Spiritual Direction or Counseling? with Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

hello and welcome to pints of aquinas i am father gregory pine and um yeah it's great to be with you um so let's see things that are worthy of note um it's may it's month of may so it's uh our ladies month so i hope that has proven fruitful uh right yeah mother's day our ladies month all kinds of wild things going on um yeah i guess the feast of the ascension is tomorrow so tomorrow's the ascension thursday unless your diocese transfers it to ascension thursday sunday uh in which case you'll be celebrating a solemn act of time travel so god bless uh but i guess short of other interesting things with which i could prelude which you know there are many but they're not especially interesting they are things i suppose uh maybe we could just get right into the heart of it so i proposed for the topic of this live stream uh spiritual direction or counseling i think among i don't know if it's a lot of catholics but among some catholics there is a question as to whether this current problem that i am experiencing in my life uh be it something just difficult or traumatic i should actually apologize at the outset so i'm at the priory in philadelphia at st patrick's and they're having some work done on the second floor i'm on the third floor so we're all just going to share in this together okay so people experience something it's difficult they wonder whether or not they should address it in counseling or if they should address it in spiritual direction i thought i thought it'd be helpful just to kind of distinguish between the two maybe even bring confession into the mix as well so that way we're just more more clear on what it is that we need or how best to approach a problem so the first thing i would say is this um i think there is a tendency among some to compartmentalize spiritual problems uh and to abstract them from more generally human problems or maybe communication problems or things of that nature so the reason for which is maybe sometimes you have it in your mind like things are going well you know at work things are going well with my family things are going well you know dot dot dot but i'm not sure about my relationship with god and i think that sometimes we can kind of assign different aspects of our life to different boxes or to different compartments um and unless we have some sensible feel for our relationship with god we suspect that it's not as it could be or it's not going as well as it might i was having a conversation with a friend you know who's in marriage counseling and he was describing how like it's just been super fruitful for their marriage and a lot of a lot of grace come from that a lot of growth and he wonders okay if this is happening as a result of my kind of undertaking this work of marriage counseling might not i do something similar in my spiritual life and i guess maybe just to kind of address that at the outset um i don't i don't think that we should draw too clear or too clean cut of a distinction between our normal life as it were and our spiritual life or like our human life and our spiritual life i think that our whole life is shot through with elements of the spiritual life and i think that we do well to think about our lives um you know like kind of more of a peace or to think about our lives as more integrated and so the lord is addressing you the lord is loving you the lord is prompting you goading you whatever converting you through your friendships through your family through your work through your hobbies through how you spend time in leisure especially in prayer and things like that now mind you there are things that you might profitably address under that rubric right that don't necessarily fall into any other box um but still you know it's helpful to think about them along the lines of these other things or to to establish some analogies between the natural and the supernatural or between or among uh the kind of daily mundane otherwise uh otherwise what's the word i'm looking for not unexceptional not on i'm just gonna leave it okay so so yes i think it's helpful to think about it in those terms now um maybe to address again uh another uh another question at the outset because throat clearing is my middle name um i don't think that everyone needs a spiritual director okay i don't think that everyone needs a spiritual director and the reason for which i think is this um that you have what you need often right you have what you need to live a life well i think many of us are haunted by the fear that if we don't have a spiritual director we're sometimes or somehow missing out right like god has all these great gifts to give us but they can only really be gotten if we troubleshoot um the difficulties that we encounter in our lives uh with a spiritual director it's like he's got the key or he's got the um you know like the life hack which will permit us to address our problems which up until now we've only ever approached confusedly or even failed to address holy or entirely and i think that's just silly i think that god loves your destiny more than more than you do right so and god expresses a kind of provident concern for the fulfillment of your destiny and that he's working through you right god baptized or saw to it that you were baptized right god is operative in the grace that he poured out into your soul uh through sanctifying grace through the virtues through the gifts of the holy spirit um and and and god makes you a competent actor or agent i have no idea what's going on out there um big city i mean big sounds alright so god has made you competence to to exercise real control or real agency real stewardship in your life so i don't think that you everyone needs a spiritual director now but getting to the actual thing that i said i was going to say the distinction between spiritual direction right and counseling say you come across some difficulty how are you to know where the fault lines lie or how are you to make a distinction as to in which forum you should address this problem and i think here it's helpful to bring confession in the conversation just to set up what each discipline addresses so confession is for healing sin okay confession is for healing sin by the giving of grace so the sacramental sign of confession is you give your sins you give your contrition you give your intention to complete your penance right and the priest acting in the person of christ gives absolution that's what you bring to the sacrament that's the sacramental sign and the first effect of the sacrament is a deepening or growth in the virtue of penitence so a sorrow for a hatred for your sins with a deep kind of resolve for christian conversion and then the final effects of the sacrament of confession is the forgiveness of sin so the sacrament of confession is about sin that's not to say that we myopically focus on sin so it becomes like uh an exercise in self-flagellation or self-condemnation no i mean it's about the giving of grace but it's a grace tailored to healing from sin okay spiritual direction by comparison is about pursuit of christian perfection sin is part of that story right but the hope is to kind of get beyond habitual sin right so we'll talk about um saint thomas talks about beginners the the beginners the proficient and the perfect the latin words are incepientes proficientes at perfecti i think um and so he has the sense that one progresses in the spiritual life right through kind of like ranks as it were those ranks don't correspond to state of life it's not like you know lay people are beginners priests are proficient and religious are perfect it's not what he's saying this is something that's given to all uh namely the grace whereby to rise in the ranks of holiness okay and you'll hear this sometimes translated in the carmelite tradition or in the 20th century kind of masters of spiritual theology as the purgative way the illuminative way and the unitive way right and it's it's it's characteristic of the purgative way that um you're working on kind of rooting out habitual sin and growing in virtue and then of the illuminative way that you would exercise heroic virtue right and begin to kind of master infuse contemplation and then the unitive way would be characterized by dominance of the gifts of the holy spirit end of infused contemplation there's so much noise in this house it's incredible um okay so so spiritual direction is about the pursuit of christian perfection so when you think about the types of problems that you would present in spiritual direction oftentimes those are the types of problems where you're intense on growth and spiritual perfection but you're encountering some obstacles to that all right so like let's say that you have the desire to be recollected but you find it very exceedingly difficult to do so so in the context of spiritual direction you might do some troubleshooting right your spiritual director might say i want you to set an alarm for mid-morning and mid-afternoon and take five minutes at those times to think about the lord i want you to monitor internet use right i want you not to look at your phone until after morning prayer and not to look at your phone after compliment right so that way you are more so recollected your first thoughts are directed to the lord your last thoughts are directed to the lord i want you to introduce some penances into your life because i think that bodily indulgence like eating whenever you're hungry and things like that have actually made you weak soft distracted so i want you to kind of remove some of those things so that way you might be more geared to the pursuit of christian perfection so those would be the types of things that you would kind of surface in spiritual direction now counseling therapy psychology psychiatry to kind of lump them all together which i realized and what not ought to do but given the fact that this is just a thumbnail sketch please forgive me in so doing i think there you're talking more about um behavioral and cognitive obstacles to just kind of basic human flourishing so the person made to the image and likeness of god has kind of natural and supernatural dimensions to their pursuit of happiness right and natural and supernatural happiness don't always track right but sometimes there are serious obstacles in the natural order which make it very difficult to flourish both naturally and supernaturally okay um so like addiction might be one of them for instance where it's it's of a such um an acute sort that it kind of like overrides voluntarity right maybe you had a choice at the outset um whether it be something like drug abuse or something like that you know you had you had a choice at the outset but then very very quickly after it becomes um you know so so compelling or so addictive that there's really very little will willingness voluntority there you go there's a sweet now uh to be spoken of so something like that right you're addressing a behavioral uh problem that really really makes it difficult to flourish as a human being but there are also cognitive problems that make it really difficult to flourish as a human being um so you can think here a particular mode of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy where they try to acknowledge different modes of maladaptive thinking so you might catastrophize you see like bad thing and you think this is devastating or you might negative think in the sense of like you render everything in its worst possible form like this person turned this way because they saw me coming and they associated me with like the smell of eggs or sardines or whatever okay um or you know there are a variety of other ways in which so i think spiritual direction is geared towards christian perfection and oftentimes it's about tailoring thought and behavior towards that end right but it's it's more so focused on ascent as it were whereas um counseling therapy things like that are more so focused on ground clearing and they typically approach it from a natural perspective so you want both to kind of stay in their lane so you want your your spiritual director to think about supernatural things and not kind of like get into a sort of malpractice where he or she prescribes you know what would be proper to a psychiatrist or a psychologist because okay they were kind of getting into the medical arts and you need real training for for that you need real training for both in fact um whereas when it comes to um counseling therapy psychiatry psychology uh if somebody were to like you know you were to go to a medical doctor um to see them about some uh issue pertaining to mental health and that you know that doctor said you know i want you to read these scripture verses that might be like a little bit strange right because this person is treating you as a whole human being right but they're but they're typically approaching it from a natural perspective and while they're all supernatural ways in which you know a therapist psychologist psychiatrist psychologist can kind of interface with his or her patient you kind of want them to stay in their zone of proper competence okay so i hope that's somewhat helpful um maybe next time i'll ask the question whether everyone needs a spiritual director because that's also a topic that comes up with some frequency okay so now i'm going to reframe myself in the picture and i am going to start answering questions so the first question comes from a patreon patron and i'm going to scroll and then i'm going to ask it i've been thinking the sounds in this house that's a that's a that's a table saw i think or a circular saw that's great um i've been thinking lately on the vice of sloth or achadia and i have more frequently noticed at play in my life being overwhelmed by the demands of love how should one safeguard against this vice and build momentum as it were and perseverance so excellent question an excellent question pertaining to the vice of sloth or acadia so you know there are these seven deadly sins or seven capital vices as they're sometimes called and they're called capital signifying head because from those vices issue a variety of other daughter vices so in the case of a chatty what you have is a kind of sadness with respect to her vis-a-vis spiritual goods because you see them as somehow unattainable so it's a torpor of soul that arises as a as an effect of despair as an effect of like kind of having given up so for instance i'm writing a doctoral dissertation which is a big project and it's difficult to establish whether one or how well one is progressing because like in the initial stages for instance you're just like reading a lot and then taking notes and you don't necessarily see a finished product like i've generated i don't know like 1200 pages of notes at this point it's like okay have i done anything well i'm scheduled to basically be writing my first chapter now and i'm supposed to finish on june 11th so that'll give me like a kind of benchmark all right which is good you know super helpful because once you're done one out of five then you have a sense of scope but i think a lot of doctoral candidates get kind of caught up in teaching classes and trying to make ends meet and then you know like the the research maybe the writing gets deferred uh from month to month and year to year and then in those moments you you begin to see the goal as unrealizable and that that incites a kind of sadness uh or it makes it so that the thought of the project itself becomes depressing and you wish that you had never begun and it's those moments where you can even begin to undertake a variety of tasks and be be living in a way that's kind of frantic or frenetic or very engaged or active but it actually signifies a deeper sadness and torpor um so so how then does one motivate a greater love for the divine good for for spiritual good such that this type of a chatty doesn't creep in crawl in creep crawl do all kinds of do all kinds of things um well i think a kind of simplicity of heart is one of the basic prescriptions namely that um you know like in moments where achadia threatens uh oftentimes it's in those moments where it requires of you a sort of simple discipline right to say i can't right to say no so like for instance i'm a doctoral candidate and do some things on the side but i say no to a variety of things even though those things are very great excellent worthy apostolic projects and often have me involved with wonderful people which is just on a human level far more delightful than sitting at my desk for x number of hours a day but um yeah a kind of simplicity about the task to say like this is the task and this task need be undertaken until it's done and then we can reevaluate at that point um and i think that our spiritual lives have a uh have a kind of priority or they they exercise a kind of um principled or um they exercise the kind of principle of importance in our lives that that demand of us that you know and so i think i think sometimes we feel like we have to say yes to things until unless we have a really good or compelling reason to say no and i think that's just not the case i think that's just not the case and you don't have to give people an explanation as to why you say you know you can say no like do you want to do this thing on a weeknight which will involve you being up late drinking alcohol and probably feeling less than excellent the next day no why well because you want to pray the next morning and you want that prayer to be devout and given to the lord that doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be super efficacious because kind of god dictates the efficacy of prayer but it means that you want to show up in such a way so as to be well disposed for it oftentimes when it comes to perseverance i think the easiest solution is sleep not because like you know we should be idolaters of sleep but because i think that like sleep kind of helps us to focus like that question of why i said like a couple times in a sense i don't i'm i'm not a fan of that all right um it helped us to it helps us to focus the question of why why am i doing the things that i do why do i find it difficult to set boundaries why do i find it difficult to say no to people why am i so easily overwhelmed by my task why do i often comport myself in a way that's characterized by sadness and despair okay well i think that you know a very simple question to ask is am i sleeping enough all right and that focuses what am i about what am i doing where am i going okay i'm kind of blathering at this point so i'm gonna pass on two the next question the next question this is actually a question sent into god's planning but i'm taking this opportunity to answer it because it is quicker than writing an email all right from hold out media um if god's will is always done either actively or passively why do we pray to change his mind or why does he require our participation for example if we pray to save a child who was born prematurely would not god save or not save the child's life based on his will rather than our prayers isn't everything according to god's will whether we pray or not i'm not against prayer but i wonder about the issue thanks and god bless all right that's an excellent question and answer that question i have a variety of thoughts one so matt and i co-authored a book called marion consecration with aquinas and we addressed this question at length in that book so you might check that out um the next thing and i think you could probably view a lot of it for free on amazon i mean like i suppose you should buy things too but yeah just check it out um so yes so this this gets into the question of secondary causes so god can bring about all effects natural and supernatural directly without the interposition of secondary causes that'd be like us okay but god chooses to give being to give life to give intelligence to give grace through secondary causes so god chooses that we be born of parents god chooses that sacraments be communicated through sensible signs god chooses that a variety of his gifts be communicated through secondary causes and the question is why not because god needs those things for one but rather because god sees it as good right god gives it because it dignifies the created order so think about just in terms of grace and when it comes to grace we're not only passive recipients of grace but now we become agents of grace we become actual instruments in the giving of grace and that dignifies us insofar as it makes us more like god who is the author of grace so in the case of prayers god wills that some effects come about as the fruit of prayer that's not because he needs those prayers in order to bring those things about nor does it mean that our prayers actually change his mind they don't nothing changes god because god is unchanging but rather god chooses to use those prayers so that the effect be brought about not as simply as a result of god's sovereignty but also as a result of our love of our devotion so you can see i mean the very positive benefit of that is that um when something good comes about it's like the fruit of a community not just of a god laid up as heavens but a god who implicates himself in the lives of those whom he loves so god wills that certain things come about as the fruit of the prayer of the saints because because it's good because it makes the saints good because those who benefit from those prayers are able to appreciate those not only things that god has god has given but those whom god has given um yeah in a kind of beautiful and subtle way so yeah i hope that's uh i hope that's helpful if it's not i failed you uh okay so i've scrolled to the top hi father gregory what's up mark j says first what's up okay um kingdom productions hi father gregory i heard you say once that god doesn't suffer in his divinity this notion seemed to divide deny the hypostatic union since christ clearly suffered are you saying god the father doesn't suffer great question so um god doesn't suffer god doesn't suffer period except in a qualified sense so the place where st thomas actually will talk about this at the level of language is in turkey parts question 16 the pertinent doctrine is called the communication of idioms so when we talk about our lord jesus christ we have to be careful whether we're speaking about the human nature or about the divine nature so we can say for instance that you know like with respect to his humanity our lord jesus christ suffers but we cannot say with respect to his divinity that our lord jesus christ suffers mind you we can say god suffers because when we say god we're pointing to the one concrete subject so our lord jesus christ is a divine person the second person of the most blessed trinity and he subsists in divine and human natures so by virtue of the hypothetic union which is a grace given his his human nature is united to his divine nature in the person of the word okay that itself is a grace that itself is a creation um so we can use certain words to point at that one concrete existing subject and we can attribute to that concrete existing subject things that transpire in both human and divine natures so we can say god dies for instance but with the particular understanding that god dies in his humanity insofar as the divine person is unchanged by that event but christ's body and soul are separated right and while both of those remain united to the person of the word saint thomas has an extended discussion actually about that in turtsia pars i want to say question 50 or 51 50 i think so right it's not to deny the hypostatic union to say that god doesn't suffer it's to affirm something that is true of god in his essence and saint thomas will affirm this in the prema pars so it's question three is about simplicity question four is about perfection five and six are about goodness it's somewhere in seven to 11 unchanging eternity might be seven question seven on god's immutability which would make eight about eternity which would make yeah i think so i think it's question seven about divine immutability yeah i think that's it so you can check out those questions there or those articles in that question and that should speak to some of it if you need more on that matter there's a great uh video from aquinas 101 so it would call i think it's called the logic of the incarnation and i gave it so just google pine uh logic of the incarnation aquinas 101 and it should come up uh jeremy gerd says you look like my cousin cheers uh what's the difference between scrupulosity and a sensitive conscience that question's actually been asked recently so it wasn't last week nor was it the week before but i think it was three weeks ago so check out the live stream from uh yeah the second to last wednesday in um april hi father thoughts on attending the invalid wedding of a not practicing catholic relative it would cause a lot of drama not to attend okay so i'm not going to tell you what to do necessarily because it's not in my business in a certain sense but also because there are a lot of particular circumstances and so i think it's it's good to have an extended conversation with somebody kind of like local with your local priest but what i will say is this i i mean in most cases you are permitted to do so the operative principles when it comes to answering this question is um sin and then scandal okay so you don't want to sin and you don't want to cause scandal of a grave nature or sort so there's a difference between for instance um attending a wedding of two catholics in the catholic church neither of whom are practicing okay so that's okay one thing and then let's say of two catholics not practicing outside of the catholic church okay so that's a different thing let's say um maybe two persons of same-sex attraction one or two of whom are members of your family or catholics who are getting married outside the church so those would be like different phenomena for instance all right and whenever you attend something you convey on it some i don't know uh approval or approbation or maybe to use more remote language you condone it in a certain sense okay um so you're you're you're making a decision it's based on your kind of your prudence on the matter you're trying to love but you're also trying to uphold justice you're not wanting to sin and you're not wanting to cause scandal so are you known publicly as a very catholic person who has talked to them about this decision and has expressed deep regret or deep reservations okay so that might factor into it for instance okay like i like almost couldn't attend that wedding i don't know if i could um so if it's of two baptized catholics being married married outside of the catholic church i don't think that i could actually attend it i'm not sure what the pertinent legislation would be or where i'd find it in the code of canon law but i know someone to ask and i would have i would have my response soon so that's like okay because i'm a public person in the church in a way that you're not necessarily not just because of like vesture but by virtue of ordination um so right you want to do everything in your power to try to encourage these people to return to the practice of the faith to try to be married uh in a catholic wedding a valid a valid mass because you know unless they are then they are you know they're not married and as a result of which the rights conferred on the married are not conferred on them so um yeah and then and then like with your own set of circumstances like are you married do you have children what do you want to teach your children how are you communicating this to your children and then can you draw a distinction between attending the wedding or attending the reception or attending as a whole family one part or the other part or maybe you get how are kind of like rolling it out at this point especially and eloquently uh god bless so i think that um i think that you want to kind of walk through all of those things with somebody local so sin and scandal all of the different pertinent circumstances where this kind of registers uh on that spectrum that i described like you know getting married in the church outside of the church something that would be more you know contrary to the natural law like a same-sex union and um and then yes uh yeah i mean it may very well be the case that there was cause a lot of waves in your family's life if you weren't to attend but i mean you you weren't brought into the world to keep the peace you know you were brought in the world to preach jesus christ and him crucified and so i think that those waves while initially traumatic and making your life difficult they might also be an occasion of deep conversion and i'm not saying that they they will necessarily be but i think when a lot of people ask this question they ask this question like just tell me that i'm allowed to go which i think is a good enough question to ask just kind of on a basic level but i think that what the big big question that you want to ask is how do i witness to them how do i best witness to them and how do i best love them right because love comes in a variety of shapes and sizes and it will depend on the setting and the circumstances and you want to be a witness in such a way that your witness can be received you don't want to bludgeon them with witness but you also don't want to withhold that witness for fear of what might come about so i'm sorry that's not especially helpful or concrete but you can use those principles and then chat them through with uh with someone close okie doke um hi father my question is this why doesn't god make his existence more obvious like blatantly obvious so no one would even question excellent yeah yeah yeah so that's a great question i actually wrote a blog post this this is um an objection that's often lodged by atheists it's called the problem of divine hiddenness or the objection of divine hiddenness there's a great article by travis dumsday in the american catholic philosophical quarterly on this and then i wrote a blog post and i don't remember what it's called but if you just search pine divine hiddenness it'll probably come up and this is also um this was raised in the debate that i had on this channel with ben watkins so in my closing statement i talk about it in a special way but the idea is this that um god intends us as free persons to come to him freely and i think that god reveals himself in a way that's subtle veiled sometimes obscure and difficult because it's the way by wes the best way by which to call forth um a genuine free response from a genuinely free creature so god uh does not overwhelm us or god does not exercise a kind of violence upon our sensibilities but rather he allures us right he he draws us into the desert as the old testament prophet speak about it or as the prophet um i guess as jeremiah says you seduced me o lord and i let myself be seduced you sometimes hear it rendered as duped uh but the word there cedutra is just to lead to oneself the lord leads us to himself in the way that is best attuned to us as thinking choosing human beings because i mean the lord did prove himself manifestly to many of his contemporaries and they still chose to reject him so it's not merely a matter of overrawing us it's a matter of appealing to us a matter of revealing to us and the way best suited to command our ascents but to command it in such a way that it sticks so that's a great question jeremy walkenford says what exactly does it mean to be sealed with the holy spirit and how does this play in the sacraments of initiation yeah good question so one would observe this in the sacraments i think you see it most in the sacraments that are only conveyed once and they confer a character so that's baptism confirmation and holy orders so to be sealed in the holy spirit uh on a basic physical level it means to be anointed either with the oil of catechumens or the oil of chrism okay and you see that in the baptismal right before the baptismal ablution one is sealed with the oil aquatic humans on the chest and then after when it's sealed with the oil of chrism on his or her forehead and then in confirmation when it's sealed with charisma on the forehead again and then in ordination was sealed with christmas on his hands what does that signify well it's an anointing in the old testament anointings are associated with priests with prophets with kings so it's a communication of graces and baptism uh the graces of divine adoption of spiritual sonship uh of kind of participation in the divine family and with that comes the capacity to worship to offer sacrifice and then in confirmation it's strengthened right so it's fortified all the grace virtues gifts of the holy spirit that you get at baptism are redoubled in confirmation as one is brought to the matureness or fullness of mature age uh and to a kind of place of spiritual soldiery so i think saint augustine talks about how you use oil you know to kind of like massage athletes uh to strengthen them from their weak limbs uh and even to heal them from their wounds so so their anointing signifies a kind of entrance into or perfection of spiritual soldiery um so it's a kind of signing with a sacred signing with this this symbol this this um you know visible element that communicates the spiritual reality and then in you know ordination uh whether pre-served bishops you have this fuller participation in christ's priesthood so not only are you disposed now to receive divine things but also to give divine things in the sacrifice of the mass and the communication of the sacraments and a kind of peculiar or manifest or excellent expression of this preaching charism this revelatory capacity things like that so to be sealed with the holy spirit means to be anointed to partake in the identity of the messiah messiah just means the anointed one right christ christos and it means specifically after this threefold gift of priests prophet and king which is communicated sacramentally and you know kind of conduces to worship the receiving of divine things and in certain sense the giving of divine things woot city all right question father is it okay to be friends with someone who disagrees with most of your beliefs but are willing to talk and debate about it to find the truth oh yeah absolutely um i'm just going to go ahead and say yes uh grayson adler says hi father upon my question is if you had only a couple of minutes to explain to someone why you were a catholic over other religions and christian denominations what would you say thanks yeah um so it would depend on the person i think when you only have a few minutes it's easy to sound triumphalistic so you can answer that question in all kinds of senses like aristotle says you've got these four different causes and you can you can answer with respect to all four different causes so like materially i am the son of barry and regina pine who are baptized catholics and they chose to bring me to the font on september 11 1988. that's that's why i'm catholic right so i that for me that wasn't a conscious choice i wasn't like yo ma i've been thinking about these other christian denominations and i want you to weigh your options before you bring me to the font i didn't say that because i was two months old okay so material cost well think about it formal cause why am i this instead of that it's because i was i mean i was given these sacraments so the sacraments make you to be a catholic and as a result of which i am so the church of christ subsists in the catholic church says lumengencium 8 and it contains the fullness of those elements of grace and salvation which conduce to divine life and i was you know initiated signed sealed with those sacraments i think i've received all of them except for marriage um so yes so that's a formal cause that's me that's what makes me to be what i am when you talk about the efficient cause i mean you would just say like because the spirit prompted me as such um you know my parents exercised some agency and that but also god did because god called me and led me and confirmed me in this thing but then with respect to final cause i think that there is some way in which you can make comparative claims and certainly lumen gentium does so check out lumenegencium paragraph 8 and i want to say 16 specifically right because this gives me all that i need in abundance to live a divine life right and to mount on wings of eagles to the heights of heaven so um yeah i think that's that's a basic description and uh yeah there are historical reasons obviously for which i think that christ founded the catholic church i think there's abundant scriptural and traditional testimony to that effect uh which would set it apart from orthodoxy with respect to protestantism i think that protestantism is a reaction as it were or it's like it's it's a it's a claim that's established over and against catholicism and there's no real kind of mutuality or there's no real um parity between the claims leveled by catholicism and protestantism like protestantism it doesn't seem to me makes sense uh without catholicism in the way that catholicism makes sense without protestantism that's a maybe that's a controversial claim but we can pick that up later if you would like to if you would like to so i go i mean yeah let's leave it at that all right erock5b let's go says fatherpine is it a sin to invest in the stock market or to maintain a 401k particularly if the companies do not engage in practices that go against the teaching catholic teaching thoughts on this no it's not you know it's it's fine i mean like you're just living in a market economy um so certainly it's it's considered a sin to lend at interest uh antecedent to a market economy you know like usury is warned against because not only are you charging for the thing you're charging for the use of the thing this is money right but money i mean the thing i mean possession of the thing entails its use as it were because it does you nothing um if you're not using it antecedent to a market economy but in a market economy i mean you don't need to use it and it's still fruitful right it multiplies depending on your your interest rate so no it's it's completely 100 ethically sound to to benefit from a market economy but i think it's good that you raise the question um i think it's good that you raise the question about doing so ethically so i think there are a lot of places in which one might invest which are not ethical and i think that you want to steer clear of that um yes and you're praying for an injury thanks i appreciate that yeah so you mentioned cross-country running a few weeks back i mentioned an injury yeah knee injury bummer and you're praying for that so i'm grateful um okay dmt course says what would have happened if the virgin mary refused her vocation that's a wild question i like that question um so our lady obviously is a free person god moves her freely to consent to the grace which he offers at the annunciation and she can sense freely but does she have the power to demur does she have the power to deny to reject that offer of grace yeah in a radical way she does whether in the actual instance she could have exercised that i that's that's a thorough theological question uh but i think that yes at the very root of it you know kind of radically she retains that that not right but that capacity of no listen what would have happened i think that god would have disposed other means when you think about it the incarnation is premised on a denial so adam and eve's denial so god's original plan was good god's subsequent plan in christ is better but had the blessed virgin mary said no i think that god would have come up with a with a different plan whether it would have been better or worse by comparison i don't know they were competent to actually make that assessment but it would have been good because god only permits evil to befall if he can bring from it some good um okay i'm gonna skip repeat questions just to see if i can get to more people um but with respect to adam and his sin and injustice check out a uh a lecture that i gave called um unoriginal sin for the the mystic institute it's on youtube and i think i addressed that question hello father i was wondering how is christ the altar other than victim and priest i often hear that often in the preface of the mass thank you cheers um i don't i don't know maybe perhaps insofar as christ is the the place in which sacrifice is offered so i know that in let's see romans 3 verses 21 through 26 there's this discussion of expiation or satisfaction and you have a word there hilasterion which refers to the kind of yeah the nature of this sacrifice which christ offers and some people render it as expiation some people render it in another way propitiation i want to say but some people just render it as mercy seat because there's a kind of appeal there to the ark of the covenant which would have been in the temple uh you know the first temple and that was a place on which the the sacrifice of atonement was offered once a year on yom kippur and um so that's the kind of meaning place as it were of god and man where a fitting sacrifice is offered now some of the language attributed to the mercy seat is then kind of transposed and applied to christ because christ is the meeting place of god and man in his very flesh but then by virtue of his sacrifice more so or yet more fully so sometimes you'll hear it the cross referred to as the altar or is the mercy seat but sometimes you'll just hear that language attributed to christ himself so there you go greetings from ecuador what's up buen dia hello father what would be the domestic response to person continuity or perseverance are we still the same person we were a year ago yes because it's the same soul the soul possesses the body or contains the body and the soul makes a thing to be what it is boom finn dunsite says hi father pine is it possible to avoid purgatory and go straight to heaven many thanks finn i think the answer is yes certainly saint perez thought so um and that would just entail making satisfaction for all of the punishment associated with sin here on earth and yeah you can you can um what do you call them plenary indulgence you can obtain plenary indulgences for those who have died and for yourself for a little more on indulgences i think i recorded a video with ascension presents on that i don't know if it's come out yet but if it hasn't stay tuned uh gleaming flute says father you rock i have a question can men and women be friends what's up great question i'm just like making recommendations of myself which is not something that i would otherwise recommend um but i gave a talk about that called can men and women be friends and it's on the internet so pine men women friends search it it's on youtube uh okay catholic dramatica says skoda said that there was only a formal distinction scotus explained this by using the separability criterion what are the effects of this view for example on divine simplicity why was he wrong dude that is that is serious um so i guess you're referring to the distinction between essence and existence um and whether so i don't know scotus that well uh and if i were to give a response right now i would probably misrepresent his thought so i'm gonna beg off and say sorry i am weak i am poor i am limited and i do not know um what a coincidence i was just thinking about if i should have spiritual director i have doubts and questions and as you read about the saints they often had directors especially in monasteries yeah so i think that maybe next week i'm just going to do a video on whether you need a spiritual director spoilers i think the answer is often no okay um julio cesar says is there an immorality of donating organs once one has passed so the catholic church i think is actually pronounced on this uh in recent years and it raises alarm about certain organs like gonads for instance um and it says it seems to suggest that it's permissible to donate others but father romanesari has weighed in on this theme so so search cesario organs uh catholic and i think that you'll find some good resources um there you go hi father how should we go about practicing the virtue of charity i can't help but feel that there must be a deeper way beyond doing stuff for others yeah that's so that's a good question um so uh i contribute to a podcast called godsplaining and we did a series called back to virtue during lent this year and the third episode is on charity because we did the theological virtues and then the cardinal virtues so i would say check that out also for aquinas 101 there's a good episode on charity and then i gave a talk that's on the mystic institute podcast called reasons of the heart which is it's just a description of love um in the sense of like amor d'alexio at caritas so it's like a description of love um beginning with a natural analogy so those would be uh those would be good good places to go but one thing i would simply say is this that the charity is about the good and it's about communion and the good charity isn't about like being altruistic like denying yourself and then forcing yourself to be generous to other people it's about discovering something that's big bold and beautiful and then giving yourself to it and then finding others along the way who can commune with you in that good and doing what with you know like kind of what's within your power your god-given power and grace uh to bring that about so yeah break down this false distinction between egoism and altruism and abide more in this understanding that it's the good that is of uh primary and principle importance okay all right next v2zui says we distinguish looking at women for beauty versus for loss but it's impossible for men to abstract sex appeal from the evaluation of beauty so how is it possible to contemplate women beauty without lust great question um i don't actually know that i have a good answer this um what would i say well it's like yeah the difference between art and pornography it's kind of hard to pin down at certain limit cases but uh people will like they'll often say you know it when you see it and i think so too when it comes to like appreciating for beauty and then appreciating for lust um so lust is a sin which means that it entails some knowledge some consent and some grave matter so so in the case of woman it will involve some objectification and it can be easier to do that for a man when a woman is like strange other foreign because a man has a has a way by which of um what would one say elaborating maybe on what he sees so like when you watch a horror movie it's far more terrifying when you don't see the bad guys than when you do because your imagination supplies uh for what is not present and so too when it comes to like lustful thoughts i think there's a kind of objectification that that entails that that entails which loses sight of the concrete person in front of you but when you start talking to them and engaging with them and for it like kind of forming a friendship with them oftentimes that's humanizing and that brings you back down to earth so i would say um yeah it's just kind of it's kind of hard to draw that distinction uh when it comes to strangers and there you just talk simply about like custody of the eyes it's just like a kind of simple discipline of not lingering long but you know all the while not treating women as if they were like temptresses or seductresses like they're trying to ensnare you as it were but i think that like at the most basic level this just kind of it cashes out in friendship you can be friends with some women and then those relationships you want to be modest you want to be chased you want to be kind of sober and your understanding of your own weakness and of hers etc i hope that's helpful okie dokie um so pops uh paz picked southern miss let's go says so my six-year-old asked me a question that caught me off guard is if god is all-powerful why doesn't he just kill satan right so god permits satan to continue in existence because even even satan's rebellion or violence visited against the divine plan uh can be used unto a good end so that god can use the temptation of the evil one to test the saints uh to call forth from them deeper virtue um to initiate them into a yet more perfect relationship and dependence upon him a greater exercise of the divine life so god only permits satan to continue subject to his providence and within the context of his plan um okey-dokey uh okay snufkin says father pine thanks for your prior advice to me transitioning atheist 32 to start praying i've been praying daily and have started attending church any further thoughts for a new kid on the block yes that's awesome next thing i would say is like get into your body so if you live in a place where you can get close to like a soup kitchen with the missionaries of charity work with people work like alongside christians who believe and who love because i think that's contagious um so oftentimes if we if you approach christianity as if it were like an ethical choice or a lofty idea wait a second is he quoting davis caritas as one oh yeah if we approach it in that way it can be like a thought experiment but it's an incarnational religion as pope benedict continues in that same document uh it's the result of an event an encounter uh which imparts to life a new horizon and a decisive direction so i think it's good to like get involved in christian community and christian charitable works and things like that not simply to say like do good stuff uh but like be involved with people who believe and who love um and try to yeah like cultivate real friendships because i think that that uh that puts flesh on the bones which it is evident that the lord has kind of begun to work in your life the lord has begun to work bones in your life if you if you rewind and unpack the grammar of that sentence you will find that it makes no sense all right sam piasecki says i'm thinking of being an fssp priest but i don't really know how to go to ford i'm an altar server i pray a good bit and i'm trying i keep a little bit and i am trying to keep learning what i what what do i do next i'm a teenager i would say next thing would be so you're a teenager um depending on what kind you know if you're 13 that's one thing if you're 19 that's another thing but i think that going to mass is good right obviously and praying is good i think that you just kind of begin to move in the direction of a priestly spirituality so for instance priests pray the liturgy of the hours you might incorporate the the office of morning prayer into your routine that's a kind of simple way to approach it altar serving is great i loved altar serving when i was getting ready to enter the dominicans because it's like just awesome to be close to the altar of sacrifice there's a kind of joy uh to be near uh god's offering of himself so yes that's good so yeah altar serving attending mass praying liturgy to the hours is a good thing another thing that i would say is like um just good christian community so i think that those priests do best who have good friends and those priests do worse who don't because oftentimes it's a temptation to loneliness uh to anxiety to yeah like a kind of abiding sadness which many priests struggle with and then they resort to kind of addictive behavior with like alcohol or pornography or things like that so i think it's you want to cultivate friendships god is calling you in communion to communion and so that communion ought to be evident at every uh at every stage of your life um gabby montagno says is there such a thing as a spiritual director who's a therapist because that would be perfect yeah i think there are but i would i would assume that they are few and far between um yeah let's okay guys we're cooking got a few more minutes left so let's let's i'm going to try to get some new people in philip schonetsky says regarding the filioque is there also an argument to be made that the sun proceeds from the father and the holy spirit as it is through the power of the holy spirit that mary conceives um so no uh you you don't often hear that said uh so you'll sometimes hear it said that the holy spirit proceeds either from the father and the son or from the father through the sun as a way that's more palatable to eastern christians sometimes but you don't hear it said that that the sun proceeds from the holy spirit because there's an order to those processions uh so the father begets the son and the father and the son breathe forth the holy spirit and that's really just um a response to the scriptural language you have christians who come back you know we'll who come later and uh give an explanation as to why and one of the analogies is the procession of word and love that you get from augustine which is not an explanation but it's a it's a helpful analogy for understanding what's at stake and he says that basically you can't know what you don't love so there's a priority that we accord to um you know the procession of the word uh vis-a-vis the procession of love so the procession of the sun the image the word the logos is antecedent to not in the temporal order right not even in a well it's hard to say but just in the simple sense that the son is from the father and the holy spirit is from the father and the son eternally right they don't cause there's no cause in the trinity but there is principality there is origin uh from which arises distinction from which arises relation again not temporally but just in a principled way and so there is a kind of priority to the to the father vis-a-vis the son insofar as the father is unbegotten and the father excuse me the son is begotten of the father and then there's a kind of priority of father and son vis-a-vis the holy spirit because they breathe forth the holy spirit and the holy spirit proceeds forth from so there you go um jose prado says what are your thoughts on receiving on the tongue versus receiving on the hand so yeah good question so the church permits receiving on the hand um but uh that doesn't necessarily mean that it's on equal footing with receiving on the tongue so receiving on the tongue would have been you know customary in the catholic church not only customary but the only option for many many years prior to the second vatican council and then developments subsequent to um yes so yeah i think that they were they were kind of bound by our experience of history um and that were bound by the church's tradition and practice i think you could think think like a similar thing with respect to whole body barrel versus um cremation uh because we believe in the resurrection of the body we treat dead bodies corpses with a certain care with a certain solicitude and i think that that informs the practice of whole body burial like when you see what happens in a cremation it's it's it's harrowing you know mind you do do whole bodies buried decay they do but still what you do with the body matters and so i think it's it's just as much about the body of the deceased as it is about those who care for him or her um so so too with the reception on the hand reception on the tongue i think that there is a priority to be accorded to reception on the tongue so reception on the hand is permissible i'm not saying that it ought to be outlawed am i not saying that hard to say um but i think that the reasons for which are this that it the the language or the like the kind of language of the body of reception is more clear with receiving on the tongue uh because you just receive right you just receive uh whereas when you receive on the hand that act looks a lot like self-communication which is forbidden right so you are receiving it in a certain sense but this final stage looks like self-communication i think what i think it looks like what a thing signifies matters right obviously we think that because sacraments matter um and then so too with respect to uh the possibility of desecration i just think like you don't have to worry about crumbs when it's placed in your tongue whereas when it's placed on your hands you do and also i find that the incidence of dropping the blessed sacrament when you communicate people on the hand is is harder to ensure against that um sorry i shouldn't use the word desecration because that entails like an intentional misuse of the sacrament um what i'm thinking here more is just like yeah like basically jesus falling on the ground um and so yeah what people often present you moving targets with their hand or they kind of try to grab for the sacrament i'm like i'm like making hand gestures but below the cameras that's not really helpful so i think that the tongue is easier especially when the person's kneeling because it's just it's a fixed target and i find that it's easy not to touch someone's tongue when it's a fixed target but with hands i often i often find that when i'm communicating people on on the hand especially during the pandemic that i touch them more regularly when i communicate them on the hand than what i do on the talk which is paradoxical so for all those reasons i think that communion on the tongue is to be preferred to communion on the hand communion on the hand is still permissible right dot dot dot that's my full answer there you go um i love the ordinary background hey thanks yeah there's like a an old air conditioning unit there um okay are you still in austria are you planning on coming to vienna anytime soon i'm not in austria and i'm not planning to come to vienna anytime soon sorry um ryan pope says can i tell my wife i need to take a break from the kids to get more sleep good luck uh jacob wilms says hello father pine and i just skipped a billion so i'm gonna scroll back up um i'm supposed to read this one does beauty convert with being says andrew villalobos wow via lobos what is that city of the wolves cheers um so saint thomas aquinas says no the reason for which is this and we're going to end this here hour with some obscure metaphysics because why not so the transcendentals name these aspects of reality which transcend all the categories so the categories would be like substance and then the nine categories of accidents which would be like quality quantity relation time place posture habit action and passion or yeah so those would be like the different ways in which you can describe which correspond to the different ways in which a thing can be all right but the transcendentals transcend all of those categories so in all those categories we have being unity truth and goodness being just signifies being right uh unity means a kind of transcendental in division so everything that is has a kind of integrity to it truth signifies that it is addressed to an intellect or it is knowable and then goodness signifies that it is addressed to an appetite or it is desirable so all things that are are you know they exhibit being unity truth and goodness and then we ask that question about beauty uh is beauty a transcendental or is beauty convertible with good and st time it says no and the reason he says is because it's not just something that's that's there by virtue of the fact that it is rather beauty signifies a kind of preponderance of accumulated goodness so he says like when a thing becomes really really good right when it kind of is built up in its goodness then we would say that it's beautiful and here sometimes we equivocate when it comes to like beauty in a metaphysical sense or beauty in an aesthetic sense or beauty even in a moral sense right in an ethical sense we want to be careful about language but just kind of in a basic metaphysical way we would say that those things are beautiful which have a super added goodness to them so they're not beautiful merely in fact merely by virtue of the fact that they are that they are one that they are true that they are good but that they are good in a particular way or good in a peculiar way or good especially so i said that was gonna be the last one but uh i just went ahead there and changed my mind okay so another question maybe it's the last one maybe it's not uh hello father pine things like may there my enemies path be dark and slippery while the angel of the lord strikes them down in psalm 35 how should we think about it when we pray the psalms like this so father gabriel tereta a dominican friar of the province of saint joseph actually wrote an article in the tomist about these passages in the psalms which are called the imprecatory psalms the psalms of cursing so one thing i would say is when you read the scriptures including the old testament all of the scriptures speak of christ all right and an especially true way or an especially peculiar way of the psalms so that's that's part of the reason why the christian tradition has adopted the psalms as its prayer book which is what we have with the liturgy of the hours because not only christ prayed them but because these things speak of christ and because in praying then we have greater insights into the interior life into the prayer of christ i recently read a book uh the last name of the author is ryan uh on like eximplarity of christ in the psalms uh the full title of which i have forgotten but ryan psalms aquinas look that up it's a good book um so when we pray those psalms we're on the lookout for how christ is you know present how christ is cursing in a certain sense and usually those passages are read allegorically so if you come across some particular i want to say it's in psalm 137 where they talk about like smashing the heads of the babies of babylon against the rocks there it's it's often read by the fathers of the church as describing the way in which we should treat sins small sins because small sins don't necessarily make a big sin but they conduce to or they uh dispose two big sins and so we should exercise a kind of violence because the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and violent men take it by force violence of discipline violence of penitence violence of mortification not necessarily the violence well certainly not necessarily the violence of bashing heads of real human beings as it were so i think that we would read those passage passages according to their genre which is literary uh which is poetic uh which is a peculiar form of prayer and that we would interpret them in light of that even whilst praying in the spirit um you know kind of odd christian so towards christ uh yeah so that'd be a basic thing all right next question buy yourself a beer that's awesome greens from norway greetings to you from the united states so my friends i think that's all the time that we have uh so thanks so much for joining uh please do check out the following things one ponce of aquinas if you haven't yet liked this video please do like it if you haven't yet subscribe please do subscribe god's planning sweet podcast episode tomorrow is about what proving the existence of god it's going to be a jammer father patrick and myself but we also have these lexiodo vena things on the weekends to kind of like gear you up for mass and that goes through pentecost so we did that lent and easter we also do it in advent those are great and we've got we've got some good guests as well uh that you might enjoy so we recently had a guy who is an actor on stranger things and a devout catholic who wrote a book published by osv so you can check that out that just dropped this past week and then godsplaining we're having a retreat july 23rd through 25th in huntington new york so we just got the cap raised on how many people we can admit to this retreat so i think we can have like 94 i think we already have like 75 people signed up so there's some spots if you are interested in attending a retreat uh with the five friars who contribute to god's planning july 23 25th long island so huntington new york um it's maybe 350 and you can check out all the details on godsplinting.org so that is all that i have for you today and it's been real it's been fun it's been real fun

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 15,722

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

Id: sU4LwpnqO4U

Length: 61min 4sec (3664 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021