Pints With Aquinas - 105: How should we understand morality? With Fr. Dominic Legge

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

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Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Today we're going to ask Thomas, why should I be moral? We're also going to be talking to him about morality in general, how free will plays into us becoming virtuous, whether or not we'll have free will in heaven. And we're joined today around the bar table by Father Dominic Legg, who is a Dominican. And it's kind of cool. Halfway through this discussion, he totally schools me and kind of accuses me of having a Jesuit

take on something I ought to have a Dominican take on. You'll see what I mean. Enjoy the show. All right, guys, welcome back to Pines of Aquinas. This is a really fabulous, fabulous, fabulous discussion that I had with Father Dominic Legg. You are going to absolutely love it. I absolutely loved it and told Father Dominic at the end of our discussion that I would be going back and listening to this again and again, because it was really like me just sitting at his feet and being like, teach me, teach me more, correct me. You're awesome. So not in a weird way, maybe a little weird. But anyway, you're going to love the show. We get into everything, right? We talk about morality, like choosing the good,

what makes a moral act good, what Aquinas has to say about that. We talk about why on earth Satan and the demons would choose against God, right? When they knew exactly what they were doing and they didn't have the sort of passions we have. We talk about free will and how that plays into morality and a bunch else. Besides, as I said, hey, before we get into today's show, I want to thank a few people because there are a bunch of awesome people who make this show really great and not just this show, but the things that surround this show. And I think it's high time that I thank them. So let me just go through the list in no particular order.

I want to thank John Michael, who runs our Facebook group, Pints with Aquinas. He's the administrator of that group and he does such a great job at posting, at responding to your questions. He's creating these little memes from quotations from the show. So, John Michael, I know you're listening. Thank you so very much. I also want to thank Kiernan Doyle, who is the one who does all of our Instagram memes. So, if you don't follow us on Instagram,

you should like do that right now, like right now, like while you're listening to us. Because Kiernan Doyle, basically, I send him different quotes from Aquinas. He develops these beautiful memes and he posts them like three to four times a week. So be sure to go check that out. And Kiernan, if you listen, you're a champion, really. You're not only like super talented, but you're super holy and thank you. I want to thank Melanie Pritchard, who is my speaking assistant. So, you know, if people want to book me to talk, they have to go through Melanie and she's the best. So by the way, if anyone wants to book me, I think I'm booked out for the rest of this year, but 2019, if you want me to come and speak at your event, just write to assistant at mattfradd.com and you'll get through to Melanie,

who is a super awesome human being. I also want to thank, finally, the folks at Guadalupe Roastery. They are fans of Pints with Aquinas and they send me free coffee. Two of the most beautiful words when put together, right? Free coffee. So since they sent me free coffee, I should probably talk about them. Not just because they sent me free coffee, but because the coffee that they sent me is good. If the coffee was crap, I wouldn't be telling you about them. I'd be like, ah, thank you, but please stop sending me stuff. They're actually really amazing. Check out their website. I want to make sure I get this right, guadaluperostery.com. That's guadaluperostery.com. Finally, I told you I had a special announcement. You remember? So the end of last week's episode, I had a special announcement. And I know I've

already made this in a special episode recently, but I've got a couple of really cool plans that I want to do with Pints with Aquinas. And the special announcement is both the plans that I'll tell you about, but then also that many of you have stepped up to the plate, which means we are closer to accomplishing our goal. So I have two goals, right? The first was I'm going to start this 182-part Bible history series. It's a completely separate podcast that would be free for everybody. Each episode would be about five to 10 minutes long, and it would give you a real holistic view of sacred scripture. At the end of every episode, there would be study questions for you and your children. So you might be listening to this in the car or something, and it'd be a great way to learn about the Bible. So once we get 910 patrons, I'm going to start cranking them out weekly.

Right now, we only have 821. So that's actually, we don't need that many. And it might sound like there's a big gap there, but we get about 300,000 downloads a month. So if you want to make that project happen, I need to get up to 910 patrons. So be sure to go over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd or go to pintswithaquinas.com, click support. That'll take you to Patreon page. You can give me 10 bucks a month or two bucks a month or five bucks a month. I don't care how much you give me. I just want to get enough supporters so I can start that project because that takes time and money, obviously, a lot of time.

The second project, once we reach a thousand patrons, I am going to write, have translated, and print apologetics material for Catholic communities in poorer countries around the world. I'm actually in touch with people in Haiti and people in Uganda. And this apologetics material that I will write will be specific to the needs of that community. So what I will do is I'll say, okay, what are the 10 things that Catholics most struggle to answer? I will write the material, as I say, and what's cool about this is I will pay. I'll do it. I'm not asking them to pay me. I'm going to pay to have it translated. I'm going to pay to have it printed. And then I'm going to fly down to these countries and give different workshops and give this material to those people for free.

And I'm even thinking about maybe taking a couple of y'all with me who listen to Pints with Aquinas and maybe I can kind of teach you and you guys can give breakout sessions down there. That's going to happen once we get a thousand patrons. Like all of this great work that I think I'm able to do, you know, I hope it's good work, please God.

I'm only able to do it because of your support. So if you want to support the show and make these sorts of projects happen, again, go to pintswithaquinas.com and click support. All right, here's the show. Enjoy it, won't you? And then let me know what you thought on Twitter or something. Y'all rock. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created and you shall renew the face of the earth. Let us pray. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Spirit they may be truly wise and ever rejoice in his consolation. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Amen. Amen. St. Thomas Aquinas. Pray for us. It's really great to have you on Pints with Aquinas. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, my pleasure. So something just happened this morning, which is every podcaster's nightmare. A bloke showed up with his lawnmower. So that's what he's doing right now. Well, I don't see the lawnmowers outside my window, so I think we're safe on this end. Okay, well, that's good. Well, he's doing it right now, but that's okay. But yeah, it's super great to have you. Always good

to have, of course, a Dominican on the show. Now, this is called Pints with Aquinas, and so obviously it's morning and it would be imprudent to say the least if we were drinking alcohol. But I am drinking espresso right now. Well, I think that's fitting. You know, you want more actuality in your life. Exactly. I think that I have this idea that espresso is like the coffee. Like espresso, how do I say this?

Espresso is to coffee in general what whiskey is to alcohol in general i think that's fair i'm i'm from seattle i grew up you know with espresso well i didn't quite grow up with it but it came into fashion when i was in high school i remember going to the original starbucks when there was only one oh so that's my claim that's incredible how old are you 80 yeah i'm 47 very good now i suppose you've spent some time in italy so that's my claim to fame. That's incredible. How old are you, 80? Yeah, I'm 47. Very good. Now, I suppose you've spent some time in Italy, so that's where you get to drink that great espresso. I've spent a little time in Italy, but I actually did my doctoral work in Switzerland where we had Italian espresso.

That's awesome. The Swiss know how to pick the right things. Yeah, well, I wouldn't know that. I've never been there. But I love that you just got to say, I did my doctoral work in Switzerland. That's the coolest sentence I've heard all day. Well, it's a great place to be a doctoral student because you it's, you know, it's quiet, it's beautiful and they have great libraries. Oh, that sounds amazing. They've got a lot of money in the university, so they have great libraries.

So I want to tell you a joke that has something to do with this, which hopefully won't offend everybody listening. My wife and I woke up one morning to the sound of complete and utter chaos, right? In juxtaposition to your quiet time in Switzerland and with your libraries and neatness. So there were kids yelling, there was mess all over the floor. And I was like kind of laying on my wife's chest. And I said, honey, you remember that sign that says if I could do it all over again, I would find you sooner

so I could love you longer. And she said, uh-huh. And I said, I think I'd be a Dominican. It's terrible. How did she react to that? Well, she laughed. So she got it. It's like the grass is always greener on the other side, probably.

You know, like I'm sure there's times within your priesthood that you see the beauty of marriage and there's a sense in which you think, well, that could have been a good thing for me. And likewise, I look at y'all and I think, oh, that looks so good. But maybe the grass is greener. There's no question that, you know, one of the things that you grow in, I think, in any vocation is an appreciation. As you grow in God's grace, you grow in an appreciation of the other ways God works in people's lives. And so to see and appreciate other vocations, you know, that's very important. As a Dominican, being able to appreciate the great gifts that other religious orders have in their charisms. being able to appreciate the great gifts that other religious orders have in their charisms. And then, of course, the married life and so many people living in all kinds of different states of life. So, yes, that's true. But I must also add that I've never had a moment of

regret about being a Dominican. I love being a Dominican. It's a great, I mean, we have a great life. It's a great history, but that our community here is wonderful. I just, I have no complaints. I'm very happy. Well, tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a Dominican, if you don't mind. Well, I was a lawyer before I became a Dominican. So I grew up, um, in Seattle with the idea that I was going to, uh, starting like at second, second grade, I think second grade, I think, from watching reruns of Perry Mason shows on TV. Perry Mason was a 1950s TV show about a criminal defense lawyer. And I thought that seemed really cool. So that was my single-minded focus. And I went off to college thinking that and then went straight into law school and worked for a few years as a lawyer here in Washington, D.C. And then began to really engage my faith more and more,

both on a personal kind of spiritual level, but also intellectually. And as I did that, I just was drawn more and more to the idea of the priesthood. And I'd gotten to know the Dominicans in law school and just was extremely impressed with their preaching and their apostolic witness. So, I came to visit the Dominican House of Studies here in Washington, D.C., where I live now, from which I'm speaking to you, and just fell in love with it. So, and you chose the name Dominic, did you? Is that right? That's right, yeah. So, we, when you enter a religious life with us you have the option it's not mandatory to take a religious name but it is a traditional thing to do so

most of the brothers uh do take a new name with the habit which doesn't change your legal name but it's how you're now you order i always feel kind of weird about those people who choose to be called father Aquinas. I think, gee, there's a lot to live up to. I mean, I know Dominic as well. But I actually thought to myself it would be cool to call my kid Thomas Aquinas. That'd be his middle name. And then I thought, no, that's way too much pressure.

Yeah, well, there's a Father Aquinas across the hall from me here. He's our superior, in fact. Well, there you go. Yeah, that's actually a traditional name in our province. We have a number of Aquinas' going back to the 1930s. So we want to talk about morality today and what Thomas has to say about the goodness and badness of human acts and what that means. And I know in an email you said to me that when you encountered what Aquinas had to say on morality, that it was a really liberating experience for you. Oh, yeah.

This was one of the things when I really began – after becoming a Dominican, I didn't become a Dominican to study Aquinas. I became a Dominican because I was drawn to the Dominican charism. And then as I studied Aquinas, it just opened up a new world for me, which was really exciting and wonderful. And I'm very, very grateful for it. And one of the things, one of the first things that was a very big deal for me was discovering this older understanding of what morality is all about and what happiness and freedom really are, which are kind of connected.

So, you know, I, like most people in our contemporary culture, I think, thought of morality as being principally about the rules. And, you know, so when, what are we talking about when we talk about morality? We're talking about what someone is commanding you to do and you have to obey, you have to obey it. And when you obey the rules, when you follow the rules, then you're doing the right thing. And when you're being disobedient, you're doing the wrong thing. And okay, there's truth to that. It's not completely false. But the question that Aquinas would ask, or really the perspective that he brings to the question of morality, is a slightly different question. It's a deeper question. It frames it in a different way.

Because for the classical tradition, and this is not just Aquinas, but if you go back to St. Augustine, morality is not about rules. Morality is about getting to the destination. So, your life actually does have a destination. There is some place that all of us are trying to go. There's a reason why we traditionally have talked about the Christian life as a journey. You're on a pilgrimage, and your pilgrimage is towards your heavenly homeland. So, where are you trying to get? And if you know that you're trying to get someplace, then there are certain things you need to do if you're going to be able to make the journey and go in the right direction. So morality is actually about journeying in the right direction and

eventually getting to your destination. And you can talk about what that destination is in different ways, but I mean, to speak about it in the most general terms, it's happiness. I mean, to speak about it in the most general terms, it's happiness. So everyone is seeking happiness, and you don't ever meet anybody who in a certain sense would say, well, I don't in any respect pursue what I think is desirable for me. I mean, it's kind of a basic truth about everybody. Even if they're very mistaken about what they, what will be good for them or what will make them happy. Everybody in the end chooses things that they find in some measurable desire in some measure

desirable. And that's really what Aquinas thinks is what morality is all about. It's about figuring out what is actually going to satisfy your desires and then aiming at it and behaving in a systematic way to get there. So it liberates us. And this goes back to Aristotle, right? And so if we can agree that happiness is what all men seek, then the next question is, well, then how do they achieve it? And different people have given different answers, right? Like pleasure or power. And it sounds like both Aristotle and Aquinas and the church agrees that to the extent in which happiness is achievable in this life, it's secured by virtue.

That's right. Well, so virtue then becomes one of the things that you discover you need on the journey. So, if you're going to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, you know, I know that that's made a real comeback, people making this pilgrimage to this shrine in Spain, in northwestern Spain, which is, you know, one of the great pilgrimage sites in Europe that have been, you know, people have been going on pilgrimage there for more than a millennium. But it's hard. You have to walk a long way, and you do need to train a little bit. You don't want to just show up there having spent a year as a couch potato.

That's analogous. That's very much like what the moral life involves, too. You need to develop certain habits. involves too, you know, you need to develop certain habits. Really, we're talking about spiritual habits or spiritual dispositions, which are more than just kind of rote habits, but you need to be disposed to be able to do the things that you need to do to go on this journey. And that's in a way what we're talking about when we talk about virtues. Right. So, I guess we could say virtue is perfected desire. So, just like you were saying, like, we can desire, whenever we choose something, we choose it because

we think it's in some way good for us, or a good, whether or not it is. And those choices, repeated over and over again, develop into a virtue, is that right? Or a vice, I suppose? Yes. Yeah. Well, I mean, in fact, Aquinas has a very developed account of virtue. So does Aristotle. He's drawing on Aristotle a lot, but he adds some very important dimensions to what Aristotle says. Aristotle gives you a picture of natural virtues or what we'd call acquired virtues. These are virtues that you can acquire by repeated actions. So, virtues. These are virtues that you can acquire by repeated actions. So, to take a very simple example, temperance, which moderates your appetites, your bodily appetites. So, if you're thinking about how much food you eat, you know, with a child, it's one of the things that you

have to train the child about, you know, eating the right amount in the right way at the right times and not eating, you know, like you don't eat the dessert before you eat the, before you eat your vegetables or something like that. We all have to learn that lesson very early. And as you acquire, as you repeatedly do that, you stop having to exert a lot of psychic energy. That's a great mundane example. Right. Because I think for most of us who grew up doing that, the idea of eating ice cream before steak is just, no, I wouldn't do that. Whereas kids would be like, yeah, totally, let's do it. Yeah. And in fact, if you do that a lot, you probably end up kind of sick. Yeah.

Like it's not really good for you. It might seem good for you one time. I mean, it might be okay one time, but if you systematically live that way, you're not going to be a very healthy person. And so, things like that are just, you can acquire those virtues. Yeah. And even things like we have to instill within our children, like, gratitude. So, you see this in parents who say to their children after having received a gift, you know, what do you say? It's like we have to teach them the virtue of gratitude so they don't end up to be ghastly little monsters who think that the world owes them something. activities human human virtues that we can acquire by training and that's why aristotle says you know in acquiring virtues it's very important to start early and it's very important to get a good foundation because once you develop bad habits it's much harder to unlearn them and it's um it begins to shape your moral life if like you have never been able to make good decisions in your life. You've just never

acquired the virtue of kind of stepping back and thinking through what are the consequences to what I'm about to do, and is this really a good thing to do, and I should think about other people before I do it, and not just think about what's good for what's in my immediate interests. That's something that as children get older, you have to kind of teach them to think about, you know, what are your classmates going to think of this at school or how is that going to affect your sister or whatever it is. And you get kids beginning to actually do some basic moral reasoning. And that's something that we can acquire by training and by repeated action. And if you never acquire it, it's very hard to just, you know, learn it all in one day. At the same time, there are other activities that

take us to a higher plane. And this is where Aquinas adds a very important dimension to Aristotle's explanation. And that is to talk about supernatural virtues. So, Aristotle only had a picture of the virtues that we can acquire by our own activity. And those are very important. Aquinas also had a picture of the virtues that God can infuse into us by supernatural grace that allow us to live in a supernatural way. So, live a supernatural life. And the best examples of these supernatural virtues are the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. So, by faith, for example, you acquire the ready disposition to believe what God reveals. And by charity, you acquire the ready disposition to love God above all things and your neighbor for God's sake. And that is living on a kind of new plane, soaring far above what our nature itself would be capable of.

And those virtues really give us a share in the divine life. So that really gets us a long way towards the goal of our lives. I mean, to put this back in the terms that we started the conversation with, you know, the point is not that God commands you to make a certain number of acts of faith or a certain number of acts of charity or to give so much money to the poor every year or something. The point is much less that God commands it. The point is that by doing these things, you are actually beginning to live the divine life that is going to be perfected in heaven. And it's going to make you happy even now. You know, these things are life-giving and peace, you know, give peace and joy to your life. So, that's very important.

This is really revolutionary for many Catholics who grew up thinking that morality was all about being a party pooper and rules that got in the way of you having fun. Like, Aquinas is saying the exact opposite. Like, if you want to be happy, you have to be good, because you can't be bad and happy. It's not possible. That's right. So it gives you a new perspective on what the rules are all about. And that was one of the other things that I found really revelatory. So I was a lawyer, you know, and used to lawyers in a certain sense are the ones who know all the rules that you're supposed to follow and what happens to you if you don't follow them. So if you just focus on law, you can become a person who's very rule-based.

if you just focus on law, you can become a person who's very rule-based. Yeah, legalistic. There's nothing itself wrong with knowing the rules. Actually, it's very good to know the rules. But what is the point of the rules? God does not take satisfaction in having us just blindly obey whatever he commands. I mean, he, of course, he wants us to obey him like any father wants a child to listen to the father or the parents. But why, for example, do you tell your children, don't run out in the busy street? Because it's not what's best for them. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You're not trying to just impose your will and exercise dominion over them and control their lives. Maybe some parents do that, but that's not a good way

to parent. How much do you think that the thought of Scotus and Occam have gone to contribute to this sort of legalism? Earlier, you said God doesn't want you just to obey him because he's telling you to do something, whereas it sounds like in some sense that's exactly what Occam thought. Well, that's right. That's part of where you get a real change in the mentality about what morality is all about. So one of the problems that developed after Aquinas became trying to understand what is a human nature or what is a human being and therefore what is good for a human being and therefore what is the goal of the life of a human being.

If we don't know what a human being is, then we can't know what it's for. then we can't know what it's for. That's right. So, as you begin to have trouble figure answering those questions, then you have to come up with some new understanding of all these rules that God has revealed to us. And with Occam, finally, you know, you don't really have a robust sense of a human nature that has a kind of end or, you know, what we would say in technical terms, a teleology that is like a kind of directedness towards a goal. And since he doesn't have that idea, or at least not a very robust sense of that idea, then he has to account for Christian morality by just talking about divine commandments and your obedience to them. morality by just talking about divine commandments and your obedience to them. And then the commandments cease to really have anything intrinsic to do with the kind of beings that we

are, and they just become God commanding and we obey, and there's not really any more sense to it than that. This is really fascinating. It reminds me of that line from Vatican II, when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible. And so, you think like, okay, you forget God, you become unintelligible. If you're unintelligible, then your end will be unintelligible. And then it's like, now look at modern culture. Like, look at us teaching second graders about the 800 different genders that they might be. Right? Like... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's very important to have a sense of what kind of creatures we are. Yeah. And what will, what is, because from that you learn what is good for us. And that actually gives us a basis for talking with people who don't accept what the Bible says about the way you ought to live. You know, God has revealed things to us that are very important for us to know if we want to get to the destination. And not just, sorry to cut you off, not just the destination in the sort of

supreme sense of like the beatific vision, but even in the immediate sense. Like, it seems to me that today when people talk about morality, even if they have some vague belief in it, they just mean, don't get in my way. Like, it's immoral to get in my way. So, even if that means getting in your way of having an abortion, or getting in your way of living the sort of lifestyle you want to live, it's sort of, morality is boiled down to live and let live. Whereas the church has this understanding of like, like the teleology of human acts, right? So... Well, right. I mean, I think actually in the American context, especially

when people say, should law be concerned about morality or should, like they're thinking about the civil law, like should people vote based on morality. Usually what they immediately think we're talking about is that you have like an evangelical pastor who's thumping the Bible on the podium and saying, you know, everything that's written in the Bible, I'm now going to legislate for you. And it's going to basically, you know, take over the way that our culture is governed. It's just going to be all according to, you know, this literal interpretation of certain biblical passages. That's usually what people immediately think you're talking about. Rather than, from a Thomistic perspective, when you say, does the law have anything to do with morality? The answer is, well, obviously, yes, because

the law is trying to govern our life together and direct us together to what is good for our community. And that is of itself a moral question. Like, that is what we mean when we talk about morality. It's not about just picking lines out of the Bible and then legislating them. I mean, there may be things in the Bible that we ought to pay more attention to with our public laws. I'm not saying that we shouldn't. But we don't have to jump immediately to that. I mean, this goes back to your question, like, can this understanding of morality help us talk with people who maybe don't already accept a Christian understanding of what life is all about?

And the answer is yes, of course, because we can begin to talk with other people like, well, what is a good life for us? What is a good life for us together? Like if I'm on a campus and I want to have a good flourishing student body, are there some parameters that are going to govern our life together on this campus so that we will have a happy campus life? And the answer is yes, there are some things that we can do and we will agree about what many of them are, we'll probably disagree about what some of them are, but that is a moral question about what is the good that we're trying to discover together as a university community. In the Summa, this is the, where are we? First part of the second part. So, this has on the

section of good and evil human acts in general. I want you to talk about this because I find this absolutely fascinating. So, evil is the absence of being. So, you think of like a bird without wings, there's a natural evil there. But when Aquinas talks about moral acts, he says, he talks about genus and species and how an act is evil in that it's deficient in what ought to be there. So let me just maybe read two lines or so from the Summa and maybe get you to comment on them. He says, we must speak of good and evil in actions as of good and evil in things, because such as everything is, such is the act that it produces. Now in things, each one has so much good as it

has being, since good and being are convertible, as was stated above. But God alone has the whole plentitude of his being in a certain way, whereas every other thing has its proper fullness of being in a certain multiplicity, wherefore it happens with some things that they have being in some respect, and yet they are lacking in the fullness of being due to them. I'm trying to find the exact bit that I saw earlier about genus and species, but I'm sure you know enough about that to speak to that. Yeah, well, so when you talk about evil, there's a couple different ways to understand what we're talking about. The most important thing to recognize, and this is the key insight going back to St. Augustine.

Of course, others recognize it too, but St. Augustine is a particularly good example that evil is not a positive thing. Evil is what we call a privation. It's the lack of something that should be there. Now, it's extremely important never to make the mental mistake of beginning to think that evil is a positive thing, because if you do that, you end up in all kinds of absurdities and you have a difficult time getting yourself out of them. So, you know, Augustine, if you read his Confessions, beautiful thing that I hope all of your listeners will pick up and read someday. It's one of these great spiritual classics. Augustine writing about his life as a maniche, so he was involved in another kind of weird religious cult,

more or less, kind of philosophy and cult together. And this philosophy had the idea that evil was a positive thing and that there was a kind of evil God who ruled the material universe. And we don't have to get into all the details, but one of the great discoveries that Augustine made that helped free him from this and come to the Christian faith was the realization that that was a completely false understanding of good and evil because God is the source of being and evil is not. It simply is the privation of what should be there. So, that means that God is the universal source of goodness and in no way is the cause of evil. Okay, so we can then talk about evil in the world, maybe in our own lives, we can understand what is like a physical evil, which you referred to. Blindness would be a classic

example of a physical evil, like the human being should be able to see, but when you're blind, you have a, there's something that has gone wrong with your eyes or your power of sight so that you're not actually able to see. And that's a privation because you would be, you would have more power, as it were, more capacity to engage the world around you if you're able to see. Then there's moral evil. And moral evil in a way is much worse than physical evil or physical suffering because it involves the will turning away from God and deliberately, intentionally choosing something that is not according to the ordering of all things back to God, who is their creator and their source and their ultimate end. And that involves a kind of chosen defect, you know? Like, that's what is involved with a sin. We're choosing to be out of order with God, out of sync with God, to really place ourselves against God. And that is a much

greater defect than just not being able to see. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. You know, this is why moral evil troubles us more than physical evil. Like, when atheists put forth arguments against the existence of God, they don't always, well, they might point to things like tsunamis that kill people, but it seems like the more troubling aspect for all of us is moral evil. So, if we had a loved one and evil was committed against him, say he was tortured, that would be a terrible thing. You could think of that as a physical evil, at least on part of your loved one. But you would almost rather him be tortured than be the torturer. So, I'm just trying to say like moral evil we find far more problematic.

Yes, and that's where the, if you want to get into the philosophical problem of evil, or you might say the philosophical and theological problem of evil, that's the hardest part of the mystery. This is why we talk about the mysterium iniquitatis. It's the mystery of iniquity or of evil that free creatures would freely choose to reject God. It's very mysterious. You can't really give a good explanation for why they do that. I mean, we can verify that it happens. I mean, most of us can verify it in our own lives that we're capable of this and sometimes do it. And yet, we can't explain why that's ever a good idea. It's never a good idea. But nonetheless, free creatures do it.

And that's mysterious. Why do they do it? Especially why do they do it knowingly? Like it's one thing to say that they've developed bad habits and that their passions override their reason. That's right. That's why the hardest case, if you want to do theology, is the fall of the angels. So, the angels, when you had the first creation of the angels created in grace, they don't have any defects of knowledge. They don't have any passions like we do. So, they're not being pushed or they don't have a divided heart. They just, some of

them, chose not to turn to God. They chose to turn away from Him. And that involves a terrible, terrible privation, a terrible diminishment of them, but they preferred that to being relative to God. I mean, that's the kind of horrible... I mean, this isn't a good analogy, but it's an understandable one. It's sort of like the child who refuses to be consoled and wants to sit in his room sulking rather than be in relationship with his mother and father who want him to come out or something. It's like, maybe it's not like that at all. I'm sorry. I'm just thinking off the top of my head. Well, I mean, one of the other questions that comes up here is, why does God permit that? Like, why didn't God just create a universe where that never happens? Yeah, that is a good question. So, rephrase that. Why wouldn't God create a

universe in which... Well, I mean, the simple answer is that if creatures are to be free, then there's a possibility of them rejecting God. Which always makes me wonder about heaven, right? Because clearly God could have just... Well, I was going to say God could have made us in a state of beatific vision. I guess that's possible. He chose not to do that. Well, okay, here we are now touching on some of the deep and most controverted questions that you find in reality.

Maybe I should get a beer. Just give me a second. That's right. It's time for a beer. Or maybe we should just go with whiskey, the espresso of alcohol. So, let me just make one point before trying to dive into the deep end. Yeah, you go for it. I'm going to sit back and learn. Let me just make one point before trying to dive into the deep end. Yeah, you go for it. I'm going to sit back and learn. Yeah. The first question is really why does God permit any evil to exist at all?

And why didn't he just create a universe of creatures that could never fail, you know, that would never defect? And it's mysterious because he clearly could have, in a certain sense, created a universe like that, but he chose not to. Now, if God is all good, why would he do that? And Aquinas' answer to this is, well, there may be, it's hard for us to see the whole picture because we only have this finite creaturely perspective. And it may be that there is in a certain sense more good because of the possibility and in fact, the real fact that some creatures fail. They fail even in moral terms, like the demons, you know, they have definitively failed morally. There may be more good in the end in the universe because of that. So, the example he gives is the glory of the martyrs would never exist without the malice of their persecutors. And now, that is not always that obvious to us. You know, we can look at that and

say, hey, you know, if I was in charge, I would have just made sure that that never happened. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you get into the nitty gritty of what evil looks like, and that's when it becomes a very emotionally powerful argument. That's right. But, you know, if we're honest, we should also say my perspective is very limited, and I don't really see how this is all going to fit together in the end. So, it's probably better for us to admit that we're limited and that God is not limited, and that God has a better angle on this than we do. I mean, to go from the heights of speculative theology to the banal, I don't know if you have seen this movie, which I don't really recommend, Bruce Almighty.

Yes. So, it came out years ago, starring Jim Carrey as a man who is angry at God, and so God appears to him and for a temporary period gives the divine power, right? So, he becomes as almighty as God. And he begins answering prayers and doing various things with the divine power. And what happens in the movie, what's funny about the movie is chaos breaks out. And the guy realizes that he's completely incompetent to use the divine power. Well, this is actually not a bad illustration because that's what happens when you have divine power or omnipotence without wisdom. Because if you were all powerful but you didn't know all of the consequences of what you did with that power, you would create havoc.

I mean, it would be very bad for us to have that. So, we can, in a certain sense, say, well, if I was in charge, I would make sure that there were no, you know, there was no evil whatsoever in creatures. But we don't really see what all the consequences of that would be and how God is able to bring an even greater good out of evil. That is also the wonderful mystery of God, that you take the most evil act that has ever been, which is the hatred towards Christ and his crucifixion. So, on the side of the people who killed him, that was a terrible evil. But out of it, out of Jesus' voluntary acceptance in love of that suffering for the salvation of the world, you have the source of every grace and eternal life for the whole world. And even the offer of redemption to the very people who were torturing him. I mean, that's the amazing thing, is that God is not only able to bring good out of it for other people, He's able even to save

the people who were torturing Him. It reminds me of Augustine's, the Felix Culper, right? Oh, happy fault of Adam, which merit for us a greater Redeemer. Here's a question for you. So, I like Thomas' response to the problem of evil. I like Plantinga's response, the free will defense. I find that works really well, at least logically. This idea that God cannot force you to do the good freely, because if he forced you, you wouldn't be free. And if you did it freely, he wouldn't force you. Maybe I'd love your thoughts on that. Are you trying to provoke me? Because this is, I'm joking, but this is one of the deep debates that goes back to, well, it goes quite far back, but crystallized in the 17th century between Jesuits and Dominicans. Right. A famous debate over grace.

Well, and this has to do with, like, who's that Jesuit bloke on Predestination? Molina, yeah. Yeah, this gets to this, huh? That's right. So, yes, I am trying to provoke you. Yes, and you're successfully provoking me. So, one of the issues is, how does God's grace work in the creature? And the Dominicans, and Aquinas actually is very clear about this, that God as the first cause,

because he's the creator, he can work in us in a way different from every other creature. Every other creature has to persuade you to use, you know, to engage the act of your will and cannot force you to do it without compromising your freedom. You know, I'd have to put a gun to your head to make you do something. Right. Of course you. But God can work within you to both to activate your will and even to direct it to its proper end. And when he does this, it increases your freedom and doesn't diminish it. Now, that is Aquinas' claim. That is Aquinas' claim. Now, it's not immediately obvious how that works, but as you begin kind of thinking with Aquinas on this, I think it becomes more and more clear, and I'm deeply convinced that

this is profoundly true. So, how to start thinking about this? You know, think about, part of the issue is what makes an act free, or what is the definition of a free act? How do we think about freedom? And, you know, you can think about freedom in an atomistic way, like I'm free in this individual choice. When I choose, I can choose A or B. You know, I can choose to take heroin or I can choose to eat chocolate instead. You know, something like that. Always choose the latter. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So that's the better choice. Now, you are technically free in making that choice. What happens, though, when you choose to take the heroin? You are involving yourself in a trajectory. You're putting yourself on a trajectory that is going to shape your future choices and actually is going to damage you and limit you in a very severe way. So, if you take the heroin multiple times, probably you're no longer going to be able to resist as easily taking the heroin. I mean, you can still resist it to some degree, but it compromises your ability to resist it. It's like an addiction. And Aquinas thinks that sin functions in much the same way. This is going back to our discussion of virtue and vice. Vice is this kind of spiritual

addiction where your will gets kind of stuck on some lower good and cannot easily detach itself from that to be raised up into the supernatural realm where you're desiring God above all things. So, as you commit sins, you get stuck and it diminishes the power of your will to choose what is truly good for it. And that's the purpose of our freedom, that we would be able to choose the good with, you know, choose the greatest good with a kind of joy and delight and ease. So, I get that eventually when our will has been compromised that we become less free, but what about that initial choice? I mean, Adam and Eve, when they chose to eat of the fruit, did so freely, right? They did. So, the possibility of freedom always includes, or the power of freedom always

includes the possibility that you can choose against it. But the question here with respect to grace that we were talking about a minute ago, is whether God can activate your will, kind of turning you away from the lower good to see the real higher good and even move you to choose it. And whether in doing that, he is somehow acting against your freedom. And Aquinas says, God does not act against your freedom because what he is doing is he's giving a kind of greater amplitude to your choice that naturally you didn't have before. And by doing that, he's giving a kind of new life to you. So let me use another example. We were talking about heroin.

Now, a positive example. example, if you take, say, a husband who has, you know, fallen madly in love with, or a man who's fallen madly in love with a woman and they get married and now he's, you know, he's trying to live out his vocation as a married man. And, you know, as you grow in that love, there may be things that the man does which, you know, maybe would not be obviously pleasurable for him, but he deeply desires to do it out of love for his spouse. And he doesn't do it under some kind of constraint. He does it because he actually finds it very joyful to do some act of kindness for his wife. do some act of kindness for his wife. When you begin to experience that sort of dynamic in your life, you feel like the possibilities for your life are growing. And you're not doing those things as if you were constrained by them. As you taste the joys of loving another person, you kind of grow in your

desire to make more acts of love like that. And the same thing is happening in the order of grace with God. I don't see how what you just said contradicted what I just said. So, I want to know if I'm wrong here, because I've been saying this for a while okay so um this idea of god doesn't make us god cannot like it's impossible for god to make us choose good freely now that's what i said and so are you saying that actually he can god can for make I guess force would be too strong of a word. You use the phrase, activate our will to do the good freely. Yes. So, at the root of this are different understandings of what the will is doing, I think. And the view that you're proposing is that the will is a power of choosing that God does not enter into. And if he did enter into it, in principle, he does not enter into it.

I mean, he could not, because if he did, it would cease to be a free power. Interesting. Now, is that metaphysically... Here's one of the classic Thomistic arguments. Is that metaphysically coherent? If God is the cause of all that is, that a creature would have some power that in a way doesn't have God as the principle of actuality for the exercise of that power. Yeah. It's like I'm treating God like he's just a big man up in the sky who's pushing and prodding as opposed to the one who's immediately present to everything.

Yeah. I mean, the key here is to not see God's causality in competition with creaturely causality, but to see creaturely causality as flowing from God's first causality, which is of a totally different order. And it's the same issue, actually, as you have with evolution, with a Christian understanding of evolution. So, when we talk about contingency in the world, you know, you have random genetic mutation or chance genetic mutation and natural selection. Okay. Is there a Catholic way of understanding how the multiplicity of species come about through a process like that? Yes. It's not incompatible with divine causality because God causes the whole system and therefore the interaction of all the contingent causes within the system. And so, there's real, from the creaturely perspective, there's real contingency. Those are not predetermined causes in the same,

within the creaturely frame, but God is causing them all, he's causing them immutably to come about through contingent events in the world. And in the same way that God can cause real contingency in the world, he also can cause creaturely freedom, which no other creature can influence without compromising the freedom of the act, but which God, because he's the very cause of the creature and therefore of the creature's freedom, he can influence that. I mean, influence is even the wrong way to talk about it. What he does is he activates it. That is, he gives it, he moves it from being in a state of potency to a state of act, and he turns the intellect towards the good which the creature is made for. So, you have a natural desire for this good, and so when you see it, your will

reaches out for it, and that's the way the will is made to operate, and it does that by a free choice. You're teaching me a lot here because I always thought, I was trying to reconcile why it is that sin's impossible in heaven, right? Because people will say, well, clearly there's a state in which free beings exist, but there is no sin, so why couldn't have God created that now?

And I thought that either it was because our free will was altered somehow in heaven such that we don't really have free will like we do now. Now I'm really provoking you. Or the second way, I thought that, well, because God is the supreme good, and it's apparent to us immediately, then any lesser good would be seen as such and we wouldn't want it. then any lesser good would be seen as such and we wouldn't want it. Yeah, that's right. When you get to heaven, when you start talking about heaven, then you see how there's a kind of unity in the Thomistic view about freedom. So, God is supremely free even though there's no chance that he's going to sin.

And likewise, so is the humanity of Christ. We definitely want to say that Jesus was totally free in going to sin. And likewise, so is the humanity of Christ. Like, we definitely want to say that Jesus was totally free in going to the cross, but we don't want to say that like, oh, you know, he almost didn't do it. It's not to say that there were not interior conflicts in his human nature, because the Garden of Gethsemane shows us Jesus saying, not my will, but yours be done. And that requires a theological account of like, what is Jesus saying there? Aquinas' answer to that, by the way, is that it was his human nature, which naturally desires to preserve itself in being, his human nature, which desires to stay alive, is saying, hey, I don't want to die.

And yet his higher spiritual will, his intellectual appetite is seeing the great spiritual good that he is at work in accomplishing through the redemption or through the incarnation and the redemptive act of his going to the cross, and nonetheless chooses, you know, to relativize the good of his human body to that supreme spiritual good. And so, when he says, not my will, he means not the will of what my human nature naturally desires, which finds the suffering repulsive, but I am choosing to do the Father's will. Right. So, Christ could not have sinned, but it doesn't mean He was any less free. That's right.

That He was supremely free. Yes. And likewise, the Blessed Virgin Mary, you know, how do we explain her perfect sinlessness? Is it just that, like, God arranged the circumstances around her life so that she never had a strong enough temptation? And there's the kind of Jesuit interpretation. That is the Jesuit interpretation. Or is it that he gave her a special grace by which she was kind of fixed on the divine goodness? Now, correct me if I'm wrong.

Christ could not have sinned. Impossible. Mary could have, but would not have. Is that right or wrong? Well, yes. I mean, if you want to say, so I might need to think a little bit about how to say that with respect to the Blessed Virgin Mary. say that with respect to the Blessed Virgin Mary. She did not, okay, she was preserved by a singular grace from original sin and from every actual sin. So, how did that work? It was a gift of God's

grace. Was there the metaphysical possibility that she could fail. Well, every rational creature has the possibility of failure. So, in that sense, looked at just as a human being, yes, she had the possibility of sinning. With Jesus, you have the added layer, you might say, or the added dimension, very important dimension, that He is truly God incarnate. And so, now you're talking about an act of the eternal Son of God. And there, you're talking about an impeccability on a different level. This is really fascinating. And you've just totally, what is it? What do people say? Like, red-pilled me, like from the Matrix? Right. Well, you know, I do think that this is a very beautiful teaching about the power of grace.

And it goes back to Augustine and the debate with what are called the semi-Pelagians. The semi-Pelagians emphasized your own human effort to cooperate or to assent to a grace that God offers you. And there's something true that they're getting at there. And Aquinas also clearly says we do have to cooperate. Our wills cooperate with God, but they cooperate as he activates them. So he can really give a grace that activates us. And when you have a conversion, that's how Aquinas explains it, you know, that God is actually just turning you to him and moving you. And that's why we can pray that he will, for example, give us the grace to persevere in our vocation until the end, which is not just

put me in circumstances where I won't be really tempted, but actually like strengthen my will to be loving you, you know, increase my love for you. Pete This reminds me of St. Paul when the scales fell from his eyes, and maybe that's similar to what you mean when you say God activates our will and in so doing, we become more, not less free. So, if you're blind and God gives you the sight to see and then you choose rightly, He's not forcing you to do the good in the arbitrary slave master sense. He's activating your will to see rightly and in seeing rightly, you'll choose rightly. That may have been a bunch of crap. I'm not sure. Yeah. No, I think you're on the right track. There's more, you know, if you want to go deeper into breaking down how exactly that works, these acts of the will,

but that's basically the picture. Okay. So, before we wrap up, I really want to get to this idea of good actions. Um, so here's that line I referenced earlier, uh, about species and that. Um, so he says the good or evil of an action as of other things depends on its fullness of being or lack of that fullness. So does that mean that if we, if we choose any evil act, we just come up with a theoretical one like rape or blasphemy, what we're saying is there's a deficiency in what that act is and that it ought to be... Yeah. Right. I mean, just take something like an act of theft or lying or something like that. I mean, something fairly simple that is also something you might encounter, you know, it's not totally strange to our personal experiences.

When you have something like that, what is going on? Well, there's an action there. And the action itself, insofar as it has any being, insofar as it is an act, there is an element of goodness in it. That you're able to do something is good. And you might even be acting for a good end. Like, oh, I'm stealing from my employer so that I can take care of the poor or something like that. And my employer is really rich, so I don't feel so bad about it. But the act itself is not rightly ordered as, you know, according to the, well, if you want to take the biggest picture, according to the whole plan of divine providence. So it's kind of changing.

It's not paying attention to the due rule or measure of the act. So there is something deficient in the act in that it's being done out of the context of the right ordering of the whole. And so there's something that's gone wrong there. Yeah, like is there a lack of... So, whenever we think of an evil act like theft, could we say, well, there is a lack of something that ought to be there? Just like in a physical being, say a person who's born blind, there's a natural evil. When we talk about moral evil, so we're saying the same thing, there's a lack of a good that ought to be there in that action, such as... Yeah, it's the right ordering of the action

towards, in the case of theft, towards what is due to another. This property belonged to another, but I took it for myself. And so, there's something disordered in that. I'm disrupting, you might say, the whole harmony of the universe by doing that. And the disorder is both outside of me in the sense that I'm taking away something that belongs to you and keeping it for myself, and that deprives you of it. And there's also a disorder in me insofar as I have willingly disordered myself under God, that I'm referring my actions not to his plan, but to my own plan, my own scheme. And that is in a way to make myself an end to myself rather than referring myself as a part under God. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I mean, there's a classic – just to add one more facet to our discussion. there are two evils that the church identifies, that the Thomistic tradition identifies, which go by, the Latin names are the malum pena, the evil of penalty, the penalty, and the malum culpa. Okay, what do those refer to? If I steal $20 from you, I have deprived you of $20. And I've also ruptured our friendship, you know, by doing that. So if I go back to you and I want to restore our relationship, I can apologize to you. But I can't restore our friendship unless you forgive me. friendship unless you forgive me. Now, suppose you forgive me, I still ought to pay you back the $20.

The fact that you forgive me doesn't mean I don't still owe you $20. But it's also not true that if I pay you back $20, then you will automatically forgive me. You know, there's two different dimensions there. This helps us understand penance in the sacrament of confession, right? Yes, that's right. Although, of course, when it comes to our offenses against God, three Hail Marys isn't going to make reparation for the offense I've just committed. But is it like, well, give it a shot? Well, it's a way for us to participate in restoring the order that we've damaged by our sinful act. But we still need him to restore us to his friendship. So, when God forgives us the sin, he's forgiving what we call the culpa, the guilt of the sin. That's like the alienation from God. That's the moral evil in me by the fact

that my will was disordered. But there's also something else that the sinner needs to do, not only have the disorder in himself fixed, his alienation from God fixed, but also to restore outside of him the damage that he did. And that's to restore like the $20 back to you. Yeah, that makes sense. Hey, as we begin to wrap up and thank you so much for taking so much time to chat with us, this has been really enlightening. How does this understanding of morality

that we've been speaking about today, how does that practically or how should that practically affect our lives in a positive way? Well, I think the most important thing is that it begins to help us see why rules are there and that the rules are not there for their own sake, like even God's commandments. They're not there for their own sake. They're there as kind of guardrails, you might say, to keep us from going off the cliff and to get us headed in the right direction.

keep us from going off the cliff, and to get us headed in the right direction. So as you grow in moral maturity, you don't need to think about the rules so much because you now are focused on the good that you're aiming at. And I find that that's really helpful for thinking about the moral life. The moral life is actually not just about getting better at obeying the commandments. is actually not just about getting better at obeying the commandments. The moral life is really about growing in love, growing in love of God, growing in faith. Like, that's where you should measure your moral growth. Are you growing in faith? Are you growing in charity?

Presupposing that you're observing all the commandments. If you're not observing the commandments, then you got to work on that first. But if you're observing the commandments, then the place to look for spiritual growth is in, for example, the theological virtues. And as a spiritual director, that's one of the things that, you know, it's your job to do. When you talk to somebody for the first time, you're trying to figure out, okay, are they basically observing the commandments? If they're not, that's the first time, you're trying to figure out, okay, are they basically observing the commandments? If they're not, that's the first place you have to work until the person's basically able to kind of stably live without falling into, at least into grave sin. Once you've got that down, then you can really start making very good positive progress in growing in the theological virtues.

And one book I would recommend to our listeners, I'm sure you would agree, is Morality, the Catholic View. Is it Pincares, the Dominican? That's right, Cervé's Pincares. That's a short version of the longer version of the great work of Pincares. of the longer version of the great work of Pink Harris. But he does. We've been talking about a lot of the things that we've been talking, a lot of things we've been talking about are explored by him in detail in this book,

the sources of Christian ethics. So that's also a great recommendation. For a quicker read though. I mean, yeah. A quicker read for sure is morality in the Catholic. He does such a great job of just showing like, if you want to be free and you want to be happy, then morality.

Yeah, that's right. Good, good acts. Thank you so much, Father Dominic. I know you've blessed us a great deal and all of our listeners. And it's super cool to think that there's people right now, like, running on treadmills and picking up their kids and they get to listen to this great information. So thanks so much for sharing. It's great being with you. Keep up the good work.

This is wonderful service. All right. Hey, do you write anywhere or where can people learn more about you? Well, I'm the incoming director of the Thomistic Institute here at the Dominican House of Studies. Terrific. And they can come to our website and see, we have a lot of our own lectures that we're sponsoring on college campuses all over the place, which people can also listen to and download via podcast. And a bunch of my lectures are on there as well. They're excellent. Yeah. Thomistic Institute. I'll throw up a link in the show notes, but people just type in Thomistic Institute into their podcast listening app and they'll find it.

Yeah. Great. Yeah. It would be great to have some of your listeners check out some of those lectures. And I've got a book out from Oxford University Press, which is soon to be coming out, I've been told, in paperback, so a little more affordable, on the Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas. So that's a little more technical. If you want to get into why Jesus cannot sin, that topic is covered there. Do you ever stop feeling like you're drinking from a fire hydrant? Like, I mean, here you are, you've got your doctorate in Switzerland, and you've published this bloody book with Oxford University, and you know so much more than so many people.

Do you just, do you still feel like, oh my gosh, I can't even begin to scratch the surface of all this incredible knowledge i wouldn't say drinking from a fire hydrant is more like um discovering that there are more and more depths that i don't i haven't yet explored you know you you get a pretty good sense of the kind of landscape the lay the land, but it doesn't mean you know all of the nooks and crannies. And some of those you begin to discover, like when you're talking about this issue of grace and human freedom, like this is very deep. And I still have a lot of questions about it myself. And I really, like I've read some of these texts of Aquinas and it's like, whoa, I have not, I've not yet gotten to the bottom of

this. Like I'm, I need to think about this some more and reread this again. And there's just, I still feel like there's a lot of zones of, of these mysteries that I have a lot to learn about. It's like the more you know, the more you know, you don't know. It's, I forget who was it, like an undergraduate knows everything about everything. The master's student is pretty sure, you know, he doesn't know as much as he used to assume that he did. And then the doctoral student just says, he's convinced he knows nothing. Well, especially when you come into contact with these great mysteries, you know, the theology of the church or the theology of Aquinas is trying to help you kind of probe the mystery, but it doesn't exhaust the mystery. And sometimes it just brings you to a greater appreciation of just how rich our faith is.

And, you know, there's – Aquinas doesn't exhaust it. He's a finite human being, too. I mean, he's a genius, much greater genius than most of us are, but even so, he is limited and the riches that God has revealed are much, much greater. Do you wish that Aquinas had not have put down his quill when he had that? Oh, I have, yeah. I mean, I have my short list of questions. Right. If I could talk to Aquinas, like, I would like to ask him. But, you know, I'm going to have to wait. I'm going to have to wait a while for that.

That's going to be the real pints with Aquinas. In heaven. Yeah, God willing. God willing we have that great conversation. All right. With the new wine. All right, well, thanks so much. It's great being with you, Matt.

Thanks. Wasn't that good? I'd say that's probably my top 10 most awesome podcasts for Pines of the Aquinas I've ever done. That was fascinating. After the interview, Father Dominic said, I'd love to be on again. And I said, well, I would love to have you on again so I will call you every day

and we will chat about everything Aquinas like or something no so that was really great thanks for listening

and being a fan one final thing I want to say is we now have those YouTube videos up so remember I told you we'd be doing YouTube videos there's been some confusion

some people think I work for Ascension Presents. I don't work for them. I just do videos for them and they do all the editing. So I'm on their channel. So if you go to, you know, Twitter, Facebook, wherever, I'll put it, hey, here's what I'll do.

I'll put a link up in the show notes and you can check out those new cool edited videos for yourself. All right, good. Have a lovely day. Go on. I'm waiting, go, go There's nothing left

Seriously, there's nothing Why are you still listening? Go listen to Catching Foxes or something Stop listening to me We're done here You're very persistent What are you waiting for? You think I'm going to start playing the guitar or singing or something?

Ten bucks if you can tell me what this is. Mama, she has taught me well. Told me when i was young son your life's an open book don't close it for it's done the brightest flame burns quickest it's what i heard her say. So the reason Australians sing with an American accent like that, by the way, that's Mama Said by Metallica, obviously. Obviously. But the reason is otherwise it would sound like this.

Mama, she has taught me well. Told me when I was young Son, your life's an open book Don't close it for it's done The brightest flame burns quickest Right, nothing cool about that. Alright, that's it. There's no more songs. This isn't like an Avengers movie

where something pops up at the end. Well, I guess it was. Okay. Bye. Bye. This is the weirdest outro ever.