-dimensional flat flat world stuff right when uh at the end of the last battle when everything is being taken up and things are going further and further and further right uh the professor c.s lewis's um brilliant and marvelous character in my view one of the most important characters in the whole narnia saga but the professor is complaining about what students learn in school right and he's he's arguing it's all in plato it's all in plato he says bless me what do they teach them in these schools and as uh as a young boy hearing that i put into my mind very early on that plato was important and i had to know more about who played it was and i had i had to learn plato because plato was not going to be taught to me in school so i think that literature has a way of capturing or introducing an idea and that had it been portrayed in another way um i would have resisted you know if if a teacher at saint charles gourmet oh my elementary school even a good hearted one had mentioned plato it would have been in one ear out the other you know mrs crystal taught me a lot of great things in third grade but if she had tried to teach me plato that would that would have that would not have gone over well you know i barely learned the guardian angel prayer so so there's there's a way in which things are things are caused or invited or evoked um in literature especially for for young people um that is important but in a way that is a way that can continue i you know i don't want to reduce things just to childhood i i think that would be a misinterpretation of what i'm trying no kind of working no and that's i mean i think of a lot of our things gone wrong in the world um is is due to the fact that we don't read anymore or at least it's not most people i mean they have these incredible studies that once last time you read a book i mean any book but let's if you i mean and it's almost no one reads anymore but then maybe once one book a year or something but i bet that book's not even like a literature book it's not anna karenina it's it's not the lord of the rings it's not brideshead revisited it's not infinite jest it's not how many people read a book of fiction or a literature book a book of literature every month every three months something like this i mean that's got to be a minuscule number and what that i think that means it takes the color out of out of our our modern world it just becomes two again two-dimensional and too flat and not not holistic enough and not well-rounded enough and not true enough not true enough i mean you can so let's just do an example of this right you i'm sure i'm sure there are plenty but just pick one and i'll pick one a particular book and does not a child it doesn't be child's book it could be especially a book of literature that has has taught you something which we're going to have to say in propositional form like we're going to talk about it but it's going but there's proposition i suppose that or that teaching itself was conveyed so vividly in a way that uh just reading a textbook wouldn't have done would you have any any uh an example of that yeah well for me you know the the example par excellence is brides had revisited which is a which is a novel uh you know i would argue about the way divine grace changes souls and works on people and how cooperation with it um can be an absolutely extraordinary marvelous thing and how resistance can be the cause of much suffering and that even you know perhaps in a more complex way that those two things can co-exist that there can be both cooperation and suffering um so yeah i know i would i would say it's brideshead right and that's and and that those statements about incorporation and grace and and human freedom which is in propositional form is so hard to like mesh together yet you see it in this in this narrative and it makes perfect sense right for me um one example i can think of is i love dostoyevsky's the idiot i think it's his best book um it's not the most important one that's probably probably brothers k but uh that's just going for you know that's that's like a christopher nolan movie right you give it an a because of its grand ambitions even if it doesn't seal it off brothers k but the idiot does seal everything off it's a it's a tight book goes it has good ambitions and it seals things off and the what what's striking about that is that lead character one of the characters is prince mishkin who is who is a christ figure um but comes in the world on the train so he comes in in kind of incarnational mode and even like in a sinful incarnation you could say because the trains for dostoevsky is a you know a modernization kind of uh opposition to the to the world he knows and what happens is this man appears this god-like man appears um and he's very natural he's very human so it's the incar it's like the incarnation but he screws everyone's light like everyone's lives start to change dramatically and what happens and what what the truth it teaches to me at least is that holiness has an effect on sin in our in anyone's life so we have the sense of like there's holy people and then there's ordinary like normal people and you know we go from being ordinary normal people to like holiness if we move up on it but rather in this case some of these people are actually fine people but when they're presented with something so pure and so holy it draws out even the littlest of their sin and they start to really screw things up such that holiness like holiness actually it's not like there's neutral and then sin and then holiness and saintliness right there's sinners saints and then normal people it's like no there's there's saintliness and there's sinfulness and satan this brings out and draws out and it draws attention to sinfulness and you need to deal with that so such you have to pick sides in a way and the story is really prince mishkin the incarnate kind of example here making a mess of things because people are being forced to realize their own sinfulness but they're also converting in that so that's that's the truth that that holiness that no one's neutral you know and that we have aspects that that we that only holiness will bring out and will endanger our own sinful tendencies but by doing that draws us to actually be honest with ourselves otherwise we can hide behind the kind of i'm not i'm not that bad i'm not that good i'm just kind of i'm ordinary and i'm just going to try to be better about stuff so it brings out that dimension really well well as we kind of move on with our uh with our goal here live explaining is uh you know more um uh more interactive right uh so so this is our little bit we wanted to just get us thinking today um a little bit about literature and get us thinking about the role that literature can have in our lives about uh about what it means to to read and to adopt the the ways perhaps of the characters we meet or or the ideas of novelists and to incorporate that in them in our lives not just as stories but it's something true something mean meaningful something that um adds to the horizon of our existence so so all of that is just kind of out there so if anyone wants books um we welcome that in the chat but uh we want to begin with a question from a patreon supporter um so this question comes to us um from stephanie so stephanie thanks for supporting us thanks for supporting the podcast on patreon she writes how do you know when entertainment or media consumption becomes sinful not regarding content but regarding how much time is spent on it um so stephanie asks you know again how do you know when entertainment media consumption becomes sinful not with respect to content but with respect to how much time we spend on these things what do you think father bonaventure well i mean if the question is am i spending too much time on entertainment or media consumption the answer no matter who you are has to be yes right it just has to be yes it's like i mean um you know if if you're a caller like yeah i mean a college student for instance am i consuming too much alcohol the answer is yes um you know do i eat too much fried do i eat too much fried food the answer is yes like you just part of because we we live because you're an american exactly no exactly i mean it's it's uh we you know we just there are certain cultural tendencies that of course we we live we're like fish and water and culture is our kind of water and american american culture right now is dominated largely by entertainment media kind of consumption and so that's just you know it's not it it's not now that's so you're we're probably all consuming too much i certainly am now it's different for whether you're religious or whether you're a lay person but here it gets in the question of like sinfulness um because you're consuming more than you ought sort of thing right because of a cultural meleu and because of the entanglement we have with our friends and social media and this sort of thing sinfulness requires it to be kind of a willed right you have to know it has to be you know and willed right intellects and wills so you have to like desire and choose to do this knowing and so that would be the first answer is probably too much certainly too much um but is it sinful that you're doing that no probably not like i probably i mean sinfulness we i think we sometimes think sinfulness and father patrick project as well because he's a moral theologian and i'm not but sinfulness it has to be a huge it's a human act like i think we think of sinfulness as something we kind of stumble into sometimes and we're always worried oh no i hope i'm not you know and now that can be due to ignorance like we could be sinning because we should have known better sort of thing but also all uh a lot sometimes they're just things that we exist in a particular culture in a particular way and we're just not mindful of it and it's not accountable in that way but again so that mitigates a little bit of it but i'm sure we're i'm sure we're watching too much uh but does it raise the level of sinfulness for instance that's that's probably tougher to save on my i don't know father patrick what do you think yeah i think you know another way to assess it right is to ask because i think for the bonaventures uh programming about about the nature of the will and sin is very important to take into consideration but another way to get at the question is to say like well am i being faithful to the obligations of my state in life right like if i'm working from home and i'm spending a bunch of time that i should be actually at my desk working watching netflix well that's a sin because you're you're deceiving your employer you're taking money for something you're not doing um so so that that instance is wrong and and the kind of evaluation of the duties of my state in life you know my am i lay person do i have a job uh am i being faithful to the obligations of that job that's kind of a starting point and then you can evaluate from there like well what about duties to my family um and other duties that we have in in life uh the last thing i'll say about this is i like i i actually really like this feature of the iphone is that now on sunday morning it judges you so right before you're getting ready to go to mass you can uh you can wake up you can look there and you can see your screen time and you could say oh no that was all time that i could have spent with my god uh and that sort of gives us a nice little pause a nice little dose of cap of guilt right before holy mass so yeah yeah that was a great question yeah this is a great question and it's something for evaluation because the uh we do we are naturally inclined to this in our culture aspect or at least speaking for myself even the religious state we have there are plenty of opportunities you waste in this so it's a good self-examine i would say to uh to look at that yeah and i suppose yeah the last word has to be a word of prudence um that the mean here is going to be a little bit different um for different people some people are going to be more sensitive to media consumption you know some people if they watch two seconds of television are going to have disturbed sleep other people are are going to be more immune and so so we do have to say that there's there's something about prudence and and the mean which uh changes from person to person there well let's move on to our next question here this one comes from austin from austin stonewall he writes i'm looking for substantive points of overlap between saint thomas and saint vincent de paul on poverty understood via theology something lay friendly specifically any thoughts or recommendations um austin the first thing that comes to my mind actually is um some of the lesser works of saint thomas aquinas they're they're more fun because they're a little bit more uh fighty uh than some of his other works right um we can think of the disputes between st thomas and uh the secular clergy of paris so i think the word contra and begnantus is actually a great place to start that is a disputation talking about the role of poverty in the mendicants so at the time you know the historical context for anyone not familiar some of the priests of paris were concerned about the role and the way of life of the friars and there was a lot of debate going on so this word contra impugnantes is a debate um style work um where aquinas is defending uh defending the role of poverty in the state of life and i think if you're looking for a text on aquinas and what he really thinks about poverty um particularly uh in the role of religious life it's there and then you could extrapolate the principles from that and say like what would be appropriate for for a lay person um i don't know father bonaventure do you have thoughts on that i know almost nothing about saint vincent de paul so i'm just gonna so i'll just talk about poverty and uh and uh saint thomas i suppose that's perfect and that and that um uh i mean thomas has a pretty rigorous view on the on on poverty in terms of the universal destination of all goods like thomas thinks that if if you don't you don't have need of something in a sense that extra thing is now ready to be used by someone who does need it so he's got the sense of things beyond your needs and basic kind of categories of of substance and sustenance now be now are available it's not like you need to like you know put anything out there you have extra from your breakfast table and like try to find but they're they're available to others and actually they belong they belong to the poor in a way um it's a it's a it's bracing view but it's because he believes that god created the world for good and that the creation is meant for for the healing and assistance of others so i think there's a there's a com there is sometimes i think we think poverty is like a social justice kind of commitment thing but it's it's actually pretty strong thomas in those works and also in the summit theology when he talks about um the the common good and the good and goods in common and what's due to others i think the the last thing that i would add by by way of conclusion of this bit um before i wander in a territory that uh you know uh is too unfamiliar to me i will say about saint mitcha de paul one of the important parts of the vincentian work um at least as it was adopted subsequently by members of the saint vincent de paul society was that it was fundamentally a work of evangelization um and i think i think that's always that that that's always the key that there would be overlap between saint vincent to paul and saint thomas aquinas both in recognizing that the greatest poverty is actually not material poverty greatest poverty is spiritual poverty and part of the work of the vincentians do is they use uh the relief of material suffering um you know working to working to better people's situation in life is the opportunity to introduce them to christ right so if you're vincentian and you make a home visit to someone the idea is to pray to bring uh not just material relief to them but to bring christ to them and that certainly would would be the the view of thomas aquinas as well that the greatest poverty um would be not material but but spiritual um great uh so anything else on that father bonaventure none nice okay well there we go so this question comes from a great friend of the show lauren barofsky hello lauren um lauren asked today why does jesus say that the last shall be first and the first last but then says for whoever has to him more shall be given but whoever does not have even what he has shall be taken away from him father bonaventure what do you do she's dwight i always have to say the first um i have no idea but um i took the poverty one first you know did you yeah you did jump over there you got it you got this my problem yeah b team sorry um maybe i'm c team uh you know so that's uh lauren that's a great question um so he he does the gospels depends which gospel we're talking about that puts this here because they they rearrange you know the saints of jesus in different ways and sort of so it the context does matter a lot and i don't have that my fingertips but i'll say this um the last shall be first and the first shall be last um at least last sunday that's in the context of the disciples arguing who will be the greatest amongst them and it seems to be about like material uh visible kind of kind of attributes of things so they're kind of deciding who's going to be the most well-known the kind of mvp you could say of them just as the pharisees would have their own kind of who's who and who's the top kind of guy and christ there is is is saying your greatness will actually look like someone's the last you'll be the the servant of all right this is his message kind of thing so it's a flipping of the material kind of uh element of things and how the world sees things to how he sees things they're supposed to go and that's that's consistent um with with of course his life and his teaching the other one though whoever has to me is more shall be given whoever does not have even that taken away from him um this is in the context at least i think this is in the context of the parable of the talents uh and there the talents are he's using them at least the church has interpreted these in many different ways but i mean these are spiritual kind of aspects of things so there it's it's not exactly a proto-capitalist kind of uh uh reading that this is like whoever has you know the the more the division of labor will produce the more capital and more capital be given to those but that whoever has whoever has been given the most spiritual authority most power and most success and most openness docility to the holy spirit's working will be expected to do more i mean it's it's in the context of of his disciples those who are following him and i think you can read that in context of saint paul's message where he talks about it the the dangers of being a leader and being a a religiously what we expected of you it's better if you have a millstone tied around your neck then leave one of these little ones astray this kind of thing right so there is i think that so i think part of the what might look like if you compare again two verses and uh together with each other contradiction the context would be one about honoring in a material visible way and the other one strikes me it's a it's a deeper sense it's not that it excludes some visibility but that it's getting at the talents which seem to be a matter of of spiritual grace and and uh effectiveness and this sort of thing and it's not not although the looking looking parable of discussion about uh unrighteous mammon and friends kind of makes this more interesting but i don't think that's in this context yeah i would i to to add just a little bit uh to what father bonovich are saying and to use a little bit different language i would say that uh part of the mystery of this verse whoever has to him or shall be given you know again to kind of push back on a proto-capitalist reading is to say that one who is disposed to god will continue to be better disposed to god right so the one who practices virtue does so with increasingly with increasing ease so the point of a virtue is that it disposes you to readily do a good thing um and if we think about that in terms of the spiritual life the one the one who does god things becomes god becomes godly becomes ultimately by the grace of jesus united to god becomes god and so we can go all the way we can take this all the way right to divinization um so the so i think the principle there right and and that that's a much easier more palatable more intuitive reading for me that's what i've always preferred that that by disposing yourself to god you become more readily more like him um for whoever has to him more shall be given and if you think about that if you say like okay the shape of my life is such that uh it's fundamentally ordered towards god and i'm gonna do so with increasingly with increasing forever like god continues to take a bigger role in your life right like you go to daily mass one lent and you don't stop doing it and all of a sudden you're a weird church lady and that's great you know like you're becoming increasingly disposed of god um that that the lord will continue to give you war whoever has more shall be given um so to say yes to christ um never impoverishes you right but always expands your life and uh draws you to ever greater horizons um and i i think that's that's a key principle to have in mind there um good let's move on here so we have a question from ms leclaire my 16 year old son she says is an avid horror reader we've read narnia and he was raised on lord of the rings that's why he loved loves books but how can i bring him out of the dark this is a great question because because of who it involves it involves a 16 year old boy and the difficulty there is that you're never going to force a 16 year old boy to do something that you that he does not want to do um in my house uh one of the one of the examples of this is that my mother um having taught us to love books was then dealing with the frustration of us constantly hiding flashlights and batteries in order to read uh late at night way past our bedtime which made mornings even into high school just epic battles with my mother getting us out of bed there's the so part of this question right is recognizing like okay uh coming to terms with the fact that children are free and they're going to be free but what is it that we can recommend to them uh to kind of uh to propose something more noble um i i think spy novels are great uh jean la cray that's that's classic spy novel stuff that that is more palatable more moral than um maybe some of the darkness of horror um the other thing that i would recommend more crime detective stuff like agatha christie is actually great so i i think you could you could recommend different genres things that are things that are perhaps a little bit more palatable there but i think ultimately recognizing that those recommendations um need to be presented in such a way right to to entice um and uh and encourage and allure father bonaventure do you have any comments there yeah well i don't have any picky recommendations on that i would say my gosh well done mom great job uh you have a 16 year old son who reads um that's impressive so well done uh you've and that the important part is he's not going to read horror for the rest of his life there's no way it's just not enough meat in it i mean there's it's plenty of meat like laying around in the blood and all that but like you know there's not enough intellectual meat that he's going to be interested in so uh it probably was just a phase and welcome to 16 year olds and he's reading horror books instead of like playing halo or playing you know a horror game thing or watching who knows what else i mean there's a great one also impressive yeah one of our yeah one of our one of our favorite dominicans father thomas more garrett i learned this phrase from him and i don't know the source of this phrase i don't think he made it up but he might have um but maybe someone he always said never let the perfect be the enemy of the good and that has always struck me as just fantastic advice i don't know if anyone in the chat knows where this comes from it's probably those quotes that's mashed up together so that some famous person said never let the perfect do something and another famous person said let the good do things too and then someone just smashed this together but don't let the perfect be the enemy good so um while it's a shame that he's reading horror books i don't know that would be actually his vampire stuff i don't know uh could be worse who knows um he's reading my gosh he's reading and you know if you've raised the lord of the rings he'll come back to solid food if he's gone this kind of garbage track or what have you if he's listening it's not okay just get there but that's fantastic so i would i'm just excited that he's i'm excited he's reading and cares about books and reads enough of them so that you can use books in the plural um and then it's just a little nudging uh to things so i think the detective one's fantastic i think some science fiction literature also includes this kind of stuff ender's game you can kind of shift that maybe recommend that kind of genre that could be similar to adventure kind of things but less darkness per se so science science fiction stuff might be helpful in this this this regard as well um but that's just personally speaking yeah nice um this question is this question is interesting and you know it will lead to uh i think maybe some further musics on our part so this comes from marion marion asks are there initiatives in the church for the promotion of literary artistic culture so she wants to know are there orders communities dedicated to writing for example for the promotion of evangelization through writing poetry so what kind of initiatives are there in the church for the bonaventure that you know for the promotion of literary or artistic culture so i'll jump in here well yeah go ahead jump in there um and uh yeah and then you could say whatever you want to say uh that's great i so i think that uh there are a few that are really marvelous and there's a journal called dapple things for example um there are more traditional um not necessarily by uh not necessarily traditional meaning ecclesial sensibilities but traditional meaning like they've been kind of they have some standing in the church projects like commonweal or um another one another great uh another great publication that i'm thinking of is more recent first things right so these are titles that you you probably know that are part of the the catholic evangelical world so dappled things first things and we're seeing a things thread uh common wheel these these are literally these are literary projects um and they're they're promoted by people of faith um and some some of the things that show up and they're really quite good um commonwealth especially in in the early the early 20th century was marvelous um so so i think those those initiatives are not to be overlooked is there like a religious order dedicated to writing i mean like the dominicans we do care about beauty i suppose but i would say uh i mean we have you have to give bishop barron uh hands down credit on uh providing this i mean he baron bishop baron's been pushing it went back with his father baron uh the word on fire is not just an information thing we talked about literature as teaching truth but artistic stuff as well um it's very well done he's always aimed the aesthetic appeal that's because he's he's you could say trained or committed to a balthazarian account in some ways of his his first book priority of christ did a lot on fun balthazar and hans was in baltimore for those who don't know swiss theologian and wanted to write so the three transcendentals um truth goodness and beauty he thought that you should lead with beauty which will lead to truth that then you can talk beauty then lead to goodness which will finally be able to lead to truth that we've been trying to truth first but people need to be drawn and attracted by the beautiful and then see the the goodness of that and the loving aspect of it and then they can be told the truth for instance that's the kind of balthazarian vision so his big 16 16 volume if you include the epilogue theologic theo drama and theo aesthetic um and baron does that and his so he produces a magazine a journal um that's absolutely gorgeous fantastic his his commentaries on movies and literature literary literary criticism movie criticism is aimed for this um the catholicism series all that stuff so i think bishop baron is kind of leading the way in many ways not just people think just the media presence but it's not just the fact he's in the media but he's doing it in a aesthetic and artistic sense and he cares about that um so he's he's one example other are there the baronites yet is the religious order that's committed to him i don't know of that yet um but but i mean the oratorians i think are an example of a of a religious order that because newman's kind of newman's group and others um that are committed to the beauty of the liturgy uh especially the sound and the sights uh and and the the literary quality of the preaching so i think it's not just dominicans i think the oratorians are committed to this in a in a real way and there i remember in oxford um this church i went to catholic church was saint aloysius gonzaga and oratorian parish and it was the litter the liturgy was beautiful it was absolutely beautiful um but from the sights the sounds the smells everything so i think the oratorians are doing this as well nice um let's go into uh let's go into uh uh a little bit of your past father bonaventures we have a question here from austin um austin says i've been raised as a reformed calvinist but have recently started exploring catholicism after stumbling upon some of these videos so father bonaventure what books would you recommend for someone who is a calvinist well you know that's well congratulations uh so that's fantastic um i think it's it's austin was the uh austin's the name um and uh that's my uh so i don't know if you may know i'm i'm a calvin i was a calvinist background although some people ask like what's it like to convert from calvinism to dominic to being a dominican i say i don't know um because thomas is so darn close if you start reading thomas um you'll find someone who is very i mean just extremely close to john calvin's position in way calvin's position and on on the things that most people associate with him predestination this kind of stuff the sovereignty of grace uh over say free will and the importance of god's sovereignty and all that and the glory of god in creation is the theater of god's glory these kind of calvinistic frames and phrases are are just very amenable to to uh to the dominicans and particularly atomism but the catholic church in general as far as books to recommend um i mean i guess it depends what what calvinist you are but a good place to be started will be guerrilla lagrange uh there's a couple books on on from him uh so pre-destination and the book on providence these are very cheap you could buy them for their paperbacks and tana or whoever publishes them now um those might be a good start to looking at at to feeling less suspicious about the faith and seeing how close it lines up with uh what you're what you're saying with with with uh calvinism so i suspect gary lagrange would be a good example a good place to start with this i also think if there's one book you should start reading or you should read is um thomas father thomas joseph white's uh the light of christ i think it's called um the light of christ it's a blue cover that book was written specifically with reformed calvinist in mind so it's a it's a it's a romp through uh the faith as if speaking to reformed calvinists so that look that book i would say um it's not published too long ago i think it's 15 bucks a cheap book i would read that that's that's the first stop first stop shopping and then uh and then gary lagrange another one you'll see plenty of he has plenty of authors in there that you might be interested in saint augustine is good too i've heard calvin liked him that'll do i mean if you have to recommend something i guess ain't augustine oh and scott hahn i suppose anything but scott hans pretty good in peter creef both these guys are calvinist converts so that's another there's a lot of calvinist converts though because most calvinists just realize like wow i get the sacraments and kind of calvinistic doctrine i'll take it this question comes to us from christopher christopher asks um i only read books on the faith theology philosophy lives of the saints because i feel like i'm wasting my time when i read other things so how do i reconcile reading fiction or fantasy et cetera yeah didn't we talk about the first 15 minutes i don't know yeah yeah yeah we talked about this i don't know i mean um but just to get it directly you know i that's why i appreciate this question yeah this is no it's a good question this is what's your answer boys you know yeah i mean the the answer the answer is um that that well let's put this away when you talk about the reading reading books about the faith i assume you mean something like propositional doctrine right it's reading books on theology so this is like the books i just mentioned or something but the fact of the matter is we live our lives a lot of the time not talking about doctrine the majority of your life is not spent on parsing out uh the objective efficacious aspects of grace versus the subject auxiliaries components to it the pre pre-emotion and just all incarnation the trinity i mean my gosh that's what's in the beatific vision perhaps but we're in we're flashing blood we've got passions we've got intellects and wills and we've got other people around us and we've got natures and that's an aspect of literature just does really well it deals with the human condition human nature a lot of times from either a theological perspective or it's even attentive to read from a lack of theological perspective to learn via negativa you know like it's good to read the other side you could say what are people in the world that you're talking to what are they what are they talking about and literature at least it used to get the highest form of that kind of common knowledge common sense aspect of what the world was up to so when you read classics you read something that everyone was reading so that's a now that's a pragmatic point but i think the actual more important point is that there are things about the human condition especially because they're written aiming at our our basic existence and in any sense actually are virtues i mean thomas says grace builds upon nature does not destroy it so even though faith hope and love are of course the theological virtues supreme what about prudence and fortitude uh and and uh you know temperance um and justice you know those those are natural virtues that are infused as well and common components but literature gets at those extremely well you know and it teaches us who we are and who we need to be and that's what i would say yeah i think christopher you know what a a kind of caricature of your view right would be to say just let's burn down the national art museum you know like the national gallery of art it's got to go it's not useful to us uh and instead we can or we can just empty it we don't even have to burn the building down we could just empty it and expand it um and make it you know a another another uh another science museum on the national mall but the reason that this view would be important i mean at least it should be abhorrent and the reason is view this this zoo would be dangerous is because that art arts art serves this purpose of drawing us out of ourselves that's part of what what father bonaventure is calling us to like to be able to be able to see a different perspective i mean one of the things that's great about fiction is that it's a kind of exercise in psychology and to put on another person's mind um just to see the world as as much as can be seen from a from another perspective is invaluable um you know admittedly we're not gonna we're not going to be able to put on another person's mind completely but this is this is a useful thing and this is part of what fiction does is it presents it presents options um and when there are options if they're investigated there could be understanding right so fiction can be a kind of um fiction can be a great a great place um as a kind of um as a kind of sandbox for these ideas right where you can work out like okay what what is what is this what is a person who lives this way um look like you know how how can how can it be to to live this way committed to these principles and fiction is a fiction is a kind of manifestation of that a kind of a a kind of exploration of heart in that sense and finally i would say uh just as you need to strengthen your muscles by lifting weights or something or strengthen your mind by doing you know sudoku or some sort of puzzles and these sort of things uh one of the aspects of the mind to thomas aquinas and any classical thinker or great philosopher emmanuel kant is the imagination uh the power of the mind to to visualize things um and as you're a kid fantasy and those kind of things uh are great imaginarian pumps you know your imagination's wild but i think as we get older we start to we it gets our imaginations atrophy a little bit because we focus on more concrete things and even more speculative things in a way more more scientific things in a way but yet the greatest the great scientist achievements were often coming from those who had great imaginations um and that the imagination so that this is again another pragmatic thing but reading fiction also pumps up the imagination and keeps that that power of the soul in good shape such that you can see truths from more angles so that even when you're looking at scientific truths or theological truths because let's be honest in theological truths we're grasping things that are beyond our grasp and so we need all the extra powers of the cognitive faculties to be able to deal with that and one of them is the imagination which gets into a complex discussion about epistemology and how this works but needless to say imagination is something that we i think we take for granted um but it's an important faculty and power of the soul that we should work on archbishop dinoya the dominican friar who works in the congregation of the doctrine of the faith in the in the vatican archbishop danoya always always always encourages the brothers he says to us just read constantly and read everything and for the archbishop who often uses literary devices to begin his his homilies um literature is a great way of practicing that's that skill of art with words that is so necessary for preaching so for dominicans and for our vocation there's a kind of there's a kind of particular duty to that and that's that's what bonaventure is explaining that this this is the kind of weight room but even beyond just the dominican i think this is part of what's lacking in our culture today the ability the inability to experiment and play with ideas um and i think literature offers a kind of mechanism for for practicing that so just to repeat a little bit there um you're not going to get a question no i'm going to i'm going to ask you this one so james larmon says father patrick what was the catalyst to you becoming involved with aletaya how do you get inspiration for the articles you write i mean i feel like i should kind of answer that at least inspiration because i live with you so i know how that kind of works but uh so elote if people don't know about this this is a very famous uh catholic well i don't know sort of news and also spiritual guidance uh site that reaches many many many many 22 million or something people but i'm you answer this question father patrick wait father bottom edge you're so gracious you know in this way um so uh james yeah the invitation came um through for other friars who had been involved with it father quine of skillboat the prior of the house of studies is involved with the publication as its uh senior editor i mean for me the important thing right comes from the dominican vocation uh i think alate is a great media outlet one of our one of our principles is that we're working to be as non-polemical as we can right to um to present news truthfully and to preside to provide a christian reflection things that really enrich people's lives inspiration stories about the saints that kind of thing are at the heart of what we do um but um for for me as a dominican it's a preaching and i think the the desire to be involved with media and comes from this desire from my vocation within a vocation you might say um to to impact people in that way so father bonaventure was talking about our audience and the success of the publication and and those things are true and and my desire to be there as a dominican is to uh is to be there providing theological clarity and then you know like i said to be involved in this work of preaching and inviting people to see the richness of the faith so i love the project and i really believe in it and for me it's a great joy it's a privilege to be involved with it boom fella bonovich is on the questions now he's loving it um this question comes from nikita um i love i've loved reading ever since i was a child she says not just prose but poetry do either of you have favorite poets you would recommend uh for me mine mine is paul claudel um it's not much of a recommendation because he's difficult to find in english but paul claudel was a 20th century french diplomat and i believe him to be just a true master um to christopher you know who wants to uh to wants to read theology and philosophy uh paul claudel could be a bridge for you because he's so theological he's so philosophical and even to mystic in in his writing and so i think his poetry is is just extraordinary and he has he has some really great works um there's a volume called colonel um which is a kind of collected a kind of collected volume that's available in translation from him so paul claudel is is my favorite yeah that's a great question and poetry is poetry is like the literature of literature right it's a meta it's a meta literature because it's poetry poetry is is to prose what jazz is to classical or something it's it's requirement it's nice going beyond this and such and it's it it gets at things that yeah no one else can so my favorite um is t.s eliot by far uh the wasteland is just one of the greatest poems ever written uh four quartets i've read a number of times i still don't understand any of it um but i love it um so i would say uh ts eliot is is by far my my favorite my go-to poet um another on this list would be i mean i like robert frost you know call me call me boring and silly american but i think he's really good uh i think he's really really good um and uh um and then let's see the other one i'd say today i mean a modern poet you could say this is right word for i mean i think professor anthony eslin's poetry and his uh 100 fold that book uh are beautiful so i think uh i think that that book the hundredfold is a gorgeous uh example of of contemporary catholic poetry that uh that gets at things from the hits the intellect uh in a way that only poetry can i'm gonna butcher his name but just to offer another living catholic a really excellent poet is it dana goya or joy of falafel yeah his work his work is phenomenal and he he also has some great commentary on uh for people interested in in writing fiction and how to how to think and write like a catholic um he's got a great little volume out on being a catholic writer um but his poems are his poems are fantastic ellen tate is also very good too i think another question here another question we're talking about is what are five works of literature that you think everyone should read look at that smile good lord who is this from um jeez okay um five works of literature all right well let me know that's hard to say um that everyone well i've always thought if you if you haven't read brothers k well let's put this away one of our our one of our our professors at at the house of studies said at one point in class and one of our dominicans um said if you haven't read the confessions you're illiterate um and and that's that's probably right but uh so in that vein if you haven't read i think if you haven't read the brothers karamazov you just you just missed out on a huge part of life you just you missed you made a choice you need to have you need to have you need to have an excuse at some point if you get to the pearly gates the question will be why didn't you read the brothers k and you need to say i did or you need to have a really good reason for that so i'd say brothers k is really important i think bride said i mean everyone just should that's that's a fantastic fantastic book uh to read um i think uh the artist the floating world by ishiguro that's brilliant absolutely brilliant that's not long it's absolutely brilliant um you know power in the glory by graham greene that's just that's just there that's just there uh it's a mountain it's a everest um and then the fifth one and what do i what do i give to people um i don't know if i have a i don't know if i then why isn't a fifth one just popping in my mind because i don't want to just say the next book that comes to my mind um well you know uh yeah so go ahead maybe i'll come up with this okay yeah i would have said my first two would it would have been the same as yours in that order um uh so in because they've already been said i'll list some other titles um one work that i really think is phenomenal is the master and margarita um the critique of uh critique of communism and a lively presentation of what happens uh or an understanding of satan active in the world so i think i think the master of margaritas phenomenal phenomenal 20th century novel uh it's really a romp too it's it's hysterical um i think you have to put um you have to put i would have to put tolkien and lewis on the list you have to read narnia you have to read the lord of the rings i just think they're phenomenal and i i and i uh yeah there's like 20 books yeah exactly so like those are you know those are those are two series right but uh yeah so that takes me up to three uh despite my uh despite my uh my first two having been shared um i would add um i would add a paul claudelle i think the satin slipper is phenomenal it's a great novel about grace kind of survival story of a shipwrecked jesuit um so paul claudel that that work does not stand up to the other works that i that i'm saying but you know just a commercial for paul claudel for my guy you gotta get it out there um do you have a fifth yet for the bottom entry no i'm just i'm sitting lime well the last that i would suggest is maybe um maybe silence by endo oh i hate that book don't read that don't listen to that man a horrible suggestion perfect so father bonovich agrees wholeheartedly with my suggestion uh yeah sorry about that that's just a horrible book you didn't have to apologize for that yeah oh no i got it right moby dick so moby dick is just um we get oh i could talk for that for moby dicks for moby dick is it remember nathaniel hawthorne is the calvinist is ties back uh earlier question um nathaniel hawthorne is a calvinist and um and he was friends with her melville and her melville is a scarlet letter is written of course big calvinist kind of thing hester prin blah blah um and and moby dick is is herman melville's response to to this book and it is the most atheistic book and it is fanta it's like it's gloriously atheistic um and it is brilliant and if you can get past 70 pages of ctology so whaleology um on it you will halfway through that book the minute that ahab steps on the deck and slaps that gold coin on that thing you're on a ride with him and you're stuck and you realize that this is a crazy man and that there's you know it's just it is fantastic so that's that's brilliant in craft and it's good to see the other side in terms of the the meaninglessness of of the whiteness that is that is the whale and that is ahab's um struggle for for that that's yeah yeah i'll retract silence then retractions are okay augustine did it retract silence remove it um and because you said moby dick i will i will i will also go american i will say hemingway um either what do you think either old man in the sea or for whom the bowel tolls yeah sun also rises get rid of both no i'm i mean i love sunderland's arises but that's either one hemingway's fantastic he's just really really good yeah so i think so i'll put hemingway on that list that's fine yeah reid hemingway's fighting it out through yeah that's fine that's fine yeah perfect um well by way of conclusion by the moderator do you have anything else to say about uh about literature about reading about the spiritual life oh i mean the spiritual life and literature i don't know um i think yeah just do it you know um i find so i i find if there are plenty of excuses when i i i so i read i i try to i aim to um read fiction every night literature every night um it's a good way to to you know step into a different world to let go of the present world for a bit and kind of prepare myself for for the next day but also it's it's it's a it's a commitment that i'm i'm not worried about my my daily uh up you know obligations and such um and but it is i mean there it is something it's a discipline it's just like prayer right like you you know you know you should pray but you don't always feel like praying but you know then long this is what you should this is this is helpful this is what you should do and this is what's great for for the soul it builds up the powers of the soul and i think literature in the same way it's it's a it builds up the imagination that power it tells teaches us truths by showing not only saying um and makes us into fuller human beings that are therefore open to fuller aspects of grace on things so it's it's a it's a spiritual discipline but it is a discipline um so it's just a matter of book clubs are fantastic for this by the way um because then you get to read things that you would have never otherwise read i remember doing a book called the barnes and noble i would never read on the road by jack kerouac or the handmaid's tale or something right both not good books but really good that i read them because people have it's good to know you know um but that's another so just like anything it's good to have accountability and book clubs are great for that too that's just so it's a spirit i think it's spiritual discipline in the broad term of the spirit as the kind of act of the soul uh the literature does this um and even the classics you know the aeneid if you had not read the aeneid add that to the list okay true yep the odyssey also good uh well finally an endorsement for something i said from father bonaventure that's nice we can we can end things peaceably uh well thank you all for joining us today for lives planning um we are appreciate that we appreciate all of you who support the podcast um to our patreon benefactors and we're very grateful uh you continue to improve our production quality and ensure our episodes are less chaotic thanks for submitting your questions everyone who joined us today it was fun um and i think father bonaventure and i uh both had uh a very pleasant time i certainly did um so uh please keep your eye out for these and we continue to do them every other friday um and uh if you have not subscribed to the show please do so on youtube's yellow warnings you know you can be flagged when we go live um follow us on facebook instagram and twitter and keep tabs on everything that's going on and if you have any questions about the show submit them through our website at godsplaining.org thanks god bless

Channel: Godsplaining Podcast

Views: 650

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Id: U8fm4IxyU20

Length: 59min 15sec (3555 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021