Pints With Aquinas - 128: Pints with Peter Kreeft

Episode Date: October 16, 2018

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Hello and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name's Matt Fradd and I am super excited about today's episode because today I tell Thomas Aquinas to go and buy himself something nice while I speak with Peter Kreeft about Peter Kreeft and fart jokes and Russian literature and death and all sorts of other things. You're gonna love it. so it started off oh hi by the way good to have you this it started off i was going to talk to peter craved about like thomas aquinas and stuff like that and we did do that we talked about aquinas how we got into him and all that business but then i was just so interested in peter craved that i asked him every question i've ever wanted to ask him this is probably my all-time favorite episode in the history of pines with aquinas, and you are going to absolutely love it. Okay, listen up, though. Before we get into today's excellent show, we are now selling really awesome t-shirts and women's t-shirts and coffee mugs and sweaters that say non-nicite domine, which means nothing if not you, Lord. They are really beautiful, and they are only available

for seven days. I was just giving a talk in Iowa recently to 8,000 people. Guess who I had to follow? Bishop Robert Barron. That's not fair, Iowa, but I did. And after, people were coming up to me and saying, I love your Pints with Aquinas t-shirt. How do I buy one? I said, you can't buy one because they're only available every few months for seven days only. Same thing with this beautiful non-dissident domine shirt. Okay. They're only available for seven days. After that, you can beg me, but I will say, no, you cannot get one. This happens every time we run these shirts. People are a day late. They say, can I still get it? And I say, no, because it's like a dictatorship and that's how it works. So suffer. So there's a link in the show notes right now. I'm going to be

posting about it all week don't miss this okay a great conversation started i have some latin on your t-shirt am i right non nissi te domine those are the words of thomas aquinas to our lord when our lord said you've written well of me what will you have as your reward you know what it means it means nothing if not you lord that's a bloody great thing to say nothing if not you lord and we talk about that today actually with peter craved this whole these final words of aquinas but seven days left less than seven days left i think i don't know i barely know what i did yesterday click the link in the show notes and go get the shirt here we go here oh by the way if you're a patron for 20 or more a month you

get free shipping just saying just saying all right here's the show bye bye bye okay i got to get back on decaf hi lovely to hear from you thanks for agreeing to do the interview you're very welcome does now work yes uh this is is not live-shaped, right? Correct, yes. Okay, I have a bit of a cold, so if I cough, we can splice that out. You got it. Sounds great. But do you mind if we just kind of jump right into it like this,

or is there any questions you had prior? No, it's just about Aquinas and how we can practically use him wrote a whole long book about that yes practical theology how your mind can help you become a saint so examples from that would be relevant

yeah yeah I have it and I read it I won't tell you where I read it, but I do read it on the toilet. But I get a lot from it. That's the closest most of us ever get to a monastery. That's right. My children are locked outside. It's really terrific.

This is one of the reasons why God invented the plumbing system. This is one of the reasons why God invented the plumbing system. Yeah, one day in the future, if they can somehow alter humans so that we don't have to go to the bathroom, that would be a bad thing. Or sleep. Sometimes I wonder if they'll do that so humans don't need sleep. That'd be terrible. Well, if we eat and drink in heaven, there's a biblical evidence that we will, will we also eliminate heaven? If not, what will happen to the food? That's a good question.

Is there a sewer system? The kind of matter of the resurrection body is something that we don't quite understand. Now, I've heard you say before, prior to the fall, Adam and Eve, when they would flatulate, that it would sound and smell like what? Like flowers.

And sound like trumpets. Oh, I've got to tell you my joke. Do you have a minute? Absolutely. This is the worst one I've ever heard. This is from Patrick Coughlin. Okay, it's got to be bad A man goes to his doctor and complains about flatulence

And the doctor says It's very common, you can always take something like Bino And the man says No, it's not ordinary flatulence Listen, so he farts And it sounds like Honda Doctor says, do that again He farts again, says Honda

And the man says You see, every time I fart It goes Honda Honda. The doctor says, do that again. He farts again. He says, Honda. And the man says, you see, every time I fart, it goes Honda. The doctor says, this is very strange. I think you need a complete physical exam. So he gives him a complete physical exam. But after the exam, he says, you have an abscess in one of your teeth. See the dentist. And the man says, well, that may be a cell. What does that have to do with my farting?

Just go. The dentist will take care of it. The man thinks the doctor is a quack. He goes to the dentist. The dentist says, I see you have an abscess in your tooth. Do you have anything strange about your farting? The man says, yes. Actually, when I fart, it goes Honda. The dentist said, I thought so.

And the man said, how did you know that? And I said, well, I thought everybody knew that excess makes the fart go Honda. Very good. I have a bunch of jokes, but they're all inappropriate, so I'm trying to think what I can tell you now, because it's only fair that I should burden you with one. So this lady's husband dies

and she asks the man who is deceased, she asks his best friend if he'd get up and say a few words. And so he does. He stands up at the pulpit and he, oh gosh, what does he say? He says, he just says one word. He looks down and he says plethora. And then he makes his way down and she looks at him and whispers, thanks, that means a lot. That's very cute. Dr. Peter Grave, tell me, how did you first hear about Thomas Aquinas? In philosophy class at Calvin College. I was a Thomist before I was a Catholic. I instantly recognized him as a genius.

That's probably the most brilliant mind that ever lived. Now, was it a Christian? You were at Calvin College, so this was a Christian course, a Christian philosophical course from a philosophical point of view. What about him immediately made you think he was brilliant? Had you had some prior reading in Aristotle before Aquinas? Enough to basically understand his terminology, I think, yes. But I had never read any philosopher, rather than a philosophy major,

who was both very clear and very profound at the same time. Right. English philosophers are very clear but not usually very profound, and continental philosophers are usually profound but not very clear, but Aquinas very profound, and continental philosophers are usually profound, but not very clear. But Aquinas is amazingly both. That's very true. I can think of three other philosophers that I think are both that way. Plato, Pascal, and Nietzsche.

What do you think? I mean, Nietzsche might be wrong about some things. Plato and Pascal, at least. Plato and Pascal, at least, are both profound and clear. I don't think Nietzsche is clear, but he is profound. He's fun to read. Maybe that's what I mean. He's energetic.

You don't get bored. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He sells himself very well to adolescents. Yeah. And so, okay, you're a Protestant. You're reading this Catholic philosopher. But I suppose that shouldn't surprise us because, of course, Catholics read evangelical philosophers all the time and don't feel the temptation to convert.

But did Thomas lead you to the Catholic Church in some way? Yeah. One of the issues that any evangelical will say is the biggest one is justification by faith. And I was told that Catholics believed that, well, they were basically thinly baptized pagans, and we sort of worked out our own salvation with a little assistance from divine grace. So I figured I'd better check out their main theologian and see if that's accurate. So I read Aquinas' treatise on grace in the summer, and I was astounded to find out that he was a very good Calvinist. You can't do anything without grace.

Were you an undergrad when you were reading Aquinas? Yes. That's pretty impressive that you were reading Aquinas? Yes. That's pretty impressive that you could kind of comprehend him that well. Did you have someone kind of to walk beside you and help you understand him, or did you just click? No, no. In fact, there are philosophers to this day I still don't understand, people like Hegel and Heidegger and Derrida.

And I'm still proud of the fact that I don't understand them, but I suspect that those do have some mental defects. I forget who it was that said that Hegel is untranslatable, even in German. He first became translated into German, yes. William James, a wonderfully common philosophical philosopher, said the only way you could understand Hegel was after inhaling some nitrous oxide. Yeah. Yeah, he is very clear. I think it's more the kind of Aristotelian metaphysical jargon

that you have to first kind of get. And once you've got that, Aquinas is pretty clear. It's surprisingly clear. It is indeed. Yeah, you go. And we have good testimony to that. Aquinas has a character witness. You know, that voice in the crucifix that said,

you have written well of me, Thomas, what you have is your reward. Non nissite domine. Yes. Just two words, that's enough. Yeah. I love that. I like when I hear it translated, nothing if not you, Lord. In other words, I'm happy to have everything, I'm happy to have nothing,

just so long as whatever I have, I don't have it without you. Well, my version of it is just two words, only yourself. Yeah, see, that's a lot more Aquinas-esque, to the point. Yeah, he's quite iconic. His vocabulary is not a plethora. Yeah, what do you think of this? I don't know if I got this from somebody or if I just started saying it, but I like the idea that Augustine is beautiful like a garden is beautiful,

and Aquinas is beautiful like a legal document is beautiful. No, I wouldn't say legal document. I'd say the C, something simple and deep. Oh, that's much better. I'm going to steal that. But there is something beautiful about a legal document. I was reading it over with my wife recently when we bought a house, and there's just something about the precision.

No word is wasted. Everything's extraordinarily clear. Good legal documents anyway, distinct from the thing you actually wrote. Right. So how do people, people might be listening and they think, well, how does Aquinas,

how does he help today? I mean, what would you say to that? Do we need Aquinas today? Has there ever been a time more in the history of mankind when we've needed Aquinas more? Yes. Well, right after the Garden of Eden, I suppose, God took care of that. The crisis in modern Western civilization is not just a crisis of faith, but also a crisis of reason. We don't even know what reason means anymore, and we don't trust it anymore.

So if we have faith, it tends to be sentimental and subjective and uncertain. Aquinas shows you by example what good reasoning is and how important it is and how much of an ally to faith it is. I think that's the main thing you can do for us. What do you think, you know, it seems like today the new atheist types and others keep talking about science, but if you have such an impoverished view of the human intellect, maybe you shouldn't put science on such a high level. Maybe we should be more like Hume, who is very skeptical about what

even science could show. Well, science is a noble activity. In fact, let me quote you something from Aquinas on that. The reason science is a noble activity is that it is reading the divine art. You know, God's an artist, and he creates the greatest work of art of all, which is the universe. And then we try to understand it. Here, a quote from the Summa. Things in nature are midway between the knowledge of God and our knowledge,

for we receive knowledge from natural things, of which God is the cause by his knowledge. Hence, as the natural objects of knowledge are prior to our knowledge and are its measure. So the knowledge that God has of all things is prior to those things and is a measure of them. This rather abstract point that God's knowledge can't conform to any pre-existing reality, but makes it, as, for instance, Soki makes hobbits by uttering the word hobbit. So that metaphysical principle is the basis for the greatness of science. It's reading God's science, which is creative, and ours is receptive, a kind of an echo in a canyon

coming back from the divine mind as the wall. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with science. It's a noble human activity. And modern science is very successful because it's so very narrow, like a laser beam. And the so-called war between religion and science is one of the great myths in the history of human thought. There is no such war. There's not a single casualty. the great myths in the history of human thought. There is no such war. There's not a single casualty, not a single religious dogma has ever been refuted by a single discovery of any science

in all of history. But people still talk about science and religion as if they were enemies. Do you, you know, I just see people say this a lot. We say things like, I want to know the truth. That's all I'm interested in. And I'm willing to go wherever the truth leads. And I think most of the time I say that I hope I mean it, but sometimes I'm pretty sure I don't mean it. Because I think that my whole life would be upended and my job would be ruined if I was led outside of the Catholic church, because I kind of make money being a kind of Catholic commentator on this issue. What was it like for you when you became a Catholic and left kind of Calvinism? Were you leaving a lot of friends behind?

Were your parents disappointed in you? Oh, much more than disappointed. I think they would have been less shocked if I had become an atheist. Many evangelical Protestants speak Catholicism as emotionally dangerous. In this search for truth, this honesty, I think we all have it. We're all tough-minded enough that we want the truth. Nobody wants to be stupid. But we have mixed motives. So

when the truth is uncomfortable, we say we want it, but we want it in a way that takes away its discomfort. And sometimes that's not possible. What you just said, like scientific stuff, and if science and dogma clashed, but is there a scientific fact you could think of that could be shown to be true that would kind of disavow you of your Christian faith? Of course. If the bones of the dead Jesus were discovered in some tomb in Palestine tomorrow, the faith would be sunk, totally sunk.

It's vulnerable. It'd be sunk for you. I don't think it would be sunk, totally sunk. It's vulnerable. It'd be sunk for you. I don't think it would be sunk for, I think there's a lot of Christians who would go on making arguments for Christianity. I think they would say something like it was a trick, or God's testing us, or it wasn't really Jesus. Well, that's different. I said if the bones of a dead Jesus were actually discovered in Palestine.

Shown to be true, beyond reasonable doubt. Yeah. Or if it could be shown that there was no Moses, and some rabbi invented the whole story of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments, and they weren't from God at all, they were just from rabbi so-and-so, then the whole of Judaism, religiously, would be sunk. Judaism and Christianity are historical religions, and therefore they're vulnerable to scientific disproof,

and they've never been disproved. All right, so the bones of Jesus show up, and you can no longer be a Christian. What would you do now? Where would you go? What would you do? I have no idea. I have no idea.

That would be like discovering that I was really a Martian and not an Earthling at all. Yeah, that's a good answer. I got some questions of people writing. Philip Haddon wants to know, who's your favorite Tolkien character compared to the Christian story and why? Ah, compared to the Christian story.

Well, of course, it's not an allegory. So the comparisons are unconscious and sort of slant rather than straight. So let me just say who's my favorite Tolkien character? Gandalf, I guess. He's the closest thing to a philosopher.

Yeah. There's that line he utters to Frodo that truly would apply to us Catholics today. Frodo said something like, I wish I hadn't lived to see this, or something? Yeah. And Gandalf says, so do all who live to see such times, but it's, what does he say? I forget.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Why did the ring come to me? That's right. We can't answer such questions, but since it has come to you, but one foot ahead of the other. Right. What will you do? Yeah. I know I'm kind of going all over the map here. I hope you don't mind. But with all this going on

in the church right now and the scandals, how are you handling it and how do you think we should? Well, I know enough about church history to expect it. Just imagine we were living at the time of the Borgia Pope. The Pope himself was probably an unbeliever who was publicly carrying on with a lot of women, one of whom was history's most famous poisoner,

and had about 13 bastard children, and didn't give a damn for the poor. Or imagine we were living during the Pazzi conspiracy, where two cardinals were being hung by their parishioners, and as they died, dangling from the rope, they were cutting into each other's flesh. That's a good point. Catholics have a history of having spectacular sinners and those spectacular saints. I guess if we had social media back then, things would be different, you know?

It's like everything is being communicated to us immediately through the Internet. That's the difference, huh? No, I don't think that's as big a difference as we think. We like to make that as an excuse. But the grapevine was in place long before modern communications. And people knew that Christians, like everybody else, contained spectacular sinners.

Jesus himself chose Judas Iscariot as one of the twelve. Another question comes in from Brian Damerick. Everyone wants to know about Tolkien. They love your work on Tolkien, apparently. He said, when will the process for Tolkien's sainthood begin? Ooh, good question. Well,

check your news up for canonization, you know. I didn't know. Oh yes. Yes. Uh, and, and that would be a wonderful thing. Here's a, uh, 300 pound cigar smoking, wine drinking, uh, life pleasures, enjoying, uh, jokester, uh, who may become a saint. Joshua asks, what's the best way for someone who isn't in the academic setting to learn more about philosophy and the faith? Well, sometimes in an academic setting, you can do as much harm as good to learn about philosophy.

There are some good do-it-yourself philosophy books. I tried to write some myself. Plato was the first and the most successful. The way to start studying philosophy is to read Plato. The old professor says in the Chronicles of Narnia, it's all in Plato. All in Plato. Dear me, what do they teach them in the schools nowadays anyway?

And I loved your book, Socratic Logic. I would highly recommend that to anyone listening. That's a great textbook that I had in undergrad philosophy class. I got a lot out of it. Amazingly, there's nothing quite like it on the market. Really? I write the books. I wish somebody else would write, but they don't, so I have to. In other words, in order to read them, I have to write them first. You're like, I'd like to retire, but darn it, I can't. Well, God will take care of that. There's a little thing called death, which is his version of retirement. Well, speaking of Socratic that. There's a little thing called death, which is his version of retirement.

Well, speaking of Socratic logic and that excellent book you wrote, you wrote a lot about fallacies. And what fallacy or fallacies do you see being most committed today in sort of, I don't know, back and forth between believers and nonbelievers or just online? Oh, I think it's the psychological fallacy, the Freudian fallacy. online? Oh, I think it's the psychological fallacy, the Freudian fallacy. You believe that only because your mother told you, or because you're a Republican, or because you're

a Catholic. The substitution of the personal, subjective, psychological because motive for any good objective, logical reason. Because you can always play that game. Right, it cuts both ways.

If somebody has an infallible argument with nothing wrong with it, and you don't want to say nothing, you can say, well, the only reason you say that is, and what are they going to say? But even if, let's say, let's say something that nobody disagrees with, E equals MC squared. Let's suppose that we discovered that Albert Einstein was really a Nazi spy, and he was planning to give the atom bomb to Hitler so that he could destroy the world and destroy the Jews, and that Einstein was just as wicked as Hitler.

Would that prove that his equations were wrong, and that he did not equal MC squared? No, it would not. Yeah, this is the genetic fallacy, right? Like, you believe this because as you say, it cuts both ways. I could say to an atheist, you're only an atheist because you were raised in Portland, Oregon,

or something. Well, yes, so what? It doesn't show that atheism is false. Of course, that's what they want. They want to escape from logical argument because in that boxing ring, they get knocked out. So they switch the game to a ring where it's always a draw. And this is why Aquinas is so great, right? He always puts forth the best version of his opponent's arguments.

Yes, Bertrand Russell says in his autobiography that when he first went to the Summa, he knew that Aquinas was, of course, bad and wrong and stupid. He was very impressed by the fact that some of his, that is, Russell's own objections were better formulated by Aquinas than by Russell. Wow, that is a fascinating thing. Yeah, you sometimes read his objections he poses for himself, and you think he's going to have to do a Houdini. I don't know how he's going to get out of this one. Here's an example. The strongest argument for atheism

is the problem of evil. And here's the clearest and shortest and best version of it. If one of two opposites is infinite, then the other would be altogether destroyed. God means the infinite goodness. Therefore, if God existed, there could be no evil discoverable. But there is evil. Therefore, God does not exist.

Right. That's a very powerful argument. Yeah. I've heard you say, I think, that it's interesting that usually Aquinas puts at least three, but he puts as many as twelve in the Summa, sort of objections against his position. But when it comes to the existence of God, he can come up with only two. Because there are only two. In fact, only one, because the other one is you don't really need God. You can explain everything by natural causes if that's what you're interested in. Right.

But that doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. It just proves that you could ignore him. Right. Right, it makes him perhaps a superfluous hypothesis, but it doesn't disprove him. Right. Here's another question from Desiree Siffen. I've got to bugger her name up here, but Siffentis, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, Desiree. She says, according to the internet, so we know this is going to be good, Peter Kreeft converted, quote,

in his final year of high school after a Calvinist professor asked him to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church that trace itself to the early church. This is from Wikipedia. And then she says, I wonder, did Dr. Kreeft tell his professor of his final conclusions? What did his professor think or say? Oh, well, if it's on the internet, it must be true, right? Right, that's what I was thinking. No, in fact, it was not in high school, but in college that I started thinking about Catholicism,

and my favorite philosophy professor, William Harry Jellema, who introduced me to Aquinas and all the other great philosophers, was surprisingly supportive of me when I talked to him about my possible plans to become a Catholic. And he said, you know, I almost did it myself when I was your age. I realize the evidence is very strong. And the reason was basically Gardner Newman's reason, reading the Church Fathers, expecting to find them as Protestants,

and finding them as very Catholic on every issue. Now this is well, see, I think most people I know who converted to Catholicism mentioned Scott Hahn, but of course your conversion was well before Scott's. Yeah, yeah, and Scott's was mainly biblical. He is a wonderful expert on the Bible, and that's another path. Look at the Bible carefully enough and gather all the data, and then look at the two hypotheses, the Protestant and the Catholic. And like any theory in science, one of them vastly outweighs the other because it explains all the data. But your historical argument could also be a good argument for orthodoxy, couldn't it?

Did you ever consider that? Yes. In fact, that was not an issue until 1054. And even after that, the issue was more political than theological. I don't think there's any essential creedal contradiction between East and West. It's more a cultural and political difference. How much authority does the Pope have? I think we tend to look at it that way.

I always feel like the underdog is much more aggressive. You know, so like Canadians hate being called Americans, but we just, you know, Americans think Canada's cute. We don't care, you know. New Zealander hates Australia where I'm from, but we just, you know, Americans think Canada's cute. We don't care, you know. New Zealand hates Australia where I'm from, but we think New Zealand's great. And I feel like the Catholics are like, oh, we love the Orthodox. The Orthodox, not always. We're like, we hate you.

You're heretics. Oh, okay, well. Well, they have to get their hackles up, I guess, to survive. But, no, my attitude towards Canadians is not that they're cute. to get their hackles up, I guess, to survive. But no, my attitude towards Canadians is not that they're cute. In fact, I would sooner build a border wall on the north than on the south. Mexicans are more Catholic than Canadians. Sam Rubenza asks, Can you please ask Peter who his spiritual heroes are

and maybe who Peter thinks Thomas Aquinas' spiritual heroes were? Well, the second question has a very clear answer, and the name is Augustine. Aquinas quotes Augustine over and over again and always favorably. Who are my spiritual heroes? Well, that means, I guess, who are my favorite saints, and I put Augustine and Aquinas up there,

and the Teresas, Teresa of Lisieux and Mother Teresa, and John Paul II, greatest man of the worst century in history. That's a good way to put it. How, like you say, Augustine and Aquinas, John Paul II, greatest man of the worst century in history. That's a good way to put it. How, like you say, Augustine and Aquinas, how does each speak to you differently? Or how are they a hero to you in a different sense? Why do you enjoy reading them, you know,

obviously they write very differently. Well, Augustine is a poet and Aquinas is a scientist, and we need both. And Augustine is a poet and Aquinas is a scientist, and we need both. And Augustine is the most beautiful writer that I can find, and Aquinas is the clearest writer I can find. And they have very different personalities. Augustine is always talking about concrete instances and himself, and Aquinas is like an angel looking clearly at the entire battlefield and telling you exactly what's going on and explaining why.

And despite the fact that they have opposite personalities, they say the same thing. So K. Justin makes that point in his two books, one about St. Francis of Assisi, who in many ways is like Augustine, and the other about Aquinas, that these two opposite characters are doing the same thing, which is a fantastic thing. Hey, I realized something funny the other day that I think you'll like.

So, obviously, Aquinas and Bonaventure, contemporaries, disagreed on certain things, okay? Aquinas and Bonaventure contemporaries disagreed on certain things. Okay. Aquinas is the what? The patron saint of scholastics and all this. Do you know that Bonaventure is the patron saint of bowel movements? Bowel movements? Yeah.

How did that come about? I have no idea, but I just think that's hilarious. There's probably some miracle that he performed. Constipation can be fatal in certain instances. So this could be a life-threatening disease that was

healed by Bonaventure. Who knows? Maybe it means that God is on the side of Aquinas with regards to the Kalama argument. I'm not sure how you're going to take this. I'm just going to say it and see how you respond. I just want to thank you on behalf of all of us millennial people who have been so blessed by your work. I'm sure you get this a lot, do you?

When you travel, you meet people in their 30s and 40s who, you know, have you to thank. Well, Christ to thank, but I mean, he used you as his tool to bring about so many conversions and to keep people in the faith. How do you respond to that? Is that a super awkward thing when people tell you that? It is. So I make a joke. When somebody says, I'm a big fan of yours, I say to them, do you know how Thomas Merton died? He was electrocuted by a big fan of yours. I say to them, do you know how Thomas Merton died? He was electrocuted by a big fan, so don't get too close. When people say they're a huge fan of me,

and that doesn't happen nearly as much as with you, I like to say, thank you, I'm huge in Turkey. So, all right, well, we should get back on track here. what else would you say that we can learn from aquinas um obviously aquinas has some beautiful things to say about how we can overcome sorrow some very practical ways people often think of aquinas as a souped up aristotle or a walking brain but he was very human and personal too wasn't he yes uh and i think a personal example is the is the biggest and most universal and overall thing we can learn from Aquinas. When you keep reading somebody, you become more like them. You become, unconsciously as well as consciously, their disciple.

But another thing is common sense. That's the main point of gesturing the book on Aquinas. The book on Aquinas is Elmach, which most great Thomas scholars say is the best book on Aquinas any human being has ever written in the history of the world. And it's also very funny and profound and short and easy. Example, you say, how do we deal with sorrow, or as we call it today, depression? Aquinas' reply, start with three things, a large glass of wine, a hot bath, and a good night's sleep.

It's spot on, though. It is so spot on. We tend to overthink ourselves into a depression sometimes, or into sadness. Yeah, isn't it amazing? We've been thinking about ourselves incessantly. Psychology is the most developed of all the sciences. You go to the bookstore, you find twice as many books on psychology as any other science. And yet we know less about ourselves than we did before we started thinking so intentionally about ourselves. You'd expect at least that we'd know more the more you think about it, but we know less. That is fascinating. When did psychology arise? Is this kind of a result of sort of Descartes and the sort of revolution of looking interiorly?

I think it's a natural development. If the human race passes through the same sort of stages an individual does, then Descartes is about 13 years old. Around the time of the Renaissance, it would become teenagers. Teenagers always have identity crises. Who am I? Am I beautiful? Am I ugly? Do I have zits? Do people hate me?

Shall I commit suicide? What shall I do with my life? Louisians don't think that way. And if you make it through adulthood, you make it to civilization. You say you don't understand Hegel, but that's very Hegelian of you. Yeah, it's funny that even Hegel's opponents think in a Hegelian way, in that they're dialectical. Kierkegaard, the three stages, Marx, dialectical materialism. Yeah, I guess it rubs off.

Do you think, do you tend to appeal, speaking of introspection, do you tend to appeal to more introspective arguments, subjective arguments for God's existence when you are, say, arguing on a college campus, or do you tend to stick to the five ways? Well, neither. I distrust subjective arguments because I distrust myself. I know myself well enough to know that I forget things and make all sorts of mistakes. So I'm more like an eight-year-old.

When my first son developed language, his favorite sentence was a two-word sentence, what's that? And he ran around the house demanding labels for everything. What's that? What's that? What's that? What's that? What's that? And I think that I'm about that stage now. I just want to know what things are. I'm too confused about myself, so I point out words. Which, apparently, even that's too complicated a thing to ask today, right?

There are no universals, there are no essences. Yeah, why is that? Why are we not? Why are we doing that? How do we be trusting? Right! I look at two trees, and they're clearly the same bloody thing. Clearly different than my dog.

William of Ockham, founder of Nautilus, is the source of all of it. The decline of Western civilization begins there. He should be the patron saint of bowel movements. No, okay. Well, bowel movements are very concrete. And in fact, one of the best things philosophers can do

is to marry half-kids and change a diaper poo. In that case, they become realists. But a very small number of philosophers, great philosophers anyway, are married. And those that are usually not happily married, and even those that are, don't usually have

many kids. And that explains why they're so nuts. That reminds me of, like, Immanuel Kant, right? I think he said something about marriage being an agreement to use each other's genitals. You think, oh, terrific. You should have got married. Well, that's almost the modern philosophy of marriage.

You know, reduce it to something scientific. Other than that, it's just a piece of paper. You know, everyone kept going on about how brilliant Kant was, how methodical he was, how he would take his same walk the same time every day. And you think, yeah, good luck keeping that up with a family and kids. Actually, Kant was engaged either two or three times, and both times the lady walked away because he took too much time, to be certain, Procrastinator.

This does bring us to an interesting point, because I think in this day and age, we tend to keep wanting to put God up on the chalkboard, as it were. We want to keep assessing arguments for and against him. We're so afraid that somewhere out there on the internet, someone will have the final say, and I'll look like an idiot, and I'll be wrong. So maybe talk a little bit about that and about Pascal's wager. I don't think most people outside of academia feel that way. I think they've taken a stand one way or another. Either God doesn't exist, or he does, or I don't care.

But in academia, you live in a world of ideas, and ideas always have opposites. And there are always possibilities, even something actual, like the universe exists. Well, how do you know? Maybe it's an illusion. Maybe the devil is hypnotizing you. Take our evil demon. In academia, you take those questions seriously. Outside of academia, you don't. Of course, the universe exists. Now, where should we go from

here? Back to common sense. True story, though. When I was about 16, I did float with solipsism without knowing what it was. I used to stand in my bedroom and quickly open the door thinking I'd catch the void. I wish I was making that up, but I remember saying to a friend in a library, I said, Gareth, I don't know if you exist. And he said, of course I do. I said, well, of course you'd bloody say that. It really bothered me. Well, when I heard in college about solipsism, I declared myself the opposite, a pluripsist.

I believe that everything else exists except me. Did you mean that, or was that a joke? It was a joke. I also founded a political party called the Apathy Party. I thought that politics was so unimportant that we ought to be apathetic about it. We had a passionate demand to be apathetic. Would you say the same thing today? Because there's a lot of hype and a lot of outrage that surrounds modern politics.

What would your advice be to us? I'd say at least least cool it a bit. Settle down. Have a glass of wine. Have a good night's sleep and think it over. Confucius was asked, should every question be gone over three times? And he said twice.

Kathleen Corey asks this about angels. She says, I've heard you talk on angels. Do you have a favorite piece of artwork that you think best portrays them? There's a lot of bad angel artwork out there. Is there something of that? That's a good question because the answer is no. I have never seen a totally satisfactory artwork

for angels. And the only other objects that I am universally dissatisfied with are elves. And elves are sort of semi-angelic. So they you'd think that you would at least be able to suggest them.

I think that Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have both portrayed them magnificently in literature. Tolkien in The Silmarillion and C.S. Lewis in The Great Dance at the end of Paralandra. as though it was in The Great Dance at the end of Paralandra. But to translate those magnificent words into images, never been done. I vastly prefer Byzantine art to Western art on angels, by the way. I would agree with you. Yeah. Do you think this comes down to the advice of show, don't tell?

You know, for a fiction, like for an author, it's like just show, like point at it, don't tell, you know, for a fiction, like for an author, it's like, just show, like point at it. Don't, don't describe it. And, and, and not just show, don't tell, but suggest, don't show. The kind of thing that Alfred Hitchcock and, and, and Night Shyamalan and others do in their movies. What's your favorite movie? A Man for All Seasons. That is a brilliant movie. Absolutely, absolutely perfect. That's what I'm saying. I don't classify The Passion of the Christ as a movie. I classify it as a liturgy. Yeah.

Hey, I just read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time in my life. Oh, congratulations. You told us to do it before dying, so I got that done. And do you know what? Well, now you can die. Goodbye. Yeah, I can die. I took all of August off of the internet and away from my phone so it looked all no there was no distractions for me the entire month i wasn't responding to emails or anything and to my great surprise i found it

terribly riveting and quite easy to read other than the pronunciation of the russian names it's easy but i think to myself the reason i don't find reading easy is i plunge myself headlong into a myriad of distractions and then complain that I can't concentrate. How wonderfully wise you are. My goodness. How wonderfully wise you are. My goodness. How wonderfully wise you are.

My goodness. All right, so maybe he didn't say that three times in a row, but he did say it. Huh, mum? Huh? You listening? Mum? Well, thank you very much. I'm huge in'm huge in turkey yeah no but it's true and you said you have add or something like that yeah yeah it's uh well i guess it's adhd which means attention deficit high definition that's the last versions of it so what does

that look like in practical life i'm absent-minded forget things. I can't do two things at once. Everybody I have ever met has at least one defect that's quite spectacular and one talent that's quite remarkable. And the greater the talent, do you think it's easier to kind of, you know, make up for all the shortcomings that everyone else around you has to make up for? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's probably why adolescence is so hard. You have to be good at everything.

In high school, if you're not bright, if you're not popular, if you're not a sports hero, if you're not gorgeous, you're a failure. But once you get to college, especially university, you can specialize. Right. It'd be interesting to see how many people who have a PhD also have ADD or ADHD, because you've got a narrow... I think the numbers are vast. Most academics just don't realize it, but that's why they go into academia. They thrive there. I've been thinking about getting my PhD, and I'm not saying this to show false humility, but I really do think it's because I want people to like me more and think I'm smart.

Well, you know what the PhD stands for in PhD, phone unit. Right. I think everyone considering a PhD should consider that they're full of crap and just want other people to think they're intelligent. That's basically what two of my favorite philosophers said. That's basically what two of my favorite philosophers said. Pascal said that philosophy is worth about half an hour's trouble. And Thomas Aquinas said his whole philosophy of theology was nothing but straw.

You know what they use straw for in the Middle Ages? To cover bullshit. And it's so difficult for people like us who are, when I say us, I mean those listening are very interested in the intellectual side of the faith, to think, well, this is what's most important while I neglect my wife and family. You know, to neglect, you know, look at me, I'm focusing in on Aquinas' epistemology in regards

to, yeah, yeah, yeah, go play with your son. You know? Alas, well, scripture tells us that to think to know if you're in the presence of God is wonderful, but if you're just knowing

and just thinking and you're very good at it, well, that makes you stupid. Pride puffs you up like a balloon. I think it was Descartes who said something like, you know, there has been no philosophical thought so insane that some philosopher hasn't thought it up because novelty attracts attention.

So you can say something like Hume, like, well, not only are we not sure of causality, but we're not even sure of the self. Maybe I don't even exist. Oh, for goodness sake. You've just given me a thought, a new thought. The cause for our insane philosophies today is the same as the cause for all the many wars that we fight today. Namely, we're bored.

We can't stand the same old thing. We can't stand common sense. So let's do something really ridiculous. We got a problem? Hey, let's go out and kill each other. Oh, what a brilliant solution. We got a problem? Let's deny that it even exists.

Let's put Clinton and Trump, Hillary and Trump up on a stage and see what happens. We did that. I had a real crisis of conscience, even though I thought that Hillary was relatively sane, her policies would be far worse than Trump, but I thought Trump was utterly untrustable. So I voted for Donald Duck as a write-in candidate. And the next morning,

I woke to find out that he had been elected. You know, how different... I have to say this. I'm embarrassed to say this, but the next round of presidential debates that are going to happen,

you know, I can't wait to get friends around, drink whiskey, and watch them. That sucks. Well, you, like me, are a typical bored modern

who wants something insane to look at. Yeah. It's interesting. It's like a train wreck. I can't not look at it. Maybe the most boring possible candidate is automatically the best one. Let's choose them. Yeah, I agree. I would love to

institute the rules of, say, the Thomas Aquinas' style of argumentation. What's that called? Philanthropy Disputation. Yeah, this is what we need in these debates. I want you, Trump, to now... I have tried a number of times to do that in the classroom situation and to get students to follow the rules, they can't do it.

They literally cannot do it. Their minds are like fleas jumping around. Why? I think it's not an intellectual thing. They can write galactic visitations. They can't speak them. Why is that, do you think? I think we're so Rousseauian, we're so emotional,

we're so responsive to instant, passionate, interesting diversions that we all have a kind of ADD. Yeah. Look, a squirrel. That's so true. Yeah, no, I'm totally like that. I wish I was less emotional. I know C.S. Lewis said his dad was so emotional, which kind of gave him a distaste for that. Well, this is the amazing thing about Augustine, a man of immense intellect and immense emotional passion. The two usually don't go together. How do we stop being bored? Because I'm bored all the time, and I think it's because I don't like myself. I think this is, I think this is, I'm not saying that because I think I'm unique. I think most of us don't like ourselves.

We seek to distract ourselves from ourselves. That's the nearest you can come to getting away from yourself. How do we stop this? I'll give you a very concrete answer to that question. Talk to the crucifix. That's not boring. Talking to the crucifix isn't boring? Yeah.

No, no, no. That's God. Look what he did for you. Look at his eyes. What is he doing now? What is he thinking about you? Is that boring? Some abstract argument?

If it is boring, it's probably because I am. I'll try it. If you find that boring, you're insane. I mean, you can find that blasphemous, you can find that ridiculous, you can find that incredibly wonderful, but you can't find that boring, you're insane. I mean, you can find that blasphemous, you can find that ridiculous,

you can find that incredibly wonderful, but you can't find that boring. But you might just not believe it. I mean, you might just be like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fairy tale. Yeah, it's a good fairy tale. I don't believe that Sauron the Great and Gandalf the Great exist, but when they

interact in Lord of the Rings it's at least interesting. Yeah, that's true. That's a good way to overcome boredom. I just got a couple more questions and then any point you need to go, just hang up on me. I won't be offended, I promise. Alberto

Amparo says, could you share a basic counter-argument to nihilism using philosophy and logic? Well, nihilism is self-indirectory because as an ism, it's a philosophy, a position, an ideology that you think is true and you think the opposite is false. So you're uttering it and you're arguing, and that means that you think that it is better to know the truth than not to know the truth, and the truth is there's no truth, but you're contradicting yourself. You're creating meaning in the very act of being a missionary for meaninglessness.

Don't you think it's true that even though we might like to talk like we're nihilists, we very rarely live that way? It's sort of like moral relativists. Of course. Of course. And that's why I like William James very much. There's a real point to pragmatism. You can sometimes find what's true by finding what works. Yeah.

What has to work. Yeah, if some philosophical theory makes absolutely no lick of difference to your life or the afterlife, it might be like a puzzle, but that's about it. Yep. A classic example of that is the story of the guru who was teaching his students that matter did not exist.

It was only an illusion. So they should not fear it, and they should not fear death or pain or anything else. And one day, his students, who were napping by the side of the road, were rudely awakened by the unedifying sight of their great guru running past them at full speed, being chased by a herd of thundering bull elephants. And the students called out to the master, Master, Master, remember what you taught us. Those elephants aren't real. Stop running. And the master called back and said, Who's running? Ah, very good. It makes no difference. I thought you were going to say the student just threw his pen at him,

threw his pen at the professor. He crushed both that belief and Zeno's paradox all in one. Jimmy asks, What's the role of the rosary in the new evangelization? It's a weapon. Father Donald Calloway wrote a very good book about the history of the rosary, especially as a weapon. It won a great battle at Lepanto. And we're threatened by similar problems now,

and we have great weapons. It's not, of course, a magic weapon. It works only with faith and love and hope. But it's a weapon that God has given us. With St. John Paul II's favorite prayer, I was very happy to hear that because he's immensely more wise and saintly than I am. It's my favorite prayer, too.

I thought that was just because I had ADD, and I was incapable of more complex stuff. I've tried Ignatius' spiritual exercises, and I find I can't concentrate on them. How do you pray the rosary? That might seem like an overly complex question, but how do you pray the rosary? Is it something you break up throughout the day, but how do you pray the rosary? Is it something you break up throughout the day? Is it something you pray in the car? In the car, usually, because that's when I can. You have other stuff to do without. And no secrets, you should do it. It's like love. Eric Frapp wrote a book with a very silly title, The Art of Loving.

There's no art used to it. I think sometimes people get overly scrupulous about the method of the rosary and then kind of miss the point of it. You know, they'll say something like, well, some of the ways my wife and I sometimes pray the rosaries, we'll pray like the Creed, Our Father, Three Hail Marys, Our Father, kind of in the morning, and then we'll pray the rosary throughout the day, and you'll hear people say, oh, you mustn't do that.

Oh, that's silly. It is silly. It's silly. The context is always a context of personal faith and hope and love. And if you forget the context, you become over-scrupulous and legalistic and gimmicky, and it's a kind of spiritual technology. Exactly, yeah. You're going to press the right buttons at the right time or nothing will result kind of spiritual technology. Exactly. Yeah.

You're going to press the right buttons at the right time or nothing will result. Yeah, exactly. All right, let me ask you three final questions. It's about your favorite,

about a book, movie, and music. So, what music do you listen to? Maybe, what's your favorite music and then music people

perhaps don't expect that you would listen to? I like the romantic. Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius. I like pretty much all kinds of music except gangster rap and heavy metal. I like classic rock. I hate Christian rock, which I think is a great insult,

not only to Christianity, but to rock. Have you heard of Bon Iver? B-O-N, next word, I-V-E-R, Bon Iver. Never heard of it. What is it? Is it food or a disease? No, it's a disease. No, it's Justin something or other is the lead singer of the band,

called Bon Iver, but it feels like deep tissue massage for the brain. So it's music. called Bon Iver, but it feels like deep tissue massage for the brain. So it's music. He's producing albums now, but check him out, Bon Iver. I think you'll love him. I like to listen to some opera, like Puccini. I also like heavy metal, so I love Foo Fighters. I'm listening to a lot of the Foo Fighters right now.

It's starting to get me. I don't know. I love Robert Riley's writings on music, on the music of the spheres. And also Anthony Esalen, who's just come out with an excellent book on great hymns. I am so glad Anthony Esalen exists. Oh, my.

Holy smokes. When I discovered him, he put words to what I somehow knew but wasn't able to articulate. You do that. You do that, too. Yeah. All right. Okay, that's your favorite music. If you able to articulate. Yep. You do that too, yeah. All right, that's your favorite music. If you had to, well, see, this is difficult, but what book are you reading right now?

Are you reading a particular book? Most of my reading is rereading. I'm rereading Aquinas. I'm rereading the Psalms, which I constantly do, writing a commentary on some of them. Yeah, great. Looking for a new great classic to read. Not finding one.

I think the last example of a new great classic was The Silmarillion. That was about 40 years ago. I've got to read that. You do. Yeah. What about Tolstoy? Do you read Tolstoy? Do you ever read War and Peace? Do you like his writing, or do you prefer Dostoevsky? I do. I do. What about Tolstoy? Do you read Tolstoy? Do you ever read War and Peace?

Do you like his writing, or do you prefer Dostoevsky? I do. I do. I prefer Dostoevsky because he's, how shall I put it, more like a volcano. Or if Tolstoy is a hurricane, Dostoevsky is a tornado. Even more force. I love them both. a hurricane, Dostoevsky's a tornado. Hmm. Okay. Even more force. Love them both.

The Death of I.M. Ilyich, Tolstoy's short story, is the best thing I've ever read about death. Oh, I can't wait to finish it.

I'm halfway through because somebody recommended it to me. And Tolstoy's confession in his autobiography is shocking to students.

Really? That such a genius, so famous, confessed after he had written War and Peace that all his friends said life is meaningless. And he said, each morning, my first thought was, I hope I have taken all weapons of destruction out of the house, because if not, I shall probably commit suicide today. And only from his serfs, his peasants, did he learn the meaning of life, which is faith and love. Gosh, that really kind of gets back to what you and I were talking about earlier,

about the intellectual climate where we think ourselves into these stupid areas, and then you just look at people doing life and loving their families and trying to be good. Yeah. Well, when you realize that you have to have faith in reason in order to be a rationalist, that you have, in fact, begun with faith, when you realize that, you're probably going to be open to using your reason to explore that faith. ignore that fact, you'll just go off in any possible direction into the clouds. Like the scientists in Laputa, in Jonathan Swift's Sculliver's Travels. They're absent-minded professors, and they live in the clouds, and the only thing they can think of is geometry, and their clothes don't fit the human bodies, and they never

look at their wives. What's a movie you've been... A parable for our time. What's a movie you've watched lately, a movie our time. What's a movie you've watched lately, a movie, a recent one? Any good movies you've seen? Yeah. Silence.

The one based on Endo's novel. Which one? Martin Scorsese's Silence about the Jesuit martyrs in Japan. Oh, yeah. Terrifying movie. Yeah, it's hard to watch that movie and then say that apostasy's okay. It is. Well,

unfortunately, many people who watch it say that that's the point of the movie. He was just trying to protect his flock and so on. Well, I think Endo himself was uncertain and deliberately left the conclusion ambiguous so that you could choose for yourself.

I got one final question for you. Is it true that you write your manuscripts on a typewriter and then send the manuscript to Ignatius? Oh, no. That would have been so cool. I shouldn't have asked you. I do have a t-shirt which shows

a man in happy anger jumping on and destroying a computer. I am a gentle person, but I have constant torture and dismemberment fantasies about Bill Gates and Microsoft Word. But no, I use a laptop. I have to. And I argue with the thing all the time, and I always lose. How many books do you have in the works right now? Oh, golly, let's see. Half a dozen or more at the printers. Usually I just have two going at the same time. I just finished one, which Ignatius is going to come out with. It's a trialogue with Billy Graham,

J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis on the Eucharist. Oh, fantastic. And that conversation may actually have taken place because Graham was fascinated with Lewis.

And in one of his evangelistic outreaches to London, he met Lewis. So I've got the Catholic, the Anglican, and the Protestant arguing with each other. And Graham is a wonderfully

honest and good-thinking man, so I don't parody him just because I'm a Catholic. Sure, yeah, that's good. Well, thank you for being on the show, and I'm really glad that you exist. I think that's so... And I'm very glad that you exist too, Matt. Good, thank you.

God bless you. Love that man. Wasn't that a fantastic interview? What a good man. Thank God for his contributions to the Church. Thank you for listening to Pines with Aquinas. As I said in the beginning of the show, you only have about seven days left to get your non-nicite domine, which is only a shirt that Catholics would buy, or medievalists of different stripes. You have

about six or seven days to get it. Click the link in the show notes. You'll be supporting Pines with Aquinas, and you'll be buying rather a great conversation starter so there you go check it out thanks for listening and a big thanks to all of my patrons who make pints with aquinas possible week after week chat with you next week bye to carry you to carry you and i would give my whole life to carry you And I would give my whole life To carry you To carry you And I would give my whole life To carry you

To carry you To carry you To carry you To carry you To carry you you