Philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy w/ Dr Alex Plato

all right we are live oh we'll be live before you said that or no how's it going good how are you doing good to see you man this is great and this is fine what a great life we lead so are you off the day of I have to teach later on I'm teaching a a class on Saint Bonaventure so I really enjoyed that class I'm no expert in Bonaventure but I really love him and and The Franciscan tradition as you know you'd be an expert in Bonaventure compared to all of us I'm sure yeah it's probably just that you know people who are super experts well I know who he is for example you know some people don't even know that so but you do you know who he is do you have a class actually I know what he's the patron saint of bowel issues true story is it right Thomas Aquinas patron saint of universities wow Bonaventure let's see is the patron saint of enter let's have a look here bowel disorders is that it there's usually a long list is that the only thing I don't know but that is so funny in like the arguments you know back and forth between Thomas and franciscans how that's never come up well there's some stories on him I forgot the the the details about him doing the dishes and being a humble man so hmm I mean it makes sense yeah well you were emphatically saying bowel issues I had the camera on Dr Plato can I can we do another one of you doing that so someone can take it out bowel issues okay we got it great good um so is the whole class on Bonaventure yes the whole class so it's it's uh it's a cross-listed class it's history Theology and philosophy and it's part of The Franciscan minor The Franciscan studies minor at Franciscan University so they have a Franciscan studies minor there which is great maybe someday they'll have a major that's the whole thing anyway I've only ever read Journey the mind to God yeah and I remember when I read it was like this is like oh it's amazing this is like mysticism in the way that you think of Eastern mysticism yeah Christian yeah and he combines I think that the best of the sort of Scholastic analytical mindset is behind everything you can see it like he wrote the sentence commentaries like all the students of the day right and then he became Minister general of the franciscans and then he started writing a lot sort of different style I mean he was also an arts master so he learned how to do that as well um the grammar logic rhetoric that kind of stuff and he wrote These amazing amazing pieces which are not in the disputed question form so it's not like the Summa right where you've got the objections and the replies and the replies to objections and Etc sort of the dialectical format it's in this beautiful ordering of threes and threes and threes and layers of Threes because obviously this world is made by God who's a trinity it Bears his imprints what some of bonaventure's main insights insights or sort of uh contributions to yeah Christian philosophy yeah um well he's he one of he's really well known for his exemplarism right and so that's one of his I mean Aquinas was an Exemplar what does that mean an exemplarist it's a it's a view of uh how to account for the creation so the creation yes of course the creation is rational and so God thought about it logically prior to when he did it yes right and so he had Divine ideas and those Divine ideas are the exemplars of everything that he made yes right and so he knows those Divine ideas because he knows himself so in knowing himself in a certain way of course he knows how all the infinite ways in which he could be participated in right and so he knows those things prior logically prior to the creation pterodactyls exactly redness Lions Matt frad um bread perfect bread perfect bread perfect bread yeah yeah so but that's but that's something he shares with Aquinas unless he explains it differently they differ they differ in certain ways which is really interesting and then of course scotus differs in an interesting way so I find I find um sort of as a non-expert looking back into the Scholastic era right I always find it really fascinating to compare those three Bonaventure Aquinas since scotus I think they're kind of the big three and I think where they agree is the sort of center of our Catholic intellectual tradition and where they disagree is really interesting do you ever meet people who are open to converting to Catholicism but things about Aquinas and his teaching that don't actually have to be believed as he States them are obstacles to them becoming Catholic and at which point you introduce them to Bonaventure and scotus yes yes no that's that's totally true there are things like that I know that some of my friends that I went to Talbot School of Theology with where did my masters you know jpmoreland and and Doug guyvette and all all those people Scott Ray um William Lane Craig is a research Professor there so I remember one of my friends who went to Notre Dame he told me that he just couldn't become Catholic because of the doctrine of divine Simplicity and when he explained it was aquinas's explanation of it which is a very kind of I guess very strict view you could say yeah so just there's absolutely no conceivable aspects or parts in God whatsoever and that's what it means for him to be simple right I mean the minimal commitment that everybody Bonaventure you know scotus and Aquinas I'll agree on right is a little bit less strict than that so you can take it more strict or you don't have to take it more strict but it's the idea that God being simple has no parts and so he can't be composed or caused to be made and he can't be decomposed or caused to be unmade right and so there's this sort of Simplicity or non-complexity right in the way that you know satisfies his first cause or uncaused cost or um yeah so he takes it a strict way in this this friend of mine he he couldn't he couldn't see that the truth of that and you know interestingly there's an article written by Peter Simpson who I really like um I really like a lot of his work he's got a great website called aristotleophile um huge you can go to his current work section he's got a lot of free translations of lots of interesting stuff there yeah um but he wrote an article and I can't remember what he wrote it who he wrote it for maybe crisis maybe not um anyway it's called have you tried scotus and it tells the story of Anthony Kenny the famous agnostic what an ex-priest and Anthony Kenny tells the story of how he um he was in seminary and he ran into lots of problems with how to understand transubstantiation and he when he spelled all of his problems it was because he was only taught the tomistic view of transubstantiation and so so he couldn't overcome that in this article Simpson's explaining if he would have known about the scotistic view right and I and don't ask me to explain it because I couldn't do that off the top of my head but um if he would have known that then it would have been an option again like you said where you know we don't have to just go with one one doctor and I mean I think Aquinas himself would be would be a fan of the plurality of our tradition and I think it's really important that plurality yeah that's a good point um because we're finite but I'm sure a lot of Catholics struggle with that right because especially converts to the faith they just want a final definitive answer on all of these many things especially if they come from a Protestant background where they've been given all this different information they want everything kind of neat and tidy but now we're kind of saying well that they're actually different takes on things and allowances yep how do you kind of reconcile that and why is that a benefit yeah um I think I think we all are sort of naturally dogmatic right we want we want to know the absolute truth and we want to know it absolutely certainly and we don't want to compromise that we want to rest there but I think that I think that there's a pride that's always involved with that where you could maybe contrast being properly dogmatic with being ideological so being ideological is where the that particular way of stating it right there's no other way to understand it no other way to interpret it you're not going to be open-minded to hear somebody else right and so it's like you're almost proud right of possessing the truth it's so like you have a possession of the truth as opposed to you've been given this truth right the dogmas that we believe have been given to us we we take what we've been given and we hand them on we can't create those we can't invent those right and so I think that the the the idea of there being a plurality in the tradition is that we're at the absolute limits of trying to use our mind right not to possess the truth and know it like that but to raise our minds to God who is the truth and so we want to be contemplating him and so I love the you know the bonaventurian angle on that which in this and scotus perfected that as well which is theology itself this science right of of of of of of of the truth right about God is is for the purpose of loving God so that's the ultimate purpose is to love God it's a it's a practical thing in that sense but the pinning of Christianity isn't to be able to refute Protestants succinctly exactly ah exactly I love God exactly and so like that's why Saint Francis famously said right hey if you're if you're studying is extinguishing the love of God then stop doing that but if it doesn't extinguish the love of God that's fine you know the famous letter to Saint Anthony can we is it okay if we teach the brothers theology because I don't know about this yeah yeah so Francis you know warned about this because it can it can puff us up knowledge puffs up yeah and so it becomes a Temptation I think right is and so we have this you know pride in possessing the truth and I think um I mean I can reflect on myself when I was a Protestant I think I had that a bit I was I was a rationalist okay right that's how I that was sort of the last thing I had to overcome when I became a Catholic and I think there's a lot of if I remember some of the comments and some of the last time we were talking is some people when I said this right they said oh he doesn't think faith and reason are connected or he thinks it's just faith alone yeah sure and so I think that that what's it mean to be irrational it doesn't mean right that you think um to deny rationalism doesn't mean you're disconnecting faith and reason but it means things like well the Trinity is that can you comprehend that I mean what's it mean for you know there to be one being right into three persons right what's it mean for there to be an infinite being right who's omnipresent omnipowerful right what's it mean for these things like we can't actually comprehend that and what's it mean for um in the in the real presence of the Eucharist what's it mean for Christ to be non-deensively present in every particle right all over the world in the consecrated house what's that even how do I understand that I can't right and so I think I think that dogmas like that that the central dogmas of our faith it's exceed our ability to understand and comprehend but what reason can do and this is straight from from the sum and I read this right before I converted it was really important for me is reason can show you that it's not impossible to believe those things yeah and that's important contradictory yes they're not inherently contradictory and the arguments that show they are all fail and so then you're left with a mystery and we have to believe these things are Mysteries and if they're not Mysteries right then we don't understand them as they should be which is beyond our comprehension right but we can see so maybe an analogy is you know you can look way over there on at a Hillside and you can see there's somebody there yeah you can see it's not an elephant this is aquinas's argument for why we can know God exists in a particular way intuitively he even used that example to know that somebody is approaching it's not the same thing is approaching yes that's the exact words I didn't know that it's like you know someone's coming but okay but you don't know who specifically exactly and so that's to me a mystery is like you you know something but you know something beyond what you know which is I think that's a brilliant and beautiful Paradox of human reason human reason itself transcended transcends itself right it's like we can we can know there's stuff beyond what we can know and we really know that there's stuff beyond what we can know isn't that kind of that's kind of startling to me think about that we know with our reason that there's stuff Beyond right what our reason can know uh it's not nothing the stuff beyond our reason isn't nothing okay it's not so in other words reason can see that there's stuff Beyond it is it even on a natural level you mean yeah on a natural level yeah so we can see Mysteries right we can see Mysteries naturally like space and time physicality and we can see Supernatural Mysteries like the nature of God right the Incarnation the hypothetic union the real presence right the inspiration of scripture all these things are to me Supernatural Mysteries and they're similar to Natural Mysteries um yeah if you look in a telescope you can see that there's something there and that if you had closer access to it you could know about that thing yeah but you can't it doesn't yeah yeah where did uh where does The Franciscan tradition and the temistic tradition disagree most vigorously almost starkly yeah where's one of the that's a good question a lot of when when these differences come up the students at Franciscan often they want to hear what now where do they differ and and again I would just say I'm no expert in this matter but I'm I'm an avid Enthusiast for The Franciscan School especially scotus um and uh and so I know the philosophy part more than the theology part um but I mean one important difference with with scotus philosophically right is how he understands the nature of of of human reason right so he understands that that we can say things about God truly right and use a term right so we can say God is wise for example so is wise is a predicate we know it's true of God we could also say that about Socrates Socrates is wise right and so we have we can predicate of man something or creatures and of the Creator something and so the question is how do I take the terms that I use for human beings or creatures like Socrates is wise how do I use that term with God if he exceeds our comprehension right that's the mystery so I've got to be able to explain that bit so I've got to preserve God's Transcendence right because he's incomprehensible and we know that negative theology is really important yes right or or saying what God is not right not saying that he's nothing but saying he seeds are understanding he's more than we can understand right right so that's one constraint because we recognize it's not univocal language that we're using when we say Socrates and God are wise if it's equivocal and everything we say about God is equivocal then we can literally know no things about God exactly so it has to be analogical exactly so so that's that's the dispute right and so I think that so the idea of the analogy of being right is that God is infinite right creatures are finite and there can be no in-between type of being that shares both of those things that's impossible being is either infinite right or being is fine so there's a Chasm between this an unbridgeable one right but the question is can we have a concept right that bridges that so the can the concept bridge that partially let's say um so to me what scotus did is he made up a new idea in the history of philosophy which is a I call it a quasi-univical concept so the concept is quasi-univical and so you can talk about what wisdom is sort of an a lexical definition let's say knowing all the important stuff okay right so Socrates knows all the important stuff God knows all the important stuff and so there's an overlap of the meaning of that right but obviously the way God knows all the important stuff is infinitely and the way Socrates knows all the important stuff is finitely full of Errors maybe some Corruptions but good enough for us to say that's true and so we can say now take the concept of wisdom now we can understand that there's a core to when we say it of God that's the same as when we say it of Socrates yeah so that's quasi-nivocal but then there's part of the concept that isn't univocal so maybe I could say that that it's the the mode of the wisdom or the way the wisdom is had or the way the wisdom is um true of God so of God it's infinite so here's an analogy that scotus uses so we've got a white light a white on the pints with Aquinas thing a white on your mug and that's a quality right but the quality comes with some sort of intensity so the whiteness is the quality and the intensity is the mode of the quality that's what scotus would say so there is no such thing as a whiteness that has no intensity all whiteness that's real that's actually instantiated has some intensity well that's the same with being and by intensity what do you mean like the brightness in the way we use intensity usually yeah so that light is a more intense exactly exactly maybe it's like it's like brighter white or something like that um and so so then we have a distinction between the mode of whiteness and the whiteness itself but there can be no real whiteness that doesn't have an intensity because if it didn't have an intensity it wouldn't be it wouldn't exist anything it has to have an intensity to exist right but here you're not just white you're not just talking about like on the visual Spectrum or something physical about it are you no that's physical yeah the intensity of the white has to do with something I didn't know if you're using a philosophical term that I was no no we're not I mean just like whatever a person who knows maybe they use a different term like artists have lots of terms for colors in their intensity and their Hue and all this stuff yeah but you can see that all the whitenesses differ yes but there's the same whiteness yep I get that yeah yeah that's what that's the next that distinction is so scotus calls that an intrinsic mode my teeth used to be more intensely more than they currently are I know mine are not intensely white at all but coffee coffee is better than uh pure white tea that's right so we have that thing to work with right the the quality and the um the intensity so the analogy is when you have being being itself so the being wise right wisdom itself is a quality let's say okay right and so that can that that has a mode as well which is yeah parallel to the intensity we would say it is it maximal is it the most wise possibly conceivable that's the kind God has right or is it the kind of wisdom that we know is full of finitude corruption partial that's the kind Socrates has so what skoda says is if there is that quasi-univical overlap right between the the concepts only part of the concepts overlapping not the whole thing so it's not univical like skoda like um Aquinas and Bonaventure would deny right so scotus would also deny that there's such a univocal concept as they denied but he invented this new kind so we got this partial overlap and so the question is if that overlaps now we can understand how we got a word from creatures like wisdom we know Socrates is wise right and we know you know Confucius is wise and whoever else right and we can imagine subtracting all the finitude gotcha right with our conceptual imagination if I can use that subtract the finitude subtract the imperfections and now we just have the core left of course nothing can actually have that chord that's just an abstraction you want to say but then we can imagine um amplifying it to 11. and now we're going yeah we're now we amplify to no conceivable greater degree but of course we're not understanding that now we've gone into negative theology so I've done positive theology first which is what Bonaventure says you have to do positive theology first so you can now say God is wise yeah right and then when we amplify it up we're beyond what we can understand now we're saying he's wise in a way that I can't comprehend I think that makes sense so so that is a difference that is right at the core right of the philosophy I I find of of Aquinas and scotus now let me say one more thing about that is that the the thing that a lot of um students are worried about that I meet is when you say that there's a univocal concept of being or univical or quasi-univical concept of being it seems to remove the Transcendence so that's a problem right and then it seems to them like you're denying the analogy of being and so actually what scoda says is the only way to preserve the analogy of being is the quasi-univical concept of being because there is no being right that can compare to God he's the standard of being everything else is a pale you know reflection of him right a participation in him right without him is literally nothing so it can't be that you've got creatures here and God here under some genus term being that they share everybody's Bonaventure Aquinas scotus everybody denies that right so the analogy of being is denying that and scotus does deny that right sorry not deny the analogy being affirms the analogy being by denying that idea of the genus turns that the two share because the two beings in concrete reality are infinitely different but there's a quasi-inivical concept that unites them does that make sense yes I wonder though if you look at what a common quietness of this is we can predicate things about God yes so I wonder how different these things actually are that's a big question there was a really great article by Garrett Smith um in the American Catholic philosophical quarterly which is the kind of biggest Catholic philosopher's publication in America and uh and he wrote about this idea of scotus and that's where I started using the term quasi-univical that's your term that's my term because he talks about the the kind of univocal it's going to look something up in Aquinas go for the kind of univical concept that Bonaventure and Aquinas denied okay right was the same thing scotus denied and scotus invented a qualification of that in a way that they had never seen before so I don't know what they think about what he said um because that idea didn't exist at the time they were writing and so maybe they could affirm that I'm not sure but here's one way to look at it theologically and this is my friend Jared told me this as a way to think about Christ right is hypothetically United right the Divine and human Natures are hypostatic united right how does that work right I mean there's a there's a human nature right which is created right and there's the divine nature and they're United somehow yeah so theologically there's like an analog there's a way to unite right in finite yeah right the two radically different types of being there's a way to unite them in the in the person right of of the word okay and so that is like a theological analog that kind of helps you see yeah somehow you can you not yeah somehow there's a union here and that's that's how I would say an analog to it oh my gosh that's fantastic but so that's one really important thing one really important thing um but they both here's what they agree on and like I said I care about what they agree on too they both agree God is transcendent they both agree that we have natural knowledge of God okay right yeah um and they both agree that being is not some sort of genus term that subsumes finite creatures and Creator under some general thing that's that's a genus of being that includes God and creatures they both deny that so they all agree on that and they they both affirm the the analogy of being meaning the analogy of concrete being God's being is on a different level than created Created being which is nothing without God himself making it something at all moments so they agree on that but they disagree on this it seems like they do I mean I don't know what Aquinas would say he didn't have that notion well too many thoughts um that's one thing here's one thing I'm sure frustrates you is somebody who is very interested and a beneficiary of the Francisco Franciscan intellectual tradition yeah is that too often people will say things like I'm more Franciscan and what they mean is I'm a heretic like here's an example right and maybe heretic's too strong a word but you and I went to this debate recently he's just thinking about it I'm lying right yeah and someone gets up and says well I'm more Franciscan right and therefore I'm okay with right telling right falsehoods right and you're like no yeah Bonaventure is 100 again totally I I think that there's a sad a sad story to tell I think about the Franciscan intellectual tradition right is and it's the story it's the same sad story of the rise of modernity and modernism right in the 1800s the schools of theology were being gutted okay right and so they used to have the different seminaries and different schools existed for each each kind of tradition right and then universities have chairs right like there would be even like a nominalist chair right you know like a scotus chair you know a Dominican chair it'd be these chairs and so that then the plurality of the tradition was preserved in the institution but those institutions began to be corroded and then you have the the rise of historical criticism and the attacks on on Christianity in 1800s until you get Leo the 13th saying guys we're losing let's call out the Marine Corps the attorney Patrice right yes get the get the let's go back to Scholastic so of course there's an emphasis on Thomas but in that document he mentions Bonaventure but but the emphasis on Thomas and that makes sense because Thomas is the universal Doctor Thomas is a genius of organizing and teaching right you look at the Summa right it's it's probably the best sumo it wasn't the only Sumo lots of people wrote summas but that's it stands out the fact that you don't know of any other Sumas at least most people don't yes exactly and so so it it deserved a private place right but what happened is I think after that of course there were Scholars right like say Alan Walter right or Ephron batoni right or uh Titus Zabo these Scholars were Franciscan Scholastics in the neoscholastic era from Leo the 13th but their tradition it got preserved in kind of like rarefied academic settings right it didn't continue to produce Franciscan friars so you get to the point in in a couple summers ago I taught some tlrs in my summer class and they said I take classes at the at the Dominican house at COA because there is no Franciscan school there's no set of theologians who are passing on the franciscans and again the reason for that is that is it partly because Thomas was able to articulate I think it has to do with the destruction of Catholic culture right in the in the in the modern era and it didn't get repaired right and so now we're still in this kind of warfare so how come that destruction in modern culture didn't affect the Dominicans as much as the franciscans because with I think with attorney potris you have the renewal of the neoscholastic tradition comes up again but if he had of but what is there to point to in The Franciscan tradition that all Catholic philosophers could have turned to I mean I I my understanding is that scotus is very difficult to read he's not as clear and precise and excellent yeah and his writing and teaching is Thomas is like is there is there someone comparable in the France yeah no I think I think there is and um you're right that the Traditions are are not parallel in this regard right because the Dominicans made Thomas their one teacher or doctor which was a big debate in the Dominican order in the 1300s interesting and some of them didn't want to make him the one doctor they wanted the plurality of doctors and the franciscans didn't have a comparable debate but as soon as scotus lived his life and did his thing right he was sort of understood as with Bonaventure right as kind of the the team right and then there were other kind of um other Franciscan theologians and philosopher kind of got glommed around it but there isn't a single right thing that you can point to easily but if we would if we hadn't lost our culture there's all kinds of summas written by like scotus's um disciple right Antonius Andreas like he wrote a summa it's very clear right but it's in Latin right unless you go to Peter Simpson's website you can find it in English right but there's lots of these things are there's manuals that are Franciscan manuals just like there were to Mystic manuals yeah but we lost a lot a lot of that is in Latin but nowadays if you go I would say a good start would be if you take bonaventure's brevaloquium which is kind of like his [Music] like a brief treatment right it's a brief treatment of all of theology but it's one volume it's like that yeah right and so that has it's it's not in disputed question form so it doesn't have here's all the objections right here's my long response and here's all the responsive objections it's sort of like just here's my answer my answer on the question so here's the question here's the answer here's the question here's the answer is it any good yeah it's really good it's really good um and but it's not going to give you the kind of dialectical thing you want there yes yes right it's interesting that you point that out that there are multiple teachers within the Franciscan tradition but you know for all intents and purposes one in the Dominican tradition because uh it's you know people usually recognize that you can't get to Thomas in the same room without them disagreeing about what Thomas said and I wonder if that is a result of limiting it to all one person and you've got all these different varied interpretations of him whereas in The Franciscan tradition yeah you get you get a similar uh you do you get a spread because being in the school put it this way The Franciscan school and the Thomas School it's there's certain traits and qualities that are that are required to be in the school you might say so certain teachings you'd affirm to are certain core ideas right but then what makes let's say what makes a um Bernard Lonergan a transcendental Thomas what makes him in the same room as say you know um uh a neoscholastic Thomas right of garagu LaGrange or something why are they in the same room like why are they both Thomas what does that mean right so I think a minimal minimal definition of being a Thomas would be when you get to questions of Theology and to a degree philosophy right your main conversation partner is Thomas Aquinas and so you go to him first for the answers right and then you go to him to learn how to talk about the answers and to learn about the issue so it's like he's your teacher so he's your man well me being in The Franciscan School sort of like Bonaventure is my man is goddess is my man like that's my first inclinations to go there right and see what they say because when I became a Catholic again I'm not an expert in medieval philosophy or these guys but when I became a Catholic I thought you know there's this these different schools and because of my friendship with Jared um I I had a an earful all the time of The Franciscan stuff which was really interesting I realized I already believe a lot of Franciscan stuff so my understanding of Free Will right was already Franciscan my understanding of the Incarnation of Christ was already Franciscan right my understanding of uh the the creation was already Franciscan so I was like then I thought I'm just gonna be in this school like I'm gonna make a commitment yeah to make this my school and that's why that's what I feel you feel most at home with yes I feel emotionally if you had to choose Drinking Buddies to have a deep conversation with it would be the franciscans sure or I'd throw it Aquinas too for a drinking putty absolutely pints with Aquinas any day yeah that's good yeah yeah now bourbon with Bonaventure uh often uh scotus gets painted with the same brush as uh with the broad brush and yeah they threw out Occam and they think Aquaman skodas are both in the same BAD Camp so why is Occam problematic but scotus isn't that's a really good point and and um there was a really great article written by let's see I think it was um I forgot the name it'll come to me but it's about this these narratives about scotus that are kind of false it's it's called the misprisoning of scotus something like that's in the title of this yeah it's an interesting title um but I think that scotus and Occam need to be seen as as very very different for one scotus is an like a confirmed doctor in The Franciscan order like so they see him as a doctor father right and rightly so and there's been absolutely zero propositions of scotus ever condemned right um he's a completely reliable theological Source um and so it's not the same with Occam right and then they're metaphysics so again I'm a philosopher so I see more that side their metaphysics is very different so um Occam he was the whole first part of his career was all about this metaphysical reductionistic program right so get rid of all the extra entities right that you don't need too many too much multiplication of entities and simplify everything and so so that's where you get sort of him being against scotus he's actually scotus's enemy on this on the point of realism right so sometimes you have the realism versus nominalism to be right um and the way that's put us sometimes people say well that's the big problem with Occam and I think they're right in a certain understanding of that term but if you look into the actual debate about nominalism it's a very complicated debate and many modern philosophers even count Aquinas as a kind of modernist moderate moderate nominalist and so it's like okay it's not I don't think that's the core issue right I think the core issues go back to the idea of divine ideas right so Aquinas Bonaventure scotus the all affirm with Divine ideas god um logically prior to Creation has ideas so his creation is completely rational and ordered right um Occam completely denied Divine ideas he just said the created things are the Divine ideas so there isn't a Divine idea prior to Creation it's pure will so how do you understand creation as rational that seems difficult for me to imagine so now you have this is the problem right this to me is a more fundamental problem than the nominalism of of Occam right is that he's not a realist with respect to Divine ideas or common Natures what where are those how do so when I talk about things how do I get the kind of rationality the strong rational The Bonaventure Aquinas and scotus get so is it fair to say that I'll come then is a strict normalist yes yeah for those at home what is that yes so so he denies he denies the um the common nature right right and the universal that you get from the common nature so so the common nature is is the root for Aquinas and for Bonaventure and for scotus of the universal that we abstract so if I say what what is dogness yes you would answer that question by pointing to individual uh instantiations of dog yeah for Occam it's like there is no common nature between all the dogs right there's like it's just individuals yeah there's individual dogs and we have a concept that we ties them all together in a certain way yes which is the case I mean that is how that even on that's true we need a concept so the question is is the concept A universal right so if I say that concept is a universal right then I need some sort of I say well what makes it Universal the fact that it made it a concept and that's awesome yeah yeah or the fact that there's something out there that they share in common that are really in common yes so that's according what does that do for the Incarnation if for us to be redeemed Christ had to take on human nature if human nature doesn't exist yeah or am I wrong in thinking that Arkham would say that I'm not sure what he said about that particular point but we could we could draw out the implications in this way and it seems like I mean I don't I don't know how to understand things without universals and common Natures that to me destroys philosophy in a certain way he must have thought it did something good for god well I I know there is an article by Peter geech that writes he writes about Occam's theology right and that's kind of the results of this nominalism are God Is So Transcendent for Occam and so mysterious for Occam right that he's Beyond logic and geech was this professor of logic and his whole career as a logician so I'm taking his word for this right is that that's the crazy thing about Occam you get you get God as this completely unknowable thing or this pure will that creates without a prior ideas right that to me sounds like a kind of extreme form of of an Islamic God yeah right it's just pure will and then when you get to Occam's volunteerism as it's called to me that is that is really a stinky part of him sum that up real quick yeah so so he he's an extreme voluntary so he he says explicitly God could have commanded that his creatures to hate him and that's when that'd be a passage to do that yes and then we'd have to do that whereas um Bonaventure Aquinas and scotus all say that's impossible God can't come it's impossible logically for God to command you to hate him right um and so they're all not these not an extreme fall interest in that sense now they have interesting differences Aquinas and scotus on the point of the Ten Commandments and how to understand the different levels of the Ten Commandments but awkam to me is planets away on these points on his extreme volunteerism right totally not at all like the opposite of scotus on this point right his extreme nominalism scotus is an ultra realist is what he's called even more realist you might say than Aquinas was right on the common nature and the universal right and um scotus believes in Divine ideas and Occam doesn't so to me that's awesome this metaphysically reductionistic program right to simplify everything to me was destructive of of the of the traditional way of doing metaphysics in in this Catholic tradition so and you began by saying that Arkham wanted to cut everything away that seemed Superfluous or yeah and of course that's why I want to bring the dogs people usually heard of that and is that what's interesting is that was invented by scotus right and so the the doctrine isn't that you should cut out entities as much as possible that's not Occam's race or scotus's racer right the the idea is you you do not multiply entities Beyond necessity yes so what makes an entity necessary is your um what you need to explain something that's a good that needs explanation yeah so you might say the creation we want that to be rational the result of a perfectly rational and ordered will we understand will to be ordered by intellect right and so the intellect is prior to the will logically so then God wouldn't have to have Divine ideas prior to his willing of creation for it to be rational seems like then I need Divine ideas right so Occam for some reason thought we didn't need that and I haven't read him so I couldn't tell you chapter and verse what he says but I know for sure he denied Divine ideas so I thought well no we do need that and then he just bites the bullet right that God's Divine ideas just are the created things there is no distinction between those and so he in other words scotus would say he didn't use the racer right right he cut away an entity that was needed to explain it is going back and forth with Arkham no no he's he's later Occam's later how much how long ago how much longer Next Generation yeah half a generation actually all come writing in response to scotus then yes so he came in and was writing oftentimes his enemy as scotus especially on that issue of realism where scotus's enemy was Henry of not enemy his interlocutor it was a friend of his actually Henry of Ghent yeah right and so his main interlocutory was not Aquinas he did write about Aquinas sometimes yeah but he was already like removed from from aquinas's time right um so he did mention Aquinas and that wasn't important position obviously but his main person he was arguing with in his career was this guy Henry of gen who was a secular and uh have you ever been to Oxford uh I have because Scott is taught there allegedly yeah is that right yeah did you get to see where he toured you know when I was there right I didn't that wasn't on my radar screen um I did so I was around gray Friars the the actual place which sadly is no longer a religious House of Oxford University um which is sad super sad to me makes me almost cry no um but uh but anyway I I'm in contact with some of the gray friars and they recently went back to walzingham for the first time in 400 years and they're studying at the black Friars because they don't have a Franciscan school but I mean black fires are awesome at Oxford I've I've met some of them and and been there and something some of my favorite Thomas okay I think a nice introduction to scotus that helps people appreciate him is the idea of the Primacy of Christ absolutely that I think that first we should say because this is often a Dominican Franciscan debate yes but it seems that Albert the Great from the book you gave me is is thinks it's more possible yes or more plausible yes though he doesn't weigh in on it Thomas seems to say no but yes it's not a it's possible it's possible it's possible so what the weight of Revelation doesn't doesn't but the idea I find beautiful I don't know what I mean by that except that when I hear it it's pleasing yes and that's one of the ideas I I had before I knew that scotus taught that I thought that makes sense right let's break it down for people because it's it's actually it's very easy to grasp but you've got to enter inside so I'm only I can only give you a surfacy understanding of it but I think myself is accurate at that level all right right um is so the question is the Incarnation was was God's purpose in in incarnating right was that posterior to sin prior to sin or prior to sin what what is the reasoning right the motive the reason for the Incarnation right and so what scotus says is given that we have the Incarnation as a as a historical Dogma we can now think about it and we can sort of work we can sort of backfill the rationality right so we're not making a pure Opry or I sort of argument about Concepts it's like we have the Incarnation we have the hypostatic union we know what that is let's work back now to figure out what God's motives were as it were and so he understands God according to franciscans as as goodness and love itself right I mean of course Aquinas believes that but it has a certain priority of place in The Franciscan order hence the title of this book keratos and Primo right first the the love is the first idea to think about and so if God is a perfect lover right then he wants to if he's going to create it all right he's going to create a creation that's the closest possible to himself because that's what a lover wants to be United as much as possible Right to his beloved right and so the idea is that's what the Incarnation is the hypostatic union is the closest possible Union of creature right in Creator there is no more possible closer Union than that and so that Union is out of the God is a perfect lover right so his so his motivation in creation is first the Incarnation so the Incarnation is the reason for creation at all and everything else right is sort of about that sort of so Christ is a metaphysical mediator right even if Adam Adam hadn't sinned So Adam is created in the garden right he's not perfect right he's got a path to follow even if he didn't sin and so he would if even if he didn't sin would be United to Christ and through that mediation right attain to the beatific Vision right attained to a perfect participation in God's life itself through Christ so Christ is sort of um predestined right to be incarnate apart from sin you're right and of course now that we did Sin right he still serves as a meteor but now he's not just sort of um raising us to a higher level into the likeness of God right hierarchorizing our soul into God right but now he's first like reaching down even lower and redeeming us because we fell down into the dirt and sin so just [ __ ] sum it up in a sentence in case people are struggling here are we saying that the Franciscan school would say Christ would have become incarnate regardless of sin the temistic school generally says that Christ became accountant because of sin and if there were no sin he wouldn't have become incarnate yeah so so that it's an occasion for it they wouldn't want to say that was the like ah main reason right but that is the yeah they would I think Thomas would say maybe you're right yeah well but they but you're right about that they generally hold that because there are Thomas that do hold the absolute Primacy it's not you don't have to reject it yeah yeah but it is distinctive of The Franciscan school and let me say one more thing about scotus that I find to be helpful is scotus I think a lot of people come to scotus um and forget that he is a Franciscan Friar right he is a devout man right he is a theologian right he's a theologian in The Franciscan tradition and so he has The Franciscan understanding that he got through Bonaventure right of the relationship of faith and reason and so obviously he has the he's a Scholastic so he thinks that reason has this exalted role but reason's exalted role is right to um is the faith that seeking the understanding uses reason so first we have faith right and we try to seek an understanding of right what we believe through reason so he has that view of reason is connected intimately to Faith just like any Scholastic right but seeing him first as a theologian and Friar and a devout person is the right way to see scotus rather than the disrupter of the Tom Mystic um whatever I mean yeah I don't think Thomas would want to see us say that about scotus right that he's the disrupter of this project right I mean Thomas knew his limit right I mean the famous story about the end of his life right he had that ecstatic Vision I mean Saint Francis had an ecstatic vision and Thomas says compared to what I just experienced everything I wrote which by the way is super amazing but it is like straw compared to what I just experienced whereas in the Journey of the mind to God Bonaventure his whole thing is based on the fact that Saint Francis had an ecstatic Vision right and that's what we're supposed to do our the Journey of the mind to God is the journey right to be able to be like Saint Francis to be able to be a saint right and we're supposed to do that Journey on Earth as much as possible and so so my point is is that Thomas knew his limits right and that scotus was first of all a Franciscan Friar right into understanding and that way should make a sympathetic and interested to hear his voice and of course he's famous for the defense of the Immaculate Conception which is which is connected to that idea of the absolute Primacy right so God is this metaphysical mediator so he would again he would save right or he was one thing you won't get yes if you don't have the Incarnation is the mother of God absolutely and one thing that you will get if you have an Incarnation is a mother of God yeah so it sounds like we're saying if there weren't if there was no sin and Christ didn't then then cry if it's true to say no sin no Christ uh it's also true to say no sin no mother of God so there's more you miss out on yes um yeah so yeah here's what Aquinas says man I'd love you to comment on it this comes from the tershipas question one article three I'm just going to read the said Contra and respondio Augustine says expounding what is set down in Luke 19 10 for the son of man is come to seek and save that which is lost therefore if man had not sinned the son of man would not have come and on First Timothy 1 15 Christ Jesus came to the world to save Sinners a gloss says there was no cause of Christ coming into the world except no cause except to save Sinners take away diseases take away wounds and there is no need of medicine uh oh fair enough yeah okay and then he is just part of his respondio he says there are different opinions about this question for some say that even if man had not sinned the son of man would have become incarnate others assert the contrary and seemingly our Ascent ought rather to be given to this opinion the second one yeah yeah I can read more but no that sounds amazing so that's that's a line that you supported here yeah but it sounds like this is the primary reason yeah where it seems like scotus is not is definitely saying contrary to that right that if there was no sin there would have been an Incarnation and we know that based on our understanding of the Incarnation the in other words the perfect union the hypostatic Union right is the closest Union of a creature and a Creator that's possible right and so that would be first will by a perfect lover and so that would require right A Mother of God and so Mary was predestined as well so you have the the predestination of Mary right and then by that scotus is able to argue for the Immaculate Conception in a way that wasn't that was new right and so we basically argued that again the same sort of reasoning as God would be the most perfect Redeemer so the most perfect Redeemer the most perfect savior would save in all the kinds of ways in which somebody could be saved I see and so being saved as Mary preservatively from original sin so she was saved preservatively from originals and she would have contracted it if there wasn't this act of the Savior right to preserve her from original sin so that's that's a different way than all of us are saved we're not saved that way right and so the perfect Redeemer he says would redeem in all the ways he could redeem so he did I see and so that's that's why that's great I didn't realize that it was his understanding of the Primacy of Christ that helped him articulate the Immaculate Conception it's a again from that idea of God is love yeah right God is love and God is the perfect lover and so his his created order right is going to be a perfect order for love and of love and I think that is a key to understanding creation for Bonaventure and scotus and when I say these things I don't I it would be wrong to hear me as saying and Thomas doesn't believe this of course because sometimes they agree but there's a matter of emphasis that's different yes right and I find the emphasis to be placed in the right way with the franciscans that's how I feel and when when go go back to the issue of divine Simplicity for example like scotus has a very different view of divine Simplicity than Aquinas so scotus has I call it the subtle view because he's a subtle doctor right so he does he does not eliminate all conceivable kinds of complexity in God he eliminates the kind that would threaten the doctrine of Simplicity and so he allows a kind of Multiplicity you might say or complexity in God but it's not the kind that that is possible for there to be a metaphysical separation in God so they're not parts that are separable it's like triangularity and trilaterality so being three-sided and being three angled those are not the same but those are metaphysically inseparable you can't be a triangle without having both of those you know and so those are aspects of a reality that are metaphysically inseparable even God cannot separate those tell me what you think about this analogy improve it if it's terrible yeah I was trying to think how um he ever tried to see something far off in the distance and someone's trying to tell you where it is and you can't quite see it and maybe somebody says will you see that thing over there look at the top of that now go straight to the right over there and you might be like I I don't I don't see it someone might have a different way of seeing that same thing like that's your starting point and then it gets you to the same thing and and sometimes one person's explanation helps you see that one thing brilliant analogy I completely agree with that and I wonder sometimes that's what the franciscans alike it's like we're both getting to the same thing and sometimes you just feel more at home with the explanation of getting there completely because I'll come up with in debates like this about Simplicity right and I'll say like I just don't I can't understand what Aquinas is saying I just don't understand it right and they'll try to explain it and I'll I just don't get it yes it doesn't it doesn't seem true or it even seems maybe not even that it doesn't seem coherent sometimes when I hear it explained right but then I think well I'm finite like how could how can I say that this man who I love St Thomas right had an incoherent thought yeah I don't want to absolutely say he was incoherent but I want to say my understanding of it it seems like that to me yeah and because I have another explanation available which is completely approvated by the church and gets me to this gets me to the same thing yes yeah right I need to affirm that God is simple then I can do it this way yeah and to me it seems like why wouldn't I help myself to that um and so it's the same with the Trinity like I I've never been able to understand and and that Thomas is you of the Trinity as the the persons of the Trinity are subsistent relations right so what that means is that the relation is prior to the things that are related so when I think in order logically so what prior yes what does that even mean so normally the way we understand relations as a sort of metaphysical idea right even if we don't think of it as metaphysics if we haven't like done it explicit like that but we think you can't there's no such thing as Brotherhood if there aren't two brothers right I mean for there to be Brotherhood here for there to be real Brotherhood a real relation here there has to be the the relata as we say for there to be the relation so the relata are prior logically to the relation but what Aquinas is saying in the Trinity is the opposite right and so I understand it's the Trinity so at some point we're going to help ourselves the tools that go beyond our thinking but that's a tool I don't understand using I don't I don't get that and so when I look at Bonaventure and and um scotus on the Trinity it makes more sense to me can you lay that out a little bit so so the typical way that the trinitarian discussion goes is like well you can you know start with a be more western or you can be more Eastern that's sort of the typical way I mean that's over simple but it's good to start there is that the Western View was like Augustine you start with God as one rise radically one he's radically simple right um and so you just go from there and try to understand how that's consistent with three so you start with one and try to get to three right and the Eastern as you might say kind of start with three and try to make sure that they're they stay one right and so you what you're trying to do in trinitarian theology is avoid the skillet and charybdis right of try theism okay right um and and and modalism I see so you want to say yes so you want to say what Bonaventure says this is a nice formula I think God is one because he's three and God is three because he's one okay so you so you want to be able to understand that mysterious line okay and so that I take to be the goal of trinitarian theology is to understand that why is God one because he's free at three yeah later yeah um so so the idea is that um so again I this is I'm not a theologian right this is off the top of my head so God God is one um obviously because I just say only academics qualify all of the statements they're about to make the rest of us who know nothing about anything are the only ones who say things with tremendous infallibility and uh so I appreciate that you know that there's experts out there that are that that would be happy to say things in the comments and correct me unless they should if they they can appreciate your humility um yeah but uh so okay so I think it starts with let's let's start with the idea of um of God's person so God is personal the one being of God is personal which means what which means he has an intellect and a will let's say okay or a memory intellect and will so he has similar things that we have so that's Augustine's analogy is yeah right the the psychological analogy so we have a memory or Consciousness The Power Of Consciousness that's my gloss on what he meant by memory right it's not just a repository of past facts or something it's The Power Of Consciousness the power of thinking and the power of acting right or loving and so those powers are all three aspects of the human soul and so that's the image of God according to Augustine I see so you yeah so so to to maybe muddy the waters but to help me understand the analogy you're three because you're one like you're one that holds your threeness together exactly because I'm one soul and that soul is three powers of inseparable metaphysically Inseparable so back to scotus using one of his famous tools remember I mentioned triangularity and trilaterality yeah so he has a special term for the distinction between the trilaterality and the triangularity because they're metaphysically separate metaphysically Inseparable meaning God can't even separate those two and they'd be real right but they aren't the same thing yes they're not identical to me to the one another so he calls that a formal distinction scotus so those are distinct formalities or rozios so aspects of a reality that are distinct in the reality and my mind picks up on that without the thing separating without the thing being able to be separated and so Bonaventure has the exact same term when he does his disputed questions on the mystery of the Trinity he calls it a distinction of reason on the part of the thing so obviously you know from upside down for me I'm slower than you are say it again so a distinction of reason on the part of the thing okay so the thing in this case our example is the triangle yeah and the distinction of reason is we know that yes the rozio of triangularity is not the same idea or rotcy or concept as as trilaterality and so and so the distinction is rooted in the thing itself in the Triangle it's not that my mind made it up like um the morning star and the evening star that's a distinction of Reason okay not on the part of the thing it's on the part of us right because I talk about Venus in the morning or Venus in the evening it's Venus this is one thing radically one identity but that's a distinction of Reason only in our minds not on the part of the thing yes right and then there's then there's of course the distinction say between this mug and the coffee in it yes those are metaphysically separable yes unfortunately um yeah so so that is it Distinction on the part of the thing what what is substance and accidents then is that a formal decision distinction or yeah that's a good we don't have to go down there until you want to finish the Trinity but yeah let's finish the train maybe we can get back to that so um finish the Trinity let's get that done so you ask how how is he free because he's one that was the question right yep so um so God is a personality put it that way I don't know how many right now but he we already know he's a personality right because he has right the image right of memory intellect and will I already know that that's his Oneness he's one personal how would you know that right unless he's revealed himself is that well you know well we do know it because you reveal them and now we're working back to explain this reasons for the Trinity yeah it's not natural theology here yeah so I think side point on Bonaventure when you read Bonaventure like in the Journey of the mind to God right there's trinities everywhere and of course he connects them to the Trinity but he's not telling us that if we hadn't known the Trinity you could have just worked your way up naturally to get the doctrine of the Trinity right but he's saying there is traces as he puts it or vestiges of the Trinity and everything right um so you can see in every every creature right there's there's um Power wisdom and goodness right in the in the creature or the there's causes right to its being that are related to power wisdom and goodness which you can already hear those terms already relate in a special way to the persons of the Trinity power father wisdom son goodness Holy Spirit right so he makes that connection directly but he says that connection was there in reality before I made it because I know the Trinity right and so the Trinity is in everything so um so I think it's wrong to read Bonaventure as arguing sort of from natural theology to the Trinity although it might seem like that if you if you encounter him I think it was Richardson Victor who perhaps tried that yes and Victor I think it's Richard yeah and I think it was the love lover yeah beloved thing I couldn't comment on what what he was trying to do maybe he did that again I'm not an academic so he absolutely and fallibly did I would guess just from my my knowing that the victorine school Hue of Saint Victor Richardson were super important to the franciscans and Bonaventure right okay so it might be more nuanced yeah so I so I'm I it could be correct right um and even if you're correct what Bonaventure is doing isn't that yeah but I'm thinking maybe he was doing what a lot of Scholastics were doing at that time which is kind of like Anselm where you're like we already have the Revelation and we're sort of like going back to find the reasons that are already in it yes and then working up so looks like an a priori argument it's not but it's not that's why I would guess that's important to know that Bonaventure doesn't do that yes it's a mystery Richard St Victor is about to come into the story cool by the way um here we go Richard so why is he one because why is he three because he's one well the Oneness of him includes personality so how does that get you three personalities though right and so what that raises the question of what is a person and so boethius had a famous definition right right a rational substance right of an intellectual nature right so Richard of Saint Victor slightly changed that right to a rational exist so uh an indiv sorry an individual substance of a rational nature that's boethius individual substance of a rational nature okay Richard of Saint Victor changed it to an individual existence of a rational nature so now the term is not substance but existence right so we can maybe see like active existence okay um so now if we understand the act of existence right as the termination this is going to be conflict as the termination of um of a being right of a being being right of being acting right according to its nature right then we have God's a personality so we have the father right and this is exactly what Augustine tries to do right the father is the unbegotten and so he as you might say God with the power to think about God or the power to love God is just that power that's already there so there's no begotten he didn't come from anything you might say there's no divine causality right um so he's the personality of God ready to think about the personality of God from all eternity and the son is the the God himself the personality of God thinking of God so he terminates in a different place right does that make sense yes it does okay so he's a different person because the term of his act of being right is different and the same with the spirit the spirit is God accepting God's God's self or accepting his own identity loving himself right for all eternity and that's a different term knowing and loving yes so you have you have um the natural mode or the intellectual mode of God's being right and that terminates in a different place right than his voluntary mode of being right but we already know he has those modes of being because he's a he's a personality and we knew that before we started Counting how many acts of existence there are does that make sense kind of yes okay yes it does so so what you get with the bonaventurian view is more emphasis on the on the individuality of the persons okay as terms right rather than as subsistent relations right um now of course none of those would be unless the other ones were so that's the question the next question how is he one because he's three okay so that was the next question yeah and so so he's three he's three of these particular kinds right so he's memory Divine Consciousness Power Of Consciousness Divine Act of of speaking the word right or thinking actively and then love and so those three acts of existence right are only United because again their personality in general you can't have intellect without something to think about so you can't think about anything unless you already have the Power Of Consciousness it's already logically required and prior to the act of intellecting if I can use that verb right and the act of willing requires logically part of it the act of intellecting and so there's these logical relations and logical order to these account one what I don't know yeah exactly and so the same with God the persons the persons can't be unless there were the other persons so they're logically interrelated in that order and so there have to be only one God's self for there to be three persons and once there's three persons there has to be one God self that they are excellent and so that's kind of a surfacy understanding of that's the trendy according to Bonaventure yeah and again if someone's listening to this thinking well I'm not convinced by that argument it's important to realize it's not really an object it's not an argument it's something that's been revealed which we hold by faith and then we seek to understand yes and so I think one cool thing about Bonaventure is when he does the trinitarian theology as these um special predicates or words that are true of God that he calls Appropriations so I mentioned one earlier when I said every every created thing requires power wisdom and goodness so you kind of naturally apply those words to the persons in this like power more belongs to the father it's more appropriate to the father than it's appropriate to the son wisdom's more appropriate to the son than to the father right and love or goodness is more appropriate to the spirit than to the father or the son of course they're all all those things but there's a more appropriate too that's the idea of appropriation what he calls an appropriation and so that is only possible if you have these acts of existence that are the persons that are more independent you might say than saying it's a subsistent relation which I don't again with all those qualifications I said about that I I don't know how to make sense of that but I do know how to make sense of the one I just described and so that's why that's that's where I'm coming from it yeah can I tell you how I talk about the children to my kids this is going to be the opposite of the spectrum of complex this is as simple as it gets and you tell me if it's heretic okay so what I'll say and and if you think you see the non-theologian will tell you if this is radical I say to let's say I'm talking to Peter and I'll say if I made a statue of you yeah that would be a being who is zero persons okay okay you are a being who is one person and God is a being who is three persons that is so simple and not terribly helpful but perhaps more helpful than if we start using Shamrocks and uh analogies like ice and gas and water that lead to modalism yeah totally well how do you if your daughter was to ask you to explain the Trinity what would you say I mean I would use chesterton's line from Everlasting men to begin with which is the Trinity is just the logic of love right and of course that sounds like Richard St Victor and it is but he wasn't the only person that had the idea right that's that's Augustine right go into yourself a notice right that there's a self there for you to love right there's a selfie to think about so that you can love and then so act of loving him so like you love yourself so that's how he gets to the Trinity here right then he reflects up there so so Chesterton said the Trinity is the logic of of love love requires you could say as an idea now we wouldn't have been able to say that statement unless we had already known that God was a trinity like why doesn't it why isn't it like a thousand people then or an infinite number of persons that love each other isn't that more love right and so you need some sort of explanation why why three and only three Revelation yeah yeah so we need we need some help there so just to draw this point out that we've kind of been skirting around I really like this idea and it's often brought up in the Theology of the Body and things like that but you have uh you know God from all eternity his love the sun the sun from all eternity has received that love and given it back to the father and this love is whatever ever you say yes so complete perfect that it is another person the termination we've been made in the image and likeness of God and when a husband gives himself to his bride the bride receives that gift and that receptivity isn't passive it's an active receptivity by which she actually gives back to right the husband this love is so profound that it always overflows and sometimes nine months later you need to give it a name I love I love that I mean that's helpful totally again it's not the argument for the Trinity it's just a way to no it's to me it's one of those like Monument tracks about like the traces the vestiges the images the sort of reflections of the trinitarian love now one thing that Bonaventure does and I've only read it once I'd like to read it again I'd like to encourage everybody to pick up a copy of Journey of the mind to God because it's probably a hundred Pages yeah it's not long but it's very very dense it's very dense go slow and just take what you can't can yeah right and and enjoy what you can because there's some thoughts in there that have the highest levels of philosophers break your brain yes I mean like Tim noon at CUA right and and Hauser wrote this article for the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy which is free online it's an amazing philosophy resource I recommend it to everybody right when you want to look up something in philosophy this is a great resource so if you look up Bonaventure right they have an entry on Bonaventure and when they talk about his um uh ontological argument so to speak for God's existence I mean they're doing philosophy at the highest level that philosophy has done today right on this very short little treatment of Bonaventure in the Journey of the mind of god wow so it's very packed and he's he is the he's like a poet and every single word mattered and every single sentence was perfectly chosen but he's he's you're missing the details of the dialectic which is as somebody used to reading Aquinas and doing reasons back and forth you're not getting that you have to go to a sentence commentary for that because like every student he read a a commentary on Peter Lombard's sentences and it's all the disputed question format just just like the Suma right so the Suma is kind of like an evolution of that it's just highly ordered and condensed and and cleaner that's what a summa is yeah so here's my understanding of something he says and I'd love you to correct me or just if not correct me expand upon it because I found this idea fascinating the idea is that sin has bent man over on himself so he's kind of like a [ __ ] as it were who's unable to see himself rightly nature rightly uh other people perhaps and that what's needed is the word of God to untwist him so that he can see reality rightly right and that and I like that is that basically right I want to expand on a second but I wanted to say something else I really like that idea you know because in the Book of Romans and I think it's in wisdom and elsewhere it makes the claim that like God's existence is Manifest and that it's our sinfulness that prevents us from seeing what really couldn't be clearer right um and uh so I like that and then I thought of an analogy because I used to do a lot of work with people who were immersed in pornography and uh you might say that pornography bends man over on himself in a way so that he's unable to see the goodness of his wife's body completely like she is good she is beautiful and blind she could be as beautiful as you want but pornography will make you blind to that beauty and what you need is something to untwist you so that you can see reality all right yes but please expand upon that I don't know because that's a beautiful idea and I think that's the right way to see it and uh and I don't know if Thomas would deny that idea but I think it has a special emphasis again in The Franciscan school because the Franciscan school back to the major differences is there's an emphasis put on Love And so there's an emphasis Put on Will right it's not Will To Power it's not Occam right it's not Nietzsche it's not anything it's will means love right the Desiring part right that that is supposed to love God for God's sake that's the emphasis for The Franciscan schools on that part of man right and so for example philosophy itself reason itself there is a method that's philosophy right it has an end right of course that end is the love of divine wisdom that's what the word philosophy means right philosopher right and so loving Divine wisdom that's the end but what Bonaventure says is that can never get to the end philosophy will never get to its own end without the faith right so we need Faith to strengthen right and to motivate and to keep on track for Philosophy for reason to even do its job and so so what he says in the beginning of the the Journey of the mind to God and I I wish I had it right here with all my my friends over here in my books I should have brought that one too is that um he talks about it's only the man of desires that can make this journey the first thing you do is get on your knees right you pray that you can become holy you pray that God removes your ignorance you pray that God removes your concupiscent desires and that's how you start the Journey of the mind of god that's literally the prologue you can't do any of this stuff appropriately because your mind is broken it's bent right now we can see even when we correct ourselves by holy desire we still only see through a glass Darkly we still only see in the mirror which is the created order it's like a mirror you look down at it you look down and it reflects on God if you if you know it's a mirror then you can see it's reflecting God but it's it's dim right it's obscure because of our sin even if we're living holy and so that is absolutely where we where we have to start and there's an emphasis put on that and I I'm I'm perhaps looking like I'm glazing over because I'm having this memory of Once Upon a Time I used to live in the Outback in Australia and I watched this particular show one evening this movie where a man in a loving marriage with a beautiful family destroyed it all by his greed I think he was somehow doing something nefarious uh with money and uh he destroyed this beautiful thing that he had and it just affected me so profoundly that the next day at work I was an analytical lab technician in a copper mine really I was yeah and I was on my own and I fell on my knees in my gigantic suit and my mask you know and I just I was crying and my father like I want to be saved and I was weeping and I'm like just break me burn me like make my life a living hell if I can have a living Heaven once it's done um and I wonder if that is kind of what the Lord sometimes uses to wake us up totally this just uh the pain yes I was just reading um there's a really great book I found recently it's by a guy named Jason Baxter it's called um the medieval mind of C.S Lewis and it's it's a popular level book it's not deep and complicated in like technical is what I mean it is very deep um but he talks to the subtitle something like how great books made a great mind it talks about C.S Lewis's all of his favorite books right that really influence him in as Owen Barfield talked about the third Lewis that nobody knows right somebody knows like the fiction writer right and everybody knows the Christian apologist but then there's like the medievalist like I mean he was at the top of his game in that in that sphere right as a scholar and so this book is about that but when he talks about Louis Lewis's understanding of his own conversion right that um for Lewis it was all about what you just said it's like giving up yourself like we want to have this last possessive bit of ourself that's just it's ourself it's my it's myself right and we want that for ourselves we don't want to just want God for his own sake we want to want him for my sake right and that to me is again that brings me back to the metaphysics of The Franciscan which makes sense of that to me because scotus has inside the will right there is a distinction of affections right and he gets this from Anselm and Anselm uses this distinction to explain the fall of the devil which is an amazing mystery to unders to try to understand so the distinction is that inside the will there's one part of the will you might say that that desires to love God for God's sake right and then there's another part of the will that try that loves the will for its for its own sake right so for its own Perfection so that part would be what we call like aristotelianism or something you're like there's all the Perfections of my human nature and I have a proper love of that but for scotus right there's a higher part of the will and that's loving God for God's sake or loving Justice for the sake of Justice love and so to me what when he talks about Freedom right so we have this amazing Catholic view of freedom from from jp2s encyclicals and before right in the freedom and truth right have to go together right and so this is so scotus's analysis is that that affection of the will the higher one he calls it the affection for Justice right loving God for God's sake loving the best good the most right yeah and so that has to keep and in check and moderate this desire for your own self which has a good part to it we should want to perfect our own wow qualities and yourself but we can't have a possession of that apart from this other one so the only way we get ourselves as scripture says is by giving up ourselves and that was the hardest thing for Lewis right and he had all these amazing experiences which he talks about where he was moved to these these these these experiences like the one you just said where he was moved to like again God's saying to him give up yourself and he says not to and then he kept it until finally he did right and then he said he was like the famous line of he was the most reluctant convert in England yeah right but that's what he had to give up and he realized that that was what all of us have to do is that's so hard to give up he uses an analogy somewhere about Tin Soldiers becoming lifelike yeah and if that were the case that you could make Tin Soldiers life like that they would protest as they became less tinny feeling as if they were dying things right there that's it that's it that's the idea what does Bonaventure mean when he says that the word has to untwist us what is that um I don't know where he said that right yeah no but that is that is a kind of common view of sin like it bends us over and twists us yeah and so our faculties are misdirected so I think the the kind of strong calvinist view as I understand it is that the faculties aren't just twisted and bent but they're broken so they don't work anymore yeah right whereas the Catholic says they do work but they're twisted and bent yeah and so we we can love the good but we're messed up and if we don't get on track then we're ultimately gonna love the good for our own sake and that's what Satan did right yeah um and so he chooses a lesser good so I think untwisting right is first of all seeing the correct hierarchy of goods yeah right and then for Bonaventure once we're in that position that once you're untwisted then then the real path of sanctification you might say begins and he describes that as a a hierarchization is his word so when when when Grace is working in us and we're loving God and we're in a relationship that's active right then it's there's two kind of principles right there's you and there's God and God is sort of empowering you and motivating you but it's still you right you're still making free choices and so that process what occurs is a hierarchization where God takes your soul imagine like your Soul's like a cloth on this table and he grabs the middle of it he starts lifting it up closer to himself so you're like getting taller your soul is like getting taller and even describes it as going through all the hierarchies of angels right the nine-fold hierarchy until you get up to where you're like where God is and that's the end of the process of high organization your soul is made and God conformed right and so first we untwist right which is now we're looking up and now we're participating with God we're cooperating you might say with God we're letting God love us for our own sake and not us loving us for our own sake right and so that's how when we give up ourselves we receive ourselves um I want to talk about what we do when our faith in God feels like uh [ __ ] yeah so like uh I was having a fellow was sitting here the other day and he was talking about extraterrestrial life and a lovely fellow very intelligent wrote a great book on the topic and is seems to be very invested in the idea that there are indeed aliens that uh I don't want to speak for him but from what I got from it sounded like he was saying the US government certainly has covered things up in this multitude of evidence he's saying all this and I don't care at all yeah and it's not because I don't think he's wrong yeah it's that even if he's right I don't care yeah like I'm an upper failure just something I don't care and then I thought that's probably what it feels like for atheists as we try to tell them about God it's like this guy telling me about aliens I'm like I just I couldn't care less I this is it says a lot about you that you're interested in this like what's going on in your home life but like I don't care yeah and uh I was at Mass I think recently and I'm just like maybe this is just all crap it's the whole thing it's rubbish none of it's true and at some point in my life I decided that it was maybe because I had some emotional experience and then someone gave me an argument that I wasn't intelligent enough at the time to pick apart and so I latched on to that and that boosted my belief and now here I am have I not just talked myself into this elaborate fairy tale I mean there's a and I don't think this but I'm trying to put it I understand there's I've had those thoughts yeah there's a there's a coherence to say Star Wars congratulations doesn't make it true there you can make Christianity coherent even as we show you the blatant holes in your theory namely evil and God not making himself evident to those who really would like to believe but can't seem to be able to intellectually accept it and so you have to then come up with a narrative that makes your story more sophisticated more difficult and then you cover it up with all the philosophical jargon but it's but it's not true out of none of us none of it's true now I say that and then I am reminded of something Lewis said where he says now that I'm a Christian I do have moods where the whole thing seems very implausible but when I was an atheist I also had moods where that seemed implausible exactly so what am I to do I think I think that's a great quote that's my turn that's what I was going to say something that you if you're in that boat then you have to at some point make a choice right and to me the choice is whether to be what Kant calls right a mythologist right somebody who hates reason right from logos if you make a choice you have to make a choice so you're like I thought I reasoned all this out right but really what I did is told myself a self-congratulatory narrative yes right for different motives that were underneath my intellect at that time right and so you have uses to use Lewis's room you've vulverized yourself you've explained away what you believe by some other motives that are non-rational underneath your intellectual processes like the reason the only reason why you're a Catholic is because you're a white male and it like helps the patriarchy or whatever in your mind right that's vulvarizing you yes right so you can pulverize yourself is what you're just giving the example of and so then you have to make a decision well is just is that how reason always is right because this is always going to disappoint me because I can always do that I can always imagine a situation where I've talked myself into it my life of love with my wife why I moved to Steubenville how do I raise my children how you raise anything the most natural things you can you can you can attack reason and distrust it right and you can you can even get to the point this is what Kant says where you could even be vulverizing your destruction of the reasons you have so you got to make a choice you recognize is this a self-defeating game right and so you reject mythology right okay mythology the hatred of reason because it's like reason LED you astray now you've been living as a Catholic and you've wasted your time screw reason right F reason I'm gonna do what I feel now I'm going to do it like Nietzsche like just be whatever's innocently becoming in you that's his idea don't take all this reason don't take all this thought the cosmos has an end and there's an order in nature all that's crap that's been made up by like Socrates and Plato and Christianity let's do LSD and watch SpongeBob SquarePants anything you want to make yourself great you probably wouldn't have said that but um uh but anyways the point is that's a hatred of reason because reason doesn't get you greatness or something that you ultimately want that's deep inside of you that reason is impotent to help you with it just keeps screwing with you right so you can be a mythologist it's like a woman who flirts with you but it won't allow you to have her you begin to resent her yes exactly and so then you reject let's say that completely and so that's mythology he says that's the Temptation for all of us and I think that said this Con did yeah and this is a Temptation I think because we live in a very Multicultural pluralistic age right and um we have a situation that's very different than yes Thomas civilization yeah um uh we we live nowadays in a situation very different to the way that those guys live because then think about the different religions that we're competing with them it's like Judaism Islam maybe some Eastern stuff they heard but like we have this proliferation of knowledge of religions from all over the world that exploded by text and everything and Scholars started studying this in the 1800s intensely and they came up with this pseudo theory of comparative religion but the point is they got all this knowledge and now we're trying to work through it we live in a culture now where there isn't a dominant spiritual form to our culture right we still have the sort of fumes of Christianity in our culture because lots of individuals are Christians but the societal form is no longer supportive of a general spiritual vision and so when people encounter religious disagreements right immediately what that does is makes them doubt their own religion because they're like well if I was raised to Buddhist I'd be a Buddhist if I was raised the Mormon I'd be a Mormon if I would and they do this thing where they think the epistemology is all on par right sometimes philosophical the epistemic parody thesis so you think that the the plausibility of all the religions is basically the same so the only reason for you to be a Christian right is because you like it right or it makes you comfortable or to change because it would be more comfortable not be a Christian have this guilt complex on me or whatever so the only things that can motivate you are not issues of reason but issues of compatibility simpatica with your personality or whatever right and that's that's a Temptation in our era and so I think we need to go back to one of one of the bread and butters you know on on your show right is natural theology right there is evidence that we can look at right there is evidence about the nature of God who he is what he's like which help us in the in the examination of religions we don't have no foundations going into it so um so now back to your issue though about mythology and hatred so I think that's the situation where people grow up and they now no longer know how to deal with their most fundamental worldview commitments right and they think well reason led me astray I was trained by my catechist or my my Sunday school teacher in my case right and I was all wrong so like screw reason I'm just going to do what I feel now and what I feel now is I kind of want to be a Zen Catholic right now or whatever um I want you to keep speaking because I'm finding this very enjoyable so so I mean I think that we have to make a choice going back to that point between being a messologist being just admit that we hate reason well then just do whatever you want then couldn't be just that I hate I hate my reason maybe my reason led me the reason you're going to use right you've got no other options here right and so if you're a mythologist so and you make a decision to hate mythology was that reasonable or not so that's really the decision you're like screw it I don't care what's the reason just go and you just forget about it right you just suppress all that and then live your life right in pursuit of whatever you feel like isn't there a different version of this though where you're not hating reason or not you're more hating your access to reason so you're hating you know your ability to understand things so you know say you had one I don't know you thought you understood something but then later you changed your mind on that yeah because you're kind of trusting of someone making an argument or something like that that's different than kind of like you fully really understanding that argument and then somehow it's not true yeah because the only way for that happened is you didn't actually understand it in the first place right yeah maybe I could say in the end it comes the same thing because when you make that decision you can see like well this is what Kant says did you make a mistake in reason because you didn't conform to the norms and standards of reason and now you're going to try to conform to the norms and standards of reasons so it's trustworthy but your access to it was the problem then you're going to be committed to reason now you might that might not solve your problem immediately right but now you're committed maybe I need to look at the arguments again maybe I need to look in detail at the objectives and and entertain those better in others maybe I need to be more disciplined in my use of reason right and so it wasn't reason's fault that would be to reject mythology it's not reason's fault it's my access to reason and we are Prejudiced and we are biased and that is true that's why that's why there's something going for the thing you said in the beginning that sort of thought that you were sort of you know pretending right which is well maybe I was biased maybe maybe I did just I'm a Christian because I thought it was I had those same thoughts when I was in college at a Baptist College I tried to become an atheist yeah I thought you know maybe this is just what my mom told me and I love my mom and you know maybe she was wrong maybe she was duped right and I'm duped too and so and tell you to me I paired it all down to to me it seemed like the most logically basic thing was is there really a god who's personal right and what are the arguments for that I'd encountered apologetic arguments right and I thought they were pretty good but then I could skepticize them I could never refute them I could never overturn them but there's plenty of objections and other experts that are atheist agnostics even good people that are atheists and agnostics that you're like why don't they believe this is so it must just be my bias must be it's when you start thinking that right but then I mean I think that inquiry at that point you know it's multifaceted and multi-level so natural theology a misunderstanding of it would be it's just sort of these like pure abstract propositions put in deductive or inductive form that's sort of like maybe old school natural theology maybe in the Renaissance or something like that but now it's natural theology includes all the disparate facts of experience this per that personal encounter you had with God when you were in that suit you now down well that's something you have to deal with also the arguments from the five is what five ways you know also Anthony Kenny who was a intelligent um amazing philosopher like rejects is why like so these are all disparate facts you put together in natural theology is more like the explanation for all these facts like um like Sherlock Holmes the guy walks in his office right and he's like oh well he sees like Masonic pin his left hand's bigger than his right hand he's got certain dirt on a certain kind of boot and he like puts all these disparate facts together to say okay I know why this has got who this guy is where he wasn't and what he wants me for so he puts these facts together which are disparate that's not like an inductive or deductive case to get to his explanation but it's a it's a path of rationality so the reason I brought that up is because in my own case I saw all the like kind of clear propositional arguments laid out right in order and and then but then there were lots of things that could skepticize all over but something I couldn't get rid of was my own experience of God and I could I could skepticize it I could say well I'm ex I'm projecting God right because I was raised to think there's this God so I'm projecting it right sort of a Freudian thing or something right so vulvarize myself right but I could also say well maybe not maybe I'm maybe it is what all these apologists are saying so I mean it's like completely agnostic position and so then I had this experience where one of my friends he said one time he ran into me he said um hey brother where's your joy and I knew that there was something about my life that was up it wasn't just my intellect like in this sort of abstract thing trying to figure out this something about my life was up so something deeper like maybe my will right maybe my I'm bent or not untwisted enough right and so then he by friendship and love right I eventually said okay and that got me back on track where I saw different arguments I was able to overcome certain objections and I can only explain that as a movement of Grace now sure it's course logically possible that this is all made up and it's not a movement of Grace but but I'm like how else am I supposed to explain it yeah so to me Christianity is true right because it ultimately explains all of these details of all different sorts at all different levels right and so that's uh using that other kind of reasoning not just linear kind of proposition again Lewis who said I believe in Christianity like I believe the sun has risen yes not because I see the sun because by it I see everything else that's right that's right and so this is this is something I'm working on now and I don't I I don't have a worked out view on this but um to me it seems like a Christian who is his is in good faith and his in his um not what do I say not corrupted by too much of bad philosophy um they just see it like the sun they they ascent and Newman uses this word they really Ascent right that God is a Creator right God the Father Almighty creator of Heaven and Earth you know all things visible they they assert that like there's a sick there's a cigar right there now once you get there then it's like the foundation for everything else you know right so that's more like say if you've had um you've talked about reformed epistemology and planting of that kind of view right it's like a properly basic belief for you now right it's one that you infer other beliefs from but which I don't have you don't have evidence or natural Arguments for but I think that view of reformed epistemology I would contest yeah I think it can become a properly basic belief but it nevertheless has all these support relations from all these disparate facts and that might have been how you first got into the proposition so you might have first got to it by this kind of complex inference that's called an abductive inference or an inference to the best explanations yes but then as you experience life everything makes sense and part of it and now it's become a basic belief because now you don't believe it from inference you believe it on real estate just directly as a fact you see it now as a fact and I would say that's my experience that's my experience both going from trying to be an atheist to being a mere Christian and then going from a kind of protestant Anglican Christian to a Catholic Christian I would have that I had that experience twice um um I like the idea of proper basic beliefs uh you explain it pretty well here's a few um the we believe in the historical past and that the we don't believe that the world was created five minutes ago with the appearance of age breakfasts in our stomachs we never ate half smoke cigars we never smoked memories of things that never happened but there doesn't seem to be any way to disprove that that the Universe began to exist five minutes ago with those attributes it's just that there isn't doesn't seem to be any good reason for thinking that yeah but it does sort of make sense of things another one would be uh uh maybe that nothing exists outside of this building that we're sitting in right now we have no immediate access to it in fact when I was about 16 years old I went through a fear of that I would quickly open up my door to see if the outside world would still existing plug in The Truman Show that whole show that whole movie yeah it was like that or the existence of other Minds yes yes you're a whole club really constructed robots yeah that are indiscernibly different from an actual human being yeah whether this is some a computer you have appearance yeah right which we we buy an active conceptual imagination imagine the appearance being identical in every respect right from the reality and so then I could just substitute reality yeah for substitute and go back and forth and it would the appearances would be exactly and yet so but we do have these beliefs even so you could even argue me into the ground right that this is actually a simulation that you're in and I wouldn't know how to respond to you but at the end of the day I might say I just it doesn't seem like that's true it seems and I don't have any good reason for it that reality is as it appears to me basically that you do exist that the outside world exists that the Universe did not begin to exist five minutes ago right uh solipsism is false the idea that I'm the only one who exists that just seems false even though you can come up with a good argument or one that sounds good for it perhaps uh same thing with God's existence but here's what I thought once upon a time when I was getting uh neck deep into William Lane Craig argue uh the debates back in like 2010 or something you know before YouTube really took off um yeah I was just like seeing the way in which debates for God's existence were getting in the way of my relationship with God and at first I wondered if that was just because I was being threatened by atheistic arguments and I think that was true partly but I also think it was true that I was in a way obsessing over Arguments for something that just seemed likely to be the case to me and I thought to myself wow maybe someone could start flirting with solipsism watch a bunch of debates on YouTube I'm not sure who the who's doing that who's debating or who's the person who's the solipsist thinks he's debating but you could imagine getting down into that and that ruining your relationship with everyone in your life yes yes and someone who loves you might shut the laptop lid and be like you need to stop this where's your joy brother yeah and and I so it's hard to say maybe Arguments for God's existence and debates of God's existence are getting in the way with your relationship with God because our immediate skeptic kicks up and says oh you're telling me to leave my brain at the door are you you're telling me that uh at the end of the day Christianity is intellectually bankrupt are you uh and it's like no that's not what it's a switch that occurs I I think that so in looking at some of the comments and whatever on both when I had when I went on Cameron's show right in your show I read different comments and there were different YouTube chatter about what I said and one of the things they said is well this guy just sort of leapt into Faith right he's he's not he's just another one of these Catholic philosophers who doesn't have reasons to believe I mean it's more complicated than that there's what I said there's a whole inferential process where you read literally like books and books of arguments right and you read the critics you mean you read you know books like the rationality of theism that Copan edited like you see like 10 different arguments you read planning US 24 so you know two dozen or so Arguments for God's existence and you look at the Skeptics of Dan Dennis in the Richard Dawkins and right in the William Rose and the atheists and you do all this homework and then you get to the point where like it seems like God exists from the evidence right and that's a certain point but you haven't got to the point where you're really ascending like I said right so when I but then as you get to the this experiential stuff you see sort of you experience goddess the best way to say it right and you've already allowed for that possibility because you can't eliminate it right yeah and so then you have these moments of Grace where it's like God speaking like for Augustine or my friend who said where's your joy brother right or even our own thoughts can do that to ourselves right and then we get to this transition point where we have all those inferential reasons we could go down the rabbit hole if you want to right but then you have just the common sense thing is like like I said on your show the first time people already believe in God at some level in some degree right and it's just like sort of seeing that that it's already in your experience right and so I think there's I would have three responses to that kind of um solipsism you know five minutes ago the world was created and stuff one you could just say that the seaming that you have like my colleague Logan Gage talks about the seemings or like kind of evidence themselves right and that you could go that route um you could go the route of more to me this sort of more complicated route of the vicenstinian route which is um when we use words right we use words to ask questions that's one way we use words and when we ask questions we assume there's sort of a range of answers that are reasonable and others that aren't some that are nonsense and some that are sense and so that distinction is inherent in the very language that we're using because language was built right for us to be interacting in rational ways right and so if we start using language to doubt at this fundamental level then the very rationality that's already built in language is undermined so it's like um so that's what he tries to say um incidents like he says there's just certain propositions like um we've never walked on mars or England is an island right well is that I mean do you arrive at that by inference no you just learned that as you grew up and then it became part of your way of thinking and speaking so somebody who says no England's not an island we'd be like what are you who are you what where are you coming like you're crazy what you know and so the the rationality that's built into propositions like that is part of the way we use language right and so language is an extension of our reason right and there's a distinction between sense and nonsense so he calls those hinge propositions right and so you could try to go that route to respond to us when somebody doubts whether this world was created right more than five minutes ago be like well what kind of standards of rationality where did you get your distinction between sense and nonsense right if they try to like come come out of priori then they're subject to wittgenstein's most famous argument right which is that there's no such thing as a completely private language right you learned language socially that's the only way to learn language it's already social right so it reflects your social nature right um and so so that route wouldn't work right if you tried to say say that um try to say well I just I have these grammar was sort of just already created in my mind with all this you're like okay maybe I could say that's logically possible but then you're going to have to say all these other words that I'm using right to even run this debate right have standards in them that are contrary to what this debate is getting me to believe right so that's the other route the other route that I that I go that I like more but it's more vague right is that there's transcendentals that we have knowledge of being truth goodness Beauty we already know what those are at some level right and those transcend right physical experience they transcend time they transcend time and space that's why they're transcendentals in that sense right and so we have this ability to know that at that level and so to me that provides itself a standard for reason right and so and maybe you can combine these three ways in some ways but I agree if you if sort of you're captured by The Logical possibility that the appearances could remain the same in the reality just be swapped for a substitute right then it has a compelling question I think it it is a compelling question philosophically to to then try to spell out what is the issue what's the problem what is evidence right what's the nature of rationality where does it come from how's it relate to language do we know Transit so those are further disputes that to me the philosopher who encounters those arguments is going to wonder at those further truths before he accepts verdicts right so they serve a use I would say um you talked a moment ago about the multiplicity of beliefs and World Views that we have to interact with today that people 500 years ago may not have had to deal with uh what do you say to the person who says to themselves whatever conclusion I arrive at there will be someone who holds a contrary opinion who could probably talk me out of it therefore maybe I shouldn't hold anything until I am you know so convinced that I could beat anybody yeah in ex does that make sense that makes complete sense and part of the problem with that is I mean it's got to be subject to its own standard so if you say well if somebody says that whenever you encounter anybody with a disagreeable answer that's contrary then you should withhold your judgment somebody else is going to say no I'm going to argue to you that you shouldn't withhold your judgment when that happens so you can't avoid this yes if there's such a thing as truth and there's such a thing as believing it right then you cannot avoid right the fact that when you affirm something is true you exclude the false as the opposite of it that's just what it is to believe and so you're going to have this thing and so the question is then look back to the nature of evidence you might say you have to encounter the evidence honestly for yourself one of my one of my really good friends his name is Ted level Johannes Gabriel Jesus right he was an Ethiopian he is an Ethiopian philosopher um and he was my roommate at Talbot and he told me this one time very interesting story in his own right which we could go down if you want um but he said you know I you just have to follow the truth no matter what and the evidences you understand it no matter what and that's you have to be true right to yourself in that regard so that's the socratic right um exhortation know thyself it's by knowing yourself that you can discover the truth and knowing yourself means I think this is really true and I think this is true because of X Y and Z and I think that even though that guy's really wise I just don't see why that's true or how that's true and I just got to be honest with what I see now um and that matters even if you're wrong it matters and so I remember when Richard swinburne a famous Christian philosopher came to um my Master's Degree at Biola University at Talbot School of Theology he lectured for three weeks and the very first lecture he says are you willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads even if it leads to atheism because that's the right attitude and I think he was right or like a Aristotle says doubt is the beginning of Truth right it's the beginning not the end right um so so I think we have to just be honest with what we have in front of us now what we think at all levels right and so I think that inside think of it this way your soul is this big um an interior Castle okay it's a huge reality it's Dallas he said it's a it's you could talk about your soul all day without stopping if if somebody asks you how you're feeling and they you could just talk about it forever it's that big right so we don't think of as this like tiny thing inside of my skull or something it's huge right and so that itself has realities in it at all different levels so call that the investigation of that right the introspective way in the introspective way of course is part of the Journey of the mind to God so we have the outside stuff right start with creatures and and all them and how they work and how they're vestiges of of God and how they can lead you to believe at least minimal things like there has to be something more than just dependent physical stuff for there to be this dependent physical stuff right so there's like the world is as Willard says ontologically haunted you can't just be a physicalist down to the ground that doesn't make sense but it doesn't get you a personal God yet so you can get to start with the external away right the extra version out here but then you get into your own soul it's nature how it works right and then of course everything that can be in that which is all your experiences all the evidence right all the things all the conversations the little things that aren't explainable except by Christianity or that all these little things are all in this history right how to understand the rise and fall of Nations this is all in your soul and you're trying to make sense of it to me that being honest with yourself is taking account of all of that as much as possible and being honest with what you know and what you don't know gosh it sounds so overwhelming you can see what sounds like I'm just gonna go ahead and get drunk well I'm a philosopher so I hang out here all the time but I think that people people are right to um ignore certain conversations yeah right so as you said a while ago like I just don't care about certain conversations yeah so to me that's that's mean to know chaos Socrates didn't say he didn't care about theology he said I don't know about things in the Underworld yeah I don't know about that and and what makes me wise if I'm wise in any way is that I say I don't know that stuff yeah but what I do know is it's wicked and shameful to do a wrong thing I do know that right and I do know that we should we should we should always obey our superiors be they gods are men I do know that right and so he had a certain realm of knowledge he was Confidant and he said and we need to practice philosophy which is which is being willing to stand right on your ground when it concerns matters that do that you do care about which is what what am I going to die for sure maybe there's aliens and that's a fascinating discussion right but what are the issues that I'm going to die for right those are the ones that we definitely should care about and other ones maybe we shouldn't right we should put a priority list and if people are working and people aren't Scholars and people aren't philosophers well they can only they have to prioritize right and of course then they're putting the good the highest which is tells you what are your priorities what's the order of goods well maybe it would be wrong for you to study exist the existence of God because it's detracting from your life in a certain way or maybe what Dallas Willard told me once right is if studying the Bible is distracting you from loving Jesus well just don't study it for a while just give it up for a while and try to pray and love Jesus right um so we have to get our keep our priorities straight so it doesn't mean everybody has to be a scholar everybody has to be a philosopher everybody has to go throughout this whole realm but you better not ignore the things that are important and it's okay to ignore other things that are less important for the sake of a higher thing right and I think anybody can do that let's take a break because I think that's a good place to break on and then when we come back we're going to take questions from our locals and super Chatters thanks very much stick around everybody hey you there looking at me you're at the number one Catholic app on the App Stores is hello h-a-l-l-o-w it's a prayer and meditation app which is faithful to the teachings of the Catholic church and is incredibly well produced go check them out hello.com Matt tutis um link is in the description below if you go and download it on your phone um you've got to start paying a small amount every month but if you go to hello.com Matt you can sign up and you'll get three months for free it has sleep stories one thing you might want to do especially if you're a parent they have sleep stories for kids and so getting to play scripture to kids is super cool also all of my Lo-Fi stuff is now over there I'm just not interested Matt because I can't listen to your voice on that well you well you could is that is that the setup yeah okay you can I don't know why you'd want to but if you want to terrify yourself I mean if speaking of sibling horror this is far more creepy if you want to listen to me read the Bible to you like this and you know I wouldn't want that yeah so forget about me Scott Hans there Jason Everett Jackie uh Francois so go go check him out hello.com Matt hallo h-a-l-l-o-w.com Matt it's fantastic and next I want to say thank you to Paula you guys have heard about Paula it is social media the way it was meant to be I'm over on parlor so if you click the link in the description below you can go see my profile and sign up over there being on parlor means freedom from reach affecting algorithms and Shadow bands actually one thing that's interesting is when I 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free speech so go check them out by clicking the link in the description below and I'll see you over there foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] now but yeah that's I think that's the thing that I love most about Plato is that there's really no way to understand Plato at least to my estimation unless you read his books yeah or at least he resists being I don't know there's the you were talking earlier about a philosophy encyclopedia and I was kind of feeling nervous about that because there's so many philosophers that I've had described to me and they've gone and read them and they're actually saying almost the exact opposite of that yeah um and I think Plato's one like like you think of like platonism and the platonic ideas yes I've not read all of Plato but none of Plato that I've read the closest thing I had to that was in the um I think it's the phaedrus Fado yeah the Fado yeah where he basically has a crazy rambling character say things that kind of resemble that um so just to see I yeah I think that Plato's dialogues are the solution to that kind of modern rhetoric not necessarily leading to the truth uh thing which is that when you actually read through them you say wait why is Socrates contradicting himself I if my brain is resisting what he just said that this doesn't a great example because in that he argues for the immortality of the soul but when people go back and they just try to very carefully analyze the the arguments that he gives for the immortality of the Soul like they don't they're not that great as arguments that some of them are maybe even invalid and so then then you think well does Plato want us to get those arguments is that why he's giving us the Fatal to get the arguments out and I was sort of trained in a way to do a philosophy or like the point was to like extract the arguments whereas then I was taught when I was in my doctoral program by my my my advisor um and dissertation director Greg be about that you have to see the dialogues as literary inventions and so because he was a Kierkegaard scholar because he was a kierkegon scholar kierkegaard's famous for all those levels of of authorship right and pseudonyms buried under pseudonyms and so like what's the cure what's Kierkegaard actually saying it's the same with Plato So I think he put those arguments in so that we could find out how they're not very good and there's clues in the beginning of the dialogue and at the end of the dialogue of pharaoh that make you think the Socrates doesn't care about the arguments per se right he does think there can be arguments and he thinks is good to try to make them but in the very beginning it says basically the reason he believes the Soul's Immortal because that's what he learned when he grew up right and that holding on to that's really important and then testing it as much as we can right and so in that dialogue he has the stuff about you know the Divine ideas or the um the Titanics I was thinking of the tomatoes okay just to but I because I don't I did listen to the what was the name of that one again the Fatal the Fatal I did listen to that but I was riding a bus and I wasn't thinking okay is full of all kinds of stuff you said okay but when I teach Timaeus in metaphysics um there's there's a part and I I can't cite your chapter in voice but he basically says what I'm gonna what's important in this sort of uh discussion is creating some kind of a plausible story and so you already know he thinks of story components but then I compare like our modern modern astrophysics right and certain ideas like their String Theory right or that you know there's 11 dimensional strings right that are rooted in a b-r-a-n-e whatever that means and you like here's some of these stories you're like I don't know what that even means it's like it sounds sci-fi but you know it's science right and it's kind of in a similar way that's what he's doing it sounds completely made up but he's trying to explain certain things so I think you're right he knows it's not literal like it's not literally the fact that human beings are this circle right and they get broken in half and that's where you get male and female and that's why we we we seek the other half so it can be a circle again which is a perfect shape um like stuff like that like yeah he doesn't literally believe that who does he have to say that it's the it's the playwright yeah the comedic playwright what's his name the Greek Aristophanes yeah that's his story of love yeah all right hey gown what up so before we get to these questions we've got a lot of questions got 25 questions from our local supporters think of this as the lightning round but before we do that I want to let people know that I have scoured the works of Aquinas and have put together a little devotional for Advent in which I've taken out excerpts from Aquinas on the Dual Natures of Christ the mother of God and the Incarnation and so for every day throughout Advent along with this ebook that I've put together will be me reading uh each meditation so if you want to get access to that as well as a ton of other things go to Matt frad.locals.com.locals.com become a supporter we'd really appreciate it helps all the work that we do and you'll also get this uh these daily meditations for Advent from Aquinas they're not like mushy meditations like you know they make you feel warm and fuzzy yeah they're more like super philosophical and but if you're into that Matt frad.locals.com we have some super chats too all right uh well only one of them was a question from uh Stephen Wang uh as a Franciscan Theologian what does scotus have to say about natural theology you're like well I'm not a Franciscan well I would I would disclaim again like you said a Scholars do that I'm not a not a theologian I think he meant let's go this is a yeah oh I see as a Franciscan Theologian so oh yeah I got it thanks thanks good um I mean his natural theology is um complicated um but I mean I think the basic story of it is is similar to say aquinases or bonaventures where there's arguments from the nature of causation um to the existence of a of a being that's a self-existent so you have similar arguments like that like Aquinas is I believe it's the second way um so you have the the you know you have a contingency type argument you have an essentially ordered causes type argument so you have that way of argument which is similar but I think what's distinct about scotus is he takes he takes Anselm's project of perfect being Theology and he tries to work with that and so what he does there is when you get to um the nature of God so you've established the existence of a let's say a a self-existent being but there's no more specificity so when you start analyzing the nature of that God scotus uses a Kind of Perfect being theology to take the kind of attributes or qualities that we attribute to creatures which are the sort that if we were to eliminate all their imperfections and Corruptions like the wisdom of Socrates right and then it would admit of say intensification to an infinite degree all those types of qualities which are called Pure Perfections those are the ones that we attribute to God and so now he has a way a kind of program of how to get different attributes for God now he also thinks there's an order to those attributes so does Aquinas but they differ again on which the order of those kind of attributes for Aquinas the master attribute is simplicity so once you get that then you can move to the other attributes and explain those and understand those it's kind of like the centerpiece of his natural theology whereas for scotus the centerpiece is God is an infinite being and he has a very distinct way of thinking about that and that's how you get the how you understand or derive to a degree the other attributes and so they both have a group of attributes with a master attribute right right and they think that you can get to a fuller understanding of God's nature but scotus takes the attributes as pure Perfections and those are the ones we attribute to God and first we just we attribute to an infinite being which is which is um sort of his master concept so that that's how I would answer that question initially all right that's all we're going to get time for is initial Road responses I've got 25 more of those which is very difficult when you're talking about really difficult philosophical theology answer do you mind if I start doing some locals and you can get back to those if that's okay yeah okay Lexi fryling says hello from the fryling family hey what's up do you know who they are okay Dr Plato when you were talking about reason and if you grew up in another religion is how one reasons when confronting their understanding of the world depended on nature versus nurture does nature versus nurture have anything to do with the formation of reason I hope that makes sense that makes sense two minutes ago yeah um I think that there is a nature to reason and we have access to the truth right so um so we have these transcendentals are already in our minds to a degree we already have the knowledge of being goodness truth that's why we all kind of understand that there is a God at some level even if we don't identify that as God and so the mind already has its natural ability it's already connected with reality so I would put it this way in a nutshell that The Logical space of all of reality is the same logical space of your introspective Zone which I was talking about with you earlier Matt so The Logical space is the same there's an isomorphism between The Logical space you can think about and The Logical space of reality right um so sometimes called that's called the spirituality of man which means kind of what we I think it's a better meaning than what than rationality right so spiritual we have a capacity for the truth that is um anything that's knowable or anything that's intelligible or anything that even has possible being we can know about that's the extent of our intellectual power that's natural now nurture right so there is a natural route to how we think and so we can we can always measure up to that standard I think nurture has a huge influence on how we think um and I think it has a much greater influence and I think a lot of people like to admit um on the one hand but then I think other people that that think bulverism is the way to critique everybody thinks it's deterministic it determines what we think so we don't want to say it determines what we think and we don't want to say that we aren't influenced in ways that are hard to discover so so I think that's why I like socrates's life as an example for philosophy because he one says know thyself so there's a root in the nature right of ourselves as rational beings or Spiritual Beings but then he says he we all need to act as God flies in the service of the god right as in other words we need to criticize our cultural forms um because we need to expose the falsehood and to some degree we've inherited we've all inherited certain falsehoods in our um in our upbringing so we we need to think we have certain limitations and falsehoods there we need to purify it as best as we can how do I think yeah sorry how does vulvarism differ from the genetic fallacy or is it it is it is that but but it's a very popular way of it yeah humorously coined by C.S Lewis after an imaginary character to poke fun of a very serious era in thinking that he alleged frequently occurred in a variety of religious political philosophical debates yes it's when we discount somebody because they're a white male or because they're a Christian or because of their erasedness where because right they're they're wealthier because yeah it's completely genetic fallacy but it's super popular uh Travis says as a philosopher do you think the question do you believe in God is a loaded question is there a better more charitable question that is more likely to spark meaningful conversation I think it is a loaded question because I think when we say God in our Christian sort of roughly Christian culture um that we mean like the name of a personal being whereas what the word used to mean is something like the one Supreme Being something like that the greatest conceivable being or the best being an ultimate explanation that isn't explained yeah and so I think that when we say Do you believe in God we mean do you have a religious um affirmation of a personal God and that puts people off whereas I think the right way to God is first like let's see if there's a non-natural reality that's beyond what we understand to be physical and if that's the case then I think we can go forward and then say well what's that reality like is that reality personal is that reality not personal is that reality mind like is that not mindless so you start more modestly that's really good and work up otherwise you're making several jumps at least in the hearer's mind when you say God so maybe the the the mnemonic device to remember that is on the five ways Aquinas always says and that's what we call God right so if you start out the question of what we call God and the person isn't in your we because they're not Christian or they're agnostic or they're atheists well it's it's putting too much pressure on the beginning question yeah that's a really good answer yeah uh Marcus says what would you say to those who would cite palimism as a bit of you than tomeism or other medieval philosophers and theologians in preference to those of the Orthodox do you have you been yeah I'm privy to the palimism Simplicity debate to yeah to a degree so I think that in the um in the in the 1400s so this is where my friend Jared is really important his work on Bonaventure and the trinity um is that um The Franciscan Way of understanding through Bonaventure right is is and scotus after that is by the time you get to the 1400s became of great interest to the to the Orthodox because the palomites were being targeted by the Dominicans and the Dominicans wanted to crush the palomites right um because they're Knights for the truth right um but um Pope I think it was Eugene IV I could be wrong on the on the the person but he came to the aid of the palomites in a certain way by saying hold on right The Franciscan tradition thinks in a way that might be how we can understand and incorporate and assimilate the insights of palomus um because of his because of their views and so then there was a guy named scolarius and father Christian kappas yeah it was all about this guy yeah um and so this guy started going around all the studio of The Franciscan Studio like the schools of Francisca has been getting all their texts and learning about it he also learned about Aquinas so he was this like avid um Latin lover even though he was an or an Eastern guy okay right greek lover and so he he you know agreed with Aquinas as much as he could then disagree didn't like the stuff that franciscans were saying yes um and so I think that palomism is not this evil horrible thing if you see it uh as compatible with the Franciscan tradition which is the opposite of an evil horrible thing right but it's a beautiful wonderful part of the Catholic tradition and so it I don't think we need to be um afraid right of like the essence energy distinction right or there being sort of a kind of complex view or a subtle view of the doctrine of Simplicity I don't think we need to be afraid of that I think we need to be careful and we need to do our work but I think in the end it's not something to to get our ideological you know hair up yeah about yeah if people are interested in this topic they can search palimism in on pineshood aquinas.com I've couple of interviews even with a Dominican who defends the coherence of palimism and simplicity ask Dr Plato if he had a college age Bible study type group with kids from multiple places in education homeschool public school what would be a good intro or catchy ways to introduce philosophical topics to them what resources would he use okay so various kids to philosophical issues if you had a college age Bible study type group with kids from college okay you know public school home school what would be a good intro or catchy ways to introduce philosophical topics to them when I so when I was at when I was an undergrad I every summer I taught in summer camps so this is a little younger as kids I mean I taught kids from third grade all the way up to high school so but one thing I did with the older kids like maybe middle school and up I did it with some younger ones too but I I role played so especially if they're already Christians and they're raised a certainly within your role play you pretend like you're not a Christian and you ask honest questions and so that engages them to respond with reason right not being able to help themselves to certain terms like Grace I mean what's that what's the word grace mean to somebody who's never been raised Christian that's like a weird word like it's not a normal word here's something I've done with a group of people before I gave a talk on logic I would put them they would all stand in the middle of a room and I would say okay that side over there let's say the left side is the affirmative and the right side is the negative and I'm going to make a statement and you go where you that's a good way the truth is and then I'll start with something that's you know pretty uh easy like um Chick-fil-A is better than McDonald's right and so they never all go to the affirmative side so it's not a great example but point is at that point someone from each side can make the case for why Chick-fil-A it's not better than McDonald's and at that point people are free to trade size so then you also have people in the middle who are kind of choosing to refrain it's just a nice easy way that's great and I think what both those those exercises have in common is that they're engaging the student in the dialectic yeah the give and take of reasons and objections because what I think happens in a lot of religious upbringing is we just hear the answers yeah and so then when somebody comes along and gives objections it like it like crushes us as opposed to you gave them the objections and you gave them the counter objections and in the counter counter objections and they've got this articulated dialogue back and forth and so you start them in I would say using their creative imagination or I called it earlier that your conceptual imagination it's not picturing things but like imagining responses and imagining Reasons from a different point of view I think that engages the philosophical one part of us philosophically I would also say read poetry and reflect uh what's that I would also say read poetry and reflect yes good idea right so you engage not just the the dialectical thing like the give and take but like the depth dimension of reality you're trying to understand the depth of things and not just why to believe things so I think both of those would be good we have a super chat here from John Mott who says also John do you know who that is yeah do all people deserve respect no next question um is it that's honestly his question yeah do all people deserve respect I mean I think maybe he's talking about in in this kind of dialectic where we have people that we disagree with or whatever I think I think to a degree I think if we're all practicing you know common decency but I one thing I noticed that my my old Mentor Doug at Talbot I watched him discuss things with students and when there were students which exercised a kind of pretense right or they tried to catch him in certain ways he's smart enough and ahead of them logically so he would call them out morally in a discussion and I used to never do that because I thought maybe I had a kind of overly tolerant view of respecting people but I think he actually did respect the person how would he do that right so he would say like you're only saying this because you think this and that's why you're doing that and so you need to admit that that's not a good motive right but if you want to ask your question honestly I'm right here to hear you yeah like he would call them out morally and he would do it in a loving way so respecting people can entail calling them out yeah approaching them yeah and I find Socrates is also a model of that because he says I was telling you Neil like in those dialogues he'll tell calacles or other people you don't believe yourself you I know that you think that there's higher Goods than wealth honor and reputation I know you think that even though you just said the opposite you've lied to yourself wow and so I think respecting people includes right calling them out at the right moment yes right but that's with the right attitude in the right way takes Prudence yes you don't want to shame them you don't want them to be embarrassed launch to just start being an [ __ ] right can that be a justice so I don't know if I addressed John's question but um uh I think so is it possible for to prove God's Omni benevolence using philosophy aquina certainly thought so absolutely I mean I think that that's the the best concept to think about God to begin with right he's the good like that's Plato right like the good right that's what we're all looking at that's the source of everything right um so I think that if we think of God as a being right who's perfect then I think we have to attribute him all the kinds of Perfections which can be yeah all the great making properties which we could imagine to the maximal infinite degree and one of those would be his his goodness right and so I think so it would come along with trying to argue for his Perfection yes or being the fullness of being if God is this way Bonaventure push if God if God is right then God is the best right I mean because his being is infinite and perfect right so he's got to be the best of the the goodest as it were right he's got to be the highest that's what it means to be Supreme deity do we have any other super chats that I've missed uh yeah there are a couple um we have one from Xavier Jimenez which I think you already answered which is can you talk about uh palamus yep and the essence energy distinction its place on the Catholic church and being a bridge from Thomson we kind of did that I kind of already addressed that and then just some uh just donation ones a big one from Daniel born he was just saying thank you yeah colleagues and things yeah oh here's a new one right now from rigid ambul got any jokes do you have any good jokes hi guys I'll tell you Peter Christ's joke you told me the other day which people have heard if they watched it was very funny I thought it was funny so this man walks into a bar and he's got a banana sticking out of his ear and the bartender says mate you got a bloody banana sticking out of your ear and the fella says what's that sorry I can't hear you I have a banana sticking out of my ear that's really good do you have a good joke I have once about that good yeah yeah my favorite joke my favorite joke is um what's green and has wheels uh let me try you have to try that's part of the job what has green what's green and it has wheels I have no idea like a green car almost everybody guesses a green car some people guess like a pickle with wheels sometimes I don't know why a tractor okay that makes sense right but do you give up yeah it's grass I was just kidding about the wheels I have a whole series of light bulb jokes but I don't know if I should should spend that time on that if you yeah well are they worth spending time on I guess that's right well here's a good one I like I like this one right this is this is uh this is a shout out to all my new quality friends um so uh so how many government workers does it take to change a light bulb I don't know five four to form a committee and talk about it why the fifth guy screws it into the sink uh Ah that's very good that was I think that's number three on the build up to the final one okay and again maybe this I think this is funny but um so the final light bulb joke of the four I only did a couple of them um is uh you know how many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb I don't know fish [Music] that's all I got for you that's great yeah all right good um is there an explanation or reason as to why we need or cannot be without an institution that can teach no objective truth that is the Catholic Church I would say can you say that one more time is there an explanation give us a reason okay why we can't be without an institution that can teach no objective truth let me uh let me see I can teach they can't I'll say it one more time so is he saying what's the reason why do we have a change but it seems to be a little more pointed than that is there a reason we can't be without it okay why do we have to have it in other words I mean it seems to me we if Jesus Christ right is authorizing the teaching of of himself right then his teaching is infallible that's his his own teaching and so the the the office right the the teaching office that has that would be you know he's Prophet priest and King so he would that office would need to be perpetuated now what are those propositions I mean that's a complicated question but I think at a surface level we can get that right obviously scripture in scripturates a lot of that right but that came through the apostles and came into the church and the church validates that and then there's the various ecumenical councils and other councils and other levels of statements and blah blah which gets complex quick but there's an office that is Jesus teaching office because he's the teacher can I give you a a a a better answer with a meme yeah go for it all right you have boromia who is Sola scriptura saying I swore to protect you from heresy and man-made traditions and Frodo says can you protect me from yourself that's good that's good a much simpler way of saying it is that text is tone deaf how many times have you texted someone or written to them they've got the wrong Impressions yeah anyway I think I want to make a Distinction on that regard so I think that so often times um that when I was a soul script tourist I said things like the the Bible sort of authenticates itself right or interprets itself right those kind of ideas right and I think I understand what that means if you're talking about an individual person who encounters scripture and God uses that to save them and lead them to Christ absolutely the Bible can do that and it has done that to many people but when we're talking about the revelation of God being entrusted publicly right with public Ministry in a public liturgy and right in public teaching right to hold us together as a communion yeah right to me it seems like that's not sufficient that's like a different discussion when it comes to the social right and not just the individual there needs to be this this office right and it has to be entrusted right to the church as a as a as a mystical body right which has an Institutional manifestation or it's not the mystical body as we understand it right Clem Harold who we both know hey thanks for the Super Chat claim he says why is making bread a properly human Act that's a good question um I mean there's something I would say this that so making bread is you're taking material things from this world right you're taking water from the grain that's been processed in a certain way um you're taking something that God made that you can't make which is life itself which is the sourdough culture right you've got the yeast to living organism and the bacteria the lactobacilli just like yogurt that's a living thing and they're in a symbiotic relationship we can't create that nobody can create life right we haven't figured that one out evolutionists say somehow we get from non-life to life but nobody actually knows and so we take something God made right that we can't make we took something we can kind of participate in which is grain we take water which again we can't make right and we take some salt so where it's like take all those things and put those together right and I think we're participating in the creative Material World using God's gifts right to make something of our own design right that can give God glory right and also it's us participating in his works as the kind of Apex I mean could flat could grains of grass ever get to a um ever get to an Apex like that all by themselves no and then of course you have the idea of bread itself being what's transubstantiated right yep that the appearances of bread so I think even in higher so naturally it's we we participate with God to make bread and then supernaturally right we have the whole sacramental ministry right uses that that that substance follow-up question is it a properly human act to make bread on Minecraft on Minecraft you can make bread on Minecraft yeah okay I didn't know that no that wouldn't if it's not actual bread with actual yeast and bacteria in it no it's not what if the regulation you make is the simulation of what's being done on Minecraft um then I'm a monkey's uncle okay uh Isabelle says does he have any kind of philosophical approach to Parenting to parenting oh my gosh um no not particularly but I do I I do um talk with my son very philosophically he really likes that he really likes logic and puzzles yeah um and I think I think that engaging children in great questions yeah where they're both the kind of puzzling kind and interesting kind and kinds like I remember one of my friends uh uh uh Jay Hawthorne his son uh when I went over there one one time he was talking about his son and he asked his son do you know anything that's not physical that exists because God is Not physical and he exists and his son clapped his hands and went that feeling I mean this is like I forget how old his son was I want to say six something like that so like the feeling the sensation the quality of that experience was non-physical so I mean I think when you when we talk this is my view of parenting this doesn't tell you how to do it but if you talk at a higher level than you then your kids can understand they pick up yeah so much language and their mind is getting smarter and smarter and smarter do I if you just talk articulately I try to speak with the highest vocabulary I can until they need right me to clarify and we use we listen to audiobooks a lot yeah and they listen to like you know Winnie the Pooh and winning the Willows the Lord of the Rings and Narnia and they have vocabulary and understand at a very high level so they're like educated just by the in the the vocabulary environment being high right um uh here's another thing I like to do with my kids which gets to the same point is to the game 20 Questions yeah it's an excellent game it's a very philosophical game it's a game of deduction so you come up with an idea oh you might think of an elephant and then your child has 20 questions to figure out what it is and so of course you start categorizing from the outside in and so a bad question the bad first question is is it grass far too specific so you have to start very general and then work your way in and kids learn that quickly I remember I was playing this with my son Liam and then he did one I could not for the life of me get it he was thinking of blood vessels like dude it can't be that it's difficult anyway parenting is parenting is very difficult parenting is um I it is definitely a crucible of sanctification because you realize that what Chesterton said like your kids students don't learn what you teach they learn what you assume when you teach so kids don't just learn what you say they learn about life by your behavior they copy you in every way and yeah like they do certain things in that are bad and you're like it's like a mirror for yourself and so I guess my only practical advice would just be to be very humble and to to thank God that he knew ahead of time that you would be a broken instrument but he's going to use it for good anyway and to be forgiving of yourself but but realize that it's ultimately your character that is going to teach them more than anything you can say um this is a very good question but and I've thought about this question before too looking forward to your answer father Boltz asks are a person's particular parents the necessary material cause I.E particular sperm and egg for their existence or is it ontologically possible for a person to have different parents in other words I know you know this but just so I can flesh it out if your parents didn't exist is it possible that Plato Alex Plato the man I call Alex Plato could have existed in a different body somewhere at some time I guess I have conflicting intuitions about that um I mean our anthropology is going to have some play here and that's what gets in engaged in this discussion yeah so I mean one way that say scotus and Aquinas and bottom if you think about the person the person is the composite of the soul in the body right it's properly a name for that composite so if you had a different body you wouldn't be you yes but on the other hand like the the person the person is is transcends that composite it's not just merely right the sum of those parts right it's like a more fundamental principle like God creates right the soul out of nothing right and the body is there too right and so there's some Act of God that's individualized right so there's a a what I call it maybe an individual Essence I could say right so yes there's a kind of thing we are that's a human but then it's like an individual Essence there so if I understand person in the one sense it seems like you've got to have the parents you had right but if I understand it to be sort of this particular thing that God creates whether it seems like I could imagine that with a different Yeah a different body I don't see why God had to make my soul connected to this body now I don't know so I take it it's the ambiguity of the idea of a person right so um like maybe we could reflect on the separation of the soul and body right so when the soul goes right there's no body but presumably like if we just assert that that survives existence is that a person no um so in one sense no right but on the other hand we want to say it's all like half a person something that seems weird to say it's half a person but it's not completely a person not person the proper respect of that person but is it you that's a good question because maybe it's not you yeah so it seems it seems to me like whatever it is it Bears the individuality right that is what we align with person yeah so to me I like thinking of it that way it's it's good you're you are you have a soul there so that you the individuality part is still the same before and after death right it didn't go away or get reduced but it's activities and powers and potentialities are all limited now because there's no body it's like the cut off your arm and I cut off your other arm and cut off your leg and I cut off your whole body like you're getting more and more debilitated right so we also make that a short where he says that if I cut off your arm and I cut off your arm and cut off your leg and I cut off just make that it's like a three second clip I want to see all right Thaddeus says we as Christians tend to reconcile the problem of evil by interpreting it as a privation on the good I wouldn't say we try to reconcile it I think that's just how we explain it however many evil things or things of this value seem to be more than just mere privations and seem to have a positive reality thoughts on that yeah so maybe we could make a distinction between material evil and moral evil so obviously material evil would be like say uh uh you know a dog is born without legs right there's like something missing there that's material evil right and then there's moral evil which doesn't have to do with material evil per se right but it's the lack it's it's the will is being is is is deformed right the will somehow is not as it should be yeah right so that's the thing that's lacking in what it should be now that's different than all other material realities because if I'm right about the analysis I gave earlier of like the the affection for justice and the affection for self-perfection are both part of the will right then there's a part that in order for the will to be properly itself it must be in proper relationship to God right because God's the highest good that you love for his own sake so if you don't love God for God's sake then your will is disordered and so that is a moral evil yeah right so of course with other acts too like when you when you prefer wealth to friendship right you've messed up the order of this well wouldn't you say like with all evil acts there's a lack of a good that ought to be there so if I do I do say that so both material and more yeah right but then you could think about this when we when we say when an animal experiences pain yeah right I mean is that let's say they even suffer from the pain yeah maybe it's so painful they can't walk properly right is that a positive evil some people would call it that right because obviously the sensation right is like a physical reality in them maybe electrochemical signals or something that affect their joints and stuff positively right and so then you have you explain the lack of their motion right of walking by this positive pain this like neurological impulses that are out of control or whatever um so that looks like a positive material evil right it seems like the effects of evil press upon us such that they feel like a positive thing as though we can describe them as being a lack so there's a lack of a thing that ought to be there namely health of the body yes but what results from that lack is something that feels like a gigantic positive thing yes no I think that's the case too like I mean my colleagues uh at Franciscan patley and John Crosby have a famous series of Articles back and forth about this issue wow so John is defending the view that that that maybe this question or was implying that there's positive evils that are that can't be assimilated to the um evil as privation viewers Pats defending Dr Lee's defending the view of the privation view of evil um and I I'm more sympathetic with with Pat's view but I see you know and John will talk about these sort of physical pain or psychological pain right it's more it it seems like you can't capture that reality that we're describing unless you use a physical positive not physical if you use a positive description I guess I don't have a clear a clear answer to that question but it seems to me like you can you can explain it as a privation right because there's you ought to be in a certain condition which you're not having all this massive physical pain right and that could be the effects of other people's senseful unformed Wills which are private is it just the way that you're explaining it you know like uh because I think that like when you say like what is evil yeah what is what does evil mean I think a quick answer is it's the way things shouldn't be that's that's exactly my gloss on it yeah physical or moral so if a father neglects his children or he physically harms them um but if you give that definition then all evil is going to be assimilatable to a privation yeah right which to me makes sense that's Anselm's understanding and others as well right hey you've mentioned your colleagues several times now why is Franciscan a good school that people should consider coming to I mean for instance Franciscan is extremely unique I mean I think it has it sort of byline right is is passionately Catholic right academically excellent so I think you've got a really great faculty right in different departments which are which are doing as good as work as they can at the highest levels right and so you've got a great faculty and then on the other hand you have the the passionate Catholic The Faculty themselves are are passionate you know not every single one of them is Catholics there's a tiny percent that isn't but they're they're friends for sure they're fellow Christians um and then but you have the student body has this Catholic experience right a Catholic life and I think um making the distinction between well University is only about learning stuff right or universities only about the experience I mean obviously those are both false yeah right University these days is about both those things and Franciscan has unique Orthodox Catholic um environment with a Franciscan charism right and and I think that that among the Newman guide schools is a unique thing it has it's a unique size as well so it's not too small right it's not too big of a student body I think it's a great size for the kinds of things we're doing and so I think it's I think it's a great place to send your kids right for to a safe place that's not obviously heterodox right it has some plurality of views which is important I think as I said earlier um and uh and you're going to get a great education in terms of the level of of understanding and expertise so we just had father Dave the president on a few weeks ago yeah man this is an interesting wonderful chat I mean he's such a great guy loves our Lord absolutely doesn't like love Lord of the Rings which is very unfortunate he doesn't love Lord of the Rings no I'm gonna have to talk to him about it please do that yeah because he texted me the other day he's like I just flew home from Austria tried to watch The Lord of the Rings 10 minutes in something like that oh he doesn't like the movie so he hasn't read it he's never read it okay he sat in front of me across this table and went fur what's the guy's name I'm like Frodo maybe oh yeah I think that's his name maybe if I agree to make an audiobook for him he'll listen to me for like you know 20 hours no he wouldn't nobody should um but he's philosophical so maybe he'll listen to a philosophical argument in favor of Tolkien Kyle Whittington says how do you Alex keep your humility being both a philosopher and a basketball legend don't try to deny it I saw the trophy in Abbe Alex's room office what is this does that mean um so uh so I don't know what the trophy is in particular but you know I did have one game right right where I where I um did really well in high school um scored 35 points I don't think he's referring to that particular game um but that we did play basketball when I was at Francis de Sales in St Louis and that's probably what he's referring to I don't remember the trophy but um yeah we had like a a league in our own little church a little gym there it was an oratory of Christ the King ah and actually Canon Avis who's here at Precious Blood now in Pittsburgh was the um was there and he married my wife and I he was the um the priest there and anyway so we played basketball in that little gym and that's what he's referring how do you stay humble um you know it's really difficult you know being as good as I am to be humble um but I manage I don't know if I do but still try Bill Wynn says is culture the kingdom of man his culture the kingdom of man I guess I don't know exactly what he means by Kingdom of Manatee means like not kingdom of God then I don't I don't think that's that's right I mean I think culture culture is a really fascinating topic um I think reading Christopher Dawson is a great place to go for that reading Joseph peeper is a great place to go culture is a very interesting phenomenon but if we mean by it like the sociological thing where there's an individual culture whether that's primitive or all the way to Advanced civilizations right you've got a kind of spiritual knowledge or spiritual uh understanding um and this is borne out by historical examination and that it's man trying to understand God in the place that he is right to some degree so all the social functions of what has these kind of three this is what Dawson teaches and I agree with this and I think this is really good but in primitive societies there's kind of an idea of sacred kingship there's an idea of a priesthood there's an idea of prophets and divinization so these three kind of offices ought to sound familiar right Prophet priest and king um and the advanced civilizations have these very clearly and each one of those there's a class of people that are kind of known or attributed by the people to have kind of a special mediatorial role and so the whole purpose of building culture and building civilization is for man to get to God and so there's something right about that because man is supposed to get to God but the question is right we can go completely astray and become idolaters and Tower of Babel people or we can do it the right way and right with with the kingdom of God so Kingdom of man is bad right kingdom of God is good but they're both cultures right and of course this one can be right simultaneous with this one right and so that's Augustine city of Mana city of godward weeds and wheat yes we should be pushing more and more and more towards the city of God and away from the city of man but in history there's like in different civilizations Even in our Western Civilization there's there's kind of a a play back and forth but culture itself to me seems like inherently good right but can be that can be corrupted just like the body is inherently good but we can be corrupted and used for evil purposes so it's not itself the kingdom of man but we can corrupt it so it becomes that and that's really dangerous then you have I would even call it an anti-culture like I think in a lot of ways our culture right has this quality to it where um so culture in one sense of the meaning of the word is um like agriculture or like a there's a petri dish in a science class and you put you culture a bacteria it's a place for it to flourish and grow that's what the culture is and so human culture and that understanding of the word culture is a place where there's soul food so that would be like it's it's Traditions right it's literature it's poetry it's philosophy it's theology it makes the soul actually grow and so I think our culture is we're that we're materialistic in that sense not meaning just we care about luxuries only although we do care about that too much but they were just fixated on material physical comfort and security right and not these higher goods and so I think we see that in in higher education higher education is not contemplative like back to Franciscan so we are a liberal arts tradition so we're trying to inculcate that in our core classes right this contemplative nature of learning this philosophical and a broad sense of learning and contemplating higher things whether it's poetry literature history philosophy theology all the different disciplines right you can have that deeper soul food within that right and therefore frame yourself or train yourself to become the person who is open and receptive to that all the time if people are doing that on a large enough scale in a society then I think your Society is has a culture in that positive sense our society seems to lack that in many ways to me it seems like that's a in in some sense maybe one of the biggest problems in our in Western Civilization is the kind of collapse of that contemplative element to to our life and we're in the rat race right we're in the we're in the um we're in the word world of work right the people talks about becoming more and more total right where what makes something viable is the end that you get out of its utility and so it makes it valuable to go to college is you get a degree and so you get a job you're like what about becoming a person that can receive higher truths from God through contemplation right isn't that something we should also try to be doing and those kind of the people the people we want to be leaders to be parents to be teachers to be the people that have that contemplative mindset so that's a long answer deep topic I don't know who it was who said a good Society is one which makes it easy for its citizens to be good there you go that's uh really helpful ever yeah Dr Plato what are your thoughts on Divine command Theory can this moral philosophy play any role in Catholic moral teaching or does it yeah I mean in in in that debate I mean I think you have an unsophisticated view would be like Occam let's say um which would be God can command anything he wants period right even you to hate him so there's no there's no um nature of God that constrains what God could command prior to his commands right so that's one view of divine command theory that has no place to be that that must be rejected that's completely false that's Bonaventure Aquinas scotus all agree get rid of that but then the question becomes well what sort of things in God's essence are the things that constrain what he can command given that there are things yeah right so then I think the first step of course is the first table of the ten commandments so God can't command you might say the opposite of those right now when it comes to the second table I think the the the issue becomes more complicated and so this is where you're going to get a disagreement between scotus and and Aquinas so I think on on that score it becomes a very complicated dispute about the nature of the created order right and so then when we have the the Divine commands are given in this order the question then becomes one of again that creative imagination right is there some imaginary scenario where God could dispense with some of those commands and to still be consistent with the love of God and neighbor right and so that obviously is something that every medieval Scholastic had to deal with because there's cases that seem like that in the Old Testament and so when scotus and Aquinas are doing this debate you might say about the Ten Commandments and whether or not God can dispense any of his Commandments and they said no not the first table so let's call that natural law in the strict sense um what about in the the second table and so Aquinas is going to interpret things like let's say um adultery yeah or or theft is a good example because that's easier to work with for for me anyway it's like um you know theft is taking somebody's property against their will so then when when when God commands us to take certain people's property against their will the idea is will he transfer the ownership and so when it looked like theft it looked like stealing it looked like he commanded stealing it wasn't actually stealing so that kind of the Paradigm for aquinas's strategies everything that looks like a dispensation of a command like an exception to it right it's just the the ACT underneath right is actually not what you thought it was and that's the strategy he employs where scotus seems to want to say that in it with certain acts right like with Isaac right that when when God commands Abraham to kill Isaac right he's commanding him to kill an innocent person and if that is a paradigm underlying description for murder then he's just commanded murder right so that seems like one where it's hard to divorce the higher level meaning of murder from the lower level description intentionally killing innocent person right now one route you might try to go is and some Thomas pursue this route as far as I know is well they're not he's not really innocent because nobody's innocent right but to me that seems like kind of a an ad hoc solution yeah because the notion of Innocence when we think of the Paradigm of murder isn't like innocence before God like we don't have original sinner actual sin it means you're not actively harming anyone so like the non-civilian in a war is innocent in the relevant sense which is why Catholics say right you can never intentionally kill a civilian right because they're innocent they're not threatening harm right if they're driving a Munitions truck right or they're like Manning a a gun right or like helping feed the bullets well that gets ambiguous right but if they're innocent in that relevant sense that's the sense it seems we mean here so then it seems like that's a really difficult case so scotus accepts that those are dispensations so then he has to go back and interpret from his understanding of Revelation these these difficult cases that the second table has these kind of things that God himself as the as the law Giver at this level right could have commanded something different so he could command somebody to murder him but it wouldn't be wrong under the same description that a moment ago was wrong so that is maybe you could call it something like a modified command Theory it's not that absolute kind of re-reject um so it seems to me like that's that's important um but I think there's one level of command theory that we should all admit even even that even I think that the strictomists and I think they do for example Elizabeth anscom who I studied this is where I got this idea so when she's examining Plato's famous dialogue the Youth of fro which kind of raises this issue right um she says it's very important for God to command things that are that are just because if he didn't command them then you couldn't obey them as being commanded so he might he might say for example it might be that we all know we should honor our parents we already are we already know that it's just to do that and unjust not to but when God commands it now you can obey God as commanding it so now that makes possible another level of act an act of piety so God has to command it for it to be an act of piety yeah but of course he can't command any Act of pie that's already unjust so so I think the commands are important because then we can obey them as the person it becomes personal now not just following our own understanding of the law from within um Marcus Levy asked if it'd be possible to have you and Jonathan pajoto on an episode of pines with Aquinas you know who that is no I've heard the name Orthodox icon cover okay I think he's a pretty interesting thinker cool um please define the problem with doing a q a on philosophy none of the questions are like do you like red they're always like what is red really and then good luck answering that quickly yeah I'll ask it do you like red Dr Plato actually when I was a kid that was my favorite color is it yeah but now I'm at the point where like if it's colored it's good so not white I like color I like color yeah I'm a fan of all colors primary or secondary colors all of them yeah I still have a special place for right in my heart because yeah now you homeschool oh your wife does specifically my my wife does too how to incorporate philosophy in homeschool asks Haley Cason you know um my wife uh really likes the the The Homeschool educator and philosopher Charlotte Mason yeah and so she's in a group where they read Charlotte Mason I've read Charlotte Mason she's a she's a legit serious philosopher too not just a home educator doing sort of practical stuff um but her her education is all about um virtue formation right and uh and so and she has a very important place for being in nature right which you know your son Peter is very much in nature and that's something that's forming him in a good way how do you know that about him well because he's a beekeeper for one and I've seen him outside running around barefooted right he's like a he's like a fairy yeah um and uh so so I think that her understanding of being out in nature is a really important part of a child's education um so maybe if we took that to the extreme we could call that what some people call unschooling which is a philosophy which is when you're in school as we do it conventionally you're kind of killing the Wonder right so we need to get them out there where the Wonder comes alive and of course that is as Plato and Aristotle say the beginning of philosophy and as people reminds us it's also the sustaining fuel of philosophy you continue to wonder it starts you there and it keeps you going right till the end when you finally learn the stuff you wanted to know so being in nature is really important but then also coupled with that is reading reading and reading what they like to read and so I let I I put stuff forward for my son to read and he picks up of all the good selections that you throw at him anything you want it doesn't matter follow your own desires right that are good if they're good then just Stoke it Stoke it don't make them do one thing or another and I think that's a good philosophy for kids because they have different kids have different personalities and different interests and they need to be pushed right to be pursue excellence in whatever domain right at the same time they're learning the general things of virtue and being out in nature and wondering so I think I like that philosophy in a completely approve of of of what my wife and her her group of homeschool Co-op people are are doing yeah right so there's a lot of singing as well and a lot of dancing and those things to me are move to Steubenville yes I mean I think those are amazing parts of Education join us in the same Co-op every Tuesday they go into the Wilderness no dance and it's not it's not a thing where they they're like only Humanities and science isn't done because they have science too and they think that it's important to have all that yeah uh why in your estimation is Harry Potter not evil and not something that parents should necessarily uh keep their kids away from I mean you know you started talking my brother when he was here about that I mean he's the expert on that um I kind of came to Harry Potter late and so I'll I'll tell this story and I'll be I'll be a Harry Potter heretic um in in a in a way that we can laugh at us I remember when it first came I didn't read any of them I didn't really care about it because it was all about allegiance to Tolkien and people like comparing this to Tolkien I'm like no I was like a complete Tolkien nerd like this is not comparable I can't buy this and so I didn't read it and I remember that my my wife and his brother were reading them constantly as you know they were coming out and that the seventh book came out and I just went straight to the end and I knew the whole thing about you know Snape with everybody so I went straight to the end in red okay I haven't read it yet I didn't tell them the answer but I said I know what happens okay of course you know they they they naturally hated me for that okay um but then I actually when I married star star just absolutely loved Harry Potter she read Harry Potter illiterate woman I mean she reads Extreme More literate than a whole story and Dustin yes they're in a book club and they're reading all the great books I wish I could read them while they're reading Dante right now wonderful so um so so she read them all until so after we got married we read them all out loud and I really enjoyed it and then I saw of course all the movies and the movies in reading the books and hearing about the books for my brother and then from my friend Jared and his wife also read them and then my wife and I compared them with the movies and of course I love the movies and enjoy them but there's certain elements that are just not done to the book so I think that the books I would say this the books have a level of depth in their composition based on the form of their composition that is belied by the level of uh language in the books so the level of language is not like Tolkien so you open up Tolkien in the language is like archaic and high language the language itself is interesting but in this it's all just kind of normal old conventional language so that's not interesting but I think that belies right the depth of her composition of the plots and her the way she makes characters and again this is something that I've heard about I haven't read this like people have written about the kind of literary alchemy that she knew about and so I think there's a real serious depth in them right um that have levels of philosophical and Theological meaning that are really important and of course the the confrontation between good and evil right is Central and of course the priority of sacrificial love I mean I see the obvious Christianity behind it and so I think a lot of the complaints that I've seen lodged against it right to me seem like they're from people that that haven't really read it except there's one figure I think it was um Is It Michael O'Brien who wrote a book about that so I think so so if I remember my brother and talking with him and Jared and my wife is he's like the only person who has a sophisticated kind of attack all the other things that you hear from popular Catholic teachers and Priests and stuff to me our our people that didn't read or are ignorant of the story or don't look at these other deep levels so oftentimes the complaints to me seem surfacy like while this the the children are rebellious and that encourages Rebellion or there are spells and wizards and that but then they but then they like Tolkien and so I'm like that's a double standard I mean um or that these spells are are Latin and so that's sort of what like demons use or something I'm like okay um but yeah I mean I we look at Latin all the time oh the protagonists use there their magic yeah to do nefarious things because they're lazy or something yes I just think that to me to me there's no good argument that I've heard to get rid of it I think it has the good things and are far greater than any of the negative things that a people have mentioned so you could say that um Harry Potter doesn't need to be nearly as good as Tolkien to be okay enough to read exactly but obviously talking's the king is Superior in the standard and far above we just JK Rowling could dream of we just met Tom Bombadil last night in my reading with Peter yeah it's an amazing amazing part Fearless yes so fascinating and he comes right I mean just the the contrast between the evil Woods that are suffocating with Mary or Pippin or both and Along Comes Tom pomberdale who is he acts the way around the evil Forest the way Christ must act around the Demonic like it's not a problem yeah I know I love it it's great it's great it's so interesting I got when I was in high school I was a complete nerd on this stuff and I got I had like a talking Atlas right good and so all the lands like drawn maps and how long it would have taken them to to ride and it's like all amazingly consistent what he what he did there's a great uh YouTube channel called nerd of the Rings okay I would highly recommend people get out there's this great video I think it's got millions of views it's called what would have happened if Gandalf took the ring ah and it's done so well you know there's a tolkien's letters are really interesting he asks at one point there's a fan that asks him about um the failure of Frodo at the end and he and he has this amazing letter I forget what number they're all numbered in his letters I wish I remember the numbers I could tell you where to find it but he talks about what he calls the logic of the story and how he's like I didn't like make it this way like it made itself like I was sort of listening you know that kind of thing and he then he imagines what would have happened if things would have been different in the end right if there was a different kind of logic of the story um and that's a really fascinating element about the nature of story so if I was going to talk to Father Dave again about Tolkien I would talk about his famous essay right the on fairy stories and just everybody knows this is going to be an audio book this month on locals my friend.locals.com we've got an audiobook on that coming out awesome and so I think there's I think there's something deep deep deep in what Tolkien is doing and Louis both right I think they're restoring and again back to my franciscanism is they're restoring the importance of what Augustine and Bonaventure called Memoria that element of our kind of we would call it Consciousness which includes maybe subconscious like it's a bigger reality than we think of right and they're restoring I think the the importance of that to what they call the creative imagination or sub creation and so when we bring this stuff out of the depths right there's a lot of it that's that's connected right to the metaphysical and moral nature of reality itself that you can't get away from and when they're doing doing this in their imaginary worlds it creates a kind of depth and ability to see things right in our world so Tolkien talks about how this fantasy can tell the truth oh absolutely right that's why yeah when I put my head into a subpod novel or a video game or a movie I come out and ready to connect with the world again I guess when I read Tolkien I come out and I see the world as I should have been seeing it before I read Tolkien but I wasn't able to yes absolutely it's it's beautiful well it's a little bigger yeah so I think I think rolling I think I think she does fit into that camp but I don't think she she does what Tolkien does at that level because he talks about how we create you the point of this Fantasy for Adults is to create a secondary world that's believable at a certain in a certain way it's believable and I I feel like the way she has magic right in her world that's in the same world it's like the two worlds are a little too close right whereas with Tolkien it's like it's like our world in Aeons in the past in some other form of the earth is at a different shape right and so it's like far enough away where I think that makes it in a weird way more believable when it's too close it's less believable so I would I would say that about in some ways about Narnia too like in some ways it's it's less close than Roland so maybe like we have Tolkien it's it's far enough away from our Ordinary World that it's but it's still close enough metaphysically and morally that it's believable and then there's Lewis and then there's there's rolling yeah I mean that's me just no I like to shoot up but they get swept up into the other world yes um and being in the other world is crucial to being in a fantasy right yeah um so are you reading any books right now and we'll end on this question any good fiction you were written I used to read only philosophical theological books but I used to always go when I go to a bookstore that's exactly where I went and that's what I'd read but I would say the last six seven years all I want to read is fiction that's great I think that's I think I don't know if it is or not but that's just how literature is literature is very very philosophical because you're presented with a whole world yeah even even not a fantasy world so Tolkien in that book I mentioned by Baxter Jason Baxter about the medieval mind of sales talks about that he kind of toyed with this idea that one of the purposes or points of a good story or effects of a good story is um is its atmosphere or the world that it makes yeah so he for example just to illustrate I'm not necessarily agreeing with him didn't like the Three Musketeers because it was like all action right and when you look at some of them like The Hobbit movies for example they destroy the world that Tolkien made right the seriousness and depth of the world about the action kind of fun stuff going on which he actually predicted himself he said if they if they make shows of my thing this is what's going to happen the world will be lost right that metaphysical moral atmosphere so Lewis was saying that's one of the points or effects of good literature so I think when you encounter good literature you're put like crime and punishment's a great example I know you know love the Russians so so the the um that world where you're in raskolnikov's head right but you're also in this world where there's all these amazing characters right it's a or Notes From The Underground yes right those are the two I've read um beautiful and so you've got this environment this moral environment that's true and that's what's made by a good story and literature conveys that and I think that that's why it's so one of the reasons why it's so important and yeah so but to answer your question even though I just said all this stuff about literature right I've been I've been not reading much literature recently I just always ask my my wife for the cliff notes but I've read that I've been reading that book by Lewis I mean Baxter about Lewis and I've been listening to consolation of philosophy which to me was so beautiful and beautiful yeah um do you feel like there's some kind of parallels between the platonic and Franciscan tradition and the Aristotelian and to Mystic because I get the same level of excitement when I read say past skull yes Play-Doh yeah Bonaventure Anselm right I kind of put them in a category they're most I don't know what it is maybe I'm completely wrong but my feeling is similar yeah like they belong in their own story and it's more mystical whereas you've got Aristotle and Aquinas and these other thinkers who are very deliberate and uh more biological more scientific maybe I mean I think and then take it one step further you look at the Latin mass and that kind of feels more in the Aristotelian to Mystic tradition and how precise the whole thing is yeah whereas if you go to the east it's very yeah it's more circular round motherly yeah tumultuous less yeah you've got the Greek and the Latin right some of the highly ordered pristine maybe that's what I mean imagine Gregorian chant versus yeah Eastern you know they're very different but they're obviously both Chan yeah yeah but I know I know thinkers have made that basic okay that basic kind of camps right yeah Morrison but I like to always say that um after Aquinas to what degree everybody was aristotiling because he introduced that synthesis at that level everybody then was being trained using all of aristol's books yeah right for their their training and so everybody in some way like you know scotus has his own synthesis with aerosol I mean Occam has his own I mean everybody has some sort of use of Aristotle synthesizing in some way whereas Bonaventure definitely is sort of the the last great as they say the last great conservative but he did and one thing that my friend Jared does in his book is talk about how in the disputed questions on the mystery of the Trinity it's a book weirdly that was lost the second generation after Bonaventure and wasn't rediscovered until the 1800s and nobody had written an integral thesis on the book as a whole until Jared wrote this book oh wow right um but he deals with Aristotle the most in any text in that in that text of the of the disputed question the Mr eternity so he himself has a kind of encounter with all of Aristotle as well in his own way but you're right that when you look at that tradition back it's sort of more playtonic right um but again that's just rough broad yeah if someone wanted to get into The Franciscan intellectual tradition dip their toe in it where would they start what's a nice easy introductory I mean I think that I think that that little tiny book I gave you that's kind of my apostolate the the the primer on the absolute Primacy of Christ it's really short it's like the biblical passages the basic arguments right I think that's beautiful to give you the kind of theological Heart Of The Franciscan tradition I think if you've got that right then then you'll see the connection to all the other things and you'll have it you'll have it as a theological tradition in school rather than just this weird philosophical competitor to to Aquinas it's its own animal and its theology is the heart of it and so I think that would be a good start there's also a little book did you find that new did you find that primer on the absolute privacy and then there's a little book about scotus himself okay by Minelli is I think the author and it's just a tiny book again about who scotus is and there's a movie right about scotus I can't do I can't do it yeah I can't do any Catholic same movies yeah it's I try watching it after you told me about it yeah still couldn't do it yeah that might be a good way to introduce yourself to this guy though okay yeah and in that school I think so one of um Jared's Mentor his mentor was Father Peter Damien fellner yeah and so he has a translation of bonaventure's triple way which was bonaventure's spiritual theology um and I think that's a very beautiful text but it has a very the beginning part of it I want to say over 100 Pages maybe is it is felner's Introduction to the work but it serves as an introduction to The Franciscan yeah School itself that maybe is a little higher level but the text of The Bonaventure is this uh triple way is accessible and beautiful like there's a way he examines the conscience and the way he talks about how we move through the spiritual life which founder called the Summa of spiritual theology like a lot of other Mystics after bonamentary use this text um as their inspiration for their mystical and spiritual theology so those are a couple things maybe um that sounds great yeah thank you for being on the show sure appreciate having me I loved it yeah good me too

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 58,719

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: 9PLRatW-hME

Length: 184min 28sec (11068 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022